Andrea Tompa

All the City's a Stage

Klára Györgyey: Molnár Ferenc, Budapest, Magvető, 2001, 292 pp. - György Nagy: Molnár Ferenc a világsiker útján (Ferenc Molnár on the Road to World Fame) Budapest, Tina, 2001, 202 pp.

 

Molnár was born in 1878, Budapest in 1873. He was the son of the physician Mór Neumann (he adopted the surname Molnár later) and Jozsefa née Wallfisch, the city's name was established by the union of Pest, Buda and Óbuda. The city and Molnár are therefore contemporaries. Budapest reached maturity as a metropolis at the same time as the young author.
A new city was born, with new avenues and boulevards, a new underground, and what was most important, new cafés and theatres. Among them in 1896, the Vígszínház, the home of modern European plays and of the flourishing contemporary Hungarian drama, thus of Molnár's plays. Molnár, his plays, his now almost forgotten prose, are unimaginable without this new flourishing capital. Mátyás Sárközi, a journalist who lives in London, gives a good impression of this age and its influence on Molnár in his Színház az egész világ (All the World's a Stage, Budapest, Osiris, 1995), a biography, in which he claims Molnár's first play, Doktor úr (Doctor) owes much of its success to the idiom of the city and its jokes. Sárközi also makes a point others seem to forget, that Molnár was the first truly and completely Budapest author in Hungarian literature. His contemporaries, linked to the epoch-making journal Nyugat, (whose contributors numbered major writers such as Ady, Móricz, Babits, Kosztolányi, Krúdy, Nagy, Tersánszky, and many others) were born elsewhere and their works lack those intimate ties with the budding city.
György Nagy does not discuss the period, he gives a summary treatment of the life, trying to establish its phases and a logical sequence. Perhaps Nagy, the goals of whose work are so clearly defined, should have completely avoided this half-hearted treatment of biographical data. Györgyey cannot afford much space to biography either, a mere twenty pages are supposed to be our guide. But as Sárközi's book shows, Molnár's life deserves more than a publisher's frame. Due perhaps to his personal interest (he is Molnár's grandson), Sárközi is acutely aware of the peculiar relation between the life and work. Molnár's life, conduct and disposition were, again, defined by the city at the beginning of the 20th century, and, in return, provided food for metropolitan gossip. Without wishing to be a mythic figure, he became one: the well-off, talented, elegant man of the world, who features in scandal, who lives and works in cafés, writes, in an almost offhand manner, successful plays and short stories, and seduces stunningly beautiful actresses.
Success is the keyword in these two biographies. Yet it sounds differently to foreign and Hungarian readers of the biographies. Molnár certainly became a synonym for success in his times: success in the theatre. It meant a great number of glittering premičres, successful productions, loud critical acclaim, thunderous applause. And, lest we forget, money. Success requires a city to resound the name, the new play, the new scandalous affair. And though Molnár had great contemporaries, the writers associated with Nyugat, whose critical and literary importance is indisputable, and also weightier, no one would try to call them successful. Success itself, the striving after it, became the theme of many a play by Molnár. When he set off in the 1920s, success followed him, to Vienna and to Broadway. To countries where the word still rings with the same positive quality as in the Budapest of the early 20th century, where however, it no longer does. Marxist literary criticism did all in its power to define Molnár's success as clear evidence of his cheapness, of his plays' being bourgeois drawing-room comedies. Success became a stigma.

Corresponding to their relative weight within the oeuvre as a whole, the most important, best and longest chapters in Klára Györgyey's book deal with Molnár's plays. Each play is discussed in some detail and competently, with an eye to their reception in Hungary and elsewhere, chiefly in the United States. (As to the Hungarian reception, both authors ignore the anti-Semitic criticism of the 1920s.) All the discussions leave to desire is a discussion of all 42 plays as an entirety, in which the need to describe method does not dominate over an attempt to find connections within and without the oeuvre. This indeed would be a further book.
Nagy devotes a short chapter to "Molnár's dramatic art," in which he discusses the playwright's world view and dramatic technique. Though it contains important insights, it again lacks a study of Molnár's relation to contemporary drama and theatre, or a thematic analysis of his work written for the stage. Missing too is something that would substantiate the last sentence of the book, according to which "the future promises an increased interest in his entire oeuvre." To make this optimism sound better grounded, Nagy's book should have at least hinted at what makes Molnár of interest for the modern theatre.
Since both authors discuss the plays in chronological order, insights into ordering principles, or the treatment of the plays by their types, are absent. Consequently, the real novelty of Molnár is missed, something which is still valid and has not been completely explored: his progress from the drawing-room comedy towards re-theatricalization. The theatre is a basic theme in many of his plays, which he doubles-like Pirandello-with life. Just like Pirandello, Molnár looks at life as reflected in the theatre. The theatre as an appearance or illusion is already featured in such early dialogues as Színház (Theatre), while the doubling as well as the making relative of theatrical reality and being became a basic theme of the "great" plays, like Testőr (The Guardsman), or the one held to be his best, Játék a kastélyban (The Play's the Thing). (György Nagy thinks eight of the plays have the theatre as their theme.) "Theatre as such is the lie-except for its essence. If the audience wants to believe a piece of painted canvass is a forest, they will believe it. And they will believe a woman does not recognize her husband when I say so," Molnár said in an interview, on The Guardsman. I think Nagy is wrong to say that "in Molnár's view people go to the theatre to be deceived, to escape from reality." In Molnár's Pirandellean search for truth there is room for several truths, and so the theatre itself has its reality of sorts -in contrast with life. Hence his interest in life, theatre and illusion in plays like Egy, kettő, három (One, Two, Three), Olympia and Riviera.
The link between Molnár and Pirandello is far from haphazard, and both books allude to it. Györgyey says that "Molnár contrasted relative and absolute truth before Pirandello" (p. 134). The similarities between the two playwrights are both typological and attitudinal: they must have seen each other's plays, and Max Reinhardt directed a play by each in two consecutive seasons: Six Caracters in Search of an Author (1924) and Riviera (1925). Sárközi even claims Molnár influenced Pirandello, rather than the other way round, though he provides little evidence. Though both Györgyey and Nagy hold Riviera to be an inferior work, Reinhardt directed it on two occasions; a year after his Pirandello production he must have been interested in the relation of two types of realities, the stylized world of the theatre and immediate, harsh reality of life. When Györgyey claims the puppets the two main characters "converse with" fail to work on stage, or as she puts it, "are not capable of acting," she must forget that one of the greatest of 20th-century directors, Tadeusz Kantor, revolutionised the theatre with the introduction of puppets. The relation between the then popular ideal of the marionette-actor (also favoured by Pirandello) and Riviera deserves a study of its own. This world of appearances (theatre included) Nagy calls-to my mind wrongly-a lie, which is void of "moral solidity." In any event, Nagy's turns of phrase are sometimes reminiscent of the rhetoric of the Hungarian Marxist literary criticism of an earlier time.
Both authors' approach to Molnár is consistently literary rather than theatrical. It is a matter of choice of course, but a book with a detailed biography and a discussion of the prose as well as of Molnár's values and validity for the modern theatre is yet to be written.