Tuwim: breaking off friendships

Lechon and Tuwim were very close friends in the 1920’s and 30’s. They were both noted poet-members of the Skamander group, which was a kind of riotous café-party society, and they shared a wild, explosive, pure-nonsense sense of humor – with Slonimski they were a kind of Monty Python Trinity of Poland. This last was their closest tie: they fooled around together, often dangerously, egging each other on to acts of sheer madness. And though both later claimed that their friendship didn’t go beyond that, it did: they avidly read each other’s poetry, and called each other at odd hours of the night to talk about their poems. It was an intense, rich friendship of two very well matched minds. To many their friendship was a sign that assimilation was possible: such close companionship between a polonized Jew from Lodz (Tuwim) and a son of Polish gentry from the east (Lechon): close, warm, intense and – entirely personal, thoroughly unpolitical.

The war changed all that. In one dramatic telephone conversation in New York in 1944 things came to a break. In it, Tuwim claimed that Russians were a lot better than Germans – this seemed obvious to him since Russians were not programmatically exterminating the Jews; but then Russians were programmatically exterminating Polish gentry (which Germans also were, but less assiduously); to Lechon the difference between the two seemed nil and to claim otherwise an act of – well what? Betrayal? Tribalism? Cruel indifference?

Lechon hung up and sent Tuwim a letter breaking off their friendship.

Which of course he didn’t have to do.

*

A friend once wrote to me about the sad fact that friendships do not last:

So many things can happen. You discover he is a card-carrying member of the KKK or the SS and you have to write him off because, well, there are limits. Or he decides that he was just born again and writes _you_ off because you are a heathen. Or he gets married (with tots!), after which it's curtain drawing for anything and anyone that came before (family life keeps him busy busy, ya know). Or he is swallowed whole by his career and never heard of again, certainly not by you. Or one of you fails to live up to expectations and slowly but irrevocably the articles of separation are consummated. &c &c. It takes nothing short of a minor miracle for anything to endure.

I have often thought about this letter and I think about it now, especially the first sentence: that one would write off a friend – “there are limits” – on the strength of political difference. Admittedly, a big difference since my friend was quoting rather extreme instances – Nazis, KKR; but then from Lechon’s point of view, praising the Russian regime at a time when the regime was murdering Polish prisoners of war was probably just such an extreme view. So he – literally – wrote off his friendship with Tuwim on political grounds.

*

But he didn’t have to.

Here in Portugal the political divide of the Salazar times split the old ruling class, dividing deeply a small society connected through blood and marriage and bonds of friendship. Yet I know of at least one instance in which members loyal to the regime risked everything to save their friends of opposite political loyalties from persecution by their own side. When politics and loyalty to friends came into conflict, these men chose friendship above politics.

Perhaps in doing so they were harking back to the old way of doing things, the pre-Republican way, in which one’s first loyalty was his king and it was personal rather than political, a loyalty to an individual man, not an abstract entity, or a cause, or a nation, or a class; it was a personal loyalty to a man divorced from his qualities: the king could be a child, or a fool, or a tyrant, he could be Catholic or Protestant, pro- or anti-Pope, but one remained loyal to him all the same: the person of the king instead of a flag.

This is one possible view of friendship, friendship as a monarchist, absolutist loyalty: a personal loyalty which goes beyond all limits.

I’d like to suggest that it is the better view: after all, it isn’t clear what one might stand to gain from writing off a friend on political grounds: the cause isn’t likely to be aided by a small rift like this – small from the point of view of the “cause”; if anything, our friend, so cruelly written off, is only likely to harden his political views (since we love most those things for which we have been obliged to pay the highest price); both he and we shall have lost a friendship, which is a tremendous personal loss for both; a very heavy price to pay in order to gain – nothing.

By writing off a friend in this manner, I suppose, we declare our loyalty to our political views, but of what use are our political views to us? Will they warm us in winter? Feed us when we are hungry? Will they share our joys or comfort us in loss? Will they drop by on an afternoon to see how we are doing and stay to talk nonsense over coffee and first one, then two, then three cups of port? And will they then stumble away at 3 o’clock in the morning, kissing us sloppily goodbye and declaring their undying love as we pack them off into a taxi?

*

Tuwim lived for another nine years after the break; Lechon, twelve. Certainly, both were tragically affected by it; but it is Lechon who left us a more thorough record of his suffering. The record comes in three forms, an unifinished essay which Lechon continued to work on until his death; a poem entitled Tuwim; and his journal entries.

In the last years of his life, in exile in New York, Lechon suffered from manic depression; he took the talking cure – the only one available then – and as part of it kept a thorough journal. The journal survives and is one of the most remarkable – and beautiful, and forgotten – literary flowers of Polish twentieth century. It is a wonderful miscellany of a thinking, sensitive mind, expressed in most touching language. The entries cover everything: lousy works about Tuwim, optimism in life, drunkenness, the homeless, psychoanalysis, reflections on reading one’s own journal, the strange custom of celebrating anniversaries, an evaluation – poor, or hopeful – of his own poetry, tears at the reading of Quo Vadis, a Polish peasant parish in America, the wonders of architecture – the skyscrapers, Polish graves in America, a dream about the Soviet prosecutor Vishinski, someone’s indecent poem, fifteenth anniversary of the break out of the war (“we go on without Poland, and go on”), love for the dearest person, etc.

Through it, like a silver thread, slinks the figure of Tuwim. Here he marks over the course of three years his progress on his essay on Tuwim: there are over one hundred such entries: “A page about Tuwim”, “A page – in fact less – about Tuwim”, “Three pages about Tuwim”, enigmatic notes of a journal hidden beneath the journal.

The essay was begun under the impulse of a dream. Two weeks after the news of the death of Tuwim, Lechon had a dream:

In a dream I saw Tuwim in some horrible tortures, which he survived; later there was some sort of a banquet in Warsaw in his honor, and I was present. It was in some dingy, poorly lit hall, like something in Divine Comedy (…) I was speaking to Tuwim, and there was still a lot left to say when suddenly there appeared between us a fellow in coat-tails and at that moment Tuwim turned away from me and I understood that I have been trapped, that the KGB had me.

This dream would haunt Lechon till his dying day; to the last he would work on his essay on Tuwim, forever unfinished. Only a poem about Tuwim was finished. It read:

I see your silver hair and your sharply outlined face
And your hand, which like an oar, pushes off reality;
You slink at night, poor Cagliostro,
Through empty streets of not your Warsaw.

With your senses torn by the tempest
You try to inhale from new streets the magic of old,
Under the new street lights which have sice lit them
You erect with mad gaze the shadows of former buildings.

You cry because you hear the rain pour through old eaves,
And still not believing that no one will stop you
You stretch out your hand in the dark, you innocent criminal,
Towards that hand stretched out from afar, again brotherly.