The Great Polish Map of Scotland, the ghostly soldier, and the poet

The National

2 days ago

Or you could listen to the Krakowiak finale of Mackenzie's Violin Concerto of 1884-5, a Scottish composer's sparkling tribute to Krakow's political and cultural defiance. Or how about the 1683 siege of Vienna with Leslie's Scots Infantry Regiment fighting alongside the Poles and Count James Leslie as general of artillery playing a decisive role?
Or much earlier, like 1576 when King Stephen Báthory granted the Scots merchants a royal grant and a designated district in Krakow. By the 1600s there were 30,000 Scots living in Poland. There is a Nowa Szkocja in Gdansk; MacLeods became Machlejd; Sinclairs Szynkler; and many more such. The Baltic trade with east coast Scotland was huge and even influenced our architecture.
The Second World War reinforced these old connections by the stationing of Polish troops, airmen and seamen in Scotland. Hence the map. For myself, I was pursuing research into an eccentric Scottish composer of the early 1600s.
I wrote about Tobias Hume in A Question Of Identity – Tobias Hume in The National on April 14, 2017. Years before, one of my sources was a CD booklet which made reference to the distinguished Polish writer Jerzy Pietrkiewicz's (1916-2007) novel Loot And Loyalty.
It featured Hume as its 'hero', and it had a Saltire on its spine. The booklet notes were written by the great English musicologist Thurston Dart and they set me on a wonderful and enlightening trail.
I'd never even heard of Loot And Loyalty, never mind its author, and the problem was, the book could not be bought anywhere. The only copy I could find was in the National Library of Scotland and I didn't have enough time in Edinburgh to read it in the library – which does not lend out books.
The Saltire was intriguing as, in those days, even the holy bible of Groves Dictionary Of Music And Musicians declared Hume to be English. I knew he was almost certainly a Scot but why had Jerzy had Hume pictured with a Saltire? The only way left for me to find out was to track down Jerzy himself.
There seemed, however, to be no way of tracing the man or his whereabouts and I only rooted him out by working on the principle that all Poles resident in Britain would know the hiding places of all other Polish residents.
I was sure Jerzy was a UK resident as he was writing and publishing in English, so I contacted my friend Basil (Julian) Barbour. Basil, as he is known to me, when not losing himself in the philosophical conundrums of space-time, earned a crust translating scientific papers from and into Russian.
He would therefore have contacts among other translators. Was one of them Polish? Yes, Mr Tybulewicz was and, on being asked to locate Jerzy, offered to act as intermediary.
This was in early January 1991, so the Berlin Wall was down, but I guessed that Jerzy either had contacts with Poland which still called for him to keep a low profile or preferred to be left alone.
I sent a letter to him, via Mr Tybulewicz, with a cassette tape of some of Hume's music as the true intermediary and it initiated my enduring friendship with Jerzy who replied and lent me a rare copy of Loot And Loyalty which he allowed me to photocopy. This is what I wrote to him after reading it:
'Loot And Loyalty – strange confederations gathering around a central figure whose innocence is alluringly complex and hovering over the dawn of evil. I have never been to those parts of Europe and you have fed me a vision of them full of clammy mists, foetid marshes and succubating mire and I begin to wonder what kind of people can possibly survive there with their souls intact.'
In a pathetic petition to the House of Lords, Hume claimed: 'I am an old and experienced Souldier, and have done great service in other forraine Countries as when I was in Russia, I did put thirty thousand to flight, and killed six or seven thousand Polonians by the art of my instruments of warre when I first invented them.'
Hume never specified the war weapon he claimed to have invented, so Jerzy imagined disease, carefully cultured and placed in a huge collapsible tower, spreading death through the entire water system of the Pripet marshes.
Tobias experimented with ducks: he starved the birds and then watched them drink, each duck from a different pail of polluted water. Those which died after drinking determined the selection of samples, and the stinking pails were guarded in a special shed, until the day – the captain thought with glee in his eyes – when they would dangle from the topmost scaffold of the Great Machine.
That's not my imagination, it's Jerzy's and his mystical turn of mind later connected Hume with the Chernobyl disaster. But I have written about this before in the essay mentioned above.
Some clue to the Polish context of Jerzy's mystical thought is to be found in his lecture Messianic Prophecy, given in Polish when he was Professor Emeritus of Polish Literature at the University of London. The lecture was published with parallel English text in MCMXCI 'on the occasion of the state visit to the United Kingdom of the president of the Polish Republic Lech Wałęsa April 1991'.
