Miklós Mészöly - a major Hungarian ‘godfather’. At play here are questions of "official" and non-official, or subjective, memory, particularly as these two narrative tropes are placed within the context of the Hungary of World War II and of the era immediately following, the 1950s

Miklós Mészöly, Death of an Athlete. Trans. by Tim Wilkinson. Liverpool: Bluecoat Press, 2012.

Miklós Mészöly (1921-2001) influenced just about all major authors writing in Hungarian today. For all that, until now essentially nothing by him has been published in English. It is not that he wrote in a dense, not readily comprehensible language. It is fair to say that he wrote in a plain but precise language, in quite short sentences, eschewing descriptive adjectives or attempts to psychologise his characters. What characterises his books is the focus on people, objects and events with an acceptance of their randomness, sometimes with seemingly jolting leaps of time or focus. Most of all, he was a master at not revealing directly the logic driving behind the seemingly arbitrary narrative. As he put it himself "The most a writer can do is to present obscurity in a clear manner. Death of an Athlete is not so much a story about athletics or a particular athlete, or indeed the direct causes of his death, but is a story of his life as pieced together by his partner of the last decade or so of his life. A whole web. The epigram for my 1968 novel Saul, might just as easily have been applied to Death of an Athlete: 'Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain...'"
Instead there is the Olympian sounding "Faster, higher, longer", which is attributed to someone named Nikolai Ozolin, the recorder. One needs to be aware of the position held by Ozolin, and what the Melbourne Olympics signified in Hungary, by date association alone, less than a decade after the 1956 Revolution.

Considering that Miklós Mészöly is generally regarded as one of the most important Hungarian prose writers of the second half of the 20th century, it is especially fortunate that one of his most seminal works, Death of an Athlete, has now appeared in an excellent translation by Tim Wilkinson, published by The BlueCoat Press.
While the title of the work would appear to indicate the main narrative course being formed by the protagonist’s death, the novel itself presents the reader with a vastly more complex situation, far less suitable to any directly linear retelling. Indeed, from quite early on in the novel it becomes clear that the athlete himself, prematurely deceased at the very start of the narrative time, is of somewhat lesser importance than the memories that he provokes in the narrator. At play here are questions of "official" and non-official, or subjective, memory, particularly as these two narrative tropes are placed within the context of the Hungary of World War II and of the era immediately following, the 1950s, when (beginning in 1948) one totalitarianism had effectly been replaced by another.
For those familiar with mid-20th century Hungarian literature, the immediate association that comes to mind is that of Geza Ottlik's School at the Frontier [Iskola a határon], which examined a totalitarian-ordered society within the microcosm of a military boarding school, and in particular the effects of that society upon human relationships and communication, the creation of a meta-language between individuals within a rigid order. In a sense, Mészöly's oeuvre forms one of the most significant way-stations on the path that leads from Ottlik to the groundbreaking prose writers who became active in the 1970s, Péter Esterházy and Péter Nádas (often referred to as Péterek, "the Peters" ). Yet at the same time, Mészöly's work testifies to the enormous legacy of Ágnes Nemes Nagy, especially in the writerly commitment to objectivity, a deep fidelity to the surface and texture of everyday life, an absolute refusal to romanticise or aggrandise. Mészöly' s work embodies a deep affiliation to existentialism as well, and because of that his work often met with a deeply negative reaction in post-Stalinist Hungary, not to mention the neighbouring Soviet satellite countries.  The entry for Mészöly, to cite one example, in the Dictionary of Writers (Hungary) [Slovník spisovatelů: Maďarsko, Odeon] published in Czechoslovakia in 1971, states:

Studied law. His stories are characterised by a particularly strange atmosphere, at times associated with existentialism. Thematically they are often based on wartime experiences, for the most part gloomy.

