Back in February, I read a collection of Antal Szerb’s short stories for the #ReadIndies event: Love in a Bottle published by Pushkin Press. I really enjoyed his writing and had his novel Journey by Moonlight (transl. Len Rix 2000) in the TBR too, which I decided to save for this week’s 1937 Club hosted by Kaggsy at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book.

When I think of farce, I tend to think of very broad-strokes comedy. Yet Journey by Moonlight manages to portray farcical circumstances with light humour and characterisation of great subtlety.

It begins with Mihály and Erzsi on honeymoon, having decided to formalise their relationship after an affair behind the back of Erzsi’s husband Zoltan.

“It was not exactly new or surprising to her that Mihály could say and do things she failed to understand. For a time she had successfully concealed her lack of comprehension, wisely asking no questions and acting as if eternally familiar with everything to do with him. She knew that this wordless assumption of authority, which he thought of as her ancestral, intuitive woman’s wisdom, was her strongest means of holding on to him.

[..]

And yet they had married because he had decided they understood each other perfectly, and that, for both, the marriage rested on purely rational foundations and not fleeting passion. For just how long could that fiction be sustained?”

Well, in answer to that question, not very long at all. Mihály loses Erzsi on a train in Italy and makes very little effort to reunite with her. Hardly surprising, given that even when they were physically together she was an abstract concept to him more than an actual living, breathing woman, his wife.

“[Erzsi] had become for him a sort of beautiful memory. He drank heavily to sustain this mood, to make himself believe that he wasn’t with Erzsi but with the memory of Erzsi. With Erzsi as history.”

Mihály is a drifter. To all appearances he has lived a life of bourgeois predictability, but inwardly he has drifted into it. Now he creates an outward life which reflects his inner life.

“At home and abroad he had been schooled in mastery. Not self-mastery, but the mastery of his family, his father, the profession which did not interest him. Then he had taken his place in the firm.

[…]

He had forced himself to become something other than what he was, to live never after his own inclination but as he was expected to. The latest and not least heroic of these exertions had been his marriage.”

The difficulty for Mihály seems to be recognising what his own inclinations are. He hasn’t supressed any great yearning or talent to take the path he has.

His overwhelming preoccupation is with the past. Acknowledging “there’s no cure for nostalgia”, he finds it impossible to live in the now or to take meaningful action in the present. As Erzsi’s ex-husband observes, Mihály is a man “so utterly withdrawn and abstracted that you have no real relationship with anybody or anything”.

At the start of his honeymoon he runs into a childhood friend, conman and thief, János Szepetneki. This sends Mihály into a protracted reverie, thinking about his other friends from that time, the elusive and compelling siblings Éva and Tamás Ulpius, and the religiously-minded Ervin. They will recur throughout the narrative, both absent and present as memories, symbols and occasionally like János, actual people. 

What stops this being completely tedious and self-indulgent is the strong vein of humour running through Journey by Moonlight. It is not overtly comic but it is consistently ironic. Mihály is both serious and faintly ridiculous and his most dramatic moments are consistently undermined.

There are entertaining interludes with the various people he encounters. My favourite occurs when the one decisive act he plans for himself is halted by an almost stranger insisting he become a godfather to a child he has never met. This request for lifelong duty occurs for no apparent reason and is one which Mihály greets with extreme reluctance. And yet, he is drawn in and distracted from his course:

“How distressing that the most sublime moments and stages of our lives can be approached only with the most banal expressions; and that, probably, these are indeed our most banal moments. At such times we are no different from anyone else.”

Yet Szerb doesn’t let the humour undermine the message of Journey by Moonlight. He is exploring how, as human beings, we recognise and live a meaningful, worthwhile life for ourselves. It’s a fine balance which he achieves expertly (the only clunky part for me was a long exposition by an academic friend of Mihály’s on dying as erotic act).

“And again he had the feeling that the really important things were happening elsewhere, where he was not; that he had missed the secret signal. His road led absolutely nowhere and his nostalgia now would gnaw him eternally, remain eternally unquenched, until he too departed.”

Szerb portrays the despair of human beings alongside our ridiculousness, and he does it all with great compassion.

“And sublime and terrible things always happened to him when life was stupid and precious.”

Marina Sofia also reviewed Journey by Moonlight this week, and you can read her wonderful post here.

To end, of the many songs about the moon, I chose this one from björk, because I thought it fitted the tone of Journey by Moonlight well. She takes her art seriously but she’s not afraid to be silly too: