Sunflower (3 page)

***

The best of his times—and the worst of his times—may have been the years of the First World War. The war came after the publication of the first Sindbad stories and
The Red Stage-coach
. Krúdy's writing had blossomed; for the first time, he had a considerable public. Perhaps because of the increasingly anxious and difficult years of the war, there was an appetite for his evocations of an older, better Hungary, an older, better Budapest, and older and better men and women—serious patricians, respectable virgins. Almost every Budapest newspaper carried a literary page. He wrote for most of these newspapers, indifferent to their political or social inclinations, interested in them only as the fount of honoraria. Yet his life was as disorganized as ever, perhaps even more so. He lived in the Hotel Royal, a large, modern commercial establishment on one of the noisy boulevards of the city, where it stands even now. The owner, a M. Várady, admired him. The owner's wife, a ripe woman in her thirties, loved him with a shameful, sensual devotion. At times, Krúdy had to resort to undignified stratagems to escape her desperate jealousies; once, at a summer resort where he was the Váradys' guest, he had a tall companion impersonate him in the evening shadows while he, bending his large frame, crawled silently among the bushes to the room of another woman, who had left a window open for him to climb in. Mme Várady had a daughter, seventeen years old, who adored Krúdy. Krúdy chose to love her. They eloped. It took two years for his first wife to consent, bitterly, to give him a divorce. Zsuzsi, his new love, was twenty-three years younger than he. She married him.

Much of this happened during the saddest years of the country. Hungary, in tandem with Austria, lost the war. A Hungarian republic was proclaimed—ominously, in retrospect —in late October of 1918, with disorderly shoutings, and rain splashing on the pavement under dark, soiled clouds, on a sodden day. There followed an ugly and unpopular short-lived Communist regime, a humiliating foreign occupation, and the reestablishment of a narrow kind of order, laced with the hatreds of a rent and diminished people. Meanwhile, most of the country had been amputated: two-thirds of the old Hungary was partitioned among the new states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and the swollen kingdom of Rumania. Krúdy, who never wrote a false word when describing a flower, a tree, a woman's garter, or the odor of the midnight air but who was an instinctive opportunist when it came to money, had written a few things—paragraphs, sentences—here and there in accord with the ideas of the now despised revolutionaries and leftists. This was but one of his difficulties under the new regime. There was now no atmosphere for his music; even the acoustics of nostalgia were out of date. The dust bath of abject poverty covered a truncated, misery-laden nation. After a while things improved. Hungary and Hungarians tend to be unsuccessful after their most astonishing triumphs, but they have an instinctive genius for recovery and rebuilding after their worst disasters. During the most miserable of those years—1919, 1920, 1921—Krúdy wrote several more masterpieces. Perhaps his new marriage and the birth of his adored youngest child sustained his spirits. He had not much changed his habits: the night before his young bride gave birth, he was at the gaming table in his club again. He sent her a tender note, saying that it was lucky that he had lost that night, since she would now have an easy delivery. A little girl, Zsuzsika, was born. She weighed “four quarts and three pints,” the elderly father would say proudly to his companions.

For he had become an elderly gentleman. He was not much over forty, still handsome, but his head had turned silver, as had his mustache. His vices were changing, too: fewer women, more wine; fewer turf days, longer tavern afternoons. But he wrote like a fiend. His feuilletons filled the pages of newspapers of every persuasion or denomination. Eventually, these writings would be gathered together and published in modest, thin, paper-covered editions. They brought him little money. His public had diminished. His reputation was running down. He had written often about autumn, about country autumns that “stretched out long, like a single shining strand of red hair.” In Budapest, too, the autumn mists were coming closer, there were “weeping young clouds, a damp wind whistling through the keyholes...when the Danube boats sound their horns like forlorn ghosts who cannot find their way in the night.” He himself was in the autumn of his life now—
dans les faubourgs de la vieillesse
, as the lovely French phrase has it. Yet there were moments of happiness (“Happiness,” he had written once, “is a moment's interval between desire and sorrow”)—or, rather, of contentment. An ancient apartment was found for him and his family, in surroundings that could hardly have been more suitable for Gyula Krúdy, though comfortable they were not. It was in a century-old house in the shadow of giant plane trees, on Margaret's Island, in the middle of the Danube, between Buda and Pest. Decades before, the greatest of Magyar poets, János Arany, had sat under the island's noble oaks, in a grove beyond the ruins of a thirteenth-century monastery. In the early nineteen-twenties, the island had few telephones; it was traversed every hour by an open horse-drawn trolley. It had an old hotel, frequented by writers, among them some of Krúdy's companions. He and his family had to take their baths there; their apartment had no bathroom. At times, they led a country existence in the midst of the heaving city, which was gradually filling with buses and cars.

