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(Afterword to the new German edition of Milán Füst’s The Story of My Wife) By the time Füst finished his best know work, Europe was up in flames. As for Rear-Admiral Horthy, the regent of Hungary who strutted about in fabulous uniforms, he had just lost his grip on reality. Disregarding the size of his army and the fact that it was deplorably under-equipped, he declared war on the Soviet Union. Having passed a new government decree, he sent Jewish men into forced labor. On countrywide raids, his gendarmerie rounded up 11 thousand (according to some sources 16, even 18 thousand) “Eastern Jews”, who in part hailed from territories that had been reannexed just a couple of years previously, and in part were Galician refugees who’d been living in Hungary as “displaced persons” for half a century by then. They were driven across the border at Kamenec-Podolskiy, where the German Sonderkommandoes were waiting to exterminate them. The third Jewish law, too, was put into effect; this went one better than the previous two, and made the marriage of “a non-Jew and a Jew” an offense, proclaiming that “any Jew who engages in sexual intercourse outside of marriage with a respectful, native Magyar non-Jewish woman” would be sentenced to a three year prison term. The strict definition of Jewishness set down in Paragraph 9 of the law went far beyond even the Nuremberg laws. Sugar, lard, bread and flour were rationed, official censors were the first critical readers of the newspapers, the prestigious literary journal, Nyugat (West), where Füst had been editor for many years, had to close its doors. Füst had always insisted that literature and the arts must steer clear of everyday life. Now he found himself on dangerous ground with his poetic principles. He seemed blind and deaf to the world around him. The day he finished his novel, they began the evacuation of the military intelligence stations in the besieged city of Moscow, and so the Hungarian communist geographer and agent Sándor Radó, who operated under the code name “Dóra” out of Geneva, could not relay the crucial strategic information about the German military command garnered by his group with great danger to their lives. His radio station “Direktor” did not sign in on that day, nor could it receive intelligence news in the critical weeks to come. On the same day, the German military command acknowledged that it could not carry out Hitler’s orders; the occupation of Moscow would be a much greater challenge than they had anticipated. In the previous four weeks, 32 thousand German soldiers had died, “Dóra” would have reported from Geneva, if only he could. Meanwhile, on the same day, in Berlin, a full ban was put into effect on news coming from the Eastern front. It looks as if all this suppressed, as well as public, ignominy and misery had left Füst unimpressed. But this was not the case. He was merely keeping their brutal actuality away from his great novel. His idée fixe extended to his political activities and political abstinence as well. He was the greatest obsessive in Hungarian literature, the most noteworthy Hungarian hypochondriac. Always exhausted, always ill, an old man even in his youth, he waited for the deliverance of death. Yet he managed to end up in a wheel chair only toward the end of his life, but then he used it like a throne. His self-indulgent complaining got on the nerves even of those who respected him most. Yet he got rid of anything directly autobiographical in his work. Outside of his work, he could not be persuaded upon to make self-revelations of any kind. He was obsessive even in his asceticism. Only one brief autobiographical piece has survived. He insisted that apart from his work, he had no life. Which could not have been true, naturally, but one thing is certain: he successfully censured and kept from the public eye the inferno that was his fate. On that particular day, he was sulking and raving in his book-lined villa in Buda, chagrinned that he’d been working on “this one silly piece” for the past seven years. Now he had finished it. The day before he had found a title and a subtitle to his liking. He wrote to Lajos Fülep, the Protestant clergyman and philosopher of art in Zengővárkony, whom, lead by his predilection for self-torture, he considered his friend. Füst raised the language of Pest, rich in Germanisms and Yiddish expressions, to the level of literary language, and only in his prose, but also in his poetry, perhaps even more expansive reaching than his prose, while Fülep was of the opinion that Füst could not speak Hungarian properly. His works will read better in translation, he kept insisting, so the offense wouldn’t be lost on Füst. Until the late 19th century, Pest was a German-speaking, or at most a multi-lingual city, and apart from the accruing industrial and commercial advantages, this fact exercised (and has continued to exercise) massive linguistic effects on the language as well. Füst’s diary entries tell us that his mother spoke with him in German, just as she spoke German with the doctor in front of him when, as a child, he ran a high fever. Füst’s counter-argument that in the interest of reinstating the purity and ancient roots of the Hungarian language Fülep needs to excise not only the Turkish and Slav loan words or, in the interest of pure intonation, even the dialects, but also the entire Latin layer from the language, was of no avail. “I am shaking you like a lemon tree,” he wrote Fülep in his prophetic ire. But in this question Fülep remained the true child of the era, unyielding, narcissistic, and blind to reality, deaf to rational thinking. It was up to him to decide what the language should acknowledge or reject from its own reality. And poor Füst, how enthusiastic he was, now that he had finally come up with a name for the Dutch-born hero of his book! And so, he began to dictate the manuscript. This transpired on a Friday, the 17the of October 1941, which is worth remarking only because on this day, Füst’s newly finished novel left everyone as unimpressed as it would continue to do for years to come. Until 1958, when Gallimard published the novel in French, and 1962, when Rowohlt brought it out in German, Füst lived and worked in his