Stop me if you’ve been in this situation before: Someone asks you, noticing how off-kilter and full of hilarity you are, whether everything is okay. Okay? you think. You are so far past being okay. Maybe you’re a bit stir-crazy from having been stuck indoors these past few weeks, a bit of Covid-19 Lockdown Blues; maybe you have gripes against the world of longer standing. For some, cheerful positivity is not the default. Leopardi in his Zibaldone [4138] reflects, “The more man grows (especially in experience and judgment, because there are many who always stay as children), and by growing becomes more incapable of happiness, the more he becomes prone to and feels at home with laughter, and a stranger to tears.” True, it is doubtful if we can say that man [sic] grows! Especially when in daily life he is not given to the freedom of his library, but he is instead

bound more than a madman is,
Shut up in prison, kept without my food,
Whipped and tormented

and dumbfounded, mugged with expectation, haunted by a bitter past – an irrecoverable past, but then why would you want to? except to escape the benumbing aches and contumelies of a dull, moronic present, all life, past, present, and future – a shitshow, a shadow – a head bashing endlessly against a wall, and now comes some simping fool who asks, are you okay? This kind of question deserves only laughter; it comes so late; and among those who laughed in this manner through the existential absurdity was the emigre poet and playwright Antanas Škėma, whose 1958 novel Balta drobulė (translated by Karla Gruodis for Vagabond Press as White Shroud) is regarded, Gruodis writes in her introduction, as a modernist classic and favorite school text in Škėma’s native Lithuania.

In his biographical profile of Škėma for the Gale DLB 220: Twentieth-Century Eastern European Writers: Second Series, Rimvydas Šilbajoris writes that “in his plays, short stories and novel [Balta drobulė] Škėma developed an artistic language adequate for expressing the searing agony the human soul can undergo—a language never before heard in Lithuanian letters.” He had an eventful life, born in Lodz, Poland and bearing early witness to the brutality of war when his family were refugees in Ukraine and he and other children would twist around the bodies of White Russian soldiers hung from lampposts. Škėma’s mother was a schizophrenic, like the mother of the protagonist in Balta drobulė, and if what is depicted in the novel in any way reflects Škėma’s experience, he would have vivid memories of his mother slowly losing her sanity while his unfaithful father tried helplessly to manage her decline. After high school he had abortive careers as a medical student and a law student before moving into a career in the arts, in 1936 becoming a member of the Kaunas State Drama Theater (a level of official success that differs somewhat from the protagonist of the novel.) His career in drama was interrupted by the Soviet occupation of 1940, and then during the Nazi occupation he was able to stage some of his dramas, before once again having to flee when the Soviets recaptured Lithuania in 1944 and ending up in a displaced-persons camp in Germany after the war, until finally emigrating to the United States in 1949. Despite being highly literate in the overall European literary tradition, Škėma seemingly never learned English and was able to obtain only menial work upon arrival in America. (Elžbieta Banytė, possibly drawing on Škėma’s autobiography, states,

In his own words, he learned how to do art while working, and his bosses thought him to be a decent but unambitious worker, a sort of “likable savage.”)

I admit it took me a little ways into this book the catch the key of the author’s bemused fatalism. The protagonist stand-in for Škėma, a middle-aged Lithuanian named Antanas Garšva, initially came across to me like a much younger protagonist, Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye (a too commonly-used American school text), and what might have thrown me was the contemporaneous New York setting – the book opens with Garšva hopping off the BMT Broadway Line, mocking the mannikins he sees in Manhattan storefronts, noting the nearby snack bar selling such American staples as “7UP, Coca-Cola, ham and cheese sandwiches; Italian with lettuce,” and playfully timing his movements – tik, tik, tik – singing out a woman’s name like a young lover, “Ele-na, Ele-na, Ele-na … I want to kiss you again. Reasonably. Only on the lips. I will trace Tristan and Isolde’s sword on your neck with magical chalk. I will not kiss you below the neck,” and from there it seemed we were in for that too-familiar wise-cracking male protagonist who tosses off the same old young poet musings – “most geniuses were ill” – in a vaguely adolescent way. Here we go again – a Poetic Young Man Novel.

But this poet is not so young, it turns out. He arrives at his day job, a lowly elevator operator at a bustling New York hotel. “What’re you so dead for today, Tony?” says Joe, a co-worker, in the locker room for the workers. Garšva sings out a bit of opera music in Lithuania, and then sighs, “Look at me, now I’m an ambassador for the Lithuanian nation.” There is bitterness beneath the hilarity, because as the novel unfolds, the various sides of Garšva’s past are exposed to the reader’s view, and we come to see a less adolescent than a mature despair, but with it a defiant embrace of art in the face of the workaday impending doom.

