UNDERNEATH THE BUNKER

Beginnings and endings: I don’t care for them. There’s only one ending for me, and I haven’t got there yet. I didn’t think much about the beginning. One day I started writing and I’ll keep going till I die. That’s it, really – that’s the way I work. Is there another way?

That’s Wdj Szesz, speaking to yours truly in 2002. Here’s Leo Barnard, monotoning in a yawn-sprinkled auditorium sometime in 2005:

The verb ‘to know’ is an impossible verb. There is no knowing. The only knowing I can conceive is the knowing that one cannot know. All other knowing is a pretence: a meaningless charade.

To cap things off, here’s me, writing in a small Bavarian journal, late last year:

What it is to have experience!

A short quotation this last one, but pertinent in its way. For those who haven’t followed my career closely, you may like to be reminded that my last novel – also my first – contained a character with an unhealthy addiction to narcotic substances. Alas, as I discovered during the planning of the project, I have no personal experience of such an addiction. Therefore, like the conscientious writer I am, I embarked upon a strict program of mostly book-based research, hoping to drag myself out of the pit of ignorance. I even spoke to one or two individuals who had, at one point in their lives, had too close an alliance with certain forbidden substances. I was, I thought, somewhere close to being an expert on that particular subject. Little did I know.

It was with great sadness that I read in almost all the reviews of the book that my efforts in this particular quarter were considered to have been in vain. ‘It would take consummate skill to create a character less convincing than der Linger’s drug addict,’ wrote one critic. Another compared me to Fernando Aloisi, the Spanish novelist, whose crazed artistic bravery is infamous:

What attracts us to Aloisi is, as many have noted, the confidence with which he fails. His failures are almost always more entertaining than anyone else’s successes. Unfortunately I cannot say the same for Adrian der Linger. He doesn’t fail in style – he just fails. This is a damp patch of a novel. I’ve met quantity surveyors with more charm, Dutch skies with less grey passages…

What went wrong? My inability to match Aloisi is far too common to be an inexcusable error, for who can match that irrepressible man? No one I know can ever hope to muddle through with as much mastery as he. Perhaps it was – as a third critic suggested – my complete lack of first-hand experience that stood in my way. Of course! Here’s how I should have gone about my research. I ought to have quit my job, shipped in a snow-storm worth of cocaine, turned on the digital children’s television channel and called round all my favourite bored housewives and frustrated teenagers for a bring-your-own-class-A-drug buffet. I’d let enough time pass for me to be as near death as possible without actually being dead and then snap out of it – just like that – take a bath, drink a glass of orange juice or two and get down to the business of writing it all down. Fantastico.

Would this have worked? Possibly not. The truth, most probably, is that I’m not a great novelist. I shouldn’t have even started in the first place. Blue Paper Moon was doomed before the first sentence found its way onto the eternally alluring blank white paper. I had neither the experience, the imagination, nor the confidence to pull through.

As I have said, two or three critics compared me, unfavourably, to Fernando Aloisi. You can understand their logic. I was surprised, however, to see that no one compared me unfavourably to Wdj Szesz. This would have made just as much, if not more sense. If Aloisi has made a career out of doing very little research, but squeezing with through sheer force of will (and buckets of charisma), Szesz has always been a model of the perfect researcher, refusing to rely on his own experiences but managing, against the odds, to use that of others in a manner that has always seemed both real and personal. His proviso, beyond the otherwise stated desire to keep on writing until he breathes his last, was always to test the boundaries of ‘how close one can get to a place without ever going there’. His ambition was to become the ‘great chronicler of Gdansk’. This, few will argue, he has become – though it remains the truth that Szesz has never once set foot in that great Polish city.

Wdj Szesz (and forgive me for repeating this) has never set foot in Gdansk. Nevertheless, he grew up – and continues to live – in its shadow, both literally and metaphorically. From his hometown, Gdansk can be seen on the horizon, except on foggy days. And yet he has never been within three miles of its outer limits. At the same time, the city has barely ever been out of his thoughts. The title of the project says it all. What is it that is haunting Gdansk? Why, it is the writer himself. ‘I the ghost of Gdansk’ Szesz likes to say: ‘I have willed myself into its streets, I have thought my way into its air and I have read my way into the soul of every person living there’.

Strong claims, no? Strong as a shark on steroids. And yet you’d be hard pressed to find anyone willing to disagree with you if you said that Wdj Szesz’s work qualifies everyone of these claims. He has never taken himself to the heart of Gdansk, yet the people of Gdansk have taken him to their heart. The city even has a Wdj Szesz museum, celebrating the life and work of a man who has, in their sweet words, ‘dedicated himself to the city’. Funny sort of dedication though. After all, it’s not as if he can’t take a trip there. Szesz isn’t bedridden. He leaves his house every now and again and is, by all accounts, well capable of operating his legs in an orderly fashion. It’s rather that – and I may as well use his words on this one – ‘the only kind of transportation I believe in is mental transportation’. This is a man who believes in reading his way to places. And why not? For him that’s the point of fiction. Most of us will never get to go to Gdansk, so why should he? The book is the greatest compromise known by man – but what a glorious compromise it is. Meeting in the middle isn’t so bad after all. There’s more space there.

