Approaching My Literature:Readings from the Hungarian Exilic ExperienceVolume 1

By Peter Hargitai

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APPROACHING MY

LITERATURE:

READINGS FROM THE HUNGARIAN

EXILIC EXPERIENCE, VOL I

Peter Hargitai

Copyright © 2011 Peter Hargitai. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfi lming, and recording, or in any information retrieval system without the written permission of University Readers, Inc.

First published in the United States of America in 2010 by Cognella, a division of University Readers, Inc.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trade-marks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation without intent to infringe.

14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-60927-910-3

Cover: Statue of Anonymous by Miklós Ligeti (1871–1944)

Copyright © 2010 by Peter Hargitai

Poetry: Th ese poems have appeared in the following publications, to which grateful acknowl-edgement is made: Sixty Years of American Poetry (Th e Academy of American Poets, Bruno Navasky, editor, 1996), Having a Wonderful Time (Simon and Schuster, 1992), Nimrod, College English, California Quarterly, Spirit, Blue Unicorn, Th e Carrel, Th e Cornfi eld Review, Palmetto Press, Th e South Florida Poetry Review, National Poetry Anthology, Dark Tower, Prairie Schooner, Kansas Quarterly, Th e Apalachee Quarterly, Polyphony, Sands, Vox, Isle of Flowers, Th e Café Review. “Th e Conch” and “For Mother’s Day” ap-peared in Forum: Ten Poets of the Western Reserve (Mentor E.V.S. 1978); “Ode to an Owl” appeared in National Poetry Anthology; “Brueghel’s Icarus, for Instance” appeared in Dark Tower, “For Ezra Pound” fi rst appeared in Dark Tower before appearing in Ezra Pound in Memoriam; “Mother’s Visit No. 29” fi rst appeared in the Palmetto Review, and later in slightly altered form in Budapest to Bellevue (Palmetto Press, 1990). “It Flies Away,” “On the Death of a Boy, Age 10” and “Song of Myself ” appeared in Dark Tower, 1972. “After One Martini” and “I Lost My Muse” appeared in Dark Tower, 1973. “Seeds” and “Sleepover” appeared as “Anyarozs” and “Altató” in the Hungarian literary gazette Élet és Irodalom; “Words” appeared as “Szavak,” “Wheedling Into Being” as “Bálványteremtő ima,” and “Stars” appeared in altered form as “Elment anyád” in the Hungarian periodical Tiszatáj; “Go” appeared as “Várj csak” in Szivárvány; “Vegetable Love,” “S(ons) and M(others),” appeared in altered form in the Hungarian periodical Árgus. “Uncommon City, Uncommon Cold” appeared in Budapest Tales in 2009. “Mother’s Visit No. 29” fi rst appeared in California Quarterly, “Lavabo,” fi rst appeared in Palmetto Review, “Venus Arising From the Sea,” fi rst appeared in Spirit. “Polyphemus” fi rst appeared in Budapest to Bellevue (Palmetto Press, Miami). “Th e Art of Taxidermy,” in College English, “Seeds,” “Cats” in Isle of Flowers. “For Sylvia Plath” fi rst appeared in the Cornfi eld Review in 1978. “An Owl for Larry Donovan” fi rst appeared in Th e Café Review. “Monument to a Kid of Budapest 50 Years Later” fi rst appeared in Daughter of the Revolution in 2006. “Th e First Litter of the Stalinist Era,” “A Brother to Emulate,” “Balástya Station, 1953,” “Waving Goodbye,” “Sleepover,” “A Little Boy Who Is Vile,” “Writer’s Block,” “A Hero’s Death,” “I Call You a Life,” “Jamming With Mother,” “Death of a Siren,” “Stars,” “A Vita,” “Bored to Death Just Being,” “Th ere You Go Again,” “Broken Hungarian

Love Song,” “Christmas 1995,” “Mother Tongue,” “Boxer Shorts: A Sestina,” “Healthwalk on the Boardwalk,” “Letting Go, “Bake-off With Death,” “Surrounded by Family,” “Riddles and Death Rattles,” “ICU Psychosis,” “Edema,” “Doctor Visiting His Dying Patient,” “Th e Precise Date of Her Death,” “Weird Sisters,” “My Secret Sharer,” “Breathing on the Ventilator,” Ghost Town,” “Th e Subtle Arrhythmia of Innards,” “Wheedling Into Being,” Icon Man,” “In Memoriam,” “Walk to St. Jude’s,” “GO,” “Come Back and Haunt Me,” “Songbound,” “Th e Pietá” appeared in the volume Mother Tongue: A Broken Hungarian Lovesong published by iUniverse, Inc. in 2003. Short Fiction: “Budapest to Bellevue” was fi rst published by Palmetto Press, “Fountain of Sirens” fi rst appeared in the Denver Quarterly, “Zoltán Muhari” fi rst appeared in Inlet Magazine, “Captive Nations, Inc.” in North Atlantic Review, “Land of Opportunity,” “Hungarian Crusaders,” fi rst appeared in the short-story volume Budapest to Bellevue published by Palmetto Press. “Only Say the Word” was published by the Hungarian Heritage Review in 1989. Th e Novel: Attila: A Barbarian’s Bedtime Story, was fi rst pub-lished by Püski-Corvin Books in 1994, Cheetah: A Barbarian’s Children Story fi rst appeared as Daughter of the Revolution published by iUniverse in 2006; A Barbarian’s Love Story was fi rst published by iUniverse in 2003 and again as Millie in 2007. Non-fi ction: “Problems of Translating Attila József ” appeared in Translation Quarterly in 1982, “Review of White Morning by Judith Berke” in Th e South Florida Poetry Review, “Review of My Manifold City by George Gömöri in Th e Apalachee Quarterly, “Th e Legacy Marxist Literary Criticism” in Hungarian Studies, “Attila József an National Identity” in Itt-Ott Magazine. “Contemporary Hungarian Poetry” appeared in Pembroke Magazine, “Budapest is a Riot!” appeared in Th e Sun Sentinel. Reviews: White Morning appeared in Th e South Florida Review; My Manifold City appeared in Apalachee Quarterly; “Hungarian Poetry in Transition: A Contemporary Context” appeared in Pembroke Magazine.

INTRODUCTION v

A rthur Nagy’s unsung journey from Budapest to Bellevue and back again, culminating in his

remarkable death, passed without notice. His estranged wife and his diminishing circle of friends have hinted that this was because his aff airs were not quite in order. Th e paper trail he left us, including his offi cial documents, are mired in contradictions to the point where it is well nigh impossible to sort out fact from fi ction and authentic papers from ingenious forgeries, so much so that the family wisely shied away from publishing an obituary that at best would be little more than well-intentioned misinformation. What has come to light recently is equally puzzling. His name, it turns out, was not Arthur Nagy at all, as listed on his passport and U.S. naturalization papers, but rather Attila Nagy, and although his offi cial birth certifi cate had him born in Budapest, in the last census he listed his country as Hungary or America or Neither. Th e exact date of his birth, likewise in question due to a faint typewriter key impression, we can only guess at. Th e manner of his mysterious death, foreshadowed in his short stories (“Th e Book of Job” and

“Fountain of Sirens”), off er such contra-dictory accounts that they cannot help but spawn more than the usual number of theories surrounding his life and work; these run the gamut from the legitimate to the absurd, including one posted on Facebook by a “friend” who, in lieu of an obituary, reduced the riddle of the author’s life to a parody of celebrity profi les advertizing fi ne spirits:

Name: Arthur Nagy or Attila NagyAge: 22 or 44Work: N/ALast book read: Søren Kierkegard’s Th e Sickness Unto DeathLatest Project: Th e Journals of AnonymousFavorite drink: Mad Dog 20/20

About the only items of interest the deceased left behind were the Journals, which consist of a set of appointment books, dog-eared, and bearing the brunt of wear, ink smears, grease smudges, illegible marginalia, inscrutable doodles and the like. Th e leatherette appointment books that had been converted into the Journals are 118 in number. Th e pages crowded

Introduction

Th e Journals of Anonymous

vi Approaching My Literature

with miniscule characters often stray outside the line and, in general, appear untidy except for the fact that they are arranged rather meticulously into literary genres (poetry, short-fi ction, the novel, drama, non-fi ction), which may suggest that their author’s intent was eventual, perhaps even posthumus publication. Th e cardboard cover of the bound Journals is in itself a mystery. Handwritten and in all caps are the words THE JOURNALS OF ATTILA NAGY, yet the author’s name is struck out by a single horizontal line and replaced below by ART NAGY, which in turn is crossed out and replaced by ANONYMOUS. Th us, Th e Journals of Anonymous.

