George Szirtes

Within, Beyond and Under

Remembering Ottó Orbán

 

The death of a friend who is also a remarkable writer is both a private and a public loss. Even within the private sphere you are aware of the life led beyond, or even under, the friendship.
Beyond the friendship lies the world of books, influences, reputations: the whole of the vast part-commercial, part-masonic and part-angelic mirage of Parnassus with its higher and lower slopes, on which the friend has as an as-yet-unsettled place, where literary mountaineers make and strike camp, and on which, if you yourself are a writer, you too may be situated (if only you could see yourself, find yourself or be assured of anything at all). This part of your friendship extends outside the door even as you are speaking, drinking and exchanging pleasantries. The magic mountain of beyond is what has brought you together in the first place.
But magic? mountain? Even as I weave this little mappa mundi for myself I am aware that it is too pretty, too cute, for Ottó, the least mythopoeic of poets, who, in "Verdi in Old Age" wrote: "I'll fart you the Dies Irae, / everyday life is the key to everything", and who, in "The Choice", imagined himself as a Japanese businessman weighing up options based on efficient market research. Out there, beyond the windows of friendship, there is no magic mountain only multifarious everyday life, the hard material business of survival that does not deal in allegories or romances. The world beyond is its own brutal truth, and we-Ottó and I-met, not because I had flown like an angel to the call of some literary trumpet on the peak of a mountain, but because I had received some money from a public fund in London to visit Budapest in April, 1984 and because the Hungarian branch of PEN had rung a few available writers and editors and prevailed on them to gather in a small conference room in Vörösmarty tér in order to meet a creature they had never heard of but who might be of some interest or use to them at some stage. Later, in the course of that same visit, on a general invitation, I called in at the offices of Kortárs where Ottó was then an editor, and so, from that time onwards, over the years, aeroplanes, buses and all the other forms of public transport, facilitated meetings with coffee, with meals and with glasses of wine, and we moved seamlessly into the world of friendship and families (Juli, Clarissa, your children Kati and Eszter, and our children Tom and Helen) without ever quite forgetting, or ever wanting to forget, the world beyond which set the conditions for all our meetings.

Under the friendship though, moves the mysterious submarine engine of creation. Under the friendship there were mysterious reasons and needs that drew me to Hungary and generated the raw material of my poems. Under the friendship lay the great organic machinery of Ottó's own drives and perceptions whose mechanism produced the phenomenon of his poetry, a poetry where "the orange malleable lava of the day before yesterday / is hardening to a dark basalt grey that one might study, / and the dumb snow falls like lint on the open wound of the world" ("The Snows of Yesteryear"), and where, "under the tongue the god deposits the shema as if it were a simple memo, and where the poet spits the millennium in small balls of paper back at the world" ("The Golem"). Because the engine is hidden and because we only see what it produces, we can never really know it: nor is it, we feel, our business to know it. Do we really want to spend time in the kitchen of the restaurant, or the engine room of the ship? The engine of the poem is rustier, oilier, more archaic and more makeshift than we like to remember. It is more like Yeats' "foul rag and bone shop of the heart" than like the clothing department of Harrods; more like a cobwebbed old Meccano set through which mice scurry than like the design of the latest Formula-1 Ferrari.
All too true. This is old knowledge. Even dressing it up in images lends it a false glamour. Under the life of our friendship, which was affectionate but occasional, undemonstrative, rarely backed up by correspondence and not always fully relaxed (but how could it be in the tragically deteriorating conditions of Ottó's illness, given my awareness of my lack of easy authority in Hungarian, and my fear of tiring him by switching between two languages-and then the guilt, always the uncomfortable guilt, of the awareness of awareness); under this life, the engine of the poems was going into overdrive. There was little on the surface to show it, but one could feel a certain juddering and would know that, under the slow waves, there was an extraordinary fever of production under way.
Romantic images again: the mountain and the ocean. I am in danger of mixing metaphors. I have said that Ottó was the least mythopoeic of poets, and yet, in some respects this is not quite accurate. There is a version of the mythopoeic process whereby the poet transcends the poem. It happened with Sylvia Plath in some manner. The submarine engine finds itself at the top of the mountain just as the figure between grows thinner, cracks, vanishes or blows up in a spectacular form of self-sacrifice to the process of self-making. But this is not what Ottó did: his poems are not attempts to recreate himself as an isolated, chosen spirit but, from the beginning to the very last poems, an instinctive project in which auto-biography acts not as the exemplary life of the Romantic Hero, but as the strange, burning, attenuated life of Everyman. This project takes enormous energy, wit, fury and compassion, all of which Ottó possessed to a remarkable degree.
Under the friendship, it was this I sensed and was shaken by. From within the friendship, there remains a lovely little drawing he did for me inside one of his inscribed books which showed Britain and Hungary on a crude map, and above it a cloud bearing the legend: YOU.
Beyond the friendship there is the point at which his poems opened their doors to me: it was when I realised something apparently dry and technical about his use of metrics, the way they freed the tongue to strike, gallop and mourn. Through the doors I saw a version of swaggering comedy that led by a series of twists and jolts into tragic vision. The series of fifteen songs he wrote near the end of his life demonstrate this stretch at its virtuosic extreme, its epigrammatic, full feminine rhymes reminiscent of Kosztolányi but speaking out of darkness, understanding and despair.
Yet not despair: the comic ingenuity of these poems is the equivalent of someone turning fifteen triple somersaults over a precipice. The man who can do that, whatever his suffering, however bleak his vision, is nobody's loser. And that's how he seemed to leave life too, not in a slow lingering descent but in one neat somersault.