Every person is shaped to a large extent by the social and natural environment in which they are raised and in which they live out their life. We often find ourselves wondering, too, in what other period we might be able to imagine our own existence. When asked whether he had been born at the right time, Bulcsu Bertha replied: “Very much so. At just the right time to be unhappy… very much so. At just the right time, too, to be happy now and then. In truth, there is a great deal of sunshine in our lives.” (Interview with Gyula Fekete, 1980.) Bertha, born in 1935, could have imagined his life in another period as well, yet he sank such deep roots into his own time, the experiences and knowledge it yielded, that in his works he only rarely concerns himself with the decades before the Second World War, and even then the past is evoked primarily through the memories of generations older than him. He is a writer of the twentieth century, of the lived present. Yet the confession that articulates this worldview also suggests that this personality could have formulated the very same words fifty or a hundred years earlier.
For an artist, origin is usually important in more than one sense: the family that raised them, the natural setting, and the wider social environment. Not everyone’s life bears out what [Hungarian novelist] Zsigmond Móricz claimed – that by the age of ten everything important had already happened to him; but if we add another decade, it becomes a truth that is hard to refute. In Bulcsu Bertha’s case, it certainly holds. After the brief years of early childhood, if not tragedies, but dramatic tensions and events threaded themselves through his life. His father, a village schoolteacher with artistic inclinations, treated him with a peculiar strictness. His parents’ conflict-ridden marriage ended, in a still rare fashion, in divorce. The broken family lived in very difficult circumstances. Wartime bombardments placed him in mortal danger more than once. He was not admitted to a university or college. If we express the life-course and its boundary situations through paired motifs and opposites, the following appear across the oeuvre: the village – the small town, later the real city (Pécs), and the capital; peasant grandparents – schoolteacher father; the country as a theatre of war – ruins and peace; existence in nature – the metropolis; protection – abandonment; traditional village and small-town society – Bolshevik dictatorship [Hungarian shorthand for the Soviet-style one-party communist regime]; childhood – youth; studying and student life – manual labour; labourer – becoming a writer; journalist – writer; the 1950s – the 1960s, that is, Bolshevism – socialism.
There are, indeed, many reasons for unhappiness. But there are reasons for happiness as well – above all, the natural environment. In Nemeskeresztúr, with his grandparents, there was the little River Marcal; in Tapolca, the lake; later, living in Györök and attending the grammar school in Keszthely, there was Lake Balaton for a lifetime. More broadly still, there was water itself and, of course, the summer that pours out sunlight, there was the garden, the forest, plants and animals, sailing, fishing, sport, the feeling of endurance, freedom, and love. The most important heroes of his narratives – often the writer’s alter egos – seek and attempt to know and to shape themselves as Robinson Crusoes of the present day. In one of his confessions he wrote: “The landscape, the geographical environment, almost determines a person’s personality, character, disposition. That alone makes it important to depict it. Besides… I am a profoundly mood-driven person. I can be attuned to certain kinds of beauty, to certain oppressive feelings.” (Interview with Gyula Fekete, 1980.)
Like most prose writers, Bulcsu Bertha wrote poems first. The few texts we know certainly show a talented young man in his twenties; yet the advice he received – that he should write prose instead, since he had such a vast store of experience – was useful. What remained in him throughout, however, was the splendid duality of the creative self: he was able to synthesise analytical objectivity with lyrical intimacy, bringing to light both the visible, knowable facts and the moods and intuitions that cling to them.
Around 1955, when Bulcsu Bertha began to write in earnest, contemporary literature was in a peculiar position. The Rákosi era [hardline Stalinist period in Hungary under Mátyás Rákosi] had excised a substantial part of both the classical and the recent tradition from its canon, and tried to coax contemporary writers into making the arts serve the Party’s day-to-day political objectives, in the spirit of ‘class struggle’ [Marxist–Leninist doctrine framing society as a conflict between classes, central to communist cultural policy]. Schematism ran riot. The danger threatened the young most of all, since they had no experience to draw on. Yet between 1953 and 1956 the best of the so-called ‘bright winds’ generation [a Hungarian label for the post-war cohort of left-leaning young artists and writers in the early 1950s] swept away schematism with works of a new, authentic spirit. The new-poetics verse of poets Ferenc Juhász and László Nagy, and the prose of writers Imre Sarkadi, Ferenc Sánta, and István Szabó have since become classics. And although party-line socialist realism continued to prevail for a long time after 1956 – for instance among the poets of the anthology Tűztánc (lit. Fire Dance) – the best of those young writers who were only just trying to start out then, and who began publishing regularly a few years later, no longer wished to conform to the demands of official cultural policy, but to the inner laws of literary creation. In narrative prose no sharp poetics shift took place around 1956; here what proved decisive was the reassertion of an authentic voice. The ‘semi-official’ classical norm of representing reality remained the oeuvre of Zsigmond Móricz.
