Milos
“When I read your work, I feel as if you’re writing only for me. If you sell a million copies, there must be a million different versions, each one tweaked just so for each reader. I feel so close to you, Milos, like you have been inside my mind.”
She put her hand on his forearm, in a gesture of deliberate familiarity that was undermined by pronouncing his name with the harsh New York vowel emphasis on the second syllable.
They were at a small party attended by those artistic figures who come to be celebrated and the rich New York socialites who both suckle them with their wealth and sup from their intellectual and artistic status. She had approached him as he stood with three other men, but she talked only to him. He listened to her with mild interest, admiring her high, arched brows, her sharp cheekbones, and her almost-but-not-quite too far apart pale green eyes.
“It’s Milos,” he corrected, drawing out the ‘i’ into an ‘ee’ and shortening the ‘o’.
“Mee-lahsh,” she repeated in response.
“Meee-loshshsh,” he crooned, exaggerating the soft ‘o’ and dragging out the end of the word as if soothing a croupy child.
“We are saying the same thing!” she laughed and then turned from him toward the other men, saying, “There was a Belarusian author who had once been the flavor of the month in literary circles, but his stern insistence on the exact pronunciation of his impossibly vowel-encumbered name had led critics and intellectuals to stop talking about him—a tragic fate in the incestuous world of elite New York literati.”
After a beat, she turned back to Milos, lightening the rebuke by smiling at him and saying, “These Hungarian names are very difficult for us Americans, you will have to excuse us.”
He found her rapid switch back and forth between adoration and dismissal somehow compelling and felt a craving to keep her attention on him.
Not wanting to be pedantic, but being unable to stop himself from explaining, he said “Actually, Milos is a Czech name—the Hungarian equivalent is Miklos.”
“I thought you were the famous Hungarian dissident author,” she said, with mock reproach.
“I am Hungarian; whether you consider me a dissident author is up to you, and regarding the question of fame, I will leave that to the ages. But my mother was Czech.”
Amelia smiled broadly at this and adjusted her posture such that her whole body was facing him again.
She suggested lightly, “So, then, are you really a Czech, hiding in the guise of a Hungarian? Or perhaps you were trapped in the wrong life, and so you fled it, and that is why we are lucky enough to have you here?”
Milos knew she was being playful, but wanting to perform for her, to provide the intellectual display she was clearly seeking, he answered her seriously, saying “Your description captures an essence many of us felt living in postwar Europe, traipsing from country to country, either trying to escape Hitler’s peculiar management style or else fumbling through the ruins of our lives. National identity is like a Matryoshka doll: each person may not know which nesting doll is truly at the center of himself, and even if he finds it, that doll is the smallest of all.”
The Matryoshka doll, he thought, is a dull and obvious metaphor, but Westerners never seem to tire of it. Perhaps it effectively captures their skittish regard for the cunning of their old Cold War rivals. At any rate, Amelia nodded thoughtfully, appearing unbothered by the cliché.
Enjoying the attention she was giving him once more and determined to do better, he continued. “For instance, returning to names, my name was originally ‘Milosz,’”—he spelled it out—“but that doesn’t work in Hungarian.”
He looked at her to confirm her interest, then continued. “We Hungarians have a unique phonetic system, and on reading it, people would pronounce it with an ‘s’ sound on the end, because ‘sz’ is said as ‘s’ whereas the ‘s’ is said as ‘sh.’ My mother changed the spelling, dropping the ‘z’, so that people would pronounce it properly. In interviews, people ask me about that change and inquire what my ‘real’ name is.” He interrupted himself with the aside “Biography seems paramount in literary assessment these days,” then continued: “But I don’t know how to answer them. I am a writer, so surely the written word is paramount, but as a child of four, my name was only what was said to me.”
At this, her palm on his arm was returned, and within twenty minutes she had her hand inching across his back. He did not correct her again, instead he accepted yet another new name, Meelahsh.
