Impressions of the City. I flew to Budapest from Milan on the Hungarian Malév line. The only other passengers were three or four men. The stewardesses handed around a Hungarian Communist paper. It was just after Khrushchyov’s visit, and I was able to make out an announcement which was featured on the front page: “Everywhere and at all times, Hungary and Russia must be friends.” No one bothered to read this paper, and the men spent most of their time in gay conversation with one of the stewardesses.
In Budapest, I found that the current joke was that Khrushchyov had come to Hungary in order to cure his sárgaság, which in Hungarian means both yellowness and jaundice. He had actually just had an attack of jaundice, and the point of the pun was that he was trying to consolidate his position with the West in order to offset his break with China. It was hoped he would withdraw the Soviet troops which are still garrisoned in Hungary, but he did not do this, and he annoyed a good many Hungarians by decorating Kádár for his services not to Hungary but to the Soviet Union. At the same time, in certain quarters, not necessarily Communist, the Hungarians had looked to him with a certain hopefulness. They had seemed to think that he and Kennedy between them might stabilize the unsteady West. The assassination of Kennedy had been felt as a setback in Hungary, as it seems to have been all over Europe.
I stayed at the huge Hotel Gellért in Buda, at the foot of St. Gellért’s Mountain, named after a Venetian missionary who was brought on by the Christian King Stephen I, at the beginning of the eleventh century, but very badly received by the intractably pagan Magyars, who rolled him down this steep hillside, in a barrel lined with spikes, into the Danube. The Gellért is comfortable, and the food very good. I order something different almost every night just to see what it will turn out to be, since the names are sometimes quite fanciful, and even by consulting the dictionary you cannot always be sure what they represent. An odd feature is cold orange soup. This, I am told, is a variation of the traditional cold peach and cherry soups. Some of the best dishes are made from ponty, the carp from Lake Balaton. A good deal of the clientele consists of what I take to be rather crass Central European businessmen and fat Germanic women. The orchestra, for the benefit of foreigners and to the distress of the Hungarians who dine with me, plays the flashy Hungarian gypsy music, sometimes breaking into song, and almost invariably Brahms Hungarian Dances and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody. The waiters, regardless of sex, address foreigners as “M’sieu, M’dame.” They did this, also, in Rome, and I wonder whether the current incomprehension of the real meaning of these service words may not be an indication of a loss of prestige on the part of the French. Papers from the “bourgeois” countries have only recently been made available at such hotels, but they often take a long time in coming. They have to be bought at the desk. There is nothing to be had at the newsstand but the international boilerplate of the Communist press, which I never saw anyone buying.
I take long walks along the Béla Bartók Út, on which the Gellért stands. The Hungarians, who, as I have seen them abroad, have always seemed so dynamic, here give me the impression, after their recent misfortunes, of being stunned and rather stupefied, of purposelessly walking the streets or going listlessly about their work—in striking contrast to busy, brisk and swarming Milan. They seem not to know quite where they are or what has been happening to them. Almost all of them have the look of belonging to about the same social level, a kind of shabby middle class, though I am told that there are working-class people among them.
There is plenty to buy in the shops, but some of it is very inferior; I bought a suitcase manufactured in East Germany that might almost as well have been made of pasteboard. But one advantage of a Communist country is that new books and handicraft products—such as the gay embroidered Hungarian tablecloths—are much cheaper than they would be elsewhere. The liquor is sold in the grocery stores or combined with confectionary and pastry in the Édesség Boltok, sweet shops. The bottles of plum, cherry and apricot brandy, and Tokaji (which we call Tokay) look quite pretty and tempting in the windows, among the fancy displays of sweetmeats, with bows of pink ribbon about their necks.
I had heard Budapest described as the most beautiful city in Europe. It is strange and dramatic, to be sure, but there is something rather barbaric about it. It wants to belong to the West, but one remembers the Mongolians and the Turks. It is a mixture of baroque and Gothic, a spiky and hispid city: churches with high, sharp spires, minarets with needles like stings. An element of the goblinesque: the porcupine dome of the Parliament House, which stretches along the Danube its weighty and enormous length; the ubiquitous unendearing cupids; the curious pronglike shaft in front of the Mátyás Church, on which a bulging mass of these cupids seem swarming like torpid bees, an exercise in the same kind of baroque bad taste as the monument to the Plague in Vienna, with its gruesome mess of tangled corpses. Of course, the city has been badly battered, especially in this neighborhood of the Mátyás Church, where the metallic scaffolding on the buildings in process of reconstruction adds to the bristling effect. The royal palace in Buda was wrecked; it has to be rebuilt after every war. In the last one, when the Russians had come, the Germans barricaded themselves in it, and they blew up all the six bridges to keep the enemy from getting across—one of them without warning, though it is said that this was accidental, with all the trams and cars and pedestrians on it. Then the palace was bombarded by the Russians and finally burned down by looters. One young man told me of his horror when, as a boy, just after these events, he had someone ferry him across the river and found Buda strewn with corpses. The Hungarians had been proud of their bridges, which bind Buda and Pest together—the first one dates only from 1848 and the two cities were incorporated in one only in 1871—and they started at once to rebuild them. They are working now on the last. But this capital, at the present time, is still rather sad and empty.
Buda, on its steep hills, includes most of the old part of the city; flat Pest is the modern commercial part. Behind the Mátyás Church in Buda is the Halászbástya, “Fishermen’s Bastion,” to which one ascends by a high flight of stairs. Though built in the last century, it presents, with its stone walls and turrets, a somewhat absurd and yet somehow formidable belated mediaeval aspect. It does not appear to serve any purpose except to afford a platform from which to admire the view. One can look down on ancient Buda, with its domes and rectangular square-windowed façades, that seem to belong in eighteenth-century engravings; the big old palaces and public buildings in bad repair, with much yellow and orange, which I found attractive, but to which a Hungarian-American friend objected on the ground that the prevalence of yellow and orange was due to their having been Maria Theresa’s favorite colors, and so reminded him disagreeably of the Hapsburgs. I stood on the bastion at an hour when an august gray and smudged-yellow sunset was spreading behind the abrupt Buda hills, which were sprinkled with the first magnolia and apricot blossoms, and with the villas of those fortunate enough to be able to have villas, scattered on their steep slopes; on their summits, rather awkward-looking monuments unidentifiable at that distance.
The many public statues in Budapest are of a special Hungarian species: convulsive, frenetic, full of desperate effort. There are a few fierce and rearing equestrians from the fabulous monarchic past, but these memorials are mostly of patriots who were fighting against oppression: heroic highbooted hussars, warriors with erectile manes and the long defiant mustaches that challenge like taurine horns. One of the poets is fixed in a permanent seizure of composition; a giant figure of Endre Ady, the great modern poet-patriot, is at once Promethean and Byronic. The male caryatids on one of the old palaces—now turned into offices and shops—are agonizedly straining with their muscles and necks to uphold the heavy stone front; the female figures on a public fountain are apparently equally taxed to maneuver their ponderous urns. Another fountain is guarded by bears. In the midst of a busy square, a group of beatific saints look out with a strange concentration into the vision of another world. The towering statue of Kossuth in front of the Parliament House had originally a tragic character: he was shown in the dejection of exile and failure, but he has now been redone as a conqueror, imperious in a gesture of accusation. A more modern but still rather romantic note is struck by a statue of Electric Power: a madly speeding female figure accompanied by a zigzagging lightning shaft.
But the oddest of the Budapest statues is in the Városliget, the big public park. The author of the first Hungarian chronicle, who is supposed to have written at the end of the twelfth century, is referred to, since his name is not known, as Anonymus Belae Regis Notarius, the Anonymous Scribe of King Béla, which is usually shortened to “Anonymus.” He is commemorated, in a curious statue, as a shrouded and seated figure, whose face is so enveloped in a hood that even when one comes quite close to it the features cannot be distinguished. The grass has been worn away by people who have approached to peer at him, but one can only catch a vague deathlike visage—meant, I suppose, to be as mysterious as the origin of the Hungarians itself. This statue stands beside a vast replica of a feudal Transylvanian castle, which was erected for the exhibition of 1896 and is now used for an agricultural museum and other prosaic purposes. The Liget is a charming and entertaining resort, one of the most agreeable parks in Europe. The city is painting and repairing it for the spring, and one remembers the first act of Liliom, which is supposed to take place in the Liget. There is Gundel’s elegant restaurant, with a white-whiskered Franz Josef porter, which cannot have changed much since the old regime; a zoo of considerable size and range, and a circus connected with it. The animals have been badly neglected. They are boxed up in small filthy cages, and it is painful to see wolves and bears pacing glumly in their stinking prisons. But with the housing situation for humans as difficult as it is, it is impossible, I suppose, to provide anything better for the animals.