Little was said yet of writer Gyula Krúdy or writer and poet Dezső Kosztolányi as possible masters. At the same time, it became possible to acquaint oneself with – and, within limits, to apply – newer tendencies of ‘Western’, and emphatically American, narrative prose. The influence of Hemingway and Faulkner was significant. The best of the young prose writers of the 1960s, of course, did not wish to become epigones of one master or another. Bulcsu Bertha could not simply walk the path of Zsigmond Móricz, or of Krúdy, or others – though he could learn a great deal from each. One might call him a Krúdy grafted onto Móricz, or the reverse: a Móricz grafted onto Krúdy – an heir at once to the social critics and to the ‘knights of the mist’ [after Krúdy’s book A tegnapok ködlovagjai – lit. The Mist Knights of Yesterdays]. Some of his critics invoked writer Andor Endre Gelléri, in whose work a realist social vision likewise coexisted with ‘enchanted realism’ – where mood plays a major role, articulated through recollection, daydreaming, dreams, and imagination. All of this lifts the stories and their characters into metaphysical relations, so that they exist not as soldiers of class struggle but as human beings. Alongside Bulcsu Bertha, the writers of this generation who could create meaningful prose were largely those in whose work these scenes of human existence appear – such as Károly Szakonyi, Ervin Lázár, Anna Jókai, and István Ágh. Asked by himself which holiday he loved most, Bulcsu Bertha replied: “Christmas, when Jesus was born, and Easter, when he rose again after being crucified. I like to experience the great mysteries, because they contain within themselves the absurdity of human existence.” (Öninterjú – lit. Self-Interview, 1978.)
According to Bulcsu Bertha’s own testimonies, it was the immense material of life he experienced in childhood and youth that made him a writer – and then this was enriched by his years as a journalist in Pécs. In time he came to feel that “a writer’s natural state is contemplation. Otherwise he will never stumble upon the world’s strange connections, its mysteries, as an explorer, only if he sets time aside for it, ponders, contemplates… seemingly doing nothing. That is the normal writerly state. If he goes mushrooming in the woods, or walks through forests without any particular aim, he achieves the same thing.” (Interview with Gyula Fekete.) This confession also expresses the differences between youth and mature manhood. A young person, too, can contemplate, but life still lies ahead of him and he may become anything; the man in his forties, by contrast, knows that he will remain a writer all his life, and at the same time he is far more experienced, more philosophically disposed. Somewhat playfully – but perhaps seriously, too – one might even say that in Bulcsu Bertha’s approach as a writer the ideas of Comte, Dilthey, Bergson, and Freud are layered upon one another: those of the positivist Comte, who held the describable, photographable facts of reality to be decisive; those of Dilthey, who, by contrast, emphasised empathy, lived experience, and intuition within the philosophy of life; those of Bergson, who examined temporality and the stream of consciousness, the workings of memory; and those of Freud, who founded psychoanalytic inquiry. At the same time – and this is most directly attested by his journalism – the principle of social justice, and with it the system of ideas of socialism, was not foreign to him. As he wrote: “There is in me a desire to improve things, and this gets me into many uncomfortable situations. The main problem is that the theory of Marxism is hard to translate into practical social and economic language. The economic and social situations created on the basis of that translation quite often leave me at a loss.” (Öninterjú – lit. Self-Interview, 1978.)
Bulcsu Bertha’s belletristic genres include the short story, the novella, the novel, the drama, and the radio play; on the borderland of literature proper lie the newspaper feuilleton [a short, often personal newspaper column], social commentary, and the interview. Critical opinion was fairly uniform in holding that his most lasting achievements were in short narrative prose – while his greatest successes came with his journalism and his interviews with writers.
