The Hungarian Quarterly, 1996 (45. évfolyam, 173. szám)

Sándor Márai: American Journal. Part Two: 1984-1989

whom and for whom they wished to speak. They still exist today, and are still few in number, but a chasm separates them from their readers, like a stylite who flees to the top of one of the undamaged columns of an undamaged peristyle of a ruined civilisation, squats atop the column, high above the mass, is fed by ravens on sandwiches and Coca-Cola, and from time to time shouts down from the top of the column on high to the sauntering, chatting, sporty hippie mass and, having no other choice, showers down his excrement from on high. The few writers who are still around today are stylites of that sort. * 28 September—With L. this morning by the ocean, in a sea-food bistro. The journey is difficult, even by taxi; with L.'s every step unsteady, getting in and out are veritable feats of acrobatics. We feel our way along; the late-September sun is scorching. And yet, even so, everything is marvellous. * 2 November—The dead. They are so many that there is no longer room for them all in my memory. Overpopulation exists not only in the world of the living; masses also throng in the hereafter. * 20 November—I went to post off the page-proofs of the corrections for the Journals 1976-83 volume and was in a kind of "farewell-to-my-craft" mood as I stood in the post office whilst the clerk stamped the postmark on the package. It is unlikely that I shall bring out another such issue in what is left of my life. For me, over the last 40 years, these jottings have been a substitute for journal­ism, for contact with mundane reality. It is also a sort of farewell in another way, when I think about writing something else. I ought to finish the thriller, but otherwise I feel no stimulus to add yet another work to the many volumes published to date. Keresztkérdés (Cross-Question) and the foreword to a volume of Krúdy, who would be a hundred this year; everything else (talks broadcast on Radio Free Europe, drafts) can stay in the desk drawer. But I still have an inclination to write that thanksgiving work, a child of the century's expression of gratitude. Each time I have thought about it, though, I have grown sad because, as Balzac complained, I have been unable to conceive of an "inter­nal form" for it. All anti-memoirs, those Malraux-style experiments, are clumsy. To write down "everything" in its flesh-and-blood reality, so to say—that is repugnant. All the same, there is an "internal form" for a farewell work of thanksgiving (it dawned on me whilst walking today), which is the heroic verse in hexameters. That would be one task still to tackle. I don't know if I shall have the strength for it, as it may be that once I am 85 "my blood has thickened, my brain run dry." * 17 American Journal

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