The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  Having read that story, I wrote, after weeks of hesitation, a fan-letter to its author. I have only written two fan-letters in my life, one to Nemeth, one to Thomas Mann. He answered at once, asking me to come and see him at his office. At sixteen, I still wore short trousers; I was suffering from pathological timidity; Nemeth was the first writer whom I met in the flesh, and it was the first time that I set foot in that awe-inspiring locale, an editorial office. In spite of all this, and though I was literally covered with cold sweat, I felt instantly and miraculously at ease when I set eyes on the untidy, bulgy-eyed young man behind his desk. It was either the dandruff on his collar and his neglected appearance which gave me back my self-confidence (it was said that Nemeth's girl friends occasionally banded together and threw him into a bath-tub) or the mild, goggling stare of his eyes which always seemed surprised at the things they saw, and at the same time took them for granted. It was the kind of stare one meets in the profiled figures on Egyptian murals. The goggling effect was emphasised by a bony, prominent nose, but softened by the ripple in his brown mane. Slightly under medium height, he carried himself with the willowy stoop of a tall scholar. Though certainly not a seducer in appearance, women ran after him like mad--it must have been that bewildered and yet understanding stare which penetrated straight to the core of their elastic defences. It seemed to say: `My dear lady, why all this fuss? There is nothing new under the sun, and you know very well that you enormously enjoy going to bed. Unless, of course, you would rather prefer a cup of tea.' His voice, soft and elaborately polite, had the same quality of taking everything for granted. It always sounded as if he were saying: `You like boiled eggs with brilliantine for breakfast? But we all do, of course.' It was the voice of a psychiatrist-friendly, soothing, never shocked. His most endearing quality, however, was his fabulous absent-mindedness, about which countless stories circulated in Budapest. The following is typical and authentic:

  One day Nemeth, completely lost in his thoughts, climbed into a tramcar. The train was crowded, and Nemeth was pushed and buffeted about, but took no notice, staring vacantly in front of him. After a while the ticket­collector took him gently by the arm, steered him to a seat occupied by a young woman and whispered into her ear. The woman blushed and yielded her seat to Nemeth. Nemeth mumbled absently, `Thank you, dear lady,' and sat down. A few minutes later, emerging from his reverie, he noticed that everybody was staring at him with looks of commiseration. He found this uncomfortable, took a newspaper from his pocket and began to read. He was promptly thrown out of the tram amidst general indignation.

  At our first meeting in that editorial office some time in 1921, I had shown Nemeth my adolescent efforts at poetry; he read them with benevolent scepticism. During my university years we had met more often, and gradually the ten years difference in age began to lose its significance. In 1926, I had left Vienna for Palestine, and as the Horthy regime was becoming more liberal, Nemeth had returned to Budapest. Whenever I visited Budapest on leave from the Middle East, and later from Paris, we spent most of our time in each other's company. During one of those visits Nemeth had given me an idea for a detective story. In the boredom of my last year in Palestine I wrote the story but it became too melodramatic and was no good. Three years later Nemeth, who was in need of money, rewrote the same story and sent it to me, but this time it had become too highbrow. I rewrote it again, and sold it under our joint signatures to the second largest German magazine, the Munchner Illustrierte. That was how `the firm' had started. I was then living in Berlin and had just been sacked by the Ullsteins. Nemeth used his half of the fee for a visit to Berlin, where he stayed with me for two or three months. We wrote the synopsis for a second detective story, and also a movie script. We could not sell either, but to discuss some idiotic plot over a bottle of wine amused us vastly.

  At that time, the petty guerilla war between Nazis and Communists had been in full swing, and my flat in the `Red Block' served as a local headquarters for all kinds of illegal activities. One night, some thirty of us were keeping vigil in the flat as we were expecting a raid by the Nazi stormtroopers. We only had three or four revolvers between us, but one of the members of our cell was a plumber, who supplied us with bits of lead pipe. The next day, Nemeth and I were travelling on a bus, when a large piece of lead pipe fell out from under his jacket and rolled clattering over the floor-­fortunately without crushing anybody's feet. In his absentmindedness, Nemeth had tucked it under his jacket in the morning, probably thinking it was his fountain pen.

  When I had left Berlin for Russia, Nemeth had returned to Budapest; now, a year later, we were again reunited. I found him, as usual, in dire financial straits, living in the small, dark flat of his girl friend, Juci (pro­nounced Youtsy). Incapable of looking after himself and of taking any practical initiative, Nemeth, who was now over forty, had never had a flat or place of his own. He had lived with his mother until he got bored with having to get home every night from Juci's, so now he lived there on a narrow couch. Juci, whom he was to marry a year later, was a small, dark­haired, swarthy-complexioned girl--she looked just like the little mouse into which Nemeth's mother had turned in the story. In the morning, she darned his socks; from late afternoon until midnight she was away, for she worked as a secretary on the staff of a morning paper. It was an ideal arrangement as Juci did not mind Nemeth's occasional unfaithfulness, and, I suspect, even took a secret pride in his conquests.

