To Michael (21 October 1959)

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[34] Misi dear,

Your withdrawal to Merton brought us a letter (Ilona's) of the kind that helps life all round. There were those years when I – my confused self – had you living beside me, a young saint; there was some selflessness store inside me, but all it produced was a great love for you, a dedication which was a governing passion over many a year to come; later, still in our youth, life hurt you, I was unable to see it otherwise than that our own family fell victim of a confused ideal of a good life. My passion for se[r]vice became an ingredient in a student's movement which introduced in Hungary a faint echo of the Russian revolutionary commitment to a cause. The intellectual proletariat, mainly Jewish, of small-town background, was affected by, and infused with, a spirit of selfless dedication to the spirit of a movement in that Waste Land. It was a different strata, the forerunner of that Populist Movement which, 30 years later did its regenerative work on a vastly larger scale in an entirely different surroundings. Actually, I was engaged in an effort which I recognize in its true character - the reconditioning of a morally destitute people. This was not done out of patriotism. I was moved by humanism. I leave it at theses flashes of insight. Recently gestures purporting similar recognitions reached me from the other, the Populist, shore.

In failing health, I am reminding us how our separate lives were to us both as massive pillars over which arched an invisible bridge of beauty: or separate singularity, in silence.

To me great happiness was to come in a complete life. There is return to achievement. Also to a mother country which I now love. Ilona and I have decided that ur names shall be linked, despite our separate pasts, in the anthology of the new Hungarian poets. This act will survive us. It seems that my daughter, another surprise, will in a vague and yet significant way make use of my work. It made me think of you and your younger son. But I want also clarity to illuminate that bridge of silence so that the setting dusk obscure it not. Very little is lacking, for there was no misunderstanding between us ever, nothing but the separateness due to my limitations, my long fumbling in life. History has outflanked that fumbling. Even if nothing could be done about it, it should not remain unsaid.

The great object which makes me break with the fifty… […] More than that: It gave me a mother country (because I had never quite belonged to Hungary; the first language I heard spoken, though I did not speak it, was German, I suppose: the second was English; Hungarian reached me together with French). That's why my roots where not in the Hungarian soil which I touched only at the age of 12, in the Gymnasium.) […] …But the Hungarian have my affection.

[35] I remember the depths from which they rose: A Magyar-Jewish mongrel, not deserving to be fully accepted as morally civilized, bearing the 'stamp' of the ethically defective, victime of the backyards standards of a church and aristocracy, whose heart (?) was elsewhere. A nobility, fitted with false pride, but without self-respect, linked to the West by a half-assimilated Jewry, not truly Western, and yet hindered in melting into the Magyar stock, in joining together the healthy ingredients of both into a mixture pregnant with possibilities of a great Eastern European people. (The Galilei was the only approximation of an entelechy of Russia's revolutionary Jewish emancipation.) And yet the Magyar stock too was denaturalized by the hothouse brood of a second-class foreign intelligentsia which pre-digested the valuable Western experiences Hungary required to nourish its peasant stock's rich undergrowth. (Maybe the throne was the

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Reference:
KPA: 57/08, 34-35