Frederick Turner

Attila József Among his Peers

A Personal Assessment

 

If any enterprise were doomed to failure, it would be the attempt to compare the stature of the great poets. Any good artist is almost by definition incomparable - often the more so, the greater the artist's effort to do no more than faithfully represent the tradition and avoid mere originality and quirkiness.
Yet the exercise of comparison does have its virtues, if only to provide one more data point in the tracking of canon formation. The critic becomes a humble part of the great sensitive membrane of the literary public as it tastes and tastes again the vintages it is given - but a part that explicitly states its preferences and thus opens itself to the disapprobation of all the other parts. But the discovery of one's own sudden intuitive disagreement can be the spur to making up one's mind.
How, then, would I place Attila József among the great poets of the twentieth century? Obviously, I have already concluded that he is there at all, among the great poets. Why? Perhaps because as a poet myself I find he has got under my guard, has been admitted into the bridal chamber of my own creative activity - I reply to him, as among the few dozen poets through the ages who demand from me a reply. His pain and the terrifying strength of his countervailing will to joy will not let me be. To change the metaphor, if I have a map of the poetic universe, there is a whole section of its frontier that is marked with the words "Attila got here alone and his is the only account we have of it. He never returned. Beyond there are surely monsters."
Some of József's Hungarian contemporaries - and what an astonishing century that was for Hungarian poetry! - are more congenial to my own temperament than he. Miklós Radnóti's courage as a poet and a man appeals more to my own ideals of knighthood; Kosztolányi's sense of the holiness of life inspires me; Babits's lyrical insight and spiritual refinement are more comfortable, and his noble public stand on behalf of political reason and moderation wins my admiration. Nevertheless, I would argue that none of the others reached as far into territory that only poetry can enter. Nobody in the history of the world has taken us so deeply into the waking nightmare - and strange delights! - of the suffering child in all of us. Moreover, he brings a sensibility sharpened by those experiences at the edge of it all to bear on the public terrors of his time: the monster ideologies of left and right, the inhuman sufferings attendant upon the advent of industrial economics, the moral and historical threat to all meaning posed by material determinism, the challenge of the newly-discovered labyrinth of human psychology and of the wretched and tormented minotaur who lives at its center. And withal he gives us a beautiful and hopeful view of a future from which he himself is barred.
Perhaps Radnóti is József's most likely rival among his Hungarian contemporaries. Radnóti discovered at the age of thirteen that he was "fatherless and motherless", but he was already old enough and strong enough to be able to construct a great myth for himself out of the rich cultural materials in his possession - of the angel, of Cain and Abel, of the Gemini. This myth had the power to counter even the ideology of the Holocaust, and is part of the cultural capital of both the Hungarian nation and the Jewish people.
But József lived through the childhood catastrophe that Radnóti heard about after the fact; and Attila, his very name erased by a new one ("Pista", which is the diminuitive of István - Stephen - the martyr), a pauper child deprived of cultural resources, was forced to go to the substance of his own life's marrow to make a story that could contain the dread of his orphaning and abandonment. Not that one should, in the fashion of well-meaning progressives left and right, applaud him simply for his handicaps in a sort of "affirmative action" poetics. József did not merely endure and survive his "disadvantages"; he took them, by some strength it is hard to even imagine, as an opportunity, as a natural experiment on his own body and soul, by which he could make discoveries for the rest of us. His childhood grief and loneliness he took as the training of a shaman and the ordination of a victim-priest. By a short head, I would maintain, he stands above the other contemporary giants of his nation.

