‘Hang in there, boy!’
Mercedes Halfon, trans. Rahul Bery, Outsider Everywhere: Witold Gombrowicz in Argentina
Fitzcarraldo Editions, 152pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781804272353
reviewed by Simon Firth
‘Kill Borges!’ Witold Gombrowicz allegedly shouts from aboard the ship carrying him out of Buenos Aires in 1963, 24 years after he’d first arrived as a passenger on a Polish cruise liner. When war broke out in 1939 and the ship was recalled, he decided, on impulse, to stay. He was thirty-five, with two suitcases, two hundred dollars, and two published books behind him – including Ferdydurke, the comic, surrealist novel about a writer abducted by his old schoolteacher, which had established his reputation in the interwar literary cafés of Warsaw, and which Milan Kundera later argued was central to the development of the modern European novel (along with the work of Broch, Musil and Kafka).
In Buenos Aires, Gombrowicz is a complete unknown. (The single newspaper notice that greets his arrival describes him as a ‘humorist’ and author of a ‘potboiler’). And for the vast majority of his time there – during which he writes The Marriage (1948), Trans-Atlantyk (1953), Pornografia (1960) and the Diary, published serially in the Paris-based émigré journal Kultura from 1953 — he leads a ramshackle existence marked by instability, destitution, and literary obscurity. ‘I fell in love with the catastrophe that I hated,’ Gombrowicz writes in the Diary, ‘that, after all, also ruined me.’
Mercedes Halfon’s Outsider Everywhere — originally published in Spanish as Extranjero en todas partes, and now available in this excellent translation by Rahul Bery from Fitzcarraldo — reconstructs these years through a series of impressionistic snapshots. Drawing on testimonials, archival material, and interviews with scholars and friends, Halfon assembles an oral history of fragmentary vignettes from Gombrowicz's time in Buenos Aires. This cumulative method is partly an attempt to prise the myth of Gombrowicz from the version he puts together himself in the Diary, whose programme he outlined in a letter to the editor of Kultura:
The patchwork Gombrowicz that emerges in Outsider Everywhere will still be recognisable to anyone who has read the Diary: he is prickly, dramatic, self-absorbed, and funny. He enjoys winding people up (Susan Sontag calls him ‘one of the great super-arguers of the twentieth century’) even though he is essentially destitute for his first few years in Buenos Aires. After an aristocratic upbringing in Poland, in Argentina he is entirely reliant on the small circle of acquaintances and friends who support and indulge him. Still, partly as a joke and partly not, he styles himself as a Count. He lives on one meal a day, usually paid for by someone else. He drifts between guest houses and spare rooms. At one point, unable to pay his bill at a guesthouse, he escapes through a window; shortly afterwards, he runs into a Polish journalist and ends up sleeping on a bed of newspapers in his apartment for six months.
Halfon suggests that this unstable, shambling existence embodies Gombrowicz's creative preoccupations: ‘the rejection of maturity, of form and the quest for the imperfect.’ In particular, Gombrowicz is obsessed with youth — ‘a value in itself, that is, a destroyer of all other values’ — and in Buenos Aires, he carves out a marginal existence where he can live as an unknown artist pretending to be a young man. He seems young, too: Halfon writes that he looks ‘as if the Argentine youth he was so fascinated by had got stuck to his face’. She quotes Ernesto Sábato’s description of him: ‘adolescent, skinny, scrawny, furiously smoking and sucking on cigarettes; theatrical, contradictory, provocative, haughty, and with an incredible sense of humour.’
This is one of several glimpses of Gombrowicz that accumulate to build a lively picture of his time in Buenos Aires. We see him through the smokey window of the Café Rex, where he goes every afternoon to argue with friends and play chess. (The chess master Paulino Frydman, watching him: ‘he didn't know much theory and essentially just attacked’). We join him strolling endlessly through the streets of the capital, and on nocturnal excursions through the Retiro, picking up young men and workers (an activity that Gombrowicz passes over in silence in the Diary). We see him in a friend’s front room, teaching philosophy classes to Polish ladies for a fee.
(At the end of the classes, he hands round his hat to collect payment). Most unbelievably, we also see Gombrowicz the employee: at the bank where he works from 1948, he arrives late, dressed like a beggar, spending his time ‘smoking nervously, in search of inspiration’. (Gombrowicz on this period: ‘Everything suffers because for seven hours every day I commit murder on my own time.’)
