Gombrowicz in

Argentina, circa 1955.

Photo: Beinecke

Rare Book and

Manuscript Library,

Yale University

Anna Krajewska-Wieczorek

Gombrowicz ’s Grimaces and Games

Whenever I think of Gombrowicz or read his works I remember an anecdote from

his life in Argentina. A child asked about the writer during a long absence from his

friends’ house: “What happened to that man who makes such funny faces?” From his

first publication of Recollections of Adolescence in Warsaw in 1933—a volume of short

stories containing “A Feast at Countess Kotlubay’s”—Gombrowicz made faces at var-

ious social conventions and initiated literary games to provoke a reevaluation of cul-

tural patterns. Although that first volume brought a considerable number of reviews,

several in major literary magazines, only a few were enthusiastic or recognized his tal-

ent. Most critics read Gombrowicz’s short stories merely as the grimaces of an idio-

syncratic teenager and as documents of his pathological deviations. The stories were so

completely different from contemporary writing that they aroused controversy for both

their style and their subjects. Critics found them “odd,” “bizarre,” and “eccentric,” and

they were criticized as “maniacal stories” breathing “sexual obsessions.” Others, however,

received the author of Recollections as an exciting promise of Polish literature, includ-

ing such prominent authors as Bruno Schulz, Leon Chwistek, and Zofia Nalkowska.

Schulz was so enchanted with the “fantastic and absurd” style of the short stories that

he had trouble accepting Gombrowicz’s later novel Ferdydurke. When it stirred up a

scandal in 1937, critics were divided between those who found it sensational and others

who hardly could hide their confusion. But Ferdydurke brought the critics to accept

reality: Gombrowicz was a writer who proved to be excitingly original.

Jerzy Jarzebski, one of the most renowned literary critics devoted to Gom-

browicz’s work, has observed that in the short stories’ reception, the game-playing

motif, so present in Gombrowicz’s early writing, escaped the attention of most review-

ers. “They didn’t capture the element of a game: with a reader, with a cognitive stereo-

type . . . nobody took up the challenge to come together with the hero, to look with his

eyes at the silliness and absurdities of the ‘mature’ world.”1

It would take more than a decade before Gombrowicz emerged as a writer of

international reputation. In the summer of 1939, at the age of thirty-five, he was invited

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on the maiden voyage of the transatlantic ocean liner Chrobry, and he decided to stay

in its destination port in Argentina when the war broke out in September of that year.

Like Kafka, he worked in a bank for nearly a decade, during which time he sharpened

his tongue and developed his youthful “games” and “faces” into a well-defined theory

of constantly changing “forms.” According to Gombrowicz, our self-image is created

by other people’s perceptions and our environment, and we become molded in that

form. The continuing evolution of our form is propelled by an ongoing tension

between superiority and commonality, and an everlasting contest between maturity

and youthful innocence. His early writing testifies to his fascination with immaturity

and his weakness for all that is common (or “lower,” as in “lower-class” company). His

plays, the novel Pornografia, and the short story “The Back Stairs” make these obses-

sions manifest. At the same time Gombrowicz never lost the intrinsic features of his

noble ancestors: the propensity for conversation, social skills, and word games in which

the main task was to seize the attention and passions of the interlocutors. In his own

life Gombrowicz always provoked such contests at Ziemianska, Warsaw’s literary café,

where he had his table, and he did the same later in Buenos Aires, and in his fierce

polemics with art- and literary-world moguls in his famous Diaries.

“A Feast at Countess Kotlubay’s” is a gem of Gombrowicz’s early writing.

