This dream world was not the happiest or the healthiest of influences. Its glamour was too enticing for anyone—let alone an impressionable child—living in a shattered city which had come close to destruction. Though what I saw on stage almost always dealt with suffering, disaster, treachery and death, these afflictions were endured with dignity and sonorous heroism. Dying sopranos forgave their errant lovers with sweetly melodious nobility. Villainous baritones went to their deaths with spirited defiance, always ending on a ringing note that brought the house down. The betrayed king raised his hands in benediction over the bodies of his wife and her lover, the nephew who had been like a son to him. Here was a world, in short, where the horrors and miseries of our life—the signs of which were still visible as we left the theatre huddled in groups for greater safety—were transformed into beauty and nobility.
I was not the first to discover consolation in art. But the consolation opera offered at that time was spurious and unhealthy. It led me into a world of showy glamour where romantic images and the warm sonority of the music—though I suspect that most of the performances were second-rate—acted as powerful drugs and distractions. Because we lived in such a feverish, hectic and provisional world, because we were waiting to enter into a state of permanence and normality, the sensuous images of opera came, quite insidiously, to represent the normality we were anticipating. Perhaps I should not admit it, but ever since those days a part of my imagination has whispered to me (despite the mockery of my rational self) that somewhere in the world there might exist a place where a forlorn maiden stands beside a moonlit tower, listening to her lover’s heartrending song, while, in the distance, the solemn chant of monks declares that the hour of his death is near. My wife and sons often remind me that whenever I arrive in a European city, the first thing I do is to find out what is on at the opera.
We lamented the absence of opera during our early years in Sydney. Needless to say, the regret was purely hypothetical. Had we found that superb theatre among swaying palms, we would not have been able to afford the price of admission. But the longing was, of course, deeply symbolic. The opera, with its brilliant lights and its elegant audience murmuring politely before the curtain rose, became an emblem for a lost paradise—one we had already lost when we sat in our box surveying the rows of bull-necked Russians spread out before us. And consequently I have been searching for that paradise ever since. A few years after we arrived in Sydney my father took me to the gods of the old Theatre Royal, or perhaps of the more plebeian Tivoli, to hear a performance of Tosca by a touring Italian company. I later learnt that some of the performers we heard that night were among the best stock-singers of the time—certainly not the luminaries of the international festival circuit, but probably far superior to the war-wearied hacks Budapest was able to muster in 1946. My response was, nevertheless, one of bitter disappointment. Where were the massive walls of the fortress? Where was the dome of the basilica, or the twinkling in the sky? A shaking canvas flat with a few clumsy brush-strokes to represent huge granite blocks was no substitute for the reality—far more real than anything else in my experience—which I had seen come to life on the vast, noble stage of our Opera House.
I have visited, since that time, many of the world’s great opera houses, and have heard singers who have already become legendary. I have been present when Schwarzkopf made everyone’s heart break at the end of the first act of Der Rosenkavalier. I witnessed the young Sutherland’s triumph as Lucia. I have heard Nilsson and Windgassen burning with passion in the second act of Tristan and Isolde, and the great Hans Hotter in one of his last appearances as Wotan. I fell under the sweet spell of de los Angeles as the dying Mimi. I have heard some of the world’s most renowned operatic conductors, and seen the work of many brilliant directors and designers. Yet on none of those occasions, whether in London, Milan, Vienna or Bayreuth, was I able to recapture the excitement of those nights at the opera when, as a wide-eyed child, I was seized by the enchantment of dangerous illusions and treacherous conjuring tricks. Perhaps only a child may experience such things. Nevertheless memories of that state of ecstatic trance into which I fell on most of those nights are inseparable from the fact that they were lost when we embarked on our attempt to establish a new life under different skies. It is an experience I am still searching—in vain, I know—to recapture.
When I returned to Budapest after that long absence, I anticipated my usual habits by arriving armed with a ticket to the opera. I had arranged in Vienna, where tickets for the Budapest opera are obtainable for next-to-nothing in order to provide a source of hard currency for Hungary’s fledgling free market economy, to attend a performance of Tannhäuser on the night after my arrival. At first, the Budapest of 1990 bore little resemblance to the city I had left all those years ago. There were no bomb-sites or craters; trams and buses ran efficiently and taxis were plentiful; the supply of electricity was strong and constant. True, it was a drab and dirty city under a gloomy winter sky. If you looked hard enough you could discover bullet-holes on the façades of many buildings. The smells wafting out of various apertures in the streets did not inspire confidence in the sewerage system. It was all a far cry from the glitz of a Vienna enamoured of its affluence, its shops bursting with Christmas luxuries, its citizens, clad in smart loden-cloth and sporting cocky little feathered hats, drinking mulled wine at open-air booths. This, by comparison, was the grimness of the Third World.
