A POOR POLISH WRITER LOOKS AT THE POST-WORLD WAR II UNITED STATES

In 1975, Tadeusz Konwicki, whose Dreambook for Our Times was then recently published by Penguin in the series Writers From Other Europe, met, by an appointment arranged by the State Department, Saul Bellow in his University of Chicago office. What could the world famous Bellow, the American literary giant promptly admired in Warsaw cafe's, think about him, Konwicki wondered in his book of literary diaries Kalendarz i klepsydra [The Calendar and the Hour Glass], about "an elderly scribe from a small country somewhere on a border with Asia?"1 Bellow was equipped with a folder which introduced Konwicki as "one of the most outstanding contemporary Polish writers." "Small countries," Konwicki continued, "in order to compensate for their smallness, don't have second-rate or even average, even good or very good artists, they only produce the great, the most remarkable and outstanding ones. What can be sadder, more pathetic, than the provincial country's greatest artist . . . ," Konwicki cries with his patent mock despair that thinly masks his anger, fed by the generic Polish post-war resentments over the betrayal of Poland by the Western world and particularly by its leader, the United States, by Roosevelt, by the ignorant American liberals, pro-Soviet leftists, peaceniks, d&enteniks, ignoramuses_ Unable to say it all because of his own once-upon-a-time brief romance with communism, Konwicki uses Bellow whom he slyly describes as a gray haired, slim gentleman with a familiar face from any European street or a publishing house or a European central committee for a soft target, while in harsher tones he proclaims his refusal to be impressed by anything in America. "Everywhere it's the same. The same high pile of downtown, surrounded by plain trashfields of one-story houses." But this was in 1975, and Konwicki had the luxury, as he himself admits, of a return ticket to Poland, where, along with the obligatory overweight suitcase, he carried a new wound: Forget the Polish complexes vis-a-vis a Saul Bellow or an Arthur Miller. The only fellow-writer, a Lithuanian kinsman, he truly wanted to meet, to whom he had "tortuously crawled across this legendary continent to the legendary San Francisco Bay," declined to see him. Hurt pride, personal and collective, cannot but darken a traveler's view. More so, most often, if he is an exile.