At Sopron, as arranged, we were joined by a colleague whom I shall call Kocsis. Or rather, we joined him, since he was waiting for us. He is a critic of talent, a grand seigneur of culture who speaks several languages and whose books are highly thought of, as the phrase goes, among the international community of scholarship. He is a vigorous figure, in spite of his age, with a broad Pannonian face and something unfathomable in his dark eyes, counterpointed by a frank, winning smile. He often holds a cigarette between his fingers, and before lighting it taps it rhythmically on the edge of the table or on a chair; he reaches out with it into the space around him like a shaman tracing magic circles in the air, as if he wished for some moments to postpone something threatening, the smoke that dispels it and abolishes it for ever.
Kocsis is a small power in the Party, and is therefore a valuable companion. With his unlit cigarette he points, like an expert guide, to objects and figures, wrought-iron balconies and drowsy fountains, old books in the windows of second-hand bookshops, and, amongst the crowd, the occasional face which he finds anthropologically of interest. Perhaps all this is a role appropriate to an intellectual with his place on the echelon of the world, and aware of his ancillary position. Among the events of history he moves not like the artist who creates works, nor like the director of a museum who chooses and arranges them, but like a guide who points them out and comments on them.
Within the Party Kocsis is a small power dethroned. He can no longer give orders but he enjoys respect and favours, like the ex-chairman of a company, who has been removed from the levers of power but still has the use of a chauffeur-driven car. His political career is a very parable. Excluded as a young man from an academic career, because he did not agree with the infamous charges levelled against Rajk – the Communist leader accused of Titoism, falsely charged with treason, and executed – he re-emerged in the 1950s as a Stalinist, never personally involved with the tyrannical machine of Rákosi, but a convinced supporter of the absolute primacy of the Party.
Far too cultured and subtle to believe in the Soviet paradise, during those years of Cold War he must have thought that the world was on the brink of a vast and final conflict, which would once and for all decide the victory or defeat of the Revolution all over the world. The West was the pure mechanism of society, the will to power of economic processes abandoned to the mercies of the strongest, to things as they are, enthralling life, if you like, but wild and brutal. The Communist East had to be the correction of reality in the name of things as they ought to be, the institution of justice and equality, the imposition of meaning on the rush of events.
It was in Hungary that Lukács had confirmed the classic thesis of Marxism, according to which immediate spontaneity is inauthentic, and takes on meaning only from the discipline of a form. The Stalinist ritual seemed to be form, order, assertion of principles over a Nietzschean “anarchy of atoms”. Western liberalism appeared as formless spontaneity, immoral vitality, random egoism, a mere process of needs divorced from any ethical criterion. The one thing was the state, the other was society. As late as 1971 Tibor Déry, a committed dissident writer, wrote a novel expressing his disgust for the promiscuous, undefined innocence of the “pop” youth of America, of a society functioning at the zero setting of a libidinous flux.
On the eve of the battle of Gog and Magog, Kocsis considered it perfectly understandable that the state should assume the full control of society, including the limitation or suppression of liberties that takes place in a wartime economy and discipline. Even in 1956, during the few short days in which such a position appeared to have been defeated, and was dangerous to uphold, Kocsis was pro-Soviet, opposed to the Nagy government’s decision to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. At his own personal risk he was a champion of the integrity of the Eastern bloc. At the moment he is practically in a position of dissent with regard to the policies of Kádár, whose liberalism – which has made Hungary the most democratic, prosperous and “Western” of the Communist countries of Europe – seems to him both too cautious and too authoritarian.
Kocsis is one of the countless examples of quick-change artistry which are a feature of Hungarian politics during the last few decades, and which have little or nothing to do with opportunism. András Hegedüs, a confirmed Stalinist and right-hand man to Rákosi, rescued from the people’s fury in the 1956 revolution by a Soviet tank which took him over the border, in the course of the 1960s became a liberal intellectual, a symbol of critical independence and revisionism. His periodical, Valóság, opened an unbiased social and political debate on the way the country was run, and on the theories of Marxism itself, leaving Hegedüs open to charges of heresy. Others have trodden the same path in reverse, from the uprising of 1956 to a position of new Marxist orthodoxy.
It is Hungarian history itself which produces these “turncoat” situations. There are the outlaws of 1956 who come back and reoccupy important posts; the swing of the pendulum between democratic phases and yet another turn of the authoritarian screw; the virtually preferential treatment which the government reserves – at least in the eyes of many old militants – for those who are without a Party. Kádár himself is a macroscopic example of such transformations, performed, in his case, in the name of dedication to a higher mission. A militant Communist from the word go, tireless in the clandestine struggle during the years of Fascism, tortured by the Stalinist police, who pulled out his nails, the man who supported the Soviet repression of 1956, and the statesman who has brought his country to the greatest possible degree of independence from Russia, of freedom and wellbeing.
