András Beck
Workdays and Wonders
[...]
Szerb and the pre-war Hungarian Quarterly
Szerb's involvement in A Companion to Hungarian Studies was not without its
own convoluted history. József Balogh, the editor of a French-language
periodical called La Nouvelle Revue de Hongrie, launched in 1932, had asked the
young literary scholar for contributions twice and received evasive replies. On the
second occasion, Szerb told him that all his time was taken up with a history of
literature. This was no idle excuse-his sweeping survey of Hungarian literature,
Magyar irodalomtörténet, appeared in 1934. All the same, Balogh scribbled an
indignant comment on the margin of one of Szerb's postcards: "It's impossible to
get anything out of him!"1 Most of the correspondence between the two has been
lost, so whether the editor got fed up with Szerb's dallying or whether Szerb
thought up a new excuse is not known. But almost three years later their
relationship was rekindled when István Bethlen asked Balogh to edit a new sister
publication, The Hungarian Quarterly, whose launch was a further gesture
towards the Allied powers. Both journals had Bethlen's foreign-policy ambitions
to thank for their existence. Bethlen had resigned as prime minister in 1932 but
played a part behind the scenes in setting them up and organising their financing.
Balogh was enormously erudite (his many achievements included translating the
Confessions of St. Augustine) and he worked tirelessly to persuade the most
distinguished authors to contribute. In 1936 he approached Szerb once again,
changing tactics by suggesting a topic and asking for an article on the great
Enlightenment-era poet Dániel Berzsenyi: "I hope this time you are not going to
turn me down," he wrote. "Indeed, I also hope that my prompt receipt of the
article will provide the opportunity for renewing our acquaintance." This time
Szerb did send in an article,2 though he was not overly concerned about following
up (when Balogh asked the author to add to the essay, it appears Szerb told his
translator to incorporate several paragraphs from the text of his History of
Hungarian Literature. Balogh wrote back: "That is a job for the author, not the
translator. Trust me; the thing is worth taking the trouble.")
They got over it. Balogh wrote at the end of that year: "As I already told you,
I find it hard to think of a person more fitted than your good self for presenting
Hungarian intellectual concerns to the outside world." From that point on, their
relationship ran fairly smoothly, though Balogh urged Szerb to send in articles
written specifically with foreign readers in mind rather than rehash works already
published in Hungarian. Also, he was keen to make sure the country's image was
projected properly: "It would be fitting to work into the article a page on those
parts of Nicholas Bethlen's memoirs that refer to France, and where you write
about Bethlen's personal hygiene you could mention that Louis XIV's ablutions
were no better, lest unsuspecting foreign readers gain the impression that we
were any dirtier in that age than other nations."3 The following year, in 1938, tightlipped
admonishment can be detected through a veil of polite formality: "I should
ask you to be so kind as to write a little more about the interesting figure of
[linguist and ethnologist] Antal Reguly and to fill a further five pages with what
I might call scholarly apparatus, providing some overview of his life's work.
I should also ask you to decide whether you intend the piece to be directed at the
English or the French. My feeling is that it would be of more interest to English
readers, but in that case it ought to be written slightly differently [...]"4 It is as if
Balogh wanted to intimate that Szerb had not paid due consideration to the full
weight of the journal's political and cultural mission.
The journal's raison d'etre was given added urgency after the First Vienna
Award of November 1938, in which Germany and Italy arbitrated in Hungary's
favour over a Hungarian-Czechoslovak border dispute (most of northern Hungary
had been given to the new state of Czechoslovakia by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon).
The journal's fate became more precarious, too. At the end of 1940 the government
considered scrapping The Hungarian Quarterly altogether,5 and when Hungary
entered the war at the end of 1941, this is precisely what happened. Bethlen had
written in vain to Prime Minister László Bárdossy urging the journal's continuance:
"War has not been declared between the United States and the Axis powers and
diplomatic missions are still in place." If the HQ were to endure until the end of the
war "its existence and politically unblemished past will count in the Hungarian
nation's favour when the time comes for peace talks."6 It appears he was prescient
about Hungary's fate.
Barely a month later Hungary was on a war footing with both Anglo-Saxon
Great Powers. So who could have authorised, and on what basis, the publication
of the Companion, which expressly called itself the single-volume 1942 edition of
The Hungarian Quarterly more than a year after the latter had been discontinued
(the last number was the Summer 1941 issue), and how was this able to appear in
1943? The likely explanation is that Miklós Kállay (Bethlen's man), who replaced
Bárdossy as prime minister on 9 March, had future negotiations for a separate
peace in mind as his highest priority. By the end of that year, following Stalingrad
and El Alamein, the war situation had changed. At Balogh's initiative, Hungarian
material for future peace negotiations was collected.7 The plan for the Companion was part and parcel of a Western-oriented propaganda campaign that came to
fruition in the spring of 1943.8 As part of that same drive, a series of books was
also projected in which, as Balogh put it with the coy non-irony of official
communications: "We shall try to supply the educated Hungarian public with the
necessary basic facts about our Anglo-Saxon adversaries."9 By August 1943, the
ball was rolling to assemble a writing team for a second volume of the Companion.
Factitious or facetious?
It is certain that Szerb did not produce the typescript Hungary in the Older English
Literature for Companion II-this volume was intended to give an idea of modern
Hungary's history and society, and, in any case, someone else had been entrusted
with the chapter on literature.10 One can assume that Szerb wrote it for The
Hungarian Quarterly, since it falls under the subject heading "Hungarian Studies",
a field dealing with Hungary's language, culture and history in an international
context and encompassing Anglo-Hungarian relations, and as such eminently
suited for the journal. The typescript includes a separate two-page insertion
(marked pages 6a and 6b, which follow page 6, with the regular numbering only
being resumed thereafter), which Szerb could well have added at Balogh's request.
