Context
Reading Stefan Themerson
Nicholas Wadley
There cannot be many philosopher-novelists
who started their careers as visual artists. But it was part of Stefan
Themerson’s philosophy to defy categories. He made films; he ran a
publishing house. As well as his nine novels, he wrote stories for
children, poems, a play, an opera, and essays on philosophy, language,
logic, literature, science, art, film, and typography. Until his death
in September 1988, he also spent spare moments making drawings:
abstract, colored configurations in which lines, points, and planes are
bent into paradox, satirizing their own logic. The sum of this prodigal
diet of interrelated activities reveals itself now as concentration,
justifying his fundamental belief that the effect of respecting
boundaries or classifications—whether cultural, professional or
political—is at least inhibiting, and usually negative. The first experience to fire his imagination was discovering
the magic of the camera. Drifting out of his studies in physics and
architecture in the late 1920s in Warsaw, he started to improvise with
photograms, collages, and various combinations of the two.
Subsequently, he made seven experimental films—five in Warsaw and two
in London—in collaboration with his wife, the painter Franciszka
Themerson (who also died in 1988, two months before him). Themerson later wrote that these films were a form of
collage, free of symbolism. He recalled Moholy Nagy’s reaction to the
most ambitious of them, Europa, when he saw it in London in 1936. Nagy called it “a sophisticated film,” about which Themerson said: Of the two films that the Themersons made together in London, Calling Mr Smith (1943) is an explicit protest—moral, not nationalistic—against the
systematic destruction of Polish culture by the Nazis (outspoken enough
to be refused by the British censor). The Eye and the Ear (1944) is an imaginative improvisation with abstract forms, representing the interaction of musical sounds. Of all their films, Themerson saw Europa (1932) as
their major achievement. It was a visualization of Anatol Stern’s
futurist poem and was highly praised by Stern himself. The few frames
that survive can only hint at the fluid visual sequences that he
described. However, the qualities that he valued in film as a medium,
especially the free association of images that refer to nothing outside
themselves, are clearly recognizable in most of his work as a writer.
The initiative behind his concern with semantics was to free words of
confusing sentimental or literary references, and, as with the
photograms, to expose their own incontrovertible identity. The
autograph character of his later novels is of several simultaneous
currents of narrative and thought that may appear only obliquely
related and that, together, create their own cumulative reality and
sense. His whole œuvre as a writer is like that: a continuous collage, its parts distinct but full of allusive echoes and repetitions. Themerson
wrote in the three languages of the countries in which he successively
found himself. That the majority of his writing was in English is a
matter of the vagaries of history. When asked why he chose to write in
English, he replied that the language chose him. During the war he
experienced the loss, disorientation, and cultural negation that was
the lot of his generation. As well as his first four films, the
(Polish) manuscript of his first novel also disappeared. But his
reaction to the force of events was more positive than simply stoical.
