My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  ‘No, I shall not lie.’

  ‘Then how will you do it?’

  ‘That is my business,’ I replied haughtily as befits a young man living in a palace and writing about the affairs of men and gods.

  PART THREE

  The USA and the People’s Democracy

  I arrived in New York harbour on a sunny but already slightly misty afternoon in September, 1941. I had travelled on the Navemar, a rickety old Spanish freighter, with a thousand other refugees, and although we followed the route of the Santa Maria, from the jewel-box houses of Cadiz to the flat shores of the Bahamas, our journey took considerably longer than that of Christopher Columbus. The captain of our ship had to face many difficulties that the great Genoese, with his abundant but wholly retrospective imagination, could never have conceived. In addition to fighting the fury of the Atlantic and of his mutinous crew (most of them ran away in Havana), he was compelled by the RAF to steer his miserable ship into the most beautiful harbour of Bermuda, there to submit to a very thorough search and investigation. The Navemar’s slow progress was also held up several times by German submarines, far more dangerous than any sea monster of sailors’ legends. The cunning Spaniard, however, by signals or by shouting in broken English while shaking his starched cuffs like a rattlesnake in his interlocutor’s face, had always been able to convince him that it was for his side, and for his side alone, that the Navemar smuggled important war materials out of the United States. Neither side trusted him, but somehow they always let him go. It is probable that the captain smuggled for both, for this, in his opinion, was the most profitable and safe way to run the business. He was mistaken. On her way back from New York the Navemar, with her contraband, her new crew, her old captain, but no passengers, was overtaken by Fate.

  Nobody knew exactly when we would arrive, so Dr Hollos, a member of the Hungarian Committee – a huge, walrus-moustached physician from New York, no longer young – had set up his headquarters in one of the taverns on the harbour. Although he had spent most of his life in America and had fully identified himself with the constitution, laws and customs of his adoptive fatherland, he completely ignored the existence of a hundred and thirty million Americans. He lived among Hungarians, his friends were Hungarians and he would accept no patient unless he were Hungarian. And even among Hungarians he was interested only in newcomers, in genuine and authentic Hungarians, who had brought with them all the quarrels and strife of their homeland, who had not yet rid themselves of their provincialism and who preserved, both figuratively and literally, the filth of Europe that he himself, in his dynamic Americanism, so deeply despised. Old Americans, like himself, bored him stiff and therefore he avoided them. The flat of this noble, selfless and hospitable old doctor served as a transit camp for every better-known Hungarian refugee, where he could rest until Dr Hollos considered him sufficiently prepared for the American way of life.

  One of Laszlo Fényes’s letters, filled with wry humour, had prepared me while still in Tangier for the fate awaiting me in New York. Dr Hollos was a great admirer, though perhaps not a connoisseur, of the arts, and even more of artists whose value to him increased a thousandfold as soon as he met them personally. Fényes had informed me that the doctor allowed newcomers very little rest and advised them to jump immediately into the American melting-pot. He would take them up into the torch of the Statue of Liberty, or on to the roof of the Empire State Building, and explain to them that their erudition or their skill was worthless here because the Americans knew everything better. Then he would comfort them by saying that the necessary knowledge could be acquired almost within minutes and without any effort whatsoever. After this he would conduct the victim into his surgery and inject him with an anti-tubercular vaccine invented by himself, which would plunge the cowardly hypochondriac who had rolled up his sleeve instead of extricating himself with a manly ‘No’, into two months of unspeakable torment, a terrible itching of his entire body.

  The treatment would be followed by a dinner served by Mrs Hollos: roast pork with a sweet gravy of sultanas, Coca-Cola and coffee boiled for at least half an hour until the last vestige of aroma was distilled into the walls of the kitchen. At dinner Dr Hollos would enlighten his guest concerning the Bill of Rights. Later, before leaving him to his own resources, he would help his protégé to find a flat, a job, and often a car, provided the hysterical anxiety and fear of America instilled into the newcomer by his protector had not, in the meantime, driven him to suicide – an event which had occurred twice before my arrival. Fényes declared that Hollos was the very embodiment of the rich American uncle, perhaps even Uncle Sam in person, for whom only two alternatives existed: either the newcomer learned to appreciate the materialistic happiness of the New World, or he did not deserve to remain alive.

