Click 
Last year, Dezsö Kosztolányi’s wonderful Skylark – a tale about an unfortunately ugly girl’s relationship with her parents, a relationship that changes dramatically when she goes away for a couple of weeks — just missed being in my year end “best of” list. If I were writing the list today, in fact, it just might be there, just as it may have been on the list had I written it on, say, a Tuesday rather than a Friday. I was thrilled to see that New Directions was publishing a new translation of his somewhat-autobiographical Kornél Esti (1933; tr. from the Hungarian by Bernard Adams, 2011), a book written near the end of his life (1885 – 1935).
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
Kornél Esti begins with one of the most fascinating opening chapters I’ve read in a long time. The first-person narrator, a writer, is around forty years old. Ten years earlier he severed his relationship with one of his closest and most constant companions, Kornél Esti. But, in a line echoing the opening to The Inferno, the narrator thinks enough time has passed.
I had passed the midpoint of my life, when one windy day in spring, I remembered Kornél Esti. I decided to call on him and to revive our former friendship.
Before we meet Kornél Esti, who is also around forty — in fact, he is the exact same age as the narrator — the narrator takes us briefly to his childhood with Kornél Esti. One wonders why he would ever want to revive this friendship. The narrator was a well-raised boy, calm and controlled; but not his friend: “There were no two people on the planet more different than Kornél and myself.” This only led to trouble for our narrator:
Once Uncle Loizi was coming toward us, an old friend of my father’s, whom I had always liked and respected, a three-hundred-pound magistrate. Kornél shouted at me:
“Stick your tongue out.” And he stuck out his own till it reached the point of his chin.
He was a cheeky boy, but interesting, never dull.
He put a lighted candle in my hand.
“Set fire to the curtains!” he urged me. “Set fire to the house. Set the world on fire.”
He put a knife in my hand too.
“Stick it in your heart!” he exclaimed. “Blood’s red. Blood’s warm. Blood’s pretty.”
I didn’t dare follow his suggestions, but I was pleased that he dared to put into words what I thought. I said nothing, gave a chilly smile. I was afraid of him and attracted to him.
Yes, their friendship could have led to many bad endings. It was still pretty bad. For one thing, the narrator and Kornél Esti were uncommonly alike in appearance. Even if the narrator didn’t follow Kornél Esti’s urgings, he was often maligned, and sometimes just by association and sometimes due to mistaken identity. It almost cost the narrator all he had.
I paid. Paid a lot. Not only money. I paid with my reputation too. People everywhere looked at me askance. They didn’t know where they were with me, whether I was right or left of center, whether I was a patriotic citizen or a dangerous rabble-rouser, a respectable family man or a depraved voluptuary, and altogether whether I was a real person or just a dream figure — a drunken, double-dealing, lunatic scarecrow who still flapped his ragged, cast-off gentleman’s coat whichever way the wind blew. I paid dearly for our friendship.
All that, however, I instantly forgot and forgave on that windy spring day when I decided to call on him.
The author seeks Kornél Esti at a hotel at which he’s rumored to be staying. At first, he cannot find his old friend, but soon Kornél Esti appears, standing in front of the mirror. Though it is never explicit, the reader has known for some time that Kornél Esti is a clear double to the author (and to Kosztolányi), but if anything this makes all we’ve read more interesting, particularly the near suicidal urges. It’s a great opening to the book and a fine introduction to Kosztolányi’s keen observations, which he packs into lively prose.
At the end of the first chapter the author and Kornél Esti decide, “Let’s write something, together.” Kornél Esti will come up with the stories, exaggerated vignettes from his own past, and the author will put them down in writing. Together they will edit for style. And, in a final bit of play, Kornél Esti suggests:
“You put your name to it. And my name can be the title. The title’s in bigger letters.”
I was in. Unfortunately, this virtuosic opening didn’t lead to the type of novel I was expecting (and I’d like to read this again without the expectations). With the play between the author and alter-ego I was expecting some great ancestor to Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock (review to come) or The Counterlife. Rather than continue to examine the relationship between the author and Kornél Esti, the book goes into those vignettes from Kornél Esti’s life, any one of which has little to do with another. I was, sadly, disappointed that an interesting concept led to a series of disconnected episodes, and that affected my overall view of this book (I’d rate Skylark above it). Still, I have to wonder if I’d read it with a different frame of mind whether I would have ended up loving this one. Most of the vignettes, after all, are striking.
For example, I loved the first one. Kornél Esti is six years old; it is his first day at school and he’s terrified. One of my favorite scenes in all of literature is when Stephen Dedalus goes to boarding school in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man. It came on the page as if it were my own memories (though I never went to boarding school). I have to say that here Kosztolányi nearly matches it, particularly when Kornél Esti’s mother leaves him alone at the classroom door. His terror and his desire to be back with her, to not be left alone, are viscerally felt, as is the profound transformation of his fear:
He could see children, more children than he’d ever before seen in one place. It was a crowd, a crowd of completely unknown little people like himself.
So he wasn’t alone. But if it had previously plunged him into despair that he was so alone in the world, now an even more alarming despair seized him, that he was so very much not alone in the world, that all those other people were alive as well.
In another vignette, in which we may see some of the inspiration for Skylark, Kornél Esti is a nineteen year old, leaving his home town for the first town, travelling by train. In the car with him is a mother and her young daughter. Kornél Esti is fascinated by the mother. Then, suddenly, he takes in the daughter, an unfortunately ugly girl: ”his soul wandered around those two souls, glancing now at the mother, now at the girl. What sufferings, what passions must tear at them. Poor things, he thought.”
In another we also find Kornél Esti on a train. This time, he’s travelling through Bulgaria. He knows not a word of Bulgarian, but he’s challenged himself to have a full conversation with the Bulgarian conductor without ever letting on that he cannot communicate.
Though that vignette is perhaps not believable, others are obviously fictitious, such as the one where Kornél Esti travels to a town that is completely honest. The advertisements are self-deprecating, explaining that in their food products they use substandard ingredients and you’re probably better off buying from someone else. The mayor himself admits he doesn’t have the citizens’ interests at heart. As it turns out, everyone is happy, and even the businesses disclosing the worst are thriving. No one expects much, so things turn out to be great.
A few other vignettes aren’t even about Kornél Esti, like the one involving a young love affair (“If a girl jumps into the well, she loves somebody.”) that ends in marriage and tragedy. One thing all of the stories have in common: a strangeness mixed into the normal tones of a conventional narration.
Kornél Esti has its longueurs, and, as I said, it doesn’t necessarily live up to the promising first chapter, but it is a lively book, a delightful read, and the work of a master I hope to get to know better.
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting with Edwin Frank, the editorial director of NYRB Classics. NYRB Classics is one of my favorites, both as a publisher and as a brand. Their books are lovely to behold and lovely (or, at the very least, always interesting) to read. They’re an important publisher because they seek to print literary treasures, whatever the genre, lost to time by simple neglect or because the commercial publishers simply didn’t think they were commercial. While visiting NYRB Classics, Mr. Frank offered me two of their new books, one of which was Skylark (Pacsirta, 1924; tr. from the Hungarian by Richard Aczel, 1993) by Dezsö Kosztolányi. The one, he said (in my words, because I can’t remember exactly what he said), was great; Skylark, he said (in his words), is a masterpiece.
Review copy courtesy of NYRB Classics.
Skylark has an interesting, yet somewhat mundane, premise. Set in a small provincial Hungarian town in 1899, Mother and Father are sending their daughter Skylark away for a week-long holiday to visit an uncle’s estate. Skylark is in her mid-thirties, yet her parents fret over her preparations as if she is a little girl. They worry about how she will cope. Were they foolish to send her away for a week? How will they cope? Skylark takes care of them, fixes all of their food. What are they going to do without their beloved daughter? During all of the preparations, as we attempt to figure out the family dynamics, we get this wonderful description of Father and Mother — as mouses:
Father wore a mouse-grey suit, the exact colour of his hair. Even his moustache was the same light shade of grey. Large bags of crumpled, worn, dry skin hung beneath his eyes.
