John Lukacs

A Thread of Years

(Excerpts)

Readers of The Hungarian Quarterly will find here three chapters from A Thread of Years, to be published in February 1998 by Yale University Press. For most articles or books an Introduction is unnecessary: their contents ought to speak for themselves. In this case, because of the unusual nature of A Thread of Years, a short introduction cannot be avoided.

The book consists of sixty-nine chapters of a few pages. Each bears the title of a calendar year: 1901, 1902, 1903, and so on.--The Hun garian Quarterly has chosen the chapters 1919, 1948, 1963 for this advance publication, because of the Hungarians who figure in them.

In this odd book each chapter consists of two parts. The first is a description of a particular place and of particular people--their behaviour, their talk, and the inclinations of their minds at that particular time. Allow me to call these
"vignettes." The second part of each short chapter is a dialogue. Then and there a second person challenges the significance of the vignette as written by the author, his friend, since that significance is debatable: why these people? why this place? why that time? why that scene? For not only do these places differ; none of the people therein are the same.

This second person is my alter ego. How and why and when this dual structure came to my mind I cannot tell. I must also eschew the main part of the Introduction to be printed in A Thread of Years, which describes the main theme of this book ("This book does not have a story. But it has a theme") simply because that is not relevant to the three chapters printed here. All I will say is that none of my vignettes deal with historic personages or with great dramatic events. They are period pictures, even though an underlying theme exists, alluded to here and there: the petite musique of a grande histoire. Perhaps half-dozen of these annualized vignettes deal with Hungarians and Hungary. (There are another half-dozen where Hungarians do appear). The reason for this is that when I struggled with what to write, say, for 1904 or 1919 or 1940 what came to my mind were some things about my native people or my native country; and one ought to write about things and people one knows best; and in these cases I had to place them within a certain time, a particular year. The people are invented. But the historical situation is not.

Yet A Thread of Years is neither a novel, nor a historical novel. This calls for a brief explanation. The historical novel appeared first in the early nineteenth century, inseparable as it was from a then developing historical consciousness. From Walter Scott to Tolstoy and to others it occurred that a historical background may make their novels more interesting and perhaps even more telling. Yet that genre of the historical novel belonged largely to the nineteenth century, it is outdated now. During the twentieth century, then, something else has been happening: the hybrid that has the silly name of "faction." Writers who have been trying this include such different persons as Upton Sinclair, Dos Passos, Styron, Doctorow, Vidal, Mailer, Sontag, Pynchon, even Solzhenitsyn. For them history is no longer the background but the foreground. This is interesting, a further subterranean development of a historical consciousness. Yet their works are flawed--for they illegitimately and sometimes even dishonestly mix history and "fiction" up and together. They include and twist and deform and attribute thoughts and words and acts to historical figures who actually existed. This is illegitimate, since it produces untruths. I am trying to do the very opposite. Instead of attributing words and thoughts and acts to famous persons who did exist, I am writing about everyday people whom I invent, but whose plausibility exists because of the historical reality about their places and times. My book may be an attempt at a new genre. Do not take this too seriously. My attempt is imperfect; and I have no interest in inventing startlingly new forms. At the end of this century I am dubious about anything and anyone who claims to be avant-garde; and as for An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Victor Hugo's hoary nineteenth-century phrase) well, it is almost certain not to be any good. Meanwhile, historical writing still has a long way to go. History has not yet had its Dante or its Shakespeare. That will come one day, and my book is not that. For, while it is not a novel, it is not history either. Yet my purpose is historical. My pictures--the vignettes--are meant to attract the reader's interest to certain people in certain places and in certain times: couleurs locales that ought to be good enough to linger in his mind.

Well after completing my book the sudden thought came to me during a visit to Hungary: a Hungarian writer, a great Hungarian writer, ought to rise one day and begin the writing of a history of different Hungarian minds through the twentieth century, in sixty or eighty or one hundred vignettes, a work that would be similar to mine but the execution of which must be different and better. So there is an idea whose time will come... because it must.

[...]

1963

Indian summer this is."
"Oh, no. It's not October yet."
"You're right--but for me it is Indian Summer."

Words spoken by an elegant and still handsome woman, in her late fifties, in a language--Hungarian--where "Indian Summer" is more telling and startling than in English: it is "Old Women's Summer", "Vénasszonyok nyara."
"For all of us," another woman says; and around the table everyone laughs, a little.

