János Boris

The Mentor: Andor Németh

 

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Their respective memoirs also indicate that the friendship was far more important to Koestler than it was to Németh. This may appear strange, given the fact that Koestler (at least by the time he wrote The Invisible Writing) was an author of worldwide renown and a political and social celebrity, whereas Németh did indeed fritter away his talents as he tacitly admits in his recollections of Alfred Adler (p. 15.). He is now largely remembered as the friend and biographer of the great poet Attila József and the friend of Arthur Koestler, who regarded him so highly.
There may be several reasons for the latter. For one thing, Németh was in all likelihood the best friend Koestler had in Hungary, his anchor in a native country that he visited only occasionally for the greater part of his life. Here is what he has to say about their relationship:

During the next ten years [i.e. from 1933 on] we were to be linked in an intimate and bizarre friendship which included literary partnership, a shared taste for the absurd sides of existence, and shared misery. During my stay in Budapest, and on later occasions in Switzerland and Paris, we were inseparable, and were known by our mutual friends as 'the firm'. Our association was to end in a ghastly scene which still haunts my dreams.
Andor Németh was the most baroque personality that I have known. In his youth he was regarded as one of the subtlest writers of Hungarian prose of his generation. His tragedy was that owing to incurable laziness, the impossibly high standards that he set himself, and his indifference to popular recognition, he never finished a novel. (The Invisible Writing, p. 168.)

Koestler characterises Németh as eccentric to the core, a true bohemian whose absent-mindedness was legendary, who never even had a home of his own and lived with his mother even at the age forty. He had hosts of friends, though, spending most of his time in literary cafés, especially the Café Hadik, also patronised by the brilliant writer Frigyes Karinthy and his circle. One of his nicknames in that circle was The Frog, (on account of his bulging eyes which rather made him look like a gentle amphibian, as Koestler recalls), or more respectfully, when they came to seek his judgement, as The Critic or The Aesthete. Koestler, during his short stints in Budapest, was also a frequent visitor to the Café Hadik, and his incisive comments on the life of that literary circle are both highly entertaining and thoughtful. He was also greatly amused by Németh's odd lifestyle, especially his relationships to women. (Later on Németh moved in with one of his girlfriends, whom he was to marry later, while keeping a series of other female admirers, of whom his girlfriend seemed almost proud.) Regarding Németh's absentmindedness, the writer Tibor Déry, another friend, recalls that when he did marry after all ("rewarding the year-long faithfulness to him of one of several fiancées by actually marrying her", as Déry maliciously puts it), he spent the wedding night in the bed of another girl, since after the ceremony he had to make a detour to the editorial office, whereupon he promptly forgot by which woman he was more expected.
For Koestler, the friendship always retained something of the teacher - pupil relationship - or even a father - son type one, as Koestler, always quick to come up with an instant Freudian analysis, explains. He first came across a story by Németh, published in 1921 in Bécsi Magyar Újság, the daily paper of Hungarian exiles in Vienna following the 1919 counter-revolution led by Admiral Horthy. The story, which Koestler later described as ingeniously Kafkaesque at a time when neither of the two could have the faintest inkling about Franz Kafka, had a deep influence on Koestler who, after some hesitation, wrote a letter to Németh, one of two adulatory letters he wrote. (The other went to Thomas Mann.) Németh was the first writer that sixteen-year-old Koestler, still in shorts, had ever met when he visited him in his editorial office in 1921, and showed him his first efforts at poetry, written in Hungarian. When the Horthy regime became more liberal, Németh moved back to Budapest and Koestler visited him whenever he was on leave from the Middle East and later from Paris, from his work as a correspondent for the Ullstein newspapers.
Németh was also one of the closest friends of Attila József, arguably the most important Hungarian poet of the 20th century, whom Koestler also became very friendly with, given that at the time of Koestler's visits to Budapest, they were both enamoured of Communism. Another trait that all three of them shared was a close interest in psychoanalysis. The botched attempts of the gravely schizophrenic Attila József to obtain treatment may have been a contributing factor to the poet's tragic suicide, whereas Németh, as his memoirs testify, was a bemused onlooker only.
According to The Invisible Writing, after the Budapest visit and their failed meeting in Switzerland, Németh and Koestler saw each other next in 1939, when Németh suddenly turned up in Paris with his wife. Mančs Sperber, who, in the meantime, had become, as Koestler puts it, "an equally close friend", joined the trio. To Koestler, the two - Sperber, the Adlerian Marxist, with his strict and precise logic, vis ŕ vis Németh, who was "lazy, dreamy and enamoured of the absurd" - seemed like each other's antitheses. Koestler felt between them, "like Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain with his sympathies between the discursive Settembrini and the pathos of Naphta." (p. 413.)