He upheld unequivocally a concept of the writer carrying his culture
with him and he believed creeds of nationalism and patriotism to be
actively dangerous: In other respects, these apparent differences of place are misleading. The early “English” novels (Bayamus, Professor Mmaa, Cardinal Pölätüo) were written originally in Polish, and Bayamus was first published in installments in Nowa Polska,
1946. They read now as the bedrock of his English writing and there is
a remarkable homogeneity—in meaning as well as content—throughout his œuvre, whatever the medium or language. He was absorbed by language, fastidious as well as
idiosyncratic in its usage. His meticulous and sometimes eccentric use
of punctuation, for instance, often plays an important role in the
repetitive structures of his writing. He wrote extensively on
aesthetics, semantics, and typography. His writing on the art of Kurt
Schwitters is essentially about meaning contained in the uses of
language, as is his revealing essay Apollinaire’s Lyrical Ideograms (1968). Set beside such concerns, the question of the language in which
he wrote appears a secondary issue. And he almost never pursued his
interests in language for their own sake. The short novel Wooff Wooff, or Who Killed Richard Wagner? (1951) might appear at first reading like a semantic diversion, but in
reality is as cautionary a tale as anything he wrote. Elsewhere, in
discussing the value of linguistic philosophy, he went out of his way
to dissociate himself from those obsessed with language per se. He wrote, of “the academic Goddess of Ethics,” that Feeling at home with England and reading its
social codes was another matter. He once talked to me about cultural
differences between Poland, France, and England: As
an offshoot of the Press, the Gaberbocchus Common Room was opened on
Formosa Street, to provide “a congenial place where artists and
scientists and people interested in science and art can meet and
exchange thoughts.” Themerson’s concern was again with the dissolution
of obsolete boundaries. In 1946, he had edited five issues of Nowa Polska on “Literature, Art and Science in England” and by the later 1950s, had
become increasingly interested in exposing the common philosophies of
art and science. He corresponded at the time with C. P. Snow. For two
years, from 1957 to 1959, the Common Room was a vital, informal weekly
forum with a membership of more than a hundred. The members were
addressed by writers, painters, poets, actors, scientists, musicians,
filmmakers, and philosophers. There were talks on physics, metaphysics,
and pataphysics; readings of Jarry, Shakespeare, Beckett, Strindberg,
Queneau, and Schwitters; performances of modern music and scientific
film. Among other contributors, Sean Connery and Bernard Bresslaw read
O’Neill; Dudley Moore accompanied Michael Horovitz’s poetry reading;
Konni Zilliacus spoke on the immorality of nuclear weapons. The project
was only reluctantly abandoned because it consumed too much working
time. In such a catalog lies at least part of the reason why, as a
writer and publisher, Themerson was not embraced by the establishment. In the 1940s and 1950s, his circle of significant friends
included writers, artists, scientists and philosophers, some of whom he
had known in Warsaw or Paris. He enjoyed close friendships with Kurt
Schwitters and Jankel Adler, both of whom he published. In 1950
Bertrand Russell wrote in warm praise of Bayamus (1949),
“nearly as mad as the world.” Their long correspondence and exchange of
manuscripts, bantering criticism and thoughts on philosophy and the
world at large began early in 1952 and continued until Russell’s death.
The original draft of factor T (1956) was written as a long letter to Russell. Russell wrote the preface to Professor Mmaa’s Lecture (1953) and Gaberbocchus published Russell’s Good Citizen’s Alphabet (1953) and History of the World in Epitome (1962), both with Franciszka Themerson’s illustrations which, Russell said, “heighten all the points I most wanted made.” As well as becoming deeply involved in Russell’s principles
and methods as a philosopher, Themerson appears to have drawn strength
from his scale of human values. Although he later felt reservations
about Russell’s total commitment to the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament—it was too much like one of the burning “aims” by which
Themerson felt the native instincts of individuals were led astray—he
shared Russell’s doubts about faith in a good society. “A good society” inspired less hope for the future than “good people.” He viewed the novel as one of several vehicles available for his current concerns. In 1952, having read the manuscript of Cardinal Pölätüo (1961), Russell wrote to Themerson suggesting alterations, because “I
think you have tried to combine into one book things which do not
readily fit together.” But Themerson never saw this as a problem, and
in any case he saw most of his novels as each having its own distinct
philosophical or linguistic subject. He deliberately chose to treat
philosophical subjects in novels because of the freedom that the genre
offers: Of the longer novels, Professor Mmaa’s Lecture is the earliest. The original Polish version was mostly written at the same time as Croquis dans les ténèbres,
