Sunflower

by Gyula Krudy

  ***

  For almost a decade, Krúdy was forgotten. His grave, only faintly marked, was sinking into the ground. Then came a marvelous event—not only in Krúdy’s posthumous annals but in those of modern Hungarian literature. A book appeared entitled Szindbád hazamegy (Sindbad Comes Home), by the great haut-bourgeois writer Sándor Márai. What Márai (who was twenty-two years Krúdy’s junior and knew him in the last years of his life) had composed was a Krúdy symphony, in the form of a reconstruction of Krúdy’s last day, in Krúdy’s style. It begins with his solitary rising and dressing in his rooms in Óbuda; it ends with his last night, enveloped in the comforter of his unforgettable dreams—dreams that carry Sindbad the sailor to another world. I read this book when I was seventeen. Afterward, I read as much Krúdy (and Márai) as I could lay my hands on, buying Krúdy volumes often in antiquarian bookshops. And I was not alone. All this happened during the Second World War, in the middle of a German-occupied, brutal, and often very vulgar world, when people found happiness and inspiration in the presence of nobler and better things of the past. I left Hungary in 1946, even before its regime had become wholly Communized, because I thought that there was no place for me in the “new” Hungary—or, rather, not a place I would want. So did Sándor Márai.

  I left my family and, among other things, perhaps two dozen Krúdy and Márai books. I was convinced that Hungary was lost; besides, I knew English rather well. I wanted to become an English-writing and therefore English-thinking historian, not an émigré intellectual who writes about Central European history in English. Twelve or thirteen years later I began to notice something extraordinary. Krúdy’s books were being reprinted in Hungary, one after another. There was—there still is—a Krúdy revival, to an extent that he (or I) could not have dreamed of. People who had left Hungary after the 1956 Rising began importing his books from Budapest. I got some of them, and as I turned their pages on quiet winter evenings in my house in the Pennsylvania countryside my eyes sometimes filled with tears. Another exile, the scholar and critic László Cs. Szabó, has written what Hungarians, exiled or not, know: “How can a foreign reader understand Krúdy without ever having seen the Óbuda towers from Margaret’s Island under gathering snowclouds; or the flirtatious scratching of the blushing leaves of birch trees in the sand, down the Nyír; or the inward smiles of the fallen apples lying on the bottom of the Lower Szamos? How could he, when he had never heard the sound of a cello through the open window of a one-story house: the sound of the bow pulled by an unseen gentleman, playing for himself alone, just before the evening church bells begin to peal from the Danube side?”

  ***

  So there is the problem of Krúdy’s Magyar language. There is the question of his place in the history of Hungarian literature. And the question of his place in European, and world, literature. Allow me to turn to what I think are the essentials of these questions before I return to the language problem.

  More than sixty years after his death two considerations are indubitable. The first is that Krúdy was one of the greatest writers, if not the greatest writer of Magyar prose. The second —not unconnected with the first—is his unclassifiability.

  The recognition of Krúdy’s importance within the ranks of the greatest Hungarian prose writers developed slowly, and perhaps erratically, but this recognition is no longer questionable. During his lifetime the extraordinary significance of his style and the quality of his talents were asserted only by a few of his greatest contemporary authors. Then during the last half- century as more and more of his books were reprinted, many scholarly and critical essays and monographs about Krúdy appeared. One main result of this is that we have now a rather clear view of the successive phases of his oeuvre. (Note that because of the staggering quantity of his writings there can never be a complete Collected Works of Krúdy; and that despite the most assiduous work of researchers a complete and precise bibliography of Krúdy’s published pieces will not be possible either.)