Garšva makes light of his status as an embattled artist in an encounter with the husband of Elena, a fellow displaced Lithuanian émigré and former high school language teacher, who Garšva initiates a meeting with in a bar in Brooklyn after he fails in his attempt to initiate an illicit affair with Elena. The whole scene is hilariously off-key, as the ought-to-be-aggrieved husband (an engineer) says, “I was going to kill you,” but instead sympathizes with Garšva’s plight as a neurasthenic with a potentially fatal illness. “What will you do?” he asks, to which Garšva adolescently replies, “I’m not a romantic. So I won’t jump from the thirty-fifth floor. I’m an aesthete, so even if I wouldn’t see it myself, I wouldn’t want others to see me unaesthetically crushed.” “Stop joking,” the engineer remonstrates. And as he hears Garšva recount how he tried and failed to seduce his wife and then collapsed from his sickness, he offers to visit Garšva in the hospital. It seems clever to have the engineer play against type; only upon rereading this scene again does it occur to me that playing against type, acting in defiance of order and archetype, was Antanas Škėma’s writing philosophy.

The snatches of Lithuanian poetry and song that Garšva sings are the residue of a stolen time, when he was a rising poet in his native Kaunas and he dreamed of becoming a great artist. But then the war happened—first came the Nazis, then the communists—and forced Garšva to become a refugee from his native land. He lived and loved, and did battle (very entertainingly) over art and poetry with the hacks and poets of shallow jingoism of the displaced Lithuanian people. Now he is stuck in a purgatorial position as a forty-something-year-old elevator boy—up ir down, up ir down he incants to himself, invoking the image of Sisyphus, that symbol of torture through pointless repetition. The elaborate whirring machinery of the lobby of this hotel, described in the latter part of Chapter 1, recall some of the bustling, machine-like physical environments described in Kafka’s Amerika:

Antanas Garšva finds himself in a spacious sunken area of the libby lines on two sides by elevators. Six to the left and six to the right. To the left – the locals. They go up to only the tenth floor, stopping at each one in between, and then return. To the right – the expresses. They stop once at the tenth floor and then each one after that, up to the final, eighteenth, floor. the hotel elevators are automatic, manufactured by Westinghouse. Signalling machines mounted on the walls flash with green and red lights that track the movements of the elevators. Like at intersections. This area of the lobby is border by the window of the flower shop. Beyond the polished glass – roses, gladioli, rhododendron, carnations, azaleas, and white- and red-veined hothouse leaves, an anatomical atlas woven of human blood and nerves.

This latter line is interesting when we consider that Škėma began his career as a medical student in 1929 “but quickly found that the sciences did not suit his artistic temperament” and later said “All I took from my medical studies was a love of corpses.” Many of the lines woven into White Shroud are like that, numerous callbacks to various parts of the author’s discontinuous past, layered on top of his present-day circumstances in poetically formed utterances. The chapters follow a regular structure of one section set in the present, the other section set in some time in the past, with the overall sum of these depictions of the past being to explain and honor the tumultuous experiences that led Garšva to the present time by turning them into art; the effect is to show the person that was Garšva, who was more than an elevator boy, however much the tempo of modern life might have a tendency to annihilate his past life. He captures the erasure in an early soliloquy on numbers:

An 87 on the left, an 87 on the right. If a guest is dissatisfied with an elevator operator he can note and report him to the starter. “That 87 is a son-of-a-bitch, that 87 took me four floors to high, 87 87 87, I wasted two minutes in this box, that goddam son-of-a-bitch 87! It’s fun to use numbers. 24,035 deported to Siberia. Fun. Forty-seven dead n an airplane crash. Fun. 7,038,456 needles sold. Fun. Tonight Mister X got lucky three times. Fun. Today Miss Y died once. Fun. Right now I’m alone and I’ll take a pill and have more fun.

It is significant that Škėma opens the novel by vigorously pushing back on society’s attempt to reduce Garšva to a number, but also by highlighting the existential absurdity (the repeated “fun”) of juxtaposing the frivolous and bullying clientele with the horrific knowledge Garšva carries with him from his past life. The presence of the latter shows us how ultimately ephemeral to Garšva is the former. He is far more than an elevator operator or a number.

