Correspondence with Luc Bondy

Figure 1.

Gombrowicz at his work table, Vence, France, 1965. Photo: Bohdan Paczowski, courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

"I was born and raised in a most respectable home": This ironic sentence, which begins one of my short stories—"The Memoirs of Stefan Czarniecki"—may also serve as an opening for these present recollections. I was indeed a milksop from a so-called respectable family; but here the word respectable should be used without irony, since it was a home of people who generally speaking were kind-hearted and had their principles.

My father owned a small property in Sandomierz province and also worked in industry; when I was growing up he was president of Central Salvage and a member of several supervisory committees and governing boards, which guaranteed him an income considerably greater than that produced by tiny Mal´oszyce. My mother was the daughter of Ignacy Kotkowski, a local landowner. My father was originally from Lithuania; my grandfather, Onufry, had had his property confiscated by the Russian government in 1863, and this led him to move to the Kingdom, where with the little money he had managed to hold on to he bought the village of Jakubowice, and then a second, Mal´oszyce, where I was born.

We Gombrowiczes always regarded ourselves as "rather better" than the landed gentry of the Sandomierz region, particularly because of various family connections that had remained from the times in Lithuania, and also because the Lithuanian gentry, richer and settled for centuries on their possessions, could boast of a better tradition, a more detailed history, and more respectable appointments. I'm not convinced, though, that the Sandomierz gentry shared this point of view. I was the youngest child. Janusz was the oldest, then came Jerzy, and then my sister Irena, who was two years older than I.

My life in Poland was uneventful and unchanging; I knew few exceptional people and had few adventures. But I'd like to show, though I do not know whether it will be of use to anyone, the way in which life shaped me—me and my literature. Naturally this will be very much an incomplete testimony, which will often remain on the surface of events, because this is not the place for more exhausting analyses or more ruthless confessions; yet I believe that even this toned-down biography will shed a small ray of light on the realities of Poland in those days. It would also be good if at the same time I were able to convey how today I regard the Poland of that time—from a perspective of twenty years spent abroad, a Western, American perspective.

In Poland I think only a few people know me from an extensive reading of my books, which are admittedly somewhat difficult and eccentric. There are more who have heard of me; for them I am above all the author of the "mug" and the "bum"; it's through these two powerful myths that I have entered Polish letters. But what does it mean to "give someone a mug" or to "fix a bum on him"? To "give someone a mug" is to lend someone a different face than his own, to distort him . . .; for instance, when I treat a wise person as a fool, or impute criminal intentions to a good person, I give them a mug. And "fixing a bum on someone" is in fact an identical operation, the only difference being that in this case an adult is treated like a child, infantilized. As you can see, both these metaphors are connected with an act of deformation that one person commits upon another. If I have occupied a separate place in our literature, it is perhaps above all because I've highlighted the extraordinary significance of form in both social and personal life. "One person creates the other"—this was my psychological starting point. I believe too that my sensitivity to form from earliest childhood allowed me later to find my own literary style and to...