Dezső Kosztolányi | Kornél Esti / 2011

the writer's other self

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dezső Kosztolányi Kornél Esti, translated from the Hungarian by Bernard Adams (New York: New Directions, 2011)

 

 This 1933 classic Hungarian fiction begins with the author's comments about a supposed friend, Kornél Esti, a boy from his childhood, who, in opposition to the author's decorous and often unadventurous behavior, relentlessly challenged his friend to take chances, racked up debts for which the author was often charged—the two are often confused and apparently even look alike— and behaved generally in a way that caused the narrator to break off their relationship. Yet years later the two encounter one another again and strike up a new friendship in which together they write a book based on Esti's fabulous adventures, the very book the reader holds in his hands. Of course, the reader quickly recognizes this relationship as a convenient "dopplegänger," which permits the author to tell stories about himself that he might not dare otherwise reveal.

 

   Strangely, however, once the tales get underway, Esti, we perceive, is not all the scandalously misbehaving creature that he has been depicted to be in the first chapter, and basically the author, Dezső Kosztolányi, disappears into authorial objectivity as Esti's life is gradually revealed in the first or third person throughout. While the publisher and others quoted on the back cover refer to this book as a novel, it might be more accurately described as a series of loosely connected stories, a kind of relaxed picaresque that in portraying Esti's travels and adventures portrays Hungarian culture from a humorous perspective.

     If Esti seems all-knowing and a bit of a cad in Kosztolányi's first chapter, he is soon revealed as an utter innocent, a proper and almost prudish young man. In an early tale he is forced to endure a railroad trip in a car with a mother and daughter, the latter of whom, a plain and simple looking child, pretends to sleep so Esti that himself will doze as well, at which point she mischievously plants a kiss upon his lips. Throughout she makes lewd gestures, while the mother politely looks on. She is, we discover, insane, and will eventually have to be institutionalized. What is hilarious about this story, is that Esti, far from being the man-of-the-world as he been portrayed, is both a prude and, we soon discover, a sentimentalist who becomes highly affected by the young girl's behavior. In Venice he don's a bathing suit and gradually wades into the water:

 

                             Then in flung his body, arms outstretched, into the pearly

                             blueness, at last to be united with it. He no longer feared

                             anything. He knew that after this no great harm could come

                             to him. That kiss and that journey had consecrated him for

                             something.

 

      The contradictory nature of this story matches the pattern of most of the works in the fiction. In the very next story, the author moves closer to a kind satiric philosophical tale as Esti and a friend visit a town where everyone is painfully honest, going out of their way to tell the truth. The citizens of this town do not speak to one another unless they truly want to, a beggar carries a card saying: I am not blind. I only wear dark glasses in summer. A shoe store announces Crippling shoes. Corns and abscesses guaranteed. Several customer's feet amputated. In trying to comprehend this seemingly self-destructive behavior the friend discovers that by going out of their way to suggest the worst, the citizens discover that things are never as bad as they suspect, and, accordingly, find everything far more pleasant than they might in a city where proclaims that everything is perfect, which, of course, is all lies.

     In another tale, Esti comes into to a rather large inheritance, but as an aspiring writer he dare not reveal his good fortune, fearing that it would end his career and he might lose his struggling friends. Consequently, while putting away just enough to survive a meager life for a few years, he attempts to give it away to strangers, slipping money into books, coats, and even—in a kind of reverse of pickpocketing—into the pockets and billfolds of people on busses and trams. Ironically, he is arrested when a recipient is convinced that he has stolen something from him. 

      It is this kind irony that permeates the book and perhaps best characterizes the author's style. In another story, Esti attempts, while traveling through Bulgaria—speaking a language in which he knows only one or two words—to carry on a long conversation with a train conductor without the other ever suspecting that he does comprehend the conversation. Through the use of "yes" and "no," tonal differences, head and hand movements and patient listening, he succeeds in befriending and, later, offending the conductor, bringing him even to tears. Another "yes" restores their close friendship.

    While swimming in a river, Esti is nearly drowned, surviving only because a young man rushes in to pull him out. Beholden to his savior he offers to become a life-time friend. But when the boring young man moves in with him, revealing a greater interest in theater magazines and the women they portray than in serious ideas, Esti becomes disgusted with his savior and fearful that he will never be able rid himself of the pest. One night, as they pass not far from the spot from where he has been saved, the elder pushes the young man into the river.

      Sought out for of a contribution, Esti becomes a benefactor to a woman and her suffering family. He helps the woman get a newspaper kiosk, and places her tubercular daughter in a hospital. The more he does for the family, however, the worse off their lives become. Finally, her son dies, the daughter grows more ill, and the mother, attempting to care for them, gives up her kiosk. As the old woman tells her sad story, Esti runs away from her, begging her to stop!

     Perhaps the funniest satire in the volume concerns Esti's studies in Germany, where he discovers a university president who falls peaceably asleep whenever one of the professors begins a speech, waking up precisely at each speech's conclusion. Kosztolányi takes his humor even further when, during summer break, the president becomes an insomniac, nearly dying for lack of rest. 

     The last tale, in which Esti can hardly cling on to an overstuffed subway, might be said to be an allegory of his life. Gradually, through pushes and pulls, he makes his way further and further into the car, finally finding a small slot in which can sit. Disgusted by most of the humanity around him, he finds joy in the face of a poor working woman, and ultimately feels some comfort in the trip only to have the conductor call out: "Terminus."

      Despite the publisher's enthusiasms, I cannot describe this work as a "masterpiece," but it is, nonetheless, an enjoyable series of ironic musings that nicely alternate between the comic and the tragic, the everyday and the bizarre.

