| 1. Poetry | CONTENTS | 3. Victims of Persecution |
Of the prose-writers, Sándor Márai is undoubtedly the most significant among later Nyugat authors, even if he wrote next to nothing in Nyugat, for paradoxically not all the writers who have been labelled later Nyugat authors were frequent contributors to the periodical. Márai, born on 11 April 1900 in Kassa, a fine city in Upper Hungary, into a distinguished middle-class family, has consciously upheld the values of his class, and has never divorced himself from his background. All his virtues and defects as a writer stem from this attitude: on the one hand, his educated irony, finesse, aloofness, and sophisticated nostalgia are all the results of his background; on the other, his intellectual arrogance, class-consciousness, and occasional narrow-mindedness are also products of his conscientious adherence to bourgeois values.
Nevertheless, the world into which Márai has withdrawn no longer exists; the idée fixe of a middle-class sensibility which dominates his intellectual and creative outlook derives from a homesickness for a class and way of life which fell victim to the upheavals following World War I, when Márai was a young man. The awareness of a historical and cultural transition is a constant source of his nostalgia for this world which has irrevocably faded into oblivion.
Márai began his literary career with poetry and journalism. Verse writing, however, turned out to have been only an experiment in self-expression, and journalism, to which he applied literary standards, an outlet for his youthful enthusiasm in championing lost causes. He soon found that it was the novel which best suited his particular talent. As a novelist, his main concern is man’s inner life; he cares very little about social or national problems. Psychology is an obsession with him, and since his main aspiration is to understand men and things, and not to set right a world which is hopelessly grim and a constant source of pessimism, didactic intent is alien to Márai. His novels, published in quick succession, were always well received by the ‘Christian-National middle class’ (e.g. Baby, or First Love, 1928; Mutineers, 1930; Strange People, 1931; Divorce in Buda, 1935; Jealous People, 1937). None of these novels contain a colourful plot or exciting narrative; it is rather their language, their strange, evocative sentence-structure, with its restrained emotions and musicality, which have captured readers. His heroes seem to live a pointless life; they are frequently eccentric, withdrawn characters who are alien to, or simply odd men out in, a conformist society. Their intuition and irrationality combine common sense with a self-analytical faculty. Márai’s relentless psychological insight brings out the unfamiliar even in familiar types, for he pursues the hidden essence of human nature, even at the expense either of sacrificing the conventions of the narrative, or of subordinating the composition to a central idea.
Márai’s most remarkable work is undoubtedly his autobiography, The Confessions of a Middle-Class Citizen (2 vols., 1934-5). All his best qualities are present in this rigorous self-analysis, which is at the same time a psychological portrait of his own class. Since he is free from the conventions of the traditional novel, he can concentrate on psychological vivisection, no matter how painful or embarrassing it might prove, whether to himself or to his reader. For Márai is spiritually brave and intellectually mature, and his artistic integrity demands of him a high degree of sincerity. He never feels pity for his self-inflicted wounds, and is always ready to offend others in the interest of truth:
I have not met a single soul whose company I could enjoy for longer periods of time; there is no human community into which I fit smoothly; my attitudes, way of life and spiritual habitat are those of the middle class, yet I would sooner feel at home anywhere else than in my own class; I live in permanent anarchy, the immorality of which I feel and I can hardly bear this state of mind.
The Confessions, together with Kassák’s One Man’s Life and Illyés’s People of the Puszta, may be considered the most significant achievement of the twentieth-century Hungarian autobiographical novel.
Márai was at the height of a popularity which he had won not only by his novels, but also by his plays, essays, and travelogues, when history intruded on his personal life for the second time. In the siege of Budapest his apartment was completely destroyed, a great disaster for a writer who, in a world changing for the worse day by day, had built a protective shell around himself with books and objets d’art; in addition, it soon became clear that in the new world arising out of the ashes of war-torn Hungary there was no place for a writer with explicitly bourgeois sensibilities and values. Márai drew his conclusions, and left Hungary in 1948; he is now a citizen of the United States, and lives alternately there and in Italy. Although during his whole career he managed to preserve a snobbish isolation, the headlong plunge into uncertainty made him realize that he was a prisoner of the language in which he wrote, and no spiritual affinity with the common European cultural heritage could compensate him for his lost natural habitat as a writer. A document of his profound sense of loss is ‘Funeral Sermon’ (1950), a pathetic poem about uprooted existence. His Diaries, which he started during the war (Part I, 1943-4, 1945; Part II, 1945-57, Washington, 1958; Part III, 1958-67, Rome, 1968; Part IV, 1968-75, Toronto, 1976) not only reveal the torments of an exiled writer, but also display the sterile existence of an intellectual whose dialogues with his reading material, mainly classical European authors, are in fact fragmentary monologues produced by a nostalgia for the inner peace and harmony of a secluded world.