Okay, so if Szesz’s reasoning doesn’t always add up, you can’t argue with the end product. I forget how many volumes of Gdansk Haunting have been published so far, but it’s a fair few. Eighteen, nineteen? It is an ongoing novel – it only ends, as stated, when the writer dies. But don’t let this put you off, nor the length of it as things stand. The only fear that one can hold in contemplation of this series of novels is that one may be crushed by their collective brilliance. These, truly, are books in which to lose yourself. If the writer haunts Gdansk like a ghost, so too may we: a legion of spirits tramping up and down the sentences of this invisible, yet strangely tangible city.

But is it Gdansk? And if it is, why is it Gdansk? Szesz oozes talent. He is as thorough a writer as you could hope to find. So why not channel his skills into the creation of a fantasy world: a city that he could call his own – Szeszville, or Wdjton? Why waste all that wordy goodness on a place that already exists?

It turns out that Szesz is not big fan of fantasy worlds. ‘All too easy,’ he says: ‘Hard to be convincing, maybe, but once you’re over that barrier, you’re safe – you make your own rules. To be a mussel on the rock of reality, that’s more of a challenge’. You can’t be held accountable for how you treat a unicorn. A living city on the other hand – now that’s a risk; especially when you deliberately remove yourself further from that reality than is completely necessary. But who am I to quibble with Szesz’s technique? Like I said, this stuff pays dividends.

Perhaps we ought to let our heavy minds rest for a moment or two on the question of how he does it. For this is fiction – but it is also, claim many, Gdansk. It represents a real city with enough accuracy for people of that city to openly celebrate it, but at the same time recognize it as a work of fiction. It is created as part of a process in which written facts take a major part: books, newspapers, journals – and yet Gdansk Haunting is not thought of as a piece of academic research. Has he just changed the names, shifted the facts around, restructured the mess of life and thrown in the odd story from elsewhere? Is Gdansk Haunting just a massive chunk of lazy academic research? Is Wdj Szesz a social biographer who can’t let go of his license to elaborate (or make diversions) beyond the reasonable? The stuff of life powers his work, but he won’t be held by it. He retains the right to enforce a fictional structure upon it. Why get so close to something and then refuse to touch it?

Here are two more sentences that close with the by-now ubiquitous question mark: What is the structure? To what extent does he enforce his own imagination upon the material? People used to think of Gdansk Haunting as some sort of jigsaw puzzle. They thought that all the real facts were there, all the actual details, but mixed up, hidden, carefully and cunningly concealed. Streets are, of course, the same. Major buildings are found in the same place. This is essentially the same Gdansk. And yet the people are not quite the same. No one resembles anyone else long enough to be thought a version of them. No one storyline maps onto real experience; though few if any of them feel as though they wouldn’t have happened.

As a pack of wolves track their prey, wild theories track this project. There are countless systems created through which, some claim, any citizen of Gdansk can find his fictional equivalent in Gdansk Haunting. Few people pause to question how a man they have never met could have re-created them in the pages of a novel: it is a given that Szesz has powers beyond the average writer. He has a hold on the city, they say. Surely, some reply, he only has a hold of those elements he can gauge through the written material he takes as his source? What can he know about the actual lives? Look and see, say the first party. ‘He knows everything’. ‘Everything,’ I echo, adding – ‘and nothing in particular’.

Most recognize the failure of these systems. One man used to believe that Gdansk Haunting presented society in reverse. The personality of a cobbler is transferred onto that of a councilor: everything is as it is, but in a different form. After years of trying to pin down this form, however, the man was forced to throw up his hands in despair. He thought he could see himself in the character of a fisherman. If he saw anything it was no more than a fleeting glance; no more than the feeling we all get when reading fiction of this kind. The more he wanted to see, the more he saw – but the less there actually was. How can something be simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar?

I sense that we are circling the question like some tribe of famished gulls. Anybody up for a swoop? What is Gdansk Haunting? If it doesn’t matter what it is, am I still allowed to answer the question? That is to say, does it matter if anything matters? Or is that a totally different question? Isn’t this meant to be a review, anyway? What’ll we get out of slamming words against the wall? Didn’t that bore Leo Barnard once say that ‘all words are brittle – go ahead and smash them, but get ready to have dust in your eyes’? Maybe so, but goodness knows what he meant…

Here’s another: What is the difference between life, facts about life, and fiction? This is not a question I will answer, except to suggest that Gdansk Haunting is, in a sense, the solution – open-ended solution though it may be. No more on this.

