Miklós Vajda

"If Any Harm Comes of This, I'll Kill You!"

The True Story of Six Hungarian Poets' Grand Tour of Britain in 1980

In memoriam János Pilinszky

I can't pretend that we were close, but we were on friendly terms. I first made the acquaintance of János Pilinszky, who was some ten years older than I and already had a name as a poet, at the house of Béni Ferenczy during the mid-Fifties. Along with friends we had in common, poets and writers, we both often dropped in there, because the Danube-bank studio of that master sculptor and, for all of us, paternal friend was a blissful island of sage cheer, calm and true art in those abominable times. János, who like so many other poets was barred from being published on ideological grounds, was then working as an outside proof-reader for Szépirodalmi Kiadó, the largest of the state-owned publishing houses, where I myself was employed as an editor. A decade later, when I became literary editor of The New Hungarian Quarterly (as it was called then), János would occasionally drop in for a chat at the editorial offices on Rákóczi út. Over time, I had managed to persuade a number of English and American poets to produce their versions of modern Hungarian poems from 'roughs' prepared by Hungarian-born translators, and had published decent translations of a fair number of Pilinszky's works done by the likes of the outstanding American poets, William Jay Smith and Daniel Hoffman, even before Ted Hughes was prompted and assisted by János Csokits to produce the volume of Selected Poems put out by Carcanet New Press in 1976. Though Pilinszky did not speak English, he was still interested in the fate of his poems beyond the linguistic barrier. He would scrutinise and savour the English texts, somewhat in the manner of a composer who listens closely to one of his works being played in the far distance because he wishes to know how it sounds.
A while later, a body of the translated poems that had first appeared in the Quarterly were collected in a single volume, Modern Hungarian Poetry, edited by myself, that was jointly published, to considerable acclaim, by Columbia University Press in New York and Corvina Press in Budapest. As a result, through Smith's initiative, the US PEN Club and State Department invited four Hungarian poets to undertake a big tour to give a series of bilingual readings in America in the autumn of 1977. Whilst that counted as sensational back here in Hungary, over there, in the States, it was at best a curiosity. The four elect were Sándor Weöres and his poet wife Amy Károlyi, along with István Vas and Ferenc Juhász. This was followed three years later, in the spring of 1980, by an invitation from the British Council to undertake an English tour. Six poets were invited: the same four again plus Gyula Illyés and Pilinszky, but Illyés then had to cry off due to illness and so, after lengthy persuasion, Ágnes Nemes Nagy agreed to take his place. The destinations were to be London, Glasgow and Bangor, that wonderful little university town in Wales, with a total of seven readings scheduled over the twelve days of the trip. My own job, as it had been in America, was to provide a short introductory talk and present the poets at the readings.

Let no one be taken in by Goethe's sunny account of his Italian journey. Poets are bad travellers - especially in a group, as I shall testify here. Sensitivities, overwrought at the best of times, may be wound up still further when they are abroad, and may reach hysteria pitch when you least expect it. As we shall see, they also seem to be prey to mishaps, possibly bizarre but turning out well. Even as they strapped on the safety belts on the aircraft, these huge but volatile egos were no doubt pondering how they were going to stand the company of a second, let alone a third member of the party, to say nothing of the fourth, in a civilised and, indeed, convivial fashion whilst they were locked in together during the long, long trip. They vie with one another even in their dreams, and even chatter that looks to be all smiles is haunted by undying memories of gifts of personally signed books for which no thank-you letter was returned, or rude comments that had been relayed to their ears, with unvoiced jealous passions and twinges of conscience shooting about in the charged atmosphere. They can hardly wait to grab a private word with someone who stands outside this vanity fair - in this case myself - to spill their views about this or that statement made by one or another member of the party (the unvarnished notes that I made about this each evening I would never publish, out of the love or respect which I hold for each of them). A not entirely innocuous quadrille seemed to be constantly on the go within the group, with each member forming a temporary alliance with this, that and a third, on the strength of a part-stifled sardonic smile or comment, against the fourth or the others, with the fronts shifting all the time. Capping all that was the circumstance that not only were we travelling abroad, but these were not just any old places but the very bastions of the evil imperialists, and with the consent of higher party-state organs moreover, and so we constituted a delegation. We were representing not just ourselves, Hungarian literature, our homeland, but in the eyes of the public, whether we liked it or not, also the very régime - that supposedly happiest barracks of the Socialist bloc behind the Iron Curtain - which each of us individually had a thousand and one reasons for hating and despising from the bottom of our hearts. So even though we were now outside, on official leave, we were still inside that place which we were always trying to remain on the outside of.
