A grayscale profile view of Witold Gombrowicz, a white man with short hair. He wears a black top hat and a wool coat. His face appears neutral.
Content warning for concentration camps, Holocaust
"I only want to be Gombrowicz, nothing more."
– Witold Gombrowicz
Though now the legacy of Witold Gombrowicz is a rather universally celebrated one, within his lifetime, this was hardly the case. A Polish anti-nationalist whose work was banned, unbanned, celebrated, and derided, only his death secured his place as a loved and mostly uncontroversial writer. This place likely would have chafed against the author if he had lived to see it, as he spent much of his time deliberately leaning into both the love and hate he inspired.
Born to a wealthy family on August 4, 1904, Witold grew up in what is now known as Poland. From quite a young age, he showed an interest in writing and art. Having been given many advantages because of his family's class status, he began feeling alienated from the other children his age. With access to an excellent education, Witold's talents were well fostered. He would later remember writing a thriller with his brother as a child and many other forrays into the writing world.
Though he was given many privileges due to his family's money, Witold would grow to resent this. Envying the experiences of the lower class children he would meet. He dealt with health issues throughout his life, and he remembered his mother's ever-present concern as stifling.
He would also say he was less than committed to the education afforded to him and instead used the space to make friendships with other students who would go on and achieve some level of success. Though initially pursuing a legal career, writing remained Witold's main passion, and he would write a number of books. He would not land a job within the legal sphere.
His first published book came in 1933 with Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity, which had its publication paid for by Witold's father. It was not received well by critics.
While he would make connections in the literary circles of Poland, he was unable to find much success for his works in his time there.
It was only just before the Second World War that Witold boarded a ship set on a transatlantic voyage for South America. By the time he reached his destination, the war had begun, and he decided to stay in Buenos Aires to avoid it, though he did not speak Spanish. He wrote of his decision to stay:
"I left for Argentina accidentally, for only two weeks, if by some quirk of fate the war had not broken out during those two weeks, I would have returned to Poland—but I did not conceal that when the door was bolted and I was locked in Argentina, it was as if I had finally heard my own voice."
Because of the choice to stay, he quickly lost contact with his family. He fell into poverty, relying primarily on charity.
He did make an effort to find solidarity with other Polish immigrants in his area and slowly began making in-roads in the literary community. However, for every friendship he solidified, another person found him irritating or arrogant. Argentinian author Roger Pla wrote of Witold:
"When Gombrowicz began to know writers and intellectuals, he garnered two reactions: the ones who said he was a snob, extravagant, nothing more. The others, like Mastronardi, became interested in him in a much more serious way."
Much like the reactions he inspired, his experience in Argentina was mixed. With such distance from his native Poland, he found himself in relative safety. At the same time, his family and friends were in danger. Two of his brothers would, at one point in the war, be captured by Nazi forces and sent to Auschwitz. As that was happening, Witold was beginning to see his first success as an author in Argentina, publishing articles and even giving lectures. He wrote of this time:
"The war. It was a holiday, a holiday which had its moments of ghastly depression in the loneliness and humiliation beyond the ocean when my black humour deserted me. Yes, I suppose it was painful, terrible, desperate. The war destroyed my family, my social position, my country, my future. I had nothing left, and I was nobody. And yet! And yet. And yet, the Argentine. What a relief! What a liberation! When I think of my hardest years in the Argentine the words of Mickiewicz come to mind:
'Born in bonds, wrapped in my swaddling clothes,
'I only knew one such spring in my life!'"
The contrast between his experience of the war and others was not lost on him. However, he still understood that knowledge within the frame of his own emotions. He wrote:
"The immensity of the Crime perpetrated against the Jewish people pierced me, too, through-and-through, and forever."
He would also remain in Argentina past the end of the war, rekindling old friendships and new ones with other Polish authors through letters. His success at this time was still limited, forcing him for the first and only time in his life to get a salaried job in 1947.