 

Los Angeles, September 28, 2011

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (September 2011).

 

Elizabeth Bowen | Eva Trout / 1969

caught in the whirl

by Douglas Messerli

 

Elizabeth Bowen Eva Trout (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969)

 

The title character of Elizabeth Bowen's deliciously written fiction of 1969 is an outsized woman, described variously by the author as "monolithic," "a giantess," and "an Amazon," along with other unflattering appellations. From the very first action, as Eva Trout drives the Dancey children past the castle she owns and where she was schooled for a short while, Bowen fixes her figure in our minds as a purposeful being constantly on the move: at the moment at the wheel of her Jaguar. The book is subtitled "Changing Scenes," a suggestion of the numerous shifts in location and emotional states of its hero. Even Eva's position in the car, as the author puts it, is "not, somehow, the attitude of a thinking person."

     As we first glimpse this towering and overpowering figure, she is about to bolt from the household in which she had originally asked her guardian to place her: Larkins, the run-down farm house wherein reside the Arbles. Iseult Arble, a former teacher of the girl, is perhaps the first and only person who attempted to actually educate her; while Iseult's husband, the less than brilliant Eric, has grown comfortable with Eva's presence, he feels a growing tension with his wife, a shift that Eva interprets as Eric's attraction to herself.

     In preparation for the move, announced to the Dancey family, while kept secret from the Arbles, Eva's London-based guardian, who has gotten wind of Eva's plans, calls Iseult to the city in order to plot a way to keep his charge from running off before inheriting, a few months later, the fortune left to her by her father, Willy. And the interchange between the two is one of the great moments of the book, as these most intelligent figures of the work attempt to comprehend and outwit one other. Constantine, as one might describe him, is a darker and more sinister version of Iseult, a man who clearly is used to hatching plots—although in this case he fails. For Eva rushes to the small town of Broadstairs, purchasing a house by the sea. But it is clear that this woman, incapable of even boiling water, will not be able long to care for herself.

     Eva has left behind numerous signs of her destination, and both Eric and, soon after, Constantine follow her, the latter believing he has found the two in an uncompromising situation (in fact, Eric has simply taken a nap).  Eric and Iseult divorce, just the first of numerous negative effects that this giantess will have on all the figures around her.

     After gaining her inheritance, Eva travels again, this time to the US to purchase what is presumably an illegal baby, there coincidentally meeting up with her first love, a former fellow classmate, Elsinore, who is now married to a traveling salesman. Her encounter with Eva results in an expression of great unhappiness with her current circumstances.

     Eva soon returns to England with her young son in hand, this time staying in a series of hotels. The child is a deaf mute, perfect for a mother who has little of intelligence to say, and who throughout the fiction is searching for someone upon which to shower love. In short, Eva continues to wreck havoc upon all those with whom she becomes involved.

     For Eva, we gradually discover, is not so much a realist character for the author, as she is a metaphor of pure action, a big, clumsy, whirlwind of a figure of thoughtless motion. Those least able to act, the emotionally complex and introspective Iseult and the eldest Dancey child, Henry, a bright and witty boy who ultimately enrolls in Cambridge, are naturally attracted (if slightly disgusted) by this energized force. Eva represents precisely what these two are missing in their lives. Yet by nature they both fear her: Iseult is not at all amused by Eva's blank stares, and Henry chastises Eva several times for her failure to think things out. Yet both enter into strange commitments with this force. Iseult determines to read to the young Eva in hopes of opening her mind and, later, of course, opens her house to her. Against his better judgment, Henry agrees to play her husband in order to fulfill the fantasy of love and marriage for which Eva has so longed.

     The disaster with which Bowen's fiction ends, the child murdering his mother with Eric's loaded and real gun, is somehow inevitable. For in a sense, the great vortext that Eva symbolizes must be destroyed in order that other, more normal figures, can survive. Ultimately Eva's son, Jeremy, would have suffocated in Eva's fantasy of love, and he would never have been able to return enough to fill the vacuum at its center.

     Bowen reiterates the tension between the two kinds of people she has created with references to Victorian literature that both Iseult and Henry mention. Broadstairs, the town to where Eva first retreats, is the home of Charles Dickens, a place which Iseult later visits. Henry mentions Browning's narrative poem-play, Pippa Passes. These two authors could not be more different. Dickens' works, filled with motherless and fatherless orphans desperately seeking for love, are played out on huge stages of vast action that catches up its characters into circumstances that are nearly always extreme, very bad or very good.

     Pippa, of Browning's carefully rhymed poem, walks through the city, singing songs that almost no one hears, but who changes everyone for the better as she invisibly passes. While the figures of Browning's work may be contemplating divorce, rape, murder, revenge, and other horrible acts, Pippa's very existence, for the most part, alters their awful plans.

     Iseult must certainly see herself more as a Pippa than a Dickensian figure, while Eva, it is clear, is a 20th century equivalent of more than one of the great novelist's desperately needy beings. Iseult's feeling that she has somehow magically connected to Eva's son Jeremy, is perhaps a kind of Pippa fantasy. But Iseult, in the end, does find some sense of balance, returning to Eric.

      Henry, like Constantine is too cynical to see himself as aligned with either, but the family in which he has grown up behave much like a series of Dickens' comic characters. But he, like Constantine—who changes in the process of the story from a wicked controller of others to a man in love, in his case with a priest—is so thoroughly affected by Eva that by work's end, he is ready to really marry her instead of simply mimicking the act. Eva, drama itself, may be wonderful to contemplate, but is impossible to have and to hold.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2011

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (August 2011)