by Imre Kertész
Does the thought of suicide still occupy you?
It does, but in a different way than before, during the dictatorship, when it seemed to be the only alternative …
Would you care to finish the sentence?
Certainly: in face of the shame of continued survival.
Would it be right to say, then, that the comforting thought of suicide helped keep you alive?
A marvellous paradox! I never put it to myself in quite those terms.
Yet I was just going to ask you to what degree this incessant toying with the idea of suicide is serious, and if it is, then to what extent has it altered the prospect for you.
Are you asking about the sorts of techniques I have employed to play for time; what, in the final analysis, was my method for surviving; or to put it another way, what did I use, and how, to deceive myself? If I were to say that I always wanted to die, and instead of that I always wrote a book—that would be an elegant cop-out, wouldn’t it?
I would make do with it if I were to read it in a book by an aphorist like Cioran, but with you I’m expecting a genuine response.
I’m not sure that if some less brutal means had been lying to hand, morphine, let’s say, or some other reliable poison … well, I’m not sure whether, on one or two occasions, my life might have been in serious jeopardy. In a western democracy I would not have come to know those moods of despair on which my heuristics fed. On the other hand, the other day, while organizing the notes that I made for Liquidation, I came across a slip of paper … hang on a second, I’ll find it in a moment … here it is. “Those years once more, the depressing dictatorship mood, happy deliberations of suicide, the whole death-game of the Seventies and Eighties …”
I see what you mean: a bit morbid, but fathomable. The discreet charms of the dictatorship … Did you ever talk about such things with Albina?
No, no way! We had other things to do: one had to live.
Could she not have found a better, easier occupation for herself than working as a waitress?
No. I mentioned, didn’t I, that her first husband had been put to use in one of the show trials, and the sentence he received included confiscation of all his property? Albina was obliged to leave their big middle-class home straight away and urgently sort out a means of livelihood. She had acquired no profession, but she did have a driving licence, which meant that she managed to obtain a job as a truck driver with TEFU, the state haulage company. She worked alongside other, likewise “déclassé elements” as well as a few genuine professional truck drivers in handling what counted as the almost punitive business of making the dawn deliveries of vegetables and milk, which amounted to stopping each and every time for the produce to be unloaded in front of the shops. She made a fairly conspicuous figure with her long, lacquered fingernails from her previous mode of life, not to say the Alsatian dog that she took along with her on the trips because there was nobody with whom the animal could be left. The dog would obligingly leap up onto the back of the truck, but once it was up there it would also “guard” the truck, so the loading workers wouldn’t dare go near it.
I can just picture the bizarre scene.
Not long after we had got together she found herself a job with what was called the Restaurant and Buffet Company. In those days that was a major privilege; the firm was managed by a former footballer called Lajos Ónodi, who collected a whole flock of déclassé persons who had been dislodged from their old ways of life. There was a dishwasher who had been a countess and a baroness who had been promoted to cocktail waitress, a football player’s wife whose husband had left her—take your pick. Albina was given a job as a waitress in the Abbázia [Opatija] Restaurant which used to be by the Oktogon.
While in the meantime you sat at home reading Schopenhauer.
One could put it like that.
Did you, in all honesty, read right through all four of the hefty volumes of the Hungarian edition?
Of Parerga and Paralipomena, you mean? I certainly did; indeed, for a time it was a constant reading-matter, and that had the abiding merit that it led me on to Kant.
Another of the books that you had need of and that sure enough, found their way into your hands?
Exactly. To the best of my recollection, a new Hungarian translation of the Critique of Pure Reason was published in the Sixties. I bought it, but it lay around unread for who knows how long. It was just as much a mystery why I packed it in the suitcase when Albina and I went down to Balatonalmádi one summer. Brilliant July sunshine gave way to days of rain. One could step out of the room that we had rented onto a covered wooden balcony. I dipped into the book and then couldn’t put it down. I read it the same way that I had read Agatha Christie’s detective stories when I was young. It was further reinforced by the fact, which I had long suspected anyway, that the world is not “an objective reality independent of us,” as the Marxists would harp on, but quite the opposite: it exists only as long as I exist, and it only exists in the manner in which I can imagine it: in the midst of the conditions of space and time and causal relations that are given to me.
A lot of that has since been refuted, if I’m not mistaken.
That’s of no concern to me; for that great text corroborated and rescued me completely. Why would I be interested in facts? Kant cannot be refuted any more than an oak tree can be refuted. It grew and spread and it stands there, but there are times when we need it in order to stay in its shade and marvel at it, like at a great encouraging example.
