To Be or Not To Be

By R.Z. Sheppard

A WARSAW DIARY: 1978-81 by Kazimierz Brandys, translated by Richard Lourie; Random House; 260 pages; $17.95

"They live in a civilization; we live in a drama," notes Kazimierz Brandys in his terse daybook.

"They" are the nations of Western Europe; "we" are the people of Poland. Bran dys, 67, is a Polish novelist who resigned from the Communist Party 17 years ago to protest government publish ing restrictions. He withdrew from official literary activities and eventually co-found ed Zapis, an independent quarterly that first printed portions of his Diary. In 1981, a week before the Jaruzelski government declared martial law, Brandys and his wife left Poland to live in New York City and Paris.

With sad Eastern eyes, the author looks back on Polish history, his romantic youth as a law student in Warsaw, the German occupation, the Russian bear hug and the insidious processes that can make an unfree people police their own thoughts. The collectivism of expression works from within as well as from without. Writes Brandys:

"Notions of dignity and justice endure, ragged and limp, in our minds, but if we encounter injustice or if our dignity is degraded, does a holy wrath really rise up in us? Or do we think, 'It's tough, that's the system we live in, that's reality.' " Brandys' Among the Warsaw are long immediate lines to realities buy of herring and stale bread, shortages of medicine, coal and snow shovels, a week's wait to place a phone call to New York, and a restaurant where the lack of stove gas means spaghetti cooked under the hot-water tap. The author himself takes lunch at the Writers Club: "Well-known film makers, owners of foreign cars and villas on the bay, rubbing shoulders with blacklisted writers and a mob of skinny critics, mixed in with a few literary in formers. All together, eating their cabbage soup with tin spoons."

Where a Westerner might see free loaders, Brandys finds the embers of cul ture and community. He is confronted with a conflagration on the eve of Pope John Paul II's June 1979 visit to the Polish capital. Strolling through the spruced-up city, Brandys discovers that thousands of Poles have spontaneously gathered around Victory Square. No police can be seen; order is kept by youths in light blue caps. Nihilism has turned its back on a moment of authentic life, "when what people have within them is expressed, and when people do not have to act counter to their social instincts and ideas."

Like many Slavic intellectuals of the past, Brandys has his feet stuck in the mystique of nationalism while his head is turned to the rational humanism of the West. He feels burdened by a literary tradition that craves patriotic miracles. A sense of ordinary society is missing.

Polish fiction, he notes, suffers from a lack of plot development. The reasons are historical: France and England have a complex heritage of court, a bourgeoisie, colonies and police, and for Brandys the fundamental elements of a story are social: intrigue, career, adventure and crime.

The nature of his diary precludes dramatic narrative and the delineation of character. One learns obliquely of the "Flying University," a scholarly group of dissidents who meet in various locations; of NOWA, the independent publishing house that challenges the censors; of K.O.R. (Workers Defense Committee) and its support of Solidarity; and of the thaws and sudden freezes that characterize government policy.

Brandys' strengths are not those of an eyewitness; much of what he describes is second-and thirdhand. He even turned down a ticket for a seat at John Paul's Warsaw Mass and watched the event on television. Instead, he is a moral witness.

He ruminates on Poland's partitioned past ("Between Germany's schizophrenic power and the deranged void that is Russia"); he broods about censorship ("The places and dates blotted from history create a dead zone whose silence is filled with the noke of artificial polemics"); he makes bitter jokes about his police tails ("my readers"); he confronts his country's weakness for anti-Semitism and ponders its damaging potential: "If today someone cared to compromise those eager for Poland's freedom, to sully them in the eyes of the civilized world ... then that desire could be most effectively realized by the founding of an anti-Jewish organization in Warsaw."

Like his country, Brandys has been shaped by partitions. He is part antique patriot, part democratic socialist, part believer in Poland's Roman Catholic identity and part Jew, a fact he establishes mostly by allusion. His steady voice, however, belongs wholly to the community of exiles that has quickened the conscience and enriched the writing of the 20th century.

--By R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"Rain, all the time rain . . .The roofs and sidewalks wet. In front of the stores, lines of people wrapped in waterproof cellophane. Cats are drinking milk again: there's a shortage of certain chemical agents, and as a result, the taste of milk has improved. Industry has had to abandon the production of those food poisons, and cats have breathed a sigh of relief . . .

I should finish the second volume of the Diary during January, and that probably means abroad. And what then? I have had a detective story in mind for a long time, which I would call The Oval Face and which I would begin more or less like this: 'Because my personal needs are modest, because I don't change wives and do not carry money on me, many people consider me a saint. Yes, I reply, I am a saint; it's the cheapest way to live.' The narrator would be a man in his early thirties who had been buried alive. The whole thing wouldn't end tragically, however. The day after his funeral, he would return to his wife . . . since in the grave he had by chance unraveled the mystery of their unhappiness."