Anna Valachi

"Finally Now I Have My Home"

On the Centenar y of Attila József 's Birth
Budapest, 11 April 1905 - Balatonszárszó, 3 December 1937

 

A unique fate awaited Attila József, the greatest figure of twentieth-century Hungarian lyric verse. His oeuvre documented both the dominant ideas of his age and the universal experience of the human psyche with unparalleled intimacy - through his own fate. József's impact on poetry is comparable to that of Bartók on music. And yet his contemporaries realised with dismay just what an epoch-making poet he was only when his death certificate was issued, at the age of thirty-two, after he had laid himself on the tracks under a freight train about to depart a small village and was killed on the spot. Thus the symbolic date of his birth as a major poet and the all too tangible date of his death are one and the same.
He published his first volume of poetry at the age of seventeen in Makó, the small town 200 kilometres south of Budapest where he attended secondary school. In the fifteen years that followed, seven more volumes of his were to appear, with an increasing number of mature masterpieces in them. And yet, neither the critics nor József's fellow writers recognised his stature as a poet. With the exception of a few good friends and Dezső Kosztolányi, practically everyone received his lyric experiments in which he strove to expand the bounds "to the limits of reason and beyond" with incomprehension or indifference.
One factor behind this strange night-blindness on the part of József's contemporaries may have been his personality. Attila József arrived on the literary scene with the explosive vehemence worthy of a François Villon; indeed, his adolescent, extravagant behaviour, his iconoclastic disposition and his provocative tone led many to view him more as an oddball than as a poet worth taking seriously. His unusual penchant for self-revelation likewise reinforced such prejudices. And it led many to overlook the fact that he always spoke of his own experiences, his own suffering, precisely so that others might also look into the laboratory of his thoughts. He expressed timeless human experiences through that which, being most palpable to him, he could study most credibly - his own fate and personality. As news spread in December 1937 of József's suicide, the public, beset by a collective guilty conscience, was swept by a sudden determination to set things right. Indeed, from one day to the next, everyone in Hungary knew just who this posthumously discovered genius was. He had endowed all those who survived him with more truths about life, more lyric bull's eyes-turned-adages, than had anyone else. He himself had shared with us the tragic secret of his creative genius, when, taking the measure of his life, he wrote: "They took me for a child prodigy; actually, I was merely an orphan."
From early childhood on, Attila József's life had been marked by unanticipated losses, emotional traumas and unusual turns; all of this was later to permeate his verse and his thinking as both motivation and motif.

"I was born..."

On April 11, 1905, in a flat comprising a room and a kitchen, on an upper floor of a tenement house at 3 Gál Street in Ferencváros (then an outlying working class district of Budapest) a midwife who lived in a neighbouring flat helped deliver the sixth and last child of Áron József, a soap-maker, and Borbála Pőcze, a maidservant who'd fled to the capital from the provinces. Years later, Attila was to come under the guardianship of his two older sisters, Jolán and Etelka, Etus for short. After living together for years, Áron József and Borbála Pőcze had married only in 1900. Three of their six children died early on. Jolán had been born before their marriage, Etus and Attila afterward. In summer 1908 their father left his family to their fate, plunging them into privation. (Based on his farewell letter, they figured he'd "drifted out" to America along with hundreds of thousands of the unemployed who tried their luck in the New World. However, as research later revealed, he'd returned to Transylvania, from where he had come to Budapest as an itenerant labourer. They never did hear from him again.) Though the mother tried to support her children through laundering, ironing, sewing, and cleaning, the struggle to survive depleted her energy, self-confidence and health. In 1910 she was compelled to turn over her two youngest children, then five and seven years old, to state care.
The brother and the younger of the sisters were placed with an old peasant farmer and his wife in Öcsöd, a small village well away from Budapest on the Great Plain. Treating them as free labour, the aging couple put them hard to work: Etus looked after the geese, Attila, called Pista (Steve) by his foster father, tended to the hogs. Deprived of their past and their individuality, and wearing straw hats and "institutional" clothes, they suffered through two years as outcasts among the other children, without a mother in an alien environment. In the school year 1911-1912, the boy learned to read and write at the elementary school in Öcsöd. Later, he strove to get over the psychological trauma through compulsive introspection and thinking about himself and about the world, and with the help of poetry.

In the Year 3 reading primer, though, I came across some interesting stories about King Attila and I threw myself into reading. The stories about the king of the Huns were of interest not just because my name is also Attila, but also because my foster parents in Öcsöd had called me Pista, having concluded after a consultation with the neighbours, and in my hearing, that there was no such name as Attila. That had taken me greatly aback, because I felt that my very existence was being thrown into question. I think that discovery of the tales about King Attila decisively influenced every one of my endeavours from then onward, and ultimately it may have been this experience that led me to literature, this experience that turned me into a thinker, into a person who listens to the opinions of others but examines them for himself; the sort of person who answers to the name Pista until he proves that he is called Attila, as he had thought. (Curriculum vita, 1937. See pp. 2-34)

