Sunflower
Page 2
Sometimes he got restless. He would corral a companion, and they would drive to the station, board the Vienna express, sit down in the dining car. When their money or the wine ran out, they would get off. He would wire one of his editors for an advance and return to the city in a day or so. Once, in the pearly haze of a summer dawn, he climbed into a fiacre with another companion. “Where to, my lord?” the coachman asked. “Keep going,” Krúdy said. “Drive slow.” They came back four days later, having made a round trip of two hundred miles, with stops at the taverns and the garden restaurants around Lake Balaton. In the fresh breezes of the morning, he would order paper and ink, and in the empty restaurants he would write twelve or sixteen pages of magical, dream-haunted prose, sometimes about lonely travelers. In one of his finest short novels, Az útitárs (The Traveling Companion), he meets “an agreeable, quiet, sad-eyed, gray, and, above all, unpretentious gentleman.”
We were traveling in the moonlight; through the shimmering fields ran those invisible foxes who by some magic always elude the hunters; wild ducks flew at a distance above a pond breathing silver; the shadows of trees moved like heartbeats...Like sadness, rain reached and overtook us, and from the darkening night it beat strings of tears against the indifferent window...and now only the words of my traveling companion echoed around me, as if Death were reading the Scriptures.
“I don’t want to bore you with my circumstances,” my traveling companion said. “That would be useless talk: like the usual, drowsy, uninspiring loquaciousness of fellow-travelers when they’re waiting for the train in the musty room of a station and the signal bell is sullenly mute on the roof. I notice that most people travel for business. A bridegroom is the greatest rarity nowadays. And those fools out of certain romantic novels, with their bones shaken and hurting after ten, twelve hours on a train, in a stagecoach or a sleigh in winter—why? For the purpose of kissing a certain woman’s hand, for being there to listen to her throaty mutterings, for the sake of getting a whiff of the scent of her petticoat or bodice; with their aim to say a few breathless words at the end of a path in a garden where the woman had stolen secretly from her bed—that kind of fool is now rare as a white raven. I was such a white raven once, exploding with love like dynamite in a quarry, the yellow smoke of which hangs for a while over the hillside until it disappears without a wisp of a trace.”
Krúdy would return to the city, but seldom to his family. He now lived in hotels that he could afford—or, more exactly, whose owners were pleased to grant him credit. Yet his memories coursed in the opposite direction. They poured into scenes of a bygone patrician world of domesticity, peopled by spotless wives and honorable old men, and suffused with the quiet loveliness of country mornings:
To breakfast on a light-blue tablecloth, smelling of milk, like a child in the family home...freshly washed faces, hair combed wet, shirtfronts bright and white around the table. Everything smells different there, even rum. The plum brandy men swallow in one gulp on an empty stomach is harmless at the family table. The eggs are freshly laid, the butter wrapped in grape leaves smiles like a fat little girl, shoes are resplendent, the fresh morning airing wafts from the beds the stifling, sultry thoughts of the previous night, on quick feet the maid patters from room to room in a skirt starched only yesterday. Even the manure carts on the road steam differently on frosty mornings from the way they do in the afternoons; the rattle of gravely ill gentlemen quiets down in the neighboring houses; the bright greens in the markets, the red of the coxcombs, the pink-veined meats shining in the willow baskets, the towers of the town had been sponged and washed at dawn; and a piebald bird jumps around gaily on the frost-pinched mulberry tree, like life that begins anew and has forgiven and forgotten the past.
His words flew with longing for the provincial Magyar Biedermeier of the previous century. He would paint such scenes over and over, with a magic of which the addicts of his writing never grew tired. And this was part and parcel of his character: again, he was not so much like Proust, who loved high society and yet condemned it, as like Monet, who painted beautiful gardens because he loved them. At the tail end of his alcoholic nights, his clothes were still spotless. He despised loud carousers. He would, on occasion, send a message and a few banknotes to his wife: “Forgive me. Take the children on a Sunday picnic.” “I’ll be back soon.” “Buy yourself some fine perfume.” His wife had become corpulent and sad, tortured less by jealousy than by the continual lack of money. She did not forgive him. His children did. For decades after their father’s death, they treasured their sad, loving memories, and even wrote short memoirs about him.