That sounds rather like a credo, which is quite unusual coming from you. So, as you have already mentioned, in 1960 you start writing Fatelessness. You were thirty years old at the time and, on the evidence of the photographs, a determined young man in good shape, who, according to what is in effect the final chapter of Fiasco, does not wish to take the chance to escape “from this city which denied all hope, this life that belied all hope: ‘Where to?’ asked Köves, at a loss to understand,… ‘Does it matter?’ Sziklai fumed. ‘Anywhere!’ … He set off again. ‘Abroad,’ he added, and in Köves’s ears the word, at that instant, sounded like a festive peal of bells. He walked on for a while without a word, his head hung in thought, by Sziklai’s side. ‘Sorry, but I can’t go,’ he said eventually. ‘Why not?’ Sziklai again came to a stop, astonishment written all over his face. ‘Don’t you want to be free?’ he asked. ‘Of course I do,’ said Köves. ‘The only trouble is,’ he broke into a smile, as if by way of an apology, ‘I have to write a novel.’ ‘A novel?!’ Sziklai was dumbstruck. ‘Now of all times? … You can write it later, somewhere else,’ he went on. Köves continued smiling awkwardly: ‘Yes, but this is the only language I know,’ he worried. ‘You’ll learn another one,’ Sziklai said, waving that aside … ‘By the time I learn one I’ll have forgotten my novel.’ ‘Then you’ll write another one,’ Sziklai’s voice by now sounded almost irritated, and it was more for the record than in hope of being understood that Köves pointed out: ‘I can only write the one novel that it is given me to write’ … They stood wordlessly, facing each other in the street, a storm of shouts of ‘We want to live!’ around them,… then they swiftly embraced. Sziklai was then swallowed up in the crowd, whereas Köves turned on his heels and set off back at a shambling pace, like someone who is in no hurry as he already suspects in advance all the pain and shame his future holds for him.” I have deliberately quoted from this scene because, for all its grotesqueness, I nevertheless feel it is very true to life.
Rightly so. I think all big decisions are, in truth, as grotesque as that.
I wonder why.
Because they are inexplicable. You have to choose between bombast and silence.
I have the feeling that in light of The Union Jack there is no need for us to say anything more about 1956. The late Sixties were characterized by a national collective amnesia, the emergence of a Hungarian society which was derided as “goulash communism” that you yourself have referred to, here and there, as “the intellectual swamp of the Brezhnev er
a” or “the West’s favourite brand of Communism.”
Yes, that was when I noticed the emergence of a collective morality (or rather immorality) of the functional man, and of fatelessness.
In Galley Boat-Log one can read lengthy analyses32 about this discovery, about functional man being “an insubstantial being at the mercy of totalitarianism.” Then in Liquidation one of the characters speaks about a separate “species” of survivors: “… we are all survivors; that is what determines our perverse and degenerate mental world. Auschwitz. Then the forty years that we have put behind us since.” What I am particularly interested in, right now, is what you mean by a “collective morality.”
That peculiarly Hungarian consensus that blossomed in the name of survival and, in essence, was founded on an “acceptance of realities,” so-called.
Realities that included the Kádár regime, installed after the crushing of the 1956 revolution …
Yes, that cheap conformity that undermined every moral and intellectual stand, that petit-bourgeois police state that called itself socialist but which regarded that docile and corrupt, simpering and authoritarian, mind-numbing, semifeudal, semi-Asiatic, militaristic Horthyite society, governed from the handsomely built dictator’s waistcoat pocket, as its true model.
According to the witticism of the day, Hungary still counted as “the happiest barrack in the socialist camp.”
If I were really looking to be ironic, I would call it the country that, in the course of its historical evolution, lived through enlightened absolutism in the late eighteenth century and has now got as far as liberal totalitarianism.
“World time,” you write in Galley Boat-Log, “that blindly ticking machine, which has been dropped in the quagmire hereabouts and is now overrun by masses of sprightly Lilliputians, who are busy trying to dismantle the appliance, or at least silence it.”33
And in so doing provincial stillness set in; the stillness of the Kádár regime.
Still, perhaps even that had its good side, didn’t it? You need stillness to write a novel, don’t you?
That’s one way of looking at it: one could pull oneself back as far as was possible. That was one of the reasons I stayed in Hungary at the end of 1956: the low cost of living and a safe hiding place. Albina pleaded that we should go …
May one ask if you ever regretted not listening to her?
You may ask, but there is no answer.
You have said that it was the language, first and foremost, that bound you to Hungary; but then, on the other hand, what has become clear so far is that you gained your most stunning literary experiences, virtually without exception, from foreign writers, whether in good or bad translation. Did no Hungarian traditions have an impact on you?
It seems not. Only later did I become acquainted with Gyula Krúdy and Dezs? Szomory, whose prose I greatly love and admire; Géza Ottlik or Iván Mándy, or indeed even Sándor Márai, whose books were available only as contraband items, were still unknown to me.
Does that go any way to explaining the foreignness of the language of Fatelessness?
No, the foreignness of the language of Fatelessness is explained solely by the foreignness of the subject and the narrator.
What I seeking for an answer to is how you “managed” so totally to marginalize yourself in the intellectual life of Hungary that you could hardly be said to have been present at “the sidelines,” to use one of Iván Mándy’s categories.
During the Kádár era that was more or less the limit of my ambition.
