by Imre Kertész
I thought at first I was holding the libretto for the Ring. As you know, I was a fanatical Wagner enthusiast at the time.
But when you opened it you found, instead of Wagner’s text, the short story by Thomas Mann. Tell me, did the book really have such a decisive impact on your life?
It did, but now you have to imagine the intellectual wasteland of the Stalinist era. Radical literature was represented by Volokolamsk Highway and Far from Moscow …24 I, on the other hand, needed to read the whole of world literature, as I soon realized. I hadn’t the slightest idea how to set about it. Anyway, in a second-hand bookshop I bought a cheap paperback in the dog-eared pages of which modestly lurked Paul Valéry’s hyperre-fined essay on Leonardo da Vinci.25 I couldn’t understand a word, which impressed me hugely.
Paul Valéry—to my generation he is at best just a name.
Yet he’s an important writer. The volume started right away with the letters he wrote about The Crisis of the Mind. In that Stalinist dictatorship, whoever would have thought there was a crisis of the mind? We had long passed that point without having given it a thought … or just listen to what he has to say about the poet’s method: “The true condition of a genuine poet differs completely from the dreaming state … I presume to discern in it a purely conscious search, a polishing of thoughts, the clapping of the spirit into exquisite fetters, a constant triumph of the victim … Even he who wishes to record a dream has to do this when fully alert. If I wish to write down accurately the oddities, the self-contradictions, of the frail slumberer whom I was only just before, to follow this pensive plunge of the soul into my own depths, like the fallen leaf of a tree through the hazy infinitude of memory, it is not permissible to delude myself that I have managed to reach this without an intense straining of the consciousness, whose masterpiece will be that it also espies the thing which came into being only at its expense.” Lines like that truly drove me wild. I soon made the acquaintance of two gentlemen who would regularly visit the same cafés that I called on: a Mr. Vermes, known from his diminutive mouse head and disproportionately large, translucent ear flaps as Bat-ears, and Mr. Weisz, who was known in Budapest’s ever-inventive argot—after the title of Lajos Zilahy’s early novel26—Something’s-Adrift-in-the-Vise. They were one-time booksellers who, after their businesses were taken into state ownership, used to lug what was left of their merchandise under their arms or in battered, old-fashioned briefcases. They managed to procure anything you ordered from them. By good fortune, I still had a few first editions of P. Howard’s books that had remained, heaven knows how, from my childhood collection of books. That was a pseudonym that “cloaked,” as was widely known, the popular Hungarian writer Jenő Rejtő, a writer blessed with a quirky sense of humour who in fact had been killed during the war while he was on forced labour service27 on the Russian front. His books were officially prohibited, but at the time they were of considerable value, so that instead of paying ready money I used to barter with them. To cut a long story short, I was by then in some measure inwardly prepared for a literary encounter with a great author, and it was my luck that of all books it should have been precisely The Blood of the Walsungs that fate delivered into my hands. It was not just the boldness of its topic, incest, which fascinated me, but also the silky-smooth style, the irony, the melancholy, the knowledge … you can imagine how I was affected on reading lines like: “Creation! How did one create?… it came to him as in a yearning vision that creation was born of passion and was reshaped anew as passion. He saw the pale, spent woman hanging on the breast of the fugitive to whom she gave herself, he saw her love and her distress and he knew: so life must be to be creative”—who else was the text addressed to if not to me?
I totally understand.
Death in Venice came into my hands not much later, and I can say of that that it truly did change my life.
In what respect?
In the most extreme, I might say revolutionary sense, because in Death in Venice I was made to understand definitively that literature is a bottomless turmoil, a blow to the heart from which there is no recovery; an elemental courage and encouragement, and at the same time something like a fatal disease.
If I’m not mistaken, you have already mentioned that you were an incorrigible romantic whom the world of existing socialism all of a sudden clasped to its bosom. Did you have any other comparable literary epiphany?
Just one. During the 1957 Book Week in Budapest I was loafing fairly lost among the publisher’s stands hunting for something new, and what’s more something that I could afford. A yellow-backed little volume came to my hand: an unfamiliar book by a French author with a name that was unknown to me. While standing there I read a few sentences before looking at its jacket: it was priced at 12 forints.
Camus’s novel, The Stranger, I believe?
Yes. And that was the second fatal blow for me. I didn’t get over it for years.
What about Kafka?
I discovered his immeasurable greatness too late, at an age when one is less receptive to primary great experiences. I have the book-publishing policy of the Socialist era to thank for first attempting to hide Kafka from readers, then pooh-poohing him, and finally, when they got round to publishing him, stowing him away under the counter.
So, the bounds of your literary taste were determined by two such radically contrasting writers as Albert Camus and Thomas Mann. I would add Thomas Bernhard as well.
