Mészöly (1921–2001) was a major influence on the slightly younger Imre Kertész and Iván Sándor (both b. 1929), Péter Nádas (b. 1942), and Péter Esterházy (b. 1950), and even on writers of a much younger generation, such as László Darvasi (b. 1962). Yet the only collection in English published by him is one that can only be purchased in Hungary itself, a volume entitled Once There Was a Central Europe, published in 1997 by Corvina Books in a translation by Albert Tezla.

That cannot be accounted for by the complexity of his style: Mészöly wrote in a plain, straightforward but very precise language in quite short sentences, eschewing descriptive adjectives or attempts to describe individual psyches. What characterises it is the way he chose to focus on people, objects, and events with an acceptance of their randomness and the possibility of co-existence of widely separate entities, sometimes with seemingly jolting leaps of focus. Tellingly, he was a master at withholding the precise bit of information that would have enlightened one as to the method behind the seemingly arbitrary narrative.

Thus, for instance one of Mészöly’s short stories from 1973 entitled “Térkép Aliscáról” (Map of Alisca), is more or less what it says: a brief list of selected features (some from different centuries) which could be associated with the place. What is not said anywhere is that Alisca was the Latin name for Őcsény, a settlement 6 km north-east of Szekszárd (Mészöly’s town of birth) in County Tolna in southern Hungary—place at which there are archaeological finds from the Bronze Age, as well as remains of a Roman military camp, and graves from the Árpádian era (i.e. the early centuries of Hungary in the first millennium), most of them referred to, directly or indirectly, in the text. Strikingly original as such stories are, readers have to work to piece together a full understanding of why they are being told and what Mészöly chose to tell in them.

It is an allusive approach which was not uncommon in eastern Europe (driven by the need to suppress certain comments to avoid undesired attention from the authorities) and compatible with literary trends in France or German but seen as alien to writers in English, where readers have become accustomed to being led by the hand. It was indeed an object of suspicion for Hungary’s cultural tsars as well, leading them to ban publication of most of his work for a good two decades. The turn came only after the manuscript for his first novel had been turned down by the two main literary publishers of the time (Szépirodalmi Kiadó, then Magvető Könyvkiadó), a decision that the Hungarian powers felt obliged to reconsider after Mort d’un athlète was published by Seuil in a French translation by György Kassai in 1965 which was soon followed by a West German edition of a translation by György Sebestyén for Hanser Verlag of Munich in 1966. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, through gritted teeth they permitted publication of Az atléta halála (1966), which in turn led to publication in Swedish (1967), Czech (1970), Polish (1971) and quite a few other languages, but not English.

In an essay volume entitled A pille magánya [The Loneliness of the Moth], published in 1989 (i.e. on the cusp of Hungary’s nominal democratisation), Mészöly himself notes:

The Biblical quote in question (perhaps not surprisingly) was drawn from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, not as uncertainly so fight I, not as one that beateth the air.” Unlikely as it may seem to anyone not familiar with the two works, that instantly ties the two novels together conceptually.

A similar potent allusiveness was clearly at work even a decade before with the novella Magasiskola [High School], which was written in the summer of 1956—emblematic year—and published later in the same year but little noticed for a decade. Ostensibly it deals with the capture and training of falcons for use on Hungarian farms to protect crops from birds and was made the basis for a rather well-received 1969 film by István Gaál under the same title in Hungarian but misleadingly renamed The Falconers in English (it won a special prize when shown at Cannes in 1970).

It also needs to be pointed out that both book and film clearly antedate Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave (1968), which was the basis for Ken Loach's marvellous 1969 film Kes, though the inspiration for Hines's short novel was (as he himself has explicitly acknowledged) T. H. White's 1951 short novel The Goshawk, which concerns White’s own concentrated duel during the training of such a bird. This was almost certainly unknown to Mészöly, who was clearly more attuned to French literature (Camus in particular) and whose inspiration was in any case a genuine pioneer of falconry in Hungary in the post-war year: a man called György Lelovich, nicknamed “Greylag” after the goose, who in turn was inspired by what one presumes was a Hungarian translation of Baz-nama-yi Nasiri—a 1874 Persian treatise of falconry by Taymur Mirza (Husam al-Dawlah Timur Mirza, who died in 1874. As the version Mészöly quotes from is different in certain details from the English text as translated by Lieutenant-Colonel D.C. Phillott in 1908, it is more useful, when necessary, to translate directly from the Hungarian text.
 
At the time High School was composed, adult fictional works with a nature theme were still quite common. In the English-speaking world one need think only of Tarka the Otter of 1927, undoubtedly the most widely read novel by naturalist and writer Henry Williamson (1895–1977), although that had more of less overt links with the ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality soon to be associated with Hitler and the Nazis. In Hungary the genre could retain its potency, naturally with a quite different symbolism, as was demonstrated by Vidravas [Otter Snare, 1984], which was by far the most popular of four novels or short novels and a dozen or more collections of short prose put out over three decades after 1953 by Erzsébet Galgóczi (1930–89), who was not defined simply by her peasant background and sympathies but also, for instance, by a clear anti-extremist line, including opposition to Hungary’s nominally left-wing secret police.

Mészöly’s novella in fact starts off just like a typical nature story:


Inhabitants of the game reserve in question:

 
After a few deft further paragraphs, the story switches to its main concern:


And then almost immediately:

We are introduced to the Persian authority before Greylag and Mészöly have trotted their way to the game reserve:
   

This leads more or less directly into an account by Greylag of a recent experience he had witnessed of wanton cruelty:


And so it continues. There is little doubt that Mészöly had some fairly direct parallels in mind:


There is a vivid description of struggles with floodwater:


Apart from a tense description of Greylag’s patient efforts to pinpoint and obtain a young peregrine falcon from a rock cliff in the wild there is little further action, and the novella ends with the narrator (Mészöly) being taken to the railway station, with the conversation ending

Which leads more or less straight to

And that, bar a couple of closing paragraphs, is the end. A neatly rounded story that seemingly says little but in fact a great deal about the Hungary of the time High School was written.

Tim Wilkinson

Tags: Miklós Mészöly