*
Now, her voice is deep with sleep. She rests her face against his cheek, her slender arms enveloping his graying chest, the thin silk of her robe making her breasts feel cool against his shoulders. He holds her hands, examining their long, thin elegance, her nails tastefully and professionally shaped. He thinks of Juliska’s hands: her much shorter fingers, palms still roughened from hard work as a teenager, the whole made chubby from years of rich American food. He pictures the deep scar across her left forefinger, ending in the middle of the nail. When she had cut it deeply, slipping with a kitchen knife, he had taken her finger in his mouth, tasting her blood, his eyes locked on hers, trying to ease her through the pain by the sheer force of his stare. Then he had wrapped it in tissues and held it tight to staunch the bleeding. They had not gone to get the stitches that it had needed—they were poor immigrants, still living frugally at that time—and it had not healed quite straight. Even years later it bothered her, as the tight skin of the scar pulled the cuticle away from the nail at the slightest knock. When he saw it cause her to wince, he again put her finger in his mouth, running his tongue along the scar, remembering the taste of her blood.
Milos’s first novel, The Irreconcilable Duality of Body and Soul, was a love story set against the backdrop of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. His ill-fated lovers face the impossible choice between physical separation and denial of principle, and thus of self. Fleeing separately as post-revolutionary Soviet control is brutally re-established, he goes to gather a few possessions while she fetches her young sister, but she is detained. A dissident author, he can only return to be with her by repudiating his principles—an act that would be made humiliatingly public, due to his adoption as a symbol of freedom in exile. Milos used this separation to explore not only the contrast between physical and emotional love, but also the bounds of self-identity—how the separation of the individual from his nation disconnects him from all that he has known, leaving him deprived of his ordinary reference points and context, while at the same time supplanting his prior self with a symbol, a heroic status, as a dissident. His hero refuses to face the inescapable choice, instead attempting to have it all: he sneaks back into Hungary to rescue his beloved, only to be captured and imprisoned. Facing physical abuse that eventually breaks his spirit, he is forced to renounce his quest for liberty and his condemnation of the regime. He ultimately loses both dignity—corporeal and spiritual—as well as the ability to be with his lover.
Milos contemplates this duality of body and soul again now in relation to Amelia and Juliska, as he examines Amelia’s smooth fingers. Amelia is aesthetically everything that he has always hungered for in women: young, tall, slim, expensively dressed, and steeped in Manhattan fashion and sensibility. Although there were many women with whom he strayed in his decades of unfaithfulness to Juliska, the common theme was the shared American-ness of their style, something Amelia personifies, from her perfectly aligned teeth in their broad, clearly orthodontically created occlusion, to her small, straight, slightly retroussé nose.
Yet now that he is with her, he longs for Juliska, not only for her sharp mind but for her starkly different physicality. Her dark eyes, the shadowed skin underneath the orbs giving her a serious demeanor, her full mouth with the teeth butting up against one another, not quite in disarray, but far from clinically perfected.
She, too, was thin when they were still in Hungary—as a child, she had been sick from rheumatic fever and had never filled out on the restrictive Soviet-constrained diet. But after they had fled to the United States she had discovered an appetite. This was long before they had the wealth that stemmed from his publishing success and subsequent fame; rather, it was the relative bounty and variety of ingredients that inspired her newfound hunger. He remembers her glee the first time she tasted a banana, her eyes alight with surprise and enjoyment. And then her first mango, succulently fleshy and sweet, its juices dripping down her chin as she consumed it. They brought fruit with them to bed, feeding each other, eating off and of one another. He bought her yogurt so rich that you could stand a spoon up in it, watched her scoop a mound into her soft mouth, savoring its thickness. She filled out, becoming plump and round where before she was so sharp edged, and he delighted in her newfound ampleness. He squeezed the new curve of her cheek, as if she were a baby; he joyfully grabbed her newly-curving hips, pressing her to him; he admiringly cupped her rounded thighs in his large hands, enjoying the fleshy fullness. The only angularity that remained was in a skeptical look that she occasionally gave him out of the tail of her eye when he was holding forth some bloated or ill thought through theory. But all else was softness, richness, her fatness representing their newfound bounty.
The women with whom he had his dalliances were always so thin. He considered his proclivity for them not substitution but rather an exploration of his devotion to her through his reminiscence of their early relationship. Now he misses the substance of her form, the softness of her curves, the weight of her body pressed against him. Juliska is much older than Amelia, her breasts lower, her skin lined. But, he thinks now, sentimentally, those lines represent the map of his life, the path of his fingers over the years; her breasts are heavy with the years of his pleasure in them. For Milos, Juliska is fullness; he drank from her for over thirty years, and now, he thinks regretfully, that source of fuel for his spirit is gone.
