Modernism: An Art of Confusion?

I like a good Scotch, but sometimes I'm just in the mood to sip on some cider and relax.  That's the way I feel about literature.  I don't want every book I read to force me to ruminate over each chapter and read multiple essays about it just to understand what it's about.  Sometimes I like a simple narrative, an enjoyable story.  There's nothing wrong with that, though some people tend to think that this attitude makes you a simpleton, that you should always be challenging yourself.  I don't need to challenge myself with every read to feel like I accomplished something at the end of it.

This is not the face of a man who takes things lightly.

I read Bruno Schulz' two collections of short stories first thing this year--technically G.K. Chesterton was first thing, but it was started in 2010--so once that was done, I was tired.  Literally, worn out.  I switched to H.G. Wells.  I didn't think The Croquet Player was going to be as haunting as it was.  Now, I'm reading The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham.  While I wouldn't call him simple, I would say that he has Victorian sensibilities when it comes to storytelling.  He writes a plain narrative, and while he talks about deep issues, he talks about them simply.  And to be honest, I'm getting more out of The Moon and Sixpence then I did out of all of Bruno Schulz.  Maybe Maugham wasn't as good a writer as Schulz, but Maugham was the most popular British author since Charles Dickens.  He wrote things people connected to, and frankly, it's hard to connect to something you don't understand.

T.S. Eliot, looking so cash.

T.S. Eliot said that modern novelists, like modern poets, should be difficult.  I disagree.  I like T.S. Eliot, but there's a reason why Byron is my favorite poet.  Some might say it's apples and oranges.  All I know is, the Romantics had quite a lot of important things to say and they said them clearly and wonderfully.  I'm not entirely sure what Eliot was trying to say; all I know if he said it beautifully.
Let's be honest here, many of the greatest works in literature were simple stories.  Sometimes they told cavernously deep messages, but the stories were enjoyable, even if you missed the message.  The stories of Shakespeare were written to do two things: entertain and sell.  Marlowe was a bit deeper, but he's also not as well beloved.  Don Quixote is a simple, entertaining story.  One could study it for years and find many things to talk about, but to enjoy it, one simply has to read it.  The same can be said of Dickens or Thackeray.  They wrote to entertain, themselves and the people.  They also wrote with important messages, and they felt little reason to hide those messages behind obscure prose.
I'm not saying writers such as Joyce, Kafka, Schulz, or Eliot are bad writers for creating difficult and challenging literature; but I am saying that just because they are difficult does not make them better.  Like I said, I've been more challenged by Maugham than Schulz, and I think the reason might just be that I've comprehended more of Maugham's message.

Bruno Schulz

Some months ago I was looking at books in Borders when I stumbled across The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.  Like most people whose literary focus has been vaguely European but specifically British, the name did not ring any bells.  However, the name intrigued me, and upon reading the brief biography, I was deterimed to learn more about the book and the man.

For those of you who are wondering: no, Bruno Schulz is no relation to Peanuts author Charles Schulz.  Well, by no way I've found, and if they were, it would certainly be very distantly.  (Maybe not as distantly as my possible relation to Thomas Mann, but we're talking about a good sized separation.)  Schulz is a very common German family name, though Bruno Schulz was not a German.  He was a Polish Jew.

He was born in 1892 in the then small Austro-Hungarian town of Drohobrycz, the son of a cloth merchant.  He was raised there and spent most of his life there.  Apparently he really liked it, and judging from the pictures I've seen of modern day Drohobych (it's modern name), it's easy to see why someone would want to stay there.  Still, he did travel somewhat, like when he studied architecture at Lviv University and briefly in Vienna.  Without traveling at all from Drohobrycz though, his nationality changed four times, as the city changed hands that many times in his lifetime.  Countries must've loved them some Drohobrycz.
Like I mentioned, he was a Jew and was very interested in Jewish culture, though he didn't know Yiddish.  He spoke Polish and German, and helped his fiancée Józefina Szelińska translate Kafka's The Trial into Polish.   He wrote in Polish, and was awarded Poland's Golden Laurel award by the Polish Academy of Literature in 1938.

From 1924 to 1941 he was an art teacher in Drohobrycz, though he apparently didn't enjoy it and only kept the job for monetary reasons.  He apparently kept to himself; he was perceived as a hermit.  Most of his life was uneventful--you know, except for all that writing of the best Polish literature of the 20th century.
His life was uneventful, I should say, until 1939.  For those who aren't familiar with history (or not good with dates) it was at this time that World War II began.  You know that one.  It's the one with the Nazis.  Yeah, it's gonna be one of those stories.  At the time, the Soviet Union owned Drohobrycz, but after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Schulz, like the other Jews in Drobobrycz, was put in a ghetto.  At the time, he was working on a novel supposedly called The Messiah, thought to be his masterpiece.  He gave this and other papers and artwork to some gentile friends for safe keeping.  They have never been seen since.
It's not all bad though.  He's still alive, and not only that, a Gestapo officer named Felix Landau found out about his talents as an artist and put Schulz to work painting murals on his child's playroom.  This of course gave Schulz certain privileges, not the least important being protection.
That is, supposed protection.  On a night in November of 1942, at the corner of Czacki and Mickiewicz streets, Schulz was shot in the head by Karl Günther, a Gestapo officer.  You might be wondering why.  Apparently, like Landau, Günther had himself a "favored Jew," who was killed by Landau.  "You killed my Jew," he said.  "I killed yours."  And so, one of the greatest Polish writers--possibly the greatest--of the 20th century died.
According to the forward to my copy of The Street of Crocodiles, Schulz was planned an escape from the ghetto that very night.  It's impossible to say if he would've succeeded.  We'll never know.  Perhaps, if he had, he would've had to start all over on The Messiah; and perhaps it would've been a masterpiece of literature, changing the art form forever.  Perhaps it would've been terrible.
As for Schulz known work, we have The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.  They are collections of interconnected short stories, containing some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read.  Of course, large credit goes to the translator Celina Wieniewska for giving us such a wonderful English version.  I highly recommend the Penguin Classics edition pictured above as it contains both books and three other short stories.
I'll end this with one of my favorite passages from The Street of Crocodiles, from the short story "August."  It is a discription of a sunflower, yet it brings to mind Schulz himself for me.
"An enormous sunflower, lifted on a powerful stem and suffering from hypertrophy, clad in the yellow mourning of the last sorrowful days of its life, bent under the weight of its monstrous girth.  But the naive suburban bluebells and unpretentious dimity flowers stood helpless in their starched pink and white shifts, indifferent to the sunflower's tragedy."