European Document/King Kadar

...A retreat towards Marxist orthodoxy is neither feasible nor necessary from anyone's point of view, including that of the Soviets, as Hungary's loyalty to the Warsaw Pact in the realm of security and foreign policy is unquestioned...

...He even prepared a cover illustration, featuring a seahorse with a feedbag...

...If writing is a mat-ter of attaining a good ear more than anything else, and White apparently gave this credence, a textbook should be the last book read by students...

...Indeed, it can be asked whether the master stylist ever wrote a vigorous sentence...

...In the West, the voting was not taken seriously...

...Doctorow is a great novelist and Garrison Keillor a great wit...

...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986...

...The cars on the street tell the story...

...Few political Robert D. Kaplan is an Athens-based corespondent for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and ABC Radio News...

...Kadar has proved an exemplary front man for an Asiatic imperial power in the heart of Europe...

...Perhaps, in order to steady Soviet fears at these and other developments,the official press has been striking a harder line against the United States, and the party has announced its intention to reinforce ideology in the schools through its Agitation and Propaganda section...

...Not even the dissidents talked cynically about the elections...

...White gave the professors a sword...

...0 : EUROPEAN DOCUMENT In power twenty-nine years, 73-yearold Janos Kadar has ruled Hungary longer than anyone since Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, and longer than any Hungarian since fifteenth-century King Matthias, whose reign was synonymous with the golden age of medieval Hungary...

...El...

...Along with the Dacias, Ladas, and Trabants, there are Mazdas, Volkswagens, and BMWs...

...He claimed no more, the same way that Red Smith claimed that he was no more than a reporter and sportswriter...

...Entrepreneurs and those, like doctors, with marketable skills can live the good life in Kadar's Hungary: a Western-manufactured car, a villa on the Buda side of the Danube, and a weekend house on Lake Balaton...

...But he did his worst damage with The Elements of Style, which he up-dated from his college professor Will Strunk's original text of helpful hints for writers...

...The values are now the same as in America...

...For this assumption to hold true, the regime must keep delivering up THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 29 more to the population...

...Style aside, there is the White of the bully pulpit...

...In fact, the Westway was probably too good for to-day's New York...

...But as the facade gets taller, it becomes ever more fragile...

...acts in postwar Europe have been as impressive...

...Had he left this infernal little book alone, Lord knows how many people able to write in the English language we might have today...

...Perhaps it was the fault of the obituary writer...

...The city's magnificent Catskill Water Aqueduct, Central Park, Riverside Park—all were designed by people willing to think big...

...Having put power in the hands of middle-of-the-mad Communists like himself, Kadar was able, beginning in 1968, to embark on a historic compromise with his fellow Hungarians...

...Instead of encouraging trial and error and rewriting, The Elements of Style has been used by at least a genera-tion of academics on their more idiosyncratic stylists the same way their forebears used to use rulers on those fractious students who insisted on writing left-handed...

...But in Hungary, pressure on the leadership is far less concentrated, since everybody is aware that the wealthy are not necessarily the powerful: Kadar and the members of his politburo live frugal lives compared to those of local entrepreneurs and Communist leaders in neighboring countries...

...Many, especiallyurban dwellers on fixed incomes, live a dreary existence on the borderline of poverty...

...He was, it seems, a civilized man, but his ideas were in the main embarrassments: Typical of these were his wish for a world federal government and his editorials expressing fear instead of understanding of the nuclear age...

...On the other hand, the mass of largely untalented proletariat—Kadar's real constituency—is not benefiting from the cornucopia...

...As Herbert Mitgang wrote in the New York Times, "his opponents often succumbed to the force of his purity," often in the name of freedom of the press and individualliberty...

...White was accomplished, but even the seemingly legitimate claims his admirers make for him now are suspect when they are not farfetched...

...He did all kinds of general editorial work, wrote short stories, fillers, humorous sketches, obituaries, often whimsical poetry, and the front-of-the-book features, "'Talk of the Town" and "Notes and Comment...

...Everyone is talking about making money," said the dissident author and sociologist, George Konrad...

...Weaned on a growth economy in the 1970s, they now face a scarcity of good jobs and a wait for an apartment which is longer than ever...

...When city and state officials introduced such a new plan in October, Benstock and the Sierra Club immediately announced their opposition...

