Zoltán András Bán

A Sentimental Education

...

(Yearning for adventure, searching for identity) As a traveller, Márai was passionate, insatiable, even voracious—a Ulyssean characteristic. When he found himself in Leipzig, he immediately set forth for Frankfurt, only to take the first fast train from there to Berlin. Then back. In Paris he would not linger long; something drove him onwards to Chartres, Britanny, even Marseille, and then over to London. In Florence he would not be content with Florence, but would be in need of Genova and Venice, as well as Sils Maria, the scene of Nietzsche's great conversion. And while he visited all the famous sites of cultural pilgrimage, it was surely not zeal for culture that primarily drove him—and even less any Baedekerish grand tour fever. He was goaded by something else, by a few questions that were fundamental for him, as well as by considerable unease over his own identity. This constant taking to trains was also a search for self: he was trying to find out who he himself was, what business he had here in the world and, specifically, in Europe.
That he was a writer, and a Hungarian writer at that, was something he came to realize quite late and much to his own astonishment. Characteristically it came to him abroad, in 1926, in his relatively comfortable apartment and, as he considered it, permanent home in Paris after reading Zsigmond Móricz's novel Úri muri (Gentlemen's Fun). He packed up and returned to Budapest—very slowly, over the course of two years, as if he had been familiar with the opening lines of Cavafy's wonderful "Ithaca": "When you set out on your journey for Ithaca, / pray that the road is long."*
The search for identity took two different directions. The first was of a personal nature, for when the nineteen-year-old Márai first set off through Europe he had not the slightest inkling what he wanted to do with his life. He did not set out to be a writer, he did not intend to be anything in particular, he was an "aimless young man" as he later described himself in The Confessions of a Bourgeois. He was a belated Werther, in love not with one woman but with all of European culture, a Werther who slowly grew into a staid Wilhelm Meister, who considered his education complete. The second was also of a personal nature, though slightly more general, an issue that preoccupied Márai throughout his entire life. Namely, what does it mean to be a Hungarian abroad and, in particular, a Hungarian in Western Europe? How does a Hungarian appear to people of other nationalities? What can a Hungarian gain from Europe and, more importantly, what can a Hungarian give to Europe? Is a Hungarian, who had always considered and identified himself as European, sufficiently European? For the young Márai, travel was a kind of examination. (Later, in the gruesome years of the Second World War, he applied this "educational" concept to the Hungarian nation and drew the bitter conclusion that his nation had failed its most important exam.)

(Exam: Foreigner, European, Hungarian) The first results of that exam were extremely depressing, even grotesque. It is also important to note that Márai was preoccupied by these questions early on, as a novelist as well as an observer and journalist. Even the title of one of his first novels is symptomatic: Idegen emberek ("Strangers" or "Foreigners"). It is primarily set in Paris, where the protagonist has arrived from Berlin. (The autobiographical inspiration is apparent and some passages could be inserted seamlessly into Márai's travel writing.) Upon arrival in his hotel in Paris, the protagonist meets an Albanian, who asks him straightaway: "Are you Turkish?" The surprise provoked by this question is elemental:

This had never occurred to him. Unconsciously he lifted his hand, he wanted to touch his face, as if to find a change, as if he had grown a wart, or perhaps during the night, while he was dreaming, his nose had developed a crook of its own.
"What makes you think so?" he asked timidly, taken aback.
"Your eyes," said the Albanian.

This scene is repeated in his travel book Istenek nyomában (In the Footsteps of the Gods, 1927). It is evening on a dark street in Luxor. Suddenly a mellifluous Hungarian voice rings forth: "A good evening to you!" The narrator freezes in terror, for he has only just arrived in Luxor, he doesn't know anyone in the city, and now on a twilit street a man of about fifty, in Arab dress and clearly an Arab, greets him in the dulcet accent of the Great Hungarian Plain. The scene is dreamlike:

"How did you know that I am Hungarian?" The reply came, which I will not forget as long as I live, "From the colour of your skin, my good sir. And the shape of your brow. From these two things I can immediately recognize Hungarians."