The American Legation. A spooky place: no American Minister, only a chargé d’affaires, and the imprisoned Cardinal Mindszenty walking back and forth on the top floor. The front door is guarded by two glaring soldier-policemen. Since they had red stars on their caps and otherwise seemed dressed like Soviet soldiers, I assumed that they must be Russians, but it turned out that they were actually Hungarians in uniforms that differed from the Russian ones only in color and a few details. In the reception room are two sets of photographs—one of the Kennedys and other American officials and one of young Hungarians engaged in skiing and other sports—that give an impression of not having been looked at by the visitors of either country. Unless you are a certified American, you are not, on account of Mindszenty, allowed above the ground floor. The Cardinal’s meals are sent up to him, and he gets a little exercise in the courtyard. A small room has been fitted up as a chapel, and he holds Mass there for American Catholics. “That albatross around your neck,” a man in the British Embassy said to me. I did not find Mindszenty popular in Hungary. He courageously stood up to the Russians, but in doing so caused unnecessary trouble for many Catholics whom he led to support him and who were penalized by the Communist authorities. In regard to social reforms, he had been flatly reactionary—had been opposed to popular education and to breaking up the big estates. It is asserted—I do not know how truly—that he would now be free to go to Rome or, if he were willing to relinquish his office, to retire in Hungary itself, but he insists on maintaining his primacy. “He wears—what you call it?—blinders like a horse,” one Hungarian said to me. It is a pity that we have sent no Minister, and that our relations should still be strained. It was only a short time ago that the official prohibition was lifted which made it impossible for the Legation staff to travel more than twenty kilometers beyond the city limits, and they are still rather restricted and uncomfortable. As a result of this, I could not get them to send my books to the United States. The whole situation is disheartening, since the Hungarians seem to idealize America. But it was, I thought, a sign of enlightenment on the part of our State Department—whose personnel have not always been so competent—that five out of the nine of the Legation staff were able to speak Hungarian. The chargé d’affaires did not, but the cultural liaison man did, having studied it before he came, in Washington.
The Russians. I heard little said about Russia. But my personal reaction in Budapest was a rearoused antagonism toward the Soviet Union such as I had not experienced since the banning of Zhivago and the death of Boris Pasternak. One felt that an energetic people had been bludgeoned and partly crippled by an alien hand, that they were still, in decisive ways, at the mercy of a great stupid power—plagued by the insincere cant of the Soviet ideology and harassed by restrictions which, so far as I could see, hid nothing from, and inhibited no thinking on the part of, the alert Hungarians. A lingering resentment against the Russians dates from 1848, when Franz Josef got the Tsar to send troops to help him put down the Hungarian rebellion. This was at first rekindled by the Russian invasion at the end of the last war. I was told a curious story of the arrival in 1945 of an officer of the Red Army at one of the cultural institutions. He began, “Messieurs, Mesdames, les barbares sont ici,” and went on to explain that, regrettably, the Russian soldiers would not all be like him, but that some of them were pretty rough customers. There followed days of robbing and raping—the usual indulgence of victorious troops. But the Russians had got rid of the Nazis; the Hungarians were grateful to them for this, and, during several years of transition, they were hoping for national autonomy and for the democratic regime that had always been the goal of their patriots. But what they got was the Communism of Stalin, and when they revolted against this, in 1956, the suppression of the rebellion by Soviet tanks.
Russian language in the schools was made compulsory, and was mostly, I gather, detested. A young woman I know, who was old enough to have had her schooling before the war, started in to study Russian, but found it made her mother so uneasy that she dropped it in a moment of repulsion when she discovered that the word for paper was bumaga, which sounded to her particularly outlandish in the coarse pronunciation of the Russian soldiers—so remote from Hungarian papir, which associates itself so naturally with papier, Papier and paper. But that was in the nineteen-forties. Now that Stalin is dead and the revolt that followed has had its effect, the objection to compulsory Russian is rather that, as a first foreign language, it is too difficult and discouraging for small children. For in spite of the reputation of the Hungarian language for difficulty, it is a great deal less difficult than Russian: an almost perfectly logical instrument codified as a literary language as late as the eighteen-thirties by a practical committee of scholars, whereas Russian was developed in a hit-or-miss fashion—a language composed of idioms, with a queer and irregular grammar. There are, however, in the universities some students who go on with Russian, and there is still the strong interest in Russian culture—Russian music and literature—that was felt before the last war. (English, which is of course not compulsory, is the second most cultivated foreign language.) I was assured that the renaming of a street after the Soviet poet Mayakovsky and the inclusion in the ballet of numbers by contemporary Russian composers was not necessarily due to the pressure of the Soviet Union. When I spoke to a Hungarian friend of their harsh treatment at the hands of Russia, I was told that the country had suffered far worse at the hands of the Western Allies when it was deprived by the Treaty of the Trianon of two-thirds of its territory. Hungary now finds herself midway between West and East, and though she does trade to some extent with Western Europe, she is mainly—as a result of our panicky prejudice against all countries that call themselves socialist—forced eastward into doing business with Russia. The feudal system in Hungary had to go—it was one of the most antiquated in Europe—and one would think that even without Russian intervention a native revolution would in the long run have been inevitable. If the Russians should pull out tomorrow, I am sure, the country would adopt some such compromise between what we have been calling “socialism” and what we have been calling “capitalism” as is now seen, in various versions, to be taking shape throughout the industrialized world.
Hungarian Ambiguity. I discovered, in speaking English, that the word ambiguous was likely to crop up as often as in one of those American literary quarterlies that are always talking about different “levels.” I was told, for example, that at present the attitude toward the churches was “ambiguous.” The policy of the government is, of course, supposed to be anti-religious, but no one, I was given to understand, necessarily pays any attention to this. Both the Catholic and the Protestant churches, though their property has been taken by the State, are actually subsidized by it. In reading contemporary writing, one sometimes gets the impression that though the writers are obliged to pretend to be following the official ideology, they tend actually, from their taste and intelligence, to give expression to a different attitude. A little history of Hungarian literature which has come out in both Hungarian and English strikes me as an amusing instance of this. It is divided into three sections, written by three different men, and I have not read in it enough to distinguish between them, but it is plain that in keeping up the show of analyzing literary history in the set terms of capitalism and socialism, proletariat and bourgeoisie, they sometimes treat the Marxist thesis in a rather cavalier fashion. They will speak of some writer’s associating himself with the sufferings of the people and describing their condition in his work and for a time becoming a socialist, but then, coolly and without condemnation, go on to record that he came later on to lose his faith in “the masses.”
I was told that a prominent Hungarian writer declared publicly, on a visit to Paris, that the thing about Hungary he regretted most was its now being cut off from Transylvania. The official reception of this at home was like that of the autobiography which Yevtushenko had published in L’Express, but I gathered that in this case the public rebuke was not made with the same sincerity. People seemed to be sure that this writer had been put up to his impious statement—which it was hoped would ricochet on the Russians—by the Communist authorities at home. If this is true, it is a good example of Hungarian “ambiguity.”
Cirkusz a Varietében. This was a kind of revue, a very Central European affair, which seemed to me really to date from just after the last war. One is likely to find such old-fashioned entertainments in the Communist countries cut off from the West. There was a sort of Marlene Dietrich commère, with a jaunty top hat and a tight-fitting gown that was designed to show her admirable figure. The acts involved parodies of the circus just opened in the Városliget. First, someone emerged from behind the scenes and told the Marlene Dietrich commère that the black panther was loose and had eaten several members of the cast—an announcement that left her unmoved. Then a man came up from the audience and attempted to start a flirtation with her, but he was presently interrupted by a snarling and roaring offstage. The man at first showed signs of fright, but then decided to face the beast, and a horrible struggle was heard, at the end of which he returned with his clothes in shreds, holding up a limp dummy tiger. “You idiot,” the lady said, “that’s not a black panther. You’ve got the wrong animal!” This was followed—after a stupid act in which a female lion-tamer lashed her whip at a man disguised as a lion—by a comic organ-grinder, with a jaunty long cigar and an old-fashioned Magyar mustache, who entertained us with a series of gags such as taking off the mustache with the cigar attached to it and walking away from the organ while it went on playing by itself. It eventually, however, stopped playing, and the organ-grinder was tinkering with it when suddenly the top flew open and a heavy thick-ankled woman popped out and turned back-flips and cartwheels all over the stage. This acrobatic ballet worked up to the climax of what was apparently to be a strip tease. The lights were slowly turned down, and her garments were seen to be luminous. By the time there was nothing but a bikini left, the stage had become quite dark. Someone exclaimed, “It’s not going to be true!,” and, sure enough, the bikini went out and the woman disappeared. There were, however, pretty, slender girls who danced the first-act finale in bikinis.
On the Fringes of the Language. It is a tight, crowded, hemmed-in language. In spite of its element of Slavic vocabulary, it is otherwise quite unlike Russian, which has the looseness of a large half-empty country. A danger in writing Hungarian without due exercise of taste is that the adjectives and nouns, with their prefixes and endings, are likely to get jammed together—“agglutinated”—in such a way as to make dense reading. A foreigner may sometimes feel that the language is muscle-bound. To this foreigner, the megs and mags may at first give an ugly impression. Meg is the commonest prefix for verbs—it is the sign of a kind of perfective aspect—and there are also meg, and; még, still, yet; mag, seed; and the common maga, which means self and is also the most frequent form for you.
