That observation is not without merit. One’s origins are always a complex and mysterious affair in which one starts to show an interest already when a child. Every child plays with the idea of what if … if I wasn’t the person they say I am but, for instance …
A prince.
Or pauper. Or both pauper and prince at once.
Mark Twain’s book must have made a deep impression on you, as you also refer to it in Fatelessness.
If we were not analyzing me but you, then it would quickly become evident that you were ducking a question it may well be I have also never fully clarified for myself. You have singled out precisely that passage, which really does have all the essential features: a highly principled father’s downfall in the eyes of his terrified son, who, however, continues to be kept well away from the edge of the precipice rather than their looking down together and assessing its depth. The big question is whether my father for his part ever took a look over the precipice. I have no way of knowing whether he had a guilty conscience about handing on his increasingly ominous heritage, or in plain language, for bringing a Jewish child into this unfriendly world. That he never verbalized it for himself — of that I am quite sure, but that would not necessarily have saved him from twinges of guilty conscience, for which he may then have compensated precisely by the show of infallible principle. As a result, I was more, so to say, ordered into my Jewishness instead of won over by argument that that was how the thing had to be. The difference may be small, but it’s important. There wasn’t anything for me to shoulder of my own accord, so I was deprived of any sense of responsibility; the most I could do was show my dissatisfaction, mutter to myself, or dream about a less nauseating situation. In point of fact, I think that was the origin of the psychological conflicts that eventually culminated in the form of Jewish self-hatred, a type that was particularly well known among Eastern European Jews as they rose into the middle classes, with Otto Weininger, or indeed Ludwig Wittgenstein, as typical highly cultured representatives. They are good examples of the fact that philosophical flair in itself offers no protection against misconceptions; indeed, quite the contrary. This is a big issue, and one under whose weight many have cracked up or, quite the opposite, turned aggressive and developed major character flaws.
You yourself, nevertheless, still managed to find another solution.
I don’t think so. This has no solution; the problem constantly follows one around, like one’s own shadow. I at most gave in to the temptation to be frank, but for that — if I may be permitted to express myself in a rather extreme fashion — I needed Auschwitz. Could we not find something cheerier to talk about?
That would call for a cheerier C.V.
All in all, I’m on the side of cheeriness. My error is that I don’t elicit that feeling in others. But see here: I was able to win intellectual freedom fairly early on, and from the moment I decided to become a writer I was able to treat my cares as the raw material of my art. And even if that raw material looks fairly cheerless, the form is able to transform it and turn it into pleasure, because writing can only come from an abundance of energies, from pleasure; writing — and this is not my invention — is heightened life.
You only reached the pleasure, as you yourself pointed out, at the expense of suffering, and I can now see your relationship with your father more clearly: to put it simply, the relationship was not exactly one characterized by openness.
No, there were undoubtedly things that we kept quiet about in each other’s presence: my father about the kind of fate into which he had helped bring me, and I about the fact that I did not accept that fate. Neither of us knew about this; we just saw the result, and that was painful. My defiance extended to everything; a distance grew up inside me instead of solidarity. I have already said that I had no liking for myself in that destructive role; I would much rather have been a pliant but carefree little boy, a good pupil, with a clear conscience, honest, industrious, lovable, but whenever I tried to be that, I would be disgusted by myself. I learned how to lie early on, but I was incapable of self-denial. Now that I’m saying this, I’m seized by an unbounded love for my father: the poor soul, he was unable to grasp why he had such a hard time with me.
You seem to be trying to portray yourself as a devious, bad-tempered child.
Bad-tempered, never; I found it easy to make friends, I was game for any escapade, any laughs. And sneaky only to the extent that I felt constrained to it by my situation. Like I said, I was unaware of my own problem, about which I would now declare pompously that it was an internalization of the Jewish question in semi-fascist Hungary.
Did that “situation” also throw a shadow on your relations with your mother? Or were you able to speak more frankly with her?
My mother had no interest at all in the Jewish question apart from its — how should I put it? — its technical side, and then later on the threat to life. My mother was high-spirited, a true epicurean, and she didn’t let herself be bothered too much by a few anti-Semites. Religion as such, as meditation, faith, inwardness, piety, spirituality, and so on, was alien to her. In any event, because she was advised to do so by the people in her circle in the late Thirties, she converted to some other confession — the Reformed Church as best I recall, but that was a pure formality that subsequently, when it turned out that it would in no way give her any protection, she largely forgot all about. She had quite a hard job getting a divorce from my father, because in those days divorces came with a string of onerous legal stipulations. It was necessary to spell out, for instance, if the divorce was being granted on the grounds of the husband’s or the wife’s fault, and my father insisted on the condition that the divorce was being granted on account of my mother’s fault. That in turn meant that my mother had to renounce any rights over her son, and she had to agree to certain stipulations about “visitation,” which duly occurred. As a result, I was able to see my mother once a week, and during the holidays twice a week. After the divorce, she lived for a while in a boarding house in Pannónia Road in the Sixth (Terézváros) District, which I supposed was a terribly chic thing to do. Later on, at much the same time as my father took a second wife, she too remarried, a fairly comfortably well-off gentleman by the name of László Seres, who was known to me as Laci or Uncle Laci. He was a stocky, well-dressed, bald-pated fellow, an engaging upright citizen, who, to the best of my knowledge, was the one true love of my mother’s life. He was the managing director of some big company until he was forced into retirement by the Jewish laws. Needless to say, I was none too well disposed to him, though over the years that antipathy vanished bit by bit for the very simple reason that he never tried to win me over. On the whole, my mother and those around her handled the embarrassing position I was put in after the divorce a good deal more elegantly than did my father, who — Auntie Kate here or there — emerged the clear loser and did not spare me any of his ironic bitterness. For instance, every week Laci Seres would give me a shiny silver five-pengő piece. “Tell the fat-head you don’t need any money!” my father would urge. That says little for his big-heartedness, but it did at least bring me closer to Father — you remember Cato and the conquered one, don’t you?…