György Poszler

The Writer Who Believed in Miracles

Antal Szerb 1901-1945

I expected something from literature, my redemption, let's say, because everyone's redemption is individually tailored and mine ought to have come from literature.
It did not; nevertheless, I spent my entire youth in a happy purgatory, because I always felt that within minutes I would understand what I hadn't understood before, and then Beatrice would cast off her veil and the eternal city of Jerusalem would reveal itself to me.

Antal Szerb was born in Budapest, where he lived for 43 years as a respected scholar and writer, though he never received his redemption. He was not cut out for it by temperament. He was born not to be redeemed but to be waiting for redemption. He perished as a stigmatized and outcast Jew in the last months of the war in a labour camp in Balf, a small village near Hungary's western border. To be accurate, he never came to damnation, either. He was not cut out for it by destiny. He was not born to burn in hell, only to live under its threat. He spent his entire life in a feverish, agitated state of mind, in a purgatory. His working life lasted twenty years when he did research in libraries, taught at university, and worked as an editor. It began in the early 1920s, after Hungary had lost the war, had been dismembered at Trianon, after two revolutions; and it ended in the mid-1940s, anticipating a second defeat and great changes. In other words, Antal Szerb lived and worked in ill-omened times.
He belonged to a young generation of brilliant essayists, which included, among others, László Németh, Gábor Halász, László Cs. Szabó, István Sőtér, Dezső Keresztury and György Rónay, men who widely differed in their outlook, interests and fate. They tried to see clearly, given the problems faced by a Hungary shrunk to a third of its former size. They tried to face difficult questions like what would be the role of culture and literature, the relationship of Hungary to Europe, the nature of Hungarian society, and the responsibility of writers within it? What happened to Hungary and why? How could it happen? And, in the first place, what was to be done now that it had happened? Most of this generation came out from under the cloak of Mihály Babits, the great poet, novelist and editor who had revived Hungarian essay writing. Szerb made a successful start in two genres. His first short stories were published by Nyugat, the country's most respected literary magazine at the time, the first essays by Minerva, the foremost journal devoted to philosophy and criticism. This was in no way an ordinary start. He was a scholar amongst writers and a writer amongst scholars, that made him both a better writer and a better scholar. He believed in literature, yet he treated his faith with irony. He believed in scholarship, but he doubted his own accomplishments. Szerb was a mild-mannered man with an ever-present sceptical smile. His violent death betrays much about Hungarian history and literature in the first half of the 20th century, and about the triumph and failure of the assimilation of Jews.

A baby with spectacles

It all began... or rather, it never really began, because I always read and wrote, almost from the moment I was born (I was the spectacled kind of baby)... The moment when the realm of modern poetry opened up for me was so beautiful that I can only quote whenever I think of it, I am so moved, but as a mark of my respect, I quote from the greatest, from Keats, who, on first looking into Chapman's Homer, compared himself to Cortez first setting eyes on the Pacific: "...and all his men/ Look'd at each other with wild surmise- / Silent upon a peak in Darien."