His short prose, which immediately attracted attention, was at first characterised by a leaner, more compact handling of story and by dramatic tension. A central scene was defined by a turning point from which there was no return. A memorable example is Jégnovella (lit. Ice Story) (1958). In this first-person narrative, an impoverished young man secures his food at night by illegally ice-fishing on the frozen Lake Balaton. Once, a fence [receiver of stolen goods] reported him, and he spent two months in prison. From then on, he had to hand over most of his catch to the man who had denounced him. On his way home from the ice-hole someone begins to follow him – the very same fence, who, however, falls into an ice-hole. He cries for help; the young man runs over, and then, seeing who is drowning in the icy water, kicks him back under. Reaching the shore, he finds the fence’s crony waiting for him. From that point onwards he has to work for him day and night; and even so, he starves, his hands and feet freeze. It is a hard, cruel story of a dog-eat-dog world where people go hungry and cold, and where it is almost impossible to remain human. The murder is not prompted by a sudden fit of rage: the fence had already put him in prison two years earlier, and then made a near-slave of him. Contemporary readers thought they could detect Hemingway’s influence in this mode of storytelling. That may be so; but what speaks here is a distinctive writerly world in which – as with that master – war, sport, water, fishing, nature, endurance, and defeat all have their part.
A far sunnier story is Az Őthey lány (lit. The Őthey Girl) (1962). Here, too, the narrative present is the early 1950s. It is summer, and the wife and daughter of an elderly, blind general – who has been forcibly resettled [administrative deportation used by the communist authorities] – work in the Georgikon Estate near Lake Balaton. All three keep alive the memory of their former social standing, even though the two women labour just like the local workers. One day a new worker arrives, who had been a parachutist in the new army [the post-war Hungarian People’s Army under communist rule]. During a lunch break the younger ones go to bathe, and the Őthey girl swims far out into deeper water. Her mother grows anxious, and the parachutist swims after her. In time they disappear among the reeds. When they finally return, the mother slaps her daughter hard, and feels that they are growing ever more estranged. “Only then did the Indian-like, tough woman lose the Second World War.” In the writer’s stories of the 1960s and 1970s one often sees the wave-motion of the continued survival and gradual disappearance of pre-1945 social differences. In time, these were gradually replaced by new, often equally painful tensions arising within socialist society. The general’s wife lived the conflict as tragedy; her daughter experienced it as liberation. It can, of course, be read as class struggle, but above all it is a matter of differing generational perspectives, and of the persistent problems – still with us – of social standing and marriage choices. On this subject an exceptionally cheerful story was also written: A királynő rokona (lit. The Queen’s Relative) (1965). The count’s child, who grew up in the post-1945 order, has become a skilled worker, his wife is a working-class girl, and he plays football for the factory team. Through Western sporting connections the team travels abroad, and the hotel porter recognises the family name and knows of the kinship with the royal family. This is how it comes about that the man is invited even to the Queen’s tea reception. Comedy in so pure a form – barely shading into satirical or grotesque elements – does not usually appear in the writer’s work.
In the lyrical, mood-painting short stories it is less dramatic action than a certain blurredness that predominates. A typical example is Harlekin és a ködhajók (lit. Harlequin and the Fog Boats) (1963). The boy is a porcelain painter, and he is sailing with the girl on Lake Balaton as dusk deepens into darkness. In the descending fog they think they see ships. The boy’s question is: “Where is the boundary between reality and vision?” Ilyen az egész életed (lit. Such Is Your Whole Life) (1965) is likewise a sailing story, but here idyll and drama build upon one another. The alter ego Lint is caught with his beloved in a night storm. Their anchor catches on something. After several dives, the boy at last frees it – only to realise that it has probably snagged on a Second World War bomb. They might well have exploded. “Such is one’s whole life.”
The pieces that are more properly called ‘narratives’ are the ones in which a multi-stranded plot unfolds across several locations and over a longer span of time. The central figure of Elveszejtett bakák tánca (lit. The Dance of Doomed Soldiers) (1968) is grammar-school pupil Józsi Harta. He and the room prefect are in love with the same girl. The school is housed in the same block as the stud farm; it used to be a barracks, and one of the stable lads and the student are friends. The problems of adolescence, school, love and dreams of a career are intertwined in the student’s life. In a borderline situation, nothing is decided and nothing seems impossible. Különleges megbízatás (lit. Special Assignment) (1974) presents completely different situations, where a former army officer with a ruined life is confronted with his son, born of a casual relationship and about to become an army officer, and with the fact that the son’s mother has always explained the father’s absence by his secret mission.