Sándor Weöres alone held himself far aloof from all this. He totally lacked even a drop of vanity, jealousy, grievance or any other base passion, despite the fact that he too had been unable to publish for a substantial period. He was not terribly interested in where he happened to be, or with whom, at any given moment, which is not to say that he did not notice, and sometimes comment on, the things that were going on. He was uniformly pleasant and courteous with everyone at all times. Many was the occasion, each and every day, that I would be taken aback, on reaching for a cigarette, to see him smartly hasten over, and always get there, sometimes almost at a trot, even from the furthest corner of whatever place we were in, simply in order to offer me a match - he, the greatest genius whom I have been privileged to know up close - before I, a nobody in comparison, had a chance to get out my lighter. Of course, I was not the only one to be accorded that and many similar gestures of solicitude, for he was the same with everyone else. Weöres was seemingly unconcerned about the success and fate of his work. It is apparent from his poems that he was fully aware of his poetic greatness, but he looked on his own person as merely the vehicle, the insignificant channel, of that greatness. It was his wife, Amy Károlyi, who kept him tethered to earth; without her, it is more than likely that Weöres would have just taken wing or forgotten to eat and died of starvation, though possibly not before drinking himself to death. It is perhaps the most considerable of Amy's merits, greater even than that of her delicate, intimately feminine lyric verse, that she was able to keep this impish sprite of a man in a fit state to be able to compose one of the most scintillating of all poetic oeuvres of the twentieth century, so immense in its scope, depth an variety.
Pilinszky, too, was a being who hovered a span or two above the ground, but unlike Weöres he did not just contemplate existence, he suffered from it, envisaging a Christ-like fate for himself. His poetry was the distilled essence, matchless in its heft and compactness, of tragedies, tortures, crimes and punishments, failures, loneliness, desperate faith and hopelessness in a desolate, dismal, devastated world. There is not a single spark of hope in the monumental doomsday vision of Apocrypha, one of the supreme and most enigmatic compositions in the whole of modern Hungarian poetry. He wrote the poem in 1952, and it took several weeks. He said later in an interview that "I had the feeling that I am holding a discus and am spinning with it and it's almost tearing my arm off but I must not let it fly, because then it would fly in the wrong direction. In general, a poem is good when, like a discus, you suddenly let it go and it flies away into freedom." Even his profound faith carried a sense of guilt: "We are God's crucifixion," he wrote in one of his notebooks, "My existence crucifies God." This solitary soul, bowed under the burden of this huge crime, puritanical and prone to mysticism though he may have been, was nevertheless also fond of success and company whenever he happened not to be under the cloud of depression, loving at these times to talk, laugh and revel in the limelight. He was easily hurt, naďve and wise all at once; on his good days an inquisitive and captivating mind, gentle and yet domineering in his own way; and always a law unto himself, and thus totally unpredictable.