He was an exceptionally well-educated man. He acquired his education by an easy and unconscious avidity. He read incessantly, out of passion, not with a view to accumulating knowledge. He felt happiest when he was in a library. Literature was not an object of study for him, but part of living. It was, indeed, redemption or damnation. He was interested not only in the work, but also in the author, the experience that gave birth to the work, and what this gave rise to in him, as reader.
Born into a middle-class family of Jews who had converted to Catholicism, he was educated in the highly regarded Piarist Gimnázium of Budapest. His form master was Sándor Sík, a priest and a religious poet, who was one of the great figures of Hungarian education. At university, Antal Szerb read Hungarian and German, to which he later added English. With the help of various grants, he spent months in Paris and Italy, and also an entire year in London. In literature he was initially inspired by French and English writers and German scholars. At the age of thirty-seven he became President of the Hungarian Society of Literary Studies.
In scholarship he started out from a double basis inspired by Wilhelm Dilthey and the German Geistesgeschichte school, and by Viennese psychoanalysis, chiefly Freud. Although not in an equal measure, his three major scholarly works-the two volumes of Magyar irodalomtörténet (History of Hungarian Literature, 1934), Hétköznapok és csodák (The Quotidian and Miracles, 1936), a book discussing the problems of the modern novel, and the three volumes of A világirodalom története (The History of World Literature, 1941), are all based on these two pillars. In the early 1930s he also published a few playfully poetical, ironic/self-ironic short stories, followed in 1934 by a scintillating adventure story, embedded in cultural history, A Pendragon legenda (The Pendragon Legend, Budapest, Corvina, 1963). Then came a nostalgic and mysterious account of a generation, the novel Utas és holdvilág (Journey by Moonlight, 1937, English translation by Len Rix, Puskhin Press, London, 2001, reviewed in this issue). Next he wrote a case study and historical parable about the scandal of Marie Antoinette's necklace, A királyné nyaklánca (The Queen's Necklace, 1943), replete with prophecies of a crucial turn of events. And in the winter of 1943-1944, in what was close to being his nadir, he published the book that has, until this day, brought him the greatest success. Entitled Száz vers (One Hundred Poems), it is a bilingual anthology of what he thought were the greatest poems, translated by the best Hungarian poets. Through the works of others, Szerb speaks about himself, protesting against Nazism with the poetry closest to his heart.

Ladies' handkerchiefs

The style reminds me of an outstanding Renaissance dancer, who was praised by Castiglione for occasionally dropping her cloak purely to demonstrate how little attention she was paying to the whole affair. It is possible to lift a heavy weight with the usual gesticulation of a circus acrobat, but it is much more elegant when you pick it up pretending it is a lady's handkerchief. One conjunctive can make a world of difference, and an unexpected turn of phrase can open up a prospect to infinity, to see the world in a grain of sand...

