My Happy Days In Hell

by György Faludy

  I felt that a funeral march was the best and most fitting description of the real situation; but subjectively I sensed only the approach of death. I was not like a sick man, concentrating his attention on his body and allowing his environment, the furniture around him, his friends and relatives to sink below the edge of his horizon; one who would have the trees under the window cut down, the flowers cut down, for why should they be there when he is gone? I felt more like a man condemned to death who looks around with absolute physical and mental alertness, to whom all the beauties of the world increase a thousandfold with the sparkling of the new stars, and who discovers new ties, new invisible tentacles binding him to hitherto unrecognized friends, to skyscrapers, to beefsteaks larger than the dish that holds them, to soldiers’ graves, Coca-Cola automats, cheerful good-mornings, familiar newsvendors, striped socks, intellectual freedom and certain human rights – that is, to persons, objects, institutions, concepts, attitudes, situations and single English sentences alike.

  In these circumstances it seemed a blessing that the ship should leave at three in the afternoon instead of at eleven o’clock, as scheduled. One of the men who came to see me off was Professor Rustem Vambéry, a slightly bent, bearded old gentleman with a face in which the features of a Greek sage, a wandering dervish and a naughty faun achieved perfect synthesis and about whom I cannot say that he hurried by my side with an alacrity belying his age, because alacrity was an inalienable attribute of his being and not only of his body. It was obvious that he belonged to that category of men who would immediately succumb to the absence or even decrease of physical and mental alertness, and thus it seemed natural to me that he would die of a heart-attack at an age reached by few – and to which he was getting perilously close – while squeezing himself into a subway carriage just as the doors began to close. Among ourselves we called him delicium generis humani, because his charm and wit were irresistible, although his wise courage, murderous humour and supremely idealistic and ethical actions – which were in flagrant and attractive contradiction with the cynicism of his way of thinking – reminded one rather of Marcus Aurelius. For ten years he had been my friend, mentor, admirer and even guardian angel, extending his long and invisible wings (invisible because he was always ashamed of sentiment) over me even while I was in Africa.

  He had guessed, although I had never said anything about it in my letters, that I was planning to disappear in the desert. As a well-known expert on international law and a publicist, an adviser of the British government and a godson of Edward VII, he possessed contacts throughout the world, thus also among the Gaullists. It was he who arranged that President Roosevelt should invite me to America. When I received the invitation it was he who, from New York, persuaded the Gaullists in Morocco to send me to Tangier, and the Spanish-Moroccan authorities to expel me from Tangier and put me on a ship that would take me directly to New York. After my arrival there he and his friend Laszlo Fényes vied with each other with hardly concealed jealousy for a larger share in the role of foster-father. They never agreed, of course, because Vambéry’s only ambition was that I should more or less follow his advice, and he minded not at all if I loved Fényes more; while Uncle Laszlo, on the other hand, alleged that if I followed Vambéry’s political advice it would be equivalent to an emotional preference. When Fényes died before the fate of the war was decided and without having opened even one of the three bottles of wine which he had carried about for decades with the intention of celebrating Mussolini’s, Hitler’s and Horthy’s fall, his role was taken over by Vambéry. When I learned from a letter forwarded to me by a member of the American mission in Budapest that my father had died immediately after the occupation of the town as a result of privations suffered during the siege and the lack of medicine, that my sister had been shot and thrown into the Danube three months before by the Hungarian Nazis, and that the majority of my friends had either been killed in the war, murdered by the Nazis or had disappeared in Soviet concentration camps, Vambéry assumed the role of my father readily, almost happily, though we never talked about it – never even gave a sign of this shared knowledge by so much as a tender word.

  I persuaded my other friends to go home and not to wait until the ship sailed. Then Vambéry, Valy and I entered the smelly but popular sailors’ pub where Hollos had once waited for me. When we sat down Vambéry’s face reflected great inner joy – the kind of joy he always betrayed when speaking about his father, the famous Asian traveller who had spoken sixteen languages perfectly and who was the first European to visit Bokhara and Khiva on foot, disguised as a dervish, although he was lame. The professor still delighted in the beauty of women though he couldn’t stand Valy, and was always shocked if women butted in when men talked, instead of simply looking after their needs. He devoted half an hour to softening up Valy, complimenting her, making her feel like a bewitched princess, in order to buy three hours of silence in which to talk to me in peace.