from 1941 to 1942 during the eighteen months or so that he was stranded
in Voiron, in the “free zone” of France, and then finished in Scotland
in 1943. In his preface to the book, Russell likens its form of
satirical allegory to Swift. The follies of human conduct are observed
with guileless candor by a society of sightless termites. They observe
by their highly developed sense of smell and they learn through their
digestive systems. It is an exposé of human conformism in face of
“progress” and absolute government. Themerson wrote Bayamus (the first novel to be published, in 1949) to launch his invention of
Semantic Poetry. The poet-narrator is aided and abetted in propagating
his new art by the mercurial, three-legged Bayamus, with all the
fugitive wisdom of a Shakespearian fool. In the later long novels like Tom Harris (1967), The Mystery of the Sardine (1986), and Hobson’s Island (1988), he approached the genre differently, flirting openly with the
form of the modern thriller. (He read a lot of detective fiction and
had particular respect for Chandler.) Within that seductive idiom, he
played many concurrent games. Usually there is a large cast of
characters: The Mystery of the Sardine and Hobson’s Island form, with Cardinal Pölätüo and General Piesc (1976), a sort of family saga, their plots enacted by successive
generations, with several characters reappearing. In the cast of The Mystery of the Sardine, General Piesc—who does not in person appear in the novel because he is dead—is listed as “absent.” Themerson wrote Hobson’s Island with the knowledge
that it would be his last book and it is not difficult to read it as a
final work. In turn, it is the most spectacularly dramatic and the most
introspective of all of his novels. The isolated simplicity of life of
the Hobson’s islanders is set on a collision course with the
overwrought values and conduct of the outside world. The conclusion is
a tour de force, both tragic and contemplative. At the end, the
narrator (Scan D’Earth) levitates above the island, surveying those
actors that survive from the theatre of a life’s work. For all the diverse riches of their discourse in mortal and
immortal values, there is nothing in these later novels without a
calculated role in their elaborate jigsaws of logic, paradox, and
morality. Extravagant and comic images always refresh meaning and are
crafted into the structure as meticulously as the elegant clarity of
the language. The lurking love of paradox is only allowed to run loose
in an occasional “wild card” character. One of the things Themerson
enjoyed in detective stories of the 1930s and 1940s was their
characteristically irrational element, the character from nowhere. The
surreal role of the man from Mars in The Mystery of the Sardine or the enigma of Nemo in Hobson’s Island are comparable devices. Later on, he examines the example of “killing”: He concludes: The ironic meaning of Themerson’s 1949 version of Aesop’s The Eagle and the Fox was so coolly stated that it went unobserved by any reviewer. After the
original rendering, he repeats the whole fable, word for word, except
that the two protagonists exchange roles. At the end, he appended this
moral, tongue scarcely moving in cheek: Time
and again, we see characters in Themerson’s novels possessed by and
then growing out of the consuming ambitions of their time. The
accumulated wisdom of these characters in their old age reflects
Themerson’s own growing certainty about the relative value of Means and
Aims. Dame Victoria, surrounded by young political zealots in The Mystery of the Sardine, says in her dying speech: Selected Works by Stefan Themerson in English:I was too young then to tell him that he was wrong.
That the film was primitive. . . . Primitive people would have taken it
as it was meant to be taken. Would have seen it as it was shown.
Without further inter-polation.
He referred to his first films as “photograms in motion”
and he likened their syntax both to the concentration of poems and to
the rhythmical patterns of music. He insisted on their autonomy:
It is something unique.
Four of the five Warsaw films did not survive the war. And
none of those that did survive allows us close enough to the free,
lyrical attributes that he prized so much in the medium, to properly
evaluate his achievement as a filmmaker. Adventures of a Good Citizen (1937, Warsaw), while it is a shrewd satirical fantasy, full of
autograph poetic qualities and morals, is nevertheless uncharacteristic
of his Polish films as he described them. Unlike the lost films, it has
a clear narrative sequence and it has a spoken soundtrack.
It is a photogram.
It doesn’t represent anything.
It doesn’t abstract from anything.
It is just what it is.
It is reality itself.
In the winter of 1937–38, the Themersons moved from Warsaw to Paris,
intending to live and work there. “There was no sense of escaping from
Warsaw,” Stefan told me, “I simply knew I had to be in Paris.” It was
“a sort of Mecca”; one which realized all of his expectations. But his
plans were disrupted by the course of the war, and by 1942 he found
himself in London, where he and Franciszka spent the rest of their
lives.