own country in complete isolation. “The Eminent Traveling Companion”, this would be the title of his novel, he wrote. Fortunately, the idea was dropped. His hero would be called Captain Drőhn, he wrote. Like this, against the rules, with a long ‘ő’, an accent that does not occur either in Dutch nor in German names. Füst went very far not only in big things, and not only in minor things. For instance, he wanted to get the better of his own negative traits. He expanded incredible energy to heal himself, as if attempting to raise himself to his own ideal of Man. Thanks to his efforts, he managed to appear more extreme in all respects than in fact he was. He was a great eccentric, and because he would have liked nothing better than to be the most sober of people on earth, he took his eccentricity very seriously. “An intolerable nature,” he wrote about his own mother. “I consider him a good stylist, even a more or less gifted person, except I hate him,” he wrote of another writer. “As for his wife, I vomited her up twice before she even came into the world,” he added, in case anyone should doubt his feelings. “These idiots can’t tell the difference between horse shit and a rainbow,” he wrote about a publisher, and he may have been right. “Germany also has its share of idiots,” an observation that would probably have been equally difficult to refute. “I suppose I liked him. And this vexes me. Because why did I like someone who was incapable of love,” he wrote to a friend about his relationship to another friend. “Needless to say, I am very sorry to hear about your illness, though I confess, not sufficiently so, because I am far too concerned with myself, for I am even sicker,” he wrote his German translator. His contemporaries had an aversion to his works not only because he made the alloy of the language of the German craftsmen, the Jewish tradesmen and the Slovak apprentices part of his own philosophically highly polished and self-indulgent poetry, thus also making it part of Hungarian literature, and not only because he got himself into embarrassing situations due to his scandalous opinions, but to top it off, he invented, and despite the protest of his editors, proof readers and printers, insisted on an idiosyncratic orthography and an idiosyncratic punctuation that reflected the musicality of the language of Pest and the rhythm of his own emotional states through the free use of the short and long vowels and the irregular structure of his sentences. Móricz did something similar at the time with Hungarian dialects and the language of the peasantry. Somewhat earlier, Bartók did likewise with Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian folk music. Füst’s language was a faithful reflection of Hungarian spoken with Jewish and German intonation, which also affected the emphases at the end of his sentences. He adjusted spelling and punctuation to accord with the language of Pest as it was really spoken, and not the other way around. When he wrote in German, he did the same thing, with a highly amusing effect. Gűtig, francősisch, beyűglich, schőn, natűrlich, he wrote. The admirable volume edited by Judit Szilágyi (Fekete Sas Kiadó, Budapest, 2002), contains the author’s letters, written in German, with this awry German orthography. Füst reproduced words as he heard them. In his German text, wherever the Germans themselves pronounce the words with long vowels, he used the Hungarian signs to indicate long vowels. But he would have never indicated a long vowel when the German pronunciation calls for short: dürfen, könnte, wünschten, Stück, Glück, verständigen and so on. It is amusing that through his letters, written in far from immaculate German, Füst reformed German orthography. On that day in October when Füst assigned a final name to his hero in Budapest (which, like the title, he later changed for the better), of his great contemporaries Witold Gombrowicz had long since sailed and weighed anchor in Buenos Aires, Albert Camus was biding his time in the more conveniently located Oran, and André Gide in the even closer Nice. All three were fleeing German occupation. Viktor Klemperer, on the other hand, couldn’t have left Dresden even if he wanted to. To fortify himself, Camus jotted down the names of his great predecessors in his diary, who also created their best works in the midst of the chaos of human history: Shakespeare, Milton, Ronsard, Rabelais, Montaigne, Malherbe. In difficult times it is more comforting to look for corroboration from those similar to us that to live with the disillusioning recognition that the human need for carnage and destruction cannot be quelled by an increase in the level of civilization. On the contrary. The general increase in the level of civilization augments the satisfaction in bloodshed and destruction, its effectiveness and its frequency. Camus had finished his L’Étranger six months previously; at least, it interested two of his friends, Pascal Pia and Jean Grenier. He also launched a correspondence with Malraux about the publication, who responded the very same day that he would talk to Gaston Gallimard about the novel. In these same hours, Gide, sitting in his room at the Hotel Adriatic overlooking the sea, was reflecting on more abstract political themes. He addressed his diary entry to those who feared the “national crisis” that had the masses in thrall. Resistance to German occupation and collaboration couldn’t be anything but national. On the other hand, if a revolution is, let us say, national, Gide wrote, then it is there to serve the triumph of one single party. He was clearly afraid for democracy, afraid that it might not survive the national resistance and the national collaboration, and he was right to fear it. Gombrowicz had similar qualms about the Polish resistance: a unified resistance consumes the individual. He feared for the helpless and fragile individual in face of constrained national collectivity. They’re either worried that the ethical is not necessarily expedient, or else they’re worried that what is of necessity expedient is not necessarily ethical. On this significant day for literature, Klemperer’s problem remained practical. He had to go to the shoemaker in Planetta Strasse. His shoemaker had told him not to come any more but send his Aryan wife instead. The decree said he couldn’t work for Jews any more, even if he, the shoemaker, continues to regard Herr Klemperer as an old valued customer. Clearly, the shoemaker too would have liked to remain ethical while bowing to the principle of expediency. And so this year so important for its literary references shouldn’t be behind in strategic nightmares, as the top warlord of the Hungarian kingdom, Rear-Admiral Horthy quickly declared war on the United States prior to Christmas. The seriousness of the declaration of war was somewhat dampened by the fact that the government official on duty in Washington didn’t know where the country in question was located, or if it was a kingdom, where was its king, and if it was ruled by an admiral, where was its navy and why didn’t it have an ocean? But Christmas was still far away. In Füst’s above-mentioned distinguished letter of October, the next sentence voices his qualms about the expediency of the name he had finally lighted on. But first he had to occupy himself with the most vital details. Concurrently, “Dóra” had to find “Direktor” in the ether with its important pieces of information. He had information that according to its own calculations, the Wehrmacht had lost 1,250,000 soldiers to date, and the maneuvers had 1,300,000 thousand casualties. Meanwhile, Füst wrote to Fülep that “this name Drőhn is still too beautiful for my taste.” His reservations were justified; and those who speak German will immediately realize that the name drones, roars, rumbles, booms and crashes; in short, in German it does everything that the ocean’s waves do when they crash against the rocks, break, and recede, and in German, this word really does all of this with a long vowel. In German the echo of an explosion, the war in the air, also rumbles with this verb. For a swarthy ship’s captain whose hundred and five kilo body and weightless spirit are equally dashed to pieces on the love he feels for his fragile and diminutive wife and on the treacherous workings of jealousy, the name is indeed far too beautiful, far too descriptive. In which case, Störr, which already stood on his list in October, twice underlined, was preferable. Which means, at most, a man who keeps stirring things up. “I jotted down approximately four thousand names, and none of them are appropriate. The name must be convincing, and if it is too beautiful, too sonorous, then it is not true, then it is the author’s invention. And yet it must be sonorous nonetheless. I would have liked a raw name, my first idea was Leimrock (Jacob), but my German writer friends just laughed, saying that it’s as if, for instance, we were to call someone paprika in Hungarian. And in response, being a people lacking in talent, they brought me the most fantastic ancient sailors’ names – the nincompoops. The most beautiful and the most characteristic names are unsuitable. A man of the sea should have a name like a dentist, that would do. Besides, he’s Dutch, and so he should have a French name, or German, and not some sort of Van der Boschke, or the like, seeing that Holland has much in common with French and German history. And now I am in a crisis situation, thinking that perhaps I should chose from among the following names (tonight’s pick): Kuppert, Raschaba, or Elvehjem. I like the last the best, except, isn’t it overly cumbersome? (My hero, I might add, is an ungainly chap, and especially in love, and that is what the novel is about.) I am also apprehensive that it might smack of Jewishness.” It is difficult to reflect on this last fear of his without a sense of unease. Why couldn’t a Dutch sea captain have a name that could just as well be Jewish? What does smacking of Jewishness mean? And why is he asking Fülep of all people, who on the excuse of linguistic criticism repeatedly rubbed in his Jewish origin? As if a person were at liberty to chose his gender, his name, or his origin. As if every single Protestant clergyman, every single independent philosopher of art and ever single Hungarian writer hadn’t decided, without the help of the Lord, whether he should follow the call of blood or of sober reason. Likewise, they probably chose of their own free will to what extent they should immerse themselves in the tribal, blood, and racial theories in the interest of the thoroughly orchestrated plunder and genocide. When and in what they should follow morals, and when and to what extent expediency. Until this whole scientific and political cloaca reaches their chin, or until it flows into their mouth? In his righteous and professional naiveté Füst petitioned Fülep for an answer. His question was rhetorical, lyrical, masochistic, and Fülep was not the only one baffled by it; it is as difficult to understand as it is difficult to understand his personal situation. Due to the three Jewish decrees, Füst had ceased to be a person under the law, but that is why he needed to light upon some means of protecting his novel from falling prey to the racial chatter that had become second nature among his circle of friends. This highly delicate and complex literary means of avoiding negative distinction he found without the council or assistance of a single friendly soul. On the other hand, he had no other recourse but to ask Mária Radákovich, who had come to visit him with her cousin, “another countess”, that “they should never call again.” In short, he threw them out of his house. “It became clear that the young ladies are not passionate devotees of the German regime, but they were just considering whether they should not be its admirers.” This was the moment Milán Füst’s artistically justified political neutrality ceased. “Because with me this question is a matter of life and death, it is that important to me. Thus, if anyone takes this question lightly, if he is superciliously, sweetly tolerant, if his sense of morality is not categorically disapproving, if he does not cast from himself once and for all and in disgust what is filthy and murderous, what is ignominious, what is inhuman beyond all imagination, that person cannot remain close to me. And not for existential reasons, because this regime may possibly pause a threat to my own life, but because of my outrage as a human being, since this inhumanity is not