THE POLISH INTELLECTUALS
259
he continued stubbornly to cultivate,
in
poverty, a private view of
the world. In a society that glorified the material, giving a soul to steel
and concrete and projecting its morality onto tractors and locomotives,
he identified himself with objects in their total passivity, reassuring
himself by the fact of their essential, swarming life. His work does not
come over well in translation, but here are the titles of some of the
poems he produced in ten years of
'~socialist"
Poland: "Give Me Your
Blessing, Floor"-"The Table Sings Its Universe"- "Study of a Key"–
"The Fine Arts of My Room"-"Translation of an Umbrella"-"Trans–
lation of a Mattress."
The prose writer Marek Hlasko is another wild boy. After a
wretched childhood, he spent a period in the Communist Youth, but
soon left it to resume a vagrant life. His first collection of stories was
not published until 1956. Its title is
First Step Into the Clouds.
Hlasko
could not have been published earlier- his violence and crudity are
like Celine or Henry Miller. But in him, as in Bialoszewski, we realize
that certain literary themes and social myths have come to life, appar–
ently spontaneously, under a political regime that seems totally con–
tradictory to them. Hlasko's hero is of the type personified by Marlon
Brando and James Dean-a tough, cynical, but still angelic boy, in
revolt against society, but unable to express this revolt by any social
choice, for all choices are equally detestable, obsessed by a nostalgia
for the absolute and the pure. The only solution for him is love, but this
also is an impossibility. In one of Hlasko's stories, a boy and a girl walk
along interminable streets, looking for a place where they can be alone,
never finding it. They are reduced to talk, in which love is almost never
mentioned. The boy is thinking of a squirrel seen in his childhood:
"What are you thinking about-that squirrel?
"What should I think about-the
ca?
Why remember everything?
There are things I don't want to remember."
"Many such things?"
"Many."
"It's funny ..."
"What?"
"We don't know much about each other."
"It's your fault. When I begin, you tell me to stop."
"I don't want to hear."
"But it's the most important thing."
For unlike James Dean, Hlasko's hero was denounced to the political
police at the age of eighteen and was tortured in an unspeakable way.
The
f{
ca"
is a certain rubber glove.
It is works like those by Bialoszewski and Hlasko that give me
