The Diary of Geza Csath (13 page)

…In March your poor cousin came here again by coach, to get himself admitted to the Moravcsik clinic. He was not able to obtain a permit to travel to Budapest so his younger brother put him in the hospital at Baja, from where he escaped back to Regoce. From there, he wrote to his father that as a doctor he attests he is completely cured of morphine addiction and thus there is no reason for him to spend any more time in the hospital. Naturally, it was a bluff. That is how he came to shoot his wife to death on 22 July, in the consulting room, with three bullets from a revolver. The unfortunate woman took the first shot with her daughter beside her. She had enough strength to escape next door, where she died an hour later. Afterwards, Geza Csath slashed the veins in his arms and took a large dose of morphine, but a Serbian military doctor pumped his stomach, stitched him up, and saved his life. The same evening he was taken to the hospital in Baja, where his brother visited him several times. Even after being shown the funeral bills, Csath refused to believe his wife was dead. He was treated in Baja until the first day of September, when he was transferred to the psychiatric ward of the hospital here. On the night of 11 September he escaped and at 6 a.m. on the 12th – in hospital trousers, striped hospital cap, and jacket – he turned up at his uncle’s, the pharmacist’s, asking for morphine and atropine. Naturally, he did not get any. After a half-hour stay there, he took his leave and started for Budapest on foot, with 100 crowns cadged from his uncle. He reached the demarcation line, where soldiers stopped him and began to escort him back. He begged them to shoot him, because he did not want to return to the hospital. When the soldiers did not satisfy his request, he swallowed the poison he had with him
– obtained we know not how or where – and at 6 p.m. on 12 September, he died. His corpse was brought into the city the next day by coach and lay in state in the funeral parlour of the cemetery here. Before the burial, Csath’s younger brother had an autopsy performed at Csath’s expressed request. Dr Dezso Valy removed the brain, heart, and liver. Csath’s brother stored them in formalin and intends to take to them to Budapest at the earliest opportunity, to be examined at the clinic.

When he began to use the poison I do not know exactly, but I would not be too far off if – on the basis of certain signs – I settled on 1910 as the year he first pricked himself with the hypodermic syringe and became habituated to the drug. At the time he was working as a medical practitioner at the Moravcsik psychiatric clinic. His literary name shone brighter with each passing day. His pieces

were performed at the Magyar Szinhaz, and he wrote in short succession short stories and articles which became events in the renewal of literature.

The effect of the poison manifested itself slowly. Even though I was in frequent contact with him, for four years, until the beginning of the war, I did not realize he was ill. Only in retrospect did I discover deeds and events which now – on the basis of what we know – strike me as incongruous and demonstrate his slow demise. This much is sure: he wrote less than before. He finished a drama but locked it in his desk drawer. Sometimes he spoke disappointedly of literature; he said he ‘wanted to be happy’, then one day, unexpectedly and incomprehensibly, he married. Neither close relatives nor friends could understand his choice, they thought it mysterious. Obviously, by this time two were thinking and acting: he and the morphine.

Pieces he wrote at the early stage of the disease show the transformation only very faintly. They are still original and polished, but the observant eye may already perceive that their effect is somehow different. I remember sensing this before I knew anything of his tragedy – I wrote to him saying as much on the occasion of his last book of short stories,
Schmidt, Brioche-Maker
. His lyrical voice of old, which welled up from the sweet depths of our common childhood and memories, suddenly faltered and his attention was fixed on very earthly, tangible phenomena. It seemed he had set some sort of psycho-physical goal for himself. I told him the preceding; he became embarrassed and claimed the age of lyricism was over, and said that perhaps he was getting older too.
The truth is that by this time he was trying to leave behind the psychological atmosphere of
The Magician’s Garden
and
Afternoon Dream
, that nervous agitation which he wanted to cure with morphine. His later, earthbound writing shows the drug’s influence. Morphine does not cause dazzling and otherworldly fever, as those who do not understand it imagine. Its effect is actually the opposite. It narrows the pupils and the field of vision. Its intellectual effect is about the same. Details come alive but the whole becomes secondary. The drug pulls one down to the earth, makes one numb, indifferent, satisfied, calm, and prosaic. Geza Csath was a seer of dreams when he was healthy; later, he kept his eyes focused on the ground. An unusual transformation, of which I have not read up to now, as writers overwhelmingly see morphine in a romantic light.

Trembling with worry and with oh! such vain and hopeless effort, I tried to call him back to life. The painful experiences noted here only have value because they apply to a person so exceptional and self-aware. After an injection, every bodily and spiritual conflict between the morphine addict and the world ceases. He no longer feels the ancient tragedy: desire that cries out to be satisfied and disgust that emerges after satisfaction. He is as if set free from the fatal web. His body and spirit seem light. He wants nothing, only that everything should stay this way forever. In this state, I know, everything was infinitely interesting to him. A table, for example, or a match-holder, which opened itself to him in its own ancient mystery. After a dose of the drug he generally became immersed in his reading, which was rather unselective in the latter stages. A shoddy newspaper article or a mediocre novel completely satisfied him. His sharp critical sense stopped working. What he read in this psychological state, he enlivened with his drugged imagination. He, who discovered Puccini for the Hungarian audience, and loved Richard Strauss, once played for me a couplet he had heard on the street. He praised it much and expounded on its beauty. I thought he was joking and laughed. Then, however, he looked into my eyes seriously, deeply, from the depth of his dreams.

This lowering of standards was the first warning of tragedy. For a time I believed I was a poor observer, or that he had suffered a loss of form. Perhaps I had overestimated him, I thought, and now I was seeing him in his true colours. With time, however, the incidents began to add up. The bohemian artist took on incomprehensible petit-bourgeois habits, and became friends with people so insipid he would surely have laughed in their faces before. He left Budapest – ‘hot asphalt hell,’ he wrote to me – left his job at the clinic, and worked as a spa doctor in the countryside. He distanced himself from everyone so that he could live solely for his passion, like a misanthropic drunk. Habits I recognized from the time he was a tenyear-old schoolboy returned conspicuously. He coloured his letters with blue, green, and red ink, illustrating every sentence with tiny drawings. Certain words he would frame in black. He spoke much of trifling matters I did not understand. A few years ago, he constantly mentioned his little white dog. He wrote hardly at all. Once, at my cajoling, he read aloud a piece in which he expounded on the notion that meat should be cut into small bits for soldiers on their way to the front because on the battlefield there is no time for the eaters themselves to portion it. This outlandish essay was very long and made my head hurt. He noticed and stopped reading with a languid wave of his hand – ‘You can’t understand this anymore,’ said the gesture, ‘and I can’t understand the rest of you either.’

Sometimes, however, he was the old scintillating intellect, especially when he had taken a stronger dose of morphine. Last year he sent me a short story based on one of his psychiatric cases and written with a sure pen. Some of his letters are pure wisdom and goodness. At other times, however, his writing is confused and bored. I could always tell when he had taken an injection beforehand. In time, he could reach his normal state, his old level, only with morphine. This poor, poor lover of the illimitable could not escape from the earth’s eddies. The tragedy that for us is desire and satiation, eternal lack of satisfaction, was for him that he could not raise the dosage infinitely: his body cracked under it. He could not go further and he could not stop.

He suffered indescribably. On his martyred body there wasn’t a penny’s circumference of room the hypodermic needle hadn’t ripped up. Abscesses formed, and he tied belts around his legs so he could drag himself along somehow. He worked that way for years. Daily, he would see to his medical duties in the small Bacska county village, and while he trudged, head down, toward certain death, he restored the health of many others. He knew very well the state he had come to, until his last month. Sometimes he also knew there was no way out. As a doctor, he

‘He ...stopped reading with a languid wave of his hand – «You can’t understand this anymore,» said the gesture, «and I can’t understand the rest of you either.»’

observed himself and experimented with his body. He varied his poisons – morphine, pantopon and opium – but like the swimmer ensnared in seaweed, he became increasingly trapped. To counter morphine’s slimming effect, he took a weight-gaining cure with arsenic, in consequence of which he thickened beyond recognition. Then, to lose weight, he took emetics after lunch. For years he could only sleep with his eyes open, light, unhealthy sleep. The slightest noise disturbed him so much that he would stop his pocket watch when he went to bed. Driven by an unbearable malaise, now and again he would decide to rid himself of his vice and commit himself to a sanatorium. This, however, was a kind of pious self-delusion. He entered smuggling morphine inside his shoes. Upon leaving he would return to his old dose.

Later, he would not hear of the sanatorium. He lost his willpower; even his logic became confused when applied to his illness. In a long letter he wrote to me last year, he tries to explain that he can only quit morphine if I send him as much as possible. His family attempted to have him committed a few more times, with his permission, but at the last moment he would always disappear. He escaped from every hospital. His disease took its own course. He was tortured by fear and began to suspect everyone. He was afraid someone would pierce his sternum with a needle and stab his heart. He had his relatives watched by detectives. He hid sharpened knives in his pockets. Finally he became passive and indifferent, a good-natured infant. The man who once dressed like a prince completely neglected his appearance. Buttons hung from his stained coat
– this grand phenomenon of spirit, knowledge, and talent resembled a country bailiff. It was dreadful to watch the experiment. He pried the poison from those surrounding him with bloody fights. When his relatives cried in front of him, he told them: ‘I see your tears, but I don’t understand them any more.’

Could he have been saved somehow? I hardly think so. Physical separation, unconditional withdrawal of the drug might have restored bodily health and possibly prevented the final bloody tragedy, but it could not have arrested the progress of his psychological illness, which morphine disguised for a few years with its own hot, dense, cloudy veil. Morphine is always an effect and never a cause. When he reached for the poison, unconsciously he knew he was choosing the lesser of two dangers. He tried to escape from melancholy, whose sweet otherworldly melody resonated in his writings. For a while he transferred his pain to art, then it was too much: the receiving environment could take on no more and the disease broke his body apart. The tragedy branches far back into his life. Studying to be a psychiatrist was perhaps an unconscious recognition that he was sick and wanted to help himself. He embarked on clinical work with feverish eagerness – and in the footsteps of Freud, at a very young age he wrote the book
On the Psychic Mechanism of Mental Illness
. Professionals praised his crystal-clear diagnoses, his medical intuition. He dreamed of morphine addiction in his twentieth year, when he couldn’t yet have had any idea of the drug. That is when he wrote
The Death of the Magician
, the source of his one-act drama
Ash Wednesday
.

The magician is a man of less than 30, whose face is prematurely sad, wrinkled and childlike from all the opium cigarettes and kisses, and on Ash Wednesday, early in the morning, he was dying.

If you start smoking opium as a strong, mature man and put a lot of care into the maintenance of your physical well-being – which is best entrusted to a clever doctor
– you may live ten years. And thus, at the age of 20 million you can rest your head on the icy pillow of eternal annihilation.

Poor thing, he too lived ten years as a morphine addict and by the time he died he was as old as if he had suffered 20 million.

