But when you opened it you found, instead of Wagner’s text, the short story by Thomas Mann. Tell me, did the book really have such a decisive impact on your life?
It did, but now you have to imagine the intellectual wasteland of the Stalinist era. Radical literature was represented by Volokolamsk Highway and Far from Moscow …24 I, on the other hand, needed to read the whole of world literature, as I soon realized. I hadn’t the slightest idea how to set about it. Anyway, in a second-hand bookshop I bought a cheap paperback in the dog-eared pages of which modestly lurked Paul Valéry’s hyperre-fined essay on Leonardo da Vinci.25 I couldn’t understand a word, which impressed me hugely.
Paul Valéry — to my generation he is at best just a name.
Yet he’s an important writer. The volume started right away with the letters he wrote about The Crisis of the Mind. In that Stalinist dictatorship, whoever would have thought there was a crisis of the mind? We had long passed that point without having given it a thought … or just listen to what he has to say about the poet’s method: “The true condition of a genuine poet differs completely from the dreaming state … I presume to discern in it a purely conscious search, a polishing of thoughts, the clapping of the spirit into exquisite fetters, a constant triumph of the victim … Even he who wishes to record a dream has to do this when fully alert. If I wish to write down accurately the oddities, the self-contradictions, of the frail slumberer whom I was only just before, to follow this pensive plunge of the soul into my own depths, like the fallen leaf of a tree through the hazy infinitude of memory, it is not permissible to delude myself that I have managed to reach this without an intense straining of the consciousness, whose masterpiece will be that it also espies the thing which came into being only at its expense.” Lines like that truly drove me wild. I soon made the acquaintance of two gentlemen who would regularly visit the same cafés that I called on: a Mr. Vermes, known from his diminutive mouse head and disproportionately large, translucent ear flaps as Bat-ears, and Mr. Weisz, who was known in Budapest’s ever-inventive argot — after the title of Lajos Zilahy’s early novel26—Something’s-Adrift-in-the-Vise. They were one-time booksellers who, after their businesses were taken into state ownership, used to lug what was left of their merchandise under their arms or in battered, old-fashioned briefcases. They managed to procure anything you ordered from them. By good fortune, I still had a few first editions of P. Howard’s books that had remained, heaven knows how, from my childhood collection of books. That was a pseudonym that “cloaked,” as was widely known, the popular Hungarian writer Jenő Rejtő, a writer blessed with a quirky sense of humour who in fact had been killed during the war while he was on forced labour service27 on the Russian front. His books were officially prohibited, but at the time they were of considerable value, so that instead of paying ready money I used to barter with them. To cut a long story short, I was by then in some measure inwardly prepared for a literary encounter with a great author, and it was my luck that of all books it should have been precisely The Blood of the Walsungs that fate delivered into my hands. It was not just the boldness of its topic, incest, which fascinated me, but also the silky-smooth style, the irony, the melancholy, the knowledge … you can imagine how I was affected on reading lines like: “Creation! How did one create?… it came to him as in a yearning vision that creation was born of passion and was reshaped anew as passion. He saw the pale, spent woman hanging on the breast of the fugitive to whom she gave herself, he saw her love and her distress and he knew: so life must be to be creative”—who else was the text addressed to if not to me?
I totally understand.
Death in Venice came into my hands not much later, and I can say of that that it truly did change my life.
In what respect?
In the most extreme, I might say revolutionary sense, because in Death in Venice I was made to understand definitively that literature is a bottomless turmoil, a blow to the heart from which there is no recovery; an elemental courage and encouragement, and at the same time something like a fatal disease.
If I’m not mistaken, you have already mentioned that you were an incorrigible romantic whom the world of existing socialism all of a sudden clasped to its bosom. Did you have any other comparable literary epiphany?
Just one. During the 1957 Book Week in Budapest I was loafing fairly lost among the publisher’s stands hunting for something new, and what’s more something that I could afford. A yellow-backed little volume came to my hand: an unfamiliar book by a French author with a name that was unknown to me. While standing there I read a few sentences before looking at its jacket: it was priced at 12 forints.
Camus’s novel, The Stranger, I believe?
Yes. And that was the second fatal blow for me. I didn’t get over it for years.
What about Kafka?
I discovered his immeasurable greatness too late, at an age when one is less receptive to primary great experiences. I have the book-publishing policy of the Socialist era to thank for first attempting to hide Kafka from readers, then pooh-poohing him, and finally, when they got round to publishing him, stowing him away under the counter.
So, the bounds of your literary taste were determined by two such radically contrasting writers as Albert Camus and Thomas Mann. I would add Thomas Bernhard as well.
With every justification. It is possible to like Bernhard hugely for a while, but then you more readily put his books to one side. But aren’t we being a bit too literary?
Probably, but then it is part of the subject.
True, true. What I was wondering was why I feel so uneasy about that expression you used: the bounds of your literary taste.
And have you puzzled it out?
There is something arbitrary about it that doesn’t correspond to the facts. We seem to be leafing about in an enormously hefty book, entitled “Literature,” and I stab a finger at two authors: they are my literary taste. In reality, however, it didn’t happen like that. Both authors burst into my life like a catastrophe, and I’m using that word in the original sense of a disastrous overturning. It’s true that I picked the authors, but I couldn’t help picking them.
Notwithstanding the fact that they fell into your hands by chance?
The word “chance” doesn’t mean anything; it doesn’t explain anything. I could replace it with the word “inevitable” and would be saying the same thing even though the two words bear apparently contrary meanings.
True. So we are still looking for an explanation as to what it was that held you prisoner among your papers.
Though sober common sense told me that I was pointlessly wasting my time and living a parasitic existence, and I took both those arguments deadly seriously … much later on, something Sartre says, most probably in Words, often went through my mind: “You talk in your own language but you write in a foreign one.”28 That sentence was not yet known to me, and I felt a little like someone who may well have left the tower of Babel but had not yet arrived anywhere.