George Gömöri
Edmund Wilson: The Hungarian Connection
I was still living in Oxford, having obtained a prestigious higher
degree in Modern Literature the year before, and working as Research Assistant
to my friend and mentor, Max Hayward. It must have been Max who directed
my attention to a long essay in the April 20, 1963 number of the The New
Yorker, a journal not widely read in England. The essay had a strange title
"My 50 years with Dic tiona ries and Grammars", but its author
was no stranger to students of Russian or East European affairs: it was
Edmund Wilson, whose works included the seminal book To the Finland Station.
Now Wilson had the reputation of a consummate polyglott but, I, for one,
had no idea that having learned Russian and Hebrew he had also become interested
in learning Hun garian.
But it was exactly this information that transpired from the erudite
but very entertaining essay in The New Yorker. It turned out that Wilson's
interest in my native language began some years earlier (in the late Fifties
or early Sixties?) when two of his plays were translated into Hungarian.
Having received the translations which he could not read, he was annoyed;
in addition various American-Hungarian friends and even casual acquaintances
who could speak Hungarian "had for years been crying up to me the
brilliance of Hungarian poetry--especially that of Endre Ady". Here
came the surprise: once Edmund Wilson was able to read some Ady in the
original, he decided that this was indeed a great poet and that the praise
of all those Hungarian informants was well justified.
In the rest of his essay (out of forty-three pages, Hungarian is discussed
on only twelve, in two places) Wilson praised Hungarian as a pleasant and
yet powerful language ("when written well it is neat and terse")
and bemoaned the fact that there were hardly any good Hungarian grammars
available. He also pointed out the American public's general ignorance
of Hungarian culture. An educated person may have heard Peõfi's
name but he wouldn't have read him and Jókai, who around the turn
of the century was still a popular writer in America, was later completely
forgotten. Ferenc Molnár was the only writer from those parts whose
name stuck in the mind of the "culturally intuned" Americans
and even he reached fame mostly on account of just one play, Liliom which
provided the scenario for the musical Carousel. Edmund Wilson did not suggest
ways to improve the situation, but simply by describing it drew attention
to the existing sad state of affairs.
At the time I was regularly writing for Irodalmi Újság,
a Hungarian emigré journal published first in London then later
in Paris, and it was there that I reported (on June 15, 1963) my discovery
of Wilson's Hungarian interest. My article did not go unnoticed by fellow-writers;
I remember László Cs. Szabó, who at the time worked
for the Hungarian section of the BBC, ringing me excitedly from London,
enquiring about further details. From Max Hayward, who knew Wilson personally,
I got the American writer's address and decided to write him a letter.
I must have asked him whether he knew certain things about modern Hungarian
literature which were not mentioned in his essay, for the fol-lowing answer
came from Cambridge, Massachusetts, dated June 5, 1963:
"Dear Mr Gömöri,
thank you for your letter. I know about Ady's role in the nationalist movement
and I know about Attila József, though I hadn't read him much. I
haven't had much time to work on Hungarian and am far from fluent in the
language; but I am hoping to speak some when in Hungary during 1964. I
should be glad to meet you but I am sailing for Europe at the end of August--not
from New York but from Montreal.
Õszinte tisztelettel (in Hungarian)
It seems as if I'd suggested a meeting to Wilson, but in the event I
reached the New World by boat exactly the same time when he left from Montreal
for Europe. (I was appointed to a teaching post for one year in Berkeley,
at the University of Cali fornia). Wilson's summer trip to Europe included
Paris, Rome and Budapest, and he wrote up his impressions in a travelogue/diary
published in the new, extended edition of his Europe without Baedeker (New
York, 1966 and London, 1967). The Budapest diary runs to fifty pages and
makes entertaining reading even thirty-odd years after the actual visit.
First of all, Wilson describes his first impressions of Budapest. He
stays in the Hotel Gellért, one of the city's oldest and (in those
days) most "elegant" hotels which he finds "comfortable"
and with a good cuisine. It is a cosy island of foreign tourists, most
of whom are "rather crass Central European businessmen and fat Germanic
women". Outside the hotel there is little life; Wilson makes the interesting
point that th Hungarians whom he met in the West were always "dynamic",
whereas here they are listless and "rather stupified". As for
the city itself, which was described to him "as the most beautiful
city in Europe", he finds it strange and dramatic but also somewhat
Eastern and faintly "barbaric". He notes that people are badly
dressed and there are comparatively few cars on the roads and concludes
"this capital, at the present time, is still rather sad and empty"
(p. 421).
Edmund Wilson is an American who speaks Russian, so he is not just
an innocent tourist in Hungary--he is also interested in Hungarian attitudes
to the Soviet Union and to those uninvited, permanent guests, the Russians.
Let us quote a passage from his diary. "I heard little said about
Russia. But my personal reaction in Budapest was a rearoused antagonism
toward the Soviet Union such as I had not experienced since the banning
of Zhivago and the death of Boris Pasternak. One felt that an energetic
people had been bludgeoned and partly crippled by an alien hand, that they
were still, in decisive ways, at the mercy of a great stupid power..."
