Books and Youth: An Elegy

Dear Friend,

Do not be angry that, following the habit from my youth, I turn to you with my little difficulties and look to you for an answer to a question which has, over these past months, grown ever more troubling and unsettling. Do not be alarmed — it is, of course, a question of literature; what else could it be?

I turn to you because you, in that great foreign city, at the very heart of things, perhaps see the situation more clearly than I do here, amid memories ten years old of Western Europe, grown a little dusty, my intellect already somewhat moth-eaten, quietly and apprehensively. I do not know if it is hopelessly obsolete — this settling down to write a literary letter on a literary question, and the fact that this question still has, as I might say, a biological importance for me: existential, I would have called it five years ago, but today even that is a thoroughly moth-eaten expression, and it is precisely this that is the point.

But do not misunderstand me: I do not wish to raise the banal question of whether the literary attitude has not had its day (literature as a way of life, taken as a whole). If there is one thing in which I am certain, if there remains anything to which I can apply that solemn expression, 'my sacred faith', it is faith that Literature is inevitable and eternal in human terms. I believe that in the most remote ages to come, far beyond the New Zealander who gazes so meaningfully upon the ruins of St Paul's Cathedral in London, beyond the rubber-and-electricity happiness of the technical utopias and the egg-and-bottle unhappiness of the biological anti-utopias, right to the very last man, who will sob out his solitude in some literary formula beneath the ever more incomprehensible stars, there will always live in man that something which we call, pars pro toto, Literature.

But this is not the point — though of course I cannot, or, more honestly, do not wish to, set out in a few clear sentences what the point actually is; I still believe, and this too is the stubborn sin of our generation, that things are not so simple, and if I stated it clearly I should already have been misleading about the problem: not perhaps its essence, but that supplementary element, that accompanying overtone, that atmospheric corollary, that je ne sais quoi, which is so much more essential than the essence. So be a little patient, and allow me to set everything out in chronological order, somewhat in the manner of an autobiographer; I can assure you in advance that there will be no childhood tea-drinking on this occasion, and I have no intention of making sensational revelations about my mother.

It began thus... or rather it did not begin at all, because I have always written and read, practically from the moment of my birth (I was a bespectacled infant, as you can imagine), so that to say exactly where it began is difficult. Yet I remember clearly one great moment of initiation; with that I shall begin. In the last year of the World War, I was seventeen, spending the summer at Mária-Besenyő. One fine day it came to me that I had managed to write a poem which – so I felt – imitated the tone and rhythm of Babits Mihály's early verse rather well. I was perfectly well aware that the poem was not good and that I was not yet a poet. Nevertheless an ecstatic happiness overcame me; to this day I feel that I was spiritually born at Besenyő, on that day, as Blake was born when he first encountered the writings of Swedenborg.

For a full year before this I had struggled and floundered and been ashamed before contemporaries who had matured earlier, because they already understood what I had not yet grasped – 'modern' poetry, the poetry of the Nyugat. Now, all at once, the secret disclosed itself to me; I understood it with the highest kind of literary comprehension: active receptivity.

The moment when the kingdom of modern poetry opened before me was so beautiful that, whenever I think of it, I am so moved that I must quote, and as a mark of my reverence I quote here the greatest, Keats, who, when he first read Homer, likened himself to the soldiers of Cortez, as they first beheld the Pacific Ocean:

...and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

A peaceful ocean opened before me, a South Sea of enchanted islands: the poetry of Ady and Babits, Móricz, Szomory, the whole of the Nyugat, then the kindred foreign poets — Hofmannsthal and Rilke, Thomas Mann, and later, when I began to know something of English and French, Swinburne and Wilde, Baudelaire and Verlaine. First of all the poets, the verses. I was young; and yet even now I hold poetry to be the highest plane of literature and of human existence altogether. At the time I understood the foreign poets only very imperfectly, but that only heightened their enchantment. Of youth one ought to say with a sigh: 'O, to read Baudelaire once more as I did at eighteen!' It meant more than first love. Inside the half-understood, quarter-understood verse, I glimpsed all the secrets of the modern sensibility; such lines were the treasure islands of the South Sea of my youth:

Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau...