Amelia, in contrast, is emptiness—not vacuous, but young, undeveloped, open to the influence of his ideas and his authorial cachet. He has no doubt that her physical attraction to him is a manifest of that intellectual hunger. Yet she is also unpredictable, in one moment a young girl, the next displaying a cynical iciness, as if she is still trying out different personas. He thinks perhaps his search for many women has been met in one, and he ruminates that maybe the problem is not emptiness, but rather that he is overfull with her, tired even of her delectable body. For all of her slenderness, there is somehow too much of her available to him. He thinks of himself as a man who relishes female nudity, yet he has come to realize that it is as much the process of undressing that he enjoys, it is both covering and uncovering, joint in their sensual roles, that titillates him. The first time he slept with Amelia, she threw off her dress in one dramatic movement, revealing herself immediately in only her tiny panties and her large jewelry, standing confidently, almost defiantly, naked before him. In that moment, having had no build up, he found himself more startled than excited.
Juliska is open and unabashed during sex, but she covers her body when she is not either bathing or making love. Perhaps the two women’s different attitudes to nudity, he muses, are driven by their different cultural backgrounds: the history of rape in Soviet Hungary, in contrast to the repression of female sexuality in America. Whatever the reason, he delights in the contrast when Juliska’s passion bursts forth from her, its prior hiddenness only highlighting her sensuality.
Perhaps, he thinks, Amelia is a rich dessert, desirable as a guilty pleasure, but not meant for everyday consumption. He knows he is being unfair: as well as being attractive, Amelia is smart and charismatic. But when she was his mistress, she benefited from his tendency to contrast her with Juliska; now that he has left Juliska and lives with Amelia, is it inevitable that she falter under the same comparison? He was never able to be content with Juliska, but only with her could he be happy.
Regret makes him terse with Amelia.
“I’m working,” he says, pushing her hands away.
“Oh yes, I can see that,” she responds. Her remark makes him shrink before the empty screen, feeling that her rapid switch from adoration to disdain is justified by his current literary impotence.
As she returns to the bedroom, he continues mulling why it was that he found her compelling enough to draw him away from Juliska, when all his other lovers had not. She captured his attention, he thinks—normally he hates the banality of stock phrases, he passionately believes that the end of any sentence should not be able to be predicted from its beginning. But he thinks that the expression ‘capturing the attention’ is ordinarily misunderstood. It is used as a compliment, but it literally means the inability to look away, to mentally escape from the allure of the subject. Watching Amelia inspired him to write at a time when he had once again been stuck; but now he is stuck in a different way, imprisoned in the wrong life, with a woman who was only meant to be a passing diversion for him—he is captured still, against his will.
He knows he is being melodramatic, and the truth is that he could leave her, not because they are incompatible, but simply because he does not love her, he loves another. But he cannot contemplate the thought of living alone; he has never been able to be alone for long, and Juliska will not take him back. He made a Faustian pact, exchanging his life with Juliska for the ability to write a new novel, and now he is trapped.
*
He cannot face going back to bed having written nothing. He ambles around the carefully-styled but, for his tastes, overly modernist condo, unsure where to settle himself, longing for a worn, soft surface. He walks out onto her broad terrace and is grateful to have an outdoor space wide enough to meaningfully pace across. He grinds out his frustration into the paving stones while breathing in air made fresh by the park. He thinks about his inability to write: now it is not Amelia who is the empty vessel, it is him.
He can no longer write about his homeland: that well has been plumbed, scraped, and scoured, left as dry as the calloused skin on his elbows. Milos has long been embraced in the Western world as a dissident author who interweaves political commentary on Hungarian communism—its daily oppressions and degradations—among stories of love and relationships. He reveals the absurdity of the mundane perversities of the regime, contrasted against the depth of its tragedy for people’s everyday lives—the fear, the secrecy, the doubts it creates about everything, including love. But much of this has been fakery.
His first book, written when he was still in Hungary, The Book of the Absurd, was a collection of short stories that were taken to be allegories about communism and totalitarianism. But Milos had merely intended them as tales. The story that launched his fame as an iconoclast was Bit Part. It presented side characters and bit players from books and movies who gather in a room, waiting. It is gradually revealed that each of them has been killed off for the sake of the story of another—to increase the pathos or dramatic effect of a central character’s narrative arc. The side victims sit around and complain about how pointlessly, carelessly, or even implausibly their lives were ended by their authors for the sake of some other character.