So who was Garšva? He was the son of a passionate, nature-loving, violin-playing father in Kaunas who would tell heroic, romantic stories about Princess Chavchavadze and railed in public speeches against the Russian and Polish oppressors, but who was also a liar who cheater on his wife; later Garšva was the partisan who grappled to the death with a 17-year-old Russian soldier before smashing his head in with a rock; he was the refugee Lithuanian poet who refused to bow to demands that he produce simplistic patriotic songs, and mocked and feuded with the unworthy fellow poets who did; he was the fourteen-year-old who would go to Kaunas Central Bookstore to read and reread Dostoyevsky and Schopenhauer, absorbing that philosophy of disenchantment (as Saltus titled his book on the subject) that says,

We are unhappy alone and unhappy as a community, married and unmarried, we are like hedgehogs huddling together to stay warm – uncomfortable when crowded, and even unhappier when separated; optimism is a bitter mockery of human suffering; life is evil, because life is war; the more perfect the organism, the more perfect the suffering [etc.]

and who then tried and failed to hang himself, before deciding he lacked the courage of Mucius Scaevola, the early Christians, and the Stoics, and wanted to live; a monumental decision, and yet what is one person’s decisions to an uncaring world? Yet one of the things that most made him want to live was love, not a specific love, although Garšva was the lover of Jonę, Zenia, and finally Elena, the doomed and exhausted love he pursues in his state of lost desperation of Brooklyn, but rather than admiring any one lover, was he is most entranced by is the act and role of loving, for Garšva was (by his own testimony) a great lover; in the opening to Chapter 5, he writes that, “My women were like Matisse’s Lorrain Chair, which brings out the blue monumentality of the wallpaper behind it. Loving them helped me feel the reality around me more sharply.” (I too have felt this sensation, how feeling loved makes the whole world seem more meaningful.)

In his 1966 essay “The Tragedy of Creative Consciousness: Literary Heritage of Antanas Škėma,” (highly recommend) Rimvydas Šilbajoris describes Škėma’s work as “a torturous and prolonged dialogue with an incomprehensible, silent God, whose presence reveals itself only in the suffering and destruction of man,” and I think this framework of a silent dialogue with God (something like the whisperings in a Terrence Malick film) provides an alternate interpretation for some of the Symbolist elements of this novel that Elžbieta Banytė in her review of the novel associates (whether literally or figuratively, I am not sure) with schizophrenia that Garšva inherits from his mother. In certain sections, while benumbed by the Sissyphean up ir down mundanity of his elevator job, Garšva appears to have visions and hallucinations of scenes from the Bible and traditional Lithuanian myth, such as a seen in which he is brought in a blue van before three judges in the Valley of Josephat in chapter eight, and when asked his occupation by the judges he identifies himself as a “poet and unsuccessful earthling.” The judges then lay out the commandments contained in a “thick book,” which states that “anyone who failed to follow the commandments is liquidated.” Garšva protests that, “I followed the commandments for seekers.” [emphasis added]

Now the three judges laugh rhythmically. Like members of an opera chorus.

“There is no such category in the Valley of Josaphat.”

Because White Shroud is a poetic novel, I can’t really say the plot has any forward movement to it. The embrace of art for art’s sake, poetry sans an ideological agenda, the Dostoyevskian play of voices, the mind-wandering intertextuality of Joyce—all this is in keeping with the Modernist and Symbolist tradition that Antanas Škėma was well versed in. Similarly in line with this tradition is the seemingly chaotic, but in fact quite deliberate structure of the book: Each chapter consists of a modern section taking in part of the course of a single day, while the corresponding sections set in the past jump around freely to different periods of Garšva’s life. Some of the modern sections concern Garšva’s romance with Elena, a fellow-émigré and former high school language arts teachers who connects to Garšva over their shared (and lost) heritage.

Gruodis says in her introduction that “the brilliance of the novel lies in how, like Joyce and Woolf, Škėma presents these narratives from different perspectives, resulting in a multi-voiced, stylistically and linguistically complex Modernist symphony. … As he travels endlessly up and down in his elevator, Garšva is writing a poem in his head – using imagery from ancient Baltic mythology, the rhythms of atonal music, and the forms of folk wood sculpture. The reconstruction of an archaic world through poetic language is Garšva’s final illusion.”

I found Garšva’s persona to be basically likeable; some readers might find him frustratingly impassive, particularly his equanimity at the prospect of his own death, but he seems to me an endearingly desperate and exhausted man; there is a nakedness and gravity to his clipped utterances that comes off like someone who knows they have very little time left to speak their mind. As Gruodis observes, Škėma does not apply moral judgments to Garšva’s experiences, but he simply paints a portrait of them; and that seems a key part of Garšva’s more poetic than practical character, the fact that not only does he not try to cohere his experience into some kind of easy moral sentiment, but he does not want to be easily pegged in this sort of way; and his desire not to peg his predicament to a problem in turn makes his problems insoluble; and the insolubility of his problems in turn feeds his poetic sense of the beauty and inevitability of death.