He had less and less money, while he gambled and drank more and more. “There are mornings,” he wrote about another writer, in another age, “when literature resembles a kind, sad wife, weeping without a word, alone; she is always in one's mind but one does not talk about her.” He spent a few unhappy months near Vienna, in a former imperial château rented by Baron Lajos Hatvany, who, besides being a baron, was a noted left-wing litterateur and dilettante, in temporary exile from Hungary for political reasons. During those months in the elegant house in the Vienna woods, Krúdy was morose and solitary. Once, he roused his host at four in the morning in order to break open an ancient armoire that, according to Krúdy, must have belonged to Franz Josef himself. Eventually, he came back to the island without a farthing, having urged Hatvany in vain to provide a substantial loan for a child-care establishment that his wife was trying to launch. The valves of his heart were leaking badly. He was lucky to have among his admirers a fine doctor, Dr. Lajos Lévy, who was one of those saintly giants of medicine from a past age who took it as their sacred duty to care for and attempt to cure men such as Krúdy without asking anything, material or spiritual, in exchange. He took Krúdy into his hospital, to cure and rest and feed him. Of course Krúdy had to be bereft of wine. But one early evening the nurses found him in his whitewashed room with a beaker of wine and a lone Gypsy playing softly, very softly. The young doctors of Lévy's entourage were shocked. Lévy only shook his head. His patient was on the road to a limited recovery, and a little wine might be good for him, he said.

There was no money in the Krúdy house. There were sad, tremendous quarrels. He passed the age of fifty. He was an old man now. He failed to pay the minimal rent on the apartment. From the island, he had often looked across to the western side of the river, the old quarter of Óbuda—Old Buda—with its one-story houses inhabited by thrifty working-class people, its rough cobblestone streets, and its peasant-baroque church towers under the high Buda hills. Now he was forced to move there, taking three rooms in an old yellow house, in some ways reminiscent of the house of his childhood. There exists a photograph of Krúdy leaning out of his window and contemplating the street with his large brown eyes. Yet his headquarters were not in that house, Templom-utca 15 (No. 15 Church Street), which is marked with a plaque now. They were in Kéhli's ancient tavern, in the next street, whose yellow flat-country wine he liked.

He wrote and wrote in the mornings, at a plain table covered with wrapping paper that was held down at the corners with big No. 2 steel thumbtacks, always with an old-fashioned steel pen, always using a bottle of violet ink. He had written more than seventy books. His wife and daughter took temporary lodgings elsewhere, returning to him from time to time. His writings were no longer popular. His advances from publishers were exhausted. Most of his former publishers would have nothing to do with him, because they could not; the Depression of the early nineteen-thirties made the publishing situation even worse. Krúdy could still place short pieces in some of the newspapers, but this income was far from enough. His most faithful readers now were a small group of people, among them some of the best writers of Hungary. They understood what his prose meant for their Magyar language, that lonely orphan among the languages of Europe. One of these writers, the novelist and poet Dezsõ Kosztolányi, arranged things so that in 1931 and 1932 Krúdy would receive literary prizes amounting to considerable sums. Krúdy asked that the awards be given him not during a ceremony but privately; he wanted to avoid his creditors. By the spring of 1933, he had not paid his rent or his bills for many months. The city authority that owned the house informed him that he would have to vacate his rooms. His electric current was cut off. On the last day of his life, he coursed through the city unhappily, stopping in governmental and editorial offices with indifferent results. He sat for a few hours in Kéhli's, with his long white hand around the small wineglass. He borrowed a candle and ambled home. Alone in his apartment, he stuck that cheap brown candle in an empty bottle and lay down to sleep. A cleaning woman found him dead, at ten o'clock on a bright morning.