Each of the characters is a well-worn or even cynical creation, familiar to the reader. Marguerite, a dowdy older woman, complains that she was forced, rather improbably, to commit suicide to top off a very bad week for her protagonist daughter. Gunter, a chain-smoking, bald-pated man in a suit, complains that he was violently crushed to death by a truck, purely to create horror in the mind of the young narrator who was his neighbor and witnessed his death. Mikhail, a barely mustachioed, greasy-haired student, was engrossed in his studies for his final exam when he was gunned down by an innumerate thug who had mistaken the book’s hero’s apartment for Mikhail’s—an act that then set the scene for the intended victim’s rollicking escape adventure. Jacov died of a massive heart attack so as to bring a recently estranged couple back together. He is particularly outraged because he died off-screen, without even appearing in the story except as a corpse, and not getting any lines. Árpád is an eight-year-old boy recently killed so as to explore the guilt of the man who accidentally ran him down in his car before driving off, leaving him to die. He does not share their bitterness; instead, he displays a preternatural sadness. Árpád reports to the group of wronged creations that he has in fact been utilized in many stories.
“I’ve died many times,” he says softly. “Sometimes they prefer a girl, but I am more popular. For some reason it produces more heartache when a boy is killed, I don’t know why.”
As they trade their stories, it becomes clear that each character is waiting to be used once more, each expecting to be again callously disregarded when an author needs a convenient emotional contrivance. But then a new character enters, an entirely unique person, not an archetype at all. He has never been seen in the room before, and the other characters are excited and surprised. The newcomer is confused, unsure where he is. The others explain the nature of the room and the purpose of its inhabitants. The novice is shocked to learn his fate and also appalled that the others are simply waiting to be reused in somebody else’s story and then sacrificed once more. He wants to revolt, to leave the room and refuse to wait around to be so cruelly recycled. But the other characters do not understand the concept behind such resistance—they are pawns, they are waiting to be utilized, that is their role.
The stranger insists “We are all ‘I’s in our own stories, and each death is a personal tragedy.”
This story was almost universally interpreted as a political parable, that characters being killed off on a whim was a vehicle to explore how individuals serve at the behest of the rulers of totalitarian regimes. He was thought to be decrying those leaders who callously cause the deaths of so many for political gain, or even for mundane bureaucratic reasons. A fellow Hungarian author wrote a review that lauded the story. He considered that it captured perfectly the mindset of the Hungarian communists who, upon realizing after World War II that the number of prisoners of war they were reported to hold was off by one hundred thousand, had rounded up random Hungarian civilians to make up the numbers and shipped them off to labor camps.
It was not that Milos did not care about politics; in fact, he had become actively involved in political dissident activities while still in Hungary, albeit initially only to get Juliska’s attention. It was just that the story was inspired by something he cared far more passionately about: his contempt for literary laziness. He was a writer first, almost myopic in his focus on character, and his ire had been directed at those who disrespect their own creations, not at authoritarianism.
Looking down as the cars zoom up the mostly empty Manhattan streets, a sight only witnessed by nocturnal creatures like himself, his eyes follow their paths up the straight lines of the avenues, where they disappear into the oddly geometric grid that makes up the city. So high above them, it is hard to feel kinship with actual people down on the street. He feels closer to the fictional personalities who reside in his mind. Only this morning, he had read a critic describing his most recent book as misanthropic. Initially, he had simply thought dismissively that at least the criticism marked a change from the usual charge of misogyny. But thinking about it now, under the shade of night that often makes his thoughts far darker, he feels the characterization is grossly unfair—he cares fervently about people. He strives to perfectly reflect his characters’ sometimes-flawed personas, to realistically capture their interactions, to show whom they love, and how they lose love.
He recognizes that this defense is really confession, that it shows that he cares more about his characters than about most people. But he thinks it highly ironic that people see his story, which is all about respect for character, as simply an allegory about the totalitarian state, because for Milos, an allegory is the very kind of utilitarian use of characters that the story was meant to condemn.
At the time, Milos needed any audience he could get. Income and recognition were very welcome. And so, even though he was uncomfortable with the misconception, he did nothing to correct it. But what he did not anticipate then was that this false impression would become a presumption that defined all interpretations of his subsequent work, a farce that he was eventually forced to participate in.