Now that I am embarked on this doomed mission of comparison, I might as well ask how József "stacks up" against the poets of other twentieth century traditions. Here again my ignorance and prejudices will be obvious. But for me the challengers would be Rilke, Yeats, Eliot, Borges, Celan, Pasternak.
Just for the sake of provocation, and despite the fact that I am not worthy to fasten the strap of their sandals, let me explain the absence of a few others. Lorca, gorgeous as he is, seems trapped within a Hispanic and revolutionary context. The civilized detachment of Auden and Heaney stands in the way of the madness that the very greatest poets must adventure into on their shamanic journey. Plath is the opposite - one who cannot see past her personal ordeal to the public world the poet is called to serve. Akhmatova, Mandelshtam, Milosz and Brodsky are busy repairing the human fabric torn by the Soviet abomination, and have only their own lovely private visions and voices to spare from the effort. Neruda is too much the buoyant propagandist for me. Pound damned himself with his preference for gold over human currency, and is a great learned-ignorant voice crying out from the ninth circle of the Inferno, blind to so much in the upper world. Brecht, for me, is the other half of Pound's double flame - though his unforgettable and highly accessible music is a huge resource for the future recovery of a poetic audience. Williams, though he has his lovely moments and a distinct vision, was an inferior technician and something of an American crank.
Stevens used aesthetic beauty as a screen to hide from himself the gigantic heights and depths of spiritual experience, and his deathbed conversion was too late. After the glories of the nineteenth century, twentieth century French poetry seems to me either strained or over-intellectual. I suspect that there were probably great Chinese, Indian, Indochinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Persian, Latin American, Arab poets, and great oral poets in the traditional cultures of Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, but I do not know them well enough to say. And I am leaving out of consideration poets who are my own personal friends, in case my admiration for their poetry is weighted with shared affectionate experiences.
Pasternak is a great writer; whether he is as great a poet per se is another matter. His poems concentrate and refract the light of his extraordinarily poetic fiction, but they get their beauty from the layering of story, character, and setting in his great novel Doctor Zhivago, especially from its ecstatic description of the landscapes and weather of Russia. Pasternak's poetic myths of Hamlet and of St. George and the dragon are given substance and evocativeness by way of the prose fiction. József, on the other hand, accomplishes it all in the poetry itself. Like the great sonnet sequences of Petrarch and Shakespeare, József's poems tell the story in a mosaic or holographic way - not as a simple linear narrative but as a recountal of a pattern of moods and incidents, many of them repeating poignant themes, that gradually builds up a total picture whose temporal order emerges as does the clarifying form of the whole. Gradually we see how the theme of rejection by the beloved who has seen too deeply into the abysses of his soul is not just a repetition but also a consequence of his double abandonment by his loving mother - first through his being put up for foster care, then through his mother's death of cancer. His own shamanic social mission as teacher and exorcist and mental traveller and sacrificer emerges as an implied story at the same time as it emerges as a theme.
With József, Celan is another in the company of great poetic suicides that constitutes so devastating an indictment of the twentieth century (and perhaps of the warped vision of poetry that the crimes and needs and fashions of the century imposed on the poet). Celan accepts with Nietzschean clarity the fragmentation and monstrous meaninglessness of the world as seen from the point of view of the Holocaust inhabitant. The fragmentation is itself recruited as a desperate poetic device: the shattered shards of all the beautiful things in western religious and secular culture are made to glitter with a terrible beauty as they are hurled together in his poems. By comparison, Radnóti never accepted the breaking of the lovely urn of civilization, the snapping of harmony's string. His last free act was to use his own dead body, wrapped in the famous overcoat, as the ark to carry his last words to a new world that would rise from the ashes of the old. Did Celan cave in to the nihilism of his universe, while Radnóti kept his sentry-post to the last? Or was it that Radnóti blinded himself, preferring the romantic myth of the Hungarian poet dying for freedom to the reality of his being just another murdered Jew - while Celan stared the truth in the face and thus left us a record that is irreplaceable? József, one might argue, managed to take all four roles - the victim, the hero, the Quixote, the stainless clairvoyant. His suicide was, explicitly, not a condemnation of the world he left; his last words are heartbreakingly generous to the world of nature and of human beings that he is leaving - their joys are real, but they are not for him:

Spring, summer, autumn, all are lovely;
but winter's loveliest for one
who hopes for hearth and home and family
only for others, when all's done.