Uprooted existence, however, did not crush Márai as a writer. His first work on the road to recovery was Peace in Ithaca (London, 1952); in the predicament in which he found himself, inspiration from the Ulysses theme came naturally to a writer of Márai’s education. Later he rewrote his period novel about Casanova (Guest Performance at Bolzano, 1940) into a play in verse, A Gentleman from Venice (Washington,1960); Ulysses and Casanova are both archetypes for Márai in his search for the unattainable. His novels (San Gennaro’s Blood, New York, 1965; Judgement at Canudos, Toronto, 1970; Something Happened in Rome, Toronto, 1971; and The Comforter,* Toronto, 1976) are all period novels, written with a central idea about faith, heretics, and freedom of thought, and containing more intellectual speculation than fiction. Márai’s memoirs, Land, Ahoy! (Toronto, 1972), about the aftermath of World War II in Hungary, strike the reader with their restrained emotions and astonishing vividness of detail. The main virtue of these memoirs is their relating of incidents which could not have been told in Hungary today. The work is worthy counterpart to his Confessions; Márai carried his traumatic experiences with him for almost a quarter of a century before committing them to writing, in a great document on the final and irrevocable disappearence of the Hungarian middle class and its way of life, of which he was undoubtedly the last inspired spokesman. Márai took his own life on 21 February, 1989 in San Diego where lived in the last years of his life.
A gifted critic of Nyugat, András Hevesi (1901-40), wrote a single remarkable novel, Parisian Rain (1936), before being killed in action as a volunteer in the French Army. Parisian Rain, inspired by the author’s stay in France, is a chronicle of rootless existence depicted in agonized monologues intérieurs, and lacking a conventional plot. The high intensity of its vibrant tone is a far cry from Márai’s restraint; moreover Hevesi has no nostalgia; he is not uprooted, he has never been at home in this world; this completely rootless existence of his is underlined by the monotonous non-events of his Parisian stay, a time when he suffered bitterly from solitude and from self-inflicted wounds.
Upper-middle-class hypocrisy, self-deception, and a distorted sense of proportion are the main motifs in the short stories and plays of Endre Illés (1902-1986), a writer whose talent never succeeded in finding its appropriate outlet; his essays on his contemporaries (Sketches in Chalk, 1958), for example, excel in fine descriptions but his short stories occasionally seem to be contrived or over-written, although Illés shows real psychological insight when at his best. As literary director of the state-owned Szépirodalmi Publishing House (founded 1950), Illés helped to shape literary taste particularly in the 1960s, mainly with his consistent policy of republishing undeservedly forgotten authors of the turn of the century.
Hevesi, and especially Illés, represent the modern type of the ‘literary gentlemen’ – but unlike the original in eighteenth-century England, whose leisured way of life included the pursuit of literature as a hobby, they were professionals who made a living as literary critics, editors, translators, or university lecturers, men who knew more about literature than writers themselves. Yet when they made excursions into creative writing, they often found that the tricks of the trade they had acquired were seldom sufficient for their own self-expression. The second and third generations of Nyugat writers included many a writer who had difficulty in finding the proper outlet for his talent. László Bóka (1910-64), for example, studied linguistics, published poetry, wrote novels, and became professor of modern Hungarian literature at Budapest University. His essays were marked by a high degree of sensitivity, and his novels by wit and irony. Albert Gyergyai (1893-1981) became professor of French literature, and was an excellent translator and propagator of French culture. István Sőtér (1913-1988), educated at Eötvös College, also became an academician, although his belletristic works, particularly before World War II, expressed an iconoclastic revolt assailing the cherished ideals of the middle classes, and were inspired by genuine artistic commitment. Later, however, Sőtér seemed to have lost his way in the maze of his conflicting commitments, and his sense of conformity overcame the spirit of the rebellious artist in him.
