"The Contact Has Always Remained"

A Conversation between Pál Ignotus and Arthur Koestler, Broadcast by the Hungarian Service of the Voice of America in December 1967

Pál Ignotus: Here we are in the living room of Arthur Koestler's London home in front of the fireplace, looking at a fine Courbet showing a bellowing cow, in the company of Arthur Koestler and a friend working the taperecorder for the Voice of America. Conventionally, I ought to say now that Arthur Koestler needs no introduction, but this would not be true. It is true that he is a world-famous author who comes from Hungary, and anyone who knows the obsessive interest we Hungarians take in the international achievements of our compatriots, might easily assume that the details of Koestler's life are far better known in the Fészek Artists' Club in Budapest than here in London or in the village in Tyrol where he spends most of his summers. That instinctive or mechanical assumption about the omniscience of the people of Budapest, however, does not apply to Koestler. It is unlikely that they would know much about a writer whose works may perhaps ring a bell, but they never read them, Hungarian being one of the few languages in which Koestler has never been published. So people had to stay content with the fifty-some other languages in which his works are available. Still, I think this hurts him, because even though he has never written anything in Hungarian, he nevertheless considers Hun-garian as his native language, and is keenly aware that he owes far more to the Hungarian cultural community than the mere fact that he was born in that geographical area. More than one chapter of his autobiography bears witness to this attitude, and my first question is also concerned with this.
Tell me, please, did Hungarian life and Hungarian literature have any lasting effect on your writing, and if so, could you put your finger on what this is?

Arthur Koestler: I lived in Hungary till the age of nine, then my parents moved to Vienna, but my first literary memory is the poetry of Endre Ady, and sometimes I wonder myself why, even if my Hungarian is rusty, I can still speak the language, although I no longer master some of the nuances. But even though I have lived outside Hungary physically, the contact has always remained.

P. I.: Anyone who knows you even superficially can confirm that you speak Hungarian fluently, even if stumbling occasionally. Let me reveal here the secret that the two of us, whenever we meet, always speak Hungarian, and I suppose we would think it an affectation to use any other language, unless there are non-Hungarians present. I have a feeling that your later contacts with Hungary, complementing the memories of the nine-year- old child in one way or another, brought a special colour to your writing and life. In your memoirs we find a strange, long list of people with whom you came into contact.
It includes poets like Attila József, and the humorist Frigyes Karinthy, the art patron Lajos Hatvany, poor Endre Havas, the poet and journalist who was beaten to death by the Communist political police, and, first and foremost, the man who was your liaison, as it were, to Hungarian cultural life, the writer and critic Andor Németh.

A. K.: Yes, even though I spent only a mere couple of months at home in 1934 and 1935, tried to keep abreast of what was going on, and, of course, Andor Németh had a very great influence on me. I learned most of what I know about literary criticism, the appreciation of literary works, from him.

P. I.: It might be interesting to write a book in Hungarian about who learned what from Andor Németh. Whenever he discovered something interesting, beautiful or odd in anything, he always reacted to it. I think in that sense he may have acted as a guide to Koestler, Attila József, even to Karinthy at times and, sometimes I felt, to me as well.

A. K.: But how much of an influence did Németh have on Attila József?

P. I.: When we were planning the journal Szép Szó, there was a moment when Attila József, who, even though he never wanted to be, could be quite reckless at times, told me that what he would like best would be if Szép Szó were written by Németh from beginning to end. So he had moments like that too. In any case, he certainly learned a lot from him, and was also terribly fond of him. You were also a friend of Attila József, and wrote about that friendship in your memoirs. Interestingly, I think the translations which you did with Laurie Lee were the first translations of Attila József's poems to appear in English. They may not be perfect but I think they are still the best that were published. Apart from your great affection for Attila József, can you tell me what made you try to translate him, and what do you think of the attempt?

