Incontrovertibly, I lack a prophet’s powers of persuasion. But then what could I have said? Just wait and you’ll find out just who I am? Meanwhile just be so kind as to carry on fending for me.
But she was your wife, and she loved you?
When it comes down to it, in the end we are on our own, and there can be no kidding oneself in that respect. “A painter paints a picture with the same feeling as that with which a criminal commits a crime,” Degas said.35 Once I start to work the world becomes my enemy …
That certainly sounds rather hard-nosed. Incidentally, I heard that not so long ago one of the Budapest theatres offered to stage one of your old pieces.
I had a hard job talking them out of it.
Why wouldn’t you agree to the staging?
Look, at the time they were written those pieces had a single practical purpose: making a livelihood. As far as their intellectual content is concerned, if I may put it this way, not a molecule comes from me.
Where on earth did you get the idea of earning money from light comedy pieces, anyway?
I’ve already mentioned that I was one of a small circle of ambitious young people who, at the height of the Stalinist era, used to analyze the plays of Ferenc Molnár.
Sziklai, the comedy writer protagonist of Fiasco, went abroad …
My friend, Kállai, on the other hand, one of life’s flesh-and-blood heroes, stayed in Budapest. And he realized his dream by becoming a well-known playwright, one of whose plays had an uninterrupted run of four hundred performances in one of the city theatres. To keep the story short, he turned up at our Török Street flat one freezing afternoon in the winter of 1957–58, pushed aside the papers, sharpened pencils, and erasers that were spread out on my wonky table, and reminded me that a few years before I had told him about a four-hand comedy set in a single scene. Had I written it down? The hell I had written it down! Then I should do so, and be quick about it. I haven’t got the time; I’m writing a novel. The two are not mutually exclusive. What was the matter: Did I want to die of starvation? That’s a powerful reason, but I don’t know how to write a play. We’ll write it together. But what if I simply can’t get my head round doing it: for instance, just can’t hit upon a plot? We’ll just have to hit upon one together!
And did you?
We did. After that I was able to write the dialogues off my own bat.
But why was the piece so urgent?
A fair few actors were banned from making regular stage appearances after the 1956 Uprising. Some of them looked around for other occupations, whereas others banded together into casual “companies” and diligently went round the country, hiring local halls and performing some harmless play. A four-hander comedy that played in a single scene would fit into even a small café.
I see. And the cultural authorities didn’t raise any objections?
Quite the reverse. The by then gradually stabilizing Kádár regime had need of laughter, of light, apolitical entertainment, a Kakanian peacetime mood. Revolting, isn’t it?
That it is. So your pieces, with their “happy endings,” contributed to upholding the conformity that you radically disavowed via your literary works and your entire lifestyle.
That’s a well-organized dictatorship for you! The need to make a livelihood turned me into a collaborator.
“Life is either a demonstration or a collaboration,” you write in Liquidation.
That’s what I mean. One day I would demonstrate by writing my novel, the next day collaborate by writing bilge. That just underlines one thing I said earlier: the scale of values of the Kádár world spread to everyone and everything, just like an epidemic. No one was exempt or immune.
But seriously, did writing these skits cause you real soul-searching?
Not at all! I looked on it as a sort of prank by which I made a living.
So, you would turn up at the first nights then with all the scruples of a thief …
Exactly so.
How many of these plays did you write with your friend Kállai?
Four or five, I don’t rightly recall.
After which you switched to translating.
But that was only possible after Fatelessness had been published.
So there was something for which you had Fatelessness to thank … Did its rejection by the first publisher you approached surprise you?
In point of fact, yes, but then again, not. It was somehow all of a piece with the things that usually happened to me.
Did it never occur to you that the assessment of those “experts,” let’s call them that, might have been right in some measure?
Nothing of the sort entered my head for a moment. It was quite obvious that the letter from the publisher was baloney and the entire drift of the invective was to serve up a pretext for rejection of the manuscript.
So what did you do with the returned manuscript?
“For the time being” I put it in the filing cabinet.
You resigned yourself to the fact that the book was not going to be published?
I don’t remember it coming to that.
All the same, what did you think or feel?
Boundless disgust and self-reproach at having deserved the fate.
I read somewhere that James Joyce was able to boast of having received more than a hundred letters of rejection. For his Swann’s Way, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust was rejected by an editor by the name of André Gide at Gallimard …
Those are not truly comparable instances. Joyce and Proust had to deal with the incomprehension and intellectual slothfulness that are customary with publishers. Those sorts of barriers one can understand and overcome. I, on the other hand, was rejected by the competent police body of a totalitarian regime, a censorship office disguised as a publisher that was run by an ex-officer of the military secret police. In my case it had long ceased being a matter of my book as such; it was a matter of a direct challenge to the Authority, of which cognizance is cursorily taken, while the perpetrator is simply swept aside as a roadblock with a devastating flip of the odious authority’s hand.
This is not just the way you were made to see it by the “dictatorship schizophrenia” to which you have already referred?
I don’t think so.
Nevertheless, in the end another publishing house did take you on and publish the book.
Not just another but the only other publishing house. There were no others at that time, and anyway, that second publishing house could just as easily have rejected it as the first.