At times there’s a more enterprising Gombrowicz at work. In 1945, short on money, Gombrowicz proposes translating Ferdydurke into Spanish. The result is one of the book’s most striking episodes: the work of ‘the Ferdydurke translation committee’, a loose, shifting group of collaborators who gather in Café Rex. There are up to ten people involved (‘a group of Latin Americans who do not know Polish, and a single Pole who does not know Spanish,’ Halfon writes). It’s a ridiculous, incredible project, and gives form to one of the book’s implicit claims: that the Gombrowicz who mythologises his self-reliance and ostracism, and is happiest casting himself as a surly antagonist, is in fact completely (and enjoyably) dependent on others, both materially and creatively; and that the formation of the man variously known to his friends as Witoldo, Gombro, and Count Gombrowicz is a collaborative project.
For the most part, Gombrowicz wrote in Polish throughout his Argentine years. (The Spanish translation of Ferdydurke is mostly ignored.) The Diary – which Halfon suggests he began writing ‘practically by chance’, having read a copy of Andre Gide’s Journal – was addressed to the émigré readership of Kultura in Paris. One of the significant exceptions is ‘Against Poets’, a lecture delivered at a Buenos Aires bookshop in Spanish. Gombrowicz stood before an audience and announced flatly that he did not like poems, that they bored him, that ‘pure poetry’ was a ‘pharmaceutical extract’, a sociable fiction maintained by mutual pretence. Halfon draws on Ricardo Piglia’s lecture ‘The Language of the Dispossessed’, which argues the real provocation of the lecture was that Gombrowicz delivered this attack in his broken, Retiro-inflected Spanish, rather than in the French that would have been expected of a visiting European intellectual. (In his novel The Diary of Emilio Renzi, Piglia describes Gombrowicz, approvingly, as a ‘guttural stutterer’.) In any case, Gombrowicz enjoys himself. (At one point, someone throws a walking stick at him.)
Gombrowicz is mostly ignored by the Argentine literary establishment. The Sur group, consisting of Victoria Ocampo, Silvina Ocampo, Bioy Casares, and above all Borges, takes no notice of him. At one point, they do meet; Halfon describes a dinner at the Bioy-Ocampo house. Gombrowicz doesn’t try to kill Borges, but the dinner doesn’t go well. Gombrowicz, Halfon writes, ‘feels uncomfortable at the dinner, hardly speaks, doesn’t make eye contact, doesn’t bring up any topics of conversation [. . .] his pride, his painful foreignness makes him close up on himself like a padlock’. Reflecting on their differences in his Diary, Gombrowicz writes: ‘What fascinated me about the country was the low; them, the high. I was enchanted by the darkness of Retiro; they, by the lights of Paris.’ Pressing the point, he writes later: ‘Borges is deeply rooted in literature, I in life. To tell the truth I am anti-literature.’
The book is at its most affecting when describing the friendships that created and sustained him. There’s Alejandro Rússovich, the philosophy student who became his flatmate and close companion for five years (Gombrowicz loves him for his ‘brilliant Argentine antibrilliance’); Cecilia Benedit, the wealthy patron who financed the Ferdydurke translation genius (and whom Gombrowicz would make wait for hours at the Rex while he played chess, before expecting her to pay for dinner). Then there’s the group of teenagers who Gombrowicz meets when he travels to the mountain town of Tandil in 1957, and who he’s amazed to discover have read Ferdydurke. ‘So I now have what I wanted: readers and a table of artists in the café, colleagues,’ he writes, ‘what a shame that not one of my colleagues is over twenty!’ (It’s unlikely he thought this was a shame).
Gombrowicz’s belated discovery and circulation in Argentina also relies on small, devoted groups of readers. When he leaves in 1963, it’s the Tandil boys who contribute to a special edition of Eco Contemporáneo magazine in his honour with writing and sketches of their memories of Gombrowicz. Later, there’s the annual Gombrowicz congress, which runs for several years in Buenos Aires ('Gombrowicz is a codeword', one participant says). There’s Carlos Gómez, who for seven years sends a daily email about Gombrowicz. (Subjects include: 'Gombrowicz and Albert Camus'; 'Gombrowicz and being fed up'; 'Gombrowicz and sea bass.') Beyond this, there’s the clutch of writers who have variously taken up the Gombrowiczan mantel: Sergio Pitol, who translated the Diary into Spanish; Alan Pauls, whose own diaristic work bears his influence; and Ricardo Piglia, who has written extensively on Gombrowicz, and draws on him for the character of Tadeuski (a Polish émigré chess master fond of quoting Kant and Wittgenstein) in his novel Artificial Respiration. (Piglia also liked to repeat the 'Kill Borges!' anecdote, even though, as Halfon notes, it isn't written down anywhere.)