I must resign myself to the idea that life is not as it portends. Geza Csath, in whom music and intelligence, colour and light, poetry and science were unified, had a stunted career. When he was 19 and no one here even dreamed of modern literature, he published his short stories one after the other in a provincial newspaper. He did not know other languages. In a small Hungarian town, isolated from every influence, he explored his own depths, and the nightmare he dreamed later turned to reality. He was wonderful at drawing, painting, playing the violin and piano, composing music – just like the spiritual relative he did not know, E. T. Hoffmann. In a more peaceful age literary historians will surely return to him.
His last wish was for his brain, heart, and liver to be removed from his body and examined at the clinic. With this bequest, he continued to search for the truth, the secret of his nature, even beyond the end of his life. It seems I too have complied by attempting to describe his suffering, the struggle and crippling of his heroic body, the fading of his bright soul, all so that I might understand – and make others understand – his tragedy, and lessen the unyielding pain I feel on his early and unjust death.

Born Jozsef Brenner in Szabadka (Subotica) on 13 February, to Dr. Jozsef Brenner, lawyer and Etelka Decsy.

1902-4
Receives prizes and recognition at school and local competitions for essays written about Szechenyi, Vorosmarty, Janos Arany and Mihaly Szabolcska.

1902
First published article in the newspaper
Bacskai Hirlap
(Bacska Newsletter).

Music critic for
Budapesti Naplo
(Budapest Diary) Publication of his first book of short stories,
A varazslo kertje
(The Magician’s Garden).
25 June, he finishes medical school and becomes an intern at the Neurological and Psychiatric Clinic under the direction of Erno Moravcsik. His book
Albiroek es egyeb elbeszelesek
(Deputy Judges and Other Stories) appears in the Mozgo konyvtar (Moving Library) series. On 20 April, at dawn, the day after a medical examination which uncovered symptoms of tuberculosis, he gives himself a shot of morphine.
From May to October he works as a doctor at the spa in Otatrafured (Stary Smokovec). He meets his future wife Olga Jonas.

1911
The Magyar Szinhaz (Hungarian Theatre) of Budapest performs his plays
Janika
and
Hamvazoszerda
(Ash Wednesday); his book of short stories
Delutani Alom
(Afternoon Dream) is published along with a collection of writing on music
Zeneszerzo portrek
(Portraits of Composers).
During the summer months, he works as a spa doctor at Stosz, and writes the medical monograph
Az Elmebetegsegek Psychikus mechanizmusa
(The Psychic Mechanism of Mental Illness).
He accompanies Professor Moravcsik to Munich. On his 25th birthday, he applies for admission to the Martinovics Freemasons, becoming a member 26 April. His short story collection
Schmidt Mezeskalacsos
(Schmidt, Brioche-Maker), his medical text as well as a German translation of his study on Puccini are published. He spends the summer at the Stubnyafurdo (Turcianske Teplice) spa as an assistant physician.

1913
He uses ever larger doses of morphine, and becomes addicted. Marriage to Olga Jonas on 19 June. He spends the summer in Palics (Palic) as a spa doctor, then commits himself to the Liget Sanatorium in Budapest for withdrawal. He leaves the hospital in December without having been cured. During the year, his short story collection
Muzsikusok
(Musicians) is published.

1914
He leaves Budapest for good. He works as a doctor in Elopatak (Valcele), then enlists in the army on 3 August, at the beginning of World War I. He is ordered to the Southern, then the Eastern front, and from October he serves in the Auxiliary Command Center in Trencsen (Trencín).

1915
In the spring, he is transferred to the First Army Infantry Unit in Budapest. After his morphine addiction is discovered, he is put under supervision. He works at Elopatak in July then spends ten days of August institutionalized. Forced withdrawal ends without success. He receives a one year release from the army and works as a doctor in Foldes from October.

1917
He is permanently discharged from the army. From autumn he works as a district doctor in Regoce.

1919
15 April - 2 June, Csath undergoes withdrawal in the psychiatric ward of Baja Hospital.
2 June, he escapes from the hospital and walks home to Regoce.
22 July, he kills his wife with three bullets from a revolver, then attempts suicide. He is rescued and taken back to the hospital at Baja.
11 September, he escapes from the hospital. Heading for Budapest, he is detained by Serbian soldiers at Kelebia. He takes a huge dose of Pantopon and dies.