Yours Ever (30 page)

Keats didn’t have to dare himself to eat a peach; he was prepared to bite into life’s whole bushel of fruit, rotten apples included. Among the Romantics, the term “gusto” may belong to Hazlitt, but it’s Keats who’s the quality’s real practitioner. He’ll get so hungry that “fowls are like Larks;” will rhapsodize on claret for lying in one’s stomach “as quiet as it did in the grape;” and resolve to be ever more efficient in feasting on female beauty: “I never intend hereafter to spend any time with Ladies unless they are handsome—you lose time to no purpose.” What’s wanted is always more; and then more still. It’s the same with matters of the spirit. The letter about soul-making describes a process that builds and builds, ever onward and ever upward: “what are circumstances but touchstones of his heart? and what are touchstones but provings of his heart? and what are provings of his heart but fortifiers or alterers of his nature? and what is his altered nature but his Soul?”

Hiking in the Lake District, this thoroughgoing Londoner discovers “an amazing partiality for mountains in the clouds.” And yet, “human nature is finer,” always, than scenery: “The Sward is richer for the tread of a real, nervous English foot.” Ordinary human imperfection—not epic virtues and titanic flaws—constitutes Keats’s true sublime. He famously discriminates between a street quarrel (“a thing to be hated”) and the energy that goes into it (something “fine” and full of “grace”) and makes the compensations of defeat more satisfying than success: “The first thing that strikes me on hearing a Misfortune having befallen another is this—‘Well it cannot be helped: he will have the pleasure of trying the resources of his Spirit.’” Keats’s own moments of discouragement often seem positively exuberant. No matter how hard circumstances press, the bedsprings of his self are available for falling back on: the harder his fall, the more cheerful their squeak.

However much he may have cried “for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!” his intellectual appetites were, if anything, more avid than his physical ones. Any of his letters, no matter the recipient, is likely to brave three different themes in the course of a paragraph. For a reader today, their greatest philosophical excitement lies in the writer’s movement toward “Negative Capability,” his most important aesthetic belief. He describes it in a letter to his brother as the creative condition in force “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”—a susceptibility to Beauty above all other considerations. The “intensity” man seeks in art is best achieved by a paradoxical passivity, an extreme receptiveness.

Men of real genius, Keats has decided, “have not any individuality, any determined character.” His own empathies are both simple and extreme: “if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.” At any gathering to which he brings his vital personality, “the identity of every one in the room begins to press … so that I am in a very little time annihilated—not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children.” This young man so bent on fame achieves his true identity by giving up the one he has.

Keats’s ideas about religion are, by his own admission, nothing special. The afterlife he imagines is just one more variety of earthly more-more-more: “we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone.” But when he talks of each man being able, mentally, to spin “his own airy Citadel,” as a spider spins its web, he speaks powerfully to the spiritualists of a later age. “Minds would leave each other in contrary directions, traverse each other in numberless points, and at last greet each other at the journey’s end.” Late in 1818, he proposes a telepathic experiment to his brother and sister-in-law in America: “I shall read a passage of Shakespeare every Sunday at ten o’clock—you read one at the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room.” He induces them, with a kind of virtual reality, into taking the same walk he likes to take himself: “Then I pass across St. Cross meadows till you come to the most beautifully clear river—now this is only one mile … I will spare you the other two till after supper when they would do you more good. You must avoid going the first mile just after dinner.”

