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PARTISAN REVIEW
me.
This subject is further elaborated in his
Diary without Vowels.
Much
more personal than
My
Century,
the diary (so far available only in Polish)
was originally written in Wat's own code that, like a Hebrew text,
omitted vowels.
An
entry from 1965 offers an interesting argument about
the increasing trivialization of cruelty in the contemporary world. Wat
begins with culture, pointing out the differences between exemplary
works such as
Confessions
of
an English Opium-Eater
on the one hand and
the prose of Michel Leiris on the other. He proceeds to politics and
notes "the trivialization that the genocide of ancient Asian empires
un–
derwent in the concentration camps of Hitler and Stalin." In another
entry, which begins by discussing the role of rhyme in poetry, Wat arrives
at a distinction between the two forms of modern genocide. According
to him, Hitler's genocide could be interpreted as Dionysian, Stalin's as
Apollonian:
Pock-marked, disgusting Stalin
as
Apollo! An apparently shocking
comparison. One forgets about the Apollo who flayed Marsyas alive.
But readers of the Holy Scripture realize that this Apollo presages
Apollyon, the spirit of darkness.
One cannot help thinking of Aleksander Wat as a twentieth-century
Marsyas. His suffering was a self-imposed curse for having once been too
close, skin to skin, to the ideology and system he later considered the
greatest illness of our (and his) century.
JAN ZIELINSKI
Paul Bowles
A WORLD OUTSIDE: THE FICTION OF PAUL BOWLES. By
Richard
F. Patteson. University ofTexas Press. $18.95.
AN INVISmLE SPECTATOR: A BIOGRAPHY OF PAUL BOWLES.
By
Christopher
Sawyer-Lau~anno.
Weidenfeld
&
Nicolson. $24.95.
The recent appearance of two books on the life and work of Paul
Bowles, and the nature of the responses they have generated, should go a
