BOOKS
735
as in his other work.
In "Ode III," a fragment of which gives
With the Skin
its title, the
painful process of experiencing the world "with my skin" is presented in
several stages. Wat views his own poetry as born out of the sensations felt
by his skin - both the skin of someone who immerses himself in the ec–
static joy of love and
gaya scienza
and the lacerated, pitiful, humiliated
skin of a sacrificial animal. Both skins are, at the same time, individual
and social: the skin of the dancer and lover communicates his intimate
joy to others, that of the defenseless offering issues a warning to others
by signalling his inner pain.
Wat is one of the few authors who indeed seem to write "with
their skin." Yet his poetry is also highly intellectual and philosophical.
This only
appears
to be a contradiction. The brain, after all, is also part of
the body. In Wat's writing, the subtlest distinctions of the mind are
tested by being translated into the language of the tactile sensations of
pleasure and pain. Before World War II, Wat's chief artistic purpose was
a variously conceived defense of individual freedom. His first volume of
poetic prose was one of the most daring explorations of the limits of
freedom in modern literature. In his collection of short stories,
Lucifer
Unemployed
(of which an American translation is underway), historically–
established ideas, notions, and psychological truths are treated in a way
that borders on paradoxical, thus laying bare all the fragility of our un–
derstanding of the world. Subsequently, after the
Cilesura
of Wat's pro–
communist sympathies, came the crucial experience of his life: years of
imprisonment and persecution in the Soviet Union. Wat returned to
Warsaw in 1946 with a burning desire to reveal the truth about com–
munism, about the atrocities committed by an inhumane system in the
name of universal good and happiness. But he found no ready audience.
His compatriots' endurance had been worn thin by the years of Nazi
occupation, and everyone seemed reconciled to the fact that the Soviets
were the winners. With the noose of socialist realism's cultural
monopoly constantly tightening around his neck, Wat abandoned his
mission and stopped writing altogether. He made ends meet by translat–
ing Russian literature, Dostoevsky in particular. Wat's thoughts on
communism's atrocities borrowed from Western literature that dealt
with cruelty. In
My
Century
he observes:
In my early youth there was a long period when I delighted in reading
the literature of cruelty from Lewis's
The Monic
to
o.
Mirbeau's
The
Torture Garden:
evidently, in my readings I'd consumed my portion
of sadism, and the world of Soviet tortures bored me like a hack–
neyed novel ... Suffering which had an end to it seemed bearable to
