There's a state funeral in Budapest today for a Canadian -- well, make this a near-state funeral. George Faludy, dubbed Hungary's "poet-king" by the press, is being laid to rest. Thousands are likely to pay their respects.
One doesn't have to be in particularly good health to attend one's own funeral, and Faludy is expected to do so, but his friends and admirers were hoping that he might be well enough to attend another ceremony planned in his honour, this one by the city of Toronto. By Oct. 3, had he lived, the poet-king would have been 96. The plan was for him and for his 30-year-old wife, Fanny Kovacs-Faludy, to attend the dedication of a tiny park named after him, opposite 25 St. Mary Street, where he lived and worked for many years during his Canadian exile.
It wasn't to be.
The dedication, having been shepherded through the thickets of City Hall by the copyright lawyer Grace Westcott and the poet Dennis Lee, will still be held on Oct. 3. Assorted dignitaries will speak; the sculptress Dora de Pedery-Hunt's commemorative plaque will be unveiled. As poets reading Faludy translations will try to make themselves heard over the din of traffic on nearby Bay Street, passersby will wonder what this is all about.
In Hungary, where he never spent 20 consecutive years as an adult, Faludy is a household name. In Canada, where he lived from 1967 until 1989, most people have never heard of him. In Hungary he was a national icon, a poet of the people (though noticed only condescendingly, if at all, by the tin-eared eunuchs of the literary establishment). In Canada, it was the reverse. Faludy was a delicacy for the cognoscenti -- not for his poetry so much as for his autobiography, My Happy Days in Hell.
Faludy burst unto the literary scene in the 1930s with a slim volume of brash poems written in the manner of Francois Villon. His verses were subversive, erotic and coruscating. The authorities gave him a choice between arrest and exile. Faludy chose Paris. When the war broke out, Faludy and his wife, Vali, fled the invading Nazis, making their way first to Morocco, then, on President Roosevelt's invitation, to America. Faludy enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and saw service in the Pacific as a tail gunner. Showing more optimism than foresight, he returned to Hungary after the war, where he was soon arrested by the Communist regime and taken to the infamous stone quarries of Recsk. He survived and was released after Stalin's death in 1953, then fled Hungary with his second wife, Zsuzsa, an ethereal ex-Communist blonde, following the defeat of the Hungarian revolution three years later.
The poet was nearly 50 when he settled in London to sum up his eventful life in his scintillating autobiography. My Happy Days in Hell produced acclaim, plus an unexpected side effect. His name was Eric.
Eric the Erotic, as I nicknamed him, although he seemed erotic to me only when viewed through Faludy's eyes, was an American ballet dancer. Old enough to have served as an intelligence clerk in the Korean war, but still only 26 when Faludy's book appeared, Eric Johnson read the American edition and became obsessed with the idea of meeting the man who wrote it.
He found him in Malta, where Faludy, by then 56, was living alone following Zsuzsa's untimely death from cancer. As a sexual being, Faludy was an omnivore, attracted to beauty, youth and intellect. The gender to which these qualities were attached made little difference to him. Faludy lustily proceeded to convert Johnson's intellectual love into a physical attachment, via the emotional medium of poetry. The outcome was a group of sonnets, among the finest in the Hungarian language.
Faludy and Johnson spent the next 36 years together, living in various parts of the world, including 25 St. Mary Street, where they shared a small apartment with a pair of free-flying finches. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, the couple moved back to Budapest, where people worshipped Faludy and tolerated Johnson. The post-communist government assigned a spacious apartment on the east bank of the Danube for their lifetime use -- more precisely, for the lifetime use of Hungary's national icon, for Johnson as the poet's "secretary" had no official status of any kind.
Johnson's occupancy of the apartment was rescinded in 2002. It was the year Cupid let loose his arrow and hit Faludy straight in the heart. The national icon fell, and fell hard, for a 26-year-old photo model named Fanny, the current Mrs. Faludy. Cupid's bulls-eye made Johnson, by then 64, possibly the first man in history to be jilted by a 92-year-old lover.
As Fanny and Faludy were getting ready to wed, Johnson joined the Dalai Lama's entourage and he wrote letters to friends saying that he was happier than he had ever been. For all I know, it was true. Still, when he was diagnosed with cancer in the fall of 2004, he did not seek treatment. His funeral pyre was lit in Kathmandu not much later.
Since no speaker is likely to mention Johnson when the Faludy Parkette is dedicated on Oct. 3, let Faludy himself remember the other occupant of 25 St. Mary Street. Here's a sonnet he wrote for Johnson in Malta, after recovering from a brief bout of illness, exactly 40 years ago:
I did recuperate, but no cure is final.
Silence is final: the stiff repose
as my cooling clay stretches out one morning,
grey sheets ill covering serrated toes.
Don't linger by the corpse. Unsightly shroud,
death's sulphur breath will turn it ochre soon.
Don't look for me. I am gone. Draw the curtain,
and let deep shadows occupy the room.
Quote, as you did before, the sage Sankara,
postulating a plane of existence
to which our stubborn spirits retire
to meet again in due time and distance.
Listen to Bach, read the Greeks you admire.
Don't throw yourself on my funeral pyre.
© 2006 George Jonas
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