Seven years after they had returned to their mother and sister in Budapest, at Christmas 1919, their mother finally succumbed to a long battle with cancer. However, the oldest sister, Jolán, who had married a man whose higher social status consequently raised hers, continued to care for her younger siblings. It is thanks to her that (with the financial support of his brother-in-law and foster father, Dr. Ödön Makai, an attorney) Attila, who had long been writing exceptional poetry, was able to continue studying at the secondary school in Makó.
The fourteen-year old boy from Budapest was a boarder at the school and, though he adjusted with difficulty at first to the new environment, he soon shone among his peers. His thirst for knowledge, his diligence, and the poems he recited in the school's literary society all earned him respect. Not only did his teachers grow fond of him, but he also found adult benefactors who helped ensure the publication of his first book of poetry in 1922, while he was still in secondary school. Szépség koldusa (Beggar of Beauty) appeared with a prophetic preface by Gyula Juhász, a famous poet from the southern city of Szeged: "Fellow Hungarians, here is a poet who is off to great heights and great depths: Attila József. Love him and champion his cause!" The student-poet paid tribute to his master's generous and loving gesture in his next collection with a brilliant sonnet sequence, A Kozmosz éneke (Song of the Cosmos).
At the same time, the young man struggled with neurosis and troubled selfesteem, and his sense of abandonment - deriving in no small part from the absence of a caring mother and father - led him to several suicide attempts even as a student. The humiliation of assimilating into a society in which privilege by birth and property ownership were held in such high esteem, a society of hypocritical morality, tore at his psyche. Indeed, eventually he gave up trying to assimilate. He tells the story of a childhood suicide attempt in an arresting piece of short prose. (See pp. 29-31.)
In 1924 the public prosecutor's office took Attila József to court for blasphemy over his poem "Lázadó Krisztus" (Christ Rebelling). Later, when a student at the university of Szeged, he was barred from a school-teaching career by his conservative- minded professor, Antal Horger, for similar reasons. Taking issue with the blasphemous, provocative spirit of József's poem "Tiszta szívvel" (With a Pure Heart), Horger said he'd see to it that József would not have a teaching career. Earlier that year his second volume had appeared, Nem én kiáltok (That's Not Me Shouting). With financial backing from his brother-in-law and his older sister, he spent the 1925-1926 academic year studying in Vienna and the following year in Paris, at the Sorbonne. What with his university studies and being a tenacious autodidact, he became a true intellectual poet, a poet who realised his verbal talents, creativity, and refined conceptual thinking in poetry with exceptional versatility in a multitude of styles and verse forms.
József synthesised the cultural experiences he had derived as a "son of the street and the soil" from life in the village, the capital and abroad as surely as he did ancient lyric traditions with modern literary orientations. Schooled by the voices of his masters, he individualised his own voice. Free verse a la his compatriot poet Lajos Kassák, avant-garde schools of poetry, and "pure poetry", whose various forms aimed at extirpating content, all of this inspired his own masterful sense of verbal play. And no less credible were his efforts to incorporate antique lyric forms; folk songs; Hungarian regős songs (akin to wintersolstice wassailing songs); the Kalevala; and even the rhythms, rhymes and melodic patterns of more popular Hungarian tunes.
In the spring of 1928, József wooed his love, Márta Vágó, with poems exhibiting playfulness a la Mozart and complex content clothed in simple, song-like forms. Márta Vágó had an upper middle class background and promised to be an exceptional intellectual companion. But their marriage plans came to nothing under the opposition of Vágó's parents, who feared for their daughter. József, who had yearned for the warmth of a home in the Vágó household, experienced this rebuff as a serious debacle. Indeed, in September 1929, he entered a sanatorium with symptoms of neurosis. Afterward, looking to heal himself of the fiasco of this love affair, he turned increasingly to radical, leftist politics. In his poem "Végül" (In the End), we hear the social scientist in him as he explains what had happened to him: "I once loved a well-to-do girl, but her social class snatched her away." Once his "folksy period" of 1928-1929 came to a close, Attila József proceeded to pen vitriolic articles for the radical-bourgeois weekly Toll. It was there that he published his acerbic pamphlet "Az Istenek halnak, az Ember él" (The Gods are Dying, Man is Alive). Though he called it an "objective, critical essay," it was quite enough to offend one of Hungary's most respected literary idols - the great poet, translator and novelist Mihály Babits - for a lifetime. Babits was not only editor of the era's most distinguished literary journal, Nyugat (1908-1941), but also chairman of the board of the Baumgarten Foundation, which supported talented impoverished writers. József's temper had been stoked by a likewise acerbic review in Nyugat of his volume Nincsen apám, se anyám (No Father Have I, No Mother, 1929). However, writing The Gods are Dying, Man is Alive, the offended poet had directed his anger not at the critic who'd penned the review but at the editor of the journal that had published it. This vehement assault on Babits was the biggest blunder in József's life, a symbolic intellectual patricide that hurt only his own career. No longer could he count on the even-handed goodwill of his country's foremost literary figure, Mihály Babits, even though he did atone for his reckless deed. (Later he conciliated Nyugat's editor with letters and with poems probing guilt and remorse - poems which then appeared in Nyugat. But instead of the Baumgarten Prize he had yearned for, he was twice the recipient of merely financial aid, with the top honour only coming to him posthumously.)

