That for weeks or months on end, or however long it was, I wrote and wrote a text that drove me to despair every day, because in no way would it assume any shape, coalesce into an organic whole. It bubbled out from somewhere deep inside me like scalding-hot lava and then spread out amorphously, destroying everything around.
That sounds pretty alarming — rather as though you were recounting being possessed by a deleterious passion.
Precisely. Every day I would write something that, when I read it over at the end of the day, I would find dispiriting. The next day, despite my ever-growing sense of dismay, I would nevertheless start all over again …
What caused that “ever-growing sense of dismay”?
The fact that I had to give way to the demands of the text. I had to recognize that the sentences that would appear under my hand would sometimes arrive unexpectedly: they knew more than I myself did; they would surprise me with secrets that I was unaware of; they would not tolerate my interventions but lived some sort of autonomous, alien life that it was up to me to understand rather than dominate … slowly the threatening thought dawned on me that I needed time, more time, in fact a great deal more time …
In order to prepare for your career?
The word “career” is totally out of place here. My so-called career is at best the product of a construct in hindsight — that’s if anyone should seek to slip in the fallacy of logic into processes that are otherwise spontaneous and inexplicable. Forget the career and try instead to imagine a completely bewildered young man who, not knowing why, started to write, sharpened pencils, and spread sheets of blank paper in front of himself while noting with horror that there was nothing to justify his actions — indeed, what he was doing was frankly nonsensical.
Despite that, every day you carried on with your apparently senseless experiments. Why?
Out of an existential angst that may have silenced everything else inside me.
Existential angst … could you label that any other way?
A compulsive psychosis … categorical inner imperative … the fulfilment of a task … how should I know?
Not a bad task. Did a sense of vocation awaken in you, perhaps?
No way! I have many faults, but I never felt a sense of vocation.
Maybe that was the way in which your talent manifested itself.
Yes, talent is one of those words that is used, but no one knows what it means.
“In the end it may yet transpire that I do, indeed, have some talent for writing, which would make me truly sorry,” writes the Old Boy in Fiasco, “since I did not start writing because I have talent; on the contrary, when I decided that I would write a novel, evidently I also decided, by the bye, that I would become talented. I needed it; there was a job to be done. I had to aim to write a good book, not out of vanity but in the nature of the thing, so to say.”
Well, yes, but at that point in time, at rock bottom, I couldn’t have known that I was going to be so wise thirty years later.
If you didn’t realize it, you have still not answered my earlier question as to what, in fact, happened to you in the L-shaped corridor.
Let’s just accept that not every question has an answer.
“There comes a moment in the lives of men when they suddenly become aware of themselves and their powers are freed; from this moment onward we can reckon to be ourselves, this is the moment when we were born,” you write in Galley Boat-Log.17
One can hardly go further than that. I recollect an ecstatic moment that I could only capture here and now with rather vacuous words.
All the same, that was the moment that determined the further course of your life.
That is undeniable.
Which forced you to the writing desk, which held you prisoner among your papers — is that what you call “existential angst”? What sort of text was it that you were in fact struggling with? Was it a novel, a short story, a diary, memoir?
Let me put it this way: a longish short story.
One that, as you said, refused to assume any shape. What happened to it in the end? Did you discard it?
Fortunately, no. The better passages from it found their way, thirty years later, into the novel-in-the-novel of Fiasco.
With appropriate alterations, no doubt.
Without changing a word.
Surely you don’t mean the novel that Berg reads out to Köves under the title “I, the Executioner”?
Yes, I do.
Staggering authorial economy! And incidentally, it does not show the least trace of thirty years of dust. However, I do now begin to see how you worked out the path that would lead you to Fatelessness.
I’d quite like to know myself.
You sought atonement for what you lived through in prison, only in doing so you amplified your problem into one of global dimensions. The only possible solution was a novel — in your case, at least, since you were born a writer.
I don’t know; one is not born for anything in particular, but if one manages to stay alive long enough, then one cannot avoid eventually becoming something … and incidentally what you refer to as the path to Fatelessness I experienced as a continuous deficiency, and the fact that I gave myself to writing Fatelessness I intended as a fulfilment of that disaster, as a kind of self-punishment. Because I found I was just getting nowhere with fiction writing. “At least you are familiar with the material,” I told myself with a degree of healthy scorn, planning to write it in a couple of months.
When was that?
In 1960.
And the couple of months became thirteen years, if I’m not mistaken. But that is to depart from the chronological sequence … when did the incident in the L-shaped corridor take place?
Precisely when, I couldn’t tell you myself. I’d put it somewhere around … late 1955. I recall it was autumn and it was raining. By then I was trying to get by as a “freelance”—a form of life that did, indeed, lead to some rather tight spots at times when it came to making a living. Anyway, around then one or two of my friends were working for the Magyar Nemzet [Hungarian Nation] newspaper, and the editor of one column or other asked me to write a piece on why the trains were running late. As a result I found myself in an L-shaped corridor in one of the Hungarian State Railway offices — somewhere near the Eastern Railway Terminal, I seem to recollect.
Hang on a moment! The last time we had a glimpse of you was in uniform, as an army conscript. First of all, you had to be discharged … as far as I know, you got involved in a fairly risky venture to that end.
You could call it that. But it’s anecdotal, so let’s keep it as short as possible.