Inner Workings

by J. M. Coetzee

  (2002)

  7 Sándor Márai

  WE ARE WITH the old General, Henrik, in his castle in Hungary. The year is 1940. In twenty years, since the fall of the Habsburg monarchy, the General has not appeared in public. Now he is to have a visitor, his one-time bosom friend Konrad.

  The General gazes at the portraits of his parents: his father the Guards officer, his mother the French noblewoman who did her best to fill this granite mausoleum in the woods with colour and music but in the end succumbed under its cold weight. In a long flashback he remembers how, as a boy, he was taken to Vienna to be enrolled in a military academy; how there he met Konrad, how the two became inseparable. During vacations back home he and Konrad rode together, fenced together, vowing to remain chaste. ‘There is nothing to equal the delicacy of such a relationship. Everything that life has to offer later, sentimental yearnings or raw desire, intense feelings and eventually the bonds of passion, will all be coarser, more barbaric.’1

  In due course the two young men graduated from the academy and joined the Guards. While Henrik led a conventional military-officer life, Konrad began to spend evenings alone, reading. Yet even after Henrik married the beautiful Krisztina, the bond between the two young men seemed unbroken.

  The flashback ends. The old General opens a secret drawer and takes out a loaded revolver.

  Out of the darkness Konrad arrives (how he has managed to cross German-occupied Europe he does not explain). Over dinner he describes his life since he and Henrik went their separate ways forty years ago. For years he worked in Malaya, for a British trading company. Now he is a British citizen and lives in England. In turn Henrik tells how, once the monarchy was abolished, he resigned his officer’s commission.

  The two agree that the post-1919 dispensation can inspire no feelings of loyalty in them. Konrad: ‘My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded . . . What we swore to uphold no longer exists . . . There was a world for which it was worth living and dying. That world is dead.’ Henrik demurs: ‘That world is still alive, even if in reality it no longer exists. It lives, because I swore an oath to uphold it.’ (pp. 92–3)

  Lightning strikes the electricity grid. In the castle the two old men continue their dinner by candlelight. A hundred pages have passed. We are halfway through Embers (Hungarian title: The Candles Burn Down). It is time for Hendrik to proceed to business.

  All these past forty years, he tells Konrad, he has been plagued by a question to which he must now finally have an answer. In fact, if Konrad had not come tonight, he would have set out to find him, even in the bowels of hell. He reminds Konrad of what occurred on a certain fateful day in 1899 when he called at Konrad’s bachelor apartment and to his surprise – he had never been there before, he was expecting a spartan set-up – found it full of beautiful objects, ‘curtains and carpets, silver, ancient bronzes, crystal and furniture, rare woven materials’. (p. 118) As he stood marvelling, Krisztina stepped through the door, and the scales fell from his eyes.

  Konrad and Krisztina had deceived and betrayed him – that was why Konrad fled the country. But had their treachery run even deeper? He cannot forget a moment when, out hunting with Konrad, a sixth sense told him that Konrad’s gun was trained not on the deer but on the back of his head. (He had not turned: he did not want to experience ‘the shame felt by the victim who is forced to look his killer in the eyes’.) Had they planned to murder him too, and if so why had their plan failed? Because Konrad had not the nerve to pull the trigger? (p. 148)

  Henrik recalls his father’s private verdict on Konrad: that at heart Konrad was not a soldier. Like Krisztina, dead these many years, Konrad had been a lover of music. Henrik has not shared that passion. Echoing the pathologically jealous hero of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, he denounces music as a call to libertinage and anarchy, a secret language used by ‘select’ people to express ‘uninhibited, irregular things that are also probably indecent and immoral’. ‘You killed something inside me,’ he tells Konrad. ‘Tonight, I am going to kill something inside you.’ (pp. 178, 141)

  Yet even as he has Konrad at his mercy, his desire for revenge seems to be waning. What, after all, will Konrad’s death accomplish? With age, it seems, we begin to accept that our desires have found and will find no real echo in the world. ‘The people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope.’ (p. 135) So of Konrad he demands no more than the truth. What was truly afoot between him and Krisztina?

