They Were Counted (2 page)

M
Y ACQUAINTANCE
with the works of Miklós Bánffy started one day some years ago when I was motoring from my home in Tangier to Rabat. My fellow passenger was a
Hungarian
friend, Kathy Jelen, who had lived for many years in
Tangier
and who was going to Rabat to sign some papers that confirmed her ownership of the copyright to her father’s works. All I had known about Kathy’s father, Count Miklós Bánffy, was that he had been a wealthy Hungarian magnate and politician; but I had not known before that he had for many years been a Member of Parliament; nor that he had been Foreign Minister in 1921/2; nor anything about his writings or of his directorship of the State theatres in Budapest; nor of his practical support for writers and artists, and indeed all ethnic Hungarians, in the new Romanian Transylvania of the 1920s and ’30s; nor anything of his role as a great landowner with a castle near Kolozsvár (once also called Klausenburg and now given the Romanian name of Cluj-Napoca) whose fortune derived from thousands of acres of forest in the mountains of Transylvania. During our leisurely four hour’s car ride we talked of little else and when Kathy told me  of his great trilogy,
Erdélyi Tőrténet
– in English
A Transylvanian
Tale
– which had been a bestseller in Hungary in the 1930s but which had never been translated or published elsewhere as the last volume had not appeared until 1940 when all Europe was in the throes of war, I longed to know more. First of all she told me about the first book of the trilogy,
Megszámláltattál
–
They Were Counted
, which had just been re-issued on its own in Budapest and had been an immediate sell-out; and it had been because of this that Miklós Bánffy’s daughter had thought it wise to confirm her ownership of the copyright and so henceforth be entitled to receive some benefit, however modest, from her father’s works which was all that remained of her lost inheritance. At that time, of course, no cracks were yet to be seen in the Communist stranglehold over eastern Europe, so there was still no suggestion that dispossessed exiles would ever regain any of their lost possessions.

Kathy then revealed that several years before she had begun an English translation, but that it had not prospered and she had never finished it. I picked up the scent at once and was soon in full pursuit. Could I read what she had written? Of course. As soon as we returned to Tangier she would bring it round to me. A few days later there arrived a tattered brown parcel containing a huge pile of faded typescript in single spacing on flimsy paper. The different chapters were held together with rusty paperclips and the appearance of it all was, to say the least, uninviting.
Several
pages seemed to have been mauled by cats, as I later found to have been the case. By then Kathy had told me more about her father, a polymath if ever there was one, kind, gentle, a linguist, an artist whose designs were still in use at the Budapest opera, a humanist and a great lover of his country and of women (
including
, it is said, Elinor Glyn who was thought to have used him as the model for one of her heroes) many of whom had fallen into his arms before he married late in life the actress who had been his great love but whom, because of the shibboleths of that
class-ridden
world, he had not been able to marry until after his father’s death. She also told me of the great baroque castle of Bonczhida, the Bánffy home in Transylvania, which figures in the novel under the name of Dénestornya, much as some years later Lampedusa’s Donnafugata was to be a pen portrait of that author’s family palace at Santa Margherita Belice in Sicily. Both houses are now ruins, the first through the spoliations of war and official neglect (the mansions of the former Hungarian ruling class were not held in esteem in Communist Romania) and the second destroyed by an earthquake.

I think I had been told that before she became Countess Bánffy, Kathy’s mother had been an accomplished and popular actress at the State Theatre in Budapest, but I knew nothing of the story of the aristocrat’s love for the actress nor of the many hurdles to be surmounted before their marriage could take place.

Dismayed though I was by the state of the manuscript I tackled it at once and was enthralled. When I started to read what Kathy had already translated, the original text and a Hungarian
dictionary
at my side, I soon discovered that written Hungarian is often a staccato language even when it is at its most elegiac. In consequence a literal translation in English would give none of the quality of the original and would fail completely to give any idea of the idiom and feeling of the first years of this century in central Europe. Besides this the length of the work and its
Dickensian
range of plot and subplot, as well as the extensive cast-list, meant that anyone tackling it would have to make an English version rather than a literal translation. What a challenge!

