Max Blecher - A poet and prose-writer, Blecher offers a harrowing account of the 'bizarre adventure of being a man' drawing upon his experience of being diagnosed with tuberculosis of the spine in 1928.

Max Blecher, Scarred Hearts, Trans. by Henry Howard, Old Street Publishing, 2008. [1939.]

Emmanuel, a young man with spinal tuberculosis and confined to a sanatorium outside Paris, narrates his and his fellow patients’ attempts to live life to the fullest as their bodies slowly atrophy and die. Blending dark humor and pathos, Scarred Hearts was hailed as a masterpiece on publication in Romanian in 1939, and was more recently compared to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and the fiction of Franz Kafka.

Like Emmanuel, Max Blecher suffered from tuberculosis of the spine, and spent the last year of his life in a full body cast and wheelchair, before dying at age twenty-nine with two novels completed.

Scarred Hearts, one of the few published works by Max Blecher, is a novel of pain and suffering. The author, who lived most of his life under the auspices of a dreadful disease, died at the age of 29. But even though this is a novel in which the characters live under the constant threat of death, even though their lives are bitter and painful, his little characters find enough strength to fall in love, to mold the most human of feelings and experiences after their own needs.
Emanuel, Blecher’s main character, and the other characters that inhabit this novel, are screaming with life, almost exploding with a sort of giddy joy and carelessness that is disconcerting, if we take into account the fact that they’re all very, very sick.
In one way, this reminds us of the saying that people are most alive just before they die. A novel with a theme that only Blecher could have tackled, with exotic characters reunited under the stigma of disease and paralysis. - Cristian Mihai

 M.Blecher suffered from Pott's disease -- tuberculous spondylitis -- which attacks the spine and essentially eats away at it. In the 1930s it was generally treated by prolonged bedrest and immobilizing patients (generally in plaster body casts, the exact size depending on the affected area). Emanuel, the protagonist of Inimi cicatrizate, is clearly closely based on the author and his own experiences, and the book focusses on his diagnosis and the time he spends in a sanatorium in the French seaside resort of Berck.
       In its relatively straightforward realism it stands in stark contrast to the almost feverishly focussed Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată, but both books were written one after the other by the same bedridden man (who died not long after finishing this novel). The confrontation with reality in this novel is of a different immediacy, the plaster cast in which he is practically mummified a too-real constant reminder that doesn't allow him to slip into the reverie that the youth of the earlier novel had been able to.
       Not much happens in Inimi cicatrizate. Most of the book describes life in the sanatorium, focussed on a few other patients, as well as Solange, the woman who become Emanuel's lover (Blecher offers quite vivid descriptions of the difficulties of engaging in sex with the plaster cast). There's a devil-may-care atmosphere -- parties, some hi-jinx, a variety of romances -- but there's a surreal feel to it, as many of the patients are wheeled around everywhere (to the dining room and everywhere else) in beds, flat on their backs. Patients do get better, but Blecher pays most attention to those who are in decline. There are several operations which don't go well, and among the most impressive passages are the descriptions of the unannounced subtle changes that indicate the condition of a patient -- including the appearance of tape around the doors to a patient's room, a sure sign the patient has died, because the room is being fumigated, the tape preventing the gases from escaping into the hall.
       Emanuel is fatalistic, and it's a frustrating disease, its course and consequences hardly foreseeable (hence also the terrible weight of seeing others who are affected and what happens to them). At times he seems to give in, but then he also fights it -- fleeing the sanatorium, for example (no easy task for a man in his condition). His relationship with Solange is also a doomed one -- they can have no future together, because he knows he has no real future -- but he is unable to let her down easily, and her collapse is also among the more impressive parts of the novel.
       Blecher is at his best in the simple realism: the descriptions of mealtimes in the sanatorium, for example, or the filth that Emanuel digs out from his cast (which builds up for months) -- and the shame he feels about it.
       Like many books in the briefly flourishing sanatorium-genre (think The Magic Mountain), Inimi cicatrizate describes an isolated world standing almost still, full of longueurs and the frustration of not being able to move towards a future, many of the patients almost completely immobilized in a body-armour that keeps the world even more at bay. Blecher conveys this atmosphere more convincingly than most: presumably writing from experience helps, though occasionally he seems almost too close to his material, trying but unable to maintain the distance that he's trying to achieve in this fiction.
       Worthwhile. - www.complete-review.com/reviews/romania/blecherm1.htm

