As I left Leni’s yesterday evening, I felt that if I committed suicide that very night I would do it contentedly, almost with good humor.
I shall never be able to explain to her how much she means, or could mean, to me. Nor am I myself sure whether I love her with a grand amour or with the last of my vital resistance.
Why does it trouble me to think that she is leaving Bucharest tomorrow? Or why does it make me so happy to have sent her two lilac branches without any message?
She may not even realize who sent them; she may not even look at them—and that would be all the better.
A wonderful day and an overwhelmingly beautiful evening. A blue sky “rustling profusely” with stars, as I said to Emil Gulian last summer on a night such as this.
But it was not like this. . . . I feel that spring has broken out. I can feel it in many things, but above all in my pressing need to be happy.
And I have to do an article for Fundaţii,1 just now when all I really want is to love a woman, whoever it may be—Leni, Maryse, Jeni, or none of them, a stranger, no matter who.
I came home alone and—why, I don’t know—our Doggy disturbed me for the first time. There was something human in the way he jumped at me, in his lively yet melancholic outburst. Without being literary—I would even feel ashamed to be asked about this—I felt that he wants to talk to me and suffers for not being able to.
Maybe I’ll go to Breaza for a few days.
I do not want to write about any of the details of my quarrel with Vremea. Some are comical, others upsetting.
I am told that Mircea was “disgusted” when he read my Rampa article in the presence of Donescu. He could find no excuse for me and agreed on every point with my “opponent.”
I don’t want to believe it, nor do I want to ask any more questions. But if even that is possible! . . .
I visited Devechi, whom I had not seen since Christmas.
We left together, and since his car was being repaired I persuaded him to get on a No. 31 bus with me.
Inside the bus, which had too many people on board, he looked dejected and ill at ease. . . . I felt the need to apologize.
“After all,” I said, “for you it’s an experience of a lifetime to get on a bus.”
Yesterday there was a letter from Leni. Loving, cheerful, without any psychological complications. A lovely girl!
Evening at the Nenişors, with Maryse staging a hysterical scene. Crying, laughing and, when I left, forbidding me to say good night. This spring is making all of us a little dizzy.
Tuesday, at the Dalles Hall, Nae’s lecture on Calvin. Fine, sober, without any posturing—and with only a few highly vague political allusions. A Nae from the good old times.
Lunch at the Corso with Camil, who had rung for us to revise his Teze şi antiteze [Theses and Antitheses] together. Before publishing it, he has a host of doubts and misgivings.
An amusing introduction, in which he declared his admiration for me.
In Romanian literature, he said, there are only three books whose sentiments add up to something profound: De două mii de ani, Patul lui Procust, and Ultima noapte.2
I resolutely freed myself from the eulogy.
“No, Camil, let’s drop that. We can talk about Patul lui Procust, but leave my books out of it.”
That shallow and unchanging tactic of ever-ready admiration I cannot but find somewhat endearing.
But I remain firm in my old affection for him. His little “quirks” always amuse me, never make me indignant. And he is certainly a remarkable fellow. I have been rereading some of his articles from 1922 and 1924. Their precision, tone, and style simply take your breath away.
I didn’t go to Nae’s class yesterday. It has started to bore me. The last few lectures have been repeats of last year’s, rather irritating because of their facile politics.
Last Sunday at the Nenişors, Tudor Vianu took Nae apart for a quarter of hour with extreme violence (though not of vocabulary). In his view, Nae is not at all original: he is a representative of Spengler and some other present-day Germans, and uses them at opportune moments without indicating his sources.
Maybe. I don’t know. But there is something demonic in Nae—and I can’t believe that that man can be reduced to nothing by academic criticism.
I am vegetating, just vegetating.
Yesterday evening I dined at Lilly’s with the whole of our group. Camil, in conversation with Mircea and myself, said in one of those displays of courageous sincerity which suit him so well—as if he had to do violence to his modesty by making it bow to the facts:
“After all, old chap, let’s admit that there are only three novelists: yourself, Mircea, and I.”
Ineffable Camil. If someone else had been there with us—who shall we say, Sergiu Dan?—he would surely have said that “after all, old chap, there are only four novelists.”
I saw Leni at the theatre, where she had a matinee.
“I’ve decided not to flirt with you any more,” she said.
I objected. She doesn’t understand anything and—quite rightly—expects this overlong game to come to an end. But for me there can be only one ending.
Pascal Alexandra’s suicide has been haunting me ever since I heard of it. I remember that they used to call him “girlie” at school. It is true that his whole being had something feminine, pallid, delicate. I think that all the way through school—and that means especially in the upper grades— I didn’t exchange so much as three words with him. He was anti-Semitic, like all of them. But then I had a kind of sympathy for the tenderness that I felt to be within him, and for the melancholy that made him end up beneath the wheels of a train.
Marioara Ventura, whom I met last week at a lunch at the French Institute, said to me:
“I’ve been reading you and found you interesting. But I didn’t know you were twenty-five years old.”
“Twenty-six, madam,” I corrected her.
Unfortunately, despite an appearance that is still sometimes youthful, I am growing older all the time.
I went to the theatre, because Leni—who had not seen her company’s new production—rang and asked me to go with her.
She arrived five minutes after the curtain, and during each interval slipped away to make a phone call.
I would be a complete blockhead if I imagined she does not have a thousand lovers. But I have no doubt that, had I helped her to love me, she would have loved me in her way. I must admit that, given how confusing and cryptic is the game I have been playing, she has always shown an astonishing tact and assurance. I have only to recall how deplorably Lilly behaved in similar situations.
I should not be angry about this evening. It justifies me in lying low for ten days—which is a perfect step toward breaking up—though after the performance we went out to a tavern with Jenica Cruţescu, where Leni told us a lot of distressing things about her setup with Froda. I have the feeling she would gladly be out of it—and I shudder to think how happy something like that would make me.
But there is no point, and I should get used to drawing a line under my life’s calculations.
I shall try to write the play about which I have been thinking for some time.3 I saw the first act (even lines of dialogue) with amazing precision while I was at this evening’s performance at the Regina Maria. With my memories of the Wagner villa plus some themes taken over from Renée, Marthe, Odette,4 I could develop something really quite refined. I shall give it a try—and if I weren’t tired, if I didn’t have so many things to do tomorrow, I think I’d start on the first act right now, even though it is past one in the morning.
Nae’s class yesterday was hard to take. Leftovers from last year’s course, leftovers of articles, leftovers of chitchat—plus a few crude jokes to arouse the sympathy of an audience that was becoming inattentive. How is it possible?
Half an hour later
I didn’t go to sleep after that. I wanted to put on paper a few thoughts I have had about the play, so that I don’t forget them. In fact, I woke up writing the scenario for the whole play. I am quite simply delighted with it. The idea seems excellent to me, and whereas half an hour ago I could see only the first act, now I have all three in outline. Perhaps it is a passing exultation, but right now I feel I have come up with something really first class. Let’s hope it works out.
It was hard getting to sleep last night. I was in a state of excitement such as I have not known for a long time. (Maybe the last time was in Paris in September 1930, when I was writing the “Buţă” chapter5 that evening in the hotel on the Rue de Rennes. Or maybe that Sunday morning in Brăila in the spring of 1934, when I was writing the Drontu-Marjorie episode.6
Last night I saw the premiere, the theatre, the performance—I was giving out the tickets. (A box for Roman,7 a box for Nae. I was wondering whether to give Jeni tickets for the premiere, and how, what kind of tickets, etc., etc. Good Lord, how childish I can be!)
If I had had a phone, I might have called Leni there and then— though it was three in the morning—to tell her about it and ask her advice.
This morning I woke up in a more reasonable frame of mind. I do think the outline for the play is good. Today I found a mass of fresh details for Act Two. The main thing now is to work out the scenario in as much detail as possible. Then we shall see. But I have confidence in myself— which doesn’t happen too often.
I can see Iancovescu being very good in the man’s role. Leni ought to act the woman. In fact she is Leni, everything I expected of her, everything she could be, everything she in a sense is.
If worse comes to worst, and only if she turns it down, the only one to whom I could give the part would be Marietta.8 She would give it less intensity but perhaps more poetry and an edge of melancholy.
Again, let’s hope it works out. I’d be happy if I could draw out all the reserves of emotion, poetry, and grace concealed in my theme.
I am not feeling deflated, but the initial fever has passed. On Saturday, and even yesterday, I felt it was something I could finish in a couple of weeks. I think I was mistaken. I may need as much as a few months. I’d be happy to have it ready by September so that I can have it performed then.
I have started writing. Yesterday I sketched out the stage setting, and today I even composed the first scene. I am happy with it. True, it is rather short. I shall probably find it difficult to group several characters and to make them move together on stage at the same time.
I don’t know what will come of it, but I have to give it a try. It interests me especially from the point of view of literary technique. I realize that I have come up with a theatrical subject, which would not lend itself to a novel, short story, or anything else. Before now I didn’t know what it meant to see a story theatrically. The process of gestation is completely different from that of a novel.
The lure of life behind the scenes, of the auditorium, the publicity posters—all this I find dizzying. There’s a bit of the play-actor in me.
And then there is the emotion of writing for Leni! The idea that she will live things thought up by me, speak words written by me! How many times I shall have my revenge on her!
On Friday evening I heard the St. John Passion at the Ateneu,9 and this morning the Matthew Passion. I found in it a lot that had remained in my memory since last year, but I also discovered many new things. I felt overwhelmed. I really had the physical sense of being beneath a canopy of sounds. It was a feeling of monumentality, which for perhaps the first time made the term “sonorous architecture” seem more than an empty expression. And how many sweet passages, how many graceful moments!