Today this says nothing to me, or rather, only as much as its sense and its musicality say, but then it contained somehow every sweet mystery: unattainable sinful loves, imperial arrogances, historical visions, rare and precious nervous ailments and perversities, unapproachable elegances, distant Parises and Londons, the future.

For it meant this as well. In my own history, modern literature was one with the rebellion which every intellectual person must pass through — protest against the adults, against the existing order of things, the demands of the individual. The rebellion was a moral, or rather an amoral, rebellion: the smashing of stone tablets, the search for a new ethos. I confess, with some blush, that at this period I was chiefly educated by Merezhkovsky's then-fashionable Leonardo da Vinci and by the writings of Wilde: the idea of the Renaissance (and what a captivating word "renaissance" already was!), the cult of beauty and antiquity; the new law within me took shape around these, the life lived for beauty. To live for beauty meant then to set oneself against everything else, against every Christian and bourgeois scale of values. This, in my eyes, was modernity itself: decadence, satanic velleities, Beyond Good and Evil, and dandyish superiority. Dorian Gray, if you still remember him, poor thing.

I felt that I was swimming in the pull of a great world current: every intellectual phenomenon I encountered at that time proclaimed the rights of individuality — Babits Mihály's poetry, the philosophy of Nietzsche, the "perceptions" of Impressionist painting, everything — and I was among those with whom the world moved forward, while the sluggish philistine mass was left behind. I still believed unconditionally in progress and felt myself borne along by its first wave. That a World War was in progress I noticed as little as a maniacal humanist might notice that the landsknechts had burnt the city, while he, on ecstatic nights, was arriving at the discovery of how to write in Ciceronian Latin.

I woke only when the house had already been pulled from under me. What I had felt to be modern – the fin-de-siècle mood of the world – collapsed at precisely the moment when I was living through it. By the end of the World War, the truly modern people were already smiling at the harmless aesthetic worldview, at toothless l'art pour l'art: they were revolted by dandyism; the objective idealism of the phenomenological school had begun to bury subjective philosophy; collectivist crazes were burying individualist ones; and activist muscle-flexing was burying decadent refinement.

All this, little by little, I conceded as well. I know now that what ended then was indeed a great and distinguished unity of style. The marvellous age of Nietzsche and Rilke, Ady and Van Gogh, Rodin and Reinhardt, the iridescent dazzling twilight of the nineteenth-century man. I know that what I had experienced as modern was only a very small portion of the intellectual spectrum of the age — but in 1920, in '21, I was ashamed even of that little, in the way that one tends, in youth, to be ashamed of one's outgrown enthusiasms. I gave up my art-history studies as well (for some fifteen years after that, I didn't so much as glance at paintings), I gave up classical philology at the university.

In the years immediately following the World War, I too felt that apocalyptic times had arrived, that everything had been turned upside down. Countries collapsed, my own dear countries: my homeland took a new and ghostly shape on Europe's new map; the monarchy, to whose citizenship I had been raised, disappeared from one day to the next, the enormous mammoth — so easily and, alas, so unmourned, as though some choral society had been dissolved; and likewise vanished our model, Hohenzollern Germany; and the most up-to-date wing of literature assured me that the great class of social and cultural production to which I belong, the bourgeoisie, would within minutes be transformed into a distasteful historical memory. But I was far too young to have any sense of the scale of the loss, or that in many respects I had been crippled for life; I felt only that on the ruins a new world would certainly now be built, a fantastic world, to be mapped not by the adults, in which everything would be possible, the world of the young, the triumphant empire of eight-legged calves and singing comets was coming.

Everything the adults had written seemed immeasurably out of date in my eyes, with the exception of a rhapsodically selected two or three whom I regarded as "forerunners." Never was I so exclusive in my views as in those years. Good God, with what sovereign disdain we were able to dismiss the great men of the day, men we would later recall with tears in our eyes! The central thing, again, was the linguistic turn. We imagined that the new world would have to express itself in a new language: anarchic, comet-like, shattering the traditions of language, declaring war on rational and conventional connections, and perhaps on the sentence itself. With disgust we looked down on every piece of writing that was satisfied with the obvious, the everyday, the normal modes of expression. We must find a new expression for everything, we said; the writer must not convey his meaning in an intellectual, discursive manner, but must project it, in images that arise as visions, into the receiving soul, only the image, only the image, the hieroglyph is the genuine thing, the new thing is the artistic.

