Ottó Orbán

An "Interview"

 

If one has a past like mine, it is easy to be a poet or a writer. I'm a millionaire.
I'm a millionaire because I had such a marvellously-troubled childhood. To say my childhood was nightmarish is understating it. It was almost impossible; it could have been an unwritten novel by Kafka.
If one has a past like mine, it is easy to be a poet or a writer. My father was from the upper middle class; a Catholic convert; an officer in the Hungarian army at the time of the Second World War; still, according to laws applied to countries occupied by Nazi Germany, he was considered a Jew. My mother was gentile, from the lowest level of Hungarian society. Their marriage had caused a scandal. During the War he was stripped of his rank and sent to a temporary camp in Hungary, and later marched to a German concentration camp. He never reached the second camp because he was killed on the way-not by Germans. He was killed by Hungarian guards who came from the same part of society my mother came from. In a sense, my father was killed by my mother's relatives. And I remain here with questions, Who am I? What is my background? What is my heritage? What can I do with this damn thing?
I was considered a Roman Catholic, so I didn't share my father's fate. Instead, I had the pleasant experience of the siege of Budapest, which lasted four weeks. We lived in an apartment house cellar while the city was bombed. Three bombs fell on our house; they were duds and failed to explode. I was a child, yet at the same time an old man. I knew everything and I understood everything, though it was a hazy nightmare. It's not precise to say I understood: my senses were awake and perceived everything, so that I recall details. But there was something which simply couldn't exist for me, and that was the connections between them. My story was just a heap of shards, all very sharp memories.
Near our apartment building was a famous bridge, the first one built across the Danube. Constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Chain Bridge connected the two parts of Budapest. We were a block away. And this famous bridge, together with the others, was blown up by the retreating Germans. When it exploded, I heard first an unearthly deep voice, a horrible voice. Then there came an earthquake. We had no electricity in the cellar, just a candle attached to the wall. The candle fell down and it was dark, and in this dark hell of dust and shaking ground, I heard screaming women and children. I well remember such details; at the same time I was a child. I wanted to get out of the cellar and play. My consciousness was split, schizophrenic through and through.
At that time, I could make no connection between my father's fate and my life. I recall my mother, a simple, warm-hearted woman, hugging me, "Oh you poor orphan. Your daddy died." I was detached from the things she said because I was accustomed to being an eyewitness. I noticed her tears dropping on my shoulder and felt how cold they were. I didn't intentionally bring about this alienation; it was just created by circumstances, by the War. Everything I write goes back to that time, even if my subjects are different. My basic experience of life, my sense of culture, and my approach to poetry are profoundly connected to it, because I had to endure such a range of human behaviour.
I have a good memory for dialogues. I believe I recollect them because they reveal the heroic aspects of survival; and yet, they were an everyday part of life's routine, even mundane utterances like, "Please scratch my back." I was reminded of this later when I came across T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland". When I read the section "A Game of Chess", I got a sense of déja vu. It recalled something that once happened to me. Some years later, I don't really know where, I found a postcard sent by my father from the temporary camp. He'd written, "God is good. And he will take care of our sweet son." As in Eliot's poem, the situation and words didn't match because something was split. The sort of split was in me.
The War shocked and crippled me, I didn't know how severely neurotic I was. Oddly, that was how I came to write poetry. But I'm the luckiest person on the earth, having learned fundamental ethics and the limits to human behaviour.
I found a method, a certain way to think about things, about people and society, because I was subjected both to surprising good and surprising evil.

