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Friends Reunited

Every year as many as eleven thousand novels may be published in Britain, of which only a handful amount to much. So it is all the more surprising to come across a masterpiece. Such is Embers by the Hungarian writer Sándor Márai. I found myself so gripped by this elegiac novel, so seduced by its limpid prose, that when I came to the final page I turned back to the first and began to reread.

The world evoked by Embers is one I recognize imaginatively and in which I feel at home. Perhaps this is partly due to my own background. Though I was born in England my roots lie elsewhere, in continental Europe, and my family’s story is one of exile and dispossession – my maternal great-grandfather is said to have walked from the Black Sea to Manchester in the late nineteenth century, while my father’s family came from Latvia. Both sides settled in England, but they remained essentially European in style and outlook.

Sándor Márai was born in 1900 in Kassa, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a lawyer, his mother came from a family of military officers and bureaucrats. Márai first published poetry and quickly became an all-round man of letters – playwright, journalist, diarist, novelist and critic – as he moved erratically, displaced between Budapest, Berlin and Paris. After the Second World War he emigrated to the United States where, following the death of his beloved wife and adopted son, loneliness led him to commit suicide in 1989.

The background to Embers is romantic, and prescient – young countesses at society balls, elegantly accoutred guardsmen, carriages rumbling over cobbled streets, and the Emperor’s summer palace, Schönbrunn, sparkling at the centre of an ordered park. But the Austro-Hungarian Empire is in decline; culture has given way to civilization, and civilization is approaching ch

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Every year as many as eleven thousand novels may be published in Britain, of which only a handful amount to much. So it is all the more surprising to come across a masterpiece. Such is Embers by the Hungarian writer Sándor Márai. I found myself so gripped by this elegiac novel, so seduced by its limpid prose, that when I came to the final page I turned back to the first and began to reread.

The world evoked by Embers is one I recognize imaginatively and in which I feel at home. Perhaps this is partly due to my own background. Though I was born in England my roots lie elsewhere, in continental Europe, and my family’s story is one of exile and dispossession – my maternal great-grandfather is said to have walked from the Black Sea to Manchester in the late nineteenth century, while my father’s family came from Latvia. Both sides settled in England, but they remained essentially European in style and outlook. Sándor Márai was born in 1900 in Kassa, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a lawyer, his mother came from a family of military officers and bureaucrats. Márai first published poetry and quickly became an all-round man of letters – playwright, journalist, diarist, novelist and critic – as he moved erratically, displaced between Budapest, Berlin and Paris. After the Second World War he emigrated to the United States where, following the death of his beloved wife and adopted son, loneliness led him to commit suicide in 1989. The background to Embers is romantic, and prescient – young countesses at society balls, elegantly accoutred guardsmen, carriages rumbling over cobbled streets, and the Emperor’s summer palace, Schönbrunn, sparkling at the centre of an ordered park. But the Austro-Hungarian Empire is in decline; culture has given way to civilization, and civilization is approaching chaos. Embers is narrated by Henrik, a retired general waiting in his castle in the Carpathian mountains for the visit of his friend, Konrad. The two have not seen or heard from one another for forty-one years. Despite circumstances that threatened to bring their friendship to an end it has continued to give meaning to their lives. They were 10 when they met at cadet school in Vienna and forged the exclusive, chaste but passionate friendship they imagined infrangible. However, as they grew older their circumstances led them to develop differently. Konrad was poor. Henrik was privileged socially and financially. Konrad was musical, whereas Henrik’s father observed that this propensity was incompatible with the military life to which the boy was apprenticed. Konrad clung to music; Henrik’s interests lay in horses, the theatre and travel. As young men the two shared accommodation in Vienna and served alongside one another. ‘We were quite different,’ Henrik observed, ‘but we belonged together.’ The two are now 75. Henrik’s life has been in suspension, his castle an unvisited tomb. Konrad has been sitting it out in the tropics. Each knew there had to be a final meeting. Konrad writes to say he is in the locality. Henrik galvanizes his staff to receive his friend in style. The dinner must replicate in every particular of menu and setting the last they took together. The great dining-hall, shut since then, is opened up, the Sèvres is taken down, dahlias are arranged in crystal vases, and large blue candles lighted in silver candelabra. Five lavish courses are served. But in one particular, things are not as they were: forty-one years ago three were present at dinner – Henrik, Konrad and Henrik’s wife, Kristina. From dusk till daybreak Henrik rehearses, dissects and interprets the life he and Konrad shared, the betrayals that threatened the relationship. He has the facts but he needs the truth. Had Kristina been Konrad’s lover? On the day of the hunt when Konrad shouldered his gun, had he intended to kill Henrik, and had Kristina colluded in this? The verbal duel to which Márai devotes two-thirds of his novel is peculiar in that Konrad barely speaks, and admits to nothing. However, Henrik, by voicing his version of the events in the company of his friend and adversary, satisfies himself that he has unearthed the truth. Embers is open to multiple interpretations. It is a disquisition on friendship. It is also a comparison of the conflicting aspects of man’s consciousness. Márai assigns to Henrik the repressed, duty-driven side and to Konrad the unreliable, feeling-driven side. Noble birth imposes on Henrik the obligation of high-minded principles and noble action. Konrad’s genteel, impoverished status leads him to thwarted ambition and uncontrolled feelings of frustration and envy. Culture and civilization, apportioned between the two, appear irreconcilable, and it is this divide, epitomized by the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of fascism followed by communism, that had appalled Márai and led him into exile. Thinking about Embers long after putting it aside, I am struck by the way in which the asymmetry in its form mirrors that of its content. Whereas the two protagonists embody the two sides of human consciousness, Márai avoids any Manichean division of good and evil, and I feel equally sympathetic and unsympathetic towards the ideals that sustain both men. The novel grips through its intelligent use of symbols and avoids any easy moral stand. I shall continue to reread it to see whether my conclusions about the merits of the two men alter as I alter.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 4 © Elisabeth Russell Taylor 2004


About the contributor

Elisabeth Russell Taylor has published six novels and two short-story collections. Her novel Mother Country was reissued in 2004. Another, Pillion Riders, was published in 2005.

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