At the exit, Nae—who had also been to both concerts (what a pensive lion’s head he had during the performance!)—called out to me from his new car, a million-lei1 Mercedes-Benz, and invited me to eat at his place. I had lunch with him and his son, Răzvan, and we went on talking for a couple of hours.
I don’t feel like it now, but I ought to write down everything he said in answer to my questions about his course. His logical armor has a thousand chinks. And it is too easy to shrug your shoulders when the questioning becomes more focused and requires you to say yes or no.
“You don’t understand,” he told me. “My theory of collectives is an escape from solitude, a tragic attempt to break out of loneliness.”
Yes, I do understand. But then let him stop speaking of the absolute rights of the collective and insist on the absolute importance of the individual.
I also wonder whether this sense of tragedy is not a little suspect, since it comes down to various theories in justification of the metaphysical value of the term “Captain” and its superiority to the terms “Duce” or “Führer.”
Doesn’t Nae Ionescu have a sense of humor? How can he take jokes like that seriously?
Yesterday evening, nearly six hours of music. I started at a quarter to nine with the St. John Passion from Budapest—but it was hard listening to it, because my radio suddenly went crazy. Then I continued at 11:30 with Radio Stuttgart, listening to a Handel overture (the Theodora,) a Locatelli symphony, Bach’s First Brandenburg Concerto and his Double Violin Concerto in D Minor, a Hebbel song with music by Schumann for choir and orchestra (very beautiful!), and the first part of Schubert’s Third Symphony. Next, at one o’clock also from Stuttgart, and continuing until 2:30, the St. Matthew Passion. I didn’t hear it through to the end because I switched it off after “Barabam” Ever greater joy listening to it, with ever more nuances.
Today I am off to Sinaia with Carol2 and Camil—hoping to stop at Breaza on the way back and remain there until Low Sunday. I should like to be able to work. If I returned with Act One at least! See how modest I am?
I have been here since yesterday evening. The car journey was nice. Patches of mauve, green, and grey. Restful.
Everything snobbish in me—a liking for comfort and a little posturing—was flattered by the hotel’s almost sumptuous decor. But depressing society: whores (Lulu Nicolau, Eugenia Zaharia), journalists (Horia, Ring), gigolos (Polizu), old hags, club gamblers. Yesterday I lost two hundred lei at roulette as soon as I entered the casino. I promise to give it a wide berth—out of disgust more than prudence.
Will I be able to write? I don’t know. Maybe at Breaza, where I shall stop from tomorrow evening onward.
Yesterday in Bucharest I saw something that shook me, because I should never have been able to imagine all its thorny complexities. I had stopped with Camil on the Şosea, where work was under way for the Month of Bucharest festivities. Some trees were being transplanted there, and at that very moment they were trying to plant a pine that had been brought from somewhere or other. Two things struck me. The first was the huge piece of earth that had been torn up together with the tree. Not torn up, strictly speaking. A cylinder had been dug around it, a kind of bowl measuring, say, two cubic meters, which encircled it like a barrel. This bowl had to fit into a dug-out area of the same size as itself. But what surprised me even more were the people exerting themselves to hoist the tree. I counted more than fifty of them. What a will to live—indifferent, powerful, wordless, motionless—there was in that tree, which appeared huge among the people bustling around it.
I’d have been happy with my birthday yesterday if it hadn’t ended so badly at the casino. I had to stay there until 2:30 in the morning because Carol was losing too much and I couldn’t leave him.
Otherwise a nice day. I managed to regain my vision of the play (I mean, I could see it again) and to get myself back into the action. I also started to write the last scene of the first act—Valeriu and Leni. I fear that I’ve lost touch with it again. I’ll try to write it in Breaza; I leave for there at one o’clock.
Later (walking in the park at eight on a splendid evening, beneath a translucent blue sky and stars with a youthful twinkle), I saw quite clearly the shape of a long piece on Jules Renard to be written after I finish his Journal. The chapter titles: Jules Renard “anecdotier,” J.R. average Frenchman, J.R. en famille with parents, children, wife, J.R. the radical, etc.
In another connection, I have decided—once and for all, I think— on the material for the first volume of “The Romanian Novel.” There will be six chapters: Rebreanu, Sadoveanu, H. P. Bengescu, Camil, Cezar Petrescu, Ionel Teodoreanu. I have some doubts about Aderca: I think I’ll keep him for the second volume, but I won’t make a final decision until I reread him. I can see quite well the preface to the first volume, where I shall explain the plan of the whole series and justify the absence of prewar literature. I want to write the book over the summer so that it comes out by Christmas.
But my present concern is still with the play. There is no doubt that I shall write it. The experiment has to be made. More than that, I don’t know—either how it will turn out, or what its fate will be.
A conversation this morning in the park between two children aged ten to eleven, in the first classes of secondary school. One in the uniform of the military school, the other with socks, short trousers, jacket, and tie, dressed in the French style as if, with his fair hair and complexion, he was a little boy in the Jardin Luxembourg.
The Soldier: Do you wear the swastika at school?
The Other: What’s that?
S: That sign, you know. . .
O: No, I don’t.
S: We wear it.
They moved off and then, after a few minutes, returned. The conversation continued. I heard the fair-haired boy explaining to the soldier:
“Religion is separate from the state. The state and religion have nothing in common—it’s been like that for a few hundred years. You know, they don’t even teach religion in school.”
His exact words. Otherwise it would not even interest me to note it here. A society of policemen, like Romanian society, cannot create anything other than whole generations of policemen—that is, people with the mind of a policeman, when they cannot actually be one by trade. I’d like to know what family that fair-haired boy comes from, who doesn’t know what a swastika is. I’d like to meet that boy’s father and shake his hand.
It reminds me of what Corneliu Moldovanu said a couple of weeks ago when, after some premiere or other, some Gypsy kids were waiting outside with a special edition about the sentence passed on Constanti-nescu-Iasi.3
“They were right to do it. But it’s too little.”
And he is a writer!
A lot to record from the hotel, especially concerning Eugenia Zaharia, a whore of quite boundless vulgarity. Entertaining, though, for her vocabulary, her rather violent beauty, and the sincerity (no! let’s not spoil a fine word), the complete insensitivity with which she plys her trade. Carol fucked her on the first evening. I think that if five men were with her in the bar, she’d be capable of going “upstairs” with each of them in turn.
She told me that Lucien Fabre wrote Bassesse de Venise mainly to take revenge on her, at a time when they had quarreled and she had gone alone to Venice. The funny thing is that it may be true. And it occurs to me that my situation with Leni may not be so different.
“And you’re a Ladima,”4 Camil said to me the day before yesterday at table. Does he know something . . . ?
As I read it, Renard’s Journal becomes increasingly dear to me. How fond I am of that man, and how absurd his death seems to me—though twenty-four years have passed since then.
That is the only kind of eternity that matters: to be more alive than a living person, and for the memory of you to be just as real as a physical presence.
Reading today his entry of 24 July 1903, I said to myself that I should write a book about Jules Renard in which I explain—through him—my love of France. Renard’s radicalism has peasant roots. That reassures me about the fate of French democracy. It will never die.
Since I arrived here I have continued the major scene between Leni and Valeriu which I began in Sinaia. I’m at page 12. I feel it is working. But can I be sure?
To some extent, what gives me the courage to write for the theatre are Renard’s notes about his own plays.
I should not like to leave Breaza before finishing at least this scene.
I think that the man’s role will be extremely difficult. Only Iancovescu could play it without making it “raisonneur, ”5 pretentious and boring. As I write, I like it more, but it also worries me more. After I finish the play—whether I put it on or not—I shall write a general recommendation for each actor on how his role should be performed.
Breaza has never been so beautiful before. It is a profusion of colors. Never in my life have I seen so many trees in blossom. I think they are apple trees. Some are so white they look a bit like a picture postcard.
A little while ago—9 a.m.—I stood for a few minutes at the end of the walk with walnut trees, looking up the Prahova Valley toward the mountains. It makes you giddy. The white of the snow on Bucegi, then the white of the apple trees in blossom, then a thousand shades of green— from the dark green of a solitary pine to the yellow, immature, moist, insecure green of the young leaves. In the middle of the landscape—right in the middle, as if placed there by some hidden laws of composition— a house with a dark, burnt roof illuminates by contrast the lively colors around it. Nor should I forget the patches of mauve, the patches of blue, the grey shadows, the water sparkling in the sun. (I went back after lunch. I was disappointed. There was no water. The Prahova has almost dried up.)
It honestly seemed unreal to me. And after moving away some twenty meters, I returned to make sure that it all really existed and was still in its place.
In the evening, though I tried to write until after midnight, it no longer worked. But now I am rereading everything I have written so far, and it seems good to me. Maybe I did well to start with the main scene. It sets the play’s atmosphere. It will be easier for me to write the preliminary scenes.
I left Breaza feeling very content, even though I hadn’t finished the Leni-Valeriu scene. Two pages were still to be done. I wrote them today, and without flattering myself I think I have done a good job. There are some moments in the scene that I find delightful—exactly what I had envisaged by way of atmosphere and tone. And more important still, the general rhythm of the scene (which is after all a long one) moves forward well.
I counted up the units of dialogue (childishness: but in the same way I counted the lines on the page in my first printed book). There are 149. Isn’t that too many? Isn’t it too long?
I have confidence in my play. I’d be surprised if I messed it up— though I still have so much to do.
