A Brief History of Polishness in Modernist English Literature
From the turn of the century to the 1930s, Polishness crops up time and time again in English-language modernist literature. What inspired the likes of DH Lawrence, TS Eliot and George Bernard Shaw to engage with Polish issues? And why did Polishness matter? Culture.pl investigates…
Joseph Conrad, the most famous British Pole
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Joseph Conrad, rep. Marek Skorupski / Forum
Where better to start in exploring Polishness in English literature than with Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad?
Conrad, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, became a British citizen in 1882, and wrote in English, despite sometimes struggling to speak the language fluently – but Polishness remained an important part of his work throughout his life.
In a 1908 letter to his literary agent JB Pinker, Conrad in fact wrote that he wanted ‘to make Polish life enter English literature’ – including exposing ‘a very particular state of society’ and ‘very special traditions’ and ‘events’ – although he admitted this was ‘no small ambition’.
Nonetheless, there is actually very little Poland in Conrad. Only three of his stories – ‘Amy Foster’ (1901), ‘Prince Roman’ (1910), and his unfinished and oft-forgotten novel The Sisters (approx. 1885) touch on Polish issues, and even then references to Poland, and attitudes towards Polishness, are not explicit.
‘Prince Roman’, for example, describes a Polish prince and uprising fighter, which could suggest Conrad’s interest in the struggle for Polish independence (Polish lands had been partitioned and divided up by neighbouring empires in the late 1700s) – but Prince Roman ultimately ends up ‘stone deaf, his health broken’, and lives out the rest of his days in a modest and completely unheroic manner. It also includes a description of Polish nationality as ‘not so much alive as surviving’ – hardly a passionate defence of the Polish cause.
The Sisters also features only limited Polishness. Although the start of the text stresses the natural beauty and ceaseless fertility of the rural Polish/Eastern European borderlands – where the land is a ‘limitless expanse’ and ‘unbroken’, the path of trees ‘like an emerald negligently dropped on the sands’ – the story quickly abandons the region, as well as its discussions of Eastern European identity, for urban western life.
‘Amy Foster’ does something similar, but Conrad’s approach to Polishness in this story is particularly intriguing. Critics have often assumed that the main character of the story, Yanko Goorall, is Polish – although there is no clear reference to his nationality, he comes from ‘the eastern range of the Carpathians’, with his surname evoking the Polish highlander people, the Górale. Thomas McLean also argues that the story reflects the influence of Polish history, and British representations of Poland, on Conrad’s literature.
But still, there is no clarity on Goorall’s nationality, with his origins ultimately left ambiguous. The character is defined only by his ‘outlandishness’, a term which emphasises the lack of firm footing for his identity: Goorall is both literally ‘outlandish’, in that he is an immigrant, and therefore away from his homeland – and socially ‘outlandish’, with British locals struggling to determine his background, language and culture, leaving Goorall unable to fully assimilate into his new home.
The highlander as stateless pariah
In leaving Goorall’s identity obscure, Conrad raises wider points about reactions to Polishness in contemporary English politics and society. Although there was initially some sympathy for exiles from the region, Liza Schuster writes that immigrants from Central Eastern Europe who settled in Britain were eventually regarded with suspicion and fear by Brits at the turn of the century:
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The newcomers were treated as carriers of disease, pollutants. At the same time, news of assassination attempts and bombings by anarchists and nihilists from Poland and Russia, which by their very nature robbed people of their sense of security, eroded liberal attitudes.
Certainly, by labelling Goorall as – at best – an ambiguous Pole, Conrad invites readings of the character as a reflection of the contemporary status of Poland which, in 1901, still lacked independence (and was subsequently ‘outlandish’ itself.)
But the point about lack of security is important here too: because Goorall’s identity cannot be determined, he is at once exile – and victim – as well as potentially diseased, disruptive, and frightening. Goorall is seen through British eyes as ‘noticeabl[y]’ foreign and ‘so different from the mankind around him’: he is a ‘creature’, rather than a human being, with ‘lustrous black eyes’ and ‘matted locks’, descriptions which reflect real-life interests and concerns about psychological disturbance, physical illness and de-evolution in the early modernist period (particularly following the influence of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud). The description of matted hair specifically suggests the scalp condition ‘Plica Polonica’ (‘Polish plait’), which, as McLean notes, was referred to by ‘every British visitor to Poland’ in the 18th and 19th centuries, as a dangerous and contagious ‘Polish’ illness which threatened to infect British citizens.