  When the Navemar dropped anchor in New York harbour I immediately recognized the old gentleman. As I rested my chin on the high railing in the bows of the ship I could see him standing just below me on the edge of the wharf, wearing a black morning coat, and holding a few typewritten quarto sheets in his hand. The sight was rather moving though I felt laughter prickling my throat. Next to Hollos stood, or rather fidgeted, a bow-legged, puny, salesman-type young man who I thought must be his secretary. Later I learned that Hollos had brought him along as representative of the working class, but treated him so condescendingly that the young man took offence and left. I called down to Hollos, who raised his palm to his forehead and peered up with a bright smile on his lips. When he caught sight of me, the smile froze, though Valy’s beauty seemed to enthral him. He found me younger than he had expected and must have been afraid that in my youthful arrogance I would detract from the solemnity of the occasion. I concluded this from the fact that he kept shouting up to me, obviously without conviction but, it seemed, to encourage himself: ‘I have always said genius is genius, no matter how old or how young!’ Finally, he took up his post at the bottom of the gangway, put his spectacles on his nose and, grasping the typewritten sheets in both hands, made ready to begin his speech. When we were informed that I was not permitted to land but would be taken to Ellis Island, Hollos asked me whether he shouldn’t deliver his speech anyway, while I was still at hand. ‘Go ahead!’ I shouted down to him. He raised his head, spread his arms wide, and began to speak in a beautiful, ringing voice. At the end of each paragraph, he pushed his glasses up on his forehead and looked to make sure I was still there. He must have heard a lot about me, because I think he was afraid I might crouch down behind the railing to laugh or to read the article about me in the New York Post that he had sent up by one of the sailors.

  I did my best to behave. I had no intention of offending that decent fellow. Only when he was turning the pages of his manuscript did I sneak a glance at the opposite shore of which I didn’t know whether it was Brooklyn or Staten Island, or at the luminous green valleys and dirty-yellow crests of the water on which low, squat tugs, furiously fast toy steamers and ferries were running back and forth carrying crowds of colourful people who kept shouting and waving to each other for no reason that I could see, since they had probably never met before and would never meet again. I found all this childish, amusing, but at the same time somehow moving, like a charity bazaar, and also a little obsolete; a nineteenth-century picture or even older, in sharp contrast with the modern – almost notoriously modern – sky-line of the city. I had the same impression of the men sitting on the edge of the wharf in their scarlet or pink braces and unbelievably colourful shirts, and of the other men running madly up and down in straw hats and stiff collars, with thick attaché cases under their arms as if they were hurrying to some meeting convened to settle the problems of the world once and for all.

  After my calm and dignified Arabs these jerky, fidgeting, hurrying little figures reminded me of the early days of the film industry. Yet I discovered one likeness between Arabs and Americans: both are filled with the consciousness of their importance, but for the Arabs the importance lies in the thoughts preoccupyi
ng them or the subject of their conversation, while the Americans are moved, pushed, pulled, driven by the importance of their activities. To the right and left of Dr Hollos’s morning coat I could look into the street through the two gates of the customs shed. I could see only the lower two-thirds of people’s bodies, which created the impression of purposeful attaché cases flying back and forth on the long wings of trouser-legs. Listening to the kind old man, I sighed deeply, not because I was depressed but rather because this was exactly how I had pictured to myself my arrival in America.

