ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
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then. I talked to the young people in the streets. How many fascist
notes there were! I have heard that French youth needs freedom, but
Polish youth should be sent to prison because socialism needs disci–
pline. And the
Operetta
somehow coincided with the mood, and the
young people received it enthusiastically, perhaps because of the
play's primitive worship of youth, or perhaps because it placed the
old, decaying world in a coffin. A coffin on stage-that was some–
thing that harmonized with the anarchic mood. Of course Gombro–
wicz also portrayed cruel, sadistic youth in
Ferdydurke, Pornografia,
Cosmos,
and
The Wedding
in the character of Henry. But in Gombro–
wicz's works all people - young and old - are cruel and devoid of
soft, warm, nonbiological feelings. This is a mirror presented to the
contemporary world of cruel fascist movements, and Gombrowicz
must have been aware of that. Shortly after the introduction of mar–
tial law in Poland I started my first lecture at the Sorbonne with a
long quotation from Gombrowicz's character Henry's monologue.
Henry the ruler orders everybody thrown into jail and held there
muzzled. My voice started to tremble. Gombrowicz's cold fury went
against the grain of Polish literature.
ZH:
Because he was a great individualist. His great taste and lordly
gestures did not agree with our soup-kitchen writing. Had he stayed
in Poland, he would never have become a collaborator. His charm
was in his ability to make a fool of everybody. I visited him once with
some medicines, and he quickly made an ass of me because I had
not read
L'Etre et Ie Neant.
He had such an aristocratic approach
to philosophy. My attitude towards him is ambiguous. I think he
would be a great artist if he weren't so deprived of love. He cul–
tivated his garden like a master. Yet because his personal life , his ex–
periences, were cruel, he forged them into a vision of the world and
into his smooth, dry, surgical style - his crystalline language. He
even corrected Dante. In one of his sketches he analyzes Dante's
tercets and shows that they could have been written better. Ungaretti
nearly killed me when he learned that I was a Pole. There is a kind of
sadism in all that, but sadism that has nothing to do with this Satanic
pageant we were talking about.
JT:
You have said it was miserable and laughable literature. It was
being destroyed by a certain mythology. But can we say that ideol–
ogy
also was a bait for various literary mediocrities, offering them
the only chance of prominence?
ZH:
It is difficult to say who is a good writer. There are very few real
writers in the world. The species is becoming extinct. After Mann