If I now had a whole month free, I’d return to Breaza and be able, I think, to stay in this week’s excellent frame of mind. On Friday I wrote ten pages there—an exceptional output for me, who write slowly and with difficulty. I shall try to clear a week for myself in early May.
This morning at the Ateneu a concert with Lola Bobescu (Lalo’s Sym-phonie Espagnole.) A girl of fifteen to sixteen, whose gestures are still those of a child, with a delightful blend of bravura and timidity. She plays splendidly, but while playing she smiles here and there to someone in the audience—probably a relative or a friend, just as Mile. Lambert’s pupils used to do at exam time in Brăila. Movingly youthful, sincere, and delicate. A girl from one of Francis James’s works.
In one of the front rows, Anton Holban applauded with a kind of lewd gusto. He is a delightful boy, with the air of an old maid. “You caught me red-handed with emotion,” he said to me.
I have been reading Album des vers anciens. Splendid. Very Mallarmé in places, but splendid. How could I have neglected him until now?
Camil—to whom I show some verses by Valéry on the way to Sinaia— said to me: “Yes, it’s beautiful. But not more beautiful than my poetry.”
While the play continues to preoccupy me (though I haven’t written any more), I am thinking of a short novel that would clear up my chapter with Leni. What happened yesterday evening at the theatre (and out of disgust I prefer to say nothing of it here) has rekindled in me the need to write about it. Two hundred pages, I had in mind. This stupid story will have served some purpose, after all. But for now the play comes first!
I have finished Renard’s Journal.
Today I made a decision with which I am happy—even if it perhaps causes a little regret deep inside me. I am giving the role to Marietta.
Nothing can be done with Leni. Her indifference is careless, thoughtless, offensive to the point of being impolite or unfriendly. I think that anyone else would at least have feigned some interest. She couldn’t even make that effort. My visit to her dressing room on Saturday disgusted me; it was much more depressing than my visit on Monday.
I am glad I spoke to Marietta. It was necessary to take the play away from Leni. I had to make a clear commitment to Marietta so that there could be no turning back.
And then, practically speaking, it is the best solution. Leni is playacting with Timică and Ţăranu—and she does it at the Alhambra. She is actually giving up theatre and going right over to operetta. She takes her distance from Tessa and becomes Miss Speed again. My play, and especially the role she should be playing, are at the opposite extreme. . . . And she wants too much to make money. She is too eager to “score” a great success with the public to risk experimenting with an original play, especially one of mine.
By contrast, Marietta is happy to play a major role, and the question of money doesn’t enter into it (or anyway, only secondarily). Today I read her everything I have written and explained what the scenario will look like. She was excited. I felt that every line was “getting through.” I felt that she understood, identified, saw it before her. And her warmth, her enthusiasm, her generosity! Moreover, since she is so keen to act the part, she will do all she can on stage (and she can do so much when she wants).
If (as rumor has it) Iancovescu moves to the Regina Maria, what an excellent cast I shall have with him, Marietta, and Maximilian. As to the production, in those parts where Haig’s touch is too heavy, I shall try myself to bring the text back to life.
I came away feeling over the moon. The reading made everything I had written seem fresher and opened up paths that had no longer been leading anywhere. Back in the street, I saw some new things for the third act (Bogoiu, the tie, “you are compromising me,” “I’ll see you outside,” etc.). As a matter of fact, he is the only one who worries me, because he is poor. I wouldn’t want the rhythm to falter suddenly after Act Two, which promises to keep rolling so well.
I shall try to leave on Saturday or Sunday. I have found new reasons to write—and isn’t it strange that I find them on the very day when I decide to give up Leni?
General meeting at the Writers’ Association. How can they take seriously such ridiculous farces? How can they think for a second that it bothers me whether Kiriţescu is elected or not, whether Toneghin is voted in or not?6
During the hour I spent there I got worked up, I formed a group, I propagandized—and only when I left did I realize what a pathetic game I had been playing.
What do I have in common with that whole business, with all that plotting and politicking? What an awful dump of a place, a dump filled with literary types. Horrible, really horrible!
More generally, I am in a period of feeling poisoned by literature. I am sick and tired of it. Why didn’t I become an ordinary professional— lawyer, civil servant—a plain dealer? Why wasn’t I destined to have a house of my own, a life of my own, a love of my own—without complications or anything “interesting,” without regrets?
Not even the Viennese show yesterday afternoon (Molnar’s Grosse liebe) managed to buck me up completely. Still, I had three enchanting hours and a few minutes of high emotion. Lilly Darvas is a great actress.
But the whole day has left behind a taste of pointlessness. I keep remembering my whole wasted life.
An “artists’” lunch yesterday at Lilly’s. Myself, Marietta, Elvira Godeanu, Haig, “Kiki,”7 and someone called Brătăşanu from Ploieşti.
Two things happened, each as unpleasant as the other:
1) It was Lilly who wrote the stupid letter against Nora Peyov in La Zid. She told me so herself with more than a touch of pride, begging me not to tell anyone else because—of course—absolutely no one knows or has guessed it.
I shudder to think that although both of them are acting in the same play, and although they see each other, kiss, and visit each other, Lilly can still come up with this kind of plot. I wouldn’t have thought her capable of such vulgarity.
2) The second incident concerns Marietta, my good old Marietta Sadova. . . . The talk had turned to the attack on Hefter,8 who was beaten by a student a few days ago right there in the street. Someone asked what had happened, but Marietta answered in an offhand way: “It’s nothing. He’ll get over it.”
Shall I write how I nevertheless came to read the play to Leni? Not now—I don’t feel like writing. Another time.
Tonight from Stuttgart, a sinfonia concertante by Mozart and then—a big surprise!—the Kleine nachtmusik.
I was glad to hear it again, because it is so closely bound up with my play. Unfortunately, my radio is on its last legs. I could pick up enough passages, though, and this has brought me back to the play after a few days in which I dropped it. I really ought to go away for at least three days, to pick up the thread that has been momentarily lost. I am reading Oswald Spengler’s Années décisives: I don’t know why it is only now that I do it, because it has been on my bookshelf for ages. A surprise to find whole sentences, formulations, ideas, and paradoxes from Nae’s course. The whole of last year’s course (domestic and foreign policy, peace, war, the definition of the nation), all his “bold strokes” (Singapore, France in its death throes, Russia as an Asiatic power, Britain in liquidation): it is all there in Spengler, with an astounding similarity of vocabulary. And I haven’t yet finished it. . . .
The day before yesterday I was in Brasov, at the trial of some Iron Guard students. Nae made a statement (which I read in the papers) that religion does not forbid all murder, and that students therefore naturally feel solidarity with Duca’s killers. I don’t think I shall attend his course any more—not to “punish” him, but because, quite frankly, Nae Ionescu is beginning not to interest me any longer. The way he sees things is too simple.
I left Breaza a month ago today. Since then my play has been marking time. Isn’t it a pity to let it get bogged down like this? Will I ever regain that happy rhythm I found during those five days in Breaza?
I absolutely must go away. Maybe it is a mere prejudice, but it is too deeply rooted by now: I cannot write here. I tried again this evening, but it’s no good. The silliest thing about it is that the whole of Act One— each sentence—is clear in my head. But it still doesn’t work.
I have looked at my diary and I think that, with a little will, I could leave Wednesday evening and stay until Monday morning. That would be four days of work. I.shouldn’t let them slip. But I have no money, Mama needs to go away, and on Saturday I have the court case with Aderca’s sister. Nevertheless . . .
Mama left on Friday. She has been in Paris since the day before yesterday.
Nae finished his course on Friday afternoon. I was there. A sober lecture (with just a moment of play-acting, and even that wasn’t too exaggerated). A very fine lecture, taut, clever, and with a whole series of happy formulations.
If I had written about it here on Friday, perhaps I’d have summarized it in its entirety. But I didn’t feel like anything over the next few days.
On the way out of the hall, Nae said to me: “I gave that lecture for you. For two years you have been giving me funny looks. Well, what do you say now?”
For the moment I said nothing. The lecture really was remarkable— and its solution to the problem of the individual and the collective was certainly interesting (though I can feel the sophistry without being able to put my finger on it). None of that, however, prevents Nae from being an Iron Guardist. At least if he were genuinely that—honestly and without ulterior motives.
I should also have liked to write about the concerts of the Berlin Philharmonic, but I cannot write now. (Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto, a Haydn symphony in D, Beethoven’s Seventh, Weber’s Oberon overture, Schumann’s Fourth Symphony, Brahms’s First, and the overture to the Meistersinger.)
I still see Leni from time to time—less and less often, and with less and less emotion. It was all a stupidly childish business on my part.
I have written two more scenes or so for Act One. I have simplified a situation in which I had badly lost my way. Nearly all the characters were in the scene—I should have left Leni and Bogoiu alone—and I didn’t know how to get the others out. The solution came to me unexpectedly, and easily enough. The soundest method is always to sit resolutely at your desk and to wait. . . .
I look at my diary and tell myself that I could still leave next Thursday (5 June) for Breaza, and remain there until Wednesday morning (10 June). That would be five full days of work. But if I manage to finish Act One before then—by filching an evening or afternoon here and there—Breaza could be kept for the second act. What cannot be done in five completely free days! I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
A moving letter from Blecher. He wants me to visit him at Roman.9 I wrote back promising that I would, and I shall certainly do it.
I happen to have been rereading some chapters from De două mii de ani (my old habit of taking a book at random from a shelf and leafing through it for an hour). There were a number of things I had completely forgotten. I had a real surprise. Apart from a few passages that are too markedly Jewish, the rest strikes me as exceptional. I didn’t know. I wasn’t expecting it.
I should be very happy to have that book published again some day, without Nae’s preface and without any explanation on my part.
