Péter Siklós

Putting the Manuscript in the Lap of God

An Interview with Magda Szabó

 

This interview took place in 1993 after Magda Szabó won the Prix Fémina Étranger, the most prestigious French literary award alongside the Goncourt, for her novel The Door.¹ The grande dame of Hungarian letters died on November 19, 2007 at the age of ninety while-as no obituary failed to emphasise-reading in her favourite armchair. She was writing up to the end, working on the sequel of Für Elise, her hugely popular autobiographical novel of her childhood and youth. Magda Szabó is the most translated of Hungarian writers. While her works have appeared in 42 languages, only four of her novels have been translated into English.

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Csaba Károlyi: You started writing in 1946. Like others in the Újhold circle-János Pilinszky, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Miklós Mészöly, Iván Mándy, to name but a few-you suffered a decade of imposed silence after the journal had been banned in 1949.

Magda Szabó: In the Fifties we were writing for our desk drawers. We'd hide our manuscripts in other people's homes because you had to be prepared for house searches. At dawn we'd hear these noises and never know whether it was the milk cans clanking or the secret police coming for us. One of these hidden manuscripts, the novel Fresco, somehow got into the hands of Mirza von Schüching², who suggested smuggling it out of the country. She was aware of the literary underground; manuscripts of exciting young writers had come into her hands. If I was prepared to risk my neck, she'd put me in touch with someone. "My neck is at risk anyway," I thought. My husband, Tibor Szobotka, had been thrown out of the radio because he'd refused to join the party. Then the Ministry of Education, where I'd been working since the war, was "liberated" from bourgeois vermin, so we were both out of jobs. With my degree in Hungarian, Latin and history and my doctorate, I was later allowed to teach geography at a secondary school. For a good while, Szobotka wasn't even allowed to teach. In short, von Schüching told me she had the means to get the manuscript to a childhood friend, an expert. "May I ask what makes your friend an expert?" I enquired. "Does he have a good knowledge of literature?" "Well, some," she replied. "You may have heard of him: his name is Herman Hesse." Hesse was a publisher's reader at Fischer's. "Fine," I told her, "so we'll put the manuscript in the lap of God and see what happens." Hesse told the publisher Insel that if they were prepared to buy Mrs Szabó, they should buy her lock, stock and barrel, including her unwritten books. And that is what happened. It was unusual for a book from a socialist country to let fly at the class struggle, the peace priests and the denounced Calvinist church-not to mention portraying the party secretary of a theatre as an idiot. So the German publishers said: "this woman was made for us; she's as daring as the devil and incredibly impertinent."

Between 1962 and 1974 the French publishing house Editions du Seuil published five of your novels. Then there was a long break before they brought out The Door which you wrote in 1987.

Seuil began to show interest in my books in the early Sixties after the German versions came out. I now know the way things go with the big publishers—they keep an eye on what each other is doing. They published Miklós Mészöly, Iván Mándy, Géza Ottlik as well as several of my books. Over time they became disappointed in us all. They had been expecting something different, something we could not give them—I cannot say what exactly. And after the French market slumped so did the German. This really surprised me as you would have expected it to pick up after the appearance of György Konrád and other dissident writers. When Chantal Philippe finished translating The Door, she went to several publishers to see if anyone was interested, but no one was. I don't think they even looked at it. Then news arrives of the Prix Fémina, and the next morning I get a fax from my old German publisher, Suhrkamp. They wanted to carry on as though nothing had happened—as though they had not stopped publishing my books in Germany as they had in France. I'd lost two big publishers, and now both popped up again.

How did you feel about winning the Prix Fémina for The Door?

It was totally unexpected. I was the ninety-ninth writer to be awarded it; Romain Rolland was one of the first. I believe there are twelve on the jury and eleven of them voted for me—critics, writers, university professors. They say that the vote is usually not so unanimous. What worries me is that whenever I am given a prize I usually have to make amends for it in some way. Then again, it is obvious that God has a great sense of humour. I mean, why have I been given this prize now? Why now? I should have got it twenty-five years ago. Now I have to worry whether I can find a way to surpass this.

Do you like being called a woman writer?

All my life I've hated women who were simply women. Besides, literature is literature. And there are writers who are born men and writers who are born women, beginning with those learned nuns who copied manuscripts in the age of the Arpadian dynasty. A good writer is a good writer; a bad writer is a bad writer. If my deadliest enemy were to write something really good, I'd say it was brilliant and I'd thank him in the name of Hungarian literature. Let me ask you: When did Tolstoy have a child? When did he watch his wife give birth? Because I don't think he did watch her. But he still knew what it was like. Or could you tell me when I was King Béla? Because that's what actors say to me: how come you're an actor, a man and a woman, an old widow and a child, all at the same time? No one who has only been a woman writer can ever be a good writer. Actually, I heard that a lot of people think the Prix Fémina is a prize for militant women. In fact it has nothing to do with them, and certainly nothing to do with feminism!

You began with a volume of poems, and you won the Baumgarten Prize in 1949 for your poetry. Your last book of poetry came out a decade later. Why did you stop writing poems?

