Book Review : The Feverish and Unreal World of a Litterateur

The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick (Knopf: $15.95)

Most every craft has an inner precinct where it is not about its subject but about itself.

In lawyering, it is appeal jurisprudence. In prophecy, it is the Book of Ecclesiastes. In medicine, one suspects it is the technology of the artificial heart. In cooking, it used to be the 18-course banquet that nobody could eat; now it is the kind of nouvelle cuisine where the cuisine is everything, and the food disappears from the plate. In farming, it is compensation for not growing things. And in literature, it is writing about the act of writing.

“The Messiah of Stockholm” is a darkly witty example of such a thing. Cynthia Ozick’s fable deals with a displaced Polish Jew who has become a minor book reviewer for a minor Stockholm newspaper, and who imagines himself to be the son of a renowned Polish-Jewish writer killed by the Germans. Its theme is contained in a series of wry variations on the reciprocal underminings of life and art.

Swollen Purity

Lars Andemening is a figure of swollen purity and diminished reality. In his private life, he is so detached from people and things that two wives have left him; he lives in a grubby room, sleeps by day and works by night. At his third-rate newspaper, he upholds the highest literary standards, writing about Kafka, and existential anxiety and knotty Eastern Europeans. He lacks a desk or typewriter of his own, as a result; gets no letters from readers; and survives precariously under the shadow of the two senior reviewers, who do popular novels and film biographies.

Lars is sustained by an obsession. As an orphan, he is free to decide who his parents are; and he is convinced that his father is Bruno Schulz. Schulz, who wrote about Polish village life in a fashion that was part mystical, part realistic and part nightmare--such disparate names as Faulkner, Kafka and Marc Chagall come to mind--was among a group of Jews shot by the Germans in the village of Drohobycz during World War II.

Lars seeks out traces of Schulz’s writing and memorabilia. He is particularly obsessed by a rumored masterpiece--”The Messiah”--that vanished when the author was killed. He strikes up an uneasy partnership with Heidi, an old bookseller with an odd ability to turn up Schulz letters and photographs.

Heidi, sour, energetic and ambiguous, keeps insisting on the importance of Schulz’s life and death, on his human reality. Lars, who wants to possess his imaginary parent in a state of pure literary abstraction, is made uneasy by this insistence. Unease turns to dismay when Heidi produces Adela, a young woman who not only claims to be Schulz’s daughter, but produces a parcel of torn pages which she claims is the manuscript of “The Messiah.”

In a series of flailing, hysterical scenes, Lars struggles with Adela, Heidi and Heidi’s husband, Eklund, who is an expert in a number of things, including--suspiciously--smuggling refugees out of Eastern Europe, and forgery. Lars resists the transformation of his literary hero and the lost manuscript into real and tangible evidences. He reads the manuscript. It is a churning, disjointed work about a village whose inhabitants are idols, not humans; and which is visited and purified by a messiah in the shape of a monstrous, self-propelled book.

Becomes a Crowd-Pleaser

It is pure feverish invention; in its purity, it is also utterly arid. Lars declares it a fake and burns it. He renounces his championship of literary sublimity; he becomes a crowd-pleasing reviewer who sticks to Scandinavian novels “and the more companionable Americans.” He is immensely successful and without compunctions; except that wherever he goes, he can’t rid himself of the smell of roasting meat.

Ozick imparts a febrile, Central European quality to her tale. She writes with wit and precision, and the slight air of a foreign style is clearly deliberate. She names the tight, malevolent circle of gossips at Lars’ scruffy newspaper “the stewpot”, and the word, resurfacing periodically, has a faintly translated effect.

None of her characters has much life; they are literary abstractions. On the other hand, they have plenty of energy. They go through sudden transformations, peeling off identities and appearing in new aspects. Heidi is seen first as comically cynical. When Lars announces that he is no Swede but a Polish Jew, and son of a famous writer, she bursts out:

“An impostor. Another refugee impostor. It’s nothing new, believe me! Half my customers have made themselves up. Fabricators. Every Pole of a certain age who walks in here, male or female, used to be a famous professor in Warsaw. Every Hungarian was once ambassador to Argentina. The French are the worst. I’ve never had one of those in my shop who didn’t turn out to be just the one who got Sartre started on the Talmud.”

When we see her last, she is struggling--along with Adela and Eklund--to prevent Lars from burning the manuscript; and begging him to use his newspaper column, and the evidences of the manuscript and Adela to bring Schulz back to life for the contemporary world.

Of course, they may not be real. Perhaps the Eklunds and Adela and their “messiah” are fakes. Is reality itself a fake? Is pure literature real? Lars renounces realism in favor of the tangible; but why does the smell of burning pursue him? It is Ozick’s clever, inner-precinct paradox.