  To Henrik’s questions, accusations, threats, and pleas Konrad makes no response. At dawn he departs. The last page is turned, the revolver remains unused.

  Embers is a novel – really a novella – in which little happens. Of the trio of actors, Krisztina is a shadow, Konrad a stubborn silence. The castle, the storm, Konrad’s night-time visit add up to no more than a setting and an occasion for Henrik to reflect aloud on the mutations undergone by his pain and jealousy over the course of time, and to utter his thoughts about life. The book reads like a sometimes clumsy narrative transcription of a stage play.

  The topics on which Henrik utters his rather conventional thoughts include the newly erupted war (a world gone mad); primitive peoples (at least they have retained a sense of the sacral nature of killing); the masculine virtues of silence, solitude, the inviolability of one’s word; friendship (a feeling known only to men, nobler than sexual desire because it demands nothing in return); and hunting (the sole arena left in which men can experience a forbidden joy, namely the urge, neither good nor evil in itself, to vanquish one’s antagonist).

  Henrik’s opinions are those we might expect of any crusty retired general. But he is more than that. He is also a follower of the vulgarised interpretation of Nietzsche, with its romanticisation of violence and its homoerotic mystique, that held sway among the unreconstructed European military elite of the turn of the century. One way of reading Embers is as a work of irony, fashioned to allow the Henriks of the world to expose the crudity of their thought in their own words, without authorial intervention. But for such a reading to obtain, the reader must accept the book as a seamless piece of imposture in which Márai’s own sentiments are deliberately silenced. The clichéd language would then mirror Henrik’s own coarse sensibility, as would the crude mis-enscène: the Gothic castle haunted by ‘intangible presences’; the table adorned with ‘exquisitely charming’ porcelain; ties ‘too deep for words’ between the master and the ancient retainer who looks after his needs; ‘ancient texts’ that he consults in search of the meaning of life, etc., etc. (pp. 25, 83, 15, 111)

  An alternative reading of this enigmatic book – enigmatic because so determinedly out of touch with its times (it appeared during the Second World War) – would give fuller weight to Márai’s pessimism about our capacity to know other people, and his stoical resignation to not being known himself. ‘In literature, as in life,’ he writes in his memoir Land, Land! . . ., ‘only silence is “sincere”’.2 Once you give up your inmost secret, you have given up your self and in that sense cease to be yourself. (Hence Márai’s disdain for psychoanalysis, with its therapeutic ambitions.) Even if in his heart the old General may feel he is not the caricature he seems to be, he may not protest or struggle, but must act out his role to the end. In a key passage Márai writes:

  We not only act, talk, think, dream, we also preserve our silence about something. All our lives we are silent about who we are, which only we know and about which we can speak to no one. Yet we know that who we are and what we cannot speak of constitutes the ‘truth’. We are that about which we preserve our silence. (Land, Land! . . . , p. 83)

  And elsewhere he observes that, in the arena of love, a woman yields up the secret of her self at the risk of losing the game.3

  In the second reading of Embers, it is perhaps Konrad, with his studied refusal to excuse himself, and Krisztina, who from the fateful day of Konrad’s flight until her death never speaks a word to her husband (‘a strong personality,’ he comments admiringly), who are truest to t
hemselves. (Embers, p. 191)

  Embers, published in Budapest in 1942, can profitably be read side by side with the novella Eszter’s Legacy, first published three years earlier.4 Like Embers, Eszter’s Legacy seems to have been conceived as theatre. It has the same focus on a single character onstage throughout, a similar cryptic psychology issuing in an unexpected act: a middle-aged woman in straitened circumstances signing over her property to a man she knows perfectly well is bamboozling her with sentimental lies. As she notes with detached amusement, something within her seems to be compelling her to be fooled. She could resist, but to do so would be to act out of character. To resist would be to reject the caricatural version of womanliness, of woman as the one who loves to be lied to, who loves to yield. To resist the caricature would be to cry out against the theatre of life, to struggle to emerge from the sleepwalk of destiny. The deeper heroism, we infer, lies in stoical acceptance.

