Journey by Moonlight

TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

IN 1991 a friend placed in my hand a slim novel entitled Utas és Holdvilág. “You must read this,” he insisted. “This is the novel we all read as students. Every educated Hungarian knows and loves this book.” I too fell under its spell. The gently ironical tone, the deceptive casualness with which the story unfolds, the amused scepticism playing on every variety of pretension, inspired an immediate trust. That trust deepened as the quality of the writing became apparent. The opening scene, moving between the Grand Canal of Venice and its seedy back-alleys with their melancholy view of the Island of the Dead, typifies Antal Szerb’s gift for loading details with an almost symbolic resonance. Mihály’s little escapade neatly prefigures the larger action that will follow, defines the terms of the conflict, and establishes the faintly surreal tone with its constant hint of irony.

This irony, distinctively Middle-European in character, operates on every level. First, as with Jane Austen at her most sly, Szerb’s authorial voice constantly mingles with that of his hero, repeatedly wrong-footing the reader to leave him peculiarly vulnerable to events. Then there are the ironic perspectives imposed by the neatly symmetrical plot, with its parallels and contrasts, each a logical consequence of Mihály and Erzsi’s deeply paradoxical marriage. Such irony goes beyond mere technique, investing everything with a disturbing ambiguity. Mihály is both anti-hero (as often noted) and hero. His actions are immoral, absurd, farcical, yet somehow our sympathies are never quite alienated. Some principle at the core of his being calls to us. His progress is both a collapse into adolescent disarray and, in its own way, a genuine spiritual journey, though pursued ‘by moonlight’ and leading to inevitable defeat. However daft his actions, he has an attractive intelligence, a surprising capacity for self-honesty, a certain reckless courage in pursuing his wild quest. Its predictably wry conclusion discredits an entire social structure, that of “the fathers, the Zoltáns, the whole punitive middle-class establishment”. Mihály is truly one of those “failures and misfits of a civilisation by which we best understand its weaknesses”.

This is novelistic art of a high order. The man who produced it was no less remarkable. Born in Budapest in 1901, he lived through perhaps the most traumatic years of Hungarian, indeed European, history. Just seventeen when the Empire collapsed in military defeat, his student years saw the bloody communist revolution of 1919, foreign occupation, the ‘white terror’ and the Second World War. His technically Jewish ancestry and his lifelong stance against fascism attracted mounting official persecution from the age of thirty-seven, and he died horribly, at forty-three, in the forced-labour camp at Balf. Yet little of this is reflected in his major writings, or indeed the man himself: life-loving, playful, a brilliantly ironical but never cynical mind, more in keeping with the eighteenth than the twentieth century. A cradle Catholic (the family were, like most Budapest Jews, entirely assimilated), educated in a Piarist seminary, he became the quintessential Hungarian man of letters, not just admired but widely loved. The narrative of Journey by Moonlight coincides with rising fascism at home and abroad, and probes the national obsession with suicide, yet the touch is ever light, the focus personal and psychological. All his literary connections reveal a cast of mind humane rather than ideological, mystical rather than political, scholarly but boldly original in its interests and methods.

Those interests were wide-ranging. Antal Szerb was a lifelong Anglophile, an authority on the German, Italian, French and English traditions, and his enduring monument is, besides the fiction, a ground-breaking History of World Literature. As a despairing colleague wrote: “He knew everything”. The intelligence that pervades Journey by Moonlight is of an exceptional order: an intelligence not just of the head, but of the heart.

LEN RIX

March 2001