Writers are never, writers are nowhere in exile, for
they carry within themselves their own kingdom, or republic, or city of
refuge, or whatever it is that they carry within themselves. And at the
same time, every writer, ever, everywhere, is in exile, because he is
squeezed out of the kingdom, or republic, or city, or whatever it is
that squeezes itself dry.
As a teenager in his native town of Plock, he already saw
English and French literature as major elements of his indigenous
cultural world. Nevertheless, up to a point, his writing in each of the
three languages—Polish, French, English—appears to have different
characteristics or points of focus. Apart from articles, principally
about film, most of his pre-war Polish writing consists of stories for
children. In France he wrote poems and the prose-poems, Croquis dans les ténèbres,
and he mused to me once about how different his writing might have been
had he stayed in Paris: might it have remained as lyrical as the Croquis? There is no doubt that much of the imagery of the Croquis appears quite distinct from his English writing, more oblique and
submerged. In Barbara Wright’s translation, the poetic mirror-image of
poet and angel on each side of the window-pane, with its evocative
inversions of interior and exterior, of the emptiness of matter and the
“hardness” of abstraction, is a case in point. The angel looks “outside
from the exterior,” a paradox he emphasized typographically. Both the
poet and the angel lose their sense of balance as they approach the
world of the other. Even in the poems written in England, we seldom
find this sort of imagery, and the poems are only a small part of his
English œuvre. It was in London that he embarked upon his theoretical writings on philosophy and language.
she is only interested in herself. I am interested in
ethical behaviour, but she is interested in ethical terminology. For
the last eighty years she’s been sharpening her linguistic tools, but
she thinks it would be unladylike to use them.
He came to feel at home with the English language
remarkably quickly. He took English lessons while stranded in France,
1940–42, and again when he arrived in London, and in 1946 he published
his first article in English, in Polemic. He often spoke of the
dual properties peculiar to English: its exactness and its crystalline
shades of meaning—the latter a quality that he alternately relished and
mistrusted.
In Poland when you met someone, their instinct was to
doubt your values or worth. You had to prove them. Friendships were
hard-won. In Paris, you were accepted as a friend until and unless you
did something to lose that status. In London, of course, it’s
different, neither one nor the other. There’s this objectivity and you
sometimes don’t find out if you are a friend until long afterwards.
He was to remain as detached from the British literary
establishment as when he arrived. He did not fit into established
groups; he was not even an émigré academic. As Anthony Burgess
once complained, “there’s a strange idea in this country that you can’t
be both a composer and a writer,” and Themerson was both of these
things and others besides. But these were circumstances he observed
with sardonic amusement. He valued his independence and anyway, in art
as in life, he despised synthetic categories. During the 1950s and
1960s, he submitted a number of poems to the Times Literary Supplement but none were accepted. To prove a hunch to himself, he sent to the
editor yet another poem, “My childhood . . . ,” as a translation, over
the signature Tomasz Woydyslawski. It was published (on 5 March
1964)—and identified as Themerson’s work by friends.
It was a wish for independence as much as anything else that motivated
the Themersons’ decision in 1948 to found their own publishing house in
Maida Vale, the Gaberbocchus Press: to be free to publish what they
wanted and in what form they wanted. The earlier Gaberbocchus books
were printed at their home on Randolph Avenue. Subsequently, they
acquired premises on Formosa Street and at that point, the Themersons
were joined by two other directors, Barbara Wright and Gwen Barnard.
The full list of Gaberbocchus titles demonstrates the imaginative
character of their publications, including Barbara Wright’s first
English translations of Jarry, Queneau, Pol-Dives, and others. What a
list cannot do is express the originality of format, typography, and
design that rapidly became a Gaberbocchus hallmark. Franciszka
Themerson was the art director and she illustrated many of the books,
but they worked together in the same close collaboration as on their
films, to produce what they described as “best-lookers” rather than
best-sellers. Asked in a questionnaire what were the Press’s main
strength and weakness, Themerson gave the same answer to each question:
“refusal to conform.” The “unclassifiability” of Gaberbocchus Press
expresses the essential Stefan Themerson.
