In that year 1913 in which the 42 year old Marcel Proust published the
first volume of his A la recherche
du temps perdu at his own expense, after a long and vain
search for a publisher, in that last year of peace, the first part of The
Crimson Coach, a novel by the 3 5 year old Gyula Krúdy, appeared in Hungary.
This coincidence seems strange today, and the inner relationship between Krúdy’s
life’s work and Proust’s great novel is as difficult to understand, indeed to
start with, it appears to defy explanation.
It is not the stories, the figures, the points of view or the way the
two writers structure their work that are similar but the manic and fruitful
poses they take up which are essential to their writing and which invite
stylization and self-stylization, and then principally the way both men feel
about time, the true subject of their epic. Both men liked to give the
impression they were amateurs, and both experienced time in a sort of centripetal
way, and not as a linear series, in the manner of earlier epic writers.
André Maurois tells that those who knew Proust welcomed the appearance
of Swann’s Way with the question: “Marcel Proust? The
little Proust from the Ritz?” Krúdy’s drinking companions
and various large-hearted ladies asked similar questions whenever the subject
was Krúdy’s literary activity. Both writers thought
it unworthy of a gentleman to take part in the business of literary life; both
needed the pose of the amateur as a stimulant which, given an extreme degree of
concentration, ensured ease, and a state of extreme sensitiveness, in other
words the ability to apperceive visions, to form them, and to formulate them.
It seems to be the case that there is some sort of connection between this
peculiar relationship to literature and a sovereign way of perceiving time,
which is linked with the rhythm and inspiration of memory. “My book is perhaps
a treatise on ‘novels of the unconscious’. I would not hesitate to call them ‘Bergsonian novels’ if I thought them that; but this would
not be a precise description.” Proust said. And Krúdy
noted on a piece of paper: “Our times are like a small railway station, in
whose waiting-room, on a cold night, we, freezing, sick, leaning on each other
for support, await a train that got stuck in a blizzard. And the train just
doesn’t want to arrive... Why then should we write about this time spent half
asleep, half dreaming, crowded together, and jostling for space? When the days
will have long departed, and today’s calendars will have faded, present joys
and sorrows will have become faint, then I too will surely find something among
the withered flowers of these years, which I will pick up with awe, like an old
love, and think about, as one falls into thought when one reads that someone is
no more whom one has loved once, long ago. As the present turns into the past
we shall even be able to count the buttons on a waistcoat better than now when
we are tête-à-tête with its greedy, hungry bones,” (Krúdy világa, “Krúdy’s world,” Budapest 1964 p. 214.)
Beginnings
Gyula Krúdy de Szécheny-Kovács, an
advocate in Debrecen, member of a family which in 17th century documents is on
occasion also called Crudi, fought in the Hungarian Honvéd army during the fight for freedom in 1848/49, was
promoted to captain, and moved to nearby Nyíregyháza,
where the former Honvéds of County Szabolcs chose him to be their chairman. His son, Gyula Krúdy, later advocate in Nyíregyháza, fell in love with his parents’ parlourmaid. Her name was Júlia Csákányi, and she was the daughter of a butcher, who did
not even own his own shop let alone a family tree. The union of the young
gentleman and the servant girl was, on October 21rst 1878, blessed by the
arrival of a healthy male child, also named Gyula Krúdy, which was not altogether right, being illegitimate
he should have borne his mother’s name, at least till 1895, when the couple
were married after all. Nine more children had followed the birth of the first
son, and this had persuaded the good advocate that his misalliance had a
delicate permanence.