taking place in the seventeenth century (at a time when the English were possibly this inhuman here and there), nor twenty five years ago, over which time has perhaps passed, but is happening now, here, nearby, in front of my nose. The smell of blood is still in my nostrils.” Füst wrote this not as a piece of general wisdom, but in his indignation to another friend, Colonel Gyula Kovács, whom he also ousted out of his life. “This is not a game, my Friend, this is not a topic that can be discussed with me amid amicable smiles, or frivolously, or reasonably.” He’d come to a head over the same subject three years previously with his younger colleague, Tibor Déry, who was no lesser talent than himself. “Don’t, I beg you, go too far, and keep your faculty of judgment intact, only that is worthy of you. In short, do not frequent the company of light-hearted young men to mock the patriotism of the Jews forced on them by the present circumstances. Because the coercive actions of the Jews are now more tragic than ever. This is nothing to laugh about or mock, my Friend – it is shocking, it is sad. And if they were Armenian, I would still feel the same way. I find the slight nuance with which Hollós lauded Hitler’s abilities contemptible; and you, who are a dear Friend, having the heart to laugh at the desperate struggle of a persecuted people, I find this preposterous, even if those struggles are laughable! After all, they’re fighting for their lives, are they not?” One look at the date of these letters and one can’t help noticing that Füst, it seems, knew much earlier in Budapest what later on Leni Riefenstahl and Wilhelm Furtwängler seemed not to know in Berlin, Martin Heidegger did not know in Freiburg, and Winifred Wagner did not know in Bayreuth. Even Albert Speer did not know it, busy as he was with his architecture. Thomas Mann, too, what a struggle he had with himself in Zürich until he allowed the facts to reach the light of consciousness. He was so naively protecting his ridiculous Academy membership and royalties, were it not for Erika and Klaus’s aggressive intervention, he might have never taken note of what was transpiring at home. It is even more thought provoking that – despite its multitudinous negative experiences of the subject under discussion – how self-satisfied the world is with its seeming credulity and seeming benevolence. And the inordinate self-love with which it has continued to nurse the short-term fruits of its seeming ignorance and guilelessness. Füst’s last diary entry, dated March 15 1944, tell us that in Budapest he even knew about the gas chambers that no one in Germany had allegedly heard of. If as a novelist Füst is occupied strictly with the lives of “non-Jewish” individuals and accompanies them on their most secret journeys – a Dutch man, a French woman, an English young lady and so on – and why wouldn’t he be able to accompany them since by virtue of birth, everyone is, first and foremost, a human being; in short, when he ignores the barbarian laws and scientific nightmares that affect him personally, he does so in the most profound political sense, in the spirit of European humanism and enlightenment. Perhaps he had something similar in mind when, twenty years previously, he attempted to save the young Déry from politically committing himself when he flirted with the illegal communist movement. “Taking a political stand and what have you – unter uns gesagt: is childish.” It is part of the amusing truth that though Füst broke up his friendship with Déry and Kovács once and for all, a couple of weeks later he nevertheless forgave Mária Radákovich, probably because Mária’s husband suddenly passed away, and he couldn’t have kept up his anger, except at the price of a lack of compassion. “But enough of this. Do forgive me for occupying myself at such inordinate length with such simpleminded problems. – If truth be told, I am just dictating seven years of hell. During those seven years, so help me God, I didn’t have a moment’s peace. It seemed an impossible venture. There are scenes that I wrote not forty, not sixty, but six hundred times over, because I said to myself: I’m not letting it get the better of me, I am not putting faux marble into such a fine building.” Füst was not satisfied, and not only with the names. Furthermore, he played with his unrelenting dissatisfaction. Unless, of course, he was praising himself to the skies. Running himself down was one of the main attractions of the games he played. Throughout his lifetime, he kept rewriting his works, all of them, including his poems. As a consequence, they were often overwritten which, like everything else, did not escape his attemtion. He wisely turned around, he returned to the first, primery copy. He wrote things back to the way they were. With time, the patience he had with himself became one of his main virtues as a writer. The initial version revealed not only the raw quality of his sentences, something that, with an appeal to aesthetics, any writer worth his salt would like to get rid of, but also the originality of the original sentence, which fills any writer worth his salt with horror. If we will, in Füst’s case the temporarily final version is born from the rewritings and restorations; it is a version that embodies the temptation to make changes as well as all the failed experiments, and thus it embodies something of the yearning after the eternal. Which has just one all-important professional consequence: there are no final sentences, even if the sentences cannot eschew the drive for finality, and so they are provisional not from the point of view of the incidental but of the eternal. Füst wrote only one major novel, but if we take eternity into consideration, it is not final. “The truth is, I have approximately twenty thousand pages of sketches – suitcases and chests are stuffed with them in the attic,” he wrote Fülep on that special day of his life. There was probably a goodly amount of exaggeration in this, too, or rather, ostentation, self-torture. “I had one other problem: to make the delivery sound careless, as if someone where just thinking out loud (in short, that he should speak in statu nascendi, with the suggestive character of improvisation), and that this terse, casual delivery should