Russell’s supportive appreciation also seems to have encouraged
Themerson’s pursuit of semantics as a major interest. But, if any
single factor bore significant influence upon this area of his activity
as a writer, it was the earlier encounter with Kurt Schwitters, in
wartime London. Themerson heard Schwitters perform his sound-poems on
several occasions and was the first to publish Schwitters’s English
writing. He gave many talks on Schwitters—the earliest in the
Gaberbocchus Common Room in the 1950s—and his notes for these talks
include his most sensitive and eloquent thoughts on anyone else’s work.
As well as his justly celebrated essay Kurt Schwitters in England (1958), he published “Kurt Schwitters on a Time-Chart” (1967) and Pin (1962), the polemical manifesto of new poetry that Schwitters was
compiling with Raoul Hausmann shortly before his death in 1947. The
choice of title for Themerson’s “Semantic Sonata” (written 1949–50;
published in factor T, 1956) may be seen as some sort of homage to Schwitters’s Ursonata.
Furthermore, the initiative behind his concept of “Semantic Poetry”
sprang from a polemical wish to purify language that strikes very
comparable attitudes to those advanced in Pin. In Bayamus,
the narrator explains to the audience at the Theatre of Semantic
Poetry, “each of the S.P. words should have one and only one meaning.”
In a radio talk in Warsaw, 1964, Themerson elaborated:
Semantic Poetry doesn’t arrange verses into bunches of
flowers. It bares a poem and shows the reality behind it. There is no
room for hypnosis in a semantic poem.
And finally, in introductory notes for a reading of the
1970s, which are themselves full of bravura verbal bouquets, he wrote
more on his rebellion against “linguistic harmonics.”
I wanted to strip words of their associations, to cut their
links with the past. This rebellion was anti-romantic and
anti-ecstatic. It was directed both against political rhetoricians and
against Joycean avant-coureurs. Against associational thickets of Eliot
and the verboidal surrealisms of History. I wanted to disinfect words,
scrub them right to the very bone of their dictionary definitions. That
was how—somewhat ferociously and sardonically—I invented Semantic
Poetry. It was meant to be funny. Both serious & funny. It became
the subject of my novel Bayamus.
In some respects it is inappropriate to consider Themerson’s novels
separately, so closely is all of his writing interrelated. There are
several instances in which Themerson brought together plots and
structures from very different writings to create a new work. The opera
St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio (1972, written 1954–60) was born from the text of Semantic Divertissements (1962, written 1949–50) and a paragraph in factor T.
Fiction allows you to do things that history or
treatises can’t—especially in the sense that you can rescue or retrieve
meanings that are lost from generation to generation. These time
barriers are harder to cross than geographical barriers.
He was genuinely concerned that the ideas of any one time
should not be lost to another generation of readers. (He discussed the
publishing policy of Gaberbocchus in these terms.) Themerson’s natural
ability to treat matters of gravity with apparent levity comes to the
fore in the allusive style of his novels. (As one reviewer saw it,
“Death and philosophy have rarely been so much fun.”)
Sometimes it is like a party. Many people meet each
other there. No special reason why they should meet, but just to give a
picture of life. Otherwise, it seems somehow—provincial.
The characters bring with them an equally large cast of
ideas, arguing, and discussing, as at a party, whatever concerns them
(him). Burning political issues mingle with discussions of social
mores, realities with dreams, the dramatic with the mundane. There is a
lot of sensible pragmatism. “If a young man becomes depressed by
reading Samuel Beckett,” one character declares, “that very fact proves
that he’s perfectly sane.” Faced with the implausibly spectacular
circumstances of the early plot of Hobson’s Island, a perplexed
secretary at the Vatican asks over the phone, “please tell me straight:
is this meant to be a parable or is it on the level?”