Working at a bank, Witold would spend the majority of his time there writing, and Halina Nowińska, the wife of his manager, described his time there saying:
"In front of him, at his desk, a secretary worked, Mrs. H. Z., who could not stand him and pressed me to inform my husband of all the 'crimes' Mr. Gombrowicz was guilty of. He was late again, he dressed like a hobo; he ate oranges like a pig and spit the seeds out into the trash; his shirt was missing a button and—the worst—he had fallen asleep at his desk again."
In the end, it was because of the daughters of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz that Witold would begin to truly gain a foothold in Poland with his works. Through the war, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz had spent much of the time hiding Jewish refugees and was an incredibly influential poet, playwright, essayist, and translator who profoundly affected the Polish art scene. Because his daughter enjoyed Witold's work, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz used his position as the editor of a magazine to publish some of Witold's pieces.
Given the chance, Witold had much to say about the situation in Poland from his position in Argentina, writing:
"The end of the war did not bring liberty to the Poles. In that sad area of central Europe it was merely a question of changing Hitler's executioners for Stalin's. At a time when high-minded liberals, seated in Parisian cafés, greeted 'the emancipation of the Polish people from the feudal yoke' with a joyous anthem, in Poland the same lighted cigarette simply changed hands and continued to burn the human skin."
A fierce anti-nationalist, Witold was not particularly liked by many Polish authorities and other Polish writers. He took the criticism, praise, and censorship he received incredibly personally, responding to a large amount of it, and fighting tooth and nail against the censorship the Polish government tried to put on his works. He wrote:
“My literature must remain what it is. Especially what does not fit politics and does not want to serve it. I practice only one politics: my own. I am a separate state.”
A bisexual man, much of his work discussed this reality. One of his more famous works, which he marketed as his diaries, openly discussed relationships with women and men throughout the pages.
He would often publicly argue with the criticisms he received, unreasonable or not. He was compared to and compared himself to only the most renowned authors. According to some closer to him, though Gombrowicz may, in hindsight, seem a confident (possibly overly so) artist who demanded every inch of space he took, in reality, much of that was a facade kept up to disguise deep insecurity. An editor of Gombrowicz wrote:
“His hypertrophic ego masked and ‘inferiority’ which he felt intensely towards the very greatest writers, towards Goethe or Shakespeare, his only and constant references. (…)
One evening, when he saw me baulking at his efforts to fascinate (he was posing as the bel esprit Parisien, which, coming from him, surprised me), he asked me point-blank: ‘What do you think of me?’ Unaccustomed though I am to doing so, I replied: ‘You irritate me.” He scowled and fell silent. I realised I had wounded him deeply.”
A friend of his Alain Crespelle said of him:
“He was a persecutor at the table and a victim in private.”
Some of those who did not like him personally did express appreciation for his work. For instance, Sławomir Mrożek said:
“Witold Gombrowicz is my nightmare. But I would be very sad if this nightmare did not exist.”
As time passed, his work only grew more popular and more recognized, both in Poland and around the globe. He found particular success in France and throughout Europe. Though it is said now that the best way to read his work and catch all the references and puns is to read it in its original Polish, Witold was incredibly involved in the translations of his work. One translator remembered that he would need to know word to word what was happening and would often argue points. Before anything else, Witold was a defender of his work and believed most (if not all) of it was not only destined for greatness but that he must usher it there.
One particularly notable event came in 1958 when an equally ambitious provincial theatre company asked to debut one of Witold’s plays. He refused them bluntly, believing his work was too much for the lower class people of the provinces to understand, he wrote:
“It is absolutely out of the question for The Marriage to make its debut in the provinces, with provincial forces, before an audience from Kielce and Radom. You yourself know that it cannot succeed, that it even can fatally harm the play, which, after all, awaits such a difficult battle because it is somewhat eccentric . . .
A bomb does not exist in order to explode on the periphery. . . . Thus I, too, wish to shoot with this eccentric, lengthy work of mine . . . into the very center of intellectual and artistic life, into Warsaw, into Cracow.... There must the fate of The Marriage be decided.”