contain everything that is called for from structural considerations – and besides, there should be a rhythm to the sentences. Because I am no longer capable of writing arrhythmic sentences.” The temporarily final version veritably carries along with it the unique story of the formation of his sentences; this is typical of Füst’s method of writing. It doesn’t take a practiced reader to catch the midway decisions in the text, the necessary omissions, renouncements, the clearly marked deficiencies, which subsequently lend meaning and character to the deformations and purposeful distortions. This is as it should be; after all, the universe is not symmetrical, but with rhythmically constructed sentences it is possible to give shape to the yearning for symmetry. Milán Füst’s oeuvre, composed of plays, poems, essays, college lectures, short stories, novels, diaries and letters, became uniquely unified and uniquely fortuitous thanks to the continual transformation and the variety of genres. Everything falls under repeated control: the temporarily final as well as the fortuitous or random. – A textual mass that, sentence by sentence, had previously gone through several possible permutations, and it is with these permutations that the author was able to transcend the boundaries of genre and language. The uncompromising determination and passion with which Füst’s masterpiece, The Story of My Wife, turns away not only from the scientific and political hysteria, but the entire obscene world (all that literature had previously described as the natural order of social relationships) and the exclusive concentration with which it deals only with the inner world of the outside world, the complexities of the soul familiar to us all, its interiors and abstractions, without for a moment forgetting or abandoning its objectivity is, one might say, unique in European literature. It has only one parallel, Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Lactos’s epistolary novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses. And not only is their theme identical, but so is their handling of language, and not only their insistence on the expressive power of linguistic contingency, but also their insistent use of what is linguistically erroneous – that smallest possible awkwardness that can still make for literature, and thanks to which the speaker can appear as a linguistic auteur, while at the same time freely transmitting the manner of expression of the social environment from which he hails. They do not censor or judge these two kinds of freedoms; they control them as authors and, above all, they are enjoying it tremendously. This is why they do not lose their way in the jungle of social roles, role changes, and role variations. But their sure-handedness is due not only to their sure sense of direction; they see beyond the themes of their own novels, which are commonplace and belong to the commonplace world of appearances. This is so thoroughly the case that Füst is even uncertain about his choice of subject for his book. But we shouldn’t impart too much significance to his uncertainty; it is philosophical rhetoric, he is weighing his own work, he is being impertinent with himself. And then, in the same rhetorical vein, he suddenly becomes obstinate: no, this is the only thing he can be sure about, his choice of subject. Füst and Laclos drew a clear distinction between those things in which the individual has freedom of choice and those things in which he does not. They do not consider animal-like instinct a personal characteristic, but the wellspring of sensual and emotional functioning (meaning individual love), something one cannot give up of one’s free will, but neither can one pretend it doesn’t exist without adverse consequences. There are many things in a person that exist beyond his individuality – the wellspring of sensual or emotional energies is one of these. Without discovering this small difference, without this small realization, not only does a person’s own little story, but his greater story, too, remain unexplained. Laclos arrives on the scene with news of the discovery of this small difference on the eve of the revolution, Füst arrives with its rediscovery in the midst of the ongoing holocaust. In their eyes, raging jealousy and the propensity for unfaithfulness are not causes, but consequences, the human outcome of the channeling of animal energies. In individual love, the two worlds, the animal and the human, converge. Both authors are fascinated by how it functions, its non-individual dependent functioning, and they treat it accordingly, as a natural phenomenon, with love and awe. They do not wax sentimental, they do not fall prey to untamed fears, but they do not use it as a means of bringing moral judgment either, even if their heroes do so. They do not use it to gain power over others. They run a linguistic check on the working of their material in these converging modalities, and in this way whatever in one person points beyond the personal they manage to place in the center of the story. Laclos’s novel is the corbel of the era of individuality, Füst’s novel is the keystone of the era of individuality. Laclos is frivolous and mocking, Füst is serious and ironic. They tell us how the games their characters play (in short, their rambling and roving about between the animal and the human, the tragic and the comic) and the mutual and dangerous intellectual pleasure of their role playing is transformed into the unified public surface of secret passions, how intellectuality deprives them of their sensuality, and finally, how, amidst the pleasure of this cruel and perfidious power play, they mutually deprive themselves of what is most important – each other. With the loss of the other, they reach the most precarious abyss of individuality. Individual freedom is made possible only through the other, and not in spite of the other. The frivolity is over, the gravity is over, sarcasm and irony cannot remedy such a horrible ending. In this tragedy we see beyond individuality along with them, and what we see there is chaos. I could have seen Füst in person, I’d heard about his famous college lectures, but by the time I gathered up enough courage to go hear him with an excitable friend of mine, we