Fejes Endre: Biography | Digitális Irodalmi Akadémia

Fejes Endre (Budapest, 15 September 1923 – Budapest, 25 August 2015)

Kossuth and Attila József Prize-winning Hungarian writer. Founding member of the Digital Literature Academy from 1998 until his death.

Endre Fejes was born on 15 September 1923 in Budapest at 27 Tisza Kálmán Square (later Republic Square, now Pope John Paul II Square). Józsefváros, a neighborhood in the eighth district of Budapest, is of great importance in his life’s work. Almost without exception, the themes and characters of his writings are linked to ‘the thousand-times blessed eighth district’: the district usually appears as the setting of his stories, as in his short stories, plays, and novels such as Generation of Rust (Rozsdatemető) and The Boy With the Face of an Angel (A fiú, akinek angyalarca volt), and sometimes as the place of origin of the characters who set out from there, as in the novel About Love on a Foolish Night (Szerelemről bolond éjszakán).

After completing the first four grades of civil school, Fejes, with his father’s intervention, became a tailor in a shop, from where he soon moved on to apprentice as an iron-steel worker at the Weiss Manfréd Steel and Metal Works in Csepel. He was conscripted in 1944, but escaped from the army and hid in Budapest until the end of the war. He left Hungary in the autumn of 1945 and travelled throughout many countries in Western Europe until 1949. He supported himself through manual labour, including as a miner in the Charleroi region of Belgium. He recalled the early days of his wanderings in Western Europe in his 1975 work, About Love on a Foolish Night, in which a character named István Zimonyi bears many similarities to the author.

After his return home, he worked again as a lathe operator at the Bosch factory in Angyalföld. In 1951 he was interned for eight months in Kistarcsa for illegally crossing the border. The reason for trying to leave the country was that his lover, Yvonne, with whom they met first in Paris, was expelled from the country, and Fejes tried to go after her. (Yvonne’s character appears in some of his later short stories, and Fejes even wanted to make a film of their story – he signed a contract with the Hunnia Film Company for the working title Yvonne in 1957, but the plan was never realised.)

After his release, Fejes worked as a labourer, but in time he was able to return to his previous job. By then he was experimenting with writing, and his first collection of short stories was serially published in the newspapers starting in 1955. Although his career as a writer began before the revolution, it was the cultural vacuum of the post-1956 period that allowed him to make a rapid and successful start – alongside his undoubted talent as a storyteller, of course. His first collection of short stories, The Liar (A hazudós), published in 1958, was very well received. The writings, which depicted typical figures and life situations in the neighbourhood of Tisza Kálmán Square, attracted attention because, instead of the idealising and ideology-driven depictions of workers of the 1950s, Fejes’ anecdotal stories gave a glimpse into the everyday life of that class, which was not imbued with politics and was not free of human desires and weaknesses. A peculiar exception is the short story Letter to the Relative (Levél a Rokonnak), which appeared in the first issue of the journal Kortárs, launched in September 1957, before its publication in the volume: the fictional letter to an unnamed relative is ultimately a criticism of those who emigrated abroad in the wake of the events of 1956, not independently of the official party narrative of the time.

In February 1959, he won a prize in a literary competition organised by the National Council of Trade Unions (SZOT), and from April he was a fellow of SZOT for a year. In 1959, Pál Zolnay directed a short film adaptation of his short story Engagement (Eljegyzés), published in his first volume. In the same year, his short story Parisian Memory (Párizsi emlék) was published in the anthology Awakening (Ébredés), a representative collection of young prose writers who started writing after 1956. In 1960, he published his short story Blue-White Love (Kéktiszta szerelem), in which appears János Hábetler Jr., the central character of the main work that was written two years later.

