Marai Sandor
Hungarian Graffiti
Being
a Hungarian in the 20th century wasn’t much fun, and being a Hungarian
writer was even worse: suicide, insanity, poverty, exile, disgrace and
death in the Holocaust were the stock endings.
Sandor
Marai (1900-89) stands out not only for his writing but for his
backbone, since hardly any other major Hungarian writer of the period
comes through without some political embarassment. Marai was one of the
first to condemn Hitler (although, interestingly, his work appeared in
Germany even during the war), and he would have nothing to do with the
Communists (he was savagely attacked by the Marxist critic Georg
Lukacs), arguing for a bourgeois decency that has only recently become
fashionable again. Marai left Hungary in 1948, never to return. His
subsequent works were published by émigré presses (in London, Toronto
and Munich) in print runs of a thousand or so.
The
Marai industry started slowly in Hungary in 1990, with the
republication of the book then considered his masterpiece, “Confessions
of a Bourgeois.” Marai’s readership at that time comprised the elderly,
who recalled him from his success in the 1940s; several academics who
had the courage to keep an eye on banned writers; and some of the
Hungarian dissidents who had found in Marai a congenial companion. But
it was thanks mainly to the Italian publisher Roberto Calasso that Marai
became a star in Europe (as well as a widely praised writer in the
United States) with the novel “Embers” — even though it was rated by
Marai, and many other Hungarians, as one of his lesser works.
Marai’s
first story was published when he was 15, and he kept scribbling up to
his death at the age of 88. More than 60 volumes appeared in his
lifetime. No Hungarian writer has benefited more from the collapse of
Communism. Most bookshops in Budapest now boast a Marai section, and not
even the Nobel laureate
Imre Kertesz has as many titles in print. When “Embers” was published
in Britain the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, flew over for the
event, a governmental blessing most writers can only dream of.
Poet,
journalist, dramatist, translator, novelist and essayist, Marai worked
in just about every literary form, but for Hungarians it’s probably the
diaries that excite the greatest admiration; written in a bare prose,
they offer a merciless examination of himself and his era. He loved his
native language, and stuck with it in exile (he could easily have
switched to German) although he was well aware this decision ensured
indigence and obscurity. His relations with his fellow Hungarians,
however, were not very smooth. Insanely principled, he found himself
isolated even within émigré circles.
Shortly
before he committed suicide in San Diego in 1989, Marai oversaw the
publication of “The Garrens’ Work: A Novel in Two Volumes.” This was
what he judged his magnum opus, the story of the Garren family from his
hometown, Kassa (now Kosice, in Slovakia).
However
you care to break up the activities of the Garrens (various chunks
appeared in various editions over the years), “The Rebels” is the
opening installment of the saga. It was first published in 1930 as a
stand-alone work. Many of Marai’s novels are tweaked memoirs or (like
his previous novel to appear in English, “Casanova in Bolzano”) heavy on
philosophical reflection. But this one fires on all narrative
cylinders.
Abel,
Tibor, Erno and Bela are finishing school. Their gang gets up to the
pranks and petty crime adored by male adolescents everywhere. What might
have been a slight account of evanescence, a kind of precursor to
“American Graffitti,” is beefed up by the date of the boys’ graduation:
1918. They will join their elder brothers and fathers at the front; for
them, the adult world is not merely confusing and hypocritical, it’s
fatal.
“Please
be so gracious as to remember that the last days are here,” announces
Erno’s father, a cobbler and hangman. Doom pervades “The Rebels,” which
takes place during the final blast of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a
realm of high culture and ferocious propriety, where you starved to
death if you didn’t have money and “stoical obligatory manliness” forced
you to shuffle off to war.
“Embers,”
written a decade later, was a nostalgic evocation of Franz Joseph’s
waltzing Vienna, whereas “The Rebels” shows a provincial city largely
insulated from the war but full of its own combat and morally mutilated
individuals. The main battle here is between the young and the old, but
even the gang of adolescents won’t make it to the end of the book.
Marai
wrote only a handful of plays, but he injected a strong theatricality
into many of his novels. His characters tend to be either laconic or
torrentially talkative. Costume and pretense fascinated him, and the
boys of “The Rebels” stage an impromptu private performance in the
city’s theater under the guidance of a sinister, itinerant actor, an
evening that will cost them dear.
The
distinguished poet George Szirtes has translated Marai gracefully.
Marai’s style, especially in his later works, is extremely clear and
spare (there’s an almost Balzacian inventory of Abel’s household here,
something you won’t find again). But the clarity is deceptive. You read a
sentence and then 10 minutes later you find yourself thinking, What did
he really mean by that? You’ll be wondering about “The Rebels” a long
time after you’ve put it down.
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