Dossier K: A Memoir (17 page)

Realities that included the Kádár regime, installed after the crushing of the 1956 revolution
 …

Yes, that cheap conformity that undermined every moral and intellectual stand, that petit-bourgeois police state that called itself socialist but which regarded
that docile and corrupt, simpering and authoritarian, mind-numbing, semifeudal, semi-Asiatic, militaristic Horthyite society, governed from the handsomely built dictator’s waistcoat pocket, as its true model.

According to the witticism of the day, Hungary still counted as “the happiest barrack in the socialist camp.”

If I were really looking to be ironic, I would call it the country that, in the course of its historical evolution, lived through enlightened absolutism in the late eighteenth century and has now got as far as liberal totalitarianism.

“World time,” you write in
Galley Boat-Log,
“that blindly ticking machine, which has been dropped in the quagmire hereabouts and is now overrun by masses of sprightly Lilliputians, who are busy trying to dismantle the appliance, or at least silence
it.”
³³

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?

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.