Sunday Morning! “The Door” by Magda Szabó

Something to remember should you encounter an artist or writer or other creative individual who strikes you as prickly or arrogant: it’s already an act of egotism to build your life around making marks on page or canvas in the face of a society that sees such activities as worthless at best. They get defensive because they have heard some version of “why don’t you get a real job?” scores of times and, in many cases, they suspect there might be something to it. Living inside your head is “privileged” and selfish; normal people have to get up and go to work everyday.

This has been coming up for me as of late because I live with a writer and I frankly live like a writer. Our apartment is a labyrinthine jungle of books and papers and magazines and other fire-hazards in a haphazard jumble. No, we are not “hoarders”; they, at least, have an organizing principle: to never let anything go. Our living space seems more guided by short-term easily abandoned obsessions. Why do we hold onto some things and throw away other things? It’s a complete mystery.

So, my partner has suggested we hire an “organizer” to, well, put the place in order and a cleaner to come in once a month, something that feels to me like being put in a nursing home. I worked as a cleaner for seven years; why would I hire one? No, my own space was never organized in that time. I don’t “file”; I pile. I’ve always been disorganized. According to my parents, it was because I live in “my own little world.” But, certainly, I know where everything is. Just like when I talk- I know what I’m getting at!

And maybe it’s because I’ve worked as a cleaner in a university that I know something most of us prefer not to think about: they judge you. They always judge you. And no matter how “brilliant” others might find your work, they think of you as the slob who leaves piles of papers and books next to the bathtub. (Not that I do that, mind you.)*

Hungarian writer Magda Szabó

Being judged for the “uselessness” of her creative work was something the writer Magda Szabó knew about firsthand: the same day she won Hungary’s prestigious Baumgarten Prize for her books of verse, she was declared an “enemy of the people” by the ruling Communist Party and lost the award and her job. She was not allowed to publish from 1949 to 1956.

Something similar has happened to “Magda,” the main character of Szabó’s unnerving novel The Door: with her writing now permitted to appear in Hungary, following a ban, work is picking up and she and her intellectual husband have to hire a housekeeper. Or, more accurately, one appears and decides whether or not she wants to clean for them. Emerence is a local woman who lives alone in a home that no one ever enters and, with seemingly inhuman strength, attends to everyone in the town. She watches the children and cares for lost animals. She sweeps the streets and shovels the snow and devotes herself to everyone in the village. It’s not exactly out of blind love or devotion to others. She certainly judges them. In most cases, fairly harshly.

Gradually, the story comes to center on the home and the newfound order there. This is our narrator’s entire world and where she does her work. In some way, it seems to be the same for Emerence. The narrator and her husband find the housekeeper frustrating and irrational and she finds them selfish and flighty. She has a history of her own with the men who live inside ideas, be they Nazis or Communists or Christians, and is now a committed anti-intellectual. The only work she respects is physical labor. Meanwhile, her employers “work” by staring out the window at trees.

For her part, Magda tries to convince herself for defensive reasons that the cleaner’s mysterious closed home is filled with goods stolen from her former Jewish employers- that, at least, would be something reprehensible by which she might condemn Emerence. No such luck; the woman seems to live by an ethical code prior and superior to written texts. She doesn’t need other people; they need her.

Before long, though, none of them can live without each other. Emerence loves her employers, although she doesn’t really care for most aspects of their life. They depend heavily on her and the narrator in turn pities the older woman, while also coming to feel that she’s failed her. We suspect the woman has some tremendous reserves of ability that have been thwarted in the course of her life. She seems supernatural. And then, she doesn’t.

While the events in the story are mostly realistic, it still feels like a parable. The housecleaner is an atheist who talks like a Biblical prophet. Is Emerence the voice of the Old Hungary? Does she embody Szabó’s Calvinist beliefs? Is she godlike? We know that Emerence loves animals and feels deep disappointment around people. We also learn she is, herself, a deeply frail human, whose strength is exaggerated by the narrator; is she, therefore, a mother figure?

Many readers were troubled by the book, while agreeing that it’s a story you can’t quite let go of after reading. I think it’s partly because Emerence loves and persecutes the narrator in equal measures, and, in both cases, we suspect she’s right. When our heroine finally and tragically fails the old woman, it feels as if she’s failed all of humanity. Her ambition comes to seem demented and perverse. But what else can she do? We can’t live our lives in utter service to other people; but, in the end, that’s all we’ll be remembered for. If this is a parable, I suspect Emerence is the narrator’s own guilty conscience. But, again, what else can she do? What can any of us do?

And so, what are YOU reading, writing, pondering, playing, watching, or judging this weekend?

* (I do that.)