  The latest of these was a lady of the Hungarian aristocracy of imposing dimensions, called Zsuzsa (unpronounceable). If Juci looked like a nimble grey mouse, Zsuzsa looked like an ornamental baby elephant. Juci loved Zsuzsa. Zsuzsa hated Juci, and was mortally jealous of her. Juci kept sending flowers to Zsuzsa in Nemeth's name, because Nemeth always forgot to send them. One day this was discovered by Zsuzsa, who threw a fit and threatened to have Nemeth thrown into the Danube by her footmen. Nemeth told me this story, on the day of my arrival, as an example of feminine unreasonableness. Juci, who was making coffee for us, chimed in delightedly:

  `. .. And imagine if poor Zsuzsa had known that I not only sent the flowers but also paid for them'.

  `Yes,' said Nemeth. 'Juci behaved very correctly in this affair, but I am afraid Zsuzsa did not.' `Correctly' was the mot juste if ever there has been one.

  Nemeth took my play to his friend Bardoss, director of the Belvdrosi Szinhdz, which means `City Theatre'. Bardoss read it the same evening, and bought it the next day. We decided that Nemeth was to translate the play into the Hungarian and that we should appear on the bill as co-authors, in the old tradition of `the firm'. We split the advance that Bardoss had paid, and Juci, who was always very practical about money, quickly worked out that under a regime of strict economy, both Nemeth and I could live on it for three months. During these three months `the firm' was to produce a second play, transfer its activities to Paris, and live happily ever after. We also decided that Nemeth should leave Juci's cramped room where he couldn't work and, for the first time in his life, set up on his own. So he and I each found a furnished room on the Danube front, at a few minutes' distance from each other, and began to work furiously on the new play. In the evenings, we went to one of the three or four cafes where the various literary cliques gathered, listened to the newest shaggy-dog jokes, and discussed every subject on earth except politics. Within a few days I had met nearly every Hungarian writer and his retinue; for the more prominent were always followed to their cafes by a suite of wives, ex-wives, mistresses, and the wives' and mistresses' boy friends. The latter were a tribe of extremely correct, nice and well-behaved young men who felt deeply honoured by being admitted to the society of celebrated writers.

  It was a strange society, and quite different in atmosphere from literary cliques in Paris, London or Berlin. Post-war Hungary was a dwarf-state, with a population of seven million of whom the majority were semi-literate peasants. Like Austria, it lived in a permanent economic depression, only interrupted by acute crises. But unlike Austria and other sma
ll countries, it had no ties, through a shared language, with the cultures of larger neighbours; the Magyars are an isolated ethnic enclave in Europe, and their only relatives are the distant Finns. Hungarian writers could only secure a larger audience by emigrating, and learning to write in the language of their adopted country. But to abandon his native language and traditions means in most cases death to the writer, and his transformation into a nondescript, cosmopolitan journalist or literary hack. Hungary's main export since the first World War had been reporters, scriptwriters, film producers, magazine editors, commercial artists, actresses, and manufacturers of topical best­sellers--the international demi-monde of the arts and letters. They were strewn all over the world by that centrifugal force which is generated when an exceptional amount of talent is cooped up without means of expression in a small country. Though I had the good fortune to be brought up bilingually and to leave Hungary as a child, I have paid the penalty which the loss of one's cultural roots entails through a long time.

  Those who remained at home were condemned to write for a small, spoiled, saturated audience. The leading Hungarian poets and novelists of the nineteen-twenties and 'thirties would have occupied an honourable place in the literature of any great nation. The smallness and misery of their country condemned them to eke out their living by writing newspaper columns, and at the same time forced them to live in an atmosphere of mental inbreeding. Writers in larger countries, once they grow out of their juvenile cliques, avoid this by instinct; but the small-town artist is condemned to a lifelong intellectual ghetto. The literary ghettoes of Budapest were the cafes, which were also the headquarters of the warring factions. Many writers worked, read, and received their visitors in cafes. They had their reserved tables, their habits, their courts.

  These peculiar circumstances lent the intellectual life of the town a warm intimacy which entirely captivated me. After a year spent in the grim human desert of Russia, I was suddenly thrown upon the bosom of a cosy, incestuous family. I remained a convinced Marxist, and was to stay in the Communist Party for another five years, but I have always been hungry for contrast, for a manner of existence directly opposed to the one I was supposed to be leading. If ever there existed a decadent society, it was here in the cafes of Budapest. For me it was a perfect escapist holiday, and at the same time a confirmation of my belief that bourgeois culture was doomed.

  It would be futile to describe personalities; as only a few works of Hungarian literature have been translated into Western languages, the authors and their relationships to each other would mean little to the Western reader. I must nevertheless mention three of them.

  Frederick Karinthy was the H. G. Wells and the James Thurber of Hungarian letters, both in one. He was immensely popular and immensely prolific. He wrote novels and plays of a fantastic and Utopian type, and short satirical sketches which appeared three times a week in an evening paper. Some time after my visit he fell ill with a brain tumour. He was operated on, seemed to have completely recovered, but died suddenly, a year or two later, of a cerebral haemorrhage. Before his death he wrote a detailed account of his illness, from the first symptoms--the auditory hallucination of a train roaring past the cafe every day at 7 p.m. precisely--to partial amnesia and total blindness, culminating in a description of the operation. It was carried out in the approved manner, the patient, fully conscious, lying face down on the operating table, and the surgeon talking to him while operating on the exposed brain. (The brain itself is insensitive to touch, and the resection of the scalp and skull is made painless by local anaesthetics.) The book is both an autobiographical curiosity and a master­piece of introspective observation. It was published in England under the title Journey Around My Skull, but attracted little attention.

