Delta, the Troubadour

 

(On Gałczyński)

In Central and Eastern Europe, the word “poet” has a somewhat different meaning from that which it has in the West. There a poet does not merely arrange words in beautiful order. Tradition demands that he be a “bard,” that his songs linger on many lips, that he speak in his poems of subjects of interest to all the citizens. Every period of history has understood the poet’s obligations differently. Probably Delta would have been happiest in the days when kings and nobles assured the poet a place at their table in exchange for a song or a jest. Even the dress of former ages would have suited his appearance better than the business suit of our century; and only long hair and a lute in his hand could have created a picture in keeping with his character.

Delta had dark, gypsy coloring, was freckled, not tall, and when he laughed his thick mouth was distorted by a jocular grimace. He brushed his hair back from a high forehead. His head was so disproportionately big for his short body that he looked somehow like a dwarf or jester, as one sees them in court paintings. He wore his neckties in a loose, big knot and otherwise betrayed a penchant for eccentric clothes. Often, those who resort to superficial quirks to identify themselves as members of the artistic clan are second-rate artists. But his “artiness” was part of his over-all act. With every gesture, every intonation of his voice, he played, so to speak, with the world; he accented the differ-

ence between his own rhythm and that of his environment. His rhythm was suggestive. He recited his verse magnificently in huge halls filled with people. He was a good actor; he dominated the audience, and he knew how to key his listeners up to a climax without once letting the mounting tension drop. He imposed his poems slowly, pausing between words; and though he was speaking, he sang. At such times, he was a living rhythmic incantation; he changed, he grew in stature.

No one knows his origins. He altered his biography to fit the needs of the moment. Once his father was a sexton; once, a restaurant owner. At times his family was Czech; at times it had Muscovite connections. The boundaries between fantasy and truth did not exist for him.

How he came by his knowledge of foreign languages was another mystery. It would be hard to imagine him sitting down to a dictionary and a grammar. Yet he cited copiously from Latin, English, French, and German poets. For a short while he studied at the University, where he became famous for writing an essay on a seventeenth-century English poet who never existed. After giving an extensive biography of the poet, the essay went on to a detailed analysis of the circumstances in which his individual works appeared. A charlatan, a hoaxer— this is what he wanted to be then, and always, enjoying himself mightily when his pedantic professor found himself in trouble, overwhelmed by such obvious proof of erudition.

Delta was an inveterate alcoholic, usually in cycles that lasted several days. Alcohol brought him to a state of hallucination marked by actions which rarely occur to other drunkards. In a travel bureau he would order a glass of beer. He would hire a hack, order it to stop at a main intersection and, after delivering a speech to an astonished crowd, he would throw off his coat and phlegmatically relieve him-

self on it. Or he would come to his friends complaining that he had had trouble in finding their homes because, as he said, “his people,” whom he had stationed throughout the city to point him the way, had so disguised themselves that he could not recognize them. Such extravagances indicated that alcohol plunged him into the world of Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe. He became a legendary figure whose latest escapades were the talk of the literary cafes.

Delta’s poetry was an added source of legend. It was unlike anything written in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. No literary school influenced him. He dwelt in the aura of the Italo-Latin civilization whose mark was still deeply graven on our country. The accessories he borrowed from the poetry of the past he then put together in a manner reminiscent of his drunken fantasies. His poetry was a kaleidoscope of chubby baroque angels, magicians carried off through the window by some unknown power (they are retained, at the last moment by a wifely bite on the ear), falconry, astrologists prophesying the end of the world. Interspersed in it were phonograph records playing the music of Bach or Mozart, potatoes in the soil dreaming of the vodka that would be made of them, planets in the shape of young women dressed in blue pants, and folk dances in the suburbs. His poetry was tragic and comic, senseless yet full of sense. This alogical hodgepodge of disparate elements differed from confessedly decadent types of modern poetry in one respect: despite the peculiar assemblage of images it presented, it was not unintelligible. The reader surrendered to its musical charm, swallowed portions of abstraction that annoyed him in other poets, laughed at the sudden twists of the author, in short, unsuspectingly entered a realm ruled by laws unlike those of everyday life.

