Mészáros Tibor (szerk.): Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai. Patterns from a globetrotting Hungarian's life (Budapest, 2004)

Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai

country and describes the first painful period of emigration, that feverish silence in which he first posed the terrible question: "Do I still speak Hungarian?" He corresponded with family members who had remained at home. His mother and his younger brother Gábor wanted to Know how he was and wrote about what was happening at home. Gábor surprised him by enclosing with a letter the note written in 1900 on which his father had informed his close relatives of "My son Sándor's" birth.

In 1959 he undertook a long journey on the West Coast of the United States. He visited San Francisco and San Diego, where he would later settle permanently in 1980. In 1960 a Washington house published his verse drama The Gentleman from Venice, in which he reworked the story of Casanova. There were no new books for years. He visited France and Italy, but made reference to them only in brief diary notes.

In 1965 he self-published The Blood of San Gennaro, set in Naples and its surroundings. It is said of the novel's hero that he wants to change the world. There are many references to the writer himself in the novel, such as the torn-off page from the hero's diary on which the date 11 April 1948 appears: the year of his emigration and the date of his birth. According to the work he is now oblivious to miracles. "The world can only be changed by sacrifice." At the end of this year he does what can only be understood in the light of what we have just read. He takes the oath, he becomes a Hungarian-American citizen.

He continued to work for Radio Free Europe, reading his writings from the New York studio. He reported on Hemmingway's The Old Man and the Sea almost immediately after its publication.

At the end of 1967 they returned to Europe, once again to the Naples area, this time to Salerno, where Lola's uncle had a flat which he had left to them. The closeness of the sea (in which he bathed almost every day) meant finding home and conviction for

the writer. "A fifteen-year coating of fur covers everything 'personal'...Not just the objects, but within us as well, the person whom we once were," he writes in his Diaries 1958-1967, which, published in 1968, are about his "change of homeland".

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