The Fawn by Magda Szabó

A novel about an ambitious Hungarian actor's difficult childhood and difficult adulthood

The Fawn

By Magda Szabó, translated by Len Rix.

288 pages. NYRB Classics. $17.95.

Esther, the main character of Magda Szabó’s 1959 novel The Fawn, is an actor. However, it is difficult at first to understand what kind of an actor Esther is, and what acting means for her. The novel takes place inside her head, in a free-flowing stream of consciousness over the period of a few hours; we are only given Esther’s thoughts and her narration for the whole book, and she doesn’t focus on her acting career. She barely even thinks about her acting for the first few chapters, which concern her childhood. Later on, we learn about some of the roles Esther has played, but only get a few indications of how she plays them. 

According to Esther, when she performs she uses what is essentially method acting: “Once I was in role I really couldn’t open a door that was supposed to be stuck, when they stabbed me I was absolutely terrified, and when someone rushed at me the blood drained from my hands and I felt sick with fear.” The stage is a total escape from the outside world, a place where “every stone in the set was a real one.” When the play ends, the applause from the audience seems “comical” to Esther. “I wasn’t interested in what happened afterwards, it was the acting I loved,” she thinks. 

Off stage, Esther does not seem to use her acting as an excuse to be a habitual liar, though she does manage one particularly ironic deception: she tells the authorities of communist Hungary that she grew up among the wealthy bourgeois, and came to appreciate the nobility of the proletariat only with the advent of communism. In reality, Esther in her childhood was among the poorest of her village, unable at times to afford basic clothes, but she understands that the communist regime does not want real stories about poverty, only beautiful lies. She tells this story, too, once she becomes a famous actor and likely one of the richest people in the Hungarian People’s Republic, with enough money to buy her own house in cash.

And yet, Esther is able to manage these lies to the authorities and her intensive acting without them overtaking her life. She is a fierce, independent personality, one who does not let circumstance or the pressures of others sway her. An incident that indicates this side of her personality takes place when her theater company is preparing to put on Julius Caesar. Esther explains to a fellow actor that she admires Agrippa for “how clever he was at all sorts of things, his passion for maps and aqueducts and public shows with staged sea battles” (Esther was an excellent student of Latin as a child, even tutoring others). As a joke, Esther’s colleague decides to ask the director who Agrippa is; the director consults Shakespeare Director’s Notes (no doubt an essential booklet for government-approved stagings) and discovers that Agrippa was “a true son of the people.” “I had to run into the bar to finish laughing,” Esther recalls (she tends to resort to laughing when encountering the crudity of others).

Esther, in short, prefers the path of greatness to the path of virtue. She is extremely intelligent, and extremely motivated, and puts all her energies towards her personal success. There is no doubt that this protagonist of a novel from a socialist country would, had she grown up in the United States a generation or two later, have been an avid reader of the novels of Ayn Rand in her adolescent years. This statement needs some clarification: Esther has almost no ideology or politics at all, and probably would have almost nothing to say about free market capitalism versus central planning and socialism. What she does have is an innate belief in her self-sufficient individual greatness in opposition to the masses of mediocrities.

Given her ambition, Esther is not one to show warm-hearted sympathy for anyone. The only time she shows an unreserved love is for the fawn of the novel’s title. In Esther’s childhood village, the fawn is taken in by a wealthy local family after the family’s teenaged son kills the fawn’s mother in a motorcycle accident. Esther becomes inordinately attached to this fawn; she enjoys nothing more than taking it for walks around the city. Eventually, she decides to let it free in the night – but when she lets it loose, it runs into a railway and is killed by a train. 

The fawn is an ambiguous symbol. Many of the characters in the novel seem like the fawn, either completely dependent on others or extremely vulnerable in the world. The men in her life are either like Esther’s father, whose hang-ups prevent him from making any money as an attorney, or like the young men in her village, who are killed in the course of World War 2. The women of her childhood village are largely dependent on their husbands; one local woman who has an affair is murdered by her husband. At the same time, I suspect Esther releases the fawn because she wishes it were like her: a creature that could be free were it not kept in fetters. 

Of all the fawn-like people in her life, the one for whom Esther has the most contempt is Angéla. Angéla and Esther grew up together in the same town, but Angéla had a comfortable upbringing as the daughter of a wealthy judge. Unlike Esther, Angéla was not a good student; she only got good grades in school due to the pressures on the school exerted by her mother. But Angéla is very kind: “I never once saw Angéla eat a whole orange by herself; she always brought one for the mid-morning break, but as soon as she had peeled it she shared it around, segment by segment,” Esther remarks. Angéla’s family is the one that took in the fawn, too. 

Esther leaves behind most of her life from her hometown when she moves to Budapest, but once she becomes a successful actor she reencounters Angéla in a most disturbing way: she falls in love with Angéla’s husband, a professor and translator named Lőrinc. In Budapest, Angéla continues to be distinguished by her virtue – she runs an orphanage – but is extremely unskilled and impractical: she needs her husband to fill out even the most basic forms required by the communist bureaucracy.

Ultimately, Lőrinc is just as much a fawn as any other character, unable to break away from the wife dependent on him. And Esther only partly realizes that she loves Lőrinc, just as she loved the fawn, because it was in captivity, kept in comfort and not involved in the cares of the world. Her tragic flaw is that a human being cannot be kept in the world like that. On the other hand, there is a clear feminist undercurrent to her fate: what most men of Esther’s time want in a wife is a captive fawn. 

I do not think The Fawn is a great novel. Esther’s performances require her to feign madness and violence; I wish there had been a bit more of that intensity in her thoughts. Could the mind of someone who has been through so much really remain as emotionally level as Esther’s does? The interactions Esther has with Angéla are only a few in number, and not very dramatic – they are disappointing, as if some crucial paragraph had been left out. Esther’s mind wanders easily, and there are too many subplots and distractions. The complexity of Esther’s thoughts make the novel a rich one to analyze (and I have enjoyed doing so in this review), but I rarely was able to feel the flow of Esther’s mind while reading The Fawn.

Finally, I wonder how this novel, published in 1959, got past the censors of the Hungarian People’s Republic. Probably the authorities classified it as an entirely personal novel, about private desires and conflicts, with no political message. But a keen reader can observe that this is an extremely subversive novel, full of contempt for the stupidities of communist rule. Fortunately, Magda Szabó, like Esther, was able to outwit the authoritarian regime she had found herself under.¹

1. That last paragraph was idle speculation; after completing this review I discovered, through Cate Farr’s piece on The Fawn in Exacting Clam, that the novel was released after Szabó had been banned from writing for ten years by the communist authorities, and that Hungary was undergoing a thaw in censorship when she published it.