The Wherewithal: A Novel in Verse
Like many of his American mates in 1968, Henryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski is trying to dodge the draft without going back to college, where he’s just been named corespondent in a professor’s divorce. Subsisting as head clerk (the only employee) of the closed-files department of San Francisco’s welfare bureaucracy, he whiles away the unbusyness typical of his workday by translating his Polish immigrant mother’s diaries and perusing the notebooks of his predecessor (literal—the man hanged himself). His mother’s manuscripts are her horrified testament of revulsion at how her fellow Gentile Poles collaborated with the Nazi death machine, eagerly participating in destroying the Jewish neighbors they’d always gotten along with—indeed, befriended and seemingly loved. The previous clerk’s writings wryly chronicle and mourn the Kafkaesque real-cases cruelties of the welfare system. When the professor’s ex shows up and drags Henryk to the outdoor concerts-cum-­demonstrations of the time, the book’s portrait of the soft, absurdist hell of the sixties is complete. More dramatic than poetic and a little raggedy, Schultz’s verse novel smolders with suppressed despair. --Ray Olson