Marek Hlasko: All Backs Were Turned

Rebel Lit is a new series by New Vessel Press showcasing works of literature that display a spirit of rebellion, challenge, heroism and courage.

The first in this series is All Backs Were Turned , by Marek Hlasko. The novel is a bleak and brutal look at the lives of a woebegone group of outcasts in pre-1967 Israel, by the Polish author known as the James Dean of Eastern Europe. Hlasko, with his startling good looks and his hardboiled, existential prose, was an uncompromising artist who pointed out the hypocrisy and cruelties of society no matter the cost. Exiled from his native Poland, he drifted from country to country, using his pen to dismantle false veneers of civility and show the horror behind the masks he encountered. Hlasko wrote about a post-World War Two existence irreparably scarred by fascism and the Holocaust. Roman Polanski called Hlasko “a born rebel and troublemaker of immense charm.” The New York Times wrote that he was a “spokesman for those who were angry and beat … turbulent, temperamental, and tortured.” We are proud to present All Backs Were Turned as the inaugural title in the Rebel Lit Series from New Vessel Press.

THE INSCRIPTION ON THE GRAVE AT WARSAW’S OLD Powazki Cemetery reads, “His life was short, and all backs were turned.” Indeed, Marek Hlasko passed away at an age at which many novelists are just coming into their own, entering what biographers like to refer to as the major phase. Hlasko was just 35—though years of eking out a marginal existence, frequently underemployed or resorting to what Poles of that generation called “black work,” and a penchant for running afoul of the law, all conspired to make him look like he was in his fifties.

By most accounts (of those who knew and cared for him, at least), the final two or three years of Hlasko’s life were a period of intense burnout, the tail end of a spectacular career that had launched him, at mere twenty, as the foremost voice of his generation — a deeply troubled generation, traumatized by the horrors of Nazi occupation, the Holocaust, and the violent Soviet-backed communist takeover of Poland that followed — and simultaneously its chief iconoclast. His earliest writings, set pieces of socialist realist psychodrama published in communist Poland while he was still a teen, are in the main forgettable, though even there, his fascination with the darker aspects of daily life, with betrayal, solitude, rage, and failure that would become his trademark is palpable; the unrelentingly grim, claustrophobic mood is only fleetingly punctured by requisite socialist platitudes, while the fiascos of the protagonists are final and irrevocable.

By other accounts, however, Hlasko in 1969, the year of his death, was about to enter a new stage in life. Having led a peripatetic existence throughout the previous decade, shuffling between various safe havens in Western Europe, Israel, and the United States — his native Poland declared Hlasko persona non grata in 1958, following the illicit publication of one of his novels by an émigré press, while he himself was in France on a state-funded fellowship — Hlasko was seriously considering settling down somewhere on the American West Coast, ideally the LA basin. When asked why there, of all places in the world, and in light of his halting English and a relative lack of contacts in the area, Polish or otherwise, his response was simple: “LA has good weather. I like good weather.”

Was his sudden death on June 14 while staying at the home of his West German publisher, of an overdose of sleeping pills, a deliberate act, as the popular press insisted, the last spasm of stubborn contrariness on the part of socialist Poland’s original bad boy, variously hailed as an Iron Curtain counterpoint to James Dean and as a communist Angry Young Man? Was it a consequence of ongoing disappointment and heartbreak? Or a merely banal though tragic miscalculation, exacerbated by immoderate alcohol use? We will probably never know with certainty. And perhaps it does not matter. Fellow author and adventurer Jerzy Kosinski, another of communist Poland’s very bad boys and a fellow exile ultimately to the US — though his eventual suicide, in 1991, was by all accounts planned — possibly settled the matter when he declared that Hlasko “personally lived through what he wrote and died of an overdose of solitude and not enough love.”

Hlasko began writing fiction while still in high school, and was publicly recognized early and often. He had movie star good looks, a roguish smile, and an ideologically “correct” past, having refashioned himself as an orphaned child of simple laborers, a housemaid and a fireman, when his father had in fact been a prominent attorney in interwar Poland. Hlasko said the right thing frequently enough when called upon and talked his way into the front offices of the premier state-run youth-oriented literary magazine, Po prostu [“The Way It Is”]. Surrounded by adoring acolytes of both sexes, guided by benefactors always on the lookout for the next hot new thing to use in the propaganda wars with the West, and even “managed” for a time by the then-chairman of the Polish Writers’ Union, Hlasko was being groomed for his tenure as a shining star of Poland’s new socialist culture. He was to be the poet of the transport truck and the proletarian suburb, a writer of youth and possibility — within Party-approved boundaries, of course. This was a role he initially assumed with enthusiasm, and it paid big dividends for a time, in the shape of fellowships, interviews, cash awards, vacations at writers’ colonies on the state’s dime, and the like.

In short, Hlasko’s rise was meteoric; he became a legend in his own time, a paradoxical socialist brand. Yet on the elemental level of the myth, quite apart from the counterfeit past, a number of factors conspired from the outset to disrupt and undercut the facile image of the communist rogue with a heart of gold and a volume of Marx’s Capital under his arm. For one thing, critics in Poland and elsewhere on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain generally referred to his texts as “behaviorism,” a tendentious genre which encompasses thousands of volumes of novels and plays that appeared in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Stalinist era, and routinely featured “difficult” characters whose consciousness needed to be raised or modified. Few took proper heed of the black undercurrents of the work, or were willing to admit that Hlasko’s true lineage was actually a fusion of the American noir thriller and Western European cinematic realism. Indeed, socialist realism merely provided a framework to be broken at the earliest convenience. Hlasko, then, was hardly the slightly disparaging painter of everyday life of Marxist utopias-in-progress, as many critics maintained (at least in their public discourse). Rather, in a true Conradian idiom he sought to “make you see,” to partake in his own vision. And as the years passed, this vision diverged further and further away from the constraining dogmas of approved, formulaic “production novels”—novels that focused, literally, on “production” in farms and factories — towards dramas of power, lust, and revenge, dramas enacted between and among fallen men — men who are in turn elevated to the status of archetypes, symbols even.

In fact, the socialist heroes of even his early stories and novels, such as The Eighth Day of the Week , are no wise triumphant New Men with a flaw or two. Instead, they are broken subjects, unsteadily seeking their way within an inhuman system, sometimes improvising, frequently resorting to manipulations and lies as they seek to improve on impossible odds, their efforts more often than not rewarded with catastrophe. Already in 1956, at the peak of his Polish fame, Hlasko stated that his narratives, chock-full of brutality and heartbreak though they were, simply reflected reality as he knew it, that his protagonists were looking in vain for love and fulfillment in a city that never smiles. (Post-war, derelict Warsaw was the setting here, though any number of Polish cities and towns would have fit that bill.) Indeed it was socialist realism, that bastard genre of happy tomorrows pledged but never delivered on — since infiltrators, saboteurs, and eternal enemies lurked always and everywhere and had to be eliminated first — which presented the cynic’s vision of life. The protagonist of