That was the end of the writer Gyula Krúdy. The sun was shining in the incredibly blue skies over Óbuda when they laid him out, in his last spotless piece of clothing—his full-dress suit. A companion recalled that, a year or so earlier, Krúdy had told him that he had tried to pawn this suit but that the pawnshop could not use it—it was too big, he was too tall, they said. To his funeral came writers, journalists, editors, waiters, headwaiters, porters, street girls, an official delegation from the city of his birth, and a small Gypsy band, which played his favorite air as the coffin was let down. His first wife cried out, “You had it coming, Gyula!” There was a hush. His friend the newspaper editor Miklós Lázár spoke at the grave. M. Lázár gave me the tear sheet of that beautiful speech, in New York, in 1963—a yellowed, brittle page from an old newspaper.

***

For almost a decade, Krúdy was forgotten. His grave, only faintly marked, was sinking into the ground. Then came a marvelous event—not only in Krúdy's posthumous annals but in those of modern Hungarian literature. A book appeared entitled
Szindbád hazamegy
(
Sindbad Comes Home
), by the great haut-bourgeois writer Sándor Márai. What Márai (who was twenty-two years Krúdy's junior and knew him in the last years of his life) had composed was a Krúdy symphony, in the form of a reconstruction of Krúdy's last day, in Krúdy's style. It begins with his solitary rising and dressing in his rooms in Óbuda; it ends with his last night, enveloped in the comforter of his unforgettable dreams—dreams that carry Sindbad the sailor to another world. I read this book when I was seventeen. Afterward, I read as much Krúdy (and Márai) as I could lay my hands on, buying Krúdy volumes often in antiquarian bookshops. And I was not alone. All this happened during the Second World War, in the middle of a German-occupied, brutal, and often very vulgar world, when people found happiness and inspiration in the presence of nobler and better things of the past. I left Hungary in 1946, even before its regime had become wholly Communized, because I thought that there was no place for me in the “new” Hungary—or, rather, not a place I would want. So did Sándor Márai.

I left my family and, among other things, perhaps two dozen Krúdy and Márai books. I was convinced that Hungary was lost; besides, I knew English rather well. I wanted to become an English-writing and therefore English-thinking historian, not an émigré intellectual who writes about Central European history in English. Twelve or thirteen years later I began to notice something extraordinary. Krúdy's books were being reprinted in Hungary, one after another. There was—there still is—a Krúdy revival, to an extent that he (or I) could not have dreamed of. People who had left Hungary after the 1956 Rising began importing his books from Budapest. I got some of them, and as I turned their pages on quiet winter evenings in my house in the Pennsylvania countryside my eyes sometimes filled with tears. Another exile, the scholar and critic László Cs. Szabó, has written what Hungarians, exiled or not, know: “How can a foreign reader understand Krúdy without ever having seen the Óbuda towers from Margaret's Island under gathering snowclouds; or the flirtatious scratching of the blushing leaves of birch trees in the sand, down the Nyír; or the inward smiles of the fallen apples lying on the bottom of the Lower Szamos? How could he, when he had never heard the sound of a cello through the open window of a one-story house: the sound of the bow pulled by an unseen gentleman, playing for himself alone, just before the evening church bells begin to peal from the Danube side?”

***

So there is the problem of Krúdy's Magyar language. There is the question of his place in the history of Hungarian literature. And the question of his place in European, and world, literature. Allow me to turn to what I think are the essentials of these questions before I return to the language problem.

More than sixty years after his death two considerations are indubitable. The first is that Krúdy was one of the greatest writers, if not
the
greatest writer of Magyar prose. The second —not unconnected with the first—is his unclassifiability.

The recognition of Krúdy's importance within the ranks of the greatest Hungarian prose writers developed slowly, and perhaps erratically, but this recognition is no longer questionable. During his lifetime the extraordinary significance of his style and the quality of his talents were asserted only by a few of his greatest contemporary authors. Then during the last half- century as more and more of his books were reprinted, many scholarly and critical essays and monographs about Krúdy appeared. One main result of this is that we have now a rather clear view of the successive phases of his oeuvre. (Note that because of the staggering quantity of his writings there can never be a complete Collected Works of Krúdy; and that despite the most assiduous work of researchers a complete and precise bibliography of Krúdy's published pieces will not be possible either.)