John Z. Guzlowski

Antoni Gronowicz: Con-man, Postmodernist,

or Polish American Patriot?

My brief relationship with Antoni Gronowicz began in 1981.

I had just gotten my first full-time teaching position at Eastern

Illinois University and as part of my responsibilities I was

handed the editorship of a little poetry and fiction magazine

called Karamu. It was and is one of the littlest of little

magazines, an annual with a print run of only 250 copies per

issue. Despite the size of this little magazine, I yearly

received about 400 poetry submissions -- mostly from beginning

writers or writers who had exhausted all of the bigger little

magazines and had some how found themselves sending a batch of

poems to the little magazine with the strange name.

One day, I received a grouping of twenty or so poems from a

writer who included an unusual cover letter. Many of the cover

letters I received tagged onto poems were sad pleadings for

recognition, or angry statements about how the world had failed

to acknowledge the poems of the sender, or straightforward

requests to please read these poems. As I said, however, one of

these cover letters was unusual. The writer was Antoni

Gronowicz, and he began by addressing me as a fellow Pole. I was

caught.

I'm something of a poet myself, and here I was listening to

another Polish-American poet. After excitedly turning to

Gronowicz's poems and reading three or four, my excitement

vanished. The poems were terrible: abstract, chaotic,

alternately obscure and obvious, and finally sloppy in the worst

sort of way. The writer was clearly a novice, I believed then,

who one day in the midst of a brain storm had declared himself a

poet.1 I turned again to the cover letter to see what he had to

say about himself.

What he had to say surprised me. In this letter he wrote of

his substantial literary accomplishments: of the volumes of 11 The reader interested in sampling some of Gronowicz's poetry in English can do soin The Quiet Vengeance of Words (New York: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences inAmerica, 1968). This volume of poetry is a reprinting of poems that originallyappeared in The Polish Review, Vol. XIII, no. 1 (Winter 1968), pp. 66-94.

poetry he had published both here and in Poland; of his numerous

book-length biographies of such figures as Kosciusko, Chopin,

Modjewska, and Paderewski; of his five novels published by such

first rate publishers as Scribners and Dodd; of his eleven

produced plays; of his three books on the history and culture of

Poland. If this wasn't enough to confound a young editor, he

went on to tell me of his current involvement with Pope John Paul

II and Greta Garbo, and of the biographies he was writing of

these friends of his. I was impressed, but also confused. How

could a writer with all of these accomplishments and such

incredible projects possibly be the author of such bad poems?

What I came to believe pretty quickly was that all of the

bragging in the letter was an ingenious con to pressure me into

taking his poems, and that this Gronowicz was just some clever

blow hard. But nevertheless, I wrote him a cordial rejection

letter, and in it I suggested he send me some of his prose. I

figured maybe I was wrong and that maybe poetry wasn't his forte

and that maybe his prose was magical and that he'd be willing to

share some with me and my 250 subscribers, and that maybe this

would be the making of my career, or at least help get me

promoted to Associate Professor.

I never heard from him again, but picture my amazement a few

months later when -- while going through a box of books at a

garage sale -- I came across a novel by Gronowicz called An

Orange Full of Dreams. I opened it up. The Forward was by Greta

Garbo. I turned to the back cover; there were words of praise

from Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. He said the book was

"Beautiful," a novel that "shows a great knowledge of women and

their many sides." The Kirkus Service said of this novel, "It

works. . . a fascinator with the seductive lilt of legend and

fantasia." There was also a quotation from the widely-respected,

American literary critic Maxwell Geismar: "Antoni Gronowicz is

some kind of Goddamn Genius."2

I was stumped. Was this guy the same Antoni Gronowicz who

had sent me those bad poems? Was he in fact the genius Maxwell

Geismar said he was? Had Gronowicz actually written all the

works he had told me had written?

What I've discovered in the years since then is that yes, my

Antoni Gronowicz, the bad poet, was the same Gronowicz who wrote 22 Antoni Gronowicz, An Orange Full of Dreams (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company,1971).

An Orange Full of Dreams and yes, Gronowicz had actually produced

at least thirty books of fiction, poetry, history, and biography

-- but no, he wasn't the genius Geismar said he was.

What he is, however, isn't quite clear to me or, I think, to

many people because my initial impression of him is, I think, to

some extent true. Despite the fact that he had written many

books and despite the fact that he had apparently received

superior reviews from such papers as the New York Times and The

Chicago Tribune, he was to a certain degree a con-man, and this

is probably how he'll be remembered by those who remember such

things. His status as a literary con-man was confirmed by the

last two works he produced: God's Broker, his biography of Pope

John Paul II; and Garbo, his posthumously published biography of

the great actress.