With every justification. It is possible to like Bernhard hugely for a while, but then you more readily put his books to one side. But aren’t we being a bit too literary?
Probably, but then it is part of the subject.
True, true. What I was wondering was why I feel so uneasy about that expression you used: the bounds of your literary taste.
And have you puzzled it out?
There is something arbitrary about it that doesn’t correspond to the facts. We seem to be leafing about in an enormously hefty book, entitled “Literature,” and I stab a finger at two authors: they are my literary taste. In reality, however, it didn’t happen like that. Both authors burst into my life like a catastrophe, and I’m using that word in the original sense of a disastrous overturning. It’s true that I picked the authors, but I couldn’t help picking them.
Notwithstanding the fact that they fell into your hands by chance?
The word “chance” doesn’t mean anything; it doesn’t explain anything. I could replace it with the word “inevitable” and would be saying the same thing even though the two words bear apparently contrary meanings.
True. So we are still looking for an explanation as to what it was that held you prisoner among your papers.
Though sober common sense told me that I was pointlessly wasting my time and living a parasitic existence, and I took both those arguments deadly seriously … much later on, something Sartre says, most probably in Words, often went through my mind: “You talk in your own language but you write in a foreign one.”28 That sentence was not yet known to me, and I felt a little like someone who may well have left the tower of Babel but had not yet arrived anywhere.
Can you be more specific about what you mean by the “tower of Babel”?
A situation in which it’s not just one another’s languages that we don’t understand but not even our own.
And that was precisely what you were looking for?
So I supposed, but in truth what I was looking for was that third language which is not mine, nor that of others, but the one in which I had to write, only I hadn’t the slightest idea of that at the time, so that the more “immediately” I sought to write, the more false the resulting text.
Let’s skip ahead. Do you make a habit of reading the reviews of your books?
Off and on, and only with due circumspection.
What do mean by “circumspection”?
You know, it takes a lot of confidence to have a book published. To “bring it out”—the expression itself indicates its gravity. You might also say that you hand it o
ver.
Unless, that is, you wish to be a secret writer, you have no choice.
Precisely. On the one hand, you have to be aware that you are surrendering yourself completely, yet on the other that is exactly what you are aiming at. You therefore find yourself in an ironic situation. There is a need for circumspection because you will never be able to approach your own work through someone else’s eyes—least of all a critic’s eyes.
Yet you still sometimes read reviews. Why?
Human foible. But also because it can sometimes be instructive, especially in a society that has been riven so much by censorship, ideologies, and jockeying for position. Here in Hungary, literary criticism has become a genre in its own right, often having little or nothing to do with the work that happens to be under discussion—a lyrical genre, more poetic than poetry.
Is that your take on it? After decades of your name being barely known, suddenly in 2003 books, monographs, are being published about you in Hungary.
I wouldn’t like to seem ungrateful, but in no case did I have the feeling that the books were really about me, still less about my works.29
Do you have the feeling that these people don’t understand you?
I don’t understand them. We speak different languages, hold different values. But for my own part I would rather end any discussion on the subject of literary criticism: it is unproductive and tedious.
Despite that, over time your existence as an author nevertheless loomed before you as a potentially soluble problem—or so at least the following cadence from Kaddish for an Unborn Child would appear to suggest: “I am at most still a bit of a literary translator, if I am and have to be anything. As such, despite the threatening circumstances, in the end I radically removed from my path the ignominious existence of a successful Hungarian author, even though, as my wife (for a long time now someone else’s wife) told me, I have all the endowments it takes to be one (which slightly horrified me at the time), not that she was saying, my wife said, that I should jettison my artistic or any other principles, she was merely saying, my wife said, that I should not be fainthearted, and the more that I was so, that is to say the less I were to do that (jettison my artistic or any other principles), the harder I would have to strive to realize those principles, which is to say, when all is said and done, myself, and hence to succeed, my wife said, since everyone strives for that, even the world’s greatest authors, ‘Don’t delude yourself,’ my wife said, ‘if you don’t want success, then why bother writing at all?’ she asked, and that is undoubtedly a thorny question, but the time is not yet ripe for me to digress on that; and the sad thing is that she probably saw straight into my heart, she was probably absolutely right, I probably do (did) have all the endowments it takes for the ignominious existence of a successful Hungarian author … what is more, and even more dangerous, I had within me in even greater measure the flair needed for the equally ignominious existence of a Hungarian author who is not successful, indeed unsuccessful—and here again I find myself clashing with my wife, who again was the one who got it right, because once one steps onto the path of success then one will be either successful or unsuccessful, there is no third way, though certainly both are equally ignominious, albeit in different ways, which is why, for a while, I escaped altogether, as a surrogate for alcoholism, into the objective stupors of literary translation …” I can see you are laughing …
Go on, admit it! I hit the nail on the head … But then, Kaddish in its entirety is fiction.