I at once asked Kathy if she would let me see what I could do and then, if she agreed and it seemed to go well, I would show what I had done to friends in London and ask their opinion before we embarked on a voyage which would involve much time and effort for us both. Encouraged, we set to work; and now the pages of Kathy’s literal translation (on which I could base an English text) arrived in exemplary legible typescript. Of course I must have been a little crazy to tackle anything of that length –
particularly
a translation of a dead author who, however well-known he may have been in his own country, had never been heard of in the English-speaking world. And not only that, but to tackle, even with the help of a born Hungarian, a book originally written in a language of which I did not then understand a single word (and I confess to not knowing many more now), was sheer folly. But I was caught by the sweep of the story, the range of
characters
, the heartbreak, the truth and the sheer humanity of it all. I knew that once started I could never stop until it was done for I desperately wanted others to enjoy it as much as I had.
Furthermore
I did have one unexpected advantage. As a boy I had often spent holidays with Anglo-Austrian cousins in their castle in
Tyrol
and so I did have some first-hand experience of
central-European
vie
de
château
which in the 1930s had barely changed since the days, thirty years before, that Bánffy had described in the trilogy. A year later the first long draft of our version of
They
Were
Counted
was completed. The others followed, and six years later it was all done.

Ostensibly a love story, the two principal characters are
cousins
, one of whom prospers while the other declines into squalor and a lonely death: but the real theme of this extraordinary
family
saga is the folly and insularity of the Hungarian upper classes, who danced and quarrelled their way to self-destruction in the ten years leading up to the Great War; and the insularity of the politicians who were so pre-occupied with their struggle against Habsburg domination that they saw nothing of the storm-clouds gathering over Europe. Ironically enough I had just arrived at Bánffy’s description of the events following the assassination of Franz-Ferdinand at Sarajevo – and the sad spectacle of the youth of Hungary marching off gaily to war while the hero of the novel reflects that nothing will come of it all but the destruction and
dismembering
of his beloved country – when bombs started
exploding
once again in that sad and much disputed city.

At this time a symposium devoted to the life and works of Miklós Bánffy was held in the great hall of the Ráday Institute in Budapest. This was presided over by the then Foreign Minister, Jeszenszky Géza. The guest of honour was Miklós Bánffy’s daughter Katalin (my friend Kathy), and in addition to Mr Jeszenszky’s opening address there were speeches and
reminiscences
covering all aspects of Bánffy’s distinguished career from no less than eleven speakers, seven of whom had travelled from the former Hungarian province of Transylvania (Romanian only since 1920). These proceedings, which took from 9 a.m. in the morning until 1 p.m. were followed by a buffet lunch, a visit to the opera house where a bust of Bánffy by his friend the great Hungarian sculptor Strobl was unveiled. This had been preserved in the storerooms of the National Museum and had now been loaned to the Opera House by Bánffy’s daughter. The
celebrations
ended with the pinning of wreaths and bunches of spring flowers to the still battle-scarred façade of the former Bánffy house in Pest. All through the proceedings strobe lights were switched on and off, television cameras whirled and repeated flashlights showed the determination of the media photographers not to miss a second of what was going on. Afterwards Kathy, a grey-haired lady married to an American former naval officer, was interviewed for two different television cultural programmes. Now, I asked myself, why was Miklós Bánffy, a name hitherto unknown in England, so highly honoured in his native land?

Count Miklós Bánffy was, as we have seen, Hungarian by birth, but a very special sort of Hungarian in that his family sprang from Transylvania; and Transylvania, Hungary’s
greatest
lost province, conjures up for Hungarians a totally different picture from that of the Dracula country of Bram Stoker’s novel and innumerable horror films made in England and America.