God's Broker claims to be a life of the Polish Pope based on

200 hours of actual, intimate, and revealing interviews with the

Pontiff as well as lengthy interviews with those who -- like

Cardinal Wyszynski and Gomulka -- knew Karol Wojtyla. But what

it actually is, apparently, is a hoax. All 40,000 copies of the

book were recalled from bookstores almost immediately by its

publisher (who subsequently declared bankruptcy) after Vatican

officials and John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia denied

Gronowicz's claim that he had ever interviewed the Pope.3 A

review by Thurston Davis published in the Catholic magazine

America further challenged Gronowicz's credibility by focusing on

the extensive statements by Wyszynski in this text. Gronowicz,

the reviewer contends, repeatedly put nonsensical remarks in the

Primate's mouth regarding such matters as the procedure for

nominating a pope, the history of the Catholic Church, and the

current situation of the Church in America. Davis seals his

attack on Gronowicz's veracity by noting that many of Wyszynski's

remarks describe events that occurred after the Cardinal's death

by cancer on May 28, 1981. The reviewer sums up his view of

Gronowicz's book with the following: "It is impossible to take

this book seriously. Common sense and internal evidence force

the reader to discount whole chunks of what is asserted here.

Much is nonsense. There are jumbled bits of church history.

There are badly told ecclesiastical jokes and pseudo-inside

church gossip. Unashamedly, most of the book is in direct

quotation marks. The guarded tongue is a quality not to be found

in Gronowicz's interviewees."4

The story of God's Broker, of course, does not end her.

Gronowicz had sold the film rights of the book for a reported six

figure sum, and a federal grand jury subpoenaed him to stand

before it to answer charges of mail fraud and to produce the

supposed notes of his interviews with the Pope. Gronowicz

refused, asserting that the First Amendment barred a grand jury's

intervention for the purpose of investigating the truth or

falsity of this book. A United States District Court held

Gronowicz in contempt and ordered him to pay fines of $500 a

day.5 He hired former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark to

represent him, and a subsequent Federal Appeals Court ruling

found that Gronowicz in fact did not have to produce the

requested information.6

A similar controversy concerning Gronowicz's credibility as 33 Ray Walters, "The Battle over 'Garbo.'" New York Times Book Review, June 24, 1990,p. 10.4. Thurston Davis, Rev. God's Broker: The Life of Pope John Paul II, America, April28, 1984, p. 324.5. James E. Roper, "Will the Supreme Court Hear Dead Man's Case?" Editor andPublisher, December 7, 1985, p. 7.6. "Gronowicz Wins Appeal on Subpoenaed Documents," Publisher's Weekly, March 18,1985, p. 16.

a biographer arose in connection with his book on Greta Garbo.

In this work, Gronowicz asserts that he had been an extremely

intimate friend of hers and a sort of Boswell to her Johnson

since 1938 when he made love to her at Paderewski's Swiss chalet.

Gronowicz also asserts in this work that he persuaded the actress

to collaborate on a biography which would be "the story of her

life as she told it to me in a voice I will never forget."7 Even

before the book was published following Garbo's death, her

friends and family challenged the biography calling it "a hoax"

and "an absolute lie," and they also claimed that Gronowicz in

fact never even knew the actress. The upshot of all of this was

another lawsuit to stop the book. This time the suit was against

the publisher Simon & Schuster because Antoni Gronowicz was dead.

The legal squabbling ended when Simon and Schuster and Garbo's

estate reached a confidential settlement which would give the

estate an undisclosed amount of money in exchange for the

publisher being allowed to continue to publish and market the

book.8

7. Antoni Gronowicz, Garbo (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 24. 8. Ray Walters, "The Battle over 'Garbo,'" p. 10.

Given all of these legal complexities and given the

questionable truthfulness of the books and given the way

Gronowicz comes across as a conman -- what gets lost is whether

or not there is anything of value in either book. My answer to

that question is yes. Despite the attack on Gronowicz's sources

and despite the daunting length of the book, God's Broker

contains sections that are worth reading. Gronowicz's depiction

of life in Krakow during the Second World War is moving and has

the ring of truth. The reader feels the uncertainty, the danger,

the fear, and the hunger of those years under the Nazi

occupation. An especially good chapter is the one entitled "The

Rays of Fatherhood" in which Gronowicz describes the attempt by

Wojtyla, his father, and his friends to share a traditional

Christmas Eve meal in 1940 and how this meal was interrupted by

the Gestapo.9 Gronowicz is also good in his depiction of the

creative, intellectual, and political milieux in Poland before

and after the war. For example, he introduces American readers

to various Polish artists and thinkers who otherwise might remain

unknown to them: writers such as Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz (author of

Fame and Glory), Mario Dabrowska (author of Adventures of a

Thinking Man), and Wojciech Zukrowski (author of Stone Tablets).

