by Les Weil
At the time of our friendship he was, in fact, quite normal except for certain eccentricities and intellectual obsessions. Dominant among these were psychoanalysis and Hegelian-Marxist dialectics. Attila had joined the Hungarian underground Communist movement in the late 'twenties, and had been expelled for Trotskyist leanings in 1930 or '31. But he had remained a true proletarian and a true revolutionary, who hated the 'Bonapartism' of Stalin with a Jacobin passion. Intellectually, he was an accomplished acrobat of the Dialectic, and capable of arguing until three or four o'clock in the morning about some obscure decree of the Paris Commune of 1871, or the Budapest Commune of 1919, analysing its implications with a manic rush of words, and with a chess-player's logical precision (he actually was a passionate chess-player, too). In the early hours of the morning he would go home and, unburdened of these cerebral obsessions, write one of the poems which have since become classics of Hungarian literature. He would read it to Nemeth and me the next day, over coffee after lunch, and then at once launch again into a dialectical excursion. He fled from poetry into cerebration, from cerebration into poetry. In his work, he achieved a magic synthesis of the two. In his life, the split never healed, either in the metaphorical or in the clinical sense: the disease of his mind was schizophrenia. We never quarrelled about politics for, though a Party member, I, too, was a born Trotskyist by temperament, and Attila did not challenge me on the point where my faith was most vulnerable, meaning Russia. Attila was not interested in Russia. He was interested in the misery of his own country, which he knew to the bottom of its depth:
`. .. On the rim of the city where I live / when darkness begins to fall /
soot-flakes sail the air, like soft-winged tiny bats/ and settle everywhere /
hardening, thickening, like birds' excrement: / thus weighs this age on
our chests . . .'
His songs of the slums show no trace of the dreary naturalism and Socialist Realism that were the vogue of the pink 'thirties; they are pure and fresh and lyrical, even at their most terrifying:
`Oppression, like a swarm of vultures / makes carrion of our hearts, /
and misery oozes down the globe / like spittle over the moron's face.'
The unique quality of the poems of his later years lies in their miraculous union of intellect and melody. In this respect I can think of no contemporary poet to whom he could be compared. His most complex and cerebral, Marxist and Freudian poems read like folk-songs, and sometimes like nursery thymes; `ideology' is here completely distilled to music which, whether adagio or furioso, is always eminently cantabile. His rhythm almost automatically translates itself into song; his rhymes are virgin matings of rollingfour- and five-syllable words (Hungarian is an inflecting language with long words, rich in dark vowels, full of rustic sap and juice, and highly onomatopoeic; all of which turns translating into a nightmare of frustration). One of his last poems, written while under psychoanalytic treatment, shortly before insanity set in, is an example of that new branch of poetry that he created-the Freudian folk-song. It is called `The Sin':
It seems I am a sinner grim,
but, thank you, I feel fine.
It worries me though, why that sin
eludes mc when it's mine.
I am a sinner without doubt
but though I rack my brain,
that crafty sin turns round about
and leaves me without stain.
As treasure-divers in a lake
I seek that guilt profound;
I left my mother for its sake
and yet my heart is sound.
One day I'll find it, stowed away
in sonic prim governess-
but now friends, let's to the cafe
I'm itching to confess.
I tell you: once I killed a man,
my father-so I think.
Before my eyes his red blood ran
in a night of curdled ink.
I stuck him with a knife, God's truth;
we're human, after all,
and shall in turn feel murder's tooth,
and stabbed, as he was, fall.
So I confess ... and lingering, wait
to watch the antic crowd;
to mark those frightened by my fate
and those who laugh aloud.
Then, just before I turn to stone,
I catch one kindling eye
which signals: you are not alone
for all must sin who die ...
Perhaps my sin is an infant stain
and really nothing worse;
and soon the world will shrink again
and I'll ride my rocking horse.
God leaves me cold; so does the devil;
it was not these who made me.
One day I shall my sins unravel
and all mankind shall aid me.
At the time of our friendship, Attila was an extremely amiable and amusing, though somewhat exhausting, companion. He had his moments of exuberance and would write drinking songs-`O wine, milk of virile men..' -though he drank rarely. He also wrote a congratulatory poem to his own birthday--the thirty-second and last:
Thirty-two and very wise-
this poem shall be a surprise
and so pret-
ty-pretty.
A gift that shall the spirits rouse
of the lonely guest in this coffee-house:
my-
self.
Thirty-two, what an event,
and never enough to pay the rent,
and always hungry
in Hung'ry ...
He had moments of a classical and festive mood: his poem of welcome to Thomas Mann, on the occasion of Mann's visit to Budapest, has the beautiful closing lines:
... We shall listen to you and some
will just gaze at you in joy, for it delights
us to see you here: a European among the Whites.
Attila usually got up at midday, and joined Nemeth and myself for coffee after lunch; and unless we told him that we had to work, he would stay on and talk through the whole afternoon. In a sense he was also a member of `the firm', for we had commissioned him to write the songs for the Hungarian version of the play. But even during that period of sanity there were occasional frightening flashes on the horizon. One day, twiddling his pointed moustache, he startled us by pronouncing in a casual, conversational voice a phrase of fantastic obscenity, all the more startling as he normally displayed a kind of proletarian puritanism.