Granted, this was written just after the debut of his career (and immediately after the  brutal crushing of the Prague Spring), but as Beáta Thomka also reminds us in her outstanding monograph (Mészöly Miklós, Kalligram, 1995), it was common for Mészöly to be accused of being susceptible to "decadent bourgeois influence" in the form of existentialism. As the postscript to the novel points out, Death of an Athlete was published first in French translation in 1965, followed by a West German edition in 1966.  Only then did the censors give permission for it to be published in Hungarian.
Reading the novel, it is easy to see what might have given the one-time socialist censors concern. The ostensible impetus for the novel — that the close female companion of the recently deceased athlete, Bálint Őze, records her memories of her lover — is at every turn undermined by the process of memory itself, its twists and turns and lack of perceptible logic. The "official" narrative that the regime clearly seeks from the narrator is one that she can never fulfil, as she herself is well aware, often giving voice to her self doubts as to this task. (As an aside, it is here fascinating to note another intriguing strand in Hungarian literature, that of the assumed female narrator. Extending all the way from Sándor Weöres’ Psyche to Péter Esterházy’s assumed female alter-ego, Lili Csokonai, to Szilárd Borbély’s poetic narratives written in the female first-person singular in his recent collection To the Body, it is a persistent phenomenon. And, for reasons hitherto unelucidated, Hungarian writers have succeed in this sub-genre of literature as no others have.)
In a sense, the official narrative of the athlete's life that the regime expects from her is the chronological and narrative equivalent of the spaces of socialism that fill the novel, particularly those of the purported public spaces of socialism, such as housing estates and sports facilities. The inscription of a personal subjective chronology onto these impersonal spaces constitutes a major philosophical and moral triumph (even if left unstated) for the female protagonist, even as she discovers at the end of the novel that the regime has no use for her memories and has alredy published its own account. As opposed to the military academy in Ottlik's School at the Frontier, the space that dominates Death of an Athlete is that of the telep, a word translatable into English by such expressions as "settlement, colony, habitation, premises, [housing] estate, establishment" and so on, and which in actuality translates one of the most essential spatial tropes of Socialist space in the Soviet satellite countries. As Beáta Thomka writes:

The telep is a part of a space of desolation, in spite of its openness, and along with it as well, the spatial model of a perfectly surveyed, enclosed world. (p. 95)

The narrator describes as well those relics of pre-war Budapest that somehow survived into this era. The description of the puppet theatre at Városliget, nearly documentary in its detail, renders a vivid picture of the sheer diachrony of life in a small central European country where not all layers of the past could be effectively and thoroughly erased. "Her small park theatre, incidentally, was not touched by the post-war wave of rationalisations… Even then it had already given the appearance of some sort of asylum against various police security threats…" And the description of the theatre itself becomes subordinate to the narrator's need to unravel the personality of its director, Becky, her sister-in-law and one of Bálint's lovers. It is possible to see, in the dispassionate depiction of these deeply complex affective bonds, a narrative germination which will eventually attain a kind of further magnificent fruition with Péter Nádas' Parallel Stories of the early present millennium.
The Bluecoat Press has produced a handsome volume, with beautiful cover art photography and high-quality printing. As a fellow translator, it is gratifying to see the translator's name reproduced on the cover of the book, a practice which does not occur often enough. Tim Wilkinson succeeds admirably in capturing the dispassionate quality of Mészöly's narrative voice, with its unswerving attention to the minor objective details that, in the end, grant to the story its profound verisimilitude. The narrative is extremely condensed, and in combination with the associational technique, may leave the reader feeling they are wandering through an infinitely complex labyrinth of memory. One in which, however, it is a privilege to dwell. - Ottilie Mulzet

 
excerpt:

“Faster, higher, longer”

(Nikolay Ozolin, the recorder)

