A Poet of Soul and Sex

...It has colored a good deal of the modern social drama of Europe...

...Przybyszewski, judged solely by his writings, is seen always as the bewildered seeker after light, even though he makes--as indeed he invariably pictures man as making--his own darkness...

...We know that the world is indeed a text and that it tells us, humbly and gayly, of its own nothingness but also of the eternal presence of Another...

...He comes of Spanish stock although like his parents he is a native-born Mexican...

...It comes after NIex/co City and Puebla...

...Whatever "self-determination" may or may not mean, this fact is established: that the peasant, especially the peasant of eastern Europe, has, since the world war, come into a place and a power not dreamed of before...

...We are en-chained in our own formalisms and inveterate habits...

...And so also in that work ironically called For Happiness, he reveals man ruined and deprived of every hope and possibility of happiness through what seems to him the uncontrollable force of sex...

...and that his tragedy is in his transplantation from the soil...

...Art is the revelation of the soul," he has written...

...If he was a throw-back to the phallic Greek, at least he preserved the pure intent of the earliest of the unspoiled Hellenic poets...

...He spent what private fortune he had and made marked improvements everywhere...

...But the study of the peasant has brought some sur- prises...

...and above all it must be noted that he has used effectively that most potent of all popular forms of literary expres-sion, the drama, to propagate his ideas...

...It is always the product of life and poetic vision...

...He is a tyro at the arts of economics and government...

...In what degree, they have asked, is the peasant fitted for self- government...

...Is it safe to entrust so much to his un- trained hands...

...To this love which is sorrow all comes and from it all proceeds...

...Snow may be taken as a key to Przybyszewski's pre- conversion writings...

...The return of Przybyszewski to the Church is an epochal event in European letters...

...But one must understand the position that Przybyszewski oc-cupies in old-world literature to appreciate the full meaning of his acceptance of the Faith...

...The Archbishop is a tall ascetic-looking man, very quiet but very friendly...

...To the Catholic, hearing of Przybyszewski's ac-ceptance of the Faith, the thought inevitably comes that, through it all, he must indeed have possessed a soul dear to God, given at long last, the starlike surety it has so hungered after...

...Neither history, nor ethics, nor arguments can make a great prose story...

...The story is told in his writings...

...Fearing that the revolutionists would kill...

...Today we read in the newsprint of his conversion to the Catholic faith...

...Not since the Italian Papini, after years of iconoclasm and anarchy, came back and gave the world his Storio Christo has so important a conversion been recorded...

...Since then his whole life-work has been a dissective process...

...When the Carranza revolution began the persecution of religion, the Archbishop was in Rome...

...all previous art, all realistic art, was marked by the absence of the search for the soul...

...Even in his early youth we find him, while he is studying medicine in the Berlin polytechnicum, composing his first treatise on The Microscopic Structure of Cerebral Covering...

...a true peasant soul, primitive in its appetites, yet healthy enough to throw off the poison of the flesh and rise above the earthly mysteries of procreation to an apprehension of the spiritual mystery of the Creator Himself...

...and it is to their school that the Polish writer has most belonged, independent and individual as he has at all times remained...

...But the fact of the matter is, there is action in his plays, action of the most moving and compelling nature, the action of repressed emotion, as anyone realizes even in reading his texts...

...Thus interpreted, love and life can mean but one thing, sex...

...Heretofore, in the philosophy of Przybyszewski the soul has manifested itself in but one function, the function of human love...

...The above paraphrase of his philosophy of life and love, drawn from his volume of essays, The Path of the Soul, sums up his whole scheme of thought...

...In my parish he took over the spiritual care of the Sisters who taught in the parochial schools, saying Mass for them every morning...

...But in Snow, more pointedly than in any other of his writings, he not only shows man and woman both crushed by the iron fist of the "frightful force," but he reveals himself as the searcher, the prober, the frus- trated questioner : The heart was dried up, like shavings of wood...

...Life and poetic vision] It seems to me that never before in the history of Christendom could a man or woman dedicate life to these two with so much confi- dence and glorious zeal...

...To see and talk with him one might be tempted to imagine that he is too polite and kind to be firm, but he is bravery and firmness itself...

...But this was his nature--to suffer and to ask...

...He is forever asking and wonder- ing...

...orate testimony from many sources...

...not alone of his native Poland, but of Germany and Russia as well...

...He started at once for Mexico but was not permitted to enter and came to Chicago and lived there in my house for more than two years, always keeping in touch with his diocese and really governing it from a distance...

...It was not until he moved to the ancient Polish cap- ital, Krakow, the centre of Polish intellectual and artistic life, in x 898, that he began to be an influence in his home country...

...During the Carranza revolution the new seminary was seized also, and during the present revolution another was taken...

...Listen to these recent re-marks by Paul Claudel: We have been liberated from the slavery of the spirit in the presence of matter, from the fascination of quan- tity...

...But, to balance his mind, to keep him sane, he had music...

