Andor Németh

Memories of Koestler

(Excerpts from a Memoir)

...

My friend, Arthur Koestler, returned from the Soviet Union in the summer of 1932.9 He had given lectures at the University of Kharkov, then, at government expense, travelled the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, as far as Vladivostok. Both of his hitherto published books had appeared in Russian and the most diverse of the other languages of the USSR, obviously including Georgian and Uzbek. When he arrived back in Budapest, he visited me quite out of the blue in my customary haunt, the Parliament Coffee-house. Koestler now settled down in Pest and in no time became one of Attila's closest friends.10 They were comrades, for one thing, and had plenty to talk about. Incidentally, Koestler was obviously in contact with other Communists during his time in Pest - László Balog, for example, and maybe with Újvári too. I introduced him to heaps of people. There was one time when I took him along to the Totis's, whose circle was likewise suspected of being distinctly "in bed with" the Communists. We, for our part, were functioning as presumptive authors, for the papers had already announced that the Belvárosi Theatre was going to open with our play in the coming season.
I don't remember too much about those months, but most definitely the fact that this was the same time when a young pianist by the name of Baba Arányi11 appeared in Budapest and took Attila and me out to dinner on Sváb Hill. She had a rich fiancé who also tagged along. Attila picked the menu, and very fastidiously too; what I also remember was that he ordered steak with onions, but it had to be big enough to droop over the edges of the plate. Baba Arányi was a decent sort, leaving a tidy sum of money for Attila when she travelled on.
In the meantime Attila and Judit Szántó had moved in together. I found that out one day when I happened to be seated by the window in a coffee-house, and Attila rapped on the window to beckon me out onto the street: "Let me introduce you to my wife." I can't say I was too happy about that, because I didn't find the woman congenial. They lived in Bajza Street, and I once paid a visit on them there. The atmosphere of that flat is palpable in the poem "Night in the Suburbs". Later on they moved from there to Korong Road, behind the goods yard.
There is one more day that I remember spending with Attila and Koestler, at the Berénys' villa.12 I was in a foul mood at the time because I already owed my landlady two months' rent, and she was badgering me very hard for it, whereas Koestler was just then looking to decamp from Budapest, having been given money to pay his travel expenses by Laci Balog, who ran the Paris Department Store. Seeing what a terrible mood I was in, Koestler suddenly had second thoughts, drew me aside, and thrust the money for the ticket into my hand. "I'll get it from somewhere else," he said. At that I regained my composure, and on Attila's request played through Bartók's Bear Dance five or six times over on the Berénys' piano. Attila wrote his poem of the same title a few days later.

*

Koestler turned up in midsummer 1934, spending roughly three months here, in Hungary.13 He got on my nerves terribly. In the meantime, I had had my heart-to-heart talk with Attila, when Gyula Illyés was invited to Kharkov instead of him. Koestler set Attila's mind at rest chiefly with the argument: "You have to understand that it's not in the Soviet Union's interest to invite Communist writers to the Congress. There's no need to propagandise them!" That reasoning hit home. I ought to mention that Koestler was still a fanatical Communist at this point.

...

The journey went without a hitch, but at Lugano, where I got off the train, both Koestler and my hostess gave me a fairly grim welcome. For a start, the train was an hour and a half late, and that had quite drained Maria Kloepfer, who was extraordinarily nervous. Apart from anything else, a picture had crashed down off the wall, which she read as a bad omen. As a result, we were all in a rather peevish and disagreeable temper on boarding the tram that was to take us from Lugano to Caslano. The next morning, at breakfast - with Koestler not yet present - my hostess greeted me with the information that she was utterly fed up with Koestler, and now what did he do but land me on her. I replied that I was sorry if that was the case, but I could go back. She then took umbrage at this and burst into tears. When Koestler put in his appearance, they immediately began quarrelling - quite obviously on some political question. Maria jumped up and ran off, while Koestler said that he was going to leave straight away. "Then I will too. You don't think I'm staying here on my own!" Koestler then made the decidedly odd proposal that if I was already in Switzerland, why not travel to Zurich, to stay with his wife, rather than go home. He was going to travel to Paris now, but he would drop a line straight away to ask Dörte, his wife, to give me every hospitality. When Maria saw Koestler packing, however, she called me aside and begged me not to put her to shame by leaving myself, when I had only arrived the previous day. I should have a good rest at her place for a few days.
So I stayed and let Koestler go on his way. It was actually only then that I learned I was in the nerve centre of the antifascist movement. Maria Kloepfer was the daughter of an incredibly wealthy Rhineland industrialist, and had been the wife of an actor by the name of Kloepfer, who was very popular at the time and whom she divorced because he joined the Nazi party. Maria Kloepfer was willing to pitch in with her entire fortune to bring about Hitler's downfall. It was with her money that smuggled antifascist books and pamphlets, printed on India paper, were put into circulation in Germany, and she also supported countless underground antifascists. Some of them lived quite close by, including for instance, Albert Ehrenstein, the Expressionist poet, whose short novel, Tubusch, I had great pleasure reading during the war; then there was Alice Berend, whose novel I read when I was at Île d'Yeu; and finally Arthur Holitscher, a distant relation of Cecília Polányi's,14 who had become a German writer, and many more. Naturally, I got to meet all of them over the days that followed, among them a Swiss writer called Humm, who since then has made quite a good name for himself as a critic. Maria had a huge library, which contained not just the entire Marxist literature but anything at all one could want. I mostly read Jean Giono, to whose work Maria drew my attention. This was all very nice, only I found I was unable to leave because the Italians, for some incomprehensible reason, had put my name on a blacklist and so would not allow me to cross the frontier. I dropped in on the consulate at Lugano, where they explained that they could be of no assistance; the matter called for investigation, which might take three or four months at least. In the end, Maria bribed a border guard to smuggle me over into Italy.