were greeted by the news that for no apparent reason, he’d been sent into retirement. I was relieved that I didn’t have to see him and I didn’t have to hear him. Even those who liked him or enjoyed his profound knowledge used the most horrific adjectives with respect to him; they made fun of him, they taunted him, his role-playing baffled some, and repulsed others. He’d lived in dictatorships, and so he must have been like a deposed king surviving on charity, without his royal household. A dictatorship does not approve of grand personalities, a dictatorship is not predictable, the apparatchiks of a dictatorship supply no reasons for their actions, while their subjects are weary of anything that stands out and prefer khaki colors instead. The wonderful rhythms of his free verse rang in my ear at an early age, but for many long years, his greatest book left me unimpressed. My illusions about the animal and the human stood in the way of my appreciation. Perhaps he chose ‘füst’ – smoke – as his pen name in order to lighten the weight of his personality through association with this airy material. Until he adopted the name Füst before the publication of his first literary work (he did not even wait for the permission to arrive from the Ministry of the Interior), he was known as Milán Fürst. Herceg – Prince – would have suited his as well, though he did not hail from a family of aristocrats. Still, his father was a very handsome and elegant man who in his younger years was rumored to have belonged to the inner circle of Serbian ruler Obranovićh, and this is why his son later received the name Konstantin Milán. We have no records to tell us how the young man occupied himself in the court of the Serbian king. If he was really there and Füst didn’t fabricate the legend, he was probably busy carousing. This had to happen at least ten years before Milán was born. When his son turned eight, he died after a long illness as an unemployed clerk, but we don’t know where he was employed earlier. Füst’s life contains much data of similar character that can probably never be verified. We don’t even know with certainty how he and his wife managed to survive under the German occupation and the Hungarian Arrow Cross reign of terror. All we know is that they had letters of safe conduct, but many with similar papers were shot on the banks of the Danube. In a letter he wrote Lajos Fülep after the siege of Budapest, Füst said, “Quartermaster Captain Vitéz Dezső Hámory saved our lives.” But that is all we know. It is also probably the stuff of family legend or fantasy that a branch of the Fürst family were barons. Darkness and obscurity. His biographer, alas, did not go after the truth. Béla Kempelen’s three-volume work, Jewish Families and Families of Jewish Origin in Hungary (Budapest, 1939) does not mention a baronial family by this name. (Nor does The Peerage or Le Gotha.) Yet it is not impossible that Füst’s father, who had no independent means, sailed into the upper echelons on the strength of the Fürst family of Marót who were, in fact, raised to the ranks of the aristocracy in the mid-nineteenth century, had an aristocratic title before their name, and were fabulously rich, and so were the Engel family of János, who were related to them, and who enjoyed the same social standing. It should be looked into. It sounds too romantic to my ears like this. On the other hand, it is a fact that Prince Thurn und Taxis married the newly entitled Miss Lola Krausz of Megyer whose dowry consisted of six million crowns in ready cash. And Ida Krausz of Megyer married Jakab Fürst, and with that we’re high up the cucumber tree along with the Fürst family. Füst evidenced a profund disdain for those who were looking for a connection between biographical detail and a piece of literature. And yet, it is enlightening to go into more depth than what Füst himself points to with his legends and allusions. When a Hungarian family of Jewish origin attempts, either literally or figuratively, to join the ranks of the aristocracy, we are faced not only with the given family’s penchant for concocting legends; we also find ourselves on the inntermost terrains of classically liberal Hungary, where the feudal aristocracy and the boureoisie form an alliance that goes beyond politics, thus attempting to make up for a lack of urbanity and an organic middle-class development. This is the tangible reality, the epoch making experiment of said alliance. It needed two world wars and two dictatorships to put an end to the relationship that promised mutual advantages, even if it was in fact unequal and burdened by conflict. Today not even traces of it remain; even the memory of this liberal era is gone. The experiment did not produce a middle class, and so there was no middle class in Hungary, nor is there one today. The aristocracy did not learn or learn to appreciate bourgeois virtues, while for their part, the nouveau riche of commerce and industry did not mature into patricians. They lacked the patience to wait out those couple of centuries. Nor did they have the time. The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy collapsed on top of them. Füst’s writings allow us to deduce something of the social sources of the distortions that lie behind the schedule, the logic and themes of this collapse as seen through the lives of individuals, for he does not deal with the phenomenon directly. He does not overstep the bunds of an individual consciousness that does not wish to know about its own past. It is this double negation that has made his book enduring. “We lived in a kitchen, in the worst imaginable filth and penury. On the street my mother cried and prayed out loud for the Good Lord to take the bitter cup from her lips – meaning that good for nothing man, my father. – And though all these problems must have weighed on me, still, it was more like a dream to me, I didn’t take it entirely seriously. I was not a neat child, I’d never heard of a comb, and at the age of seven I was surprised to learn that people usually eat dinner – back then I didn’t know what that was – and even later, the idea of a proper dinner was, for me, one of the main symbols of a decent life. – My father died: – and when he died, I felt nothing: – I wailed like a professional