  During his first phase, from approximately 1894 to 1911 (recall that his first published writings appeared when he was fourteen!) we can already detect without difficulty most of the elements of his extraordinary style and vision. At this time he may be still somewhat classifiable, because of the similarity of many of his themes (though with hardly any similarity in style) to those of the great Hungarian novelist Kálmán Mikszáth, of the previous generation. The second period began with the Sindbad books, in 1911–12. It may be said (though imprecisely) that it was then that Krúdy reached his full powers. What is more certain is that it was then, and then only, that he became a well-known writer among the considerable reading public in Budapest. This had something to do with the fact that most of his work now dealt with scenes and people in Budapest—but the significance of this must not be exaggerated. He wrote much more of old (nineteenth-century) Buda and Pest than of the modern Budapest of the 1910s; while the symbolic and impressionist qualities of his prose developed further and further.

  The third “period,” 1918 to 1923, corresponded with the greatest tragedies of his country and nation as well as with lamentable upheavals in his personal life. Perhaps his greatest masterpieces—including the present Sunflower—were composed in these years. He now turned back from the present to the past, from Budapest to the provinces, to an older dreamlike country—which, however, must not be attributed to an escape into nostalgia. These books are suffused with what, perhaps surprisingly, Maupassant once wrote: that the aim of the “realistic novelist” (and Krúdy was anything but a “realistic novelist”) “is not to tell a story, to amuse us or to appeal to our feelings, but to compel us to reflect, and to understand the darker and deeper meaning of events”—in Krúdy’s case, particularly of people. Krúdy writes of imaginary people, of imaginary events, in dreamlike settings; but the spiritual essence of his persons and of their places is stunningly real, it reverberates in our minds and strikes at our hearts. This Introduction is not the place to explain or illustrate this further; but perhaps readers of this book will recognize what this meant and still means.

  The last eight years of his short life were his saddest years, interrupted twice by serious illnesses and leading directly to his premature death. There was no deterioration in his style; but there was less of a concordance of his themes and of his interests. Much of this was due to his personal constraints and difficulties. We may, however, detect yet another emerging element in the evolution of this extraordinary writer: his increasing interest in the past history of Hungary, perhaps propelled by his sense that the eye of a great novelist may see things that professional historians may have missed. In these often sketchlike reconstructions it is again and again evident that Krúdy is sui generis, and unique.

  Indeed, one of the marks of Krúdy’s extraordinary position in the history of Hungarian literature (and if I may say so, in the history of Hungarian mentality) is the character of his unclassifiability. During the twentieth century there has come a break, a veritable chasm, in Hungarian literature, as well as in ideology and politics, between “populists” and “urbanists” (or between “nationalists” and “internationalists,” though none of these terms are quite accurate). Again this is not the place to analyze or even to describe this—often regrettable—phenomenon further, save to suggest that similar scissions exist in other nations too (e.g. between “Redskins” and “Palefaces” in America, or between “Westerners” and “Slavophiles” in Russia, etc.) Now it is not only that Krúdy does not belong into either of these categories. Nor is he a “hybrid,” writing about Budapest one day and about the old provinces on another morning. He is—not at all consciously, but characteristically and naturally—above them, without even thinking, for a moment, about their differences. That alone is a mark of his greatness. The unclassifiable character of his style, of his vision, of his very Hungarianness is more than the mark of an eccentric talent: the talent exists not because it is eccentric, and the eccentricity is remarkable not because it is talented. Like a Shakesp
eare or a Dante or a Goethe in their very different ways, Krúdy is a genius.

  But then even a genius cannot be separated entirely from his place and time. Krúdy belongs to Hungary; and he belongs to the twentieth century. He is a modern writer—though there may be plenty of problems with that overused adjective. (The time may come when we, completely contrary to the still accepted idea, will recognize the works of French Impressionists not as breaking away from representational art but as its culmination.) The words “impressionism” or “symbolism” would have meant nothing to Gyula Krúdy. Nor was he a “subjectivist” writer. But within his capacity to see and to describe people (and places) beyond the constraints of mechanical time, to understand the confluences of dreaming and wakefulness, of consciousness and unconsciousness (not sub-consciousness!), of the ideal with the real (and not with the material!) we may detect elements of those recognitions that appear in the works of such different artists and thinkers and composers as Bergson, or Mallarmé, or Debussy and Ravel, or Proust (with whom he has been often compared, though the French prose writers closer to his style are Alain-Fournier and Valéry Larbaud), or even—perhaps—of Virginia Woolf (with whom otherwise he had nothing in common). Krúdy, in sum, is one of the greats of European literature of the twentieth century.