The only significant authoress to emerge in the later generations of Nyugat was Erzsébet Kádár (1901-46), who received acclaim in her mid-thirties by winning a short story competition. Most of what she wrote during her short career was published in Thirty Baskets of Grapes (1944), and shows her to be a first-rate writer. Although her world is limited to childhood experiences and the life of a housewife without prospects, her constructive power and candid portraits make the stories worthy of attention.
István Örley (1913-45) also derived inspiration from his childhood experiences. His short stories, permeated with constant nostalgia for his youth, contain an unusual degree of tension; his insecurity and restlessness are aggravated by the guilt caused by the ‘desertion’ of his own class, the gentry. The hero in one of his stories summarizes Örley’s excruciating sense of guilt: ‘Among the old I proved to be more immature than a new-born baby, among the young I was considered a bearded old man. In church I was thought to be godless; in the corner of a ballroom a prophet. By common consent mothers declared me to be more lustful than a satyr, the consent of their daughters found me more ascetic than a monk.’ (‘Hanna’, 1936.) No doubt he was influenced in his creation of a nostalgic atmosphere by both Krúdy and Márai, yet his male figures, fleeing from ‘good’ society to deserted streets, cheap taverns, or night cafés, constantly fight against their own solitude – occasional friends and prostitutes provide only short periods of alleviation – the terror of silence soon encompasses them, and their monologues must fill the void left by the lack of genuine human relationship. Örley was a master at describing such states of mind; unfortunately he died young (during an air raid) before he could write a major work.
Örley was a soldier by profession, who managed to preserve his artistic sensibility intact from the senseless drills of the military academy. He never wrote about his experiences there; it was his friends and comrade, Géza Ottlik (1912-1990) who described the atmosphere of a military school as reflected in the recollections of two former cadets many years later. School at the Frontier (1959) is a long novel about tedious school years, and about the systematic bullying by the warrant officers and the older boys which breaks down the resistance of the eleven-year-old recruits, who are paralysed into numbness, not seeing, not hearing, not noticing anything until they become totally alienated from civilian life, for their attempts to behave with decency and to preserve their individual dignity intact usually meet with disaster. Ottlik’s work is much more than a long narrative of these years; in fact, the narrative serves only as a framework within which he tells the reader something about the ties that really count between people, about what human beings really live by: the depth of essential relationships and the reservoir of strength they represent. There are two narrators – Medve, who is dead, but has left a manuscript behind him, and Beebee who corrects, explains, modifies Medve’s story. There are brief allusions to the later lives of the various characters; Ottlik thereby adroitly disrupts the linear time-sequence of events, achieving a construction that has a fascination of its own.
By putting events into context and perspective, Ottlik seems to be suggesting that the fragmentary information anyone possesses at any given time and place is insufficient for human understanding, and consequently communication, with its insufficient words, sign language, and clumsy actions, is inevitably incomplete. Ottlik’s message is effectively supported by his powerful immediacy. Although critics suggested that Ottlik is far too familiar with existentialist literature, the fact remains that not only has he managed to depict complex human relations in the formative years of adolescence, but, by expanding the meaning of a one-time experience into universal proportions, he has written the best modern novel in Hungarian about the impossibility of communication, about the fragmentary nature of self-expression, and about the perplexing dilemma of the self versus society.
Having left the ‘school at the frontier’, Ottlik chose to avoid the military academy and enrolled at Budapest University to read mathematics, a discipline which also left a lasting imprint on his mind; he is always ready to employ abstract notions and mathematical terms in conceptual sentences, yet none of his short stories suffer from intellectual coldness or conceit, and his mathematically-trained mind effectively assists him in precise descriptions, in the sparing application of emotional effects, and in economy of composition. Ottlik’s first stories were published in the late 1930s, and his central problem, already then, was the enigmatic existential insecurity of every individual; this, however, never became an obsession with him, but rather a state of mind derived from the real insecurity experienced by his generation in the chaotic days of World War II. Of his minor works, Rooftops at Dawn (1943, rewritten 1957) deserves special attention.