Almost all of Keats’s letters are conscious entertainments, full of humor—which he preferred to wit. He sends up the lyrical conventions of travel writing; turns mock-heroic over the unpaid bills piling up; and passes on the story of “the fattest woman in all In-vernesshire who got up this Mountain some few years ago—true she had her servants—but then she had herself.” Eager not to try the patience of his audience, he’ll apologize for a letter that’s too heavy (the recipient being responsible for paying the postage); admit that his epistolary style suffers when he waits too long to reply; and concede the difficulties he causes his correspondents with his changeable, nothing-by-halves personality: “I carry all matters to an extreme,” he writes Benjamin Bailey in July of 1818,

Keats’s own greatest pain comes from Fanny Brawne, described to his brother and sister-in-law, after he first meets her, as “graceful, silly, fashionable and strange.” Only eighteen, “she is ignorant—monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions”—which is to say, the sort of mercurial creature guaranteed, when placed against Keats’s own quicksilver nature, to produce a romance of wild fluctuations. “Miss Brawne and I have every now and then a chat and a tiff,” he tells his brother and sister-in-law two months later. Writing to Fanny herself, this great epistolary philosopher will settle for the dull boilerplate of ecstatic love (“I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form”).

A year into knowing her, Keats attempts withdrawal from Fanny’s undependable affections, but five months later he is still riding the whipsaw: “the extasies in which I have pass’d some days and the miseries in their turn, I wonder the more at the Beauty which has kept up the spell so fervently.” In May of 1820, still not twenty-five but with his health and money and time running out, he continues to beg for Fanny’s “whole heart.” The following winter, in Rome, he will be buried, as he instructs a friend, with one of her unopened letters.

WITH ITS LOVE OF
fashioning opposites, nature seems to have set down Keats’s a century later in a provincial Polish town, in the shy, dark shape of Bruno Schulz. To Keats, melancholy was merely what comes from recognizing the finite, temporary nature of things fabulous (“Ay, in the very temple of Delight / Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine”). To Schulz, melancholy is an omnipotent scourge, not pleasure’s price but its absolute denier. If Keats’s imagination was sponsored by the world, Schulz’s only darts through life’s alleys and cracks, forever expecting to be snuffed. And yet, the letters of this discouraged, menaced artist have a poignant Chaplinesque charm. We never tire of Schulz amid his troubles.

Stuck teaching drawing in a local gymnasium, the already middle-aged writer finds himself unable in the mid-1930s to capitalize on his recent literary debut, the critically praised prose fantasies—
a sort of Polish magical realism—of his book
Cinnamon Shops
. “I don’t know if I can stand this drudgery much longer,” he writes to one editor. In truth, it’s worse than that; Schulz’s inability to control his students is both comic and nightmarish:

The schoolmaster-artist hopes for a grant that will give him a respite. He’s blissful when he’s awarded one; crushed when the stipend runs out. Additionally burdened with family problems (a neurotic sister) and poor health (kidney stones), Schulz also despairs of his on-again, off-again engagement to a troubled and usually absent fiancée, Józefina Szelińska. Still, whatever their difficulties, she “represents my participation in life,” he tells one correspondent; “only by her mediation am I a human being and not just a lemur or gnome.” And yet, it’s in these delighful, miniature incarnations that Schulz, wearing his mournful cap and bells, seems to look up and resize the world for our imaginations.

“I am a reactive creature,” he writes to Romana Halpern, one of several artistic women who offer appreciation and aid. His self-diagnosis may shift all the time, but he pinpoints one afflicting constant when he tells “Roma,” in August 1937: “What I lack is not so much faith in my own gifts but something more pervasive: trust in life, confident acquiescence in a personal destiny, faith in the ultimate benevolence of existence.” Through all his premonitions of doom (“I’ve left springtime behind for good,” he declares in 1934), he goes on writing and sketching, marvelously, knowing that his depression—which, among other symptoms, keeps him from answering letters—has ironic roots in a preoccupation with contentment, one that makes him spend “every other minute testing the balance of satisfaction in exploring the art of happiness. Every other minute I ask myself the question: Do I have the right to be satisfied,
is the undertaking ‘Schulz’ worth carrying on, does it justify further investment?”

