88
PARTISAN REVIEW
terpersonal contact. From his early childhood on, he seemed to be
destined to clash with and rebel against the various rituals of what he
later called "the inter-human Church." He was born in 1904 in his
father's country estate in central Poland; even though Gombrowicz
Sr. soon switched from land-owning to industry management and
the family moved to Warsaw in 1911, Gombrowicz grew up in an
environment that cultivated traditional ways of life, respected social
hierarchies and itself was full of aristocratic pretenses. The only
rebellious and whimsical child in his family, Gombrowicz graduated
with some difficulty from high school (which was to be portrayed as
an oppressive realm of empty stereotypes in his first novel,
Fer–
dydurke)
and, acceding to his father's wish, studied law unen–
thusiastically at Warsaw University and in Paris . As a graduate
back in Warsaw, he was already known well enough for his unor–
thodox views to be unable to find a job as a lawyer, which he ac–
cepted gratefully as a chance to devote himself entirely to writing. In
1933, his literary debut, a collection of short stories provocatively
titled
A Memoir Written in Puberty,
came out to skeptical reviews;
almost all of the critics dismissed the book as "immature," even
though precisely the exploration and defense of "immaturity" was the
author's chief objective. Nevertheless, Gombrowicz won recognition
among the more avant-garde-minded authors. By the mid-1930s he
already was viewed as a sort of guru by a circle of his not much
younger fellow writers who gathered regularly at "his" table in the
famous Ziemianska cafe in Warsaw. It was
Ferdydurke
that finally
made a genuinely big splash; published in 1937, this novel was
savagely attacked by critics from both the extreme left and extreme
right , but
it
was also acclaimed by some others as one of the most
spectacular manifestations of the avant-garde spirit in Polish fiction .
Ferdydurke
was the last book Gombrowicz published while residing in
Poland; before the war, only a play, three more short stories, and an
unfinished novel of his managed to appear in periodicals, the novel
being a hilarious Gothic parody serialized pseudonymously in a
Warsaw tabloid. At this point, Gombrowicz was enough of a celeb–
rity to be invited aboard a newly-built ocean liner-ironically, to
take part in its trip as a representative of Reborn Poland's young
literature, expected to strengthen cultural contacts with the Polish
emigre community in Argentina.
While in Buenos Aires , he learned about the outbreak of war
and decided not to return. There was more to it than his self–
admitted incapacity to serve as a military hero. In a sense, it was one
