In the Seventh District of the City
In the seventh district of the city, on the third floor of the late-nineteenth century block, in the corner apartment, the window has been left open in the summer heat. I cannot be quite certain of the dimensions of the room but it will have appeared adventurously large to the child under the table, who cannot be more than two years old. He is quite naked and possibly amused by something that is being said by an adult he cannot see to another adult nearby. Or it may be something else entirely that is amusing him: a foot, a sound across the narrow street, a feather from the pillow that his mother is beating at the window, as it drifts towards him. As it lilts past it sparkles for a second, then tickles his bare shoulder.
At this point the front door opens and there is a draught that billows and shudders under the table. It is a strange feeling, possibly the first sexual feeling the child has experienced. He stops for a second and laughs.
It might well have been so.
Je est un autre, said the young Rimbaud. Well, yes. What other option is there for the child than to be an other, or another, a definable completed entity, a sequence of hindsights that lands him right where this sentence lands you?
At the beginning of language there were two distinct urges: one to register presence, the other to register desire. The first—a cry—became poetry; the second—a question—became the story. What happens next? Asks the story. If I do this, desiring that, what will you do? And after that? And then?
And then? The oldest words. The root of syntax. Syntax leads us to conclusions: that is its nature, its whole drive. It's the only thing that appears to make sense, the rest is explosions and exclamations. But there remains naming: not ‘then?’ but ‘what?’ That is the cry that a poem is, or at least the heart of the poem, in which language confronts the phenomenon of the world. See! It's here! It is present! I feel it! It isn't anything I have ever named before. If I rock to and fro and summon up my very first verbal sensations I may be able to start constructing a meaning. The words themselves are as strange and alien as the thing out there. But, having named—or possibly in the very act of naming—I have to rely on the assuring nonsense of syntax to tie this fragment to that fragment, so it makes a whole that goes nowhere in particular (few people hold their breaths to see what the last line of a poem might be), but is an echo in language of what the thing is.
And that thing is never just an isolated specimen: it is in motion, dragging its past and future with it. It exists in both memory and imagination. It deploys its own syntax, which is more like the syntax of dream than of logic. It comes at us like a cry that is also music. And so we labour on the poem that must have the effect of cry-as-music, but a cry that is articulated through words, words that string themselves along the thread of syntax, so we seem to be talking, singing and exclaiming at the same time. The world remains perfectly ordinary and that, precisely, is the strangeness. Here is an ordinary human room, full of the clutter of pianos, cupboards, chairs and tables—and look, there is a naked child under the table—but the room is suddenly filled with lightning. The poem is the ordinary room of language whose every pore is filled with lightning. The child imagined in the lightning.
*
The story begins with the naked child under the table who has made himself memorable by experiencing the pleasure of realising that he has a body that has more possibilities than he had imagined. Up to this point his body had been a more or less an internalised feeling. His consciousness was not aware of having a distinct surface, by which I mean a surface that is distinct from his sense of himself. Something has opened up and registered there.
Out there, in the world he cannot yet register, the city is still in ruins after the month-long siege and the bombings at the end of the war. The Party is in charge. The country has undergone its first wave of show trials and purges. His father has entered the shadow of those events but the child can know nothing of this. When his father leaves home for work, he steps into the corridor ringing the courtyard, hastens down the stairwell with its graffiti, its chipped plaster and stucco, its big communal door, and enters a city full of light and rubble. Out there are corners to turn, public buildings to pass (look there is the Liszt Academy of Music!) and, when he turns right, the ring road with its trams and buses. The stairwell is deserted for a moment. Then two more sets of feet descend, stopping for a moment by the ranks of mailboxes to pick up some magazine or the mail. The child's father is lost by now in a crowd of people scurrying this way and that as the camera pulls out and away into a detached, godlike position somewhere above the roofs and courtyards. I am a camera, the famous Isherwood line from Goodbye to Berlin (1939), can join Je est un autre as a cornerstone of the story. As the camera zooms out the child too vanishes in the map of the city, the map itself being a form of syntax, as is the movement of the camera. Nous sont un autre.