mourner. – There stood my mother with a thousand forints: – and started dragging me along on her supplicating trips – a skinny, sickly child (eye problems, ear problems, anemia, pneumonia) – as the symbol of destitution, that’s how she wailed and begged. (Our well to do relatives were bad, proud, and ashamed of us.) Finally, she was given a tobacconist’s shop. She started working from five thirty in the morning until twelve o’clock at night. She nearly worked herself to death. For a year and a half we slept on the floor in a corner of the shop – we had no home – she was worried, and she saved. She cooked, cleaned, ran the shop, and nursed me when I was ill – and I was always ill. – She didn’t hire a servant or a shop assistant because she was terribly suspicious – she was afraid they’d steal from her. She accused me of it too, soon enough – and perhaps this is why at the age of nine I once tried to commit suicide by hitting myself on the head with a soup ladle. We survived – in the greatest imaginable filthy and penury – wracked by constant, excruciating fears that a business rival might show up, or that they’d take our source of livelihood away. My mother didn’t go out on the street for years: the shop was open even on Sunday. Our great conflicts began early on: the staggering hatred of two people entirely dependent on each other.” But it is possible that every sentence of this text is pure stylization. For one thing, he studied the violin with one of the best teachers in Budapest. He had hemorrhage of the lungs, and yet he was taken to Abazzia to recover, where he was happy for the first time in his life. From then on until the German occupation of Hungary, he kept a diary. His villa was bombed, but he did have a villa, a third of the diaries were destroyed, and yet, two-thirds remained. He and his wife slept on a mattress thrown on the floor in an unheated room, the poet wrote after he’d been bombed, but courtesy of Judit Szilágyi’s publication, we know that this was not quite true either. They lived with his brother-in-law, where they had a bed and a room of their own. His sentences were sent adrift on the tide of his imagination, and what he imagined was by no means unfounded. Throughout a lifetime of producing great literature, he kept commuting between these two distant shores, imagination and reality. But before that he attended high school, and learned English as well as German, and picked up some French as well, and he study law, and received his degree in law, he worked as a teacher, got married, and though he’d promised himself he’d never do such a thing, for how could he desert his own ancestors, he converted to Catholicism, and so on. Also, his wife came from a well-to-do family and supported him for decades. What’s more, their correspondence suggests that by the end of their lives, they actually learned to love each other. I saw Erzsébet Helfer once. She was a widow by then. She was dressed as if the city were still under siege. She was carrying a middle sized, battered fiberboard suitcase. She was taking not only unpublished Füst manuscripts with her (she was going to the Frankfurt Book Fair), but in a separate box, home made tea cakes (also for the Book Fair). People said that she made the best teacakes in the city. Whoever she showed the manuscripts to for publication she also offered them her teacakes. Before her death, she set up a prize from her own money and the proceeds from the Füst royalties. During the dictatorship, this was the only prize awarded by an independent board. I was among the first to be awarded the Milán Füst Prize, and I was looking forward to meeting the widow of the great writer at the award ceremony. She was too sick to attend. But she baker her delicious tea cakes and sent them on a plate. Füst kept this rather humdrum but by no means uneventful middle class life, the teacakes, the villa, and what have you, under wraps, though he probably kept it under wraps in the interest of his work. He was interested in the psychological consequences of social differences and distortions. Living conditions bored him to death, and his boredom proved to be extremely fruitful for his work. His monomania was a result of this tormenting boredom, his loathing of anything common and of mass culture, and this aversion gave birth to his hypochondria. In his poems, he concentrated on the only lyrical person on hand with a preciosity bordering on artificiality, I, I, I, while in his prose he dealt with the brutality of the inner lives all those individuals with whom this single narrative I, I, I was entangled in passionate and senseless relationships. In his novels and poetry he gives us the illusion-free psychograph of human passion and suffering, and as for his heroes, at times he brought them up against the repressive political regime of the time under which he himself was living, at other times, not; and at such times he’d invent something to replace it. As for his own life, he didn’t obscure or misrepresent the truth intentionally, for he had nothing to hide, but rather because dictatorships bored him to tears along with the khaki-colored unfortunates living in them. At times he preferred to imagine a new world, or else dress up the real one. In face of the banality of evil, he idealized the intellect, he idealized literature and art. But he did not idealize himself, not even his aesthetic heroism, which served as a secure, protective shield. Milán Füst is among the major sober intellects of world literature, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that his sobriety is not scandalous or that it is not painful. “A good story teller cannot afford to be a realist,” he wrote in his diary. (Translated by Judith Sollosy) tószó Füst Milán A feleségem története című regényének új német kiadásához Mire Füst befejezte élete fő művét, Európa lángokban állt. Ami ezekben a napokban a magyar kormányzót, a mesés egyenruhákban feszítő Horthy ellentengernagyot illeti, ő realitásérzéke utolsó morzsáit emésztette el. Hadseregének méretével és siralmas felszereltségével mit sem törődve a Szovjetuniónak üzent hadat. A zsidó férfiakat kormányrendelettel munkaszolgálatra kötelezte. Csendőrsége országos razziákon összefogdosott 11 ezer (más adatközlések szerint 16 vagy 18 ezer) "keleti