...Whatever it may be that his fresh veins draw from the turned furrow or that his soul apprehends in the mys- teries of the fructifying earth and the shadowy hori- zon of forests that forever circles his hard-won fields, the peasant unquestionably develops a nature that is profoundly sensitive, deeply philosophical, and thus essentially tragic...

...This is the "exalted pessimism" which, as Przy-byszewski's French critic Lucien Bourgu~s points out, was the inspiration of Nietzsche and Tchekhov and Ibsen and Schopenhauer...

...One evening when I returned from the office of the Extension Society, he met me at the door of his room and told me he was going to Mexico...

...Even the most degraded characters of his fic- tions are always the victims of a vast universal passion rather than mere libertines given over to indulgence and lust...

...Archbishop Orozco was con- secrated Archbishop of Chiapas and he busied himself not only with his spiritual work, but also with improving the condition of his cathedral town where he was responsible for the building of one of the large public utilities...

...There is no action in my plays," Przybyszewski has said, "for I concern myself only and solely with the life of the soul...

...Reymont, to whom was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in x925, was also of peasant stock...

...Przybyszewski did just this...

...But in Snow also we hear him confuting his own dic-tum that "death is the only remedy" for the boredom of life, uttering the ringing phrase, "A man who fights, who slaves, who wears himself out in bloody struggle to achieve the unobtainable, is beautiful...

...Love is the disturbing consciousness of an unknown and frightful force which throws two souls together in the endeavor to fuse them into one...

...This phenomenon, while pleasing to the lovers of democracy, has nevertheless raised serious questions at times in the minds of the friends of liberty...

...We know once more that we are made to dominate the world, not to be dominated by it...

...Now, anyone who has read Reymont's epic of the soil, The Peasants, and his equally searching Promised Land, which is a study of the peasant transplanted from the soil to the industrial centre, knows this--that the story of the peasant is a tragic one...

...In his even more successful dra- ma, The Golden Fleece, originally produced in 19Ol, he depicts woman as the one fatal desire of man, the one thing for the possession of which man, driven on by a blind and nameless momentum, will sacrifice all, even honor and life...

...Perhaps I should add that this paper is necessarily a personal view...

...and they are of double importance in that, influencing the minds of the masses who see them, they have influenced also, and even more markedly, the dramatists and the drama itself...

...They reveal a soul too fine to go down, too strong to give up...

...In the art of letters he is no longer a tyro, but a master tried and proven...

...He votes and holds office and sits in the halls of legislature--in Poland he has even occupied more than once the prime minister's chair...

...our young men follow other gods...

...The former seminary was a building of remarkable beauty with a magnificent library It was seized in early revolutions and the library scattered...

...His city is the second largest in Mexico and the diocese comprises the state of Jalisco...

...The soul, then, is this artist's concern...

...An atom whirled through a blind cosmos, the soul, as he has seen it, is but a part of a vast consuming, devouring, and self-multiplying whole, the full essence of which he expresses in the one word sorrow...

...But why disturbing...

...Sex is the core of that thought, and in none of his writings is this set forth more compellingly than in his drama, Snow, the only one of his works to be translated into English...

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...And when he lifts himself out of the rut of his narrow little thatched domain, and ventures into the sophisticated world, he goes almost mad with the puzzle of life...

...His prevailing characteristic is generosity...

...His title is Arch- bishop of Guadalajara...

...And this is all the more to be remarked when it is recalled that, born in the "German" Poland of pre-war times (in the same year that Reymont was born in "Russian" Poland, I868) and educated in German schools, he did all his earlier writing in the alien tongue...

...But in many places, especially among women and in schools conducted by religious women, there is now visible a growing eagerness, a clearer discernment, a great tact in the presence of art...

...In Snow he poses the age-old ques- tion of life over and over, in a dozen different ways...

...A POET OF SOUL AND SEX By CHARLES PHILLIPS N OTHING has been more frequently remarked in recent discussions of Europe and its post-war reconstruction, than the phenomenon of the peasant...

...But our vitality finds no artistic outlet...

...for one thing, he manifests a pon-derable slowness in grasping the idea of taxation--and there is danger in that...

...The sun has swept into the sky anew, we have thrust the curtains aside, and we have thrown out the window the plush furniture, the bibe- lots of the bazaar, and the "pallid bust of Pallas...

...But if what has been said proves at all interesting, there will be plenty of substantiating material...

...His plays, despite the fact that they are never in the "popular" vein (any more than, for example, Eugene O'Neill's are in America) are among the established pieces of the modern theatre in Europe...

...Now, it would seem, he has found his own strength and has indeed conquered himself...

...Ours is, in all truth, a time when life courses once again in the veins of the spirit...

...This balance, this cultivation of his sense of rhythm, coupled with the delicate dissective nature of his mind, are the fac- tors that perhaps account most for the perfection of Przybyszewski's diction...