Yet, as I discovered again the once familiar places, as the map of the city which had lain buried in my memory all those years rose once more to the surface of my consciousness, I began to recognise something not at all unlike the excitement of that hectic time in 1946 when the city was beginning to wake from the nightmare of war. This was, after all, the first year of yet another new world for Hungary. The forgetful slumber in which it had languished for almost as long as I had been living in Australia was beginning to pass. Once again, you could see people selling things almost everywhere you looked—‘genuine’ Russian army hats, statuettes of Lenin (which, no doubt, you could deface at will), embroidered tablecloths (‘I need medicine for my blind mother, noble sir’), devotional images, fob-watches with the emblem of the Soviet railways on their lids, enormous flat-irons—anything and everything was for sale in the ferment of a newly-born free market economy. Despite dire warnings posted on the backs of doors in hotel rooms or displayed in cafés and restaurants all over the city, some tourists readily accepted invitations whispered to them in many languages: ‘You want exchange? Very good rate!’
In that grimy city, where the superb collection of old masters in the art gallery is disintegrating under the onslaught of damp, mould and neglect, the Opera House stood, as formerly, a resplendent emblem of national pride. The fairytale foyers, a late nineteenth-century dream of ‘Renaissance’ grandeur, the sweep of the auditorium and the graceful proscenium arch were a riot of freshly applied gilt. This was not the faded splendour of theatres like Covent Garden or La Fenice which speak of tradition, of restraint and of the allure of rich but worn magnificence. Here everything was much too bright, raw in its opulence, in the dazzling shine of a newly created world. And when my eyes had adjusted to all that brightness, I realised how small a theatre this was. Where I had remembered a vast auditorium, its tiers of galleries rising to the sky, with an enormous stage capable of containing massive fortresses and vast palaces, I saw a cosy, extravagantly jewelled place, a diminutive, provincial cousin of the great houses in Munich, Dresden and Vienna which it could not match in grandeur but could rival in richness of decoration. A charming place, but not one to inspire awe.
The lights dimmed, the visiting Soviet conductor raised his baton, the first notes of the pilgrims’ song rose insecurely from the horns. When, at length, the not very expertly played tumult in the orchestra pit subsided, the curtain went up to reveal a crinkled cyclorama, in front of which a group of young people clad in leotards pranced, leapt up and down and generally rushed around in a fever of activity.
Later, Venus’ love-nest rose from the depths of the stage, lit by a flickering pink glow and dominated by an enormous plush-covered sofa with large brass studs, on which reclined the Queen of Love. Never was the old joke about the fat lady more to the point. With a flapping double chin and a vibrato a mile wide (the legacy, no doubt, of her Russian training), the singer performed the music efficiently enough. But where was the enchantment, where the glamour? Her dumpy clenched fists and fat little wrists beat time to the music. She shuffled two paces to the right, two paces to the left and collapsed on her sofa as if exhausted from passion and desire, streams of perspiration running down her chubby cheeks.
The performance continued on its pedestrian way. At length the hero escaped from Venusberg and encountered his former friends in the valley of the Wartburg as they were returning from the hunt. Obliging menials trotted around the stage displaying various trophies, principally a reindeer in shiny wax suspended between two poles of machined timber. Meanwhile another drama was brewing in the auditorium. A correctly dressed elderly gentleman began to upbraid a pair of jeansclad Germans who cuddled and kissed, tickled and slapped (between shared sips from a large bottle of mineral water) in their expensive seats—purchased, no doubt, for a song in Vienna, just as I had purchased mine. Other properly dressed members of the audience, observing this fracas, murmured approbation as the old gentleman’s fury rose to heights of vehemence in his defence of the respect to which culture, especially Hungarian culture, should be entitled. I remembered the retired town clerk. I remembered the terrible fuss over my mother’s painted fingernails. I grew so discouraged that I left after the second act, going back to my hotel to watch what CNN had to say about the imminent war in the Gulf.
A few days after returning to Sydney I went to the opera again. There was no comparison between the two performances. What I saw and heard at Bennelong Point had the assurance and sophistication of a metropolitan culture. And yet the old worm was already gnawing away inside me. I forgot the fat Venus in her pink suburban disco, the squawks that emerged from the orchestra pit, the clumsy shuffling as the Thuringian nobility arrived to witness the great song contest. What I saw again was that vast, glamorous edifice of my childhood enchantment, an emblem of a marvellously satisfying and romantic world I had lost forever. By comparison, the black shell of the Opera Theatre, its cramped stage, the whole of that brutally practical auditorium spoke of a humdrum and commonplace life. I realised, as I walked out of the theatre into a star-lit summer night, the Harbour twinkling magically with a thousand lights, the open-air cafés serving their last customers, the ferries gliding silently over the mirrored water, that exile seels your eyes, allowing you to see only what your longings and sense of loss will permit.
My mother as the grande dame c. 1940. When the Russians looted our flat in 1945, they put pins through the eyes in the photograph.
A golden summer in our ‘villa’, sharing a tub with a cousin.
My father in 1942 — defending the country that, as it turned out, did not want to defend him.
Photograph taken in 1946—I think—when I was nine or ten, but somehow I seem younger. Could it be 1942-3, when I was six or seven?
Arrival in Sydney.