Without a written will and last testament, the author’s fi nal wishes were left to conjecture, his family and friends reporting that sometimes, depending on his mood, he leaned toward cremation, at other times toward preservation of the corpus. What with all the confusion surrounding the matter of his literary estate, the family decided to harvest his body and to cremate the body of his work, and were it not for swift and aggressive action on the part of some Miami fi re fi ghters, the life and work of Attila (Art) Nagy would surely have slipped out of our reach and into ignoble anonymity. While Attila Nagy left neither real property, money or any material goods to his survivors, he did take great pains to make his wishes public about the disposition of his literary estate.

In a recorded message taped sometime between 1969 and 1999 and sent to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and simultaneously to the

Library of Congress in Washington D.C., he articulated his wish that in case of his death, these two institutions ought to take posession of his unpublished manuscripts, the Journals in particular. Th e message, furthermore, contained specialized instructions about how to preserve the manuscripts from the ravages of time and the elements. Th ere had been no known reply to Mr. Nagy’s unusual request from either the Hungarian Academy or the Library of Congress until a full year after his death, when a parcel arrived from Washington returning the small reel of tape. Th e accompanying terse note simply stated that the Library of Congress does not catalogue unsolicited materials. When the family was apprised of this recent development, they did not seem surprised. One distant cousin, who identifi ed herself as Piroshka Kun and who is a licensed gymnasium (secondary school) coun-selor in Budapest, made a statement to the Hungarian press that it was well-known for a time now that her American relative suff ered from delusions of grandeur and fancied himself a writer.

Once the surviving Journals were recovered and made a matter of public record, and one of the earlier pieces, the aformentioned “Th e Book of Job,” was shown to two publishing houses, one a mainstream commercial house, the other a small literary press, the concensus of opinion was that the text was not only eminently unpublishable but unreadable or readable only in parts. Most of the Journals had been written with a fountain pen and, unhappily, many came into contact with water from a leaky airconditioning

INTRODUCTION vii

unit, which rendered hundreds of pages illegible. Between the fi re and water damage, the loss is incalculable. Still, the salvaged portion of the work, not counting the translations, is by no means insubstantial, albeit some text appears to be recycled throughout the genres, and, indeed, several of the shorter pieces such as “Zoltán Muhari,” are integrated into a larger work that is ultimately the novel in Th e Barbarian Trilogy. Such cannibalizing, insofar as it is practiced by writers of all periods from the epic to the post-modern, is by no means unique, but the repetition of certain scenes, notwithstanding whether they are intentional, may be less easy to appreciate on casual reading.

Approaching highly nuanced literature such as Th e Barbarian Trilogy requires a careful study of the text in the context of the Journals in their entirety in order for us to appreciate how the narratives were composed at various periods of the author’s life, and how the resurfacing of the same scenes, at times only cosmetically altered, is part of a conscious eff ort to achieve a richly layered palimpsest; in this way, a single scene may be viewed in varying and sometimes competing contexts. And so it goes with the characters. Th e same character may emerge in diff erent guises to show yet another side to a personality that is too complex to treat in a single piece or even in a single genre. Th e mysterious character of Piroshka (Scarlet) is a prime example. At times she may pull at our heartstrings as a poor, sickly girl in need of a life-saving transfusion, but then at other times, she may also appear as a death siren who embodies all that is false nostalgia for a

country that exists only in the imagination; later she is a vampire who sucks the blood out of living life fully in the here and now; and in one horrifi c, apocalyptic vision, she actually becomes the Harlot of New Babylon. Whether such a novel dynamic enhances the whole’s esthetic eff ect or detracts from it promises to be a subject of lively debate.

Th en there’s the question of extra-textual issues surrounding the Journals. Although assessing the true merit of any text is ultimately the province of the literary historian, critics and readers alike will fi nd it diffi cult to dismiss an author who, among other things, managed to predict, and in convincing detail, the exact manner in which the Twin Towers disintegrated, seven years before 911. Copies of the book, out of print and bearing the innocuous title of Attila: A Barbarian’s Bedtime Story, privately printed in 1994 by an obscure Hungarian-American press, are still available today from the rare book sections of Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Th e lure here is this: If one prediction has come true, are there others lurking in the text? What, for example, does the Little Horn of Prophecy tell us in this, his most enigmatic novel? If the symbology is intended to be a visionary extension of the biblical Little Horn, how does it become an instrument of war and ultimately a weapon of mass destruction unparallaled in human history?

Of course, the real question is just who is this Attila Nagy? Are the Journals in their aggregate to be taken as thickly veiled autobiography? Is their author a prophet, a poet, a mad man? An anonymous anomaly? And what of his work? In approaching

viii Approaching My Literature

literature, does it get there and, if so, is it important enough to secure a legitimate place in the literature of exile?

Distinguished Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, an exile writer himself, chose to preserve Attila Nagy’s short story “Zoltán Muhari” among his archives at the University of Texas. In and of itself, this might be more of a curiosity than an endorsement, were it not for the imposing parade of other literary luminaries with whom the author has crossed paths, and these include Joseph Brodsky, Robert Bly, Donald Justice, May Swenson, Ágnes Nemes-Nagy, Elie Wiesel and Ezra Pound, even though Nagy’s initial contact with the controversial poet-in-exile came some two years after Pound’s death. And to add yet another dimension to the question of le-gitimacy, in 1994 Yale critic Harold Bloom included in Th e Western Canon, under the heading “Th e Chaotic Age: A Canonical Prophecy,” his translation of the great Hungarian poet Attila József, who lived in exile in his own country (see Perched on Nothing’s Branch in Vol. 2).

What may be interesting to both the specialist and the layperson is how seamlessly the theme of exile is woven into the fabric of each genre, beginning with “Th e Book of Job,” which off ers a rare glimpse into the author’s mysterious life and death, while it introduces the Journals’ genesis and the singular architecture of the work as a whole.

Unfortunately, the fi rst page of “Th e Book of Job” is obliterated, but we do discover from there on that Attila Nagy left Hungary in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution. Th at he wrote in the third

person from the point of view of Attila Nagy or Art Nagy. Th at he liked to use words like “wake” instead of words like “after” and that it was this tendency and tendencies similar to this that made him unemployable. Yet in the summer of 1969, Attila Nagy felt excited about jumpstarting his career. His hair cut short and neatly combed, his suit just a week old, his Fu-Man-Chu somewhere between the sink and the Manhattan sewers, he lined up at a downtown employment agency in the Empire State Building, feeling he had a defi nite edge. What he didn’t know was that he was teetering on the edge, a very sharp and jagged edge over an abyss that was as steep as the drop from the Empire State Building. And thus begins “Th e Book of Job.”

