A SHORT MÁRAI READER

Herbal
(1943)

On having high standards

And you must train yourself to insist on the highest standards. This is of the utmost importance. The masses are greedy but they have no standards. You must remain moderate and exacting. The world is becoming more and more like a Woolworth's, where you can get anything for a dime, shoddy goods which satisfy the quotidian desires of the hedonist masses quickly and cheaply. The dangers of this mass gratification are already apparent in all the domains of life and the spirit. A culture will be destroyed not only when the barbarians descend on the fine squares of Athens and Rome with their battle-axes, it will also be destroyed when these selfsame barbarians descend on the public squares of a culture and there trade and barter with no regard for quality. You must be particular, and hard to please. Do not be finicky or squeamish when you pick and choose, be rigorous and relentless. You cannot be too exacting where moral and intellectual principles are concerned. You cannot be too consistent when you judge this first-rate, that tawdry, this valuable, that worthless. This is your duty if you are a man and want to keep this status.

On forms and civilities

Forms and civilities must be respected to the last. Taking your meals, talking in bed and at table. At a time when social life is increasingly becoming less formal, you for one should remain true to the existing, final and crystallized forms of greeting, bowing, handshaking, expressions of sentiment and opinion. In an age when everyone demands that you don a uniform, you just keep your jacket on at all times, and in the evening, when asked out, wear a dark suit. Not for the sake of the clothes, but for form's sake.
It is not only books that can save a culture. It is also the small reflexes of everyday life. When an age comes at you with its fists up, answer calmly and politely by raising your hat.
That's all you can do.

Diary

1943-44

I have lived through liberalism, communism, the White era, neobaroque democracy, fascism and national socialism, and I may have to live through several variants of pink and red ages. But I have never lived, nor am I likely to live, under the aegis of political or ideological slogans, when the paralytic and the epileptic will not hate the healthy, when those with little or no talent shall not level a torrent of unfounded and ridiculous accusations against those whose talent distinguishes them, raises them just an inch above the rest of their profession. Anyone who does not know this does not know mankind. It is a fact, like death, that must be reckoned with.

*

For a long time a European could say, with calm assurance: "My God." Then, flaring up in sudden protest, sullenly and in a menacing voice he began to say: "My religion." Then, gabbling excitedly, he began repeating like a parrot: "My country, my nation." And now, jabbering idiotically in his rage, he is loudly chanting "My race."
At this point he has ceased to be a European.

1958-67

A young woman was stabbed to death in the small hours somewhere in New York. Hearing the victim's screams, the neighbours all rushed to the window but no one rang the police. The police later interrogated those who lived in the neighbourhood. They admitted-thirty-seven of them!-that from their windows they had watched the killer finish off his screaming victim but had not picked up the phone because "they had been afraid of getting involved." The police indignantly recorded this "cowardly indifference". But it is not only the householders of New York who show such apathy. When in November 1956 the Russian Bolshevics ruthlessly murdered the Hungarian revolution, the neighbours-the French, the English, the Americans-leant on their window-sills, lamenting, and watched the tragedy without lifting a finger. No one picked up the phone to protest that the innocent were murdered under the eyes of the world. Why not? They were probably afraid of "getting involved."

Confessions of a Bourgeois
(1934)