Goorall’s language is also impossible to ascertain: locals ‘[try] him with a few words’ of the languages they know – Spanish, French, German and Italian – but when Goorall finally speaks, his dialect is ‘senseless’, ‘startling’ and ‘so utterly unlike anything one had ever heard’. And although Goorall eventually learns to speak English, he is never fluent – with the enduring language barrier becoming particularly conspicuous when he falls ill and desperately asks his wife for water:
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She had not understood, though he may have thought he was speaking in English.
Earlier, his wife also reacts with terror when she hears Goorall singing to their son in his language, fearing that it may cause ‘some harm’ to the boy. This also reflects Anglophone anxieties around the corruption of the English language through dialects, urbanisation and mass emigration in modernism – as Michael North details in The Dialect of Modernism.
In fact, one consequence of such concerns around immigration – and particularly immigration from Eastern Europe, as Schuster notes – was the 1905 Aliens Act, the first act to control immigration in Britain, which was introduced to prevent ‘undesirable’ aliens from settling in the UK. Although this was designed after ‘Amy Foster’ was published, rising levels of prejudice were still prevalent when Conrad was writing – McLean suggests that:
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Conrad’s story is a nightmare of exile, and perhaps also a critique of the British response to Polish refugees.
The place of ‘our guest’ in English culture
It’s worth mentioning here the struggles Conrad himself had in becoming part of British society. Throughout his life, Conrad clearly remained interested in the Polish political climate and struggle for independence, penning articles about Polishness in The English Review and, in 1914, suggesting in his essay ‘First News’ that the war was of little hope to the Polish cause. And though he wrote in English, he also regularly stressed his foreignness among British culture – when he attended a rather uninspiring event at a music hall with fellow novelist Ford Madox Ford, he turned to Ford and said:
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Doesn’t one in spite of everything feel a stranger in this beastly country?
But his Polishness – his foreignness – was also centre-stage in contemporary British authors’ perceptions of his writing. Indeed, on one occasion in 1910, Conrad fell out with his agent, Pinker, after he accused him of ‘not speaking English’, and he was known to have an accent throughout his life.
And although Conrad was admired by most English authors for his distinctive style – including by Ford, who said his writing contained ‘little crepitations of surprise’, and HG Wells, who said it was ‘Oriental […] as delicate as clockwork’ – others were less enamoured by his approach to the English language.
Robert Lynd, for example, said it was a ‘very regrettable thing’ that Conrad chose to write in English, rather than Polish, suggesting that:
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Had he but written in Polish his stories would assuredly have been translated into English […and] would, I am certain, have been a more precious possession on English shelves than the works of Joseph Conrad in the original English, desirable as they are.
Despite everything, Conrad was never quite accepted as a British writer – much like his characters. And, when Conrad died in 1924, Virginia Woolf’s obituary labelled him ‘our guest’ – despite the fact that he had, by the time of his death, lived in the UK for over 40 years.
But there were more Poles in Anglophone modernism than just Conrad...
‘Fra th’ Pole’: Poles in DH Lawrence
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DH Lawrence, photo: Wikimedia Commons
DH Lawrence was another English modernist writer who was personally influenced by Polishness, with his wife Frieda being of mixed German and Polish blood – suitably, Polish characters feature in his 1915 novel The Rainbow, which details three generations of a Polish-English (and part German) family.
As in Conrad, the identity and nationality of Lawrence’s Polish characters are difficult for English locals to determine. When the Polish-German Lydia Lensky and her daughter Anna appear, English characters are unable to immediately ascertain their names or origins, which instead become the subject of gossip:
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‘An’ wheer do you reckon [Lydia’s] from, then?’
‘I don’t know. They do say as she hails fra th’ Pole. I don’t know,’ Tilly hastened to add, knowing he would attack her.
[…]
‘Mrs Bentley says as she’s fra th’ Pole – else she is a Pole, or summat.’
The confusion around ‘fra th’ Pole’ here suggests English characters are oblivious to Poland, and Polish nationality: Lydia is clearly different, clearly ‘fra some foreign parts’, but the details of her background and identity are left uncertain. By conflating ‘fra th’ Pole’ with ‘is a Pole’, Lawrence also toys with the difference between residency – living somewhere, but perhaps not being a citizen of that country, and nationality – that is, belonging to a nation. Lydia, who is only partially Polish, epitomises this overlap, never quite being a full Pole or, later, a full Brit. But for Poles, the intersection between identity and place was also a pressing issue in the early 20th century when the Polish state was still under partition, with Polish nationals divided from their country and forced to live across the world. Leaving Lydia’s identity unclear, Lawrence therefore implicitly comments on issues of belonging for those from Poland – and the sense of exile pervading their every move.
