February 11, 2009
Sandor Marai's novel, Esther's Inheritance, originally published in Hungary in 1939, is best understood as a metaphor for the ability of a people to embrace a leader even when they know he is liar, a cheat, and a fraud. Marai was virulently anti-fascist and he saw his country fall under the control of a fascist party following years of painful poverty and need brought on by the Great Depression, and WWI. Could he have been trying to write a novel about when decent people follow indecent leaders? Using his character Esther as a stand-in for the Hungarians tired of deprivation, is he saying that her choice to follow the no-good Lajos is just because she is too tired of going on by herself, tired of being so unsure of the way forward? I'd rather interpret this beautifully written novel as a metaphor than accept it as the story of a smart woman who denies everything she knows is right to follow the wrong man down a path of certain destruction, a woman who explains herself by stating: "But we, we women, cannot be wise and rational in the same way....I understand now that is not our affair." Because the novel began with Esther as such a strong and admirable character --so strong, a survivor -- and then has her spiral downward and end with such a horrible speech ("because I am a woman"), I must read this novel as metaphor -- or hate the writer completely.
And I cannot hate a writer who writes so beautifully. Marai writes like a dream; his images are both sketchy and very bold, his characters are much more than what they first appear to be, his passage of time is so fluid and yet not chronological but back and forth. The action in the novel takes place over a weekend but the time encompassed is twenty years. Twenty years between betrayal and reckoning, but the reckoning is not of Lajos, the cheat and the fraud, charming but deceitful, but of Esther, the one left behind to do her duty, the one strong enough to survive but in the end, not strong enough to resist.
Resistance: Marai is saying that resistance to a charming lie we desire to be true is the most difficult struggle we will face. And Esther cannot win the struggle. Lajos is the symbol, in this lyrically told dream-fable, of the lie we desire, of the political leaders promising that beauty and riches and everything good is within reach, if only we believe. Lajos says quite plainly that he tells lies because that is what people want to hear: "One has to make life more beautiful, or else it's unbearable... That's why I promise people all kinds of things on the spur of the moment and know as soon as I tell them, that I will never do what I promised." Scary? Sound like few politicians you know? But even worse: Lajos justifies his actions by saying, "Ultimately people are only responsible for the things they consciously decide to do....actions? What are they? Instincts that take you by surprise. People stand there and watch themselves acting. It is intention, Esther, intention is guilt. My intentions have always been honorable." Terrifying words from a lover, horrifying from a politician. And what political party has not taken the claim of "honorable"? Fascists did, in Hungary in the desperate years of the 1930s. They claimed to a people hungry and sapped of energy and hope, that they could bring a new era, new prosperity, and renewed pride back to the Hungarian people. The people might have known they were being lied to but they responded by voting the Fascists into power. Desperation breeds belief, even in a lie.
Esther is not the only one to follow Lajos, most everyone around her does also. They know he is a cheat and a liar and would steal the silver if they didn't lock it up. And they do lock it up but in the end he gets everything, anyway. He has a charisma that goes further than truth. He knows to sing the song that desperate people need, a song of consolation. A song full of lies and of hope: the most dangerous song of all.
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