Volume 30, Number 10 · June 16, 1983
Little Emma A Story by Géza Csáth
By Geza Csath
NOTE: In 1919, only months after escaping from an insane asylum, Géza Csáth had swallowed poison and died. He was thirty-one. Before succumbing to insanity and suicide, Csáth had been a student at Budapest Medical School, a music critic writing on Bartók and Kodály, a neurologist at a prestigious Budapest research clinic, a country doctor, and a soldier in World War I. Ten years before his death he'd begun smoking opium, and within a year was an addict injecting morphine and Pantopon. 'Immeasurably loathsome and despicable' is how his diary describes the junky existence: '...in my weak and forever veiled voice, my steady staring in the mirror, my cynical and shrunken penis, my drawn face, my witless conversation, my impotent, lazy life, my suspicious behavior, my insolence with which I lengthily disappear into the WC, my stupidity.... I also think that I stink, because with my sense of smell impaired, I can no longer smell the stench of my poorly wiped asshole or the mouth odor caused by my rotting teeth.'
Feature, 3317 words
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