Ferenc Dániel
Tandori on a Stroll
A Film Portrait of the Poet Tandori Dezső. Directed by Gábor Zsigmond Papp
In a small country whose language is also an isolated one, poetry always has a special role. This was certainly confronting the authorities in Hungary, under both the hard and the soft dictatorships. The most relevant words were pronounced by great generations of poets. In 1958 a new apprentice appeared among them, a young man who had perfected the art of form, with a unique knowledge and vision and
a devastating ability to turn the various linguistic elements inside-out and then
reassemble them. His name was Dezső Tandori. The cultural powers-that-be had no idea how to deal with him. He was
tolerated, but they detested him though politics was not at all part of his nature.
It was just that he did not fit into any
aesthetic pigeonhole. At the same time,
he was frighteningly prolific, almost to
the point of being pathologically grapho-
manic. Even if estimates seem far-fetched, his total publications may well number around 600 over the last forty years (including a huge number of prose translations, with such feats as Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, volumes of poetry and translated poetry, works of prose, crime fiction, plays for radio, story-books, essays and criticism). He has created personal mythologies around sparrows, teddy bears, and, recently, race horses.
Almost imperceptibly, with the demise of Socialist Realism, the advent of democracy, and the commercialization of public taste, it became irrevocably clear that Tandori was not just a relic of the old era. With poetry which is precariously poised on the cusp between life and death, he has matured to become something of a living classic. Both his past work and his most recent poems set a standard to be emulated.
In the Hungarian film-making tradition the principal trend is one that expresses social commitment, rather than exploring individuality. The reasons are complex and reach far back into the past, and I do not want to pass judgement on them here; nor, for that matter, do I want to bore by analysing them. Suffice it to say that it was such a pleasant surprise to find some young film-makers, Gábor Zsigmond Papp and friends, choosing Dezső Tandori as the hero and subject of their debut film—as well as appointing him as their inspirational cinematographic tour-guide. Tandori is now sixty; both as a writer and poet and as a personality he defies classification. It was clear from the outset, and the young film-makers knew this, that they would not get very far if they tried to make a film about Tandori through the usual film portrait approach to a poet. As he himself has written (professes and practises): "I have become a motley figure nowadays."
As regards the habits of this nowadays motley figure, he bears no resemblance whatsoever to the writer as we knew him during the long period of dictatorship (Tandori: "that time was unsustainable, because it was not viable, just… a world"), because the writer then wore the guise of a "conscientious minor bank official", like that of someone who is not a fully-fledged member of the Hungarian literary fraternity, and who "had to be accepted on his own terms". Nowadays Tandori is a tramp in shabby clothes and knitted cap, a vagrant, a clown, a racingman, sometime exponent of the art of living on the bread-line; occasional vegetarian, and a rescuer of birds. And not just any old how: "I confess to being a sparrow-royalist and I am mortified if I go for years without remembering the spirit of painters like Paul Klee, or Morris Graves, who spent half his life painting nothing but birds because he felt that on wings he could perceive the "divine element" of life and who, if he is still alive, has been living for the last half-a-century in the Canadian-American wilderness, on his small plot of land, Japanese style."
The team of film-makers tried to bring out the natural soliloquizing, the need to have his say which interweaves with Tandori-the-clown’s circus-style comings and goings. They even followed him, with their camera, to London. Cheap little hotel. Betting shops. Races. Tandori’s Ł1 stakes. His winnings. By this stage it is immaterial whether or not he is communicative; the eternal paradox of the moving picture remains: just how much of the hero’s synchronous inner/outer state is it able to translate or transmit? Not a lot? No, not a lot, which makes one aware of the silences, or is it an awareness that something is being held back? Tandori: "One of my visits to London set a standard for me. We were doing a biopic, I was translating Hungarian texts into German, and at the same time I busied myself betting on the horses and having a wander about the place. As for the filming, and the translating too: so far they’ve been disappointing. But then on the next race I increased my winnings sixfold. There are still the horses — that’s what is left of the standard — and as for what are ‘angels’? Roaming about, while thinking about those dear to me, living and dead, about myself, or about absolutely nothing at all?" Elsewhere Tandori says: "I am an unhappy loner by nature, although at the same time I don’t quite comprehend the way things are; why should any kind of parallel living be a ‘problem’ if it is completely, hermetically separate? Can there be such a thing? Now I can look forward to ten, maybe twelve happy years with another—(maybe it will be the last) sparrow, which is only just a year old; and there is no talk of ‘self-surrender.’"
Imperceptibly, however, and without recourse to any special device to do so,
the film-makers bring us, the audience of this film portrait, face to face with the
fact that what this is really about is the self-surrender of their roving hero. In figurative terms: about death. The various episodes chosen by Tandori are ordinary, everyday ones, but in some strange way they are like a roll-call of the deceased. The horses he bets on have names like Primitive Heart, Without Friend and Beachy Head—the favourite clifftop for suicides in England; "he has a good laugh" about these.