The irony, of course, immediately comes into play:

Thus they of course exposed me, five paces from the Nile and the graves of the 18th Dynasty, on the border of Sudan; they exposed me, in vain had I purchased my clothes in Paris, my hat in London, my shoes in Vienna, a blind man could see that I was Hungarian.

The explanation is simple: the Arab dragoman had spent some time in the service of a Count Teleki in Hungary, hence his command of Hungarian. The narrator then exhaustively questions him on the colour of his skin, on what the distinctive tint is. Naturally there is no rationally demonstrable explanation.
That scene in turn can be paired with another in Idegen emberek. The protagonist becomes entangled with a French woman, travelling with her to Brittany on an impulse. After they break off the relationship, she calls him a "dirty foreigner" to his face. Then comes the crucial scene. Our protagonist calls on a Monsieur Durand, with whom he had once lodged at the same hotel and who is black and homosexual. (The young Márai had a noteworthy sensitivity to the shunned or the marginalized, perhaps because, as an artist and a young man in search of his own identity, he felt a fellowship with them.) Although the question is deadly serious, the ironic intent is unmistakable:

He took a breath and quickly said, "Tell me, do you consider me a white man?"
The black man looked up, rolled the whites of his eyes, and measured him up and down. In a flush of excitement he added: "I mean, am I a real white man, one hundred per cent? I know that I am neither black, nor brown, nor yellow. But recently I have been beset by doubts... I think you are an expert."

The black man walks around him, thoroughly examining him, palpating his face, and passes his judgment, "White enough," he said decidedly.
It is not entirely groundless to assume that this expert verdict decides the narrator to return home to Hungary. Sufficient whiteness (coming from a dark-skinned man) is enough to bring the search for identity to a close. The not-completely-white man must content himself with his not-completely- West-European homeland. There is a reflexive irony to this gesture. It has an aftertaste of resignation and wry melancholy. And something of the self-pity of an aristocrat.

...

