The Man With White Eyes – Leopold Tyrmand | #language & literature

The Man With White Eyes – Leopold Tyrmand

The Polish title of Leopold Tyrmand’s most famous novel is much shorter, perhaps one of the shortest in classic Polish literature. ‘Zły’ means ‘the evil one’, or ‘the wicked’, but also refers to the devil. It’s a story with a comic-book touch: the lone vigilante with an unknown identity fighting crime in post-war Warsaw. Or rather, amongst the ruins of Warsaw, as the city was totally destroyed during the war and only rebuilt from the ashes recently.

The white eyes from the English title are his characteristic feature, together with a deadly punch and a diamond signet ring, which the main character uses as a knuckle-duster, tearing the jaws of bad guys to pieces. This book, published behind the Iron Curtain in 1955, feels like a surprising parallel to Batman or precursor to Sin City.

The whole story contains dozens of scattered scenes. A hooligan attack at the tram stop. Bullying in the bus. Dozens of realistic pictures, each of them seen by a different person. Tyrmand first describes some place: a street bazaar, a dive bar, or a hockey field in a bad part of town. Later he introduces the local gang that bullies innocent folk. And then, in the shadow, a pair of white eyes glow.

The titular character is like a ghost. A rumour, an urban legend. He comes, he punishes and saves, he disappears. Even the way he wages his war against hooligans and thugs is unrealistic. Nobody uses firearms; it’s a story of street brawls with fists, boots and the occasional aid of knives and bricks, gas pipes or ‘tulips’ – broken glass bottles. Slowly, page by page, the pieces of the puzzle fit together. The urban legend grows and we learn more about ‘Zły’ thanks to his allies, his victims and his archenemy, the Warsaw crime boss who controls the street gangs of the city.

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Three Crosses Square in Warsaw, the location where Leopold Tyrmand's 'Zły' begins, as well as the place where the character of Juliusz Kalodont's kiosk is stationed, photo: Wikimedia Commons

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The whole story really feels like modern pop culture, something like Punisher or Iron Fist on Netflix. But it can’t be. It comes from an entirely different world, Poland under the communist regime, in one of its darkest moments, called ‘Stalinism’. A time of rebuilding and revolutionary change, oppression and terror. After the war, thousands of people were killed for opposing the communist regime, and many more were discriminated against and punished for having the wrong level of education, social background or pre-war wealth. And old Poland was replaced by a communist utopia, with its propaganda, socialist-realist art and so on. The whole Soviet, North Korean package.

Simultaneously, it was a time of social transitions. The borders changed and people from lost regions moved into houses abandoned by fleeing Germans. People from the countryside, who often walked barefooted and starved before the war, moved into the cities, received free education, health care and the chance for a stable future

And the West, especially the USA, was seen as the great enemy. Before Stalin’s death allowed the first shy reforms in 1956, any forms of American entertainment were either unknown or banned. The question is, how did Tyrmand get his ideas? Did he invent the superhero genre from scratch?

The author explains in the novel that his idea of world-building, with the city ravaged by hooligans, the desperados of the era, regular bandits and organised crime lords, came from western movies and books. Another influence came from Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novels. Sienkiewicz wrote about the Dzikie Pola, which means ‘The Wild Fields’, the lawless borderlands of Ukraine, vast plains invaded by Cossacks and Tartars. And in his book, Tyrmand directly compares his lawless Warsaw to the old Ukraine and American Wild West.

Still, it’s pretty possible that Leopold Tyrmand actually knew about Batman. And he was an expert of American pop culture, especially jazz, so he could have been inspired by the DC comic book. The author himself was a bit of an urban legend, too. At one point, he was famous for being the only artist in Warsaw who dared to stare at the other side of the Iron Curtain. He was a famous dandy and a trendsetter, allegedly involved in the bikiniarze movement, the Polish equivalent of beatniks. Bikiniarze were a subculture of rebelling kids, enjoying jazz music and other forbidden trends from ‘decadent West’. No other writer dared to live – and dress – that way. Tyrmand was an iconic nonconformist. And it’s worth mentioning, that in this time and place, nonconformism often meant death.