When Gyula Krúdy,
the third of his name was born, Nyíregyháza had
24,102 inhabitants, a County Court, an Inspectorate of Taxes, an Office of the
Tobacco Monopoly, and a Grammar School. The man who taught Hungarian literature
at that institution also published a newspaper which, in 1892 printed a
short-story “Why did Cain kill Abel,” by his talented pupil, and there was
other evidence too, proving the extraordinary maturity of this fourteen year
old lad. “At the time I loved those angellike
creatures amongst women who did not have to be wooed too much. I was a hefty
lad and already in my earliest youth I used to lay flat cooks who weighed a
ton, to give them evidence of my devotion. A favourite passtime
of mine was to lie in wait in woods and cane-brakes and ditches like some
apprentice-highway man, and pounce on passing pettycoats,
and on vagrant Gypsy women of whom there were still quite a few in the Nyír, in those days. On moonlit nights I used to climb into
other people’s courtyards. There were some who were astonished that I wasn’t
beaten to death” (Krúdy világa, p. 7.) Thus Krúdy
wrote on his fiftieth birthday. He fought his first duel at the age of sixteen,
against the Town Clerk of Nyíregyháza, who, at a
dance had dared to make arrogant and tasteless remarks about the young man.
That same year Krúdy sent a few short stories to a
respected daily in Debrecen, who invited the author—the honourable chairman of
veterans, they imagined—to contribute regularly. A beardless youth appeared
instead of the ancient captain, but the newspaper world in those days had not
yet succumbed to deadly seriousness, and thus the school-boy turned into a
journalist. On the morning of his grammar-school leaving examination Krúdy returned to Nyíregyháza in
a large peasant cart filled with boon companions, and there after passing his
examination with C throughout, and a B in literature he was declared officially
mature.[1] Shortly afterwards he worked for a paper
in Nagyvárad (Oradea) which sent him to Budapest to
report the Millenary festivities.
The eighteen year old lad trod the pavements of the Seat of Government
and Royal Residence in the 1oooth year of Hungary’s existence, in the midst of
romantic festivities, and that same year his first book appeared “Elopement
from the barracks and other stories.” That’s if it ever appeared. Right to this
day noone has been able to lay his hands on a single copy of this
collection of stories, and a scholarly biography places it in the world of Krúdy legends. But the next year’s volume “The Nest is
Empty and other stories,” was reviewed in a number of papers. 113 books
followed. Many Krúdyologists claim to own 126 first
editions. Sceptics like to mention 80. Krúdy, who
raised Budapest gossip to the level of legend, of vision, of Dionysian
literature became a legendary figure himself, thanks to Budapest gossip, this
sweet and childishly allknowing chatter in a most
resigned manner.
Around the time when Krúdy moved to Budapest
the papers of the capital published a number of pretty short stories, signed Satanella, a young schoolmistress whose real name was Bella
Spiegler, and who was not only well-educated, clever
and charming, but also relatively small, dark, soft and plump. Krúdy stayed true to this type all his life. In 1899, aged
21 he married Bella Spiegler who was seven years
older than he, thereupon his father disinherited him, but this did not in the
least worry this selfconfident young man. He was
getting good money for books for the young, and this made him feel all the
surer of his worth as a writer and gentleman, “Gyula Krúdy is a modem writer, but in spite of his modernity he has
acquired a large public and he is sure of the love of his readers,” a critic
wrote in 1900, and another compared him to E. T. A. Hoffmann, when he was still
only 25.