There is an interesting characterization of Hungarian by Gyula Illyés, the dramatist and poet, who seems to be regarded in Hungary as at present one of its ranking writers. I translate from the French version given in an Esquisse de la Langue Hongroise, by Professor Aurélien Sauvageot:
“It is not the language of trade, of persuasion, of weighing things, but rather that of pronouncement, of judgment. It is a language which articulates, strongly emphasizing every word. Foreigners, when they first hear it, feel that it is a language of command. But it is not. It does not evoke commands or troops that are waiting to obey, but, on the contrary, a free solitude, with two men quite remote from one another, each of whom has to wait when he has sent out a word till the resistance of nature has been overcome, the verbiage of the trees and the waves. It evokes a solitude from the beginning of time! And the protest against that solitude. Those who forged it have communicated only thoughts that are completed, already chewed, and then they have said no more. Each of their words has its value. Behind each thought is a real experience, if not a real sorrow. The very word for thought [gondolat] is derived in this language from the word for care [gond].”
I said something in English to a friend with whom I was reading Hungarian about the room’s being rather warm, and she asked me whether I knew how to say “I am warm” and “I am cold” in Hungarian. I supposed they were Meleg vagyok and Hideg vagyok. That, she said, was what a foreigner would think, but if you put it that way, people might laugh. Meleg vagyok implies that you are Lesbian, Hideg vagyok that you are frigid. What you ought to say is Melegem van and Fázom. A tip for foreign visitors.
I had already known about Gábor Devecseri and made a point of being taken to see him. He is a poet and a classical scholar of a kind that could exist only in Hungary. The reason for this uniqueness is that it is only the Hungarians, so far as I know, who can claim that their verse is, like Latin and Greek, both accentual and quantitative. We do not really know how Greek and Latin verse were read. The meters, as they have come down to us, are based on long and short quantities, and these do not correspond with what are supposed to have been the stress accents—so in reading we have had to resort to substituting stress accent for quantity, emphasizing the long syllables and leaving the short ones unemphasized, as the meter seems to direct. (There are those, to be sure, who contend that the accents written in Greek are indications not of stress but of pitch, though in modern Greek they indicate stress.) Now, in Hungarian the length of a vowel is as important as the stress on an accented syllable and does not necessarily coincide with it. If, in trying to read Hungarian aloud, you pay more attention to one than the other, you will immediately be corrected, and I have found it a painful ordeal to try thus to read Hungarian poetry; it reminds me of attempts I have heard to read aloud ancient Greek poetry in such a way as to give value to both stress accent and quantity—in fact, it resembles those feats of performing conflicting movements with the right and left arms or legs. But this does make it possible, as their poets have been boasting ever since the eighteenth century, for a Hungarian to translate Greek and Latin poetry and reproduce—as is not possible, so far as I know, in any other modern language—both quantity and stress accent. There are also double consonants by which they seek to give the effect of the Latin and Greek double consonants which make a vowel “long by position.” Gábor Devecseri has thus translated many of the classics, and he has spent years on a translation of Homer, which has now come out in paperback and has had an immense circulation. It was odd to find that Devecseri had been surprised that a young Englishman he had met should be able to recite passages from Homer. This visitor had told the Hungarian poet that his activities in his school and university days had been divided between classics and athletics. Devecseri had innocently commented, “Then half your time was well employed.” He evidently did not know the traditional attitude of the English in regard to the Greek and Latin classics.
Another feature of Hungarian verse that makes it uncomfortable for the foreigner is the fact that, since Hungarian words are all accented on the first syllable, it is almost impossible to produce true rhymes. A true rhyme, from our point of view, can only occur when two lines are made to end in words of which the stressed syllables correspond. But this is almost impossible in Hungarian. There are assonances, not real rhymes, and they constantly pair endings in m with endings in n. Devecseri said that they now and then do introduce true rhymes—sometimes for humorous effect—“like a pinch of salt,” and he showed me an example of what he believed to be a true rhyme, but this (unalom and malom) turned out to be, from our point of view, not a true rhyme at all but as impossible a combination as if one should try to make boringly rhyme with singly. Final syllables that rhyme exactly are regarded by Hungarians as easy and cheap, undoubtedly for the reason that the prepositions and pronouns in Hungarian are likely to be written as suffixes at the ends of the words, so that the effect of trying to rhyme them would be clumsy. The Hungarians, Devecseri said, were “a nation of translators.” He read me translations of Shelley and Keats, which sounded very beautiful, and it was curious to hear the lyric effects of these poets reproduced by such different means. Someone had claimed that the translation of Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind was the finest Hungarian poem. Poe’s Raven had been translated some fifteen times. Devecseri showed me several of these, and I found that various devices had been resorted to for “Nevermore.” Later on, in talking of this with someone else, I tried on a deadpan joke: I said that there was one translation in which the refrain was “Nem nem soha.” Nem nem soha—which means No, no, never—was the great Hungarian slogan when the country, by the ruling of the Treaty of the Trianon, was being reduced by two-thirds. (I have known a Hungarian of American birth who told me that his parents in the Middle West had this motto up over the fireplace.) “Oh, yes,” said my companion in Budapest, “but that was a satirical parody at the end of the first war.” I did not know whether there was such a parody or whether, without actually knowing of one, he had taken me at my word.
How to Say “You” in Hungarian. One of the first and most baffling problems that the student of Hungarian runs into is what word to use for you. When he asks a Hungarian to explain this, he finds that he has created a situation similar to that which arises when the beginner in Russian asks his teacher what the verbs are for to go and to come. In this case, the Russian teacher is put to the embarrassment of breaking it to the student that there are no such verbs in Russian; that there exist, instead, innumerable verbs for different kinds of going and coming, depending on means of transportation, on frequency and regularity, on completed or continued action and even on length of stay at one’s destination; and that the student can only hope to gradually get the hang of these. But, in spite of this proliferation of what seem to the foreigner two simple ideas, it is possible to give a definite explanation of the function of any of these words; whereas, if you ask a Hungarian what to do about saying you, he is likely to be nonplussed. There are four words for you in Hungarian, and each of them has a plural. Their nuances are a very important part of the same Magyar ceremoniousness which, before the present regime, embroidered personal relationships with a system of class honorifics that seems almost as complicated as the Japanese; but though the hierarchy of honorifics has officially been abolished by the Communist administration, the different ways of saying you still remain, and one can still admit another person to varying degrees of familiarity or keep him at varying degrees of distance by addressing him in different ways. This may raise serious issues of a kind that does not exist in English or even in those languages that make a distinction between the formal vous or Sie and the familiar tu or Du. What corresponds in Hungarian to tu and Du is the somewhat similar te, but what corresponds to the more formal counterparts is maga (literally self), which is respectful, like the Italian lei, and, like it, takes the verb in the third person. The difficulties created by te and maga have been amusingly satirized in an imaginary dialogue by the humorist Frigyes Karinthy:
Two men meet on the street. They have known each other for ten years; they have never been particularly intimate, and if they have happened to meet, they have been in the habit of exchanging a few politely cold words and immediately separating. But five days before this meeting, they have attended a banquet together, and in the course of it drunk champagne and addressed one another as “te” [this implies, it seems, a special ceremony like swearing “Bruderschaft”]. Now both of them remember this, but one of them is not altogether sure as to whether on this occasion they had been really on a basis of “te” or had only seemed to be. The situation is difficult, because, if they have really been on terms of “te,” one of them will be offended if the other fails to remember it and will suppose that he now regrets it. If, however, this was not the case, how will the other be able to handle the situation if one of them now suddenly begins calling him “te”? Nevertheless, they will have to converse, because both have stopped on the street, and each decides at once that he will wait till the other addresses him and take his cue from that.
ONE (shakes hands with the other and looks at him encouragingly). Uh…
THE OTHER (looks at him in the same way). Uh…well, well…(He does not let go of the other’s hand.)
ONE. Well, well…this is pleasant…uh…our meeting again. (He looks at his friend smilingly and pressingly.)
THE OTHER. Well…which way are…Are we going in this direction?
ONE. I’m going, precisely, in this direction…This is where I am going. Well…uh…how are we?
THE OTHER (glad that he can speak of himself; there is no doubt that for the time being he must speak in the first person). Oh, I’m getting along all right. The heat is awful, but otherwise I’m feeling well…uh…One does feel the heat, doesn’t one?
ONE (eagerly). Oh, yes, terribly. And the sun is broiling, besides!
THE OTHER. Yes, of course, that’s it! It isn’t merely that it’s so beastly hot, the sun is broiling, besides.
ONE. At a time like this in summer everything seems to combine.
Painful silence. The situation is putting a strain on both of them, but they do not dare to separate before the problem of “te” has been solved, since in order to be able to part, one has to say either “szervusz” [which implies “te”] or “your humble servant” [which implies “maga”]; no third course is possible.
THE OTHER. Well, what is…uh…the family doing? This kind of weather is hard on the family, isn’t it?