There is no doubt that, of everything I have written, that is the book that will live on.
Yesterday from Rome, a delightful piano sonata in C by Mozart. Later, from Budapest, a violin sonata in E major by Handel.
Yesterday evening, a long visit to Leni’s. It is a long time since I have had such a calm and restful conversation with her. . . .
I should have taken her in my arms, kissed her, and said: Come to me tomorrow, Leni. She would have accepted without hesitation. The whole time I was there she made numerous little gestures of affection, of invitation, which I let drop or deliberately refused to understand.
I am more empty than sad—and I live because I once came into existence.
The last three days have been poisoned for me by serious trouble at the office [sic!]. I am not cut out to be an attorney—and if I were honest, I’d have to give it up altogether. But I don’t have the courage to break anything off, not even that.
Nor do I even know whether I shall be able to leave Bucharest on Thursday, though I have such a need to—not so much for the play as for myself.
Bogoiu is in danger of becoming too subtle. That cannot be allowed to happen. He must retain a basic optimism, somewhat jovial and emphatic. His note of melancholy must appear, from time to time, out of a rather uncouth robustness and simplicity.
“I am walking with a compass in my pocket and searching for north. If I think about it, that seems to be the only thing I have ever really looked for in my life: the north.” Such lines—though I like them in themselves—cannot be Bogoiu’s. I shall definitely get rid of them and revive the tone of dullish heartiness that Bogoiu ought to have.
Perhaps to some extent he is a poet, but without realizing it.
As you see, I haven’t left Bucharest. Will I be able to tomorrow? I don’t know. The Pleniceanu affair is a terrible burden.1
Marietta told the Bulandras2 about the play, and it seems that both of them—especially Mme. Bulandra—are thrilled at the thought of acting in something of mine. But I won’t agree to give the part to Toni at any price (even at the risk of its not being performed at all). It would spoil everything.
The ideal interpretation would be Iancovescu, Leni, and Timică. If necessary, Iancovescu could be replaced by Vraca,3 and Leni—if absolutely necessary—by Marietta. Any other cast would completely foul up my experiment with the theatre.
I have finished the first act. I arrived in Breaza at four in the afternoon. By evening I had written three pages. Yesterday, seventeen pages. (I think that is a literary record for me. I don’t remember ever having written so much in one day.) Now finally, this morning, the last three pages of the scene with the mechanic—at last linking up with the final scene, which has been written for so long.
Decidedly, Breaza is proving more favorable to my play than anywhere else. It is true that, when I arrived the day before yesterday, I had already sketched everything in my head: scene by scene, almost line by line. But it is also true that in the same situation in Bucharest, I would have managed to write no more than fifteen pages in fifty days—whereas here, in less than two days, I have written twenty-three.
I think that Act Two would go well if I had ten free days at Breaza, working at the same rhythm. I see it very clearly, in great detail. . . . The serious difficulties and resistance will begin again only in the third act; it is the most unclear one at present—or rather, the only unclear one. But it too may become clearer as I write the second act.
I am content. I feel that I have made things simpler and am laying the first act aside with a workman’s satisfaction. I am not yet aware of its defects. There must be something: maybe a certain lack of unity in the tone. Most of all, I wonder whether the final scene—of which I am so fond—really blends with the first part of the act. And I don’t know whether it is too long. I also ask myself whether Leni’s constant presence in the scene is not tiring both for her and for the audience, and whether, for her to stand out in the major scene with Valeriu, she should not be taken offstage earlier for a few minutes, so that her, voice (when she returns) carries that touch of surprise that I think is necessary for theatrical dialogue.
I return this afternoon to Bucharest. If the Pleniceanu affair works out in court, I shall have another good stretch for literature and abandon chambers as soon as possible for this Breaza that is so well disposed toward me.
I am thinking of a book called “Behind the Scenes” that I could bring out in a year or two. I would put into it everything I have written in connection with literary creation, with working techniques, the writer’s life, the experience of publishing a book, etc., etc.
The idea came to me in Breaza when, having finished the first act of the play, I was amusing myself by rereading everything in this journal that refers to the play—from the evening I began to write it up to the present. What I noticed was that it is not without interest as a veritable “record of work in progress.”
The volume might comprise: i) The journal of Oraşul cu salcîmi—as it was once printed in Azi—and any additions since the novel appeared; 2) The journal of the play; 3) The series of articles published in Rampa under the title “Voluptatea de a fi scriitor” [The Delight of Being a Writer]—as written and, if possible, reworked, or, if not, completely rewritten; 4) My various polemics with Calinescu, Al. O. Teodoranu, Stancu, and Pandrea. (What a pity I tore up my reply to Lovinescu for Vremea.4 It would have fitted in so well here. I wouldn’t be able to write it again.) Also the article with Mircea Dem. Radulescu and whoever else; 5) My critics confronted and commented upon—especially Rosu’s article, to which I would add the note of 26 October from this notebook; 6) Various literary events and anecdotes that I have seen or experienced: for example, my passing through Sburatorul, the “duel” with General Vaitoianu, the incident with Lovinescu (the dinner jacket).
I think it could be an entertaining dossier, and the title strikes me as a happy choice.
The evening before last, I read the first act at Mircea’s. Apart from Nina and himself, Marietta and Haig, Maryse and Gheorghe were also there. I think they listened with pleasure and did not grow tired of it. (I realize that my hero annoys Mircea, and I know why. He thinks he is conceited, self-satisfied. But Mircea is mistaken, and I shall try to explain to him why.) I cannot know what they honestly think of the act. Of course, they told me they liked it. But anyway, the reading helped me: I saw the act complete and really had the impression that it holds up well.
I am still working out the details of the third act. I think I’ll use Jef here more than I originally intended. And I won’t create a love affair between him and Mrs. Vintilă—that would be too easy.
I have been rereading my note from last year, 11 June 1935. How stupid I was, and how miserable.
Am I less miserable today? No. But I am less stupid. I haven’t seen Leni for some ten days, et je me porte très bien, cher monsieur5 I am not really even dying to see her, and I wait rather lazily for the days to pass. One day I shall phone her—one sunny day. I have decided to act as if she is out of town, and the method is successful.
A distressed letter from Poldy. Why, oh why? We, on the Hechter side, are a family with a taste for lamentation. It’s true that life has done quite a lot to help me keep this up. But I ought to impose more self-control, more determination to be contented (as far as this is still possible for me).
I am rereading Les faux-monnayeurs6 after ten years or so. How hastily I judged it! And how summary was my article of 1927 in Cuvântul! But I’ll wait until I have finished the book before revising my overall judgment of it. I shall try to develop what I think in an article for Revista Fundaţiilor.
For the moment let me just note one astonishing thing: the great, powerful similarity between Mircea’s Huliganii and Les faux-monnayeurs. Has no one noticed it before? Has not he himself noticed it? I shall ask him, but also after I have finished reading the book.
On Saturday and Sunday I went to two football matches at O.N.E.F., together with Camil and his . . . Dragoş Protopopescu.7
It was rather embarrassing, especially as on the way out I had to get into Dragos’s car and even sit next to him in front.
I felt like asking him: “Are you an Iron Guardist, or aren’t you? If you are, be one entirely.” (Without a doubt, I prefer the clear, implacable attitude of someone like Mota.8)
But he would be entitled to say in reply: “Are you a Jew, or aren’t you? If you are, don’t hold your hand out to me again, and don’t take mine when I hold it out to you.”
There should be—and it’s not the first time I say this to myself— there should be more intransigence, more rigidity even, in my life. I am too “supple”—and I utter this word with a touch of scorn for everything in me that is too accommodating.
Dragos P., who still thinks I am close to Nae, told me a funny thing (in fact, it is only to record it that I am writing this note).
“What’s with Nae?” he asked me, because we were just then driving down Şoseaua Jianu behind the professor’s home. “He’s having a hard time of it. He’s burnt his fingers with the Germans. They’ve been scheming against him. I heard from a very good source that Sân-Giorgiu9 took to Berlin a letter of Nae’s to Blank and showed it to a number of ministers there. Indeed, he seems to have been instructed by the King to do that; the King, who has the original of the letter, gave it to . . . Sân-Giorgiu to show to the Germans. Seicaru1 was also involved in the machinations, and he too has a photocopy of the document.”
I listened to all this with a curiosity that I tried to hide as best I could. I listened with a bored ear, so as not to put Dragoş on his guard.
“I don’t know . . . I don’t think . . .”
“Oh yes, I assure you: it’s very serious. But I want to have a word with Nae. He should be warned.”
Two days (yesterday and today) stupidly wasted, because of the Pleniceanu business.
I went without eating at court yesterday until five o’clock, dizzy with hunger, nervous tension, and impatience. I pleaded well—and lost. I am a good speaker, but I shall never be a good attorney. The Bar amuses me: the adversary, the judges, the rising, questioning, slightly rhetorical phrases that I manage to come up with. And, silly as it seems, I like listening to myself. Just as I am bad at chitchat (my pathetic figure at a society gathering or a social visit!), I am good at public speaking.
But it is of no use to me. I could be a lecturer, not an attorney.
The whole of today wasted at Mrs. Pleniceanu’s waiting for the bailiff. And meanwhile so many things I love, or could love, are awaiting me. At least if one of them were . . .
I shall try to leave for Breaza on Friday.
Hot, bored, endless troubles in court (still in connection with the Pleniceanu affair), no appetite for anything, except perhaps sun and love.
“Sun and love”—a perfect summary of my ideal of happiness. Yesterday at Snagov I saw the very image of such a life.
