Ladislas Reyrnont

...February I6, I9Z 7 THE COMMONWEAL 407 LADISLAS REYMONT By CHARLES PHILLIPS S OPHISTICATION is the curse of modern litera- ture...

...His father was a proprietor, a mill owner...

...a quite mad Gertrude Stein juggling an agglutinative script before our bewildered eyes--they are all sophisticated and they are all sterile...

...In the long history of literature, of men who have toiled and suffered to be artists, there is no record more burdened with the characteristic pain and patience and disappointment of the peasant's life than Reymont's...

...His poems, as he would tell good-naturedly in later years, were laughed at by his companions...

...for Rey- mont himself cannot escape the soil...

...and the dream caught him up, too--the dream of far lands beyond the horizon over which the railway trains that he checked in and checked out were forever disappearing...

...one must have seen the Polish prairies dotted over with their giant-winged windmills, with the thatched cottage of the miller and his meagre acre of garden and plowland adjoining, and his family of a dozen or more children to be fed, and he earning a precarious living out of the pennies paid him by his neighbors for grinding their rye...

...When Russian schoolmasters for- bade Polish, even on the playground, young Reymont revolted...

...True, in the scheme of life as the Polish countryside knows it, there are people even more poverty-stricken than were Reymont's people...

...It would be diffi- cult to find in literature a more compelling example of the power of dramatic symbolism than this--unless, in- deed, one turn to Reymont's major work, The Peas-ants...

...In the Josef Pelka of The Dreamer, Reymont has pictured himself more than in any other of his characters...

...as if the breath of the earth, the mist that rises from the plowed land, had intoxicated him...

...And for this, of course, there is an all-sufficient reason...

...in the other, removed from the soil, and, thus removed, suffering and dying just as the green shoot suffers and dies when plucked up by its roots...

...Once the bruising fist of circumstance crushed his fine young soul so unbearably that he turned to the cloister for refuge...

...Recognition came slowly...

...but not even here did he forget his life at the railway office...

...To the writing of The Peasants he devoted four years...

...Because this is what happened--the world was captivated, perhaps without knowing why, without realizing that it had found a writing-man who is not sterile...

...And yet the day was not far off when all Poland was to be reading his novel, The Dreamer, and all his neighbors were to discover in it much of the record of his own hard life among them...

...and he produced some twenty-eight volumes...

...It is difficult to escape the biblical implication in dis- cussing Reymont's writings, especially his Peasants...

...And there is the death of Yagna...

...There were fourteen in that family to be fed and shod and clothed--and to be educated...

...That strain was strong in him : his father had fought in the Rebel- lion of '63...

...And nearly twenty years more had to pass before the full recognition of the world was to be given it, and before we in America were to know it...

...But his brief novi- tiate with the Fathers of Saint Paul in the Monastery of Our Lady at Czestochowa only convinced him that his vocation was the pen and his place the world...

...for, at last, Reymont had "accomplished a miracle...

...But he was a dreamer...

...Always the soil...

...This stocky youth with the speculative eyes of the dreamer, but with the wild brush of determined hair and the fighting chin--he was an enigma, and therefore a fool...

...his railway reports brought him only reprimand and were sent the rounds as a joke because, once he would grasp his pen, the power in him that would not be denied leaped into play to fashion realities on the stationagent's file-sheet where there should have appeared only facts...

...he wrote for over thirty...

...He was a conscious artist...

...Reymont lived fifty-seven years...

...And in such scenes as this, too, lies one of Reymont's strongest claims to literary greatness...

...if merit was granted to his cycle of sonnets, he was accused of having stolen them...

...In Ferments, he returned even more definitely to that scene...

...Writing was no more easy for him than the toil and sweat of tillage and harvest for the peasant...

...if his sceptical friends could have Ruessed then that 408 T H E C O M M O N W E AL February I6, I927 these failures of his, which disgusted them so, would one day make the very fabric of success and fame for him l When, at twenty-six, his first story, The Death, was published, and he announced his intention of devot- ing himself henceforth to writing, they despaired more than ever of him, calling him not only a failure, but a fool...

...Most of Reymont's wri, tings are thus the harvest of his own experiences...

...the clod of earth shone like a diamond, like a particle of the sun . . and the whole world was amazed when it saw how infi- nitely beautiful was that clod of earth and how immeas- urably rich it must be if it could nourish such a heart l...

...In the ages to come, when under new dispensations men may be searching with immense curiosity the records of our time, this work may well be found and accepted as a genuine folk utterance...

...A dreamer surely...

...Here, for instance, in the death of Boryna, scat- tering the earth itself for seed in his moonlit delirium, and falling stark at last in the furrow at dawn, clasping the soil in his hand--here is writing that is incompar- able for vigor and beauty and significance...

...His writings have gone into the tongues of all these lands...

...When Ladislas Reymont made himself known to our reading world a year ago through his Nobel Prize novel, The Peasants, something refreshing happened, something really new--something as old as the song of Caedmon, but new to us, because we have so long lost the flavor of the old and the real...

