The Iron Capital of Bruno Schulz

As a writer, a painter and a man, Bruno Schulz believed that the aim of life was to mature into childhood. In the peachy light of the recent me-speak compulsion to get in touch with one’s inner child, Schulz’s belief might look like yet another reason for not getting in touch with him. He didn’t write a lot, and a lot of what he did write was in a Polish difficult even for Poles: he is hard to translate. Nearly all of what he painted went missing. He is one of those creative spirits from what Philip Roth called "the other Europe", the Europe beyond the Elbe, whose reputations tend to stay there because it is hard to airlift them out. If we add to all that the notion that he was a toy-cuddling advocate of infantilism, he could be lost to us indeed. But the truth of his mentality was anything but infantile: it was a penetrating realisation that the perceptual store of our early childhood forms what he called "the iron capital" of the adult imagination.

The realisation was itself realised in his two little books of short stories, Cinnamon Shops (otherwise known as The Street of Crocodiles) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass: the two little books that constitute the bulk of his writing as it has come down to us, and which are enough by themselves to make him a weighty figure. Nobody quite matches him for seeing everyday objects in three dimensions, and evoking them as if the fourth dimension, time, had been erased. Making a mythology from the actual, he convinces us that the actual is made from myths. Reading him, we feel as our own children must feel when we are reading them the words of Maurice Sendak while they are looking at the pictures. Colours breathe. Textures pulse. The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker loom like totem poles. And it is all done in such a short span, in paragraphs worth chapters, and chapters worth a book. There might have been another, longer work — the novel usually called The Messiah — but if the manuscript ever existed it vanished like the paintings; and all other possibilities of future work vanished along with his future. On a scale measured by his potential achievement, he died young.

In fact he had already turned fifty when he was murdered, but we are right to think of him as still beginning, because it was always the way he thought of himself. So it was an untimely end, as well as a terrible one. If only it had been uniquely terrible. Alas, it was a commonplace. He was one more Jew rubbed out by the Nazis. The circumstances, in his case, were merely unusual. In the Drohobycz ghetto, a Gestapo officer with good taste, one Felix Landau, had made a pet of him so that could paint murals. In November 1942, on a day of "wild action" — that is, a day when the Nazis ran around shooting people at random instead of rounding them up to be shipped off in batches, as on an ordinary day —

(The rest of this article is in The Meaning of Recognition, published by Picador in 2005.)