Young & Beautiful Vol02 Issue01

YOUNG & BEAUTIFUL

EDITOR’S NOTE

The Janus Faces of Youth

Janus Faces Youth

Sándor Jászberényi is the author of The Devil Is a Black Dog: Stories from the Middle East and Beyond (New Europe Books, 2014). In 2017 he received Hungary’s Libri Literary Prize. As a correspondent for Hungarian news sites, he has covered the conflict with Islamic State, unrest in Ukraine, the revolutions in Egypt and Libya, and the Gaza War. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Magazine, AGNI, and the Brooklyn Rail. He divides his time between Budapest and Cairo.

Sándor Jászberényi

In general, when we look back on our childhoods, we remember them as having been beautiful. I certainly remember my youth as a beautiful time of life, though I was never beautiful myself. Like most people, I hardly resembled the images of idealized beauty that smile at us from magazines and silver screens. My body always seemed awkward and disproportional to me, no doubt largely because, like most adolescents, I compared myself to movie stars. Which is one of the reasons why I always hated it when people took pictures of me.

Not too long ago, I happened across a photograph of me that was taken some twenty years ago. The situation wasn’t nearly as tragic as I had thought at the time.

But that’s not quite right. If I want to be precise, I should say that the situation was much less tragic than it is today. For twenty years ago, I was a young man. To borrow from Dante, midway upon the journey of our life, I now have not even youth to boast of. Twenty years ago, I was just ugly. Now, I am ugly and old.

Not that I have any great objection. I am not wrestling with some midlife crisis like so many middle-aged white men do. I am not desperately trying to halt or push back the hands of time. But I do find myself more and more likely to look back on the world of my youth as a far more beautiful backdrop than the cluttered stage of my adult years. I even catch myself muttering the usual cliches about how “things were better when I was a kid.”

This is not true, of course.

“There are a lot of problems in the world now that weren’t in the world then, but there’s never been a time in the world when it was problem-free,” says the wonderful Fran Lebowitz in an interview with us. This is her reply to twenty-somethings who effuse over how much better it must have been to have been a twenty-something in New York back in the 1970s.

Things were different, of course, but hardly problem-free.

This issue of The Continental explores the themes of youth and beauty. The two concepts at times seem inseparable, and the world is certainly obsessed with both.

The nineteenth century was consumed with feverish thoughts about eternal youth. One need merely recall Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. And this craving has only grown since. It is hard to escape the impression that, while aging used to be simply unpleasant, with the advent of the information age and social media, it has become well-nigh impossible.

One merely need consider how the movie stars and pop stars of the 1980s relate to their own age to see how big a problem this is.

When we came up with the theme for this issue, we tried not to limit our authors in how they approached the issue. We certainly did not expect anyone necessarily to indulge in nostalgia, which is how people who are no longer young so often look back on their youth. We wanted our authors to be free to explore whatever came to mind.

In literature, the question of youth usually comes up for an author when she or he is no longer young or has at least a dawning sense that she or he will not always be young. In music and mathematics, there are

Sándor Jászberényi

prodigies whose genius shines through when they are but children. In literature, however, one can count on one hand the authors who burst onto the scene before their twenties. Arthur Rimbaud, the French enfant terrible, is perhaps the first to come to mind.

Rimbaud was a teenager when he wrote the poems that radically changed the world’s understanding of poetry. By the time he had reached the age of twenty, he no longer took much interest in literature.

And Rimbaud rarely dealt with the question of youth in his poetry, since it was a given for him. But he did not write a single poem through which youth does not shine.

Otherwise, it is hard to think of many other writers whose genius was apparent when they were still young. Lebowitz may well be right that good literature requires some experience of life.

In any case, I heartily recommend my editorial colleague Balázs Keresztes’ excellent conversation with Fran in this issue.

We learn, for instance, of her views on aging, the contemporary cult of youth, and even some of her memories of her own childhood. I very much enjoyed this interview, because, as always, Lebowitz is incisive and witty. And I am confident our readers will enjoy it too.

In this issue, our readers will also learn of what it was like to grow up in Hungary in a family in which your grandmother’s first husband later becomes the most famous vampire in history, at least on the big screen. Noémi Saly tells the not so happy story of Bela Lugosi’s first love.

Eccentric film director Abel Ferrara (whom one might well dub the king of New York, to borrow the title of perhaps his most accomplished film) shares a ghost story from his youth. Fans and the film world have long wondered when Ferrara will finish his memoir, which was announced a few years ago.

I think it’s safe to say that he is hard at work, and he remains a force to be reckoned with.