In recent years, the work of Joseph Roth, Antal Szerb, Leonid Tsypkin and Stefan Zweig has been rediscovered, treating readers to some delightful "lost classics". Each of these minor Mitteleuropean writers has a unique voice to be treasured, despite the slightness of some of their work and the overindulgence of some critics. Max Blecher's Scarred Hearts comes to us packaged as just such a lost classic. It was his second and last novel (in 1937), and Paul Bailey's introduction tells us that Blecher's "elegant style" was compared to that of Kafka and Rilke. Bailey also calls the novel a "masterpiece".Blecher was born in 1909, into a Jewish family in Romania. At 19, he contracted spinal tuberculosis and was hospitalised. Scarred Hearts centres on Emanuel, a Romanian student, who in the opening chapter is diagnosed with Pott's disease. His attentive father thinks that only a spell in the sanatorium at Berck-sur-Mer, in northern France, will cure his son: "All the patients here lead normal lives... They dress normally, they go about on the streets... only they do it all lying down."

On his first morning at the sanatorium, Emanuel is faced with a surreal vision of the dining room: "The patients lay on their stretcherbeds, two at a table. It might have resembled a banquet from antiquity... if the drained, pallid faces of the worst sufferers hadn't shattered any illusions." Unfortunately, descriptions of the strangeness of life at Berck, and the alienating effects of illness, are too often sacrificed to an uneven mix of Thomas Mann-lite, which nestles alongside the Mills & Boon emotings that describe Emanuel's relationship with Solange: "She was an animal every bit as splendid as his horse, which he adored more than anything."
Constantly, Blecher tells us what a "melancholy" world this is. Emanuel's love affair, and the tragicomic episodes featuring his fellow-patients are an attempt to show that life must go on, but Blecher doesn't ever fully face the implications of his own words: "When someone is, all of a sudden, removed from life and has the time and the necessary calm to ask himself a single, essential question regarding it – one single question – he is poisoned forever." Here is the existential heart of the book, but Blecher shows himself unwilling to tackle its consequences.
Instead, we get a weak pastiche of Mann's The Magic Mountain. Sadly, this is a lost classic that did not need to be found. - Mark Thwaite

 As this novella is set in a TB sanatorium, readers may look for debts to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. The sensibility of Scarred Hearts, however, belongs to another world: Bukovina, Polish Galicia, and German-speaking Prague.
For all Max Blecher's experience of Paris, this is plain writing, never portentous, always attentive to detail, sometimes surreally funny, and his true contemporaries are Franz Kafka, Bruno Schultz and Joseph Roth.
His intelligence was capable of sustaining an intense correspondence with many of the leading writers of his day. His own life was sadder than any of them. Emanuel, the sick adolescent at the centre of Scarred Hearts, has the same spinal tuberculosis that was to kill Blecher in 1938 at 29.
Yet this novella has a rich vitality, and is lit with flashes of humour. Blecher is amused by the tedium and exhaustion of repeated medical examinations; he quotes an Englishman who is said to have killed himself in exasperation at "all this buttoning and unbuttoning".
The medical implements of another age - nickel-plated constructions of tubes and crossbars, wires everywhere - are observed without self-pity.
A wet corset, wound around Emanuel's body to support his crumbling spine, then left to harden, resembles the wrap used as a punishment in Soviet psychiatric hospitals. In the sanatorium of Berck-sur-Mer, once the inmates are strapped into these corsets, they can only be wheeled about on trolleys, and have to eat lying down.
The doctors are not unkind, but as the ash from their cigarettes falls on their clothes and the floor, we make out a cheerful resignation to their patients' condition.
For all the comic constraints of the corset, sexual passions remain strong, though their fulfilment is awkward.
Jealousy, too, can be triggered by overheard noises. Emanuel falls in love for a time with the calm beauty of Solange; but what matters most to him are the friendships he forms with his fellow patients. As Quitonce, one of the sickest, remarks with rueful charm: "In the space of one year, an invalid… uses up the same amount of energy and willpower you need to conquer an empire."
Blecher makes every observation count: tea and vanilla scenting Emanuel's first bland love affair, say; or the bloated cat face of a cashier gazing out of a round cold eye. He exposes the schadenfreude of the sick without shame, and confesses that Emanuel, too, finds the rain against the windows gives him unexpected pleasure, as he reflects that the whole world feels the same melancholy in such weather.
Emanuel is first guiltless in his lusts, then ruthless in his rejection of Solange as she begins to bore him. Using a horse and cart, he escapes, still corseted, along the seashore to find an almost maternal protection from a rich American. He is jolted out of this brief period of peace by a visit from a visibly deranged Solange bearing a rotting shoe and a dead bird.
Mikhail Bulgakov, in The Master and Margarita, wrote that "Manuscripts don't burn" - his own survived in the archives of the KGB. But published books can quietly disappear.
It is a matter for rejoicing that this small masterpiece should survive to delight readers of another century. - Elaine Feinstein

