Biography
Witold Gombrowicz’s life spanned the extremes of affluence and poverty, obscurity and fame. The youngest of four children in a wealthy landowning family, he was born August 4, 1904, on his parents’ country estate, Maoszyce, in what is today southeastern Poland. His father was an estate manager and industrialist and his mother an educated but conventional woman of her social class. Distant from his father and brothers, the young Gombrowicz found himself in the orbit of his mother and sister, who overprotected him. He suffered from chronic respiratory illnesses, which plagued him all his life and worsened when asthmatic attacks began ten years before his death. Images of choking, strangling, and suffocation recur in his writing. He rebelled against maternal smothering at an early age, and his youthful alienation from his family became a dominant autobiographical theme in his writing (his adult relations with his family were cordial). Balancing the pathological aspect of his biography was his indefatigable sense of humor, with which he deterrorized his psychological and physical ailments.
When Gombrowicz was seven, the family moved to Warsaw, where he received a good education, including private tutoring and attendance at an elite high school. He took a law degree at Warsaw University and, after an apprenticeship with a judge, devoted himself full time to writing. From an early age, he devoured literature, philosophy, and history. His first literary effort, at age sixteen, was a history of his family, based on the four-hundred-year-old family archives. Later, he secretly wrote fiction but achieved satisfying results only during his law apprenticeship, when his first book took shape. Its reception in 1933 was overwhelmingly positive, but a few condescending reviews led him to regard his debut as a failure. Nevertheless, his strong and eccentric personality soon established itself in Polish literary life. His polemical novel Ferdydurke placed him in the spotlight, winning for him zealous admirers and detractors, but his play Ivona, Princess of Burgundia was noticed by a single critic, and Possessed, his last work before emigrating, was a potboiler written for money.
In the summer of 1939, Gombrowicz took a cruise to Argentina as a journalist and was stranded abroad when the war broke out. Though speaking no Spanish and short of money, he decided to remain in Buenos Aires, where there was a Polish community. He had little in common with his émigré compatriots or the Argentine literary establishment, and despite introductions to leading writers and editors, he could not support himself through journalism. He was saved from starvation by the charity of Polish friends and a wealthy Argentine heiress, low-paying clerical jobs, a few small subsidies, and panhandling. He spent the war years mostly avoiding high culture and frequenting the slum and port districts of Buenos Aires. After the war, he began writing again. The Argentine heiress funded the publication of Ferdydurke and The Marriage in Spanish, but the books failed to launch his career in Argentina. Weary of poverty, he took a job at a bank, but the success of his books among Spanish-speaking youth energized him, and his years at the bank (the job was a semi-sinecure) were some of his most productive.
In 1951, Gombrowicz made his debut as a Polish émigré writer by publishing excerpts of Trans-Atlantyk in the journal Kultura. As with Ferdydurke , the novel provoked attacks, but when his diary began appearing in April, 1953, he became a fixture in émigré culture. He left the bank in 1955 and lived modestly on his literary earnings, paid lectures on philosophy, small grants, and the hospitality of friends. He spent long periods...
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in provincial Argentine towns, where he did much of his writing and attracted yet another generation of youth. For a decade, he had tried to have his works published and his plays staged in Poland and France, but not until the 1950’s did he have any success. The enthusiastic reception of his books in Poland encouraged him, and their suppression in 1958 was a severe blow. When his works began to appear throughout Europe, the Argentine literary establishment finally began to pay him some attention, but by that time Gombrowicz had accepted a generous Ford Foundation fellowship to be a writer-in-residence in Berlin, and he left Argentina in April, 1963.