They sit in beautiful afternoon sunshine. Six of them: two married couples, a widow, a single man, on the terrace of a hotel--a gravel ellipse under summer umbrellas now gathered in, on top of a stony rampart above a lake. The lake is the Worthersee in Austria, in the province of Carinthia, an old and famous Central European summer resort. This is mid-September, and half of the summer visitors and tourists are gone. On the narrow sandy beach on both sides of the terrace there are still a handful of bathers and swimmers. The wavelets of the lake keep lapping against the stones with a chilly monotony. But the sun is strong enough for some of the women to take off their cashmere cardigans and fold them or drape them on the back of their chairs, the breeze from the lake is not strong enough to chill them. The brightness of the air is almost supernatural: the mountains across look closer than they actually are. The lake is dotted with the white flecks of a dozen sailboats and there comes, momentarily, the roar of a motorboat and a water-skier racing in its wake. On a nearby promontory stands a very large villa, with its gardens descending in terraces lined with laurels, roses, yews. The air is so clear that those flowers, too, look closer than they are.

The villa is postwar, and the water-skiing is postwar, but otherwise the scenery is much the same as it was before the war, thirty years ago, or perhaps even earlier. This group of six people know that, and it is one of the reasons they are here. They have been here before, though perhaps not on the same terrace--they have come over here from another hotel, for the pastries and iced coffee, with whipped cream for some of them. That afternoon custom, too, is as it was before. They are survivors. One of the couples fled from Hungary where Communism was about to be imposed, in 1947, the other couple and the widow in 1949, the single man in 1956. They had lived through the war, and the German occupation, and the siege of Budapest, and the Russian conquest of Hungary. Now one couple live in New York, the other couple in Milan, the widow in Vienna, the single gent in Munich. All of them had known each other in Budapest, two of the women were classmates there, and now they are old friends. At least three of them take vacations together each year, the others come every two or three years, having spent weeks and months beforehand writing letters and telephoning each other about where to go and when, to a customary hotel of theirs or to another one? All of them are between fifty-five and sixty-five. The women are well-dressed, two of them rather smart in their imprimé dresses and with their silk scarves and fine shoes, their hair freshly done; the men are heavier and well-dressed too, in a somewhat old-fashioned way, in their linen suits or in a sweater with an ascot tucked in around their necks. A foreigner would find it difficult to classify them, even without hearing their strangely uncategorizable language. Only the Austrians, the hotel personnel and the older ones among the waiters know that they are Hungarians, but not Hungarians from Hungary: Hungarian emigrés.

They look well-heeled, and so they are. Well they have survived everything, or almost everything, except that they have their memories of the people and the lives they lost: the widow's husband beaten by the Communist police and dying ten years later in Vienna because of his hopelessly damaged kidneys; the brother of one of the men killed in a death-camp in Poland (two of the group are half-Jewish); the parents of another deported by the political police and then permitted to return to Budapest where they now live in two cramped rooms. But they have another set of memories, of other people and other lives too, and so their talk is the old high talk of old fashionable Budapest, with its inestimable knowledgeability of human matters. This lends another dimension to the music that murmurs beneath their talk, for each of them hears the sea of the past murmuring close, as if their left hand held a shell out of that sea against their ears, day and night.

Must I tell you," one of the women says, "that one of the pleasures of friendship is to talk of our own infirmities?" About a common acquaintance: "He is so selfish, not only the way he lives; he is always pushing others to arrange
their lives as he wishes them to live." About the divorced daughter of another acquaintance who is pregnant again, without being married: "She reminds me of Germany," "How?" "After expanding she can't retain her conquests." About New York: the gentleman tells what happened when he had collapsed; in an emergency, he was transported to a big hospital; no one knew whether he had a stroke or a serious heart attack; he was unconscious. "And guess what was the first thing the nurse said when I came to." "What?" "Man, you sure got cloudy urine."

But their conversation gathers speed and seriousness when they turn to the handsome widow. Gossip is thickening into advice. They know that she is being courted by another Hungarian emigre who lives in Switzerland and who keeps inviting her to Leysin or Davos in the summer and to Menton or the Canaries in the winter, and that a month ago he was in Vienna on business, setting up in the Sacher, and asking her to dine with him, which she did. They know him; he is stocky, with a gravelly voice, rich, perhaps a bit vulgar; but he has, after all, placed himself in the very midst of rich life, there are all those rich hotels and resorts and restaurants where he makes sure that he is known, and there is that rich apartment of his in Geneva. "Quite overdone, üppig", the widow says, in German. "He showed me his collection of emeralds. Stunning, but I think he collects them for investment, business, G'schäft", she says, again, with a slightly contemptuous Viennese pronunciation. "Vera!" her best friend stops her. "He talked about you to us in Milan, all the time. He took us out to dinner, and to the Savini..." "Yes, because you had got him a ticket to the Scala." "Stop it. He is all Feuer und Flamme about you." Feuer und Flamme: "Fire and Flame"--they throw a few such German phrases into their talk, not because they find themselves in Austria, but because that was another old Budapest custom too. Vera smiles, quite contented, but she also shrugs her shoulder a little. They know her and love her and are convinced that marrying that man is what she ought to do, what she must do now, on the cusp of the autumn of her life. They know all about her, her virtues and her missteps (if that is what they were), including the fact that for two years she had a sad and rather hopeless love affair with a younger man who had fled from Budapest to Vienna after the 1956 Rising; and also that many years ago one of the married men in the group had been in love with her, though they are sure (especially the women) that she has got no one now (but, as the men say among themselves, walking back to the hotel, one
never knows.)