If one pays close attention, certain pages of Galley Boat-Log attest to the fact that your unnatural situation took a greater toll on you than you may have been prepared to admit even to yourself.
You know, there’s a kind of syndrome to which I have given the name “dictatorship schizophrenia.” Every artist longs for recognition, though he is well aware that it is precisely what he doesn’t want. He finds it hard, however, to resign himself to the fact that he has created a work of art that nobody takes any notice of. One incident that happened to me was that an unknown colleague addressed me in the corridor of the writer’s retreat at Szigliget. He must have arrived not long before, because I hadn’t seen him around. “Are you Imre Kertész?” “Yes, I am.” “You wrote Fatelessness?” “I did.” Whereat, he embraced me and rained kisses on my cheeks—he was a tall and beefy man, so I had a job pulling myself away from him. He lauded the book at length, and in a far from unintelligent way. It was only then that I discovered who his nibs was: one of the Party’s chief ideologists, a chief censor, what was then called a super-Reader, the highest court of appeal in matters of suspect manuscripts. He was editor-in-chief of some critical journal in which, following his abounding enthusiasm, he got an anonymous author to write a noncommittal review that was printed in a well-hidden corner of the journal devoted to brief notifications of insignificant books.
Nice! But what can one learn from the story that one didn’t know already?
As best I recall, you asked me how I had managed to “marginalize” myself in the intellectual life of Hungary. As you can see, I didn’t have to try too hard. The Kádár regime’s scale of values functioned like a well-oiled machine, more or less automatically, quite independent even of the people who operated it. Orwellian doublethink was so self-evident a feature of life in Hungary that it could not be shaken by any private convictions or opinions.
So how could personal convictions or opinions exist, or indeed be articulated?
By totally separating them from the “must-know” region of the brain, the sphere of practical action. The blame for any consequences of that could be shifted onto the existing world order, the dictatorship, so nobody personally felt themselves as being dishonest.
Or crazy.
Quite the reverse, since they had pragmatic sense on their side; in Hungary, only life’s cavillers and dissidents could be crazy.
I found an intriguing entry in Galley Boat-Log in which, back in 1964, you wrote down a quotation both in the original English and in Hungarian translation: “He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making himself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.” And you end by attributing it to Shakespeare.
It’s actually Orwell.34
But you wrote Shakespeare, presumably out of caution.
“Dictatorship schizophrenia,” as I said. In case my notebooks were gone through.
Those written traces of the struggle you were waging for your intellectual self-preservation.
Those notes were enormously important for me at the time.
And also to preserve your sanity. As I see it, that was ultimately the most difficult thing of all for you in the Kádár world: to keep a level head. If there is any poetry in Galley Boat-Log then it springs from the struggle you were waging to keep a sane mind … But let’s now switch to light entertainment. Would you care to say how you became the author of the book for a number of much-performed musicals, popular light comedies?
It’s been done to death. I’ve already covered that a hundred times.
I came across the following lines in the frame novel of Fiasco: “I wrote a novel, in the meantime producing dialogues for musical comedies, each more inane than the last, in order to make a livelihood (hoodwinking my wife who, in the semi-gloom of the theatre auditorium at “my premieres,” would wait for me, wearing the mid-grey suit that had been specially tailored for me for such occasions, to take my place before the curtains in a storm of applause, and she would imagine that our beached life would finally work free itself from the shoals after all); but I, after assiduously putting in appearances at the pertinent branch of the National Savings Bank to pick up the not inconsiderable royalties due for this claptrap, would immediately sneak home with the guilty conscience of a thief to write a novel anew …” That makes it sound rather as though writing farces became your real job and you con
sidered novel-writing a form of truancy, of bunking-off from school.
As indeed it was. In practice, I wouldn’t have been able to give an excuse for it that was any better than I could have given for stamp-collecting or breeding exotic birds.
Was that because you were lacking in self-confidence, or more because you suspected that you would be unable to convince those around you?
Incontrovertibly, I lack a prophet’s powers of persuasion. But then what could I have said? Just wait and you’ll find out just who I am? Meanwhile just be so kind as to carry on fending for me.
But she was your wife, and she loved you?
When it comes down to it, in the end we are on our own, and there can be no kidding oneself in that respect. “A painter paints a picture with the same feeling as that with which a criminal commits a crime,” Degas said.35 Once I start to work the world becomes my enemy …
That certainly sounds rather hard-nosed. Incidentally, I heard that not so long ago one of the Budapest theatres offered to stage one of your old pieces.
I had a hard job talking them out of it.
Why wouldn’t you agree to the staging?
Look, at the time they were written those pieces had a single practical purpose: making a livelihood. As far as their intellectual content is concerned, if I may put it this way, not a molecule comes from me.
Where on earth did you get the idea of earning money from light comedy pieces, anyway?
I’ve already mentioned that I was one of a small circle of ambitious young people who, at the height of the Stalinist era, used to analyze the plays of Ferenc Molnár.