ONE (stupidly). Hard on what family?
THE OTHER. Why…(jokingly) Our family? The lady and the children?
ONE. Meaning my children?
THE OTHER. Uh…Yes, of course, of course. The children.
ONE (not quite understanding). Is it my children—or…
THE OTHER. Yes, of course—just what I said. Our family, as they say jokingly, ha ha ha.
ONE (chuckling). Oh, jokingly!
Long silence, at the end of which they warmly shake hands and laugh. Suddenly the first man notices that a bug is crawling on the other’s jacket.
ONE. Look out—we must look out. There’s a bug crawling here…uh…
THE OTHER. Where?
ONE. On the thingumabob…on the jacket.
THE OTHER. What jacket?
ONE. Uh…on this one here…uh…(jestingly) not on mine, ha ha.
THE OTHER (staring at him). Well, whose?
ONE (painfully facetious). I’m not saying.
THE OTHER. On mine? (He keeps staring).
ONE (after some cogitation). Yes.
THE OTHER (grasping the situation and brushing off the bug). Thanks. It’s most kind of…of people to be so attentive to one another.
ONE. Oh, it’s nothing.
THE OTHER. NO, but I’m very grateful.
ONE. Nothing at all, a mere trifle.
Long silence.
THE OTHER. Well—I’ll be getting along now.
ONE (frightened). Already?…Is it really so urgent? Can’t—can’t we chat a little still?
THE OTHER. It’s just that I’m not sure that…that it isn’t inconvenient…. One…
ONE. Not at all, not at all! I’m really very glad that I’ve had a chance to see…that we’ve had a chance to see one another…
THE OTHER. I, too, am very glad…that…one has had a chance to see one another.
ONE (resolutely). I’m going toward the boulevard. Won’t…shan’t we go together?
For no reason at all, they go together and talk about all sorts of subjects—politics, philosophy, poetry, business, pure generalities—simply because they must not address one another directly. Each is painfully waiting for the other to address him first.
ONE (It is now twelve o’clock and all the bars are closed). Well, where—where do we live? Where do we live?
THE OTHER. Who? Where does who live?
ONE (submissively). I.
THE OTHER. HOW should I know that?
ONE. Why, of course…
He steps on the other’s toe.
THE OTHER. Ouch!
ONE. What’s the matter?
THE OTHER. Nothing…just a little accident, ha ha…we stepped on my toe.
ONE (pale with anger). Who did? Who?
THE OTHER (absentmindedly). I don’t know.
ONE. You don’t? (He slaps him.) Take that, you damned idiot! Now do you know? (He is addressing him at last as “te.”)
He takes out a revolver.
THE OTHER (happily). Yes: of course I know!…Szervusz!…Te, te, te….
They fall on each other’s necks.
But then there is also the problem of ön. When I asked my Hungarian friends at home how this pronoun was properly used, they reacted with something like horror and advised me never to use it. It was pompous and appropriate only in some such situation as that of a teacher addressing a pupil. When I went to Budapest, I used maga to the people in shops, but was then told that this was incorrect, that I ought to have said ön, since the relation between customer and shopkeeper was a strictly impersonal one. A Hungarian lady in Boston recommended, after some thought, simply putting the verb in the third person and using no pronoun at all—ön and maga both take the third person. A Hungarian lady in Cambridge, also after some reflection, suggested that I might try kegyed, a pronoun I had not yet encountered. I found that it, too, took the third person and was described in László Országh’s dictionary as “the most formal way of address.” Kegyed means kind, merciful, and kegyelmes is a high honorific. But I was then told by someone else that it had been used only by peasants, and when I inquired about it in Budapest of somebody close to the Party, I got the rather scoffing reply that—presumably because I was an American—someone might possibly call me that. “Are you ever addressed as kegyed?” “Oh, no!” he said. He admitted, however, that although an attempt had been made to cut down on the old distinctions, they seemed to be reappearing. He said further that it was really no use for a foreigner to try to get these things right. Age, rank, intimacy, sex were involved; one had to have grown up in Hungary. And it was true that I never ceased to be astonished by the unpredictability of the words for you. I noticed, in one of the scenes of Molnár’s The Devil—a conversation between an artist’s model and a rich young lady who have met for the first time—that they said sometimes maga, sometimes kegyed, and sometimes ön to one another, and I assumed that this must indicate nuances of friendliness and respect, but when I inquired about it I was told that in spite of the honorifics which the model bestows on the lady, the pronouns, in the kind of language the two women are using to one another, do not have any special significance and are actually interchangeable. An American woman who, before the last war, had been married to a Hungarian nobleman told me that she and her husband had always called one another maga, not te, but that her husband had called his men friends te. A young Hungarian professor resident in the United States described to me his difficulties with the forms of address on a visit to Budapest. He found that whereas in the United States the émigrés among themselves called one another te, the scholars in his native country—as it seemed to him, rather stiffly—addressed one another as maga. He addressed them as kolléga úr (Mr. Colleague) or kollégém (my colleague) and began letters “Kedves kolléga” (Dear colleague). In the official Academy of Science, the woman secretary always called him elvtárs, the Hungarian word for comrade, the required use of which is evidently repugnant to the traditionally ceremonious Hungarians and seems now to have been largely dropped. They made fun of it by saying elvtárs úr, and when my friend protested that he was not an elvtárs but a citizen of the United States, she replied that so far as she was concerned everybody in that office was elvtárs. (The awkwardness and absurdity of tovarishch has also become a problem in Russia. According to a recent bulletin, the old-regime words for sir and madam—sudar’ and sudarynya—are now to be readmitted.)
Bartók and Kodály. It was delightful, in Budapest, to see the ballets and operas of Bartók and Kodály so spiritedly performed in their land of origin. You can get no idea of Kodály’s Háry János or Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin from the sketchy orchestral suites that have been put together from their scores, or even, in the case of the former, from hearing a complete recording. I attended a matinée for children of Háry János, which began at eleven o’clock in the morning. This opera, in actual performance, has something in common both with the Rimsky-Korsakov of Le Coq d’Or and The Tale of the Czar Saltana and with the English Christmas pantomime. It is full of animated toys and astonishing fairy-tale tricks. Háry János is a boastful old soldier romancing to a friend in a tavern, and the story of the opera is the fantasy he spins—by implication, a benevolent satire on the romantic self-infatuation and extravagant boasting of old Hungary. Háry, according to his story, has stopped Napoleon’s army singlehanded; and the Empress Marie Louise, who, disgusted by Napoleon’s cowardice, has divorced him and returned to Vienna, has fallen in love with Háry and takes him to live in the palace, with the intention of making him her husband. But Háry ends by marrying the peasant girl to whom he was already engaged. In the meantime, all kinds of wonders and farcical incidents occur. Háry performs the heroic feat of moving the customs house, which was holding up the Empress’s coach, so that she finds herself beyond the frontier, and when a great village clock strikes, each of its numerals opens up a round shutter and a little bugler pops out, after which a parade of mechanical figures takes place on the balcony underneath. The soldiers of Napoleon fall dead when Háry János brandishes his sword, and Örzse, the peasant sweetheart, also taken into the palace, is assigned to the menial task of feeding the two-headed eagle of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is made to stretch down from its perch and peck at the corn that she brings it.
The composer himself was present at this matinée, in a bottom-tier box—a tall distinguished old man, with drooping eyelids and myopic eyes. When the audience recognized him at the first intermission, they applauded, and he modestly rose and bowed. He left before the next intermission. He had come on account of the children. One could not but be moved by this evidence of the honor in which—even in a communized country, and in spite of the example of the Soviet Union—an artist is still held in Europe.
I had already seen The Miraculous Mandarin several years before in Frankfurt—a stylized expressionist performance, which made little impression on me. But in Budapest it was terrific, and I saw it twice. The first time, it was part of a mixed ballet program, which included an aged pair doing the Blue Bird pas de deux decrepitly, and a ballet by Khachaturian—one of those things about a wild semi-Oriental tribe, with much whirling and leaping and brandishing of knives. There was also a remarkable number in which a piquant little girl did a stunt—to tremendous applause—that I had never seen in ballet before: she would roll herself up in a kind of ball and hurl herself backward, to be caught by her partner. If she had fallen, I should think she would have broken her back. In another number, the men, holding the girls horizontally, would throw them up into the air, and before they were caught again the still horizontal ballerinas would have made a complete revolution. What distinguishes the Hungarian ballet from any other I have ever seen is its atmosphere of unruly tumult and dangerous acrobatics. This comes to a shattering climax in The Miraculous Mandarin. You have a prostitute who is managed by three pimps. She hails in men off the street from her window by waving a handkerchief. The first is a fat bourgeois, who is murdered, robbed and thrown down a trapdoor. The second is a young man who has no money, so they simply put him out. But now a huge shadow is thrown against the glass of the door. A gigantic Chinaman appears, and at first sits perfectly silent, disregarding the enticements of the girl, who was played with much vivacity by the little reckless hurtling dancer. She eventually becomes frightened and wants to give up, but her companions, peeping out from their hiding places, insist that she persevere. Then, suddenly, the Chinaman goes after her, so violently that she runs away. He pursues her, and the pimps become frightened. A tremendous roughhouse occurs. They bop him on the head with no effect, and throw a chest at him, which he catches against his breast. At last, they overcome and stab him and throw him down the trapdoor. Grinning, they congratulate themselves; but the lid of the trap opens, and the Chinaman’s great hands are seen powerfully clutching the floor: he is pulling himself up. His pursuit of the girl begins again. He chases her upstairs and knocks one of the pimps off the staircase. A second time, they overpower him, and hang him by a rope out the window, but even this does not take. He releases himself and returns. But he has now been too badly injured to renew his pursuit of the girl. After a few convulsive efforts, he dies in her arms. She has come to admire and pity him.