"...melting in the crowd..."

In keeping with his characteristic self-destructive nature, in 1930, having delivered this fatal blow to his career as a poet, József did something equally fateful: he joined the illegal communist movement. Within its fold he held lectures, led seminars, explained Marx's precepts to workers, choreographed groups that recited political-poetic texts, set his earlier poems to a revolutionary score, and urged on his new brothers-in-ideology with illegally duplicated lyrics. Eventually he was taken to court again, this time over his poem the "Lebukott" (Nabbed). József even moved in with a woman he'd met in the movement, Judit Szántó, a worker and poetry reader - and the ex-wife of the proletarian poet Antal Hidas, who had lived in Moscow for a time. This strong-willed woman cared for József through six years as a strict, surrogate mother of sorts. She created a home for him, stood by him for better or worse, and struggled for his poetry to be recognised. That said, she never did manage to become the sensitive, inspiring, intellectual companion to József that Márta Vágó had been. In the first years of their life together, József was primarily interested in renewing revolutionary poetry. No sooner had the result, the volume Döntsd a tőkét, ne siránkozz (Strike at Capitalism, Stop Moaning) appeared on March 21, 1931, than the public prosecutor's office confiscated all the copies it could get its hands on. It was around this time that József first began therapy under a psychoanalyst. Dr. Samu Rapaport asked his patient to improve the style of his own volume of essays; and so the poet was simultaneously immersed both in psychological scholarship and his own childhood memories. His lyric perspective and conceptual thinking were permeated, above all, by his study of the invisible connections between the physical world and the world of the mind, by a desire to knead and so create a new quality out of the contradictions. ("Weigh yourself with the universe," he wrote in "Ars poetica," one of his later poems.) At the beginning of the 1930s József was engaged in philosophising on art's mission to fill the void in the world; on inspiration and on intuition; and on how a work of art renders perceptible the whole, imperceptible world. (In his lecture "Literature and Socialism," he theorised on the mutual impact of society and art, and his aim was that his intellectual forays should be understood by manual labourers.)
Although party membership meant a great deal to József, personally speaking, he reserved the right to think freely even within the folds of the illegal organisation. Not only did he continue to manifest his exceptional erudition and tortuous way of thinking in vitriolic essays and polemic articles but, in keeping with his nature as an enfant terrible, he annoyed his dogmatic comrades, who were exasperated by the heretical thinking of this poet "directed from within." When the "Draft Platform of Hungarian Proletarian Literature" appeared, in June 1931, in Sarló és Kalapács (Hammer and Sickle), a Hungarian-language journal published in Moscow, signed by Hungarian writers in exile there, one of its proclamations maintained that Attila József was looking to the fascist camp for an escape route from Hungary's political crisis. As always when at the receiving end of an unmerited attack, the offended poet avenged himself through his intellectual superiority.
In June 1932 he co-edited the Marxist journal Valóság (Reality) with his friend Ferenc Fejtő. (François Fejtő, who at ninety-six, today lives in Paris, is a historian and writer who was among the first to recognise a great poet in József.) The "poeta doctus" who sought to synthesise the basic precepts of scientific socialism and psychoanalysis, and alongside poetry, also wrote essays on philosophy-cum-economics, published his pseudo-Marxist essay Egyéniség és valóság (Individuality and Reality) in the journal. It clearly showed the influence of the POLSEX movement theory of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. No one understood a word of the piece, which had been written in a deliberately complicated manner so as to "annoy the comrades"; consequently its author - whose name also appeared as editor in chief - was branded an anti-Marxist bedlamite. (The censors soon banned the journal, and József's co-editor, Ferenc Fejtő, wound up in jail.) By autumn 1932 Hungary's Communist Party leaders were determined to expel the heretical, "headstrong" Attila József from the illegal movement. Indeed, they were further troubled by the meditative tone of the poems in his newest volume, Külvárosi éj (Night on City's Edge): ruminative, brooding poems like "Mondd, mit érlel" (What Will Become of Him), "A város peremén" (On City's Edge), and "Holt vidék" (Dead Landscape) would hardly incite the masses to revolution, unlike the volume he had published a year earlier calling for the overthrow of capitalism. However, the prose pieces József wrote at this time - for example, an unfinished essay, Hegel, Marx and Freud, as well as fragmentary meditations, bear witness that this "engineer of the enchantments of the given world" aimed to place even psychoanalytic thinking in the service of the struggle for social justice.
The year 1933 offered much to brood on for a compulsive rationalist like Attila József. Hitler's arrival in power posed the question of where the Communists went wrong in calculating that their world revolution was just a matter of time.