That was his ideal. Heavy-weight scholarship-wrapped in a light, elegant style. The weight of knowledge and thoughts, presented with an ease of phrasing and wit. To pick it up, as if it were a lady's handkerchief. To write literary history for an adult readership rather than an academic audience.
The essay was the genre closest to his heart. It is shown in the way he mastered its art utilizing and adopting what he learnt from Geistesgeschichte. In the way he was inspired by French theorists-Taine and Sainte-Beuve, for example -in a concern for method and a critical faculty. In the way he turned to English historians (Macaulay and Lytton Strachey) to move towards pathos and irony.
In the way he was guided by Hungarian models (the 19th-century novelist and essayist Zsigmond Kemény, and his own master, the poet Mihály Babits).
He was inspired by many influences. But by the 1930s he had developed his own, distinctly individual style.
The two major scholarly attempts-the histories of Hungarian and world literatures-were preceded by some weighty studies. In Hungarian literature, these studies featured some of the great 19th- and 20th-century poets: the Enlightenment and Romantic Ferenc Kölcsey, the Classicist Dániel Berzsenyi, the Romantic Mihály Vörösmarty, and the classical-modern Mihály Babits. In preparation to his other major work, he published important essays on Blake, Ibsen, Stefan George and-in the footsteps of Castiglione-on what he called "the courtier", and on European early Romanticism. He also experimented with compiling a tableau of a period or a movement with the help of several portraits. His favourite age was early Romanticism and Romanticism, his true ideal early-Romantic and Romantic man; periods and attitudes in which emotion and intelligence, inspiration and intellect, experience and form all come together to struggle in the soul and in the works of art. In the final analysis, this is, of course, a struggle between the conscious and the subconscious. If the subconscious fails to pry into or burst open the conscious mind, there can be no poetic ego and no great poetry. If the subconscious floods and sweeps away the conscious mind, the poetic ego and great poetry will both be destroyed. When the subconscious strikes a balance with the conscious mind, and when the tension is offset by resistance and form, then a poetic ego and great poetry can emerge. This is the essence of Romanticism in Szerb's interpretation. The secret door between the subconscious and the conscious opens, letting the beautiful monsters of the subconscious underworld flood the conscious upper world. This is present in the poetry of Blake, Hölderin and Vörösmarty. They form the subjects of his best portraits. This requires the theories of inspiration and intuition formulated by the Geistesgeschichte school and the related philosophies that includes not only Dilthey but also Bergson. And that requires the "psyché-map" of psychoanalysis, the layered structure of the subconscious and the conscious mind. Freud and his id and superego, Jung and his individual and collective subconscious. Szerb has the same disposition: a fertile duality of irrationality and rationality, inspiration and irony, constantly provoking and correcting one another.
Magyar irodalomtörténet is not difficult reading. This is where the author mentions those ladies' handkerchiefs-with a charming elegance. Erdélyi Helikon, the respected journal published in Kolozsvár (Cluj) for the Hungarians in Transylvania, arranged a competition for a new history of Hungarian literature. The book should discuss the links between Hungarian literature and Europe, and draw the distinctive profile of the Hungarian genius. Here, Szerb was also inspired by the great dilemma of the "generation of essayists": What was the task and duty of intellectuals after the collapse of historical Hungary? He won the competition. He wrote the book. And he instantly rose to fame.
In method, he turned his back on the 19th-century conventions, the various versions of positivism and neo-positivism. As an alternative, there was Geistesgeschichte, although the German scholars had only written treatises on authors and periods: portraits and tableaux. They never tried to draw an evolutionary picture of historical processes. But what could provide a link between the series of portraits and tableaux? Perhaps it could be the typology of Geistesgeschichte, with which he had experimented in drawing up a picture of European early Romanticism and the courtier. Perhaps it could be the evolutionary theory of Geistesgeschichte, as outlined by Eduard Spranger and the Hungarian Tivadar Thienemann. This was why he wrote in the introduction that Geistesgeschichte is a history of ideas (as Korff had clearly demonstrated in his book on Goethe), a history of styles (as Strich had clearly demonstrated in his treatise on Classicism and Romanticism) and creative intuition. The first two are scholarly categories, the third is more of an artistic one. Intuition is a form of creative/receptive empathy. This is what leads to the understanding of a unique author's given work. Or, more precisely, to the threshold of understanding (of a mystery?) This is not yet an understanding, only a possibility of understanding. But this is not enough, as ideas and styles, reception and understanding are conditioned by the historical/social setting. Something he learned from the most respected member of an earlier generation of Hungarian historians of literature, János Horváth. According to Horváth, literature is a spiritual community of writers and readers-mediated by written works. This needs further discussion, and for this reason, he extended Geistesgeschichte with the sociology of literature. And since the creative intuition leading to the understanding of authors and works must be concretised, he extended Geistesgeschichte and the sociology of literature with the psychology of literature.