My writings were appearing by now, and I was proud that Osvát Ernő received my new poems with ever greater head-shakings and declined to publish precisely those which I considered my best: for in my youthful blindness I regarded even Osvát, the world's foremost "comprehender," as one of the adults, and his recoil from my work was my surest criterion that we were heading in the right direction, we, because by now several of us were writing in the hieroglyphic manner, poets who have since fallen silent, and among the more established we felt the best to be our honourable kin: Szabó Lőrinc, Sárközi. We were a small sect, a proud sect of mutual adorers, with a fantastic defiant Helicon before us. With those outside the sect we did not deign to speak, and as I look back now I think we must have been very happy, because to be a sectarian is the greatest joy on this earth: the sect is shared solitude, the deserted island on which people nevertheless live — the most perfect social arrangement. I am also convinced that Huxley writes truly in his latest book, when he argues that only a system of autonomous bodies of four to ten persons could save the world, if it can still be saved. We were profoundly earnest, as all sectarians are; the aestheticism and dandyish cynicism of my earlier years had completely fallen away; we were manly, pathetic, and for a time deeply religious, with the devoutness of church-goers. Several among us became monks — the most serious, the most valuable.

In my previous phase I had felt that I was "modern", that is, contemporary with my age, not left behind. Now I felt that I was ahead of the age; it might take decades before "the others" caught up and understood, I was avant-garde, an advance guard. This made the happiness of the sect yet more magnificent: this is what it is to stand on a mountain-top, this is what it must be to fly, the vertiginous intoxication of a magnificent pride.

I read everything that counted as avant-garde in foreign literature with feverish eagerness, and chiefly the writings of the German Expressionists. Unhappily, the majority of German Expressionists were hopelessly dilettante; their verse could not be read twice, and I settled upon their one great poet, Georg Trakl, about whom I began to write my first essay.

Then one summer I happened upon several back numbers of the Nouvelle Revue Française — the 1913 and 1914 volumes. I discovered with astonishment writers I had barely known by name: Gide, Claudel, Valéry Larbaud, Suarès. In these there was nothing programmatically avant-garde, as in the Germans, and yet they had achieved everything I was then seeking and desiring — and much earlier, long before Central Europe had noticed. Instead of the blind flailing of the Expressionists, there was Gide's action gratuite rendered in objective form; a new prosody, a new technique of comparison, a new play of associations, perfected with Latin elegance in Claudel's verse, whose lines followed one another as the sunlit, quiet waves of a sea follow upon the shore-sand. Life for life's sake, André Gide taught, and the ethic of the great moment that shakes one's whole being was far more truly avant-garde than l'art pour l'art had been before.

I understood neither the German Expressionists nor the great Frenchmen entirely, partly because it is indeed difficult to grasp the new style of a foreign language, and partly because the Germans wrote incomprehensibly by programme. And as for the French, even when I did understand them, I persuaded myself that I did not understand them fully, because divination mattered more to me than complete comprehension. Once again I had joys like those of reading Baudelaire — but what had then been only an instinct had now become an apodictic principle: I no longer considered as true poetry anything that could be understood immediately and completely. The tension of half- understanding was necessary; what the athletic effort is for other men, or the devouring of distance by the motor-car, that for me is the slow, gradual comprehension of a difficult poet.

After this I wrote less and less. The comprehension of literature came to mean ever greater excitement than the "practice" of it. I am, I think, more of a reader than a writer. In those years I came together, chiefly at the university, with members of my generation of similar temperament — with that not very fanatical sect which is nowadays praised and reviled as "the essay-writing generation."

It was then that I encountered the new literary science. Literary history had hitherto consisted, under the influence of the natural sciences, largely of dry data-collection and commentary; in those years it was transformed, under the inspiration of the new philosophy and poetry, into a creative activity. It was during this period that the writings of Gundolf and Strich spread among us; they wrote so beautifully about literature that what they wrote was frequently more beautiful and more resonant than what they wrote about. And once again they brought me the spell of half-understood things: new words, a new terminology. At that time the words: classicism, romanticism, fate, awe, primal experience, form, substance, etc., I felt as realities, not mere words, I was a realist in the medieval sense of the term.