On another occasion I found Attila lying on the couch in Nemeth's room, in a state of obvious depression. I asked whether anything was the matter, and he said yes. I asked what it was and Attila, suddenly sitting up, said, grinning: `Let's see whether you can find out through Bar Kokhba.' `Bar Kokhba' was a question-and-answer game much in vogue at that time in Budapest, a variant of `animal, vegetable or mineral'.' The dialogue which ensued was roughly on these lines:
L Is it something that happened to-day?
A.: Yes.
L Is it money?
A.: No.
L A woman?
A.: Yes.
L Irene?
A.: No.
L Judith?
A.: Yes.
L Is it tragedy or comedy?
A.: Tragedy.
I: Has she run away?
A.: No.
L Has she killed herself?
A.: N-no.
L Tried to kill herself?
A.: Yes ...
Thus did I learn that Judith, Attila's wife, had tried to poison herself, and had been taken in a critical state to the public ward of a hospital. Attila was not allowed into the ward, and was waiting for news over the telephone. He loved Judith and was suffering agonies on her behalf; but that did not prevent him from playing that game. In the end Judith was saved. That scene was partly a symptom of his state of mind, and partly an expression of the macabre Gnlgenhumor which saturated the atmosphere of the whole town. (The name of the game is derived from a legendary event: Bar
Kokhba, leader of the Gallileaa insurrection against Rome, sent a spy to the enemy camp. The Romans caught the spy and cut out his tongue, then let him go. He nevertheless managed to convey what he had seen to his eader, by answering Bar Kokhba's questions with blinks of the eye signifying yes or no.)
Attila had repeatedly tried to kill himself, the first time at the age of nine, when he swallowed a bar of starch in the belief that it was poison. At fourteen or fifteen, he lay down on the railway track to get himself run over by a goods train which passed through the village every day at a given hour. Time went on, but the train did not come. In the end Attila got up and started walking along the rails to meet it. He then discovered the reason why the train was late: it had killed another person a mile farther up the line. `Somebody else has died for me', he used to say afterwards.
From then on trains, in particular goods trains, became another of Attila's obsessions. They keep roaring through his poems, as the ocean `sick of prey, yet howling on for more' does through Shelley's: until finally they got their prey. In I937 he spent a few weeks in a mental home. Then, as his condition seemed to have improved, he was handed over to the care of his sisters, who were living in a small village on Lake Balaton. One evening in November, he ambled down to the railway station where a goods train was standing, bound for Budapest. As he was approaching the station, the train slowly began to move. He broke into a run, squeezed through under the lowered barrier, knelt down at the track, and, as the train was gathering speed, laid his right arm in between two carriages on the rail. The arm was later found, cleanly severed and thrown at some distance from the mangled body.
A few days after Attila's death, his family found in his drawer a shirt from which the right sleeve had been cut off with scissors. His guiltcomplex had apparently inspired him with the idea that he must have his right arm cut off; and when that was done the train, howling for more, had drawn the rest of his body under the wheels. His death was, fittingly, announced to his sisters by the giggling and spluttering village idiot.
The Hungarian Communist Party, which had excommunicated Attila Jozsef in his lifetime, canonised him after his death. Had he been still alive when Hungary came under Russian rule, he would have shared the fate of all my other friends; so it is just as well that he chose the goods train. If he could come back for an hour, he would twirl his moustache and launch into a dissertation on the proper dialectical timing of one's death.
The third person I have mentioned was our mutual friend, Paul Ignotus. He was a youngish, baldish, humorous and amiable person who had lived all his life in the shadow of a famous and overbearing father. Old Ignotus had been the literary pope of Hungary, founder and editor of Nyugat, leader of the `Western' movement in Hungarian letters. Young Ignotus followed in his father's footsteps as a brilliant literary critic, and co-editor, with Attila and Nemeth, of a literary magazine; in the late 'thirties he emigrated to England, where he worked during the war in the Hungarian section of the B.B.C. He did not take any direct interest in politics; he was a mild Liberal with vague sympathies for both Socialism and Communism which he regarded as the radical wing of the `movement towards progress'. After the war the new Hungarian regime offered him the post of Press Attache at the Hungarian Legation in London, which he saw no reason to refuse.
In 1950 his father died, and Ignotus went to Budapest to attend his funeral. This was a short time before the trial of the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Laszlo Rajk. Ignotus never returned to his post. A short paragraph in the Hungarian papers announced that he had been sentenced to nine years' imprisonment for high treason and espionage. He was never tried in public. His crime was that he had lived in the West; his tragedy that of the confused and gullible Liberal. During our long post-war discussions in London he had always smilingly reproached me for my `fanatical' distrust of Stalinite regimes, and had dismissed my warnings not to return to Budapest as the result of an obvious persecution mania.