...

Tibor Déry, who in 1938 received a two-month prison sentence for translating André Gide's Retour de l'U.R.S.S. into Hungarian, wrote to me to ask that I look Gide up and put in a word for his then unpublished novel The Unfinished Sentence. He wanted Gide to lend his support in getting Gallimard to publish the book in French. Before doing so, I sought out Robert Aron, whom I had met in Albert Gyergyai's rooms at the Eötvös College during his stay in Budapest, in order to find out how I might get in touch with Gide. Aron said that was very simple: I should write to him as Gide was punctilious about replying to every letter. A few days later, I duly got a decidedly odd answer. The letter itself ran roughly as follows: "Dear Sir, I have not been in Paris and returned home only a few days ago. At this moment I am very busy, but at the weekend I shall gladly be at your disposal, so give me a telephone call then to arrange a meeting. Gide" Beneath that he had written as an afterthought: "But you may also call me before then." I then looked at the envelope, on the back of which it said, "Call me at once." I pondered a lot over that curious letter. For a start, if he had changed his mind three times, why did he not throw the first letter away and write in another one that I should give him a call the next day or the day after that? And then why had he not thrown that too away and just written that I should give him a call right away? But then I realised that this was Gide all over. First of all, he had placed no weight on what I had written to him, regarding it as, at best, an unpleasant obligation, though not one he sought to duck. That was the frame of mind in which he wrote the first letter. He had then reflected and been reminded of the unfortunate Déry, so he thought to himself, no, this business has to be settled, and speedily at that. That's when he added the postscript that I could call him earlier. Then last of all, after he had sealed the letter into an envelope, it had occurred to him that maybe Déry was in real trouble, which is when he had written on it that I was to call at once. As to why he did not throw away the previous lines, I came up with two explanations. The more serious one: Gide's total honesty. He had thought, let the recipient see the whole psychological process that had taken place in him. That's the essence of it, but another part is that Gide also had the very human vanity that he did not like to erase anything once he had written it down. Anything documented his psyché, and was thus interesting and worth preserving.
After all that, I paid Gide a visit. He was living in the garret of a tenement house, in what I would call little more than a student's lodgings. (Here I may point out to anyone who is unaware of it, that his whole life long he lived in chateaux, being a big property owner, not just one but several, and even in Paris he had a splendid permanent residence, but out of Christian humility he decided at one point that he would live on his own, not accepting services from anyone, even employees, and at the same time auctioning off his entire library, much of which was composed of rarities, signed copies from all the major writers around the world, donating the proceeds to charity.) The door, of course, was opened - since he had no servants - by Gide himself, wearing a dressing-gown. He must have been about seventy by then, but I was startled by his youthful appearance. He was a tall, vigorous man, who moved around briskly and purposefully; his brow was distinctly Goethean.
We sat down at a table, with me facing Gide. I suspect he deliberately seated his visitors so that they would be in the light while he was in shadow. I began by saying what I had to say, struggling mightily with the French as I did so, and therefore rather dully and flatly, of course, and obviously with many grammatical errors. Gide paid no heed to that but listened, calmly and patiently, meanwhile paying attention - and quite clearly paying closer attention - to how I was saying it rather than what I actually said. In a few sentences, I sketched out what Déry's big, three-volume work was about and what its significance was. Gide responded that from what I had told him he didn't doubt it was an important book, but - and no one should take this amiss - he just didn't have the time to read works that were as lengthy as that, particularly when they were poorly translated. As for the Gallimard Press, they were not very likely at the present moment, given the tense international situation, to publish a bulky Hungarian novel, however interesting it might be. Not long before, he had recommended that they translate the magnum opus of the Austrian writer Robert Musil, about which he had heard many good things, but Gallimard had not accepted even that recommendation. He therefore saw little sense in putting in a word for Déry's novel with them.
He said all this after having given it careful thought, with unsparing candour, after which he got purposefully to his feet and saw me to the door. I thought that must have been the end of the matter, yet two or three weeks later Aladár Tamás, one of György Bölöni's crowd,16 caught me in the street and informed me that Gide had remitted a very substantial amount of money to the Communist party with the request that they forward it to Tibor Déry. Whether he actually received it, I don't know. Obviously, by then it was no longer possible to send it directly. That doesn't surprise me, because after the war I learned from the writer Jolán Földes that during the early years of the war Koestler managed to collect and send quite a considerable sum of money for us but it never reached us.