When France collapsed, in 1940, Németh and his wife Juci took refuge in a small village in the South where they lived under police supervision... in the constant fear of arrest and deportation... They just managed not to starve thanks to the ingenuity of Juci who made women's handbags and sold them to the villagers. (p. 413.)
During the war years, Németh, according to his memoirs, saw a lot of the other Hungarian exiles in France. Koestler, however, was not among them, since he chose to escape from France to London where he published the first of his international bestsellers, and became a celebrity both as a kind of resistance hero and as the fervent anti-Communist that in the meantime he had become.

Their last meeting took place in a Paris hotel room in 1946. A whole chapter in The Invisible Writing is devoted to the encounter, entitled "The End of a Friendship" (pp. 406 - 417). By then Koestler, back in Paris for the first time after six years, was at the height of his success: Darkness at Noon was "a best-seller and a lion" and an influence on the political battles in post-Occupation France. His immediate reason for going to Paris was to attend the rehearsals of a play he had written and which Németh had translated into Hungarian (or which they had in fact co-authored). Bar du Soleil had almost been produced in Budapest under the joint name of 'the firm', but Koestler, who had lost the original manuscript during his hurried flight from France in 1943, re-wrote it under the title Twilight Bar. The sole reason for it being produced now in Jean Vilar's theatre was that Koestler's name was then en vogue.
'The firm' was never en vogue, so the play had not been produced up to then. This caused friction from the start. When Koestler arrived in town, he only saw Németh in a café for a few moments, while rushing to a meeting in the company of Vilar, who had waited in a car outside. All there was time for was "a quick embrace and a disjointed staccato conversation. I was whisked off to the theatre." While the Némeths sat around in their hotel, Koestler was constantly in a hurry, rushing from one important meeting to the next, and he even had to put off seeing Németh twice in a row. Németh was as understanding and tried to be as nonchalant about the new differences in their lives as he could. Over the telephone, when Koestler called him next, he went as far as saying,

Look, don't apologise. Juci and I both understand. Our circumstances have not changed. Yours have. It is quite natural that you should be too busy to see us. I only rang because I was hoping you could spare me a few minutes on a rather urgent technical matter. (p. 415)

This was as close to the truth as could be but, needless to say, it did next to nothing to ease Koestler's conscience. They agreed to meet in Koestler's hotel. They sat facing each other in the dimly lit room, but it seemed they had little to say to each other.

It was like talking across the bier of our dead friendship. I talked about England, the Blitz, the political future; it meant nothing to him... He had not written a line during those six years. What for? He could only write in Hungarian. Who would translate it into French? And who would publish it? (p. 415)
They swapped some memories (most of their mutual friends were now dead, killed either by the Nazis or the Communists), and discussed the future, Koestler growing increasingly fidgety in the meantime. He was due to have dinner that night with André Malraux and still had to change. "I was a busy little man," Koestler wryly comments. They talked through the open bathroom door. Then it came to the "urgent technical matter" at which Németh had hinted in their earlier phone conversation. Koestler advised Németh very strongly against returning to Budapest where, he thought, he would probably be facing arrest and, possibly, mortal danger. Németh asked him for a small loan on which he would be able to live in Paris for the next six months. He would write a novel, find his feet again. They parted. Koestler provided the money (he was quite affluent by then) via his London bank, but learned later that as soon as he got hold of it, Németh and his wife boarded a train and returned to Budapest. This was the "ghastly scene" Koestler hinted at earlier in The Invisible Writing and it was the end of their friendship. After that, Koestler never heard from Németh again. He learned indirectly that, unlike a close friend of both, Paul Ignotus, who was arrested on trumped-up charges, Németh was unharmed if almost forgotten. "The only one in our circle," Koestler writes in The Invisible Writing, "who had returned to Hungary and survived the purge."

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János Boris
is Science Director at Gondolat Publishers.
He translated Arthur Koestler's Arrow in the Blue into Hungarian.