I at once asked Kathy if she would let me see what I could do and then, if she agreed and it seemed to go well, I would show what I had done to friends in London and ask their opinion before we embarked on a voyage which would involve much time and effort for us both. Encouraged, we set to work; and now the pages of Kathy’s literal translation (on which I could base an English text) arrived in exemplary legible typescript. Of course I must have been a little crazy to tackle anything of that length — particularly a translation of a dead author who, however well-known he may have been in his own country, had never been heard of in the English-speaking world. And not only that, but to tackle, even with the help of a born Hungarian, a book originally written in a language of which I did not then understand a single word (and I confess to not knowing many more now), was sheer folly. But I was caught by the sweep of the story, the range of characters, the heartbreak, the truth and the sheer humanity of it all. I knew that once started I could never stop until it was done for I desperately wanted others to enjoy it as much as I had. Furthermore I did have one unexpected advantage. As a boy I had often spent holidays with Anglo-Austrian cousins in their castle in Tyrol and so I did have some first-hand experience of central-European vie de château which in the 1930s had barely changed since the days, thirty years before, that Bánffy had described in the trilogy. A year later the first long draft of our version of They Were Counted was completed. The others followed, and six years later it was all done.
Ostensibly a love story, the two principal characters are cousins, one of whom prospers while the other declines into squalor and a lonely death: but the real theme of this extraordinary family saga is the folly and insularity of the Hungarian upper classes, who danced and quarrelled their way to self-destruction in the ten years leading up to the Great War; and the insularity of the politicians who were so pre-occupied with their struggle against Habsburg domination that they saw nothing of the storm-clouds gathering over Europe. Ironically enough I had just arrived at Bánffy’s description of the events following the assassination of Franz-Ferdinand at Sarajevo — and the sad spectacle of the youth of Hungary marching off gaily to war while the hero of the novel reflects that nothing will come of it all but the destruction and dismembering of his beloved country — when bombs started exploding once again in that sad and much disputed city.
At this time a symposium devoted to the life and works of Miklós Bánffy was held in the great hall of the Ráday Institute in Budapest. This was presided over by the then Foreign Minister, Jeszenszky Géza. The guest of honour was Miklós Bánffy’s daughter Katalin (my friend Kathy), and in addition to Mr Jeszenszky’s opening address there were speeches and reminiscences covering all aspects of Bánffy’s distinguished career from no less than eleven speakers, seven of whom had travelled from the former Hungarian province of Transylvania (Romanian only since 1920). These proceedings, which took from 9 a.m. in the morning until 1 p.m. were followed by a buffet lunch, a visit to the opera house where a bust of Bánffy by his friend the great Hungarian sculptor Strobl was unveiled. This had been preserved in the storerooms of the National Museum and had now been loaned to the Opera House by Bánffy’s daughter. The celebrations ended with the pinning of wreaths and bunches of spring flowers to the still battle-scarred façade of the former Bánffy house in Pest. All through the proceedings strobe lights were switched on and off, television cameras whirled and repeated flashlights showed the determination of the media photographers not to miss a second of what was going on. Afterwards Kathy, a grey-haired lady married to an American former naval officer, was interviewed for two different television cultural programmes. Now, I asked myself, why was Miklós Bánffy, a name hitherto unknown in England, so highly honoured in his native land?
Count Miklós Bánffy was, as we have seen, Hungarian by birth, but a very special sort of Hungarian in that his family sprang from Transylvania; and Transylvania, Hungary’s greatest lost province, conjures up for Hungarians a totally different picture from that of the Dracula country of Bram Stoker’s novel and innumerable horror films made in England and America.
After a turbulent history of domination by marauding hordes from Asia and the Turkish empire, and a period of semi-independence, Transylvania had settled down by the seventeenth century into a largely autonomous Hungarian province, a prosperous if turbulent land of mountains and forests and castles and historic towns. It was called Erdély in Hungarian, and Siebenbürgen — ‘seven cities’ — in German. Its capital, Kolozsvár, renamed Cluj-Napoca by the Romanians after Transylvania had been ceded to Romania by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, was a university town with a diffuse culture where the dominant Hungarian landowning families all had town houses, and which was proud of its status as an alternative capital to Budapest. The people of Transylvania were partly of Romanian origin, and partly Hungarian. There were also Jewish, Szekler, gypsy and German-speaking communities — the last known as ‘Saxons’ who formed a solid largely Protestant middle-class that did not take sides either with the Hungarian aristocrats who were the landowners or with the Romanian peasantry. Some of the noble families, like the Bánffy’s, were Protestant (though if a wife were Catholic, like Kathy’s mother, the sons would be brought up as Protestants while the daughters followed their mother’s faith), others Catholic, while the Romanian-speaking minority was Orthodox. It was from the ranks of the Bánffy’s, Bethlens, Telekis and other great landowners, that the princes and governors and chancellors of that once autonomous province had been chosen.
Count Miklós Bánffy was born in 1873 and lived most of his life either at the castle of Bonczhida near Kolozsvár, or in the family’s town house in Pest a few minutes’ walk from the town palaces of his western Hungarian relations, the immensely wealthy Károlyi family. Mihály Károlyi, the country’s first republican president after the fall of the Habsburgs, was Miklós Bánffy’s second cousin, childhood playmate and once a devoted friend — a friendship which, after Károlyi’s marriage and conversion to radical politics, would be destroyed by mutual distrust and hostility. Bánffy, who like many of his class was educated at the Theresianum in Vienna, later studied painting in Budapest with Bartalan Szekely and then law and mathematics at the Hungarian University at Kolozsvár, first became a diplomat and then took up politics as an independent MP for his home province of Kolozs. During the First World War he was intendant of the Budapest Opera House, introducing, despite considerable opposition, the works of Bartok; and in 1916 being responsible for most of the arrangements for the last Habsburg coronation, that of the Emperor Franz-Josef’s successor, his nephew King Karl. In 1921 Bánffy became Minister for Foreign Affairs, resigning a year-and-a-half later principally because of ill-health brought about by overwork and the strain of trying to represent his country at the League of Nations (where, despite serious opposition, he had obtained Hungary’s admisssion as a full member) while being stabbed in the back by lesser men at home in Budapest. At that time he still had confidence in the régime of Admiral Horthy, who had by now made himself ‘Regent’ following the short-lived Socialist republic (of which Mihály Károlyi had been the ill-fated President) and the previous few months of the Communist rule of Béla Kun. This early confidence was to wane as Horthy soon showed signs of neo-fascist megalomania.