István Vas was the real doyen of the group. An emotional, yet staunchly rationalistic lyric poet who, after the avant-garde and Communist detours of his younger years, cultivated a traditional poetry of experiences, in fixed, often song-like forms and at a very high standard. Vas worshipped women and travelling, lapped up European culture of all kinds, and loved to be surrounded by young writers. He penned a brilliant autobiography and shrewdly observed essays, whilst his wide-ranging work as a translator, slightly irritating though it could sometimes be due to the traces it bore of the Germanically tinged language of Hungary's assimilated Jews, was more notable for its brilliance of execution (this is also discernible as an intriguingly individual seasoning in his original work). He was the object of constant leg-pulling and good-natured chivvying on account of his long-standing friendship with György Aczél, the supreme guardian and omnipotent manipulator of culture and ideology in Hungary, second only to János Kádár in the Communist Party command - a tie that he dared not, could not, and did not even wish to repudiate, for in the terrible autumn of 1944, when the terror unleashed by the home-grown Nazi militias of the Arrow Cross Party was reaching its horrific pitch, it was Aczél who, though a Jew himself, had donned an Arrow Cross uniform to pull Vas and a number of other friends out of forced-labour brigades and thereby undoubtedly saved the life of this epicurean poet, totally unfitted as he was for physical work, starvation and bodily suffering. In my own mind, I had classified Vas as a weak and, I dare say, cowardly man, yet still a person whom I was fond of and respected even so, until the day that I learned that he was, to the best of my knowledge, the sole person who in 1950, when the Stalinist reign of terror in Hungary - the next nadir in the country's modern history - was at its most ferocious, had had the guts to stand up in a party meeting and announce that he was leaving the party because he could not agree with its policy. To do such a thing then was quite unthinkable, truly tempting Providence, comparable, let us say, to someone standing up in church and reviling God during the time of the Inquisition. In the horror-stricken silence that had followed this statement, Vas had laid his party membership book on the table and left the room. That cost him an enforced silence that lasted several years, but he could be happy that he got away with his skin in one piece, for in those days a person could land a lengthy prison sentence for much lesser crimes - a political joke, say, or listening to the BBC's broadcasts. (My own mother was doing time in prison at that very time on utterly ridiculous trumped-up charges).

By the time of the American trip, or in other words by the latter half of the 1970s, Ferenc Juhász could already be said to have been a historical monument of himself. The only one of the group that made the two tours, aside from me, who is still alive, he is now a living monument on which severe damage has been wrought not by time but by his own hand. His is a strange and tragic story. The massive social mobilisation that followed Hungary's defeat in the Second World War, directed as it was by the authorities on high and soon made part of the Communist Party's power politics, assisted him to rise out of his simple rural artisan family background. His early poems, with their fresh-voiced, naďve praise of the new world that was being inaugurated, showed considerable talent. As the Communist dictatorship showed its true face after the takeover of power in 1948, with the glaring incongruity between the propaganda and reality becoming ever more obvious in every sphere of life, Juhász turned his back on politics and, withstanding the pressure, and indeed blackmail, that was exerted on him by his party to write poetry that fulfilled its socialist-realist agitation purposes, proclaimed a wholly innovatory mythico-metaphorical approach in which large-scale poems welded devices borrowed from folk poetry to a prodigious fantasy for modern imagery with a searing, pathos-laden emotional charge to portray the world in a cosmic setting. That was both Juhász's individual take on the world as well as that of mid-twentieth-century man and a nation wallowing in the squalid purgatory of Socialism. On both the reading tours, each time that the dramatic passages of his monumental ballad The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries out at the Gate of Secrets (1956) were sounded, the very air in the auditorium would stand still as the audience held its collective breath listening to this poet and member of first-generation intelligentsia read out his epochal paean to the hard-won glory and tragedy of a disappearing ancient rural way of life and the birth pains of the nascent modern world, based as it is on the same ancient Romanian folk ballad from which Bartók had earlier drawn the text for his Cantata Profana: the efforts by the sons who have been changed into stags to respond to their mother's call to return home are in vain, as the span of their antlers prevents them from passing through the door to the family hearth. When W. H. Auden read the translation of it that the Canadian poet Kenneth McRobbie had made for an impending anthology, he noted in the preface that he wrote for the volume: "I am convinced that The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries out at the Gate of Secrets by Ferenc Juhász is one of the greatest poems written in my time." The eternal, impassive processes of Nature, and more particularly, the unending cycle of destruction and its attendant suffering, death, decomposition, and the regeneration which sprang from that, was a subject that had greatly preoccupied Juhász even in his earlier poetry. After 1956, he developed that vision into the vast compositions that he himself called epic poems although, speaking as they do about his parents, his youth, his love, even about flowers or flying, they are more gigantic lyrical outpourings, lists, catalogues, litanies or jeremiads than true epic poems. With their matchless linguistic fertility and the flood of enthrallingly precise, detailed images gained by elevating the knowledge of micro- and macrocosms achieved by modern physics, astronomy and biology into the vocabulary of poetry, they lay out the same things before us, over and over again, with a near-manic intensity. In time, the torrential abundance of the not uncommonly somewhat sado-masochistic imagery broke through the frameworks of the grand constructions to begin living a life of its own. Juhász's unique poetry overflowed its own possibilities and, from the latter half of the 1960s, switched increasingly into self-repetition, later verging on self-parody. Above all for Mr and Mrs Vas and myself within the group, who had once been close friends of his, this was accompanied by a distressing change in personality as Juhász reached a point where, incapable of renewing his inspiration, he sought refuge from his critics in the party's embrace. György Aczél recognised the great opportunity that this gave to bind the widely admired poet to the party once and for all: he issued an edict that the media would not be permitted to carry any adverse criticism of Juhász. That protection and holy-cow status lasted to the very end of the régime and was the final nail in his remaining credence. Juhász is now a forgotten poet, despite the fact that his pre-1965 work unarguably ranks amongst the greatest.