So we have Geistesgeschichte, sociology of literature and psychology of literature, a highly modern methodology for his time. It showed up the character and evolution of Hungarian literature in an unprecedented way. It made the point that Hungarian literature and literary history was a miniature copy of European literature and literary history. It had everything on a small scale that European literature had on a large scale. It had everything in its individual version that European literature had in its focus. On a small scale and on the fringe of European development, Hungarian literature produced everything that much larger cultures had produced at the centre of development. In a small culture, at the periphery of development, everything appears differently from the way in which large cultures originally created it in the centre of development. The Hungarian Renaissance and Hungarian Enlightenment for example, could only emerge in a form that Hungarian conditions permitted and determined. It is this "difference" that provides the dynamism in the development of Hungarian literature. From period to period, it establishes a synthesis with Europe, and after a disintegration, it starts moving towards a new synthesis. The alternation between differentiation and integration is the law of evolution in Hungarian literature. This was the basis of Medieval Hungarian Latinity. Then the same became the basis of the Hungarian Renaissance and Enlightenment. And finally, this was the basis of the wonderful blossoming of new writing in the first half of the 20th century around the literary journal Nyugat. The material in A világirodalom története (The History of World Literature) is even freer. It is not knowledge that becomes hesitant; it is the methodological rigour that eases up. The tone and the gestures become ever lighter. The task itself is entrancing: writing about world literature during a world war. The Muses are not silent in a war, as he said in the preface. On the contrary, he made a scholarly unsubstantiated yet humanly very reasonable claim: the world is in dire need of a little goodness. And anyone who loves books cannot be a bad person.
His idea is that the material of world literature is not very extensive: only the best qualify. A carefully selected private library can hold all of world literature. The most important books are those that mean something to everyone, regardless of borders and nations. Naturally, this world literature is more or less confined to the literature of Europe and North America. The common foundation is provided by Greco-Roman Antiquity and the Jewish-Christian Scriptures, augmented by the Romance and German languages, French, Spanish, Italian, English and German, and later also Russian, Polish and Scandinavian literatures. The notion derives from Goethe, but not in its original form. In Goethe's account, world literature resulted from the unification and integration of national literatures. In other words, unity emerged from diversity. Babits, who wrote a history of European literature, was closer to the truth when he said that the diversification and differentiation of the unity of world literature produced the various national literatures. In other words, diversity emerged from unity. Szerb follows in Babits's footsteps, but only insofar as his ideas are concerned, not his genre. In his history of European literature, Babits produced an extensive, poetic reader's journal. In his history of world literature, Szerb produced an enjoyable popular lecture on the subject. Hence a dilemma. A poetic reader's journal does not require systematic presentation, but a popular science lecture does. Szerb's conceptual framework can be derived from the crisis philosophies fashionable between the two world wars, such as Oswald Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West) and from the Kulturkreis theory: the ways in which living cultures could become dead civilizations. Western, "Faustian" culture had just reached that stage. To a certain extent, with his poetic diagnosis of the decline and of the "silver age" of culture, Babits's essays led the way in this regard, too. And so did the works of the widely read and much debated essayists, Julien Benda's Trahison des clercs and Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses. Szerb's vision of world literature was imbued with similar ideas. How to save world literature at a period of the "Faustian culture's demise". This was similar to what Erich Auerbach said decades later: Right now it is still possible to collect and process the material, because there are still people who know and understand it. Therefore, the conceptual framework was given. But-luckily-it was not possible to bend the material to it entirely, only partly and with some reservations-and Szerb knew this. Had it been possible to do so, then it would have produced a dry piece of scholarship. But since the material was bent to it only partly and with reservations, it produced some scintillating analyses. It provided a witty guide to centuries of the history of literature with some brilliant portraits and vignettes. A highly readable, nostalgic and ironic guidebook to what once, in an ideal world, has mattered, taking readers to the present, right up to the literature of Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia.