The Mandarin invariably gets wild applause. I thought at first, because of a backdrop with high buildings and winking signs which was evidently meant to represent New York, that the Mandarin had been made a symbol for Capitalism, which took a long time to kill. But then, might he not as plausibly be Communism, which heroically resisted being killed? I was not, however, left in doubt, after seeing the ballet again, that the Mandarin was here intended—and had probably been intended by Bartók—to represent simply Hungary, who shook off all attempts to suppress her. The set was a false lead. It seems characteristic of Hungary in relation to her present regime—as it had been, I suppose, under the Austrians—that her people will make some pretense of obedience to their directors, then behave in such a way as to defy them. Under pressure to produce Russian plays, I thought they felt a certain satisfaction in performing one—Leonov’s The Blizzard—that has been denounced by Russian critics and is at present, I believe, banned in Russia.
The second time I saw the Mandarin was as part of an all-Bartók bill, with Bluebeard’s Castle and The Wooden Crown Prince. I do not think that, except in the Mandarin, this composer is naturally dramatic, as Strauss and Berg and Britten are, in the practical theatrical sense. The second of these pieces—which I have heard only once—is a kind of subjective fairy tale, and Bluebeard, Bartók’s only opera, though it has indeed its spooky beauty if one merely hears it on records, did not seem to me effective on the stage. It has been compared to Pelléas et Mélisande, but I have always felt that this has a similar weakness: you are not interested in what is happening to the characters. Like everything else of Bartók’s, Bluebeard’s Castle is extremely subjective. It is supposed to be preceded by a spoken prologue, the text of which I have not seen but which explains, one is told in a description which comes with a German recording, that the meaning of the opera “must be sought in another and hidden stage within the mind.” But I cannot make out this meaning. What is the significance of the visions that Bluebeard’s most recent wife beholds when she unlocks the seven chambers, and why are her three predecessors identified with morning, noon and evening, and herself put away by them as night? Bartók is capable of drama, but it is mostly inside himself, as in the startling Concerto for Orchestra, with its alterations of uneasy melancholy and furiously assertive passion, and the eruption into its Fourth Movement of a banal popular tune, which—this work was composed in America—seems at once nostalgic and mocking.
There is very little motor traffic in Budapest, and it is comic, after Paris and Rome, to see a taxi driver, held up very briefly at the entrance to one of the bridges, grin sarcastically and throw out his hands. There are not very many taxis, and I had often to walk home from the theater along the broad and interminable boulevards. At night, these were almost empty. There was, I heard, a fairly lively night life, but I made no attempt to explore it. I never saw anybody at night who had the appearance of going anywhere to amuse himself—a few straggling old men and women. Even the most important streets were badly lighted. I was told that these lights in the streets had been getting dimmer for months, and this seemed to make the people dimmer. Everyone is gentle and polite. I hardly heard a disagreeable word all the time I was in Hungary.
Molnár’s Theater. I have read in Hungarian three of Molnár’s comedies: Az Üvegcipő (The Glass Slipper), Úri Divat (done on Broadway as Fashions for Men), and Az Ördög (The Devil). I did not care much for the first of these, though it has its amusing patches. I am told by Molnár’s widow, Lili Darvas, that Molnár declared it was based on his early relations with her—which seems to me, on Molnár’s part, something of a piece of impertinence, comparable to the statement by Bernard Shaw that the relations between Higgins and Eliza in Pygmalion were based on his own relations with Mrs. Patrick Campbell. The Irma of The Glass Slipper—Miss Darvas insists that she was not very good in this part—is a pathetic but impudent little slavey who devotedly waits upon and is hectored by a middle-class maker of furniture (perhaps a joke by Molnár about his own craft). The J. M. Barrie side of Molnár—the Barrie of A Kiss for Cinderella—is too much in evidence here: the poor, quaint and wistful little girl who is designed to bring on smiling tears. And the last act is terribly padded—as is likely to be the case with Molnár—with unnecessary characters and incidents contrived to fill out the evening. The furniture manufacturer, as we have clearly foreseen from the start, will marry the little girl.
Úri Divat is, however, much better—is, in fact, it seems to me, something of a comic masterpiece. The first and last acts take place in a shop which—as one would not gather from the Broadway translation of the title, which really means “Clothes for the Quality”—deals in women’s clothes as well as men’s. In the first act, a terrible triangular crisis is going on between the owner of the shop and his wife and a scoundrelly assistant. The situation is just about to come to a head, but this is always being postponed or interrupted by the necessity of looking after the customers, and the shopkeepers and their assistant are always being forced to alternate between serious personal scenes and obsequious professional ones in which they have to try to please these customers. The dramatist exploits, to great comic effect, the social discriminations, with their corresponding usages and honorifics, of the old Hungarian society: the nagyságos asszonyom and uram (appropriate to the middle class), the méltóságos asszonyom and uram (appropriate to certain officials), the méltóságos báró and kegyelmes gróf (when it is necessary to deal with a title), as well as the formulas of abject deference with which the language of such people as the shopkeepers was encumbered in addressing their social superiors: the incessant kérem, tessék, kezeit csókolom, parancsoljon méltóztatni. It is not at all surprising that this comedy should have had no success on Broadway. Only the great popularity of Molnár’s plays in the United States in the twenties could have led to the folly of attempting it. The force of the comedy partly depends on the contrast between the language that the shopkeepers use to the customers and the language that they use to each other, and the former almost entirely evaporates, I find, in looking up the translation, when all the gentlemen are addressed as “sir” and all the ladies as “madam.” Then there have to be nuances of deportment in relation to the elderly Count, the Nervous Gentleman, the Noble Lady, the Shy Lady, the Anxious Lady, the Efficient Lady, the Dissatisfied Lady and the Patient Lady. The whole play is really a study in the shopkeeper’s profession—some have the qualifications, some do not—in a city such as old Budapest. It reminded me of the shopkeepers in Karlsbad, in my childhood, who would greet one, if one stopped to look into the window, with a bow and an “Ich habe die Ehre.” The play has a curious resemblance to an Elizabethan comedy—Thomas Dekker’s The Honest Whore—of which the subplot depends on a similar character: a linen draper so meek and subservient that he will stand for any insolence from his customers and from any provocation on the part of his contemptuous wife. I was struck by a typically Magyar reaction on the part of a Hungarian lady in Cambridge to whom I gave Úri Divat to read. “That man is a fool!” she said. “Such people ought to be exterminated! The people who always submit do just as much harm as the aggressive people.” I suggested that the character was amusing. “He is not amusing at all!”
I was not able to see this play in Budapest. Nowadays it would never do. The gentle, self-effacing shopkeeper who allows himself to be swindled by his wife and his shop assistant but who emerges as almost a saint, with the love of his once discontented but later adoring cashier, to return to his Heaven-sent vocation could hardly today be tolerated as even a comic hero. But I did see another play of Molnár’s which had for me a special interest. Ferenc Molnár made his first international reputation through The Devil, which was produced in Budapest in 1907 and reached America the next year in—I learn from S. N. Behrman’s chapter on Molnár in his book The Suspended Drawing Room—no less than four simultaneous productions: two in English, one in German and one in Yiddish. I did not see either Edwin Stevens or George Arliss in the title role but only a road company in Red Bank, New Jersey. The play had such a sulphurous reputation that—I was then thirteen—it rather frightened me, and I was curious, in Budapest, to find out what all the fuss had been about.
