IN HUNGARY, POETS were revered. Children learned to recite poems even before they learned to read, there are streets named after poets and life-size statues of poets all over the country. Most of my beloved poets were unabashedly nationalistic. I had grown up with poetry, admittedly the kind of nineteenth-century Hungarian poetry that scans in iambic pentameters and renders Hungarians tearful with patriotism or nostalgia. I had loved János Arany, Sándor Petőfi, Mihály Vörösmarty, and Endre Ady. I used to know every word in Vörösmarty’s verse play, Csongor és Tünde. So many years later, I can still recite a few lines.
My grandfather used to take me to the Gerbeaud coffee house on the square named for Vörösmarty and I would spend hours walking around his massive statue with stone versions of some of his characters. The statue of Sándor Petőfi, hero of the 1848 uprising against the Hapsburgs, is not far from Vörösmarty’s. A romantic figure, young, always in love, he died fighting for the country’s independence from the Hapsburg Empire. My chief ambition before the 1956 Revolution was to be a poet.
I gave up that dream together with my first language in 1957 when I landed in New Zealand but I had not given up my love of poetry.
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GEORGE JONAS WAS the first Hungarian ’56er I met in Canada. It was at a party to celebrate his birthday. He wore dark glasses, though it was dark enough in the apartment where the party was held, a leather jacket, and leather pants with, incongruously, a collared shirt and tie. He was about six foot two, with a fringe (really), brown hair, high cheekbones, and a cigarette holder. He smoked constantly, lighting one cigarette after another. He had a soft voice and a relaxed Hungarian accent. He was working at the CBC then, producing radio and TV dramas and documentaries. Since 1962 he had written, produced, and directed about a hundred dramas. He would add a hundred more before he left the CBC.
More important in my estimation of George, he was a poet. His first poetry collection, The Absolute Smile, had been published by the new House of Anansi in 1967. His second, The Happy Hungry Man, was published in 1970. Margaret Atwood was his editor but, as she recalled, he didn’t need much editing. These few lines were my favourite:
The happy hungry man believes in food
The happy homeless man believes in a home
The happy unloved man believes in love
I wouldn’t mind believing in something myself.
George and I became friends by increments. We would meet for lunch and talk about music, fascism, Hungarian humourists, old films, George Orwell, poetry, Canadian law, motorcycles, the joys of flying, and politics. We had both survived a revolution and both of us were enamoured with Canada, but he thought my views of the world were, at best, naive, at worst, dangerous. He feared that I had retained too much socialism. I thought he was too far to the mordant right and lacking in sympathy for the poor.
But we always agreed on poetry. We would recite long Petőfi poems—ones with a bit of humour—and Heine, Rilke, sometimes even Pushkin. As for his own poems, I love “Memories”:
The Room has four walls, the room is empty,
And there is nothing left in the room.
Around the room the house is dying
The way worlds die.
I lived here, I am told. I don’t remember.
What I remember is nothing to speak of:
A summer perhaps, and a flow of streams.
Now I am tired. Elephants
Sit on my dreams.
One of George’s best-loved poets, George Faludy, had also landed here after ’56. He had been the most famous poet of the 1950s in Hungary. His translation of the little-known fifteenth-century French vagabond poet François Villon made him into a celebrity. Faludy had served hard time in both Nazi and Communist prisonsI: George called him “an equal opportunities resister.” A small man with wildly unruly grey hair, Faludy was a frequent visitor to George’s midtown apartment. When he met my mother, who could still recite his Villon poems by heart, he was impeccably polite and even flirtatious, though he was travelling with his gay lover at the time.
George Jonas introduced me to the work of Sándor Márai and Stephen Vizinczey, both of whom I still read today. Vizinczey had emigrated to Canada when George did, but unlike George, he had found Canada stifling. His first novel, In Praise of Older Women, was self-published. Vizinczey used to personally cart copies to bookstores, where they were snapped up by eager book buyers. Though Márai died in penury in the United States, his novel Embers became an international bestseller twelve years after his death.
Both George and I kept Márai’s diary next to our beds for late-night reading. I also keep T. S. Eliot there, the collected W. H. Auden, and now, the George Jonas Selected Poems. Poetry sustains me.
I. I used to send copies of Faludy’s autobiography, My Happy Days in Hell, to various publishers in the UK and United States, in hopes of seeing it back in print. I am delighted to find it now, available online from Amazon.