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- Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This book is the record of a journey through the world cultures of contemporary London. More specifically, it records a series of encounters with individuals who, although otherwise very different from each other, have three things in common. They are all displaced from their homeland or their origins. They have all become, in some sense, Londoners. And they are all, in their own fields, creative artists. Drawing on many hours of recorded conversation, but distilled with a poet's eye for form and for the telling detail, God's Zoo weaves its story from many stories, each chapter gaining resonance from the others. This is a book about many things. It bears witness to the difficulties encountered by people who have left behind not only a homeland but also family, culture and language. It is also a portrait of a city: London, as Kociejowski writes, is the main character even though it sits and watches silently for most of the time. Above all, it is a testament to the enduring value of art and creativity in human lives.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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MARIUS KOCIEJOWSKI
God’s Zoo
Artists, Exiles, Londoners
For Bobbie
Contents
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
Psalm 137:4
God’s Zoo: An Introduction
This book is the record of a world journey through London’s cultures, or, more accurately, through those people whom I take to be emblematic of those cultures. What they have in common is that they are poets, novelists, artists and musicians, occasionally some combination of these, and, all in all, well equipped to give voice to their experiences. They are also people who have a healthy mistrust of language. They are all but one of them inhabitants of London and that includes faraway boroughs of which we know little. They have come here from other countries.
London is the main character even though it sits and watches silently for most of the time. London is what the people I’ve journeyed through appeal to, their frame of reference, and, like God, whether or not it responds to them remains its prerogative. I thought at first I might make London show its legs but it won’t even get up on stage. It will not be forced. Sometimes one senses in it, within this living city, ghosts of other cities. The parts of London in which my subjects live are often, to some extent, the suburbs of elsewhere, or else the city for them is not so much a geographical space as it is a mental one. Admirable and lovable though they are, I do not walk with the psychogeographers, picking up spirit traces. When, on the other hand, worlds appear to run in parallel, and, at least for one of the people I have written about here, the Tigris really does seem to flow through London, I have been quite shameless in exploiting those connections.
What follows is not strictly about exiles: it is about émigrés too; it is also about people who are wary of defining themselves either way, who quite simply are no longer in the countries in which they were born and raised. Often they are here merely because they did not return home. It’s true of many of the people about whom I write that the words ‘exile’ or ‘émigré’ hardly ever come to their lips and when they do it is usually in order to remove any taint of disgrace. The words are used mostly by other people. Most problematic is the word ‘exile’: nowadays it is employed with scant attention to its original meaning, which is banishment, from the Latin exilium or exsilium. An exsul was a banished man, one commanded to quit his native soil. Ovid was such a figure, Dante another. True exiles are now rare. Solzhenitsyn was bamboozled out of Russia. Pasternak almost certainly would not have been able to return had he gone to collect his Nobel Prize. The most debased use of the word is when one hears of tax exiles, when exile is synonymous with a Bacardi nightmare. A favourite buzzword of journalists, pollsters, demographers and sociologists, the term ‘exile’ has been stripped by them of any metaphysical dimension and is therefore the most unsatisfactory of handles. Whenever I use it, I do so reluctantly.
The modern exile is someone who has been forced to leave his country because of war or economics or is unable to return for fear of punishment or starvation. And even if we accept this limited, limiting definition, we are looking at something that is substantially different from what it was even half a century ago, when the decision to leave, or not to return, was considerably more drastic, almost certainly irreversible. The sense of isolation is no longer felt to quite the same degree. The letter that once upon a time took several weeks to arrive, which, after being tampered with by the authorities at the other end, might have brought news of birth or death, has been largely rendered obsolete. Communication is now immediate, and as such it has altered the very condition of exile. Space and time are no longer the obstacles they once were. What does remain the same, however, although in ways more difficult to measure, simply because things are not as clear as they once were, is the internal shifting of one’s tectonic plates. I want to know what happens inside.
Artists are already exiles of a kind, which is to say the position they occupy in society is not what it used to be, when, say, a poet was his country’s conscience. This is not strictly true, of course, because in some parts of the world, where there are no government subsidies other than those provided for the forging of prison bars, a man of words can still deliver strong punches. What a meltdown there’s been, though, in the affairs of men. We are truly bound ‘in shallows and in miseries’. Artists have become, at the very least, internal émigrés, retreating further and further into themselves. And being fiercely individualistic, most of them, they are wary of sharing too much with their compatriots and indeed there are often tussles over cultural space. Only rarely are they willing members of ethnic communities except, of course, when there’s money to be made. Our cultural institutions go to great lengths to ensure there’s always some kind of jamboree. The danger for any artist in such a position is the slippery slope of compromise, and nowhere is this more in evidence than within closed circles. There one may offend one’s peers a little, but only if one does not push at mutually agreed upon boundaries. All, ultimately, must eat from the same plate. Generally speaking, then, creative people are not easy to drop into tidy ethnic scenarios. The Turk is not to be seen anywhere in that part of London where daily staples are advertised in words with undotted i’s. The Iraqi seems perfectly happy to live among Poles with their truncheons of smoked pork sausage. The Iranian lives in a predominately West Indian neighbourhood. The Zimbabwean lives in Harare North.