An unduly neglected author of this generation is Endre Birkás (1913-75), an outsider among outsiders. His first novel Ambush (1943) passed almost unnoticed by the critics in the hectic days of the war, and, like Ottlik, he reappeared on the literary scene only after the revolution, with a new novel: Forgotten People (1960), concerning the fate of the 2nd Army on the Eastern Front.* The novel reveals Birkás’s best qualities: detachment, a sense of dry humour, unadorned language, and terse composition. His world lacks sharp contours; it is always a rainy day in his stories, which are peopled by lonely, humiliated figures whose uneventful, drab lives are unfolded in a few masterly strokes, bringing back memories of tragedies stored deep in the mind. His most productive period falls in the 1960s, and his best novel is Dead End (1963), in which he produced a relentless analysis of a mixed marriage between a Hungarian husband and a Swedish wife. Birkás defects are also his virtues: emotional restraint, natural shyness, and a decency which never allowed him to falsify artistic truth in the interest of effectiveness.
Gábor Thurzó (1912-79), born and brought up in the inner city of Budapest, started his literary career in the footsteps of Márai as a writer of the middle class. First he experimented with esoteric themes and came under the influence of the neo-Catholic trend, particularly Chesterton. His world is, however, initially restricted to the narrow, ancient streets and Baroque churches of the inner city (Fortunatus the Helper, 1936) where he spent not only his childhood, but all his life. He has a keen eye for minute detail; his style is ornate, with strange, evocative adjectives, many of them describing light effects, which lend his first novel and early stories a curious, brooding atmosphere. His first mature novel (Days and Nights, 1945) treats an unusual triangle, in which an ageing woman fights a losing battle against a young schoolmaster for her actor husband. It is by an unsuccessful attempt at suicide that she regains her husband, and the schoolmaster decides to marry the daughter of a colleague. On a sudden impulse, however, he leaves the small town with one of his pupils. Thurzó skilfully utilizes the psychological aspects of the conflict arising out of his theme. His stylistic excesses had by now subsided, and the novel is a balanced yet passionate chronicle of human relations.
After World War II Thurzó broke with the neo-Catholic group of writers centred round Vigilia, and, in a series of short stories, looked back on the movement with a critical eye (‘A Lamb in the Sheepfold’, 1948, or ‘In the Lion’s Throat’, 1948) asking bitter questions about the moral responsibility of those who, while preaching the loftiest principles, were passive onlookers during the horrors of the war years; the stories are all inspired by the collective guilt of a generation for which absolution was nearly impossible.
In the bleak years of Stalinism Thurzó subsisted on script-writing for the film industry. It proved a creative silence: his works written after this experience reflected what he had learned – an effective use of dialogue, and swift changes of scenes achieved with ‘cuts’, as in films. Of his later short stories ‘Amen, Amen’ (1957) is the best, taking place during the revolution of 1956, and providing Thurzó with an opportunity to make a final break with the past by depicting figures who once belonged to the Establishment of the Horthy regime and who believed the revolution to be their chance of bringing back what was now irrevocably past. Thurzó’s hero, Dr Schay, looking at events from the comparatively sheltered world of a block of flats in the inner city, gets a curiously distorted picture of men and events – Thurzó realized that the revolution was not by or for the middle class, and was able to express his assessment on an artistic level.
His most ambitious novel, The Saint (1966), about a case of canonization,* vigorously propagated by the Church during World War II, was written after a period of self-imposed silence. The protagonists of the novel all had their prototypes in previously written short stories, and in this final version Thurzó’s main theme – how these militant priests exploited the credulity of the masses for political objectives – is described with psychological insight. Thurzó adapted his novel to the stage (Advocatus Diaboli, 1966); it had a successful run, but also proved that its author was a better novelist than a playwright.
Emil Kolozsvári Grandpierre (1907-1992) has always been regarded as a controversial figure in literary life. His great-grandfather came to Hungary as a French tutor in the early nineteenth century, and Grandpierre seemed to inherit a touch of the light, quizzical Gallic wit which is one of his main assets. His first significant novel, The Love Affairs of Dr Csibráky (1936), is a satirical portrait of a scholar, who is living proof of the vanity of scholarly knowledge; his private life is governed by wrongly selected axioms, and consequently this essentially tragic figure lacks any redeeming quality because of his ridiculous defence mechanism. In A Great Man (1937) he depicts with the same satirical disposition several types of the intelligentsia. Many critics found Grandpierre’s views about the intelligentsia destructive, although he only seemed to be suggesting that the traditional role of the intellectual is no longer applicable in modern society, and the sooner this is realized the better. During the Rákosi regime, the general intolerance prevailing in literary life prevented Grandpierre from writing effective satire. His later works are written in a lighter fashion; they are often entertaining (e.g. Dialogue with Fate, 1962), often documents of Budapest humour and slang (Wrapper, 1965); but they frequently treat human conflicts in a superficial manner. His latest work is autobiographical (The Last Wave, 1973).