  I made use of the time to order my thoughts and line up my arguments, or rather the premise and basis of my arguments: the five years in America. I had guessed rightly when I arrived here. The five years had gone by according to schedule, like a well organized political campaign. Soon after my arrival I had been elected secretary-general of the Free Hungary Movement and, at the same time, editor-in-chief of the movement’s weekly, the Harc (Fight). As there were many exiled Hungarian politicians, journalists and scientists in America who were only too glad to work for us it was pretty easy to put out a good weekly. We could safely say that it produced itself almost without help, because the contributors in New York, Buenos Aires or Ottawa knew, without requiring instructions, exactly what to write, at what length and how. Only with Bandi Havas did I have difficulties from time to time. In the meantime he had gone to London where he became secretary to the head of the Free Hungary Movement, Count Michael Karolyi, the former President of the Hungarian Republic. The reason for our quarrels was the communist, or rather fellow-traveller, tone of his articles. Towards the end of the war we quarrelled for good because I refused to print his review of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon which he described as an unfounded, unmitigated lie – in spite of the fact that he was very friendly with Koestler, adoring him and hating him, admiring him and wishing to destroy him at one and the same moment with all the fervour of his schizophrenic mind.

  When, after Hungary’s occupation by the Germans, the already radically censored Hungarian press was virtually liquidated, Harc remained the only worthwhile Hungarian paper in the whole world and thus, to a certain extent, it filled a historical role. Its circulation was pretty high but it was never a profitable enterprise. The contributors received no fees and neither did I. Every Thursday night the copies, fresh from the press, were brought to my flat, Valy wrapped and addressed them, and then I loaded the large packages on my shoulder and took them down to the huge mailbox which may still be there on the corner of 72nd Street and Broadway. Although I thought the weekly rather good, I found little pleasure in it. It gave me the same feeling that I experienced when talking to a meeting of American Hungarians, most of them over sixty, who did not bring their children because these no longer understood Hungarian and who, although they applauded my speeches, never handed on what they had heard but took it with them to their grave or crematorium. Harc never got into Hungary, neither its arguments nor its style ever entered the bloodstream of a people, as an inheritance for subsequent generations, but it withered like grain falling on rock. What bothered me most, however, was the fact that the paper, compelled by circumstances, was a political publication even though it discussed the social and historical events of the world on a very high level. I had, therefore, to realize that five years of my activity would figure only in a Hungarian history textbook dealing with the Second World War, or perhaps in a couple of paragraphs in my autobiography. It would not even get a line in the history of Hungarian literature.

  At first I was rather reluctant to take part in the movement. I considered its leaders – V
ambéry, Fényes and Karolyi – admirable idealists who were trying to make the allied governments accept and execute their untried political theories concerning Hungary. I persuaded myself that it was my duty to participate in such noble but unrealistic (and thus a priori condemned) schemes, but, to tell the truth, I was also greatly amused by the characters and ideas of the leading personalities present at the weekly meetings. A few months later, to my great surprise, I realized that I had been mistaken. The leaders of the movement, who had excellent diplomatic connections and enjoyed the support of the British and Free French governments, many outstanding American publicists and important dailies, as well as of Carlo Sforza, Jan Masaryk and others, planned not only to establish, after the war, a democratic Hungary on the Western pattern – which, we were certain, the Hungarian people would heartily approve – but to do this within the framework of a Danubian Confederation. The economic problems of Eastern Europe and the problems of the national minorities – my friends argued – could be solved only within the framework of such a confederation; only a federation of states with a population of seventy to a hundred million would be able to prevent the rebirth of German imperialism and the European advance of Soviet imperialism. The plan was supported by the former Czechoslovak Premier Milan Hodza and other leaders of the European emigration. Vambéry and his friends, it turned out, considered press-propaganda, the newspaper and our movement’s meetings to be mere décor; far more important to them were the diplomatic negotiations prepared with great circumspection at which they tried, with weighty arguments, unbelievable patience and exemplary self-discipline, to convince the heads of the State Department of the correctness of their political views.