This correspondence was revealed publicly and drew more criticism towards Witold. He had fierce defenders, who claimed he was the height of literature to which all other Polish citizens should aspire, but the man remained controversial. At one point, a faked interview with him was published in an attempt to discredit him in the eyes of the public.
Witold himself was not entirely against this hatred, as he believed that whether hate or love, he would rather people cared about him than not, he wrote:
“I would prefer them . . . to burn me at the stake or drown me in the toilet. Art, like faith, fears only one thing: tepidity.”
Most of this criticism and controversy was happening during the Polish October, a time described by David Brodsky as:
“Politically, the phrase “Polish October” refers to the installation of a new government in October 1956, along with the hopes this event inspired for a more liberalized regime. In cultural terms, however, the Polish October is analogous to the “Thaw” in the Soviet Union-but much warmer-and it includes a period of about two or three years, roughly from 1955 to 1958, during which intense debate, settling of accounts, and a reevaluation of tradition took place.”
After this window passed, so did Witold’s time in the center of the limelight. While he was still admired, hated, and loved by many, his work softly exited the public debate. It was shortly at the end of the Polish October that Witold would begin his return to Europe with a trip to West Berlin, which he described writing:
“They treated me [in Berlin], as I have said, with great and impeccable hospitality and with no less impeccable friendship—but no, not a penny’s worth of politics, nonsense, but a lot, I assume, had to do with my being a Pole. Obviously, as a Pole I weighed on their conscience. They felt guilty.”
He would describe his time in Paris writing:
“If I wished to sum up my stay in Paris in a few words, that above all would be it—walking the streets. Not even roaming. Walking.”
Despite his outwardly anti-nationalist nature, he still kept a protectiveness of Poland in his mind as he travelled, writing:
“As a Pole, a representative of a weaker culture, I had to defend my sovereignty: I could not allow Paris to get the better of me!”
In his time in France, he would meet Rita Lambrosse, a French-Canadian scholar, and they began their relationship without much expectation, looking to spend months together at most, which was not to be.
Rita said about the beginning of their relationship:
"Gombrowicz was 59 when we met, and I was 29. He was a fascinating man and he was always really liked by young people. Gombrowicz was capable of being really amusing, he had a child in him as well as a poet. And I was fascinated with literature, although when we met I didn't know his work at all. Witold was different from other intellectuals, he acted like an incognito prince. This fascinated me. On the other hand, Witold needed somebody younger in that period of his life, someone he could spend time with and someone who would take care of him. We suddenly realised that this feeling is serious, and that we understand each other increasingly well."
Witold's health had been a limiting factor for him throughout his whole life, and the support of Rita made a significant difference to him as he aged. Having throughout his life dealt with varying levels of ability, his asthma having an impact on his lifestyle if it never did entirely stop him from smoking, he saw both this and the poverty he had fallen in through different periods of his life as a cost of the path he chose, writing:
"There is an art for which you get paid, and another one for which you have to pay. And you pay with health, with commodity, etc. Naturally, I don't know if I'm an important artist or not, but anyway, my life, in this sense, has been as ascetic one."
It was, in the end, a heart attack that inspired one more change in Witold's life. According to Rita, he realized that he had none of his affairs set in order after the health scare and knew whom he would trust to be the executor of his legacy. Their marriage came after four years of being in a relationship.
Having told Rita that he was attracted to men and women when they met, the two seem to have made a happy life together. Witold worked on his books and Rita on her thesis.
Witold would write through this period of his life, as he had through every other, and wrote of their relationship.
Forty-four years after his death, Rita would find a manuscript he wrote under their bed and said she was conflicted about its publication:
"I was also tempted, for a long time, to delete the fragments of Kronos that are about myself. But I resisted, I am now mature enough to look at these parts with a distance and a smile. Kronos has been published in its entirety. I was also afraid for a long time that it will be read solely in the context of standards of behaviour, as a text with the air of a scandal and one which describes very intimate affairs that are not understood or accepted by everyone. But people's mentality has changed a lot throughout these years."