I was invited to eat at the home of Maryse’s mother, with her and Gheorghe. She has a magnificent villa. It’s like a little triangular toy, with dark brown walls and a red roof. White rooms, large and simple furniture, blue armchairs, many flowers, canvas chairs, a chaise longue, a small landing stage with two boats, a lawn, a sunshade, fishing tackle, quietness, water, forest. . . It was like a dream.
I went into the upstairs bedroom for a couple of minutes—and I dreamed I was installed there as master of the house, together with Leni on a holiday that had just started and would never finish. Am I so lazy? I don’t know. I am tired, rather, and I have a longing to be happy, what with everything inside me that has had to remain for so long idle, broken, disconsolate.
We went out fishing in the boat and stopped for a while at Snagov Monastery, so moving in its beauty. At the entrance to the nave there was a fresco with a remarkable group of women on the right; a shape so utterly surprising there. The first woman, her thigh draped in long material, had a voluptuous gesture of the leg that I would not have expected to find on the wall of a Romanian monastery. On the other side of the wall, in the church proper, an old scene (Descent from the Cross?) looks from the altar toward the exit, curious in the childish awkwardness of its perspectival errors. It reminded me of a painting by Zurbaran in the Louvre. (Not The Burial of Saint Bonaventura?) In a group, an old man raises his hand to his beard—a gesture enchanting in its secular expressiveness.
How many things to record last week! But I keep feeling disgusted with myself, and this journal still seems nothing more than a delusion.
The reception at the Blanks on Thursday evening caused me a drunken night. Perhaps my first joyful bout of drunkenness. And Maryse’s presence stimulated rather than discouraged me.
At two o’clock, as we were watching a cabaret show put on by the hostess, I said to Leni, who was “consenting” beside me:
“I’m really drunk. I remember only very few things from my past life.”
“For example?” she asked.
“For example, that I love you”—and her hand squeezed mine in a new lovers’ pact.
My two-week absence was, I can see, a good strategic device. I think she would be unwilling to lose me. And once again, if I wanted it, if I were capable of wanting it, everything would be extremely simple.
But I saw her again the next day at her place (kind, affectionate, loving, offering herself sincerely enough) and yesterday at the match. This once more gave her the assurance of being “strong”—proof that allowed her to become again inattentive, neglectful, and coquettish.
Right, sir, we’ll resume the strategy of silence. It’s the only game that still offers the possibility of success in this story.
I had a good time at the Blanks on Thursday evening. Horia Bogdan not only praised me to the skies about my advocacy on Wednesday, but made a terrible fuss about it to Mircea, Nina, Marietta, and everyone. (Leni told me several times to invite her along one day when I’m pleading in court.)
Even more amusing was the fact that Horia Bogdan told his wife all about my advocacy that very evening on their way home from the hearing. If I can believe him—that is, if they weren’t just nice words on his part—there seems to have been some discussion about me in chambers.
Well, what if there was?
I didn’t make it to Breaza, and I no longer think I shall have time to go. It pains me to note that the play is being left for the holiday months. But will I be free to leave Bucharest? And will I have enough money?
Only a period of getting away from it all, like that August in Ghilcoş, could pick me up again. I’ll wait and hope, as much as I am still capable of hope.
Uproar and anti-Semitic assaults in court. (And two days before, I had been saying to myself that I should give up writing and do nothing but advocacy.)
We may be heading for an organized pogrom. The evening before last, Marcel Abramovici (Auntie Rachel’s one from Brasov) was knocked down in the street by twenty or so students, who then dragged him unconscious into the cellar of their hostel and only “released” him a couple of hours later, with a deep head wound, his clothing torn and bloodied.
Yesterday Sicu Davidovici was thrown into the stairwell of the Commercial Court. Marcu Leibovici was also beaten up: there’s someone who continues to follow his destiny—I think he was the one most often roughed up at university.
Yesterday evening there was a street-fighting atmosphere on Strada Gabroveni (I had been to see Carol Griinberg). The Jewish shopkeepers had lowered their shutters and were waiting for their attackers, determined to resist them. I think that’s the only thing to do. If we’re going to kick the bucket, we might as well do it with a club in our hands. It’s no less tragic, but at least not so ridiculous.
This morning Leni asked me on the phone not to go to court any longer; she said that she had worried about me the whole of yesterday. She seemed honestly concerned about my fate, and—why not say it?—that made me feel good.
I am reading Stendhal’s Journal and would like to be somewhere far away, very far away, without papers and news, but with a few classics—and a woman. Perhaps with Leni. Or someone less agitated, a more languid presence. . . .
I have been meaning for a long time—but have kept forgetting—to note here something I heard a week ago from Marietta. Apparently Paul Zari-fopol2 died in a woman’s arms, and that woman—believe it or not—was none other than Lisette Georgescu. I would never have imagined anything like that. I am more inclined to assume that the people I know are virtuous. Probably because of my lack of personal experience.
Camil Petrescu, whom I met this morning at the Capşa, was angry at my suggestion that the trial of the Craiova anti-fascists was out of control.
“Those people shouldn’t even have a trial; they should be sent straight off to prison for ten years, or twenty years. Don’t give them the chance to make Communist propaganda in court, with witnesses and lawyers.”
When we left the Capşa we went a few steps down the street and he repeated what he thought of the latest anti-Semitic attacks.
“It’s regrettable, old man. But all Jews have a responsibility for it.”
“How’s that, Camil?”
“Because there are too many of them.”
“But aren’t there even more Hungarians?”
“Maybe, but at least they’re all in one place, in the same region.” (I didn’t understand the argument, but I didn’t want to insist. What was the point of repeating the long conversation I had with him in January 1934? I am clear about him—and all he can do is depress me, never surprise me.)
He went on to say:
“My dear man, the Jews provoke things: they have a dubious attitude and get mixed up in things that don’t concern them. They are too nationalistic.”
“You should make up your mind, Camil. Are they nationalists or are they Communists?”
“Wow, you’re really something, you know? Here we are alone and you can still ask questions like that. What else is communism but the imperialism of the Jews?"
That is Camil Petrescu speaking. Camil Petrescu is one of the finest minds in Romania. Camil Petrescu is one of the most sensitive creatures in Romania. How could Romania ever go through a revolution?
I had lunch at Mircea’s. While waiting for him and Nina to come back from town, I read some twenty pages at random of Le côté des Guermantes. It was an episode I had completely forgotten (in fact, I have the impression that I’ve forgotten it all): a lunch that Marcel had with Saint-Loup and Rachel “quand du Seigneur.”
Rachel bears a surprising resemblance to Leni. I felt that I was reading the story of my own love.
I spent Sunday and Monday in Brăila, where my old class was celebrating the tenth anniversary of the baccalaureate. After fourteen months away, I found Brăila lacking in surprises—unchanged, admirably silent, and uncomplicated. It was a strange feeling to stay at the hotel there. My room—“Hotel Francez”—overlooked Strada Polonă. St. Peter’s Church was directly opposite my window, at the end of the street.
At the school I felt more than I would have expected. I sat on the bench—the last bench in the 8th form—and found myself beset with memories. On my right, Ficu’s empty place.
Goraş called out the register and we answered in turn—“Present.” Now and again we heard “Absent” and a few times “Dead.” Four are no longer alive.
Then something amazing happened: Goras’s speech. It deserves to be written down in its entirety, word for word. But I don’t think I could do it. Still, I shall try to reconstitute it.
“Gentlemen, there are always misunderstandings (some of them very painful) between form master and class, between teachers and pupils, but I should like you to believe that the traces and regrets they leave in the teacher’s heart are no fewer than those they leave in the pupils’. I, for example, have carried a memory for ten years that has caused me a lot of suffering and from which I am glad I can free myself today by telling you about it.
“It concerns one of the most brilliant boys in your year. I am thinking of Hechter. He was in 7-A and had won a prize in Romanian language. At the end-of-year prizegiving—even today I cannot think how it happened—I forgot to call for him to come up. It was hot, I was tired and burdened with worries—so perhaps such a mistake was understandable. All I can say is that it was not deliberate. Once the ceremony was over, I remembered and went to look for Hechter. He said something that annoyed me, and I made a very sharp retort. I immediately regretted it. I realized at once that I was doing the wrong thing. But it was too late. I want to tell him today, in front of you all, how much I suffered for the injustice I did him on that occasion. I assure him that it didn’t take me all these years to remember it. It is not the brilliant career he has since made for himself, not those fine literary achievements of his, which make me speak as I now do. I have felt the pain right from the first moment. I should have liked to apologize to him before now. It was not possible. I was not able to do it. I tried once, but I realized it was very difficult. I am doing it today, and I tell you I am glad I can in the presence of his classmates. If possible, he will forgive and understand.”
I was overwhelmed. It brought tears to my eyes, and I was trembling all over. I replied in a barely audible voice, saying a lot of things badly.
“Headmaster, I have never met anyone before who was capable of doing what you have just done.”
That was the truth. The gesture struck me as quite extraordinary, humanly speaking. Goras is an even more complex person than I thought.
At the “banquet” that evening (we all dined at the Monument), I sat next to him all the time and we chatted quite comfortably. I’ll send him my books and perhaps write to him.
The next day, on Monday, a long walk by the Danube, as far as the Cropina canal beyond Reni. A fish lunch was awaiting us there, as in a dream. The huge cast-iron kettle in which the fish soup was simmering, the spitted carp around the live coals; it was a sight straight out of Sadoveanu or Hogas. I had my clothes off all day, bathed in the Danube, went rowing, ate an enormous amount, drank. . .
