Abstract
What happens when our ancestors depart? After our intellectual heroes die, there may be silence, or else impatience to move on. There may also be time for further consideration, or recovery. After Bauman there is now a post-Bauman boom, this is led by the excellent biography of Bauman by Izabela Wagner. And many other books, including the splendid monographs of Jack Palmer, Bauman and the West, and Dariusz Brzezinski, Bauman and the Theory of Culture, the first of which reads Bauman forward into the intellectual contemporary, the second back into Polish roots and the deep intellectual currents of his earlier formation, Bauman before he was Bauman.
Zygmunt Bauman was not my hero, but he was my teacher and friend. Like all friends, he did not offer me transparency, nor did I ask for it or offer it on my own part in return. Yet one night as I went upstairs to my bed in his home in Lawnswood Gardens something else happened. He gave me an envelope—he often gave me something to read overnight, a second nightcap—and said, ‘Read this, give it back in the morning, we will never talk about it.’ I did, and we didn’t. He was the age of my father, and with more authority than my dad. What was this mysterious document? It was a family memoir which he wrote for his daughters, strictly private, and it is now the core document of the assemblage generated together with other fresh materials by Izabela Wagner. This text published by Polity in total may be an imperial platypus of sorts, seemingly sewn together, and its title misleading. But it offers an incredible source of insight into Bauman’s soul, and his soul searching.
There are several sources for this book, including different Polish texts unknown to those of us trapped outside the language, and for this we are to be grateful, not least to Izabela Wagner. A significant supporting apparatus of notes follows.
I shall not attempt even to gesture a summary here but the challenges to readers, me included, is significant, as its pages can be read over for pathos, and insight into his boyhood, Jewishness, life as a soldier, son, exile, and his persistent core of strength. What did you do during the war, Father? Well, here it is. Readers of the Wagner biography will already be familiar with some of these details, given her reliance on this newly available text—nothing to eat; bast peasant shoes; the resulting love of and need for bread in the house overnight, his Soviet life as a forester and traffic cop, the intelligence work during reconstruction. This is what I read upstairs in bed all those years ago, then failing to find sleep, stimulated and disturbed both by my experience and by his, yet bidden to silence. There is so much more here, contemplation and rumination of a kind which is distinct to his usual, public voice; engagement with his favourite writers and then some, such as the extensive engagement with Dabrowska’s diaries, contemplating life, time and death. ‘I am tired’ of trials and torments, he writes. Yet writing pushed away death; and it was also a fortunate life.
And the title? Well, it may be ‘A Life in Fragments’, if we are to focus on the texts as documents in themselves; but it is not authorized by the subject, and it should not be taken to represent a life lived in fragments. Bauman’s life was broken repeatedly, by fascism, communism, exile, etc.; but in its own tempo and commitment his was a solid modern life, one of striking consistency and determination, manoeuvred around the facts of global turbulence. He was a socialist by choice, and a conservative by disposition. These, and many other related issues to do with the complexity of his character are suggestively illustrated by the fibres in the documents assembled together in this book.
The second of the books under review is Volume 2 in the Polity/Bauman Institute Selected Writings series, ably marshalled by Mark Davis and his crew, with translations by Katarzyna Bartosynska, whose work holds up both these volumes. Like the memoir materials scanned above, the papers here are rich and ill-given to summary. What they do make clear is the richness and depth of Bauman’s early, pre-exile life. Some examples include solid early reflections on bureaucracy (1957), bourgeois democracy (1961), and ‘perfect planning’ (1966). Perhaps the most penetrating here is ‘The End of Polish Jewry’ from 1969, full of the analytical and probing depth that some readers much later found lacking from his work. For when he was upbraided for being short of facts, more recently—‘where are your facts, Sir?’ it was the life experience of his presence which quietly answered: I speak from the data of life. It was a life of experience and reflection, of the woes of the twentieth century, of its accumulated intellectual wisdom absorbed from eastern and western sources across the social sciences and liberal arts, and from the wisdom allowed by all of this in combination.
There are so many things in history and politics, including of course many we did not speak of; exile, exit visa, Israel, always hinted at, the lacerating loss of his Polish home and culture, its rich home of networks of colleagues and addresses, the wacky days of being mistaken for a Cold Warrior by well-funded Sovietologists simply because of his biography. But as he did like to say, I will not live the second part of my life off of the first. He would not perform tricks for new masters aspirant. He did not like crowds, or masters. He was not a pliant man.
The materials in this second volume arc through to the Polish Solidarity, then Blair, 9/11 and Brexit. All this is held together by fine editing at the hands of the Bauman Institute team. The book is worth reading for their editorial introduction alone. It offers a state of the art overview of the issues involved, together with clear interests in assessing continuities and changes across Bauman’s life and his project, reaching from the early encounters with C. Wright Mills and Ralph Miliband to later encounters with Ed Miliband, via Kołakowski, and Hochfeld’s hope for an Open Marxism, Zionism and then Israel in the back of all this. As Janina Bauman put it: ‘We didn’t want to go from being the victims of one nationalism to being the perpetrators of another.’ Bauman could not escape from Poles, or Jews. He could not, and did not choose to escape from his own identity, or his century. Swept along by the globalization of his world, he became its creature as well as its critic. For those of us with sympathy, or curiosity, the experience remains intriguing.