Readers also receive -- through Gronowicz's interviews with

Edward Gierek and Wladyslaw Gomulka -- an intimate and amusing

though probably fictitious sense of the political and social and

economic issues facing Poland during the Cold War. Especially

interesting are the arguments Gronowicz -- who often presents

himself as a character in this biography -- gets into with

Gomulka.

The Garbo book is equally interesting -- and incredible.

The great actress comes across, as one critic notes, "as an

altogether consistent, unillusioned, candid confessor" of the

most gossipy sort.10 She speaks of her relationships with John

Gilbert, Leopold Stokowski, and Winston Churchill. The section

on Churchill is especially amusing. He is depicted as a dirty

old man frothing and pleading with Garbo to show him her breasts.

The book is also filled with wonderfully entertaining anecdotes

about Hollywood. She tells us, for example, that Chaplin

wouldn't hire her because she was too tall and too good an

actress. John Lahr, the reviewer for the New York Times Book 9. Antoni Gronowicz, God's Broker: The Life of Pope John Paul II (New York: Richardsonand Snyder, 1984), pp. 104-107.

Review, enjoyed the book thoroughly and remarked, "If the book is

false, it is Gronowicz's very clever fiction."11 Taking a

similar position, the reviewer for Film Quarterly noted, "If

Gronowicz invented much or all of Garbo, he created a marvelous

character."12

While I am discussing Gronowicz's biographies of famous

Twentieth-Century figures, something needs to be said about his

most unusual book-length biography, the completely forgotten book

Hitler's Woman (also published as Hitler's Wife). The blurb on

the front cover of the paperback edition describes the book as a

depiction of "the intimate life of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun."

And the blurb on the back cover tells us the following: "The

intimate facts of this affair were traced by Antoni Gronowicz,

correspondent, during the dangerous days of the Third Reich.

Hunted, robbed, beaten almost to death, Gronowicz fled Germany

and published his amazing story in the United States, where it

was featured in Life and aroused a storm of controversy."13 But

10. John Fell, Rev. Garbo, Film Quarterly, Vol. 44 (Summer 1991), p. 28.11. John Lahr, "The World's Most Sensational Absence," New York Times Book Review,June 24, 1990, p. 10.12. John Fell, p. 29.

these sentences do little to prepare the reader for the amazing

narrative in this book.

The "intimate facts" correspondent Gronowicz brings from the

jaws of death and the mouth of hell are totally unbelievable.

But completely entertaining in an absurdist sort of way. He

presents Eva as a young girl living in the Carpathian mountains

of Czechoslovakia before World War I. All of which is

impossible, but that's beside the point. What is remarkable is

where Gronowicz takes us next in this story. Eva, it seems, is

in love with a Czech Robin Hood-freedom fighter who robs from the

rich to give to the poor -- and when he's not doing that -- he's

singing melodious gypsy songs in his deepest bandit basso. Into

this comic opera situation, steps Adolph Hitler, but an Adolph

Hitler no one has ever seen before. He has abandoned his art

studies in Vienna and has come to Eva's village to become a

police chief. He, of course, falls for and marries Eva who had

promised her father on his deathbed that she would marry some

good aryan boy. A love triangle at once develops because,

although married to Adolph, Eva is still drawn to the dark-eyed

13. Antoni Gronowicz, Hitler's Woman (New York: Belmont Books, 1961).

guitar strumming bandit.

All of this is weirdly comic. And one of the high points is

Eva and Adolph's wedding night during which he -- instead of

making love to her -- gives her a long-winded lecture first on

"the relation of home to the community and of the latter as an

integral part of the state" and second on the need for aryan

"duty and discipline."14 Meanwhile, Eva fights a losing battle

to stay awake. Adolph rants and Eva snores. The comic high

point of the novel, however, occurs near the book's end when Eva

-- tired of Adolph's aryan histrionics flees with her gypsy

freedom-fighter lover. She tells him, "I prefer Death with you

to life with Hitler."15 Their do-or-die, neck-or-nothing flight

through the dark mountains is accompanied with all the

melodramatic claptrap of a Saturday afternoon melodrama. There

are blizzards, avalanches, wrong turns, dead ends, howling

wolves, gun battles, horses dying beneath Eva and her lover, and

a fevered pursuit by Adolph Hitler armed with blazing six-guns.