Liberation was not an event with a capital "L." The Red Army came to our apartment house and it was the same old thing. They too had dirty faces and burning eyes. We stayed in hiding. Later, two months later, we ventured onto the city streets for the first time. We had just reached the Opera House, which was burned out, when suddenly a car stopped near us. I was scared; I was trained to be scared, to duck behind something. From the car, a Russian soldier with a moustache and a round face shouted, "Malchik!" I didn't know a word of Russian, and couldn't guess it meant "kid". I thought he was going to kill me. He reached me a huge piece of army bread. For me, those minutes of my life were symbolic-they somehow followed logically from our plight in the cellar. Again an unlooked-for good and two players in the scene, a frightened child and a middle-aged man. They didn't speak each other's language. They could do nothing for one another-except to make this gesture, a piece of bread. It's like part of the Mass; yet for me more than symbolic. I came to understand its meaning only much later.
A writer would be lucky to be like me, expected to do only one thing, to survive: survive childhood, and then survive the first writing years without dying of hunger. And if those things can be managed, one is free to write one's masterpieces-if possible. Of course I'm joking; still, I mean it.
The process lasted at least thirty years. The most curious part was the moment it started. When my father died, my mother had no job; she was a housewife. After the War, times were difficult and she couldn't keep me at home. We were fortunate enough to have an institution for war orphans that finally took me. I spent five years there.
Most of the children had backgrounds like mine, and it was hell. One of the teachers, however, was a relative, and a kind of genius. He was depressed because he couldn't make contact with the children; so he invented a wonderful pedagogical exercise. He urged us to write poetry. Exactly how he did it, I don't know; but finally he inspired us to write. At first we laughed; then gradually we were caught and held by his trap; we wrote unconsciously, almost accidentally. We didn't think about it. It was just a good excuse not to do homework.
He took notes. Years afterward I found myself and my story among them.
I was impossible. I couldn't make contact with the other boys. I was always crying. I was a nightmare for the teacher. After about a month of writing childish poems, I went to him and told him I had written a poem about my father, and wanted to read it to the class. I was adamant about that. At first he was anxious I would start bawling and make a bad impression; but I was so stubborn that he finally said yes. And he was greatly surprised. I was proud. I was stable. I did not tremble. I felt my achievement. In a way, I was over the pain. And I was over it. After class I went out in the yard and started to play with the other children. It was a kind of cure so efficient I even forgot all about it.
That was the start, and I was not conscious of it. For a long while I forgot about writing. I wanted to be an engineer or something like. At eighteen, I fell ill again and began writing poems-pretty bad poems. My basic experience was the same. I was moving in the same troubled direction. I struggled until I was about thirty-five, until I had somehow created a whole landscape for myself. My vision of the world became more or less clear. But it was unintentional. My life was too heavy a burden and I wanted to get out from under it. Again and again I tried writing; it turned out I was just working at a means to think about my life. Of course, when I reached a certain level, I realized my poems were a kind of summary: I understood now what had happened to me.
I was lucky in so many ways because not only was my childhood troubled, but my adolescence. I was thrown out of my family because they were scared of me, scared of having a writer in a family. The only thing they knew about writers was that they had tuberculosis and were paupers. In their own foolish way, they wanted to help me; they thought I'd give it up if they didn't support me. I also had many hopeless and not-so-hopeless loves; I lived a quite disastrous life-until at twenty-one I had a nervous breakdown. I was always walking on the edge. There was a real danger that I'd just fall off in the dark somewhere. That was my fate. I was lucky I couldn't marry any of the three crazy loves of my youth: I thank God now a hundred times a day for my escape, because they'd have been catastrophes. At the time, I felt my life was just a continuation of the War's nightmare.
In one respect, my life had enough problems for two normal people, rife with quite horrible fears before taking a better course. My first volume of poems was published in 1960 when I was twenty-four. Later, my early years proved to be essential, because in the life of some poets and writers, or of any kind of artist, there may come a perilous moment, that of sudden, even overwhelming success. It can prove more threatening than past troubles because it corrupts surreptitiously. When one grows interested in success, eager for any possible prize, it is deadly. I was prepared even for that.

I had no desperate desire to be an early success. At thirty, I was considered by
some literary folks to be the most promising talent of my generation; but my writing did not receive general critical acceptance. I was accused of being phony, of lacking true talent, of being simply an imitator. Later, I realized it was quite reasonable for me to have had that problem. Because of my background, I was open to almost any influences. I took them in and built on them. It was a survival technique. It was a learned behaviour, as well as a way of writing.
It took a long time for me to arrive at that blend of styles that became mine.
At that time, a friend of mine told me that they would recognise me as a poet when I was forty. He teased me, saying I was only in my thirties and had ten years to go. I called him an idiot and told jokes about him. I was unjust. He proved absolutely right. At forty, the critics and the public somehow realized that these experiments with different stylistic elements created a unique effect.
I was never a mere imitator. And I never feared the influence of many kinds of poetry. I was lucky at that time in my life because I could translate such different poets as Geoffrey Chaucer and Allen Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas and John Donne, just to mention my English-language poets. As I approached fifty, I was suddenly awarded prizes. I realize now the timing was quite good. Thanks to my background, I hope I may survive these prizes, and even this more or less late success, such as it is.
In any case, success doesn't concern me. I am happy about it; but that's all.
It has nothing to do with my work. I'm only in pursuit of my story, of the war-like times in life, and their significance. I hope to send a message worth sending to the next generation.
I hope it's not the message, but something that can be attached to such a message. I must go back to that child, and to those four weeks in the cellar.
The craziest thing of all was that life at that time and under those circumstances was somehow, in some extraordinary way-I hate to say it-beautiful. There is something in us strong enough to cope with the worst.
My heritage is not a question of religion. I have a curious attitude about that. During adolescence I fought bitterly with my mother. Later she became fond of my wife and for her sake tried to accept me. When she became a grandmother, she was crazy about that, and somehow the family peace was restored. But even then, I thought, I am my father's son; I identify with his heritage.
Then my mother had a brain tumor. She had an operation and I visited her in the hospital. Her head was shaved and I realized her blond hair was white with age. I saw myself lying on her bed; it was my face on the white pillow. I realized I had been foolish not to grasp the duality, that I cannot distinguish between them. Sensitivity, perceptiveness, the cultured part of my talent comes from my father; but the stubborn, struggling, warrior-like drive for survival-that is hers. Even now, when I comprehend, I can't say which is more important, because one without the other just wouldn't have worked.
My poems, whether they derive from my childhood or not, tell a Hungarian story. Although my approach to writing and my account is personal, it's also Hungarian, as in the disparity that existed between my parents and for me. My father thought he was Hungarian, but he was considered only a Jew. My mother also thought she was Hungarian, but she was merely proletarian. As their inheritor, I remain here with the complexity of my questions.