Towards the end of the book, (because I feel I have to justify this claim with an example) Garšva wakes up with Elena after they have spent the night together. She doesn’t want him to die.

“Don’t drink,” Elena asked.

“I’m afraid of death, so I drink. I’m afraid of death, so I write. I’m afraid of death, so I take pills. Everything is because of death. The poet Vaidilionis said that trees covered in toadstools are ironic. My life is ironic.”

I will note that one of the more charming aspects of Garšva’s manner of expression is his poetic repetitions, and chopped rhythm of his sentences, the chopped content of his thoughts, which create wonderful verbal effects.

You reach out your arm. An ivory paperweight. You reach out your arm. Chagall’s illustrations for Dead Souls. You reach out your arm. Plato and a Platonic god. And if it’s too dull, there’s a Renoir hanging on the wall. It’s heaven on Earth. And so interesting how the Negro mask is used! And the lawn in the park is trimmed – perfection, harmony. My own atmosphere, I’m afraid, is nothing but passed gas, a cosy stench. I would be a grotesque if I tried to be a Plato.  Maybe, if I got myself a job as a night watchman, I might be able to squeeze out some Faustian stories for little children. Isn’t suffering – no matter how lovely – grotesque? [Ed. note: some of Garšva’s expressions stop you short on a second reading. And yet imagine the distraught tone in his voice as he’s declaiming …] Van Gogh shot himself in a field, and his blossoming cherries are so lovely! Poe drank himself to death, and the cries of his raven are so lovely! Ciulionis ran from the madhouse through the snow, and his sonata paintings are so exquisitely musical! “Kill me doctor, or you’re a murderer,” begged Kafka. This Jew is indeed charming with his horrifying nightmares!

It is somewhat disturbing how suicidal ideation can be made so artful, and not even in an old Medieval chivalric context. Garšva’s suicidal ideation is built out of Modernist poetry. But the self-destructive tendency I was meaning to trace comes right after this, as the core conundrum of Garšva’s aesthetic way of existing in the world is made explicit:

“I’m sorry you’re angry, and that …” [Elena trying to calm him down]

“I know, I’m contradicting myself. And I’m jealous. And illogical. You’re right. I mock. I admire. I drink, I love. Because I like to drink, love and mock. If I find a harmonious truth, I’ll have lost. And I’ll lose if I fail to find truth.”

He must search for the truth; but the truth must always be chaotic and not harmonious, otherwise he will have “lost” the aesthetic game that composes his life; a game that expresses itself in the balletic way – or rather, tragically balletic way – that the story ends, the desire for suicide of Garšva’s friend and fellow émigré Stanley, the perhaps doomed love with Elena.

But as tends to be the case with poets and aesthetes, Garšva’s main purpose is his art, and if there is something he wishes to salvage out of the chaos, it is to create something of permanence, a past that cannot be erased. As he tells Elena later in the same conversation,

I would like to say a few words. Final words. For myself. I’d like to write a cycle of poems in which each letter is an irreplaceable ornament. I would work long and hard to find them. … This is my obsession. A few lines etched into marble, that’s what I long for. The illusion of immortality? So be it. To die with a real illusion is the real thing. I will give thanks. To my father, my mother, the marshland, the semaphore, Jonę, my seizures, my critic, books, the soaking old woman, Zenia, Vaidilionis. All of them. If you think we can try, then let’s try. I may win. If you believe in me, then stay. If you need me too.

What constitutes “winning” to Garšva is perhaps the permanence he is struggling for, and his struggle is perhaps with the entropy of life in 20^th century, which threatens to dissolve all artists searching for their monument into forgotten dust. Although he did not find fulfilling employment in the United States, the author behind White Shroud does seem to have achieved something of the permanence his character was searching for in spite of the author’s untimely death in a car accident on August 11, 1961. Škėma was returning from a meeting of Lithuanian émigré writers in Michigan at the time of the accident, and it seems that both while he was still living and in the years following his death there were many within this who appreciated his unique contribution to their literature. While I cannot say White Shroud has become a favorite novel of mine—the ideas, art, and techniques of the novel seem too familiar to me at this point in literary history to bring about the sort of surprise that yields attachment—I am appreciative of meeting with a writer who is quite likeable in spite of (or probably even because of) his desultory outlook.