Ágnes Nemes Nagy was fairly close to Weöres and, particularly, Pilinszky; she was forever arguing, as a tease, with Vas, but she loathed Juhász as an ex-Communist and folk poet of dubious character, a pathological windbag and Aczél protégé, and she did not take much trouble to hide her opinion. With her authoritative but straight-talking demeanour, cool intellect, and schoolmarmish punc-tiliousness, she was the easiest of my travelling companions. She, like Pilinszky, had started publishing whilst the war was still going, then after it, under the flag of the magazine Újhold (New Moon) that was started in 1946 by her husband, the essayist Balázs Lengyel, she pulled together that generation of promising young writers (Pilinszky amongst them) who looked on literature not as a political terrain but as an artistic opportunity for dissecting the predicaments of human existence. The magazine came under fire from the outset as the prime target of György Lukács, the Marxist philosopher, who had recently settled back in Budapest after more than a decade of exile in Moscow, and who regarded literature in the spirit of Lenin's dictum that saw literature as "part and parcel of universal party work". Attacks in that vein were sustained right up until the magazine was finally banned in 1948, which at one and the same time marked a long-term muzzling for both Nemes Nagy and her husband. "I daily struggle with existence," wrote this famous beauty in one of her early poems. She thought that the task of the twentieth-century poet is "to explore and incorporate into poetry those contents of the human consciousness that remained hitherto unknown or untapped." For her, poetry was a delight as well as a craft. "Craft of mine, and delight, / how you sustain me / between morality / and dread, dark and light" ("To My Craft", tr. Hugh Maxton), and, when the dread had set in, she firmly stuck to morality and never compromised. By the start of the 1980s, when we went to London, that daily struggle with existence had given rise to a body of work that, relatively slight though it may have been in quantity, was all the more impressive in its weight and significance, masterpieces of objective lyric verse that created a new school which had a regenerative effect on Hungarian poetry. Despite her much-cited statement that "every poem is inexplicable", striving to give expression to "unnamed emotions", her essays and the marvellous analyses of poems that she produced, based in part on her own experience, now constitute obligatory reading for anyone interested in the subject.

So much, then, by way of a necessary preamble to a fuller understanding of what actually happened on that 1980 tour of Britain. It is, perhaps, already apparent that the group which set off on the trip was no ordinary collection of poets, but each was a world unto himself or herself, spinning around its own axis, with its own climate and past. If Illyés too had been able to make the journey, then the full spectrum of contemporary Hungarian poetry would have gained a platform in Britain through its leading representatives. By then, all of them could count on published English translations, the majority exceptionally good, of a fair number of poems, primarily through the offices of The New Hungarian Quarterly and later the aforementioned Columbia UP anthology, though Weöres and Juhász had also shared a 1970 volume, Selected Poems, in the Penguin Modern European Poets series, which also included the likes of Prévert, Apollinaire, Rilke, Akhmatova, Zbigniew Herbert and Enzensberger. The literary editor, who had a big share in achieving this, after many years of work, and who was now simultaneously functioning as friend, organiser, route master, interpreter, M.C. and general psychological crutch, could take a certain pride in having made the right decision, enduring countless affronted protests, to reject, once and for all, the translation efforts that were offered in patriotic zeal by enthusiastic Hungarian-born dilettantes who were domiciled outside the country, in favour of publishing only the work of reputed Anglo-American poets, produced from rough translations. Poetry translations can only ever be done by a poet, and into his or her native tongue - that was, and remains to this day, this editor's unshakeable conviction. The exchanges of air-mail letters and international phone calls, and the occasional personal meetings that this protracted labour involved, even attracted the attention of the secret police, and in the course of an attempt to recruit him, the editor received dazzling offers of scholarships, financial support, even lengthy stays abroad, in return for supplying certain bits of intelligence... My widowed mother, who had only been set free on a suspension, fled to America in 1956, and, as they controlled the licence to mutual visits, I was an easy target for blackmail - of which they did not fail to remind me. Only intervention by the editor-in-chief, who had friends in the highest quarters, rescued me from the fate of having to sacrifice my honour on the altar of poetry.