As a consequence of the new terminology, the whole of literary history had to be begun again from the beginning. In the new language, the old findings became vastly deeper, more far-reaching, revealing larger connections. The language was again my central experience — the language which, this time, lifted things from the teeming world of Werden into the immovable, fixed-star heaven of Sein, and which by virtue of its very stylistic character amounted to an ethical commitment: the veneration of the stasis of eternal truths, in place of the dynamics of progress.

By way of literary scholarship I found myself once more in a sect: the company of the Hungarian Geistesgeschichte scholars, of Thienemann and Zolnai. This was no longer merely a sect but an externally acknowledged, feared, and attacked scholarly élite. So my life ran on, enriched from sect to sect.

It goes without saying that I turned with the greatest devotion to the poets who had built the new linguistic heaven, to old, holy Hölderlin and above all to Stefan George, the great love of my youth; today I shudder when I recall the intensity with which I venerated this poet who carved himself into a statue, this giant of intellectual pride and distance, the poet who came into the world expressly for the service of literary scholarship. At first I understood Stefan George even less than I had understood Baudelaire or the Expressionists. I did not understand a single letter of him. George's poems are, in fact, far more comprehensible than, say, the verse of Ady Endre; almost too easily comprehensible...

From 1924 onwards everyone again made the pilgrimage to Paris, as before the war. Everyone discovered that Paris was entirely different from what they had imagined on the basis of Ady Endre's poems, and with this discovery in our knapsacks we felt that we were the first truly Western European generation in Hungary.

With a fateful naturalness I now encountered the writers who expressed, in post-war Western Europe, what I needed and what was new: the French generation of Giraudoux and Paul Morand, and then the new English writers — Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, and their circle. During my years of wandering it was given to me once more to feel that everything was beginning anew in literature and in myself. My Georgean period, viewed in retrospect, seemed heavy, pathetic, and schoolmasterish; the ideas had ceased to be solemn German fixed-stars and had descended to dance at a whistle. Again it was the language that captivated me: Giraudoux's ironic prolixity, Huxley's deadpan wit, the directness of the English women writers, as though they were speaking simultaneously from within the reader. In this chattering style, following the winding paths of free association, distant, difficult, problematic things were uttered with breathtaking désinvolture — this style reminded one of that eminent Renaissance dancer whom Castiglione commends because, in the course of the dance, he lets his cloak fall, to show how little he is attending to the business as a whole. Heavy weights can be raised with an acrobat's gesture too, but it is more elegant to do so as though one were merely picking up a lady's handkerchief from the floor. A great deal can be fitted into a conjunction; at a sudden turn of the sentence, a prospect may open towards the infinite — to see the world in a grain of sand... Among the Hungarian writers it was at this time that I came to love so deeply the work of Márai Sándor, which conceals and yet contrives to lift the veil upon the metaphysical.

Yes, this is it, I thought; this is what I must learn; this is our vocation, we new Westerners — to remove the dignified and outmoded stiff collar of the Hungarian spirit and to teach it to walk in a beautiful, colourful, soft shirt. I am neo-frivolous, I said, proudly and with the spirit of a sectarian, and in private I took my frivolity no less seriously than I had taken Geistesgeschichte.

Monotonous as it may sound, I must once again declare that in the new Western writers too there was something I did not fully understand, and which they themselves were probably not fully clear about. Beyond the Joycean innovations of style, it is the miraculous that I have in mind. For it was the unsatisfied thirst of their possessed souls that made the new writers — believe it or not — frivolous and playful. They saw that the great seriousness of their predecessors had led nowhere, and tried a different approach. When St Francis of Assisi was released from prison, he made it a matter of principle to behave like a fool and was fond of standing on his head — and it was at this very time that the superhuman, surpassingly strict first Rule of the nascent Franciscan Order was taking shape within him. I do not wish to enlarge upon this now, but it will surely be clear to you too that from standing on one's head there is a straight road to Mount Alverna and the stigmata.

With eyes closed we run along mountain-tops
and our hearts for ever long for wonder...