In early summer József engaged in a rough and tumble battle of articles published in the party paper Új Harcos (New Warrior) over the question of antifascist workers' unity. In consequence, the Hungarian Party of Communists broke its ties once and for all with the heretical poet. Although there are no written records of József's formal expulsion from the party ranks (to protect the illegal party and its members, records were not kept of names) many of József's contemporaries recalled that from 1933 on he was no longer in the party's organisational fold. (After 1948, when the Hungarian Workers' Party rose to power under the leadership of Mátyás Rákosi, this point of ambiguity was used to the advantage of those who steered the nation's cultural politics. In order to popularise their own ideology, they tried to make use of the poetry of Attila József, who by then had been dead for eleven years. It was in the party's interest that the relationship between the poet and the Communist Party be sold to the public-at-large as having been conflictfree. Consequently, they falsified his biography and denied that he had been expelled. Indeed, the very issue of József's party membership was taboo for decades.)
Notwithstanding his expulsion, it appears that József, disillusioned though he was with the nearsighted, aggressive, dogmatic communist movement, retained his faith in "scientific socialism" to his death. Indeed, for the rest of his life he was a self-avowed leftist. Once his formal role in the movement had become untenable, however, he turned with all the more passion toward psychoanalysis. He put what he had learned on this front to good use as a poet; his verse took on the language of conceptual-visual metaphors and drew on those subconscious, concentrated memories that assume visual form, namely, dream symbols. (Take poems such as "Ritkás erdő alatt" [Under a Sparse Forest], "Óda" [Ode], "Téli éjszaka" [Winter Night], "Eszmélet" [Consciousness], "Kései sirató" [Late Lament], "Iszonyat" [Dread], and "Nagyon fáj" [It Hurts A Lot].) Indeed, the psychoanalytic perspective fertilised both the thematic and the conceptual universe of his poetry in a unique way. His boundless imagination allowed him to "measure" his own self using nothing less than the universe's own unit of measure; through this imagination he created a lyric oeuvre from personal experiences that was at once cosmic in perspective and unmistakably individual in tone.
József's application of depth psychology to verse yielded one of the world's finest love poems, "Óda" (Ode). He wrote this masterpiece in the space of one night in June 1933 at a gathering of poets in the tranquil retreat of Lillafüred, in northern Hungary, under the inspiration of an unknown beautiful woman. Though he was still living with Judit Szántó, József was unable to write her love poetry; for it was the proximity of the unattainable, unpossessable, "timeless woman" that, from beginning to end, brought his imagination into gear. "Ode" is more than a poem: it is love magic in a modern guise. And it is certainly the only poem in József's oeuvre written from the perspective of an embryo in blissful symbiosis with an imagined mother. With the "pure discourse" of poetry, József here brought to life and rendered fully accessible not only the organic wholeness of the world - the world as a biological and industrial landscape expanded to universal proportions within a woman's body with respect to the precise, synchronised operation of unseen internal organs, suggesting the "spontaneous timelessness" of divine perfection. (Mihály Babits, whom József had since placated in a gracious letter, published this exceptional poem in the August 1933 issue of Nyugat. However, the hypersensitive poet-eminence could never bring himself to forget the unmerited, boorish attack he'd received from that enfant terrible, Attila József.)
"Ode" very nearly caused a fatal change in the poet's personal life: Judit Szántó found it in his pocket. What she chanced to read was an enchanting poem written in the hand of the man she lived with but which was clearly inspired by another woman. Szántó took an overdose of quinine. Discovering her suicide attempt in time, the poet called an ambulance, and while the doctors fought for Judit's life, he awaited the outcome in a coffee house. Try as he did to swathe himself in a nervous, sullen silence, those of his acquaintances who saw him brooding in the coffee house could hardly fail to notice the devastated state he was in. And so they kept asking him what had happened until finally, answering each query with only a "yes" or a "no" in keeping with the rules of the game of Twenty Questions, until he allowed them to discover the cause of his agitation. This morbid game was immortalised in a short story by Dezső Kosztolányi, who'd recognised József's talent early on and had encouraged the young poet. Kosztolányi, who'd heard the story from József's friends who'd been there in person that day, published it in the September 10, 1933 issue of Pesti Hírlap Vasárnapja under the title Ezerkilencszázharminchárom (Nineteen-thirty-three); and, later, aptly titled Barkochba (Twenty Questions). (It is also described in Tibor Déry's memoir, see pp. 47-58 of this issue.)