In the end, this trip to Great Britain turned out to be a veritable small triumphal procession for Hungarian poetry, even though the group was afflicted by a series of unexpected blows, absurd accidents and grotesque episodes. The most serious of these came on the very first evening and befell Pilinszky, who was mugged in a London street. This left its mark on the remainder of the tour, badly upsetting everyone to the point of frank hysterics. The next morning, István Vas, with whom I had been friendly for decades, and who was by no means the sort of man whom one would associate with physical violence, stepped up to me in the hotel lobby and, grabbing me by the lapels with astonishing ferocity, literally hoisted me off the ground with one arm as he hissed, "If any harm comes of this, I'll kill you!" He then tossed me aside like a rag and stalked off like the hero in some action film. I was so stunned that I couldn't get a word out. Later on, I realised that he was actually concerned for his wife, Piroska, who was accompanying him whilst still recovering from a heart attack. It looks as if I'm going to be held responsible even for blood clots forming, I thought to myself. Piroska, who was not only a first-rate painter who had more recently shown herself to be a witty writer into the bargain, but who also proved extremely effective as an author and purveyor of gossip, was right now playing both sides against the middle in the said quadrille, keeping the shifting alliances in constant motion.
Vas himself was the next victim. On the night before our appearance at the Riverside Studios in London, seen by all as the high spot of the tour, he slipped and fell whilst making his way to the bathroom, hitting his head on the corner of the wardrobe so badly that it was necessary to call a doctor at once. The nasty, heavily bleeding gash that he had received required several stitches, and the poet was ordered not to go on the stage the following day. That obliged Juhász to take his place in reading out Vas's poems in the original Hungarian.
The following day it was the turn of the Weöreses. In the middle of the night I was awoken by Amy's terrified voice on the phone. Three total strangers had broken into their room and were searching under the bed. "For God's sake do something right away!" By the time I reached the room the strangers had disappeared. This was repeated twice over, and only in the morning did I discover that whilst we had been away in Scotland and Wales, the hotel had, by mistake, double-booked the room to members of an Irish hurling team, who, in a blind-drunk state, had been looking in vain for a bag under the Weöreses' bed.
On the final evening we dined at the home of the extraordinarily helpful and kindly Hungarian cultural attaché, who had accompanied us throughout the trip. "I've heard so much from all of you," this truly decent man announced after the meal, "that I should like you to hear a little something from us." Whereupon he and his equally delightful Russian wife produced a guitar, or maybe it was a balalaika, and set about singing a string of sentimental Soviet songs in Russian. So it was that a group of the giants of modern Hungarian poetry, doing all they could to avoid catching one another's eye, coughing and spluttering from suppressed laughter, came to be serenaded, in a scene worthy of the pen of a Mroz©ek or Örkény, slap bang in the middle of London's elegant Belgravia.
Later that night, Ferenc Juhász was roused from a sleeping pill-induced stupor by a loud banging on the door. Staggering to open it, he was confronted by two drunken Englishmen, who linked arms with him and, with shouts of glee, began to drag the protesting, pyjama-clad poet towards the lift. Juhász, who did not speak a word of English, said in the morning that it had taken every ounce of his strength to shake them off. I subsequently found out that a national convention of waste-paper dealers was being held in the hotel, and two tipsy dealers who were looking for a drinking companion had obviously mistaken the room number. I shall refrain from adding the obvious remark. Let it suffice to say that this episode was an appropriately surrealistic note on which to end the tour.