  Karinthy was the kind of wild literary genius which grows in small countries and provincial towns. He certainly had international stature, but he could neither be translated nor transplanted, for his writing was saturated with the traditions of his country, the idiom of his town, the specific slang of his milieu. He was a darkly handsome, stocky, middle-aged man with an air of tolerant melancholia. His gestures, slow and tired, carried a strange authority. His court, which resided at the Cafe Hadik in Buda, consisted of his wife Aranka; her boy friend Csuri; his devoted secretary and court jester Denes; and two former girl friends, permanently in the throes of some domestic or psychological crisis. Aranka was a now fading classical beauty, and a great lady of considerable intelligence and wit who constantly fought a losing battle against her own innate bitchiness. Some twenty years earlier she had been the muse of Hungary's great poet, Endre Ady, who had drawn a portrait of her as a flapper greedy for life with the face of a saint and the character of a lesser guttersnipe. Her lover, Csuri, was a blase young man who addressed Karinthy as `master' and treated him with impudent deference, while Karinthy suffered him as an ageing St. Bernard suffers the antics of a fox terrier. As Aranka refused to keep house, the court took all their meals in restaurants, and Karinthy generally paid for everyone; he was permanently in debt and forced to hack out three pieces a week for Az Est, a cheap tabloid paper.

  The long evenings spent at Karinthy's table, his air of tolerant resignation as he listened to the chatter and quarrels of his court, gave me the first intimation of the abyss of loneliness in which some artists are condemned to live.

  Between Karinthy's operation and his death, Aranka's boy-friend, Csuri, left her. She tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a window, but only succeeded in breaking her hip; she remained permanently lame. The Nazis put an end to her misery. Aranka was of Jewish extraction; she either ended in a death camp or killed herself--I do not remember which.

  Two Hungarian writers were particular friends of `the firm'; the poet Attila Jozsef, and the critic and essayist, Paul Ignotus. Though in his native Hungary Attila Jozsef is posthumously regarded as the greatest poet the nation has produced, his name is still virtually unknown in the West. This may justify the pages that follow--quite apart from my personal feelings for a dead friend.

  Attila Jozsef committed suicide at the age of 32; both his work and his personal fate were a terrifying symbol of our time. He was a contemporary Villon, whose life and poetry revolved around the two treacherous poles of this age, Marx and Freud, and who died a victim of both.

  Attila was born in 1905, the son of a day-labourer and of a charwoman. His father disappeared when he was three, and until his seventh year Attila was brought up in an orphanage. He earned his living while at school as a movie-usher, newsboy and night-waiter; and at college as a railway porter, Danube sailor, dock-worker, office-cleaner and private tutor.

  His first poems were publshed in the leading Hungarian literary magazine, Nyugat ('Occident') when he was sixteen. One year later, in 1922, Nyugat printed his poem 'Innocent Song' which caused a nation-wide scandal, and his expulsion from the University of Szeged. `Innocent Song' was acclaimed as a kind of manifesto of the Central European post-war generation. The translations in this chapter are merely meant to indicate the trend of Attila's poetry.'

  INNOCENT SONG

  I have no God, I have no King,

  my mother never wore a ring,

  I have no crib or funeral cover,

  I give no kiss, I take no lover.

  For three days I have chewed my thumb

  for want of either crust or crumb.

  Though I am twenty, strong and hale­-

  my twenty years are up for sale.

  Should there be none who wish to buy

  The Devil's free to have a try;

  then shall I use my commonsense

  and rob and kill in innocence.

  Till, on a rope, they hang me high,

  and in the blessed earth I lie­-

  and lush and poisoned grasses start

  rank from my pure and simple heart.

  His first volume of poems was published in the same year, his second volume in 1925, when he was twenty. In that year, the Maecenas of Hungarian letters, Bar
on Louis Hatvany, sent him on a summer vacation to France, and in later years, too, helped him with small sums. Nevertheless, the whole of Attila s short life was haunted by poverty; he never achieved ,the monthly two hundred' which became one of his various obsessions. The 'two hundred' refers to Hungarian pengoe, and the total of the unattainable dream was the equivalent of twelve pounds per month.

  When I met Attila in 1933, we were both twenty-seven. He was of pure­bred Magyar, rural stock: of medium height, lean, sparse, sinewy, he carried his body like a regimental sergeant-major. He had a narrow face with a high forehead, calm brown eyes, and calm, regular features to which a certain dash and enterprise was added by a trim moustache with pointed ends. It was a handsome and manly, but quite unremarkable face that could have been a ladies' hairdresser's; nothing in its unruffled appearance suggested that its owner had spent several months in a mental hospital, suffering from delusions, and was heading for the final break-up.