Gotham Diary:
Patina of Years
5 September 2013
When I wasn’t reading They Were Counted yesterday, I was wandering through images of and Web site pages about Bánffy Castle, in BonÅ£ida, Rumania. It used to be rather grand, in a country-house way, for Transylvania, but the Germans all but demolished it in revenge for MÃklos Bánffy’s opposition to collaboration with the Nazis. An outfit called the Transylvania Trust, in which the arts ministries of Hungary and Rumania appear to be cooperating (!), is spearheading a restoration project. No sooner had I learned about all of this (and don’t take my word for any of it; I’m in a daze) than I launched into Part Five of They Were Counted, which begins with a description of summer morning at the castle (called “Denestornya” in the novel) that is so quietly ecstatic that it would serve as just about anybody’s idea of Eden: time itself stands still as you read. Just a snippet or two:
So with time, the great house grew and was transformed and spread itself with new shapes and new outlines that were swiftly clothed with the patina of years, so that when one looked at it from afar, from the valley of the Aranyos or from the hills even further away, the old castle with its long façades, cupola-capped towers and spreading wings and outbuildings seemed to have sprung naturally from the promontory on which it stood, to have grown of itself from the clay below, unhelped by the touch of human hand. All around it, on the rising hills behind and in the spreading parkland in front, vast groves of trees, some standing on their own while other spread like great forests, seemed like soft green cushions on which the castle of Denestornya reclined at its ease, as if it had sat there for all eternity and could never have been otherwise.
*And everywhere the nightingales were singing, only falling silent for a moment as Balint passed the bushes in which they were concealed and then starting up again as if unable to contain their joy.
*
The young man reached the bank of the millstream near where the outer wooden palisades had once stood. He crossed over what was still called the Painted Bridge, even though every vestige of colour had long since disappeared, to the place where the wide path divided and led either to the left or the right, while ahead the view stretched across the park interrupted only by the clumps of poplars, limes or horse-chestnuts. In this part of the park the grass was quite tall, thick and heavy with dew. It was filled with the feathery white heads of seeding dandelions, with golden cowslips, bluebells, waving stalks of wild oats and the trembling sprays of meadow-grass, each bearing at its extremity a dew drop that sparkled in the sun. So heavy was the dew that the grasslands, as far as the eye could see, were covered with a delicate shining liquid haze.
Something tells me that Bánffy Castle has a vastly improved chance of being restored to “its ease,” now that thousands of people with money in their pockets are going to want to visit it. Here is the fictional great house that actually exists. And in that rarest of places, an exotic corner of Europe featuring great natural beauty! You can get there by taxi from the nearest town, which you can get to by train.
***
I have not had this experience before. Even when I was young, I heard all about the great books long before I read them. Every now and then, something very good would sneak up on me — I discovered Trollope all by myself (he was very unfashionable at the time), and laughed my way through Barchester Towers — but, as a rule, books like War and Peace did not arrive unheralded. Everyone else had read these books, and now you would — I would — too. Shakespeare and Jane Austen had not been recently discovered.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see how The Transylvanian Trilogy got buried. The territory of Transylvania itself was contested, and so were the regimes of the two countries with claims to it, when the novel appeared in 1934. It had no natural fan base, and only a necessarily small (Hungarian) readership. A big book, it would not be translated on a lark. Its enemies would only increase after World War II, when Communist regimes in both Hungary and Rumania would have every reason to disparage Bánffy’s serenely ironic narrative of the bygone ways of “decadent aristocrats.” The novel soon fell out of print and remained in that limbo until 1982. Its only favorable wind came in the form of the novelist’s daughter, Katalin Bánffy-Jelen, who together with the late Patrick Thursfield (who seems to have done most of the writing) worked on a translation into English. This appeared, with unsurprising lack of éclat, in 1999. Word of mouth slowly built up the momentum that inspired the editors at Everyman Library to relaunch it.
All this makes sense, but still. Known unknowns are familiar presences in world literature, especially where Antiquity is concerned: we know the names of plays by Sophocles and Euripides whose texts have disappeared. Most of Tacitus appears not to have survived. Sometimes the known unknowns turn up, as in the Nag Hammadi library, where, again, we knew the titles of the books from a letter of denunciation, instructing recipients to destroy them. (Most complied.) But unknown unknowns… One must pause to wonder how many other masterpieces were interred by the catastrophes of the last century, particularly in Central Europe.
Bánffy’s Transylvania (as well as his Budapest) may be remote, but it is a distinctly European setting. It is a little behind the curve on industrialization, and still primarily agricultural, but its elite is sophisticated and well-educated. (Quite a number of Bánffy’s ladies decorate their speech with English, and of course everyone knows German and French.) The landowners are “liberal” only with respect to the Crown, which was worn by the Austrian Emperor; otherwise, they are as conservative as any landowning class. (They do not seem to be particularly reactionary, however.) Unlike the Russian grandees of nineteenth-century literature, they don’t have one foot in a world of violent barbarism. If they have a besetting sin, it is inattentiveness. They share the common assumption that things are just going to go on as they are indefinitely. It is only at the beginning of Part Four, Chapter Four (an astonishingly lengthy piece, which could, with only a very little tweaking, stand on its own as a novella), that Bánffy strikes a note of scolding mockery.
As far as most of the upper classes were concerned, politics were of little importance, for there were plenty of other things that interested them more.
There were, for instance, the spring racing season, partridge shooting in late summer, deer-culling in September and pheasant shoots as winter approached. It was, of course, necessary to know when Parliament was to assemble, when important party meetings were to take place or which day had been been set aside for the annual general meeting of the Casino, for these days would not be available for such essential events as race-meetings or grand social receptions. And, after the Budapest races, the Derby season in Vienna would follow, and so many people would be away at that time that it would be useless to make plans for a time when “nobody” would be in the Budapest.
This is very gentle, and the same could be said of upper classes elsewhere at different times. Something like the same thing could be said of America today, with so many people cocooned in Matrix-like unconsciousness of the world beyond the world around them. (The Internet appears, perversely, to intensify this massing of affinity in ignorance.) We all want to enjoy life, and a lucky few, such as the aristocrats in Bánffy’s novel, are wealthy enough to enjoy life very thoroughly. Life can be very beautiful when you don’t have to think about folding the laundry and cleaning the bathroom, much less going to work. Thousands of people today — but only thousands, not hundreds of thousands — enjoy the same gracious leisure that we read about in the big old novels. They largely have the sense to stay invisible to the billions. The rest of us learn what we can manage to do without servants.