Tibor Déry

No Judgement

Excerpt from a Memoir

...

I usually had 76 fillérs on me, sometimes even two pengős, but Lajos Nagy would never ask for more than one pengő on principle. Admittedly, he would beckon me over to his table every time I showed up at the coffee-house: even a good two-pengő friend was a rarity in those days, particularly one from whom it was possible to cadge without blushing. If I was not left with enough money after making a loan available, I would not order anything. "Later!" I would say to Jancsi, the pleasant, round-faced lad, who had advanced from cigar-seller to waiter and subsequently headwaiter. "Yes, sir, later," he would smile encouragingly, well aware of the position. At another table Attila József was reading a newspaper. "Will you come to Hódmezővásárhely with me?" he asked.
"When?"
"Tomorrow."
"What are you going to Vásárhely for?" I asked him. "I would go, but I've got no money."
"You don't need any money," said Attila József. "My brother-in-law will take us there by car."
Stunned: "Your brother-in-law is that rich?"
Attila brushed that aside; he was still able to do so back then. The next day, totally unacquainted with his family circumstances, I got into the car. In front were the chauffeur and the brother-in-law, Dr Ödön Makai (now deceased); in the back seat, Attila and I. I did not know his sisters either, only by name - one of them, from a poem of his, Lidi, who was actually called Jolán, but whom I later had to address as Lucie - but I did know Attila's poems a good deal more thoroughly, and in point of fact it was to go to their place that I had got into the car. In Budapest the chauffeur drove, but when we reached the outskirts of the city the brother-in-law took over at the wheel. Within five minutes he had run over a chicken, then crashed into a tree in his nervousness.
"He passed his driving test yesterday," Attila said.
I laughed out loud, knowing I was invulnerable, but Attila was trembling beneath the smile, white as a sheet. "Don't you have something to do in Kecskemét?" he asked after a while.
"Sure I have," I said. "About as much as in Vásárhely."
"Then we'll get out there," said Attila, "and do the rest of it by train."
The brother-in-law respected our open lack of confidence and was apparently not offended. Only at Kecskemét it turned out there would be no more trains that day in the direction of Vásárhely, so we had to spend the night there. We still had enough money for a hotel room for the night.
It was not only my restless flitterings abroad that meant there was no continuity in our friendship, a tenyear age gap also separated us, although during my stays in Budapest, whenever I returned home from Germany, Italy, Norway, Yugoslavia, Vienna, Mallorca, Transylvania, and so on for a rest, my affection for him, which would have grown further during my absence, always sought him out and found him, and on those occasions we would wander about the streets arguing for half the night, with him usually ending up sleeping at my place. But Attila, like his contemporaries, was one of the second generation of Nyugat writers, whereas I hovered between the two generations, which is to say, neither accepted me, both fending me off with one hand: the one by right of their prestige, the other by right of their youth. I did not join in either trend or circle; I merely had specific friends in the one and the other. But then Attila was too shy to invite the older and more or less respected fellow writers back to his place, to the desolation of his mundane existence; I never went to call on him at any of his lodgings, all I knew about his financial circumstances was from his poetry. I only met his partner, Judit (now deceased), once or twice at best; and I was quite unaware of his life-threatening attachment to E. Gy. He didn't know much more about me either. Our questions, the problems of literature and Communism, converged without any personal background, and although we argued we were largely in agreement, particularly in his last, seared years. But whereas I burned with a slow fire, the earsplitting explosions of his emotions could increasingly be heard from his hell.
I suppose that was the formula of his life and art: reason's interminable compromise with uncompromising, merciless instincts. What people of more fortunate dispositions surmount, the artist sublimates. His mind - an excellent work superintendent - reorganised his instincts into a world view; that is how it found room and a role for his cruelty too. That couplet, 'With pure heart I'll rob and steal, If needs must, will even kill," I reckon, should be taken literally: the murderous desire in art's smiling Orphic discipline.
I take a look at his poems now, here on the pink millstone table, under the sun's rapidly slanting rays. The skeleton is seated next to me but no longer wishes even to face his life's work: he is still averting his skull. There is an autumnal mist over the surface of Lake Balaton.
"Don't be ashamed!" I tell him. "Look around you! Twilight's delicate charm, like your poems: how much murderousness it conceals. Take that swallow over there, for example, above the baluster: the innocent lives of how many insects does it extinguish, I wonder, as it flits back and forth, like your lightning-quick associations of ideas? Innocent, did I say? They too kill one another."
But the skeleton merely shrugs his shoulders, if I'm not mistaken.
"Give yourself credit," I carry on, "for having striven to give your aggressions human dignity. You set them in the service of a noble idea, that of making the life of man easier. They did serve as well, until the idea, dunked in the dust and mud of this Earth, declared you altogether unsuitable. You couldn't put up with that. Nor I, later on."
"We couldn't put up with it because we really were unsuitable," Attila says, or rather murmurs, even whispers, so neither of us should hear.
"Are you trying to tell me," I respond, having heard anyway, "that one is unsuitable?"
"No, I'm not trying to tell you that," says the skeleton, with a stubbornness that was already familiar from his living phase, and raps on the table with the right arm pressed under the left armpit. "The idea reckons on dust and even mud, because the dust came first and a soul could only have breathed into it afterwards. It was me who was altogether unsuitable."
"You believe that?" I respond doubtfully. "On that basis, I am too. Man is a responsive being, says Georg Lukács. Unaware of your nature, you clung to that proposition, unfortunately for you. I would class you more as an asker, along with myself. You would have found more peace inquiring, although not into Eastern Orthodoxy."
The skeleton again shakes just its head, squinting in its whole being. I blush beside the millstone table: Am I applying my own pattern to him, to his weak physique, to the answers he wants to rely on? All the same, answering is simpler than asking. It's more perilous to churn up the sea than to contain the storm in Aeolus's ox-hide bottle. If he asks and finds no answer to his bloody internal battles, where is he going to turn for help: to mental disorder?
"Yes, of course," I say soothingly. "Being younger, you sought certainties, just as I did for a long time. You needed supports in the obnoxious reality that you were so superbly acquainted with. Where you were short on experience you patched that with a poem. Your dissatisfaction rubbed up against the dissatisfaction of an entire class and caught fire. Sympathy, like air pressure, tossed you high above yourself. I am familiar with the process; it took me too on its back."
"You regret that, perhaps?" the skeleton asked sarcastically.
"The hell I do," says I. "I record it as among fate's happy gifts." I presume that at this juncture he would have raised his index finger if he had one, as a signal of concurrence. But this time the word to go with the index finger is missing, as if midway he had had second thoughts. With his head being averted, only one eye socket can be seen, and it is empty anyway.
"Likewise put it down to your credit," I say, "that you vigorously drew mankind's attention to the intermediary function of reason between nature and society. You yourself may have come apart in the struggle between the two, but you encouraged further efforts precisely by the spectacular, heart-stirring example of your defeats."
I have the impression that he would gladly turn his head my way with an interrogative gesture, were he able. But visibly, nature is again stronger than the etiquette of social intercourse.
"Oh yes," I go on, "by the crude, forthright depiction of your instincts, with which there is little comparable in world literature, you vociferously warned of the danger with exemplary sensitivity and credible strength. You didn't even put a question mark after the picture, rightly entrusting that to the reader."
"It wasn't the question mark that I entrusted to the reader but the proofs," the skeleton says.
"Where," I asked in near-professorial tones, though immediately ashamed of myself for my seeming self-assurance, "where in literature, with the possible exception of folk poetry, do we come across such shameless directness as your bravery in expressing the conflicts in your love life? Such plain declarations not just of your desires - there are other examples of that - but of frustration, physical and mental disappointment, vengeance, menace, curses from beyond the grave, in a word: sexual blackmail - as in your esteemed poetry? Offering the whole thing as a lesson for public use."
"Naturally, I wasn't the first to go down that narrow path," rejoins the skeleton, modestly averting his skull still more, as if he wished to inspect the neighbouring vineyard with his unrealisable line of sight. "I also gained encouragement from medieval poetry; as is well known, I endeavoured to develop that further."
"And you placed in the other pan of the poetic scale, by way of expiation," I carry on, "all the tenderness that you could no more call into play than your thirst for revenge. Again, just as an example of public utility. Though if I rightly recall, in real life as well..."
"Let's drop it!" says the skeleton, once more with an absent, dismissive gesture.
