Békés Pál: Biography

Pál Békés (Budapest, 27 March 1956 – Budapest, 28 May 2010)

Attila József Prize-winning writer, playwright, literary translator, university professor. He was elected a posthumous member of the Digital Literature Academy on 4 June 2020.

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Born on 27 March 1956 in Budapest, in the district known as Csikágó (a phonetic Hungarian transcription of Chicago, also a symbol of gang wars and crime). His parents were, in the words of Pál Békés, ‘accidental survivors of the Holocaust’. His father, Miklós Békés (1924–2017), who later worked as a cardiologist, was about to be executed by the Arrow Cross in January 1945, but the bullet, despite being fired at close range, miraculously ricocheted off the bone between his eye and temple. His mother, Mária Békés (1927–2014), a journalist who published under the name Mária Gróf, was deported with her family to Auschwitz in 1944, from where she was the only one to return. She later became editor-in-chief of the educational journal Gyermekünk (Our Child). Pál Békés, a writer with a passion for the interconnections between individual destiny and history, returned to these events many times in his works. Just as he incorporated elements of the past of ‘Csikágó’ into his private mythology, so he also incorporated what happened to his parents.

In 1974, he graduated from the Radnóti Miklós High School in Budapest, a school that was progressive even under the communist regime. Before his university studies, in 1974–1975, he worked as a sociological interviewer at the Mass Communication Research Centre of Hungarian Radio and Television. The domestic travel that his job entailed also influenced the development of his writing career. His first short stories were written in a hotel in Miskolc based on his travel notes, and travelling remained an important source of inspiration, both thematically and figuratively, for the rest of his career.

In 1979, at the age of twenty-three, he published his first novel, Cranes (Darvak). The following year, he graduated from Eötvös Loránd University with a degree in Hungarian-English Comparative Literature. He started working in Budapest secondary schools as a substitute Hungarian and English teacher. He worked as a freelancer for most of his life, making a living by translating and writing plays, radio plays and screenplays. In his works, he often reflected on the peculiarities of the freelance lifestyle as a determining condition for the creative process, which also influenced the length of his writings. He also drew inspiration from these factors for his highly successful short prose works of the late nineties, known as ‘stamps’.

His first work of children’s literature, The Clumsy Magician (A kétbalkezes varázsló), was published in 1983 with illustrations by Ferenc Sajdik, and is still popular today. The urbane fairy-tale novel has been translated into many languages. At the same time, he wrote his first collection of short stories, Myths of the Housing Estate (Lakótelepi mítoszok), published in 1984, often considered the most memorable achievement of Pál Békés’ fiction.

In 1987 he married Ágnes Merényi, a literary translator and editor. They had two children, Dorottya Anna Békés (1988) and Bálint Mihály Békés (1990). They divorced in 1993.

In 1992–1993 he lived in New York on a Fulbright scholarship and attended courses at Columbia University.

In 1996, his highly successful musical The Jungle Book (A dzsungel könvye), based on Rudyard Kipling’s novel of the same title, premiered at the Pesti Theatre.

In 1997, he was a fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

From 2000 until his death, he served as chairman of the Hungarian committee of IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People), and in 2004 he was the curator of Hungarian Magic, a one-year series of events in London celebrating Hungarian culture. In 2005, he created the Hungarian version of ‘The Big Read’ movement to promote books and reading.

In 2006 he published his magnum opus, Csikágó (a ‘gang novel’), the texts of which can also be read as stand-alone short stories, and offer insight into the life of a micro-community in the neighbourhood from which the novel takes its title.

Pál Békés died after a long illness on 28 May 2010. In accordance with his will, his parents and friends founded the Békés Pál Civil Society, which has awarded a prize to an outstanding prose writer each year since 2013.

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His fairy tale novels The Clumsy Wizard (1983), The Great Day of Doctor Vidor Minorka (Doktor Minorka Vidor nagy napja, 1985), Scarycreature (Félőlény, 1991), and The Wise Suppletory (A Bölcs Hiánypótló, 2005) are important works of Hungarian children’s literature. In recent decades, the dramaturgical reimaginings of his plays New Buda and TV-play have earned him a prestigious place in the history of Hungarian theatre. His work as a literary translator should also be mentioned, as he translated important works by Vladimir Nabokov, Anthony Burgess, Woody Allen, Sue Townsend, Tom Stoppard and Edward Albee. Perhaps this explains why Békés was for a long time regarded by the literary public more as an author of children’s literature, theatre and literary translation, and received little recognition as a writer. This is also shown by the fact that his short story collections Tribal Conditions (Törzsi viszonyok, 1990) and It’s All the Same for Bugs (A bogárnak mindegy, 1993) did not attract too much attention.