Visions speak with tongues of Angels
Krúdy was 6 ft 3 inches tall, slim and powerful, noticeably silent, he
could hold his liquor, he was always well-groomed, often a spendthrift and even
more often broke; he used to carry his head slightly inclined to one side; as
mentioned he did not take part in literary life, first of all because though he
was interested in books that he liked to read, especially Pushkin and Dickens,
the same reason meant that he was well-educated, he nevertheless looked on his
craft, writing, as a cumbersome means which served to formulate certain images
so that the vision could so to speak be enjoyed with the palate, and then be
sold for as high as possible a fee, and secondly because he was far more
appreciative of a solid piece of beef, an understanding waiter, a quantity of
wine of good quality, and especially the happiness, which ladies gladly keep
ready for men with Krúdy’s capacities, than of soft
sentiments, literary fashions of any sort, and all wordy male enthusing of a
spiritual kind. Krúdy knew as little of true
friendship and of the feeling of love in general as of an abstract humanism,
and he was indifferent to the world as such. “He wanted to make money and he
wrote masterpieces instead,” Antal Szerb noted in his History of Hungarian Literature and Krúdy himself put the following words into the mouth of one
of the figures in The Crimson Coach.[2]
“Literature is a terrible poison. If men and women of the middle class
taste it, they become syphilitic. Writers are all impostors. They proclaim
their toil a royal profession, the most glorious of all. Yet strictly speaking
no one needs literature. People would be far happier without it. They would go
on getting bom and dying. Life, great and glorious,
has nothing in common with small, serried rows of letters. Writers, like some
secret conspiracy, have been poisoning the souls of people for centuries—so
that they could make a living themselves. Their tales and songs are only fit to
cause uneasiness and confusion in the human soul. And if the sweet poison of
literature has invaded a family, unhappiness is sure to follow, the wives of
writers are all unhappy women.”
He was not concerned with literature when he was not working, nor other
abstract things. He played cards, he went racing, he payed
court to women and even more often he let them pay court to him, he lived with
an intensity that ate him up, he was linked to the world of things by an almost
instinctive interest, he was uninhibited in arrogant observation and in action,
and uninhibited in the way he put things into words.
Thanks to his extraordinary constitution Krúdy
was capable of noting the most curious occurrences in hours of massive
drunkenness, occurrences which moved on the borderline of reality and dream,
but not only the visions, the process of work itself, the application and
self-discipline without which that astounding life’s output could never have
come into being were possessed by a mysterious demonology. Nietzsche’s words
about the Dyonisian being the eternal and original
power for art are confirmed by Krúdy’s example, but a
sentence by the unjustly almost forgotten Johann Georg Hamann
brings us closer to an understanding of the way Krúdy
worked: “To speak is to translate from the tongue of angels into the tongue of
men, that is thoughts into words, things into names, images into signs which
can be poetic or curiologic, historic or hieroglyphic
and philosophic or characteristic.” Krúdy who was
free of any ties to a linear perception of time, at the centre of his
experiences which mirage-like had taken off from the earth’s surface, so that,
distorted into the magnificient, no longer subject to
the force of gravity, they should float free as dreamscapes, as timeless worlds
in which a romantic courtesy rules, and tragicomic figures blow about, who don’t
feel wild pain or unrestrained joy, that Krúdy
“translated” in precisely the sense meant by Hamann.
In other words, his novels and tales don’t derive from any intention to
proclaim anything in parables, let alone directly, nor do they follow aesthetic
principles, or a will to compose. In Krúdy’s art
there is a more direct connection between vision and form, which could only
come about because the teller of tales left it to language, the only material
of his craft.
Krúdy’s sentences
are often incalculable adventures which are subjected only to the laws of
syntax, the rhythm of speech, and free association. According to Antal Szerb, when Krúdy is off on a trip whose aim cannot be guessed by
starting a sentence with for example: “So that—” the reader too is off on a
journey in his own memories . Thus Krúdy begins to
describe a lady, he reaches her eyes, and suddenly the sentence expands:
“A curious longing was in her eyes, as in those of a dreamy respectable
housewife who, in her youth had been payed an
unforgettable compliment by a drunken prince, who, exploiting her inexperience
had suddenly embraced her in a funny way at midnight mass, stroked her and
kissed her, and by the time the inexperienced spinster might have screamed
because of the unexpected attack, only sleighbells
could be heard from outside, where it was snowing.”[3]
Or, a self-absorbed melancoly couple in love,
goes for a walk in a wintry landscape:
“Those days of love are the unforgettable ones when neither knows for
sure what is happening right around them. Black hands on clocks move as fast as
windmills on the horizon. One can see people only from afar, the way a
librarian living amongst his folios in a medieval castle could see them through
the leaded windows;—there is a fair somewhere and people hasten to the fair
along the winding highway. Beggars in rags of many colours, rich gentlemen in
fancy clothes: oil and wine merchants with their two-wheeled carts; fat, rouged
women in coaches who with eyes befogged by desire and mouths dripping at the
corners stare at a slim tightrope walker; horse dealers in velvet trousers and
red waist-coats, swear and pour brandy into their miserable nags; an evil-eyed
grey haired thief carries a large loaf of bread on his back; while a young
pickpocket, in particoloured trousers, strides
along playing with the feather in his cap; young women lower their eyes as
noisy soldiers pass, thinking thoughts, for which the friar would consider
countless Our Fathers insufficient punishment.
