New Releases: The Enchanted Night by Miklós Bánffy
Short stories by a famous Hungarian writer
By Miklós Bánffy, translated by Len Rix
256 Pages. Pushkin Press. $16.95.
Miklós Bánffy’s story “Little Borbálka and the Terrifying Sanfranics,” the second one in the new Pushkin Press collection under the title The Enchanted Night, begins like a fairytale. It opens with Borbálka, a teenage girl in a small country village, sitting in an apple tree and looking over a wall at a mysterious neighbor’s house - the house of Sanfranics. He is the local eccentric, who lives alone and seems to pass his days looking out his windows and smoking his pipe; he is sometimes spotted in the local forest, but “always, predictably, when you least wished to see him,” although none in the village “had ever seen him actually leave the house.”
Through a series of dramatic events, Borbálka grows closer to Safranics. Meanwhile, unsure whether to go through with marriage to her fiancé, a pompous apprentice schoolteacher, Borbálka decides to undertake an old ritual: if, after undergoing certain steps, she sees seven deer cross her sight at sunset in a certain location, she has receives a sign that she should get married. Borbálka helps her undergo this ritual, and, miraculously, seven deer crossing her vision is exactly what she sees.
However, “the vision must have been a false one,” for soon after Borbálka gets married, her husband begins beating her several times a week.
Bánffy’s best tales are so effective because they gesture towards a moral universe, but in the end reveal life to only be a dark forest incomprehensible to human sight and imagination. Borbálka’s final fate could be one out of a naturalistic novel, but is even more shocking coming from a tale that hints at the fantastical and supernatural.
Though best known in the English speaking world for his Translyvanian Trilogy, Miklós Bánffy was also a writer on economics, a politician, an arts administrator, and a member of The Hungarian nobility. The Enchanted Night collects short stories from across fifty years of his writing career, from 1896 to 1946. Though the stories in this edition are not arranged in chronological order, his themes and style do not seem to have varied much over the course of his life.
The introduction by the translator Len Rix praises Bánffy for his authentic portrayal of “the Transylvania of real life,” though only a few of the stories take place in the Hungary of his age. The settings in fact range from Scottish manorial estates to ancient Chinese kingdoms, often depicted with the broadness of an enthusiastic outsider than with the intimacy of a local. Frequently, Bánffy uses stories within stories, with the implication that tales from older civilizations are applicable to modern ones.
The finest stories in The Enchanted Night are “The Contaminated Planet,” where a tourist’s idyllic-seeming vacation is interrupted by a bizarre, science fiction-like nightmare, and “The Dying Lion,” where a priest tries to give religious succor to a famous atheist writer against the wishes of the writer’s wife. Both are built upon competing visions of the world - humanity as benevolent vs. humanity as malignant in one and religious principles vs. secular principles in the other - and, by the end, both sides seem sullied by their conflict; nobody and nothing is triumphant.
Unfortunately, the tension produced by those two stories - a tension both personal and existential - does not enliven much else from this book. The last and longest story in this collection, the titular “The Enchanted Night,” is also its biggest failure, and several other of the stories are unremarkable. No story is completely devoid of interest, but many contain serious flaws.
A common defect of Bánffy is that he indulges in his description of larger-than-life or grotesque characters, at the cost of a fully-realized story. In “Helen in Sparta,” we see the unhappy married life of Helen and Menelaus after the end of the Trojan War, but the inner state of Helen - which should be central - is overshadowed by descriptions of the repulsive Menelaus, with his “gross, sluggish frame” and his gruesome war stories, which involve “embellishing and exaggerating, lying through his teeth.”
Strangely enough, “The Enchanted Night” fails almost for the opposite reason - the characters are too insubstantial. The protagonist of “The Enchanted Night” is Mimi, a young woman of minor nobility who is proud most of all of her supposed bloodline and is perfectly content that her marriage to a nobleman of slightly higher status is arranged “on the basis of a few nods shared by the appropriate heads of the clan.”
Bánffy’s satirical portrait of a conceited royal world is finely done, but soon enough war breaks out, and before Mimi is even aware of it, the fighting has reached her resort town. Amid the chaos, she is rescued by some irregular combat units - half outlaws and half patriots - and during the night falls in love with the dashing leader of these unofficial heroes.
Despite the title of “The Enchanted Night,” the crux of the story is the morning of disenchantment afterwards. Mimi is found by official soldiers and handed over to her husband, who takes her from the battlefield hideout to a luxury hotel and separates her forever from her new lover.
What makes the one night Mimi has away from her usual aristocratic trappings so enchanting? The underground fighters embody the very features of nobility that Mimi and her circle pretend at: they are brave, sensuous, and most of all receptive to the beauties of music (whereas Mimi is raised to treat classical music as a means of asserting her higher status). So great are the virtues of Mimi’s protectors that their war refuge becomes an idyll - and here the story loses its tension, turning into a glimpse at the lives of superior individuals rather than any sort of drama or conflict. The character of Mimi, so well-established in the previous pages, seems to fade into nothing.
By contrast, Yourcenar’s Coup de Grâce, another novella about how ordinary persons can be ennobled amid times of war, emphasizes how such a situation is dependent upon a state of extreme stress and total upheaval, and comes about through personal suffering, not relaxing moonlit evenings. Like “Little Borbálka and the Terrifying Sanfranics,” “The Enchanted Night” is about a fairytale juxtaposed against the miseries of the real world, but in the latter story the fairytale seems completely unconnected to and unaffected by the real world - the two strands hardly seem to overlap at all.
The last sentence of “The Enchanted Night” is “It was as if nothing had happened…” Unfortunately, that closing line is not as ironic as it should have been.