You do not understand, he told his wife and the other women trying to cling to him: I must be alone. I need solitude. We know, or at least we can surmise, that his incomparable scenes grew in his mind while he mused for hours, half awake. Yet they did not crystallize until he began writing. He let his pen saunter, amble, canter away, down endless roads and tree-lined paths laden with the honeyed golden mist of memories and the old Magyar names of innumerable flowers, trees, ferns, birds. I write “endless roads” because his novels and stories have only the thinnest of plots. They are four-dimensional paintings, whose magical beauty is manifested not only through shades and forms but through the fourth dimension of human reality—time itself—as the thin stream of the story all at once bursts into a magnificent fountain, the water splashing and coursing in rainbow colors. Like Balzac, Krúdy wrote every day, through his worst hangovers, because he needed money instantly and desperately. Unlike Balzac, he never corrected his manuscripts, and he cared little for the proofs. He possessed only a few books, and not many of his own. He wrote because he had to. He never cared for his reputation. Some of his companions and admirers were writers, but he would never— absolutely never—talk literature with them. The topics that interested him were the preparation of certain standard Magyar dishes, the odd habits of attractive men and women, stories of the turf, and the fascinating legerdemain of certain people able to lay their hands on money whenever they had to.
He would tuck his sixteen pages into his pockets, hail a carriage or walk to an editorial office, and request his honorarium. Then came a long midday dinner, well after the noon hour, in a half-empty restaurant, where he would be surrounded by the silent, respectful service of the owner and the waiters. Then the turf, the gaming table, and the night life. By midnight, he would have little or no money left. There was the memorable occasion when, having played and lost at baccarat for hours in his club, he stood up and said to an acquaintance, who was holding the bank, “Give me the cagnotte.” That was incredible. The cagnotte was a box with a slot, sunk in the center of the green felt table, where winners would occasionally drop a few chips after a successful run. That club of writers and artists depended on the nightly cagnotte for some of its upkeep. “But, Gyula—” this gentleman said. “No ‘Gyula’” Krúdy said. “The cagnotte.” After a moment of deathly silence, the gentleman lifted out the box, opened it with a key, and poured out its contents before Krúdy. Krúdy ordered a waiter to cash them in; then he swept the money into his pocket, stood up, and left. The club did not expel him.
***
The best of his times—and the worst of his times—may have been the years of the First World War. The war came after the publication of the first Sindbad stories and The Red Stage-coach. Krúdy’s writing had blossomed; for the first time, he had a considerable public. Perhaps because of the increasingly anxious and difficult years of the war, there was an appetite for his evocations of an older, better Hungary, an older, better Budapest, and older and better men and women—serious patricians, respectable virgins. Almost every Budapest newspaper carried a literary page. He wrote for most of these newspapers, indifferent to their political or social inclinations, interested in them only as the fount of honoraria. Yet his life was as disorganized as ever, perhaps even more so. He lived in the Hotel Royal, a large, modern commercial establishment on one of the noisy boulevards of the city, where it stands ev
en now. The owner, a M. Várady, admired him. The owner’s wife, a ripe woman in her thirties, loved him with a shameful, sensual devotion. At times, Krúdy had to resort to undignified stratagems to escape her desperate jealousies; once, at a summer resort where he was the Váradys’ guest, he had a tall companion impersonate him in the evening shadows while he, bending his large frame, crawled silently among the bushes to the room of another woman, who had left a window open for him to climb in. Mme Várady had a daughter, seventeen years old, who adored Krúdy. Krúdy chose to love her. They eloped. It took two years for his first wife to consent, bitterly, to give him a divorce. Zsuzsi, his new love, was twenty-three years younger than he. She married him.
