Antal Szerb: Journey by Moonlight

This is novelistic art of a high order. The man who produced it was no less remarkable. Born in Budapest in 1901, he lived through perhaps the most traumatic years of Hungarian, indeed European, history. Just seventeen when the Empire collapsed in military defeat, his student years saw the bloody communist revolution of 1919, foreign occupation, the ‘white terror’ and the Second World War. His technically Jewish ancestry and his lifelong stance against fascism attracted mounting official persecution from the age of thirty-seven, and he died horribly, at forty-three, in the forced-labour camp at Balf. Yet little of this is reflected in his major writings, or indeed the man himself: life-loving, playful, a brilliantly ironical but never cynical mind, more in keeping with the eighteenth than the twentieth century. A cradle Catholic (the family were, like most Budapest Jews, entirely assimilated), educated in a Piarist seminary, he became the quintessential Hungarian man of letters, not just admired but widely loved. The narrative of Journey by Moonlight coincides with rising fascism at home and abroad, and probes the national obsession with suicide, yet the touch is ever light, the focus personal and psychological. All his literary connections reveal a cast of mind humane rather than ideological, mystical rather than political, scholarly but boldly original in its interests and methods.

Those interests were wide-ranging. Antal Szerb was a lifelong Anglophile, an authority on the German, Italian, French and English traditions, and his enduring monument is, besides the fiction, a ground-breaking History of World Literature . As a despairing colleague wrote: “He knew everything”. The intelligence that pervades Journey by Moonlight is of an exceptional order: an intelligence not just of the head, but of the heart.

LEN RIX

March 2001