In this narrative – and, of course, in many others – it is striking how the writer’s handling of time gradually changes. As his personal life-time advances, there increasingly appears a kind of temporal confrontation that places side by side not yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but the present and the distant past of many years earlier; and it either does not speak of the future at all, or sees it merely as the prolongation of the present, from the standpoint of those of more mature years. The old man’s life, ruined in his youth, is confronted with the happiness of his son, which is, however, called into question by the experience of the father’s fate. The central figure in the narrative A rettenetes légió (lit. The Terrible Legion) (published in volume form in 1982) is Géza Sviátó, an alter ego of the author, who recalls a former, bold Balaton society, and in the present he is living through a terrifying war exercise with his family in a house on Lake Balaton. With his friend, an officer in the army, he also recalls a thought by Marcus Aurelius he once heard: “The content of human life is momentary; matter is changeable, perception is obscure; the whole composition of our bodies is easily perishable... All bodily things are rushing streams of water, all spiritual phenomena are dreams and mirages, life is a struggle and an exile, the praise of posterity is oblivion...” His friend adds another thought from the Stoic philosopher: “Every single being strives for what it was created for. What it aspires to, that is its purpose. Where its purpose is, there is its profit and use. The good of an intelligent being is community. For it is a long-established proposition that we are made for community.”
With these quotations, a third time-plane also enters the perspective, validating the dialectic of happiness and unhappiness by two thousand years of experience. The 1960s and 1970s were sometimes characterised – by reference to the scientific and technological revolution – through the notion of accelerated time. Before that, after 1945, the social situation did indeed change at a dizzying speed; but in this sphere, from the 1960s onwards, ‘time stopped’. Bulcsu Bertha’s outlook, meanwhile, became increasingly conservative. It was not nostalgia for the past, rather he mourned a future envisioned, which proved to be unrealisable: the image of a world with a human face, a world tailored to people, traces of which he had experienced in the culture, morality and nature of her childhood village, where there was a long tradition of decent relations between man and nature, man and man. It is the disintegration of these that has embittered him, and that is why his vision of the future has become such that it increasingly includes, instead of society, a person who has nevertheless preserved his self-consciousness and values, such as the elderly gardener of A tulipános kert (lit. The Tulip Garden) (published in volume form in 1986), who is also, in essence, an alter ego of the writer, the expression of his creed. The confrontation of time is necessarily also a confrontation of values.
Short stories and narratives sometimes form cycles. A cyclical character is also created by the repeatedly returning alter egos: Lint, Illés, Ambrus, Géza Sviátó. Almost the entire volume Fehér rozsda (lit. White Rust) is shaped by the – later reappearing – alter ego Gyula Bernáth, who sometimes recalls his youth, and sometimes the everyday experiences of a middle-aged humanist intellectual. Reading Scott Fitzgerald, he noted the thought that “the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness” (Boldog boldogtalanság – lit. Happy Unhappiness.) Several narratives also form a cycle titled Vízparti történetek (lit. Waterside Stories), published in the volume Utazás fehér lavórban (lit. Journey in a White Washbasin) (1994). The waterfront is of course Lake Balaton, and the world of adolescence is evoked. Őszi vizeken (lit. On Autumn Waters), which opens the cycle, is the confession of the writer approaching his sixtieth year. “Shouldn’t we put our life boat to windward for once, pull down the sails and drop anchor? To stop and sway in the misty waters of life, and wonder why we are in the world? Is it to work ourselves sick, to work extra jobs for a nicer piece of furniture, a car, or simply to make a decent living? Could we have anything else to do on earth? An idle hour when we have nothing to do but look up at the trees and clouds as human beings might be worth more than productive working fits. We should hold on to a birch branch or a reed before we are completely sucked into the industrial, utilitarian world and our being is torn down. We should take a breath and live a little.”