Such rules as I made, I soon broke, such that maybe the breaking of them was my only rule. There were a number of things I swore I wouldn’t allow myself to do, which I went ahead and did anyway. It was almost as if by first wrapping myself in chains I’d earned myself the right to wriggle free of them. At first I had decided that on this zigzag journey through London’s cultures I would address only those people working within their own languages. And problematic though this was, I would extend this to include both visual and musical language. This ‘purist’ approach fell apart almost immediately. My Turk, upon arriving here, began to write in English. What he had committed was, in E.M. Cioran’s phrase, ‘heroic treason’. This does not seem, however, to have invalidated the ‘Turkishness’ of his prose. Moreover, the subject is not only a Turk but a Jewish Turk, or a Turkish Jew, which puts him in the position of being a double-exile, but then this, too, is probably untrue because what writer is not at very least a triple-exile? Another was a Hungarian who, on occasion, lapsed into something approaching the incomprehensible in any language although, all in all, he was pretty sharp. (It is with sadness I speak of him in the past tense.) The Iranian remembers nothing of her Iranian childhood and is firmly rooted in the English language. She is, however, so very Persian.
A too rigorous system of enquiry, when applied to people, will not allow for the accidental seepage, the trickle of a phrase, that shows up in it more microcosms than the ocean it feeds into. ‘You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery,’ says Hamlet, and he exclaims, ‘’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?’ Whether he whispers or bellows this is something for a good director to determine, but there can be few lines that argue more effectively against the academic marshalling of human nature. It was this very line, incidentally, which in Pasternak’s translation won the applause of Soviet audiences. They waited breathlessly for it, seeing in this a coded reference to their own plight. That plight is, really, everyone’s.
So fine, then: I betook myself, small blue MZ-N707 Type-R Walkman recorder in hand, through a city which, in cultural and ethnographical terms, is the world’s most diverse. Whenever possible I allowed myself to be guided by circumstance. Sometimes this amounted to no more than a gut feeling that here was somebody with whom I could converse. The choices I made were not always the most logical ones. If I did not write about the most obvious figures maybe it was because enough has been said about them already, so often I approached people who have not had the attention they deserve, but in the main I went for those whose stories intrigued me. Absolutely imperative was that I felt sympathy for their work, because without it I’d rapidly decelerate and finally splutter to a stop. If they happened to be people with whom I’d already crossed paths once or twice, then so much the better. What it meant was that something about them had stuck in the brain and, such is one rule of thumb, what sticks there is probably worth sticking onto the page.
Absolutely paramount to any understanding of my intentions is that this is not a book of interviews. It is, rather, a series of ‘constructions’ based on many hours of recorded conversations. I made it a point of principle never to go to any of my subjects with prepared questions. This is because I believe that the words of greatest value arise from good talk rather than interrogation. Such questions as I did ask belonged wholly to the moment as they would in the natural flow of any conversation. There are stretches of direct speech that I have allowed to stand without significant change, otherwise, and quite without shame, I pulled together fragments of conversation from here and there, splicing them together, and I shifted materials to where I felt they would make the greatest impact. There are several instances, I will not say which ones, where I sought to reconstruct, to the best of my abilities, what people would have said had they been saying it in their own language, which is a roundabout way of saying I tweaked their English. Also I think it is impolite to duplicate other people’s mistakes. Sometimes editing of this kind has the curious effect of at first striking a false tone, and then, with further polishing, suddenly returning the subjects to themselves. As with an invisible mender, the surest guide to success was whether or not my subjects themselves would notice. I wished, above all, for the character of a conversation to be preserved. This was the ideal towards which I strove.
Of the various writings I have had recourse to perhaps none is so profound, so poetically charged, as the Polish writer Józef Wittlin’s ‘Sorrow and Grandeur of Exile’. Actually it is the text of a talk delivered at a meeting of the American Branch of the International PEN Club on 27 February 1957. It haunts the writing of this book although not to such a degree that I have had to crib from it. The sense, rather, was of finding myself sitting with him at the same table. Wittlin, born 1896, was a novelist, poet, essayist and translator not just of Joseph Roth and Rainer Maria Rilke, both of whom he knew, but also of Homer’s Odyssey which, in his earliest versions – there were many – he sought to reproduce in hexameters. After his experiences during World War I, as an infantryman in the Austrian army, he became a pacifist, and so it is unsurprising that the Homer he first began to translate, in 1914 of all years, was not the Homer of the Iliad but the Homer of vagrant heroes. ‘The fatherland of Homer,’ Wittlin wrote, ‘is the pain which is everywhere.’ Józef Wittlin died in New York City in 1976. All the tragic currents that run through the twentieth century ran through him, but exile for him was not a wholly lamentable state of affairs. There is even, he suggests, unlimited freedom for the émigré writer. ‘Solitude,’ he writes, ‘is a miraculous soil on which the ability of an objective view of human affairs is born.’
One passage from his piece is of particular relevance:
In Spanish, there exists for describing an exile, the word destierro, a man deprived of his land. I take the liberty to forge one more definition, destiempo, a man who has been deprived of his time. That means, deprived of the time which now passes in his country. The time of his exile is different. Or rather, the exile lives in two different times simultaneously, in the present and in the past. This life in the past is sometimes more intense than his life in the present and tyrannizes his entire psychology. This has its good and bad aspects. An exile living in the past is threatened by many dangers. For instance, by the danger of pining for trifling things whose real or alleged charm has gone for ever. He is threatened by the danger of pining even for the stage properties employed by older, today no longer living, worlds … The life of the exile, like the life of any other person, speeds onward to its end, but an exile, as it were professionally, moves backwards. Hence, often serious and even tragic, conflicts arise. It happens that the émigré lives in a complete vacuum which his imagination fills exclusively with phantoms of a dead world.
