648
PARTISAN REVIEW
I
kept writing, but
I
didn't want to publish, since my so-called poetics
was anti-Marxist, prone
to
irrationalism.. . . I tried to adapt my fic–
tion to political views, but the results were terrible... .
I
didn't want
to publish this stuff. And what I thought good I could not publish
either, for my Communist conscience would not allow it. So
I
shut
up. . .. I wrote then a great deal, but I would destroy everything, for
whatever
I
wrote was either bad or non-Marxist.
Throughout the 1930s, the lot of the Polish Communist or
Communist-sympathizer was, to put it mildly, not a happy one . Not
only was he or she apt to suffer harassment at the hands of an increasingly
repressive regime
(The Literary Monthly
was banned by the authorities in
1931, and Wat spent a couple of months in Warsaw jails). Moreover, and
more importantly, his or her faith in the Soviet Union was severely taxed
by Stalin's policies - the forced collectivization and the dread purges -
which entailed a near annihilation of the Polish Communist elite. For a
while Wat managed to look away, to live, in his own words, with his
eyes half-shut. Yet toward the end of the grim decade, his mounting
doubts, his revulsion from the Great Terror, could no longer be
assuaged.
This was not necessarily the case with his fully committed friends . "In
1937," he recalls, "when I would say to some prominent Communists,
'Is not [the evil of all] this apparent to you by now?' they would an–
swer: ... 'Yes, we know, but we cannot simply leave - this is our entire
youth.' " "Communism," continues Wat, "has shown how immensely
difficult it is to walk out on one's youth if it has been a kind of peak
experience. All these old Communists who came to Communism by
different paths reached it by the road of idealism and selflessness."
It is clear that the vehemence of Wat's ultimate recoil from Com–
munism had not made him vindictive toward his former traveling com–
panions, had not prevented him from respecting, indeed admiring, the
original motives of those seduced by the mirage. A salient example of
such fair-mindedness is Wat's entirely persuasive portrait of one ofWat's
chief associates on the editorial board of
The Literary MOllthly,
the
Communist stalwart Jan Hempel. Their coexistence was not always har–
monious. As the liaison with the Party, Hempel, was a guardian of
political orthodoxy, forever on the lookout for anything that smacked
of a "deviation," most notably of Trotskyism. A relentless simplifier, he
would clash repeatedly with Wat and a doctrinaire but highly intelligent
Marxist critic, Andrzej Stawar. Yet, he emerges in Wat's narrative as an
uncommonly appealing human being - a man of total integrity, purity
and personal kindness. These admirable qualities, combined with an al-
