Like many before him, he started from Paris and a visit at Giedroyc's at Maisons-Laffitte. There he got a home, food, and protection of his vital publishing interests. However, after the initial delight with the "wunderkind", the "ill-treated and unhappy boy who has rebelled", the prince-of-the-editors and his home crew led by the Hertzes soon got disappointed and impatient with the one who, irrespective of the circumstances, followed the old-Polish, Warsaw's or drivers' ways, abused their hospitality and played a media circus star intoxicated with freedom and a sense of self-importance. Graceful, aware of his good looks and charm which he had previously tried on women, editors and their secretaries, he does whatever pleases him: gives interviews to second-rate, silly, sensation-seeking French tabloids, wastes the cash earned on his published and prize-winning books, hangs around with tarts and drinks vodka, preferably in Russian bars."Having come to Paris, I behaved like a total idiot", this Polish Dmitri Karamazov will soon confess.
The short stories, especially those written in Israel, in which Hłasko, "crossing the last border of shame", poses as a pimp as in A Tale About Esther or a male prostitute, a gigolo living off rich women as in Killing the Second Dog, are naturally a literary fiction, but one which falls within his convention of "true fabrication".There must have been something in it, for Marek had an unlimited imagination and would sometimes authenticate, arrange and try out its products in his "lifewriting", often in a risky and costly way. His sharp, vibrant literature was squeezed out of life, obtained through living, incubated in and tested on himself.
He did not want it to rustle with paper; he was ready to waste his health, position, dignity for it. Credible description, natural dialogue, psychologically true behaviour were to him categorical and sacred, priceless imperatives. This is of critical importance to understanding whatever sense and logic there was in his adventurous life, his European, Israeli and American hustle with the intermingling countries, landscapes, women, standards, habits, occupations, psychiatric clinics and prisons, publishing houses, the cars in which this "communist James Dean" sped and the planes in which he cruised over California.
His life from 1958 to 1969 was a hectic, impatient and seemingly chaotic run which was initially counter-pointed by his meandrous and unsuccessful attempts to return to his Country from Paris, West Berlin, Tel Aviv, and which later became more disorderly, capricious, driven by depression, a sudden impulse, a desire to see someone's face (Janek Rojewski's, Esther Steinbach's), to enter into a relationship with a woman (Sonia Ziemann) or conversely, to run away from her, from the bourgeois captivity of well-being and the boredom of the German Gemütlichkeit (Sonia Ziemann, her father and brother). It must have also been driven by his urge to travel and see new regions of the world or nooks and crannies of existence, or by simple business (the publishing house Kiepenheuer und Witsch in Cologne, Roman Polański in Hollywood, ZDF's editor Hans-Jürgen Bobermin in Wiesbaden). This chase, those comings and goings, gettings together and leavings, marriages and divorces, the glass wool factory and the tin wholesale business, the construction site, the measuring staff and foundry furnace, the cockpit, the night club and the cheap, lousy hotel eroded Hłasko's invaluable energy of youth, legendary vitality, resilience and perseverance, spiritual balance, daring, humour, good feeling and sound sleep (he was getting increasingly addicted to tranquilizers and sleeping pills). "We lose life when we live" - but then he was gaining a thing which is priceless to a born, organic writer: literary themes which have been paid for and verified by life.
The struggle which he continuously treated himself to, be it in France, Italy, Switzerland, England, Germany, Israel or the United States, must have had a certain mysterious therapeutic property and contained or released some compensatory and defence mechanism, for it translated into spontaneous and regular creativity. He was constantly on the lookout for this or that, chased and destroyed it, overfilled with a restless spirit of contrariness, challenge, rebellion - a truly Hegelian spirit of instant negation of whatever condition has been achieved. And all this hustle and bustle would regularly - despite Hłasko's lack of organization - spew out new short stories and novels like a devil's mill, their time and method of conception a mystery to everybody. What came out were shapely, fair little pearls of "Polish", "Israeli" and "American" stories.
In one decade Hłasko managed to have produced - in addition to smaller works, such as the essays on contemporary filmmaking for the Swiss Die Weltwoche or Letters from America, which were printed in Giedroyc's Kultura - a long number of fair-sized, outstanding short stories and novels which were translated into many languages.
Regardless of all those more or less clever discussions about this "confabulation", "lark", "literary autobiography", "para-autobiography" or "diary turned into fiction", a separate and extremely important place in Hłasko's output is taken by Beautiful Twentysomethings, a work written at Maisons-Laffitte, whose first excerpts were immediately printed in Kultura, vols. 11 and 12, at the end of 1965, and which was published by Instytut Literacki in May 1966. This extraordinary book waited for publication in the author's country another twenty plus years to finally, castrated by the censorship and with a non-committal publisher's foreword, came out in Czytelnik in 1988.
Hłasko's tangled, turbulent and yet literary fruitful life came to an end in 1969. Aged thirty-five and an exile for eleven years, he died on the night of 13th June at 26, Hauberisserstrasse, Wiesbaden, in the flat of the aforementioned German television editor and screenplay writer Hans-Jürgen Bobermin, in unexplained circumstances. The immediate cause of the death which occurred "between 1 and 8 am" was a collapse due to an overdose of sleeping pills combined with alcohol. So much for the medical report. The multifarious indirect causes which the years deposit in one's consciousness are usually unknown to ambulance doctors.
Author: Tadeusz Stefanczyk, December 2006.