The 1920s and 1930s were the golden years of Márai's journalism. The examples alluded to here may demonstrate how much his journalism permeated his literary work. As Márai himself saw it, journalism is often the antechamber to artistic creation. He had a penchant for the aphoristic and the glittery, the pleasure of a pensive moment, the profondeur of the instant. In his autobiographical Memoirs of Hungary (1971) he confesses that he never wanted to be a journalist but adored writing for newspapers and the immediate pleasure that it affords. Journalism brings instant satisfaction to the writer and to readers, who by the next day may have forgotten their delight and are already craving something new, a repetition of what appeared the day before and with the same intensity and style—but with some new titillation. There were very few who satisfied this desire with such ingenuity and craftiness as Márai. Let it be said to his credit that, in contrast to many of his colleagues, he was fully aware of all this. Writing for newspapers gives a writer an immediate gratification: the lines produced on a Monday are already grinning at him from the stands on Tuesday; sitting on the tram, he can see someone reading his little sketch, in the afternoon the first telephone calls start coming in (congratulatory, of course), and by the next day everybody has forgotten about it. But this is of little concern, there will be another edition tomorrow. It is a blissful pleasure, though it is also a responsibility and an exam to be taken repeatedly. As he recalled, "Journalism is a field in which one must prove one's talent again and again, daily."
To prove his talent, he worked in every genre. He wrote feuilletons on trifles, he wrote regular reports, he did interviews, he responded to books and performances, he produced snapshots from daily life. He took notice of everything and there was no subject that he considered beneath him. He did biographical sketches and portrait pieces, and in his young days made what amounted to a survey of the spiritual, intellectual and material condition of Europe, seeking out the side-streets and not only the grand boulevards. At first he worked without any specific goal, a kind of spiritual vagrant, in order to earn a living. He sent copies of his articles, with or without minor changes, to Hungarian newspapers in Budapest, Kos·ice and Prague, and sent German versions of them to Frankfurt, Leipzig and Vienna. This was when Márai learned how to write prose, how to situate an attributive or a conjunction. He mastered paragraphs and the art of rhythm, and practised the epic cadence, the simple and the complex procedures for sustaining a reader's attention.
When he published three novels in quick succession in Budapest (Bébi avagy az első szerelem [Baby or First Love]; Zendülők [The Rebels]; Idegen emberek [Foreigners], his contemporaries were stunned. They were at a loss to explain where this originality and self-assurance had come from, the alarmingly mature Weltanschauung and thinking of someone so young (we must not forget that he was not yet thirty), the intellect and thrust accompanied by such ease of expression. He had clearly acquired all this through his journalism, a field that at the time bore even more substantial freight: Ernst Bloch wrote Erbschaft dieser Zeit, one of his principal philosophical works, on the basis of a series of feuilletons he had published in the Frankfurter Zeitung.
There is a sort of fluttering, an intoxicating uncertainty in these articles. They emanate a mood of transition, the mood swings back and forth between sadness, even lethargy, somewhere between despair, with its wave of resignation, and a guffaw, with a slap on the knee. Their author is passing through and these articles are works of a genre in passing. A literature in transit, with no lodging secured, with papers of uncertain origin (though never false!), sometimes without even a passport or visa. Because of this, no single feeling emerges as dominant; Márai works with extremely fine transitions. Before a text tilts incurably in one direction, he thrusts it back in the other with an attributive so well-aimed or a punctuation mark so deadly placed that the reader is only conscious of them later. Or else he flips the point of view on a pinhead, putting everything in a different perspective. The journalist Márai was the crucible for the writer Márai. On the other hand, the incredible experience the journalist gained by writing several thousand (!) articles, affected his craft as a novelist both for good and for ill. He acquired a facility for rapid and concise expression, a terseness specific to him, but this sometimes lapsed into a certain superficiality, a glittery frivolity, as if at times it was the pen at work and not the person holding it.

...

(Engagement, ivory tower) Márai, like his friend and contemporary Dezső Kosztolányi, is usually held to be a writer of impassibilité, of aloofness from daily affairs, from politics. This could well be true in as much as he presumably would have concurred with a famous passage of Kosztolányi's, arguing that the ivory tower is a more human place, with fresher air, than the office of a political party. And Kosztolányi declares somewhat haughtily: homo aestheticus sum, though the opposition, which sounds so seductive, between homo aestheticus and homo moralis is at times no more than a delusion. So much for Kosztolányi. Márai knew this quite clearly, and though he was never a member of any party and never joined any political or literary movement, group, or society, at decisive moments he spoke out, politically, with commitment, for he knew that he had to forewarn his nation. At the time of the budding of fascism, Márai did become a homo politicus and remained one to the end of his life. One of the high points of Hungarian journalism is his "Messiah in the Sportpalast", in which he memorably catches—as an anxious outsider—the ominous mood of the crowd, silent, then howling with the speaker, at one of Hitler's 1933 speeches. It is a warning, an appeal to his nation—to the extent that this can be done in a newspaper report. It was a primal experience for Márai and he returns to it in Jelvény és jelentés (Emblem and Meaning, published in 1947), the fifth part of his cycle of novels A Garrenek muve (The Work of the Garrens). But he spoke out to no effect, his nation did not take heed—the fate of the 600,000 Jews dragged off from Hungary in 1944 speaks more loudly than anything else about this historical deafness. Márai's 1945 journals, recently published from his surviving manuscript, reveals that it was the wounds inflicted by Arrow Cross Hungary, and not just those inflicted by Muscovite Communism then coming to power, that persuaded him to leave his homeland as soon as he could. The homeland he adored, but which had become such a monstrous child.

 

Zoltán András Bán
a literary critic, is editor of the cultural section of the weekly Magyar Narancs.