Oliver VII

TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

ANTAL SZERB’S LAST NOVEL, written just two or three years before his appalling death in 1944, is his most thoroughly genial. The sly wit, benign good humour and capacity to surprise us at every turn are not new to his writing, but the sunniness of its view of humankind is. Devised in a world of tramping jackboots, the setting and tone have more in common with the Bohemia of The Winter’s Tale than with Hitler’s Bohemia-Moravia. Humankind may be venal, self-deceiving and self-important, and things are never quite what they seem, but there is not a harsh word in the whole book. Indeed, readers coming to it by way of Szerb’s acknowledged masterpiece, Journey by Moonlight (1937), might be somewhat disconcerted by its apparent frivolity. Certain themes will of course be familiar, as will the subtle and pervasive irony, but gone, apparently, are the darker spiritual questionings, the confrontation with inner demons, the brooding sense of psychological determinism; and the manner is now unswervingly playful. What, such readers might wonder, has become of the writer’s high seriousness?

Those, however, who arrive by way of his first novel, The Pendragon Legend (1934), might find it a natural development of Szerb’s earlier, more nonchalant ‘neo-frivolist’ style, his practice of exploring real philosophical questions through the most seemingly irresponsible means. In Pendragon the trick was to parody different forms of popular (English) fiction, and play them off against each other to explore the instability of the self. Oliver VII takes this theme a step further. Licensed perhaps by his reading of Pirandello, Szerb now focuses on the connection between role-play and inner identity in a world where illusion and reality are inextricably confused. As with Pirandello, the formal artifice of the production carries the theme. Venice is treated so stagily that ‘at times the whole scene seems to wobble’. Every major character hides behind some form of disguise — not least the royal hero who, oppressed by convention, plots a coup against his own throne, goes into exile, moves effortlessly into the role of confidence trickster, and ends up impersonating himself. But Szerb is no mere imitator of the Italian illusionist. Whatever casual resemblance there may be to Henry IV, the novel serves a very different vision of the world. What Oliver learns about the self looks not back but forward to the French existentialists, as well as insisting on less fashionable notions of responsibility and integrity.

In fact it is to the preoccupations of Journey by Moonlight—both overt and hidden — that Oliver more directly speaks. The parallels are so many and so pointed it is hard not to see the later novel, for all its lightness of tone, as a return to unfinished business. The progress of the young King sheds more than a passing light on what happens to Mihály, the protagonist of Journey by Moonlight. Both begin as misfits who feel stifled by convention, yearn for the ‘real life’ of the world ‘beyond the fences’ and contrive to escape by characteristically underhand means. Finding themselves in Venice, they head for its dubious underside in quest of adventure. Events force them to take stock of who they are, what they really want, and where their loyalties lie, and they are forced to choose — between two women, and whether to return to the old life. But whereas Mihály meekly submits to being fetched home ‘like a truanting schoolboy’, Oliver goes back for his own, distinctly honourable, reasons.

The intimate connection with the earlier novel is confirmed by a steady stream of allusions. A character lost in the ‘narrow little backstreets’ of Venice imagines the water swirling blackly in between them, as if ‘still heaving with the forgotten corpses of past ages’—a note more appropriate to the morbidly nostalgic hero of Journey. More usually these echoes are given a farcical twist, as when rotund little Pritanez, the corrupt Finance Minister of Alturia, locked in a room in circumstances of comic indignity, is heard complaining from afar. The description evokes that wonderfully mysterious moment in Journey when Mihály is enchanted by the sound of wailing from behind a wall: ‘There was a profound, tragic desolation in the song, something not quite human, from a different order of experience.’ The echo in Oliver VII verges on self-parody.

Themes are echoed too, only to be re-examined. To take just one example: the adolescent theatricals which, in the earlier novel, shape the adult lives of all their participants like a destiny, are replaced by a set of altogether more adult games, played for different purposes and to entirely different effect. Oliver’s various role-plays are entered into deliberately, with an ever-watchful eye on the consequences. Through them he acquires a fund of insight into both the world and himself and, in distinct contrast to Mihály, he comes to accept the role he has been allotted in life. For him, a man defines himself by doing what his situation requires.

