And in so doing provincial stillness set in; the stillness of the Kádár regime.
Still, perhaps even that had its good side, didn’t it? You need stillness to write a novel, don’t you?
That’s one way of looking at it: one could pull oneself back as far as was possible. That was one of the reasons I stayed in Hungary at the end of 1956: the low cost of living and a safe hiding place. Albina pleaded that we should go …
May one ask if you ever regretted not listening to her?
You may ask, but there is no answer.
You have said that it was the language, first and foremost, that bound you to Hungary; but then, on the other hand, what has become clear so far is that you gained your most stunning literary experiences, virtually without exception, from foreign writers, whether in good or bad translation. Did no Hungarian traditions have an impact on you?
It seems not. Only later did I become acquainted with Gyula Krúdy and Dezs? Szomory, whose prose I greatly love and admire; Géza Ottlik or Iván Mándy, or indeed even Sándor Márai, whose books were available only as contraband items, were still unknown to me.
Does that go any way to explaining the foreignness of the language of Fatelessness?
No, the foreignness of the language of Fatelessness is explained solely by the foreignness of the subject and the narrator.
What I seeking for an answer to is how you “managed” so totally to marginalize yourself in the intellectual life of Hungary that you could hardly be said to have been present at “the sidelines,” to use one of Iván Mándy’s categories.
During the Kádár era that was more or less the limit of my ambition.
If one pays close attention, certain pages of Galley Boat-Log attest to the fact that your unnatural situation took a greater toll on you than you may have been prepared to admit even to yourself.
You know, there’s a kind of syndrome to which I have given the name “dictatorship schizophrenia.” Every artist longs for recognition, though he is well aware that it is precisely what he doesn’t want. He finds it hard, however, to resign himself to the fact that he has created a work of art that nobody takes any notice of. One incident that happened to me was that an unknown colleague addressed me in the corridor of the writer’s retreat at Szigliget. He must have arrived not long before, because I hadn’t seen him around. “Are you Imre Kertész?” “Yes, I am.” “You wrote Fatelessness?” “I did.” Whereat, he embraced me and rained kisses on my cheeks — he was a tall and beefy man, so I had a job pulling myself away from him. He lauded the book at length, and in a far from unintelligent way. It was only then that I discovered who his nibs was: one of the Party’s chief ideologists, a chief censor, what was then called a super-Reader, the highest court of appeal in matters of suspect manuscripts. He was editor-in-chief of some critical journal in which, following his abounding enthusiasm, he got an anonymous author to write a noncommittal review that was printed in a well-hidden corner of the journal devoted to brief notifications of insignificant books.
Nice! But what can one learn from the story that one didn’t know already?
As best I recall, you asked me how I had managed to “marginalize” myself in the intellectual life of Hungary. As you can see, I didn’t have to try too hard. The Kádár regime’s scale of values functioned like a well-oiled machine, more or less automatically, quite independent even of the people who operated it. Orwellian doublethink was so self-evident a feature of life in Hungary that it could not be shaken by any private convictions or opinions.
So how could personal convictions or opinions exist, or indeed be articulated?
By totally separating them from the “must-know” region of the brain, the sphere of practical action. The blame for any consequences of that could be shifted onto the existing world order, the dictatorship, so nobody personally felt themselves as being dishonest.
Or crazy.
Quite the reverse, since they had pragmatic sense on their side; in Hungary, only life’s cavillers and dissidents could be crazy.
I found an intriguing entry in Galley Boat-Log in which, back in 1964, you wrote down a quotation both in the original English and in Hungarian translation: “He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making himself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.” And you end by attributing it to Shakespeare.
It’s actually Orwell.34
But you wrote Shakespeare, presumably out of caution.
“Dictatorship schizophrenia,” as I said. In case my notebooks were gone through.
Those written traces of the struggle you were waging for your intellectual self-preservation.
Those notes were enormously important for me at the time.
And also to preserve your sanity. As I see it, that was ultimately the most difficult thing of all for you in the Kádár world: to keep a level head. If there is any poetry in Galley Boat-Log then it springs from the struggle you were waging to keep a sane mind … But let’s now switch to light entertainment. Would you care to say how you became the author of the book for a number of much-performed musicals, popular light comedies?
It’s been done to death. I’ve already covered that a hundred times.
I came across the following lines in the frame novel of Fiasco: “I wrote a novel, in the meantime producing dialogues for musical comedies, each more inane than the last, in order to make a livelihood (hoodwinking my wife who, in the semi-gloom of the theatre auditorium at “my premieres,” would wait for me, wearing the mid-grey suit that had been specially tailored for me for such occasions, to take my place before the curtains in a storm of applause, and she would imagine that our beached life would finally work free itself from the shoals after all); but I, after assiduously putting in appearances at the pertinent branch of the National Savings Bank to pick up the not inconsiderable royalties due for this claptrap, would immediately sneak home with the guilty conscience of a thief to write a novel anew …” That makes it sound rather as though writing farces became your real job and you considered novel-writing a form of truancy, of bunking-off from school.
As indeed it was. In practice, I wouldn’t have been able to give an excuse for it that was any better than I could have given for stamp-collecting or breeding exotic birds.
Was that because you were lacking in self-confidence, or more because you suspected that you would be unable to convince those around you?