Sometimes those in love see life this way, a long way from themselves,
and it does not even occur to them that street urchins are making rude signs
straight behind their backs.”[4]
It is truly not surprising that the historians of literature cannot
classify Krúdy’s work. Attempts were made to compare
him not only with Proust and E. T. A. Hoffmann, but also with Gogol, with
impressionist painters, and lately also with Herzmanovsky-Orlando;
he was called a precursor of Giraudoux, of Virginia Woolf, and of Julien Green; some time ago he was also considered a
somewhat opinionated imitator of Kálmán Mikszáth. It is certainly true that Mikszáth,
that sarcastic teller of anecdotes from the turn of the century whose
bitterness shows through his cosiness, had an initial influence on Krúdy. But the angeltongue of his
vision is audibly there in his first major novel: The Podolin Ghost, published in 1906.
Splendour and Misery
Five years later Nyugat (West),
the publishing house linked with the respected literary journal of the same
name, brought out the first volume of those stories which have Sindbad as their
hero, the Arabian Nights’ seafarer, an adventurer in the Krúdy
manner of course, who does not rove the high seas but the highways of a dreamt
up stalwart philistine world, in coaches and on foot, who sighs and pants while
he worships real and imagined women, who has a special liking for good cooking,
who meditates on life at the tables of old inns, who acts foolishly, repents
and then does it again, finally he parts from life, changes into a mistletoe
and then, even from the hereafter, he visits various ladies.
If the bibliographers have not lost their way amongst the Krúdy legends then we must look on The
Crimson Coach as Krúdy’s
fiftieth work. He, who belonged to no literary clique, a rogue elephant who
until then was considered as writing gentleman of some talent, an eccentric
whose physical strength and syntax, whose ability to hold his drink and
literary style, whose mastery of the art of love and epic talent, whose ability
with a sword and feeling for language, all deserved recognition, was now
enthusiastically welcomed by the new literature. Endre
Ady, the lyric poet, whom much divided from Krúdy, wrote in Nyugat:
“What a lachrymose, dear, splendid book this is all the same, just as he
wrote it, he who wrote it, a magnificent lyrical witness to the fact that
dreams make a modern Casanova passive. And if it’s not a novel, well then it
isn’t, but a brilliant X-ray of the psyche, taken at one of the most ornate
stages of that illness which is called youth. A diagnosis of the soul of the
artist, and a somewhat sweetish memory, full of the heart-ache of our lives in
Budapest ten years ago, our emotionalism, and of the nights through which we
dragged our youth. It is the work of an amorous, strong poet, whose nobility
makes him stand out, and this alone ensures him a long life in the esteem of
all those who want to find their vanished youth.” (Krúdy világa, p. 138.)