Milos had instead focused on the relative financial freedom that the commercial success of The Book of the Absurd allowed him. He was able to write, without the distraction of other necessary employment, albeit with some additional close scrutiny by the authorities. But the unstated pact between dissidents and Hungary’s communist regime was that as long as the political content of the writing remained adequately oblique, it was tolerated. Allegories in particular provided cover for both writer and the state. And so, after an initial flurry of attention, Milos was able to focus on his work.
He next wrote a novella about a girl who cannot heal. She starts off beloved for her striking beauty, but each bruise and scratch she garners through ordinary life stays with her, visible to all. At first the bruises add to her loveliness, and she is all the more adored for her evident fragility, for the sense of melancholy that her injuries create. These injuries form a halo of suffering that emphasizes her splendor. But the damage accumulates and eventually she becomes hobbled like an old woman. She is ignored, forgotten, even despised for reminding people of the impermanence of what they value, reviled for continuing to exist when her beauty, and her value, is gone. Milos meant it as a physical representation of heartbreak and relationships, the accumulation of hurts that come to define every relationship and weigh it down. What was once beautiful—the initial romance, the utter devotion and mutual hunger that defines the beginning of a love affair—becomes an insult when contrasted to the thoughtlessness of the everyday interaction with a loved one.
Once again, Milos’s story was taken as a political allegory, the bruised girl representing the victims of communism, the harshness of a utilitarian conception of individuals as disposable servants of the state. The attention created by the novella—admiration from the West and consternation from the Soviets—provided enough money and connections for Milos and Juliska to move to the United States, a move actively encouraged by the Hungarian state. Dissidents who were previously forced to stay in communist controlled countries in the 1950s and 1960s were being actively pushed out by the 1970s. Dissenters were considered less dangerous in exile than within. Many thought this was because, even in prison, their resistance colored the legitimacy of the regime and reminded people of the existence of Hungarians who dared to oppose its reign. Milos thinks it was more strategic than that: those who were imprisoned were martyrs to the cause, whereas absent authors came to be considered deserters, even those who were pushed out under threat of force. Leaving was an option available only to intellectuals, and it had the effect of not only delegitimizing the single voice of the individual dissident who left, but of simultaneously stigmatizing intellectuals in general, even those who did not leave. Those who stayed appeared always about to leave, tainted by the desertion of the others.
But the new policy gifted Milos and Juliska the ability to flee the repressive state, and even Juliska, so devoted to Hungary, did not fight for them to stay. She seemed to recognize by then that it was wise for them to go. In the States, Milos continued to write, and the number of column inches in serious journals reviewing his work grew exponentially; but so too did the pattern of misperception. With his next book, The Atlantic had declared his protagonist “the most powerful dissident voice” in literary fiction of the moment, which had surprised Milos so much that, late one night, feeling vulnerable, he had become convinced it was a barbed taunt. His next book was his first international bestseller, but with the success came paranoia that the nascent scrutiny of the literary world would inevitably result in disappointment. When it did not, he instead came to feel more and more like a fraud. He wanted to confess his fakery to the world but he was too afraid, having grown used to the wealth and adoration that had come with his success, and he could not help but preen a little in his revered status of the exiled dissident. Instead, he decided to write a book that could not be misinterpreted.
He wanted to write a novel that was simply about sex. That would prevent others from projecting their desires for greater profundity upon it. So he wrote a novel about a man who is uxoriously besotted and sexually fixated upon his wife, particularly with her swan-like neck. He describes how the man imagines thrusting his tongue into her mouth and down her throat, a deliberate echo of the standard movie sex scene in which the man’s thumb is always put in the woman’s mouth as a euphemism for a felated penis. In the cruelest test of his devotion, the wife develops throat cancer. The husband tries to be dutiful and take care of her but he cannot bear the thought of her once beautiful throat rotting with disloyal cells. He runs into the arms of his young mistress because his wife reeks of death, whereas the mistress is full of life. But, of course, the mistress is a watery shadow of the depth of his feelings for his wife (only now, thinking about this forgettable book, does Milos realize that he predicted his own future). For once, the story was not interpreted as an allegory for communism but was instead misconstrued as evoking an immigrant’s torment in his loyalty for a dying old country, contrasted against dissatisfaction with the superficiality of the West. The only disagreement among the critics was not over this interpretation but over whether Milos had gone too far in his graphic descriptions of the minutiae of unusual sex practices and his obsession with infidelity.