During interviews, she would say that Witold would at times represent events differently than she remembered them. When discussing how he would characterize their fights, she said:
"I think that Witold was not fair in these fragments. We fought very little, literally a few times, about totally silly things, but he took these quarrels really hard, I think that he found the fact that I could disagree with him difficult to accept. It's a manifestation of his slight misogyny, a trait that was a part of his personality. In Kronos, Witold writes about "Rita's hysteria," but there were really no hysteric scenes, I was simply cross with him a few times and I didn't speak to him."
Since Witold died in 1969, Rita has been a representative of Witold's work and its maintained relevance. Releasing a book of his forty-four years after his death, running a website describing his life, and writing two biographical works describing her husband's life.
It is clear, even with Witold's deep entrenchment in the politics of his day, much of his work is still relevant to ours throughout, with him addressing identity, culture, sexuality, his mythos of arrogance, and even things like the fear of the next generation moving on from the art and forms of art treasured by the previous, such as when he wrote:
"I do not fear that 'future generations will not read novels', [...] It is probably a complete misunderstanding to conceive of serious art in categories of production, market, readers, supply and demand (...) art is not the fabrication of stories for readers but a spiritual cohabitation, something so tense and so separate from science, even contradictory to it, that there can be no competition between them.
If someone fine, dignified, prolific, brilliant (this is how one ought to speak of artists this is the language art demands) is born in the future, if someone unique and unrepeatable is born, a Bach, a Rembrandt, then he will win people over, charm and seduce them…"
Because of this, his work and life are still widely celebrated throughout Poland, though it is hardly likely he would be as universally appreciated if he was still using his voice to commentate on the country's current affairs. A bisexual man, Witold is the history Poland tries to erase with its continued denying and hiding of their queer population. It is an unshakeable truth that it has been and continues to be queer people shaping the past and present of Poland, particularly the art scene. Those who have loved it, hated it, loved to hate it, through all the difficult moments in the country's history. Through the voice of a man who was forced to leave it behind, we find a tremendous queer history in the heart of Poland, Witold only being one more unique piece to it.
Being given a national day, acclaim, many more translations, and some level of respect from the worldwide community, Witold became known for exactly what he was, a writer. Though his death has unfortunately led some to try and pacify his voice and impact, the steward of his legacy is a woman who knew him. She has maintained the truth about him and his life carefully and clearly. Having ever avoided censorship, the work of Witold, and the people who loved him, stand as a monument for a controversial man. There is no better way to end a discussion of him than with his own words:
"It is not without pleasure that I can tell my majestic colleagues who write for humanity, and in the name of humanity, that I have never written a single word other than for a selfish purpose; but at, each time, the work betrayed me and escaped from me."
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material
Brodsky, D. (1980). Witold Gombrowicz and the “Polish October.” Slavic Review, 39(3), 459–475. https://doi.org/10.2307/2497165
Choules, R. (2013, May 3). An Introduction To The Life And Work of Polish Writer Witold Gombrowicz. Culture Trip. https://theculturetrip.com/europe/poland/articles/the-untranslatable-literature-of-witold-gombrowicz/
Entrevista a Rita Gombrowicz por “Kronos.” (2013, October 22). Congreso Gombrowicz. https://www.congresogombrowicz.com/entrevista-a-rita-gombrowicz-por-kronos/
Gombrowicz, W. (2007). A Kind of Testament. Dalkey Archive Press.
Hutchens, J. J. B. (2020). Queer Transgressions in Twentieth-century Polish Fiction: Gender, Nation, Politics. Rowman & Littlefield.
Introduction—Witold Gombrowicz. (n.d.). Retrieved June 26, 2021, from https://witoldgombrowicz.com/en/wgwork/diaries/diary-1953-1969/diaries-introduction
Street Journal, B. I. to T. W. (2004, January 16). An Irreverent Writer Earns Sober Centenary. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB107419667073922400
Witold & Rita Gombrowicz in Vence: ‘It Was About Life & Work’ – Video. (n.d.). Culture.Pl. Retrieved June 26, 2021, from https://culture.pl/en/video/witold-rita-gombrowicz-in-vence-video,