An understanding public shared the opinion of the critics, within a year
15,000 copies of the novel were sold and eight new editions have been published
since. The second part of the work, An Autumn Journey in a Red Mail Coach was
published in 1917, meanwhile Krúdy, who neither took
part nor any interest in the war, but retired to the wine-cellars and his
dreams, as an alleged war-correspondent, had published twenty more books,
amongst them The City of Budapest in the year
nineteen-fifteen whose title-page showed a one-legged
invalid pursuing a lady with the help of his crutches. That year Krúdy received the Francis-Joseph Prize of the city which
was the Seat of Government and the Royal Residence, which is only worth
mentioning since it was not given to him to receive any further public honours,
except the Baumgarten Prize, and the Grand Prix of
the PEN Club, which were in the giving of writers, and given to someone who in
those years was already mortally ill, and as poor as a church mouse. The
Autumn Journey in a Red Mail Coach received just as much recognition as the
first volume. “Periods and continents have no limits in Krúdy’s
writing, everyone of his characters lived always, and
everywhere” (Krúdy világa, p. 442.) was one opinion, but towards the
end of the war the public was occupied with other and much more questionable
things than ghosts, and love affairs, with murder and flight, with two
revolutions which Krúdy observed with calm and
occasionally active benevolence, a counterrevolution, the establishment of a
new political order which led to the disappearance of the sets and costumes of
the Krúdy small world-theatre. Krúdy
took no notice. True he had finished the Autumn Journey in the Red Mail Coach but he
continued to dream one or the other theme of the vision and, travelling along
adventurous roads, he returned to some of the figures of The
Crimson Coach, already in 1921, in a novel A nagy kópé (The big
scoundrel), then also in Őszi versenyek (Autumn races) and another novel Az utolsó gavallér (The last beau) and finally, two years
before his death in Hero of the blue ribbon.
Meanwhile the marriage with Satanella of
exemplary suffering, which had long ago become hollow, rotten and nonexistent was formally dissolved too, and Krúdy had married again, a young and charming lady whom he
had got to know already when he had wooed her mother in a tempestuous but not
exactly sane manner. The young woman was touching and heroic, but to no avail. Krúdy habitually lived in a hotel. He stayed true to a way
of life, and to a type of woman, but not to any one woman. Wine, solitude, the
freedom of a robber-baron, the devotion of boon companions, and the certainty
not to have to depend on anybody’s love, or friendship, or even gentleness,
that’s what he needed for his work, besides his family had received their
patent of nobility already from the kings of the House of Anjou. Three children
stemmed from his first marriage, and the young woman too brought a child into
the world. Krúdy who in those months temporarily
lived with his wife on Margaret Island, in an old house which had once belonged
to Archduke Joseph, and which was therefore considered a palace, drove to the
hospital and then returned to the island. When he was asked the weight of the
new born girl, he answered, sitting high in the hansom-cab “Four liters and three tenths.”[5] As befits a legendary figure.
Nevertheless he wrote book after book in those years, amongst them strange and
beautiful works. Hét bagoly (Seven owls), then Boldogult ifjúkoromban (In my
late youth), and the beautiful stories in the volume Az élet álom (Life, a dream). A dream book also
appeared, meant for practical use, completely useless, but formulated with
accomplished poetic power, besides other, older books, again and again. They
brought in some money. Krúdy badly needed it.
How he could lose his readers, of whom there had been so many ten years
earlier, and with them the benevolence of publishers and editors, with such
terrifying speed, how he was suddenly left alone, and not just as a writer,
that is a question to which possible weaknesses in Krúdy’s
work are not an adequate answer. They were not there, or rather they were
visible only in occasional articles and children’s books prompted by the need
for money, but not in the important works he wrote at that time. What is a more
adequate explanation is that the sociological changes of the twenties produced
new interests, and split the public in a bigger half, those who as part of the
“neo-baroque” as the historian Gyula Szekfű called it, preferred rural and courtly idylls, and
best-sellers imported from the West (which Hungary by the way avenged with many
comedies written for export, and with the invasion of Hollywood), and a lesser
half, which preferred modern writing, such as that which came into being in
Hungary under the patronage of Nyugat, or which
was imported with a fanciful conscientiousness. There was no room for Krúdy between Cronin and Gide, or between Herczeg and Babits.