  Eszter’s Legacy is more straightforward than Embers in its narrative strategy, more transparent about its paternity – Chekhov, Strindberg – and therefore perhaps a less puzzling introduction to Márai’s austere and radical fatalism.

  Sándor Márai was born in 1900 in the provincial city of Kaschau (Hungarian Kassa), which after the end of the Dual Monarchy in 1919 ceased to be in Hungary and under the name Košice was allotted to the new state of Czechoslovakia. On the side of his father, a lawyer, the family was of Saxon origin: the name had been Grosschmidt, but in the wake of the uprisings of 1848, in which they had fought on the Hungarian nationalist side, they had changed it. At home they spoke German rather than Hungarian.

  Márai’s education was interrupted by the First World War. Called up at the age of seventeen, he seems to have spent most of his period of service hospitalised. After the war he flirted briefly with the student left, then went abroad. In Leipzig he enrolled at the newly created Institute for Journalism, but found the courses too academic, and moved to Frankfurt, where in a livelier intellectual atmosphere he felt more at home. He had a gift for making contacts, and was soon publishing in the prestigious Frankfurter Zeitung. He read Kafka and translated some of Kafka’s stories into Hungarian.

  From Frankfurt he progressed to Berlin, where he enrolled at the University of Berlin. His plan was to take a German degree, acculturate himself fully as German, then pursue a career as a German writer – in effect, to resume his Grosschmidt heritage. Instead he married a girl from Kaschau, abandoned his studies, and moved to Paris, there to follow the life of a free-floating intellectual of a loose Central European identity. For five years he used Paris as a base to travel extensively. He wrote for Hungarian newspapers; he also wrote a first novel, later to be repudiated.

  In 1928 he returned to Hungary to settle and to re-learn Hungarian properly. He wrote voluminously, plays and novels. Between 1930 and 1939 sixteen books appeared, through which he began to win a substantial readership in both Hungary and the German-speaking world. He belonged to no political party, lived a private life. His tribute to the novelist Gyula Krúdy speaks to his own values: ‘He was not prepared to write for a social class nor for the Volk, only for the class and Volk of independent people. He never cared to be the darling of the nation.’5

  War broke out, but the stream of his publications continued unabated. These included a memoir of his return to Kaschau, now once again part of Hungary. In 1943, along with other Hungarian authors, he signed an open letter calling for the defence against outside influences of what he saw as a threatened Hungarian culture. He began a diary, written with publication in mind, the first volume, covering 1943–44, appearing in 1945.

  Between the end of the war in 1945 and 1948 Márai published eight more books. But as the takeover of the country’s institutions, directed from Moscow, moved into gear, the official attitude toward him grew frostier. Reading the writing on the wall, he withdrew into exile, first in Switzerland, then in Italy, then in New York. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 gave him new hope. He returned to Europe, only to be met by a stream of defeated refugees. In 1979 he and his wife followed their adopted son, a war orphan, to California. He died in 1989, by his own hand.

  During his exile Márai was published in Hungarian by the Toronto publishing house of Vörösvary-Weller and in translation in France and Germany. In all, between 1931 and 1978, twenty-two of his books came out in German translation. The fact that appreciation for his writing was unaffected by changes in the political climate suggests that his notion of what it meant to be above the politics of the day found an echo among the German middle class. Meanwhile Márai continued to work on his Diaries: five further volumes appeared between 1958 and 1997. In 1990 he was posthumously awarded the Kossuth Prize, Hungary’s highest honour.

