Lunch with the Editor
A Conversation with One of Hungary’s Most Celebrated Writers

By Alexis Nelson
This article was printed in Abroad View magazine fall 2004

The first time I met Miklós Vajda, before I was familiar with any of the details of his life, I was already painfully aware of his significance as a human being.

I showed up at the offices of the Hungarian Quarterly one icy January afternoon, hoping for an internship at the best-known English-language literary journal in Budapest. Before I could see Mr. Vajda, I was handed a nametag and a computerized card. Without this key-card, I wouldn’t be able to pass through any doors in the building, of which there seemed to be far too many. I made my way through the overly secure Hungarian Press Building, I tried to prepare myself to meet with someone worthy of all this protection.

Mr. Vajda sat in front of a small window overlooking Castle Hill, inside a cramped room stacked with papers. The white-haired, neatly-dressed man rose to greet me as I entered. In a soft voice, he asked me to take off my coat and have a seat. In the same quiet manner, he agreed to let me work for him and gave me my first task: to read an unsolicited article and tell him what I thought of it. It occurred to me as I gathered my things and left that I had never met anyone who could so appropriately be called a gentleman. Glancing at the title of the paper he’d given me, I also wondered what I could possibly have to say about the 16th century Venetian politician

Ludovico Gritti’s role in the Hungarian court of King János Szapolyai.

After I’d been working at the Quarterly for a month, I met Marie, who had held my position a few years ago.

“Isn’t Miklós just fabulous?” she asked, and I marveled at the way she spoke of him with such authority.

When I asked her whether or not she found “Miklós” slightly intimidating, Marie shook her head, and her immense black ponytail swung confidently back and forth.

“Oh no, he’s just darling!”

I was completely bewildered, especially once I’d learned from Marie something of Mr. Vajda’s history. He came from a fine Hungarian family, his mother a famous and beautiful stage actress who doted on him. Even under the watchful eye of the Communist regime, Mr. Vajda—who opposed it—became an important intellectual figure as a young man. He translated many American plays into Hungarian and even befriended playwright Arthur Miller. Through his work at the Quarterly, he became known as a politically subversive figure in Hungary, but one whom the regime was forced to tolerate.

Soon after my meeting with Marie, I was given a unique opportunity to do some fantastic busywork at the Quarterly. The wife of the American newscaster Peter Jennings—herself a journalist—happened to be of Hungarian descent. She was working on a book about famous Hungarian ex-patriots living in the U.S. and had asked Mr. Vajda to help her find some articles relating to her topic in back issues of the Quarterly. I was given the assignment of going through the indexes of more than sixty years of journals, scanning for articles that might be helpful, and compiling a list of these for Mrs. Jennings. As a prize for the extra time I’d be putting in to get this job done quickly, Mr. Vajda suggested that we get lunch together one afternoon.

The night before I was scheduled to have lunch with Mr. Vajda was a very restless one. I was plagued all night by dreams of grandeur. In one, I enjoyed a glass of whiskey in front of the fireplace in Eugene O’Neil’s East Coast mansion; in another, I angrily told off a spineless Communist Party representative; and in yet another, Arthur Miller told off a spineless Party rep on my behalf, after which I threw my glass of whiskey in the man’s face, and Mr. Miller and I joined hands and skipped down Castle Hill together.

Mr. Vajda and I lunched at the cafeteria in the basement of the Hungarian Press Building (In order to reach the cafeteria, a key-card had to be used no less than four times.). In my eagerness to appear quite fond of Hungarian cuisine, I piled onto my tray a plate of pickled beets, a big bowl of bean soup with potato dumplings, two bricks of fried cheese on a bed of various cubed vegetables and, for desert, a Gundel-style palacsinta (a special Hungarian crepe filled with chocolate sauce and crushed walnuts). My cheese blocks came with a mayonnaise-based dipping sauce. For his lunch, Mr. Vajda selected a small piece of casserole.

When we took our seats at one of the checkered tablecloth-covered tables, I felt like that mysterious girl who is suddenly plucked from obscurity to share a slow dance with the prom king. Unfortunately, I only felt this way for about five minutes—or until, in my nervous excitement, I made a bottle of seltzer water explode all over myself, Mr. Vajda, our table, the table next to us and the people sitting at the table next to us. Then I felt more like that kid in my kindergarten class who got caught hanging upside down on the monkey bars in her favorite blue dress on the one morning she forgot to wear underpants.

“That’s alright,” Mr. Vajda told me, taking the bottle of water from my hands and filling my glass for me, “People have done far more embarrassing things than this inside these walls.”

For the rest of our meal, Mr. Vajda entertained me with stories about some of his former colleagues. One of them he described as “a truly brilliant man, who spoke several different languages, but had no personality whatsoever.” During the 1960s, this man, who was the editor of a rival literary journal, was used as a tool by the Communist Party. Although ridiculed by most Hungarian intellectuals for stuffing his journal full of blatant Party propaganda, he managed to maintain a decent reputation abroad and was sometimes invited to speak at various conferences. The editor, however, was so used to lying for the Party that he began to confuse his fantasies with real life and was known to weave wild lies into his lectures.

Once, he told an auditorium full of American students about the time he met Franz Kafka at a café in Vienna. This story included an amusing anecdote about how the editor had explained to Kafka that there was a famous Hungarian writer who also bore the name Kafka, although this Kafka was a woman who spelled the esteemed name with two Fs and a long A. However, it was soon calculated that the editor could not have been more than five years old at the time of Franz Kafka’s death. Of his compelling account, only the bit about there being a Hungarian Kafka had been true.

Although none of the angry letters were published in his journal, after many weeks had passed, this brief statement appeared from the editor: “There are two stages of senility. The first is when you begin to go senile. The second is when people begin to notice.”

Mr. Vajda laughed often and stared at some point just above my head and across the room as he told me this story. Then suddenly, he stopped talking and glanced around the room. Many of our neighbors (including those that I had drenched) had left already. A bit of afternoon sunlight shone through the old lace curtains hanging on the windows and cast web-like shadows on the clutter on our table. Mr. Vajda slowly began collecting his things to go.

“Oh no, but you haven’t finished your cheese,” he observed politely.

In fact, there was still a half-block of fried gouda sitting in the middle of my crowded wasteland of a tray. I picked up my fork again with a tremendous display of enthusiasm, and Mr. Vajda settled back into his chair and continued to speak. AV

ALEXIS NELSON was a literature and creative writing major at the University of California in Santa Barbara. She studied in Budapest from 2002-2003. Read more about Nelson’s internship at the Hungarian Quarterly.