In Germany, the Škėmas lived in various Displaced Persons camps where refugees from across Eastern Europe endured pathetic conditions in rough barracks, cohabited with several families to a room, had no means of employment and were forced to live on meagre handouts. At first the refugees maintained illusory hopes about Allied assistance in chasing the Bolsheviks from Lithuania and they recreated organisations that had existed in Lithuania, including writers’ groups (approximately seventy per cent of Lithuania’s Writers’ Union members ended up in the DP camps). While some of the refugees fell into so-called “DP apathy”, the more ambitious, especially the younger among them, used this time more productively – they threw themselves into studies and became better acquainted with Western cultural innovations.
The DP period was a crucial one in Škėma’s intellectual and creative development: he travelled with Lithuanian theatre troupes, studied translated world literature in German magazines, and spent time with other writers, eventually concentrating his energy on writing and publishing his first book of prose, Cinders and Sparks (Nuod guliai ir kibirkštys, 1947), an exploration of his painful wartime experiences. Although critical reactions were reserved, it was noted that Škėma knew how to concentrate a great deal of meaning into a single detail, as in this episode describing the bombing of a shelter: “Brain matter flew out of the split skull and splattered an edition of World History. It looked as though a mischievous boy had turned over his plate of porridge.”
After four years, Škėma and his young family emigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn. Škėma quickly joined the Lithuanian émigré cultural scene, directing and acting in theatre productions in the US and Canada, and writing for the cultural press. Avant-garde film-maker Jonas Mekas, who was then a budding writer, remembers how Škėma was embraced by the younger generation of émigré artists and writers even though he was a decade older. In the US, Škėma was unsuccessful in finding work that even remotely suited his artistic talents, leaving him to work in a factory packing boxes and later as an elevator operator in the upmarket Statler Hotel in Manhattan where, he ironically noted, his acting experience came in handy. Škėma devoted every spare minute to his writing, even while at work.
In 1949, Škėma began to write his most important play, The Awakening (Pabudimas, published in 1956), in which he explores the nature of the Soviet regime through the challenges faced by two former classmates and the woman they both love in an NKVD (Soviet Interior Ministry) prison during the first Soviet occupation of Lithuania.
While writing The Awakening, Škėma was also experimenting with prose, trying out various stylistic registers. Saint Inga (Šventoji Inga, published in Chicago in 1952) contained the key story “Sunny Days” (Saulėtos dienos), based on true events from Škėma’s early life in Ukraine. But the author’s goal was aesthetics, not autobiography – to present a reverse version of the myth of a lost paradise, to express a disharmonious world view and a loss of faith in the search for any kind of harmony in the irrationality of the twentieth century. It is in this work that Škėma discovers the motif of rising and falling, which will appear in later works as Sisyphus’s struggle up the mountain or as a parallel to Jacob’s climbing up to Heaven. Not surprisingly, Škėma’s book shocked the generally conservative, Catholic Lithuanian émigré reading public, in particular the book’s transgression of sexual taboos, so that publishers forced the author to wait six or nine years for his later books to come out.
Nor did Škėma’s most important work, unquestionably the novel White Shroud (written in 1952–54, but published only in 1958, in London), avoid angry reactions – some members of the book club that published it even cancelled their subscriptions. The scandal did not subside with the author’s death: a Catholic philosopher warned the Lithuanian nation that society must defend itself from the poison of nihilism Škėma had left out for it during a difficult time.
Time has shown that, half a century later, White Shroud has become not only a very important Lithuanian novel, but also an enduringly popular one. The once shocking love scenes now seem quite tame, the humour and irony haven’t lost their bite, the agitated, fragmentary narrative reflects the pulse of today’s world, and the mass migrations of the early twentieth century offer new possibilities for identifying with the protagonist, Antanas Garšva. White Shroud does not present any moralising truth and refuses to explain the meaning of life, which makes it appealing to readers of different generations, especially youth.
White Shroud can be seen as a three-storey building constructed of several types of fragments. The present time of the novel, the ground floor, depicts less than twenty-four hours in the life of Garšva, a poor immigrant, once a well-known poet, who now works as an elevator operator in a large New York hotel. The second floor consists of memoir-like passages titled “From Antanas Garšva’s Notebooks” which relate key experiences in Garšva’s childhood and youth, and several years in DP camps; this layer is complemented by third-person accounts of traumatic episodes from his life in Lithuania, which the character himself can no longer remember. The third floor contains recent events from Garšva’s life in the United States, including his love affair with the married fellow-émigré Elena, and several meetings with his friend Doctor Ignas.
The brilliance of the novel lies in how, like Joyce and Woolf, Škėma presents these narratives from different perspectives, resulting in a multi-voiced, stylistically and linguistically complex Modernist symphony. In the present time of the novel, passages of introspection shift to descriptions in an objective narrator’s voice, while internal monologue is interrupted by dialogue between Garšva and hotel guests or employees. These passages of dialogue could have originally been written in English but Škėma expresses them in Lithuanian peppered with comical émigré jargon. The immigrant’s daily struggle to adapt to a harsh new world is in sharp contrast to the protagonist’s rich inner discourse, where he improvises on a combination of personal experiences and the great historical themes, drawing in myriad cultural allusions, literary quotes and fragments of virtually abstract Lithuanian polyphonic folk song. As he travels endlessly up and down in his elevator, Garšva is writing a poem in his head – using imagery from ancient Baltic mythology, the rhythms of atonal music, and the forms of folk wood sculpture. The reconstruction of an archaic world through poetic language is Garšva’s final illusion. But as Yeats said of life in modern times, “the centre cannot hold.” By the end of the novel, Garšva has not been able to write down his poem or put the fragments of his life back together in any kind of a rational structure. The grammatical and linguistic disarray of the final pages mirrors the final unravelling of his mind.
Most of the novel was written in Montreal, where Škėma went in 1953 to be with his lover, the poet Birutė Pukelevičiūte, leaving his wife and daughter in Brooklyn. Pukelevičiūte had admired Škėma’s genius from the time of the DP camps and had had similar difficult experiences – in Gdansk (Danzig), Poland at the end of the war, she barely escaped the mass rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers (Škėma’s mother was similarly lucky while living in Ukraine), and during the sixties she was accused of indecency for her erotic poetry. This short union was fruitful for Škėma on the creative front. Without a Canadian work permit, he was free to devote all of his time to his art – rehearsals for a production of his play The Awakening and the writing of The Elevator, as this novel was originally called.