...Remember the Great White, if you must, as a journalist who got on the firing line every day, and did his part...

...It's also revealing that Westway failed despite support from the city's three major newspapers as well as from former Governor Hugh Carey, Governor Mario Cuomo, Mayor Ed Koch, and most other important elected officials...

...But Kadar proved more cunning than Husak by half...

...He himself con-ceded, in a foreword to an edition of his collected essays in 1977, that "the essayist . . . must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen" in the world of letters...

...The party congress last March further consolidated the power of the country's economic czar, Ferenc Havasi, a man in his fifties dedicated, like Kadar, to further decentralization of the economy, a process which in Communist systems passes for reform...

...But the subways do need money and, if worse came to worst, a modest park-and-boulevard would probably do...

...The issue, rather, is whether the truce between ruler and ruled in this Central European nation of 10.7 million can long survive Kadar: His reformist policies have not so much improved the system's performance, as they have sharpened its contradictions...

...Though Hungarian society may now be in turmoil, Kadar's regime has by no means been discredited...

...After all, the dissidents serve a useful function: They are absolutely no threat to Kadar's regime, while their relatively unfettered existence secures his popularity in the West...

...The details of the succession are no longer even crucial...

...With such a difference between rich and poor, it is no wonder that property crime is growing at the rate of six percent a year...

...They will fight anything more than the construction of a few new traffic lights along Manhattan's Lower West Side...

...White resurrected it in 1959, how-ever, and it has been a nuisance ever since...

...This disillusionment has given rise to an increasingly autonomous trade union movement...

...One gang of burglars, according to a local police colonel, chose its victims by leafing through the Budapest phone book, which lists occupations as well as addresses...

...In truth, Westway was probably overdesigned—which is what late in the game earned it the opposition of con-servative groups in Washington, such as the National Taxpayers Union and Pat Robertson's "700 Club...

...As Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote, "Graveyard, or memorial, prose is among the least edifying and least pleasing forms of human composition...

...He was occasionally a pest, but he did it passably well...

...Perhaps only the misuse of it has turned it into a bane, some may say...

...It is a losing battle, though: Western-style consumerism will always demand more than what a Marxist economy, no mat-ter how innovative, can offer...

...Since East European producers cannot meet Hungary's demand for private autos, the regime has been importing cars from the West at an increasing rate, and has reduced the tax on them from 100 percent to 40 percent to make them more affordable...

...Such was indeed the case with White A self-effacing sort, he would hardly have stood for some of the garlands heaped upon him...

...He joined the New Yorker magazine in 1926, one year after its founding by Harold Ross, and worked almost continually for it, in one capacity or another, until his death...

...Three decades of Kadarism have seeped down into all levels of the bureaucracy...

...If his essays are paradigms of decency and politeness, they can also be perfectly precious and perfectly dull...

...As a Hungarian journalist observed, "Our consumption is modern, our production is not...

...More than one candidate was allowed to stand for each seat...

...No, not at all...

...Disillusionment is increasing, especially among the young...

...Of late, no crackdowns have been reported...

...Kadar, like Gustav Husak in Czechoslovakia, came to power :'.s a Soviet quisling and betrayer of a popular uprising...

...Remember that Matthias's successors turned out to be short-lived...

...He could have been a force for good...

...As in Poland, union wrath is directed upward...

...Worst of all, perhaps, the book has in-directly caused any number of journalists and word-watchers to write their own fussy columns on the craft, profession, or art of writing...

...How to remember E.B...

...He calls the process "the embourgeoisement of Hungary under the Communists...

...Nowhere does repression appear asrestrained and as sophisticated as in Hungary...

...Joe Mysak is assistant managing editor of the daily Bond Buyer...

...But the reforms have left the country virtually unprotected against an invasion of Western influence—the consumer culture is more developed in Hungary than anywhere else in Eastern Europe...

...The only politburo member with a hardline reputation is Karoly Grosz, and this label could be in doubt, as Grosz has recently been given to making reformist-sounding speeches...

...EMINENTOES THE GREAT WHITE by Joe Mysak When E.B...

...Matthias was a romantic figure of whom legends were told...

...At the local level, the elections served to rid many towns of old party hacks and replace them with younger, more popular men...

...The puffs were predictable, and caused a certain unease, coming as they did from the same kinds of experts who believe E.L...