The Honi Soit office c. 1957. Robert Hughes is in the foreground. Also pictured are David Solomon, Elizabeth Stafford and Martin Davey.
At my 21st birthday party, with, left to right: Jan Spratt, Robert Hughes, Christina Dennis and Jennifer Baume.
On the way to England in 1960, with Jill Kitson on my left. The suntan acquired on the five-week voyage did much to confuse people about my national identity.
Outside the block of flats where we spent our last months in Budapest.
INSIDE
THE LANGUAGE OF THE TRIBE
Language holds the key to the newcomer’s experience. It determines the extent to which the migrant may find a congenial place within his new world. His future—whether of contentment and a sense of belonging, or of isolation and, at best, imprisonment within a tightly-knit group—ultimately depends on how efficiently the new language is acquired. The achievement of that essential feat relies on a large number of factors, of which age and general linguistic ability are probably the most important. Some people find it easier to learn languages than others; the young generally experience much less difficulty than adults. With adults, cultural habits and level of education play a most important role. A well-educated person is more likely to prosper in a new language than an illiterate, though there are always exceptions.
For migrants, learning a language implies far more than the acquisition of a vocabulary and grammar. Some of the most unfortunate people among my parents’ acquaintances were several cultivated men and women who had an excellent reading ability in English, representing at times the habit of a lifetime, who nevertheless could not make the transition from a basically literary and cultural use of the language to idiomatic speech. Their precise, clumsy, often excessively elaborate attempts at spoken English proved an almost insuperable barrier in those trivial and mundane transactions where linguistic proficiency is tested. At times these people gave offence because there seemed to be something mocking and dismissive in their pompous formality. The truth was, of course, that they were merely using inappropriate tools—they spoke like heavily accented parodies of characters in Dickens because for them writers like Dickens had provided a norm and a model. Their ears were too accustomed to those literary cadences to recognise that what they heard around them each day was in many ways a different language. By contrast, people who learnt English in a haphazard and wholly unsystematic way, as my mother did, were frequently able to communicate freely, because they had a grasp of idiom and had achieved an unconscious recognition of the connection between language and the social reality it conveys. That they spoke in a garbled grammar, or that they never mastered the intricacies of accentuation did not matter very much. Though they always remained quaint, and their speech gave rise at times to amusement, they nevertheless lived within Australian society, even if their position was very close to the margin.
The process of learning a language in such circumstances is essentially indescribable. Once you have learnt what you had not known until then, the former state of ignorance becomes to all intents and purposes incapable of recovery. I am able to remember a time when the meaning of very ordinary English words was unknown to me. I can recall vividly certain occasions when a hitherto meaningless sequence of sounds or letters suddenly acquired sense, when these sounds or letters no longer formed a tantalising puzzle. I can also recall the frustration and disorientation of those early days in Sydney when the sounds we heard around us and the written messages we saw everywhere—shop-signs, newspaper headlines, advertising hoardings claiming our attention from all sides—were no more than a menacing jumble of insoluble riddles. What I cannot remember at all precisely, though, is the mechanism of that process of learning, nor the point at which the confidently English-speaking child or adolescent finally emerged. The reason for the lack of precise and identifiable memories involves more than the mere passage of time or lapses of memory. It has a great deal to do with the linguistic identity of the individual who is engaged in an attempt to recapture the past.
If I were asked what is my first or native language I would have to say Hungarian, though I am not at all certain that until my fourth or fifth year German would not have had an equal claim. But clearly, my principal language is neither Hungarian nor German, but English. I grew up in English, my adult self is English-speaking and, more importantly, my conceptual and intellectual life exists only within an English-language context. I do not know the Hungarian expressions for countless abstract concepts I use in my everyday life. Nor can I remember the Hungarian words for many commonplace objects. When I lost a glove on a cold winter day in Budapest in 1990, 1 could not think of the word for glove; a shopkeeper who spoke English had to help me out. I look back on the past therefore from the perspective of English, a language which has shaped my c
oncepts and attitudes. I cannot recapture or convey the experience of learning, of growing familiar with a new language and a new society, because what I was then learning and attempting to absorb is now familiar, it has become an integral part of my self.
In the course of such a process, to learn is also to forget—but not entirely. You can remember events; you may recapture the emotions and the atmosphere of a particular time of your life; humiliations, anxieties and anguish leave indelible marks on your personality. These may be recovered from the past. And there remains, moreover, an ineradicable substratum of your ‘native’ language ready to pop up like a malicious imp at the least provocation. Yet for me the process of learning inevitably involved the act of unlearning. In my teens I did everything to avoid having to speak Hungarian, assuring my parents’ acquaintances that I had forgotten the language. That was, of course, a long way from the truth. Yet Hungarian was in the process of becoming a secondary language. The act of forgetting represented as much a self-willed and symbolic assertion as a natural and inevitable process. This was largely the result of a naive and, it seems to me in retrospect, tiresomely aggressive attempt to become a genuine Australian. It was due in large measure to my inability to reconcile the social, emotional and psychological claims of my two languages.
Inside Outside Page 9
