1. Poetry
1. Poetry
WHILE the avant-garde and népi ideology affected the development of poetry in the inter-war period to a considerable extent, the traditions of Nyugat—a high degree of craftsmanship and the lack of direct political engagement—also survived, and there emerged two generations of poets whose revolt against their predecessors took place without actually breaking with the cherished ideals of Nyugat. These ideals included first of all a deep attachment to polgári humanizmus. Humanism, unlike the various political creeds of the inter-war period, implied a lack of ideology, and a rejection of all kinds of violence; a polgári humanista poet would not subscribe to any ideology which advocated the happiness of mankind through violent means. Consequently, the later Nyugat poets were immune to the infection of national socialism, a disease which took numerous victims from the népi camp in the late 1930s. At the same time, they also rejected the creed of socialism, for they were believers in solid middle-class values (hence their epithet: polgári), which they equated with the ‘universal’ and ‘eternal’ values of mankind. From this moderation in political attitudes, it also followed that they were less prone to nationalism; on their scale of values national consciousness occupied a relatively insignificant place.
Yet they often found their predecessors too pompous, too pre-occupied with technical brilliance, and perceived too many pretences in their attitude to humanistic ideals. Most of these poets consequently broke with the cult of beauty, with formalism and conventional self-expression. Those poets who were born in the belle épogue preceding World War I are conveniently termed the second and third generations of Nyugat. Most of them lived to see the horrors of World War II, and after the Communist takeover they were silenced in the years of Stalinism, reappearing on the literary scene during ‘the thaw’ and after the revolution of 1956. *
Some of the younger poets, such as Sándor Weöres, who made their debut on the eve of World War II and displayed the full extent of their creativity only in the post-revolutionary era, are discussed in Chapter XXV. This arrangement is, of course, subjective and arguable.
The oldest poet of the second generation was József Fodor (1898–1973). Born and brought up in Transylvania, Fodor’s road to disillusion and pessimism led through. war and revolutionary experiences, emigration and unemployment. His fertile imagination created luxuriant imagery; his inspiration was nearly always romantic. His instinctive rebellion found no practical aims, hence his disappointment with the working-class movement. A militant humanism, however, directed against the authoritarian state, survived continuously in his poetry into the 1950s. His early revolt was a role and a mask, in spite of its imposing qualities (Gasping Woods, 1927; Write it on the Leaves of a Tree! 1931). In the late 1930s anti-fascism became the dominant theme of his verse (Without Harmony, 1937); his castigating voice, his prophetic vision of doom and suggestive images of discord are documents of an inhuman age. After 1945, for a short time Fodor believed in the advent of a new, better world—he celebrated, for example, the dead of the Soviet Army who had come to die for the liberation of Eastern Europe (‘Red Tombstones’, 1945), but the advance of Stalinism made him withdraw into inner opposition, with the lesson that a poet should be true only to himself, a notion which characterized his last creative period (Witness to Decency,1962).
The most original poet of the second generation was Lőrinc Szabó, who has never achieved popularity, for he was a ‘poets’ poet’—his narcissistic sensitivity, self-analytical intelligence, and inherent separateness from the ordinary pattern of human ambition appealed only to the few. Born on 31 March 1900 in a lower middle-class family in Miskolc (a large industrial town in Northern Hungary), Szabó attended the University of Budapest but never completed his studies. It was Babits who noticed the brilliant technique of the young poet’s early efforts, and soon a master–pupil relationship developed between them. Szabó spent two years as the Babits family’s guest, and his first volume Earth, Forest, God (1922) bears witness to Babits’s influence. At the time of avant-garde experimentation, Szabó wrote with classical restraint about bucolic landscapes, avoiding the expression of personal experiences at all costs. What gives these poems a certain uniqueness is a vibrant restlessness oscillating behind the façade of harmony between form and content. Beauty and happiness appear in these poems only as vague daydreaming. Szabó revels in the abundance of adjectives, his Dionysian temperament is unable to come to terms with the limitations of form imposed on his verse.