When it first appeared in 1933, the story did not excite as much interest as “Premedi-

tated Murder” or “Five Minutes before Sleep” (later retitled “The Adventures”) in the

same volume. In the sociopolitical context of the 1930s this is understandable. “The

Premeditated Murder” provoked revulsion to its unprecedented treatment of a crime,

and the exoticism of “Five Minutes” was also alluring in its way. “A Feast,” read in an

era of aristocracy and landownership, could only have been regarded as mockery or

caricature of society’s upper spheres. Leon Chwistek, the writer, art theorist, and

mathematician, was one of the very few who singled out “A Feast at Countess

Kotlubay’s” as a masterpiece of symmetry and exhilarating wordplay. When Ferdy-

durke was published later, Chwistek proclaimed: “Once I had read the story of Count-

ess Kotlubay, I knew that I had encountered a writer of uncommon caliber!”2

“A Feast at Countess Kotlubay’s” is the first of many Gombrowicz works sit-

uated in aristocratic or royal circles. The important plays—Ivona, Princess of Burgundy

and Operetta—take place in a palace or court and involve aristocracy. The novellas

Pornografia and Cosmos are located on the estates of landowners, and high society’s

manners and customs become vital elements in two other major works: Ferdydurke and

Trans-Atlantyk. In all, contradictions of superiority and commonness, a dialectic of

“higher” and “lower,” compel a literary mechanism allowing Gombrowicz to initiate

interactive games. Those games transmit a subconscious desire to free oneself from

one’s “form,” a form imposed by another party or antagonist of some kind. Nonethe-

less, such an opposition, in spite of vigorous confrontation, remains governed by rules

of symmetry.

krajewska-wieczorek

80

Tom Wheatley

(Marquise, at top)

and Paul Gutrecht

(Narrator) in A Feast

at Countess Kotlubay’s,

directed by Michael

Hackett, 1997.

Photo: Bogdan Krezel

The aristocrats in “A Feast at Count-

ess Kotlubay’s” need a guest from the common

sphere at their banquet as much as their com-

mon guest aspires to enter their world. Their

“higher” or superior existence is sanctioned by

its distance from the “lower” level of the bour-

geois; he mirrors himself in them, and they do

the same in his presence. “Higher” needs

“lower” as aristocrats need their servants and

lackeys in order to celebrate their superiority

and to have an audience for their games. The

guest (our Narrator) at Kotlubay’s feast becomes

an object of the game because he is excluded

from the closed system of etiquette and speech

codes; the more he tries to imitate the higher

style, the lower he falls. It happens because the

“higher”—here an aristocratic baron—

responds to an aspiration of the “lower” (the

Narrator) by retreating behind the tricks and

styles associated with a person of a lower class.

Paradoxically, this makes the Narrator feel like

the one ascending to an equal (i.e., “higher”)

position. This, however, proves even worse for

him; the Narrator, unexpectedly placed above

his station, becomes defensive—behavior that

sends him “lower” again.

In Gombrowicz’s commentary on his

early work, prepared for a new publication in

Poland in 1957 but withdrawn from the volume

Bakakaj shortly before it was published, the

author writes:

In the grotesque “Feast” the Countess Kotlubay and her guests consume, of course,

an ordinary cauliflower, while a boy named Cauliflower wanders in the fields,

comes to the window of the palace, and dies there of exhaustion. The connection

between Cauliflower–a man and cauliflower–a vegetable is strictly formal and lies

in a sound of the name. The meaning of that story is based in the fact that starva-

tion and suffering of poor Bolek Cauliflower increases the appetite of the aristo-

crats who eat cauliflower-vegetable. A natural cruelty of aristocracy of all sorts is

the mystery, which my humanitarian vegetarian cannot conceive for so long.3

gombrowicz ’s grimaces and games

81

In “Feast” the tension between “higher” and “lower” takes a form of snobbery. Snob-

bery becomes heightened, and underpinned, by the cannibalism of the aristocracy.

Gombrowicz himself admitted to his own mania of snobbishness in both his Diaries

and “Conversations with Dominique de Roux.” He said in the latter: “Snobbishness

got the better of us, my brothers and me, which was to some degree unavoidable in our

circle. However, it was also strange because we were intelligent enough to realize how

silly and nihilistic it all had been.”

Thus the voice of a narrator in “Feast” can be treated as the voice of its writer,

and the stage character might be modeled upon Gombrowicz. While adapting the

story for the stage, Michael Hackett and I followed this course and shaped an image of

the Narrator as an aspiring intellectual flattered by his invitation to Kotlubay’s salon.