The moral principles that underlie all of Themerson’s work were first clearly set out in the essay factor T.
This essay exposes the “Tragic factor”—a fatal flaw in the human
condition. It is the product of a discrepancy between man’s Dislikes
(D) and his Needs (N). Themerson’s first analogy is about members of a
tribe and their Need and Dislike for tomatoes. They have a vital,
biological Need of tomatoes as their only local source of vitamin C.
However, since the eating of tomatoes is forbidden by their religion,
the tribesmen have developed an equally vital Dislike of the taste.
Hence, “factor T.”
I do not know about weasels, but it is difficult to
imagine two anthropoid apes that would kill each other, or steal from
each other, unless they happened to be unanimous. They have to be
unanimous in their desire for one and the same female, or for one and
the same coconut, if they are to fight. And even then their dislike for
killing and stealing must be great if they feel compelled (as soon as
they develop a language) to invent some lofty reasons for this
unpleasant behaviour, and thus build philosophical systems, religions
and police forces.
And again:
We invent our god to exculpate us when we find it necessary to perform
the unpleasant act of killing those who invent their god when they find
it necessary to perform the unpleasant task of killing us. And we
invented the police force, not only to prevent others from killing us
when they find it necessary, but also to force ourselves to kill the
others whenever this act, which we dislike, is found necessary for us.
There is a tragic discrepancy between our dislike of killing and the necessity of doing so. I call that discrepancy factor T, and it seems to me neither virtuous nor wise to ignore it.
Certain vital needs of our guts (N) cannot be satisfied
without affecting our nervous system in a certain way (D). The
resulting state of perplexity (T) is basically unavoidable.
He successively investigates the inability of philosophy,
religion, and science to deal with the problem, suggesting at one point:
It seems to me a pity that rational ethics underestimates
our need to know that our original Tragedy is at least recognised.
Rational ethics concentrates either on Dislike or on Necessity, but
refuses to face the Tragedy that is imbedded in the situation. And this
is why we are compelled to think rational speculation utopian or
sentimental when it emphasises Dislike; materialistic or fascist when
it emphasises Necessity; opportunist when it switches from one to the
other; hypocritical when it preaches D and kills for its N, and donnish
when it studies our N and leaves D to believers.
Just as elsewhere he suggests that the novelist may have
more to say on morality than the computer scientist, so here he
proposes literature as the only fruitful field of research into the
tragic dilemma, because without it “we shall never know what it is that
has been built up . . . in our brains.”
I propose to call “Man” anything (a beast, a plant, or
a machine) whose nervous system is split into two parts so that one
part prompts it to perform actions leading to the satisfaction of its
primary needs while the other part restrains it from performing such
actions whenever they are (as they invariably are) to the detriment of
other organisms—thus producing a neural tension which results in its
building gothic cathedrals, chinese pagodas, houses of parliament, bull
rings, Royal Societies, revolutions, counter-revolutions, heavenly
kingdoms, Stratford-on-Avons, in short, anything uneatable and
uninhabitable, even if it doesn’t amount to more than an aspirin tablet
of hypocrisy.
Towards the end of his life, Themerson returned to the subject in another essay, The Chair of Decency,
given as the Huizinga Lecture at the University of Leyden, 1981. Using
a generous repertoire of allegory and fable, he set out a sustained
argument for a return to basic human values. He suggests that the
self-conscious aims and missions of the modern world have deluded us
into losing sight of the intuitive decent values in our behavior
towards each other that we are born with. Aims are cultural, he says,
but the proper Means are biological. The highest of our natural human
instincts have been discarded in the misguided and blinkered pursuit of
beliefs and causes:
I propose not to call “Man” things (whatever their anatomy) whose
nervous systems, free of the split, allows them to do without
hesitation the necessary pillage in the woods of the world.