When he became a staff-reporter on a Budapest evening paper in 1921, his apprenticeship with Babits came to an end. His new volume Caliban (1923) is marked by a mixture of poetic styles; his revolt against Babits is accentuated by an instinctive attraction to Baudelaire and Ady, a diabolic joy over man’s inclination to make a fool of himself, and a belligerent attitude to set a ‘blown-up ego’ against an ageing and corrupt civilization. For indeed, the poetic message of the volume conveys the conflict between instinct and intellect (‘Burn the books, Caliban!’), rural tranquillity and bustling city life (‘Curse the city and flee!’) and the individual versus society (‘We live in an iron age and there is nothing worth saving!’). He turns against the traditions of his Christian upbringing with the same rage (‘My Home, Christian Europe’), yet his escape from tradition brought him no joy of pagan freedom; there is in Szabó a fundamental, secret alliance with his enemy; he needs him, he is indebted to him. The best piece in the volume is a long poem narrating the fate of some fifteenth-century Albigensians who were rounded up in their caves, and all of whom perished, except for a few who were sent to the galleys (‘Lament for our Brothers’). Szabó uses the dialogues of the last three surviving slaves on the galley to evoke the tragic atmosphere of the event in fragmentary yet effective images, bearing witness to his visionary power and his ability to eliminate superfluous material. The result is a ballad-like composition whose impact is forceful.
It is the theme of technological civilization that is carried over into his next volume (Light, Light, Light, 1925). Szabó now attempts to identify himself with the object of his hatred; throbbing modern life pulsates in the rhythm of these poems, using the technique of expressionism and simultaneism; there is no linear sequence of thoughts, but a chaotic awareness of notions and exclamations only. The best example of his expressionism is ‘Ode to the Port of Genoa’. A volume of aggressively expressionistic poems followed: The Masterpieces of Satan (1926), which reveals him as a highly neurotic person wrapped up in the meaninglessness of things: ‘Poison! Pistol! Under the express-train! / Slit your rasping / throat, you madman!’ (‘Poison! Pistol!’). Szabó’s anarchistic revolt came to an end with this volume; the next stage of his creativity, lasting from the late 1920s to 1945, displayed marked efforts to describe reality in terms of the tangible world.
The volume You and the World (1932) is full of disenchantment, agnosticism, and psychological self-analysis. Humans are filthy, and filthy bodies cannot produce clean thoughts. Virtue and vice are relative; truth is a question of viewpoint. The certainties of the mind are self-deception. Only the laws of instinct and self-interest remain operative, and only a temporary liaison is possible between the sexes, for it is a ‘fleeting pleasure’, a ‘merciful drug’, or a ‘secret duel of two self-interests’. He discovers an ‘inner infinite’ in individual biological existence; it is a microcosmos where totality is found. Yet his solitude is frequently a source of consolation against despair. ‘Sleep off your ideals’ (‘Inside Your Skull’) Szabó declares; or ‘I am covered by solitude, as an apple is by its skin’ (‘Solitude’) he reports, as if observing and describing a natural phenomenon. Some of the poems in Separate Peace Treaty (1936) suggest complete nihilism (e.g. ‘Insane Truth’); but a restless and exploring mind like his had to find a way of avoiding a dead end. Assisted by stoicism and oriental philosophy, he grasped the significance of everyday reality; his unadorned and terse language gradually changed, his vocabulary came to contain familiar lower-middle-class clichés or even argot expressions. The best pieces in the volume are, however, the ‘Lóci’ poems, written about, or addressed to his son, revealing a Szabó who, like a child, has lost his way in the maze of life.
