From Conrad's Country

10 CONTEMPORARY POLISH STORIES (252 pp.)--Edited by Edmund Ordon, with an introduction by Olga Scherer-Virski --Wayne State University ($5).

Half of the ten Polish writers brought together in this book are living in exile. That is probably inevitable, since none of them seems to be gifted with the kind of talent a cultural commissar would find useful. The only line to which they hew is their personal vision of life. Except for two, these are stories born of a sad understanding of man's fate. Joseph Conrad is by that reason not too far removed from these countrymen of his. There is in some of them the same underlying Slavic brooding, the recognition that in the end men and women are doomed or saved according to their own natures.

The tone is set in the first story, Father Philip, by Maria Dabrowska. Young Philip Jaruga does not really want to become a priest, takes his vows because his parents, who own a tailor shop, see the church as the safest answer to the question of his future and a step up the social ladder for themselves. Though he lacks dedication, Philip is not without conscience. But his earthy hungers are stronger than any spiritual pull. He starts to drink, winds up with a mistress, and is finally crushed by the tragic results of his best-meant advice to a parishioner. The moral: be yourself.

Premeditated Crime is a chilling exercise in pure atmosphere wedded to a sadly penetrating knowledge of the heart. Arriving at a gloomy country home to settle a property matter, an examining magistrate finds the owner dead. A heart attack, obviously. But was it? Why are mother, son and daughter so rudely anxious to have the judge leave? Why are they so secretive, so oddly lacking in true grief? Combining the technique of the detective story with Dostoevskian insights, Author Witold Gombrowicz unravels a skein of conflicting family emotions and so clears the way to a final tragedy that is as terrible as it is inevitable. A slip anywhere would have undone the entire story. There are no slips.

Still in his 20s and still living in Poland, Marek Hlasko writes the kind of story that the regime must find irritatingly lacking in proletarian joy. The young workmen in The Most Sacred Words of Our Life are indifferent to their jobs, cynical and joyless. The young hero is lyrically awakened by a beautiful love affair with a tender and passionate girl. He leaves her in the morning to rush to work, and discovers that three of his fellow workmen have had the same girl, that she has spoken to them the identical, sacred words of endearment. It is a simple and devastating story in which the finest feelings of youth are turned into final despair.

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