The whole of my youth was spent waiting for some great, grand absurdity from which everyone would at once draw a breath of relief, some grotesque impossibility, the mere appearance of which would annul everything that sits upon our heads: that one must grow up, that one must earn money, that one must die, that one must be born... Once, in childhood, I somehow saw from the Andrássy út that a mountain had grown up in Buda, and I was happy because that meant no school the next day — something of that kind was what I awaited. Perhaps now, I thought, in the musing, beer-soaked solitude of London, perhaps now the moment has truly arrived. People will come to understand that wonder is a vital necessity, more important than daily bread.

The dream of the clowning English and French was myth — the fundamental and classical mode of expression, beside which all naturalistic fussing, observation, and portrayal of soul and society is so laughable. Leaving aside the daily problems and the annual problems, they sought the road to the eternal realities of the soul, and this is why the English wrote eccentric tales of ladies turning into foxes, of chimpanzees in love with their schoolmasters, of sparrows arguing in Greek, of the Good Lord dressed as a wine merchant, of well-bred elderly witches; this is why the French found their way back to the dream castle lost by Alain-Fournier, who fell in the war; this is why, in the novel of the Italian Bontempelli, the little boy is born of two mothers; and this is why the great river of Thomas Mann's oeuvre flows into the sea of biblical myth.

Beginnings and endings have a habit of meeting; the spirit is a serpent biting its own tail; late civilisation is in love with first culture, with the wolf-smile of the Apollo of Veii, with the immortal good humour of the Etruscan dead, carousing on sarcophagi that might as well be bridal beds. The end of vitalism is the comprehension and embedding of death within life. It was thus that I arrived at the last sect, with my Dávid-Ferencian faithful unfaithfulness, and Kerényi Károly was my last master, with the bold theories of the history of religions furnishing the final "thrills."

So it was. I have told my youth. All this was long ago; since then years have passed, since then all manner of things have happened to me — life, realities — but none of them has any bearing on this account. I left off at Kerényi and the Etruscans. Since then, nothing has happened. It is precisely this that I wish to speak of. Of this nothing. Since then I have read a very great deal, many beautiful poems and books, but...

In the West, meanwhile, the fashion of wonder-seeking frivolity has passed. (I know now, alas, that it was only a fashion.) Thick books are once more being written about the lives of bourgeois families; some win the Nobel Prize, some do not. Neo-frivolism has been defeated by eternal naturalism, by neo-tedium. Geistesgeschichte came to an end with Weimar Germany, and I believe the history of religions will gradually come to an end as well. The last Hungarian sect, Kerényi's Sziget, has drifted away. Yet though the writers produce as diligently as a termite queen (I saw one once in a cinema), who lays out her hundreds and thousands of eggs in rhythmic motion, as though on an assembly line, hatching an entire army — still there is complete calm, nothing is happening.

Yes, you see — this is what I wanted to say. All this elaborate prologue was needed for so little. But I wished to show that I have always waited for the miraculous, and that literature has always, until now, arranged for me to be able to wait for a new miracle. This was all that my entire life was about. If a stranger reads these lines, he will evidently conclude that I am a superficial and snobbish aesthete, that I have fallen for every literary fashion in turn, that I am a literary dandy who falls ill if he has to be seen in public with last year's novel. But you know that I changed, faithfully-unfaithfully, with every intellectual shift, because I was always seeking the true and the final, with ever-renewed naïve faith. I was waiting for something from literature — my salvation, let us say, for everyone is saved after their own particular fashion, and I was supposed to be saved through literature. I was not saved; but I spent the whole of my youth in a happy purgatory, because I always felt that it was only a matter of minutes before I should understand what I did not understand, and then Beatrice would lift her veil and the Eternal Jerusalem would be revealed to me. I was not saved — but thus it was better. Thus I was young. To be young means to wait for something.

And now, with anxiety, trembling, I look about me across the field of our language and the great languages, in search of something new and distant and incomprehensible to me. And in vain; I understand everything I read. I even understand the Surrealists — but where are the Surrealists now? There are one or two English-American poets whom I do not understand: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound — but I have the feeling that they are not worth understanding; besides, they are old uncles by now, not the outriders of some new sect. There are no sects at all any more. Duhamel, too, observes in his new book that the time is past when a new avant-garde journal appeared every six months. In the nineteen-thirties, avant-garde literature came to an end throughout Europe. Tell me, how did this happen, and why?