He concludes with: 'And yet, and yet. Maybe, to paraphrase the words of King Lear, we will, again and again, take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were the spies of God.'
My copy of the lecture is dedicated to me by Jerzy: 'In the sign of Tobias Hume and Archangel Raphael', under which joint protection I remain confident of a kindly reception in the hereafter. Having reacted warmly to my radio plays, he wanted me to make one out of Loot And Loyalty but I did not have it in me to give it the kind of treatment called for by Jerzy's work.
Andrea del Verrocchio's 15th-century painting Tobias and the Angel (Image: Archive) Jerzy's own radio play, The Cosmic Clock, was of disturbing originality, with extraordinary sensual imagery and a feel for language all superbly realised by Paul Scofield in a Radio 3 broadcast in 1991. It was inspired by The Saragossa Manuscript, a novel by Jan Potocki, who took his own life in 1815 with a silver bullet, and it is as mystical a work as Jerzy could have wished for. His imagery is disturbing:
'She wore a silver moon on a dark velvet band around her neck, and inside her beautiful body she held a cosmic clock which kept their fourfold time at bay, and the demons never dared to look into her eyes. One did, a stupid goblin they picked up while crossing the Bosphorus, on the day the Sultan was assassinated in Istanbul, and the goblin lost both sight and speech for seventy-seven days.'
Work of that nature, with its strange psychological insights and uncompromising sensuality, was in a different league, and that he thought, from my own writings, that I could do anything good with Loot And Loyalty still surprises me. Jerzy's autobiography, In The Scales Of Fate, I found deeply impressive and wrote to tell him so.
He was very touched and understanding of my own decidedly mixed feelings about autobiography, for his book troubled me by the extent to which it rummaged in my conscience.
Pietrkiewicz had been in exile in the UK (he was a mature student at St Andrews University) since the start of the last world war, in which he was a courier for the Polish underground. He was a renowned poet in Polish, defending the artistic respectability of the peasant life of which his own past forms a moving revelation.
He is a fine novelist in English and handles the language with a freshness and directness of peculiar sensitivity, and moral vision – here writing of his peasant uncle who was innocent of the contemptuous treatment being meted out to him at a market:
'The whole scene imprinted itself on my mind because it exemplified my own desire to see dignity as a posture of angels, therefore winged with silence.'
This visionary sense is matched by a pervasive but discreet sensuality:
'I loved to catch the flying type of beetle just to feel its sticky abdomen'.
Early encounters with the occult provide a fascinating thread throughout the book, which is refreshed by frequent skips forward and back across decades and borders, from his nightmare escape from Poland to his retreat in Andalusia, as connections spark in the memory.
There is no slavery to time or place here, and yet no confusion in the narrative.
The book is full of many echoes and is therefore full of questions rather than answers. It has been written in submission rather than self-glory. It adds weight to the chain of life and yet invigorates the muscles which need invigorating to cope with the extra burden.
Above all, it unfailingly holds the attention with an intelligent and passionate humour. It is that rare thing; a book of wisdom. Here is part of what he wrote in response to my doubts about autobiography, and perhaps it may serve me as a defence for the existence of these memoirs:
'... Yes, at 51, your present age, I would have abhorred autobiography, its probing into the dark corridors of the self. And then the orphan syndrome would have been put in operation: show a good face once more, to appease the world.
'Now I know I can no longer procrastinate. I have to use myself as a witness to the memory of a civilization which is almost gone. But the dead, do they care? Sometimes perhaps one of them answers to the echo of his name. Tobias did. And he rewarded me with his recorded music, and now with your letter ...'
Elsewhere he wrote:
'The dead are deaf. Mercifully, they don't have to listen to what is shouted above their graves: they stay in line ready for roll-call.'
Having spent so much of my life and energies doing what I could for the music of the dead and the long dead, I prefer what he wrote for me: that sometimes perhaps one of them answers to the echo of his – or her – name.
One does not well remember the appearance of all one's friends, but Jerzy's I can envisage instantly. He was slight, and as fragile-looking and beautiful as fine bone china.
All his movements were sensitive, gentle and executed with unhurried purpose.
His eerie, at the top of a villa near Hampstead Heath, looked out upon the disorder of London,but contained within it an ordered and uncluttered world of simple things, carefully placed – a religious statuette, birds, a mug of flowers, all in their own unostentatious way, beautiful – himself a beautiful man.