Yet it was not innocence which Szabó admired in children, it was their irresponsibility, lawlessness, and subversive happiness; he sought justification for revolt against social mores, for he had always rebelled against moral values. Moreover he discovered dialectics for himself with the help of oriental masters; not only was there the other side of the coin, but both assertion and negation could be true at the same time, and in his poetry Szabó attempted to bridge these contradictions in an effort towards achieving synthesis. His accumulated disgust with the complex selfishness and inanities of human existence paralysed his efforts in Struggle for a Festive Day (1938), and in the new poems of his Collected Verse (1943); in this last work Szabó often simply repeated himself, as if inspiration had begun to subside. He rewrote a great many former poems for the Collected Verse, and the new variants frequently appeared to be paraphrases of the former version.*
An example from the poem ‘Imaginary Journeys’: ‘I am everything! Celestial battles, / lie, sunshine, iceberg, truth.’ (Original version) ‘I am my imagination: celestial battles / all my desires and dreams are truths.’ (Altered version)
After 1945 Szabó was ostracized for a time for his alleged cult of violence, and he reappeared on the literary scene with a lyrical autobiography, Cricket Music (1947), consisting of 352 sonnets. * These poems indicate the beginning of a third and last period in Szabó’s artistic development. The tone is always reflective; the poet consciously escapes from the worries of the present, and in the rarefied air of happy memories Szabó is able to achieve harmony and an inner peace of mind. The sonnets alternate between lyric and narrative poetry; events are told, re-lived, and condensed into a series of miniature self-portraits, and Szabó’s aloofness lends them unity.
Szabó later added some more sonnets by way of a lyrical epilogue (1957) making the total number 370. He wrote 18 lines in couplets, departing from the formal division of an octave and a sestet, with the argument that the extra lines concluded and cemented the structure of his particular message.
In the 1950s Szabó made his living by translations. He inherited from his masters and cultivated a keen sense for the art of translation, worthy of the traditions of the first generation of Nyugat poets. Before publishing his own verse, during and after his apprenticeship with Babits, he had translated Baudelaire, Omar Khayyam, Coleridge, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and his best translations were published in Eternal Friends (1941; a second collection: 1958). The sheer output of his translations is remarkable in itself; Szabó was obessed with philological accuracy, yet the finished product always carried the hallmark of the genuine artist. The same is true of his translations in the 1950s when he could not publish freely, and earned a living by translating various poets, or whatever was ordered from him by the state publishing houses.
His last work is a sonnet-cycle comprising 120 pieces, The Twenty-sixth Year (1957), a lyrical requiem for his deceased sweetheart, the best love-poetry Szabó ever wrote. It is the natural history of a love affair, and is free from sentimentality, for Szabó’s mystic interpretation of love provides catharsis and he discovers the beauty, richness, and fullness of life while contemplating his mistress’s death. It is a fitting conclusion to the lifework of a poet whose renewed search for the true poet’s point of view of the bleak human condition often created painful disenchantment and mental agony for him, but finally brought about serenity, harmony, and fulfilment through the memory of a genuine human attachment. In one of his last poems (‘While Listening to Mozart’, 1956), significantly, he decided to adapt the motto seen on an ancient sun-dial: Non numero horas nisi serenas. He died on 3 October 1957.
The impact of Babits’s poetic ideals proved to be of primary importance for many of the younger poets in the third generation. Town-born and bred István Vas (1910–1991), for example, conscientiously sought to follow existing traditions. A sensitive and intellectual poet, Vas occupied himself with minute observations of detail; his erudite verse-commentaries or elegiac meditations were marked by impeccable craftsmanship. Although he was completely uninterested in politics or national issues, Vas was confronted with the realities of the day in 1944 when, on account of his Jewish origin, he was persecuted. Consequently, the Soviet occupation of Hungary in 1945 was liberation for him in the truest sense. Yet his polgári humanizmus soon objected to what followed, the gradual subservience of literature after the Communist takeover.