But at the same time he was only too well aware of the betrayal of all human value and meaning that the "monster ideologies" of the twentieth century had accomplished. He himself did not pass through the event-horizon into the black hole of the Holocaust; but he knew what it was from his own childhood, painted with the same macabre surrealism as Kosinski's imagined outcast in the The Painted Bird, and could speak to the world with the authority of such knowledge.

To compare József with Jorge Luis Borges may seem incongruous. Yet they share certain great virtues as poets: astonishing technical virtuosity, a nobility of mind and expression, an aware and ironic spirit, an intricate and experiential philosophic brilliance, and a capacity to enter the strange world of dreams and alternative universes, drenched in some unforgettable mood and atmosphere. Borges is in my opinion the greatest short story writer in the history of the form; but, as with Pasternak, I would ask whether his poetry matches his prose. As Borges admits, he lived the life of one who

.never goes anywhere
without a thermometer,
without a hot-water bottle... ("Instants")

- but József went naked into battle with life and flinched from no wound. Despite the majestic grace, philosophical brilliance, wit, and luminous clarity of Borges' verse, I must prefer József. T.S. Eliot makes an even more problematic match with József. Prufrock, of course, is not so very far in feeling from the bitter young Attila - both are alienated, sardonic about the cultural pieties, shockingly original in imagery and discordant cultural reference. But József's early rebellion is much deeper, more passionate, even more despairing, more proudly defiant, even while it lacks Eliot's erudition and multi-layered self-irony. Eliot's Wasteland is a metaphor, clad in the fragments of all the great Indo-European myths; but Attila lived the wasteland, in those industrial outskirts with their de Chirico perspectives, their dandelions growing in the cracks, the vermilion glowing portent of the molten iron baby in its cast, the moonlight pouring through the factory windows. Instead of fleeing to Eliot's country churchyards, József, like Milton's Satan, decides to make a heaven of his hell and find in industrial modernity the promise of a just and loving human future out among the stars. Who knows what József might have become if he had lived? Could he have found, as Eliot did, a spiritual home? Probably not - the damage had gone too deep. Eliot is cautious and reserved in feeling and sensory response to the world, and this protects him. "Go, go, go, said the bird; human kind cannot bear very much reality" - and Eliot went. But not Attila József. "Terrify me, my hidden God," he says in "Tumble Out of the Flood":

I need your wrath, your scourge, your thunder;
quick, come tumble out of the flood,
lest nothingness sweep us asunder.
I am the one the horse knocks down,
up to my eyes in dirt, a cipher,
and yet I play with knives of pain
too monstrous for man's heart to suffer.
How easily I flame! the sun
is not more prone to burn - be frightening,
scream at me: leave the fire alone!
Rap my hands with your bolt of lightning.

At this stage in canon-formation it is clear that Eliot is by far the better known poet in terms of influence, citation, and general familiarity with his oeuvre. Eliot, moreover, filled out nobly the other duties of the poet as critic, scholar, cultural conscience, philosopher, witness, and lived enough years to do it. He has the huge advantage of being in English, while József must live fully only in the ear of ten million Hungarians, and but haltingly in the world language. But for me Eliot will remain the glory of conservative modernism, while József looks forward to the new human age that we are entering, painfully but in hope, today:

.I must have work. Would it were task sufficient
that one confess the past. The ripples of
the Danube, that is future, past, and present,
fondle and hold each other in their love.
Our forebears' struggle, with its strife and slaughter,
remembrance melts and renders into peace:
our common labours now to set in order,
were pains enough to be our masterpiece. ("By the Danube")