Time, or the loss of it, is one of my themes. What happens, say, when people move from Arabic to World Time? What happens when even the countries they’ve left behind enter World Time? What does one have to do in order to preserve one’s creative voice inside Greenwich Mean Time? What happens to those whispered promises of love at closing time? Time plays havoc with most people, especially as they get older, but I think it does so all the more with people who are exiles or émigrés. There would appear to be a tendency in them to recreate time not according to what it actually was, or is, but to what it might be. (My Hungarian provided a masterclass in imaginative historical reconstruction.) Wittlin remarks on the dangers of being too passionately rooted in one’s time because to be so is to be its slave. ‘Only a destiempo,’ he concludes, ‘can be really free.’ This journey, then, is not always an unhappy one. Quite a few of the people I spoke to are pleased to be here. Some found their artistic voices only after they came to London. Sorrow may be in attendance, but rare is the artist in whom it is not.
What strikes me about the stories I’ve gathered here is how often, and with hardly any prompting, the shades of grandparents tiptoe onto the scene. This, I believe, is inextricably connected with the matter of time. It’s something addressed in these pages by the Uzbek writer. Almost always, in his poetry and prose, there is a scene with an elderly man or elderly woman and a young boy. What’s missing is the generation in the middle. Spiritually, the elderly preserve in themselves something that was all but destroyed during Stalin’s time, whereas their children, born in the 1930s, were the shiny new products of a Soviet atheistic culture. Authenticity is the preserve, therefore, of those who had at least a glimpse of traditional life. It is to them that younger Central Asians, and for that matter Russians as well, go looking for examples of wholeness, or, as my informant puts it, unbrokenness. The foregoing describes an extreme, of course, but it is a situation repeated in varying degrees throughout many of these stories. There is the natural reticence that comes, or ought to come, when speaking of one’s own parents, and with the absence of various kinds of psychological barriers the channels between grandchild and grandparent are usually more open in any case, but there is another reason why those elders loom so large in the memories of exiles and émigrés and that’s because at a double remove they are what their children, so rooted in time, could never be: the custodians of lost worlds, emperors and empresses of the invisible.
So why do I call this book, this place, these people, God’s Zoo? The phrase appears as a quotation, unacknowledged alas, in Paul Tabori’s The Anatomy of Exile: A Semantic and Historical Study (Harrap, 1972). I wish I could run it down to its source. The words leapt from the page, hovered for a bit, tickled my senses. Then a couple of people – not anyone in this book, though – said it could be read as offensive. Who, among my subjects, foreigners all of them, and therefore deeply sensitive to such issues, would wish themselves inside a zoo? I’d been, they said, wildly inappropriate in my choice of title. So I went back to being without one, desperate for a single hook from which to hang a multiplicity of stories. I came up with all kinds of verbal infelicities. Still, that old phrase kept humming in the ear. (It fed the eye too. I liked the zed. Polish is rich with them; English, by comparison, is impoverished.) Months later, I mentioned it to one of the subjects in the book and, while admitting it might draw fire, she loved it as a title. Others liked it too, and then I realised just how lazy my earlier acceptance of other people’s interpretation of it had been. Surely what it meant was that as creatures are to men, so are we to God, and that in this respect it defines the human condition: we are all in God’s Zoo.
Semantically the phrase doubles up to mean where we all live. Although the gates to the city may be open (even if a couple of people here would dispute this) we are confined to it through circumstances, whether they be family or social ties, profession or even the absence of one. Most of us are in there for the duration. We’d sooner choke on its fumes than sniff the roses elsewhere. We are even lured into the illusion that civilisation is here, barbarism outside. Our behaviour, in this packed environment, is not quite as it is in Nature. It is, arguably, both better and worse. Where, in Nature, will you find long-stemmed glasses? Where, in this city, can one, with impunity, skin a rabbit? This may be the Devil justifying his position, but the phrase, when originally coined, did refer to this London of ours.
As Tabori notes, and he is speaking of the different forms of exile, the phrase also serves to describe our ‘infinite variety’. What struck me when gathering these stories was how different they all are. I had initially feared they would be straitjacketed by a common theme. The results demonstrated quite the opposite: containment, it seems, set those voices free. Already, though, I have begun to drift a little. There’s somebody I’ve got to see, and, as luck would have it, he’s cooking for me. The dish he promises is one from his childhood in a faraway place. Will he be able to find the spices by which means he’ll recreate all things gone? God’s Zoo. I, for one, will be there at swilling time.
The Poet, the Anarchist, the Master of Ceremonies
Whose Tale Contains a Desk Inlaid with Midnight Blue
John Rety’s eyes twinkle like cut diamonds tossed onto a haystack darkened by several weeks of rain. They make him look younger than his 77 years. I should think that, like me, he does not own a comb. The accent could be from anywhere east of a certain longitude. It’s not easy to say from where exactly because the years of speaking English have made of it a kind of mélange. The madness, which he has in abundance, is of a species that could not be from anywhere other than what used to be called Eastern Europe. Mitteleuropa really, but because of the Iron Curtain it was twice removed and sealed into a ghetto for our Western fantasies. We wanted those countries free, but only in captivity did they ever really shine. When he’s not scowling, which these days seems to be most of the time, Rety scintillates. Short and stout he may be, but, as my wife can testify, because she danced with him once, he is fleet of foot, and although on that occasion the music was an Irish pub band whose cheeriness is of a species that never fails to depress me, he seemed to move to another music altogether and indeed may have been a Habsburg waltzer in a past life. When I told him on the phone that my world journey through London had brought me to Hungary, or at least that part of it which is to be found in Kentish Town, there was a terse silence.
‘What about it?’
As is so often the case with people who adore the limelight, Rety packs a great deal into the shadows of a previous existence.
‘Will you be my Magyar?’