Generation of Rust was published for the 1962 Winter Book Fair. The first edition of the novel sold out almost immediately, and it has gone through dozens of domestic editions and been translated into more than thirty languages to date (including an English language edition by McGraw-Hill in 1970). Fejes was awarded the Attila József Prize in March 1963. The family novel, which follows the story of the Hábetler family from the end of World War I to the early 1960s, both develops the ‘portrait technique’ of Fejes’ short stories, i.e. the ability to portray the characters with a few distinctive features or habits, and anticipates the way in which later novels would be portrayed, based on frequent repetition, recurring phrases and story moments. The framed narrative, also used here, is a frequently employed technique of the author. Generation of Rust, however, has generated years of controversy in the national public primarily because of its subject matter. Its publication coincides roughly with the so-called ‘Goulash Communism debate’ in the pages of the journal Új Írás, which explored the contradiction between the boom in household consumption in the early 1960s and the basic idea of socialism. Fejes’ novel also touches on this problem, since the bourgeois outlook the working-class family of Nagyfuvaros Street has on life, which he portrays in a highly critical manner, was in no way compatible with the contemporary ideal of class-conscious working-class life. Criticism came from various directions in the controversy surrounding Generation of Rust, but in spite of this (or perhaps because of it) the book was one of the greatest literary successes of the 1960s. In the wake of the criticism, Fejes published a very sharply worded collection of essays a decade and a half later, entitled Never Thought So (Gondolta a fene), which also caused quite a scandal – the 1977 incident ended with the book being withdrawn and closed.

Shortly after the novel’s publication, Endre Fejes wrote a dramatic version of Generation of Rust which was directed by Károly Kazimir and premiered at the Thália Theatre on 14 November 1963. Kazimir’s production ran for over 200 performances, and Fejes subsequently adapted several of his earlier short stories for the stage. Jitterer (Mocorgó) was first performed at the Thália Theatre in 1966 (a year later a TV film version was broadcast), while Vonó Ignác was first staged at the József Attila Theatre in 1969. A collection of short stories written between The Liar and Generation of Rust, entitled Cheerful Buddies (Vidám cimborák), was published in 1966. The film adaptation of Blue-White Love, also published in this volume, was first shown on television in 1969.

In 1968, the weekly Tükör published sequels to the author’s novel Good Night Summer, Good Night Love (Jó estét nyár, jó estét szerelem), and the serialised version was published in early 1969. The stripped-down and repetitive narrative style of this work about a swindler working-class boy who pretends to be a Greek diplomat further develops the cyclical narrative technique of Generation of Rust, which results in a text that typifies the script-like film language of later Fejes’ prose. The two-part TV film version was made in 1972, and the premiere of the musical based on the novel was held at the Vígszínház in 1977, with music by Gábor Presser. In 1973, the author published his first collection of short stories, The Liar, with additional texts – the aforementioned subtitle identifies the expansion: ...and other stories from the thousand times blessed eighth district.

In 1975 he was awarded the Kossuth Prize. It had been known since the late 1950s that Endre Fejes would write a novel about his post-1945 wanderings. In the mid-1960s, several news reports announced that the work would soon be going to press, but it was not published until 1975. About Love on a Foolish Night is the picaresque story of three young men from Józsefváros who, for various reasons, decide to leave Hungary after the end of World War II. Their adventures begin in Vienna, where, while waiting for a Jewish transport to Palestine, they take advantage of the chaotic conditions of the temporary camp and try to make their way through the many cities of Europe that have not yet recovered from the war, through a variety of legal and illegal activities. Fejes’ novel, although real parallels can be discerned in the biography, sets the story in a fictional framework: in the present, an anonymous man celebrating his forty-eighth birthday recalls his youthful memories to a lady friend he calls ‘pretty eyes’. About Love on a Foolish Night was originally intended to be the first of a trilogy (as indicated by the subtitle, The First Night, on the first page of the novel), but no sequel was ever written.

Endre Fejes’ last novel, The Boy With the Face of an Angel (A fiú, akinek angyalarca volt), was published in 1982 (almost at the same time as the theatrical premiere of the dramatic version of the novel). The novel, which is in a way constructed of still scenes, fragmented and told with the brevity of a film script, actually reopens the basic question of Fejes’ earlier works, such as Generation of Rust, at a later moment in time: why was the social mobilisation encouraged by the system unable to produce a conscious working class of the new era, one that did not merely idealise petty-bourgeois consumption?

The writer spent the last three decades of his life in increasing seclusion, publishing no more volumes until the regime change. In the early nineties he published co-written novels, from which he compiled two collections: Poor Vivaldi (Szegény Vivaldi – 1992) and Missing Angels (Lemaradt angyalok – 1993). The last volume of his life was On the Loose (Szabadlábon – 1995), a selection of his earlier writings. Endre Fejes stopped writing after that.

After a long illness, he died on 15 August 2015 in Budapest.

This biography was written by Gábor Reichert, translated by Benedek Totth and Austin Wagner.