"...only to leave them"

It was around this time that József, in his late twenties, made the acquaintance of Arthur Koestler, who was visiting Budapest, and they were introduced to each other by a mutual friend, the writer and critic Andor Németh. Koestler was to remember Attila József as someone whose hobby-horse was psychoanalysis and Hegelian-Marxist dialectics, and who, notwithstanding his expulsion from the Communist Party for his Trotskyist deviations, remained a good proletarian and hated Stalin's Bonapartism with Jacobin passion.
By around 1933-1934, the poet's foremost aim in life was to stand on his own two feet as a man. He wanted to be a "mature man. whose heart / harbours neither mother nor father" - a man capable of winding up the burdensome relationships of childhood and creating an independent existence for himself. And so he was all the more determined to break with Judit Szántó - unsuccessfully, however, until the summer of 1936. Since making a living from poetry was impossible, József felt it was his foremost ambition to obtain the recognition of Babits and the era's leading literary scholars, and (in the footsteps of fellow artists more fortunate but not necessarily more talented than he) to be awarded the prestigious Baumgarten Prize. His poetic self-esteem had long needed such recognition of his achievements; and his bread-and-butter worries were such that the prize, whose three thousand pengős amounted to a one-year scholarship that would have guaranteed worry-free working conditions, would have been a financial godsend. (According to a popular song of the day, "Two hundred pengős a month of pay, and a bloke'll joke every day.")
Inseparable from József's grand project to stand on his own two feet were his urgent compulsion to disengage from his symbolic mother and his concomitant sense of alienation from the world. He was twenty-nine in 1934, when he cast his cycle of twelve free-standing poems Eszmélet (Consciousness) into final form. This monumental piece, a meditation on the philosophy of existence that had ripened to maturity from his own experiences, is the single most analysed poetic work in Hungarian literature, having spawned several books' worth of essays. For József, such "rumination" meant a methodical self-vivisection. And no sooner did he begin therapy again, than in the course of conjuring up and virtually reliving the past, he played spine-tingling psychodramas with himself, so that he could shape his phantasmal experiences into poems. Poems of a sort never written before. Arthur Koestler christened this type of poem, invented by Attila József and inspired by depth psychology, the "Freudian folk song." Their alarming content notwithstanding, such poems could indeed be crooned or hummed, bringing the listener an ambivalent, uncanny sense of beauty.
From 1933-1934 onward his past, which until then had been lost in a silent fog, resonated in József as an ever more resounding grievance. Now that he was rebelling as an adult against former humiliations, he, the poet, could cast his current psychological state onto that powerless child at the mercy of adults, onto his former self. The child evoked in his poem "Mama", who lives on within an adult choking with regret, is screaming and stomping because his mother is attending not to him but something else. In "Kései sirató" (Late Lament) the adult, likewise identifying with his child-self, reproaches his mother - who has long since turned into dust - with fuming, blasphemous anger for her unforgivable sin: leaving her son in the lurch by dying. (See these two poems on pp. 6, 7-8 of this issue.) The poet of "Iszonyat" (Dread), meanwhile, derives an almost masochistic, sensual pleasure from identifying with a helpless infant whose seven-year old sister, in their mother's absence, tortures him day long with a "pretend-nursing game": the dimly lit one-room flat resounds to the sounds of moaning, howling, gasping for breath, whimpering and whining.
"Dread" appeared on November 15, 1934 in Toll; and, a month later, in József's newest volume, Medvetánc (Bear Dance), in which the poet collected those of his poems he thought most important. By then he rightly felt that the time had come: his art had earned him the longed-for Baumgarten Prize. However, both in 1935 and in the following year he received only that lesser Baumgarten award, a relatively modest sum, given to talented beginners. Meanwhile, some of his peers who were certainly more fortunate but far from as accomplished, had already won the top prize more than once.
József managed to endure this flagrant injustice only because in the meantime he had realised a great dream of his: he had co-founded a journal with Pál Ignotus, the son of Nyugat's founding editor. And so, in the last two years of his life, as co-editor and principal poet of this journal, he was finally able to work in the company of friends who understood and appreciated his art.

I am an editor on the literary and critical magazine Szép Szó. Apart from Hungarian, I can read and write French and German, correspond in Hungarian and French, and I am an accomplished touch typist. I was also able to do shorthand, and I could brush up that knowledge with a month's practice. I am familiar with newspaper printing technology, and I can draft documents. I consider myself to be an honest person; I think I am quick on the uptake and an assiduous worker. (Curriculum vitae, 1937)

