Among Hungarians the consensus seems to be that Márai will ultimately be remembered for his six volumes of diaries. These are not yet available in English; the recent German edition has been pilloried for the sloppiness of its editing.
With the diaries can be included the unfortunately titled memoir Land, Land! . . . (in Hungarian as Föld, Föld! . . .), first published in Toronto in 1972. (The title recalls the cry of the sailor on watch aboard Columbus’s flagship as he sighted the New World.) In 1996 Land, Land! . . . appeared in English under the limp title Memoir of Hungary 1944–48.9 The 1996 translation is execrable, and is not used in this essay. Nonetheless, until we have translations of the diaries and more of the body of Márai’s fiction, this will be the most substantial of his works to which English speakers have access, and our estimation of him will have to depend heavily on it.
Land, Land! . . . is a memoir of Márai’s life from the arrival of the Red Army on the outskirts of Budapest in 1944 to his departure into exile in 1948. It is not strong on incident – Márai was not witness to any actual fighting, and for the Márai family the immediate postwar period was largely a matter of scraping by in a devastated city. It consists rather of a chronicle of political, social, and also spiritual change in the capital as the Communist Party tightened its grip on all aspects of life.
For some weeks in the summer of 1944 Márai had to share his villa north of Budapest with Russian soldiers, and the forced propinquity of the tall, elegant Middle European who spent his free time absorbed in Spengler’s Decline of the West with Russian, Kirghiz, and Buryat peasant boys, their rudimentary exchanges mediated through a young woman who spoke Czech, was an eyeopener to both sides. ‘You are not a bourgeois,’ one of the more perceptive Russians tells Márai, ‘[because] you don’t live on [inherited] wealth or on the labour of others, but from your own labours. Still . . . in your soul you are a bourgeois. You are holding fast to something that doesn’t exist anymore.’ (Land, Land! . . . , p. 53)
As for Márai, in his Spenglerian frame of mind he privately lumps Soviets with Chinese as ‘Easterners’. Between Eastern and Western varieties of consciousness he posits an unbridgeable gulf: Eastern consciousness contains inner spaces created by vast geographies and histories of subjection where Westerners cannot follow. The Russians may have chased the Germans out of Hungary ‘but freedom they could not bring, [they themselves] did not have it’. Young Russians are barely to be distinguished from the Hitlerjugend: ‘In their souls the reflexes of inherited culture [have] died out.’ (pp. 64–66, 19, 35)
Though well aware that the Nazis, whom he despised, used a vulgarised reading of Spengler as a pillar for their theory of history, Márai falls back on Spengler for his own historical interpretation of the westward expansion of Russia. Why? Partly because the interfusing of culture and race in Spengler is compatible with Márai’s own notion of culture bred in the bone, partly because Spengler’s pessimism about the fate of the West (that is, of western European Christendom) is congenial, but partly also because Spengler belongs to Márai’s fund of reading and one of the more pigheaded articles of Márai’s conservative credo is to yield up nothing without a fight.
Once the Germans have been chased out, Márai and his wife return to the city of Budapest, where they find their apartment in ruins, the library largely destroyed. They move to makeshift quarters, waiting along with their fellow citizens for the expected next step in their liberation, namely the return of Hungary to the fold of Christian, Catholic Europe. When the realisation dawns that they are waiting in vain (Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, says Márai, captures the mood of the interregnum exactly), that Hungary has been abandoned to the Russians, a wave of randomly directed hatred spreads over the country. In fact, Márai contends, one of the features of the postwar period in general was the spread of waves of psychotic hatred – hence the rise of so many vengeful revolutionary movements all over the world.