It has to be read.

14. Antoni Gronowicz, Hitler's Woman, p. 83. 15. Ibid., p. 155.

I am not a historian specializing in the area of biography,

but I think that what Gronowicz may have achieved in these three

works (God's Broker, Garbo, Hitler's Woman) is something

approaching the creation of a new genre -- the pseudo biography.

His blend of fact and fantasy puts him in the camp of such

respected post-modernists as Robert Coover with his fictionalized

account of Richard Nixon's love for the atom spy Ethel Rosenberg

in the novel Public Burning; such postmodernists as Tim O'Brien

with his fictionalized memoir The Things They Carried in which

the author continually undermines the reality of the events that

he says make up his Vietnam experience; such postmodernists as E.

L. Doctorow with his fictionalized account of life in a Ragtime

America peopled by such "real" people as Houdini, Henry Ford,

Emma Goldman, Pancho Villa, and J. P. Morgan. I think this

connection to the postmodernists offers the scholar a perspective

on Gronowicz's works that bears attention and opens these works

to some interesting questions regarding the nature of biography,

the nature of fiction, and the intersection of the two.

Almost nothing else in Gronowicz's list of thirty plus works

matches the odd audacity of the three texts I've been discussing

up to this point. His two postmodern novels, An Orange Full of

Dreams and The Hookmen, are barely readable, even for those

interested in postmodernism as I am.16 Despite their self-

reflexive metafictional tone, their convoluted, fragmentary

narrative lines, their various excesses, their abstract,

flattened characters, these two novels lack the imaginative flair

and intellectual intensity of the best postmodern fiction written

by such novelists as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, John Hawkes,

William Burroughs, Cris Mazza, and William Gaddis. The only

aspect of these two works that I found interesting was the way

Gronowicz again revealed himself as a conman/artist in An Orange

Full of Dreams. In fact, there are basically two deceptions

going on in this work. First, it begins with a Forward

supposedly written by Greta Garbo in which she talks about a

dream that she supposedly told to Antoni Gronowicz, a dream

Gronowicz claims inspired the novel. This, of course, more than

likely is more of the same con that we have seen from him before.

Her estate claims that Garbo never wrote this Forward. The

second, more interesting con, is that this book, An Orange Full

of Dreams, which pretends to be the biography of a fictional

Polish actress of the Nineteenth-Century is in large part a word

for word transcription of Gronowicz's 1956 biography of the real

Nineteenth-Century Polish actress Modjeska.17

So what do we have here? A real biography masquerading as a

fictional biography? And earlier we had fictional biographies

masquerading as real biographies? Perhaps I should include this

novel in the list of three postmodern pseudo biographies, or

maybe this is another new genre, the pseudo novel. Again, it

appears that, for scholars of contemporary historiography and

literature, Gronowicz offers some interesting possibilities for

further study.

Before I conclude, I'd like to say a few things about the

rest of Gronowicz's work's. Beside the plays, about which I

cannot speak because I have not been able to track any of them

down (a thought which leads me to suspect that perhaps they don't

exist), the remainder of his works are primarily about Poland and

Polish subjects. These are probably the books that are of most

16. A positive review of The Hookmen appeared in Polish Review, Vol. , no. (1973),pp. 112-114. A largely negative review of both novels was printed in Polish AmericanStudies, Vol. XXXI, no. 1 (1975). pp. 42-44.17. Antoni Gronowicz, Modjeska (New York: T. Yoseloff, 1956).

interest to scholars wishing to trace various Polish-American

literary, historical, and cultural connections. These works, I

think, divide very nicely into three categories: his novels about

Poland, his works on Polish history, and his biographies of

notable Polish figures.

In each of these groups, Gronowicz's authorial persona seems

different from that of the writer in his Garbo or Eva Braun books

or in his postmodern novels. He presents himself in his Polish

books as that archetypal Polish figure: the eternal exile longing

for home while trying to explain to all the world the country

from which he came. The view we get of Poland, therefore, is a

view colored by nostalgia, and a desire to make the strangers he

finds himself among love his home country as much as he does.