Once in my childhood I stood on Andrássy út, imagining that I was witnessing the rise of a new hill in Buda... I expected something like that to happen... Ruminating after a few beers in my London solitude, I feel that perhaps now the moment has finally come. Perhaps now people will understand that miracles are essential in life, more essential than our daily bread itself.
Cervantes' novel is the first literary work in which two worlds exist in parallel. Prior to that literary works inhabited only one world: historical works were rooted in reality, and novels lived in the world of miracles. The writers of history were as serious about reality as novelists were about miracles. Cervantes was the first writer to take both worlds equally seriously; or rather, he took seriously neither of the two, but a third one, symbolised by Dulcinea del Toboso.

Miracle is a key to Antal Szerb's life and theory. The nostalgic hope for, and the ironic rejection of, miracles with Dulcinea as its symbol. She mediates between dreaming and awakening, between miracle and reality, between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Dulcinea is the deliberately assumed ideal: there is no certainty, yet we must pretend that it exists. The operative words are "between" and "pretend". The desired floating from one world to the other. Floating and metamorphosis are the key elements of Szerb's oeuvre: he hopes for the arrival of the miracle, and at the same time he grins both at the miracle and at his hope. This is what his short stories and novels are about, but he even creates a theory for it-on account of the Dulcinea parable and the miracle associated with it. The result is the book Hétköznapok és csodák (The Quotidian and Miracles), a brief outline of the contemporary English novel.
It is a history of the English, American, French and German novel in the first decades of the 20th century-based on a graceful theoretical foundation. Its two pillars are formed by the theories of the novel proposed respectively by Georg Lukács, the Marxist philosopher, and Karl Kerényi, the historian of religion. The novel as the formulation in prose narrative of the dilemma of a "problematic individual," as the prose narrative of the myths of Odysseus, reduced to a bourgeois adventure story. Both the problematic individual and the bourgeois adventure story contain the elements of miracle. Miracle and playfulness turn the myth into prose, and prose into myth. As regards the Dulcinea parable, Szerb's short stories serve best to illustrate it. They usually have at their centre a scholar waiting for some miracle to happen, floating idly between reality and dream. Szerb writes four versions of this theme in four outstanding, lighthearted short stories. The point of departure is "Szerelem a palackban" (Love in the Bottle). It is about Sir Lancelot and his ill-fated love for Guinevere. He is tormented by this love, by his inability to attain the dream in reality, to produce the miracle in ordinary life. But when the wizard Klingsor sets him free, he becomes really unhappy, he cannot live without the dream and the miracle. He would rather spend his life in agony for the dream, than in a dreamless reality. So, when Klingsor restores him to his unhappy love, he feels happiness. In "St. Cloud, egy kerti ünnepélyen" (A Garden party in St. Cloud), the literary man Dr Bátky experiences a miracle, a dream: he encounters a beautiful English girl. In the meantime, however, reality, ordinary life also has something in store for him: a red-blooded French woman. But he does not confuse the two. By the time he gets his fill of reality, the dream, the miracle has disappeared. In the short story "Gondolatok a könyvtárban" (Musings in the Library), Dr Bátky, this literary alter-ego of Szerb, meets his colleague, a beautiful young Hungarian woman, in a library in Paris. He feels that his dream has become reality, a miracle has happened in ordinary life. He feels it, but it scares him and so he retreats from his dream to reality, from the miracle to ordinary life. He takes the beautiful Hungarian woman back to her college just in time before the gate is locked. In "Madelon, az eb" (A Dog Named Madelon), the same Dr Bátky encounters the dream, the miracle, in a London park. She does not torment him, she does not evaporate, and he does not retreat from her. He gets her quite simply and without much fuss. And he could get her at any other time. But he is bored with her and sends her away. It is not the dream, not the miracle, that he sends away, but reality, ordinary life, because he does not recognise the miracle. (See the story on pp. 29-34 of this issue.)
The central character of the novel The Pendragon Legend is again János Bátky, the mild-mannered, shy scholar. But instead of being entangled in romantic affairs while floating in the border zone of two worlds, he is physically transported to another world. From reality to dream, from ordinary life to a miraculous one. From a London library to a castle in Wales. From the imagined fantasy world, inspired by medieval scholarly writings, to a resurrected, real medieval world. The atmo-sphere is decidedly eerie. The resurrected myths of the Rosicrucians are transposed into a 20th-century adventure story, with a sympathetic and faltering literary man from Budapest messing things up a little. The story takes place on at least three levels. With a castle in Wales at stake, there is a case of a contested will, leading to a murder. Hence the detective story. In connection with the murder, ghosts, genuine and feigned alike, roam the night. Hence the ghost story. And the contested will and the murder investigation are set in the cultural history of the entire Rosicrucian Brotherhood. This provides the foundation for the essay-novel. The three together form its structure. A detective story, a ghost story, and an essay-novel, all put between quotation marks. These are three ironic, rather than satiric, parodies, which are montaged. One element is reflected in another. As a result, all three elements are questioned, as well as elevated. And of course, we have a self-portrait and a picture of a historical period. This is in fact an experimental novel: What can you do with the combination, rather than the mixture, of novel types, if you happen to be a writer who loves them all, but have faith in none of them? Or if you happen to be a scholar who knows everything, and is sceptical about all knowledge. He uses his scepticism to check his illusions, and his illusions to get him over his scepticism.
Szerb's second novel was Journey by Moonlight,* an almost purely autobiographical fiction. It is also a novel of adolescence, or at least a nostalgic look back on adolescence from adulthood, confronting dreams and enthusiasms with disillusionment and the fading of memories. It is a gently poetical, lyrico-epical masterpiece about the dilemma of someone not wanting to grow up but not being able to go back either. The hero longingly thinks back to the delicately erotic intimacy of rebellious adolescent gangs, but he cannot reconstruct it. All he can do is investigate what's left. He also investigates what's left of it in the others. Thus the book fits into the history of novels of adolescence, those by Alain-Fournier, Cocteau and the Hungarian Sándor Márai. But Szerb's book also transcends them by looking back on adolescence, rather than going back to it, and by saying a painful farewell to it. Italy is the location of the farewell. The country where the ghosts come out of the alleys. First are his own ghosts. Then the ghosts of the others follow. Mihály, the hero and the narrator, embarks on a journey into his own past. He must peer into the abyss, both psychologically and historically, so as not to fall into it. He meets three varieties of ghosts, three versions of one's wish to settle accounts without breaking off relations. He meets up with the participants of the morbid-erotic games of his youth. One turned the outward layer of the former games into the amoral lifestyle of a confidence man. The second transformed the deep strata of the earlier games into an ultra-moral lifestyle of a monk. The third became a mystical-erotic death demon in the deep strata of the earlier games. And what about the hero and narrator? He woke up with a bitter taste in his mouth, leaving behind both layers of the old games.
A generation's awareness of impending destruction is also evident here, with a historical cataclysm already looming large over the horizon.

