It was in the heart of Transylvania — in the old princely capital then called Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca) that I first came across the name of Bánffy. It was impossible not to. Their palace was the most splendid in the city, just as Bonczhida was the pride of the country and both of them triumphs of the baroque style. Ever since the arrival of the Magyars ten centuries ago, the family had been foremost among the magnates who conducted Hungarian and Transylvanian affairs, and their portraits, with their slung dolmans, brocade tunics, jewelled scimitars and fur kalpaks with plumes like escapes of steam — hung on many walls.
For five years of the 1890s, before any of the disasters had smitten, a cousin of Count Miklós Bánffy had led the government of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The period immediately after, from 1905, is the book’s setting. The grand world he describes was Edwardian Mitteleuropa. The men, however myopic, threw away their spectacles and fixed in monocles. They were the fashionable swells of Spy and late Du Maurier cartoons, and their wives and favourites must have sat for Boldini and Helleu. Life in the capital was a sequence of parties, balls and race-meetings, and, in the country, of grandes battues where the guns were all Purdeys. Gossip, cigar-smoke and Anglophilia floated in the air; there were cliques where Monet, d’Annunzio and Rilke were appraised; hundreds of acres of forest were nightly lost at chemin de fer; at daybreak lovers stole away from tousled four-posters through secret doors, and duels were fought, as they still were when I was there. The part played by politics suggests Trollope or Disraeli. The plains beyond flicker with mirages and wild horses, ragged processions of storks migrate across the sky; and even if the woods are full of bears, wolves, caverns, waterfalls, buffalos and wild lilac — the country scenes in Transylvania, oddly enough, remind me of Hardy.
Bánffy is a born story-teller. There are plots, intrigues, a murder, political imbroglios and passionate love-affairs, and though this particular counterpoint of town and country may sound like the stock-in-trade of melodrama, with a fleeting dash of Anthony Hope; it is nothing of the kind. But it is, beyond question, dramatic. Patrick Thursfield and Kathy Bánffy-Jelen have dealt brilliantly with the enormous text; and the author’s life and thoughtful cast of mind emerges with growing clarity. The prejudices and the follies of his characters are arranged in proper perspective and only half-censoriously, for humour and a sense of the absurd, come to the rescue. His patriotic feelings are totally free of chauvinism, just as his instinctive promptings of tribal responsibility have not a trace of vanity. They urge him towards what he thought was right, and always with effect. (He was Minister of Foreign Affairs at a critical period in the 1920s.) If a hint of melancholy touches the pages here and there, perhaps this was inevitable in a time full of omens, recounted by such a deeply civilized man.
Chatsworth, Boxing Day, 1998
* John Murray, 1980.
INTRODUCTION. MIKLÓS BÁNFFY AND THE TRANSYLVANIAN TRILOGY BY PATRICK THURSFIELD
MY ACQUAINTANCE with the works of Miklós Bánffy started one day some years ago when I was motoring from my home in Tangier to Rabat. My fellow passenger was a Hungarian friend, Kathy Jelen, who had lived for many years in Tangier and who was going to Rabat to sign some papers that confirmed her ownership of the copyright to her father’s works. All I had known about Kathy’s father, Count Miklós Bánffy, was that he had been a wealthy Hungarian magnate and politician; but I had not known before that he had for many years been a Member of Parliament; nor that he had been Foreign Minister in 1921/2; nor anything about his writings or of his directorship of the State theatres in Budapest; nor of his practical support for writers and artists, and indeed all ethnic Hungarians, in the new Romanian Transylvania of the 1920s and ’30s; nor anything of his role as a great landowner with a castle near Kolozsvár (once also called Klausenburg and now given the Romanian name of Cluj-Napoca) whose fortune derived from thousands of acres of forest in the mountains of Transylvania. During our leisurely four hour’s car ride we talked of little else and when Kathy told me of his great trilogy, Erdélyi Tőrténet — in English A Transylvanian Tale — which had been a bestseller in Hungary in the 1930s but which had never been translated or published elsewhere as the last volume had not appeared until 1940 when all Europe was in the throes of war, I longed to know more. First of all she told me about the first book of the trilogy, Megszámláltattál — They Were Counted, which had just been re-issued on its own in Budapest and had been an immediate sell-out; and it had been because of this that Miklós Bánffy’s daughter had thought it wise to confirm her ownership of the copyright and so henceforth be entitled to receive some benefit, however modest, from her father’s works which was all that remained of her lost inheritance. At that time, of course, no cracks were yet to be seen in the Communist stranglehold over eastern Europe, so there was still no suggestion that dispossessed exiles would ever regain any of their lost possessions.
Kathy then revealed that several years before she had begun an English translation, but that it had not prospered and she had never finished it. I picked up the scent at once and was soon in full pursuit. Could I read what she had written? Of course. As soon as we returned to Tangier she would bring it round to me. A few days later there arrived a tattered brown parcel containing a huge pile of faded typescript in single spacing on flimsy paper. The different chapters were held together with rusty paperclips and the appearance of it all was, to say the least, uninviting. Several pages seemed to have been mauled by cats, as I later found to have been the case. By then Kathy had told me more about her father, a polymath if ever there was one, kind, gentle, a linguist, an artist whose designs were still in use at the Budapest opera, a humanist and a great lover of his country and of women (including, it is said, Elinor Glyn who was thought to have used him as the model for one of her heroes) many of whom had fallen into his arms before he married late in life the actress who had been his great love but whom, because of the shibboleths of that class-ridden world, he had not been able to marry until after his father’s death. She also told me of the great baroque castle of Bonczhida, the Bánffy home in Transylvania, which figures in the novel under the name of Dénestornya, much as some years later Lampedusa’s Donnafugata was to be a pen portrait of that author’s family palace at Santa Margherita Belice in Sicily. Both houses are now ruins, the first through the spoliations of war and official neglect (the mansions of the former Hungarian ruling class were not held in esteem in Communist Romania) and the second destroyed by an earthquake.
I think I had been told that before she became Countess Bánffy, Kathy’s mother had been an accomplished and popular actress at the State Theatre in Budapest, but I knew nothing of the story of the aristocrat’s love for the actress nor of the many hurdles to be surmounted before their marriage could take place.
Dismayed though I was by the state of the manuscript I tackled it at once and was enthralled. When I started to read what Kathy had already translated, the original text and a Hungarian dictionary at my side, I soon discovered that written Hungarian is often a staccato language even when it is at its most elegiac. In consequence a literal translation in English would give none of the quality of the original and would fail completely to give any idea of the idiom and feeling of the first years of this century in central Europe. Besides this the length of the work and its Dickensian range of plot and subplot, as well as the extensive cast-list, meant that anyone tackling it would have to make an English version rather than a literal translation. What a challenge!