Curriculum vita

 

I was born in 1905, in Budapest, Greek Orthodox by religion. My father, the late Áron József, emigrated when I was three years old, and the National Child Protection League placed me with foster parents in Öcsöd. I lived there until I was seven, by which time, like most poor children in villages, I was already working - in my case as a swineherd. When I was seven, my mother - the late Borbála Pőcze - brought me back to Budapest and enrolled me in Year 2 at elementary school. My mother supported us - me and my two older sisters - by doing laundry and cleaning, working in different homes from dawn to dusk, and I, not being under parental supervision, would skip school and misbehave. 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, Stevie, 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.
When I was nine the world war broke out and our fate went from bad to worse. I did my share of standing in queues in front of shops - there were cases when I would take a place in the line before the food store at nine o'clock in the evening, then at half past seven in the morning, just when it would have been my turn, they announced under my very nose that they had run out of lard. I helped my mother however I could. I sold water in the 'Világ' picture-house; I stole wood and coal from the Ferencváros goodsyard so we could keep our home warm; I made toy windmills from coloured paper and sold them to better-off children; I lugged shopping baskets and parcels around in market-halls, etc. In the summer of 1918 I holidayed in Opatija, thanks to King Charles' campaign to give children summer breaks. By then my mother was ill with cancer of the womb, and now it was me who presented myself to the Child Protection League, ending up for a short period in Monor. Returning to Budapest, I sold newspapers, dealt in stamps and later on in 'blue', 'white' and postal bank notes like a little banker. During the Romanian occupation I was a bread-boy in the Café Emke. In the meantime, having done five years at elementary school, I attended a junior secondary school.
Mother died at Christmas in 1919. The Chancery court appointed my recently deceased brother-in-law, Dr Ödön Makai, as my guardian. For a spring and a summer I served on the Atlantica Marine Shipping Co.'s steam tugs Vihar, Török and Tatár. It was then that I took the junior secondary school Year 4 exam as a private student. My guardian and Dr. Sándor Giesswein next sent me to the Salesian Seminary at Nyergesújfalu. I only spent two weeks there, being Greek Orthodox, not Catholic. From there I ended up in Makó, at the Demke Boarding-School, where I was soon granted a free place. For my bread and board in the summer I tutored at Mezőhegyes. Year 6 at the grammar school I completed with distinction, although as a result of pubertal disturbances I attempted suicide on several occasions, as there was no one, neither then or prior to that, who stood by me as a friend able to give some advice on sexual matters. By then my first poems had appeared in print, Nyugat publishing the poetry I wrote at the age of seventeen years. They considered me to be a Wunderkind, but I was only an orphan.
I left the grammar school and boarding-school after completing Year 7, because in my loneliness I felt I was very indolent: I didn't study because by the time the teachers had explained anything I had already learnt the lesson - the distinction on my report was proof of that. I went off to Kisszombor to be a maize-field guard and day-labourer in the fields and got work as a private tutor. On the entreaties of two kindly teachers of mine, I decided to obtain the schoolleaving certificate after all, so I took the combined Years 7 and 8 examination and thereby finished a year earlier than my ex-classmates. Altogether just three months were available for studying, however, which is how I got straight good marks for Year 7 but only pass marks for Year 8. The school-leaving certificate itself was better than Year 8: the only pass marks were for Hungarian and History. By then I had been charged with blasphemy over a poem of mine. I was cleared on appeal. After that I was a book salesman for a while here in Budapest, then during the inflation I was a clerk in Mauthner's private banking house. There, after the Hintz system was introduced, they assigned me to the book-keeping department, and not long after, much to the vexation of older colleagues, I was entrusted with supervising what could be paid out on cash desk days. My keenness was slightly undermined by the fact that, aside from my own duties, I was also saddled with things that were properly theirs by my older colleagues, who anyway never missed a chance to cause me vexation on account of my poems appearing in the newspapers. "I wrote poems myself when I was that age," they all said. The company later went bankrupt.
I decided that I was going to become a writer for good and would also find myself a bread and butter job that was closely related to literature. I enrolled to do Hungarian, French and philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Szeged. I signed up for 52 lectures a week and out of 20 passed the end-of-term examination with distinction. I was given a free lunch every day by a different family; I paid for my lodgings out of what I was paid for my poems. It made me very proud that Professor Lajos Dézsi declared me fit to do independent research. Any pleasure, however, was stripped away by the fact that Professor Antal Horger, by whom I was to be examined in Hungarian linguistics, summoned me and in front of two witnesses - I know their names to this day, they are teachers now - declared that as long as he was around I was never going to become a secondary school teacher, because - so says he - "the sort of person who writes poems like this," and at this point he held up an issue of the daily Szeged, "cannot be entrusted with the education of the future generation." There is much talk about the irony of fate, but in this case it truly is so, for that poem, which bears the title 'With a Pure Heart', became celebrated, with seven articles written about it. Lajos Hatvany declared it on more than one occasion to be a document of the whole postwar generation "for later eras", while Ignotus "coddled and caressed, burbled and murmured" this "exquisite" poem "in his soul", as he wrote in Nyugat, and he declared this poem the epitome of new poetry in his Ars Poetica.
The following year - I was twenty by then - I went to Vienna, enrolled at the university and earned a living by selling newspapers at the entrance to the Rathaus Keller and cleaning the premises of the Hungarian Academy in Vienna. When the director, Antal Lábán, heard about me he put an end to that and gave me meals in the Collegium Hungaricum as well as putting students my way: I tutored two sons of Zoltán Hajdu, the managing director of the Anglo-Austrian Bank. From Vienna and dreadful slum quarters, where I lacked even a sheet on my bed for four months, I went as a guest straight to the Hatvany Mansion in Hatvan, and then, with fares provided by Mrs Albert Hirsch, the lady of the house, and the summer having ended, I travelled to Paris. There I enrolled at the Sorbonne. I spent the summer in a fishing village on the coast, in the South of France. After that I came to Budapest. I attended two semesters at the University of Budapest. I did not take the exam for a teaching diploma because - with Antal Horger's threat in mind - I supposed that I would not get a job in any case. Later, the Institute for Foreign Trade, on being established, employed me as a Hungarian and French correspondent; I believe Mr Sándor Kóródi, my managing director there, would be happy to provide a reference. At that point I was assailed by the kind of unexpected blows that, however much life may have toughened me up, I was unable to withstand. The National Social Insurance Institute referred me initially to a sanatorium and subsequently put me on sick-pay for severe neurasthenia. I resigned from my job, having realised that I could not be a burden on a young institution. Ever since then, I have been living off my writings.
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. [1937]

Translated by Tim Wilkinson