  The only book to emerge directly from Márai’s American experience is The Wind Comes from the West, a collection of travel pieces based on a trip he took in the 1950s through the Southwest and South, with a dip into Mexico. One test of the quality of travel writing is whether it offers the natives a new perspective on themselves. This is a test that Márai fails. His information about the United States seems to come more from American newspapers than from personal observation; his commentary on what he sees is rarely fresh or striking. It is hard to imagine Americans finding this book of much interest, except perhaps tangentially as a record of how a European of Márai’s generation and upbringing viewed their country (San Diego, for instance, is commended for its compact city centre, its South Italian elegance).6

  Márai himself understood his commentary on America in a different light. In the old days, he wrote, a European visitor to America could pretend to be an explorer in an undiscovered land. But in today’s America there is nothing left to discover because there is no such thing as the unknown. All that is left for the writer is to use the experience of travel to appreciate the fact that he is foreign to the continent, that he is a European.7

  Márai’s greatest popular success was with a book titled in German Bekenntnisse eines Bürgers, to be glossed as ‘Confessions of a member of the old European middle class’. When it first came out in 1934, this was taken to be a work of autobiography. Alarmed, Márai added an authorial note to the third edition stressing that what he had written was a ‘fictional biography’ whose characters ‘do not live and have never lived in the real world’. Nevertheless, the career of the hero of Confessions follows pretty closely the contours of Márai’s early life as far as we know it, while his opinions are entirely consistent with Márai’s own. It will be left to a future biographer to tease out what exactly was invented.

  The first volume of the Confessions takes us through the unnamed hero’s childhood and youth, first in his parents’ comfortable home in Kaschau, then in boarding school in Budapest. This loving, leisurely evocation of a way of life long gone is the most attractive feature of the book. It is a way of life – that of the central European Mittelstand, hardworking, patriotic, socially responsible, respectful of learning – to the memory of which Márai clung even after it was gone.

  The second volume follows the hero’s Wanderjahre as he drifts through postwar Europe, first as a less than wholehearted student, later as a freelance writer, from Leipzig to Frankfurt to Berlin to Paris to Florence until, in 1928, he returns to Budapest to settle down seriously to the life of a writer.

  In Berlin, with the mark plummeting and Hungarian forints in his pocket, he finds himself comfortably off. Together with some friends he hires an office and publishes a literary magazine. He has erotic adventures; he writes his first play. Never has life been so gay and carefree.

  In Paris, he and his new wife try out la vie bohème. They are miserable. The food is poor, hygienic arrangements are unspeakable, they cannot understand Parisian speech. ‘We lived like exiles in a primitive, tight-fisted city.’ After a year they abandon the experiment: they move to the Right Bank, rent a comfortable apartment, import a maidservant from Kaschau, buy a car, live in greater style. He himself is still drawn to Montparnasse (‘a university seminar, s
teambath, and open-air stage in one’), but preferably as an onlooker, not a participant.8

  Gradually he learns to be more charitable to the French. They may be hardheaded and miserly, the war may have undermined their confidence, but they have not lost their quintessential sense of proportion, of what is good for them. Their modesty and lack of taste – ‘self-conscious, almost humble’ – becomes endearing. And it does not take much for them to open up and be warm. (p. 372)

  As for the Germans, with their unexpiated, mythic sense of guilt, their mass tendencies, their complicated, nervous bellicosity, their disturbing uniforms, their pitiless craving for order and inner lack of order, they may well constitute a danger to Europe. Yet behind this ‘pedantic, crazed’ Germany glimmers an alternative, softer Germany, the Germany of Goethe and Thomas Mann. Who knows which is the real one? (p. 316)

  The second volume ends with the hero ensconced in his study in Budapest, full of misgivings about the way the world is heading and about his own prospects. In the ten years he has been away he has lost his feel for his mother tongue. All over Europe the level of culture is sinking, civilised standards are waning, the herd instinct reigns. Yet even if it does make him sound like a premature sexagenarian, he will raise his voice on behalf of the bourgeois Enlightenment, ‘an age, generations long, that proclaimed the triumph of reason over instinct and believed in the power of the spirit to resist and curb the drive to death’. (p. 420)

  Read as a narrative fiction, Confessions is episodic and lacking in drama. As a memoir of artistic life in Berlin and Paris of the 1920s, it is short on observation and superficial in its judgements. It is best accepted as what its title proclaims it to be: a statement of faith by a young man who, having experimented with living as an expatriate bohemian, and having seen at first hand the disquieting political developments in Italy and Germany, confirms for himself what he seems to have known all along: that in every respect that matters he belongs to a dying breed, the progressive bourgeoisie of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.