*
Scars of the war were my early signposts. Silence, heavy with secrets is what I remember most, but in the gray of winter the smell of coal was sweet, writes the Hungarian-born American photographer, Sylvia Plachy, in her book, Self Portrait with Cows Going Home. This brief text appears under the black and white photograph of a girl looking directly into the camera. The girl is wearing a track-suit top zipped up to the chin. The street in which she is standing has single-storey houses. There is a single car behind her to the right. Clearly, this can't be Sylvia Plachy, not judging by the car. It's a late sixties car and she left Hungary in 1956, when I did. The girl in the photograph has a slightly plump face which will become more slender as she grows. She is about ten years old, her eyes intelligent, her hair stuck down with a side-parting, a little lank, as if not washed. The sky is an even pale grey without shadows.
I have met Sylvia Plachy just once, in New York, at Ben Sonnenberg's apartment some five years ago. She called in and we chatted, a little awkwardly perhaps. She had been assistant to André Kertész, one of my photographic heroes. She would have been a slip of a girl then. There is a photograph of her in the book at the age of twenty-one taken by Kertész. She is a pretty, earnest young woman in it. Kertész called her taknyos (snot-nose kid) and referred to her as his friend and honorary granddaughter. Maybe she is the young girl in the photo after all. Maybe she found someone who looked like her, who, as she grew slender, might have become her.
Plachy's book is a kind of lyrical autobiography, with snatches of text. The photographs are veils and moments of clarity. There is much of Hungary there, but in drifts, like snow, in images that shift and sift and add up to what? To something like memory itself, perhaps, possessing the provisionality of memory. As language too is provisional. And suddenly there on p.138, almost by way of a joke, she has a photograph of Kertész on a street corner, taking a photograph of her. The joke—a pun—is in the street name, Kertész utca, Kertész Street. It is the street along which stands the block, on the third floor of which, the naked child was experiencing the draught through the open door, as he crawled under the table. It is the first street of my own memory. The date of the photograph? 1984. The year I first returned there. For all I know I might be walking down the street, towards Kertész, or away from him, towards the Liszt Academy of Music.
My own mother was a photographer. In 1940, at the age of sixteen, she came to Budapest from Cluj in Transylvania, to be apprenticed to another photographer, Károly Escher. Déjà vu.
So the third term is déjà vu. J'est un autre; I am a camera; déjà vu. Three terms. But surely this is unhealthy, this concentration on the self. There is a world in which we act, in which everyone acts, in which the zoom-out camera is God. In the world where my father walks to work, everyone has a role that is significant in its own terms. In King Vidor's 1928 silent film The Crowd the camera moves about the street, much as Walker Evans's camera might have done. (Look, there is my father!) Its big idea is to catch what there is before it moves off; to develop a syntax that carries with it a whole sea of faces and bodies, each of them significant in its own moment, each a cry that is music and speech at the same time, each its own kind of poetry. Nevertheless we have a central couple, John and Mary, and the journey John and Mary undertake—their own trajectory or syntax, is tragic. We watch the death of John's father and see the boy climb the stairs towards it. We are dizzy and heartbroken. We are everyone and everyone is John and Mary, perfectly ordinary and tragic. And then the camera zooms out, and the crowd swirls. It is the New York crowd, the city where I met Plachy, and John, truth to tell is a little pathetic, the way we—and I do include myself—are a little pathetic.
Because we know everything beforehand. Despite the suspense, despite the ever branching road of possibilities, we experience life backwards, observing the clues that led us to the place we happen to be standing in. I know the child under the table. The child does not know me. The John in the film, John Sims, was played by an actor called James Murray. I open up the IMDB website and find the comments of one particular reader, one among many:
...Such was the fate of James Murray whose portrayal of Sims was a flash of brilliance in an all too short career. He was my Great Uncle and when he died, he was penniless, found in the Hudson River with no identification but my grandfather's business card.
By 'such' he means alcohol and drug addiction.
My mother was deported from Budapest in the late autumn of 1944 and taken to a concentration camp. The fascist Arrow Cross militia were raiding apartment blocks. Some of those they picked up were set, like her, on trains to work first, die later; others were taken down to the shores of the Danube, lined up, and shot, so their bodies fell into the icy water.
Shoes, teeth, spectacles, coins, business cards. Crowds of them. This is old news. The next time we see it, we will already have seen it. It hangs about the streets even now, in the veils of Plachy's photographs. It is a form of déjà vu, a form of presence. So John Sims, so John and Mary, so James Murray. Déjà vu. I am a camera. J’est un autre.
And then the Sims, those quite other Sims, the sims and avatars we indulge ourselves in, our pseudonyms, our places of refuge, our noms de plume.