 

Max Blecher, Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality,
Trans. by Jeanie Han, Non Basic Stock Line, 2009.

This autobiographical fiction offers an intimate and unsettling account of Blecher's ideas of self-identity and the body. He explores the 'crisis of unreality' in relation to the human condition and shares his adolescent experiences of physical infirmity, social isolation and sexual awakening.

A poet and prose-writer, Blecher offers a harrowing account of the 'bizarre adventure of being a man' drawing upon his experience of being diagnosed with tuberculosis of the spine in 1928. He was treated in various sanatoria in France, Switzerland and Romania where he spent much of his time corresponding with Geo Bogza, Mihail Sebastian, André Breton, André Gide, Martin Heidegger and Ilarie Voronca, and sporadically collaborated with Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution and Les Feuillets inutiles.

What makes Max Blecher akin to Kafka, Bruno Schulz or Robert Walser is above all the faculty of inhabiting misfortune... Things emerge from their neutrality and besiege him, seeking to fascinate or terrorise him. - Ovid Crohmalniceanu

 

Extract:

I was a tall, thin, pale boy, with a slender throat poking from the overly large collar of my tunic. My long hands dangled below my jacket like freshly flayed animals. My pockets bulged with objects and bits of paper. I used to have a hard time retrieving a handkerchief from the bottom of these pockets to wipe the dust off my boots, when I reached the streets of the 'centre'.

Around me evolved the simple and elementary things of life. A pig would be scratching itself against a fence and I would stop for minutes at a time to watch it. Nothing surpassed in its perfection the rasping of coarse bristles against wood; I found in it something immensely satisfying, a soothing assurance that the world continued to exist...

On a street at the edge of town I found a workshop for rustic woodcarving, where, again, I used to linger for a long time.

In the shop there were thousands of smooth white things among the curly shavings that fell from the workbench and filled the room with their rigid froth, redolent of resin.

The piece of wood beneath the tool would grow finer, paler, and its capillaries would come into view limpidly and well inscribed, like those beneath a woman's skin.

Alongside, on a table there were wooden balls, calm and massy balls that filled the whole surface area of my hand with a smooth, ineffable weight.

Then there were the wooden chess pieces, redolent of fresh wood stain, and the entire wall covered with flowers and angels.

Such materials sometimes exuded sublime patches of eczema, with lacework suppurations, painted or carved. In winter, blisters of rime erupted, the solidified water acquiring carven forms. In summer flowers gushed forth in thousands of minuscule explosions, with red, blue and orange petalised flames.

Throughout the year the master carver, with his spectacles missing one lens, would extract from the wood spirals of smoke and Red Indian arrows, seashells and ferns, peacock feathers and human ears.

In vain did I watch that slow labour in order to
catch the moment when the ragged, moist piece of
wood exhaled itself in a petrified rose.

In vain did I myself try to consummate such a miracle. I held in my hand an untrimmed, ruffled, stony piece of pinewood, but from beneath the plane, all of a sudden, there emerged something as slippery as a fainting fit. Perhaps, as I began to plane the plank, I was overcome by a deep sleep and extraordinary powers then spread their tentacles through the air, entering the wood and producing the cataclysm.

