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).
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