In point of fact, the State Sports Press asked me to compose some sort of memoir about his life—not long and, above all, not too technical. The technical aspects, they said, could safely be left to them, it being anyway rather shaky ground. Ticklish. A whole gamut of aspirations and ruffled sensitivities, club and individual jealousies. They wanted something different from me. They dropped a heavy hint that they would like to see the book being given a title like “Lyrical Memoir of an Athlete Outside Competition,” or something similar. A person who never wrote, only lived, can easily be hoodwinked by those kinds of reservations, can believe that what is at one’s fingertips is as good as on paper. I don’t kid myself. It’s getting round to eight weeks that we found his body in Firestone Valley on the Vlădeasa Massif in Transylvania. He had fallen on his face among smouldering pine logs, and from early morning until late in the evening a blazing sun glared on the nape of his beck. Festoons of Formica rufa, the big European red ants or southern wood ants, had settled under his singlet like the stitching of some secret tattoo. He had on the same black-and-red track shoes as at the competition in Prague at the end of the summer. Those are facts. Yet I know the paper will not be more docile as a result; indeed, it seems to have become even more resistant and mistrustful.
I seriously think that the only person who can be truly objective is one who also has good reason to be biased. There is always a touch of weakness in true understanding. That kind of thing does not go down too well these days, of course, being judged a cowardly line of thought. But women are well aware that this is not so; the case is otherwise. One thing is for sure: this is not the book that I would like to write about him—more an irresolute collection of data in order to finally get to know the person I lived together with for ten years; the man, the adolescent, the boy—all together. Men never manage to break away, once and for all, from one period of their life or other. They carry everything around with them as if, for some reason, they were in constant need of all of it, though it is also possible that it is us who need it. All I know is that if I were to be reborn I would want him to be my son. Maybe as a mother I would be able to be more humble about tolerating someone living beside me whom I love more than anything else but who equally does not truly live beside me or beside anyone else. Not that I, the lover, lacked humbleness either.
When we first came across him on Vlădeasa the blue enamel stopwatch was on him I had the job of forcing his fingers apart and recovering it; I recall I sweated a lot before finally managing it. When it slipped out of my grasp I was seized with such dread that for minutes on end I was unable to open my eyes. In the end Old Man Luka, the caretaker for the kabana, leaned over next to me and pulled me down onto the ground but meanwhile holding out the palm of one hand under my hand, counting on my dropping the curious, coloured stopwatch. I did not drop it. I stared fixedly, thinking that when he had fallen on his face the reset button must have been pressed because the hands were at zero. As a result it was impossible even to guess what distance he had covered in those last minutes. Wherever Bálint trained, whether on cinder track or cross-country, he never omitted to keep a check on the time. For my par I was so familiar with lapses of time that he set himself for covering any given distance that I was able to keep track from that alone. But the index hands stood at zero.
All that happened barely two to three weeks after we had returned home from Prague. That Prague meeting was the last one in which he participated, though even that was just half-heartedly. In the semifinal he left his competitors standing with the ease one had come to expect, but then quite unexpectedly did not take the starter blocks in the final. Our pleas were futile; threatening him with disciplinary action, unavailing—it was no use. He dug his heels in; the harder people tried to persuade him the more politely he ignored them. I already knew him: it was the sign that he had already reached a decision for good and all. He withdrew quietly into a corner of the dressing room and watched with great attention the gymnastics of one of our young sprinters. Bartosi was going through exactly the same movements as Bálint himself between getting dressed and stripping off. There was nothing odd about the exercise: he casually raised a flexed knee up to waist level, even leaning a bit towards it, before supply stretching the leg in front. Whether putting on or stripping off his tracksuit bottoms, that movement fitted in naturally with the operation of changing clothes.
I noticed that a wry smile was playing around his lips as he watched Bartosi. The latter himself noticed that he was being watched; he became flustered, and (inasmuch as one could tell on his-tanned face) I think he blushed.
Neither of us said anything, however.

***

The Cul-de-Sac of Sport (appendix to Death of an Athlete)

In our world the concept and practice of sport have gone to rack and  ruin, been emptied, defrauded. It is not only in the much-cited Greek sense that we no longer have any feeling or need for it, but we have also forgotten about the spirit and aims of the first ‘modern’ Olympic Games. The more archaic significance and meaning of sport would strike us as almost ridiculous if one were to bring it up among sports fans. In its original signification and practice, sport was a contest, which, both intentionally and unintentionally, transubstantiated the competition of life itself into a game—except it was ferocious. The merciless dynamism of life was a sublimated form of the ancient instinct to gain the upper hand. As a result, it is also a school of the psyche—at least what we know about it. The Greeks were alive to it; indeed, they also  took care (later on symbolically as well) not to celebrate a nameable person in victory but victory as such. Similarly with a still living rite: in the elevation of the host, for example, what counts is not the priest who raises the chalice but what he raises. I find it marvellous that in the oldest Olympic contests, for instance, the only representation one was permitted to make of the victor was a tiny, almost distorted statuette with unrecognizable features, and the prize was always symbolic, of pointedly immaterial value. Subsequently the dimensions of the statuettes were enlarged, but the sketchiness and impersonality survived for a long time. When the dimensions of the permissible statuette started to approach life-size, it still remained the rule that it should not (or just barely) exceed actual life size, and recognizability was only permitted in a highly stylised form. Incidentally, that also had an impact on the singular transformation of Greek sculpture: the fine harmony of the personal and the impersonal. They were still able to conceive of a champion not as someone whose personal achievement but as someone in whom the human achievement needed to be commemorated. That of universal man. The situation nowadays is almost sick, schizophrenic, unappetising. In the direct sense of the word, it is not a question of we ourselves doing anything for our own ability to compete being elevated to a game; instead, we breed spectacular sportsmen who act in our stead and drive themselves in our stead, for us then to marvel at them and celebrate them like well-trained machines. There is no question of body and soul; it is a matter of business, blind pressure, well-paying receptions and the like. We are familiar with this, along with all its scandals. We even wish to find gods among them—once they have been shot down from our sky. One has to be stuck somewhere. Let him be the champion; a sports diva. That is putting it somewhat  radically, but in essence it is what I think about the kind of sport which is in fashion today. In Death of an Athlete the archaic meaning of sport was what I was attracted to and interested in; it was  on that account I chose the main protagonist and subject. To be very honest, it was not purely on an appealing  whim that as the epigram for my 1968 novel Saul I selected a Biblical quote which relates a big parable in sporting terms and similes. No, it was done very deliberately. Sport without a soul is nothing. As is a soul without sport. All one has to do is put in place the words, the sense and practice of the words.
(Extract from A pille magánya [‘The Loneliness of the Moth’]. Pécs: Jelenkor Kiadó, 1989, p. 221-222)