He published much humorous verse, signing it with a variety of pseudonyms. His inventiveness in

finding subjects seemed inexhaustible. Among other things, he wrote a cycle entitled Little Songs of the Chief of the Office of Graves. He liked to include a fictitious list of his works in each book; I remember such a title as “An Introduction to Cannibalism— stenographed university lectures:    Troilus    Drug

Store, Publisher, out of print.” Because he was popular with the readers, he never lacked offers from publishers and the radio. His pen, which was his sole means of support, could have earned him a good living; but he constantly needed money because he immediately drank up his fees.

When he was sober, no one could have guessed that he was the author of poems that made the public laugh. Taciturn, gloomy, sly, he became animated only at the sight of money. In bargaining, he was inexorable. Once he named a sum, no argument could induce him to make a concession. What was worse, he demanded payment at once, which posed a terrible dilemma for his editors. They wanted his poems; but giving him money involved the risk that he would begin his drinking cycle and forget his commitments. Some editors found a solution: they would give him the money, then refuse to leave him for a single second until he handed them a manuscript. Such transactions often occurred in coffeehouses. The banknote would lie on the table between the two contracting parties. Delta, after fruitless efforts to soften his opponent, would take out his pen, write the poem (which, depending on his mood, might be excellent or mediocre), and picking up his note go off to drink.

Sometimes he landed in a sanatorium for alcoholics. The results of the “cures” were not good. His victories in his battles against the medical profession were widely recounted. In one of the sanatoriums, story has it, his triumph was so absolute that both patients and doctors, equally drunk, held bicycle races through the corridors.

Charlatan, drunkard—and yet he was an outstanding and, despite appearances, tragic poet. He began his literary career in years of economic crisis. Unemployment, universal hopelessness, the growth of Nazism in neighboring Germany all shaped the character of his writing. He was rightly called the “king of nonsense.” Yet readers who were not deceived by his superficial buffoonery saw in his poetry an ominous vision of the end of civilization, of an approaching “iron age,” of catastrophe. He spoke as if everything were lost years before Europe plunged into darkness and cruelty. The dread and beauty of past ages lived again in his work, but there was no hope of rest in them. The concepts and images he used had the consistency of dreams; they chased one another with the speed of a hurtling train. The Madonna who often figured in his poems was not the Madonna of the pious but merely a stylistic ornament. Fascists and Communists killed each other off in his verse with the gory ardor of actors in the Grand Guignol, while he mockingly cried: “O reality! O my sweet mother! For you killing flies is the same kind of bother!” He defined himself exactly when he said: “Braced on my Waterman/ I go off to the abyss/ of eternal doubt.”

The End of the World is his title for a poem in which scholars and politicians, revolutionists, lovers and drunkards, canaries and cats are all swept away in the end by a cosmic catastrophe—to the satisfaction of the author, and the fulfillment of the “vanity of vanities” theme of Ecclesiastes. And all this is described by a pen that is playing. In another of his poems, Folk Fair, there are carrousels, young pairs sitting on the grass, lawns littered with empty bottles, seesaws. Suddenly the sky clouds over, rain begins to fall, and the darkened heavens—in a manner that is a secret of Delta’s art—merge into a sad eclogue by Virgil punctuated by the bark of machine-guns.

His most unusual poem was Solomon's Ball. Why

does King Solomon give a ball? Why is he living in the twentieth century? Perhaps it is not King Solomon after all, simply Solomon? Why do the unemployed enter the ballroom selling butterflies? Who keeps singing Persian songs about Gulistan, the garden of roses? Where do the hordes of policemen come from who suddenly start performing wild dances? It is pointless to pause over such questions. The special logic of the dream does exist, but only such a poet as he can use it freely. “In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo” was T. S. Eliot’s expression for nonsense. Delta raised the conversations that took place at Solomon’s ball one degree higher, into the realm of delirium and “eternal doubt.”

The world as reflected in his poetry was oppressive; yet his poems—and here is one more inner contradiction of this queer man—were free of sadness and despair. On the contrary, they said a vigorous “yes” to life. With every word he praised the world as he saw it, a tangle of absurd pleasures, drives, words, and wars. He loved his phantasmagory. He loved carrousels, dancing gypsies, crowded Sunday excursion boats on the Vistula, his wife to whom he addressed his odes, cats sleeping on parapets, blooming apple trees. He loved enthusiasm and joyousness for their own sake. Whatever he touched changed into a scene of movement, color, and music. Subjects were merely a pretext for him. Like a silkworm, he spun out of himself a fine thread which he wrapped around whatever he encountered. He could compose songs and hymns on any topic.

Never displaying any political inclinations, he had always distributed his mockery evenly over all the groups that were vying for power. That is why his conversion, in 1937, to extreme nationalism was received with some amazement. The editor of an important rightist weekly had long tried to capture him, and at last he succeeded in purchasing him as

the exclusive property of the periodical. The magazine on whose pages his poems now began to appear was violently anti-Semitic. Its large circulation figures resulted from the spread of nationalist convictions in our country, particularly among the youth. The liberal public could hardly believe this new phase of his shenanigans: he lauded the marching “falangists,” prophesied a “night of long knives,” a new St. Bartholomew’s Eve for the Jews, liberals, and the left. Still, it was obviously a fact; such articles and poems did appear, signed by his name and bearing all the traits of his style.

Why did he write them? Racial questions were of supreme indifference to him. He had many Jewish friends, and the very day he published his racist statements, he would come to these friends (naturally he was drunk by then) and, falling on his knees, would declare his love for them and beg their forgiveness. The causes of his union with the right must be sought elsewhere than in his political tastes. Delta, buffoon and troubadour, did not lack professional principles. He respected his poetic trade; but his respect was not for what he wrote about. How and for whom—that was important. He scorned esoteric literary schools that catered to a small cluster of connoisseurs. He ridiculed poets whose words could be understood only by a smattering of intellectuals. Solitary meditations that had no hope of finding readers were not for him. Like troubadours of yore, he longed for a lute and a throng of admirers. It would be hard to find a better example of a writer revolting against the isolation of the intellectual in the twentieth century.

Delta’s hostility toward the Jews had no racial roots; he confined it to Jewish writers who, in general, were particularly given to celebration of literary “values” and “refinements.” It sprang from his battle against, and struggle to escape from, the literary cafes. Besides, as I have said, he was for enthusiasm.

The crowd marched, the crowd brandished canes; this was health, strength, primitiveness, a great popular festival. Where my readers go, there go I; what my readers want, I give them—this is what he confirmed in every poem. As the nationalist “movement” began to take on mass proportions, he moved to keep in stride with the masses. He told with pride of the thousands of young people who knew his verses by heart. His pride was justified. The poets of the sophisticated “avant-garde,” isolated as they were, took pride in their craft; but he beat them even on their own ground. Nor did they dispose over such a range of artistic media as he did. Last of all, we must consider that in order to live he needed a patron, a person who would force him to write, fight his drunkenness and, in short, control and care for him.

The War broke out. He was mobilized as a private. His unit was stationed in eastern Poland, on the borders of the Soviet Union. When the Reds moved to meet the German army, he was captured by the Russians. But along with a number of other disarmed Polish soldiers, Delta was turned over to the Germans. He spent the next five and a half years in a POW camp in the Reich. As a prisoner he was used for various types of work, chiefly agricultural. His qualifications for physical labor were slight. It is hard even to imagine a man less prepared for a mode of life in which the most important and almost unsolvable problem was how to fill one’s stomach. Still, he survived, this strange court dwarf in tatters, wielding a shovel as he recited Horace. Undoubtedly, his fluent knowledge of German came to his assistance. (...)

