I can just picture the bizarre scene.
Not long after we had got together she found herself a job with what was called the Restaurant and Buffet Company. In those days that was a major privilege; the firm was managed by a former footballer called Lajos Ónodi, who collected a whole flock of déclassé persons who had been dislodged from their old ways of life. There was a dishwasher who had been a countess and a baroness who had been promoted to cocktail waitress, a football player’s wife whose husband had left her — take your pick. Albina was given a job as a waitress in the Abbázia [Opatija] Restaurant which used to be by the Oktogon.
While in the meantime you sat at home reading Schopenhauer.
One could put it like that.
Did you, in all honesty, read right through all four of the hefty volumes of the Hungarian edition?
Of Parerga and Paralipomena, you mean? I certainly did; indeed, for a time it was a constant reading-matter, and that had the abiding merit that it led me on to Kant.
Another of the books that you had need of and that sure enough, found their way into your hands?
Exactly. To the best of my recollection, a new Hungarian translation of the Critique of Pure Reason was published in the Sixties. I bought it, but it lay around unread for who knows how long. It was just as much a mystery why I packed it in the suitcase when Albina and I went down to Balatonalmádi one summer. Brilliant July sunshine gave way to days of rain. One could step out of the room that we had rented onto a covered wooden balcony. I dipped into the book and then couldn’t put it down. I read it the same way that I had read Agatha Christie’s detective stories when I was young. It was further reinforced by the fact, which I had long suspected anyway, that the world is not “an objective reality independent of us,” as the Marxists would harp on, but quite the opposite: it exists only as long as I exist, and it only exists in the manner in which I can imagine it: in the midst of the conditions of space and time and causal relations that are given to me.
A lot of that has since been refuted, if I’m not mistaken.
That’s of no concern to me; for that great text corroborated and rescued me completely. Why would I be interested in facts? Kant cannot be refuted any more than an oak tree can be refuted. It grew and spread and it stands there, but there are times when we need it in order to stay in its shade and marvel at it, like at a great encouraging example.
That sounds rather like a credo, which is quite unusual coming from you. So, as you have already mentioned, in 1960 you start writing Fatelessness. You were thirty years old at the time and, on the evidence of the photographs, a determined young man in good shape, who, according to what is in effect the final chapter of Fiasco, does not wish to take the chance to escape “from this city which denied all hope, this life that belied all hope: ‘Where to?’ asked Köves, at a loss to understand,… ‘Does it matter?’ Sziklai fumed. ‘Anywhere!’ … He set off again. ‘Abroad,’ he added, and in Köves’s ears the word, at that instant, sounded like a festive peal of bells. He walked on for a while without a word, his head hung in thought, by Sziklai’s side. ‘Sorry, but I can’t go,’ he said eventually. ‘Why not?’ Sziklai again came to a stop, astonishment written all over his face. ‘Don’t you want to be free?’ he asked. ‘Of course I do,’ said Köves. ‘The only trouble is,’ he broke into a smile, as if by way of an apology, ‘I have to write a novel.’ ‘A novel?!’ Sziklai was dumbstruck. ‘Now of all times? … You can write it later, somewhere else,’ he went on. Köves continued smiling awkwardly: ‘Yes, but this is the only language I know,’ he worried. ‘You’ll learn another one,’ Sziklai said, waving that aside … ‘By the time I learn one I’ll have forgotten my novel.’ ‘Then you’ll write another one,’ Sziklai’s voice by now sounded almost irritated, and it was more for the record than in hope of being understood that Köves pointed out: ‘I can only write the one novel that it is given me to write’ … They stood wordlessly, facing each other in the street, a storm of shouts of ‘We want to live!’ around them,… then they swiftly embraced. Sziklai was then swallowed up in the crowd, whereas Köves turned on his heels and set off back at a shambling pace, like someone who is in no hurry as he already suspects in advance all the pain and shame his future holds for him.” I have deliberately quoted from this scene because, for all its grotesqueness, I nevertheless feel it is very true to life.
Rightly so. I think all big decisions are, in truth, as grotesque as that.
I wonder why.
Because they are inexplicable. You have to choose between bombast and silence.
I have the feeling that in light of The Union Jack there is no need for us to say anything more about 1956. The late Sixties were characterized by a national collective amnesia, the emergence of a Hungarian society which was derided as “goulash communism” that you yourself have referred to, here and there, as “the intellectual swamp of the Brezhnev era” or “the West’s favourite brand of Communism.”
Yes, that was when I noticed the emergence of a collective morality (or rather immorality) of the functional man, and of fatelessness.
In Galley Boat-Log one can read lengthy analyses32 about this discovery, about functional man being “an insubstantial being at the mercy of totalitarianism.” Then in Liquidation one of the characters speaks about a separate “species” of survivors: “… we are all survivors; that is what determines our perverse and degenerate mental world. Auschwitz. Then the forty years that we have put behind us since.” What I am particularly interested in, right now, is what you mean by a “collective morality.”
That peculiarly Hungarian consensus that blossomed in the name of survival and, in essence, was founded on an “acceptance of realities,” so-called.
Realities that included the Kádár regime, installed after the crushing of the 1956 revolution …
Yes, that cheap conformity that undermined every moral and intellectual stand, that petit-bourgeois police state that called itself socialist but which regarded that docile and corrupt, simpering and authoritarian, mind-numbing, semifeudal, semi-Asiatic, militaristic Horthyite society, governed from the handsomely built dictator’s waistcoat pocket, as its true model.
According to the witticism of the day, Hungary still counted as “the happiest barrack in the socialist camp.”
If I were really looking to be ironic, I would call it the country that, in the course of its historical evolution, lived through enlightened absolutism in the late eighteenth century and has now got as far as liberal totalitarianism.
“World time,” you write in Galley Boat-Log, “that blindly ticking machine, which has been dropped in the quagmire hereabouts and is now overrun by masses of sprightly Lilliputians, who are busy trying to dismantle the appliance, or at least silence it.”33