Mary Ann Evans, Lucile Dupin, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Samuel Clemens, Françoise Quoirez...
Salvatore Albert Lombino, Evan Hunter, Ed McBain.... Rabbi Ishmael, Rabbi Akiba...
The Chevalier de Pas, Dr Pancrácio, David Merrick, Vicente Guedes, Alberto Caeiro, Alexander Search, Bernardo Suares, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Fernando Pessoa...
Myles na Gopaleen...
Darby and Joan.
As for the actors' profession, where does one begin?
I have written before how, on one of my early visits to Hungary, I was driven to a friend's by one of his friends and, just before, I got out, he said: Tell me your real name? I didn't understand him at first, but then remembered that my father's original name was László Schwartz. Szirtes was assumed after the war. Having told him that, he then told me his 'real' name. And so to other such real names, the poets Miklós Radnóti (Miklós Glatter), István Vas (István Weiss), Ottó Orbán (Ottó Szauer). Three among thousands. Names of refuge, alternative futures, altered pasts. Glatter grew into Radnóti, Weiss into Vas, Szauer into Orbán.
Schwartz (the name as shared by Tony Curtis, originally Bernie Schwartz) wouldn't have been the real name, if there ever was one. It would have been the Germanicised version of something else. In the same way Leopold Bloom's 'real' Hungarian name was Lipót Virág (virág meaning flower or bloom), but before that, before he Hungaricised it, it might have been Leopold Bluhm. What goes around, comes around. And before that...?
But some things must be fixed, the law insists. Impersonating a police officer is a crime. Trying to enter a country with a false passport is a crime. To assume a false name is a betrayal of trust.
Give me the real you.
Or, rather, choose your avatar and act out a life in a series of terrains. Be a virtual Sim in Sim City. Be what you cannot quite be in your dreams. Dreams sweat and snore and lose balance. No sweat here. No sweat. Speak Simlish, which is a combination of Ukrainian, French, Tagalog and Navajo. Lose kilos of unwanted fat. Engage in relationships that exist only in the shared imagination. Meet other Sims. Enjoy a house party, go on a hot date, take a vacation. Welcome. There are plenty of people here extending their lives. Make yourself right at home. Become John Sim. Join The Crowd.
We are in fact dangerously close to some 'real' you. We move into the syntax of something that verges on cry and music in simulated smoothed-out form. The child under the table vanishes into his own disposable fiction. Nothing changes.
And yet: What's my name fool? the former Cassius Clay, but by then Muhammad Ali kept asking as he pummeled, Ernie Terrell in 1967. What's my name?
Our fourth term is the pseudonym, or better still, what Pessoa termed it, with all his other names, the heteronym. Not a false name, but another, equally true name.
What might have happened if only...? What if...? Little by little a deposit forms and becomes a shape. Like memory, the shape is provisional, but we drop it into our personal syntax so it seems intended, fixed, whole, past. Say the exile were not exiled but remained at home to become what seemed so much more natural, so much closer to hand. The son of the doctor becomes a doctor. The industrialist's children move through society, privileged and bored. Of the peanut vendor's seven children, three die, one becomes a peanut vendor, one a genius and one a thief. Who knows about the seventh. Maybe one is John Sim.
We say becomes, but that solves little. It is as if we spent our lives moving through heteronyms, constantly becoming something else that might be named in a slightly different way.
“I think it is the duty of the poet to obtain citizenship for an increasing horde of nameless emotions,” wrote the Hungarian poet, Ágnes Nemes Nagy.
The poet is the specialist of emotions. In practicing my craft, it has been my experience that the so called emotions have at least two layers. The first carries the known and acknowledged emotions; these have names—joy, terror, love, indignation. There is a mutual agreement about their meaning, they have a past, a science, and a literary history. They are the citizens of our hearts. The second layer is the no man's land of the nameless.
Citizenship and names. But surely, if she is right, we float between the two layers, and our true lives, if anything, spend much of their time, especially their dream time, in the lower, unnamed one, seeking citizenship. There everything is slippery and shapeless, a sea of heteronyms drifting like currents. 'I think it is the duty of the poet to obtain citizenship...' yes, but then by what name do these nameless, drifting objects of our attention become citizens. Maybe it is the poems themselves that are the name.
