Polish Memories by Witold Gombrowicz & Bill Johnston

Author:Witold Gombrowicz & Bill Johnston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2004-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

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In that year of 1933, the year in which my first book was published, my father died. He had been ill for many months, but his condition worsened suddenly, and when he passed away only my mother and I were present. It wasn’t till the following day that my brothers arrived from the country.

This death left me with a rather shameful memory. When he died, I tried to embrace my mother so as in this way at least to show my feelings; but the gesture came out awkwardly, and in the blink of an eye the entire abjectness of my situation was revealed to me: I was incapable of ordinary human reactions, of sincerity, tenderness; I was as it were paralyzed by form, style, by this whole accursed manner that I’d created for myself … and here I was, incapable of offering my own mother a little warmth at such a moment! Relations were distant in our family; we were too critical, ironic, sarcastic; our sense of the ridiculous was too great, and this killed any more intense response in us. I’m speaking of myself and my brothers, since both the women—my sister and my mother—were rather victims of this state of affairs. But my father had an uncommunicative, Lithuanian nature, and his relations with us were not close.

When my brothers appeared and there began the complicated process of arranging the funeral, a macabre mixture of grief and social, even financial, affairs, along with common snobbery (how should the obituary look in the Kurier Warszawski? who would speak at the service?), my distaste and anger took precedence over all my other feelings. I didn’t reproach myself or my brothers that we were not able to grasp the fact of the death right away. After all, no one is in control of their feelings, and besides, sentiment had to find its own, more intimate moment. But I was irked by our powerlessness in the face of form and its conventional demands, and by the docility with which we donned funereal expressions, even though in our black suits we really were grief-stricken.

Yes, at the funeral I was racked by dismal reflections. Our family was coming to an end. Appearances to the contrary, and despite the fact that my brothers had married and had children, it was a family in decline; the unhealthy blood of the Kotkowskis, which we had inherited from our mother and which burdened us with the possibility of psychological disturbances, was probably the direct cause of the disorder. My father was the last of the Gombrowiczes who enjoyed respect and inspired confidence; we, the next generation, were eccentrics of whom it was said, “What a pity they didn’t take after old Gombrowicz.” Concerning myself I had no illusions: I knew I was a kind of psychological cripple for whom a normal existence was out of the question, and who had to seek his own path. Sensitivity, imagination, complexes, fears, and obsessions preyed on me all the more as they

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