Translated by: Tim Wilkinson

Miklós Mészöly, Once there was a Central Europe: Selected short stories and other writings, Corvina, 1997.

Born in 1921 Mészöly started writing just in time to be caught in the vice of Stalinist literary mechanics. Not keen to produce the kind of work which hymns the love of collective farmgirls for their tractor-pool he eventually took refuge in writing for children.

He re-emerged in the late 1950s with allusive stories like ‘Encounter’ whose refusal to spell things out in an account of the meeting of two women after seventeen difficult years is both a violation of the Stalinist (and Hollywood) ethic of ‘plain facts for plain folks’ and a mild stab in the post-modernist dark; it also produces an unmistakable tingle of literary truth. As does ‘Three Potato Bugs’ which focuses on the chaotic days at the end of World War Two, pointing up their quotidian cruelty, the terrifying cheapness of life… In ‘The Old and the Dead’ Mészöly lays out his profound sense of the physicality of things; defying the cerebral, dry tendency of the written word; we feel the whole cramped world of his ageing protagonists and their days as we meet middle-aged Ági and her energetic and sensual young niece Vali dressed up in red shoes and tights. Set in Romania it explores everyday life and inconsequentiality, its a detailed story of people who make no historical impact and who are almost never written about. Mészöly takes us off the beaten track better to feel the stones beneath our feet. In ‘Glory of Colonel Sutting’ by contrast he ‘does elegiac’ with a wistful look back at mid-nineteenth century Hungary. Another side of his technique again is displayed in the vignettes described here as ‘Videoclips’ — although these can’t be compared to the crass packets of visual clichés that fill MTV’s long hours of airtime. In the finest example ‘Christmas, the 1950s’ the dreary cruelty of Stalinism, its utter disregard for the powerless, is poignantly evoked in only twenty-seven brief sentences. Bravo Mészöly! RK - babelguides.co.uk/book/28?page=2

Sample:

I’m travelling at night on a train to a town in the Alföld. A single dim lamp is burning in the car; it is almost dark, a stench and a dependable, sweaty warmth. It is bitter cold outdoors. I record 1954.

At one of the stations, Uncle Laci comes aboard. He is tipsy. He opens the door noisily and bellows; ‘At ’em Csepel...’ When he sees that nearly everyone is sleeping, he lowers his

voice, disappointed; ‘Workers …!’

Then he sits down.

Right across from an auntie wrapped in a shawl. First he glares

at her, then reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hunk of sausage. He holds it out, offering it to her. ‘It’s really good! You don’t think so? It was longer, you know. Aren’t you going to have a taste?’

‘It’s in good hands,’ she says.

Uncle Laci licks the side of his mouth, and so keeps from

hiccuping.

‘I know,’ and he takes a bite of the sausage. 192 

Miklós Mészöly (b. 1921) is a novelist , short story writer, and essayist. Barred by Stalinist officialdom from publishing in 1948, he re-entered the Hungarian literary scene in 1957 with the publication of Dark Signs, a collection of short stories. Since then, he has published a number of signíficant works which made him well known for his "small ," everyday stories presented in an almost minimal-ist style, but laden with philosophical implication and a distinctly Central-European worldview. His themes of remembrance, forgiveness, permanence and death have won him a large and devoted readership.Albert Tezla taught English and world literature for thirty-three years at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. His recent works include The Hazardous Quest. Hungarian Immigrants in the United States 1895-1920 (Corvina, 1987), Iván Mándy, On the Balcony, Selected Short Stories (Corvina. 1988) and Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary 1944-1948 (Corvina, 1996). - www.libri.hu/konyv/meszoly_miklos.once-there-was-a-central-europe.html

 

An even quieter revolution V: A high mark for Miklós Mészöly

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