The return journey was magnificent. Mounted on the ship’s cabin, I had the whole Danube in front of me (a Danube wider than at Brăila, with a more orderly forest of willows, almost as in a well-kept park). It was bright sunlight when we left at six, and we caught the last flickers of twilight as we got off at Reni. After an hour in which the little town was alarmed by our invasion (delightful public gardens filled with girls, children, and young lovers!), I resumed my place on the cabin roof as we traveled “in the moonlight”3 to Galaţi. From there to Brăila, where we arrived at one in the morning. I was rather drowsy.
A fine day, which took me out of Bucharest and allowed me to breathe. It made me aware again that the earth is bigger than the three square kilometers on which I live, fret, and talk.
Visited Leni yesterday—very loving, very warm, not in the least coquettish. She told me some interesting things about Jeni Cruţescu’s love for her.
“She loves me like a man. There hasn’t been anything physical between us—if there had been, I’d have told you—but I’m not sure there won’t be some day. She suffers a lot because of me, and I admit that I’m to blame; if she behaves with me like a man in love, I behave with her like a flighty woman.
“Lots of people tell me that I’ll cause her nothing but unhappiness, that it will all end in tragedy. We have talked about that ourselves, and once we even decided to part—but it wasn’t possible. After a week, she came back feeling miserable.”
It’s strange that I don’t feel at all jealous of Jeni. I listened calmly to Leni as she spoke, and I think it amused me more than it intrigued me. My love for her has never been more natural, more secure. But why, and for how long?
My appointment to the Fundaţie came when I was no longer expecting it. For a few days I could not believe it; I thought that everything would turn sour at the last moment. But this morning I got 39,500 lei outstanding. Fantastic! And from now on I’ll get 6,000 lei a month (5,935, to be precise).
So that’s my holiday taken care of. I’ll be able to work and, let’s hope, finish the play.
This morning, when I left the Fundaţie and was walking down Calea Victoriei, I suddenly had the happy idea of entering the Columbia store to ask whether the Kleine nachtmusik that I ordered last May had arrived for me. It was there. I paid for it, and I am happy that that was my first purchase. Maybe it’s a good sign. And the records are magnificent.
Otherwise I do not have the curiosity to write. Nor is there a lot to say.
Had a long, confused dream last night, in which Leni passed through several times.
On Sunday Lohengrin from Bayreuth, which I heard in equatorial heat. The voices were admirably clear, the chorus and orchestra blurred.
“But tell me softly at dusk—am I happy?”
I have been here since Friday morning. Back again in the Wagner Villa. Some changes, different people—as always, I am awkward among unfamiliar people with whom I am forced to speak. But the landscape is the same, the air healthy, the firs close by Yesterday I went to the Bicaz Gorges. At night, by the lake beneath the full moon. Mornings in the sun, on a chaise longue. I am regaining without difficulty that calm sense of happiness that I had last year.
I want to start writing tomorrow. I have no excuse not to, but nor do I feel any great enthusiasm. I have just reread the first act, this afternoon, and it seemed to me long and convoluted. The criticisms that Camil made when I read it to him still pursue me.
Anyway, tomorrow I shall be doing my duty—with resignation if not with relish. That will come too, after I have written the first few pages. “Le plus difficile, ” says Renard, “c’est de prendre la plume, de la tremper dans l'encre et de la tenir ferme au-dessus du papier. ”4
I have written little, but written nevertheless. The main thing was to start on the “scheduled” day. It is true that, from the whole day (in which I sat for some five hours with writing paper in front of me), I shall select no more than four pages or so. I have written the first two scenes of Act Two. But I got stuck in the third scene, with Leni and Bogoiu, and I don’t think I should press it too hard. I shan’t touch it all evening. I’ll leave it until tomorrow morning.
I finished the first scene (Bogoiu and the Major) by sacrificing the discovery of the diary—an incident which some time ago, when I was composing the scenario (or scenography, as Stendhal used to say), struck me as particularly funny. But now I have the impression that it is both facile in its effect and very difficult to write. Till tomorrow, then.
A cool evening, but of a perfect purity. The moon right in front of my balcony, in a fir tree. And throughout the valley, a translucent stony blue.
The mystery of the phone call in Act One will remain unresolved. I’ll never know with whom Leni was speaking, or what she said. I don’t want to pry open her secrets. Let her keep them.
Evening
I have finished the Leni-Bogoiu scene. I have started the fourth scene (Ştefan-Mme. Vintilă) and got halfway through it. I’d have finished it for sure if the young married couple on the balcony next to mine had not happened to fancy reading aloud all afternoon. They are reading a French book in turns: now she, now he. Then they comment on and explain it, passage by passage. Exasperating! An intellectual honeymoon: the most detestable kind.
Without this misfortune it would have been a productive day. Even so, I am happy with it. Eight pages written. And a lot of things made clearer.
I have allowed myself a short break tomorrow morning in order to go up Ghilcoş. But I shall try to make up for it tomorrow afternoon. Let’s hope.
I didn’t “make up for it” Wednesday afternoon, as I had promised myself. The whole day was sacrificed because of the outing on Ghilcoş, where I got lost for nearly two hours (on the way back). But the view was marvelous.
Yesterday it rained from morning till night. A rainy day, but also a day of work. Ten pages. I finished the scene with Ştefan and Mme. Vintilă. Began the Leni-Jef scene, which came to an abrupt halt, however. Impossible to take it any further for the moment. I have abandoned it— and moved on to the scene straight after it, where those two strangers come into the pensiune. I can feel that it will work. At the moment (lunch hour) I am at Scene IX-a, page 27. Today I wasted the whole morning on correspondence. But I shall work this afternoon. I have to.
A letter from Jeni, who is at Sovata. Funny how she dates it: “So-vata, on the 3rd of August.” That “on” is an old tic of mine, from 1925-1926. She has kept it, doubtless without realizing. That too is a kind of loyalty.
A man can never know what remnants from previous love affairs are in a woman’s gestures, habits, vocabulary, and idiosyncrasies.
The fourth rainy day. It’s starting to get on my nerves. I surprise myself feeling nostalgia for the city. I’d like there to be a film, a concert. . . . And yet, the thing I look forward to most is the sun.
I think I have been working quite well. Yesterday evening I finished the scenes with the two strangers. There are things that amuse me. But I wonder whether I have not exaggerated here and there, whether I have not pushed too hard, whether I have not resorted to facile effects. I don’t know: we shall see. I’m at page 40. Let’s see what comes of today
Yesterday I thought of Ionel Teodoreanu5 as I walked down the road. I don’t know why. I’d have liked to see him. This morning, who do I find in the pensiune trying to rent a room from Fräulein Wagner? Ionel Teodoreanu, with his wife. A real joy to see him. They’ll be staying in the pensiune from tomorrow evening. He’s writing a novel. I hope we won’t disturb each other.
The fifth rainy day. We’re in the middle of November. No sign anywhere that it will get better. I have a feeling that it’s all over, that I’ll never see a clear sky again here in Ghilcoş.
I’m on the final scene—the one about which I wrote in March (that night when I made a first outline of the play) that it was the “major scene, and hard to write.”
I approach it with trepidation. How will it work out? If I finish it today or tomorrow, I’ll leave myself a free day before moving on to the third act.
Is it possible that I shall return to Bucharest with the whole play written?
I’m not very keen on the pages I wrote yesterday. But I don’t want to get held up on them now. I’ll have a go at revising them at the end. Right now they seem exaggerated to me. The transition is too abrupt, the effects too calculated.
Evening
I was right. It’s hard going. I am at my desk6
Yesterday evening I had just started to write some lines in this notebook when Ionel Teodoreanu knocked on my door. I asked him in and we sat chatting for a couple of hours. When he left, I no longer knew what I had wanted to say in that sentence, and I abandoned it as it was, especially as we had to go to eat.
In brief, I meant to say that the scene at which I had stopped was bothering me. It is the first real stumbling block since I have been at Ghilcoş. And I don’t feel like skipping over it to the third act. I want to finish Act Two so that I can put it aside as work completed. Yesterday I sat for some six hours with the paper in front of me—and I came away with just a couple of pages (not even two full pages) that can be kept.
I’ll give it a try today. To be frank, if the sun were shining, I’d give myself a few hours off and go up Ghilcoş or Ţohard—that might clear my head. But the weather is still bad: the same November sky, a wind that is cold but not strong enough to chase away the clouds.
Teodoreanu is the same fascinating conversationalist I knew in Galaţi. I listen to him with the most intense pleasure—even though he speaks to me only about himself, about literature, and about the novel he is writing. He read me a few passages, and some of them struck me as first class—especially a brief episode with two protagonists, Hans Müller and Mircea Ştefănescu.
“I’m in an anti-lyrical phase,” he said. “It’s a novel that I’m writing in spite of myself: I think you’ll like it.”
As for the rest, he is an enchanting companion. His sons, who are staying on my right and are sort of balcony mates, have been given orders to be quiet. Mrs. Teodoreanu makes an exceptional black coffee, and I receive a ration of two cups a day.
His novel is called Noah's Ark. It takes place at Borsec, in Frau Blecher’s pensiune, also known as “the Blecher Fleet.”
Since we had been talking about Cezar Petrescu—who, almost without realizing it, used in his books ideas from various conversations or literary confessions—I hastened to say as a precaution:
“You know, there is also a pensiune in what I am writing at present, a Pensiune Weber run by a Fräulein Weber up in the mountains, which one of the characters compares to a boat. . . .”
We both laughed at the coincidence, but it was not a bad thing for me to have mentioned it.
“Anyway,” he said, “I don’t think we shall bump into each other. We’re probably moving along different tracks.”