“Do you have an appointment?” asked the receptionist.

“No. Yes.”“Mr. Jesus Garcia will see you in a mo-

ment. Please have a seat.”Attila waited for nearly an hour, enough

time to lose his initial exuberance and begin brooding about his dead father. His father had been a royal judge in Hungary before the Red Army removed him from his royal bench. Th at was a year before Attila was born. A strict disciplinarian and a fi rm advocate of the Prussian system of corpo-real punishment, his father taught Attila the value of a liberal education, including the study of Latin, so that one day his son could breeze through writing perscriptions as a medical doctor. Now, Attila was thinking, the poor old man would never get a chance to see his son’s Associate of Arts degree. Or his new wife Chloe. Not

INTRODUCTION ix

exactly what his status-obsessed father or his materialistic mother had in mind. Th ey would have preferred he had his M.D. in hand before he dated, and even then they would’ve preferred a Hungarian girl who could cook, bake, and play Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody on the piano. Attila had gone against their wishes, and in style, by marrying while still in school and, of all people, an American and a hillbilly.

Th e receptionist had to call his name twice, mispronouncing it each time, before Attila reacted. “Mr. Garcia will see you now.”

“Hi, guy. Jesus Garcia.”Attila looked up and saw an enormous

hand with a blue-stone pinky ring coming at him. His employment counselor, Mr. Jesus Garcia, turned out to be surprisingly youthful and exuberant, himself fresh out of community college. But there was also something familiar about the face. Next to his nameplate was a framed photograph, a bus ad showing Jesus Garcia smiling broadly behind a desk: Th e success story of another graduate. It was the same smil-ing face Attila had seen plastered on every bus in the city. Although Mr. Jesus Garcia was a recent graduate, it seemed he was already famous.

When it came time to discuss money, Attila became conscious of accenting his speech with a nervous fl ourish of the hand, a looseness in the wrist, a bit of overacting while he articulated his salary require-ments: “No, I don’t see how I can accept that sort of start. It is not commensurate.” Did he actually say commensurate? Commensurate with what? Th ere was something wrong with his sentence, if it

qualifi ed as a sentence, which it probably did not. Either it was a fragment or it was missing an object.

His employment counselor sighed, toyed with a pencil and said, “Oh-kay. How would you like to take the Wunderlich Test, guy?” Mr. Garcia explained that the test was designed to sort applicants into the proper slots: Clerical, sales or mechani-cal. “Should be a breeze for you. You’re college stuff .”

Attila wrapped the wire rims of his glasses around his ears and studied his op-tions. A, B, C or None of the Above. Most of the questions focused on American folk sayings such as, “Once bitten, twice shy,” and all of them required simple multiple choice answers. Th ere was no essay. No opportunity for brilliance.

He was stuck on question number 17, something about the bird in the hand and the bird in the bush.

“Time’s up, buddy!”Instead of exploding in a vulgar exple-

tive in his native Hungarian, Attila said scheiss under his breath and swallowed hard. Here he was with an A.A. in Liberal Studies, with a formidable background in Latin and Greek and a smattering of German, but without the faintest clue about the bird in the hand and the bird in the bush. He was both startled and baffl ed. His time was up. “Your time is up, guy.” And, unbelievably, seventeen out of a pos-sible twenty-fi ve answers were incorrect.

“Oboy,” Mr. Jesus Garcia said. “I better take it from here.” Mr. Garcia tapped his desk with his pencil a few times, then he swiveled his chair a full 180 degrees. He dialed. He held the phone under his chin

x Approaching My Literature

and swiveled in his chair. Mr. Garcia was a master of swiveling. Th e telephone fi t perfectly under his jaw. He lit a cigarette, he joked, he lied, he winged it, winked at Attila and hoodwinked whoever would listen: “Hey, this is Jesus Garcia of Snelling and Snelling. I have a young man here with a desire to succeed.”

Succeed? Attila Nagy would rather die a mad monk in Siberia than succeed in the sense that Mr. Jesus Garcia wanted him to succeed. He’d rather wear sandals, grow an unruly beard, don a sackcloth robe and a hood, read the psalms in Latin from dawn to dusk, wear a tonsure if he had to—he’d rather do all of these things than swivel in a chair, grinning ear to ear with a stupid gummy smile. He’d rather drop dead doing just about anything other than the physical act of swiveling. It was becoming abundantly clear that Mr. Jesus Garcia was not a knight in the Arthurian sense.

Too bad Attila had blown his interview at the private school, where he could’ve devoted his life to reading and writing like the monks there who spent a lifetime meditating, teaching and just shuffl ing along garden paths and statuesque court-yards that led into gilded chapels fragrant with incense. But when they’d asked him about his philosophy of education, he should’ve taken his time instead of trying to impress by rattling off a diffi cult passage by Th omas Aquinas, only to choke halfway through, lose his bearings and, in a bizarre non-sequitur, settle for a vague slogan of Confucius followed by a crazy laugh. Too bad.

Because he needed a job. Because not only had he disappointed the monks and

Mr. Jesus Garcia, but he was disappoint-ing Chloe, who was probably wondering, and rightly so, how long her husband was going to be unemployed. She wanted him to get a job, what she called a real job. She was sick and tired of his shit, his MD 20/20 which tasted like orange Kool-Aid and rubbing alcohol, his rancid cigarettes, his ghosts, and his laughing his ass off for no reason.

Suddenly, Attila found himself sitting across from Mr. Jesus Garcia and stifl ing what was looking more and more like a laugh. His employment counselor wanted to know what was so funny. Attila laughed but couldn’t tell him.

“Shit, man, what’re you laughing at?”Attila snorted. “Okay. I’m okay now.

I’m good.”Mr. Jesus Garcia shook his head, tapped

his pencil. “You have any idea what the go-ing rate for grads is right now?”

Attila’s laughing spasm returned and with a vengeance. He was imagining whacking Mr. Jesus Garcia on the head with his telephone. He wondered what it would sound like.

“Any idea?”None. He was too busy imagining the

queer sound the telephone would make against Mr. Jesus Garcia’s skull.

“Oh-kay. Let’s call it a bad day, huh.” Mr. Garcia reached out his fat hand with the pinky ring. “Let me make a few more calls. I’ll get you in the door, but you’re going to have to do the rest, guy. Fair enough? Call me tomorrow?” Mr. Garcia may have been the fi rst man in history to place his thumb to his ear and pinky fi nger

INTRODUCTION xi

to his mouth to mimic holding a phone. Attila wanted to whack him.

Instead of going straight home, Attila took a detour to a section of the East River, a gray abandoned strip of water that reminded him of the Danube in old Budapest. Th is was his favorite place to brood and compose poetry and to listen to a plaintive sound submerged under the water, always the same sound, the same notes, the same song mouthed by the same dying young female emerging in his poem. Sometimes he got close enough to see her bluish breasts fl oating just under the sur-face of a rainbow colored oil slick. She sang to him about bones of coral and mares of night. Omens and amens of death. Th ere were days when the lines would come to him like waves, one after another. Sometimes a poem in its entirety would appear only to evaporate once he got to his Pinto with the bad muffl er. Sometimes he’d stuff pencil and paper into his pocket to write down the words, but when he read them back at a red light or a stop sign, they were never the same, and most of these drafts, if they could be called that, ended up littering the highway or collected in a green dumpster.

Attila had to make one more stop before he could face his wife. Th e Go-Go place across their apartment. On a bar stool by the wall, he downed a quick beer as if it were Alka-Seltzer, and he would’ve been on his way were it not for the large German woman next to him who blocked his pas-sage. To avoid contact with her, he ended up twisting his legs like a contortionist. He must’ve looked like he was holding

himself because the bartender tossed him the restroom key.

“Piss ant!” the German woman said.Th e lone Go-Go dancer broke into a

laugh.It took physical eff ort on his part to

extricate himself and sneak out the back door, hit the nearest Convenient store and get himself a bottle of MD 20/20 in a brown bag. He slunk into the alley and af-ter a swig and a spasm of howling laughter, emptied his pockets of the day’s creative eff orts straight into the dumpster. It would be another hour before he’d stagger up the fi re-escape, his eyes bloodshot, his mouth reeking of cheap booze.

Seventeen year-old Piroshka, who stayed in the same apartment building, greeted him in Hungarian. She was here for a heart operation. Although she was born a Blue Baby and her skin had an unearthly bluish hue, she didn’t mind showing it off . Today she wore a skimpy bikini and oversized sunglasses, and she was riding a little girl’s tricycle back and forth on the fi re-escape-landing. Exercise, she said. Doctor’s prescription. She and Attila laughed like maniacs. Th en Piroshka stopped laughing and her face was sud-denly serious. “You owe me some poems, remember? Where are my poems?”

He hemmed and hawed and giggled. She asked if she could put her hand into his pocket.

“No, Chloe’s upstairs.”“Take me with you.”“Where?”“Upstairs.”He laughed as he turned and quickly

ran up another fl ight of stairs. Chloe was

xii Approaching My Literature

in the kitchen and in a good mood. Instead of riding him for being late with booze on his breath, she gave him a big kiss. She had some good news for him. A Mr. Jesus Garcia had called; he may have found him a job.

Th is was sobering news, and Attila put on a serious face. “Did he say anything about pay?”

“No, but I guess it’s close to what you asked for. I fi gured you might be celebrat-ing. Th at Mr. Jesus Garcia, he sounded so nice. He really likes you.”

“What time is the appointment?”Chloe beamed. She had another

surprise. An appointment book. She had already written in the appointment for 11:00 a.m. on Th ursday. She handed it over to him and said, “Here you go, Mr. Businessman.”

Attila made a sour face.“What is it now?”“I don’t know. Just not crazy about this

… book of job thing. I hate the word job, I guess.”

“Well, I guess you’re going to have to get used to it.”

“I told you I don’t want a job. I want a position.”

“I beg your pardon, your honor. A po-sition.” Chloe threw his dish of macaroni and cheese on the table so it danced.

After dinner his spirit lifted. He told her he thought things were bound to work out. Th ese “jobs” were temporary but not his thing. He had dreams of something much greater. She deserved so much better and he told her so.

“Yeah, sure.”

Attila winced. He really wanted to start a new life with her here in New York. As man and …

“Bullcrap!”Th en he got downright maudlin. “I

love you, Chloe.” “You have a great way of showing it.”“I’ll show you now.” He kissed her hard

on the mouth.“Hey!”He wavered.“Show me,” she said, almost in a

whisper.He wondered if he could.She moved in for the kill. “Show me,”

she said to him with sudden passion, pro-pelling him into the tight squeeze of their bathroom. Th ere was more rage in this than passion.

“Here?”“Right here. Standing up.”“You’re crazy.”“You’re fucking her, aren’t you? You’re

fucking Piroshka.”He told her she was unreal.“You can close your eyes and see her!”

she said. “I won’t look the other way any more. I can’t close my eyes to what you’re doing to me!”

“I don’t need her to make love. I swear it.”

“Show me.”Th e shiny silk panties fell to the fl oor.

He stood there hapless, trying not to think of the cottage cheese under the skin of his wife’s thighs. And she worked so hard at aerobics. Th e leg-warmers, the jazzercise, the cosmetics, the bullshit. Maybe if she would stand in the bathtub behind the shower curtain’s softening gauze, her thighs

INTRODUCTION xiii

would fi rm up and look like Piroshka’s, and then he would fi rm up, and then they could have it all.

She patted his groin. He had a way to go. “What is it, darling? Your dick is so sad.”

Was she trying to be funny?“Pssst … It’s a tired subject,” she said.

“Moot. Th is realism—slash—idealism tripe. All in the cabesa. Maybe novel for a girl from Upper Slabovia but not exotic enough for this girl from Upper Manhattan.”

And where was Chloe from? Boonietown, Kentucky?

To punish him, she went into the bath-room, sat on the toilet without closing the door, tinkled, passed a few farts to show she was more in touch with the elemental stuff of life than some people she knew. But her eyes welled up and leaked around her contact lenses, causing them to slide to a blur until she fi nished her business.

She was dabbing her eyes with toilet paper. “I don’t mean to be mean. Teasing you about Upper Slabovia and all that. It’s just that I’m jealous, I guess. Th at you’d rather be with her than with me. Or with any other Hungarian. Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore. Maybe I’m the one who’s crazy.”

He drew her to him.A hiss-laugh of the token variety es-

caped from her lips. She said she couldn’t. Not now.

“When?”“When you really want to.”“When will I really want to?”“Just hold me,” she said.

Now it was he who felt defl ated. When she said that. Still, he tried lifting her off the toilet with the requisite grace.

Th ey danced on the bathroom’s tiny fl oor mat, pressed against one another in a kind of static dance where the two pres-sures canceled each other and they ended up standing in one place, living unhappily ever after.

Th e marriage had started off on a rocky foot. Actually on a broken foot and a broken leg.

If there was one thing Attila was look-ing forward to, it was fulfi lling his fantasy of snuggling in bed with his luscious wife. In the wee hours of the morning he rolled into spooning position and, to his shock, was met with the words, “Now no.”

He sloshed back to his side of the king-sized waterbed, bewildered, hurt and seething inside. It amazed him that after a minute or at the most two, she’d be sound asleep. Damn it. He was annoyed at the perfunctory rejection, but at the same time couldn’t help but feel a sense of envy that she could fall asleep and stay asleep so eas-ily. Her chest infl ated with each inspiration and defl ated with each exhalation in per-fect rhythm. By comparison, his breathing was ragged; he was still seething. Maybe he was too sensitive to pester her while she slept. She slept so beautifully, her body still like Sleeping Beauty’s, her breathing even, quiet. She was a study in serenity. He, on the other hand, had been a fi tful sleeper all his life, turning and tossing and rumpling up his sheets as if a battle had taken place during the night.

If only he could sleep like Kitty. He made a conscious eff ort to synchronize his

xiv Approaching My Literature

breathing with hers. After several repeti-tions, he realized this was never going to work. His nerves were all ajitter. Under the covers, he cracked every knuckle on his ten fi ngers. Not all of his knuckles made the popping sound, some just plain hurt, and it pissed him off . Nothing was helping. He was more agitated than ever, restless like a wild animal trapped in a cage, except with him, the cage was his rib cage, and he was conscious of his heart banging against it. If he turned on his side, he could feel the blasted heartbeat drumming in his ears and echoing like sonar underwater. If he could, he’d climb out of his skin.

He tried his other side, only to turn back again in a matter of seconds. As he tossed and turned, he caught himself mak-ing bizarre faces that came on like ticks; again and again he found himself pressing his eyelids together and gritting his teeth in a painful and sustained grimace.

Th en his arms and legs would start up. He extended his right arm, stretching it straight at the ceiling, his right forearm tightening with a curious urge to make a fi st. He kept opening and clenching his hand in a pumping motion; each time his fi st felt tighter and heavier. Th e heavi-ness of his fi st frightened him. Now the legs kicked in. Th e muscles of his calves twitched involuntarily, and the impulse to move them was so overwhelming that he kept shifting his legs, left, right, left again, bending them at the knee, crossing them at strange angles, raising them in the air, changing positions every two seconds or so. He counted sheep, he added them, subtracted the, multiplied them, divided them, squared them, took their square

root, but nothing. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get comfortable, but in spite of himself he somehow dosed off before daylight.

Kitty explained over coff ee that she didn’t like to be touched while she slept. Th ey got into a bit of a tiff until her eyes welled up. He noticed a pattern with her early on. When she was on the defensive, her eyes would well up. It wasn’t that she was cold or anything like that, it was just that she had these “trigger” spots, she said, and setting them off could potentially cause untold pain. Attila tried to imagine these “trigger” spots as numbers on a touch-tone telephone, and it just didn’t work. He just wanted to be close to her, groin to butt, thigh to thigh. No buttons involved.

She confessed the real reason behind her push to buy the old king-size waterbed at Salvation Army. It wasn’t really about having more room for the two of them to romp around, but more about her needing more room, period.

“Room away from me?” His voice was verging on the tremulous and he hated it.

“Yes,” she said, her eyes welling up again. She told him he probably wasn’t aware of it, but he did “things” while he slept. Like kick and lash out. He fl ails his arms and his legs go crazy while he sleeps. She’s deathly afraid of getting kicked by him in one of her tender spots. When she got up during the night for a glass of water, he was sound asleep on his back, and when she came back he was still asleep, fl at on his back, but his arms and legs were high in the air and they were fl ailing like a … cockroach having a seizure. She must’ve thought what she said was funny because

INTRODUCTION xv

she laughed so hard her eyes crinkled at the corners, her face turned red, and she was laughing herself to the point of real tears. She instinctively put a hand to her mouth to muffl e what could only be described as insane laughter.

Attila off ered a half smile; he pursed his lips, but there was no reprisal. At least not today. He did get back at Kitty by taking about $3,200 of her money, money she had saved by working for her family’s miniature golf course for years. And he invested all of it in green and white striped soccer uniforms on special order from West Germany to outfi t team Attila founded, called the Lakewood Sir Lancelots. Th ey made it offi cial by applying for member-ship in the Lake Erie Soccer League. When Kitty found out she wanted to break his leg, but as it turned out, she didn’t have to. In their third match, Attila did that for her. He broke his right leg and his right foot and had to wear a hip cast down to his toe.

Since his bulky cast couldn’t feel the accelerator, he had to use the choke on in his old car to get to work. He was on his fourth job in as many months. For his fi rst job, he was a waiter at the Silverthorne, where he kept pouring wine into tall water glasses till he was fi red. In less than a week. His second job was for a diaper service in Shaker Heights, a swank neighborhood where he drove a little truck with a picture of a baby’s butt. He had to pick up and bag dirty diapers, and after a while the truck, his own clothes, the dash, and the steering wheel all smelled of baby pee and ammo-nia, and he just couldn’t bring himself to eat his lunch or to urinate into a Maxwell House jar per instructions from his trainer.

At the end of week two he walked off the job by abandoning the truck, fi lled with ripe diapers, on the corner of Shaker and East Boulevard. His next job was cleaning orangutan cages at the Cleveland Zoo while the workers were on strike for close to three months. Th is was his longest job. Once the strike was over, so was his job. For being a scab, he was shouted at, taunted and shot in the back of the head with a water pistol containing ammonia.

As far as Attila could tell, the trouble with his marriage was that his wife was not an avid believer in his dream of becoming the voice of his generation. He had already made what he considered to be a prelimi-nary overture to Ezra Pound by writing to the great poet in Italy and sending along some of his poems. How was he supposed to know the old man was dead? And even if he had known, chances were it probably wouldn’t have made a diff erence. For most of his life, Attila was not one to take time too seriously. Time was incidental to him, a nuisance, like the incidentals of working, eating and eliminating, or making sure there was enough money to keep these things going. It was called the cycle of life.

He looked out their grimy kitchen window in Manhattan. Piroshka was still on their fi re-escape-landing. What was she doing there? Her long bare legs were pumping insanely on that ridiculously small tricycle and she was out of breath. Maybe he had better start pedaling himself if he really wanted to get anywhere.

Which meant that on the morning of the job interview Attila Nagy would have to wake up a changed man and brace himself for the cycle of life. His pushups

xvi Approaching My Literature

would have to be methodical. In the fi nal analysis, his wife was probably right: It was not necessary to work among fountains, arched windows and statue-fi lled court-yards. His romantic idea of beauty was perhaps an illusion, and his insistence that he was somehow destined to create beauty through the written word was nothing more than a delusion. Too bad the words illusion and delusion rhymed so beauti-fully. Attila Nagy wrote them down in his new appointment book. Every time a line would come to him he would jot that down too, not just on scraps of paper but in his leatherette Journal. Soon his book of job was beginning to look more and more like a book of poems. It was crazy. His mind would keep fl itting to an image of a long-haired poet reciting the words illusion and delusion to a dying siren, and in French.

Just as he was about to surrender to his senses to the art of dying, his heart started to pound against his ribs. A wake-up call from his wife to get with it. Real men had real jobs. He was a man, damn it, not a piss ant …

After he gargled with some Mad Dog 20/20 and slapped on the English Leather, he felt revived and left the bathroom with a forced laugh, feeling his balls. He did his best to exude confi dence in his new suit with the padded shoulders. Chloe and Piroshka cheered him on as he walked out the door, his new appointment book in his breast pocket, his Samsonite briefcase fi rmly in his grasp.

Morning rush hour over the George Washington Bridge trickled and gleamed and he was riding high, the gears of his

Pinto shifted smoothly, his timing was right for a change. Standard Products turned out to be a maze of offi ces in Montclair, New Jersey, and once he entered the swivel doors he was given an ID tag and led to a tight cubicle where the interviewer blew on a Styrofoam cup.

“Coff ee?”“No, thank you.” He was quite sure,

thank you. But Attila Nagy did take the liberty of lighting a cigarette.

“Tell me Mr.—uh—Nagy, what are you looking for in a position?”

Th e word position blindsighted him. He didn’t expect it. He placed his cigarette carefully in the ashtray, and in a monotone voice blurted he was looking for a job with a progressive fi rm where there was an opportunity to succeed. “I like working with people. Contact.” Th e cigarette in the ashtray began smoking with unusual vehemence. Attila looked to see whether the interviewer noticed it or not.

“Th e opening we have,” the interviewer continued, after a cough, “is public rela-tions. Sales really. With a base—”

“Base?” Th e smoke rose to a new in-tensity and was now blanketing the room.

A burning ash fell to the rug and Attila Nagy had to get on all fours to retrieve it. Th e interviewer became annoyed and said that this was ridiculous. Th e interviewee was hunched at the foot of the desk. Blood rushed to his head. After a short interview, which was terminated somewhat abruptly, he was almost glad to fi nd himself outside the swivel doors. He breathed in the free air and tried walking off the stress, but walking wasn’t enough. He ran. He had

INTRODUCTION xvii

to. Th ere was no other way to burn off the excess adrenaline.

He spotted a public phone, took a deep breath and called Jesus Garcia. He got an earful: “You didn’t get it. Th e guy doesn’t like the way you sit. Watch how you sit, man. He said you lit up. During an in-terview? And burnt a hole in his oriental rug? Jee-zus! You didn’t. Please tell me you didn’t. Th en after the interview he said he saw you sprinting around the grounds like it was the fucking Olympics. What were you thinking, buddy? Talk to me.”

