The Pendragon Legend (33 page)

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