The Diary of Geza Csath Read Free

success for pleasure, and then willingly faces death when the pleasure is over. No, Csath is more honest than that. He shows that addiction is much worse, much less “literary” (despite making for great literature). This is addiction: Csath pays for decreasing pleasure at increasing cost, and is forced with each transaction to admit that the payoff is not worth the price, before he is allowed to reach for his feeble reward. He descends against his will, knowing that the price is too high, and that his dominating mistress is cruel in her implacable selectivity, for she takes precisely what her victim prizes most, in increasing order of value. “The usurious toll it collects in exchange for this simple trick on human misery,” he writes, in one sentence overthrowing the fantasy of 1909 with the reality of 1913. And as she peels away her next slice of the victim’s life, her lover squeals that he doesn’t want to play anymore, that he wants to go back to a time before he knew her. She does not listen; she proceeds to take what she wishes.
    In return, she still grants him her occasional favors, in decreasing intensity, until he is running after her, giving up everything, crying as he does so, and receiving nothing at all in return, but crumbling teeth and hellish insomnia and ceaseless vomiting. Casanova has become a pathetic boy in hopeless love. “I am so revolting, weak, and pitiful that I must genuinely wonder at Olga, that she still loves me…I cannot perceive the smell of my poorly wiped ass or my decayed mouth.” Here, then, is Opium ’s promised reward for bold transgression, what awaits the “real human being” who trades bourgeois concerns for twenty million years.
    By its horrifying last entry the diary has proven itself again to be potent literature, but this time didactic literature. Csath was opium’s lover and he was her slave, and he is one of the rare men eloquent enough to express the elusive ecstasy felt by the lover and the inescapable nightmare lived by the slave. In that dual eloquence he stands as a very human lesson, proof that the suffering of the latter far outweighed the pleasures of the former.
Arthur Phillips Paris, 2003
T H E D I A R Y O F G E Z A C S A T H
N O T E S O N T H E S U M M E R O F 1 9 1 2
    A terrible and depressing thought: I no longer have any inclination to write. Since I began to work penetratingly with analysis and to examine my unconscious spiritual life in all its facets, I have no more need to write. Yet analysis only brings suffering, bitter recognition, and disappointment, while writing brings joy and sustenance. But still I can’t! I write with difficulty, anxiously. The thought is killed in the bud by criticism. And I can’t put my innermost, unsettled affairs onto paper. I am inhibited by the feeling that others can read between the lines as clearly as I – the psychoanalyst
– can read into the writing of other authors. Nevertheless, with iron will, I force myself to write. I must write. Even if writing will never be my life’s work again, at least it should be fun. I must play, even if I can’t enjoy myself, because it’s the only chance I have of ever making a lot of money.
    So, the summer of 1912! Dezso 1 and I made the trip together. The boy came back from Szabadka 2 very thin and pale. He had a cough. I worried. He slept badly. It brought to mind nights we had spent together long ago when he was in his second year of pharmaceutical studies; then I slept poorly and disturbed him.
A beautiful summer morning dawned on Wednesday, 29 May. We took care of the luggage, washed quickly,
     
1. Dezso Brenner, Csath’s brother 2. Subotica
     
     
    Csath as a child in Szabadka, early 1890’s (bottom row center, in white), next to him, brother Dezso
    and within half an hour we were stocked with newspapers and having breakfast at Keleti palyadudvar 3 . Altogether we had perhaps 300 crowns left of the 1,500 I had withdrawn for the spa venture; the rest had been