The Heresiarch of Dreams.(Regions of the Great Heresy: a Biographical Portrait of Bruno Schulz)(Book Review)

Regions of the Great Heresy: A Biographical Portrait of Bruno Schulz, by Jerzy Ficowski; Norton, 2003, about $40.

BRUNO SCHULZ, the Polish-Jewish writer and artist, was born in 1892 in the Galician town of Drohobycz, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father ran a haberdashery shop; the family was comfortably off, secular and fairly well assimilated. In 1915, Schulz's father Jacob died, and Drohobycz's marketplace, including his father's shop, was flattened by the Russian army. This was the great divide in Schulz's life. Unlike Kafka, to whom he bears some resemblance, he doted on his father. All his subsequent writings were to become a mythological consecration of his father's cabalistic speculations in the backroom to his shop. Double-entry bookkeeping has rarely been described with such entrancement:

 
   The Book lay in all its glory on my father's desk, 
   and he, quietly engrossed in it, patiently rubbed 
   with a wet fingertip the top of decals, until the 
   blank page grew opaque and ghostly with a 
   delightful foreboding and, suddenly, flaking off in 
   bits of tissue, disclosed a peacock-eyed fragment. 

War ended in 1918, and Drohobycz became Polish (it is now in western Ukraine). Schulz went on to earn his living as an arts and crafts teacher, and wrote and drew on the side. He was a bashful and sexually complicated man, to judge from his weirdly compelling and theatrical drawings, which show dwarfish males who, as in Masoch's notorious novel Venus in Furs (1870), take their pleasure by prostrating themselves before elegantly bored young girls. In his story "The Street of Crocodiles", "[they] wear their hair ribbons in a characteristic way and flounce on their slim legs with a peculiar gait, an impure expression in their eyes that foreshadows their future corruption". These are men begging to be oppressed by the female leg, preferably sheathed in silk.

It was only through the intervention of friends in the 1930s that his stories were published at all, in the volumes Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass. The shy literary sensation started a frantic correspondence with established figures in Polish letters such the versatile (self-)dramatist Stanislaw Iguacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) and the future literary enigma Witold Gombrowicz (an entertaining selection was published in translation, in 1988, as Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz). He fell out with the latter, whose novels were to make a speciality of exploring how art looks to people who don't like art, when he pointed out that for the "doctor's wife from Wilcza Street" (an invented Philistine) Schulz was a "pervert or poseur" and, anyway, his stories were "just pretending". In an open reply Schulz averred that though he might find it difficult to resist "the charm of her legs", such a reader was constitutionally incapable of appreciating his stories, her vitality being simply "her heavy passive mass".

Schulz was a late Romantic: in a letter of i936, he avowed that wanting to "mature" into childhood was his artistic aim. He sets out to make the modest town of Drohobycz into something like a modern Babylon: his stories are dominated by preternatural seasons, the peculiar splendours of provincial life, and a parental home where every door n-fight be the secret passage to the archives of the cosmos. "The inhabitants of the city are quite proud of the odour of corruption emanating from the Street of Crocodiles", their concession to "modernity and metropolitan corruption".

Almost every story has the same small east, in particular the enigmatic, impractical figure of Father dreaming of demiurges among his bales of cotton, and his arch-enemy, the housemaid Adela, who is ...