...Many have become opposed to further reforms, on the grounds that the measures only seem to benefit the class of "new rich...

...Such an approach dovetails with a recent party decision to channel funds away from investment and into consumption...

...True, the dissidents failed to elect candidates, but the party had to pack the caucuses in order to win...

...None of them could be built today...

...The June elections for parliament and local councils were a case in point...

...However, by selling out not only to the Russians, but to his own countrymen as well, he has won a measure of legitimacy which should be the envy of every other East Bloc leader, past and present...

...In his latter days—and even he said once that it seemed he had been born old—he played the role of the crusty senior citizen, and in his last battle took on Xerox Corporation for "sponsoring" an article in Esquire by Harrison Salisbury...

...Kadar: the devious functionary, who knew just how far the rules could be stretched without alarming the boss in Moscow...

...New York was built by people with imagination...

...Even at its angriest, White's writing rarely bristled, but...

...Because he wrote editorials, White said, he kept his politicking to the confines of a voting booth...

...At one nominating convention, dissident Laszlo Rajk forced Foreign Minister Peter Varkonyi into a public debate...

...The golden age of Marxist Hungary may be about to pass...

...Not in the words of the memorialists, or the masters of graveyard prose, or the ridiculous geese who write for the newsmagazines with their weekly manias...

...While in Poland the plot reads like a potboiler, in Hungary it is more like a nineteenth-century period novel...

...White was part of the New Yorker during its glory days, and he was also part of it in its decline...

...The drama between ruler and ruled in Eastern Europe is being played out in its subtlest form here...

...merely stiffened with resolve...

...Governor Cuomo once said that the Westway would be "this generation's contribution to New York City'sfuture" In a perverse way, he was probably right...

...But in Hungary, it was seen as a real, evolutionary step...

...Kadar unlike his Czechoslovakian counterpart, gradually removed his rivals on both sides of the divide: Stalinist ideologues as well as 1956-era revisionists...

...Kadar is a working man of little formal education—deficient of charm or charisma—who has always taken the path of least resistance...

...White hardly needs introduction...

...The politburo has been stacked with Kadar's ideological clones...

...White...

...The first few years.of his reign were devoted to the physical elimination or imprisonment of those involved in the 1956 revolution...

...It's a step in the right direction when the standards of Chicago replace those of Moscow," remarked a Western diplomat...

...Activating production means providing talented people with incentive, so the regime has more and more been sanctioning inequality in every sphere...

...The basis of Kadar's legitimacy is still the widespread knowledge that—within the confines of Soviet imperialism—he provides the best available option...

...For years, he wrote the New Yorker's editorials...

...There is a prevailing flavor of syrupy insincerity, an affectation of wholehearted truth-fulness, amounting to the worst kind of deception, which sickens as it surfeits...

...It was meant to be a text-book...

...This may be fine for memoirs or obituaries, but it is hardly suitable for all subjects...

...The city's politics is now dominated by people with twisted ambitions and small minds...

...The official attitude toward the dissidents keeps shifting...

...White died last October at the age of 86, he was eulogized as a master essayist and stylist, a "writer's writer," and "one of the nation's most precious literary resources...

...And it is unlikely that White will be remembered as more by history...

...His place is a secure footnote in American writing...

...He was sincere, and well-meaning, and compassionate, and frequently a booby...

...While the new parliament has no real power, its new-found legitimacy, in the eyes of the people, could eventually turn it into a pressure group much like the unions...

...As any banker will tell you, market-oriented reforms have not improved Hungary's productive capacity as much as was originally thought...

...But New York's environmentalists won't settle even for this...

...It is hard to imagine a greater public amenity than a new "Central Park" around which to reconstruct Manhattan's Lower West Side...

...He has been held up as the epitome: of the much-vaunted New Yorker style, and he must be held at least in part responsible for what the magazine became by the early 1960s—in the words of Tom Wolfe, "dull, lifeless, grossly overedited, over-rated," its sentences clogged with "amplifications, qualifications, modifications, and specifications...

...The combination is not uncommon...

...These groups helped defeat a last-ditch effort to save the project in Congress...

...Another comer is Kadar protege Laszlo Marothy, a vice premier in his forties...

...The famed White style was suffused with a kind of effortless melancholy and reverie...