“In our country, serious writers and intellectuals had to look as ragged as possible and it was considered impossible for them to have a good haircut,” Austrian author Cornelius Hell notes in a fantastic essay about his youth and the attitudes among the intelligentsia towards beauty. Hell goes so far as to question whether it is always a blessing to be beautiful and young. “So even if [intellectuals] were good-looking,” he writes, “they had to hide it somehow. Also, when I was young, you had to smoke as much as possible if you wanted to be perceived as an intellectual. And I did want to be, or at least to become an intellectual.”

Jeffrey McDaniel writes about growing up in Center City, Philadelphia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when many American cities were terribly run down.

In Prague, extras on a film shoot smoke in Nazi uniforms in the streets, prompting American Michael Stein to ponder at length questions concerning what we are given by our parents as we embark down the paths of our lives, how generational traumas like the Holocaust are passed down, and how alarms go off in our heads even when we know that there’s nothing wrong. Stein offers an unsettling, even harrowing essay about our parents and the fears we inherit.

Our readers will find an engaging array of writings in the ‘Young and Beautiful’ issue of The Continental Literary Magazine. We have tried to get as many perspectives on the issues of youth and beauty as possible and also to show how these themes are perceived in Europe and the United States. In contrast to the themes in our previous issues, on these topics, there are not many significant differences between the two continents.

We all yearn for youth and crave beauty, whatever language we speak, wherever we come from, whomever we love. ¶

Nocturnal Predators

AUTHOR

/tɒmaːʃ

køt:ɛr/ Tamás KÖTTER

(1970, HUNGARY)

Tamás Kötter is a lawyer, businessman, and writer. He has published several collections of short stories (Rablóhalak, Dögkeselyűk, Nem kijárat, Férfiak fegyverben) and two novels (IKEA, Vasárnap; and most recently Vikingek) in Hungarian with Kalligram Press. The focus of his “capitalist realist” works is the middle class, the employees of multinational corporations, and the life of “robot prisoners in inhumane organizations”.

/tomɒs kuːpɾ/

Thomas COOPER (1971, UNITED STATES) TRANSLATOR

Thomas Cooper is a literary translator and scholar of translation theory and literary history. He has taught Hungarian literature at the University of North Carolina, and he served as Assistant Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He now teaches at the Károli Gáspár University in Budapest. He has translated works of literature by an array of authors, including Nobel Prize-winning writers Imre Kertész and Herta Müller.

Nocturnal Predators

Tamás Kötter

First, we work through a sexual problem rooted in childhood trauma. I play the uncle who allegedly molested a female member of our group when she was just a child. Ivett is somewhere in her forties, married, and works as an auditor for a telecommunications company. I know her type well, she’s always sniffing around for someone or something. She exudes a sour, old smell, which makes it a bit hard for me to identify with uncle Feri, the perpetrator. Ivett may have been beautiful when the event took place, of course, and now time has left her shriveled, the constant tension and anxiety of the world of multinational companies have ground her down, the need always to be on one’s feet. At the same time, I lament to myself, if as a child she were merely a miniature version of this withered old woman, uncle Feri must have been quite a pervert indeed, and I am not at all surprised that Ivett is still unable to reach orgasm, even after fifteen years of marriage and two children, with a decent husband at her side, at least that’s how she describes her accountant spouse, if perhaps in a somewhat muted voice.

To my great delight, in contrast with Ivett, Judit, the forty-something woman playing her in this scene, is a very shapely creature with a perfect hourglass figure. But still, I play the role of uncle Feri with some measure of restraint. I caress her hair and smell it, trying to wear something of a lecherous face, like Joe Biden does, who is suffering from dementia and, according to wagging tongues, other mental problems, when he’s around little girls. Ivett is quick to put her traumas into words: “he fondled my thighs and put his hands between my legs,” she says in a neutral, declarative tone worthy of the profession that has ruled her life. After Dr. Halmos, who is acting as a kind of director for our little impromptu performance, has given me a gentle nod of approval, I happily place my hand on Judit’s thigh. Muscular and taut, you can tell from the feel of her firm flesh, much