  The African euphoria, the picaresque life, was now over. My year of happiness in Morocco had fed on innumerable sources; the most important of which was that I had, at last, found my one and only, made-to-measure environment, the environment that fitted my character like a glove. This was true of the desert where, between the two concave lenses of heaven and earth, on a stage without scenery, I stood in the birthplace of dualist religions and was compelled to ponder at length, though without result, on the great questions of life and death, being and not being, good and evil – something I had always yearned for without having found the time for it amidst the duties, occupations and even pleasures of everyday life. But it was true also of the desert’s opposite, the market-place of Marrakesh, the busy squares of Tangier, the tohu-bohu of the tea-houses after midnight where life was a medley of knifings, love-making, funerals, bargaining, quarrels, gossip, the strange exhibitionism of a world in which the beggars on the street corners conversed like philosophers and philosophers copulated in the streets like dogs. It was true of my Arab friends, first of all Amar but also of the robber prince Sidi Mohammed and the Sudanese merchants with the donkey, the storyteller in the market-place and the slipper-maker from whom, after hours of anecodotizing, I bought a pair of sandals. In all these I recognized myself, a more attractive, more uninhibited and more sincere incarnation of my being, reflections of myself – and this filled my intensely extroverted being with all the more happiness as at last, without the torment and discomfort of introversion, I encountered myself again and again, in a million shapes, in the scenery of the world outside, or in the actors and mutes wandering across the stage.

  My pleasure in Morocco was enhanced to no little degree by the twofold discovery that I had escaped from the increasingly disciplined and unbearable workshop of technical civilization and, at the same time, rid myself of certain problems and dilemmas raised by my conscience. I had always borne everything without complaint although it had always pained me that I had landed – due to the place and time of my birth – in a technical civilization which not only determined my way of life but also limited my imagination, and which even censored and emasculated my thoughts and emotions. Ever since my early youth I had regretted – although I never talked about it lest I should be branded a reactionary or insane – that I had to live in a society in which I knew, long before undressing them, the colour, cut and price of every woman’s underwear; in a society in which the lowest, the basic layers had discarded, or were in the process of discarding, their ancient culture and pleasures for the sake of the gas-oven, the sink, the bathtub and the monotonous drabness of industrial towns; where the progress of the food industry deprived foods of their taste and flavour; where mass-produced consumer goods were pushed down the throat of the consumer through the conditioning effect of advertising and the complete destruction of good taste, and where the walks and conversations of the Athenian philosophers and Faust, or even of two peasants of average intelligence, were replaced by the thoughtless tedium of automobile passengers stuck in the traffic of large towns. When listening to Hitler’s or Stalin’s speeches on the radio I wondered what would have happened to the Roman Empire had Nero’s or Caracalla’s nonsensical gabble been broadcast in the reading room of the great library of Alexandria or the market-place of Antioch

  In Morocco, a few moments before the last, victorious onslaught of conquistador civilization, I had a glimpse of the world in which I should have liked to live. I could talk to artisans not yet compelled to spend their entire lives in the service of a machine and proud of never having carved the same pipe twice; I knew a world in which they were sorry for motor-car owners instead of envying them, because, at least symbolically, they had cut off their legs and thus left the world of the living, had wrapped themselves in a cloud of dust, isolating themselves from the titillating tempation of whores and lewd boys, the endless variations of chance encounters and conversations; where poems were recited by minstrels and where journalists were no more than the modest chroniclers of everyday events like authors of meteorological announcements and did not believe themselves to be lighthouses of history – and lighthouses which, moreover, guide ships in the wrong direction; where I met a more ancient, to me more familar form of story-telling which, instead of describing social reality or presenting flesh-and-bone people, was content to invent immortal fables.

  My greatest joy, however, was that I was rid of all political and moral obligations. My upbringing, my timidity, but above all the extraordinarily disagreeable, yapping and pig-headed categorical imperative residing in my soul had unceasingly compelled me to fight against my instincts and the loud protests of my healthy egoism. Instead of just observing, pursuing my pleasures, writing poems or simply enjoying idleness, I was forced to serve certain humanitarian principles, to devote part of my time to the realization of a certain degree of social justice, and to struggle for democratic and patriotic aims. In Morocco I expended no zeal for my country, nor for the victory of the Allies, nor for any other cause, and in my state of helplessness I refused to make up for lack of action by listening devotedly to Western radio broadcasts or discussing politics at the café – my categorical imperative demanding either action or nothing. At last I could live the way I wanted: I observed the world, wrote poetry and spent my days in sweet idleness.