The ceremony at which the journal was finally named has lived on as an endearing anecdote. The founders, who could not come to agreement on this matter, felt that József's suggestion, Szép Szó, "beautiful word", had an all too aristocratic, affected ring to it. Indeed, they were still pondering on the title when they gave the manuscript of the first issue to the printer. Finally they opted to let chance decide. They had József write down all the titles suggested by the editorial board and put all the slips of paper into a hat. Then they asked a writer who just happened to stop by to fish out the winning title with his "virgin hands". The lucky slip of paper read "Szép Szó". And so the board members resigned themselves to fate. Only later did the poet own up: he'd written the same title on each and every slip of paper. At first the others were annoyed, but with time they came to be grateful, for the name did in fact sensitively and precisely embody the ideals of the leftist liberal journal.
With the founding of this journal, József developed a working relationship with old friends. Imre Cserépfalvi, whom he had met in Paris, was the first publisher of Szép Szó; Andor Németh, a good friend whom József lured home from Vienna to help with the journal, also became a full-time staff member. It is Németh who was to recollect that the position of editor had the effect of temporarily steadying József's tottering self-esteem. In addition to being poetry editor, József dealt with the technical aspects of publishing the journal. Indeed, the printers later recalled that "in his zeal, he thoroughly mixed up the first issue, which at least doubled the compositor's work." And so, among themselves the printers dubbed him "Attila, the Scourge of the Press" - after his legendary namesake, "Attila, the Scourge of God". József Attila's dedicated work and good intentions were, however, not in doubt. As for those poets who approached him with a view to publication, he more than won their respect: the young craved for his severe judgements and advice, and some even echoed his poetry.
But not even his editorial position with Szép Szó brought Attila József unmitigated happiness; financial independence remained elusive. All his life he had struggled to get by; he'd always depended on the support of family members and occasional patrons, and continually being at the mercy of others had devastated his self-esteem. Now it was the journal's sponsor, Baron Bertalan Hatvany, who financed the poet's personal expenses, including the cost of psychoanalysis (and, later, the cost of treatment at a sanatorium). Nor was József capable of regarding a poem that sprang from the depths of his soul as a "product" ("My verse belongs to those who asked for my heart imbued in poems/ and all I need in return is friendship") - though the need to make a living meant he invariably had to ask to be paid. His ambivalent relationship with money only further reminded him that he was incapable of making a living, unlike others: those rival poets among his peers who were more fortunate and savvy than he.
Before the founding of Szép Szó, József was already seeing another psychotherapist, Edit Gyömrői. It was with her help that he reconnected with his ambivalent feelings toward his long dead mother. Indeed, he went to her office with great curiosity, as if entering a time capsule for continual, thrilling journeys back to his own past. The trouble began when the therapist noticed that the poet lying on the couch and zealously consumed in free associations and fantasies was afire with love for her, a love with all the symptoms of transference neurosis. And the patient's mother complex manifested itself dramatically: he was less and less inclined to distinguish between past and present. With frightening intensity he now relived the sense of abandonment he had felt on being sent to Öcsöd. The little boy yearned for his mother's love and warm embrace, meanwhile thinking of her with hatred for having deprived him of all this by dying. As an adult confronting his memories, he was also consumed by an intense guilty conscience over the unbridled anger he felt toward her.
The poet projected onto his analyst all his old, stifled emotions that, through the prism of his mother, he nurtured toward women. With impassioned transfiguration he imaginatively relived the past. He couldn't get enough of this game: he behaved like a demanding child even with his therapist. Indeed, he pursued and blackmailed this woman with his love, notwithstanding that she had a sixteen- year-old son; of course, knowing that she had a son may have only strengthened the poet's predilection to imagine her as his own mother - and as his lover, too. Nine years his senior, she was no beauty, but her personality was exceptionally attractive and suggestive. With longing entreaties, with attempts to make her feel sorry for him, and with fanatic verbal wizardry, he strove to melt the armour of professional indifference off his mother-confessor. He wrote her a poem, the aptly titled "Egy pszichoanalitikusnőhöz" (To a Woman Psychoanalyst) and in another he announced: "Gyermekké tettél" (You Made Me Be a Child Again, see p. 9). This confession, inspired by the "mother love" that sprung from his transference neurosis, appeared in the May 1936 issue of Szép Szó, which honoured Freud on his eightieth birthday. Indeed, it appeared in close proximity to another of József's poems, one that rendered homage to the father of depth psychology, "Amit szívedbe rejtesz" (That Which Your Heart Disguises).
Freud, to whom József sent a German translation of his poem, replied with a telegramme thanking him for both the poem and the thoughtful gesture. József waited in vain, however, for Edit Gyömrői to respond to his love. Dissatisfied with his psychoanalyst, the poet sat down in the Japán Coffeehouse on May 22, 1936, to interrogate his own subconscious self. In a notebook whose 170 pages he had numbered in advance, he proceeded to write his self-confession, an unrestrained flood of impressions he titled Szabad-ötletek jegyzéke két ülésben (Record of Free Ideas in Two Sittings). He completed it two days later, at home.
His aim in writing this was to cast from himself - and thereby to objectify - his chaotic jumble of memories, his feelings toward the key figures of his life, and his transports of intense emotion toward Edit Gyömrői, who had given him nothing in return for her fee, he felt. By switching off his consciousness, as it were, and recording his subconscious self on paper, he hoped to create a precise picture of himself. He filled practically every page of the notebook with an unbridled mass of words. He let everything pass out of him that came to mind: obscenity, blasphemy, puns, flickering traces of memory, obsessions, fleeting thoughts. And yet he was neither any wiser nor any calmer on completion.

The hapless soul writing all this longs immeasurably for love, for love to keep him from doing things he is afraid of doing. He was beaten for doing something he never would have done, had he been loved. He is the child who wasn't loved, and who, moreover, was beaten by those who couldn't bear not loving him. And so he yearns for love, so they don't bother him. Szabad-ötletek jegyzéke két ülésben (Record of Free Ideas in Two Sittings) May 1936.

