BOOKS
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Lars, presented with the recovered original copy of Schulz's
Messiah,
"felt his own ordinary pupil consumed by a conflagration in the socket.
As if copulating with an angel whose wings were on fire."
David Grossman's hero, a Hebrew writer similarly obsessed with
Schulz, observes:
Whenever I finished copying some passage, my pen would jiggle and
litter the page with a line or two of my own - though how shall I
put it - in Bruno's voice, by straining to hear him, having clearly
perceived his desperate need
to
express himself, now that he was de–
prived of his writing hand .. . I was merely the vessel, the writing
hand ... through which his stifled energy could flow.
Schulz managed to do the writing and drawing that has spurred this
adulation in his spare time, that is, when he was free from the drudgery
of teaching drawing twenty-seven hours a week
to
young boys at a
Drohobycz gymnasium. From a very young age, he covered every avail–
able scrap of paper with his sketches., mystified in later years at how
we manage to acquire certain images in childhood that carry decisive
meanings for us. They function like those threads in the solution
around which the significance of the world crystallizes for us. These
are the texts that are marked out, made ready for us somehow, lying
in wait for us at the very entrance of life.
Schulz did not have his first book of stories,
Cinammon Shops,
pub–
lished until he waS forty. The stories began life as a series of postscripts
dropped off into a mailbox, part of a correspondence now lost, with a
Polish-Jewish writer, Debora Vogel. Eventually the postscripts broke free
of their epistolary moorings and were discovered by another influential
Polish woman, Zofia Nalkowska, who became Schulz's patroness and
persuaded the publishing house of Roj to publish this unknown writer
from the provinces. By contrast, from an early age he impressed teachers,
friends, and galleries with his artwork.
Schulz began to illustrate his stories some ten years before his literary
debut. He designed the dust jackets for
Cinnamon Shops
(1934) and
Sanatorium under the Sign oj the Hourglass
(1937), and he created drawings
for each book, although only the thirty-three for
Sanatorium
were used.
Jerzy Ficowski believes that Schulz himself wrote the copy on the
original dust jacket of
Sanatorium:
