Sándor Márai: The Man Who Bore Witness

The express train left Budapest in the early afternoon and halted at the Enns bridge just after midnight. It was the summer of 1948. A Russian soldier checked passports—indifferently. At the time it was still possible to travel, or escape:

The night was still. The train started up soundlessly. After a few moments, we left the bridge and travelled on in the star-studded night toward the world where no one was waiting for us. In this moment—for the first time in my life—I really felt fear. I realized I was free. I began to feel fear.

The penalty for freedom, for the writer, was cancellation—the Left has been woke for a long time. The man being obliterated from memories in his native Hungary was one of the greatest European writers of the last century. Sándor Márai was a novelist, short-story writer, poet, playwright, essayist, diarist, autobiographer, travel writer, journalist and translator. Born in 1900, he was, when he left Hungary in 1948, one of its best-known and respected writers. When he killed himself in San Diego in 1989 he was forgotten in his homeland, unknown elsewhere.

Memoir of Hungary 1944–1948 was published in Hungarian in Toronto in 1972 and finally reprinted in Hungary in 1991. The original title, Föld, föld!, means Land, Land! The dull-titled but well-intentioned English translation was published in 1996, reprinted in 2005, and though it is praiseworthy for introducing Márai to new readers it is sometimes puzzling, as when his grandmother took her breakfast: “Of course, the servants also put francs [??] in the coffee, no matter how much the residents of the house grumbled—one cannot depend on servants not to put a spoonful of francs in freshly brewed coffee. Was this an act of ‘prole’ revenge, or superstition?” I wish I knew. Fortunately, when talking of communism the text is much clearer.

Since his death Márai has been uncancelled and offered to readers in Hungary. During his long exile he continued writing in Hungarian and published his books outside the country. Now recognised as a major European writer, his works are published in Spanish, German, French and slowly, too slowly, in English. Presently only two novels seem readily available to us—Embers and Portrait of a Marriage. The French have also been offered two volumes of his journal from 1943 to 1967. American publishing interest in him, which seemed present earlier in the century, seems to have dissipated—or perhaps his language and what he represents are no longer welcome between their covers. Across the Atlantic, the University of Chester not only includes a Harry Potter book as reading for English undergraduates but does so with a “trigger warning” alerting students to the possibility that it might create “difficult conversations about gender, race, sexuality, class and identity”. And in Australia we publish historical novels by Anita Heiss. Modern books are no place for a dead white cultivated man.

MEMOIR of Hungary ends on the edge of freedom in 1948 but begins on the edge of catastrophe at a celebratory name-day Sándor family dinner in March 1944. As his invited guests depart, uninvited Germans are arriving as they occupy Budapest. By the end of that siege year the Germans have gone and the Soviets have taken their place and offices—goodbye Gestapo, hello KGB. Márai and his family took refuge in the countryside as the violence in the besieged city destroyed their home. The Soviet soldiers are locusts who steal everything. Incomprehensible, they rob with enthusiasm. The looting dismays even the fantasists who had been dreaming of their arrival. A communist village shoemaker was robbed of his coat, and his dreams: “‘They thought I was a bourgeois,’ he explained in a whimpering voice, ‘because I am fat and have a leather coat. And I was waiting for them …’ This was the first time I heard the voice of disappointment.”

For anyone who grew up on the Australian Left, as I did, the story Márai tells is that part of twentieth-century history that my generation never wanted to hear: the terrors of communist realities we did not need to listen to from New Australians in the 1950s and 1960s and the stories behind the scars of the Vietnamese boat people which contradicted our youthful and ungenerous perceptions of the Vietnam War they had lived through.

Márai’s Memoir is in three parts: the Soviet invasion of Hungary; the imposition of a Hungarian communist regime; the acceptance of the idea and action of emigration.

THE Red Army introduced Márai to Soviet Man—hordes of dangerous, thieving, unpredictable human locusts: a face-to-face meeting with the products of Soviet life and education. Some years later an “Australian writers’ delegation” allowed Manning Clark to meet Soviet Man. His perceptions were different from Márai’s—he believed he had entered a “high-minded” society and was confronting “a people who believed in the teaching of the Enlightenment, who believed in education, who believed in knowledge and brotherly love”. He acknowledged none of the despairing witness accounts written over the previous forty years.

It was their lack of education that Márai noted among the occupiers he came in contact with, and he was an observer of the brotherly love noted by Clark when a Russian soldier encountered an old man and his family. The old man, previously persecuted by Nazis and the Hungarian Arrow Cross, revealed that he was a Jew:

The scene that followed was astonishing. On hearing the disclosure, the Russian soldier broke into a smile, removed the submachine gun from his neck, walked up to the old man, and, according to Russian custom, kissed him gently—from left to right—on the cheeks. He said he was a Jew, too. For a time he silently and heartily squeezed the old man’s hand.

Then he hung the submachine gun around his neck again and ordered the old gentleman to stand in the corner of the room with his entire family and to turn with raised hands toward the wall. When the old man didn’t understand the order immediately, the soldier shouted at them to comply right away or he would shoot them dead. The women and the old man stood in the corner of the room, their faces turned to the wall. After this, the Russian robbed them slowly, at his leisure. He was an expert. With the skill of a wall-demolishing burglar he tapped the tile stove and walls from one end to the other and pulled out every drawer. He found the family’s hidden jewels and all their cash, about forty thousand pengos. He put everything into his pocket and left.

The Buda that Márai returns to is in ruins. His apartment and furniture, all inherited, are smashed. His library has been reduced to pulp. It is a time when people disappear—again. A newly written book by Sartre appears and Márai learns “that I was not ‘free’ because the classless society had not yet become a reality”.

An aside by Márai, taken completely out of context by this reader, is wonderfully illuminating of our own gender-manufacturing world and its result which is seldom named:

Giraudoux [the French writer], shrugging his shoulders, said that when a nation changes its form of government, it is like a person undergoing a sex change, a female being made out of a male, a male out of the female, but in fact, as a rule, only a hermaphrodite is created by the process.

Márai had been anti-Nazi and was now anti-communist and was scathing of his enemies—his fellow writers who aided communism, who took the awards and the perks:

They acted as if they didn’t know that a system that can survive only if it deprives individuals of their freedom of private ownership, enterprise, choice of employment, expression of opinion, writing and political attitude cannot renounce despotism, because this is the only way despotism can hold on to power.

Is there a single Australian writer, of the Writers’ Week variety, who has dared to question the woke wave of rights currently eroding all notions of responsibilities?

IN 1947 Márai, the same age as the century, returned to Paris, where he had lived as a young man. Once more his writing feeds an anachronistic modern reading, for he appears not as an old exile troubling the memories of his past but as a critic of our present—or is he relevant in this way because he is describing the root cause of our present malaise? Communism as an untreated and evolving malady that ran through the twentieth century contaminates the twenty-first like congenital syphilis. Social media woke madness is an inherited gift of hatred from grotesque and rotten forebears.

The familiar Paris bookshops were still there, and some of their owners remembered him, but books had changed:

It seemed as if the book no longer sprang from ideas, nerves, memories and musings but from ersatz materials; ersatz products of the intellect proliferated, hunched. Piled up in shop windows. It was not “trash”; it was something else … This para-literature now gushing forth like an intellectual tidal wave inundated everything, including the critical columns of newspapers and periodicals.

Over the next twenty years he became confirmed in his idea that “ever fewer persons had faith in the book. And without faith there is no literature.”

He returns to Hungary with no illusions of the West. When the decision is made, he will be a clear-eyed émigré but in the meantime he experiences the communist life of fear and terror in Hungary where the Moscow plan for imposing communism is being carried out: the identical tricks, lies and deceits were applied to all slave states they erected. He found temporary ways to distance himself from his country’s boot-licking writers and evade the deceitful enticements of the new rulers. He also noted a truth: “The Party’s gibbering orthodox literature, the commissioned trash of Party policy, the panting dissertations called socialist realism did not appeal to the reader.” So much for the Australia Council for the Arts. After Márai’s departure the piles of his published books still with his now nationalised publishers were not pulped as he expected—they were quietly shipped abroad and sold to Hungarian-language bookshops for foreign currency.

This period, as Moscow imposes its recipe for domination on Hungary, aided by the politicians who had survived their own time of exile in Stalin’s Soviet Union, is a time of decision and planning. It is still possible to obtain a passport and travel. In preparation for the wrenching separation from his homeland and language Márai searches among past Hungarian writers, often the overlooked journalistic writers in already forgotten publications. How much of what has been written over the last fifty years would we pack into our memories if they get their wish and burn Australia to the ground? A recent collection of woke essays, popular on Goodreads, is called After Australia.

THIS Memoir of Hungary is a country’s story—much of Márai’s personal life at the time remains private. “Lola” is mentioned three times but never introduced as his wife. The last time she intrudes into the text she is placed between brackets:

(Lola promised she would come with me, and this pleased me, because one can have confidence in the promise. A man falls in love with a woman twice: first when he comes to know her, and a second time twenty-five years later in the period following the silver wedding anniversary. What takes place in-between is most often confusion and without any significance from an emotional point of view.)

The final night in his homeland was spent with a friend in the quiet garden of a Buda restaurant:

I felt the moment had arrived when I could ask myself in all sincerity: What is the true meaning of this gigantic dispute? What is Bolshevism? For a hundred years the Communists had laid down the Manifesto; for decades this threat has smouldered in the consciousness. Now I recognized something about reality—what the meaning of all this is. It is nothing more than the reign of terror, the violent, merciless, extorting terror of a small band hungry for power and plunder. Is it possible that this system can amend human wretchedness?

Márai lived his response to that last question, and his friend lived his: “We said goodbye at the street corner, in the night. In farewell, we asked each other’s pardon: he for staying at home, I for leaving it.”

The decision he takes lasts the remainder of his life. By 1989, and living in America, family members including his wife and their adopted son were dead. His translator was coy about the end; Márai had “apparently committed suicide”. In fact, the final paragraph of his life was punctuated with a gunshot to the head—after calling the San Diego police.

Memoir of Hungary 1944–1948
by Sándor Márai
Corvina in association with Central European University Press, 2005, 428 pages, US$26.95