BOOKS

DANGEROUS GAMES

A SandorMkrai novel about adolescence in a time ofwar.

BY ARTHUR PHILLIPS 

Sándor Márai keeps getting younger. Twelve years after he committed suicide, in 1989, at the age of eighty-nine, Knopf published the first American edition of his novel "Embers," which had originally appeared in Hungary when he was forty-two. That launched Márai's career in this country. Three years later came "Casanova in Bolzano," written when he was forty. Now, courtesy of George Szirtes, we have the first English translation of "The Rebels" (Knopf; $24.95), Marai's fourth novel, published when he was only thirty. It's a darkly comic, war-ravaged coming-of-age tale that displays much of the genius visible in his later works, but it's also funnier and more extravagantly imaginative than those books might have led one to expect. In 1930, of course, Marai had not yet experienced most of the great tragedies that lay in store for his nation and for him.

Marai was born in 1900, in a town in the Hungarian provinces called Kassa, where his father was a lawyer and his mother a school teacher, and he came to Budapest as a young man to make a career as a journalist. He succeeded, but art rapidly took precedence: volumes of poetry appeared, then plays, and a first novel when he was twenty-four. By then, the Versailles Treaty had transformed his home town into Kosice, Czechoslovakia. War and politics were redrawing the map of Marai's life, and they did not stop until after his death.

He published more than sixty books in his lifetime, almost half of them novels, and from the nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-forties he was considered one of Hungary's leading literary men. As the Hungarian-American scholar Albert Tezla notes in an introduction to a memoir that Marai wrote in 1972, he was often described by critic and by himself as a “middle-class writer. To American ears, it’s an odd distinction; our writers are either literally or commercial, but for him class identity was stronger. A character of his seems to be pronouncing an authorial credo when he says, "I am a bourgeois. I am deliberately so." Marai took the label, and the responsibilities that he felt it entailed, very seriously. He considered that his class, at its best, embodied the highest European traditions: liberal democracy, enterprise and creativity, intellectual curiosity, and duty tempered with tolerance. After the First World War, though, he saw his class fail to live up to those ideals, and he blamed its selfish refusal to shape a democracy for Hungary's interwar political troubles, and its slide toward Fascism. The middle-class writer's task now was to write an obituary: "I see the whole [class] disintegrating. Perhaps this is my life's, my writing's sole, true duty: to delineate the course of this disintegration."

He chronicled it from within a disintegrating nation. The Versailles Treaty reduced Hungary's size by two-thirds, and political chaos followed. Order finally took the form of the authoritarian reign of Miklos Horthy, who was proclaimed Regent, although Hungary had no king, and who was still called "Admiral," although Hungary had lost its coast under the treaty. Horthy’s regime, which Marai detested, brought Hungary into the Second World War as a lukewarm ally of Nazi Germany, and Marai responded with what he called "internal emigration"-"by turning completely inward, toward my work."

Living under a dismal government, on the wrong side of another world war, Marai found himself preoccupied with the problems of the past, and his fiction from this era - "Casanova in Bolzano" and "Embers"- explored how history is claimed and reinterpreted in people's efforts to determine the future. In "Casanova in Bolzano", set in the seventeen fifties, the middle- aged Casanova returns to the town where, years earlier, he lost duel over a young girl. The man who wounded him, the Duke of Parma, is now old and dying, and the girl has become the Duke's wife. In a series of dialogues in Casanova's hotel room, the Duke and the Duchess attempt to determine the meaning of that duel, to contradictory purposes. The Duke wants the Duchess's unqualified devotion; the Duchess wants Casanova to acknowledge her as his one true love. With their happiness at stake, both describe to Casanova a future based on their own understanding of the past, and both try to charm or bully him into seeing events as they do.

Two years later, when "Embers" was published, the moral collapse of Hungary's middle class was patent, and the novel is decidedly more sombre, the future it depicts less malleable. After a long, self-imposed exile, during which he has surrendered his Hungarian citizenship, a man returns to face a childhood friend, a retired general whose wife he tried to steal forty years earlier. She's dead now, and the two old men, with very little future ahead of them, pass a long night in an attempt to settle blame. One of them wants only to see clearly the degree to which he misunderstood his youth and his life; the other, not having won the woman, wants only to thwart his old friend, keeping all secrets and clarity to himself. With little to gain except a peaceful deathbed and old men's pride, the two wrangle over the meaning of what has gone before.

In "Casanova in Bolzano," when the conversations end, the Venetian lover is left alone with his thoughts. "The candles had guttered," Marai writes, "but were still smoking." In the closing pages of "Embers," after the long debate about the past, the old general says, "Look at that, the candles are burned right down." And, indeed, the image provides the book's Hungarian title, "A Gyertyak Csonkig Egnek" ("The Candles Burn Right Down"). In "The Rebels," a dozen years before, a scene is set with the line "Agyertya csonkig egett": "The candle had burned right down. They could see only outlines in the darkness." The image obviously spoke to Marai. By the failling light of a nominally independent Hungary, he wrestled with the question of when things had gone so horribly wrong. For all his efforts to understand, the future arrived noisily in 1944, and his fruitful period of internal emigration came to an end. The nazis invaded their sluggish partner, rabid Hungarian Fascists dispatched Admiral Horthy, who was a moderate by comparison, to Germam; the Hungarian role in the Holocaust began in earnest, and Marai retreated to the countryside. There he was soon overrun, from the other direction, by the Soviet invasion.

After the German surrender, and a dangerous year spent living in close quarters with the Red Army, he returned to the ruins of his Budapest home, which had been bombed to the foundations.

He clambered over his crushed top hat, his candlesticks, his photographs, and salvaged from what had been a six-thousand-volume library a single book, 'On the Care of a Middle Class Dog’. Considering his belief that "the arts exit to keep us from falling into ruin," it must have required great courage to go back to the writing.

Marai was able to publish for a while longer, as he watched the Hungarian Communist, with Soviet backing and the acquiescence of many other writers, seize power. When he realized that he would no longer be able to emigrate into his work - that he would not even be allowed to keep a dignified silence in the face of totalitarian oppression - he left his homeland, for the last time, in the summer of 1948. After sojourns in Switzerland and Italy, he came to the United States, living in New York and then settling in San Diego when he was seventy-nine. Even after Hungarian liberalization, in the nineteen- seventies, he refused to visit his homeland or allow his books to be published there unless two unlikely demands were met: that the Soviet occupation end and free elections be held. In 1989, having lost his wife, his adopted son, his sister, and his brothers, he declared himself "a thoughtless guest who has overstayed his welcome." But death did not come quickly enough. "I am beginning to lose my patience," he said. Within a year of his suicide, the Soviets were withdrawing, and the Hungarians had held free elections.