Descent to Hell

Dear Sándor, for just this once I turn to you not with a literary problem in mind, but with a pressing personal need. I have been allotted to the digging of trenches here in Balf (outside Sopron), completely cut off from home, and also from any kind of reinforcements. Tóni Szerb was here with me, but sadly, he is no longer with us; we buried him yesterday. Gyuri Sárközi is here, too, and he will join me in this appeal: please send us some money by way of a loan... the best thing would, of course, be something in kind, such as food... I am sorry to bother you with a request such as this, but this is most serious... Embracing you: Gábor Halász... Sanyikám, de profundis... help us, please, if it is possible and if you can. Embracing you: Gyurka Sárközi.

Balf, January 31, 1945.

"De profundis" it was. The letter was written by Gábor Halász, one of the finest of the "essayist generation", Szerb's friend, jointly with the poet György Sárközi, another friend of Szerb's, to Sándor Weöres, one of the great Hungarian poets of that century. I wonder how many letters Halász wrote "not with a literary problem in mind".
Antal Szerb was a Catholic, at a time a practising Catholic, who was considered a Jew under the anti-Jewish laws. After 1943 he was called up to do several stints in a labour battalion. The 42-year-old teacher, who had won numerous awards both as a teacher and as a scholar, was sacked from his job in 1944. He was forced to wear a yellow star. Then, in 1944, he was called up for the duration. Initially he unloaded barges in Budapest; later he was taken to the western borders to dig anti-tank trenches at Balf to hold up Russian armour. He died there of exhaustion, but possibly a violent death. Sárközi and Halász perished, too.
He was full of plans. He left behind manuscripts. Even before the German occupation on March 19, 1944, his last book, the anthology of Greek, Latin, English, French, German and Italian poems that contained both the original poems and their best Hungarian translations appeared. He arranged them thematically: Loners, lovers, sorrows, nights, visions-and so forth. The one hundred poems make up a self-portrait, a veiled and bashful confession. It is about the things one does not like to talk about explicitly. In any event, it collects and preserves values in a cataclysm.
Not every detail of Szerb's descent into Hell is known. There were attempts to rescue him, both in Budapest and at Balf. The letters he wrote to his wife provide us with only a sketchy picture. His tone was initially quite hopeful.
Then came physical deterioration and spiritual surrender. Something must have gone astray in Balf. It could have been an attempt to get him out. His last letter, dated December 6, 1944 makes a reference to it. Then his figure disappears in the night:

...My dear ones, I am infinitely saddened; not only your plan failed, but I did not even get the parcels. In general, the place where we are now, Balf, is awful, and we are in dire straits in every regard. I have no more hope left, except that the war will end soon; this is the only thing that keeps me alive. It is getting dark now and I am really not in the mood to write more. All of you, have faith in that we shall see each other soon, and love your poor Tóni.