Viennese Interlude and the End
There was still one period in his life when he had a good time: his
sojourn in Vienna, in the Empress Elizabeth’s Villa Hermes, in the midst of the
open woods of the Lainz nature reserve. Baron Lajos Hatvany, really a writer
but more of a literary man, and man of the world, whose share of a sugar-refinery
inherited from an earlier generation that had established it thanks to a
tremendous effort of will, had made him more than independent financially, had
emigrated to Vienna to escape the tasteless counter-revolution and had leased
the Villa Hermes, to which he had invited Krúdy, out
of friendship and because a patron is always conscious of his duty. Krúdy came. The Baron took Krúdy’s
MSS to Paul Zsolnay, the publishers, who at first
could not make up their mind to bring out the work. (Forty years have passed
since then, and they have not been exactly hostile to Krúdy,
as the appearance of The Crimson Coach appears to
prove.) The Baron also payed the drink bills. He
meant well. And it was the right thing to do. But it was simultaneously that
famous drop which all of a sudden makes the cup overflow. Krúdy
returned to Budapest after jolly days in Vienna, this time really to his wife,
since he was ill. It is a matter of common experience that one cannot have
visions without paying the penalty. They had been fetched from the Dionysian
hereafter, and forced to appear in the clumsy, and common environment of human
corporeality, so they took revenge and attacked the necromancer’s stomach and
liver, and also his heart. Krúdy was forty-eight.
There are secret reasons why that is the classical time of life when those who
do not reach a great age begin to die. In the following year, 1927, a single
small volume by this permanently indefatigable writer appeared, a new edition
of a legend of that St Margaret who, in the 13th century, had founded a nunnery
on that island on which the Krúdy family still lived
in a fake palace. The times had gone when Krúdy said
to a lady who was a cashier and an enthusiast and who therefore begged that her
lover should spend at least a whole night with her, the times then when Krúdy took leave after an hour of love, with the following
words: “A gentleman has business at night, in the Orpheum, for instance.” That’s
when she jumped out of the window, the poor soul. Krúdy
lay in hospital, was patched up somehow, two years later he had a stroke which
led to hemiplegia, recovered and wrote and wrote. In 1931 he published his last
volume, Az élet álom, he acted
as his own publisher, and payed the printer who
produced the thousand copies of the book with the sum of money which had been
given to the sick Krúdy as the Prize of the Hungarian
PEN Club in order to help him over his greatest financial needs. The money was
supplied by that Lord Rothermere, who once upon a
time had a Krúdy-like dream in which he became King
of Hungary.
All the same Krúdy could not pay his lightbill on Margaret Island. He worked by the light of
countless thin candles. Then he moved into a small house in Óbuda,
and while there he payed regular visits to Kéhli’s, a simple restaurant familiar to him from earlier
excursions. On May 11th 1933 the government press-chief asked him to call. That
man, small also in body, upbraided him for having published an article “Race
with the Moon” in an Hungarian language paper published in Prague. In the
opinion of the government Krúdy had not acted as a
patriot, the press-chief said, whereupon Krúdy,
extremely agitated, stormed out of the room furnished with the childish
good-taste demanded by protocol. That afternoon he went to bed. He still spent
that evening at Kéhli’s. Before going home he asked
them to fill a liter wine-bottle and then went to the
lavatory, was woken by young Kéhli who kept sneezing
powder for that purpose, took his bottle, reached his bed safely, and died.
Young Kéhli who payed a
call on the dead towards noon the next day, took a note that the bottle stood
at the foot of the bed, empty.