The autobiographical note John Rety produced for his most recent pamphlet of verse In the Museum (Hearing Eye, 2007) reads:
John Rety was born when he arrived in England in 1947, two years after World War II and at the age of seventeen. He came by the Alberg [sic] Express from Budapest where he was born on 8.12.1930. After a period of 4 years of various employment he began to have work published and became the editor of various literary publications, having had a book of his short stories published in 1951 [sic] (slated by the Catholic Herald and praised by the Morning Advertiser). He turned to poetry around 1980 having finally decided to give up painting when in 1977 his studio was broken into and all his paintings were stolen. In the poems printed here a judicious reader will be able to adduce underlying incidents and other significant details of the writer’s life.
Will trains ever again sound our inner disturbances? What better illustrates our rootlessness, an unresolved love affair, or the swoop of time than a train’s whistle? There was an Austrian movie Arlberg-Express, directed by Eduard von Borsody and produced the same year John Rety made his departure. The single mention of it in the British Film Institute archives describes ‘a criminal adventure about a stolen jewel and a young musician who returns home from being a prisoner of war’. The film itself is not available. What one hears of it is enough, though, to evoke a Europe in post-war turmoil, an endless stream of people on the move.
What gives Rety his public face, and which has made him something of a legend in literary circles, although not always a lovable one, are the Sunday evening poetry readings he organises at the Torriano Meeting Hall in Kentish Town. The late Julia Casterton, poet, describes the atmosphere thus:
The Torriano Meeting House is a mixture of a Quaker quiet room, but not quiet, and a Spiritualist Church, but with the spirits alive rather than dead. There are readers from the floor in the first half, lots of them, and the place gets very hot, with a little air blowing through the Virginia Creeper that festoons the one window; and in the second half, two ‘known’ poets, though as everyone in the audience is a poet too, it can be more of drama than two solo performances, and there can, on occasion, be some very intelligent heckling. John Rety, as master of ceremonies, is very strict. If the poems from the floor are no good, he shouts at everybody and tells them they should read more good poetry if they’re to avoid writing rubbish. The atmosphere is something between the beginning of an Aldermaston March and Brendan Behan’s aunt’s tea party, because everyone’s actually very nice, in a pugilistic, revolutionary sort of way.
Rety takes issue with that Virginia creeper, saying it creeps on the outside.
On the publicity brochure for the readings are written eight of the most dangerous words ever to have been committed to the English language: ‘All poets present are welcome to express themselves.’ And express themselves they do, sometimes at considerable length, or so it feels, and it brings to mind Leopardi’s anecdote about Diogenes the Cynic who, upon seeing a poet endlessly reciting his verses come to a blank page, cries out, ‘Take heart, friends. I see land ahead.’ It has to be said, though, Miss Casterton’s quite right: as master of ceremonies Rety usually puts a stop to any poets outstaying their welcome. Sometimes they give rise to his virulence: ‘We had Sir Stephen Spender here once and he had to wait three quarters of an hour while poets spoke from the floor. If William Shakespeare himself walked in, I’m sure he’d have to wait a couple of hours.’ Often, just before the invited reader takes the stage, the would-be poets, their weekly vowel movement done, take to the street, which brings to mind yet another story Leopardi relates: when the poet Martial was asked by someone why he wouldn’t read his verses to him, he replied, ‘So as not to hear yours.’ I would say there is nowhere in London where bad poetry comes closer to touching the sublime, and this, I believe, is because of the way the words move through that rather special atmosphere. This said, it is also a place where very good poems get an airing. The hot furnace of the Torriano has been the tempering of many a fine poet over the years. Also it has acted as a platform for poets as diverse as John Heath-Stubbs, Dannie Abse, Ken Smith, John Arden, David Halliwell, Lotte Kramer, Mimi Khalvati, and James Berry.
John Rety is other things too – poetry editor for The Morning Star, honorary member of some new manifestation of the Theatre of the Absurd, ‘Toyota Corolla’ in the Icelandic Car Choir, a professional chess player (a Hastings Master in 1956), and he has even written a play, To Hell with Heaven, which, so legend goes, he offers people £5 to read. Actually when speaking to him one does enter a kind of theatre, the absurdities flying back and forth, but recording him is another matter: he is faltering, shy even, seemingly unable to distinguish between what has value and what doesn’t, but then he claims he is much quieter than he used to be. This he puts down to old age, but, really, I don’t believe him. All one requires is a match, and, once struck, a small flame travels in silence to where memory explodes, and suddenly, by the flash it makes, if one is quick-eyed, one gets a picture of things as they once were. In the theatre of operations that has been his lifeline for over a quarter of a century now, we turned the clock back to when John Rety was Réti János and then pushed it forward again to when he was born, aged seventeen.
War disrupted a life that hitherto gave no cause for complaint. For reasons that still elude him, Rety was sent to an English nursery school in Budapest. ‘Wee Willie Winkie’ he remembers, but no equivalent Hungarian rhymes. One of his early memories is of being allowed to take over the steering wheel of the school bus, which really was more like a lorry, he says, and such recklessness of spirit brings to mind the saying that God made Hungarians in order to sit on horseback. All vehicles are extensions of horses or at least that’s the case the further east one goes.
Rety’s grandfather, Réthi Lipót Pál, was an impresario, head of the First Hungarian Theatrical Agency, and among the people he brought to Budapest in 1907 was Enrico Caruso. Aged 80, Réthi was deprived of the aristocratic ‘h’ after a court hearing designed, it seems, to bring him one step closer to the proletariat. It seems no Réti or Rety, even an aitchless one, ever strays too far from the stage. Rety’s father, István, took over from his father as director but only for the ‘metal albatrosses’ to intervene.
My mother wore a paper shirt
My father wore a hat –
The metal albatrosses
Soon put a stop to that.