In Bulcsu Bertha’s oeuvre, the objective basic tone of epic representation was at first made individual either by a dramatic tension that often ran towards tragedy, or by a lyrical quality. Alongside these, in time, various forms of comedy appeared: the humorous, the ironic, the satirical – mostly not as determining features but as colouring elements (Rablómese – lit. Bandit Tale; Malomrév – lit. Mill Ford; Rákleves lit. Crayfish Soup; Senki kutyája – lit. No One’s Dog; A rettenetes légió – lit. The Terrible Legion; Miért jönnek a fináncok? – lit. Why Do the Revenue Officers Come?; A kéményseprő – lit. The Chimney Sweep). Grotesque elements inevitably appear too, adding a carnival-like feature to stories such as A kéményseprő (lit. The Chimney Sweep) (published in a volume form in 1983) and A festő és modellje (lit. The Painter and His Model) (published in a volume form in 1994). The satirical-grotesque, sometimes absurdist style of representation also characterised the play A fürdőigazgató (lit. The Bath Director), premiered in Miskolc and Eger in 1977.
From the 1970s onwards an elegiac mode of perception and representation becomes increasingly general. It partly comes from the more mature age, and by the confrontation of times; but above all it is due to the fact that in the 1960s one could still hope that envisioned ideals and reality would draw closer to one another in the long run. However, experience increasingly suggested that this was not so. The outcome of the confrontation of values is dispiriting as well. The elegiac quality became definitive through a nostalgic memory of the past, the origins as viewed in the present, and an uncertainty about the future. The ironic, self-ironic perspective often dissolves the elegiac mode. This elegiac character is often mixed with irony, and through the frequent autobiographical references, self-irony too. Öninterjú (lit. Self-Interview) is the most direct example of the latter.
It is worth taking stock of the motifs that are most decisive in Bulcsu Bertha’s work. First, one must mention the motifs of nature: water, sunlight, fog, winter, summer, forest, garden – and, connected with these, gardening, fishing, hunting, sailing, and walking in the woods. The presence of work is very important: a person is shaped to a large extent by the physical and intellectual activity they perform, and the writer holds both to be essential. Among human relationships, those of work, of locality, and male-female relationships play a central role. Forms of social differences and even more so the relevant moral conduct often appear as well.
Over a little more than a decade Bulcsu Bertha wrote six novels which were all published between 1965 and 1976, with one exception. Füstkutyák (lit. Smoke Dogs) (1965) is set in the early 1960s in a village by the River Dráva, after the organisation of the téesz [termelőszövetkezet: state-promoted agricultural production co-operative/collective farm], in a conflict-ridden period stirred up by the merging of such co-operatives. The protagonist is the new head of the unit, 40-year-old János Krizek , whose wife and child fled Hungary in 1956 and “defected” to the West. Krizek is in crisis, drinks heavily, but eventually solves the problems of the unwelcoming village, exposes the thieves, and gets his private life sorted out. A bajnok élete (lit. The Champion’s Life) (1969) is set in 1956–1957. The protagonist, 20-year-old Gyula Káli leaves his love and a secure life behind in Mohács, near the Danube, and heads for the capital to become a table tennis champion. He achieves his goals, but sinks into utter loneliness. Át a Styx folyón (lit. Across the River Styx) (1969) is a historical novel about the battles and defeat on the River Tisza in the summer of 1919. First Lieutenant István Elek, a Latin and History teacher in civilian life, sympathises with Marxist ideas, but his political officer thinks he is too much of a ‘humanist’. Wounded, he finds shelter and love in a fishing hut, but his hiders get executed, he gets tortured, and then shot while fleeing. Tűzgömbök (lit. Fireballs) (1970) takes us back to the time when Hungary became a theatre of war. The protagonist is Ambrus Thali, a fourth-grade student. It is clear that the writer has turned his personal experiences into a novel. Te jössz, Lupusz… (Your Turn, Lupus…) (1970; published in 1987) tells the story of an urban youth gang in the capital in the 1960s, among whom theft and rape are commonplace. A young man who has left his job becomes involved, and has no strength to leave the gang. He falls in love with a girl, but the gang rapes her too. Lupus then stabs the gang boss. The protagonist of A kenguru (lit. The Kangaroo) (1976) is István Varjú, a truck driver in his early twenties, whose ambition is to become a lorry driver. He does his job responsibly, spends his weekends with his peers, and in time he finds a long-term relationship, gets married and has a child on its way.