He slammed down the receiver, wishing it were Mr. Jesus Garcia’s skull. He jumped into his Pinto, ground its gears, and gave it gas, plenty of it, weaving like a mad man through the Lincoln tunnel. It was time to pop open his glove compartment for his emergency supply. A Wild Turkey mini. Th e tiny bottle was made of plastic, and for some ungodly reason the cap wouldn’t come off . It kept going around and around. He tried using his tie to get a better grip. He bit on it. No good. In his desperation, he resorted to the car’s cigarette lighter, burnt a hole into the bottom and sucked out the contents. Damn. Easy, baby. He followed his breathing in an eff ort to calm down, but it wasn’t working. Nothing was. Th ough he swore off the Go-Go joint, he did make a pit stop there and at the nearby convenient store and got plastered. He was going to be late again. And again. Like all cycles, his had a habit of repeating itself. After a month or so of spinning around in this orbit, he decided it was time to break the cycle and not go home at all.

He spent most of the time driving around the East River neighborhood,

and when he wasn’t riding his Pinto, he was living out of it. He ate in it, slept in it and kept a Journal of what he perceived were breakthroughs, one after another. Th is went on for months, possibly years, when, for no discernable reason and in a frenzy, he cleared his car of cheeseburger wrappers, Styrofoam cups, crushed cans, cigarette butts, and empty bottles that had to be rolled out from under the seats. Th en he headed home.

Shoes in hand, he tip-toed through the hall of the apartment. With practiced ef-fi ciency, he swept aside the streamers sepa-rating hall and living room. Th e television was on. Loud static and a snowy picture. Chloe and Piroshka, still in her bikini, were sitting side by side on the loveseat, pretending to be absorbed by what was on television.

Bonnie, Chloe’s American collie, made no eff ort to greet him.

“Hi,” Chloe said without looking up. Piroshka was quiet, her eyes riveted on the fl ickering screen.

“I, uh,” Attila stammered, “took some time off . Th e last interview kind of blew me away. I had no other choice but to check myself into my car. I guess I lost track of time. Sorry about that. But I’m okay now. I’ll land something eventually. I feel like something physical. Bike currier, driver, that sort of thing. Where I don’t have to think.”

“I don’t want you to think.”As he went closer, he noticed that

Chloe’s left hand rested under Piroshka. Under the seat of her bikini pants. He felt a sensation of falling in air, uncertain whether it was a thrill or a shiver. “You

xviii Approaching My Literature

have your hand under her,” he whispered into Chloe’s ear. She ignored his observa-tion and signaled it was time for him to walk the dog.

Bonnie took one look at him and scur-ried under the loveseat. He called out the dog’s name, slapped his knee. “Come on, girl!” He crouched down, his face inches from the leg of the couch and Piroshka’s ankles. Chloe’s collie was glued fl at on her haunches. Attila tapped the fl oor, but the snout disappeared under the loveseat. Attila’s head prickled with heat. He made sweeping motions with his arm and snatched the forelegs. Bonnie’s nails scraped hardwood. Th e hindquarters were fi nally out. Attila looked up. Th e girls were cackling.

Without a leash, Bonnie raced ahead of him down the steps, out the door and along the grassy sidewalk. She sniff ed the grass obsessively, then stopped and squat-ted. Watching the dog squat her body into a beehive set something off in Attila’s brain. Without knowing why, he had an inkling to throw something at the animal to stop her from squatting. Now there were two things in life he couldn’t stomach: Swiveling and squatting. He looked around for a piece of gravel, a stone. Anything.

“Come here!”Th e dog cowered, lumbered toward

him in a slow shuffl e. He looked into the animal’s stupid eyes. Th ey bulged, pleaded. He circled around the dog and the dog circled with him, her neck twisting back, the round eyes vigilant. He noticed again the fl at of the head. It suggested an irritable absence of mind—the lack of any-thing other than raw instinct. Th ere was

something disturbing about the dog’s few uncreative habits: Th e way she stomached the fl oor when she stretched. Th e breathless blind licking of anything and everything. When another dog came by, she would off er her behind for a sniff . Sometimes she darted a tongue at its anus. It was refl ex. What Attila called indiscriminate licking. Another habit was sniffi ng other dogs’ excrement every chance she would get. Another was stretching the forelegs; another was her physical act of excretion, squatting rigidly, the rib cage infl ating into a beehive, the muscles of her hindquarters taut, a look of utter inevitability in her face as she submitted helplessly to animal instinct. “Come here, you beast!” Attila slapped his thigh again and again, unable to control his breathing. His voice changed and he was conscious of it. It was a voice both of feminine pleading and masculine aggression, high tension, most of which he managed to contain in the area of the inner neck like a burning cincture. But sometimes, if he tensed his own lower back like the dog, and put his hand on it, he felt stronger. It drove his heat away.

He brought his hand down with a motion to strike the fl at of the head. He watched the eyes wince. Th e upper and lower lids furrowed past shut. It occurred to Attila Nagy that this nervous reaction could somehow aff ect the performance of the gonads and produce a kind of neuras-thenic weakness. It was important that all stimuli pass directly to the nerves without being manipulated by the brain, and that is why such a beast was perfect. Especially the fl at of the head. He tried to think of the exact position of Chloe’s hand, whether it

INTRODUCTION xix

was palm up or palm down. Because if it was palm up …

Attila and Bonnie returned to the apartment. Chloe was alone. No sign of Piroshka anywhere. It was as if she were never there. Still, he wanted to know just what the hell her hand was doing under her ass?

“Look,” Chloe said. “It’s your sick fantasy, not mine.”

“Sick?”“Sick.” She snatched his Journal from

the fi replace mantle and threw it at him. “What about this? What is this supposed to be?”

A terrifi ed Bonnie wedged herself under the loveseat. Chloe was livid. It was the appointment book she’d gotten him. She couldn’t believe it. Page after page overfl owing with his scrawny letters. Strange doodlings in the margins, poems, scribble-bibble. It was the diary of a mad-man. One page was devoted to a drawing of a naked man riding a horse in the heavens. Astraddle in his lap was a blue girl who looked a great deal like Piroshka. A diamond star ran from the man’s tailbone to a point in the middle of his forehead, each segment labeled alpha, beta, gamma … Under the fi gure were an asterisk and the words: Th e beast must be integrated.

Ah, it was fucked up. What was it sup-posed to be about? And why was she blue?

Attila said it was about Art. With a capital A.

Chloe exposed her breast and said that that was art.

Attila Nagy had no time for her art. He was raking his memory for something he forgot. Time. Time and its relationship

to the rhombohedral system. “TIME!” he exploded suddenly at Chloe. Didn’t she know that she was telling him what to write, what to draw, when to work, when to play, when to eat, when to crap, when to sleep, when to wake up, and what to do in-between? And lately he couldn’t even daydream because she would scream at close range: “You need a fucking wake-up call!”

It was TIME! What he needed was time to execute the plan he had hatched during his dark night of the soul. He had already codifi ed his concerns in poetry in the oblique language of symbols and quirky images. How to do it without suspicion, without guilt. To surprise her by the pur-est drift where the illusion was silk. Time was of essence, not so much a given set of numbers on the face of a clock ticking to a countdown, but a river running into the ocean. And the ocean was death.

Attila made a quick entry into his Journal before retreating into the bath-room. And it was there while taking a shower (he could not tolerate a hot bath), that he smelled a mixture of linseed oil and burning skin before he lost his footing and tumbled into mythology. In place of a fl oor, a blue sky with fl uff y clouds sailed underneath him. He was naked but with-out a horse. Without his Pinto. Th ere was no Piroshka, and no stars, only asterisks at the foot of a page. Days, weeks, perhaps months sailed by, and in the meantime, Chloe was seriously considering Baker-acting his ass.