In Oliver VII, Szerb is also seeing off demons that haunted both Mihály and his own younger self. The moral, psychological and indeed sexual confusions that Journey holds up for such unsparing scrutiny, in all their pathos and absurdity, had a painful resonance for their creator. Beneath the surface of the 1937 novel swarms a vigorous underlife of private reference. Mihály, haunted by the dead Tamás, the aloof, pale, fastidious young man for whom he once entertained clearly homoerotic feelings, is very much an alter ego of the writer himself. In real life, at the age of 18, increasingly troubled by his feelings for a schoolmate called Benno Terey, Szerb wrote a novella entitled Who Killed Tamás Ulpius? In it, as Csaba Nagy has shown, he attempted to exorcise once and for all the ambiguous elements in his love for the young man. The tale commits in effect a double murder, of the beloved person, now seen as a malign influence, and of the youthful Szerb himself: it is in fact a kind of joint suicide, one which finds its direct echo in Journey. The 1937 novel seems to suggest that Szerb, both as a Catholic and a newly married man, like Mihály, on his honeymoon, felt the need for an even deeper understanding of what happened, and perhaps a more thorough purgation. So steely is the intelligence at work that the issues are left, in the final chapter, clarified but unresolved, and the hero’s ignominious return to Budapest is yet another self-betrayal, another defeat. The ending of Oliver VII is in direct contrast. While it too leaves us with lurking ironies and unanswered questions — every page of the novel presents a new surprise, and there are signs, for example, that Princess Ortrud may not long remain the convenient ingénue she has so far appeared — Oliver, unlike Mihály, does achieve a capacity for moral action to match the insight he has gained into his own divided self and divided loves, and his relationship with the now-forbidden lover ends in a scene of real dignity.

Oliver VII, then, far from a mere afterthought to Szerb’s more ‘significant’ novels, is a source of new understanding of them. Indeed it is only when the three novels are taken together that the prevailing spirit of his art can be fully understood. Over the eight years his values have not so much changed as clarified, and Oliver VII is in some ways their most direct expression. The ‘neo-frivolism’ alluded to in Pendragon can now be seen as the subtle business it is. Szerb nowhere expands this concept into a formal philosophy — that would hardly have been in the spirit — but its implications are many and various. Its essence was caught by the religious historian Károly Kerényi, who said of the writer that “he never took himself seriously”. This was more than a compliment; it exactly reflected the value Szerb attached to the ‘self’ as in ‘self-interested’ and ‘self-important’. If personality is plural — as Freud, and Pirandello, knew, and Pendragon wittily demonstrated — then the different selves that make it up will include some very odd bedfellows. For Szerb’s mentors, if that is what they were, the consequences are potentially tragic: reality is unknowable, and the poor battered ego is locked into a hopeless struggle for stability. Szerb turns that conclusion on its head. Since life, for him, is a joyous, miraculous thing, and love not entirely an illusion, the instability of the ‘self’ is in fact a form of release. Its inconsistent nature, and the endlessly ingenious strategies it devises to keep its end up, are necessarily comic. The art that grows from this realisation is too benign for satire, too shrewd for sentimentality; it pulls off that almost impossible trick of accommodating a disillusion bordering on cynicism with an amused, indeed delighted, acceptance of the world with all its faults. Its origins may lie as much in Szerb’s religious predisposition as in any psychological theory, but the message it sends out was not a bad one for its time.

In October 1942, the questions of identity and loyalty that feature so strongly in Szerb’s fiction took a new and urgent form. A lifelong Catholic and a sincere if somewhat free-thinking Christian, he found himself reclassified as a Jew (by descent) and therefore an alien in the land of his birth. Religious affiliation was no longer a defence. Now it was his turn to choose: between living out the role he had been so cruelly allotted, and the chance to flee. At first he simply clung to hope, while his scholarly works were banned, and Oliver, passed off as a translation from the English of a supposed A H Redcliff, sank without trace (his widow kept it in a drawer for the next twenty years). He lost the right to teach in his university; was summoned for periods of forced labour. Next came the yellow star and the ghetto. Ahead lay the death camps. He was presented with repeated opportunities to escape; someone arranged an academic post for him at Columbia University. Each time he sadly but firmly declined. Some of those close to him, such as the poet Agnes Nemes Nagy, thought he acted from naive optimism, misplaced idealism or the misguided notion that his fame as a scholar and writer gave him exemption; and those factors may have played some part. But there was also a real commitment to Hungary and to his work there (“How can I teach students who haven’t read their Vörösmarty?”); and, even more, an unshakeable loyalty to those he loved. In 1944 he was officially granted permission to emigrate, but stayed because the Arrow Cross threatened reprisals against his wife. Similarly, just weeks before his horrific death in January 1945, he rejected help because his younger brother was in the same camp. On another occasion, he simply refused to leave if it meant abandoning his old colleagues and friends Gábor Halász and György Sárközy. (It made no difference. They survived not much longer than he did.) Friends wrote of the ‘mood of resignation’ that came over him, and the way he continued to put others first, to think of their needs when his own prospects were becoming so dark. It is impossible not to connect these attitudes with the values enshrined in his books, not least Oliver VII. Indeed, almost all the qualities that made Antal Szerb such a remarkable human being seem to find expression in his radiantly benign last novel.

LEN RIX

August 2007