Much of this happened during the saddest years of the country. Hungary, in tandem with Austria, lost the war. A Hungarian republic was proclaimed—ominously, in retrospect —in late October of 1918, with disorderly shoutings, and rain splashing on the pavement under dark, soiled clouds, on a sodden day. There followed an ugly and unpopular short-lived Communist regime, a humiliating foreign occupation, and the reestablishment of a narrow kind of order, laced with the hatreds of a rent and diminished people. Meanwhile, most of the country had been amputated: two-thirds of the old Hungary was partitioned among the new states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and the swollen kingdom of Rumania. Krúdy, who never wrote a false word when describing a flower, a tree, a woman’s garter, or the odor of the midnight air but who was an instinctive opportunist when it came to money, had written a few things—paragraphs, sentences—here and there in accord with the ideas of the now despised revolutionaries and leftists. This was but one of his difficulties under the new regime. There was now no atmosphere for his music; even the acoustics of nostalgia were out of date. The dust bath of abject poverty covered a truncated, misery-laden nation. After a while things improved. Hungary and Hungarians tend to be unsuccessful after their most astonishing triumphs, but they have an instinctive genius for recovery and rebuilding after their worst disasters. During the most miserable of those years—1919, 1920, 1921—Krúdy wrote several more masterpieces. Perhaps his new marriage and the birth of his adored youngest child sustained his spirits. He had not much changed his habits: the night before his young bride gave birth, he was at the gaming table in his club again. He sent her a tender note, saying that it was lucky that he had lost that night, since she would now have an easy delivery. A little girl, Zsuzsika, was born. She weighed “four quarts and three pints,” the elderly father would say proudly to his companions.
For he had become an elderly gentleman. He was not much over forty, still handsome, but his head had turned silver, as had his mustache. His vices were changing, too: fewer women, more wine; fewer turf days, longer tavern afternoons. But he wrote like a fiend. His feuilletons filled the pages of newspapers of every persuasion or denomination. Eventually, these writings would be gathered together and published in modest, thin, paper-covered editions. They brought him little money. His public had diminished. His reputation was running down. He had written often about autumn, about country autumns that “stretched out long, like a single shining strand of red hair.” In Budapest, too, the autumn mists were coming closer, there were “weeping young clouds, a damp wind whistling through the keyholes...when the Danube boats sound their horns like forlorn ghosts who cannot find their way in the night.” He himself was in the autumn of his life now—dans les faubourgs de la vieillesse, as the lovely French phrase has it. Yet there were moments of happiness (“Happiness,” he had written once, “is a moment’s interval between desire and sorrow”)—or, rather, of contentment. An ancient apartment was found for him and his family, in surroundings that could hardly have been more suitable for Gyula Krúdy, though comfortable they were not. It was in a century-old house in the shadow of giant plane trees, on Margaret’s Island, in the middle of the Danube, between Buda and Pest. Decades before, the greatest of Magyar poets, János Arany, had sat under the island’s noble oaks, in a grove beyond the ruins of a thirteenth-century monastery. In the early nineteen-twenties, the island had few telephones; it was traversed every hour by an open horse-drawn trolley. It had an old hotel, frequented by writers, among them some of Krúdy’s companions. He and his family had to take their baths there; their apartment had no bathroom. At times, they led a country existence in the midst of the heaving city, which was gradually filling with buses and cars.
