A Stranger in His Own Skin
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Life, real life, always seems to be somewhere else. Other places, other times, other lives appear so alluring; if only we could shake off those drab identities that dog us so peskily at heel! The sentiment, enunciated by Rimbaud in “A Season in Hell,” lies at the heart of fiction, too. Real life is elsewhere – “la vraie vie est ailleurs” – especially in the pages of novels where we can slide into the skins and souls of others, however distant they are from us in language or location. Moralists call this escapism and disparage it. Isn’t this what in the end drove Don Quixote crazy? Isn’t this what embittered Miniver Cheevy in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s cruel little poem?
Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one.
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.
Cheevy ends up as a daydreaming drunk. Isn’t this a bit harsh? Call me escapist but I couldn’t function for long without the occasional stratagem of evasion that fiction so splendidly affords. I often find myself haunting old bookstores or the remoter regions of obscure libraries, and when I glimpse other shadowy figures stalking the shelves, I know, without asking, that we are all linked by that same metamorphic urge, the desire to step outside of ourselves and become, however briefly, someone else.
Central European writers seem to have been especially driven by this sentiment. Even the most casual awareness of their history makes plain why. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera titled one of his earlier novels “Life Is Elsewhere.” That feeling of exclusion, of a kind of innate ostracism, as though life, “real life,” were meant only for others – and not only those in other places but in other times – hangs over the novels of Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, and so many others.
On a recent foray into the darker recesses of the stacks, I came upon a novel that exemplifies this sense of elsewhereness to perfection. This is the Hungarian author Antal Szerb’s “Journey by Moonlight,” which first came out in Budapest in 1937 and has only recently made its appearance in English (Pushkin Press, 238 pages, $12.95), in an elegant translation by Len Rix.
Antal Szerb was unknown to me, but he is one of that remarkable generation of Hungarian authors who are now reemerging from long immersion in oblivion, and of whom Sandor Marai, the author of “Embers” (Vintage, 224 pages, $12.95) and “Casanova in Bolzano” (Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $22.), is probably the most celebrated recent example. Szerb was born into a thoroughly assimilated Jewish family in 1901 in Budapest and, though nominally a Catholic, perished during the final Nazi onslaught in 1944.
A “journey by moonlight” is one taken in fits and starts, with only occasional bursts of illumination to show the way, and this is precisely the itinerary of Mihaly, the nervous, uncertain, mercurial protagonist of Szerb’s wonderful novel. Mihaly is Mitteleuropa personified in all its hazy reveries, neurotic prevarications, abrupt second thoughts, and restless yearnings.
His journey begins on his honeymoon. Acting on a half-understood impulse, he deserts his bride in Venice and begins wandering throughout Italy, in search not so much of himself as of the self he used to be. Mihaly is a figure pinned to the past, forever squirming like some moth freshly impaled on the sharp point of remembrance. He cannot accept life as it might be with his glamorous new wife, nor can he break free. Instead, he obsessively revisits the single period in his life, in adolescence, when he seemed to capture some fleeting sense of belonging amid the tight circle of a few eccentric friends in Budapest.
These friends, who crop up throughout the story, represent all human extremes, from Eva and Tamas, the incestuous brother and sister whose existence is governed by outrageous playacting; to Ervin, the chain-smoking Don Juan haunted by dreams of purity, who becomes a miracle-working Catholic monk; to the slick and disreputable Janos, con man, petty thief, and ladies’ man. This might have turned into a soap opera on the Danube but for Szerb’s remarkable skill at characterization. He is at once brutally clear and oddly gentle with his personages, so that they stand out with all their flaws exposed and yet remain somehow strangely lovable. Mihaly’s friends change; they grow and develop and mature, for better or worse; only he remains fixed in time, unable to free himself. He is a stranger in his own skin, yet incapable of transformation.
As he straggles through Italy, his journey into his own past is mirrored by a deepening sense of the antiquity that surrounds him. Szerb subtly hints that Mihaly’s own twilit journey through the past parallels a vaster journey into an unrecognizable underworld populated by Umbrian and Etruscan shades. Luckily, his sly sense of humor saves his novel from portentousness – this is a very funny book. The climactic scene, which I won’t give away, represents a kind of triumph of the bittersweet only the most inveterate of daydreamers could concoct.
The great Hungarian poet Janos Pilinszky, a younger contemporary of Szerb’s who lived through the Holocaust, once described a wolf “lonelier than the angels” who fell in love with human ways and stood awestruck before a house and the family life at which he peeped through the windowpanes. The wolf had the quintessential outsider’s daydream. But when the wolf who “loved its walls, the caresses of its bricklayers” finally slipped into a human house, “he stood all through the night, with wide eyes / and on into the morning when he was beaten to death.” Szerb spares his characters the poor wolf’s fate; only he himself, more lucid but as filled with longing, was not spared.