Alfred Polgar is a name that rings no chimes in the good old Anglosphere. His great fan, Clive James, the Australian essayist, tried to remedy that situation in his mini-encyclopedia, Cultural Amnesia; however, the effect of his article on Polgar is to make him seem untranslateable and forever in the corner pocket of the Habsburg Empire freaks out there. Unfair!
From the classic New Yorker talk of the town piece to Nicholson Baker, miniaturism has had an honourable place in English language lit. Polgar has a distinct family resemblance. His great period was in the interwar era – which, for German writers, ended in Germany in 1933, and in Austria a little later. Polgar was resolutely modern, a cinephile, a presence at the great modernist theatre events, Piscator and such. He was, ultimately, a reviewer – except what he reviewed was often a moment of streetlife, a smell from his childhood.
The quintessence of his art is in a little piece entitled “Orange Peel”. Here he reviews the reaction of a legless beggar to a man throwing away an orange peel. That’s the show, people. He explores the beggar’s motives for yelling at the man for throwing away the orange peel. Then he reviews his own motives for writing about it. Then he puts in doubt his own witnessing, as the evening was approaching, the light wasn’t right, and perhaps the beggar wasn’t legless after all.
“But let’s leave open the question of why the beggar’s soul slipped on the orange peel. Let us leave the small event, around which bloom psychological, social, ethical and cosmic perspectives, uninterpreted. Since, even so, the same circumstances broaden out and occur in heaven and on earth and between the two, we can surely authorize the question why just this story of the orange peel had to be written. Oh, whatever stuff must be written! My literary credo is that one should not write anything which a person cannot read with interest and implication an hour before her death. But that leaves not much other literature than the Bible and the stock market report (Kurszettel).”
Between God and the devil, the bible and the market: now that is an apocalyptic place for a minimalist writer! I love it.
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