“Especially as what I’m writing is . . . a play.”
He didn’t seem surprised, and he explained why.
“My eldest son, Ştefănucă, told me at lunch today. . .”
(Knocking at the door. I open it: Mrs. Teodoreanu. She has brought my morning coffee. We speak only with our eyes for fear of starting a new conversation. He continues:)
. . surprised: ‘Papa, you know that Mr. Sebastian talks to himself when he writes.’ I didn’t believe it, but now I understand. . .
I explain to him that I do feel the need to speak each line before writing it down.
No progress. I’m at a standstill—the last scene of Act Two is putting up stupid resistance.
Act Three, to which I have been trying to draw closer, lacks any shape. For so many days, not a single new idea.
And the sun never returns. I’m beginning to think that is why things are going so badly for me. Yesterday I didn’t even try to work. And yet I can’t be content with idling about. I keep having pangs of conscience— and each passing hour seems a reproof.
Well, in the end I did finish Act Two yesterday. I think it will need some major additions. I must have a scene with Leni and Ştefan, preceding and preparing the final scene. And I should also dwell a little more on Mme. Vintilă. Maybe the Leni-Jef scene can stay as it is. But I’ll have to add something to Leni’s “speech” in which she persuades the two intruders to leave.
All these additions seem necessary not only for the internal economy of the act, but also to achieve the right dimensions. Clearly it should be shorter than the first act, but the disproportion seems to me too great. To have seventy-nine pages for the first and only forty-nine for the second: that’s a difference not only of thirty pages but, when it’s acted, of half an hour.
The sun is back. This morning, two hours naked on a chaise longue on the terrace. I’m convinced that I shall recover my holiday form, which has always been excellent when I’ve had enough sun.
Yesterday evening a very pleasant stroll with Teodoreanu toward Floarea Reginei.
I’m almost afraid to raise the curtain on the third act. I know so little about what will happen in it.
It seems funny to write it, but when something slightly unfamiliar happens to you, you always have a sense of absurdity and implausibility—so monotonous and well managed is the life we lead.
Well, I have been the victim of an act of banditry. For five minutes or so I was in the movielike situation of having a gun pointed threateningly at me: “Hands up!”
To be honest, he didn’t say “hands up.” I was with Gulian7 and his wife, up on Great Tohard. We had reached the summit and were admiring the landscape (which is exceptionally broad and rich in views). I was sauntering along when I heard a voice in front shout out:
“Don’t move!”
I didn’t realize what was happening; I thought it was Emil’s voice or some hiker fooling around. Then, after two or three seconds, the penny dropped. A tall guy was standing in front of us, with a forester’s coat, a Mephistophelean beard, a spiky moustache (both beard and moustache certainly false, though quite well stuck on), and a hunting rifle (double-barreled, I think) pointed at us. “Don’t move!”
He made a loading action, no doubt to impress us. There was no need. We were sufficiently impressed.
“Take your clothes off!”
We took our clothes off. We didn’t feel like arguing. By happy forethought we were wearing bathing suits underneath. We left our clothes in a heap and moved off a few meters. Still following us with his gun, he ordered us to lie at full length in the grass. As I was staring at him, he asked me a couple of times:
“What are you gaping at, eh?”
Then some terrible words:
“Don’t look round, you bunch of motherfuckers!”
He had a rasping voice, with a Hungarian accent. I heard him searching through the pockets—and wondered what else could happen to me. I saw again the events with Terente in 1925.8 For a moment I wondered whether he might take one of us and try to extort some money. But I was calm enough to joke to Emil:
“Well, it’s an experience, after all.”
Hortansa Gulian, who has a smattering of Hungarian, told the man to take what he wanted and leave. (Obviously she did this without turning her head and looking at him—which had been forbidden.)
“Olgos,” he replied in Hungarian. “Shut up!” Then I heard him munching something: he was eating some chocolate and rusks he had found in a handkerchief. Finally I heard:
“Okay, now come and get dressed!”
When I turned my head, he had vanished.
The balance sheet: he had taken my watch (which I greatly regret— clearly I am unlucky with clocks and watches), my tracksuit top, and roughly eighty lei that I had had in my pocket. Emil lost a silver cigarette case and about five hundred lei. It’s funny he left us the other things: beret, sunglasses, trousers.
Then we went back, half frightened, half amused. Our entry into Ghilcoş was priceless: the conversation with the gendarmes, the people looking at us, some wanting details, or smiling with a touch of disbelief, or beginning to feel worried. We are famous. Maybe they’ll write about it in the paper.
When I think about it now, my bandit was probably a dilettante. And if we didn’t feel too good in his company, he was also a little scared by the operation—afraid to approach us even for a moment. Hortansa was wearing earrings worth tens of thousands of lei, and each of them—of course—a wedding ring. We saved them. I think that if I had had a little cunning, and above all a little presence of mind, I could have saved my watch while I was taking off my trousers.
I also wonder whether his gun was loaded, and whether—had we rushed him with our walking sticks—we might not have put him to flight, or caught him—what a victory!—and taken him down with us to the police. But the gun might have been loaded after all, and it was not worth trying a glorious experiment to save the little we had to be stolen. Only if he had come close to us would I probably have done something.
Now the gendarmes are looking for him in the surrounding area. I’d quite enjoy having a chat with him.
I have begun Act Three after a lot of fumbling. I’m still not completely clear about it. I’m advancing slowly, illuminating short distances as I cross them but not knowing where I will go next. There are days when I write nothing, and others from which I select no more than three or four of the written pieces of dialogue. But I no longer have the distressing feeling of a few days ago—about which I spoke to both Marietta and Mircea— that I won’t be able to write any more at all and shall be left with a never-finished play.
It is moving with great difficulty—but it is moving.
I think it has become clearer. It was very hard, but now I sense that I have really achieved clarity once and for all.
Yesterday and today—though not very productive in terms of the number of pages (one and a half yesterday, four and a half today)—have sharpened the contours of Act Three. It has turned out quite different from what I planned, but I’m glad I have recovered a serious tone after the scenes with Bogoiu and the Major, which took it off in a direction that was too crudely comic. It won’t be a comic act. I have, for example, given up the scene with the fish caught by the Major—a scene I enjoyed so much in my first outlines. In fact, the Major and Mme. Vintila no longer appear at all in this act. I didn’t pack them off; they went of their own accord, through the inner logic of things.
The play is closing in around Leni, Ştefan, Bogoiu, and Jef. All three love her—each in his way—and when Leni leaves she will abandon all three. I am rediscovering a very old memory from a film I saw in childhood: The Three Sentimentalists. It is an emotion regained.
I am surprised at the psychological meanings that Bogoiu and Jef have acquired during the months that I’ve been writing the play. Originally intended as quite episodic characters with a mostly comic function, they have become linchpins of the whole psychological action.
So far I have written the first three scenes of Act Three, leaving unfinished (at 7:30 p.m.) the scene with Bogoiu and Leni. A summary outline has been done for the whole act.
The only danger is that the elimination of the Major and Mme. Vintila will leave the act too short. But I am determined not to let this influence me for the moment. I am writing the play as it compels itself to be written. Later, when it is performed, I shall make the strictly necessary amplifications—if any are indeed necessary. I have the impression that, especially given the length of the first act, the play could be divided into two parts, with a single interval after Act One. Acts Two and Three would then be performed almost straight through, with a single five-minute break between them.
I am thinking of various titles (“Holidays” is too flat): “A Sunny Day,” “The Game of Holidaymaking,” “Playing at Happiness.”
I think I have regained the joy of writing. For a moment (which lasted some ten days), it deserted me. If I remain in the mood for work, I shall stay in Ghilcoş until I finish—that is, if necessary, even after the first of September.
I am halfway through the eighth scene, the high point of Act Three in which Leni and Ştefan have it out. From now on, the rest will be perfectly straightforward. I realize that if I work harder and make a more concentrated effort, I could finish everything in a single day.
But, on the one hand, the rain is back, and since yesterday morning we have again been in mid-November. I miss the sun so much . . . I’d grown used to working on the balcony—especially between five and seven in the afternoon, when Mount Ghilcoş right in front of me passed through the most delightful glow of twilight. And the presence of Teodoreanu, also bent over a desk on his balcony, was friendly and reassuring. . . .
On the other hand, I am still being bothered by the investigation into what happened on Ţohard. They have summoned me a few times to the police station to show me various suspects. In the end they settled on a guy who, so to speak, offers the highest guarantee of being guilty. I can’t swear he is the one, but I do know that his stare frightens me. Now they have summoned me to the preliminary hearing in Miercurea-Ciuc. Obviously, I won’t go. But all these parleys, all these trips to the police station, all these statements I have to make (always with the fear of getting an innocent person into trouble) irritate me and, by interrupting the flow, prevent me from working.
All the same, I can now consider the play virtually complete. Two days more, or five or six, and it’ll be over. But I should like to finish it here, so that I don’t have to leave a single line until Bucharest.
No, I won’t finish it either today, tomorrow, or Sunday. I don’t know when I’ll finish. Although the eighth scene is now over—the one with Leni and Ştefan, which seemed the hardest in this act—not all the difficulties have passed. The very next scene, for example, between Ştefan and Jef, is putting up considerable resistance. I struggled with it the whole of yesterday afternoon, and again the whole of this morning, without coming away with more than five or six snatches of dialogue. Strange how resistances appear when you are least expecting them.
