Len Rix

It was a matter for some celebration last year when Antal Szerbs publishers finally reissued his Oliver VII. This charmingly wayward novel has been out of the public mind for far too long. Written in a steadily darkening period of its authors life, in an already dark period of Europes history, it is a hymn to joy, a glimpse of a more innocent world made all the more subversive by its shrewdness, its clear-eyed freedom from illusion, its generous transcendence of everything that is mean, life-hating and cynical. The tale of a bored king who plots against his own throne and ends up impersonating himself in exile, it slipped into the world, appropriately enough, under cover of a nom de plume—in fact posing as a translation—and it has challenged interpretation ever since. It is unashamedly playful. It touches on questions of philosophy and morality while reducing the reader to gales of laughter. Indifferent to questions of political correctness and intellectual fashion, it evades every category into which the critic might wish to fix it. And it has paid the price, spending decades in near-total oblivion.
Even when not cocking a snook at the official morality of the times, it troubled those who genuinely wished its author well. Its apparently frivolous plot made it seem lightweight, 'experimental, a work so utterly different in kind from Szerbs masterpiece Journey by Moonlight (1937) as to amount to little more than an afterthought. György Poszlers admirable 1973 study¹, guided by Szerbs own brilliant essay on illusion and reality in the dramas of Pirandello, seems to have been the first to penetrate its more serious intentions. Poszler achieved this by reading it as combined parody of the picaresque and detective novels with a philosophical agenda deriving from Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV. But even he goes on to suggest that the novels anonymous first printing may have reflected doubts in the authors mind about its value; and writing about Szerb in these pages (No 167, Autumn 2002), he chose to omit it from his short list of the writers fiction written after Journey by Moonlight, presumably now convinced that, once the element of parody and the debt to Pirandello had been noted, it had little fresh to say after all.
Poszler had, however, shown a way forward for others. The comparison with Pirandello was both illuminating and calculated to make the most sceptical reader take the novel more seriously. Nor was the connection a fanciful one. Szerb was not only writing about the Italian around the same time as Oliver VII but, through some remarkable failure of vigilance, was allowed to make a short radio broadcast on his plays as late as 1943. Poszler writes with such verve and authority that his essay will doubtless continue to set the tone for some time to come.
But Oliver VII has never sat still for long in any critical box, or even the elegant combination of boxes he contrives for it; and the link with Pirandello, however suggestive, may in the end prove limiting. Whatever their common themes and intellectual affinities, Szerbs personality, temperament and vision seem to be of a subtly different kind. The question remains whether Oliver VII has other fish to fry than Absurdist ones; and whether, indeed, one of the objects of parody might not be Pirandello himself. Szerbs art is full of such surprises. It is the stuff of his vision and the key to his narrative technique.
There are of course other reasons why the novel might have been so long overlooked. To those untrained in the mental gymnastics of illusionism it might appear surprisingly slight. Szerbs tale of a bored king who becomes a trainee con man is certainly entertaining, with its sly wit, moments of broad farce and ingenious use of masks and disguises—but what does it all add up to? The plot is hardly realistic, the ending possibly sentimental. Those who come to it with high hopes after Journey by Moonlight might feel more specific reasons for disappointment. Certain themes, and the ironic manner, will be familiar, but they will look in vain for the darker spiritual questionings, the confrontation with inner demons, the brooding sense of psychological determinism of its predecessor. For many readers in the West, Hungarian novels are supposed to be gloomy, despairing and ideally a touch neurotic. Oliver VII's benignly indulgent tone might come across as simply a retreat, a persecuted mans regression into wishful thinking. Any Hungarian book about a popular uprising that results in nothing nastier than a few quaint graffiti, the comic humiliation of a state official and a witty student prank, must surely have its head in the sand. Those arriving from Szerbs first novel, The Pendragon Legend (1934), might be less disappointed, but only because bringing lower expectations. Pendragon is, like Oliver VII, another tissue of parodies that masks its serious side with a deceptive air of frivolity. In both narratives, the sheer entertainment and playful tone disincline one to look for deeper implication. Certainly, British reviewers of the 2005 translation of Pendragon were happy to celebrate the fun, the literary wit and the pace of the story, and generally left the philosophy to fend for itself. Will that be the fate of Oliver VII too, when Pushkin release the first English translation later this year?
In one sense, there would be something rather pleasing if that proved to be the case. The enduring popularity of Pendragon and Journey by Moonlight in their native land arose independently of political censors and learnedly-explicating professors alike, and this surely is a tribute to Szerbs gentle humanity as well as to his art. If we are to arrive at a full and balanced judgement of the writer—as the reprinting of Oliver VII now gives us a chance to do—we have to consider what sort of man he was, and what distinctive temperament drives his inquiry into the questions raised in his work.