Halfon mentions in an interview that the book was commissioned, and she didn’t come to Gombrowicz as a convert. This is one of the book’s strengths: Halfon’s descriptive, collative method allows her to remain slightly askance of Gombrowicz, sketching out his contradictions without ever flattening them. Outsider Everywhere is an excellent addition to the Gombrowicz library in English (alongside the self-parodying Gothic novel, The Possessed, also published by Fitzcarraldo) and manages to both inhabit and ironise Gombrowicz’s own injunction to keep to the margins:
In Buenos Aires, Gombrowicz is a complete unknown. (The single newspaper notice that greets his arrival describes him as a ‘humorist’ and author of a ‘potboiler’). And for the vast majority of his time there – during which he writes The Marriage (1948), Trans-Atlantyk (1953), Pornografia (1960) and the Diary, published serially in the Paris-based émigré journal Kultura from 1953 — he leads a ramshackle existence marked by instability, destitution, and literary obscurity. ‘I fell in love with the catastrophe that I hated,’ Gombrowicz writes in the Diary, ‘that, after all, also ruined me.’
Mercedes Halfon’s Outsider Everywhere — originally published in Spanish as Extranjero en todas partes, and now available in this excellent translation by Rahul Bery from Fitzcarraldo — reconstructs these years through a series of impressionistic snapshots. Drawing on testimonials, archival material, and interviews with scholars and friends, Halfon assembles an oral history of fragmentary vignettes from Gombrowicz's time in Buenos Aires. This cumulative method is partly an attempt to prise the myth of Gombrowicz from the version he puts together himself in the Diary, whose programme he outlined in a letter to the editor of Kultura:
'I must become my own commentator, or rather, my own stage director. I must forge a thinker Gombrowicz, a genius Gombrowicz, a Gombrowicz who is a demonologist of culture and many other unthinkable Gombrowiczes.'
The patchwork Gombrowicz that emerges in Outsider Everywhere will still be recognisable to anyone who has read the Diary: he is prickly, dramatic, self-absorbed, and funny. He enjoys winding people up (Susan Sontag calls him ‘one of the great super-arguers of the twentieth century’) even though he is essentially destitute for his first few years in Buenos Aires. After an aristocratic upbringing in Poland, in Argentina he is entirely reliant on the small circle of acquaintances and friends who support and indulge him. Still, partly as a joke and partly not, he styles himself as a Count. He lives on one meal a day, usually paid for by someone else. He drifts between guest houses and spare rooms. At one point, unable to pay his bill at a guesthouse, he escapes through a window; shortly afterwards, he runs into a Polish journalist and ends up sleeping on a bed of newspapers in his apartment for six months.
Halfon suggests that this unstable, shambling existence embodies Gombrowicz's creative preoccupations: ‘the rejection of maturity, of form and the quest for the imperfect.’ In particular, Gombrowicz is obsessed with youth — ‘a value in itself, that is, a destroyer of all other values’ — and in Buenos Aires, he carves out a marginal existence where he can live as an unknown artist pretending to be a young man. He seems young, too: Halfon writes that he looks ‘as if the Argentine youth he was so fascinated by had got stuck to his face’. She quotes Ernesto Sábato’s description of him: ‘adolescent, skinny, scrawny, furiously smoking and sucking on cigarettes; theatrical, contradictory, provocative, haughty, and with an incredible sense of humour.’
This is one of several glimpses of Gombrowicz that accumulate to build a lively picture of his time in Buenos Aires. We see him through the smokey window of the Café Rex, where he goes every afternoon to argue with friends and play chess. (The chess master Paulino Frydman, watching him: ‘he didn't know much theory and essentially just attacked’). We join him strolling endlessly through the streets of the capital, and on nocturnal excursions through the Retiro, picking up young men and workers (an activity that Gombrowicz passes over in silence in the Diary). We see him in a friend’s front room, teaching philosophy classes to Polish ladies for a fee.
(At the end of the classes, he hands round his hat to collect payment). Most unbelievably, we also see Gombrowicz the employee: at the bank where he works from 1948, he arrives late, dressed like a beggar, spending his time ‘smoking nervously, in search of inspiration’. (Gombrowicz on this period: ‘Everything suffers because for seven hours every day I commit murder on my own time.’)
At times there’s a more enterprising Gombrowicz at work. In 1945, short on money, Gombrowicz proposes translating Ferdydurke into Spanish. The result is one of the book’s most striking episodes: the work of ‘the Ferdydurke translation committee’, a loose, shifting group of collaborators who gather in Café Rex. There are up to ten people involved (‘a group of Latin Americans who do not know Polish, and a single Pole who does not know Spanish,’ Halfon writes). It’s a ridiculous, incredible project, and gives form to one of the book’s implicit claims: that the Gombrowicz who mythologises his self-reliance and ostracism, and is happiest casting himself as a surly antagonist, is in fact completely (and enjoyably) dependent on others, both materially and creatively; and that the formation of the man variously known to his friends as Witoldo, Gombro, and Count Gombrowicz is a collaborative project.
