Stanislawa Przybyszewska is possibly the oddest early 20th Century writer you've never heard of.
The illegitimate daughter of rogue Polish Communist writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, she spent the latter part of her thirty-four years on this earth holed up in a tiny, unheated room in
It’s also a possibility that she had an incestuous relationship with her father. Incest was apparently quite popular in the 1920s. And these young gals today think they’re so hip with their bi-sexuality.
Oops, sorry---bi-sexuality is SOOOO 90s.
Anyway, she was desperately poor, mentally unstable, and so obsessed with Robespierre and the French Revolution that she began to date her letters (most of which were desperate cries for financial help) according to the Revolutionary calendar.
No one paid any attention to her in her lifetime; and, according to British reviewer Hilary Mantel, “Tuberculosis, morphine and malnutrition were adduced as the causes of death, but she could more truthfully be diagnosed as the woman who died of Robespierre.”
By the way---yet another lonesome artist bites the dust to the tune of consumption! Sorry for the exclamation point, but I’m a little obsessed with consumption lately.
Sometimes, when I get too involved in a project, I think of Stanislawa Przybyszewska.
Tuesday afternoon was a slow day at work and, with few other staff around on this Tuesday, I retreat into my writing. Just as I sit down to eat some lunch and scribble, a table comes in and I put my piece of grilled chicken into the microwave to preserve it.
And it’s cold. Really cold. They won’t close the open windows and doors or turn on the heat. I go to my locker to get the sweater I keep there for just such a day---known around work as my “Grandma Sweater”.
In the back of the restaurant, a maintenance man comes to repair some broken booths and the smell of massive amounts of model-airplane glue permeates the air.
The kind of glue mid-Western kids used to get high off of before meth labs became so trendy.
I begin scribbling blog notes for later----dating my notebook according to the My Right Foot numbered days calendar.
I shuffle back and forth between my reheated chicken and my script with my Grandma Sweater wrapped around me wondering if I’m just tired or the fumes are starting to eat away at my brain as I re-write the same sketch over and over again.
And, except for a couple from
I think of my father who died of…oh, you’re not going to believe this---consumption.
Oh my god. I’m becoming Przybyszewska.
Well, without that nasty incest stuff. He died when I was fourteen; however, like Mr. Przybyszewski, was pretty absent from my life.
Przybyszewska’s biography titled A Life of Solitude was written by Jadwiga Kosicka and Daniel Gerould.
Gerould, by the way, also wrote one of my favorite fun books about the French Revolution, Guillotine: Its Legend and Lore. He’s also a Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at The City University of New York. A few years ago, I sent him an email asking for some particular information regarding a certain legend/story about the guillotine he had mentioned in his book. He was very kind and wrote back to me with as much information as he could supply.
So, it was quite a surprise to me a year later to stumble across the story of Przybyszewska and discover that Professor Gerould was one of the authors of the book.
It’s a hard book to read. Not in style, but content. Particularly if you’re struggling in the arts.
Unlike other biographies of artists, Przybyszewska never hit the big time. Przybyszewska is never discovered sipping a soft drink at a soda fountain in downtown
Her plays WERE eventually found and discovered to have literary merit. They have been produced occasionally---around
And the film, after all, was called Danton.
While Przybyszewska’s story is certainly fascinating, it’s not the sort of thing a struggling artist should read on a bad day.
Her last letter ---written to writer, Thomas Mann in November 1934, reads:
"I've run out of bread, and I can't get along without it. The cold is torturing me. Every object in my room is laden with pain; in each 'bent' muscle there lurks pain, unimaginable spiritual and bodily pain. And nothing and no one provides an answer. And nowhere any love. And the self-torture of my exercises is no longer possible: I don't have any courage left.
Had I know that such suffering is possible---I simply would have refused to come into the world.
I can neither live nor die.
Against my wishes, my thoughts blaspheme. I don't want anything. Or anyone (oh, Lord, oh, God, that this must be true!); only peace and quiet.
Yes---peace and quiet.
That's easy to say!
I'm not pure enough. I've used myself up. I've misused myself. Then...
I know only one thing. I can't go on."
And then, she died.
That legendary, beautiful consumptive death that lurked in garrets all over the world. Like Mimi and Camille. Only Przybyszewska was real. No director yelling "Cut". Just a final breath and a cautionary tale.
The lesson learned: There are no guarantees.
Other lesson learned: Get out of the garret!!! For godsakes, get out of that cold miserable garret of the apartment or of the mind and interact with real live people!
It’s easy to get wrapped up in a project, but a long time ago, I discovered that sometimes people are the best medicine. Sometimes, other people are also the best cure for Artistic Scurvy.
So, despite the fumes beginning to put me to sleep at work, I decided to make sure I drug myself out to the theatre/writers group tonight. No matter how uncomfortable I feel or how much I hate the forced social atmosphere of the place.
Tonight, after a long string of rainy days, I need to be around people.
One thing I’ve noticed about people is that most people like to talk about themselves. And, in general, that’s a good thing.
However, some people take over the conversation with their stories, attitudes, suggestions, declarations, beliefs and random thoughts---all about them.
I encounter one or two of these folks tonight. They’re okay people.
For about five minutes.
After that, I begin to tune the continuous sound of their voice out of my head and begin to glance around for others like myself. People with little to no agenda. People who just enjoy a good conversation for the sake of itself. Real people who can talk and listen and comment and jump back with a snappy response.
Fun people. Nice people. People involved in the moment and the other people around them.
It seems odd to me that Przybyszewska chose Robespierre as an idol.
"I have the calm certainty," she wrote to a friend in one of her letters, "that I understand Robespierre better than anyone whose works are known to me."
As someone who knows a little about Robespierre, I would say that “The sentence, the guillotine, and the beheading were adduced as the causes of death, but Robespierre could more truthfully be diagnosed as the man who died of Robespierre.”
After all, Robespierre was the man who had sent bands of criminals into the convents and rectories all over
Oddly, or not so oddly, Robespierre made sure he was the first to ascend the peak of the “mountain” over-looking the crowds of
To many, Robespierre was positioning himself as The Supreme Being.
Robespierre would meet the guillotine two months later. But this time, it would be only his head over-looking the angry mob of
After the theatre group let out, we headed over to the after-bar. Most of the Przybyszewskas of the group don’t even attend this weekly after-haunt. But the Robespierre’s are there. Talking and talking and talking. Standing on their David-like cardboard box over-looking the bar patron throng.
Tuesday night, I find my level of comfort in the conversation by talking---but by discussing someone else.
A long conversation begins over cocktails about what a wonderful job a particular actress did that night. Not only did we enjoy her performance, but we have enjoyed ALL her performances and began to review everything from her gentle performance in dramas to her natural comedic skills to her understated reading of some stage directions last summer when she so memorably uttered the simple words, “They come.”
She is not a part of this conversation. She sits in another conversation nearby. Later, when she passes us, I begin to tell her how we just finished having an extended discussion about her wonderful portrayals and how much we all enjoy her performances. She laughs and smiles and jokingly asks if we taped the conversation.
“I almost came over to get you,” I explain, “but the conversation about you was SO engrossing that I didn’t want to leave talking about YOU to go get you.”
At the after-bar, without explanation, I ask people to put their right foot in---no need to shake it all about.
I take the picture.
I am the Mary Janes and the cream-colored tights pointing slightly off and to the side. Not intentional, I was just too focused on the camera.
Though I sometimes feel my feet aren’t quite in sync with the road-most-traveled; tonight, I realize I am neither Przybyszewska nor Robespierre.
I’m somewhere in the middle.
And slightly off and to the side.
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