József's mission as a shaman to his people was not, could not be, completed and fulfilled in the gathering shadows of the Second World War and the Holocaust. One could well argue that William Butler Yeats did indeed complete and fulfil his own work as prophet and liturgist of a nation - and in the electric medium of the English language, could act as a model poet to the world at large. No poet is Yeats' superior in sheer musicality and perfection of expression. Yeats' golden hallucinations, the sages standing in God's holy fire, the jewelled bird, the silk-enfolded sword, the stone-eyed sphinx, are forever. Yeats made sure that Ireland's revolution and liberation were guided and uplifted by poetry, and that nation's contemporary success may be largely due to the enormous infusion of cultural capital he gave it and its language. By comparison, József's Hungary had to go through two or three more unsuccessful revolutions before it found its political home, and the revolution that finally freed it was, sadly, not a poetic one but a decent down-toearth affair of civil society and sound business administration.
But Hungary's task was far greater than Ireland's, and the consequences of its liberation may be more important. I was in Budapest in 1989 as the walls were coming down and the city was full of fleeing East Germans. The gaiety of the Hungarian spirit, though not led by poetry, was nurtured by it: Attila József and Mihály Babits, among others, had taught Hungary what it was to be a "true European", and the cultural memory, undaunted by the Soviet half-century, fed those brave middle-class people as they clamoured for truth and free elections.
In another way József can stand comparison with Yeats. Yeats' learning is profound, but partial. His romantic rejection of science and technology, his preference for the history of art and the mystical philosophers, led him toward the gorgeous but barren temptations of magic and astrology. This tendency does not harm his poetry, but dates and limits its relevance in the long run. On the other hand, József's grasp of the sciences as true miracle, and of the real promise of technology and just laws, gives him a power that will remain and increase. Even if warped by Marxist ideology in its early years, his practical vision of the future, his refusal to be poetically daunted by its prosaic reckoning of rural electrification and decent health clinics and sound labour law, stands as a remarkable achievement. In an odd sense, he ends up being a rebel against the rebellions of modernism - "fascist-communist romance" as he calls it in "Enlighten Him". His
imaginative triumph is to see the simple business of having families and exploring the universe as worthy of shamanic celebration and poetic joy:

For we'll beget a girl so pretty,
clever and good; a brave wise boy;
they'll save a shred of us, our pity,
like sunfire from the Milky Way, -
and when the Sun is guttering,
our princelings in their sweet machines
shall fly, and fearless, chattering,
find stars to plow the human genes. ("March")

Crude and naive, perhaps, but for me this outflies anything in Yeats' vision.
Rilke, however, in ways seldom even noticed, certainly not celebrated, is like József profoundly aware of and interested in science. Rilke's grasp of the mystery of biological evolution and genetics - and still more, his ability to see their spiritual implications, invisible to most proponents of it, is exemplary. It marks him as someone who will be useful - indispensable - to future ages. Though Rilke's androgynous sensibility is very far from József's gallant, defiant boyish masculinity, they are both reaching beyond the sociological modernism and sterile revolutionary spirit of their times.
Rilke's inimitable music and grace, the visionary shiver of his land of grief, his celebration of nature as passionate as Pasternak's intoxicated springscapes, his learning that rivals that of Eliot and Borges - these redeem in many ways the century he worked in. How does József compare? Perhaps we could say that Rilke's spiritual aestheticism distances him just a little from the raw edges of life that József tore himself upon. The darkest tragic spirit, that is close to a nightmare kind of picaresque, where one wanders through a Bosch landscape of terror - the landscape of much of middle Europe in the twentieth century - cannot be contained in Rilke's angelic spirit. But József perforce had to make room for it in his, and it did not destroy him. What destroyed him was the joy from which he was barred - and knowingly but helplessly barred himself - but which he had the heroic honesty to recognize as valid.
I find I cannot after all provide a league-table in which we can place József as equal first, or second, or third. But I hope I have made the point that he has carved out a place for himself in it.

 

Frederick Turner
is a British-born American poet who teaches literature as Founders Professor at the Arts
and Humanities School of the University of Texas at Dallas. He is the author of numerous
volumes of poems, essays and theoretical studies in poetry and has,
with Zsuzsanna Ozsvath, published a volume of translations of the poems of
Miklós Radnóti (Foamy Sky, Princeton University Press, 1992), and a volume
by Attila József (The Iron-blue Vault, Bloodaxe, 1999).