Details. Oh yes, details. There are a lot of details in Gdansk Haunting. Well-managed details, I hasten to add. It’s encyclopedic, but it’s no encyclopedia, if you catch my drift. There are many leaves in the stream, but the stream keeps flowing. The current is aimless but strong. Anyone or anything can be carried on it. It is hard not to be. Where does the stream lead? Somewhere, nowhere, anywhere, who cares? This is life – and yet it is more than life. It is someone else’s life. One thinks of the joy of reading newspapers, or the biographies of ‘ordinary people’. Gdansk Haunting is a much greater joy – don’t ask me why, it just is. Wdj Szesz offers that little bit more than any journalist. He probes deeper, he covers wider, he writes better. There isn’t a nook or cranny into which he will not creep. He is the apocalyptic cockroach of fiction, albeit a ghostly one. Nothing defeats him. As mental travelers go, he’s a strong one. That mental backpack has been loaded with care. Or, as they been known to say in Gdansk, he approaches his task ‘nec temere, nec timide’.

Not that the subject doesn’t help him out. I don’t need to tell you that Gdansk has a history worth setting out straight, let alone embroidering or subtly reconstructing. And Szesz takes us through this history at our leisure. All the major events are there, from the campaigns of the Teutonic Order to the Solidarity Movement of the 1980s, mostly unaltered, though with the names and personalities of many of the major players changed. Szesz seems to get right to the heart of these events. I say ‘seems’: clearly I don’t know what it felt like to be there at that time: and neither does Szesz, not for sure. Then again, if you’re coming from the Leo Barnard school of thought, neither did the people who were there at the time. ‘A window is made of shards of glass, but no one shard is a window in itself’. If this anonymous quotation is relevant, tap your right elbow with your left hand. If it isn’t, pretend you never read it. It’s all the same to me.

What is Gdansk Haunting? It is a city built of letters. It is vast and vibrant: a bottomless ocean of stories. I struggle to pick a representative incident: there are too many. Push my head under the water, however, and this is what flows into the echo chamber of my mind. Mr and Mrs Glinka exchanging bread-based metaphors for life at No. 27 Szeroka Street. Magdelena’s opening night at the Teatr Minsky – also her last night, thirty eight years later. Two hours in the life of the canal cleaner’s son’s short-sighted girlfriend. The alarmingly fascinating chapters on the judicial system. Book Five, every brilliant word of it. The first and thirteenth chapter of the most recent volume – including the poignant denouement of the Szymon Gizdan storyline. Pretty much everything concerning the shipyard protests. The rambling religious musings of Braciszek Polowski. The deliriously abrupt description of Ursula Barva’s schooldays. The early history of BOP Baltia Gdańsk seen through the eyes of four elderly women. The second half of the chapter entitled ‘The Baltic Newt’.

I could, of course, go on. I won’t. What strikes me about all of these things is perspective. Szesz takes as source material relatively mundane texts, texts whose perspective is ordinary at best. What can he add to them? Not his personal experience of a place – for he has never been there. But what am I saying? I am desperate, as many people are, in my insistence on the ultimate lack of a physical relationship between the writer and his subject. If I were Szesz I would shrug it off. Never stepped in Gdansk? What does it mean? He’s been there all his live. He is, after all, the ghost of Gdansk. And this ghost never fails to offer an extraordinary perspective on events. Where has he been? Where hasn’t he been? If someone were to ask me if I’d ever been to Gdansk, I’d be tempted to say yes. At least, I’ve been to Gdansk Haunting – which is close enough, if not closer than the real thing.

I’ve met Wdj Szesz just the once. He doesn’t get out much. Too busy writing. Five minutes was all I was granted for my interview – and about three of those were taken up by me spilling coffee over my notes (and a few drops on Szesz’s shoes). In the last couple of minutes, however, I did manage to squeeze an interesting sentence or two out of the remarkable man. One of those sentences can be found at the beginning of this increasingly unsatisfactory review. The second can be found at the end. Which is, it so happens, right here:

I remember being in a similar position to you now. When I was about twenty I met a writer, a Polish novelist it was, going by the name of Artur Mawalski. I asked him to sign a book. I didn’t own one of his own books, so I asked him to sign one of Kafka’s. He didn’t seem bothered by this. I told him I wanted to be a writer. He looked on in sympathy, as if I’d said I was diseased. In the front of the book – Amerika I think it was – he wrote the following line: “Everything you need to know you will learn by doing it”. That night I met some friends at a small drinking establishment on the east side of the town. The following morning I discovered that I had defaced Mawalski’s comment at some point the previous night. I couldn’t recall having done so, but it was clearly in my handwriting. I had crossed out “by doing it” and written “by reading about other people doing it”. This drunken idea became my life’s mantra. And I have to say, it seems to have served me well.

So it has.

Review by Adrian der Linger

Further Reading:

Wdj Szesz Archive