(p. 425). Wilson mentions the fact that Hun garian resentment against the
Rus sians goes back to 1848-49 and gives a brief but basically accurate
description of the political changes since 1945, with special reference
to the role of the Russians. He also notes that the compulsory teaching
of Russian in schools is "mostly... detested" and that young
Hungarian schoolchildren find learning it (as a first foreign language)
rather difficult.
This observation is followed by another, for a linguist quite fascinating,
one; namely, that Hungarian is really a much easier language to learn for
a foreigner than Russian. For, says Wilson, Hungarian is "an almost
perfectly logical instrument codified as a literary language as late as
the eighteen-thirties by a practical committee of scholars, whereas Russian
was developed in a hit-or-miss fashion--a language composed of idioms,
with a queer and irregular grammar" (p. 426-427). As for the political
attitudes of Hungarians, the American writer senses a kind of broad support
for post-1945 reforms but no love for the one-party system and, in the
case of a future Russian withdrawal, can envisage some kind of a compromise
between "socialism" and capitalism". (What he could not
foresee, of course, was the total collapse of the party-states of Eastern
Europe and the USSR in 1989 and the concomitant loss of faith in "socialist"
solutions.)
In order to characterize the Hungarian language, Wilson quotes a long
passage of Gyula Illyés's which he translates from an essay in French.
In the chapter "How to Say 'You' in Hungarian" he gives a most
amusing description of the baffling question of addressing people of different
age, rank and familiarity and ends it with the translation of a humorous
sketch by Frigyes Karinthy, in which two men meet on the street who have
known each other for some time but who for some reason are not quite sure
whether to address each other formally or in familiar terms. Of Wilson's
Hungarian contacts only one, Gábor Devecseri, Homer's best Hungarian
translator is named; indeed, Wilson gives an account of a long conversation
with Devecseri, in which the latter states: "We are a nation of translators",
and reads Hungarian translations of Shelley and Keats to his visitor to
show how pleasant they sound in Hungarian.
Outside Budapest, Wilson visited only Debrecen, where he met several
members of the Faculty of English at the local University. One of them
(a lady scholar), "the friend who had been helping me with Hungarian",
reacted cautiously to Wilson's comment that "it was sad to think of
all the brilliant Hungarian scientists and writers and musicians that they
had lost through emigration" (p. 461). Her reply was "We have
hidden resources". And indeed, in the final chapter of his Hungarian
diary, though describing the Hungarian intellectuals whom he met as "sober,
serious-minded and discreet", Wilson feels that behind all this "chastening"
there still remained much of "the passion, the dynamic force which
have made Hungary... such a constantly humming powerhouse" (p. 466).
So for all the negative impressions listed in the first part of his diary,
Edmund Wilson still found much hope for the future of this "strangely
isolated country", which gave so many important scholars and scientists
to the world in our century.
In the autumn of 1964 I got a one-year Research Fellowship at Harvard
and soon afterwards made the acquaintance of Zoltán Haraszti. He
was a Hungarian writer and critic of Jewish extraction who had left Hungary
in 1920 and made his career as an American scholar and the Keeper of Rare
Books in the Boston Public Library. I mention Haraszti's name here (he
died in the late 1970s) because he told me that he knew Edmund Wilson quite
well and it was he who first drew his attention to Ady's poetry. (In The
New Yorker article Wilson made a remark which I am quite certain referred
to Haraszti: "A Hungarian who was young in that period said to me
that Ady was a "state of mind"). Soon afterwards--in early November--I
wrote again to Wilson who was at the time at the Centre for Advanced Studies
at Wesleyan University. I had a query to him about a job prospect for a
Hungarian friend and also, rather foolishly, suggested to him that he should
try to translate some poems by Ady. His short reply is dated November 9,
1964 and apart from an answer to my query it contains just one sentence
worth quoting in the context of his "Hungarian interest"; "I
am sorry that I can't undertake to translate Ady". Alas, Endre Ady
is still awaiting his truly gifted (or at any rate, suitable) English or
Ameri can translator.
Edmund Wilson's 1964 visit to Hungary was, by the way, mentioned by
Iván Boldizsár, founder and long-time Editor of The New Hungarian
Quarterly, in an essay published in 1973 (No. 52). As Boldizsár
was abroad during Wilson's Hungarian visit, the American critic met Miklós
Vajda, the literary editor of the journal, and it was only in 1966, during
a trip to the United States that Boldizsár finally made Wilson's
acquaintance, visiting him in Talcottville. Boldizsár's 1973 reminiscences
about this visit, "A Day at Edmund Wilson's", NHQ 52 (pp. 102-125),
are a masterpiece of evasion--he freely discusses Wilson's interest in
Hungarian literature and argues about the fine points of American politics
but carefully avoids any hint of Wilson's less than enthusiastic account
of the political situation in Hungary.
George Gömöri
is a Budapest-born poet, translator, critic and scholar living in Britain
since 1956 and teaching Polish and Hungarian literature at the University
of Cambridge. He has published several volumes of his poems in Hungarian
as well as translations of Polish poetry and English translations of Hungarian
poems.