This is also emphasised in the difference between Lydia’s Polish and British life: in her new Yorkshire home, Lydia is ‘poor, quite alone […] but in Poland she was a lady well-born, a landowner’s daughter’. Lydia repeatedly returns to memories of her Polish upbringing – from the countryside, to the peasants, and the seasons – and when she comes back to the reality of her British home, ‘she [is] lost’. It is precisely loss, and nostalgia, which saturate Lydia’s new life, and though ‘in the superficial activity of her life, she was all English’, she is haunted by her past in Poland: the ‘great blot looming blank […the] long blanks and darkness of abstraction were Polish’. The terms ‘blank’ and ‘abstraction’ equate Polishness with emptiness; both in terms of physical loss and as the terminology of linguistic omission, serving as a nod to disrupted communication. Lawrence therefore implies Lydia’s past Polish life has permanently vanished, never to be recovered or re-accessed. But ‘blanks’ are also pauses, moments of respite: Lydia returns to her rich heritage of Polishness to break away from her English life, which has proven only disappointing – a life of bereavement, an ongoing struggle to belong, and prejudice.
The ‘Pole’ in Wyndham Lewis
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Conrad’s grave, photo: Wikimedia Commons
In Lawrence’s work, Polish characters exist on boundaries – both belonging and in exile, both in the past and in the present, both rich and poor. And in Wyndham Lewis’s literature, Polishness is also associated with liminality: in his 1909 essay ‘The “Pole”’, Lewis describes Polish characters as ‘board[ers]’ of hotels, where they are defined by their guest-like identity – as ‘exile[s]’ or as perpetually ‘wandering’ people – rather than as anything permanent.
In fact, and despite the seemingly clear title of the essay, Polish identity is again left unclear here: ‘the Pole’ not only comes from Poland, but can also come from Russia – and indeed from ‘any nation’, so long as their life ‘resembled the unaccountable life of the true slav parasite’. The scare quotes around the term ‘Pole’ in the title of the essay serve to reinforce these ambiguities, casting doubt on Polish identity – Lewis might allege he is recounting a particular ‘sect’, and demonstrates an awareness of contemporary political exile from Eastern Europe, but any sense of real-life Polishness is left suspended.
As Richard Niland notes, Lewis returned to Polish themes when World War I was declared, saying that he felt the ‘curtain went down’ on Conrad in 1914 – Niland suggests that Conrad may have been seen as ‘too much of an outsider at a time of intense national pride’. This is more in keeping with Lewis’s later fascistic ideology, and provides a new lens when reading his disparaging comments on Polishness back in 1909. Lewis also wrote about a Russian-Polish art dealer, Louis Soltyk, in his 1918 novel Tarr. And, in his 1933 long poem ‘One-Way Song’, he also name-dropped a real-life Pole – the poet, pretender to the Polish throne, and eventually extreme right-wing activist, Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk:
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But lo upon the sidewalks of New York
I am now of the same standing as Montalk.
Montalk, who was born in New Zealand, was the great-grandson of Count Józef Franciszek Jan Potocki, the Polish insurgent, and based his claim to the Polish throne on these family connections. Jailed in the 1930s for trying to publish erotic poetry, Montalk donned mediaeval garb and gained a reputation for his eccentric style. He also had connections to wider English modernists too.
After a meeting with him, Virginia Woolf said he was:
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An appalling bore, dressed in flowing purple, with hair down his shoulders, conviction that he is King of Poland; and the accent and manners of a Cockney stable boy.
Author
(From Stephanie De Montalk’s Unquiet World)
During the war, Montalk published his Katyn Manifesto – the first acknowledgement of the Katyn massacre published in English.
Wyspiański & Katherine Mansfield
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Katherine Mansfield, 1917, photo: Wikimedia Commons
Another Anglophone writer inspired by Polishness was Katherine Mansfield. According to Gerri Kimbler and Magda Heydel’s article for the LA Review of Books, ‘Katherine Mansfield: The Polish Connection’, Mansfield began to be inspired by Polish art and culture after a love affair with literary critic and translator Florian Sobieniowski, which began around 1909.
Sobieniowski was an admirer of Stanisław Wyspiański, who died in 1907 – one of Mansfield’s poems from that time was addressed ‘To Stanislaw Wyspiański’:
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From the other side of the world,
From a little island cradled in the giant sea bosom,
From a little land with no history,
(Making its own history, slowly and clumsily
Piecing together this and that, finding the pattern, solving the problem,
Like a child with a box of bricks),
I, a woman, with the taint of the pioneer in my blood,
Full of a youthful strength that wars with itself and is lawless,
I sing your praises, magnificent warrior; I proclaim your triumphant battle.
