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Charles Hebbert on Antal Szerb, SF Issue 69

Love at First Sight

At a loose end after university in the 1980s I went to Budapest to learn Hungarian. My teacher gave our group a Hungarian novel from which we studied passages in class. It was a slim book with an enticing cover photograph of the Bridge of Sighs and an intriguing title: Utas és holdvilág – literally, ‘Traveller and Moonlight’.

The opening line lures you in: ‘On the train, everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice, with the back-alleys.’ Mihály and Erzsi are two young Hungarians on their honeymoon in Italy. In Venice Mihály goes off on his own one evening and gets lost in the back-alleys. He is looking for a drink, but even he is not quite sure what kind of drink – which sets the tone for his journey through the book.

The couple then move on to Ravenna: ‘The place smells like a corpse, Ravenna’s a decadent city,’ says Mihály. He and Erzsi are sitting in the main square when a motorbike roars towards them and an old classmate of Mihály’s jumps off. After an awkward exchange the man, a rogue with the satisfying name of János Szepetneki, who has studiously ignored Erzsi, declares: ‘I’m going. Your wife, by the way, is a thoroughly repulsive woman.’ This brutal comment about Erzsi, a ‘well-dressed, attractive woman’, leads to Mihály telling her all about his wild childhood friends, whose shadows fall across the length of the book.

By now I was hooked, and avidly read the rest of the book on my own. However, my thirst to find out what happened outstripped my limited knowledge of the language, so though I raced through the book, enjoying its flow, I missed much of the detail.

Fast forward twenty years, when I read Nicholas Lezard’s ecstatic review in the Guardian of a new translation by Len Rix of Utas és holdvilág, translated as Journey by Moonlight. Opening

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At a loose end after university in the 1980s I went to Budapest to learn Hungarian. My teacher gave our group a Hungarian novel from which we studied passages in class. It was a slim book with an enticing cover photograph of the Bridge of Sighs and an intriguing title: Utas és holdvilág – literally, ‘Traveller and Moonlight’.