In fact, he steadily tries to grow that frail, fabulous enterprise. We find Schulz looking up from letter after letter with those bright lemur-like eyes, making himself ingratiating, clever, winsome—doing what needs to be done to keep his writing career alive: proposing translations of his own work; securing letters of introduction; complaining about the favoritism and fixes involved in literary prize-giving; even soliciting blurbs for the incomprehensible verse of a rich man whose favor he needs. Schulz eventually becomes embarrassed over the abundance of good turns done him by Romana Halpern, and on February 21, 1938, must tell her: “How sweet of you to remember my affairs even while you are in the hospital, to escape from medical care to run an errand I hadn’t even asked you to do.”

But he keeps her on the job, and it is to Roma that Schulz admits suffering from “the misconception that literary creation can begin only when all difficulties have been cleared away over the entire range of one’s life.” His own writing life disproves this idea utterly, but he still can’t let go of it, or allow Roma the opposite misconception, “that suffering is necessary for creative work. This is a worn old cliché.” Schulz tells her she’s making a mistake to “overrate” him; her “emotional binge” of artist-worship may provide him flattery that he finds “very pleasant,” but he fears “the ‘morning after.’”

And yet Schulz himself, in letter after letter, exalts the creative life over the one he’s forced to lead each day in Drohobycz: “One must … fence off one’s inner life, not permit the vermin of ordinary cares to infest it.” As with Keats, the goal of his writing seems ultimately less aesthetic than spiritual: “I long for some outside affirmation of the inner world whose existence I postulate. To cling to it by sheer faith alone, to lug it along with me in spite of everything, is a toil and torment of Atlas.”

Whether writing to Roma or, as in the sentences just above, to the novelist Tadeusz Breza, Schulz betrays no embarrassment over his abject wants. He believes in something like the opposite of
ripeness, positing “immaturity” as the life force, and art as a kind of “regression” into genius. “My ideal goal is to ‘mature’ into childhood. That would be genuine maturity for you.” A reader realizes, from such declarations, that the weird near-gaiety to be sensed in Schulz’s letters is not conscious whistling in the dark of circumstance but the laughter of a childhood self that remains alive behind a single, but thickening, wall.

In 1936, during an exchange of open letters with Schulz, the writer Witold Gombrowicz conjures up the figure of a doctor’s wife who, he says, has pronounced Schulz “either a sick pervert or a poseur.” Like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Brown or J. D. Salinger’s Fat Lady, this bourgeois matron becomes the avatar of a mighty challenge. Gombrowicz dares Schulz to abandon his more rarefied imaginings and “Get back down here on earth!” to grapple with this real and unpleasant woman.

But Schulz won’t take the fleshy bait: “Oh no, dear Witold, I have liberated myself from this sort of thing.” He is bent on transcending sexuality (however hard he finds it “to resist the charm of [the woman’s] legs”), as well as everything “cynical and amoral, irrational and mocking.” With this doctor’s wife, he adds, Gombrowicz may be pretending to “defend vitality and biology, against abstraction, against our detachment from life,” but as a fellow artist, whether he knows it or not, Gombrowicz is really, like Schulz, chasing something newer and better: “The avant-garde of biology is thought, experiment, creative discovery. We, in fact, are this belligerent biology, this conquering biology; we are the truly vital.”

Schulz’s reply, published in the journal
Studio
, was probably no more self-consciously composed than many of his private letters, which he was known to put through outlines and drafts. Indeed,
Cinnamon Shops
, his masterpiece, grew directly out of his well-wrought letters to Debora Vogel, a writer friend and philosopher. As Jerzy Ficowski, Schulz’s posthumous editor, explains: “piece by piece, the brilliant stories which would become the stuff of Schulz’s first book [were] couched in extensive postscripts which gradually took over the whole substance of the letters.” Publication saved both the
Cinnamon Shops
stories and the exchange with Gombrowicz;
most of the rest of Schulz’s large correspondence was destroyed during the Holocaust. He himself was killed—shot in the head by an SS officer—in 1942.

Four years earlier, he had composed for Romana Halpern one of the most vivid assessments ever made of the imaginative challenge posed by letter writing: