Peter Farago: Remembering Miklos Szentkuthy
In: Quadrant January – February 2005
Born in Budapest, I lived there until the age of eighteen, when in 1949 I left for the West with my mother. Since then I have lived mostly in Australia. Recently, I returned to Budapest for two months with my Australian wife, Joan. For her it was a challenge to make her way without speaking the language and an opportunity to learn more of the culture that had shaped me in my youth. I became her guide and interpreter. For me it was an attempt to reconnect with my roots. We stayed in a flat near the suburb where I had lived with my family and attended school. In the first few days we found, nearby, a large bookshop where we could access e-mails. The shop, called Libri, was in Moscow Square, the commercial and transport hub of the Buda district. On the very first visit as I browsed the shelves, the name Miklos Szentkuthy on the spine of a book caught my eye and brought a flood of memories. When I had progressed to secondary school, or gymnasium, at the age of eleven, Miklos Szentkuthy was my form-master. Szentkuthy is now recognised as one of the foremost exponents of modern Hungarian literature and there is currently enormous interest in his work.
I had hardly thought about Szentkuthy again until I saw his name in the Libri bookshop. I bought the book, Myth of Myths: In Memoriam Miklos Szentkuthy, and read it from cover to cover, an arduous but improving challenge for my rusty Hungarian. It made me return to the whirlpool that was Hungarian literature in the 1930s and 1940s and gave me a chance to appreciate, for the first time as an adult, Szentkuthy’s greatness. It was a book of memorials, essays, critiques and interviews collected by the editors, celebrating the author’s life and works.
I found that Szentkuthy had died in 1988 at the age of eighty and had received the Kossuth Prize, Hungary’s premier literary award, in that year. Although I remembered that he was an important writer, and that his friends and admirers regarded him highly, and that he had written a weighty book called Prae, I now learned that a communist government to which his writings had been anathema had honoured him.
My parents had read Prae, a book beyond the understanding of schoolboys. I now learned that it had started a great debate in the 1930s about modernism in Hungarian literature. It had also laid out a path and a style of writing that its author took some fifty years to implement and perfect.
Szentkuthy was and is regarded, by some of the giants of Hungarian literature, as equal to the European greats such as Proust, Musil and Joyce. Of course, with such an acknowledged stature, he also possesses unique qualities of his own.
Prae was published in 1935 but was not Szentkuthy’s first book. At the age of eighteen this schoolboy had already written a novel, Robert Baroque, that was only released after his death by Maria Tompa, his editor and literary executor. Already in this book this teenager projected an intention to shine and conquer as a writer of modern novels.
In the 1930s Szentkuthy taught both Hungarian Literature and English Language and I attended his classes. It was partly his influence that sparked in me an enduring interest in both these subjects and also in Politics and History Teachers at our school were mostly of two kinds. One group were impoverished gentry from the provinces who struggled with life in the city but worked hard to make our education a success. Others, a minority, posed as misplaced geniuses, intimating that teaching us was way beneath them and was only done for reasons of need. They seemed to feel cruelly oppressed by having to do it, as if at another time and place they would have been in more elevated positions, maybe as bishops, generals, university professors or cabinet ministers. These illusions ill equipped them to cope with the grind of teaching and caused much bad temper. Corporal punishment and abuse were common in large and unruly classes. Because we despised these teachers, we caused them as much grief as we could get away with. At times, an act of defiance leading to the inevitable assault that followed seemed a fair price to pay for the pleasure that had preceded it.
Szentkuthy stood as a beacon in this darkness of misery and cruelty. We sensed his superior qualities, and for many of us knowing him was our only contact with real genius. We knew he was a writer and an orator of considerable impact; it was he who was called upon by the headmaster to mark solemn occasions by addressing the school assembly. He could conjure up drama and emotion for us, worthy of the giants of the theatre. He had no discipline problems, unlike many of his colleagues. True, he was form master but his authority did not depend on his position.
He never used abuse or corporal punishment and even though some of his lessons went far beyond our reach, we were puzzled, intrigued and hugely entertained by him. We liked the texts he chose and often read to us, using his theatrical skills. In class, he was engaging, humane and funny, drawing on immense knowledge of his subject, his talents and a boundless enthusiasm. He never addressed us as though we were lesser beings, treating us decently, and earning our affection. For thiswe willingly forgave his strange ways. He could at times be icily remote, perhaps inhabiting some higher plane of existence, unreachable for ordinary humans.
His handwriting was impossible to read; attempts to decipher his reports drove readers to despair-although the upside of this was that interpretations provided by the weakest of students could please their parents.
Szentkuthy’s authority was also boosted by his physical presence. He was a rangy man of two metres with long arms and legs taking up much space around him, and his gestures were expansive. He was quite handsome, with a hook nose, and his face was somewhat mask-like in repose but when he was fully engaged it became open and friendly with a broad smile. When he walked into a room, all eyes were on him.
