George Szirtes
Budapest Diaries
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Here are three intellectual emigrée women of comfortable middle class background, shaping narratives out of their personal childhood memories, the memories of their friends and relations, and the researches of historians. The memories are of loss, deprivation and danger. Susan Varga is a lawyer and journalist, Susan Rubin Suleiman a Professor of French, and Magda Denes a past president of the New York State Psychological Association.
Suleiman's is perhaps the simplest approach. She returns to Hungary in 1993 on a one year's residency as a Fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study and keeps a diary. The book is essentially that diary, with a preceding chapter about an earlier visit in 1984, an end chapter about a return visit a yeat later, and a short prologue concerning the circumstances of her family's departure from Hungary in 1949, when the author was just ten years old.
The prologue states the motif of the whole book, indeed of all three books. "One is not only the child of one's parents. History too nourishes us or deprives us of nourishment." History and parents: parents are our first contacts with history, their constant presence is our first apprehension of timelessness and their aging the most acute reminder of our own fabula. They fade from our presence as our concerns elbow them aside. The pun of Suleiman's sub-title referring to the anyakönyv or registration documents as the "Motherbook" points us to the author's central concern. As a mother herself she seeks to establish her identity by reference to her own mother. Although she is struggling with an earlier dislike of her, mother equals history. Resolving the conflict with mother is resolving history. Of course, in the course of the diary we learn a great deal about Hungary in 1993 too. What she learns in this respect is not particularly surprising. We skim through the political and social situation, follow the rise of right wing nationalism, explore her connections and friendships among Budapest's liberal community ("small town, Budapest", as she remarks half way through the book), and half-humorously observe her frustrating struggles to sound the clarion call of feminism in this insignificant, godforsaken, worrying, if perfectly charming part of the cultural empire. This element of the book is intelligent but not deeply informed journalism. Its value lies less in its originality of perception or grace of literary style than in its benevolent wide-eyed reportage. At the same time, Suleiman is persistent in enquiring into her own past on the basis of relatively few clues, some "parenthetical notations" on an incomplete family tree and a vision of ten years earlier when, as she says, "I suddenly saw, as clearly as if projected on a screen, my mother as a young woman, holding my hand as we walked down a boulevard in winter, setting our faces against the wind and playing the multiplication game". It is those faces against the wind that strike us with most force: this is part of that genuine history of moments Eliot invoked; it is Suleiman's moment in the rose garden, and if we read this book with more than anecdotal interest it is because we find that vision engaging. Quite early in the book the author gives us an account she had written in 1984 following her first return visit. This passage, in italics, is the only extended passage of meditation she gives us. "It was at this time, I believe, that I began to conceive of history as a form of luck… But, as I grow older, it occurs to me that I have often felt that way about my life: seeing it, for better or worse, as my own creation, and, at the same time, contradictorily, as the product of blind luck". She remembers passing a corpse in 1945 and pondering what it was like. "After a while," she says, "I stopped thinking and even looking. I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other." In effect this is what she does in the diary too. Of course she looks and feels and records her feelings but the interlude of thinking and digesting seems too short. For all the encomia on the book jacket praising the intelligence, candour, honesty and insight of this, according to Alix Kates Shulman, "postmodern" memoir, Suleiman might actually have employed greater intertextuality or pushed further at the limits of linear narrative and tried to understand the movements of those feet of hers a little more intensely. Budapest Diary is enjoyable, entertaining and, naturally, moving, but it is moving chiefly by virtue of what happens - or, rather, what happened - outside the book. I don't think the relationship between that which is diary or social narrative and that which is quest is convincingly established. That which happened in the past, the events, consitute the fabula, of whose meaning she is vouchsafed a vision in 1984. The fabula is not the book, though. Everyone has stories. The trick is to seek the meaning and construct the form that meaning seeks. I like Suleiman's book but I wish it had been wilder, funnier, messier, and wiser.
