The Hungarian Quarterly, 1996 (46. évfolyam, 178. szám)

Attila József 1905-1937 - Tibor Déry: No Judgement (Excerpt from a memoir)

What little joy his friends were able to give him for two years came late for someone whom troubles had aged so rapidly. One slowly comes to hate the thing that one longs for in vain. An artist's loftiest secular pleasure, the sole like-mate­rial reward that he can receive for his work from society, the sole handkerchief for the artistic sweat of his brow, is recognition; if that comes late, he rejects it. Attila turned inwards; he no longer wanted to be freed from himself. He did not put on airs with his misery; he was not sentimental. He despised sympathy, that paltry substitute for love. He could no longer find any other solution than hold­ing himself to be responsible. He accomplished that just as extremely and daring­ly, ran his head just as much against the wall that he had set before himself, as he had previously done against the outside world. I was a witness to the slow, sometimes spasmodic, moving self-education, with which he tried to find space for misanthropy in his heart, like a mother finding space for the growing child in her body. He would have liked to be cunning, tough and calculating, yet the youth that was stranded in his nerves, time and time again, gave the lie to that, filter­ing through into the play of his features, shining out of his movements; he resem­bled a clumsy puppy preparing to play the role of a wolf. I recall one interminable nocturnal conversation we had—we kept one another company in the street for a long time—when he said he did not want to write any more poetry, he was done with his poetic career, and he would fight tooth and nail for an ordinary job. There was nothing else he wanted than to earn two hundred pengős a month, he explained; a world founded on interests could offer him no more than that. That is why he no longer wanted to accept anything free at the psychiatric clinic, where he could have accepted everything. He lit up a cigarette, cried, and worked out what his friends spent on cigarettes for him. He would hide gifts of cakes or mandarin oranges and passed them on to others. He brooded about leaving the expensive sanatorium and placing himself under free treatment, so as to be a burden on no one. He no longer considered his poems were a return service; the conviction grew in him that they were worth nothing. He no longer even trusted in his reason, not even in his lucid spells. If he still heard the occa­sional optimistic word, it was evident from his smile that he personally did not believe it. He visibly became detached from his future, the sweet, ethereal form that we imagine is hovering above us, and before our very eyes he slowly sank into the earth. Even then 1 was watching out for whether he would find some way of writing. A year later, five years later, in a recurrent lucid spell as his doctors had pronounced?... The living are cruel, a week before his death I sat down to write a letter to him in Szárszó about how magnificent his poems were, and he should work... I never finished the letter; I ripped it up. Being worsted in the struggle that he waged for a humane order, and not wish­ing to harm another person, Attila killed himself. Thinking over this, I was so moved that I turned to him to embrace him, skeleton though he might be. By then, though, he had gone. »• Translated by Tim Wilkinson 58 The Hungarian Quarterly

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