Füstkutyák (lit. Smoke Dogs) and A kenguru (lit. The Kangaroo) are clearly career stories. The first is made more eventful by a criminal plot, yet János Krizek’s sudden ‘perfecting’ proves schematic. A kenguru (The Kangaroo) may rather be called a young-adult novel, offering teenagers a ‘recipe for life’, presenting a model of sensible integration. The authorial and pedagogical intention is unmistakable. A bajnok élete (lit. The Champion’s Life) is at once a career story and a story of failure. Gyula Káli strives obsessively to become a champion. At the start of the novel we meet him in an idyllic summer and in the happiness of love. He leaves all this behind without warning. In Budapest he also has a love affair, but he breaks away from that girl as well because she ‘hinders’ him from living only for sport. And when, unexpectedly, he wins the national championship, he has to face the fact that he has mostly just made enemies. The next day his sailor uncle comes to see him and tells him that his love has already married, and that he can no longer return to the small world of Mohács. “In life, this is precisely the art: to keep your family, good friends, and at the same time bring your plans to success. Some people lose their family, some their plans. Many unhappy people live on this earth.” It is self-evident that this novel strongly alludes to biographical troubles, since it is not only elite sport but also artistic and scholarly activity that can threaten a person with dangers that distort the personality. Te jössz, Lupusz… (lit. Your Turn, Lupus…) is a story of failure, as the boy will end up in prison. Lupus – i.e. ‘Wolf’ – committed his villainies without any remorse, almost becoming an intellectual leader within the gang. His suddenly flaring love changes his personality; in essence he has already broken with the gang when they act according to their dog-eat-dog laws. In the name of social morality, Lupus settles accounts with the gang leader called Evil, but the laws do not permit this. He has, in a sense, already paid for his villainies before the murder. He has a chance of purification, but the question is what prison will make of him. Át a Styx folyón (lit. Across the River Styx) is a historical novel which, in connection with revolutionary ideas and the struggle against the Romanian occupiers, seeks to grasp the confusion of the age. That, however, could only succeed in a limited way, since the novel is based on the period’s official interpretation of history.
The writer’s dearest novel was Tűzgömbök (lit. Fireballs). This is understandable, as Ambrus Thali is his alter ego in age, biography, locations, and experiences. (The figure of Ambrus also appears in the late waterside narratives.) Today’s readers can agree with the writer: among the author’s novels, this is the most significant one. More broadly, it is probably one of the best Hungarian novels among those depicting the period of the Second World War. Its factual and psychological authenticity is exemplary. The plot is set between Holy Thursday 1944 and the spring of 1945 in a village by the River Marcal. To escape the air raids, the boy is taken to his grandparents there. Later, as the front approaches, he is taken to relatives in Szombathely with the help of his soldier father. In the endgame of the war, the boy’s mother and baby sister are killed in the bombing, and his father has almost certainly died as well.
A great advantage of the novel is that its central hero is a child, and, to a degree, its viewpoint is the child’s as well. The third-person narration makes it possible for us to observe, more widely than the boy can, the hellish upheaval that replaces, for him, the peaceful summer mood and fishing. It is also true, however, that the sudden change of home becomes even more frightening through Ambrus’s imaginings that he is not his parents’ child at all – thinking that he was not actually taken to his grandparents, and will be chased away eventually. In his imagination, he clings to the notion that he is in fact a Tatar child, and that his mother is Tatar too. At the end of the war, he tells his refugee friend: “My mother is alive... Tatar people live forever. Even if they die, they live. They ride invisible horses, only their clattering can be heard in the night... One day she will catch me and put me on one of her horses... We will ride among the stars... All of us, the whole Tatar nation, will ride together in the night... We will eat garlic lángos [fried flatbread] and go after the wild goats...”