Susan Varga employs a greater range of devices. Her mainstay is a series of tape-recorded conversations with her mother, the Heddy of Heddy and Me, from which she quotes quite generously. But she is equally prepared to paraphrase, to describe the process of recording and to consider the light that process throws on the relationship between her mother and herself; she employs her own memories, considers the pattern of her own life as it colours, and is coloured by, the past, makes conscious reference to her researches and background reading (rather more than in Suleiman's case), and is generally more free and easy with chronological structure. Unlike Suleiman she is not herself a mother and has in fact chosen a lesbian relationship, so the quest she undertakes - a quest clearly regarded as a quest and maintained as a priority throughout - is not undertaken to establish similarity and reassurance, but to explore difference. Nor does Varga take particular pains to make herself agreeable to the reader. These are neither virtues nor vices in themselves, but they provide a certain energy which helps to hold the various elements together. Varga was only five when she left Hungary in 1948 and, as she confesses "I have virtually no memories". The story that emerges through her conversations and researches is the sadly well known one of wealth, persecution, loss, arrests, death, survival through hiding, ingenuity, and luck. Although the story is of Heddy, it is the desire to get to know her real father, Feri, who died before she was eighteen months old, that launches her on her venture; Feri, whom she partly blames for simply turning over and dying in a labour camp. Suleiman's father had been a promising Talmudic scholar, Varga's father was also bookish, but worked as a wealthy feather merchant. Within eighteen months of his death Varga had a new father, but the story follows the fortunes of mother, grandmother and baby, a female triumvirate. Suleiman's notion of history as luck informs Varga's too, though in her case the luck is fairly supported by courage, canniness and stamina. Underneath the voices of the narrative there is the sheer adventure of survival; subterfuge, smuggling, improvisation and those great descents and ascents which characterize the cliff-hanger. At the beginning of the book, Varga's mother recounts the experience of her girls' school reunion where everyone had to tell her life story in three or four minutes. The brief curriculum vitae, which is everyone's highly edited fabula or specifically angled synopsis, contains all the terrible sound and fury of the period's history. Those who survive to tell us all are ever fewer in number. Soon enough there'll come a time when there will be nobody. The strength of Varga's book is that she paints such clear and vivid portraits of the central figures of her mother's story that the events that befall them, although they are the material of anecdote, are freighted with meaning.
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The most intensely written of the books in Magda Denes's Castles Burning which is based wholly on personal memory. Denes is five when the story begins in 1939 at the point where her wealthy publisher father leaves for America, deserting his family who proceed to descend into the maelstrom that follows. Father disappears: mother, son and daughter remain. Eventually all the males in the story have gone, the two young loved ones - the author's brother and the boy who loves her - are both killed. The central character here is Denes herself, proud, demanding, precocious, tough, brave, bossy and very intelligent. The missing father is not only not longed for but actively, and understandibly, despised. The driving force of this book is the author's love for her brother Iván and her handsome cousin Ervin, the two lost boys. Her brother is her first love and closest ally. They cover for each other and support each other. However resourceful or brilliant the other characters, including the mother, the aunts and uncles, the helpers and hinderers, friends and enemies, our eyes are for them, their adventures and their personalities. And how well we know them! The narrator, who is five at the beginning and thirteen by the end, presents us with complete conversations and fully recovered incidents, so that we begin to feel that, by the end, the narrator is divine and incandescent. It is a piece of brilliant scene painting and character creation, and by far the best written of the three books. It is also the most deeply disturbing.
What disturbs is precisely the complete realization of character and the perfect extended recall. What has become of Eliot's moment in the rose garden? What kind of will has strung these moments together, and at what cost to faithfulness? Is it documentary or fiction? We are told nowa-days that there is a phenomenon called Recovered Memory in which troubled adults claim to remember childhood incidents of abuse. We are properly suspicious of these. Should we be equally suspicious of such long and intense narratives presented as memory?
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Denes writes with the intensity of an artist: her scenes are directly and immediately present. There is no postmodern hedging or decentering here. We follow the characters through their travails in war-time Budapest and we care deeply about them. We undoubtedly believe in something. Certainly the awfulness of awful stories has an impact in itself, though we know that, however awful and heartbreaking a story might be, there is worse yet, and that the very act of telling and survival is evidence of this, so it is not the events themselves alone that invite our attention and emotional commitment. Emotional commitment is given to evidence of emotional truth. Castles Burning is written as though the whole narrative unfolded in a single flash of lightning. One trusts the voice to tell the truth as it believes it to be in the light of that flash. But one also thinks of all the dead who have no voice and cannot speak.
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