However, what they know about her, what she did do and what she will do does not belong to this vignette. What belongs to this vignette is their survivorship. Great chunks of their lives had been amputated, all of them are maimed, in one way or another--but are they maimed worse than are unhappy women or men of a corresponding class of people, say, in England or America? More, yes; worse, no. Their wounds are deeper but they heal better. The Muses are the daughters of Memory, but these people know how to govern their memories; they are the orphaned children but the orphaned fathers and mothers, too, of their memories. And they know where they are. In the midst of Indian Summer, that is. They are like all Hungarians, congenital pessimists; but here they sit, in the still warm September sun, having Eiskaffee, mit Schlag on the Wörthersee, talking to each other in 1963 à la 1936. They all live a little beyond their means ("if I could only afford to live the way I live," one of them says), which is very Hungarian, too, and the six of them have a total of four children, which is very bourgeois, and they know that they will not live much longer and then rest (rest? if that is the word) in alien cemeteries; but now their flesh and their souls are warmed by this Indian Summer; and perhaps they know that this is not only their Indian Summer, it is the Indian Summer of Europe, more, the Indian Summer of Western civilization, of the only civilization that they know--and that we know.

*

I know that you know those people very well, and that you are fond of some of them; but we are concerned with history, aren't we? I fear that you are overdoing that Indian Summer bit. The Indian Summer of Europe--or, at that, of Western civilization--were the years before 1914."

Of course. But this is something else: it is the Indian Summer of Indian Summer, the sun having come out for a few years, that's all. They are in the midst of the recovery of their lives, including some of their comforts and standards. That of course can happen anywhere, any time. But they are also in the midst of the recovery of Western Europe after the war, as a matter of fact, near its ephemeral peak. Incidentally, they know that. On that particular afternoon they do not talk much about politics, but they all agree--wrongly--that the United Europe is coming; as one of the men says, "that can no longer be reversed", and of course they are all in favour of a Union of Europe. It did not happen that way, and perhaps it will never happen, but that is something we know in 1993 when, I fear, most of them will be dead. However, there is one thing I want to say. Having been cosmopolitan Hungarians, the desire and love for Europeanness was bred into them. And, unlike some Western Europeans, they are very pro-American too. Because of many reasons: America the leader, the hope of the free world, etc., etc. They understand little about American politics and American tendencies--including the couple who live in New York. Perhaps they like America for the wrong reasons. But they know that this recovery of Europe after the war, this restoration, was largely due to American generosity and to the American example.

"Very nice; but that prosperity includes things that they do not and cannot like very much. All those crowds of tourists. The rise of the proletariat. Giving credit to the masses--that was the American achievement. After the war the Europeans have thought it best to emulate it: the welfare state, instalment buying, and soon the credit cards. The lower classes first merging into and then submerging of what were the middle classes once. All polls and popularity contents and television. Well, it is usually you, not I, who keeps worrying about where this will lead, where it has already led, whether it has been any good."

Let's not think about the results. What I was trying to suggest was that there was this little Indian Summer after the big Indian Summer, in Western Europe for about ten years, say 1958 to 1968; and that these people, not Western Europeans by birth but refugees and survivors, knew it perhaps better than any other people. And they are blessed thus, but perhaps they do not know that.

"Spare me your apocalyptics, and tell me just one more thing. What happened to Vera, and to Fire and Flame"? Reader, she did not marry him.
"It's 'Reader, I married him.' " You have your Jane Eyre wrong.
Well, she did not marry him, but not because he wouldn't know Jane Eyre, or Strindberg from Schnitzler. He was not civilized enough.
"But I feel, and perhaps you suggest, that she had slept with him once, perhaps in Vienna, or how would she know about his apartment in Geneva?"
I am afraid that this must have been so, and I will admit that this would not have been taken so lightly either by her or by her kind of people fifty years before, which is why I insist that this was an Indian Summer after the real Indian Summer...
"There is, however, one good thing to say for this century, and you know what it is. In 1963 this woman, in her late fifties, is attractive, indeed, she is still sexually desirable. Wouldn't have happened in 1893."
Good point, but doesn't belong here.