as you can tell from her whole deportment, that she places considerable importance on her appearance and her body. Which is, we have been given to know, the cause of her problems: her mother was young when she gave birth to her, so as a young woman, she had to watch this budding girl grow into a mature, sumptuous beauty who exuded the intoxicating scent of carnivorous plants (the mere touch of her skin makes me hard), and as so often happens, the mother began to look on her own flesh and blood as a rival. As Dr. Halmos explained on an earlier occasion dissecting Judit’s case – unlike men, who quickly settle the problem with a ritual symbolic murder sometimes even culminating in physical violence, women settle in for a long, cold war. But I don’t have time to dwell on Judit’s problem, because my hand is sliding almost automatically into her lap. I can feel the adrenaline throbbing through my body, and although I haven’t had a drop of alcohol, I shed my inhibitions as easily and quickly as I do on those evenings, the consequence of which I now must spend my Tuesday afternoons with these, for the most part, withered figures. Dr. Halmos says something, but I can’t hear him because I’m simply not present anymore. I have closed my eyes, but I don’t have to amble blindly in my secret labyrinth for long, the darkness which has descended on me is dispersed by the beams from the spotlights shining from all directions like light through a thousand keyholes, my brain is tense with music, my pulse has reached a steady thump, and I whisper, as if quoting some familiar song, “you’ve got one hell of a body,” and then the usual feeling comes. I have set out towards something that I know well, in the middle of which I stand alone, I and my desires, something that pulls me towards it like the scent of blood attracts sharks. I have no idea how much time has passed in this murky world when suddenly Dr. Halmos’ voice strikes me on another frequency which is almost earsplitting. “Thank you Gábor, that will be enough.”

INTERVIEW

“Talent the most democratic thing left in

the most in the

the country”

country”

/frɛn

Fran

(1950, UNITED STATES)

INTERVIEW WITH INTERVIEWED BY BALÁZS KERESZTES ON OCTOBER 10, 2022

most country”

Fran Lebowitz is an American writer and public speaker. She is known for her sardonic social commentary on American life as filtered through her New York City sensibilities and her association with many prominent figures of the 1970s and 1980s New York art scene, including Andy Warhol, Charles Mingus and Robert Mapplethorpe. Lebowitz gained fame for her books Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981), which were combined into The Fran Lebowitz Reader in 1994. She has been the subject of two projects directed by Martin Scorsese, the HBO documentary film Public Speaking (2010), and the Netflix docu-series Pretend It’s a City (2021).

Fran Lebowitz

Writer, public speaker, and social commentator, Fran Lebowitz has been an iconic presence in New York City since the ‘70s. She never shied away from formulating her opinions about city life, technology, or politics. And she has done it with unrivalled sardonic humor for decades.

Our current topic in this issue of the Continental is Young and Beautiful. What do these terms invoke in you?

I know this doesn’t seem true to people who are young, but it’s almost redundant: although not all young people are beautiful, all young people are more beautiful than they’re going to be when they’re old. When you get to be not young that’s the age when your friends start telling each other how great you look. When we really did look great, we never told each other. Now what we mean is you don’t look as bad as some other people do. No matter what you look like (and I know that all young people are not beautiful), you are at your best. You’re not going to look better and better the older and older you get. On the other hand, there is a great thing that happens in nature: just when you start to not look good, you also start not being able to see. This is a gift of nature.

Are you nostalgic about your youth?

For the last many years, kids (by which I mean people in their twenties) stop me on the street all the time and say, “Oh, I wish I lived in New York in the 70s. It seems like it was so much more fun.” And because I was asked it so often, I really thought about it. Was it more fun in the 70s? And I finally came to the conclusion, which is: “well, I was in my twenties in the 70s.” So if you’re asking me, is it more fun to be in your twenties than your seventies? A lot more. No matter when you’re in your twenties, that’s the most fun. Maybe it used to be more fun then, but you don’t have the choice. You get to be in your twenties once. Here’s what you should do in your twenties: have fun. Because life does not get more and more fun the older you get. I realized that people who are in their twenties now think that the world seems worse than what it was when I was in my 20s. Which is surprising to me because I don’t know what they’re comparing it to. There are a lot of problems in the world now that weren’t in the world then, but there’s never been a time in the world where it was problem free. But there is of course the Internet. Now people don’t just compare themselves to people they know, they compare themselves to everyone in the world, which is an absurd thing to do, so I would caution everyone against doing that. But of course no one listens to me.

“Talent is the most democratic thing left in the country”

Editor-in-Chief

Sándor Jászberényi

Editorial Team

Thomas Cooper Margit Garajszki Owen Good Balázs Keresztes

Guest Editor Márton Méhes

Copy Editor Michael Stein

Online Editor & Coordination Manager Eszter Jászberényi

Communications (PR & Marketing) Viktória Stift

Editorial Assistant Bence Horváth

Executive Director Dániel Levente Pál

Art Editor & Design Dániel Németh Lobov

Typefaces

Mohol by Ádám Katyi – hungarumlaut.com Latienne Pro by Mark Jamra for TypeCulture – typeculture.com

Cover page design Based on the photo Flamingo from the series Animeyed by Flóra Borsi floraborsi.com

Published by Petőfi Cultural Agency Nonprofit Ltd. Szilárd Csaba Demeter, Chairman of the Board HU-1117 Budapest, Hungary Garda utca 2.

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ISSN 2786-2844

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