  This brings me, in conclusion, to the last problem, which is that of the Magyar language—and, consequently, to the enormous difficulties of Krúdy’s translatability. “Everything suffers from a translation, except a bishop,” wrote Trollope in dear old Victorian England. Yes, and this is especially true of works from the Hungarian—but not only because of the already-mentioned uniqueness of the Magyar language, and the unrelatedness of the small Hungarian nation to the great linguistic families of Europe. Nor is the main problem—though problem it is—inherent in Krúdy’s prosody and vocabulary which are earthy and ethereal at the same time, sometimes within the same sentence. Krúdy is a deeply Hungarian writer. That quality has nothing to do with nationalism (the mistaken belief of many a populist), though it has much to do with the older, more traditional virtues of patriotism. His prose is poetic, and profoundly national, soaked with history, with images, associations, including not only words but rhythms recognizable only to Hungarians, and among them only to those whose imaginative antennae naturally vibrate not only with such words and their sounds but with what those descriptions historically—yes, historically—represent.

  That is why his translations require unusual talents. “How can a foreign reader understand...?” From that passage by Cs. Szabó with which I ended “The Sound of a Cello” I left out his last two sentences:

  Hopeless. Hopeless.

  Still...go ahead and try, my friends.

  Well, Mr. John Bátki has tried. And largely succeeded.

  —JOHN LUKACS

  Sunflower

  1. The Touchable Eveline

  The young miss lay abed reading a novel by the light of the candelabra. She heard faint creaks from another part of the townhouse: was someone walking in a remote room? She lowered her book and listened. The hands of the clock were creeping up on midnight like some soul climbing a rock face.

  Miss Eveline at age twenty had already more or less got over mourning for her first love, except for the occasional recollection, whooshing by like a gull on the north wind, of a young man who had threatened suicide. Otherwise she was the very image of health and serenity: she favored a serious aspect; in summer she wore white, in winter black; she made her autumn devotions in the Franciscans’ Church, with the same fervor with which she hoed the spring garden at her country estate; she believed a great happiness awaited her somewhere, and for this reason she remained calm as the days flew by.

  However, the midnight noise alarmed her.

  At first she could not recall whether she had locked her bedroom door. But she was sure the small door to her bathroom was unlocked. And so her eyes fixed on that door. Softly, she slipped out from under her comforter and tiptoed toward the bathroom. With trepidation she saw that she had left the key in the lock on the other side of the door. She watched mesmerized as the copper doorknob started to turn with the softness of a coffin being lowered into the grave. Such mastery of locks could only mean a practiced hand on the other side of the door.

  Eveline took one last look around—her window faced the December garden. It was a mezzanine window protected by a cast iron grill in the style of old town houses in the Josephstadt district of Pest.

  Next she looked about for a weapon, to defend herself. Her eyes passed over a Turkish-style paper cutter, to rest on a hat pin.

  The doorknob, by now, had almost completely rotated. The moment arrived for the stranger to try the door.

  Now the rose-colored door, indeed, began to open.

  Eveline’s shout was so loud she didn’t recognize her own voice:

  “Get up, Kálmán! There’s a robber in the house!”

  In her terror she flung her sewing kit at the window with such force that the pane broke with a loud crash.

  The doorknob, released, clicked back into place.

  Then a door slammed in the distance like a loud oath.

  The footfalls she next heard from the street could have come from anyone out for a melancholy meditative midnight stroll.

  Heart thumping, Eveline ran to the window. The white garden resembled a graveyard. Old trees stood motionless, wearing their overcoats of snow. The distant wall at the end of the garden loomed white. The house grew quiet again, like a discarded diary whose heroes and heroines have departed from this world.