More interesting than Márai’s views on world history are the stories he has to tell of the lives of ordinary people in Budapest, first under Russian occupation, then under Hungarian communist rule. Inflation ravages not only the social but the moral life of the country. The secret police return, familiar despicable human types, recruited as before from among the ‘proles’ but dressed in new uniforms. There is a striking eight-page anecdote about a Jew, hunted during the war, now a powerful police officer, who sits down in the fashionable Café Emke and has the gypsy band play patriotic tunes for him from the fascist 1930s, smiling with pleasure while Kirghiz soldiers watch mistrustfully from the next table. ‘Straight out of Dostoevsky,’ comments Márai. (pp. 157, 145)
Was it a mistake to have returned to Hungary, Márai asks himself ? He thinks back to the day in 1938 when the news came that Chancellor Schuschnigg of Austria had capitulated to Hitler’s threats and resigned. Like everyone else, Márai knew the world was shifting beneath his feet. Yet the next day he played his usual game of tennis, followed by a shower and a massage. He is not proud of the way he behaved. ‘One is always ashamed when one finds one is not a hero but a dupe – a dupe of history.’ But what should he do now? Pour ashes over his head? Beat his breast? He refuses. ‘All I regret is that, while I had the chance, I did not lead a more comfortable life with more variety.’ (pp. 125, 127)
It takes a fair amount of self-confidence, even arrogance, to write like this. Land, Land! . . . , is a more deeply revealing confessio than the Confessions of 1934. About himself Márai is candid: like the rest of the Hungarian elite, he has failed to respond imaginatively to the crises of the twentieth century. He has behaved like a caricature of the bourgeois intellectual, scorning the rabble of the right and the rabble of the left, retreating into his private enjoyments.
Yet this failure, he argues, should not mean that the Mittelstand of Europe should be condemned to the scrapheap of history. Identity is not a purely personal matter. We are not just our private selves, we also participate in the caricatural version of ourselves that exists in social space. Since we cannot escape the caricature, we may as well embrace it. Besides, ‘it was not only I who was a caricature in . . . the time between the two world wars: in the whole of life in Hungary – in its institutions, in the way people looked at things – there was something caricatural. It is good to know one is not alone.’ (p. 132)
A year after the war’s end Márai permits himself an excursion to Switzerland, Italy, and France. Switzerland gives rise to melancholy ruminations on the death of humanism, Europe’s great gift to the world, in Auschwitz and Katyn. What does a Europe that has lost its sense of humanistic mission hold for a ‘fringe-European’ like himself ? The Swiss look with scorn on their poor, shabby visitor. At least the Russians don’t do that. (p. 196)
In France he is on the lookout for the ‘courageous and exact self-criticism, the moral accounting’ he expects of the French, but finds nothing of the kind. The French, it would seem, want only to take up where they left off in 1940, refusing to see that the four-hundred-year ascendancy of ‘the white man’ is at an end. (p. 206)
Back in Hungary the final crackdown has commenced. The secret police are everywhere. Márai ceases to write for newspapers, but does continue to publish books, including two volumes of a trilogy about the Hitler period, which Georg Lukács savages in a review, choosing to read what Márai has to say about the fascists as a veiled comment on the communists. Thereafter Márai falls silent, living modestly on his royalties. He spends his days immersed in the minor novelists of nineteenth-century Hungary, with their stories of the world of his childhood.
More and more pressure is brought to bear on bourgeois intellectuals to endorse the regime. It becomes clear that even the freedom to be silent, as a form of internal exile, will be taken away from people like him. He consults his beloved Goethe, and Goethe tells him that if he has a destiny it is his duty to live out that destiny. He makes preparations to leave. Strangely, no official obstacles are placed in his way.