For the most part, Gombrowicz wrote in Polish throughout his Argentine years. (The Spanish translation of Ferdydurke is mostly ignored.) The Diary – which Halfon suggests he began writing ‘practically by chance’, having read a copy of Andre Gide’s Journal – was addressed to the émigré readership of Kultura in Paris. One of the significant exceptions is ‘Against Poets’, a lecture delivered at a Buenos Aires bookshop in Spanish. Gombrowicz stood before an audience and announced flatly that he did not like poems, that they bored him, that ‘pure poetry’ was a ‘pharmaceutical extract’, a sociable fiction maintained by mutual pretence. Halfon draws on Ricardo Piglia’s lecture ‘The Language of the Dispossessed’, which argues the real provocation of the lecture was that Gombrowicz delivered this attack in his broken, Retiro-inflected Spanish, rather than in the French that would have been expected of a visiting European intellectual. (In his novel The Diary of Emilio Renzi, Piglia describes Gombrowicz, approvingly, as a ‘guttural stutterer’.) In any case, Gombrowicz enjoys himself. (At one point, someone throws a walking stick at him.)
Gombrowicz is mostly ignored by the Argentine literary establishment. The Sur group, consisting of Victoria Ocampo, Silvina Ocampo, Bioy Casares, and above all Borges, takes no notice of him. At one point, they do meet; Halfon describes a dinner at the Bioy-Ocampo house. Gombrowicz doesn’t try to kill Borges, but the dinner doesn’t go well. Gombrowicz, Halfon writes, ‘feels uncomfortable at the dinner, hardly speaks, doesn’t make eye contact, doesn’t bring up any topics of conversation [. . .] his pride, his painful foreignness makes him close up on himself like a padlock’. Reflecting on their differences in his Diary, Gombrowicz writes: ‘What fascinated me about the country was the low; them, the high. I was enchanted by the darkness of Retiro; they, by the lights of Paris.’ Pressing the point, he writes later: ‘Borges is deeply rooted in literature, I in life. To tell the truth I am anti-literature.’
The book is at its most affecting when describing the friendships that created and sustained him. There’s Alejandro Rússovich, the philosophy student who became his flatmate and close companion for five years (Gombrowicz loves him for his ‘brilliant Argentine antibrilliance’); Cecilia Benedit, the wealthy patron who financed the Ferdydurke translation genius (and whom Gombrowicz would make wait for hours at the Rex while he played chess, before expecting her to pay for dinner). Then there’s the group of teenagers who Gombrowicz meets when he travels to the mountain town of Tandil in 1957, and who he’s amazed to discover have read Ferdydurke. ‘So I now have what I wanted: readers and a table of artists in the café, colleagues,’ he writes, ‘what a shame that not one of my colleagues is over twenty!’ (It’s unlikely he thought this was a shame).
Gombrowicz’s belated discovery and circulation in Argentina also relies on small, devoted groups of readers. When he leaves in 1963, it’s the Tandil boys who contribute to a special edition of Eco Contemporáneo magazine in his honour with writing and sketches of their memories of Gombrowicz. Later, there’s the annual Gombrowicz congress, which runs for several years in Buenos Aires ('Gombrowicz is a codeword', one participant says). There’s Carlos Gómez, who for seven years sends a daily email about Gombrowicz. (Subjects include: 'Gombrowicz and Albert Camus'; 'Gombrowicz and being fed up'; 'Gombrowicz and sea bass.') Beyond this, there’s the clutch of writers who have variously taken up the Gombrowiczan mantel: Sergio Pitol, who translated the Diary into Spanish; Alan Pauls, whose own diaristic work bears his influence; and Ricardo Piglia, who has written extensively on Gombrowicz, and draws on him for the character of Tadeuski (a Polish émigré chess master fond of quoting Kant and Wittgenstein) in his novel Artificial Respiration. (Piglia also liked to repeat the 'Kill Borges!' anecdote, even though, as Halfon notes, it isn't written down anywhere.)
Halfon mentions in an interview that the book was commissioned, and she didn’t come to Gombrowicz as a convert. This is one of the book’s strengths: Halfon’s descriptive, collative method allows her to remain slightly askance of Gombrowicz, sketching out his contradictions without ever flattening them. Outsider Everywhere is an excellent addition to the Gombrowicz library in English (alongside the self-parodying Gothic novel, The Possessed, also published by Fitzcarraldo) and manages to both inhabit and ironise Gombrowicz’s own injunction to keep to the margins:
‘Be foreign forever! Be reluctant, distrustful, sober, sharp, and exotic. Hang in there, boy! Don’t allow yourself to be tamed, domesticated. Your place is not among them, but outside of them.’