Perhaps the whole world came to a stop in those few seconds and no one was aware of the time elapsed. In deep sleep the craftsman had of course carved all the lilies on the walls and all the violins with their volutes. When I awoke, the plank revealed to me the lines of its age, like a palm shows the lines of fate.

I picked up one object after another and their variety dizzied me. In vain did I grip a file, slowly run my fingers over it, place it to my cheek, swivel it, let it fall spinning to the floor... In vain... in vain... nothing had any meaning.

Everywhere, hard, inert matter surrounded me - here in the form of wooden balls and carvings - in the street in the form of trees, houses, and stones; immense and futile, matter enveloped me from head to foot. In whichever direction my thoughts turned, matter surrounded me, from my clothes to the springs in the forest, passing through walls, trees, stones, glass...

Into every cranny the lava of matter had spilled from the earth, petrifying in the empty air, in the form of houses with windows; trees with branches that ever rose to pierce the emptiness; flowers, soft and colourful, which filled the small curved volumes of space; churches whose cupolas soared ever higher, as far as the slender cross at their pinnacle, where matter halted its trickling into the heights, powerless to ascend further...

The first thing to say about Max Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Irreality, given the circumstances of its creation, is that it seems not to be a real book with a real history and readership but rather something fictionalized and brought into being by an authorial sleight of hand. It is the sort of book one imagines being carried around in years gone by in the coat pockets of eager students, dog-eared past recognition. Which is to say the book is one of those works that comes prefigured by a legend, and in this case the legend seems to have been started even before its author, Blecher, a Romanian Jew, had died at the age of twenty-eight.

Blecher was killed by a form of tuberculosis that slowly crippled him; he was nineteen when he received his diagnosis, and passed the majority of his adult life between bouts of illness and residencies at a sanatorium in the town of Roman. Adventures, his only full-length work to survive, has been lost and rediscovered more than once since 1936 (this — by Michael Henry Heim — is its third translation into English); as Herta Müller writes in an essay here by way of introduction, “few books published in Germany since 1990 could compare with Blecher’s novel for sheer literary intensity. But perhaps that’s why the book never attracted a wider audience?”

What are we to make of such a legacy? Blecher’s book is being compared to those of Kafka and Bruno Schulz, authors whose work is similarly attended by a kind of extratextual loss and impossibility — which would be an unfair comparison if Blecher did not so clearly share their preoccupation with the limits of substance, and even more, their skillfulness in rendering the uncanny into prose. Here no less than in Schulz’s cinnamon shops the writing is precise and thrilling, and the reader feels even from the first that he has been put in the hands of one who knows the effects his rhythms and representation will have on his reader’s imagination.

“Staring at a fixed point on the wall,” he begins, “I occasionally have the feeling I no longer know who or where I am. At such times, I experience the loss of my identity from a distance: I feel for a moment that I have become a complete stranger, this abstract personage and my real self vying for authenticity with equal strength.”

These losses of identity form the basis of the plot. It is a vaguely peripatetic story in which a young, male narrator, of indistinct bourgeois origin, recounts the wanderings that led to the loss of his self and world. But if in this description Adventures would seem already derivative, the reader will find that the narrator’s adventures are not the end-point of the investigation; indeed, beginning from a familiar premise, he extends outward into numerous layers of possibility. Again and again, in each of the chapter-length episodes, the narrator recollects an incident in which some aspect of his world — an acquaintance, a home, a setting — is suddenly transformed into a new existence.

Once during a crisis the sun sent a small cascade of rays onto the wall like a golden artificial lake dappled with glittering waves. I also saw the corner of a bookcase of large, leather-bound volumes behind glass. And in the end these true-to-life details, perceived from the distance of my swoon, stupefied and stunned me like a last gulp of chloroform.

and

I experienced this sort of mental shift often and in the most varied circumstances. It would sneak up on me and make an abrupt turnabout in my inner state. I would, say, happen upon an accident and stand about gawking for a time like the rest of the spectators when all at once my perspective would change — it was like a game I used to play: I would make a strange animal in the paint on my wall and then one day I was unable to find it, its place having been taken by a statue or a woman or a landscape composed of the same decorative elements — and although everything about the accident remained the same, I suddenly saw the people and objects around me from the point of view of the victim, as if I were the one lying there, viewing the whole thing up from below and out from the center and feeling the blood pouring down my body.