I see them faintly smiling still
And a bit surprised at that
For mother sweet was fond of her shirt
While father was at one with his hat.
But fate and destiny jointly declared
An unequal war on my mother’s shirt
And their metal albatrosses
Destroyed my father’s fine hat.
(‘World War Two’)
The ‘metal albatrosses’ require no explanation, but that paper shirt may strike some readers as a bit obscure.
‘My mother, Ilus, was full of ideas. There was no soap available, so she decided to make some. It looked like soap, it smelled like soap, it had the hardness of soap, but when you added water it didn’t lather. Still it was a great achievement. Then she decided there was lots of paper about, and so why should anybody wear cloth shirts when in summer it was warm enough to wear paper ones. She made these beautiful shirts, always out of the best paper, which you wore for a while and then threw away. She made them for anyone who wanted them. Sometimes she decorated them in different colours with geometric woodcut decorations. Those shirts made their own music, which is to say that when you walked you could hear them crinkle. She was that kind of woman, inventive – a brave woman too, braver than most people in that she took no notice of the bombings, and would never go to the shelter. One day the bombs were falling and she was polishing her nails, and she said to my father, “I have run out of acetone. Go and get me some.” My father said, “But, my dear, the bombs are falling.” “What are you worried about bombs for? I need some acetone to remove my nail varnish.” Another time, we were making tea. She said, “There is no lemon.” My father said, “But darling, all the shops are closed, the greengrocers are all gone, and anyway there’s not a single lemon to be had in the whole of Budapest.” “János, prove your father wrong and get me a lemon.” So I went. There was an air raid, people running about, and I knocked this person up, saying to him, “Lemon? Have you got a lemon?” “Yes,” he said. So I bought it and ran all the way back through the falling bombs. She said, “How much did it cost you?” I told her. “What, you paid that much for a lemon!” That was her all over. She should have written poetry, not me.’
The war, as Rety describes it (and this is so often the case with childhood accounts of battle), is curiously remote. This was in fact largely true of the first years when the country was under the often controversial leadership of Admiral Miklós Horthy, who tried to keep Hungary out of the war, although that sometimes meant striking deals with Hitler, even to the extent of passing a series of anti-Jewish measures. Admiral Horthy also, whenever possible, rescued Jews. Given the fact that Rety’s family were nominally, though not religiously, Jewish, their position was precarious to say the least. Things changed when the Americans began their carpet bombing of Budapest, which, though the Americans did not know it, put a temporary stop to the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. The actual physical fighting started later. It was not until March 1944, when Hungary tried to make a separate peace, that the Germans invaded, kidnapped Horthy’s second son, which, after the horror of losing a first son on the Eastern Front, forced the father to abdicate, and the fascist Arrow Cross Party took over. The true horrors began.
‘There were some people, very few, who stood up against the tyranny. My father was in hiding somewhere, my mother elsewhere. I took no notice of the restrictions. I went wherever I wanted to. I carried messages for what I now realise must have been the Resistance. I did that while the bombs were falling. The shrapnel whizzed past me, and sometimes I’d pick up a piece that was still hot. I suppose young people living in war zones grow up thinking it is a natural thing to go and see a friend and find only a demolished building. The Russians encircled the town and you could hear gunfire coming closer and closer and all of a sudden they entered, first Pest and then Buda. There was no food. If a horse collapsed on the street people would rush to cut up the carcass. Soon you began to see human bodies all over the place. The bridges were bombed and there was utter chaos. A young person doesn’t really care about those things, and I began to believe that was part of my life. I was valet to Captain Gyuri Pukás, a quite well-known actor, son of my family’s barber. As it happens my father was his agent. After the war, he was tried by a Hungarian court for being of some rightwing persuasion. I was the only person to go and testify for him. They laughed their heads off because I was only sixteen and they took no notice of what I was saying to them. Pukás was a marvellous person, very handsome, and he got me to stay in some deserted barracks where there lived only a cook and one other person, me. Barcza cooked a huge meal each day for all the would-be assembled but it was just us two. The rest of the town was starving and we had all this meat which he cooked in a huge cauldron. Then Barcza would ring a bell at which sound nobody came, we’d eat, and then we’d throw the rest of the food in the gutter. I asked him why he did this and he said, “Orders are orders. I have been told to cook 200 dinners. I’d be shot if I didn’t.” I suppose these experiences formed my ideas. I became a lifelong anarchist. I don’t believe in nationalities, I certainly do not believe in religion, nor do I believe in rulers and I regard the people who rule over populations as either mentally ill or criminal or both. I am prepared to speak English at the moment, but if there was another language I’d be quite happy to speak it because I do not believe in any superiority of any one language over another.’
‘Were you ever in danger?’
‘I was in another building just a few months before the war finished and this man from the 7th District – his name was Hartyáni, a tailor by profession, a lifelong communist, and, as far as I understood it, district commander for the Resistance – said to me, “Go downstairs to the gate.” He opened the gate and gave me a big kick on my backside and said, “Go on, run!” “Where to?” I cried. “Anybody you know because it’s not safe here any more.” Later, I learned there was a huge police raid on the building and I would have been arrested and put in a camp. Hartyáni survived, or so I believe. I should be grateful to him because he saved me, but I don’t know why he had to give me a kick on the backside. After the closure of the barracks, where the cook and I lived, Captain Pukás gave me the address of a devoted friend of his, a bedridden woman called Julia. She was the last person to shelter me. I had to bring her provisions and after a while she began to believe I was her son. When the war finished she was very upset I had to go.’
‘Did all your family survive the war?’