To us, this English teacher looked like the archetypal Englishman, always impeccably dressed, his hair a little longer and his shoes shinier than anyone else’s. He wore ties with unusual patterns and went bareheaded at a time when men nearly always wore hats. Much of the time he wore a green three-piece suit, of what I have learned since should be described as a fine tweed. No one I knew dressed as splendidly as Szentkuthy. He was elegant, smooth, and a little aloof, with a hint of the aristocrat, yet friendly when approached-a kind of Hungarian Anthony Eden.
Not long after I started at the gymnasium, my parents met Szentkuthy on the occasion of some parent-teacher consultation-perhaps they had asked him to read to them one of his illegible school reports I had taken home. Soon my father and he became friends, and my parents and I sometimes visited him in his flat. As these visits became more frequent, I gradually came to realise that this man was indeed a genius, or at any event was treated as such among his close circle.
I came from a bookish family-my father was a writer and journalist, my mother an actor-yet the number of books in Szentkuthy’s flat dwarfed our library. His books were everywhere, on shelves, tables, chairs, on the floor, in bedrooms and passageways. In his study a large oak desk seemed to groan under the weight of piles of books and files that were in current use. I learned, as a result, that it was possible to read several books all at the same time on a variety of subjects and to use books not merely as a source of entertainment but as tools of many arts and sciences.
Szentkuthy also had the largest collection of sound recordings I had ever seen, and the most splendid record player, encased in a mahogany cabinet. On a few occasions I was present when friends gathered at his flat, discussing literature, the politics that mired Hungary in the war and the postwar hopes of those who were against the prevailing order. All these people were dissenters and subversives in their defiance in word and, I suspected, some in deed, of the regime.
Two of them I remember particularly well. Miklos Toth was a fairly high-ranking public servant in the Hungarian Foreign Ministry and privy to information about some weighty matters and, among friends, a trenchant critic of government policy. The other, a man by the name of Bona who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and was probably a communist, was perhaps in touch with the underground. These were people I could admire for their knowledge, passion and courage.
There was also danger. When the merest hint of dissent could lead to deportation or worse, this anglophile writer and his friends dared to meet, for what to me were opaque purposes but clearly in defiance of the authorities. I have learned since that Miklos Toth, still in the Foreign Ministry, fell foul of the communists in the early 1950s, was charged in one of the show trials and executed.
As the friendship between our families deepened, word got around among my schoolmates that I knew Szentkuthy, that somehow I was connected with him. This gave me a certain kudos, which I shamelessly exploited, hinting that I could exert influence if needed. Luckily this claim was never put to the test for I was too timid ever to act on it, but for a while I did enjoy some faintly reflected glory off the great man. No undistinguished schoolboy could hope for more. Yet more was to come. Over the next few years I was drawn further into Szentkuthy’s circle. Thinking about it now, maybe I was influenced more by this relationship than I realised at the time.
This was 1944, and the Eastern Front was inexorably moving towards Budapest as the Red Army pushed the German enemy back across Eastern and Central Europe. Soon, my father was taken by the Nazis and became one of the millions of their victims.
Hungary, a German satellite in the war, tried, covertly, to negotiate a separate peace. This led to the invasion and occupation of the country by the Germans; the power of government passed into their hands and their Hungarian Nazi puppets. Budapest was bombed by the Allies while fascist thugs roamed the streets, helping the occupying German forces.
Those of us with any Jewish blood feared the worst, and many were rounded up and sent to the death camps by Eichmann’s SS. Szentkuthy’s mother and wife were Jewish, as was my father. Under this regime, this required the wearing of the Yellow Star as a mark, to aid processing. Neither the Szentkuthys nor my mother and I complied, avoiding co-operation that could lead to our destruction. Except for my father, we all continued to live as before, hoping that before our fates wtrc sealed, we would be saved by the Red Army.
In these circumstances parents wanted at least their children to be safe. To this end, my mother, an Aryan, in agreement with the Szentkuthys, fled, taking their daughter Marion and I, both thirteen, to Nagymaros, a village about one hundred kilometres north of Budapest. She was to look after us there until the dangers had passed.
Strangely, for me the long summer and autumn of that terrible year of 1944 are full of happy memories. Under my mother’s care, Marion and I became almost like brother and sister, furthering the friendship we had already had in Budapest. We loved the peace and tranquillity of the village where we boarded with a peasant family, the Valentines, who had a teenage daughter of their own. Stefi quickly taught Marion and me the ways and games of the village children, so we soon felt that we belonged. We even accompanied Stefi regularly to her church for Evensong and Bible classes taken by nuns. All this was comforting after the fears and uncertainties of Budapest. We three children shared happy times, roaming around the countryside, cadging lifts on rickety peasant carts, exploring the wooded hills nearby.
Sometimes my mother would take us to a little beach by the Danube where we could go for a swim. We came to love this idyllic existence in the midst of war. At times the drone of warplanes overhead and the rumbling of German armour on its way to Budapest intruded as dark portents of horror. Although this was an ethnic German village, the few Jewish people and other enemies of the Nazi regime hiding here were relatively safe. Our landlords and our immediate neighbours must have suspected but did not betray us.
Mr Valentine worked in the railway workshops in Budapest while Mrs Valentine and Stefi tended their small mixed farm, where we helped out. There was water to be fetched from the village well, the pig, goat and chickens to feed, eggs to collect, and the vegetable garden to maintain. On some Sundays Mr Valentine would take me with him to a lush meadow to cut and bring in a barrow-load of grass hay. This was man’s work and girls were not asked to participate. I had the feeling that to a small degree I took the place of the son Mr Valentine had not had.
These blissful times ended suddenly. Our parents worked out a strategy for my mother, Marion and I to return to Budapest just as the ring of Soviet armour was closing in on the capital at the end of December.
They thought that once the siege of Budapest began we would be safe from the Nazis. The plan worked; on Christmas Eve 1944 the Red Army moved through Pest to the Danube and began the shelling and aerial bombardment of Buda where we now all lived, the Szentkuthys near what is now Moscow Square and my mother and I further north on Rose Hill.
The siege of Budapest, one of the bloodiest of the war, continued until February 13, 1945, when the German garrison and their Hungarian allies surrendered. The survivors crawled from the cellars and found that much of Buda was in ruins. I remember thinking at the time that it was a miracle that anyone could have survived. We hoped in vain for my father’s return. The Szentkuthys’ flat was destroyed during the siege while they huddled in their cellar like most survivors of Buda.
Liberation made us feel that we had been born again; the new papers issued to everyone by the re-formed police authority seemed like a licence to live. Our friendship with the Szentkuthys was resumed, strengthened by the experiences we had shared. Marion and I remained friends.
Because I changed school, I no longer had Szentkuthy as a teacher, but continued to have contact because of my mother’s close friendship with him. He had a reputation for liking women. They were all around him-his wife Dolly, a friend, Magda, who lived with them, and others, including my mother. Dolly was a devoted wife and general manager of the household, Magda mostly present in the writer’s study curled up in an enormous lounge chair reading and smoking among scattered books and papers.
When Szentkuthy was writing, which was most of the time, we all knew that he must not be disturbed. Everyone tiptoed around and spoke in hushed and reverent tones. At other times there was laughter, music, parties, poetry and play readings, as though the resumption of our lives had to be celebrated. As I remember it now, life went on this way until late 1947 when, according to my mother, she and Szentkuthy had an enormous row. Because I didn’t witness it and later she never wanted to talk about it, to this day I don’t know what it was about. I was only just fifteen, and children were not told everything then. The outcome was loss of contact with the Szentkuthys, including Marion, to my great regret. My mother never talked about them and I never asked because I felt awkward about it. She and I soon became refugees from Hungary’s Stalinist regime, eventually finding our way to Australia, where we settled in Melbourne in 1950 and made a new life for ourselves.
What werw Szentkuthy’s origins? Briefly, he was born in Budapest and lived nearly all his life near Moscow Square. His father was a high-ranking public servant, while his mother came from a humbler family of small merchants and workers. He was very close to his mother, while at times his relationship with his father was troubled. He suspected that his father was less than faithful to his wife, although it is not clear whether these suspicions were justified.
Szentkuthy as a youth feared that he would prove to be a disappointment to his parents. They, recognising his talents, could not have been more encouraging, supportive and loving. He did brilliantly at school and went on to university where he gained an arts degree. Postgraduate study followed, leading to a Doctorate in English Literature in 1931, his thesis a study of the works of Ben Jonson. In the following year he won a scholarship to study in England. On his return, after the publication of a string of essays and novels, including Prae, he begun, in 1937, his most ambitious project, The Breviary of Saint Orpheus, a serial novel that was
to grow by 1988 to eight volumes.
After a short stint as a secondary teacher in another school in 1939 he moved to the Arpad Gymnasium where he remained until 1948. In that year he won the Baumgarten Prize and a one-year travelling scholarship to England. After the horrors and privations of the war and the oppressions of Stalinism, Szentkuthy and Dolly were tempted to remain in the West but decided not to defect. Szentkuthy’s literary language was Hungarian even though he always insisted that he was a European writer. As his work and intellectual circle were in Budapest, he felt he had to return.
Before they had left for England, like so many parents of their generation, they decided that for their daughter, Marion, leaving Hungary for good was a different matter. To ensure that their only child should not be mired in Heaven-knew-what horrors yet to come, they decided to send her to school in Switzerland. She was never to return to live in Hungary, although when it became possible she made frequent visits. She eventually married and settled in Italy, where she still lives. Inevitably, writing in Hungarian, Szentkuthy shared the fate of other writers in this language-almost total lack of recognition as contributors to world literature.
This is always a pity but in his case even more so, first because of his uniqueness as a creator of a version of the modern novel, and second because of his breadth of talent as novelist, essayist, literary critic, philosopher, biographer, orator, broadcaster and translator. As a result of this isolation, few people have access to his art.
Peter Farago
has lectured in Politics and History at Monash University Gippsland Campus for over three decades. None of Miklos Szentkuthy’s works has yet been translated into English, although several are available in French. The Miklos Szentkuthy Foundation in Budapest is, among its activities, working to introduce his work to readers of Western European languages.