In 1945 he and his fellow prisoners welcomed the arrival of the British troops. Since they were accompanied by units of the London Polish army, he entered upon a round of encounters, drinking, and song. Having dried up those springs of money and

alcohol, he set out for France. Once again, as in 1939, this was an era of universal wandering. All of Europe was on the road; millions of forced laborers, prisoners, and slaves were returning to their homes; other millions were fleeing or being expelled from their native lands. Delta met large numbers of Poles everywhere. He wrote patriotic and anti-Russian poems that harmonized perfectly with the mood of his audience. He squeezed money out of every variety of emigre committee. His pre-war admirers, rejoicing that he had survived, did everything they could for him.

Gradually, however, his life in Paris and Brussels lost its charm. The possibilities of publishing were small; the public was dispersed over various countries; and there was ever less money. He felt he was becoming an ordinary impoverished exile whose-buffoonery, personal and poetic, passed unnoticed. Gloomy, bitter emigration, a void, and a taste of disaster. Where was the mass of people which could give him back warmth and friendship? It was in his native land. There, too, was his wife, who had lived through the German occupation working as a waitress in Warsaw restaurants. Publications that came from Poland persuaded him that the trend was liberal. The envoys of the Warsaw government assured him that he would be received warmly and that his pre-war rightist sins would be forgotten.

His return to Poland was accomplished with every prescribed scandal. From the moment he left the boat, he was in a state of alcoholic and patriotic euphoria. He sent telegrams to his wife from every railroad station. When at last he showed up in Cracow (where his wife had gone after the fall of Warsaw), in the company of a girl friend he had brought from Brussels, his wife immediately instituted sharp repressive measures and threw out the girl. His wife came of a Georgian emigre family. She was small, thin, and black-haired; she had oriental features, a slightly

humped prominent nose, and fiery black eyes. She liked to wear silver bracelets on her fine wrists. In all, she looked like a Caucasian madonna. Though she was passive and female, she had a good head for business and a gift for keeping her husband in hand.

Delta’s return was convenient for those who directed literature and propaganda. He was a popular poet. That he was known as a rightist only enhanced his value. He was a considerably greater asset to the new regime than many overly zealous leftists.

He had always needed a patron; now he found one who was really munificent, the state. His became a truly golden pen; its every motion—he wrote in big, decorative letters on long scrolls of paper— brought him larger fees than he had ever earned before. Moreover, his verbal enthusiasm, without which he could not live, now rested on a solid foundation. There were no longer “falangists” nor crowds excited against racial minorities; but there was the rebuilding of the country and the placating of national honor through the acquisition of territories in the West which originally belonged to Germany. His poems were always sunny no matter what he wrote about. That was good. Now he filled them with optimistic subject matter, with pictures of reconstruction and of the happy future; and that was even better. Since he had no trouble in finding remunerative outlets, he went wild. Odes, satiric verse, humorous prose, dialogues flowed from his workshop in an unbroken torrent. One magazine gave him a whole column in which, every week, he lodged his “theatrical pieces.” These were short, little scenes from what he called the “smallest theater in the world,” the Green Goose. In no other language have I read such pure absurdity. The heroes of the Green Goose were people, animals, and objects. The readers who attended these weekly performances of his cabaret were a little ashamed of their liking for these oddities, but they pounced on every issue of the magazine.

His activity was the subject of much controversy. Those who wanted to be considered “sure” and those who took their Marxism seriously were indignant. How could one, they asked, permit this clown to run riot as if he were in a Parisian existentialist cafe? He was a petty bourgeois who had gone mad. Why print his poems on the front pages of leading magazines; why allow him to have a career? Everybody remembered his anti-Semitic days, when he threatened his colleagues with a “night of long knives”! Now, no one was so well off as he. Wasn’t this disgraceful?