A. K.: Well, I tried and tried, but I don't think I succeeded. On the island of Ischia, my neighbour was Wystan Auden, perhaps the finest poet in England today. Well, I recited the poems to him. "Nice, quite interesting," he said without any enthusiasm. "Interesting, very interesting." Then I read the Hungarian originals to him, so he could hear the poem, the deep vowels, then read two poems in English, at which he said, "Throw them away, throw them away; the music is not there at all." But I did try to convey some of their meaning. This is no false modesty, but somehow the structure of the Hungarian language is such that the music gets almost completely lost in a translation. When I read the originals to Auden, "On the Outskirts of Town" (A város peremén) was one, and when we got to "when storm rages," where in Hungarian you actually hear the thunder, he heard it too, and told me this was impossible, no use. This is like trying to put music into words.

P. I.: This is very interesting, though pretty intimidating to anyone toying with the idea of translating Attila József.
Arthur Koestler is a versatile author, and, ever since he started to write, he has been inbued with scientific and political interests, a novelist's vision, a researcher's quest for knowledge, a journalist's curiosity, so it is not really right to divide his career into two or three stages according to the subjects he wrote about. Still, with some overgeneralisation and simplification one might say that in the last decade and half or so, his attention has been mainly focused on issues in the natural sciences or rather natural philosophy and psychology. When his last but one big book, The Act of Creation, appeared, he was likened to H. G. Wells in so far as he is the one who can best translate modern natural science into the language of literature. This is where its importance or function in contemporary English life lies. One of the conclusions or leitmotifs of your book, The Ghost in the Machine, is that mankind, as we know it today, is in fact the result or bearer of an aberration of a paranoid nature. Is that really true?

A. K.: Yes. But then poets always said we were crazy, that mankind was mad. Of course they meant this in a poetic way, and not scientifically. I was in California at a conference to which some fifty psychologists and biologists are invited every year, and there I tried to develop a fairly new theory with my colleagues, which then went into my last book, The Ghost in the Machine, a highly logical theory, a psycho-physiological theory to explain why we are all crazy. The theory is that the reason why human history is so ugly and bloody is that we went astray in the course of evolution, that somehow our brain grew too fast, and that the new brain, the neo-cortex has not become really integrated into the genetically older parts of the brain which are responsible for emotions, so that there is no real harmony between thoughts and feelings but dissonance, and what we really tried to do with my colleagues was to examine the anatomy and philosophy of the brain. The conclusion is that paranoid schizophrenia is, well, practically built into the human race, and it is one of the great misconceptions that we have only gone crazy now, in the modern age. Not at all. We were crazy already at the beginning of history. Wherever human civilisation started, the obsession with human sacrifice was there, whether they sacrificed virgins or had to execute the king after a year, as in many a primitive culture, so that paranoia is not a consequence of modern developments but has been there since the very beginning.

P. I.: Your last book ends on a highly hopeful note which is very pessimistic at the same time. You regard the collective suicide of mankind as quite conceivable because mankind has at its disposal all the means by which it can blow itself practically out of existence in a nuclear world war. At the same time, however, while seeing these things quite clearly, and going even farther in pessimism when portraying the whole thing as the final outcome of this paranoid aberration, you are also quite hopeful that the illness can be cured, and cured precisely through new scientific discoveries and the purification of scientific approach.

A. K.: This is a distant prospect indeed. The doctor's duty is first to establish a diagnosis, and the objective here was only to do that. Therapy will then follow.

 

Pál Ignotus (1901 - 1978)
was a journalist, editor, translator and broadcaster. He started his career in journalism in 1923 in Budapest, where he was among the few who recognised at an early stage the poetic genius of Attila József with whom he developed a close friendship. Together they edited Szép Szó, an important literary journal. Anti-Jewish legislation forced him to emigrate in 1939. In London, he headed the Hungarian Section of the BBC, after the war worked at the Hungarian mission in London, but was recalled to Budapest in 1949, where he was arrested and imprisoned on trumped-up political charges. Released and rehabilitated in 1956, he returned to London, where he edited Irodalmi Újság, the leading Hungarian literary journal in the West.