Intermittently throughout all this roaming about, the film-makers, aware of Tandori’s obsession with finding magic numbers, numerological associations related to a notion of eternity which is one of anguish, interpose flashes of numbers. 7—"list number seven of dead Hungarian writers". 15—"If I am now nearly 60, then I can expect to live, let’s say, another 15 years. Let’s say. That means that I have 1/5 of my life left to live. If I get up with all the little birds at 5 o’clock in the morning and I’m up till 9 in the evening, then that’s 16 hours. One-fifth of that would be 3 hours 12 minutes. But this way it is not possible to grasp, to feel, what ‘one-fifth’ is, or what ‘15 years’ is. But transpose it onto a day; then, I can tell you: from 5 in the morning I live 18 hours and 12 minutes. Or alternatively, taking it from 9 in the evening, I’m now at 5.48 p.m. — I die at 9 p.m. Here’s a joke too... on the radio, which supposedly I’m not listening to, I hear that the last book on Hungarian botanical gardens was published in 1914; since then there have been a lot of works on ‘twenty-sixth-grade plant rarities’ from foreign parts instead. This is how we ought to live. We’ve just got to keep on trying." A film portrait can only point out the existence of this numerology, not keep pace with it.
It is refreshing to see a film that does not belong to any particular genre. A stopping-point: an improvised stage-set made of paper and cheap fabrics. Centre-stage we see Tandori. The scene is purposefully casual. The positioning of the camera is also designed to appear accidental. Why? For Tandori’s benefit: "It is a dreadful problem that in Hungary the prevailing notion about literature is that it should be smooth, there is the expectation that it should be carefully crafted. This is wrong. In England there was a horse called Lamtarra, a Derby-winner as well as winner of two other big races, and which was booed off the course (or rather, his owner was) for going into retirement (put to stud) unbeaten and with four victories to his name. But horses are not a good basis for comparison. A writer does not have the option of being "put to stud" when his powers wane."
Maybe not the stud farm, then, but he
can become a motley figure, who can be "described" by these rapid cinematic associations: not only does he believe in the secret connections of numbers, as all gamblers do; he also believes in a sort of determinism inherent in the potentialities of objects, events, things, times of day, states of being, rumours and experiences of the mind. This is an organic process which takes place from the inside. According to this theory a book is not an "escape" to somewhere, but rather an "entrance way" into something. Writing does not set out anything in figurative or summary form, or as a non-existent concept or conceptual something. "Every object, every force-field we ourselves create or experience, even a form condensed into an essay, has its own ‘novel’". Poetry: a "comprehensible absolute". What makes a human being toil: "is not destructiveness, but rather ‘the human being is really constructive’; a pair of bird wings are enough to make his nihilism vanish into the blue beyond, and it is not madness which is imposed on someone, in the form of poetry (or prose)".
One of the objects of Tandori’s experience must be the multitude of signs in London advertising "Tandoori chicken". As he has been drawing graffitti-style forms himself of late, the posters and scrawls which rise in front of him on the street — this is the film-makers’ construct — fall into a kind of poetic order, into a net of contextual associations: they "focus" on him. Because this flippantly bragging, motley figure of nowadays also keeps a rigorous eye on his affairs. T.S. Eliot. Kafka. Rilke. De Staël. Wittgenstein. A detailed account of a Koala Card Championship. Reminder notes on which Tandori "sets out" or "keeps a record of" what he has written to date, to whom or what he will be faithful until death, how the big and small numbers occur in the lives of his "holy people". What are the factors which make up his values? —"not those good people who reward motleyness. The words are all to be taken as if in inverted commas. The "real intelligentsia"? I don’t know. Their vogue words—obsession, destructiveness, some-where, anyway, etc., to mix them well— are alien to me. They have read more Derrida and Habermas, etc., than I have de Staël, Beuys, Michaux, Dubuffet, Wols, Artaud; maybe on Wittgenstein we coincide..."
In this film-portrait Dezső Tandori appears a charismatic, photogenic "character". Yet the question has to be asked: knowing the limitations of the medium, why did seeing the film leave him with a bitter taste, a feeling of embarassment? Was it perhaps the camera’s terrible objectivity which he found off-putting? "... despite the fact that I see myself as old in photos, on film, I’m not decrepit, far from it..." We have no clear explanation for it, except perhaps that most people feel some anxiety when faced with their own image on film. It is as if they had been robbed or branded in some way. A justifiable fear. Tandori’s fear is also justifiable, because his current poetry is frequently animated and transfigured into words by an inner camera-eye which bears the mark of death:
The moving picture, even in its once-upon-a-time, pliable, subordinate form, "cannot help but record", and this makes it merciless. We who have adopted it are motivated by self-interest; even robbed of our aura, we always want to be eye-witnesses. In the belief that everything is as it always was.
Ferenc Dániel
is a dramaturge at Hungarian Public Radio. He is also a critic and has been
involved in making animated and
documentary films.