The Poland he describes becomes the Poland of the exile's

dreams, a beautiful country of sensitive, humane people fated by

geography and history to struggle against successive waves of

brutal tyranny. Readers see this dream being dreamt in all of

these works. In Bolek and Four From the Old Town, two richly

illustrated adolescent novels set and written during the Second

World War, Gronowicz tells of young people dealing with a Poland

just before and after the Nazi blitzkrieg.18 In the former

novel, a young boy flees Poland at the start of the invasion; in

the later, the adolescents Gronowicz describes stay and struggle

to survive in a world transformed by the Nazis. What is most

evocative in these works is Gronowicz's depiction of that first

September of the war, what the brilliant novelist and translator

W. S. Kuniczak has called the "Thousand Hour Day."

However, what is equally interesting are the issues

Gronowicz raises, a number of which Professor Gladsky discusses

and analyzes in his seminal book on Polish American writers

Princes, Peasants, and other Polish Selves. In this study

Gladsky talks of how Gronowicz's marxist/socialist tendencies

influence his fictional analysis of conditions in Poland in these

two novels.19 There are other issues as well that Gronowicz's

Polish works suggest. He talks about why Poland was so

unprepared for war because of what he sees as the duplicity of

its leaders, he talks of the tensions between the Polish

aristocracy and the Polish peasants who were --- according to

Gronowicz -- betrayed continually by these nobles, he talks about18. Antoni Gronowicz, Bolek, trans. Jessie McEwen (New York: T. Nelson and Sos, 1942),Four from the Old Town, trans. Joseph Vetter (New York: Scribner's, 1944).

Polish-Jewish relations and the lives of Jews in Poland during

the war. On this last point -- although, as Professor Gladsky

rightly points out, Gronowicz is far from accurate concerning the

condition of the Jews -- Gronowicz nevertheless may be a valuable

source of information for students of the Holocaust simply

because he does depict how people outside of Poland at the time

did -- albeit inaccurately -- view what was happening to the Jews

in Poland under the Nazis. In fact, a discussion of his

misperceptions and the causes of his misperceptions may be as

valuable as a discussion of what is perceived accurately.

I think there is also value in Gronowicz's three histories

of Poland: Patterns For Peace, Polish Profiles, and The Piasts of

Poland. None of these books are exhaustive, definitive studies

of Poland; in fact each can be viewed as a sort of naive, folk

history. Nonetheless, they all contribute something, and what

they contribute is just that nostalgia I mentioned earlier -- a

longing for a place, and a people that seldom finds its way into

history. Gronowicz may have skewed the facts, but he gives us

something perhaps as important: the exile's anguish over his 19. Thomas Gladsky, Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves: Ethnicity in AmericanLiterature (Amherst, University of Massachusetts, 1992), pp. 120-121.

country in perpetual chains. The second value comes from the

sense of these works as being naive histories, folk histories.

The view they take of Poland is -- to speak frankly and in a way

ideologically consistent with Gronowicz's sense of Poland -- the

peasants' view. Gronowicz consciously wants to give voice to the

voiceless, to the peasants who he feels most felt the burden of

Poland's fate. We see this most clearly in Gronowicz's The

Piasts of Poland, a book in which Gronowicz as "historian"

assumes the voice of a Polish peasant relating his country's

troubled history to his children.20

But the strongest sense of Gronowicz as an eternal exile

comes in his four biographies of Polish exiles: Chopin,

Kosciusko, Paderewski, and Modjeska. Although these works were

written for children or probably because they are written for

children, Gronowicz cuts to the emotional essence of these lives

lived in exile, of our lives lived in exile.21 When he describes

Chopin dying of tuberculosis in Paris and his longing for one

last return to the green flat fields of Poland, or when he

20. Antoni Gronowicz, Patterns for Peace (New York: Paramount Publishing, 1951); ThePiasts of Poland (New York: Scribners, 1945); and Polish Profiles (Westport, CT: L.Hill, 1976).

describes Kosciusko's decision to leave the safety and wealth he

had in America in order to take up arms in what we all know would

be a failed revolution, or when Gronowicz transcribes the funeral

oration given at Modjeska's grave in Krakow Cemetery -- I think I

personally can forgive him to some extent the license he took

with facts, the deceptions he perpetrated, and the god awful

poetry through which I first made his acquaintance.

____________________________________

21. Antoni Gronowicz, Chopin, trans. Jessie McEwen ( New York: T. Nelson, 1943);Gallant General: Tadeus Kosciusko, trans. Samuel Sorgenstein (Scribners, 1947);Modjeska (New York: T. Yoseloff, 1956); Paderewski: Patriot and Pianist (New York:1943).