Swinging the Cat

COSMOS by Witold Gombrowicz. 166 pages. Grove. $5.

It's berging. Berging with my bamberg with all the bambergity of my bamberg.

Berging or, just possibly, Bunburying. It is 70 years since John Worthing went Bunburying in Wilde's comic masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. Onstage, Bunburying is such a mischievous male lark that, as Auden puts it, "Whenever I see or read the play, I always wish I did not know what I do about Wilde's life at the time he was writing it." Bunburying was shorthand for a visit to a fashionable London male whorehouse, and Bunburying, or berging--the disguise of homosexual material in literature--is still a common phenomenon in this outspoken age.

It is also easy to spot: the voyeurs, the bitchy domestic debaters, the dealers in rites and perversions are often stand-ins for unexpressed sexuality.

One of the more skilled practitioners of the sexual shell game was Witold Gombrowicz, a Polish writer who spent much of his adult life in Argentina, totally unknown to the world. He died at 64 in France last year, after enjoying a muffled underground explosion of fame. Cosmos won the $20,000 International Prize for Literature. It is an achingly attenuated suspense story --except that it turns out that there is no object to the chase, no rich cache of contraband drugs, no key diplomatic documents and no blondes. Just a hanged sparrow, a hanged cat, a mysterious bit of wood suspended in a shed and, finally, a hanged man whose death is as meaningless as the cat's.

The discoverer of these pitiful carcasses is Witold, a dour, perfervid student who, with an equally jittery friend, has decided to board in the country while studying for exams. They tramp along a road in stifling heat until they encounter the hanged sparrow. As if it were a signal, they check into the next house with a guest sign. There are no other guests, only a retired bank manager named Leo Wojtys, his wife, his daughter and her new husband and, for that obligatory grace note, a deformed servant.

Spontaneous Combustion. The neurasthenic students sit through stultifying dinners and spend the rest of their time finding unsettling "clues." But to what? Though the final horror is forestalled, the psychic answer comes halfway through the book. Upset by noises and "arrows" that he thinks he sees in the ceiling cracks, Witold goes out at night, climbs a tree in the front yard and watches the daughter and her husband preparing for bed. On his way back to his room, he strangles and hangs her cat.

The household is aghast, but it is fair to assume that one member is not mystified at all. Shortly afterward, Leo corners Witold and lets him know that he is quite aware of the young man's obsession with his daughter--and quite satisfied. As it happens, behind his cherished respectability he himself has led a secret phantasy life. "Bergtitbits and bergpenalties awarded by the High Court," he crows. "Bergpunishments inflicted by the local penal authorities and bergtitbits awarded by the department of caresses and delights."

When Witold asks him who gets these rewards and punishments, there is no reply, but at the end of the excursion one of the party is dead and another ostracized. Witold's swinging the cat is the only attributable crime in the book. The rest is the result of spontaneous combustion among darkly hidden obsessions.

Mental Demolitions. To write such a demonic little tale without being either boring or ridiculous requires craftsmanship at the level of near-wizardry. Gombrowicz had it, and enjoyed deploying it on the invisible swirling storms that start in the mind. In Ferdydurke, his best-known novel, a 30-year-old man is possessed by a mad professor who succeeds in turning him back into an adolescent. Pornografia is an unholy four-way murder plot in which two middle-aged bachelors and a pair of young lovers collaborate. Gombrowicz's mental demolitions take place in the framework of a stillness and normality that recall Kafka, but there is no suggestion of a living nightmare. Instead, Gombrowicz's possessed creatures seem to derive their inspiration from bad dreams and, like infernal missionaries, set about molding the real world to their own image.

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