There was a very creditable revival going on in the repertory of the Vigszínház (the Comedy Theater), where the play had been first produced, and I took the precaution of reading it first in order to be able to follow it. Two young people, a boy and girl, have been brought up, as protégés and hangers-on, in the house of a rich family. They had always loved one another, but the girl has married the rich man’s son and the boy has become a successful painter, who has been having an affair with his model but is engaged to a society girl. János and his former sweetheart have now been seeing each other on social occasions, but no move has been made to revive the past. The husband of Jolán, the young woman, however, a stock odious husband of the period, a pretentious parvenu, stupidly unaware of the inflammable situation, brings his wife to the painter’s studio and insists on his painting her in décolleté. For this, she has to take off her blouse. The husband then leaves her with the artist, and, after a scene in which the two young people intimately discuss their old love, the painter leaves the young woman alone. Shyly and hesitantly, she makes herself unbutton the blouse, and as she is about to hang it on a throne for models which is standing with its back to the audience, she suddenly screams and drops it. The Devil appears from the throne, where he says he has been asleep, and politely hands her the blouse: “Pardon, Madam. You have dropped something.” All this I remember quite clearly; but I could not have been interested in the rest, for what happened after these first provocative scenes I found that I had almost completely forgotten. I could only remember the Devil, in a later act, walking past a window and flashing the red lining of his cloak at a moment when Jolán is struggling with her temptation. I cannot imagine that the long speeches in which the Devil expounds his immoral moralities were not cut for the productions in English. It is worth noting that Man and Superman was first produced in New York in 1905, and that there had hardly been time in the theater for Shaw to have set a precedent. In any event, the “diabolonian ethics,” as Shaw called it, was prevented from outraging the audience by his sending them out of the theater reassured by an ending which, if not quite conventional, was calculated to gratify the ladies. And Molnár’s Devil, for all his ostensible cynicism, is bringing Boy and Girl together. The scruples that Jolán feels about succumbing to János and that are steadily combatted by the Devil are of so purely conventional a character—since her husband does not deserve her and there are no children to complicate matters—and János’s relations with his fiancée are based on such mistaken motives that the Devil seems right to discourage them. His role is very much like that of the old gentleman in George Arliss’s Disraeli or one of those other romantic comedies, who disentangles the young lovers’ difficulties and ultimately effects their union. As someone said to me in Budapest, Molnár’s Devil—especially as played by a stout actor of amiable appearance and of by no means towering stature—really should have been called Onkel Teufel. But the play—unlike such trade goods as Disraeli—does have some psychological interest: the Devil is more or less made to represent the hidden impulses of sincere passion which are at war with the social exactions.
One of the cleverest scenes is that in which Jolán is made to write a letter for the purpose of telling János that he must never see her again. She hesitates as to how to go about it: she is aiming, she tells herself, at something extremely severe, “brief and dry and final.” But the Devil is there and takes over. He dictates a flaming epistle in which he makes her declare that her friend must never see her again, because if he did their love would go up in a holocaust, they could never control themselves, they would kiss as they had never kissed before. “What have I written?” she asks, in a daze. Says the Devil, “Something very severe, calculated to banish him.” This is followed by some hanky-panky about the delivery of the letter, which the Devil does not at first give János and which János tears up without reading it, thus sparing the woman the embarrassment of her overheated avowal. But they finally go into the bedroom together, and the Devil, after listening at the door, turns to the audience and announces, “Voilà!” The crispness and the point of this did not quite spark off as it should have. The theater of Budapest is now perhaps further away from Paris than it was in Molnár’s time, and the actor stressed the first syllable as it is stressed in all Hungarian words and gave the -là a long Hungarian á. The artist, in the meantime, has made things all right for an audience of the early nineteen-hundreds by announcing that Jolán is his “future wife.”
The Vigszínház is huge, and though The Devil had been in the repertory ever since January—this was May—it was still packing the house with a most sympathetic audience, who, in spite of the official pretensions to Communist austerity and discipline, were delighted by the Devil’s worldly cracks and applauded the outburst of Jolán’s letter. The production was full of color: the glittering lights and gay waltzes of the big evening party at the house of the millionaire, the elegant gowns of the women, who were good-looking and excellent actresses. The dramatic critic of a literary paper associated with the Party said to me that though it ought to be possible to make Molnár acceptable to modern Hungary, that was not the right way to do it. He particularly seemed to object to the grandeur and glamor of the party. That kind of thing, he said, had nothing to do with the way people had to live now. I got the impression that he thought that all this ought to be made ridiculous, but though it is true that Molnár liked to exploit the attractions of nobility and luxury, it is true, also, that his own origins led him to satirize the upper classes and to enjoy making his humbler characters eventually come out on top. Not, of course, that this would satisfy the doctrinaire Marxists, because what they come out on top of is the old smart upper-class world. I assured him that the audience at The Devil was still, after five months, house-filling and enthusiastic. “That’s a rather special audience at the Vigszínház.” I hope I have not misunderstood him. I found that when he reviewed the play he had not taken this banal line, that he had written about it rather favorably. But he may have been class-angling for a foreigner.
I was sorry, in Budapest, not to be able to see more of the theater. The variety it offered was astonishing—especially after the poverty of Rome. Besides Hungarian classics and modern Hungarian comedies, they were doing foreign plays which ranged from Shakespeare, Molière and Racine, through Diderot (a dramatization of La Religieuse), through Büchner, Shaw and Pirandello, to O’Neill (“An American Electra”), Tennessee Williams, Anouilh, Noël Coward and Cole Porter.
The Franz Josef “Image.” I had inquired of a Hungarian psychoanalyst who has long been practicing in New York how analysis had been doing in Hungary. “Oh,” he said, “all the Hungarians have a Franz Josef complex”—that is, I concluded after I had been for a time in Hungary, a kind of father complex which made Franz Josef either a great paternal authority who had to be obeyed and revered or a tyrant who had to be challenged. I put this to a friend in Budapest, expecting a scoffing reply, but he answered that there was something in it, and the more I heard of the Hungarian past the more I came to believe it. The paternal figure of the Emperor—though it may not haunt the younger Hungarians—still lingers in all this part of the world. In Vienna, I went to a musical show called Frühjahrsparade, which gave Viennese and foreigners the complete Viennese works: waltzes, the Prater in spring, an appetizing Viennese bakery, pretty women in chic costumes of the early nineteen-hundreds and, as a climax, Franz Josef in his palace. The Emperor, a very brief part, was played by a leading actor, and his appearance was hailed by an applause which seemed to include the Emperor with the actor. This Franz Josef was very bon enfant. He kindly receives the young girl from the bakery, who appeals to him to help to get a hearing for a waltz song which her fiancé has written. Amiably disregarding her gaucheries, the Emperor arranges this, and the song is of course a great hit. The finale is a spring parade, at which the tune is played by a military band, with a filing-past of many bright uniforms, including a detachment from the Tyrol, now partly separated from Austria—a feature patriotically applauded. You cannot have it quite this way in Budapest, but I saw an amusing Hungarian film in which Franz Josef, though treated humorously, was no less in the background of everything. (I had been told that the Hungarian films were poor, but this was extremely good—well acted and well produced.) It was called A Pénzcsináló (The Counterfeiter) and was adapted from a short story from the days before the last war. A vulgar lower-middle-class man discovers that he can imitate exactly the bills with the head of Franz Josef; he passes off his counterfeits and becomes very rich. He makes connections with the world of the nobility and is able to get his daughter married to a young man of good family. Through all this, the visage of Franz Josef on the bills is constantly present to his consciousness and, according to the counterfeiter’s mood, eyes him dubiously, frowns severely or winks in a kind of connivance. The counterfeiter gambles with the nobles and loses—I believe they are supposed to be cheating—and the winner demands prompt payment. But the man has sent his family to the country, and along with them the counterfeiting machine, in order to get it off the premises, and he is in desperation to meet the emergency. He is rescued by a nouveau riche snob, who has heard about the counterfeiter’s having forged a coat of arms for his family and will pay him a high price to have one forged for himself. The counterfeiter’s noble friends, impressed by the upstart’s resources, invite him to come in with them on a project for which they need a great deal of capital, but he explains to them the source of his money, and they summon him sternly to a meeting. He goes to it with apprehension, but it turns out that his only punishment is to be made to drink a huge goblet of wine. They all get drunk together; the nobles do not care where the money comes from; they go through with their scheme, and it prospers. The end is a fantasy of the counterfeiter’s, which begins with the kicking legs of a line of chorus girls and goes on to a reception by the Emperor, who greets him in bad Hungarian and accepts one of the cheap cigars that have figured in his relations with the nobles, and which ends in a snowstorm of counterfeit bills, with Franz Josef’s face on every one. The corruption of the monarchy triumphs. Yet, even in satirizing the monarchy, the film has a certain amount of ambiguity: the nobility are all rascals, and the detective who has been after the counterfeiter is finally himself sent to jail by the powers who have an interest in concealing the fraud; but—especially in connection with the daughter’s wedding, at which a Hapsburg is present, not caricatured but played straight—there persists a certain exploitation of the traditional Hungarian snobbery.
The bitterness against the Emperor is seen at its most intense in a legend that followed the Hungarian defeat after the uprising of 1848. Thirteen Hungarian generals were executed in one day by the Austrians, and the Hungarians are supposed to have put a curse on the family of Franz Josef, who were to pay, man for man, for these executions. Ludwig of Bavaria went mad—a Wittelsbach, not a Hapsburg, but the Empress’s cousin; Maximilian was shot by the Mexicans; the Empress Elizabeth was stabbed by an anarchist; the Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself and his mistress; the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo, etc., etc., to the number of thirteen. But Franz Josef in 1849 had only just ascended the throne. He was nineteen years old at that time, and he was to live to be eighty-six. The Hungarians got used to having him there as both a butt and a presiding presence. The confusion of feeling about him is illustrated in a family anecdote told me by a Hungarian friend. This lady’s mother, she said, was an out-and-out anti-Hapsburger, but her father was a person of sufficient importance to be asked to the royal receptions when the Emperor made one of his brief visits to the palace reserved for him in Buda. On one of these occasions, the husband came home to announce that his pocket had been picked. “What do you expect,” said the wife, “when you go to meet Franz Josef?” The husband left the house in a rage.