But to go back to that very first night: I was awakened at around two o'clock in the morning by a knocking on the door of my hotel room. A clearly shaken János Pilinszky, white as a sheet and trembling all over, stumbled in. "I've been robbed!", he muttered several times over, and then slumped onto the bed. Only with the greatest difficulty was I able to drag out of him what had happened. Following the big reception that had been thrown in our honour, Pilinszky had been taken by the poet Peter Jay, his publisher and one of his translators, to have a meal in Soho, then still a rather seedy district, full of bars, peepshows and porn-flick joints, as well as many decent little restaurants. They had to converse in French as János did not speak any English. Around midnight, Jay, who lived in Greenwich, suddenly leapt to his feet and, with a cry of "I'm going to miss the last train!", rushed off, leaving János, who had no idea where he was, to his own devices. He paid the bill, then left the restaurant to look for a taxi. From that point onwards, all he remembered was coming to on the pavement between two parked cars. What had happened - whether he had been struck or had just passed out - and how long he had lain on the ground, he couldn't say. He had hailed a taxicab, which had brought him back to the hotel, the name of which, fortunately, had lodged in his memory, but when he had come to pay the fare, he discovered that the more than six hundred pounds in cash he had brought with him from Hungary was missing from his wallet.
The daily allowance that our hosts, the British Council, were giving us was still in his trouser pocket, so he had been able to pay the taxi driver. Nevertheless, by the time he reached this point in the story, tears were flooding from his eyes.
He was unable to account for the fact that the wallet had been placed back in the inside pocket of his jacket - a courtesy one does not usually associate with muggers. There was no obvious sign of violence on his body, so it seemed unlikely he had been knocked down. He did not know the name of either the restaurant or the street. There was a receipt for the six hundred pounds that he had purchased back home, so it was all above board, because he had been intending to buy for himself a hi-fi system and a large number of recordings of J. S. Bach's music. It was not so much the loss of the money that mortified him, he explained, more the brutal manner in which he had been stripped of it, an innocent made victim, and the stark reality of human nastiness.
"I need to phone my wife in Paris right away," he said suddenly (this was when he happened to be in his second marriage), and immediately picked up the receiver to ask the hotel switchboard, in French, to put him through to the number in Paris. I did not listen to the conversation as I went out into the corridor. Lines from Pilinszky's poems were running through my head, imagery of shocking power that conveys his horror of physical contact. And the two-liner "For Life": "The bed is common. The pillow is not." By the time I returned to the room, he was lying on my bed, somewhat calmer, in the foetal position.
"My love life, you know," he said in a near-whisper, with a sadly dismissive wave of the hand, "is a desert. A big nothing." That irresistibly put me in mind of the close of his great poem "The Desert of Love": "And hope / is like a tin-cup toppled into the straw." I sat down beside him and tried to console him. At this point he interrupted me in a reedy, high-pitched, almost childlike wailing tone to ask something extremely simple and touching: "Dear Miklós, would you be so kind as to stroke my head?" And then he closed his eyes.
I have to admit that this moved me almost to the point of bringing tears to my own eyes. I began stroking Pilinszky's head, but even in the midst of the emotions of the moment I could not help perceiving the situation in all its bizarreness. It crossed my mind that the last time I had stroked anyone's head, it had been that of my retriever, Zsuzsi, who had died ten years or so before; for her, too, a person could not give more. I grasped at once the pitch of suffering that he must have reached, the extremity of loneliness, for someone to yearn for an elemental human touch like that, for him to feel the need for comfort even from a not particularly close friend like myself. I was also well aware that had anyone else been in my place, János would have made the same request.
I don't know any grown-up man, myself included, who would be capable of that same degree of extreme self-revelation and unashamedness in any state of distress or moment of desperation or helplessness. At whatever cost, most of us maintain a sense of our own dignity, the carefully cultivated face that we turn to the outside world, to other people, until the day we die. This unforgettably weird and poignant moment suddenly also cast a new light on Pilinszky's poems. Their incomparable power derives from that same vulnerability of totally exposed frailty.
For a few minutes we remained there, wordless, on the hotel bed as I stroked János Pilinszky's head. Then the poet suddenly raised himself, grasped my hand and pressed it as he gazed at me with eyes closed. That's right, gazed at me.
It was one of his habits to signal his thanks with his eyes closed and a silent play of his features, all accompanied by a slight, wry smile and a rapid series of tiny nods of the head. With that, he left the room.