Reading these analyses left Milos incredibly frustrated: it felt almost Kafkaesque. For weeks he had stewed over it, pondering what else he could do, what he could say, to make people want to read his books just as books, to appreciate his authorship, not his supposed message. He had devoted his life to trying to create beauty and art, and instead of it being valued, it was covered over with transfused meaning that overwhelmed the delicate structure he had created.
It was too much; he felt worn down. He finally decided that he simply had to accept his fate as a dissident author. And so he wrote his first truly and explicitly dissident novel, in which he laid out his political views of communist Hungary and communism in general. He described its attitude towards its people, its propaganda techniques, its cruelty and absurdity. But that book, that one honest account, was all but unanimously panned by the critics—they regarded it as far too obvious and lacking in symbolism. It was his only failure.
That failure made him deeply anxious of the potential loss of both financial security and literary regard. So Milos had returned to crafting stories and novels constructed around his ordinary obsessions—love affairs, sexual dalliances, and fictional creations—knowing they would continue to be interpreted as heavy with political significance and somber satire.
He wrote two more critically lauded novels and, once again, had great commercial success. Of course not all critics liked his work, but nobody doubted his authenticity—with one exception. Robert Stedman, a critic for an influential literary magazine, was Milos’s main detractor. He described Milos as “ponderous,” “pretentious,” and “intellectually self-indulgent,” which in Milos’s mind was a rather repetitive criticism.
Stedman could barely contain his tone of glee when he wrote an article reporting on the work of a doctoral student, Jessica Ambrose. Her dissertation on Milos was used by Stedman to question whether Milos was in fact a fake. Ambrose had used literary content programming to compare authors’ scanned texts against an enormous database of words categorized in various ways by linguists. She had analyzed a handful of contemporary political authors’ works, arguing that each writer had a distinct signature. Milos, she said, did not fit the pattern because, in contrast to most political dissidents, he used few political words. Ambrose argued that this was true even when her analysis accounted for the double meaning of coded words that are often favored by writers struggling under repressive regimes: for instance, using ‘executed’ as a synonym for ‘produced,’ but signifying execution; using ‘dictated’ to mean ‘prescribed’ but also to suggest ‘dictatorship.’ So many words favored by political dissidents have secondary meanings—such as ‘alienated,’ ‘finger,’ ‘blame,’ ‘concentrate,’ ‘camp,’ ‘force,’ ‘conspire,’ ‘web’—but this was not Milos’s vocabulary at all, she claimed. Instead, his prose was delicate, filigreed, and lyrical. It was the dialect of romance, not of revolution, she concluded.
According to Ambrose, Milos also failed to match up with political dissidents on multiple other scales. She argued that his use of words denoting social ranking did not fit the pattern of dissidents. Milos used pronouns such as ‘I’ and ‘me’ far too frequently, and rarely used communal pronouns such as ‘us’ and ‘we.’ Once again, this captured his concern not with social movements but with individual stories. In addition, she considered that his emotional tone was too positive, landing him exceptionally high on the ‘happiness scale,’ out of sync with other writers describing life under repressive regimes. As well as being too happy, his thoughts were apparently too complex: on the ‘analytic’ scale, his language involved complex syntactical structures, rather than personal language typically favored by those describing oppression.
Of all Ambrose’s characterizations that Stedman turned into critiques, this last one most enraged Milos. He had stormed around the condo, muttering to himself and complaining to Juliska, ultimately penning a letter to Stedman’s publisher. He wrote:
If I write ‘the happy bird chirped,’ according to this analysis my text measures 0.25 on the ‘happiness scale’, because I use the word ‘happy’ once among my four words. Yet isn’t ‘chirped’ one of the most joyous words available to an author? And yet it counts for nothing. The great poet Rilke wrote one of the most magnificent homages I have ever had the pleasure of reading, that captures love of writing: “Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.” To me, this describes the quintessential bliss of being an author, yet it uses the words ‘die,’ ‘confess’ and ‘forbidden,’ so according to this bizarre new analysis, it is a sorrowful lament. This approach to literature is not only inane, it is Orwellian, relying on an oppressive concept of a production line of words, which is then used to accuse authors of inadequate authenticity. We need not look to any of my or other authors’ accounts of dictatorship to see if they are adequately similar, as we have the very seeds of such a regime being dressed up in the guise of literary criticism right here in America.