There were five rooms in all, laid out as an L, three front rooms and two facing the courtyard. Apart from the children's room, all were large and airy. The occupants of these fin de sičcle middle-class apartments were not overly concerned about the quality and placing of their childrens' rooms, not even those well-to-do families who otherwise doted on their offspring and begrudged them nothing in the way of education or clothing. Opinions on "hygiene" varied considerably. In those days the hypothesis that "germs were a health hazard" drove many housewives distracted, I knew several old ladies who were obsessed with the idea of cleanliness, they dusted all day, walking up and down in their apartment wearing gloves, hunting germs with feather-dusters. It was the ambition of every middle-class housewife to have not one speck of dust mar the surface of her French-polished furniture; visiting gossips held veritable inspections under the pretence of partaking of coffee in their friends' homes, and woe betide the miserable wretch in whose home the slovenly housemaid had forgotten to run the dustcloth over the piano that day. My mother, the two maids and the "Miss" housecleaned all day long. In the morning the maids cleaned the rooms, their work was supervised by the Miss, and later my mother appeared like a general mustering her troops and subjected their work to ruthless scrutiny, running her fingers along the hidden crevices of the furniture, hunting for specks of dust half the morning. The watchword was that absence of dust was the main condition of "modern hygiene". But the childrens' rooms in most apartments were a sorry sight, only hidden closet-like rooms were designated for this purpose, and though the back of the piano was always polished, in most homes the bathroom was sparingly used. In our family the bathroom was regularly used as there were many children, and in any case, my parents had unusual and not at all up-to-date principles regarding personal hygiene. The nursery-maid stoked up the battered iron stove in the bathroom morning and night and the Miss bathed the chlidren; but general opinion had it that "too much bathing was injurious to children's health", as it made them soft. In most places the bathroom was used as a lumber room, where family members did go occasionaly to wash, but because of the hand-laundered wash of underclothes hung up to dry, the piled up suitcases and tools for cleaning shoes and clothes stored there, they could not move around freely in the dark room. In the apartments of many of our acquaintances luggage gathered dust in the bath, which was restored to its proper use only at the end of the year, on New Year's Eve. Towards the close of the century, the middle-classes bathed only in case of illness or marriage. But they insisted on having a bathroom in their apartments, they just did not have much use for it. The gloomy bathroom in our flat was also crammed with all sorts of odds and ends, my mother struggled desperately to keep some kind of order among the towels and bathrobes, everyone had their "own special peg", the towels, dressing-gowns, wraps hung there all jumbled up as in the cloakroom in a theatre, no one knew which one was theirs, where it was supposed to hang, when their turn would come. The bathroom was in eternal chaos, a hotbed of resentment and turmoil.
As opposed to the childrens' rooms or the bathrooms, perfect order reigned in the larders. Huge stores of food were laid up-superfluously-in large, dry, light rooms, as if it was a besieged castle that was being stocked with flour and lard, or the larder of a country mansion, where there are no butcher's or grocer's within a day's walking distance. In fact there were huge supplies of everything amassed in my mother's wardrobes, in the cupboard drawers; bolts of linen, knitwear, skeins of wool, but we laid up stocks of everything else, including bootlaces and dustcloths. This craze for hoarding would come upon my mother from time to time, and she would return from her shopping trips as triumphantly as if we were living in the desert and she had managed to procure rare and precious articles of consumption from a caravan passing through. We bought flour by the sackful, cooking fat by the barrel, millwheel-size rounds of cheese, nothing was ever measured out by the decagramme in our house. But even in possession of these large stocks we lived soberly rather than extravagantly. There were already three children squealing in the house, two servants living in, and the cook prepared meals for seven every midday, yet my mother was given no more than a hundred forints for kitchen expenses a month, and she may even have managed to put some of it by now and then. We ate meat twice a day, my father did not hold with the custom of eating reheated leftovers from luncheon in the evening. My mother kept a good table, we ate hearty, rich Hungarian meals, but a hundred forints sufficed to feed seven people. A Canaan-like bounty and low prices characterised the Hungarian world at the time, not the inevitable slump in prices that followed the war, when lack of money determined prices, and the goods and products of destitution were used as barter; the low prices of peacetime profited everyone. We lived in great style, in a rich, materialistic world. Even breakfast was a festive family occasion, like a nameday or a wedding. My father would arrive from the bathroom to the elaborately set breakfast table freshly shaved and faintly smelling of eau-de-cologne and hair-oil, sit down at the head of the table in his tobacco-coloured house-coat and reach for the local paper-we subscribed to the church paper, the Northern Hungary News which was published at episcopal cost by the episcopal press. While he waited for the tea to draw in the onion-patterned Meissen porcelain tea-pot, he would skim through the news. It was a ceremonial moment. This early in the day the moustache-press still stretched beneath Father's nose, he took it off only before eating, and with a small brush would carefully brush his brilliantined moustache to the left and right. My mother sat down opposite him, and on both sides of the table a pair of children watched round-eyed the celebration of breakfast. The children had coffee for breakfast with buttered rolls, and thick brown soup in the winter, but watching our father partake of his breakfast made up for everything and was an uplifting experience. My father breakfasted with such grace, in such a dignified, majestic way; his tobacco-coloured house-coat with its brown silk lapels, the light, graceful movements of his small, feminine, signet-ringed hands, his self-possession and that air of benevolence proper to a pater familias charmed me anew every day. He drank fragrant, golden tea with a lot of rum for breakfast, ate ham and lightly boiled eggs, honey and Hungarian butter (he often quarreled over the butter with my mother, who for reasons of economy, or for heaven knows what reason, sometimes bought Danish butter, and I remember the scene my father made one morning when he somehow formed a suspicion of this betrayal, he got up from the breakfast table and threw the "Danish butter" into the water closet!) he had toast especially made for him, and I could have watched this solemn ritual, his high-bred airs and graces for ever. This morning idyll seemed like a bourgeois religious service. Only a successful man, for whom the day could hold no unpleasant surprises, could prepare himself for it in such a leisurely, refined manner. In reality my father had not yet "arrived" at the time, it was the class to which he belonged that had arrived, and it was the irradiant awareness of belonging to this class that lent his behaviour and gestures such dignity. Those who belonged to this class and had a good record of service could begin the day with perfect equanimity.