Journey by Moonlight     by Antal Szerb, Translated by Len Rix Original title: Utas és Holdvilág Original language: Hungarian Original year: 1937 Published by Pushkin Press Pub. Date: February 2002 Format: Paperback, 323 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.97 x 6.54 x 4.80 ISBN: 1901285375 List Price: $18.00, £11.44 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £10.30 Buy online from Amazon.com for $12.60

A highly amusing (and popular) Hungarian book from the late 1930s, in which we meet the romantic figure of Mihály, aloof and poetic but struggling to break with an adolescent rebelliousness which he tries to quell under respectable bourgeois conformism but also with the disturbing attraction of an eroticised death-wish. While there is no doubt an element of (the then especially influential and risqué) Freudianism in this, as well as perhaps the sexual and emotional claustrophobia of a society with strong Catholic and martial traditions, it is also has a distinct originality.

The narrative is a little pat but, lying beneath this symmetrical structure, there is the phenomenon that afflicts Mihály:

‘the worst symptom of all; the whirlpool. Yes, I really mean the whirlpool. Every so often,’ he confesses, ‘I would have the sensation that the ground was opening beside me, and I was on the brink of a terrifying vortex’.

No doubt Mihály’s inner torment also has resonances of the Fascist death-wish of the 1930s, considered by some authorities on the subject to be a result of the terrific psychic wounds of military service in murderous World War One. Antal Szerb, a Catholic of Jewish descent, was himself sucked into that particular whirlpool, dying at a forced labour camp in January 1945.

Mihály, with his suicide-wish, isn’t the only character to be suffering from this vertiginous pull downward. His newly-married-but-soon-to-be-estranged upper crust wife, Erzsi, who he thought would save him from the vortex of passion, is also in the clutches of this death-wish, a death-wish that Szerb identifies with ‘freedom’;

Do you recognise this feeling? A man is walking on a wet pavement and slips. His one leg collapses under him, and he starts to fall backwards. At the precise moment when I lose my balance, I am filled with a sudden ecstasy...I began to fly off into annihilating freedom...

However, neither of the protagonists in the story ever do get annihilated, nor did they ever really wish it; a little flirtation with death maybe; because what Mihály really enjoys — and has since childhood — is ‘being the sacrificial victim’. Wife Erzsi, now in Paris after Mihály has abandoned her on their honeymoon to pursue his demons, gets the same idea:

Now, now at last she was putting behind her every petty-bourgeois convention, everything that was still Budapest in her... she would give herself to a man who had purchased her, would give herself to an exotic wild animal and lose forever her genteel character...

Both of Szerb’s romantic protagonists seek a kind of erotic life that would in fact be the death of these two spoilt children and they are thereby filled with a guilt more powerful and sickly than ever.

Aside from its haunting Italian settings and amusing incidental characters like ‘Millicent the Innocent’, Journey by Moonlight remains an interesting exploration of the raw and twisted, the politically incorrect and non-‘life-affirming’ feelings that go to make up the complex of human possibilities, and it offers an escape from the trite moral manicheanism of much contemporary writing. Try it if you dare!

Ellesley noted with resignation that his patient was courting the American girl and grew even quieter. For he was still very attracted to Millicent. She was so different from Italian women. Only the Anglo-Saxon type can be so clean, so innocent. Millicent—innocent; what a splendid rhyme that would have been, if he had been a poet. But no matter. The main thing was that this heaven-sent delight was doing visible good to his dear Hungarian patient.

The next day Mihály and the girl went for a long walk. They ate their fill of pasta in a modest village tavern, then lay down in a classical-looking wood and slept. When they awoke, Millicent observed: ‘There’s an Italian painter who painted trees just like these. What was his name?

‘Botticelli,’ replied Mihály and kissed her.

‘Ooooh,’ she said, with horror on her face. Then she kissed him back.

Now that he held the girl between his arms, Mihály decided happily that she did not disappoint. Her body was as elastic as rubber. Oh the ‘Foreign woman’ made flesh—how much she means to the man whose passion pursues fantasy and not physiological fact! The pleasure of the preliminary and quite innocent kiss suggested that every detail of Millicent’s body would prove foreign, other, wonderful. Her healthy mouth was entirely American (Oh, the prairies!), the little hairs on her neck were foreign, the caresses of her large strong hands, the transcendent cleanliness of her well-scrubbed body (Oh Missouri-Mississippi, North against South, and the blue Pacific Ocean!)...

‘Geography is my most potent aphrodisiac,’ he thought to himself. 120-121