Mother, as always, wore black. Her hair, which she slicked down with walnut oil, was not yet altogether white, and her face showed hardly a wrinkle. Only along her forehead rant two deep furrows.
Yet how alike they looked! The same trembling, startled light in their eyes, their gristly noses narrowing to the same fine point and their ears tinted with the same red glow.
Meanwhile, Skylark (“They had given her that name years ago, Skylark, many, many years ago, when she still sang. Somehow the name had stuck, and she still wore it like an out-grown childhood dress.”) sits outside waiting for them to call her:
She did not move at once. Perhaps she hadn’t heard.
In any case, she liked to sit like this, head bowed, peering at her work even when she had tired of it. The experience of many long years had taught her that this posture suited her best.
Perhaps she heard some sound, but still did not look up. She governed herself with all the discipline of an invalid.
As you can see, much of the joy in this book is in the great descriptions, always perfect but unexpected: mousey parents, a name like an out-grown childhood dress, a woman governing herself with all the discipline of an invalid. These descriptions create such a wide range of possible interpretations. On the surface parents and child love one another — perhaps too much. Or is one being bullied by the other? Finally Skylark goes in to see her doting parents, but the contrast is immediately present:
The elderly couple watched with fond smiles as she drew near. Then, when her face finally revealed itself between the leaves, the smiles paled slightly on their lips.
Why the paled smile? Do they fear her? Do they pity her? Do they despise her? But soon Skylark is on a train, and Father and Mother are bereft. They really do miss their daughter. Trying to figure out how to spend their time, they begin making their way to the only restaurant Skylark deemed passable while she was away. Their presence on the street is a strange sight:
The interest that had met the couple in the restaurant followed them out into the street. Strangers turned to look at them as they passed. Not that there was anything unusual about their appearance. People simply weren’t accustomed to seeing them there in the street, like old couches that belong in the living room and look so strange when, once or twice a year, they’re put outside to air.
Again, so much wonder is in the subtle descriptions. All that I’ve summarized above takes place in the first few pages of the rather short novel. Father and Mother still have a week to suffer through. Only, to their surprise and not-slight horror, they find that they enjoy themselves. The food at the restaurant is wonderful. Skylark, who must have a sensitive stomach, always produces such bland dishes. They reunite with old friends and go to the theater, something they don’t usually do becasue Skylark’s eyes are sensitive and cannot cope with the theater smoke and the closed-in area.
I must stop summarizing the plot now. I think it is obvious this book is about a father and mother who are basically voluntarily enslaved by their daughter who is sick or ugly or both. However, the book is so much more than that, both in scale and intimacy. This is Hungary in 1899. Father and Mother read the newspapers, but they aren’t interested in the events that we, with hindsight, know are important. But why should they care? Their lives are in complete stasis with so much emotion and power carefully covered up below the surface. This week without Skylark threatens to destabilize the existence they have created.
In a state of excitement, things that normally pass unnoticed can seem pregnant with significance. At such times even inanimate objects — a lamppost, a gravel path, a bush — can take on a life of their own, primordial, reticent and hostile, stinging our hearts with their indifference and making us recoil with a start. And the very sight of people at such times, blindly pushing their lonely, selfish ends, can suddenly remind us of our own irrevocable solitude, a single word or gesture petrifying in our souls into an eternal symbol of the utter arbitrariness of life.
The ending of the book is masterful. As one would hope with a “masterpiece,” the threads don’t tie up in the way we might expect, and the pattern turns out to be far more complicated than we imagined — and much sadder. Much is said in this line:
Nothing had been settled or resolved. But at least they had grown tired. And that was something.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough.
Recent Comments