The two pages concern the experiences of the Elizabethan adventurer Captain John
Smith (1580-1631) during a visit to Hungary (more on that later). The snag is that
the pages are almost word for word the same as the article "Captain Smith in
Transylvania" which Szerb wrote for the Winter 1941 issue of HQ, his last
appearance in the journal. The typescript itself must have been drafted earlier. But
if that is indeed the case, why did Balogh not publish it?
It was Smith, of course, who colonised Virginia, the white man whose life was
saved by a plucky American-Indian princess Pocahontas after he was captured
by her father's tribe. Szerb wrote about this well before the couple were
immortalised by the Disney cartoon, but they had been legendary figures, widely
known in the English-speaking world. Szerb wrote a short piece which appeared
in Hungarian under the title "The First American in Transylvania" in the
September 12th issue of the daily Magyar Nemzet about Smith's Transylvanian
adventures (these had been published as early as 1630.)11 Here Szerb mentioned
"as a matter of strict scientific accuracy" that Smith's story had been the subject
of intensive study by the nineteenth-century Hungarian scholar Lajos Kropf,
who had come to the conclusion that Smith's patent of nobility and coat of arms
were nothing but "common forgeries". Neither was it certain that "Smith had
ever set foot on Transylvanian or Hungarian soil". Szerb was more indulgent
than his sceptical predecessor: "It is perhaps not for us to take sides on the
issue," he remarks, only to do exactly that with his very last sentence,
grandiosely and in an unscholarly way side-stepping the issue of the truth: "In
all events, it is more fun to suppose the curious adventurer really did pass this
way, in the Transylvania of old."
Szerb's friend István Gál (1912-1982), who wrote the section "Hungary and the
Anglo-Saxon World" for Companion I, took issue with this facetious laxity, sallying
forth with scholarly guns blazing in a letter in next day's issue of the paper,
decrying the article's "allusive approach". He marks Szerb down for quoting solely
from Kropf's Hungarian-language article without indicating he had any awareness
of Kropf's series of articles in English. Here Kropf noted that the King of Arms at
the London College of Arms, who entered Smith's claimed patent of nobility into
the official register, was later incarcerated for forgery. This conclusively settled the
matter of the patent's authenticity and, in Gál's view, meant that Smith's
adventures in Transylvania were also fabrications.12
Szerb did not react directly to the criticism. Instead he worked his response
into the expanded essay on Smith that appeared in the HQ. Here he refers to one
of Kropf's English articles, supplying the publication date with impeccable
scholastic pedantry. An academic ethics committee adjudicating this delicate
handling of the dispute might well judge that Szerb had only checked up on the
piece by Kropf after the event. But did it really happen this way? How can we
decide with hindsight of half a century? In any case, academic muscle-flexing was
alien to Szerb's nature. Szerb makes clear that information about the forger had
been brought to his attention only recently. He could do this with a clear
conscience as it did not require him to alter or retract in any way what he had
written earlier: "...but even if we call into question the authenticity of the patent
of nobility [...] it does not follow that Kropf is right in his general condemnation."
For Szerb, Kropf represented the hypercritical spirit of the nineteenth century,
"that spirit which doubted everything that could be called into question and made
a clean slate of history", adding "though we do not know for certain that Captain
Smith actually visited Transylvania, we may state with much less certainty that he
did not go there."13 In so saying, he was essentially using the HQ's gravitas and
academic respectability to repeat his earlier frivolous closing remark that "it is
more fun to suppose the curious adventurer really did pass this way, in the
Transylvania of old."
[...]
1 
The Balogh-Szerb correspondence forms part of Balogh's papers in the Széchényi National Library:
see József Balogh to Antal Szerb, 22 September 1933 and Antal Szerb to József Balogh, 1 July 1933,
OSzK Archive, Fond 1/2013.
2 Antoine Szerb: "Le soir de Berzsenyi," Nouvelle Revue de Hongrie, 1936 vol. 55, pp. 47-55.
3 Anthony Szerb: "Count Nicholas Bethlen's Autobiography," The Hungarian Quarterly, vol. 4, Winter
1937, pp. 684-89.
4 József Balogh to Antal Szerb, 10 February 1936; 31 March 1937; 18 January and 25 November 1938,
OSzK Archive, Fond 1/3013.
5 József Balogh to István Bethlen, 19 December 1940, OSzK Archive, Archive, Fond 1/322.
6 Tibor Frank: "A Hungarian Quarterly irodalompolitikája 1936-1944" (The Literary Policy of The
Hungarian Quarterly 1936-1944), Filológiai Közlöny, 1978, no. 1, p. 55.
7 See the chapter "A nyugatbarát politikai erők élén" (At the Head of the Pro-Western Political
Forces), in Ignác Romsics: Bethlen István. Budapest, Osiris Kiadó, 2005.
8 The volume seems to have appeared some time around April 1943, as one learns from one of
Balogh's letters, OSzK Archive, Fond 1/990.
9 See a letter from Balogh to Domokos Kosáry dated 14 August 1943, in which he asks Kosáry to
write a short Hungarian-language history of England.
10 József Balogh to István Bethlen, 8 July 1943, OSzK Archive, Fond 1/322.
11 The True Travells, Adventures and Observations of Captain John Smith (1630).
12 "Az első amerikai Erdélyben és a román propaganda" (The First American in Transylvania and
Romanian Propaganda), in István Gál: Magyarország és az angolszász világ (Hungary and the Anglo-
Saxon World). Argumentum-OSzK, 2005, p. 27.
13 Anthony Szerb: "Captain John Smith in Transylvania," The Hungarian Quarterly, vol. 7, Winter
1940-41, p. 741.
András Beck
is a critic who has published widely on the theory of art and literature.