The opening line lures you in: ‘On the train, everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice, with the back-alleys.’ Mihály and Erzsi are two young Hungarians on their honeymoon in Italy. In Venice Mihály goes off on his own one evening and gets lost in the back-alleys. He is looking for a drink, but even he is not quite sure what kind of drink – which sets the tone for his journey through the book. The couple then move on to Ravenna: ‘The place smells like a corpse, Ravenna’s a decadent city,’ says Mihály. He and Erzsi are sitting in the main square when a motorbike roars towards them and an old classmate of Mihály’s jumps off. After an awkward exchange the man, a rogue with the satisfying name of János Szepetneki, who has studiously ignored Erzsi, declares: ‘I’m going. Your wife, by the way, is a thoroughly repulsive woman.’ This brutal comment about Erzsi, a ‘well-dressed, attractive woman’, leads to Mihály telling her all about his wild childhood friends, whose shadows fall across the length of the book. By now I was hooked, and avidly read the rest of the book on my own. However, my thirst to find out what happened outstripped my limited knowledge of the language, so though I raced through the book, enjoying its flow, I missed much of the detail. Fast forward twenty years, when I read Nicholas Lezard’s ecstatic review in the Guardian of a new translation by Len Rix of Utas és holdvilág, translated as Journey by Moonlight. Opening the book was like returning to a conversation with an old friend. I was transported back to the feelings I had had when I first read it, but now I discovered the nuances that had escaped me before. This was the beginning of my renewed love affair with Antal Szerb, fuelled by successive translations of his works by Rix. When I met the translator a year or so later, he told me he had also learnt the language with the help of this book, though in his case he had pursued his learning rather further. Rix had already been intrigued by the sound of spoken Hungarian when he was given the novel by Hungarian friends. ‘This is the book we all read as students,’ they said. It was love at first sight. He decided to teach himself Hungarian, which in turn led to a translation. This he assiduously worked on for six or seven years, masterfully polishing it into its final state. Szerb would surely have been delighted that he had been ‘found’ by such a kindred spirit. Like Szerb, Rix was a teacher until he retired and is fascinated by languages; and beneath a quiet humility burns a strong passion that becomes apparent when he talks about Szerb and other writers he has translated. Journey by Moonlight certainly deserves to be more widely known. Its very unheroic hero Mihály is finally settling down after years of being a bit of a wastrel: he has ‘married well’ and is going to take his position in the family firm. ‘It was Mihály’s first visit to Italy at the age of thirty-six, on his honeymoon.’ He had always been afraid of Italy, which he ‘associated with grown-up matters’. But now that he was married, Italy was no longer a danger. However, Italy unravels his respectability and awakens in him a nostalgia for his lost friends and their bohemian life. As he goes down more and more blind alleys, Mihály misjudges both himself and those around him at every turn. A kind and modest man himself, Szerb presents even the humiliation of his hero in a very human way, not least because Mihály’s struggle with the questions of self and identity had roots deep in Szerb’s own life. Born in 1901, Antal Szerb grew up in the complex world of an assimilated Jewish family in Budapest. When he was a child his parents became Catholics – Hungary was noted for encouraging its Jewish population to convert. Indeed, Jews felt more secure there than elsewhere in the region, so much so that even in the late 1930s Szerb and many others did not take the chance to escape: Hungary is our home, they said, we won’t be harmed here. Szerb went to a good Catholic school and joined the Boy Scouts, but his early writings show that amid the growing undercurrents of nationalism the question was always there: where did he belong? He toyed with the idea of becoming a priest but instead became a teacher, reading and writing feverishly in his spare time. He also travelled to Paris and lived for a year in London in 1929–30. A keen Anglophile, he spent much of his time there in the old British Library Reading Room, falling in love with English literature and translating writers such as P. G. Wodehouse. In 1934 he found his writing voice, completing his History of Hungarian Literature and his first novel, The Pendragon Legend, a comic masterpiece of murder, mystery and misguidedness set in England and Wales. Both books displayed his vast breadth of reading – in the latter he included numerous parodies of English authors – and both were a great success. In 1937 came Journey by Moonlight, which became a cult book after the war and is his best-known work. However, as Hungary tied its future to Hitler and fascism, a succession of laws from 1938 onwards stole the property and then the freedom of those like Szerb who were now officially identified as Jewish. While anti-Semitic feeling grew on the streets, Szerb continued to work at the same frenetic pace. Alongside his job teaching literature in an economics school (where he was revered by his pupils) he completed his History of World Literature in 1941 and his masterly novel Oliver VII and The Queen’s Necklace, the true story of a fraud involving Marie Antoinette, in 1942. In 1943 he was thrown out of his teaching post and his books were banned (he tried to pass Oliver off as a translation from the English to get round the ban). Later that year the Hungarian fascists drafted him into forced labour close to Budapest. In 1944 his labour unit, which included two close friends, both writers, was dispatched to western Hungary to work on the defences that were supposed to keep the advancing Soviets at bay, but the living conditions in the work camps were so horrendous that they amounted to little more than death camps. Nonetheless Szerb rejected the chance to escape, not wanting to abandon his friends. On the day that Auschwitz was liberated, 27 January 1945, a weakened Szerb was beaten to death by his guards, and his friends died soon after. With the murder or exile of so many Hungarian writers, artists and scientists, now classed as Jews, the country lost a generation of its finest talent. Yet the defeat of the fascists brought no improvement in Szerb’s literary standing in Hungary. For the fascists Szerb had been Jewish, not Hungarian, and nationalists had not liked the way he took the nation’s great names off their pedestal and wrote about them with humour and gentle irony. For the post-war communist regime, however, he was too bourgeois, and his lack of appreciation for Soviet writers kept him out of favour. Even today Hungarian literary scholars do not give Szerb the critical attention he deserves. The only full biography of the writer is notably unsympathetic and ignores Oliver VII, while even more supportive critics dismiss it as lightweight. In 1990 the authorities tried Sightto rename a school in Budapest that is named after him. The idea persists that he is somehow not patriotic enough. Szerb’s short, simple sentences, influenced by his study of French and English, may be a translator’s dream but they do not endear him to those Hungarians for whom only long tortuous sentences can be serious. As Szerb wrote in his introduction to The Queen’s Necklace: ‘People in this country expect scholarly works to be unreadable.’ His work, of course, is quite the opposite. Yet it is somehow fitting that Szerb’s style poses these challenges: the difficulties in classifying his work mirror his own struggles with the questions of who he was and where he belonged, just as his heroes always struggle to see their way ahead. Szerb described his own work as ‘neo-frivolous’, which captures very nicely the consciously self-ironic style that conceals more serious concerns. Critics who dismiss Journey by Moonlight as a decadent bourgeois novel or Oliver VII as a romp miss the essence of the man and his work. Oliver VII best epitomizes this misinterpretation. Here Szerb picks up his earlier themes: again a young man tries to find his way, uncertain of his path into adulthood. Yet while János Bátky blunders around blindly in The Pendragon Legend and Mihály in Journey by Moonlight faces humiliation and defeat, Oliver rises to the challenge. The hero – and this time he is a hero – is the newly crowned king of a small central European state who doesn’t want to be king. He secretly organizes a coup against himself and disappears, landing in the company of some con men. When he ends up having to pretend to be himself, King Oliver VII, he understands, albeit reluctantly, that he must actively embrace his fate. Unlike the earlier novels, here the ending is hopeful, with a sense of loose ends being tied up – an extraordinary book given the circumstances in which he wrote it. An insight into this fascinating writer can be found in his account of a trip to Italy in 1936. The Third Tower tells of how he travels round some of the places that would feature in his works, such as Venice and Ravenna, but is restless. Eventually he visits San Marino and finds himself alone, away from the hordes of tourists, by a tower that overlooks the tiny country. ‘For the first time on my present journey I am happy . . . The happiness I feel here . . . is something I must not give up for anyone: anyone or anything. I cannot surrender my soul to any nation state or any set of beliefs.’ He feels like a man for our times.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 69 © Charles Hebbert 2021


About the contributor

Charles Hebbert is an editor and translator. He lived for ten years in Budapest and was a co-author of the Rough Guide to the city. As he plays his accordion, he dreams of translating other fine Hungarian writers from the 1930s.

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