My people have had nought to contend with…
(Extract from the poem.)
The poem, which is a homage to Wyspiański, the fight for Polish independence, and Anglophone ignorance about Poland’s struggle, was translated by Sobieniowski into Polish in 1910, but only published in English in 1938, after Mansfield’s death.
Kimbler and Heydel also write that Mansfield and Sobienowski were connected through their work for the English little magazine, Rhythm, with Sobienowski listed as a Polish correspondent for the magazine. There were also plans for an edition of Rhythm dedicated to Wyspiański, they note, but this never came to fruition.
Poles & the Preludes in TS Eliot
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TS Eliot also touches on Polishness in his 1915 poem ‘Portrait of a Lady’:
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We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole
Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips.
‘So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul
Should be resurrected only among friends […]’.
Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins
Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,
Capricious monotone
That is at least one definite ‘false note’.
Here, unlike with the previous authors, Eliot is not concerned with issues around Polish identity – rather, Polishness, epitomised in Chopin, is part of Eliot’s criticism of Romanticism, and focus on the lethargy of modern life. As Andrew Swarbrick writes, the lady – who chirrups away about Chopin – represents ‘a culture falling into decadence’: her words are ‘slithery’, and her world is one of ‘dulled inertness; wishes and desires are not advanced towards any action’. The man she is talking to, meanwhile, is left bored by her incessant chatter, his body interrupting the music with ‘a more primitive, aggressive sensation’, which parodies the high-culture and elegance of the concert hall.
But what about the references to Polish characters? Aside from Chopin as a symbol of Romanticism, it could be argued that Eliot is also commenting on the influence of foreign culture (and Polish culture) in Britain. Eliot was certainly familiar with some examples of Polish-British culture, including Conrad: his 1925 poem ‘The Hollow Men’ even begins with the epigraph ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’, a quote from Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, which itself comments on anti-imperialism, and issues around defining foreignness.
Critics suggest the phrase ‘the latest Pole’ may refer to Polish pianists Artur Rubenstein or Ignacy Jan Paderewski – both of whom were known for their long hair.
But interestingly, the description around ‘the latest Pole’ – that they ‘transmit the Preludes, through [their] hair and finger-tips’ – could also be read as a more ominous description of the spread of Polish culture. Although connected to the arts and to high culture, it also implies threats of corruption. This recalls depictions of Poles – as in Conrad’s ‘Amy Foster’ – as diseased and repulsive, and again plays into contemporary anxieties about increased migration; the suggestion that Polish characters are porous and corrupting points to fears that foreignness could contaminate modern life. This is reinforced later in the descriptions of the (English) man’s bodily noises, which eventually overwhelm the poem, transforming the beauty of the music to grotesqueries of the flesh.
No limit to Polishness in Anglophone modernism
And that’s not all – Polish characters also appear in other works too, including Jean Rhys’s debut novel, the 1928 Quartet, in which the Polish art dealer Stephan Zelli is sent to prison – and his wife Marya has to survive in Paris alone. The novel is in keeping with Rhys’s later works, many of which detail (female) displacement and foreignness.
And in George Bernard Shaw’s 1909-1910 play Misalliance, the Polish Lina Szczepanowska, who was from an ‘interesting nation’, also gives English characters a lesson in pronouncing her name:
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Say fish church […] now say Szczepanowska.
And American poet William Carlos Williams was another Anglophone writer inspired by Polishness in his works. In fact, he once said the language of his poems, a vernacular of everyday American modernity, was from ‘the mouths of Polish mothers’. His poetry reflects the lives of disadvantaged individuals he visited in his professional career as a doctor – including the possibly Polish character Mrs Robitza in ‘Portrait of a Woman in Bed’.
From language to the arts, from immigration to nostalgia, Polishness was depicted in varying ways in Anglophone modernism, with literature referring real life issues affecting Poles in the early 20th century. Virginia Woolf might have just deemed Conrad a ‘guest’ – but Poles in Anglophone modernism were so much more than that…
Written by Juliette Bretan, Jan 2021
Sources: ‘The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad’, vol 4, edited by Frederick R Karl and Laurence Davies; Lisa Schuster, ‘The Use and Abuse of Political Asylum in Britain and Germany’; Michael North, ‘The Dialect of Modernism’; Jeffery Meyers, ‘Joseph Conrad: A Biography’; Terry Collits, ‘Postcolonial Conrad’; Richard Niland, ‘Conrad and History’; Stephanie De Montalk, ‘Unquiet World: The Life of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk’; lareviewofbooks.org
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