It is generally true to novels that in the protagonists’ dreams, imaginings, and alcoholic visions another world appears, in which the real and the surreal mingle in strange ways. Sometimes the terror of reality intensifies within them, and the threatening ‘smoke dogs’ appear, or ‘fireballs’ that even conjure the atomic bomb; sometimes they evoke a dream-world, like the Tatars; sometimes, for Lupus, they bring forth the world of the two lakes and the small town that recalling childhood memories; sometimes the figures cut from magazine pages and pasted into the lorry cab – such as a kangaroo – become symbolic. The role of the water motif is a shared feature: the Dráva; the Danube at Mohács, then at Paks, and in the capital; the Tisza transformed into the River Styx; the bank of the Marcal; the lakes of Tapolca; Lake Balaton. Water symbolises life, love, and happiness far more often than death, most elementally in A bajnok élete (lit. The Champion’s Life). And sex and love are almost always essential motifs, with the two more than once being radically distinguished from one another.
For the sociographic series Magyarország felfedezése (lit. Discovering Hungary), Bulcsu Bertha wrote Balatoni évtizedek (lit. Balaton Decades) (1973), which was then published in three editions. This work is fine literature and a sociography; an autobiography and a social portrait. The two strands can be distinguished even by chapter, with the first – recalling adolescence and youth – framing the picture of the present day. The latter is partly an objective the portrait of the time, and partly a personal opinion on the current changes. By 1970, it was clear that the mid-twentieth-century world of Balaton would disappear. For the reader of today, his portrait of 1970 has itself already become history. At the time, it seemed that the changes were essentially headed in the right direction, even if there were many anomalies and phenomena to be rejected. Signs of a more human-scale life started to appear.
With several years of journalistic experience in Pécs behind him, Bulcsu Bertha began to write feuilletons and social commentary in the late 1960s. Much of this was published under the series title Jelenségek (lit. Phenomena) in the columns of Élet és Irodalom. As these pieces later became available not only in separate volumes but also alongside narratives, it is clear that literary short prose, a narrative, life-sketch quality, the feuilleton form, and literary journalism blend together in them. These pieces also acquire an individual profile, expressing the author’s unique and sovereign world through their atmosphere, lines of thought and style. There is much to take in in his ‘working’ meditations on the frailty, fallibility and sometimes skillfulness of man and his society. The observer seemingly lives the life of an ordinary Hungarian citizen, of the average intellectual: he struggles with the shortage of housing, the lack of telephones, inadequate services, and incomes that do not provide for the needs of life; and as a consequence, he struggles with the rapid deterioration of human conduct, indifference and alienation. The greatest impact was made by the piece titled Kesudió (lit. Cashew Nut), published in Élet és Irodalom on 28 February 1976. (It also appears in the volume Willendorfi Vénusz – lit. Venus of Willendorf, 1988.) In this essay – which caused much debate – Bertha wrote that everything seems to be fine in the country, it all seems to be going well, yet through numerous examples he shows that “we move, we live in a faulty circle” – that is, almost nothing works in the way one would expect in a normal society. Journalism is usually perishable. There are, however, exceptions, and Bulcsu Bertha is one of the classics of this genre.
His interviews with writers, too, have a classical value. They were first published in the Pécs-based Jelenkor, and later they were compiled into volumes. In the 1970s there was still hardly any usable scholarly literature on contemporary writers. The personal approach also proved novel: in the 1950s this genre could not exist at all – just as social commentary could not – while in the 1960s interviews were still semi-official and distanced. From 1969 onwards Bulcsu Bertha first produced conversational portraits of his writer friends, and then gradually widened the circle, but only included those he could relate to as a reader. Some of his questions were original in his own time, as they did not inquire about matters of literary history, but they were what made these texts unique and memorable. After describing the conversational context and the home, he asked about friends and women, about dreams, about mood, about food and drink, about daily routine. This is how authentic portraits were formed. And these are valuable not only as pieces of Bulcsu Bertha’s own oeuvre, but also as source material for future literary scholarship regarding the interviewed writers.
In the spring of 1995, in a television conversation, the ill and resigned writer spoke of the country’s bleak situation; then he concluded by recounting that, travelling to Lake Balaton, they went into a large tree nursery and there “I saw, astonished, that an enormous number of people were coming and going on foot and by car, buying fruit trees. And where people are buying fruit trees, there is hope after all. Because it is true that the country’s economic life is bad and everything is going terribly, but we still have our gardens… And I will plant a walnut tree here, and a peach tree there, and a line of currants. And as long as people are still active in planting trees at least, and they present a will to live at least on the level of gardening, there is still hope. And as we moved on from the nursery, this had really lifted my mood.”
[2012]