Bertha Bulcsu: Biography

Bulcsu Bertha (Nagykanizsa, 9 May 1935 – Budapest, 19 January 1997)

Three-time József Attila Prize-winning Hungarian writer and publicist. He was elected a posthumous member of the Digital Literature Academy in 1999.

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Bulcsu Bertha was born in Nagykanizsa on 9 May 1935. He passed his school-leaving exams in 1953 and applied to college, but was not admitted for ‘political reasons’. The reason was most probably that his father had served as a company commander in World War II and had to go into hiding after 1950.

Having failed to get into college, he worked in factories and on construction sites. He began publishing fiction in the second half of the 1950s. His first poem, Night at Balaton (Éjszaka a Balaton), appeared in the literary supplement of the daily newspaper Zala in 1956. His first short story was published in the weekly periodical Magyar Ifjúság in 1957 under the title Carriers (Fuvarosok). In Pécs, he worked briefly in the county library, but as the modest salary was not enough to support himself, he returned to work as a manual labourer. He later became a journalist for the Dunántúli Napló, and then headed the culture section of the Esti Pécsi Napló. Early on he became involved in the work of Jelenkor journal, which was launched in October 1958 and soon became one of the leading Hungarian literary journals. His narrative Awakening (Eszmélés) appeared in the very first issue of Jelenkor. Bertha’s first volume, Girls in the Sunshine (Lányok napfényben, 1962), was partially composed of the short stories written in the beginning of his literary career. In addition to his short stories, his influential interviews with writers and artists were also published in Jelenkor.

In 1956 he married Teréz Nemes, with whom he had a son before they divorced in 1961. In 1962, he married Franciska Nagy, a journalist, and they had a daughter together. In 1967 he moved with his family to Budapest where, except for the summer months spent in the family house at Lake Balaton, he lived until his death. In the capital he worked for a while as a freelance writer, then from 1971 he became first the editor and later the deputy editor-in-chief of the Új Írás. From 1976 to October 1993, he was an editor of Élet és Irodalom. It was here that he published the sensitive social and public affairs articles he became famous for in the mid-seventies, later subtitled Jelenségek (Phenomena). An early and famous example of this critical tone was the Cashew (Kesudió), which analysed the anomalies of the socialist economy using the metaphor of cashews imported from India and left in unsold heaps in Hungarian shops.

It is clear from his correspondence that he found life in the capital difficult; however, he did publish novels, short stories and interviews almost annually. In addition to his prose works, he wrote three screenplays and several TV and radio plays. His work has been recognised with three József Attila Prizes (1966, 1971, 1975).

He did not engage with party politics, and in an interview in 1979, he defined himself as a socialist. Given the social sensitivity of his works, this was appropriate in that most of his works attempted to portray the problems, existential crises, multifaceted worlds and moral dilemmas of the working class. After the regime change in 1989, his interviews revealed a mood of despondency, disillusionment and attachment to conservative values. This kind of worldview transformation is illustrated by the fact that in his final interviews he described the condition of the contemporary Hungarian literary scene as ‘anarchic’; he spoke of the loss of ‘values’ and claimed that the biggest problem in literary life was the marketisation of the book industry.

In 1992, he was a founding member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts.

In the early nineties he was very ill and underwent several operations. He died on 19 January 1997 and was buried in the Farkasréti Cemetery.

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Bulcsu Bertha first grabbed the attention in the literary world with his short stories, which he later published in two collected volumes (Girls in the Sunlight, 1962; Harlequin and his Lover, 1964). It was in this genre that he created his most enduring works. These early short stories, interspersed with autobiographical elements, set in the semi-past – typically in the 1940s and 1950s – but distanced from the concreteness of history and politics, and evoking the locations of the Danube and Lake Balaton, are among the best of the period’s Hungarian prose.

Already in Bertha's first volume (The White-Faced Man), the figure of Illés appears, to whom, together with his other literary alter-ego, Lint, a ‘feuilleton writer of uncertain mood’, he devoted a separate cycle in The Last Day of Summer (1968), a collection of short stories divided into three units and considered the culmination of his early short prose. These are Bertha’s most autobiographically inspired writings, evoking the memories and fears of a childhood spent near Lake Balaton, while also recounting the doubts and frequent despair of a middle-aged publicist and editor in Budapest.

Bertha’s short stories depict the working man, mostly rural day labourers and urban workers. However, it is not the sociographic-sociological context of work or the political visions of the working class which interest him, but the moral world of the individual. In almost all his short stories, moral situations are at the centre of the plot (illegal fishing, theft, escape from prison, conflicts with friends or family, murder, etc.), and the narrator analyses the various phases and dimensions of crime and punishment along the lines of these very simple events, which evoke moral reflections and value judgments. His stories are characterised by gloomy, dark beginnings and tension-filled dialogues, and the terse narrator successfully conveys the unspoken inner turmoil of the heroes, the repressed emotions behind their seclusion. It is no accident that his novels have been compared to the writing of Maupassant and Hemingway.

His finest and most enduring works, however, are those in which he was able to combine the external, behaviourist type of description and realism with the lyrical and atmospheric – a volatile balance most evident in his evocations of the years he spent at Lake Balaton, most notably in the stories of Harlequin and his Lover, The Last Day of Summer and some of the narratives in Over the River Styx (Át a Styx folyón – 1969).

Bertha published excerpts from a novel in progress as early as 1962, but his first novel, Smoke Dogs (Füstkutyák), was published in 1965, followed by several longer prose works up until the early 1970s. The heroes of Smoke Dogs, The Life of the Champion (A bajnok élete – 1969) and Over the River Styx are all typical, if instructive, realisations of the humanist-antifascist man-type typical of the aesthetic expectations of the communist era.

Smoke Dogs takes place during the years of violent collectivisation; a small village in Transdanubia has a small farmers’ cooperative in a broken community, and a new leader, János Krizek, with a dubious past and full of doubts, arrives to sort out local conditions. He finds it difficult to convince the initially distrustful village community of the aims of socialist society, and has to contend with both the resentment and overt and veiled attacks of many.

The protagonist of the novel The Life of the Champion is a professional table tennis player, Gyula Káli, who subjugates everything to his sports career and his own needs, and it is precisely this behavior that leads to his ‘downfall’ at the end of the novel: after he becomes a champion, he is forced to come to terms with what he has neglected and left behind in order to achieve his goal, and how he has become so far removed from man’s inherent desire for freedom.

The volume’s companion piece, Over the River Styx, is a short novel whose hero, István Elek, is a Red Army teacher-turned-commander who gives his life for his country and the revolution in a battle against the Romanian intervention troops.

Bertha’s next novel, Fireballs (Tűzgömbök), published in 1970, is more strongly linked to the writer’s earlier style of autobiographically inspired short fiction, as his protagonist, Ambrus Thali, experiences the threat of war (bombings and the violence of Arrow Cross thugs) as a third-year primary school student.The work also gives a picture of the anachronism of the urban-civilian world in its final hours.

Interestingly, the surrealistic visions that only appear sporadically in his short stories become more prominent in Bertha’s longer works, making the realistic descriptions all the more dynamic and moving. The protagonist of his first novel, János Krizek, who is suspicious and secretive, has astonishing hallucinations, seeing walking smoke-dogs in his sleep and drunken stupors; Ambrus Thali’s childhood imagination is often haunted by memories, first of a man in a castle, then of a ‘river Tartar’, and on one occasion he sees fireballs. The latter novel by Bertha, Fireballs, was also made into a feature film in 1975.

What is perhaps Bertha’s best-known novel, The Kangaroo (A kenguru), centres on a young truck driver, István Varjú, and the picaresque story is structured around his adventures and acquaintances during his travels. The novel, which was published as a serial in 1974–75, was made into a film before it was published in book form (1976), and is considered one of the first Hungarian travelogues.

Bertha Bulcsu’s fifth and last published novel was Your Turn, Lupus... (1988), written in the 1970s. The theme of this work was also drawn from the world of youth, this time encompassing the life of teenagers without ideals or goals in the lawless atmosphere of slacker gang life.

A separate unit of Bertha’s rich oeuvre are his interviews with artists, especially writers, which were published regularly in Jelenkor from the early 1970s. These texts were published in three collections before the regime change (The King is Naked [Meztelen a király], 1972; In the Writers’ Workshop [Írók műhelyében], 1973; Afternoon Conversations [Délutáni beszélgetések], 1978). His last book of interviews, Writers, Actors, Prisons (Írók, színészek, börtönök), in which he collected the experiences of intellectuals imprisoned during the 1950s, was published in 1990.

Although Bertha Bulcsu’s writings, especially his short stories, were at the forefront of Hungarian literature in the 1960s and 1970s, much of his work has fallen out of the literary canon. It is not his writings that have lost their significance: the problems he perceived and presented remained topical throughout his second period as a writer. The reason for his being outcast is more aesthetic in nature: Bertha created his most enduring works by writing on themes and in genres that were highly valued in the literary politics of the socialist Kádár regime (social novels and short stories, parabolic historical novels, sociographies, feuilleton, etc.). But his writings did not survive the paradigm shifts in Hungarian literature (‘prose turn’, neo-avant-garde, literary postmodernism), and he himself did not follow the poetic aspirations and critical trends of the 1980s and 1990s.

However, some of Bertha Bulcsu’s short stories, Girls in the Sun, Harlequin and his Lover and The Last Day of Summer, are among the finest short prose in Hungarian literature. His sociographic writings on Lake Balaton and the people that lived there reveal the ‘love geography’ of a unique Hungarian literary landscape. His interviews with writers and artists, put to paper with tenacious labour and commitment, are a fascinating source of semi-historical Hungarian literature.

The biography was written by Dániel Szabolcs Radnai, translated by Benedek Totth and Austin Wagner.