Published in English in 1920. New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 499 pages. Translated from the Polish by Edmund Obecny. Read here or here.
Ballet dancers of the Grand Theatre, Warsaw, late 19th century. See page for author, via Wikimedia Commons
I like to read an author’s works in chronological order when I can, starting with their hamfisted juvenilia (or astonishingly precocious debut, as the case may be) and ending with the salutatory, newly vulnerable works of their “second childhood.” I am at least somewhat patient to put off reading an author’s opuses, being of that philosophy (as I said in the introduction to this website) that literary works are of a gradient level of quality; one cannot always easily separate a “classic” from a non-classic—which is how Penguin, et al. keep coming up with new ones! (I jest; I’m not seriously comparing publishers of forgotten classics—whom I love and respect and thank you for all you do—to Hallmark. It examples the crassness I’m occasionally susceptible to.) But another reason I read from the beginning is because the career of an artist is as interesting to me as those of his characters, “his Acts being Seven Ages,” the first being autobiographical, the second more outward facing and less egotistical, and the third, fourth, and fifth being his or her expansive masterpieces—wherein the artist transfigures his bland world into an artistic one.
With Polish great and future Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Władyslaw Stanisław Reymont‘s first novel The Comedienne (1896), we are still largely in Act One. Sometimes a novel can disappoint mainly by being substantial, but in a direction we weren’t looking for. A comedienne is, I expected, a brilliant performer who wows the public, a dazzling wit, a charming presence; but there is no such charming presence in The Comedienne. It turns out that in Poland, komediantka is not so much a term of respect so much as one of scorn. The komediantka is a low status, poorly paid figure—akin to being called a spinster or a prostitute, which came as an equally desultory discovery to me as the reader as it did to Janina Orlowska (Janka in the original Polish), the titular heroine and comedienne.
Janina’s story will sound familiar in these days of Ailes, O’Reilly, and Weinstein: An idealistic young woman leaves her hometown and goes to the big city to achieve wealth and fame as an actress. When she gets there, she discovers that the life of an aspiring actress is not one of glitz and glamor or high-minded idealism. No, it is a relentless hustle that more often than not is a theater of tawdriness, exploitation, and crushed dreams. Your high-minded art is become lowbrow showtunes played for an audience of ignorant buffoons. Worse, powerful men neglect to pay or promote you, at least when they aren’t trying to sleep with you. Other women sell themselves to men in order to advance their careers, and urge you to do the same, but when you refuse them, these same people participate in a quiet conspiracy to hold back your career, since you refuse to sacrifice your dignity by playing the rich harasser’s game.
Wladeslaw Reymont in 1924. By Nobel Foundation [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Like so many such novels of the 19th century, The Comedienne is the tale of a woman who wants to be independent, but is trapped by the patriarchal/capitalist order of the larger society; in this aspect, we might compare Janina to the protagonist of a novel set on the other side of the globe, but published only four years later, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, or to Emma in Madame Bovary, even if The Comedienne is a more faulty and less potent work than either of those; it has a very promising premise, and some moments of genuine excitement, but Reymont wastes too many of these eleven chapters on ineffectual behind-the-scenes machinations of the theater that don’t lead anywhere. That both the story and Janina’s career don’t lead anywhere are what we might jestingly call the inner and outer tragedies of the book. Unless like me you are a completist, the reader may wish to peruse the book, and I would recommend reading Chapters I, II, IX, and the very striking fisherman scene in Chapter X to get a sense of this author’s developing narrative powers.
Chapter I gets the book off to an explosive start. In Bukowiec, a provincial railroad town similar to the one where Reymont spent some time working as a switchboard operator, a swarthy rich bloke named Grzesikiewicz has arranged with the station head Orlowski to marry the latter’s daughter, Janina. Orlowski is a widower who has taken on a housekeeper named Krenska, who is trying to insinuate herself into old man Orlowski’s heart so she can marry him and inherit his money, but to do that she needs to have Orlowski’s daughter out of the way. Janina, meanwhile, is an unusual young woman of 19, who like Emma Bovary and so many other trapped heroines has been transported by literature—in Janina’s case, the drama. She is exceptionally idealistic about the art, dreams of becoming a world-famous actress, and we are lead to believe she has a great destiny in front of her:
The stage was not yet set, and was only dimly lighted. Janina crossed it a few times with the stately stride of a heroine, then again, with the light, graceful airiness of an ingenue, or with the quick feverish step of a woman who carries with her death and destruction; and with each new impersonation, her face assumed the appropriate expression, her eyes glowed with the flame of the Eumenides, with storm, desire, conflict, or, kindling with the mood of love, longing, anxiety they shone like stars on a spring night.