Still, a fiction that you wrote while living in a dictatorship, even if it was a late phase of that dictatorship. Give or take the odd irony, though, you did describe very accurately the dilemma faced by a writer, an intellectual of any sort, in a closed society.
One where at all events it is shameful to live. On account of my latest novel, Liquidation, I was leafing through Kaddish not long ago and I myself was taken aback by the frankness of the death wish which was the original stimulus, the guiding principle, for the novel.
In Galley Boat-Log you are preoccupied quite a lot with the idea of suicide, as if you felt uneasy that survivors like Borowski, Améry, or Primo Levi eventually succumbed to this temptation …
Do you think that “temptation” is really the right word here?
That’s a question I’d rather put to you. The odd entry in that diary sounds almost like an apology, and I’m not thinking here of that oft-quoted self-reflection of yours in which you explain that what saved your life was the fact that you were pitched from a Nazi dictatorship straight into a Stalinist dictatorship, so that unlike others living in the free world you were never enticed by hope.30 What struck me more were tucked-away remarks like: “In certain cases suicide cannot be condoned: it shows a lack of respect, as it were, to the wretched.”31
Well yes, to survive Auschwitz—a trifle vulgar, perhaps. I might say it stands in need of an explanation.
Toward the end of an essay on Jean Améry you call him “the saint of the Holocaust.”
A life that had been consummated and bore witness; moreover he knew exactly when it was time to cross into the apotheosis.
You can’t mean you envy him?
Wonderment is always tinged with a tiny spot of envy. In any event, he gave a form to his life that I have not had the strength for.
Was Améry’s example, or his figure, an inspiration for you in creating Bee, the antihero of your most recent novel, Liquidation?
I keep a photograph of him. He is sitting on a bench in a public space, his arms spread apart on the backrest. He is smiling. I have never seen such a smile anywhere else.
I know which photograph you mean; I have it too. Apart from the bitterness, there is indeed something otherworldly about it, if I may put it like that.
But to answer your question, while I was writing the novel I took the photo out many a time, sometimes studying it for as long as half an hour.
With the chilly inquiring look of a writer, or the unremitting pangs of guilt of the private individual?
I don’t know how the person is separable from the writer, or the other way round. In any case I always strive to find the uniquely authentic interpretation.
The individual’s interpretation as a writer?
That of the individual and of the situation.
Would you say “truth” instead of “interpretation”?
I don’t know what the truth is. I don’t know whether it is my job to know what the truth is, in any case. Truth-telling artists generally prove to be bad artists. Anyone who is right generally proves not to be right. We need to have respect for man’s fallibility and ignorance; there is nothing sorrier than a person who is right …
I think I catch your drift. From the viewpoint of the end of the story, you have reached your goal and you were right.
Then there is no point in our continuing this discussion. That it is, so to say, over from a dramaturgical point of view; now let’s see what story comes of it.
Well … the story of a hard yet successful literary career.
Right then, let’s now look at how the success story and the life that I undertook to interpret relate to each other.
Obviously, the result of a first, superficial look will be absurd.
What do you understand by that notion, by “absurd”?
That what’s on the outside has little to do with what’s on the inside.
Or, in other words, the story to real life.
Nevertheless, there is something in common to the extent that your novels stem from your existence, and the result stems from your novels …
With the rider that those novels became detached from me earlier on, so they’re no longer the novels they were at the time of writing: hazardous, seemingly unrealizable enterprises.
Fine, but the jackpot still depends on the spin of the wheel at the roulette table, not on any decisions, struggles, or conflicts that the player may have undergone beforehand.
That’s not a bad simile. I would only draw your attention
to the difficulties of narratability; it may be no chance that Homer was supposed to be a blind man. If we do not know what we are narrating, then we soon get to the incommensurable relation of existence and the seemingly achieved goals, where we have to abandon everything. Furthermore, this logical dead-end has been reached in the name of logic.
And if logic were to be suspended?
That still seems to be the most useful method. Then I can see my life as a series of now rational, now absurd struggles—stations that I am not permitted to thread onto the string of expediency because then I shall obtain a false result.
Despite that, you were led by goals; you must surely have set yourself a goal of some kind while you stepped from one station to the next.
Very likely, but then that’s a rule of life: a man lives with his face turned to the future, but that does not mean to say that he moves forward. I accept that we may be guided by notions of goals, but that is just an illusion: what we imagine to be the future is not as yet reality itself. It is not the future that lies in wait for us but the next moment, and anyone who thinks he is seeing beyond that moment is deceiving himself.
All of us live in this productive state of self-deception most of the time.
No doubt. And in the meantime lose sight of the ultimate goal.
I see too much Schopenhauer on your bookshelves.
Every great philosophy is a philosophy that serves to conquer the fear of death, but the truly great philosophies conquer the fear of death by accepting death.