What might have been! and Too late! as the saddest cries. The names we might have lived under, that might have swum through our very organs, remain unnamed. We cannot name everything. The heteronyms are, as Pessoa knew, endless and limitless.
A note from my log:
I was reading at the Arnolfini last night with Peter Bennet and Rita Ann Higgins, excellent poets both, wishing—particularly during Rita Ann's reading—that I could have written this or that poem, or, rather, wishing that I could pitch my voice in that place. I wished it because it is a warm, hard, proud, generous, human place, a place for lives that don't often enter other people's poems. I like such places.
That thought is immediately succeeded by another thought: You can't and never will, not only because you are not a woman, Irish, etc, but because that range of voice, marvellous in her case, would be quite inauthentic in you.
I imagine this is a not uncommon feeling. Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope, wrote Shakespeare (as if he needed to, we think) in Sonnet 29, a line Eliot stole for the beginning of Ash Wednesday, adding:
....
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
(Edmund Wilson in, as I remember, The Shores of Light, gave the 'young' Eliot—Eliot was just thirty-nine—a thorough telling-off for imagining himself 'agèd', let alone an 'eagle', and never mind stealing Shakespeare, thereby comparing himself with him.)
*
But what is the “ourselves” that we seem to be stuck with? I don't specifically mean as social beings (‘Lots of folk live up lanes / With fires in a bucket’; wrote Larkin in “Toads”, considering the possibility of being someone else), though maybe that enters into it. I mean as a range of voices.
The lack of fixity in a writerly “identity” has long been a matter for intellectual debate—our authors are dead, long live our readers!—but it is odd to feel it directly, on the pulse, so to speak. On our own pulse! Which of the 19th century French critics was it (Saint-Beuve?) who accused certain poets of his time of only writing the poems that their diction fitted them to write? Touché!
I think it is like this: that we do get trapped in ourselves, in the voice we have developed with great pain and struggle—or haply landed on as if on a deep mattress from a great height—at the time we actually call our development. Having somehow “found our voice”, which is maybe no more than just one voice among others we might have found, it becomes a security. It is what we can do. It becomes us. We become it. At best we become Laocoön wrestling with the serpent of our own voice. At worst we just give ourselves up to the bloody serpent and do whatever it insists on. Then the serpent gets bored and crawls off and we have nothing left except our guilt, smugness and ever less comfortable passivity.
It may be good to accept this, to admit our limits, to cultivate—let me change metaphors here!—whatever garden we seem to have built around ourselves: to make it entirely our own. It may be good in the way that humility is good.
And yet the flipside of such humility (everything has a flipside) is, first timidity, then smugness. Realising this might be liberating. We may then, still in humility, ask just what it is we so admire in this man's gift, that woman's scope, and why it seems to be important to us? And we may perhaps tear up and re-plant a piece of our well-cultivated garden, or go and start an allotment elsewhere where another voice might grow, one we might have grown in the first place, had circumstances been different.
This doesn't mean we become a series of allotments, or, like Fernando Pessoa, a mysterious set of heteronyms, just that we don't cling too closely to that right little, tight little garden. Extending our 'selves', expanding them, is not like a piece of colonialism. We don't take anyone else's space by doing so.
The line between exploration and occupation of territory is faint. We may even distrust it. But, maybe, what I hear in Rita Ann Higgins (for example) has a kind of corresponding timbre in the voice I myself sing in. Maybe that is what learning is.
Maybe 'the agèd eagle' had something there:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
The first time is the only way of knowing. The rest is words.
*
The camera zooms right out, so the crowd itself is the organism rolling through the streets, through the organs of the city, the state organs, the organs of sense. The child's sense of itself under the table moves into the street joining the names outside. And so the camera picks him out, little heteronymous creature, just there. Right there.
George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948. His family were refugees from the 1956 Uprising and settled in England where he studied sciences at school, trained as an artist and finished up being a poet and translator. His first book, The Slant Door won the Faber Prize in 1980. His twelve books since have won various awards, most recently the T S Eliot Prize for Reel (2004). He has been translating from the Hungarian since his first return in 1984 and has published over a dozen books of translated prose, verse and drama, that have won a number of prizes. He has edited a number of anthologies of Hungarian writing and written a book on art as well as a number of libretti and musicals. He reviews for The Guardian, The Times and other papers and teaches part time at the University of East Anglia. He is married to the artist Clarissa Upchurch, with whom he has published Budapest: Image, Poem, Film (2006).