zsidót", akik részben az előző években visszacsatolt területekről származtak, részben olyan galíciai menekültek voltak, akik akkor már fél évszázada éltek "hontalanul" Magyarországon. Kamenyec-Podolszkijnál hajtották át őket a határon, ahol német Sonderkommandók vártak rájuk és végeztek velük. Kihirdették a harmadik zsidótörvényt, ez megkoronázta az előző kettőt, megtiltotta "nemzsidó és zsidó" házasságkötését, és három évig terjedő fogházbüntetést helyezett kilátásba "annak a zsidónak, aki magyar honos tisztességes nemzsidó nővel házasságon kívül nemileg közösül". A zsidó fogalmának definíciós szigorában a törvény kilencedik paragrafusa alaposan túltett a nürnbergi törvényeken. A cukrot, a zsírt, a kenyeret és a lisztet jegyre adták, az újságoknak hivatalos cenzorok voltak a legelső kritikus olvasói, a legrangosabb magyar irodalmi folyóirat, a Nyugat, amelynek Füst hosszú évekig az egyik szerkesztője volt, beszüntette működését. Füst mindig is úgy vélekedett, hogy az irodalomnak és a művészetnek a közönségesebb dolgoktól távol kell maradnia. Poétikai eszméivel most veszélyes területre ért. Mintha vak lenne, földsüket. Ugyanazon a napon, amikor regényét befejezte, az ostromlott Moszkvában evakuálni kezdték a katonai hírszerzés intézményeit, s ezért a "Dóra" fedőnevet viselő magyar kommunista geográfus és hírszerző, Radó Sándor sem tudta Genfből továbbítani azokat a fontos hadászati értesüléseket, amelyeket csoportja nagy veszélyek közepette megszerzett a német hadvezetéstől. "Direktor" rádióadója aznap nem jelentkezett, a következő kritikus hetekben sem fogadta a titkos híreket. A német hadvezetés viszont aznap látta be, hogy nem tudja teljesíteni Hitler parancsát, Moszkva bevétele keményebb diónak fog bizonyulni, mint ahogy remélték. Az utóbbi négy hétben naponta 32 ezer német katona pusztul el, jelentette volna "Dóra" Genfből. Berlinből aznap a keleti frontot illetőn teljes hírzárlatot rendeltek el. Mintha Füstöt az egész elhallgatott és nyilvános gyalázat és nyomorúság nem érintené, nem érdekelné. De nem így volt. Munkájától, fő művétől tartotta távol brutális aktualitásukat. Monomániája politikai megnyilvánulásaira, politikai absztinenciájára is kiterjedt. A magyar irodalom legnagyobb monománja volt, a legjelentősebb magyar hipochonder. Örökké kimerült, állandóan beteg, már ifjúként aggastyán, ő már csak a kegyes halálra vár. Élete végére sikerült csak tolókocsiba kerülnie, de akkor aztán trónként használta. Az élveteg panaszolkodással tisztelőinek is az agyára ment. Műveiből azonban minden közvetlenül autobiografikust eltüntetett. A munkán kívül nem volt rávehető semmiféle önvallomásra. Monomániás volt aszkézisében is. Egyetlen rövid önéletírása maradt fenn. Azt állította, hogy a munkáján kívül nincs élete. Ami természetesen nem lehetett igaz, de annyi szent, hogy sikerrel titkosította és cenzúrázta a poklot, mely sorsként kijutott neki. Aznap csodás könyvtárával kibélelt budai villájában dühöngött és duzzogott, hogy immár hét éve ezen "az egyetlen taknyos munkán" dolgozik. Most a végére ér. Tegnap megtalálta a megfelelő címet, megtalálta a megfelelő alcímet. Fülep Lajosnak, a zengővárkonyi protestáns lelkésznek és művészetfilozófusnak írt, akit önkínzó hajlamától vezetve a barátjának tekintett. Füst a germanizmusokban és jiddis fordulatokban gazdag pesti nyelvet beemelte az irodalmi nyelvbe, nem csak a prózába, prózájánál talán még teljesebb ívű költészetébe, Fülep viszont úgy vélekedett, hogy Füst nem tud magyarul. Fordításban majd jobban fognak mutatni a művei, ismételgette, hogy jól üljön a sértés. Pest a tizenkilencedik század végéig német, vagy legalábbis kétnyelvű város volt, s ennek ipari és kereskedelmi előnyeiről nem beszélve, megvoltak (és a mai napig megmaradtak) a vaskos nyelvi következményei. Naplóbejegyzéseiből látjuk, hogy az édesanyja németül beszélt vele, mint ahogy a feje fölött németül beszélt az orvossal, amikor gyermekének magas láza volt. Füst aztán hiába érvelt, hogy Fülepnek a magyar nyelv tisztasága és őseredetisége érdekében nemcsak a török és szláv jövevényszavakat vagy a tiszta intonáció érdekében akár a dialektusokat kéne száműznie a nyelvből, hanem ki kéne operálnia a magyar nyelv egész latin rétegét. "Rázlak mint egy citromfát", írta Fülepnek bibliai dühében. Fülep ebben a kérdésben a korszak derék gyermeke maradt, csökönyös, narcisztikus, vak a realitásra, süket a józan észre. Majd ő megszabja, hogy a nyelvnek a saját realitásából mit kell és mit nem kell tudomásul vennie. Lelkendezhetett a szegény Füst, hogy végre valahára rálelt a holland születésű főhős nevére, és a kész kéziratot diktálni kezdte. Ez egy pénteki napon történt, 1941. október 17-én, ami legfeljebb azért érdemes említésre, mert Füst éppen elkészült regénye ezen a napon éppúgy nem érdekelt senkit, mint ahogy később sem. Amíg a regény 1958-ban meg nem jelent franciául a Gallimard-nál, majd 1962-ben a Rowohltnál németül, Füst teljes elszigeteltségben élt és dolgozott a hazájában. "A fényes utítárs" - ez lesz a címe a regényének, írta. Szerencsére nem ez lett a címe. Hősét Drőhn kapitánynak fogják nevezni, írta. Így, önkényesen, hosszú "ő"-vel, egy olyan ékezettel, amely sem holland, sem német névben nem létezik. Füst igen messzire ment, nem csak a nagy dolgokban, nem csak a kis dolgokban. Például úrrá akart lenni a saját rossz tulajdonságain. Óriási energiákat fordított az öngyógyításra; mint aki saját emberideáljához kívánja felnöveszteni önmagát. Szándékának hála, sikerült is minden ízében végletesebbnek mutatkoznia, mint amilyen volt. Nagy különc volt, s ebben azért sem ismerhetett tréfát, mert a világ legjózanabb embere akart volna lenni. "Tűrhetetlen természet" - írta a saját édesanyjáról. "Jó stilisztának tartom, többé kevésbé tehetséges embernek is, csakhogy én útálom" - írta egy pályatársáról. "A feleségét pedig kétszer kiokádtam, mielőtt a világra jőtt" - tette hozzá, hogy érzelmei felől ne maradjanak kétségeink. "Ezek a barmok nem tudják megkülönböztetni a lószart a szivárványtól" - írta egy kiadóról, s talán igaza volt. "Rettenetesen sok a marha Németországban is" - ami valószínűleg szintén nehezen lett volna cáfolható. "Úgy látszik, szerettem. S ez bosszant. Mert minek szerettem valakit, aki nem is tudott szeretni" - írta bará
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