Art Galleries. The Hungarians excel in literature, in music and in the theater, but they lack the vocation of painters, as seems to be the case with all the peoples in this Eastern part of the world, including the whole of Russia. There is a large National Gallery in Budapest which is entirely devoted to the native art and in which its qualities may be studied. It is true that there are only occasional exhibitions of the work of contemporary artists—there has lately been a very strong protest against the museum’s slighting of modern art—and that it is impossible to judge recent achievements from the contents of this old gallery. It is true, also, that almost all the religious paintings have been collected in a museum at Esztergom, the ancient cathedral town which is the residence of the primate of the Catholic Church. But the general lack of taste of the varied collection in Budapest seems to indicate—at any rate, for the centuries it covers—an absence of natural talent. The sculpture here is mostly clumsy, highly dramatized—like the public statues—but less acceptable when not seen out-of-doors, where it represents the actors in the national epic. The dominating impression that the paintings make—from the lowering blacks of Mihály Munkácsy to the half-Cubist browns of Derkovits—is one of dark dull colors and rather coarse textures. Among the most attractive pictures are some early-nineteenth-century portraits of piquant black-eyed personalities that could not be anything but Magyar. The situation is very much the same as in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow: the interest lies for the most part in carefully executed genre pictures of typical scenes of Hungarian life and in ambitious historical illustrations that commemorate famous events. These latter run to painful subjects: revolutionaries in prison and tragic farewells. The underground struggle against Austria which followed 1848 was a stimulus to this kind of painting, at a time when it was possible to express that struggle only by implication, through incidents of the struggle against the Turks: the militant Franciscan monk who fell to his death in defending a fortress against them; the indomitable women of Eger who astounded the harem-keeping Turks by fighting like demons with the men at the gate of another fortress. The pictures of country life, with their murky embrowned landscapes, are influenced by the Munich School. The murkiest pictures of all are those of Munkácsy, the great reputation of the nineteenth century, whose work is here displayed on a gigantic scale. He strikes me as a third-rate Rembrandt: large, somber, yet not solidly built canvases, interiors with many figures that usually have some social significance, or towering Biblical tableaux. Also trained in the German School, he was the most ambitious of the nationalist artists. His canvases are deteriorating from his use of asphalt in his paint, which has lately been flaking off.
There are some very odd, embarrassing things among the other paintings. The pseudo-classical imaginings of a kind of Magyar Golden Age that entirely lacks Hellenic refinement: “Paganism,” “Sleeping Bacchante”; an extraordinary Cupid and Psyche, with Cupid suspended just above his love in such an awkward position as to seem to be not hovering but performing a balancing act. An astonishingly elaborate still-life of rich Hungarian pastry that makes one think of gluttonous eating rather than of serious art. Landscapes derived from Corot, but a little too stiff and bristling. The equivalent of scenes from Victorian novels in the manner of Augustus Egg and Holman Hunt’s Awakening of Conscience: a fashionable married couple, sulking on the verge of explosion; honeymooners of a humbler level embracing on the couch of a dark inn room, a table set at hand for their supper, with simple plates and a pitcher of wine; a tragic brother and sister, Orphans, both in dark mourning clothes—he with his head in his hands on the table, she with her hands in her lap brooding in blank desperation. They are confined in a bare room, lit only by a single lamp, with darkening windows behind them. But the painting seems to become somewhat worse—instead of being illuminated and aerated—when, at the end of the last century, they began following Paris instead of Munich. There is a rather messy Picnic in May, which must have been to some extent inspired by Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe—the ladies in blue and pink gowns, the men in what look like velvet jackets, on a background of Paris-green grass.
The Szépmüvészeti (Fine Arts) Múzeum, which stands just outside the gates of the Liget, is an enormous old-fashioned marble palace with a classical columned front, up the steps of which, the day I visited it, a procession of small schoolchildren—a now familiar sight—was being led. It contains a large collection of non-Hungarian art, which includes some excellent things: Grecos, Goyas, a good many Cranachs. But the selection of these pictures, I thought, had not been made with very much taste. There were second-rate specimens of good painters and an admixture of abominable Böcklins and other inferior German stuff. Here, too, a discouraging darkness, but mainly due to the weather. The only light came through a large central skylight from a heavily overcast sky, and one could not see anything satisfactorily. It was only just as I was leaving that someone turned on the electric lights. This situation, however, is much worse in the galleries of Paris, where, even at the Louvre, they do not have any artificial light at all but simply let the people leave when it is getting too dark to see anything.
Debrecen. I wanted to visit this old university town, which lies in the extreme east of Hungary, not far from the Rumanian border, and the Institute of Cultural Relations was good enough to put a limousine at my disposal. This enabled me to see the country between Budapest and the border which is known as the Alföld or the puszta—that is, the lowland or the waste land. I was surprised, after reading about the horrors of the Old Hungarian life, to see how well the countryside looked, and that the peasants’ houses—at least along the road—were clean and freshly painted. This had once been a desert, with not even trees, only used for grazing. It has never been densely populated since the Turkish occupation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the natives fled to other parts of Hungary. Now eighty per cent of the Hungarian land is under collective cultivation: miles and miles of smooth green fields, all sown with crops in green strips and not divided off by fences. Along the roads, they have planted some poplars. There are also a few large pig farms, and still some goatherds and shepherds with their flocks. Hungarians who have not been in Russia will tell you that it is just like the steppes, but actually the steppes seem flatter. On the steppes, as far as the eye can reach, there is sometimes nothing but grass and no landmarks upon the horizon. Here the country is bristled at intervals by the queer long-handled high-legged “heron wells,” which one of the Hungarian poets has likened to gigantic mosquitoes that suck the moisture from the arid soil.
The Turks left the puszta also culturally arid. There is almost nothing here now except the University. A theological school was founded at Debrecen in 1531, before the Turkish conquest, and the town first acquired importance as a center for the refugees who had been driven out of their villages by the Turks. It later became Calvinist, and is now the headquarters of Protestantism in Hungary, which was at one time thirty per cent Protestant. (Many of the children nowadays are not even baptized.) Debrecen is very rich in cultural and historical associations. There are the usual statues to writers. The early Calvinist lyric poet Csokonai was born here in 1773; so, also in the eighteenth century, was Fazekas, the author of a famous humorous poem, Ludas Matyi, of which I was given by a professor there a new beautifully illustrated edition. Petőfi lived in poverty here, and Endre Ady studied law. There is a curious Calvinist museum, full of manuscripts and first editions and archaic scientific apparatus. Another museum, the Déri, founded by a rich collector, has an admirable exhibition of costumes, utensils, weapons; a reproduction of a bedroom in a peasant’s cottage and another of an ancient pharmacy; a room devoted to the work of a bad Debrecen-born sculptor named Ferenc Medgyessy—the approach to the museum is ornamented by four of his atrocious statues, which represent Art, Exact Science, Ethnology and Archaeology. The old hardly-decorated Calvinist building which houses the scientific and literary collection contains the revered meeting hall in which, in 1849—since the Austrians had taken Budapest—Kossuth and his followers met, preparatory to going to the adjacent church and declaring Hungarian independence. When the Germans had been driven out at the end of the last war, the new Hungarian government was organized in this same room. The wooden staircase up and down which Kossuth and his group had walked in connection with their historic meeting has never been allowed to be touched; it is unpainted and rather broken down. There is a pathos about these steps preserved thus as holy relics. People talk as if Kossuth’s defiance of the authority of the Austrian Crown had been a real declaration of independence which, like our own, had had permanent results. But the immediate consequence was that Franz Josef brought in the Russian troops, that Kossuth had to flee to Turkey, that the army surrendered to a Russian general and that an Austrian terror followed. It was to cost Hungary much further struggle and blood to arrive at the Dual Monarchy of 1867, which still left the country, however, by no means free from interference and repression by the Austrians. But the earlier rebellion had had its effect in validating the claims of Hungary and procuring later reforms, as did that other suppressed rebellion of 1956, which partially relieved the oppression of Stalin.
The modern University of Debrecen, which dates only from 1914, is one of the chief centers of Hungarian intellectual life. It is based upon an impressive large new building, which contains most of the offices and classrooms. I met several of the English faculty. One was translating Steinbeck and taking her students through Tom Jones, another was doing work on Poe’s influence in Hungary. A middle-aged lady, who had visited England, took me around the town. The main street is ill-paved and ill-kept. In the residential streets, the houses reminded me of provincial Russia—a succession of one-story dwellings with bluntly arched windows and yellow or red fronts. Though the façades were very narrow, I was told that these houses extended far back from the street and had long courtyards behind them.