A good portion of the book seems to be unreal or dreamed. But unlike actual dreams, which are always tedious, Blecher carefully staggers his incidents so that the levels of reality never clearly distinguish themselves and slip away before one’s very eyes. This quality may be the part of Blecher’s talent that is most comparable to Kafka in that both convey their dreams so intuitively that the reader begins to believe that he is now the dreamer.

In this way, over the course of the novel, Blecher’s narrator undergoes a number of transformations. Each time, as he writes, “the moment [of] identity returns… a stereoscopic slide in which the two images, separated by mistake, suddenly give the illusion of three dimensionality once the projectionist brings them back together. My room seems fresher than ever. It reverts to its former consistency, its objects finding their proper places, as when a crushed lump of earth in a glass of water settles in layers of various well-defined and parti-colored elements.” 

Thus, as if life were no longer restricted to the living, the objects in his home and environs are by turns dissolved and reformed, reconstituted in other bodies, combined with natural elements, and placed side-by-side with themselves in dual existence. In her essay, Müller describes these metamorphoses in erotic terms; and while it is true that a deeply, at times explicitly, sexual quality runs throughout the book, sexuality itself is but one of the numerous sensations which seem possible at any given time. At all times the landscape of the book is one that expands past our expectations, far beyond the visible plane, into a realm in which nothing is impossible or incredible, only more or less unlikely.

Gradually, by turns, developed and destroyed, it seems the narrator will begin to approach a point of revelation. Such a point is brought about by his attachment to a girl named Edda; and when it crumbles, when she dissolves, it is not because of the narrator’s love but rather his fixation. “In not one of my walks,” he realizes, “not one of my meetings, had I thought of anything but myself. It was impossible for me to conceive of another’s sufferings or even another’s existence. The people I saw around me were purely decorative, ephemeral, and as material as any object, as houses or trees. But in Edda’s presence I felt for the first time that my concerns could move beyond me, resonate in new depths and a new existence, to return in disturbing and enigmatic echoes.”

Such is the restless state of youth.

In 1936 Blecher was visited at the sanatorium in Roman by his friend Mihail Sebastian. He talked to Sebastian of the difficulty he had anticipating his death. “’I tell myself that Jules Renard died in 1911,’ he said. ‘At a distance, death becomes so inconsequential. I just have to imagine that I too died a long time ago, in 1911. I’m not scared of death. Then I’ll rest and sleep. Ah, how well I’ll stretch out, how well I’ll sleep! Listen, I’ve begun to write a novel. But I don’t feel that I absolutely must complete it. If I die first, I don’t think I’ll even regret not having finished it. What a minor thing literature is for me, and how little of my time it takes up!’”

While reading of this distance, it is difficult not to think of Keats, who, in a 27 October 1818 letter wrote to Richard Woodhouse of the poet’s negative capability. “He has no Identity,” says Keats, “he is continually in for — and filling some other Body — The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute — the poet has none…” And he concludes that, “If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no more?”

According to Sebastian, at one point Blecher decided to commit suicide. He tore up all his papers and manuscripts, consisting of eighty pages of a novel and seventy pages of a journal, but could not bring himself to act. He was forced to wait another year until the final end. - Colin Torre

The writer Max Blecher:

Max Blecher was born on the 8^th of September 1909, at Botosani, in a wealthy family, since his father, Lazar Blecher, owned a glass factory. Moreover, Blecher’s family is Jewish and their role in the cultural life from the interwar period was significant, taking into account that with the Jewish people, the Romanians had their first contact within the occidental lifestyle. The Jews have developed especially in literature, as in the case of the writer Max Blecher.
Short introductive biography
Although born in Botosani, Max Blecher enrols to the primary school from Roman, city where he will spent most of his time, which explains why in most of his works can be found descriptions of this city, which Blecher calls as ‘fantastic’. The high school he attends is still in Roman, following after graduation to leave to Paris to study medicine. But his whole life and all the future plans are baffled by his sudden impaired health. After many medical investigations, the doctors draw the diagnostic that the young Max Blecher had a disease without a cure at that moment, ‘Pott’s disease’. The disease starts suddenly, with an infection located between the spinal discs, being known also as ‘the tuberculosis of the spine’, and the medical term is ‘spondylitis tuberculosis’.
Max Blecher had no choice but to abort his studies from Paris, following his hospitalization at a sanatorium from France, at Berck-sur-mer. At that time, Blecher was only 19 years old. Taking into account the acuteness of his disease, his body is plastered, and this is how Max Blecher will spend his short life.
With the attempt to treat the depredation caused by the disease, Max Blecher was hospitalized many times in Romania, but also in France or Switzerland, but without any result.
Max Blecher’s destiny is quite tragic. Instead of studying medicine in Paris, he lives on his own pain and suffering which transforms him into a different human being. Gradually the young Blecher shrank into himself and the only way he chose to confess is through literature.
Max Blecher – literary itinerary
The disease strongly influenced Blecher’s life, and thus he chose to confess in a unprecedented style, through a pure, original and somehow uncommon creation, Max Blecher becoming a true literary phenomenon.
Max Blecher literary universe is quite weird, yet attractive. Death becomes an obsessed subject. Many of his works describe very detailed, in a special poetic style, the devastating sensations of the disease.
But his works are influenced just by the horrible disease which consumed him both literally and figuratively. Max Blecher, despite being bedridden, lives with the intensity of carnal love when he falls in love with Maria Ghiolu. Blecher dedicates her poetry volume ‘Transparent Body’, released in 1934. This is the first and last poetry volume signed by Max Blecher. Geo Bogza is the one who helps Blecher to release this volume and moreover, he is his close friend who supports and shares his ideas.
Since 1935 Max Blecher has lived in the Roman city, ending his fight against the disease and trying to escape from all the overwhelming thoughts through his writings.
In 1936 is released the first novel of Max Blecher, entitled ‘Adventures in Immediate Unreality’, an exceptional novel in which Blecher’s identity is duplicated within the novel’s character. The image of the invalid with his interior dramas is suggestively depicted in this novel and the room is the universe of Blecher’s creation, his novel becoming a symbol for the so called ‘literature of the room’. His disease allows him to perceive the surrounding environment at a very advanced level, and he throws in writing the events, either the real ones or the ones from the dreams. The dream world transforms into a real world, where death is the main character. For Max Blecher the dream has the same symbolic meaning which we can also find at Mircea Cartarescu.
Besides the subject of death, disease and dream, Max Blecher also explores in his first novel the condition of the Jews and their cultural identity. Thus, the author becomes aware of his own social identity and his personality is pure Hebrew.
Max Blecher’s following novel, ‘Scarred Hearts’, is released in 1937. This novel distinguishes from the first one, through a different style. It’s an autobiography, a novel of the memories, a novel in which the main character, Emanuel, is an alter-ego of the author.
The last novel of Blecher is released after his death, in 1971. It’s entitled ‘The Lit up Burrow’, the one responsible for its editing is the Jewish writer Alexandru Binder, know also under the name Sasa Pana. The novel is also considered as a true ‘sanatorium journal’, because Blecher depicts all the details of the tough life from the sanatorium, with all the aspects of his disease, the never-ending pains, the torments of his soul and body which crushed him every second, and the stark landscape dismayed him completely. The character has the impression that he drifts away from himself, living in a permanent confusion.
The literary critics state that Max Blecher is the predecessor of the surrealist style in the Romanian literature, especially with his poetry volume.
Max Blecher’s work is a complex creation, in which the imaginary merges with reality. His literary universe is enclosed by the suffering caused by the cruel disease, and most of the times it’s enthralled by the sanatorium room, by the room from Roman or even by his plaster corset. Through literature, Max Blecher manages to keep his soul alive. - whatafy.com/the-writer-max-blecher.html