He had less and less money, while he gambled and drank more and more. “There are mornings,” he wrote about another writer, in another age, “when literature resembles a kind, sad wife, weeping without a word, alone; she is always in one’s mind but one does not talk about her.” He spent a few unhappy months near Vienna, in a former imperial château rented by Baron Lajos Hatvany, who, besides being a baron, was a noted left-wing litterateur and dilettante, in temporary exile from Hungary for political reasons. During those months in the elegant house in the Vienna woods, Krúdy was morose and solitary. Once, he roused his host at four in the morning in order to break open an ancient armoire that, according to Krúdy, must have belonged to Franz Josef himself. Eventually, he came back to the island without a farthing, having urged Hatvany in vain to provide a substantial loan for a child-care establishment that his wife was trying to launch. The valves of his heart were leaking badly. He was lucky to have among his admirers a fine doctor, Dr. Lajos Lévy, who was one of those saintly giants of medicine from a past age who took it as their sacred duty to care for and attempt to cure men such as Krúdy without asking anything, material or spiritual, in exchange. He took Krúdy into his hospital, to cure and rest and feed him. Of course Krúdy had to be bereft of wine. But one early evening the nurses found him in his whitewashed room with a beaker of wine and a lone Gypsy playing softly, very softly. The young doctors of Lévy’s entourage were shocked. Lévy only shook his head. His patient was on the road to a limited recovery, and a little wine might be good for him, he said.
There was no money in the Krúdy house. There were sad, tremendous quarrels. He passed the age of fifty. He was an old man now. He failed to pay the minimal rent on the apartment. From the island, he had often looked across to the western side of the river, the old quarter of Óbuda—Old Buda—with its one-story houses inhabited by thrifty working-class people, its rough cobblestone streets, and its peasant-baroque church towers under the high Buda hills. Now he was forced to move there, taking three rooms in an old yellow house, in some ways reminiscent of the house of his childhood. There exists a photograph of Krúdy leaning out of his window and contemplating the street with his large brown eyes. Yet his headquarters were not in that house, Templom-utca 15 (No. 15 Church Street), which is marked with a plaque now. They were in Kéhli’s ancient tavern, in the next street, whose yellow flat-country wine he liked.
He wrote and wrote in the mornings, at a plain table covered with wrapping paper that was held down at the corners with big No. 2 steel thumbtacks, always with an old-fashioned steel pen, always using a bottle of violet ink. He had written more than seventy books. His wife and daughter took temporary lodgings elsewhere, returning to him from time to time. His writings were no longer popular. His advances from publishers were exhausted. Most of his former publishers would have nothing to do with him, because they could not; the Depression of the early nineteen-thirties made the publishing situation even worse. Krúdy could still place short pieces in some of the newspapers, but this income was far from enough. His most faithful readers now were a small group of people, among them some of the best writers of Hungary. They understood what his prose meant for their Magyar language, that lonely orphan among the languages of Europe. One of these writers, the novelist and poet Dezsõ Kosztolányi, arranged things so that in 1931 and 1932 Krúdy would receive literary prizes amounting to considerable sums. Krúdy asked that the awards be given him not during a ceremony but privately; he wanted to avoid his creditors. By the spring of 1933, he had not paid his rent or his bills for many months. The city authority that owned the house informed hi
m that he would have to vacate his rooms. His electric current was cut off. On the last day of his life, he coursed through the city unhappily, stopping in governmental and editorial offices with indifferent results. He sat for a few hours in Kéhli’s, with his long white hand around the small wineglass. He borrowed a candle and ambled home. Alone in his apartment, he stuck that cheap brown candle in an empty bottle and lay down to sleep. A cleaning woman found him dead, at ten o’clock on a bright morning.
That was the end of the writer Gyula Krúdy. The sun was shining in the incredibly blue skies over Óbuda when they laid him out, in his last spotless piece of clothing—his full-dress suit. A companion recalled that, a year or so earlier, Krúdy had told him that he had tried to pawn this suit but that the pawnshop could not use it—it was too big, he was too tall, they said. To his funeral came writers, journalists, editors, waiters, headwaiters, porters, street girls, an official delegation from the city of his birth, and a small Gypsy band, which played his favorite air as the coffin was let down. His first wife cried out, “You had it coming, Gyula!” There was a hush. His friend the newspaper editor Miklós Lázár spoke at the grave. M. Lázár gave me the tear sheet of that beautiful speech, in New York, in 1963—a yellowed, brittle page from an old newspaper.