He continued to fall down a blue whirl past honking geese, splashing down on a sandy beach, where an amazing unicorn

xx Approaching My Literature

galloped in the slow gait of a merry-go-round. Water was dripping from the rivu-lets of his mane and dandelion milk from the tip of its horn. Um-pah pah. Um-pah pah.

“What are you doing in there?” Chloe demanded.

“I have fallen into mythology.” He sounded almost apologetic.

“Th ey don’t have mythology wards at Bellevue, only psych wards.

To show her how wrong she was, he mounted the unicorn and assumed the position of a knight of chivalry. Th e lone bulb in the ceiling fl ickered and then died. She kept diagnosing him from the hall: Th ere were many early symptoms, varying with diff erent cases, such as free-fl oating anxiety, peculiar religious ideation, imagi-nary ability in certain fi elds, day-dreaming, brooding, reclusiveness … OPEN THE DOOR, GODDAMM YOU!

“Confi teor Deo omnipotenti.” In the darkness, the knight of chivalry prayed fervently to be delivered of his torturer.

Chloe swiveled a full 180 degrees and eventually succeeded in coaxing him out of his marathon lockdown by whispering sweet nothings through the keyhole. Th is was so silly that he unlocked the door and exposed his nakedness to the light. So many things had happened while his mind went AWOL, it was too crazy. One: He now had a job. Chloe had signed him up for the Taxi Drivers Local. She had already paid his union dues for a full year. He was to start driving tonight.

Attila massaged the bridge of his nose as he took all this in. He found the confl u-ence of events fi tting and just. After the

dark night of the soul came illumination. Th en union.

“You must be famished,” Chloe said.Attila gobbled up the peach cobbler

of his TV dinner. It was yummy, dessert before the main course.

“She’s coming,” Chloe said between sips of Sangria.

Attila wedged his knee between hers.Th e doorbell went off downstairs. “Piroshka? Just like that?”“Th e main course. And guess what? She

isn’t blue anymore.”Attila was out of breath as he opened

the door. Piroshka, pink as a new baby, brushed past him in leg-warmers, and greeted Chloe with a tight embrace; their whispers fi lled up the space around them with sibilance.

To amuse them, Attila left and came back out in his taxi driver’s cap. A novelty prop.

In a matter of days, the trio got into the habit of settling themselves on the loveseat like old friends. It turned out that after her heart operation, Piroshka had become an exercise nut. Now when she got excited, her mouth no longer turned bluish, but a deep cherry red.

“Do you have an Exercisor?” she asked Chloe in conversational English. “Yes, but I’ll have to look for it,” Chloe said. “You want to help me look for it?”

Before they left, Piroshka told Attila that if he had stayed in Hungary, he could be driving one of those hot Icarus buses. Instead of answering, he put an ear to the wall. Sounds of drawers opening. Finally they were back with the Exercisor—four coiled springs with a handle on each end.

INTRODUCTION xxi

Th ey sat down next to each other and pulled. Th eir knees came together. Attila recited an ode of Horace in perfect tempo with their accelerating breathing.

How would you answer me if a fl ameWere to blaze in place of fair ChloeAnd longing were to bind us again?Would your door be open for me then?

“42nd open,” blared Attila Nagy’s cab radio. “Driver needed at 42nd.”

“42nd,” responded Attila. Th e dis-patcher gave him the address and he was on his way. He dog-eared the graduate school catalog he was looking at before tossing it on the passenger side. It was from the University of Miami. For the past hour, he’d been scrutinizing their Ph.D. programs.

His taxi slid to a stop just north of 42nd Street, the doors fl ared open, and two young men jumped into the back seat. “Hell’s Kitchen, mother,” said the man with the pick in his hair. He said he was Th e Man. Th e other give him a high fi ve.

“Yes, sir,” said Attila. His foot on the accelerator trembled. Th e cab banked a sharp right.

“Hey, where you going, mother-fucker?”“Pardon me?”“Pardon me, pardon me, mother-

fucker?” It was Th e Man mocking him.Attila cleared his throat and asked him

about time.“What do you mean TIME, man?”

Attila said he may have to do time and wanted to know if they had ever done time. “What is time like?”

“What you talking about?”In the rearview, Attila saw him reach for

a pack of Kools. Th e bottom of the package was torn away and the top left unopened to keep lint off the end from going into the mouth. Th at’s when he saw it. Th e handle of a 45 sticking out of the belt.

“I’d like to buy what’s in your pants,” Attila said with eff ort.

“Cock-sucker.”Th e cab swished past grilled storefronts.“Right here, baby.”Attila disengaged his meter, stopped,

and looked into his rearview. He was about to recite Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech when instinct told him to put his hand on the stick.

“How much you got, turkey?” asked Th e Man.

Attila thought he heard the 45 cock. Th e men were halfway out of the cab when he shoved it into low gear. Th e sudden jolt rocked the cab and ejected them. Th e gun dropped to the fl oor with a thud. Receding in his rearview, his passengers lay sprawling on the curb.

Red lights could not stop Attila Nagy. He kept blinking, checking his rearview. He had the gun. His spine arched and his heart pounded. If he catches them in bed, that’s the end. Th e justifi able end.

He slunk up the stairs of their apart-ment, the gun throbbing painfully in his pants. It was maybe 4 in the morning. Surprise!

Th e TV had been left on and squelched like the static of his cab radio. Attila turned

xxii Approaching My Literature

up the volume and charged into the bedroom. Th ey were not there. Piroshka and Chloe were not there. He yelled for them. Checked every room, looked across the street to see if the Go-Go neon sign was still on. Where could they be? He stumbled into the kitchen. Nothing there but a pile of dirty dishes. Chloe had left a note on the fridge. It said she was pregnant and they were about to be evicted. Th ey couldn’t go on like this.

For now she was staying with a friend. In parenthesis was a 212 area code number. He had one last chance to make good. Th e one last chance was an ad she had cut out for him from Th e Times:

COUNSELLOR NEEDED

Growing FirmGrad with verbal skillsA great communicatorAND A BURNING DESIRE TO SUCCEEDApply to Personnel International(Background in Psychology helpful)

Personnel International turned out to be an employment agency looking for an employment agent. Although he was sleep deprived and looking like shit, he was hired on the spot. Looks didn’t matter, only voice, diction, intonation, persuasion and words, lots of words used creatively in what they called telephone savvy. Th ey would train him, of course.

Th e fi rst thing they told Attila was that they were not in the business of psychology. Th e open salary was a straight commission on anyone hired through the eff orts of …

Art. Th at was his new name. Attila was unsatisfactory. People would not be able to relate to it. “Spooky,” was the way his new boss put it.

Art was instructed to spend the rest of his morning going over a manual pi-rated from another employment agency. Snelling and Snelling. Th e letters were faint but visible under the erasures. In the afternoon his boss had him make as many calls as it took to land something for this accountant.

He rifl ed through his list of openings, looked in the Yellow Pages, Th e Times, the Herald Tribune. He swiveled. Art was now in the business of selling people like himself. Without knowing why, an image of Judas Iscariot counting silver fl ashed in his mind like one of Stalin’s Torches, and the next thing he heard was his father’s voice berating him about how foolish it was to start a family without the neces-sary means. Th e nest had to come fi rst. Even birds knew that much. He swiveled in the other direction, dialed numbers with a fury. Boxed in ad after ad. Dialed and swiveled, swiveled and dialed as if his life depended on it. He didn’t realize it before, but his life and Chloe were one and the same. His breath was quick and ragged. His boss was on the line with him, coaching him between calls, telling him to slow down. Th e Russians weren’t coming. Attila glanced into the manual and dialed the next number. “Hello, this is Art of Snelling and Snelling.”