His place as a fiction writer may have been shaped in part by his marginal position in children’s literature. For a long time, books categorised as children’s literature were treated as second-rate literature compared to works written for adults. The changes that shaped literary criticism in the 1980s, i.e. the period around the beginning of Békés’ career, probably had no positive impact on the perception of his work as ‘adult literature’. Inspired by picaresque novels, the story-driven writings of the author seemed somewhat anachronistic in light of what might be called the ‘prose turn’. In Hungarian literature, the prose turn refers to a postmodernist stylistic movement in the second half of the 1970s which altered the traditional narrative (linear storyline, unified structure, etc.).

Békés’ work seems all the more anachronistic because his second novel, My love, en route – Three Chapters (Szerelmem, útközben, 1983), took up a kinship with the tendency toward the turn of the sixties and seventies in its conflict structure and character formation, which most people in the eighties were already treating with detachment as ‘generational prose’. Although he liked to experiment, his linguistic playfulness was subordinated to atmospheric creation, anecdotal storytelling and plot weaving, unlike the seemingly innovative prose poetics. An exception to this approach is the volume A Sentimental Journey through Central-Europe, or András Jorik’s strange wanderings in the land of former and real countries (Érzékeny útazások Közép-Európán át) written in 1987 but only published in 1991. Evoking the image of 18th–19th century romantic novels and inspired by the tradition of Peregrine literature, the work conveys the experience of Hungary, and of Central and Eastern Europe in general, before the regime change with linguistic playfulness and bitter humour.

After the regime change in 1989, the reception of Pál Békés’ works generally became more favourable. Even in some of his later works, Békés experimented with staging what could be considered generational experiences, such as the critically acclaimed Stamp Collection (Bélyeggyűjtemény, 1999), comprised of ‘very short stories’ or ‘flash fiction’ pieces. This contemporary mosaic of sometimes quite lyrical short pieces continued to grow after its publication and acquired its individual character through its own concentration (its full length can be read in the posthumous volume Stamps Collected, 2012).

In terms of generational experiences, the novel The Accomplice (A bűntárs, 2004), with its bravura plot, is also noteworthy for its consistent exploitation of the crime genre and its potential for anecdotal narrative. These works have received more acclaim than the author’s earlier volumes, but have not changed the leylines of reception.

The publication of Csikágó in 2006, the result of years of research, was perhaps the most important event in the author’s career. The volume gained critical success and attracted great interest among readers.

Csikágó’s treatment of space is not limited to the eponymous Budapest district. In fact, the threads of the brilliantly woven plot stretch from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, through the strange phenomena of Hungarian history and social history, to the United States and Australia. The short stories that make up the volume can be read independently, but reading them together opens up deeper layers for interpretation. It is no coincidence that the phrase ‘gang novel’ appears on the cover of the first edition of this volume as a genre defining definition. On the one hand, it refers to the environment depicted in the novel, to the houses with a gang (in Hungarian, a gang is an outside balcony or open corridor of apartment buildings), and on the other hand, it can be seen as a metaphor for the structure of the novel, which suggests something of the novel’s concept and the pattern of connections between individual life and history: like the apartments in the houses, the individual fates are separate, but share a common horizon – the gangway is the 20th century. Working with an omniscient narrator, Békés reflects on this rhizomatic structure with a number of metapoetic, self-reflexive moments.

As a writer, literary organiser, author of children’s literature and theatre, and literary translator, Békés was a significant figure in contemporary Hungarian literature. His colourful career is a testimony to the dedication, multifaceted talents and above-average work ethic needed to make a living in Hungary as a literary freelancer. Perhaps it is precisely the difficulty of reconciling these commitments that is made clear by the fact that Pál Békés’s literary oeuvre cannot be described as consistent in terms of quality. However, even in the details of his less successful works, we can observe solutions and technical writing expertise for which the author of Myths of the Housing Estate, Stamp Collection, The Accomplice and Csikágó must certainly receive praise.

The biography was written by Tibor Juhász, translated by Benedek Totth and Austin Wagner.