  The young woman hurriedly donned a fur coat: it felt against her nightgown like a fawning tomcat. Her perky little slippers appeared as if on command from under the bed. A glance in the mirror showed a dark female with small lively eyes and chalk-white face. She stood motionless, heart pounding murderously, and broke out in a cold sweat. With the immediate danger gone, she did not know what to do. She could only stand there frightened, oblivious to everything.

  “Could it have been him?” she wondered.

  Her former fiancé, Kálmán. Certainly familiar enough with her house to find his way in the dark labyrinth of zigzag corridors with doors opening left and right. He knew about the spiral staircase leading from her mezzanine quarters down to the garden, built in the days when Jacobins lurked in old Pest and the owner of the house had been part of the conspiracy. The aristocratic palaces lined her street as stately as illustrations in a travel guide. Among them, the mansard roof of her narrow single-story house stood like a little old lady guarding the family silver. An ordinary robber would have gotten lost inside this antique house. The midnight intruder had to be Kálmán.

  But what did he want? He was free to drop by any time, in broad daylight, and ask for whatever he needed, as he had so many times before, for instance when bankrupted by cards or the horses; in such cases like some benevolent relative she had always helped him out generously. Crisp, faintly perfumed banknotes rustled in her rosewood money box at whatever odd hour Kálmán appeared in the boudoir overlooking the garden. Her delicate, white fingers handed over the largest of these banknotes as casually as if it had been a handkerchief. Out of superstition, she had always asked for a penny in return so that good fortune would not leave the house. But Kálmán appeared on other occasions, as well: whenever he had been wounded, abandoned or betrayed by some woman. At such times the rosewood box in the corner contemplated Kálmán’s downcast head with compassion. The girl’s snow-white fingers were kept busy chasing away the clouds from the young man’s brow.

  But Kálmán had not visited here in two years.

  What did he want now?

  Did he have money troubles again? Before their final break-up Eveline had paid all of the young man’s debts. So he could start a wholesome new life with a clean slate. So he could forget Eveline, who in turn would do her best to forgive him.

  Eveline sat by her window until dawn. She watched the trees soak up the light. Dawn poured over the city like farm
-fresh milk. The dwarf shrubs emerged from the gloaming like schoolchildren with snow on their hats after the long walk to the schoolhouse A solemn cypress in its black and white robe loomed like a melancholy gambler returning home at dawn.

  Eveline opened the window.

  She saw footprints in the snow-covered garden.

  Light snow still falling turned the footprints into paling memories. And just as hunters distinguish a wolf’s tracks from other beasts’, so did Eveline, hands pressed against her heart, recognize the tracks left by her nighttime visitor. In a flash, she was on her feet, through the bathroom, down the spiral stairway, and out in the garden. Never mind that the doors were left open behind her.

  She tiptoed toward the first footprint as if it were a butterfly in noonday sun. And knelt, as in front of an altar. Then bent down and kissed the snow where her midnight guest’s foot had landed.

  She kissed the mark left by the heel. Because that’s where the body’s weight rests, its strength, courage and resolve. Her lips touched the imprint of the arched sole, the part that rests on the invisible stirrup that ever supports the rider, keeps him from being unhorsed. These perpetual stirrups steer the wanderer’s footsteps this way and that. Sometimes they lead to surprises in uncharted and wondrous lands where never-to-be- imagined women await their man, all practiced smiles, shameless knees, and breasts as unclean as the pavement in the street. These same stirrups will guide the wearying footfall in other directions. From the wild booming of the contrabass to the faintest murmurs of the heart; from the antic swirl of the masked ball to the gentle flames of the hearth; toward the barely audible gravelly crinkling of freshly sprinkled garden paths under plantains that exhale deeply like sleeping virgins. O these stirrups one day will completely overpower the poor, hesitant feet. Who knows where they will then speed the lost traveler?