'But I Had to Keep Going'

The Polish poet Aleksander Wat (1900-67) was arrested, yet again, in 1940 by the NKVD and moved from prison to prison, first in Lwów, then in Kyiv, a city he describes as “bucolic” compared to previous confinements. Wat impresses me as an “ebullient pessimist,” a phrase the late Terry Teachout applied to himself. The more common species of pessimist is the crank smitten by his own gloominess. He is spiritually lazy, easy on himself and unforgiving of the world, an adept at Schadenfreude. He’s a disappointed lover who turns rebarbative and has learned that he can get a lot of attention by raining on picnics. 

That’s foreign to Wat’s nature. At his most disheartened he invariably experiences an epiphany, a sort of restorative enlightenment. Born a Jew, he converted to Catholicism. Wat is never naïve. He knows the epiphany won’t last but for the moment he experiences relief. In his understanding of the modern world, he sometimes reminds me of the more melancholic Whittaker Chambers who wrote in an October 8, 1956, letter to William F. Buckley:

 

“The age is impaled on its most maiming experience, namely, that a man can be simply or savagely—above all, pointlessly—wiped out, regardless of what he is, means, hopes, dreams or might become. This reality cuts across our minds like a wound whose edges crave to heal, but cannot. Thus, one of the great sins, perhaps the great sin, is to say: It will heal; it has healed; there is no wound. There is nothing more important than this wound.”

 

Wat can accept Chambers’ premise without fatally despairing. He arrives in Kyiv in a prison train and is shuttled around the city in a Black Maria.  Between 1918 and 1920, Kyiv had changed hands sixteen times. In 1934, it became the capital of Soviet Ukraine. The Germans occupied it from 1941 to 1943. In 1941, Babi Yar. Wat continues:

 

 “Golden autumn. Everything quiet and deserted. When a human form flitted past, it would be dark, indeterminate. The hands on the clock had stopped for good or had been broken off. The clatter and rumble of our vehicle was accompanied by dead silence. We must have passed some trees, but I didn’t notice them; birds must have been chirping, but I didn’t hear them.”

 

The landscape and broken clock recall a surrealist painting, an unlikely celebration of Keatsian autumn:

 

“A broad lawn, in the center of which was an enormous, branching, bird-filled tree. ‘Tree, tree, tree,’ I repeated aloud as if I had just learned the word until finally my escort, who was used to my being silent, as required by regulations, began looking at my lips in amazement. The leaves had curled into golden scrolls under and around the tree. Had I been able to stop and lie down under the maple tree, to listen to its million leaves rustling and the birds singing in that beautiful October twilight, then all my exhaustion, all the sweat and nightmares of Zamarstynov [site of an NKVD prison in Lwów] would have fallen away from me. But I had to keep going.”

 

In that final sentence, Wat sounds like Beckett’s Unnamable: “You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.”

[All passages by Wat are taken from My Century (trans. Richard Lourie, 1988). The Chambers excerpt comes from Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. 1954-1961 (1969).]