Can you be more specific about what you mean by the “tower of Babel”?
A situation in which it’s not just one another’s languages that we don’t understand but not even our own.
And that was precisely what you were looking for?
So I supposed, but in truth what I was looking for was that third language which is not mine, nor that of others, but the one in which I had to write, only I hadn’t the slightest idea of that at the time, so that the more “immediately” I sought to write, the more false the resulting text.
Let’s skip ahead. Do you make a habit of reading the reviews of your books?
Off and on, and only with due circumspection.
What do mean by “circumspection”?
You know, it takes a lot of confidence to have a book published. To “bring it out”—the expression itself indicates its gravity. You might also say that you hand it over.
Unless, that is, you wish to be a secret writer, you have no choice.
Precisely. On the one hand, you have to be aware that you are surrendering yourself completely, yet on the other that is exactly what you are aiming at. You therefore find yourself in an ironic situation. There is a need for circumspection because you will never be able to approach your own work through someone else’s eyes — least of all a critic’s eyes.
Yet you still sometimes read reviews. Why?
Human foible. But also because it can sometimes be instructive, especially in a society that has been riven so much by censorship, ideologies, and jockeying for position. Here in Hungary, literary criticism has become a genre in its own right, often having little or nothing to do with the work that happens to be under discussion — a lyrical genre, more poetic than poetry.
Is that your take on it? After decades of your name being barely known, suddenly in 2003 books, monographs, are being published about you in Hungary.
I wouldn’t like to seem ungrateful, but in no case did I have the feeling that the books were really about me, still less about my works.29
Do you have the feeling that these people don’t understand you?
I don’t understand them. We speak different languages, hold different values. But for my own part I would rather end any discussion on the subject of literary criticism: it is unproductive and tedious.
Despite that, over time your existence as an author nevertheless loomed before you as a potentially soluble problem — or so at least the following cadence from Kaddish for an Unborn Child would appear to suggest: “I am at most still a bit of a literary translator, if I am and have to be anything. As such, despite the threatening circumstances, in the end I radically removed from my path the ignominious existence of a successful Hungarian author, even though, as my wife (for a long time now someone else’s wife) told me, I have all the endowments it takes to be one (which slightly horrified me at the time), not that she was saying, my wife said, that I should jettison my artistic or any other principles, she was merely saying, my wife said, that I should not be fainthearted, and the more that I was so, that is to say the less I were to do that (jettison my artistic or any other principles), the harder I would have to strive to realize those principles, which is to say, when all is said and done, myself, and hence to succeed, my wife said, since everyone strives for that, even the world’s greatest authors, ‘Don’t delude yourself,’ my wife said, ‘if you don’t want success, then why bother writing at all?’ she asked, and that is undoubtedly a thorny question, but the time is not yet ripe for me to digress on that; and the sad thing is that she probably saw straight into my heart, she was probably absolutely right, I probably do (did) have all the endowments it takes for the ignominious existence of a successful Hungarian author … what is more, and even more dangerous, I had within me in even greater measure the flair needed for the equally ignominious existence of a Hungarian author who is not successful, indeed unsuccessful — and here again I find myself clashing with my wife, who again was the one who got it right, because once one steps onto the path of success then one will be either successful or unsuccessful, there is no third way, though certainly both are equally ignominious, albeit in different ways, which is why, for a while, I escaped altogether, as a surrogate for alcoholism, into the objective stupors of literary translation …” I can see you are laughing …
Go on, admit it! I hit the nail on the head … But then, Kaddish in its entirety is fiction.
Still, a fiction that you wrote while living in a dictatorship, even if it was a late phase of that dictatorship. Give or take the odd irony, though, you did describe very accurately the dilemma faced by a writer, an intellectual of any sort, in a closed society.
One where at all events it is shameful to live. On account of my latest novel, Liquidation, I was leafing through Kaddish not long ago and I myself was taken aback by the frankness of the death wish which was the original stimulus, the guiding principle, for the novel.
In Galley Boat-Log you are preoccupied quite a lot with the idea of suicide, as if you felt uneasy that survivors like Borowski, Améry, or Primo Levi eventually succumbed to this temptation …
Do you think that “temptation” is really the right word here?
That’s a question I’d rather put to you. The odd entry in that diary sounds almost like an apology, and I’m not thinking here of that oft-quoted self-reflection of yours in which you explain that what saved your life was the fact that you were pitched from a Nazi dictatorship straight into a Stalinist dictatorship, so that unlike others living in the free world you were never enticed by hope.30 What struck me more were tucked-away remarks like: “In certain cases suicide cannot be condoned: it shows a lack of respect, as it were, to the wretched.”31
Well yes, to survive Auschwitz — a trifle vulgar, perhaps. I might say it stands in need of an explanation.
Toward the end of an essay on Jean Améry you call him “the saint of the Holocaust.”
A life that had been consummated and bore witness; moreover he knew exactly when it was time to cross into the apotheosis.
You can’t mean you envy him?
Wonderment is always tinged with a tiny spot of envy. In any event, he gave a form to his life that I have not had the strength for.
Was Améry’s example, or his figure, an inspiration for you in creating Bee, the antihero of your most recent novel, Liquidation?
I keep a photograph of him. He is sitting on a bench in a public space, his arms spread apart on the backrest. He is smiling. I have never seen such a smile anywhere else.