By the end of 1936, József's delusions had taken on chronic proportions. In a fit of jealousy he wanted to kill László Újvári, his therapist's fiancé. Using what remained of the fourth instalment of his modest Baumgarten award for that year, he bought himself a pair of knuckle-dusters and proceeded to attack the other man in her consulting rooms. Fortunately, nothing terrible happened: the intelligent and physically strong young man, who only felt sorry for the afflicted poet, "disarmed" the assassin who'd been sawing the air in so frenzied a manner. On another occasion, knife in hand, József awaited his therapist from behind the front gate of a home on a tranquil hillside in a residential neighbourhood of Buda. However, she did not react with fright towards her agitated patient, who in turn proceeded to talk effusively for hours: she walked about with him through the night, until the poet finally wearied of his ceaseless complaining. József's worsened mental state became increasingly apparent to those around him. He was performing even his editorial work with impatience, as though it was a burdensome task and little else. "I've got to read so many bad poems submitted for publication that in the end I will become a really bad poet," he complained to his former loved one, Márta Vágó, who was the secretary at Szép Szó at the time. But he insisted on the value of analysis; for, as a poet, he wished to continue mining the treasures of his subconscious mind. He confessed to Márta that his great poems would never have been written had therapy not served to stir up his past experiences from the fog of oblivion and bring them into sharp focus; these experiences had then worked their way into his poems in the form of concrete images. Even as he objectively recognised the practical benefits of therapy, József continued to harbour subjective and ambivalent feelings toward his therapist. He was determined to take revenge on Edit Gyömrői for being too "cowardly" to love him. Damning poems and malevolent words were not enough to placate his fits of murderous rage. His friends tried talking reason to him, but in vain. He decided to file a complaint against her for charlatanism: she was not a qualified medicinal practitioner, after all, but a lay analyst. However, he finally abandoned this plan for revenge. And at the end of 1936, Edit Gyömrői turned József's continued therapy over to a male therapist.
December 1936 saw the publication of another collection, Nagyon fáj (It Hurts a Lot), which comprised poems inspired by psychoanalysis and poems drawing on recollection that had appeared over the course of the year in Szép Szó. On one of the days before the Christmas holidays - the eighteenth anniversary of his mother's death - the poet, wanting to see how many people sought out his new book, waited about in the publisher's bookstore on Váci Street in the centre of Budapest from morning to night. Not a single copy was sold that day. Later, the publisher, Imre Cserépfalvi, was to recollect that "one of the most beautiful and most profound books of poetry in Hungarian was met by deathly silence."
The final year of József's life began with the usual letdown: he did not receive the Baumgarten Prize. To make matters worse, the censor banned him from reciting his poem "Thomas Mann üdvözlése" (Welcome to Thomas Mann) at a January 13, 1937 reading in Budapest by the Nobel Prize-winning writer, who had been exiled from his country. József had written the poem for just this occasion.
Together with the intensive emotional tribulations stemming from his selfinduced love of Edit Gyömrői, these fiascos further set the stage for his nervous breakdown in early February 1937. His new therapist gave him a referral to the Siesta Sanatorium, and after a two-week round of relaxation therapy he left appearing strengthened and free of his dependence on Edit. This marked the close of that stage of József's career comprising his most innovative poems.
Hardly was József beyond his love for Edit, which had utterly depleted his emotional energy, when - at a literary salon - he met his final muse, Flóra Kozmutza, on February 20, 1937. This young and beautiful woman, studying to be a teacher of mentally handicapped children, worked in the Budapest laboratory of the famous analyst Lipót Szondi. There she had the poet do a Rorschach Test. József fell in love at first sight, not only with the girl but also with her very name. Soon he was busy wooing her with hymn-like poems modelled after classical forms, and at their second meeting, he asked her hand in marriage.
Flóra was the most secretive of all of József's muses - not only because her sense of propriety disinclined her to be in the public eye, but moreover because the poems addressed to her seemed in fact not addressed to her, the flesh-and-blood woman, but to an imagined, impersonal beauty, an incorporeal ideal. At the same time, the studied, illusory, otherworldly beauty at the centre of the Flóra cycle was fraught with the certitude of hopelessness.
Throughout, there was something peculiar and irrational about József's relationship with Flóra. The poet's unusual "assertiveness" - the rapid marriage proposal - alarmed her, but as she later admitted, she was unable to "resist the onslaught." The poems, too, affected and impressed her even though she felt they weren't addressed to her; no, she was but an instrument of their creation. József meanwhile worked himself increasingly into a frenzy over this love; for Flóra was beautiful, clever and considerate, while also being strong and resolute, capable of opening the door to his own "rebirth" while also offering refuge. And yet deep within himself the poet must have sensed that his hope was an illusion, not only because of the girl's ambiguous demeanour. Flóra did stand by him honourably and was supportive throughout, but her vacillation suggested to him that she was committed to someone else.
And so it was. Much later, Attila József's final muse wrote that, some two months before she met József, in December 1936, she'd made the acquaintance of the poet Gyula Illyés - a onetime friend of József's who had since become a rival who was close to Babits - and that her heart had immediately skipped a beat. But as Illyés was married, she suppressed her feelings for him. (For his part, Gyula Illyés, who was later to become Flóra's husband, wrote in his journal that he'd fallen in love with the girl at first sight; but, being a married man, he knew full well he wouldn't have the slightest chance of winning this upright young lady.)
József, who had incomparable intuition and a flair for conjecture, gradually pieced together the puzzle of this emotional love triangle; and his jealousy only strengthened his already well-developed inferiority complex.
In June 1937 József suffered another nervous breakdown and again wound up in the Siesta Sanatorium. This time he received intensive treatment for schizophrenia, although in fact he was not insane, as Flóra was virtually alone in perceiving.
All indications suggest that József in fact feared that which he also desired: that Flóra would say yes to his proposal. For then he would really have to prove himself to be the same sort of man as the charismatic Gyula Illyés. And yet he felt at home only in the fantasy world of imagined love. Indeed, once the game turned serious, and Flóra - with her self-sacrificing spirit and her sense of calling, but not out of love - accepted his proposal, József chickened out and backed down. He escaped into a mad game, into illness. Indications are that he carried on this game unbeknownst to his doctors, wanting to outmanoeuvre them. They, believing him to be ill, set out to cure him of his supposed schizophrenia, naturally without success. The circle began to close: the poet retreated into the isolation he'd erected for himself and with the bitter awareness that he could never again shake off the stigma of mental illness.

