Having set it aside for a few weeks, I’ve picked up Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy again, and I’m nearing the end of the second volume, They Were Found Wanting. The novel has become slightly more puzzling — not as a read (nothing could be more straightforward) but as a phenomenon. Set in the first decade of the Twentieth Century, the Trilogy was written in the wake of World War I, and published in a troubled country with little interest in an epic that was centered in a territory (Transylvania) that no longer belonged to it. This initial impediment to the novel’s success was dwarfed by the two crushing blows that followed, the Nazi invasion of Hungary and the Communist takeover after World War II. Bánffy, born to one of the great Protestant but aristocratic families of Transylvania, died a poor man in 1950, stateless in every way that counted. His novel was stateless, too. Out of print when he died, it would not reappear in Hungary until 1983. Translations into other languages followed, with the author’s daughter co-producing the English translation that appeared in 2001. The Transylvanian Trilogy is therefore the Sleeping Beauty of great novels, unknown for the better part of a century. It is astonishing to think of all the literary critics and other pundits whose understanding of modern literature necessarily failed to take it into account.

It’s easy to make impressive claims for Bánffy’s work. It is obviously heir to the large-format canvases of Trollope and Tolstoy, setting a great love story against a detailed panorama of political crisis. The profusion of fully-realized characters brings Proust to mind, although Bánffy’s impatience with the easily-distracted élite is softened by an insider’s affection. But I don’t know where to turn for precedents for the copious amount of extravagantly appealing nature writing. I have heard that Transylvania is a beautiful part of the world, but now I know it, sight unseen, from Bánffy’s pages. This is not “nature writing,” nor is it cinematic. The fields and forests are vividly experienced by the characters; the beauty of this world gets under their skin.

Miklós Absolon sat at his ease between two columns on the veranda of Borbathjo, his elegant baroque manor house in the largely Szekler district of north-eastern Maros-Torda. His bald head was covered by a tiny velvet skullcap covered with pearls that he had brought from Bokhara and the collar of his soft silk shirt was open round his thick bull-like neck.

It was May and the sun was shining. Absolon had nothing whatever to do and he was just sitting there, barely even allowing himself to think. His attitude was that of an inscrutable oriental sage, content merely to contemplate.  After all, it was warm and the sun was bright. The view from where he sat was not particularly interesting but stretched into the far distance, right across the Kukullo River, which here was only a meandering stream, surrounded by water-meadows bright with the yellow of buttercups and the lime-green of young grass, up to the valley where the hillsides were covered with forests of beech, pine and hornbeam, all now in bud, and, still further to the south, to the peaks of the eastern Carpathians.

The view was so familiar to him that now he barely noticed it. He had known it from his childhood before the days when his restless urge to travel had carried him to the farthest and most unknown parts of Asia. Or course he had come home from time to time, until that day when he returned with a crippled lag and could roam no more.

If Absolon was thinking of anything at all it was to reflect that, after all, everything, everywhere, was much the same. What essential difference was there between squatting on a rock at Kuen-Lun disguised as a pilgrim and apparently watching the goats outside a Tibetan monastery, or lying at ease in the shade of a Kirgiz tent in the Taklamakan desert, and sitting here at Borbathjo, in the heart of the Szekler country, on the veranda of the house in which he was born?

Life could be beautiful, thought the old traveller, where you were — provided that, if there was no reason to travel, one was content to sit and enjoy it, unlike those city folk who always seemed so fretful and nervous. This was his philosophy, though he rarely thought about it in such simple terms and never discussed such things with other people.