  As I watched the flying attaché cases during Dr Hollos’s address, in which, among other things, he enumerated the great political tasks awaiting me, I realized with deep melancholy that I had arrived not only in the Mecca of technical civilization, the Rome of the most efficient capitalism and the Babel of material prosperity, but also among friends, followers, compatriots and a political organization, into a predestined role, where the starved daemons of duty, political honour and ethics would throw themselves upon me like devils on the damned.

  Five years later the thirty-thousand-ton luxury steamer that was to take me to Le Havre anchored in the very same harbour. The melancholy of my arrival was then replaced by a desperate anxiety, relieved only by a portion of untempered curiosity which I had not experienced at the moment of my arrival. Early in the morning I was taken to the harbour by about two dozen friends – among them Lorsy and his wife – in a solemn and depressed mood. They avoided talking to me and preferred joking with Valy. The whole thing reminded me of a funeral march, with everyone trying to give me the respect due to the corpse and speaking not to me, but about me. The tugboats, ferries and little steamers hurrying back and forth over the translucent green troughs and smoky yellow crests of the waves had, in the meantime, lost their strangeness; my shirt was as loud if not louder than those worn by the loiterers whom I had watched appalled five years before, and I knew not only the name of the Jersey shore opposite but also the cluster of towns behind it, and the cemetery on the marshy strip, near the shore, where we had buried Laszlo Fényes. All this, however, was only the skin of things, the thin layer on their surface, like the checked shirt on my body or the edge of the Hudson’s estuary on America. Behind that thin layer I knew the entire continent, from the library at Harvard to the sandy beaches of Florida, or to wartime Detroit where, at night, freight trains loaded with tanks had rattled through the streets and where an aeroplane would rise in the direction of the Ford works as I lit my last cigarette after closing the Frigidaire, and the next one would rise as I stubbed it out; I knew the greyish-blue mud of the Big Snake River where in the sticky summer heat greyish-blue-bodied, slender Negro boys sunned t
hemselves on the shore like alligators; I knew the beryl of the Green River, the blue of the Colorado, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and, up north, Kodiak with its airfield covered with ice and steel netting, and Attu in the Aleutians where one’s body and tommy-gun submerged in the light snow like a plummet in the waves of the sea. But it was not only the landscape I loved, with the enthusiasm and pathos of Walt Whitman, but also the people. I had drunk and revelled and travelled with them in cars, transcontinental railways, freighters, aeroplanes, jeeps and tanks; I had rejoiced and sorrowed with them, shared their fears and their boredom and had thrown musette-bags, beer-bottles and hand-grenades with them. I knew how they rose in the morning, I knew what they thought about before going to sleep, I even knew how they died.

  Only when I was about to leave their country did I become conscious of how much I had become used to them, of how much I loved them, in spite of all my pretences, my objections and private opinions; of how much they meant to me with their chewing-gum, their drinking, their humour, and even their roast pork and sweet currant sauce, their undrinkable coffee, their historical amnesia and their conception of life as a race-track. I had to realize that my attachment to my own country was primarily a matter of language, since I could write poems only in Hungarian, but that I considered this people better, more honest and even in their simplicity more human than my own. I would gladly have remained among them if my remaining would not have broken my life in two. I felt as if I were leaving a party where the hosts were naïve but benevolent men who respected my intellectual capacities without, however, understanding them, who treated me with particular kindness and consideration and in whose company I would begin to be happier than ever now that the war was over and forgotten. And I was leaving it only to descend into an infernal cellar with dead bodies strewn over the floor, immured behind dripping walls; I was going among raving maniacs and bloodthirsty fanatics who tore, screamed, screeched, scratched at each others’ purulent, never-healing wounds in deafening quarrels, the original reason for which everyone had long forgotten.