But the idiocy of the enterprise of counting an author’s words and judging a work on its numbers may actually mask a far more pernicious element: the suggestion that complex structures are inconsistent with a particular type of work. Are we always to be bound by what has come before us? Must we fit a mold in order to be considered within a given camp of authors? If so, count me out—I care not whether you consider me a political writer or a romance writer, I am a writer of humanity, free to roam across the entire panoply of human emotion and experience.
Juliska begged him not to send the letter: “I agree that you are right, I agree that Stedman is a jealous and pedantic fool. But Milos, you will only fuel the fire. Let it peter out, do not fan it with your name and your attention.”
And she was right; Stedman’s article received only a few mentions; ignored by Milos, it was ignored by others. Ambrose’s analysis constituted a brief spark of controversy and insight but it never caused anyone else to question Milos’s credentials. But it led Milos to once again begin interrogating himself, rolling over in his mind whether he was complicit in his misperception as a dissident, questioning his own role in this façade of his life as a writer.
Looking out now at the lights of the city, beyond the dense darkness of the park in the foreground to the spectacle that is the city that he loves, so busy, with so much energy and light and possibility, he feels somehow above all of these concerns. It gives him the space to reflect on whether perhaps, subconsciously, the secondary meaning imputed to his work was what he had meant all along. He tries out this idea, pondering it, turning it over in his mind, seeing how he likes the image of himself not as the misunderstood genius, but as the understood subtle social radical, a mystery only to himself. But he immediately rejects this alternative history and he remonstrates with himself for indulging it. That would disparage the gravity and worth of the themes that to him are vital—a well-written character is as important as a political overthrow.
But then he asks himself: hasn’t he betrayed that value by allowing it to be masked, to be covered by the disguise of what everyone else takes to be a deeper meaning that is actually nonsense? In allowing the interpretation of others to construct a layer atop his own work, isn’t he like those pens for hire that work on television shows, those authorial prostitutes? Or like those who work by committee to write screenplays for movies, who are slaves to corporations that tell them which characters to create, what they should have them do, when there should be more excitement or pathos added in through stock plot twists and absurd epiphanies. Those who let corporate finances determine how their ideas and their words should be revised, who let others shape their work, or perhaps worse, who agree to create the inferior revisions themselves.
He knows this line of inquiry only leads to trouble. He had resigned himself to being misunderstood, yet these same ideas had continued to torment him. These thoughts had once again prompted him to try to honestly express himself. He wrote a confessional novel, Regrets and Misunderstandings. In that work, he admitted to the world his own fraud through a barely disguised self-portrait. His avatar was a writer who only cares about art, but who becomes an ideal of a writer of politics. The character allows himself, through his own greed and fear, to be utilized by the literary establishment for their own purposes, for their own shallow self-satisfaction in condemning the ‘other’.
Yet even this, a novel so honest, so raw, was misunderstood. It became his most celebrated satirical work, seen as offering both biting commentary on the absurdity of totalitarian rule and simultaneously on the hypocrisy of the West. It was considered an exploration of the way that authenticity is manufactured in totalitarian regimes through the rewriting of history and through the sacrifice of artists and writers on the altar of propaganda and symbolism. And it was lauded for simultaneously also being just as ruthless in assessing the self-congratulatory empty hyperbole involved in the West embracing these authors, while refusing to help those being slaughtered in contemporary genocides.
After this final futile effort at truth telling, Milos came to understand that attempts at honest reflection are too hard for the reader to appreciate, because they reveal to the audience their own role in both foolishness and self-denial. It is in everyone’s interest for the acclaimed artist to continue with his fruitful trope, he concluded. He told himself that regardless of his true motivation, he had become a successful writer who loves writing, who knows nothing else, and who cannot afford to turn away his own admirers, his own audience.
After Regrets and Misunderstandings, he not only resisted any urge to confess again, but over time, he learned how to play the game, without ever actually lying. He became adept at constructing successful political stories without consciously developing those themes. When interviewers asked him about the meaning, he simply said that he leaves that to the readers’ interpretation, suggesting that even he, the creator, learns much about the political significance of each story by judging the reactions of others to it. This was celebrated as both humble and postmodern, promoting the idea of the reader as participant in the conversation that interprets the novel. But the self-doubt never left him, particularly in the dark of night, which somehow sheds the cruelest light on his own reflection.