The Narrator’s lofty speeches—or so he believes in his attempts to impress the Count-

ess, Marquise, and Baron—echo the amateurish poetry written with pretentious

pathos by the nobly born women in the Ziemianska Association, to which Gombro-

wicz’s mother belonged.

Our production of “Feast” at UCLA was spurred by an invitation to partici-

pate in the Third International Gombrowicz Festival in Radom, Poland, in 1997. (The

production was subsequently performed in Lódz, Krakow, and Warsaw.) We were

committed first to finding a work unknown to Southern California audiences and sec-

ond to creating a role for Barbara Krafftowna, famous for her performance as Ivona in

the world premiere of Gombrowicz’s Ivona, Princess of Burgundy at Warsaw’s Teatr

Dramatyczny in 1957. Krafftowna had previously collaborated with us on Seneca’s Hip-

polytus, as one of several professional actors performing with UCLA students in our

Laboratory for Theater Research. As the project’s dramaturg, I searched through

Gombrowicz’s writing for a piece that would satisfy both ambitions.

In reading the short stories, “A Feast at Countess Kotlubay’s” seemed to

promise ideal stage material for our needs. The adaptation called for a cast of five

(which we later enlarged by creating servants’ roles performed by students) and the

irresistibly theatrical character of Countess Maria Kotlubay. Luckily, Michael Hack-

ett, who had successfully directed three productions in Warsaw during the 1990s,

shared my enthusiasm and saw what Kotlubay’s story offers a theater director. Hack-

ett’s directing style, which combines elements of text with music and dance, seemed to

fit well with the story. The only remaining issue was the task of translation. (There

wasn’t an English translation of Gombrowicz’s early stories at that point, though they

are forthcoming in this centenary year.)

I took up the challenge with trepidation. Knowing the subtlety of Gombro-

wicz’s original Polish, his playful creation of linguistic quibbles, and the stubbornly

ineffective English translations of Gombrowicz’s longer works, I felt intimidated.

Hackett helped me find English equivalents for such puzzles as the transformation of

krajewska-wieczorek

82

the Countess’s name (the Polish “Kotlubaj” morphs into her pen name “Podlubaj,”

which has erotic connotations). Hackett also penned additional lines and composed

lyrics for the Countess’s song. His text radiates Gombrowicz in its esoteric and quasi-

grotesque style.

In his staging, Hackett sought an atmosphere that would convey the 1930s

origins of “Feast.” He was drawn to the American comedies of manners by Philip

Barry as well as the screwball comedy tradition—especially the work of Preston

Sturges. While apparently elegant and light, this style masks the Depression’s dark

social anxieties and American culture’s hidden class consciousness. Over the course of

the play Hackett staged an increasing disjunction between what was happening and

what was being said. At times the gestures, movement, and musical tone stood in

direct contradiction to the Narrator’s lines. Barbara Krafftowna used her remarkable

ability to convey one meaning in her spoken text and another in nuances of vocal

inflection and gesture. The Footmen evolved into sinister forces, adding an element of

constant foreboding and danger; they were the embodiment of the Countess’s subtext

of aggression and decadence. In the course of translating “Feast” and before rehearsals,

Michael asked me how the style of Gombrowicz might be characterized or compared

with other writers. I answered hesitantly (because Gombrowicz’s style is singular and

hardly comparable to anything) that it could be called a conglomerate of F. Scott

Fitzgerald, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Marx Brothers.

The sinister dance of cannibals at the close brings to mind a story passed

down among generations of Gombrowicz’s family. As a child of seven or eight, having

received a bow and arrows as a gift, young Witold started testing his arms by aiming

at his cousin, an older girl. Witold’s aunt warned him against such a dangerous act,

and when it was clear that he would not heed her, she suggested to the girl that she

pretend she had been killed. When the girl fell on the ground motionless, Gombro-

wicz approached her, and said: “It’s true; she is killed all right. We have to carry her to

the cook.”

Notes

1. Jerzy Jarzebski, Gra w Gombrowicza (Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniezy, 1982);

my translation.

2. Leon Chwistek, Czas no. 36 (1938).

3. Editor’s note, Bakakaj (Krakow: Wydawn. Literackie, 1986); my translation.

gombrowicz ’s grimaces and games

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