Finally, Miklós Szentkuthy (1908-1988) made his name with a bulky ‘narrative text’ published privately under the title of a Latin preposition: Prae (1934). Szentkuthy utilizes the technique of free association as employed by James Joyce, and his volatile heroes wander freely through different ages, changing their character or sex, as does Virginia Woolf’s Orlando; nevertheless Prae differs essentially from Ulysses. While the latter has a hidden plot, constructed with logical precision, the former completely disregards the traditional relationship between writer and reader. Prae is an indirect approach to totality. Its author not only disregards conventional approaches involving linear time sequence and systematic knowledge, but believes that the world is essentially chaotic, and no rational approach is possible. His mouthpiece in the novel, Touqué, argues that science and scholarship presume the world to be the sum total of a series of unrelated facts, although facts exist only in their relationship. Szentkuthy’s idea is similar to what Heidegger calls In-der-Welt-sein. Moreover, since man’s rationality breaks down in front of the incomprehensibly chaotic world order, the world is absurd; therefore it has to be depicted in an absurd way, a notion which seemed to overpower French literature years later. Szentkuthy is interested in the contrasts created by the antonyms chaos-order, rational-irrational. Chaos is the equivalent of nature, or life; order equals an analytical and systematic approach-forms in particular, and artificiality in general. In describing the world the only possibility is to take the self as a starting point. Since all the ‘selves’ are different, Szentkuthy believes that ‘there is not a single book or even a single line in the whole world which would even approximately contain my truth’. Obviously, philosophical discourses make difficult reading when presented in the form of a ‘pseudo-novel’. What Szentkuthy attempts to convey in fictional form is that there are cognitive processes beyond the range of the approaches known to us, and that reality is more, or greater, than the perceptible world. In addition, he believes that hallucinogenic agents can influence the cognitive process, but he admits that these processes are hopelessly buried in the self, as their images and vision cannot be relayed to the reader, either artistically or otherwise.
This is the essential problem with experimental literature of Szentkuthy’s kind. The reader cannot successfully follow the author into his highly interesting, yet hopelessly private, world. This is the fate of Szentkuthy’s excursion into unknown dimensions, in spite of the wealth of information, richness of detail, and frequently original philosophical discourses in his Prae.
His next work, Towards the Only Metaphor (1935) is perhaps less speculative, and contains more belletristic detail. Its title reveals Szentkuthy’s desperate tenacity in his aim as an artist to capture and condense totality in its most essential form.
There is an impenetrable, desperate difference between my thoughts and my writing. Late in the night I walk hurriedly among the trees of Mount St. Gerard: there are thousands of sensitive impressions, thousands of metaphors and logical flashes of inspiration. I experience the whole gamut of ethos, I play long parts in tragedy and comedy, I plan murders, I offend lovers, I create rich parents, I outline theories, and when I return home, when I take up the pen, I have in my hands the most unfamiliar, the most deceptive, the most ineffectual clichés.
Szentkuthy seems to have found a reassuring solution to his perplexing artistic dilemma in his monumental Breviary of St Orpheus (so far: 8 pts., 1939-74), in which, Orpheus, the symbol of human intellect, ‘submerges’ in history and culture in order to experience the timeless aspects of human existence. Szentkuthy, like many of his contemporaries, was silenced by the Rákosi regime, and reappeared on the literary scene only in the 1960s. For a time he seems to have abandoned St Orpheus and published novels about great creative artists, like Mozart (Divertimento, 1957), or Goethe (Face and Mask,1962). These novels, like his short stories (Angelic Gigi! 1966) contain the final residue of his ambitious experiments, brilliant intellectualism, and youthful playfulness, and they are not entirely free of snobbery and mannerism.
| 1. Poetry | CONTENTS | 3. Victims of Persecution |