*
By the time he met Amelia, he knew he could not write about his homeland again. He had nothing left to say, no parable to exploit, no metaphor left to draw out. For years before, Hungary had felt like a presence in his life, a character looming in the background, its impact reverberating through all else. He had resented it, but he had understood that it had been essential to him, he had benefited from it. Now he can no longer face the idea of returning to it again, even in his mind. Even that grudging link had been lost when that book had come out—he cannot even form the name of the author in his mind, so furious and attacked does it make him feel. There was nothing explicit in it, but the accusation was there, implied, and Hungarians, if not Americans, had understood the code, knew what it meant. They knew that it was Milos that he was talking about, they understood the allegation, and there were whispers in the community over whether it could be true. Milos felt betrayed by the question even being asked. So he completely avoided Hungarians after that, and anything Hungarian; he even refused to eat the food that Juliska brought home from Élvezet, a pastry shop whose very name meant ‘treat,’ and whose cakes Juliska adored.
The blockage that had set in within Milos after that was unlike his ordinary struggles with writer’s block. This was not a problem of getting started; this was a tightening up of the mental muscles he used every day. He could not even think of ideas to play with, let alone develop them to the point of creating characters around them. He kept butting up against that restricted zone in his mind that Hungary represented, a prohibition that overshadowed being physically evicted from his homeland. This was a mental expulsion, an intellectual prohibition, an embargo on his thoughts and explorations.
And so he had turned to Amelia, and her often delightfully inane circle, to give him new stimulation and ideas. And having found that inspiration, he had delved into it, knowing exactly what he was sacrificing. He had wanted to immerse himself in that new world, and so he had left behind his old life, had torn himself away from Juliska, so as to be able to write again.
He wrote his most recent book, Triviality and Hedonism in New York, as a satirical look at the young, rich, urban socialites of New York. He wrote of the casual way Amelia and her walthy friends had minor plastic surgery at the slightest sign of aging, or even preemptively. He described the money they spent on clothes and art and real estate, glancing at each only briefly before moving on to the next conquest. And most pointedly, he described their obsession with latching on to creative types, seeking meaning in their associations with the talented and gifted.
The novel was such a contrast to his prior work, which had always centered around his own exile, exploring the philosophical and the political, the harshness of the criticism balanced by the longing of the expelled ex-patriot. Some critics had considered the book another entertaining satire but many had panned it. He deeply felt the burn of the criticisms, but he knew that that the novel was fatally flawed.
It was the emptiness of the book that was the problem. Their frothy, effortless existences was its theme, yet his book did not transcend the thing it meant to satirize, and so it itself became ludicrous. What had slowly dawned on Milos as he was finishing the novel was that what he had esteemed in them, what he had thought of in them as exquisite lightness was really mere triviality. He had come to recognize the wrongheadedness of his own novel even as he was creating it but he could not bear to waste the effort of all those words, after such a barren existence for so many months beforehand. So instead of letting it go, he had put that problem right there in the title, trying to own it. But it had not been enough to relieve him of the responsibility of producing such a meaningless tract. And Milos thinks now that he became, as its creator, an empty vessel, guilty of the very act that he was attempting to parody.
Triviality and Hedonism was a commercial success, with many critics lauding it is as a funny and caustic mirror held up to Manhattan society; others panned it as vacuous, but nobody saw it as authentic. But Milos thinks to himself that in fact it was his first novel that was not reinterpreted as some great political manifesto, so it was really his first book that was truly understood as it was written, and thus arguably his only genuine work.
But immediately he knows that that is not true—it was meaningless because the characters were held in derision by their own author. They were not flawed, but rather hollow. They were vehicles for commenting on, and satirizing, the flaws of American culture. Which in retrospect, Milos himself cannot understand, not only because that is the kind of writing that he most despises, but because he loves America with an ardor that defies such pointed criticism. It welcomed him, gave him a home, celebrated him, and nurtured him. He feels the book marks him as a traitor, both to his new home and to his literary ideals, ideals in which characters are real, multidimensional, and ultimately true.
And this is the hardest truth for Milos to acknowledge, because thinking about this self-betrayal leads inevitably to thinking of other betrayals. And that is the one topic that is so unbearable to contemplate that Milos now, as always, must bury himself in some other more minor crime to avoid even thinking of it. So once again, he turns to Amelia, and finds temporary relief.