This the opening of Chapter Five of Part Five of They Were Found Wanting. In the very next paragraph, the scene is disturbed by the appearance of a carriage in the distance. The approach and arrival of the carriage covers more than twice the length of what I’ve just copied out. It is a virtuoso performance, following both the vehicle across the landscape (and then out of sight but still audible) and Absolon’s inability to imagine who his visitor might be. That she is a woman, he can tell from the parasol peeking out from behind the coachman, but he can tell no more. I had no more idea than Absolon of her identity, but I had a feeling, guided, I am sure, by the suave undercurrents of this expansive fiction, that it would turn out to be Adrienne Miloth, the wife of Absolon’s nephew and the great love of the book’s hero, Balint Abady. And indeed it was. I am sure that I was not the only reader to feel a Wagnerian portentousness in this brilliant scene-setting. But what I want to call attention to is the fine braiding of psychological and physical detail. There is really only one sentence of specific landscape painting, but its vista is extensive, stretching from buttercups to mountaintops, and Bánffy’s language artfully contradicts the claim that the view “was not particularly interesting.” There is the conjuring of distant places, but not as exotic scenery; Absolon is “disguised” in Tibet and “lying at ease” in the Taklamakan. (I must say that I found the latter remark almost boastful, as being somewhat improbable in a trackless waste whose name means something like, “you may find your way, but not your way out.”) Above all, however, there is the fact of Absolon’s being as planted in this view as any tree. The “old traveller,” now lame, surveys his birthplace, and is no less inscrutable than it is.

I quote the passage also because it presents some of the difficulties that many readers will have with The Transylvanian Trilogy, once they realize, if they were so mistaken, that Transylvania is not an imaginary region invented as the backdrop for vampire stories. (Two-thirds of the way through the Trilogy, I can report that there is no hint, not the remotest, of the antics of the undead.) When Bánffy was writing, Transylvania had been ceded to Romania by the Treaty of Trianon. In time, the Romanians would re-name everything, so that it is difficult now to get a map of the province with the old Hungarian names. (The map provided in the two-volume Everyman Library edition is shockingly inapt.) But the grasp of a rich and complex history is also presumed. The Transylvanian aristocracy, unlike that of the Danube plain that constitutes modern Hungary, went Protestant in the Reformation, and it stayed Protestant. This only intensified the “Wild West” (or east, in this case) reputation of Transylvanian grandees, a friction which in turn mirrored that underlying the “Dual Monarchy,” a confection of 1867 that attempted to distinguish the identities of the Emperor of Austria and the King of Hungary, even though they embodied in the same man, Franz Josef von Hapsburg. Throughout the novel, the “men of 1867” are pitted against those of “1848,” partisans of Hungarian independence. As for the Szeklers, they were Hungarian, Protestant smallholders, and they were also emigrants leaving the country.

This political background is not at all decorative. Indeed, I have never read a more chilling account of the run-up to World War I, which is tacitly presented here as an inevitability. The Transylvanian Trilogy has the sweep and power of the best historical fiction, but it is written by a witness and participant — Bánffy was a career diplomat — and not by someone born long afterward. One big surprise is the antagonistic character of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whom I had never thought of as anything but the jolly old victim of an assassination. In Bánffy’s treatment, Franz Ferdinand is a malignant opponent of Hungarian autonomy and a reactionary intent upon emasculating diets and parliaments. When Balint Abady is not engrossed by his longing for Adrienne (whose marriage is complicated by the possible madness of her husband), he is almost as horrified by international developments as he is by his countrymen’s refusal to pay attention to them. The reader who can grapple with these foreign details will be rewarded, however cheerlessly, by the picture of a dysfunctional legislature that stinks with familiarity. The vulnerability of liberal democratic political systems to personal opportunism and rent-seeking is endlessly palpated, like a loose front tooth.

***

The carriage drew up, and Adrienne got out.

That’s how the chapter opening closes, and, as it did, I was acutely aware of having been reading. The scenery, perhaps, could be captured in a movie, but not Absolon’s impassive expectation. What you can see is only part of the story. Reading, alone among media, allows the momentary to be placed alongside, or perhaps atop, the historical. It is not just a beautiful woman who gets out of the carriage, but Adrienne Miloth, and all that we know about her. She alights upon a carpet of well-chosen words.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, November 11th, 2013 at 1:02 pm.