The View from Denestornya

Count Miklos Banffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy is a long novel about the follies, beauties and shortcomings of Hungarian society in the decade leading up to the First World War. He wrote it during the 1930s, when the disastrous outcomes of that war were still developing. Nostalgia may have been an active ingredient of this project, but Banffy’s purpose was to record rather than gild what had been lost. One of his conscious motivations was to help future Hungarians understand their past.

Since he was not writing for a twenty-first-century English-speaking audience, we may perhaps be forgiven some haziness about facts he takes for granted and which colour everything he writes – for instance, that Hungary was on the losing side in the First World War; and that before the Empire which it uncomfortably shared with Austria fell apart, Hungary was about three times its current size. Transylvania, the setting of much of the narrative, was then under Hungarian rule, although most of its people were ethnic Romanians. The titles of the three volumes, borrowed from the fiery words written on Belshazzar’s palace wall, give immediate warning that this is a story of loss: They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting, They Were Divided. The trilogy was a success when it first came out, but since its viewpoint is aristocratic it sank from view during the Communist era and has only recently resurfaced. I came across it when the first volume appeared in English and the others were still being translated. Very far as my family ever was from castles in Transylvania or grand balls in Budapest, something in the tone of the writing, the buoyant voice tinged with wistfulness, drew me in. It is a voice from just before 1914, an era which has special resonance for me. My father was the third of seven children of a Somerset parson. According to his sister, he was already seen as ‘a bit difficult’ before he sailed off to Gallipoli as a very young officer. He was wounded, but recovered enough to carry on. Or so it seemed, till he had a breakdown in the 1920s. As far as I know, little that happened to him during the rest of his life made him feel comfortable, except marrying my mother, but she died too early. I remember him as an elderly man, gallant but often mournful, with an aura of nostalgia around him that was all the more powerful because he spoke so little, either of the past, or of what he was feeling. Miklos Banffy, by contrast, is a man who wants to talk. Not about the war – he, being older than my father, did not have to serve in it – but about the world it hastened away. In some respects, the fact that he is recalling rural Transylvania rather than Somerset makes little difference: it is still the same era, when life in the countryside, though no one yet knew it, was about to change; cars and machinery were appearing, the men and the horses would soon be sent to war, the outworn stability of relationships between people of different classes could not hold. By contrast with England, however, the middle classes in Transylvania were only just getting into their stride, and a rascally, self-seeking lot they were too, looked at from the height of Denestornya Castle. Count Balint Abady, the Lord of Denestornya and of great tracts of forest and farmland besides, is the trilogy’s hero. Young, debonair, but also serious-minded, he is full of goodwill. He knows all the local titled families but is also grander, having connections beyond Transylvania and having been to school in Vienna. This makes him feel an outsider. His cousin and friend, Count Laszlo Gyeroffy, shares this uncomfortable feeling, but to a greater degree. In the early parts of the novel, before Laszlo descends into alcoholism, we accompany the cousins as they variously negotiate the pleasures, excitements or tedium of society, with its balls, races and grand shooting parties. Numerous sub-plots thread their way through these events against the backgrounds of the servants’ quarters, the gaming tables, a charity bazaar, a shooting lodge, the foresters’ encampment. The characters crackle with energy, much of it springing from their malicious or eccentric personalities. Hungarians, says Banffy, love the ridiculous, and there is plenty of evidence of that here. The varied landscapes become almost an additional character in the narrative. In its precise description and painterly detail, the novel often reads like good travel writing. Two themes, however, take centre stage: love and politics. Balint’s slowly blossoming but doomed affair with a married woman runs through the trilogy almost from beginning to end. He gets within an ace of what he so dearly wants – the chance to marry Adrienne and have an heir to Denestornya – only to have it snatched away on the eve of war. Banffy was right to deny him his heir. The age of aristocratic paternalism was coming to an end. Any heirs Balint might have had would not have been allowed to hold on to their inheritance for long. Banffy’s zest for politics takes up a fair bit of the book, which may be why he has been compared to Trollope. He had already been a diplomat, an MP and in 1921–2 Hungary’s Foreign Minister, before despair at the venal ways of the political world led him to become a writer instead. His Balint is a patriotic Hungarian, distrustful of Vienna, in favour of universal suffrage but inclined to view demonstrating workers as rabble whipped up by demagogues – upstart lawyers, probably. In his lofty, trusting way, he does his best to help the Romanian peasants by encouraging co-operatives. By the novel’s end Balint has many reasons to be broken-hearted. Rather than take a soft option offered him in Vienna, he enlists for the war. The scene in which he leaves his ancestral home, making sure that everything is left in good order, is poignant. First he bids farewell to the animals, then he leads us through the gardens and orchards and into all the rooms of the castle with memories dear to him. The conclusion of the novel is datelined ‘Bonczhida, May 20^th, 1940’. Bonczhida was the real castle upon which the fictional Denestornya was based. Presumably, when Banffy wrote that scene of leave-taking, he was at home and everything was still in place. Enacting that last tour in his mind may have been a presentiment. The castle was later burned down by the Nazis in reprisal for Banffy’s suggestion that Hungary should sue for a separate peace with the Allies. At least in one respect, fate was kinder to him than to his fictional counterpart. He had one daughter, Katalin Banffy-Jelen. It is through her work and that of her co-translator, Patrick Thursfield, that we can now read this grand novel in English. It was only a will-o’-the wisp feeling that drew me to it, based on nothing more substantial than a tone of voice, the sense of a particular time. But I’m delighted that it did, because reading the trilogy opens up and restores a whole world, just as Banffy hoped it would.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 5 © Ruth Pavey 2005