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The novel can of course be enjoyed without any sense of these undercurrents. The broad comedy, the sly wit and unfailing good humour are a source of steady delight, as is the freshness of the writing, with its constant surprises and reversals. The gentleness of the irony is not a new feature of Szerb's writing—it determines the tone of both Pendragon and Journey—but the sunniness of its view of humankind is. Conceived in a world of marching jackboots, the setting and tone have at times more in common with the Bohemia of The Winter's Tale than with Hitler's Bohemia-Moravia. Villains abound, but no actual evil is done, and their villainy is not so much seen off as transmuted into good. St Germain, the archswindler, becomes, like Shakespeare's Autolycus, the unwitting instrument of redemption (and the parallel is made even more teasing when he suggests, only half-jokingly, that 'there must have been a divine purpose at work here'). The King's elaborate deception leads in the end not just to self-discovery but to the salvation of his country. Of course humankind is venal, self-deceived and selfimportant, and things are never quite what they seem; but there is not a harsh word in the whole book. The prevailing spirit is one of cheerful, amused, openeyed forgiveness. How that was possible at so steadily darkening a time for its creator remains a matter of conjecture.
For all this, Oliver VII confirms the self-declared 'neo-frivolism' of Pendragon as the 'serious' business it is. Szerb nowhere expands this concept into a formal philosophy—that would hardly have been in the spirit—but its implications are many and far-reaching. Originating, no doubt, as the natural expression of an irrepressible wit, itself the overflow of a formidable intelligence, it becomes a selfimposed discipline, a means of distancing personally-charged material, to make it available for the impersonality of art. At the same time, it gives free reign to the principle of surprise, so integral to his sense of the paradoxical nature of the world. In The Pendragon Legend an alchemist who has all his life 'believed passionately in the supernatural' makes the shattering discovery that it actually exists. Mihály's voyage of self-discovery in Journey by Moonlight is equally marked by a series of comic reversals of certainty: 'This was not the first time he had seen black as white.' And as the 'fire-eating' Delorme observes in Oliver VII, 'sometimes these truisms turn out to be true. Life holds no greater surprise'. In the dizzying world of Szerb's fiction, things are forever turning out to be the opposite of what they seem, or even more strangely, what they always were.
The philosophical, or perhaps we should say psychological, essence of this neo-frivolism was caught by the religious historian Károly Kerényi, who said of the writer (a close friend) that "he never took himself seriously". This was more than a compliment; it exactly reflected the value Szerb attached to the 'self' as in 'selfinterested' and 'self-important'. If personality is plural—as Freud, and Pirandello, knew, and Pendragon wittily demonstrated—then the different selves that make it up will include some very odd bedfellows. For Szerb's mentors, if that is what they were, the consequences are potentially tragic: reality is unknowable, and the poor battered ego is locked into a hopeless struggle for permanence. Szerb turns that conclusion on its head. Since life, for him, is a joyous, miraculous thing, and love not entirely an illusion, the instability of the 'self' is in fact a form of release. Its inconsistent nature, and the endlessly ingenious strategies it devises to keep its end up, are necessarily comic. The art that grows from this realisation is too benign for satire, too shrewd for sentimentality; it pulls off that almost impossible trick of accommodating a disillusion bordering on cynicism with an amused, indeed delighted, acceptance of the world with all its faults.
What is perhaps most moving of all in this, is that the values enshrined in Szerb's novels were so much of a piece with the qualities that made him such a remarkable human being, and that those qualities, attested by so many—his unfailing kindness, his playfulness, the gentleness of spirit—find such full expression in this radiantly benign, all-forgiving last novel. They were qualities he took with him to his grave.