...Young Ladis- las got little schooling...

...He was only in his mid-thirties when he began it...

...Finally, we have his two greatest works, The Prom- ised Land, and The Peasants, which, taken together, make one great prose epic of the husbandman in the two aspects which most faithfully reveal his soul...

...The death of Yagna, coming as it does at the very end of a huge four-volume work, led up to, as it is, through a thou-sand pages of ever-tightening, never-failing suspense, suspense created through authentic characterization-- this scene is an unimpeachable demonstration of sus-tained literary power...

...The pen that would raise man to the stars must set its leverage in the earth...

...then, at last, the whole world looked up to behold this singer of the soil, as one of his colleagues, Kornel Makuszynski, has phrased it, "holding tightly clenched in his hand a clod of earth, like the knight who carried in his hands from the Holy Land a burning light...

...The Peasants has something of all the qualities that have gone into the making of folk-song from the beginning of time--tim- plidty, spontaneity, ingenuousness (instead of ingenu- ity) rich figurativeness...

...When he ven-tures from it, from subjectivity to objectivity, from in- terpretation to mere observation, he fails of his best, as he did partially in his historical novel, The Year I794, and as he did almost wholly in The Opium Smokers, and The Vampire...

...The pen that merely scratches glyphics on the enamel of life neither stirs us nor lifts us up...

...and it is communal...

...If he could have guessed then, that night in the dingy tavern at Skierniewice, when he sat up through the long but swift-flying hours of dim lamplight and lived over the huge drama of Sienkiewicz's masterpiece--if he could have guessed then that he himself, Reymont, would one day wear coequal honors with his master...

...tens of thousands, indeed millions, of people have read him and are reading him...

...But Europe in the meantime had long accepted him--France and Spain and Germany and Russia, all the Slavonic countries...

...in the one, living on the soil, a part of it, as much as the wheat blade is a part of it...

...who has the fecundity of elemental truth in him, and of elemental feeling...

...he was almost forty when it was finished...

...whose gesture is of David dancing unabashed, not of Michal, the sophisticate, looking on in pretentious boredom...

...he labored over his books, thought them out, composed haltingly and with infinite care...

...when he was twenty, and half-starved, of soul as well as body, he lost a coveted promotion because the dream caught him up out of the pages of Sienkiewicz's triology and held him while the golden material chance slipped by...

...In that episode, Reymont comes very near out-Greeking the Greeks for katharsis, for pathos and the towering tragedy of the inevitable...

...The subdued all-potent sound of the plow, the fresh exhala- tion of the unfolding sod, are in nearly all of his writ- ings...

...and he got the less because he came from the fighting stock of Poland...

...And what place is there in the world for the dreamer...

...The rest of his story, up to his finding himself as a writer, is a story of struggle for bread, in railway of- flees, in drygoods stores, as a telegraph operator, as an actor...

...Then, at last, came the Nobel award...

...an Ezra Pound sprinkling his self-conscious verses with quoti- dian Latin...

...The Promised Land is the tragedy of the peasant transplanted and destroyed in industry...

...The brief story of his school-days is an almost continuous story of punishments and expulsions...

...as if the mesmeric gesture of sowing and reaping, of creation itself, had got into his soul...

...That life which had furrowed his soul with the harrow of pain and failure and disappointment, had planted a crop, too, and his pen was harvesting it--not with bitterness, but with that quiet fidelity to truth which is the essence of realism...

...But one has to know what the mill in peasant Poland means, to appreciate the hardships that surrounded Reymont's early life...

...A Van Vechten dropping his "quotes" in the manifest hope of being regarded as "new...

...There are lower social strata than that from which he rose...

...It is the trag- edy of exploited and exploiter, and it has among its many dramatic scenes one of such electrifying force that no reader can forget it--that scene where peasant and employer, facing each other in the fury of primi- tive lust for blood and conquest, are both ground to a mad death by the vast machine that has heretofore been their life and given them sustenance...

...More than twenty editions of Reymont's masterpiece have been published in America alone in less than twenty months...

...That work comes very near being pure folk-writing, as so much of the Old Testament is...

...The Peasants came out of more than the mere professional observance of a liter- ary man ; it came out of elemental folk experience...

...In The Comedienne, Reymont again made use of his experiences, this time drawing on his life as an actor in the days when he had toured the outland towns of Poland with a troupe of barnstormers...

...his mother had fought, too, as Polish mothers ever since the Partitions had fought, keeping the story and the language of Poland alive in the hearts and on the tongues of their children in the face of every interdiction...

...Pelka, too, drudged through the lonely sun-smitten and winter-bitten days, and the lonelier nights, of a rural station- clerk...

...We turn away from them...

...I, who regarded real- ity as a stupid, wretched nightmare, unworthy of con- sideration, Imstoop to describe the foul gutters of life ?"--so he once spoke of himself and of those youth- ful enthusiasms of his which never left him...

...even to Japan...

...But his richest gleaning was to come out of his understanding of the life of the peas- ant, the life of the soil as he had known it...