A few nights ago, a friend brought out a slender bottle of golden wine, which someone had left on her table months ago without explanation. It was Hungarian, its label incomprehensible to us (although Peasant Glasses recognized the word for “sweet”). We opened it on the balcony, with the sunset glowing in the west, BBQ coals glowing at our feet, swallows wheeling overhead: it was sweet, rich, honey-graped. Cloying at first, until you grasped the complexity and found yourself reaching for the bottle, studying its color, pouring a second glass.
A memorial at Krudy's birthplace
I thought of Gyula Krúdy.
Krúdy is new to me, a prolific and melancholy writer of the first few decades of the last century. He is one of the giants of Hungarian modern literature, all but unknown in the English-speaking world. His boosters compare him to a Magyar Proust, with some reason – Krúdy is a voluptuary, losing himself in sensual detail, more interested in conveying the impression of being at a place and a time than in telling a story. Like that sweet wine, his writing can be cloying if gulped, easily dismissed if sipped and put aside; but in the right dose it is intoxicatingly beautiful.
Much of modern and pre-modern literature is defined (at least in the eyes of the West) by the experience of the English or French in WWI. For intellectuals of those countries, the war was both catastrophe and enlightenment, a horrifying demonstration of just how corrupt the world had become, a proof of the flimsiness and falsehood of beauty.
Hungary’s experience was different. Bound into union with Austria after a failed revolution in 1848, Hungry was already a nation in decline, growing economically but politically powerless. When the Central Powers lost, the country was helpless, invaded by even the weak Romanian army and dismembered; losing much of its territory to Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia in a treaty that still infuriates right-wing radicals there today.
Krúdy is by no means a political writer; but in the works available in English, most written before the end of the war in 1918, this sense of conscious cultural twilight is thick enough to taste. “The Adventures of Sindbad” is a collection of stories, most in Budapest or in the countryside, about an amorous eponymous adventurer who may or may not be dead or a ghost, may or may not be 300 years old, but spends his time revisiting the lovers of the past for moments of brief, beautiful and painful reminiscence.
“Sunflower,” a novel that itself is a series of barely connected chapters, is much the same: lovers entranced by their love, or by the intoxication of loving. A young gambler, the beautiful girl he loves who flees to the countryside, the old aristocrat who hides himself on a remote island to play his violin and die of heartbreak (or the idea of heartbreak), the country rake who meets his match drinking with the daughter of an adulterous ghost. These are histories, and tall tales, not a story.
Krúdy writes in metaphors. You can see him, slightly drunk, scribbling at a table at twilight, writing without benefit of editors or time to think beyond the next few pages (he was always poor, a gambler who died penniless). They tumble one after the other until he is lost inside the metaphor itself, and it becomes the content of the sentence instead only a device. Here he describes an insomniac’s feelings at dawn, fearful, with flitting unstable thoughts:
Night shatters like a worn-out curse. At the call of that crazy bird, the sluggish, motionless curtain of darkness begins to stir. Other sounds filter from the far distances. Perhaps it is the wild geese passing high overhead, following their obscure paths, obeying a mysterious command to cross night’s vast gulf like wandering souls conversing in otherworldly tongues.
But cocks’ crow signals the arrival of those never-glimpsed vagabonds who stand stock still under your window in the dead of night, with murder in their eyes, guilt and terror in their eyes. Come morning, they regain their original shapes and turn into solitary trees at crossroads or hat-waving, curly-haired young travelers with small knapsacks and large staffs, humming a merry tune and marching bright-eyed toward distant lands to bring glad tidings, fun and games, new songs and youthful flaring passions to small houses that somnolently await them. There they sit down at the kitchen table, earn their dinner by telling glorious tall tales, help pour the wine, chop the wood, nab the fattened pig by the ear; they also repair the grandfather clock that had not chimed in forty years and leave in the middle of the night, taking along the young miss’s heart as well as her innocence…
These stories are written in the language of their subject. Where Proust seeks to evoke, Krúdy writes about seducers in the language of seduction itself. He is a thoroughly, avowedly untrustworthy narrator, in precisely the same way that his seducers spin pleasant, intoxicating lies to women who believe not a word, but who fall in love despite their unbelief.
The sweetness is tempered with melancholy, with comic asides that show he’s laughing at his own foolishness, and with a gleeful disdain for the constrictions of reality. At the close of one early story, Sindbad the lover dies and is reborn in the afterlife as a sprig of mistletoe attached to a nun’s habit. This turns out to be far more boring than expected, and he does everything to shake himself loose, and get back to a town that he knows:
Sindbad had fallen between the rails: trains passed over him, firemen threw fiery ashes over him and a piece of greaseproof paper landed in his vicinity, containing the remnants of a well-chewed leg of duck. This unpleasant neighbor attempted to strike up some kind of relationship with him, but Sindbad pretended to be asleep until night came, then succeeded in escaping without being observed, leaving the rails behind and drifting into the town which he immediately recognized…
The gold miners’ wife sat in front of the mirror, combing her hair. She had long golden hair and the comb ran lightly through it like a boat gliding across the water. Up and down moved the comb – at that moment it was the proudest utensil in the whole house, not surprisingly, since in its previous life it had been a mere dancing master in one of the outer suburbs of Pest….
Everything is alive. Everything is touched with personality and history and melancholy. Everything is drunk on its own impressions, comic and beautiful. It must be taken in measured servings, like everything intoxicating. But a draught of Krúdy should be in everyone’s bookshelves.
Krúdy resources online:
- Wikipedia: Gyula Krúdy
- New York Review of Books: Krúdy
- Hunlit: Krúdy bibliography
- A history of Hungarian literature: Krúdy