Thus 1945 was a dividing line in his poetry, and his experiences helped him to perceive ordinary facts in relation to the long perspectives of history. His first volume of significance (A Moment in Rome, 1948) appeared after a journey in Italy; antiquity had contributed to his better understanding of his own day—his post-war sensibility confronts an Italian landscape or a Roman column, and his youthful conservatism is transformed into maturity. The mature Vas is a reflective poet whose individual memory is extended to include the collective memory of mankind. His relentless insistence on precision, however, remained a salient feature of his later poetry, together with the conspicuous absence of similes, and an attachment to reason, which seems to be a sensory organ of cognition with him. His desire for innovation came to the notice of his critics with his Underground Sun (1965), a work which contained ‘essay-poems’ operating on several levels of time, space, and consciousness. He connects apparently unrelated objects and facts. Meticulously precise descriptions are unexpectedly interrupted by reflections, meditation about eschatological issues are mixed with everyday, trivial events, like toothache. The resulting poetry attempts to express a system of relationships which make up the personality, real and imaginary, of the poet. Following the Nyugat traditions, Vas is an excellent translator, and by no means an insignificant prose-writer. His autobiography The Story of the Lyre (I. Troubled Love, 1964; II. Investigation Interrupted, 1967), a frank and unpretentious account of his own development, deserves special attention.
Anna Hajnal (1907–77) was noticed by Babits. Her early poetry is noteworthy for its musicality, and its main theme is love-ecstasy (Hymns and Songs, 1938). After the war she joined the ranks of ‘socialist-realist’ poets, a role which hardly fitted her former poetic ideals. Her later verse subsisted on war experiences, and was frequently inspired by folk-poetry and primitive cultures (Capricious Summer, 1965). László Kálnoky (1912–85), like Vas, followed in the footsteps of the Nyugat masters; his intellectual power; irony, and ability to create bizarre imagery, however, saved him from being a mere imitator (Garden of Shadows, 1939). György Rónay (1913–78) was a neo-Catholic poet, but religion always remained in the background of his intellectual verse. Rónay, like many of his contemporaries, rejected personal experience as inspiration for poetry. His moral sensitivity provided him with a sure guide in the treatment of all topics (You Speak About Me, 1942). As an editor of Vigilia, Rónay encouraged the Catholic trend in present-day Hungary, a not too loud, but distinctly audible, voice in the chorus of contemporary poetry. Like all the later Nyugat poets, he was an accomplished translator, particularly of French works, and a noted essayist whose expertise in his chosen field (late nineteenth-century and modern poets) is widely admired. Pál Toldalagi (1914–76) has been unduly neglected until recently, although his muted voice and delicate moods have always been vehicles for the genuine and deeply searching self-expression of an agonized spirit; ill–health prevented him from leading a full life during practically the whole of his adulthood. He sought and found comfort in Catholicism, and his poetry reflects a deeply felt guilt, and his struggle with the phantoms who eventually came to carry him off (Window onto a Last Judgement, 1948). Győző Csorba (1916–1995) is the youngest of the Nyugat poets; his original voice developed in the seclusion of his native Pécs in Transdanubia. He too prefers an intellectual approach to all his themes, which are varied, but never unusual. Yet his inspiration rarely lets him down, and the presence of the native landscape represents a terra firma in his poetic investigations of the world.
Finally, the unusual figure of József Berda (1902–66) should be included here, although his connections with Nyugat, as with any other movement, were transitory. He came from a working-class background, but without any of those deep scars for which many writers of low birth compensated through their whole lives. Of little formal education, Berda was an earthy figure among all those refined poets who were deeply engaged in expressing cosmic vibrations or complex sensibilities, with their perfect technique, and their eye on contemporary foreign models. He never held a proper job, or participated in literary life; his poetry was always in praise of man’s natural instincts, and about such simple joys as good food, lazing in the sunshine, or the general well-being of his body and soul. The source of this unsophisticated philosophy was his deep suspicion of general and lofty moral ideals, a suspicion reinforced by his having seen all the crimes committed in the name of humanity and of principles which were supposed to bring salvation to men. Berda’s poems were mostly in free verse, with frequent enjambement; he also wrote ironic and witty epigrams which became very popular.