...in The Children of Satan, he occupies himself once more, wholly and entirely, with the havoc of sex in the soul of man...

...It was this profound unrest, this insatiable want, this endless questioning that drove Przybyszewski to what I have called the almost-madness of his most fa- mous writings...

...Take Poland alone: the greatest poet of modern Poland, the recently deceased Jan Kasprowicz, late dean of the College of Letters in the University of Lwow, the man who gave Polish literature her best translations of Shakespeare and Shelley and other English masters-- was a peasant, one who rose directly from the soil...

...What processes he passed through to reach this end we can easily guess...

...But if he wrote as he did, he never be- came, never could become, such a thing as we unhap- pily produce at times in our native theatre, a mere "sexy" producer of pornographic thrillers...

...it is the ineffable consciousness of a fathomless depth, the sense of a psychic abyss, within whose depths are found the life of unnumbered generations and of the untold cen-turies of sorrow which humanity has endured to per- petuate itself...

...In his novel, Homosapiens, he portrays man destroyed by the obsession of sex...

...He has at least found a star to steer by, whether he be yet in peaceful waters or not...

...Only the strong know how to conquer themselves, he cries, as if challenging his own weakness and his own despair...

...The soul was wounded...

...Meanwhile it may be well to remember that the past ten years have been remarkable for the development of interest in the culture which is a product of faith...

...He is not only an accom-plished musician, but perhaps the foremost of the criti- cal interpreters of Chopin, that great countryman of his who, if not a peasant like Przybyszewski, neverthe- less drew his best inspiration and wove the fabric of his finest textures from peasant life...

...Something his peasant for-bears, walking their plowed furrows with bare feet, but with their earth-soiled hands in the Hand of God-- something they bequeathed him and kept alive in him, to win him back to the sound faith of their childlike hearts...

...So like- wise the greatest of Poland's living writers today, Stanislaw Przybyszewski (pronounced Shib-e-shevsky) is of peasant origin...

...Our books are dull and asleep...

...An overwhelming majority of the people are very pious and very faithful...

...His sister, now dead, was the wife of a prominent French-Mexican merchant, one of the wealthiest men in the republic...

...Sorrow and sex, then, have been life to this profoundly disturbing poet...

...As journalist, essayist, critic, novelist, he has wielded a distinct influence...

...He had his office and secretary at the residence of the chaplain of Columbus Hospital where he often attended the sick...

...The cathedral is probably the third in size and beauty...

...The state of Jalisco is one of the strongest Catholic sections of Mexico...

...There, founding the journal Life (Zycia) he became the spokesman of the "young" revolt of the time, the leader of the symbolists, the su- preme apostle of individualism...

...On the stage this action, subjective though it be, comes out in dark and vivid coloring...

...His family was always prominent and quite wealthy...

...In Polish, the most flexible of all the Slavic languages, he is acknowledged not only as a master, but even a magician...

...And he possesses an uncanny power of probing the souls of his characters and of awakening in his readers and his auditors a consciousness of soul-existence that is profoundly disturbing...

...Can't you under- stand the yearning of a man who has always lived in the filth and loathsomeness of life...

...But always he has been the peasant soul, primitive in force, mystically attuned to creation, puzzled and bruised by life, disturbing because he has been himself forever disturbed...

...With a true peasant's soul in him, profound and sensitive, he ventured as it were from the reedy pond of his native Polish prairie out onto the high seas of the world, the world of Berlin and Krakow and Warsaw...

...It could have been supported by elab...

...To the astonishment of most of us we have discovered, while we discussed this son of the soil in his relation to government, that already, and long ago, he has demonstrated his right to a place among the literati...

...He has been him- self "the powerfully powerless soul" that he has de- picted, the soul self-poisoned and self-dismayed...

...This is earnestly invited...

...To Warsaw in I9OO ; and from then on, growing in power and influence, he has become recognized in Europe, in Germany, France, and Russia, as well as in Poland, as an arresting and disturbing power...

...And these things will be so until we face the problem of literature squarely and tell ourselves what it is...

...I wanted to seize the will-o'-the-wisp which flies above the morass of life...

...No dark terrors such as haunted our fathers, of science that would destroy the foundations of belief in a night or of paganism that could engulf all spiritual citadels, oppress our minds...

...And the swirling cross-currents and tidal undertow of that world, driv- ing him onward and drawing him down, brought him to the verge of something very like a madness...

...He has found his own soul...

...Only your everlasting ques- tions as to the cause and purpose of life, the riddle of being and not being, the seeking for something that can't be had and which doesn't even exist...

...For a quarter-century, Stanislaw Przybyszewski has been a leader of the "young" thought of eastern Eu-rope...

...For years, chartless and unpiloted, he swept along his tor- tuous way, bewildered, questioning, crying out, rising and falling, lost...

...Perhaps the masters of an older day were greater...

...O the Editor:--I have just received your telegram and answer it as follows: His name is Francis Orozco y Jimlnez...