It did to start with. That was in the summer of 1948. The country was still ruled by a coalition government, and each of the parties was printing one or two dailies. The various titles would hit the streets from the morning until the late afternoon hours; of course television of any kind did not exist. I was able to breathe the real smell of fresh printer’s ink, I would dictate the day’s “scoop” over a phone line before we went to press; I was acquainted with a few celebrated chief editors — the last of the Budapest journalists. I lived a pretty exciting life for those few short months. Together with my boss, the editor of the paper’s “City Hall” column, we would turn up every morning at City Hall and do the rounds of all the councillors’ offices, sniffing around for the latest news. I had a regular accreditation to the City Hall reporters’ club. The doyen of the club was an elderly journalist, Varjas was his name, who worked for the Kis Újság [“Small News”], the paper of the Smallholders’ Party. In early 1949, the journalists made bets as to whether or not Cardinal Mindszenty would be arrested. I remember word for word what Varjas said: “If they dare arrest Mindszenty, then I say anything can happen here.” I met him in the street several months later, and he was in a terrible state. He had forgotten to put in his false teeth that morning; the greying hair that poked out from under a battered deerstalker was matted. His newspaper had been closed down and he had been kicked out. He shook my hand gratefully: “Other people no longer recognize me,” he complained.
In The Union Jack you recount an even more appalling encounter. I’m thinking of the passenger of a black limousine.
Forget it! That was horrible.
“Before too long I was to be stumbling around in rust-tinted dust beneath the interminable labyrinth of pipes of a murderous factory barrack-complex,” you write.
Yes, I was very lucky. In those days dismissal notices were not one of the customary forms of the prevailing relationship between state enterprises and state employees; or at least in the case of intellectuals they generally had other ways of going about it. Firms would preferably fabricate some kind of political conflict, which would often end with the intellectuals being arrested. By contrast, I was handed a regular notice to quit the Szikra Publishing Co.: they would have no further need of my services after January 1st, 1951.
What circumstances did you have to thank for that luck?
My insignificance most likely. Nevertheless, if I was to avoid being liable to prosecution for the criminal offence of “work-shyness constituting a public threat,” I had to get a new job within three months. I became a factory worker; there wasn’t really any other option.
What was the factory called?
MÁVAG, the Hungarian State Iron and Steel Works.
Ugly name.
No uglier than the factory itself.
All the same, your text seems to glorify the ugliness.
Glorify it? I don’t get what you’re driving at.
I’ll carry on the quotation, if you don’t mind: “… bleak dawns smelling of iron castings would await, hazed daytimes when the dull cognitions of the mind would swell and burst like heavy bubbles on the tin-grey surface of a steaming, swirling mass of molten metal.”
What’s your problem with that?
The fact that I gladly read it; more than that, I take a real delight in it. Meanwhile The Union Jack deals with reality and the aporia of the formulation of reality.
It doesn’t deal just with that, but I can begin to see what you’re driving at. I won’t duck the issue. Like it or not, art always regards life as a celebration.
A carnival, or a memorial service?
A celebration.
But in your case it is precisely the difference that subsists between loathsome material and festal glorification that is so striking.
That’s a problem for a moralist, not a writer. Anyone who considers a poet to be a voyeur of horrors and, in a shrill falsetto, forbids him to write poetry after Auschwitz. Is that it?
I am inclined to the view that if one talks about art and dictatorship, one can’t avoid Adorno’s precept.
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But why are we speaking about this in connection with The Union Jack, which doesn’t even mention Auschwitz?
Our discussion is not just about The Union Jack but about your life, which you are continually reformulating. Why? “What experience is for — that’s another question, I reflected later … Who sees through us? Living, I reflected, is done as a favour to God,” you write.
Writes the narrator of The Union Jack, whom you shouldn’t confuse with me, who is putting the words in his mouth. But what has that to do with Adorno?
Just that you insert an otherwordly, metaphysical element between Adorno’s sentence and your own sentences, or in plain language, you speak about God where Adorno only sees ignominy.
You know, these are very ticklish matters …
OK, but then let me put it more simply: what is your response to Adorno’s famous — or maybe infamous — dictum?
Look here, I learned a lot from Adorno’s writings about music, when those were being published in Hungary, but that was alclass="underline" I never read anything else by him.
You’re not answering my question. What is your opinion of Adorno’s renowned dictum “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”?
Well, if I may give a straight answer, I consider that statement to be a moral stink bomb that needlessly pollutes air that is already rank enough as things are.
That’s undeniably a straight answer. Would you care to justify it?
I can’t imagine how as keen an intellect as Adorno could suppose that art would renounce portraying the greatest trauma of the twentieth century. It’s true, though, that the industrialized murder of millions cannot serve as the basis for aesthetic pleasure, as it were, but surely that doesn’t mean one ought to regard the poetry of, say, Paul Celan or Miklós Radnóti as barbaric? That’s a sick joke, there are no other words for it. And as far as aesthetic “pleasure” goes, did Adorno expect these great poets to write bad poetry? The more you think about that unfortunate pronouncement, the more senseless it becomes. But what I see as truly harmful is the tendency that it reflects: a preposterously misconceived elitism that incidentally runs riot in other forms as well. What I am referring to is the assertion of an exclusive right to suffering, the appropriation, as it were, of the Holocaust. Oddly enough, that tendency concurs with the attitude of the advocates of the “Schlußstrich”—the “finishing touch” stance — the people who would reject having anything to do with the Auschwitz domain of experience and would limit it to a narrow group of people; the people who, with the demise of those who survived the death camps, consider the experience itself as being a dead memory, remote history.