‘My father survived, my mother too, but unfortunately my beautiful grandmother Sári was shot dead on 11th January 1945, only days before the Russians came. There was some young thug in Nazi uniform, a Hungarian fascist, and she said to him, “Look, boy, you had better remove your Nazi armband and disappear because the Russians will be here soon. Save yourself.” There were witnesses to this. He took her into a corridor, and all they heard was a pistol shot. That’s one reason why I never went back to Hungary because I couldn’t face those people again after what they did to my grandmother. A civil servant, a friend of my grandmother, told me what happened to her. “By the way,” he said, “she left a bag of beans. If you come along each day, I will make us lunch.” Food was scarce. We ate in silence for about a month. One day he announced, “I’m afraid the beans are finished, so there is no reason for you to call tomorrow.” So that was that. When I heard what happened to my grandmother I ran and ran, kicking all the stones, swearing and cursing humanity and everything else. That woman was very precious to me. The reason I’m here at all is because just before the First World War, during one of the pogroms, she swam across the River Drava from what would later be Yugoslavia, with the two small children strapped to her back, my mother aged one and her brother aged two. Meanwhile, my grandfather Schaffer jumped up and down naked on the bank of the river so as to draw the attention of the soldiers who were firing at her. They shot him dead and she made it across to Hungary.’
Years later, Rety’s daughter, Emily Johns, produced a linocut of that scene.
‘She was a lovely woman. She used to take me to the park and on the way she would stop at a pub where she’d blow the head off a glass of beer and, drinking it in one swig, say, “Don’t tell your mother.” She had a machine with which she produced these cloth buttons. She was the poorest of the poor, but she made some money out of these buttons which she sold to the department stores. I would go with her. It was good fun going to those stores because they had some kind of doorless lift that went up and down, which, if you were lucky, you would jump into, otherwise you ended up nowhere. She was the one who did everything. She cooked for all the family but never ate with us. I used to sit with her while the others were guzzling. She would stay in the corner by the window with a Bible in her hands and, being an educated little boy, I said to her, “But granny, you’ve got the Bible upside down.” She said to me, “Don’t tell your mother otherwise I won’t have five minutes’ peace and quiet.” She realised that as long as she had a Bible in her hands and gave the impression of being a pious woman they wouldn’t disturb her, this despite my family coming from a very atheistic crowd. In some ways I resemble her. I’ve never been able to keep my mouth shut.’
The Russian army entered Budapest on 17 January 1945, although it would be another month before the city, under the control of the Arrow Cross, capitulated. The Battle of Budapest would be one of the bloodiest sieges of the war. Some 40,000 civilians perished. Rety and some other people were taking shelter in the basement of a tenement building at 40/42 Rákóczy út. The future Hastings Master was sitting on his own, setting out chess pieces on a board, when a group of German soldiers burst in, looking for civilian clothes in order that they might disguise themselves. One of them saw Rety alone at his chessboard, sat down with him and began to play. Rety recalls that he employed the King’s Gambit. The German was close to winning when his companions shouted at him to leave with them as quickly as possible. Rety was left staring at his unfinished game. A few minutes later, there was a sound of boots on the stairs and a Soviet soldier burst in, extremely tense, and covered the civilians before him with his machine gun. A woman screamed. The soldier swung round, saw the chessboard and sat down to complete the game.
‘And being the man in the middle, I was soundly beaten,’ Rety muttered, fully aware of history’s ironies.
Rety returned to the other shelter where he had been with Hartyáni. On the floor above, some women and children were having a celebration when a drunken Russian soldier entered, waving wildly his Shpagin PPSh sub-machine gun, which the Magyars nicknamed the ‘balalaika’ on account of its shape. When Rety went up to see what the commotion was one of the women whispered to him to run upstairs to the seventh floor and ask the woman called Ada to come down, saying she was the only person who could ease the situation.
‘Ada practised whoredom on the seventh floor.’
‘Practised what?’
‘Whoredom. She was our local prostitute, a very beautiful, very fussy woman who spent hours making herself up for her next customer. I went to fetch her. I can still remember the room, which was to the left of the door, and there she sat, staring out the window, a little dressing-table in front of her. She was surrounded by gentle lilac colours, soft furnishings. She wouldn’t make a decision until she’d heard the full story, which I had to do quickly, and even then she thought about it for a while. She allowed me to watch her put on her makeup. Then she got up, threw a dressing gown over her negligee, put on her slippers, and said, “Let’s go.” There was now quite a crowd of people standing around the Russian. She sidled up to him and the situation changed immediately. She didn’t speak Russian. It was her hands that talked. Theoretical, isn’t it? She understood the man was drunk and because she understood that just then he was no better than a dog she acted as a woman who understood men. There are very few women capable of understanding a man in all his moods, their sudden changes, and she dealt with the situation beautifully. The Russian fell asleep in her lap. We have been prudishly made to believe that certain women are saintly and certain women are prostitutes. My advice to a woman who doesn’t understand a man is not to live with him because he will not be able to explain to her who he is. These prostitutes, however, they know! If Ada’s case had been better advertised, she would have been made a saint in the Roman Catholic church.’
‘So did it become sexual?’
‘It is always sexual when a woman calms a man down.’
‘Yes, but did he go upstairs with her?’
The queen is a most versatile figure, against which the pawn only rarely has a chance. Fornication, Rety assures me, did not take place.
After the liberation, Rety’s mother had another brainstorm and devised a poster.
COME FOR A COMMUNAL BATH, ALL OF YOU. I WANT TO SEE YOU ALL, NAKED AND UNASHAMED. I SHALL WASH YOUR BODIES CLEAN AND TEND TO YOUR SORES. ALL THAT DIRT OF HATRED AND OF CRUELTY WE MUST NOW WASH FROM OUR BODIES AND FORGET FOREVER.