"Don't let's drop it!" I say "This is just between the two of us. There was that time once when you really did attack a woman with a kitchen knife, because she didn't love you but another man. Though by then, given the advanced stage of your illness, you were often confusing real life with the imaginary, and vice versa, dissolving poetry with insoluble facts."
A fair time before that, in 1933, when he was at the height of his intellectual powers, he dropped by the apartment in which Andor Németh was living in Jókai Square. The inconsequential story that follows has been recounted by three writers: by Jolán József, in her recollections of her younger brother; in an account by Andor Németh in his more recent book about Attila; and finally in a novelistic treatment by Kosztolányi, likewise based on Andor Németh's account. All three, though drawing on a single source, differ from one another, and indeed also from a fourth, the one recorded below, which may well also have Andor Németh as its source. I was apprised of the event on returning home, some eight to ten days after it had occurred, from Yugoslavia, where I had been flexing my novel-writing muscles for the past year on my book Szemtől szembe (Face to Face), and readying myself for Vienna, where I would make a start on A befejezetlen mondat (The Unfinished Sentence).
In how many diverse garbs events get clothed! What is left, if one attempts to strip them off? If down to the bare bones - a painful undressing process - there remain the facts that prosaically run the world. Fortunately, an event pulls on so many layers that even the most astute investigative historian's fingertips are barely able to palpate where the clothing ends and where the facts begin. Sadly, in the course of being stripped down, the event loses the very thing that makes it comprehensible and interpretable: its human magic.
In his flat in Jókai Square, Andor Németh was just in the middle of dictating a translation to Juci, his wife to be, when, getting on for noon, Attila József stopped by and, as was his habit, stretched out on the couch in one corner of the room. Németh carried on dictating. After a while he left off, happily, and went to lie down beside Attila. Let me conjure up for the dear reader the lock of greying hair that would fall down over his brow with each sudden movement.
"Any news?" he presumably asked, maybe even giving a yawn as well.
"Yes," said Attila.
That would have been enough for Németh to lose interest, I imagine, knowing his character. He was no fan of events. Quite evidently he would not have responded at all.
"You're not even curious?" Attila would presumably have asked.
"No," said Andor Németh.
"Then do a 'Twenty Questions' on it!"
"An event of public interest?"
"No," said Attila.
Andor Németh perked up a bit at that. "So, the kind of event that primarily
affects our friends and acquaintances?"
"That kind," said Attila.
"Will it put me in a better mood?"
"Not likely," said Attila.
At that Andor Németh slumped back. "Keep going all the same!" said Attila.
Presumably Andor Németh gave another yawn; he had been dictating his Balzac translation since nine o'clock that morning. "I'm not in the mood," he said. "Sum it up in two words!"
"Just keep going," said Attila.
Juci brought in three black coffees from the kitchen and perched on the corner of the sofa. "Are you staying here for lunch?" she asked Attila.
"Yes, here," says he.
"Does it affect me personally?" Andor Németh asked.
"No."
"You?"
"Yes."
"Literature?"
"No."
"Something to do with a woman?"
"Yes."
"Trouble then." Andor Németh would more than likely have said. Attila's dealings with women were of no interest to him. "Judit?"
"Yes."
"You had a row?"
"Yes."
"She's left you?"
"No."
"You've left her?"
"No."
"She's committed suicide?"
Andor Németh was a dab hand at Twenty Questions: as Attila was lying next to him on the divan, alive and unscathed, indeed had even asked for lunch, as a logical sequel to the events only Judit could have committed suicide. Or attempted to do so. That there had been an attempt only became clear the next day, or the day after that, when she, taken to hospital by ambulance, was able to walk out under her own steam.
The story is inconsequential, but all the same, if it has diverted four writers, it points beyond the history-shaping fact latent within to what lies above the bare bones. And, being interpretable, that straightaway sets in motion a game of Protean changes. I barely knew Judit, nor did Kosztolányi, and Andor Németh did not like her; however, they all knew that Attila had been living with her for three years, that she would get up at crack of dawn to do a full day's heavy manual work in an umbrella factory, that she cleaned, cooked and washed for Attila, who spent his days in coffee-houses and often spent his evenings too away from home; and - now it turned out - she had attempted suicide out of jealousy, because while going through Attila's pockets during her cleaning she had found a love poem addressed to another woman. None of that could have happened without leaving a mark in the poet's sensitive conscience. Yet Attila, pallid though he may have been, was playing with the possibility of her suicide, her death?
If it's true that the ludic instinct is one of the sources of art, I muse quietly, likewise averting my head, albeit towards the Balaton, then the same motive - the passion and need to mould and form - prompted in Attila that spooky Twenty Questions as it did his poems. He endeavours to surmount the disorderliness of reality, as in his poetry, by forcing it between the human laws of the game, neutralising it by elevating it in this way. Great art nullifies (changes) reality, though starting off from it. I am thinking not just of the autonomous magic of words, which links our basest instincts with what is most sublime within us, but also of their effect: by proclaiming the magic word I actually drive out my demons. What is uttered aloud changes. Murderous instincts lurked in Attila: it is sufficient for me to refer to the recurrent motif of the knife. If he had not resolved them in his poetry, he might perhaps have killed sooner or later. "I'd like to kill, the same as everyone," he writes in one of his Medallions. Andor Németh left something out of his Twenty Questions: the question "Did you kill Judit?", because highly as he esteemed the poetry, he nevertheless did not reckon it powerful enough to strike the knife out of the killer's already upraised hand: so if Attila was lying beside him on the sofa, then on this occasion he had not wished to kill.

Translated by Tim Wilkinson

Tibor Déry
Tibor Déry (1894-1977) was a leading novelist who came from a wealthy middleclass family but became a Communist in his youth and spent most of his younger years abroad. After experimental poems, drama and fiction, he wrote the huge A befejezetlen mondat (The Unfinished Sentence, published only in 1947), a panoramic treatment of Hungarian society between the two wars, seen from a left-wing point of view. In 1945 he joined the party and more or less supported its Stalinist policies despite severe ideological criticism of his work up to 1954, when he began airing his misgivings. For his leading role as a writer in the 1956 Revolution he was sentenced to 9 years in prison, but - as a result of world-wide protests from the likes of André Gide, Arthur Koestler, T.S. Eliot and many others - he was amnestied in 1961 "for reasons of health". His novellas, Niki, Love, (1955-1956) and some short stories depicting the real face of the political system, appeared in numerous foreign translations at the time and made him famous. In the mellowing years of the Kádár regime he wrote a number of important novels and collections of stories and essays. His autobiography, Ítélet nincs (No Judgement, 1969), from which the above excerpt was taken, is written in the form of a "conjuration": during it some of the deceased he had been close to join him as he sits at a stone table in his hillside garden at Balatonfüred, overlooking the lake, and there he reminisces and engages them in conversation.
Nyugat (West, 1908-1941) was the leading literary periodical of the period. One of its editors, the poet, novelist and essayist Mihály Babits (1883-1941), a stern personality of immense prestige and authority and a father-figure to the younger generations, denied Attila József the much coveted Baumgarten Literary Prize as the head of the Baumgarten Foundation. The penniless and often starving young poet lampooned him for this in a cruel poem, something Babits was never able to forgive, not even when years later József duly apologised in a fine poem. To the end of his short life he continued to receive only smaller sums of aid from the Foundation.
Lajos Nagy (1883-1954) was a prolific writer of short stories, a great realist and satirist, and the author of volumes of descriptive sociology in which he depicted the dire conditions of village and small-town life. His chef d'oeuvre is "Grand Café Budapest", a delightful, humorous description of coffee-house life in Budapest in the thirties, of which he and Déry and Kosztolányi and József were, among countless other writers and intellectuals, regular players. Beside Lajos Nagy, the poet Gyula Illyés was invited to Russia to attend the Soviet Writers' Congress held in Moscow in 1934, an invitation which stung Attila József deeply because he thought he would have better deserved it.
E. Gy.: Edit Gyömrői, one of József's analysts, with whom the poet fell in unrequited love. Andor Németh (1891-1953) was a critic and novelist, a close friend of Attila József and also his first biographer. The incident mentioned here, the suicide attempt of Judit Szántó, József's companion for six years, is the subject of Kosztolányi's story "Twenty Questions", appearing on p. 38-46 of this issue.