The study of the split is a pleasure. Yet, if our scientific research
goes so far as to make us able to meddle with it, the pleasure will
become a danger. Because, if the split is what makes a thing a “Man,”
then mending it would be synonymous with the extinction of human kind.
no Aim is so exalted that it be worth a heartbeat more than
Decency of Means. Because, when all is said and done, Decency of Means
is the Aim of aims.
Looking backwards from this declamatory manifesto of his
philosophy, we may see different faces of the same thought in almost
everything else he wrote. The Polish stories for children address
themselves to questioning the real world—the practical experience of
daily life, human values, the ambiguities of language—with no suspicion
of condescension or cultural improvement. The lyrical parable of the
film Adventures of a Good Citizen champions the liberating experience of walking backwards, in face of conventional prejudice.
These two fables are a warning to us not to deal hardly
or injuriously by somebody who can defend himself by dealing hardly or
injuriously with us. There are many less subtle and imperious creatures
which we can eat in peace, and to the Glory of God.
Quite apart from the stories for children, there are
several instances of a fable-like use of non-human characters. There
are the termites in Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, and in the tragi-comic opera St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio (1972),
the hero is confronted with the modern dilemma of survival by the wolf,
who runs a factory canning lamb chops. (“God gave me a carnivorous
stomach,” the wolf argues, “God must help me fill it.”)
I’m so thankful that I don’t understand about Ideas. I’m thankful that when I was a young girl I wasn’t educated to have Ideas.
The subtitle of General Piesc is “The Case of the
Forgotten Mission.” When the ageing general is at last in a position to
realize his lifelong mission, its reality dissolves and he no longer
remembers what it is. Instead, he spends his last days in a tender
relationship with a fellow-being (from which union is born Ian
Prentice, the prodigious critic of Euclid in The Mystery of the Sardine).
And all of this without trace of sentiment. It is another child of
General Piesc, the ubiquitous Princess Zuppa, who voices one of the
final statements on the theme of decency, towards the end of Hobson’s Island:
Beware of love. Love is cruel, and decency is gentle. Love
is ugly and decency is beautiful. Love is easy and decency is
difficult. Love creates hate.
“But what does decency create?” she is asked.
Alas Mrs Shepherd, decency creates love, and that’s our human vicious circle.
Stefan Themerson’s writings methodically expose religion,
politics, patriotism, power, success, and love as equally unerring
paths towards inhuman behavior. Stated so baldly, this seems an
unreasonably bleak account of his work, against the grain of his own
affirmative openness and belying his wit, humor, and lightness of
touch. Nevertheless, the stark events at the conclusion of his last
novel appear to hold out little hope for the struggle between Means and
Aims. When I told him of my reaction to this tragic finale, he
expressed genuine surprise. For him, the same tragedy is present in
most of his writing. “It just brings us back to square one,” he said.
“It simply reminds us that the choice is ours.”
___
The Adventures of Peddy Bottom. Out of Print.
Aesop, the Eagle & the Fox & the Fox & the Eagle. Out of Print.
Apollinaire’s Lyrical Ideograms. Out of Print.
Bayamus and Cardinal Pölätüo. Exact Change, $15.95.
The Chair of Decency. Out of Print.
Collected Poems. Out of Print.
factor T. Out of Print.
General Piesc. Out of Print.
Hobson’s Island. Out of Print.
Jankel Adler. Out of Print.
Kurt Schwitters in England. Out of Print.
Logic, Labels & Flesh. Out of Print.
Mr. Rouse Builds His House. Out of Print.
The Mystery of the Sardine. Out of Print.
On Semantic Poetry. Out of Print.
Professor Mmaa’s Lecture. Out of Print.
Semantic Divertissements. Out of Print.
Special Branch. Out of Print.
St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio. Out of Print.
Tom Harris. Dalkey Archve Press, $13.50.
The Urge to Create Visions. Out of Print.
Wooff Wooff, or Who Killed Richard Wagner? Out of Print.