She passed through these various transformations unconsciously, impelled by the memory of the plays and roles she had read, and so great was her abstraction, that she forgot about everything and paid no attention to the stagehands, who were moving about her.
But then at dinner one evening, Orlowska announces to his daughter his intention to marry her off to Grzesikiewicz; a maelstrom ensues. Janina, the wannabe world-famous actress, married to some rich provincial boor like Grzesikiewicz? Never! Her father invites Grzesikiewicz anyway and tells Janina she is to accept his marriage offer (because that gambit always works.) Janina tells Grzesikiewicz the same thing she told her father, Grzesikiewicz leaves heartbroken (poor guy), and Orlowski flies into a terrible rage and starts throwing things. He has it out with Janina, tells her (like Juliet’s father) to go die in the street, and she runs off to bewail her misery, which moment Krenska takes advantage of to tell Janina that she should quit this shitty little town and run off to Warsaw to pursue her dreams, which Janina does.
Whew! What a tremendous opening—exciting, intricately plotted, and with four fully sketched characters; but after this burst of energy, the novel loses its way—or rather it takes another trail, and somewhere along this trail, gets lost. Chapter II introduces us to the garden theater company in Warsaw, and opens on a scene of chaos which encapsulates the strengths and weaknesses of next several chapters, because we can immediately see that Reymont is a master of dialogue, and his gift is amplified here by having been immersed in the milieu he is depicting: for having been born into a peasant family (a world he was to bring to life in his epic, The Peasants), Reymont spent the early part of his career as part of a traveling theater troupe. He has inherited Dostoyevsky’s gift for capturing street banter with the swiftness and punch of real speech, the heteroglossia described by Mikhail Bakhtin, as shown for example in this alternating praise and mockery of Cabinska, the theater director’s wife:
“You played superbly! . . . We all stood behind the scenes in rapt attention.”
“The critics were all weeping. I saw Zarski wiping his eyes with his handkerchief.”
“After sneezing . . . he has a bad catarrh,” called someone from the side.
“The public was fascinated and swept off its feet in the third act . . . they arose in their chairs.”
“That’s because they wanted to run away from such a treat,” came the mocking voice again.
“How many bouquets did you receive, Madame Directress?”
“Ask the director, he paid the bill.”
Yet all this wonderful crosstalk can’t make up for the fact that, when you get down to it, these characters aren’t terribly interesting, nor are they sharply defined enough as to be truly memorable as characters. Reymont’s strength paradoxically is his dialogue and his lyrical descriptions, while his weakness is his characters, who blend together rather than making any marked impression. (This is one aspect of his art that shows a good deal of improvement in his later novels.) The issue is that memorable characters aren’t so much described as depicted; they have an unaccountable movement and life of their own. What they do or say, not how they are blandly described, is what makes them who they are. That said, the three most memorable characters in the book are Janina, the playwright Glogowski, and the fisherman who makes a brief but impactful appearance in chapter X, serving as some sublime combination of wise hermit, Zen mystic, and Charon, the ferryman who carries the dead to Hades.
“Who are you?” Janina asked, almost unknowingly, stirred by his words.
“An old man as you see, who fishes and likes to chat. Oh yes, I am very old. I come here for a few hours every day in the summertime, if the weather is fair, and catch fish, if they let themselves be caught. What good will it do you to know who I am? My name will tell you nothing. In the sum total of humanity I am merely a pawn which is given a certain number upon entrance into this world and retains the same at the time of its exit. I am a cell of feeling long ago registered and classified by my fellow-beings as a ‘ne’er-do-well,'” he said, smiling.
The fisherman is the voice advocating a return-to-nature, a simplifying of our lifestyles. His thinking is in line with that of Leo Tolstoy, who at this moment in time was as famous for his spiritual awakening as for his fictions. Like a Tolstoy or a Buddhist monk, the fisherman has no use for the vanities of the world:
“Are you not at all interested in what is going on in the world, in how people are living, what they are doing, what they are thinking?”
“No. To you that doubtless appears monstrous; nevertheless it is entirely natural. Do our peasants interest themselves in the theater or in world affairs? They do not. Isn’t that true?”
“Yes, but they are peasants and that is entirely different.”
“It is the same thing, merely with this addition; that for them your famous and great men do not exist at all and it doesn’t make the slightest difference to them whether Newton or Shakespeare ever lived or not. And they are just as well off with their ignorance, just as well.”
This is a current of thought here that Reymont will revisit in Volume 2 of The Promised Land. Already he has shown considerable talent for dialogue and descriptions of settings. These elements don’t come together very well in The Comedienne, but fortunately the career of this author still had many momentous Acts still to be played.
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