‘I don’t know if this was ever enacted, but philosophically she was right and certainly it was the right place to do it because Budapest was full of thermal baths. Also we were surrounded by all these bloody priests and their novices. The war was such a long time ago. If you hadn’t reminded me, I wouldn’t have known it happened.’
‘And what of the peace?’
‘I must say there is a lot of anti-Soviet propaganda, but I still hold with affection those Russian women soldiers who ran Budapest after the liberation. You never saw women like that, in the middle of the road, with outstretched hands, stopping all the traffic, telling people which way to go. There was no nay-saying to them. Those Russian women were the Russian Revolution as far as I was concerned.’
‘How did you feel about Soviet forces coming into Hungary?’
‘They were a breath of fresh air. I was in the Resistance, hoping for someone to liberate the place. The last three or four months, when all the scum came to the surface, was when the real atrocities took place. In only four months they managed to deport hundreds of thousands of people – Jews, gypsies, political opponents, anyone they disliked.’
Why did he leave her behind, they were made for each other, they were in love. He could not remember the moment of their parting. ‘Shall I see you tomorrow as usual?’ ‘Not unless you come and see me in London.’ She laughed and thought it was one of his jokes.
(‘Banal Incidents from My First Period’)
‘The woman in my “Banal Incidents” is really an amalgam of all my past friends and loves, but she could also be this woman I met just three days before I left Hungary. Viera was married to some distant relation of mine, a man who wrote penny dreadfuls, sometimes two a day. She was a mathematician. She attached herself to me and spent her whole time feverishly writing out long equations. She wanted to make sure I understood all there was to know about mathematics. She gave me, for example, a very simple formula, which I still remember, on how to solve quadratic equations:
You see, the more unknowns there are, the more difficult it is to find the solution. If there is only one unknown, then it’s very simple. The point is everybody wants some kind of ally, somebody with whom he can discuss his ideas. I don’t know what happened to that woman but clearly she should have said to me, “Don’t go to that foreign country. Stay here. I want to make you into a mathematical genius. I will leave my husband and I’ll pump you up with mathematics for the rest of your life.”’
There were people who were alive and those were the ones he left. He left them where they were. He didn’t take them with him. How could he have put all his acquaintances into one suitcase and carried them across Europe on the Arlberg Express? How could any brain put up with such cargo? One ticket transports one person only, but the suitcase is packed full of ancestors, kin, friends and ex-countrymen. ‘Carry your bag, sir?’ ‘By all means, as long as you can lift it.’ ‘But it is as light as a feather.’ ‘For you it may be, for you don’t know, can’t feel what’s inside.’
(‘Banal Incidents from My First Period’)
‘I have no idea why, but I was the first person to be granted an English visa that year. It was guaranteed by a man called György Tarján who was an actor with the National Theatre in Hungary and later became head of the Hungarian Service of the BBC. I met him just the once after my arrival but I was never offered a job or anything. I have no idea whatsoever as to why it was I came to this country. My parents thought it would be a good idea for me to come to England and to continue studying English, but I didn’t realise I’d be stuck here.
‘It was really going from one war-torn country to another. My aunt who’d lived here most of her life was waiting for me at Dover. There was silver service on the train going from there to London. The city was very poor. The snow was very high that year and there was hardly any heating. There was still rationing, and the whole place was a bombsite, even more so than anything I saw in Budapest, with whole areas levelled. But people were very cheerful. You could still hear Cockney voices, which you don’t any more. The point is this: the first nine years of my life were halcyon days, but once the war started it was not so much the bomb damage which affected me as the fact that everybody around me had gone completely mad. Their behaviour became strange to me. I tried to keep to my own interests and walked the streets of Budapest as if nothing was happening but most people were terribly afraid. I tried not to give in to that but when I arrived in England it was as if all of a sudden I had left a mental hospital and was now living in a free-speaking country. I have never regretted the move. I have become very fond of this place and am probably more anxious about it than most people who were born here. There are signs now of complete dereliction. Almost immediately after I arrived, my aunt burnt my Hungarian passport so I couldn’t go back. The British authorities gave me permission to stay for as long as I wished. My first job was in publishing with an old man called Eugene Prager who was also a refugee – from Prague, as it happens; a very lovely man who published some nice books but because he couldn’t speak a word of English he didn’t know what he was printing. I thought I was set up but suddenly he decided to stop and I found myself without a job in 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain, so I hung around the coffee houses until I was asked by some people to edit a new magazine called Intimate Review, which published people like Colin Wilson for the first time.’
Elsewhere Rety describes the Intimate Review as ‘a bohemian newspaper without offices or staff. Its headquarters was a table in the newly opened coffee house in Northumberland Avenue.’ Then came his first literary break.
In 1953, Rubicon Press published Rety’s first book, Supersozzled Nights, or, Htuoy’s Backward Youth, an epistolary novel, which in the second half appears to forget it is one. The book doesn’t end: it stops. The illustrations by John Addyman are in a satirical vein, and the one on the dustwrapper depicts a young, rather fey, figure at its centre, whom I go excavating for in an older man’s features. Ah yes, the uncombed thatch, it’s got to be him. It is too early in the history of the human race to be able to say what Supersozzled’s literary value is, but maybe it would suffice to say it resists the temptation to become great literature. It is, rather, a relic from bohemian Soho at a time when even its whores were the creatures of a monochrome world. Almost every time I open the book there is a fresh tear at the edges of the pages. Could it really be destined for extinction? Certainly the Soho it depicts is gone, or, rather, it has been displaced by the unaffordable. Supersozzled has its moments, but these are like separate cars of a train that comes without a set of tracks, and, at times, is rendered in the slightly laboured English of the foreigner whose disadvantage is to speak it too well for common usage. There are impressive passages, though, such as those contained in a chapter about going to an exhibition of a sculptor whose identity is not important, although it would be nice to know, and which begins, ‘There are sculptors, and eminent ones, with their crowing of cocks understandable only to hens.’