Experienced members of the Party quieted the outraged puritans, smiling indulgently at their naiveness. Delta was needed and useful at that stage. He had many followers; everything he wrote helped create an atmosphere of patriotism. It was politic to show that even rightists and Catholics had joined forces with the government. The reading public was not as yet ready for serious, sensible literature. At the moment. Delta’s farces best suited its taste. All this was a game, for a time; and then—off with his head.

When Poland was at last obliged to pass from restrained worship of Russia to outright idolatry, he let no one outdo him. He wrote of the heroism of Soviet soldiers, of the gratitude every Pole should feel toward Russia, of Lenin, of Komsomol youth. He adhered to the Communist line in every respect. As an eminent author, he received a Soviet visa and spent some time in Moscow, sending back enthusiastic reports in prose and verse. In one he announced that the magnificence of Moscow was marred by but a single flaw: it was too much like Taormina; people ate just as many oranges there, and he didn’t like oranges.

His correspondence from Moscow drove the puritans crazy. They knew that Moscow was a gloomy and rather forbidding city. His raptures bore

all the traits of derision. They seemed to say: “You want me to sing praises; very well. I’ll sing praises till they come out of your ears.” Still, it was not easy to guess his real intentions. It was impossible to tell whether he was lying or telling the truth. Normal criteria did not apply to him. He moved in a different dimension. Like a prestidigitator, he always pulled the proper number of rabbits out of his hat, and all of them rabbits of the required color. He invariably transformed everything into opera bouffe. Because he constantly used exaggeration as his artistic tool, his opponents could prove nothing against him. He neither mocked nor spoke the truth; he performed tricks, he practiced art for art’s sake.

He was never “serious.” And as we know, this is the basic requirement of socialist realism. After the writers’ congresses at which socialist realism was proclaimed the sole creative method allowed, the partisans of gravity began their action against him, sure now that they could take their revenge. Analyzing his poetry, they proved that the world for him was nothing but a toy to play with. Once, before the War, he had written An Elegy on the Death of a Butterfly Run Over by a Freight Van. Despite its long title, the elegy consisted of four lines which concluded that the thoughtless butterfly richly deserved its fate. Now he found himself under the wheels of the van. The period of austerity and precision was beginning. He could write on every subject, from the Madonna to Lenin and Moscow, just so long as his master demanded his services, yet his poems never lacked spontaneity. They were always exuberant; but we must add that in them the Madonna as well as Lenin and Moscow became something unreal, a kind of theater in the clouds. Now, however, “the struggle against the spontaneity of the creative process” had become the slogan, which meant that it was no longer enough to write on prescribed subjects; one had to write in a prescribed manner.

Delta wanted to serve his lord. In order to exist as a poet he needed a genial, amused seigneur who believed that neither his government nor anything in heaven or on earth deserves to be taken too seriously, that song—half serious, half scoffing—matters more. But such princes have long since ceased to be. The lord who held him in thrall tolerated him for a while not because his songs were pleasing, for song is merely a means to an end. It was when his songs no longer served the desired end that his master knit his brows in anger. Publishers were instructed to print only those of his poems in which he demonstrated that he had reformed. The puritans rubbed their hands in glee. At last they had wrung his neck. They knew that no matter how he tried he could not reform. Deprived of their former exuberance, his poems no longer differed from verse ground out by second-rate rhymesters.

Thus he entered the realm of living shadows. Nothing should be wasted, however, in a socialist economy. Men who have fulfilled their role can find work enough for their capacities. Delta’s existence was assured; a state publishing house commissioned him to do a translation of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Some two years after his fall from grace he has been given another chance. At this writing, all his past sins are being discussed openly in the leading literary weekly. This is a sort of trial, with a favorable verdict prepared in advance. Delta will return to favor once more; but once more, it will be only for a time.

 Czesław Miłosz 

Captive Mind