The majority of Polish émigrés were indifferent to Gombrowicz’s international fame, but he found a more sympathetic audience among Western Europeans, for whom his controversial tone was refreshing. His fiction and drama rapidly conquered Europe, gaining for him literary prizes and the status of a celebrity with a devoted following, but his yearlong stay in Berlin fatally weakened his health, and he spent the last five years of his life as an invalid, barely able to taste the fruits of his late and dearly earned success. Recuperating after Berlin, he met a young French-Canadian student, Marie-Rita Labrosse, who became his companion and later his wife, with whom he settled on the French Riviera. Despite his continually deteriorating health, Gombrowicz remained active and productive until the very end, retaining his characteristic pungency and humor. He died in his sleep on July 24, 1969, and the obituaries in Poland and throughout Europe mourned his death.
Biography
Witold Marian Gombrowicz’s life falls into two main phases, separated by his decision in September, 1939, to stay in Argentina, where he was caught by the outbreak of World War II in Europe. He was born in 1904 into the family of a landed proprietor-turned-industrialist; in 1911, his family moved from a country manor in southern Poland to Warsaw. The most rebellious and whimsical child in his family, Gombrowicz nevertheless graduated from high school and, in 1922, acceding to his father’s wish, began to study law at Warsaw University. After he graduated in 1927, he continued his studies in Paris but soon returned to Poland, where his unorthodox views made it impossible for him to find a job as a lawyer. In all probability, this professional failure hastened his decision to devote himself entirely to writing. In 1933, his first book, a collection of short stories under the provocative title Pamiętnik z okresu dojrzewania (a memoir written in puberty), was published to rather skeptical reviews that generally dismissed the book as “immature.” Nevertheless, Gombrowicz quickly won recognition in the circles of young writers. By the mid-1930’s, he was already enjoying a moderate fame as a colorful personality and fascinating causeur as well as an insightful literary critic. It was, however, his first novel, Ferdydurke, that became a genuine event of Polish literary life. Published in 1937, Ferdydurke provoked a heated critical debate on avant-garde tendencies in modern Polish prose.
Before the war, Gombrowicz managed to publish in magazines and journals three more short stories, his first play, Iwona, ksi#x0656;̨niczka Burgunda (pb. 1938; Princess Iwona, 1969), and an unfinished novel, Possessed, a gothic parody that was published pseudonymously as a newspaper series in 1939.
By a strange twist of fortune, only a few weeks before the German invasion of Poland, Gombrowicz took part in a trip of a group of young writers to Argentina. While in Buenos Aires, he learned about the outbreak of war and decided not to return. The first Argentinian years, while offering him inner freedom by cutting off all of his ties and obligations, were also extremely difficult, marked by isolation and financial hardship. To make his living, he took a poorly paid job as a clerk in a Polish bank in Buenos Aires. At the same time, he stubbornly continued his writing and after some time gained recognition—not so much among Polish émigrés, however, as among young Argentinian writers. He returned to the literary scene in 1953 with the novel Trans-Atlantyk and the play lub (revised 1957; The Marriage, 1969). Also in 1953, he began to publish fragments of his diary in the Institut Littéraire’s monthly, Kultura.
The publication of Trans-Atlantyk, a novel dealing satirically with the notion of traditional Polish patriotism, was met with vitriolic attacks from the conservative segment of the émigré community. On the other hand, after 1957-1958, when four books by Gombrowicz had been published in Poland during the short-lived political “thaw,” he became almost a cult object for many young writers and critics, who enthusiastically welcomed everything avant-garde and unorthodox after the years of Socialist Realist boredom.
Between 1957 and 1966, Gombrowicz published, through the Institut Littéraire, the rest of his most important books written in exile: two novels, Pornografia and Cosmos, and the diary in three volumes, the last of which also included his third play, Operetka (1966; Operetta, 1971). Meanwhile, in 1963, he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and left for Europe. After some time spent in West Berlin (this stay as well as some of Gombrowicz’s public statements made him a victim of vicious attacks in the official media in Poland), he moved to Paris and finally settled with his young French wife in the small town of Vence in southern France. The last years of his life were marked by his rapidly growing international fame as well as by his deteriorating health. He died in Vence in 1969, after a long struggle with illness.
