Janusz Rudnicki – The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus

Saturday, September 17, 2011 — Damian Kelleher

Janusz Rudnicki – The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus

The narrator of Janusz Rudnicki's The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus is nameless, lonely and old. He commemorates the thirtieth wedding anniversary with his wife and the tenth anniversary of her death by visiting the Powązki Cemetery. While there, he reads Bruno Schulz (the great Polish writer, known in English for The Street of Crocodiles). While there, he worries about his life, one in which “death has passed me by.” While there, he decides to leave Poland.

He decides to leave, partly because he witnessed a young couple fondling one another at the Powazki Cemetery and it made him sad and lonely and, partly because of “...our thirtieth anniversary, which is basically our twentieth. And maybe also because I've never gone anywhere else, since then. Those are the reasons I decided to leave. To leave!

And he packs, of course, his Schulz.

He arrives in Sicily, where he vows, in his newly begun diary (fragments of which we are reading), that he will not speak of his wife any longer. She has been left in Poland, along with the rest of his life. Of course, this doesn't actually happen – she remains firmly embedded in his mind, in large part because he doesn't have anything else to occupy himself with. For the last ten years, he has missed her, and for the last ten years, he has become progressively side-lined in his children's day-to-day lives as they grow and make their own families, and side-lined by his occupation as a teacher of Polish, thanks first to his age and then to his retirement. In short, he has nothing else to do with his time except miss her, read Schulz, and guiltily hire prostitutes to appease his physical desires while heightening his emotional frustrations.

In Sicily, then, an “exquisite hotel, the aristocratic Villa Ducale.” He walks around, enjoys the sights, and then ends up at the Teatro Greco, an amphitheater, and sits near a stage to watch a young girl performing her routine. She cartwheels, somewhat successfully, and he watches. She looks “like Salma Hayek” and then, while she practices a handstand, her blouse falls to her armpits and her stomach and breasts are revealed, and then she notices him, and then – she stays that way. The notice the other noticing, and neither seems to mind. The narrator forgets he is an elderly Polish man, forgets his wife, forgets everything, because her is a beautiful young girl and she doesn't mind.

The story shifts. Before, the narration was confessional in the sense of a distant autobiography written by a man who feels little any more for the times he is explaining. Certainly the narrator went to great lengths to examine his loneliness but the sensation was one of abstraction, an examination occurring because it was interesting, but not because anything was going to change. Now, newly energised by the sight of the young woman's breasts, the narrator shifts his tone, becomes exuberant, irrational, and wildly enthusiastic regarding unlikely possibilities. In short, he falls in lust.

Though the story is different in tone, it reminds one of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, which sees a similarly elderly man who falls in love with a young person (in Mann's novel, a young boy) while travelling overseas. Death in Venice has the old man make a fool of himself in his attempts to impress Tadzio, which involve, among other things, dressing much younger, lightening his hair, and wearing makeup to cover blemishes and wrinkles. The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus, on the other hand, shows the narrator as a bit of a fool, but one who knows it. He eagerly inserts himself into the woman's life by “accidentally” bumping into her where she works and where she relaxes, but he knows (for the most part) that he is the unwanted old man. He is content to bask in the radiance of her youth.

At one stage she suggests to him he should stay with her and her friends and perform in their troupe. He balks, but then – why not? What's in Poland for him? His wife is dead and his life has become a matter of waiting out time until he, too, died. Why not stay? And, just maybe, it'll mean they can be together. He agrees and moves into the share-house where she lives:

I have my little nook. Mattress on the veranda, not enough space in the apartment, there's always someone sleeping somewhere. But I like to be alone, anyway. She sleeps in a room with a girlfriend, she can always come out to see me. But she doesn't. The starry night above me, mixed feelings inside me. Because she doesn't.

No, instead, the narrator becomes “Augustus”, a bumbling clown in the performances. He hates this new life, and hates more that she ignores and neglects him. For her, he was able to fill a role and she was young and pretty enough to convince him to do it. For him, it's the foolish love of a man old enough to know better (but are we ever, really?)

As a parallel to Death in Venice, which sees Venice fall under the sway of a contagion, in Sicily the bird flu has arrived. Birds are dying and, again like Death in Venice, the story shifts in tone again to become more heavily symbolic, more allusive and harder to pin down. The narrator as we know him disappears into “Augustus”, and as the story ends he is injured, ill, and possibly crazy. The woman has vanished, the troupe has vanished, and he closes the piece walking along a beach with dying birds dropping from the sky.

Curiously, instead of Death in Venice providing a firm literary anchor to the story this role is instead provided by Bruno Schulz, whose work provides quotes taken in and out of context. Quite frequently the narrator will quote a line from Schulz, italicised, generally though not always fitting in smoothly with the text. An example:

I observed her with a mixture of apprehension and pleasurable excitement, she looked at me, I nodded my head...

Schulz wrote surrealist stories, tales that mixed reality with something else, something darker and more strange. He was fond of doubles and dopplegangers, and the surface of things was never the reality of them. In this, The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus is not a literary child of Schulz, but the text, all the same, remains enamoured with him. The narrator loves Schulz, but the construction and execution of the story is indebted more to Thomas Mann. It's an interesting juxtaposition, one that plays out effectively over the fifteen-odd pages of the story.

The greatest success of The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus is that the narrator knows he is the fool and is willing to play the part if only because it means that he can, for a little while, be near a beautiful young person again. It's sad to think that he feels this way, that his own life has become something grey and limited and small and known, and that he can't be the source of light any more, but can only feel its heat from a distance. He is an endearing fellow, and one wishes he could have had a better experience in Sicily, but then it wouldn't have been true. The young woman was never going to be with him in any real sense, and the saddest part is he knew it but played along anyway.

The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus by Janusz Rudnicki is a short story from the Dalkey Archive Press' anthology, Best European Fiction 2012

Author	Janusz Rudnicki
Title	The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus
Translator	Jennifer Croft
Nationality	Polish
Publisher	Dalkey Archive Press
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Fishpond (AU)

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