Cheers.
Excellent wine this, old man. What wit, what strength this wine has! It’s just the right age, six years old. Six is the best age for dogs and for wine. White wine is dead after seventeen years: it loses color and aroma, and is no more animated than the glass it’s stored in. I discovered this very recently, in Badacsony, from a vintner. You should not be impressed when snobs offer you very old wine. All this takes time to learn.
Where was I? Oh yes, the money.
Tell me, why are writers so slipshod when it comes to the question of money? They write about love, glory, fate, and society; it’s just money they never mention, as if it were some kind of second order of existence, a stage property they deposit in their characters’ pockets so that the action may proceed. In real life there is much more tension about money than we are willing to admit to ourselves. I am not talking about the economy now, or poverty: in other words, not about basic concepts, but about actual money, the everyday, infinitely dangerous and peculiar substance that, one way or another, is effectively more explosive than dynamite; I mean those few coins or fistfuls of banknotes that we manage to grasp or fail to grasp, that we give away or deny ourselves, or deny someone else … They don’t write about that. Nevertheless, the everyday anxieties and tensions of life are made up of a thousand such common conspiracies, misrepresentations, betrayals, tiny acts of bravado, surrender, and self-deniaclass="underline" tragedies can develop from the sacrifices involved in working to a tight budget, or else avoided, if life offers another way of resolving the situation. Literature treats economics as though it were a kind of conspiracy. That’s exactly what it is, of course, though in a deeper sense of the word — real money exists within the spaces of abstractions such as “the economy” and “poverty.” What really matters is people’s relationship to money, a character’s timidity or bravado concerning money: not Money with a capital M, but the everyday money we handle morning, afternoon, and evening. My father was rich: in other words, he respected money. He spent a dime with as much care as he would a million. He once spoke of not respecting someone because the individual was forty but had no money.
It shook me when he said this. I thought it heartless and unjust.
“He is poor,” I defended him. “He can’t help it.”
“That’s not true,” he sternly replied. “He can help it. After all, he is not an invalid, he’s not even ill. Whoever gets to forty without having made any money — and he, in his circumstances, could undoubtedly have made some — is a coward or lazy or simply a bum. I can’t respect such a man.”
Look here, I am over fifty now. I’m getting older. I sleep badly and lie on the bed half the night in the dark with my eyes wide open, like a beginner, like someone practicing to be dead. I am a realist. Why, after all, should I fool myself? I am no longer in debt and owe nothing to anyone. My only obligation is to be true to myself. I think my father was right. One doesn’t understand such things when one is young. When I was young I considered my father a ruthless, unbending man of finance whose god was money, and who judged people — unfairly — according to their capacity for making it. I despised the concept and felt it to be mean and inhumane. But time passed and I had to learn many things: romance, love, courage and fear, sincerity, and everything else — in other words, money too. And now I understand my father, and I can’t find it in myself to blame him for the severity of his judgment. I understand that he looked down on those who were neither ill nor invalid and had passed the age of forty but were too cowardly or lazy or shiftless to have made money. Naturally, I don’t mean a lot of money, since there is considerable luck involved in that: great guile, sheer greed, or blind chance. But the kind of money that lies within a person’s power to get — that is to say, given one’s opportunities or horizons in life — that is wasted only by those who are cowardly or weak. I don’t like refined, sensitive souls who, faced with this fact, immediately point to the world, to the wicked, heartless, greedy world that wouldn’t allow them to spend the twilight of their lives in a pretty little house with a watering can in their hands, tending their garden on a summer evening, with slippers on their feet and a straw boater on their heads, like any small investor who has happily retired from working life to rest on the rewards of industry and thrift. It’s a wicked world, wicked to everyone equally. Whatever it gives, it sooner or later takes away, or at least tries to take away. Real courage consists of the struggle to defend the interests of oneself and one’s dependents. I dislike the mawkish sensibility that blames everyone else: those ugly, greedy financiers, those ruthless investors, and the “terribly crude” idea of competition that prevented them turning their dreams into small change. Let them be stronger, more ruthless if they will. That was my father’s code. That’s why he had no time for the poor, by which I don’t mean the unfortunate masses, but those individuals who weren’t clever or strong enough to rise from their ranks.
That is a pretty heartless perspective, you say. It’s what I myself said for a long time.
I don’t say that now. I have absolutely no desire to pass judgment on anyone. I just go on living and thinking; it’s all I can do. The truth is, I have not made a single penny in all my life. I barely looked after that which my father and his fathers passed on to me. Mind you, that is no easy matter, either, looking after money, because there are vast powers out there constantly at war with the concept of private property. There were times I fought these powers — enemies both visible and invisible — as vigilantly and fiercely as my ancestors, the founders of our fortune. But the truth is that I was not myself a maker of fortune, because I was no longer really in touch with money. I was of the penultimate generation, whose only desire is to keep what they have been given out of a sense of honor.
My father would sometimes speak of “poor people’s money.” His respect for money was not based on mere accumulation. He told me that a man who is no more than a factory hand all his life but who, by the time he has finished, owns a small plot, a little house, and a few fruit trees, and can live there on what he has earned, is a more heroic figure than any general. He respected the miraculous willpower shown particularly by the poor — the healthy and the exceptional among them — who, through fierce, stubborn effort, succeeded in grabbing a share of the good things of the world. They had a patch of the earth they had the right to call theirs; there was a house they had bought with their own pittance: they had a roof over their heads. He admired these people. Apart from them he admired nothing and no one. “He was good for nothing,” he’d say sometimes and shrug when the fate of the weak and helpless was described to him. The conviction with which he pronounced “good for nothing” was itself a form of contempt.