After a turbulent history of domination by marauding hordes from Asia and the Turkish empire, and a period of
semi-independence
, Transylvania had settled down by the seventeenth century into a largely autonomous Hungarian province, a
prosperous
if turbulent land of mountains and forests and castles and historic towns. It was called Erdély in Hungarian, and Siebenbürgen – ‘seven cities’ – in German. Its capital, Kolozsvár, renamed Cluj-Napoca by the Romanians after Transylvania had been ceded to Romania by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, was a university town with a diffuse culture where the dominant Hungarian landowning families all had town houses, and which was proud of its status as an alternative capital to Budapest. The people of Transylvania were partly of Romanian origin, and partly Hungarian. There were also Jewish, Szekler, gypsy and German-speaking communities – the last known as ‘Saxons’ who formed a solid largely Protestant middle-class that did not take sides either with the Hungarian aristocrats who were the
landowners
or with the Romanian peasantry. Some of the noble
families
, like the Bánffy’s, were Protestant (though if a wife were Catholic, like Kathy’s mother, the sons would be brought up as Protestants while the daughters followed their mother’s faith), others Catholic, while the Romanian-speaking minority was Orthodox. It was from the ranks of the Bánffy’s, Bethlens, Telekis and other great landowners, that the princes and governors and chancellors of that once autonomous province had been chosen.

Count Miklós Bánffy was born in 1873 and lived most of his life either at the castle of Bonczhida near Kolozsvár, or in the family’s town house in Pest a few minutes’ walk from the town palaces of his western Hungarian relations, the immensely wealthy Károlyi family. Mihály Károlyi, the country’s first republican president after the fall of the Habsburgs, was Miklós Bánffy’s second cousin, childhood playmate and once a devoted friend – a friendship which, after Károlyi’s marriage and conversion to radical
politics
, would be destroyed by mutual distrust and hostility. Bánffy, who like many of his class was educated at the Theresianum in Vienna, later studied painting in Budapest with Bartalan Szekely and then law and mathematics at the Hungarian University at Kolozsvár, first became a diplomat and then took up politics as an independent MP for his home province of Kolozs. During the First World War he was intendant of the Budapest Opera House, introducing, despite considerable opposition, the works of Bartok; and in 1916 being responsible for most of the arrangements for the last Habsburg coronation, that of the Emperor Franz-Josef’s successor, his nephew King Karl. In 1921 Bánffy became
Minister
for Foreign Affairs, resigning a year-and-a-half later
principally
because of ill-health brought about by overwork and the strain of trying to represent his country at the League of Nations (where, despite serious opposition, he had obtained Hungary’s admisssion as a full member) while being stabbed in the back by lesser men at home in Budapest. At that time he still had
confidence
in the régime of Admiral Horthy, who had by now made himself ‘Regent’ following the short-lived Socialist republic (of which Mihály Károlyi had been the ill-fated President) and the previous few months of the Communist rule of Béla Kun. This early confidence was to wane as Horthy soon showed signs of
neo-fascist
megalomania.

In 1926 Bánffy retired from public life in Budapest and went back to live at Bonczhida. From then until his death he devoted himself to literature and the arts, partly as a prolific writer whose major work was the now classic trilogy about life in Hungary from 1904 to 1914, and partly in being one of the leading spirits in founding a publishing house to encourage young
Transylvanian
writers in Hungarian to become better known and so retain their identity in the face of Romanian domination. Bánffy’s
published
works also included novels, short stories, plays and two
volumes
of autobiography.

On returning to Transylvania he acquired dual Romanian and Hungarian citizenship and, trusted by both sides though holding no official position with either, worked hard to reconcile the mutually suspicious governments in Budapest and Bucharest. His work was made easier for him as, unlike a some of the other Hungarian landowners, he spoke Romanian fluently. Despite the huge success of the Trilogy and widespread public appreciation of Bánffy’s cultural work in Transylvania, it is saddening to note that his political aims were not always understood by some of his fellow aristocrats who misinterpreted his efforts at
rapproche
ment
with Romania as acts of disloyalty to an afflicted and
deprived
Hungary. Ironically enough the (unpublished) letters of the distinguished Romanian diplomat Virgil Tilea, reveal that he too was subjected to similar criticism from his peers in Bucharest because of his friendship with Bánffy.