I started writing as a child—not just poems; all sorts of things. One minute I decided to be an actress, the next I was writing plays. Then I was writing stories for children. Why did I stop writing poetry? In 1949 the cultural dictator József Révai withdrew the Baumgarten Prize that had been awarded to me that morning, and gave it to the party poet Péter Kuczka at noon. That was one reason. Another was that at the time you could only write poems about sad, bitter things, and that is what I tried to do. But after a while I'd had enough of everybody writing poems about how terrible things were for them. This isn't right, I thought—the periodicals are full of all these sad poems. Then in 1953 something happened to me at my aunt Piroska's funeral. Everyone was busy with something at that funeral and no one seemed to care about the deceased. This really pained me: I loved my Aunt Piroska very much. And I thought this is what I should write about. The funeral was a turning point in my life as a writer. I decided to record that experience, not in verse, but in a novel. I was a schoolteacher. But when would I have the time to write? My husband said, "I'll cook on Sundays; you sit down and write—you need time to write novels." I had written short stories all through my university years. But at the time I thought I was going to become an academic, a Classics scholar, a specialist on old Hungarian literature. That is all I know, nothing else. It's no good asking me about Kafka, I know nothing about him. I don't even like him.

Ten years after the Baumgarten, you won the József Attila Prize just after the first novels came out.

That was a very sad day for me, coming as it did two weeks after my father's death. I'd just got home from the funeral. I was all in black and couldn't understand a word people were saying to me. I'd lost my father, whom I loved in a special way— not like children usually love their parents; it was more as if I were his sister-inarms rather than his child. The things he never dared tell my mother, he told me.

Ókút (The Ancient Well) is a truly excellent recreation of childhood—effortless, natural, precise and playful. Why should the foreign market be deprived of this book?

Thank you for the encouraging remark! I was recounting memories of the first ten years of my life in that book. And described what we were like, we Szabós. There were times in the Szabó household when we had nothing to eat, but there was always the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the child could speak Latin from the age of three.

There seems to be a real-life model for almost every character in the novels. How does that make you feel when the readers believe that the events in the novels are taken from real life?

The strangest thing about that is when the Szabós start saying: how did you have the heart to speak ill of poor old Auntie Emma, where's your sense of honour? You know very well there are things we never tell strangers. And you've written about them in a novel! How could you stoop so low? I'm a member of the Szabó clan, too, so I am denouncing myself as well, but we are not like others; this is what we are like. They should thank me for not writing about one of our cousins, who never left the house because her eyes always felt cold. That is quite peculiar, isn't it? I did not write about that. I didn't tell the world everything, only the stories that could be told.

Did everything really happen as described in The Door?

Yes, literally. The model for Emerenc was my housekeeper, Juliska. Everything is true, including the dog Viola, who died here in my flat at the age of fourteen. And the story about the Kossuth Prize is also true: when I was awarded the prize in 1978, I was asked to appear on television for the first time in my life. I couldn't refuse. And meanwhile Emerenc was dying. I despised television and did not want to appear on screen with the other Kossuth prize winners. Then, when I came home that night, Szobotka said: you're a brilliant speaker, what happened to you? That was truly dreadful. Never mind that you looked ghastly—that's because they shot you badly. Your face was quite distorted with terror and remorse. But you said such stupid things, it was a disgrace.

What did the French critics have to say about this scene in the novel?

I was called to account for attending the writers' congress in Greece while Emerenc in the novel lay dying. In the end I cried out in despair: Don't you understand? Even if it had been my father who lay dying, I would still have had to go—what else could I have done? I'd been chosen to represent Hungary at that congress! The more soft-hearted among the journalists burst into tears at that. And I repeated in the words of the novel: I did not kill Emerenc; I wanted to save her. My public was strict but fair—it all ended with a shower of kisses. I suddenly became everybody's Magda instead of Mme Szabó. They finally accepted the explanation that I had had to go, that I couldn't be beside Emerenc every second of the day, but they said I had not emphasised this enough in the book and instead had dwelled on how happy I was to appear on television. They had not understood the significance of this at first. Imagine, there were eighty journalists present, and they were all celebrating my book. And later they wrote that I was a star of France! Has anyone ever written something like that about me in Hungary? That I'm a star? Me? That is the only thing that's still missing. I daren't show the French reviews to anyone at home!

 

¹ The English translation, for which Len Rix won the prestigious Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, came out in 2005. The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books praised the novel's intelligence and intensity of style and it was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize the following year-alongside Imre Kertész's Fatelessness, translated by Tim Wilkinson.

² German baroness Mirza von Schüching was the wife of Géza Engl, a German translator at the Hungarian Corvina Publishing House.

 

Magda Szabó (1917-2007)
studied Classics at university and expected to pursue an academic career. One of the writers associated with the Újhold literary review in the late 1940s, she first came to public notice with her poetry. During the first half of the Fifties she taught in secondary school, writing novels for her desk drawer. After 1956, novels, plays, books for children and the young and volumes of essays came out in quick succession.

Csaba Károlyi
edits the review section of the literary weekly Élet és Irodalom.