Vándor Lajos
We, the twenty-five letters of the alphabet
CONTENTS, INTRODUCTION
Contents
Introduction
THE POEMS OF LAJOS WALDER
I AM A WANDERER
'WE, THE TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET ...'
REVERENCE
PHILOSOPHICALLY PROFOUND POEM
INTERVIEW
THE HEAD
MR SOMOGYI, OR THE EVERYDAY ODE
GROUP PORTRAIT OF MYSELF
MOOKY
SHORT LYRICAL ORATION
BUDAPEST
ANIMAL TALE
INFORMATION
ARM-IN-ARM
LEGEND IN PROSE
A POET LIVES HERE AMONGST YOU
TRAVELLING
STUDY-TOUR
MEMORIAL SPEECH
OBLIGATORY SPRING POEM
HOROSCOPE
PARLIAMENTARIANISM
'IN THE LAST FEW DAYS...'
FAMILY EVENT
WORLD HISTORY
'I WAS ABOUT 15 YEARS OLD...'
ART GALLERY
LOST GENERATION
PEACE
LAST HUMAN BEING
EXPEDITION
THE LITANY OF VAINLINESS
TYPEWRITER
POEM OF THE UNEMPLOYED
THE LAST SPECTATOR
THE DREAM
'AT 7.20 PM THE ORIENT EXPRESS ROLLED IN...'
THE HUMAN
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
BUDAPEST DIVISION
MOMENTS
COMING TO TERMS WITH THE IMPOSSIBLE
SELF-IMPOSED EXILE
MUSIC FOR PROSE
A Poem by Agnes Walder: IN THE FULLNESS OF TIME
Notes to the Poems of Lajos Walder
Introduction
In 1987 my family in Sydney received a letter and a tape-recorded cassette from one of my aunts in Budapest. The letter stated that there had been a one hour program on Radio Budapest about my father and his poetry. She knew that we would want to hear it, so she taped it. The program was put to air by Mr Géza Hegedüs who was, by then, the famous old man of Hungarian literature. He was a writer/historian who also taught drama at university and was one of the foremost literary critics of his times. Mr Hegedüs had also been a friend of my father in their youth. The radio program was entided, 'Remembering the memorable Lajos Vándor'.
My father's real name was Lajos Walder. 'Vándor', meaning 'Wanderer', was his chosen literary pseudonym. 'But who remembers him today?', lamented Mr Hegedüs:
Our broadest literary history doesn't mention his name, and even in the Lexicon of Literature there are only a few lines which inform us that Lajos (Walder) Vándor (1913-1945) was a poet; that fascism took him away; and that since then all trace of him had disappeared. Yet it is not so much that all trace of him has been lost, but rather that the trace of his exciting poetry has been lost, with its strongly individual voice which, in a moment of history, became popular and highly esteemed from our podiums.
Mr Hegedüs went on to claim that my father was an extraordinarily gifted poet, whose work was so unique that it hardly had any relatives: What a sensation it was for us to hear that particular voice, which in his poems awakened gaiety in us while reminding us of our deepest anxieties ... [His] outstandingly recitable and highly effective free verse was well known during the 1930s because the most popular presenters of the time were keen to recite it.
I feel it is my job, ... to let the reading public know that there was a poet called Lajos Vándor, who lived for just under 32 years, who was the most credible voice to express the times between the two world wars. Without the totally individualistic voice of this artist, the overall picture of that time is not complete.
Mr Hegedüs first met my father in 1932. Hegedüs was then one of five twenty year-old young men (most of whom later became famous writers in Hungary) who started a literary periodical called Anonymous. He fondly remembered the occasion of their meeting and reported it thus:
One afternoon the door of the editorial office was opened by a round-faced young man who was, by the standards of those times, dressed in a bodgie fashion. His manner was provocatively arrogant. He wasn't tall, but he was all muscle and under his slicked black hair his face was smiling. I remember well, he said the following, word for word:
My name is Lajos Vándor. I am a poet, a law student and a trainee worker at the knitting mills. To the proletarians I am a rotten bourgeois; to the bourgeoisie I am a stinking proletarian; to the petit-bourgeoisie I am an evil anarchist and to the anarchists I am a cowardly petitbourgeois. And everybody is right, whatever they say about me. But I wrote a few masterpieces - these, the poets and les belles arnes would call prose, and the prose writers and modern aesthetes would call poems. Take them and eat them, read them, and publish them; but first give me a cigarette because I left my cash register at home and I don't have four cents in my pocket to buy a single fag.
As I was reading his poems I was gripped with the feeling that I had rarely sensed such a completely accurate expression of our times. This was fright, anxiety and profound indignation mixed with bizarre humour.
The poet was then just nineteen years old, and one of the poems he handed to the other young men was 'We the Twenty-five Letters of the Alphabet...'. Mr Hegedüs's assessment of his work in 1987 included the following remarks:
His uniquely voiced poetry was written with enormous compositional care. He carefully planned what appeared to be careless and polished it until it was exacdy as careless as he intended it to be. He lived not quite 32 years. He had two volumes of poetry published. Their content is 50 poems. But there is not a single inferior one among them. Once, with his usual self-sarcasm, he said to me: 'I only write my selected works.'
In an era of entirely pessimistic hopelessness, Vándor heralded gentle humanity and tried to find some measure of comfort in the joy of knowing how to laugh. It is with this laughter, this manly humour, that he rose above his own despair. Lajos Vándor lived with this moral superiority for nearly 32 years, when, with the knowledge of life regained, he died immediately. It is as if he had written the theme in one of his sadly amusing poems.
...