  The heads of the State Department countered with various arguments based on a political realism that changed every month. Answers often depended on the room our friends happened to enter and the mood of the official occupying it. At first they tried to persuade us to collaborate with the emissaries of the feudal Horthy régime and the Hungarian Communists – a few almost illiterate Moscow agents – and when we refused, Under-Secretary Sumner Welles sent us a message that he would have us interned. We were saved from arrest only by the goodwill of Secretary of the Interior Ickes. A few months later they dropped Horthy’s emissary like hot bricks and established at Camp Atterbury, in Indiana, a Habsburg Legion, the future of which was to serve as a guard of honour to the Emperor of the Habsburg Monarchy or the Holy Roman Empire; it was not yet decided which. When Otto Habsburg who, personally, is quite a nice fellow, arrived in America, the New York Times gave him a great deal of publicity and Roosevelt invited him to dinner. Quite naturally we were advised to toe the new line. When we replied that although we regarded the monarchists as a democratic political party, there was no denying the small number of its members, the antagonism of the Hungarians, the Roumanians, the Czechs, the Serbians and the Italians, the protest of the Czechoslovak and Polish governments in exile and the historical realities of the twentieth century, which factors led us to consider the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire, or even of the Habsburg monarchy, absolutely impossible, they looked upon us as upon raving lunatics. Another time they explained to us, very patiently, that our British and French connections were rather compromising, and argued, somewhat obscurely, that the Soviet Union was, in a way, democratic and Great Britain an imperialist power; or rather, that after the war America was going to democratize the Soviet Union with the help of a several-thousand-million-dollar loan and, hand in hand with a completely reformed Stalin, after putting an end to England’s role as a great power, would conduct the peoples of the world towards peace and prosperity.

  For years I believed that Cordell Hull, Sumner Welles, A. A. Berle and the others were deliberately fooling us with these stories, so that they could go on elaborating their secret plans for the post-war period undisturbed. It was only after Roosevelt’s death that it became obvious that it was he who inspired these naïve ideas, and that the members of the State Department had not deliberately been misleading us. They had been doing their best to serve the constantly fluctuating American line in foreign policy, to which only its hair-raising dilettantism gave a certain continuity. By the time we understood this the war was over, a democratic Hungarian Government had been formed, the Free Hungary Movement and its organ, Harc, had lost their purpose and I could at last return to a Hungary, the future of which was determined by the unpublished text of the Yalta agreement.

  In addition to engaging in politics and editing the paper, I pursued a third profession in the United States. Immediately after Pearl Harbor I volunteered for military service. I was soon called up and was demobilized in 1945, at Fort Dix, without having performed any important feats of heroism. I always knew that my participation in the war would not decide its outcome and my reasons for volunteering were rather biographical than anything else. It would have been impossible that I, who regarded the struggle for democracy as a moral obligation, preached democratic principles in prose and verse, was a sworn enemy of Nazism and secretary-general of the Hungarian exile movement, should not take part in the defence of democracy and the liberation of my fatherland. I volunteered because I felt that it was up to me to represent my friends who were, without exception, twenty, thirty and forty years older than myself. I knew it would be more reasonable and infinitely wiser to remain in New York and write poems, but it was unthinkable that my biography should contain the sentence: ‘During the Second World War, Faludy lived in New York and produced a few beautiful poems.’ It would be bad enough even if my biographer refrained from adding: ‘… after he had so often and so enthusiastically encouraged others to risk their lives in the defence of liberty.’

  I told my friends about my intention only after I had already signed up. I wanted to confront them with an accomplished fact and, at the same time, I was curious to hear their arguments. Laszlo Fényes remained silent but his eyes blazed with fury, particularly when he learned that any argument he would put forward against my joining up would come too late. Besides, there was nothing he could have said, because he too had always preached – and practised – that one must fight for one’s convictions regardless of the risks involved. Vambéry, too, remained silent, but subsequently he did everything in his power to obtain a safe assignment for me. He tried first to have me transferred to the Office of Strategic Service and then to the Office of War Information. The first attempt foundered on my resistance, the second on that of a battalion commander who liked me a great deal. Only in the last year of the war did Vambéry succeed in having me recalled to New York, where I worked on military dictionaries in a department of the War Department and later in the editorial offices of the Yank newspaper. Freda Kirchwey, editor of the Nation, suggested that I volunteer as stretcher-bearer, in which case I would not have to bear arms, though the danger would be as great as if I served as an ordinary soldier. She was somewhat disappointed when I explained to her that I was no pacifist and that if I exposed myself to the risk of being shot at I should much rather be in a position to shoot back. Lorsy declared that a poet had but one single moral obligation: to run away from the shooting. Professor Oszkar Jaszi, whom, because of his beautiful, calm features that looked as if they were cut into pink marble, and his plain but frighteningly accurate logic we called, behind his back, the ‘marble-headed ox’, held that it was well worth dying for a great cause, Hungary’s liberation or the unification of Europe. However, these would be accomplished only by the Third World War; the Second would do no more than liquidate one totalitarian power without solving the problems of either Hungary or Europe, so if I died in this war, my sacrifice would be just as senseless and useless as if I had been killed – as a volunteer, too – on a battlefield during the Spanish War of Succession, or the Seven Years War.

  The opinion that affected me most was that of an extraordinarily erudite and sensitive old journalist friend of mine who was at the same time a woman-chaser and strategist, a man of the world and a scientist, a revolutionary and an aesthete:
Pal Kéri. Had I asked him first, I am certain that I should never have volunteered. He explained that from a literary point of view – and let us here remember Thackeray, Tolstoy and Stendhal – only the Napoleonic Wars had proved fruitful. The First World War produced only reportage, and the Second, as I would see for myself, would produce not a single worth-while work. Therefore, I had absolutely no business joining the American Army. Furthermore, there was a danger of my becoming so fond of the Yanks that after the peace treaty I would remain in the States and thus kill the poet in myself while, if I went home, the worst that could happen would be that I myself would be killed.

  Behind Vambéry’s shoulder, through the white lace curtain, I could look out upon the harbour. In the distance, between the Statue of Liberty and Staten Island, the sea swelled tautly like the weed-covered belly of a sleeping water-god. I was again overwhelmed with the fear of one condemned to death, but now this hitherto unknown sensation was coupled with an old, well known, indefinite anxiety. This anxiety had haunted me day and night throughout my childhood: sometimes it was caused by the wrinkles in a sheet, winding themselves around my legs like snakes; sometimes by the dim light emanating from the bronze naiad standing in a nest of bronze ferns in the darkest corner of the room next to mine; and sometimes, particularly in the twilight of winter afternoons, it came as I sat by myself, scared to distraction of the future, of the life waiting for me outside. Later, particularly in the seven years of my emigration, anxiety returned only in my dreams. One of the recurring dreams was that my enemies, the Hungarian Nazis, had tied me to the trunk of the famous five-hundred-year-old plane-tree on the top of a hill near Budapest and were sticking knitting needles between my vertebrae; at other times I dreamed that I was stealing into my father’s house and was trying to reach the door to ring the bell, but my feet had turned to lead and I was unable to get to the door. I knew that I had ‘come home too early’, that our Nazi janitor had seen me and was going to hand me over to the police. At times I would have nightmares whenever I went to sleep. I begged Valy, and later my buddies in the army, to wake me should I toss around or scream in my dream. The mornings, when on waking I could look out upon the trees of Central Park or when my eyes fell on my machine-gun, were the happiest moments of my life. Lately, however, since the end of the war, my dreams had become hazier, although they were still far from enjoyable. In the morning I remembered only that I had been afraid but I couldn’t remember of what. Now, for the first time, I felt that nightmarish anxiety in the middle of the day; and I had no doubts as to its cause. I was standing on firm ground, or rather the very edge of it, and in a few hours a ship would sail with me towards a half-submerged country of uncertain climate and poisoned atmosphere. For a while this journey into the dark would be accompanied by flashes from the last two lighthouses; this eloquent professor of law and the humanities, and that somewhat monstrous Statue of Liberty seen through the window.