The next morning I found a completely different Pilinszky down in the hotel lobby. He was relating his adventure to the others, with expansive gestures and almost laughing at himself. The Hungarian embassy had already been informed about the incident, whilst the consul had put in a call to the police. They interviewed János and took statements. For us it was then off to Glasgow, where we had a reading arranged for the following evening. On the train, János, who hardly ate anything but rather chain-smoked and drank one coffee after another, was soon sozzled. He was taking strong antidepressant medication, but we were unable to dissuade him from drinking. The whisky made him euphoric, and he looked as if he felt on top of the world, telling stories and chattering the entire journey, taking full benefit of everyone's wish to go easy on him and protect him.
Three days later, on returning to the hotel after the banquet that had been put on in Bangor following the reading there, our escort in Wales, as a parting gesture, handed over an envelope to János. She explained that the London newspapers had written up the incident in Soho, and the restaurant's staff, scandalised to hear about it, had made a collection in order to provide at least some slight compensation for the amount stolen from the Hungarian poet. There was Ł15 in the envelope. In Wales at that time, then undergoing a wave of renascent nationalism, it was not unusual for holiday cottages that had English owners to be targets for arson attacks. The restaurant's upright waiters and cooks, it appeared, were expressing solidarity with the sons of another suppressed small nation. János, somewhat tipsy again, was all but carried away by his feelings of deep gratitude and, seeing it as a message from Christ, stuffed the envelope in his pocket.
At breakfast the next day, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, who up till then had been the one rock of sobriety and sage calm amidst the upheavals going on within the group, informed János that he must return the gift.
"What are these Welsh going to think," she said, "if a Hungarian poet who is travelling with six compatriots, and with an official from the embassy on hand as well, feels obliged to accept financial assistance from them? That we couldn't do anything to help you? You must thank them for the handsome gesture, but you are going to give the money back - and straight away," she declared with a sternness that brooked no argument.
János leapt to his feet, white as a sheet.
"You want to drum up a kangaroo court over me!" he screeched. "A new Rajk trial! I protest! That money was given out of the best of intentions! For me to hand it back would cut them to the quick, in just the same way as I was cut to the quick by the robbery!"
Ágnes was not one to be so readily deflected.
"Well, we all know that you, my angel, imagine you are Jesus Christ personified and think you can do anything you please. We are in a foreign country now, however." She called everyone who was close to her "my angel", it was a pet phrase with her. Having said which, she turned to the rest of us: "We should vote on it. Everyone should speak their mind, because this affects each one of us. You start," and she pointed to Vas.
I have rarely heard such a pile of hot air and prevarication as then ensued from one mouth after the other. János did not even pay any attention, sunk as he was in his misery. Ágnes was right, of course, but everyone felt sorry for János, and no one had the heart to force him to return the money, but then again no one dared or wished to say that out loud and clear.
Ágnes understood this perfectly well from all the cavilling. She cast a withering look around at us and got up from the table.
On the train back to London, where five appearances had been lined up for us, János was again the worse for drink. He asked me to tell the British Council representative that he did not wish to have any part in the remainder of the tour and was going to fly back to Budapest the next day. Meanwhile, would they arrange to send a psychiatrist to see him in the hotel that evening. Shortly after that, he added that as soon as we reached London he was going to put in a call to Aczél and inform him that he was not going to accept the Kossuth Prize that he had been awarded. That was the only means of protest he could think of: to deprive himself of a great satisfaction.
Needless to say, I did not comply with his request. I did not pass on his message. I guess he did not put in that call to Aczél either; at any rate, he did accept the Kossuth Prize. Once we were back in London, he was again caught up by the urge to appear in public and its attendant delights. On each occasion he was entirely transfigured; the irresistible manner in which he delivered his poems, rough as it may have been at the edges, and the indefinable aura that radiated from his personality were a huge hit with audiences, even amongst those who did not understand a word of the poems in their original language.
I do not know if he left any written record of that bizarre journey, which in his own mind, of course, he immediately assimilated as yet another station on his personal calvary. He died one year later, just as he was preparing to travel to London again to take part in an international poetry festival. Maybe this time, struggling with another poem, he just could not let the discus go, and flew away holding on to it.

Miklós Vajda
an essayist and translator of British, American and German fiction and drama, is the Editor of The Hungarian Quarterly.