My friends were impressed with his work and I did not tell them my thoughts, they would have called me a purist, with the best not good enough for me. It is true I am apt to speculate now and then, but I try to be fair. I always try to be kind to mediocre people. I praise them and usually make them feel good and on top of the world. I despise the bad and expect miracles from the best, though. I expect the best to surpass themselves, in humility to their fellow beings and because they are the hope of the human race and it is only by their standards that it is worth while to live. Thinking that, I followed them to the bus-stop and decided to go back on my own to continue my meditations. However, as I looked at the back page of my newspaper I saw that the horse which I picked with such optimism was placed third in a field of similar number. Suddenly I forgot all about art and correct and incorrect living and the image of the horse came into my mind and I began to laugh and my friends began to laugh, the way they thought my system of picking winning horses is not good enough.
Now, I thought to myself, life is complex. There is art, there is fate and there are your cows. Your cows are very important because they complete the picture. They are slow and quick at the same time. They seem to do nothing yet all the time they are producing milk and getting ready for their last day. Their presence is obvious, though seldom noticed. They are the essence of life, all around us and nowhere at the same time. One makes profound statements and the horse he tips to win finishes last and leaves his profundity behind like another umbrella or glove.
‘I can still read it, but I wish I wasn’t imbued by fiction. That is to say it was all about real people I met in the coffeehouse era of the 1950s, although some of it was made up. I had the idea a story had to be something with a middle, a beginning and an end and which pleased everyone. I wish I’d been less inventive, but I feel it is as good a bit of writing as that from any of my contemporaries although none of them could really write. My situation was that I became more an editor than a writer. If there was a blank page, I quickly filled it with fiction, usually under a different name, but more and more I began to regard myself as a handmaiden to the arts. I then co-edited with the late Peter Everett a magazine called The Fortnightly that ran for four issues. It printed people like Elizabeth Smart, Burns Singer, Doris Lessing, Philip O’Connor who wrote as “Caliban”, Tom Blackburn and John Heath-Stubbs. I met Louis MacNeice and Francis Bacon and others. There was Peter Brooke who wrote under the name of Anthony Carson, an excellent writer but now completely forgotten. He was a very big chap suffering from some kind of cold and we put him up on our floor where he stayed for three days and suddenly he woke up, dragged me to his bank where he walked up and down with the manager until he got a hundred pounds out of him. Then we had something to eat. I remember him sitting in the French in Soho and scribbling while the printer’s devil waited for his weekly article for the New Statesman. Francis Bacon, you’d never see him completely sober. Everybody said “Francis is here” or “Francis is gone”, but he was always there somewhere. John Deakin the photographer used to be there.’
Meanwhile, in Hungary, there was revolution. One of the victims of 1956 was Rety’s father who was walking down a road when the sound of gunfire from a tank startled him and gave him a fatal heart attack. When I asked Rety his feelings about the Hungarian Revolution, I was treated to a dose of his famously contrarian nature.
‘I was very happy in England. I really distrusted the so-called Revolution altogether. My impression of the political elite of Hungary was that they were very rightwing, supremacist, and they hated everyone who was not what they called “a Hungarian”. They hate the Romanians, they hate the Yugoslavs, they hate the Turks, they hate the Jews, and they hate the gypsies. If all those people did not exist they would invent someone to hate. They didn’t like the idea of living in some kind of state, however bad it was, where there was a common education, a common currency, and where people had as much chance to live as the next person, and were adequately housed. They love the colour of their flag, but I wasn’t convinced by the Revolution and I am still not convinced, especially when I hear about what is going on at the moment. They haven’t changed at all. They are just as rightwing and vindictive as they have ever been. I don’t like the idea of any kind of state and certainly I don’t like police states, but at least under the Soviets they didn’t have racial disharmony at the top of their agenda. If I didn’t come out of Hungary I’m sure I would be dead now because those disgusting people with their lies would either have killed me or bored me to death. I don’t know why I ever had the misfortune of living in their midst.’
Soon after the death of his father, Rety’s mother came to London where they lived together for a while.
‘One day she said to me, “I would like to get married, so could you disappear from my life. Nobody will marry me if he sees I’ve got a bearded son.” I did see her once more. I was in the Inverness Street Market, in Camden Town, queuing for vegetables, and there was a woman in front of me who I thought looked very much like somebody I knew. I kept jumping the queue, sidling up, and the closer I got to her the more she wanted to disappear and then I followed her and she turned and was about to slap me in the face for molesting her. She stopped, and said “Oh, Jancsi, it’s you.” She gave me her card, saying she was married, and told me to be careful what I say when I phone her. I never saw her again. My aunt found out from some friends in Budapest that she’d dropped dead two years earlier on Pond Street, in Hampstead. I made enquiries, but I don’t even know where she is buried.’
After Rety’s Soho existence, he and his wife, Susan, opened a furniture shop in Camden High Street. Many of the people who lived in the area were stalwarts of the Soho scene – Jonathan Miller, George Melly, John Roberts and Alan Bennett – and were surprised to find him there. ‘What are you doing here?’ they’d ask, but Rety had now forsaken literature for furniture.
‘We used to lend our furniture out to little groups like the Unity Theatre. They were putting on Hedda Gabler