At the funeral the Sárai Gypsy Band, played
two tunes: “Lehullott a rezgőnyárfa
ezüstszínű levele” (The
aspen lost its leaf) and “A menyasszony selyemágyát most viszik” (They
are carrying the bride’s silken bed). Krúdy’s mother,
Júlia Csákányi, the butcher’s
daughter and former servant girl, was present, she cried out loud, and cursed
all women the world over, since it was women who had driven her handsome son to
an early death. In addition to debts, Krúdy left the
following items: “Two white linen suits made from sheets, a scarf, a silk
handkerchief, a pair of white kid-gloves, one of a pair of grey spats, three
pairs of buttoned boots with gussets in grey suede, six pairs of socks, a grey
herringbone overcoat, two pairs of black striped trousers, a black jacket and
waistcoat, a short sheep-skin waistcoat, brown pullover, six pairs of
underpants, four night-shirts, nine handkerchiefs, a navy blue shirt, and a set
of formal evening clothes.” They were the formal evening clothes which the
pawn-brokers had refused to take because they were outsize. He was buried in
them.
Art and Life
Since provided that we ignore the deceiving possibility of an hereafter
which can still be grasped by human senses and which because of a surfeit of
happiness may perhaps prove deadly on a second occasion, all that is human
finds a comforting end in the grave, this attempt to characterize a gentleman
whom I do not know with the help of his transmitted texts and sundry gossip
that came my way, should now he concluded, but perhaps a reader who is so
inclined may all the same discern the cold fork of lightning of pure envy in
all this rapture which attempts to be objective but which can hardly be
throttled. And the author of these lines must provide an explanation for this
yellowish-blue light.
His somewhat enthusiastic admiration derives, one must say, from the
fact that he does not know any writer—excepting Goethe —neither personally nor
by repute, nor thorough reading his works, who has as fruitfully mastered the
double task of living intensely and writing intensely, as Gyula
Krúdy. There have been many wonderful writers who
completely committed themselves to their calling, and who grew like
Michelangelo who, balancing his slender body on unsafe planks, lying on his
back, covering his curly beard in sticky colours, completed the fresco on the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a fresco mind you, in other words with no possibility
to correct anything later. And there have been men of the world, who wrote on
the side, some very well, like our dear Oscar Wilde, of whom we don’t know to
this day whether he perhaps only used the pose of a man of the world as a
stimulus. But Krúdy managed to live and write, to be
call and echo, shape and shadow, body and mirror-image. Here
life is turned into art, and art into life again, a last and highest
possibility of manly existence is intimated and a titanic standard set. We did
not speak of “vision,” “the demonic,” “the titanic” and other such things because of laziness or a preference
for the formulae used by times past, but because facts are involved which have
not lost their validity though a Spartan silence may envelop metaphysics these
days. A phenomenon like Zola, who writes books following patterns and who is
stuck with the wish to be socially effective, or an occurrence like Walt
Whitman can be grasped in the most touching way, but even reading these good
writers one suspects that somewhere in the world where Mithras defeats the dark
bull, there must be a second plane where the bright spirits meet. Gyula Krúdy is also amongst the
illuminated like E. A. Poe, and Dostoevsky, like Proust and Kafka. He was
favoured by the demons, a man who saw the Middle Kingdom, and who could
describe, with an appearance of small-town philistine comfort, sometimes even
gaily, what is present in all men beyond common experience and speculation,
though they may not know it. The world in which Krúdy
moved—not as a man since the corporeality from which he derived his joy in
visions is transient—lies in distant heights, beyond what can be ordinarily
sensed, and when Krúdy’s heroes get a piece of boiled
beef between their teeth then angelic gourmets are chewing a metaphysical cow.
[1] The Grammar
School leaving Certificate is called Certificate of Maturity in Hungary (The
Editor).
[2] Cited from Gyula Krúdy: Tie
Crimson Coach, translated by Paul Tábori,
Corvina Press, Budapest (pp. 130.)
[3] Őszi utazás a vörös postakocsin (Autumn
Journey in a Red Mail Coach) Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, Budapest 1963. p. 249-250.
[4] Őszi utazás a vörös postakocsin, pp.
353-354.
[5] Customary
units when ordering wine (The Editor)
(The New Hungarian Quarterly, 1969/34. 83-91. p.)