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PARTISAN REVIEW
turns out to make quite a lot of sense? One can only hope that the
long-awaited publication in English of the first volume of Gom–
browicz's
Diary·
-which, among other merits, is also the most in–
cisive commentary on Gombrowicz himself-has at last provided the
reader with the set of keys necessary to enter this writer's System.
I'm capitalizing this word because , if we are to make anything
of Gombrowicz, we need to see not only the apparently grotesque
and bizarre side of his mind but its reverse side as well: its
philosophical toughness, consistency, and precision. This is most
evident in his
Diary
which, contrary to its title , only to some slight
extent progresses along the lines of the genre's traditional form: a
record of everyday events that mayor may not resonate with some
more profound reflection in the diarist's mind. At one point Gom–
browicz even deliberately pokes fun at such a model of the diary by
jotting down, tongue-in-cheek:
I got up, as usual , around ten o'clock and ate breakfast: tea with
ladyfingers, then Quaker Oats. Letters : one from Litka in New
York, the other from Jelenski in Paris .. .
At three , coffee and ham sandwich . . .
I make known the above so that you will see what I am like in
my daily routine.
But, on the whole , the
Diary: Volume One,
even though sprin–
kled with personal anecdotes and reminiscences, is hardly a detailed
chronicle of Gombrowicz's "daily routine" in Argentina between
1953 and 1956. What he wrote under the disguise of a diary is ,
rather, a series of neatly interconnected essays, elaborating on vari–
ous components of his ever-present System. One more manifest dif–
ference is that this particular diary was not supposed to wait in the
writer's drawer for discovery by posterity; on the contrary, it was ad–
dressed to a specific contemporary audience , most of all to the Polish
emigre intelligentsia that in the early 1950s formed the readership of
the Paris-based monthly
Kultura ,
where the
Diary
was initially pub–
lished in installments .
In this historical and social context, the
Diary
was bound to be
received as a no-holds-barred piece of impudence. Consider its im–
mortal beginning:
"Diary: Volume One.
General Editor: Jan Kott. Introduced by Wojciech Karpinski.
Translated by Lillian Vallee . Northwestern University Press .