“Th is is Snelling and Snelling! Who the hell is this?” It was the voice of Jesus.

Click.Th e earpiece exploded into a siren.

INTRODUCTION xxiii

He grappled with a sinking feeling, then a sick nausea, followed by a volley of irregular heartbeats. He made a beeline for the men’s room and vomited. After he was done, he put his face so close to the mirror that it looked like he had but one eye. One animal eye oystered at the corners. Th e bloodshot animal eye blinked. He fi shed a quarter out of his pocket for the pay-toilet, receded into the stall’s tight squeeze and locked himself in. He squatted. He squat-ted and waited. Th rough a slit, he saw a man grooming his hair with a pick. Was it Th e Man? Was Th e Man in his head only? Th ere were, of course, varying symptoms.

He could not aff ord to believe in any-one anymore. Only himself. Not Chloe. Not Piroshka. Not Jesus Garcia. Not Jesus.

Attila withdrew into himself and tried to meditate by curling his thumb and forefi nger in the delicate manner of a priest. He had this notion that he would have to consecrate himself to become Man by forcing everything from his head to his tailbone until he felt empty behind the forehead. Th e hiatus left there would be his third eye. Th e other eyes closed slowly until they disappeared. At the same time, he felt a shiver move toward his lower spine. Th e tailbone extended and seemed to anchor him. He knew that to accept his own manhood, he would have to be content with this new growth coming to life, including the base of his being, which he now regarded as an area confi ned to his tail. Art was close to another of his ‘into the body’ experiences. Not out of the body but into the body. It was like increased light to the retina of his third eye. Like an illumination. He wondered whether

gaining a body would have to mean losing a mind. Th e answer was yes. Yes. He would lose his mind but only for a while. Only while he was squatting on the toilet. Once he made his decision, he purged himself of all that was intellect and surrendered to wonderfully blind instinct. Now he could squat and let the urine fl ow. No, he was not about to be disturbed in his ritual of integrating the animal.

For the fi rst time in his life, Nagy felt himself to be—large. Physically. His tail grew rigid and stood out in front of him as his new compass, his new guide. Even his posture became erect. His new hulking shoulders were butting the ceiling. If any-thing, all that was going to be done away with was what he conceived as his naive innocence or the illusion of it.

At last he yielded to the pull of the earth. Lowering himself, his pants down to his knees, he felt in his gonads the chimes of an altar bell at the moment of consecra-tion. Et caro factum est. And the word was made fl esh. He massaged his thighs, crying as never before, holding his manhood, his strength, his balls. Because the word was made fl esh and he himself was a miracle, and embracing himself in his own arms, he rocked back and forth, his shoulder snug against his face.

Guided by his third eye in the middle of his head, he elbowed his way through the swivel door without waiting for the electric eye to dismiss him.

He was surprised to fi nd Chloe back in their apartment and on the waterbed. Only a bra. Th e head of a vibrator stuck out from under the pillow, still whirring. He clicked off the mechanical device and

xxiv Approaching My Literature

allowed his new weight to press on her. On her cleavage. Something unfolded inside his pants. She drew up one leg in a dancer’s movement to give him more room. Again he was the rider. Um-pah pah. Um-pah pah.

A gun went off , with a pistol-shot pop at a place called the Cleavage of Beasts. Th e arrow with aim (a small caliber bullet with his number on it) left a hole gaping in the middle of his head, right by his third eye.

A shudder. It wasn’t a particularly pretty sight, not a belle vue at all, and neither was there time for pain to pass into pleasure or to notice the blue water under the

overpass. He fell again, this time without being noticed, a little like the mythologi-cal Icarus who fl ew too close to the sun. Or like the tottering Polyphemus, famous for the way he was blinded. It didn’t really matter, because Attila Nagy fell into Art and fi nally into obscurity right under the overpass, blindsided and snagged right by the hole in his head, a bluish fi nger up his amazing eye.

August 17, 2010 Peter HargitaiGulfport

from

Th e JOURNALSof

ANONYMOUS

Contents xxvii

P O E T R Y 1Brueghel’s Icarus, for Instance 3Uncommon City, Uncommon Cold 4Psychotropes 5Wheedling into Being 10Mother’s a Racist 11Kaleidoscope 12Polyphemus 12Mad Dog 20/20 13Mother’s Visit No. 29 14Broken Hungarian Love Song 15Letting Go 16ICU Poet 19Ode to Beauty 21Th umbing an Aging Mannequin 22Under the Tongue 22Go 23It Flies Away 23Song of Myself 24I Lost My Muse 25After One Martini on a Pan Am Flight 26She’s 85 and He’s 50 27For Ezra Pound 28Hera and the Peacock 29Ode to an Owl 30Blood on His Apron 31Th e Conch 31Bed Bug 32Strangelove 32Lithium 34Widows and Sons 35

Contents

xxviii Approaching My Literature

For Sylvia Plath 36Writer’s Block 38Th e Subtle Arrhythmia of Innards 39Living to Kiss the Page 40Th e First Litter of the Stalinist Era 41Seeds 41A Brother to Emulate 42Balástya Station, 1953 42Waving Goodbye 43Sleep-Over 44A Hero’s Death 44Rebels 45Virgin and Child 46Cats 46A Recitation 47Jamming with Radio Free Europe 49I Call You a Life… 50A Vita 51I’m Bored to Death Just Being 53Lavabo 54Th ere You Go Again 55Dog Is My Co-Pilot 56Red Crocodile 57For My Wife on Mother’s Day 58Papa’s Schmaltz 58Christmas 1995 59Lunch at My Uncle’s 61Boxer Shorts: A Sestina 61Healthwalk on the Boardwalk 62S(ons) and M(others) 63Of Riddles & Death Rattles 64Doctor Visiting His Dying Patient 65Th e Cubist and the Impressionist 66La Paloma Blanca 66Bakeoff with Death 67Th e Precise Date of Her Death 68Witchcraft 68Palms Nursing Home: A Vision 69Surrounded by Family 70Stars 71

Contents xxix Contents xxix

Death of a Siren 72Breathing on the Ventillator 73Ghost Town 74Diamondhead 75Icon Man 76Vegetable Love 77Birds and Bees of Paradise 77My Browning Dutchess 78Edema 79Words 80My Secret Sharer 80One Must Die 81Come 82Songbound 83On My 55th Birthday 84Passing by the Freeway 84Heart of Stone 85Th e Pietà 86Th e Owl 87Th e Art of Taxidermy 87

SHORT FICTION 89Zoltán Muhari 91Th e Feast of the Epiphany 99Th e Hungarian Crusaders 103Land of Opportunity 113Captive Nations Inc. 121Fountain of Sirens 131Th e Chosen People: Th e Crowning Proof 139Hungary 2000: Our Image in the New Millenium 157Only Say the Word 171

THE NOVEL 177ATTILA: Th e Barbarian Trilogy 179

Attila: A Barbarian’s Bedtime Story 181 Millie: A Barbarian’s Love Story 349 Cheetah: A Barbarian’s Children’s Story 509

D R A M A 665Th e Politics of Abuse 667

xxx Approaching My Literature

N O N - F I C T I O N 709 Budapest is a Riot! 711

Time Code: Th e Crowning Proof? 715Homoerotic Suggestion in Antal Szerb’s Utas és holdvilág (Th e Traveler) 721Lukács and Limbo: Th e Legacy of Marxist Literary Criticism 731From Stones to Towering Domes: Attila József and National Identity 739Problems of Translating Attila József 747

R E V I E W S 755White Morning (Judith Berke) 757My Manifold City (George Gömöri) 761What Else Can I Say? (László Neményi) 765Hungarian Poetry in Transition: A Contemporary Context 769