Years pass in exile, years of impo
tence, cut off from ‘the wonderful, lonely Hungarian language’, yet his faith in the class into which he was born, and the historical mission of that class, remains unshaken:
I was a Bürger (even if only in caricature) and am still one today, though old and in a foreign country. To be a Bürger was for me never a matter of class status – I always regarded it as a vocation. The Bürger remained for me the best thing that modern Western culture produced, for the Bürger produced modern Western culture. (pp. 89, 86)
The recent flare-up of interest in Márai is not easy to explain. During the 1990s five books of his appeared in France without attracting more than respectful reviews. Then in 1998, promoted by Roberto Calasso of the publishing house of Adelphi, Embers in Italian shot up the best-seller lists. Taken up by the impresario of German literary reviewing, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Embers in its German guise sold 700,000 copies in hardback. ‘A new master,’ enthused a reviewer in Die Zeit, ‘whom in the future we will rank with Joseph Roth, with Stefan Zweig, with Robert Musil, with who knows what other of our faded demigods, perhaps even Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka.’10
Embers appeared in English in 2001, in a translation by Carol Brown Janeway not from the Hungarian but at second hand from the German translation – questionable professional practice. American reviewers seemed to accept without question claims by the publishers that Embers was ‘unknown to modern readers’ before 1999 (in fact a German translation had appeared in 1950 and a French translation in 1958, reissued in 1995), and treated Márai as a lost master, now recovered. The success of the book in Europe was repeated in the English-speaking world.
It is hard not to believe that this success is in large part a response to the popular-romance elements of the book – the castle in the forest, the story of passion and adultery and revenge, Konrad’s sultry oriental paramour, the overblown language, and so forth – that is to say, to exactly that caricatural layer of kitsch which Márai, in his complexly ironical way, both distances himself from and accepts as unavoidable; though in the case of European readers one should not ignore a deeper historical tide, namely exhaustion or even mere impatience with a vision of the twentieth century in which everything either leads up to or leads away from the black hole of the Holocaust, and a corresponding nostalgia for times when moral questions still had manageable dimensions.
In 2004 a second novel by Márai, Vendégjáték Bolzanóban (1940) (‘Guest-play in Bolzano’), appeared in English translation under two different titles: Conversations in Bolzano in the UK, Casanova in Bolzano in the USA.11
The action of Conversations in Bolzano is exiguous, and it is part of the conception of the book that it should be so. It begins with the arrival of Giacomo Casanova in Bolzano. He has just escaped from prison in Venice, and he has unfinished business in mind. Five years ago he fought a duel with the Duke of Parma over the Duke’s fifteen-year-old fiancée, Francesca. The Duke had warned him then never to come back. Now here he is.
Apprised of his presence, the Duke pays him a visit in his room in the inn. He offers a deal: in return for the freedom to woo Francesca and perhaps spend a single night with her, Casanova must undertake never to see her again. For his pains he will receive ten thousand ducats and a letter of safe conduct.
What is in it for you? asks Casanova. It will be my gift to my wife, the Duke replies: the experience of a night with a great artist in love, and a lesson in how little capable of true love he is. As the fruit of that lesson the Duke expects to win his wife’s gratitude and affection.
Casanova accepts what the Duke regards as a deal but he himself sees as a challenge.
Soon after the Duke’s departure, Francesca appears. Her husband underestimates her, she says. She is prepared to throw up everything to live with Casanova and show him what true love can be. But she can see that his passion is no match for hers. His only fidelity is to his art. Taking her leave, she foretells a wretched old age for him, filled with regrets.
The substance of Conversations in Bolzano is made up of these two extended conversations, which are pretty much monologues (the Duke’s running to a full fifty pages), and Casanova’s ruminations upon them. As the original title suggests, the novel plays with the idea of the celebrity performance, seeming to look forward to the performance to take place at the Duke’s masked ball and perhaps afterwards in the Duchess’s bedroom; whereas the prologue, set in Casanova’s room and addressed to the subject of whether there is to be any performance at all, turns out to be the only performance there will be. In its static quality – instead of action in the present we have memory of action in the past and reflection upon the possibility of action in the future – and its thin narrative line, Conversations in Bolzano, like Embers, reveals an author more at home in the theatre of the nineteenth century than in the novel.
As in Embers too, there is little of what one would call development. All three of the characters, even the young Duchess, have set positions from which they speak, and their speeches do no more than enunciate these positions. Individually and collectively (as participants in the performance) they are exemplary Máraisians. ‘You, like me,’ says the Duke to Casanova, ‘are merely a cat’s-paw, an actor, the tool of the fate that is playing with us both, a fate whose purpose sometimes appears unfathomable.’ (p. 202) Francesca may urge Casanova to rebel against the role prepared for him – that of the heartless seducer – but her urgings carry no hint that she hopes to change him. The lovers seem aware that they are playing out a tragedy of sorts in which the promise of love will be smothered in the name of domesticity on the one hand and sensuality on the other; nevertheless they do not, themselves, aspire to rebel against their roles in it. A melancholy stoicism takes the place of tragic courage.
Márai nowhere suggests that the memoirs the historical Casanova left behind prove him a great artist. Nevertheless, in his attractiveness to women and in the instinctive unease he awakes in the authorities – he was jailed in Venice not for anything he had done but for ‘his entire manner of being, his soul’ – Casanova embodies the Romantic artist-rebel as conceived in the popular imagination. (p. 107) The intellectual heart of Conversations in Bolzano consists in the confrontation between the naïve conception – kept alive by Francesca – of the artist as the figure of truth and the Casanovan counterexample of the artist who submits, ethically as well as aesthetically, to the practice of illusion, even illusion of the most clichéd kind. The artist in seduction gets his way, Casanova suggests, neither because he opens the girl’s eyes to who she really is nor because he blinds her with lies but because both he and she sense that lies repeated by seducers generation after generation come to have a truth of their own.
When Francesca and Casanova take the stage for their big scene, they do so (as the consequence of some unconvincing plotting) in disguise: Francesca masked and costumed as a man, Casanova as a woman. Francesca sets out the naïve position on the subject of love: love entails the stripping away of illusion and the embrace of the naked truth of the beloved.‘We are still only masked figures, my love,’ she says, ‘and there are many more masks between us, each of which must, one by one, be discarded, before we can finally know each other’s true, naked faces.’ (p. 261)
In his farewell letter to the Duke, Casanova in effect gives the artist’s response. Love relies on illusion, he says. ‘There was yet something else I knew that the duchess of Parma could not yet know: that the truth can only survive as long as the hidden veils of desire and longing draw a curtain before her and cover her.’ (p. 291) The melancholy truth into which Casanovan art initiates us is that not only are we always masked but we cannot survive in an unmasked state.
Conversations in Bolzano begins as historical fiction of a routine kind, but the busy filling-in of background and recreation of milieu is happily soon over and the book can settle down to being what Márai wants it to be: a vehicle for expressing his ideas on the ethics of art. Further translations from Márai’s fictional oeuvre are promised; but nothing made available thus far
to readers without Hungarian contradicts the impression that, however thoughtful a chronicler of the dark decade of the 1940s he may have been, however bravely (or perhaps just unabashedly) he may have spoken up for the class into which he was born, however provocative his paradoxical philosophy of the mask may be, his conception of the novel form was nevertheless old-fashioned, his grasp of its potentialities limited, and his achievements in the medium consequently slight.
(2002)
8 Paul Celan and his translators
PAUL ANTSCHEL WAS born in 1920 in Czernowitz in the territory of Bukovina, which after the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 had become part of Romania. Czernowitz was in those days an intellectually lively city with a sizeable minority of German-speaking Jews. Antschel was brought up speaking High German; his education, partly in German, partly in Romanian, included a spell in a Hebrew school. As a youth he wrote verse and revered Rilke.
After a year (1938–39) at medical school in France, where he encountered the Surrealists, he came home on vacation and was trapped there by the outbreak of war. Under the Hitler-Stalin pact Bukovina was absorbed into the Ukraine: for a brief while he was a Soviet subject.
In June of 1941 Hitler invaded the USSR. The Jews of Czernowitz were driven into a ghetto; soon the deportations commenced. Apparently forewarned, Antschel sought hiding the night his parents were taken. The parents were shipped to labour camps in occupied Ukraine, where both died, his mother by a bullet to the head when she became unfit for work. Antschel himself spent the war years doing forced labour in Axis Romania.
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