Antal Szerb: The Pendragon Legend

The trip to America was extremely tempting. So far my travels had been limited to a single continent. Besides, common sense dictated that I should forget Cynthia. This love, or whatever it should be called, was quite hopeless. I could never marry her. My own snobbery recoiled at the thought of anyone so closely connected with the age of Shakespeare and Milton making herself the ‘life-companion’ of a so petty bourgeois a creature as myself.

And even if by some miracle she did become my bride, the marriage, I told myself, would not be a truly happy one. Cynthia as middle-class housewife would have lost everything I loved in her, the one quality she perhaps had never possessed at all — the proud, lofty inaccessibility of the legendary Lady of the Castle.

While I pondered and deliberated, the following letter arrived:

My Dear Friend,

It’s extremely kind of you to think of me, especially as I’ve been reading a great many books, and I would love to have your opinion of them. Most of them are in French. It would be so nice if you were here, because there is so much I don’t understand.

I am quite well now, and go out for short walks in the mountains. I wish I could write you a description of them, but I can’t think what to say. Could you recommend a good book about the Engadin people and the Ladins in general?

I have excellent company here. My school friend Daphne Fitz William is here with her brother, who is a captain in the Navy. He’s a very nice boy, and very intelligent. You would certainly find a good friend in him. Captain Fitz William has asked me to marry him.

I’d like it very much if you would write to me in detail about your plans for the future, and your work. In any case, never forget that I am, and always will be, your very good friend. Do write.

Yours,

Cynthia Pendragon

Antal Szerb’s first full-length novel was the product of an enchanted year (1929–1930) on a postdoctoral scholarship in England, much of it spent in that cradle of learned eccentricity, the Reading Room of the British Museum. Already fluent in several European languages, Szerb was gathering material for his ground-breaking Histories of English Literature and World Literature. At the same time, though a committed Catholic, he was deeply interested in heterodox religious ideas and unusual states of consciousness, and in the late twenties Rosicrucianism and the Occult were very much in the air. The happy result of this conjunction was The Pendragon Legend (1934).

Into this, his first full-length novel, Szerb poured all his enthusiasms, many of them distinctly non-scholarly. In it he draws on, and quietly parodies, popular crime writing, gothic horror, romantic fiction, the regional novel, various forms of occult treatise and the historical memoir. The hero of the book is an unmistakable version of the writer himself, cruelly satirised. Most of the other characters are affectionate caricatures of the English (the category ‘English’ to include the Irish, Scots and Welsh), for whom he held an intense, if at times baffled, admiration. ‘Continentals’ such as the Hungarian anti-hero Janos Bátky and Lene, the sexually omnivorous Teutonic ‘modern woman’, receive the same irreverent treatment. The upshot of all this foolery is, against expectation, a highly original psychological study, with some intensely dramatic, and some delicately touching, moments.

Born in 1901, Szerb was an essayist, playwright, novelist, literary historian and academician. By 1934 he was Hungary’s most respected writer: a small, shy, loveable man noted for his unfailing kindness and vast erudition, sweetened by an ever-playful wit. As the poet Agnes Nemes Nagy remarked: “Fifty per cent of what he said made you laugh, and ten per cent filled you with awe.” But he was born into a deeply troubled Hungary, with his Jewish origins coming under increasing scrutiny, a disadvantage which he compounded by his consistently anti-fascist stance. His brutal death in a labour camp in 1945 was an unspeakable loss, not just to Hungary but to European literature.

For all its stylistic assurance, its almost post-modern virtuosity in playing literary genres off against one another to create a work of vital originality, Pendragon is probably not Szerb’s masterpiece. That remains Journey by Moonlight (Utas es Holdvilág, 1937) , a novel seemingly as dark and probing as Pendragon is light and flippant. But the two have more in common than meets the eye. Both are the record of a spiritual journey, thoughtlessly begun, that ends in significant failure. Bátky, like his counterpart Mihály in Journey , is a fatally shallow ‘seeker’ whose blunderings bring him up against profound truths the significance of which he never quite grasps. Both anti-heroes represent important aspects of Szerb himself, subjected to unsparing scrutiny. What the two books share above all is a particular irony, no doubt ‘middle-European’ in character but also distinctive to this particular writer. It is less a literary device than a mode of vision, in which a fiercely searching intelligence is balanced by a delight in humanity and an irrepressible playfulness. The Ego, as Bátky’s progress reveals, is a pathetic, often absurd creature, a disconcerting mixture of ill-understood promptings and wild improvisation, always the prey of circumstance, and far less important than people imagine. Szerb has read his Freud, but the perspective here is closer to that of the mystic. As the narrator observes, in one of his wry flashes of self-insight: “What a shame that those moments when man is noble and pure and akin to the gods are so transient, so fleeting, while that complicated nonentity the Ego is always with us — of which one can speak only in terms of protective tenderness and gently irony”. In that sentence lies the core of these endearing novels.

LEN RIX

May 2006