I ended up in psychoanalytic therapy for treatment of neurosis. How to characterise my illness? I had always considered myself sharp-minded, as someone who easily finds a home among abstract concepts and is blessed (or, as I often thought, cursed) with imaginative talents. As someone who vanishes amid images like a startled bird amid the trembling leaves of a lush forest. However, I was utterly bewildered by real life. I felt no connection between my ideas and my life, my mind and my instincts, my knowledge and my desires. On the one hand, I knew full well that I resembled a paranoid being that constructs a system of ideas out of delusions, and I knew that I wasn't insane, after all; for, although I had considered this possibility - indeed as a youth I had told myself that I was insane - this system of ideas I'd constructed was to reality what a more or less precise map is to the depicted piece of earth. Önvallomás (Self-Confession). Summer 1937

Dazed by medication though he was, he continued to correspond with Flóra, and at the urging of friends, tried to write. ("Költőnk és kora", "Our Poet and His Time" is a lyric masterpiece of self-confession, portraying the sublimation of a soul resigned to and preparing itself for the journey to the "Mother," to the "great void.") Finally, at the urging of the poet, who was still being treated at the Siesta Sanatorium, Flóra said yes to their planned marriage - but in his final poem ("Íme, hát megleltem hazámat", "So, Finally Now I Have My Home", see p. 10) and in the farewell letter he wrote to Flóra the day he died, Attila József himself relinquished his imagined family completeness in freeing his chosen companion to "he who will be more worthy of her." For his part, he chose the first woman, the divine Mother, in Heaven. The tragic sequence of events comprising the final phase of his life speaks for itself.
4 November 1937: József leaves the Siesta Sanatorium and travels with his older sister, Jolán, for home care with Etus and her three children at the family pension in Balatonszárszó.
28 November 1937: Flóra pays them a visit. József hands her his two final poems, which he wrote on hearing of her impending arrival, so that she would see that he is working.
2 December 1937: József's friends and his doctor come from Budapest to see him with good news on several fronts: about a job, about word that he will receive the Baumgarten Prize. He says he'd happily ride back to the capital with them, but there is no room in their car.
3 December 1937: After writing farewell letters in the afternoon, he goes for a walk in the evening from which he never returns. He is struck and killed by a freight train departing at the Balatonszárszó station. According to witnesses, he kneeled down alongside the tracks and lowered his head under the approaching wheels once the train finally started off after a long delay. The events to follow illustrate posterity's strange byways:
5 December 1937: In the presence of a small group of friends and family, József is buried in the Balatonszárszó cemetery. National newspapers milk the tragedy for all its worth, turning it into a sensational bit of bloodcurdling news; and from then on they nurture his memory with utmost respect, as one of Hungary's best poets, and they look for a scapegoat to blame for his death.
20 February 1938: Szép Szó hosts an evening at the Academy of Music to honour the memory of Attila József. Hungary's greatest writers and poets are present to remember him. However, members of the Hitler-inspired Hungarain Arrow Cross Party disrupt the event by handing out leaflets.
April 1942: Attila József's body is exhumed in Balatonszárszó.
2 May 1942: His ashes are reburied in an honorary gravesite in Budapest.
20 March 1959: On order of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, at a ceremony excluding the public, Attila József is again reburied, this time along the so-called Workers' Movement Grave Promenade.
17 May 1994: Attila József is laid to final rest in the family plot in Budapest.
Since 11 April 1964, the anniversary of Attila József's birth, Hungary has celebrated Poetry Day. Scholarship on him and his work has burgeoned from year to year and might well fill a small library; his poems have been translated into many languages. Both the tenement building he was born in, on Gát Street in Budapest, and his final home, the family pension in Balatonszárszó, the poet's earthly and spiritual birthplaces, today house memorial museums.
In 2005, the centenary of his birth, UNESCO declared a year of remembrance for Attila József.

 

Anna Valachi
is a literary historian specialising in Attila József's life and work on which she has
published several books. Her research centres on the effect of psychoanalysis
on József's poetry. She teaches literature at the University of Kaposvár.