Because of the way he rebelled, Tyrmand holds a very special status in the history of communist Poland. Most of the martyrs of the era died, killed by Soviets or Polish security forces, beaten to death in prisons or shot in forests during a chase, but Tyrmand fought differently. He rebelled by wearing nice, colourful socks and following ‘bourgeoisie’ manners. He was like a parrot or a proud peacock amongst pigeons and crows.

The writing of The Man With White Eyes was an act of protest too, as it was aimed at pure entertainment, not educating the readers with Marxist propaganda, which was the only accepted task of Polish writer in this era.

And who does the man with the white eyes fight against?

His enemies are tough, demoralised, war-scarred kids, who became Poland’s first generation of hooligans. They wear oprychówka, a flat cap, stuffed with old newspaper to create the desired shape and protect from blows. Such hooligans were a real plague; they robbed and killed many people, especially in the local trains. They were famous for catchy lines, which they used during robberies, such as: Kup cegłę za stówke, ocalisz pan główkę meaning ‘Buy a brick for a hundy, and protect your head, buddy’. This line was later used in a famous hooligan scene from the comedy Ewa Chce Spać / Eve Wants to Sleep.

Tyrmand’s novel focuses on entertainment, but it also tries to ask: why do some people like violence and hurting others? The author seems to believe in individual responsibility and he argues that thugs receive their lesson by taking a serious beating. Zero Tolerance. But he is aware of the social and historical conditions.

Poland after the war was a scary place. People were poor and accustomed to death and killing. And after the war ended, things got worse. Those who returned to their homes could easily be killed by their neighbours for a pair of shoes or a slice of bread. This violent, chaotic reality of a new beginning was portrayed in such movies as The Law and the Fist directed by Jerzy Hoffman and Edward Skórzewski, with a famous song by Edmund Fetting, or the more recent Rose by Wojtek Smarzowski.

The schools were full of demoralised, traumatised kids, who spent their war years in the woods, shooting Germans and Russians. And now they had to pretend that they were once more innocent schoolboys. I heard a family anecdote from this era, about a boy who brought a hand grenade to school and after the exam stood up and gave an ultimatum to the teacher. Give me an A, woman, or I’ll blow this damned place to pieces.

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Mural dedicated to Leopold Tyrmand's 'The Man with White Eyes', Three Crosses Square, Warsaw, 2018, photo: Szymon Starnawski / Polska Press / East News

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But how does this book read in the 21st century? Is it still fun?

The novel is a page-turner, full of violence, street fighting, love affairs and poetic impressions, which give a subtle finish to the picture.

Tyrmand likes to mix various perspectives. Observe the filthy bar and a bloody fistfight with the eye of a scared outsider, the subtle, cultural journalist. This way of writing gives a really broad scope, but the story doesn’t have a clear main character. You cold say that the main character is the city of Warsaw itself.

There were many attempts to adapt The Man With White Eyes into a movie or TV series, but it’s a difficult task. The legendary nature of the main character makes it even worse. It’s like a Batman movie in which we only have Batman, but even more silent than usual. Bruce Wayne appears only near the end and tells us how Joker killed his parents, and so on. But for the novel, it works.

The mood of the book is violent, funny and dark, romantic and witty, with a wide panorama of city life, its subcultures and trends, main streets and dangerous corners. It’s a rumble in the ruins. Tyrmand loved his damaged, war-torn city that had just been resurrected from the ashes.

My favourite part of the book is a chain of scenes, where a crime lord’s recruiter visits various shady places in Warsaw in order to gather a great army of hooligans for the final battle. We enter teenaged house parties with prohibited jazz music, infamous, crime-driven districts, slums and river beaches, building squares and so on, looking for new soldiers. It’s like travelling in time, through obscure places usually omitted by history books. Each visited part of the city has its own vibe, its own rhythm. Tyrmand adored jazz and wrote a book about it – even his style of writing was a bit jazzy, vivid and vibrating.

If I were to find some western equivalents of this story, some spiritual kin, I would say that the cult movie The Warriors by Walter Hill, about the funky street gangs in 1970s New York has a similar touch, a display of various districts and subcultures. Another reference would be A Clockwork Orange, both book and film.

leopold tyrmand

communist Poland

The Man With White Eyes

post-war warsaw