With the passing of the third 'Jewish Law' of October 1942, the questions of identity and loyalty that feature so strongly in Szerb's fiction took a new and urgent form. Reclassified, to his dismay, as Jewish, and an alien in the land of his birth, it was now his turn to choose: between accepting the role he had been allotted, and the chance to leave. At first, it seems, he simply clung to hope. His books were banned; Oliver VII sank without trace; he lost the right to teach in his university; was summoned for periods of forced labour. Ahead lay the ghetto, the compulsory yellow star and the death camps. Presented with repeated opportunities to escape and an academic post at Columbia University, each time he declined. Some of those close to him, such as the poet Ágnes Nemes Nagy, thought he did so out of naive optimism, misplaced idealism or the misguided notion that his reputation gave him exemption; and those factors doubtless played some part. But there was also a real commitment to Hungary and to his work there ("How can I teach students who haven't read their Vörösmarty?")—which his widow later claimed as the major reason he stayed. And there was also an unshakeable loyalty to those he loved. Even when granted permission to leave in 1944, he declined when the Arrow Cross threatened reprisals against his family; again, just weeks before his horrific death in January 1945, he sent his rescuers away because his younger brother was in the same camp. On another occasion, he simply refused to leave if it meant abandoning his old colleagues and friends Gábor Halász and György Sárközy. People wrote of the 'mood of resignation' that came over him, and the way he continued to put others first, to think of their needs when his own prospects were becoming so dark. It is difficult not to read the values embodied in his fiction, particularly Oliver VII, into his conduct during these appalling circumstances.
Forgiving he might have been, and possibly overtrusting. But he was not blind to what was coming. For some time he had been compiling his last book, an anthology of his hundred favourite poems translated from the major European languages. Just one of these was his own work, from the German of the Swiss Nobel laureate Spitteler. It proved horrifically relevant. In it, Consul Cornelius the Clement, who has ordered that his slaves should be required to perform only labour that is congenial to them, discovers one who is physically incompetent and an object of general mockery. He asks the man what he did in his home country and receives the sour answer (the title of the poem): 'Only a King'. Cornelius considers for a moment, then, being a man of clemency, gives the order: 'Kill him'. Is it chance that 'only a king' is also the concluding phrase of Oliver VII?
Antal Szerb more than once complained that the playfulness of his manner too often led people to underestimate the seriousness of his scholarly work. It is hard to resist the notion that much the same fate has befallen his three novels. They have too often been patronised as a mere adjunct to his great histories of Hungarian and world literature; and their playfulness too, as the bleak publishing history of Oliver VII testifies, is too often taken at face value. No less taken for granted is Szerb's sheer technical mastery. Every aspect of his craft rewards attention: its subtle tact, the delicate, constantly-shifting, ever-mimetic style, the limpidity and purity of his diction, the ear for dialogue, the almost mathematical symmetry of his plots, his capacity to charge naturally arising situations and objects with symbolic resonance—quite apart from the shrewdness, even in so delicate a concoction as Oliver VII, of his comments on the human condition. These virtues, so integral to his hold over a faithful and growing readership, have never attracted the critical attention they deserve.

¹ György Poszler: Szerb Antal. Budapest, Akadémiai, 1973.

Len Rix
was born in Zimbabwe, and studied languages before reading English at Cambridge, where he now lives. His translation of Oliver VII will appear later this year, to join his other versions of work by Antal Szerb: The Pendragon Legend (2006) and Journey by Moonlight (2001) (for Pushkin Press), and A Martian's Guide to Budapest (The Hungarian Quarterly, Vol. XLVI, No. 180). In 2006 he was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for his translation of The Door by Magda Szabó.