Look at our style. Once, with Maurras and Lasserre in our baggage, in fierce reaction against Romanticism, we desired that Hungarian literature should become classical. It seems that this wish has been granted. Hungarian prose style has assumed what seems to be a definitive form. We write as we learnt from the best of the Nyugat generation; those who come after us attack us for it, but they write in precisely the same way. Once I used to rack my brain over new expressions while writing; today I think: "now how does one say it?" I no longer take pleasure even in correctness of language, and I consult the Pesti Hírlap's language column with due caution. Today, whoever can write writes alike, and somehow it is the same abroad. This is very fine — the idiosyncratic crazes have ended, the extravagant style-romanticism has faded — but the New, whenever it comes, will still have to begin with a new style; every great historical turning-point has set out with new words and a new word-order, and of this there is not a trace anywhere.

Abroad too they feel that something is seriously wrong with literature. Nothing proves the profound banality of the problem better than the fact that even the League of Nations has occupied itself with poor literature — as effectively as it habitually deals with the affairs of persecuted minorities. I read that the minutes have just been published of the conference held by the Permanent Committee on Arts and Letters in Paris, 20–27 July 1937. Paul Valéry was naturally in the chair; contributions were made by Duhamel, Hazard, Madariaga, Jules Romains, and by those who habitually contribute on such occasions; Werfel and Charles Morgan participated in writing. (I do not know why Hungarians habitually fail to participate on these occasions.) Discussion included the writer's changed position, the dangerous competition of other modes of communication, the advance of quantity at quality's expense, the damage caused by economic barriers, and the necessity of freedom; on this last question a heated debate developed between the French and the Italians.

All these contributions, so far as I can see, locate the danger to literature in the growing indifference of the public. Duhamel, in his new book, complains that writers too have become commercialised; Herbert Read, in Poetry and Anarchism, complains that they have sold their souls to politics. But this is still the audience's role: it is the audience's doing if the writer politicises at the expense of his art. None of this touches the essential point. Literature, I know full well, is to a very great degree the function of economic and social forces; but in the end the spirit is nevertheless an autonomous thing, and if the manifestations of the spirit are sick, the sickness must be sought first of all within the spirit itself. The fault lies in the spirit; the spirit has fallen into some deep provincial lethargy and will not give birth — will not give birth to new, beautiful monsters.

Could I be mistaken? Is it possible that the New has already begun, and I simply do not know of it? It might well be so; most intellectual movements have reached me five or six years after their birth, which is the curse of our peripheral Hungarian situation. But I have never kept such close account of the literature at home and abroad as now; I read almost everything that interests me without delay. And still nothing, nothing. — Besides, it is no longer my business to discover the new. The young are here; it would be their turn now.

Yes, here is a new generation, at the most generational age, and it has no intention whatsoever of behaving as befits a new generation. It believes in no new ism upon which we might wave a weary elder hand; it admires no one whom we have not admired; it hates no one whom we have not hated; and if it sometimes does abuse us, it does so not for literary reasons and with a bad conscience. Yet this new generation is extraordinarily talented — at least in Hungary: its lyric poets are, on average, better than those of the preceding generation, more lyrical; its journalists create new forms; its scholars are formidably equipped. But where is the defiance, the sect, the slogan, the ecstasy, the "mania"? Where is something that I would need to learn from them — something that I finally cannot understand, something that would once more sweep me into the current of wonder-expectation? O young people, envied young people, why will you not become my teachers? Why is what suits me sufficient for you? Why have you not struck me dumb with some sudden, lunatic brilliance, with some linguistic water-miracle, with a voice that comes from afar and has never before been heard?

Tell me, how can this be? A Panic terror seizes me; at night I wake with a pounding heart: is it possible that the world is full of new beginnings and I simply do not notice them? Is it possible that my receptivity has burnt out, that the wonder-awaiting instinct has died within me? Is it possible that there is nothing wrong at all — only that I have grown old?

I cannot believe it. For I feel that I cannot go on like this — without expectation, understanding everything, without wonder. Dear friend, if you do not write to me soon about some magnificent avant-garde movement, some new unrest that is beginning to ferment out there, I shall — who knows? — learn Persian, so that I may once more enjoy the incomparably beautiful spell of half-understood things.