In writing these pages I have been haunted by the memory of Richard Hillary's book, The Last Enemy. At twenty-three, Hillary was the only survivor of a group of young fighter pilots--the flying undergraduates of the Battle of Britain. He called himself `the last of the long-haired boys' and felt that he was an anachronism, a survivor from another generation. There is a phrase which runs monotonously, like a row of tombstones through his book: `From this flight Broody Benson did not return'. `From this flight Bubble Waterston did not return.' `From this flight Larry Cunningham did not return ...' He was the only one left, and he had `to go on paying the tribute; for the survivor is always a debtor.'
A few months before my arrival in Budapest, two Comintern agents, Szallai and Fuest, had been summarily tried and hanged. They had arrived with false passports from Moscow to reorganise the underground party in Hungary, but had been detected and arrested soon after they had crossed the frontier.
These executions created a considerable stir, for since the late 'twenties Horthy's regime had settled down to a fairly liberal routine, more or less in the tradition of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. The leaders of the Commune of 1919 were in exile--some in Moscow, some in Paris; but minor participants such as Nemeth, and sympathisers such as Baron Hatvany, had gradually been allowed to return, and live unmolested. Freedom of the Press had been restored; the legal opposition in Parliament comprised several parties, including the Socialists, and the literati could express pretty well any opinion they liked. Attila Jozsef was free to publish his revolutionary poems, and Lajos Kassak, the doyen of Hungarian revolutionary writers, to edit, at his table in the cafe, his Marxist quarterly. The police did not bother about Communist litterateurs, so long as they remained merely litterateurs and had no contact with the one potential enemy, the underground Party. By 1933 that underground Party had been reduced to a handful of intrepid fanatics; the rank and file had deserted them. Szallai and Fuest, two tried and experienced Comintern men, had been sent to remedy this situation and to instil new life into the underground. Their execution--the first political execution for several years--was intended by the regime as a warning example.
My friends in Budapest told me ghastly details about it. The hanging had not been public, but certain notables and privileged persons had been admitted to it. Several ladies of the Hungarian aristocracy had managed to obtain admission tickets. They were females of that loud-voiced, flashy and conspicuous variety who are the despair of Ritz managers all over Europe. When the two men were led to the gallows in the prison courtyard, where a special stand had been erected for the onlookers, the noble ladies broke into screams of hysterical abuse. Szallai and Fuest had both participated in the Commune of 1919 and the ladies were now getting their revenge for the ignominies they had suffered by having refugees billeted in their houses and for the stains they left on the carpets. The two men under the gallows answered back; one sang the 'Internationale' until the trap fell, the other shouted slogans and promised that their death would be avenged. Had they been able to foresee what form that vengeance would take, they would probably have died less bravely.
When I arrived in Hungary, the memory of these events was still fresh. The reader may think that under these circumstances it was a risky thing for me to travel from Moscow straight to Budapest. In fact it was not; but the niceties and ambiguities of a Communist's double existence in those days are rather complicated to explain. It ought to be remembered that, with the exception of Attila and Nemeth, nobody in Budapest knew that I was a member of the Party. I had never written in Communist papers. In my Party cell in Berlin I had been listed under the alias Ivan Steinberg. To all appearances my record was perfectly proper. I had worked for years for the respectable Ullstein papers, and had been sent to Russia as a correspondent of the equally respectable Duncker Press Agency on behalf of a string of Liberal newspapers. I had never been mixed up in Hungarian politics. I even had a certain reputation in Hungary, for the papers had reported with patriotic pride that the only reporter on the Zeppelin Polar expedition had been a Hungarian. In
cidentally, my Palestine passport having expired shortly after that trip, I had reverted to Hungarian nationality, and was travelling with a Hungarian passport. In short, I was a bourgeois journalist who, after many travels in foreign countries, including Russia, had come to visit his aged parents in his home-town.
There was, of course, a remote possibility of some Hungarian agent in Berlin having reported that I had been frequenting Communist circles. But that in itself, and even membership of the German Communist Party (which could hardly be proved), was not a punishable offence, provided that my activities had not been directed against Hungary. At worst, I thought, the police would interrogate me (as they did), and have me shadowed (as I believe they did). But as long as I steered clear of any contact with the underground Party (which I certainly did), I had nothing serious to fear.
This calculation, confirmed by advice that I had gathered in Moscow, proved correct. When I arrived at the Hungarian frontier, the passport officer suffered a slight shock when he saw my Russian visa. Hungary maintained no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and Hungarian papers had no correspondents in Moscow. But when I explained that I was working for German newspapers and showed my credentials, the officer, somewhat doubtfully, let me proceed to Budapest. He kept my passport, however, and told me that I would get it back at police headquarters, whither I should be summoned in due time.
The summons came about a week after my arrival, to my father's address. I went to headquarters without being unduly worried. The sergeant at the inquiry desk was of the jovial, moustachioed type familiar from my childhood; Communist or not, I found it a cosier place than the G.P.U. in Baku. I was received in a room by three cool and polite plainclothed officials of the Political Department. On the staircase I had kept repeating to myself:
`DON'T BE ON THE DEFENSIVE. YOU HAVE A CLEAN CONSCIENCE. YOU WORK FOR THE