The housing situation presents one of the most difficult problems in Hungary. The country people—partly because of their hostility to the collectivization—are moving into the cities by the thousands, and Debrecen is as crowded as Budapest. Few families have more than one room. I was told by someone close to officialdom that it would take at least ten years to provide adequate housing facilities.
I stayed at the Golden Bull, the best hotel in Debrecen. It was in a state of mad confusion, owing to special preparations for a visit by Walter Ulbricht, the Secretary of the Communist Party of the East German Republic-repainting, moving furniture, climbing ladders, all remarkably inefficient and messy; the elevator always out of commission.
In saying goodbye to the friend who had been helping me with Hungarian—also a member of the English Department—I said that it was sad to think of all the brilliant Hungarian scientists and writers and musicians that they had lost through emigration. “We have hidden resources,” she said.
What is tragic about Hungary is that its history of stubborn and energetic effort, of intellectual genius, should so often end in abortion. Kossuth died in exile, Széchenyi went mad. The 1848 revolution was crushed, the 1956 revolt was crushed. Petöfi, fighting the Russians, was killed at twenty-six; Ady died of syphilis; his successor, József Attila, went mad and committed suicide; Bartók was half-extinguished by exile.
When I was just about to leave, it was explained to me that somebody would have to ride with me—I couldn’t go in the car alone, because the time of my arrival would have to be checked by a responsible civil servant. I was accompanied by an agreeable young man, who had to go to Budapest. He was teaching French literature and writing about Blaise Cendrars. The river Tisza was overflowing, as it always does every spring when the snow on the Carpathians melts. It was silvery and winding, quite lovely in its setting of the new green of trees and grass, among which it spread silver ponds. We had to wait to cross it on a narrow railroad bridge—an unsatisfactory arrangement. When a train had gone by, we followed it, and at one point the car stumbled over the tracks. I had so far escaped official sightseeing, but my companion stopped the car at a restaurant in a large collectivized area. This, I afterwards learned, was the Hortobágyi Csárda, a famous inn on the largest Hungarian steppe. “During Horthy’s Fascist regime,” I find in a recent Hungarian book, The Geography of Hungary, “the Hungarian gentry brought here their guests from abroad to show them the fata morgana, the ‘true puszta’ and the ‘csikós’ [cowboys] clad in colorful national costumes. This aura of cheap romanticism artificially cast around the puszta had the result that in West European geography books Hungary is often represented as a country of semi-nomadic shepherds. Since then, the ‘world-famous puszta’ has assumed a thoroughly different aspect as the inferior grasslands and barren alkali grounds have given way to giant irrigated model farms.” I went first to look at one of those heron wells, which turned out to be broken down. A stork flew up from a field with a wad of dry grass in its bill and carried it up to a roof to be applied to its nest. Some of the people there, I was told, were living in their own houses, others in a small community building. We went into the celebrated restaurant, which was remarkably clean and attractive. On the front porch, a girl was posing to be photographed in a long overcoat of wool called a suba—the same word as for a fur coat in Russian—that hung down to her feet and enveloped her whole figure. Such young people—although I was told that there were still peasants living in poverty—were certainly far from the days when officials were under the impression that büdös paraszt (stinking peasant) was all one word.
What have been the effects of the collectivization? It was not inevitable for a Communist regime, since Polish agriculture has not been collectivized, and it has certainly not been popular with the peasants. A few have held out against it. I was told by an Americanized Hungarian who had recently revisited Hungary that so many of the young people had gone to the cities that it was hard to see how it would be possible to get a new generation to work the land. But when one reads—and in non-Communist sources—of the previous condition of the peasants: sometimes twenty or twenty-five servants on one of the big estates housed in a one-room hut and getting one piece of bread a day—one realizes that any regime which finally did away with the old feudal society could not but have been an improvement. Reforms had been attempted from time to time, but they had left things pretty much as they were. Between 1880 and 1907, emigration to the United States had so much increased that in 1907 alone one percent of the population left the country. There was in Hungary even less of a middle class than there had been before the revolution in Russia, and both the industrial workers and the peasants inhabited a world quite apart from the often absentee landowners. At the end of the century, when upper-class Budapest was supposed to be at its most brilliant, many people were living in dark basements, sometimes a family of five in a room; in the country, after the First World War, the factory workers sometimes lived in caves. I remembered the stories I had heard about the old upper classes. I had been told that at house parties given by one of the richest families, the Festetiches, the guests had been received with a lackey holding a torch on every stair; an American girl I know who married a Hungarian nobleman discovered that her husband and his shooting friends amused themselves, when not on the hunt, by using the Sèvres china for targets.
Approaching Budapest, we had the Gödöllő hills on our left, dark and sudden after the flat even green of the Alföld. They looked a little menacing until, coming closer, one could see through the thickening day that their sides were covered with vineyards, and they thus made an impression more genial. When we arrived at the door of the Gellért, and before I said goodbye to my companion, he had to make out a slip, authenticating the time when the car had arrived at its destination.
Hungarian Character. From my experience of Hungarians in the United States, I had expected to find them in Hungary tumultuous, self-assertive and talkative. I was surprised to see in Budapest so little of what I had assumed to be inalienable qualities of the national character, and I came to the conclusion that many of the old emotional demonstrative kind must have been shot or subdued or have left the country after 1956. But I was told by a younger man than most of my Hungarian-American friends, who had emigrated long before this and become an American citizen, that his own generation had never much resembled the older Hungarian emigrants. The ideal of the swashbuckling braggart of the type of Háry János, of the flamboyant Hungarian patriot made famous by the age of Kossuth, of the frenetic musician still inspired by Liszt, had almost completely faded. And so had the ideal of the grand seigneur with a feudal castle in the background—an ideal about which I used to have the feeling that even the Hungarian Jews, and even when they had left Hungary, felt some obligation to represent. This must have been finally discredited by the reactionary regency of Horthy, which followed, after the First World War, the brief Communist regime of Béla Kun and lasted for a quarter of a century, destroying for all youthful aspiration the glamor of the feudal past and inciting an anti-Semitism which was enough to somewhat dampen the enthusiasm of the brilliant Hungarian Jews who had played so important a part in the intellectual life of Hungary and who had found in Hungarian nationalism an outlet for the then homeless Jewish patriotism. The Hungarians I met in Budapest and Debrecen did not rant and did not romance. They were sober, serious-minded, discreet; they said exactly what they meant. I had thought that Hungary resembled Ireland—always boiling, with much rhetoric and exaggeration, against the oppression of a foreign power, to which it had adapted itself with some flattery and much sly duplicity. But Ireland’s liberation from England has left the Irish Republic at the mercy of one of the narrowest of the branches of the Catholic Church. Hungary, detached from Austria, is now partially at the moment controlled by the policing of Russia; but the Communism of Hungary today is not really the same as that of the Soviet Union. The Hungarians have been through a series of murderous and crushing ordeals—with the war, the Nazi occupation, the Stalinist occupation and the revolt against Stalinism after Stalin’s death—and they are obliged to think cleverly and carefully as to how to salvage their country and to adapt it to its neighbors and the modern world. And yet I found on further acquaintance—behind all this chastening, still, banked—the passion, the dynamic force which have made Hungary, in its strange isolation, its strategic position in the center of Europe, such a continually erupting crater, such a constantly humming powerhouse, which is also such a constant exporter of power.
I was a prey to the inevitable delusion to which the visitor from the United States falls a victim in this part of the world. I remarked in Budapest one day that it seemed to me the logical thing that the countries there, whether socialist or non-socialist, should eventually consolidate themselves as a Central European federation. It was replied that this conception was a very old story. But who was to head such a federation? I could not answer that nobody need head it, since the North, in our Civil War, had imposed its hegemony on the South. I knew that at the time when Hungary had been something of a dominant power she had not been at all liked by the Rumanians, the Slovaks and the southern Slavs, and that she had not been particularly kind to them. Later on, an American friend, a retired professor of government, told me of visiting Hungary before the last war and making the same kind of hopeful suggestion. He had said to a young man he met—I am not sure of what national stock—that what seemed to be needed in that part of the world was a new University of the Danube, which should admit all nationalities and solve the language problem as best it could. “You don’t understand, Mr.——,” the Central European had replied. “We hate one another!” Such hatreds, of course, still exist. One must add to the antagonisms mentioned above the hatred of the Slovaks for the Czechs, which has evidently been intensified since the Allies, after the First World War, decided, rather unrealistically, to combine them in one national package. (The Poles, the Hungarians and the Jugoslavs do, however, appear now to be more or less friends; they have to deal with the same problems.) I repeated this story to another young Hungarian, now resident in the United States and of a more objective intelligence. It was not so much hatred, he said, that prevented these states from combining as the lack of a lingua franca. Before the last war, the German language had to some extent provided this, but where were they to get one now? The second language in the “satellite countries” is now supposed to be Russian, but anyone who has studied Russian must feel that as a second European language this complicated illogical tongue must be hopelessly impracticable. “A language,” said one German-speaking Hungarian, “where you have to decline the numerals!” He had never gone so far as to find out the worst. His English is quite perfect.