Life is a compromise, Kádár once said during the public celebrations for his birthday, and the true short-cut may sometimes be what appears the longest way round. Kocsis today, with his unlit cigarette between his fingers, may be treading that short-cut, attempting to pause every so often, perhaps, to sit down on a bench and look at the landscape. That very revolutionary war economy, in which he believed, turned out to be the weak spot in Socialism as it really was. When power directly assumes the whole yoke of society and its problems, taking on the onus of every detail and the control of every detail, its totalitarianism (as Massimo Salvadori has said) turns against it and undermines it from within, as happens with a human organism subjected to immense strain for enormous stretches of time. The 1956 Revolution was, in part, an apoplexy on the part of this excess of power, the collapse of this titanic effort by the Party-State: the attempt to invade and control every aspect of social life. With its elastic and elusive formula, “whoever is not against us is for us,” Kádár’s compromise turns that totalitarianism upside down, allowing room for a whole range of components and attitudes, no longer strictly regimented according to a single standard (“with us”), but limited simply in a negative way, according to the liberal viewpoint: it is enough to be “not against us”. Kádár’s long short-cut, and his compromise, are a typically Hapsburg strategy. Out of the cracks in the system forged according to the Soviet model something is reborn: not only a nostalgia for Mitteleuropa, but even the form appropriate to it, its ethical-political style.
Kocsis has also, in his way, found an allusive Mitteleuropa of his own, a personal short-cut. He tells me that he is at work on a monograph on Babits. And in its way the choice is significant, because it is a secondary choice, but not too much so. The ideology of the régime favours Marxist writers, or else – and even more so – the great national classics, such as Petőfi or Vörösmarty, whose legitimate heirs Communism proclaims itself to be. Or even the “exploded” interpreters and unmaskers of the decadence and crisis of the bourgeoisie, such as Endre Ady. Revolutionary poets such as Attila József are more suspect, because their radicalism is likely to collide with the Party line, even if the monumental work on Attila József by Miklós Szabolcsi does in fact give evidence of the cultural freedom pertaining in Hungary today.
Mihály Babits is a special case. In literary manuals, as in the going cultural debates, he is a poet who receives the homage due to a somewhat marginal classic – he is accorded a sort of respectful oblivion. Babits (1883–1941) was a humanist intrigued by tradition, but also a master of the split with tradition that has in many ways taken place in modern lyric poetry. This split he attempts to restrain, finding a happy medium in well-defined form, much as though he were throwing a lifebelt to the great shipwrecked mariners of modern poetry. Babits protested against the enthusiasms and horrors of war, accepted the Chair of Literature in Béla Kun’s Communist republic, but declared himself to be an anti-Marxist, withdrawing thereafter, however, when faced with Horthy’s Fascist régime, into a discreet opposition. He opposed all kinds of irrational thinking, and on the exquisitely crafted jewellery of his poems he bestowed an afflatus of human suffering. He was sensitive to the “tears in things”, but above all to the sufferings of individuals and the downtrodden classes.
He never praises the victors, and this must be something to recommend him to Kocsis. Perhaps Kocsis sees himself mirrored in the lines in which the poet tells us that he wishes to concentrate the All into his sonnets, but never succeeds in reaching out beyond himself and his own small impasses. Poetry dies, says Babits in a poem; and elsewhere he says that it is useless writing with a finger like drawing on sand. The gods die and mankind goes on living. Maybe the gods of Kocsis are dead, but he certainly is going oh living, amiable and helpful, and he takes his mind off things by listening to the whispered words of this poet. With equal discretion Babits guided the vagrant letters and words through their paper labyrinths, keeping his own weariness at bay, and harkening to the sounds of the boats and the muffled engine-noises coming up from the Danube; he hoped that some god might offer a bed to the river of words which rose to his lips, so that it might flow between ordered banks to the sea, there to vanish.
The poetry of Babits cannot today become a banner in the ideological debate and the underground clash between left and right, the conservatives and progressives of Hungarian culture and politics. His is a clear voice but a gentle one, an arcadia like the one the poet himself saw around him in his childhood, among the vineyards of Szekszárd – a Pannonian arcadia, and therefore well acquainted with the violence Babits sometimes forced himself to slide over.