But I haven’t got myself worked up about it. I am waiting. The finale is shaping up splendidly, with a wealth of nuances that I didn’t suspect ten days ago, when the whole third act seemed lifeless. But will I be able to bring out all these nuances? If I don’t extract a moment of great delicacy and refined emotion from the penultimate scene (Leni, Ştefan, Bogoiu, Jef), the only explanation will be that I don’t have an ounce of talent.
As for the title, I think I’ll stick with Joucul de-a vacanţa [The Game of Holidaymaking].
I have finished. To whom shall I wire, as in my first year: “Passed exam. Am happy”?
But have I passed the exam? I’ll find out later.
I have been here since yesterday. My accommodation (the Paruseff Villa), a poor Bulgarian’s home, is little more than a hovel. Very clean, though, and literally at the water’s edge. The waves break three meters from me. A yard, some chaises longues, and the sea stretched far out before me. I think I am at the midpoint of the bay.
The ceaseless sound of the waves has a rhythmic evenness that lulls me to sleep. My slumber was deep, even, and long, as never happened in Ghilcoş. Yet the roar of the waves never stopped, and my window was wide open all night.
This morning, my first dip in the sea. Rediscovered the great pleasure of swimming. And I swim so badly.
A circle of actors and painters, long lazy conversations, an idle, trouble-free, couldn’t-care-less atmosphere that is truly relaxing. Iancovescu, Ţoţa, Marietta Rareş, Lucian Grigorescu, Paul Miracovici, Baraschi, Mützner. Today we all had lunch together at Judge . . . (I’ve forgotten his name), and in the afternoon, with the sea in front of me, I listened to Bach (the Third Brandenburg,) Mozart (a violin concerto), Vivaldi, and Beethoven.
Evening is drawing in, I am alone in the house, and the waves still keep breaking alongside me. . . .
I won’t write here about what happened when I passed through Bucharest. Four quite tiring days. I didn’t see Leni, and perhaps I won’t see her any more. She asked me to visit her on Wednesday—and I didn’t find her at home. I’m fed up with it all. I don’t want to begin again the ordeal of telephone calls, waiting, suspecting, scheming. It is all such old hat, and so pointless. In a way, that incident will make it easier to find a solution for the play. I’ll give the part to Marietta—regretfully, but without hesitating. She’ll make of it what she can. I’d like her to act it with Iancovescu at least—but I fear that even that won’t be possible and that I’ll have to accept Toni in the end. In that case I’ll be heading for certain disaster.
On Wednesday evening I read the second and third acts to Marietta, Haig, the Nenişors, Mircea, and Nina, and by chance the Pencius. A dubious outcome: the first impression was rather depressing. But then I pulled myself together. There are a mass of criticisms that I should like to record here. But my ink has run out, and besides, it is too nice outside. Maybe tomorrow.
Act Two might work in its present form. Maybe not even the scene with Leni and Jef needs anything more to be done to it. But the final scene absolutely must be reworked. In fact, that was what I felt right at the start, when I first wrote it.
The scene immediately after the two intruders leave is also quite inadequate. The idea is excellent (one of the best things I came up with in the whole play), but the goods are not delivered. I realized this myself, but it was Haig, in particular, who drew it to my attention.
The whole episode with the two stowaways works very well. They were all ears and laughed a lot.
That’s all I find at the moment to say about Act Two. The picture is much more complicated for Act Three.
I leave this afternoon. I haven’t written anything, or read anything. I lay in the sun—that was just about all. A few happy days. Being lazy is my highest pleasure. That is why I haven’t noted anything here. It doesn’t interest me.
The sea is calm—a mirror.
I saw Leni and told her I had decided to give the play to Iancovescu and Marietta. Only if that doesn’t work out will I be able to offer it to her again. She took the news with self-restraint, but the emotion was visible. Maybe not “emotion.” Surprise, annoyance, regret—and, very far off, an urge to burst into tears. Such is the stupid logic of the game we are playing with each other. So long as she knew that’ the part was hers, that I was writing and preserving it for her, she was thoughtless to the point of indifference. Now that she has lost it, or is threatened with losing it, the part becomes necessary for her and she suffers at no longer having it.
Nor am I any different. I am rediscovering that “sporadic boorishness” of which Swann spoke. All it takes is a little uneasiness—some doubt, self-questioning, and the idea that I am indifferent to her—and I suffer at not seeing her and think of her day and night. But when it happens (as it did this morning) that I find her dejected, yielding, and ready to love me, then I suddenly regain my distance and stop loving her. This morning I felt she was ugly. Quite simply, I didn’t like her—for the first time since I began to love her. But I know it’s not true, and that even if it were, it wouldn’t be important. The truth is that this morning I and not she was running the show—which forced her to love me, and me not to love her. It is a childishly simple psychological mechanism, which always functions in the same way.
Besides, this doesn’t prevent her from being, as before, coquettish and duplicitous—innocent amid a whole structure of lies. I felt bad listening to her explain last Wednesday’s incident. My recent rereading of Swann has once again shown me how much our comedy resembles all the comedies of love. Leni too is any old Odette, and even more am I any old Swann.
Long intricate dreams tonight, not much of which I can remember.
I am living in a kind of old house with a lot of other people—a boardinghouse?—in some place or other that is certainly not Bucharest. I am courting a girl and bring her into my room. Someone who seems to be her brother or lover, and who has been watching us from the balcony, enters the room and surprises us. A rather confused drama ensues. The girl and the boy both die, either murdered or by their own hand. I am responsible. I too will have either to be killed or to kill myself. But a woman intervenes, and in a long monologue (which seems to take place at the graveside of those two or at some monument) she tells how it was she who killed them—so that I am saved . . . and wake up.
The second dream was even more confused. I am in a large room with a huge number of people. As far as I can make out, it is a memorial meeting. A little later, things become clearer: it is the anniversary of the magazine Nouvelles littéraires. People are holding up large placards with writing on them, all over the vast ballroomlike hall.
A woman is giving a speech. She is interrupted by a man, who shouts out:
“Enough! You’ve talked too much about the Hebrews. I’m surprised you don’t bring Niemirower here too.”9
At that moment an elderly bearded Jew who may actually be Niemirower protests. He takes out a book and starts to read a Jewish prayer. The heckler also takes out a book, from which he reads a Romanian prayer. In reality, nothing can be heard because of the surrounding racket, but one can see the two men reading with great fervor at the back of the hall, on a tall monumental staircase as in a pompous scene from an illustrated magazine.
Some heavy scuffles break out. I, together with a girl or a boy who has been sitting beside me, slip away from the crowd and quickly go home—to the house in my first dream. For a moment I anxiously wonder whether I shall find the door open. It is open. I prepare to run into my room, but I don’t have time—because I wake up.
Evidently both dreams were much more complicated, but I cannot remember any more.
The evening before last, on Sunday, I was at Maryse’s to give a reading for Iancovescu. Marietta and Haig were also there, as well as the Nenişors, Ţoţa, and Ghiţă Ionescu.1
A good reading, which people found quite easy to follow. Iancovescu was boisterous in his enthusiasm:
“It’s the most fantastic thing I’ve heard for the last forty years. It’s a great moment in Romanian theatre. You don’t realize what you’ve done. It’s an honor for me to act in it. You don’t realize the paths you are opening. What technique! What dialogue! What a wonder!”
I listened with amusement, quite calmly. I am getting to know him. Everything for him is fantastic, unique, epoch-making. Everything: his vineyard in Balcic, his dog, the sunset at Surtuchioi (which was indeed marvelous—I regret not having written in Balcic about that walk). I know how much Iancovescu’s superlatives need to be toned down in order to gain a precise idea of what he wants to say. So I don’t let myself be taken in by his excesses of enthusiasm. I know my play better than he does. But he really does seem to have liked it a lot, and an honest commitment can be read beneath his downpour of admiration. It is a point won.
His remarks about the third act are quite accurate; he certainly has a keen eye. The scene in which Leni and Ştefan have it out with each other is too explanatory in style. Crudely explanatory. He suggests a simple solution: cut everything up to the scene with Jef and Ştefan (which he liked a lot, I’m glad to say), write the planned scene with Bogoiu and the Major’s fish, drop the first Leni-Ştefan scene, and then link it all up. A five-minute operation.
I don’t see things that simply, however. The last act needs to be gone over more thoroughly.
All the readings I have done up to now (Sunday’s was the third, not counting the earlier readings of Act One) have been enormously useful to me. They have fixed in my mind the things that work and those that don’t work. It seems to me that an audience of five hundred will react no differently from the audience of ten I have dared face up to now.
In Act Two I shall modify the Bogoiu-Leni scene (in the way that Camil and Gulian indicated, with an exciting identity of views). The proof that this change is necessary is that, after the first act, Iancovescu said to me that Bogoiu is a character from the family of Fulda’s Fool— which is quite wrong. Anyway, the change is simple and easy to make, more a problem of transcription than of actual transformation.
Act Two will remain almost untouched. The first scene splendidly indicates the change of atmosphere. Again my audience listened with great pleasure to the entrance of the two stowaways. (I shall only change something that Bogoiu says to the police—which doesn’t work at all.) Iancovescu gave me here a simple but excellent suggestion.
I think I shall write the third act again, apart from the last four scenes. I’d need three to four days for that, and would go off to work in somewhere like Sinaia, or maybe Braşov or Sibiu. We’ll see. I’m not in any hurry at the moment, though Iancovescu assures me that he’ll be performing it by Christmas—and has offered to sign a contract straightaway to that effect. But there will be major difficulties. I have a feeling that he won’t accept Marietta; that he would prefer Ţoţa. In that case I won’t let him have the play. However much I need Iancovescu—and now, especially, I feel he is irreplaceable—I can’t let him put on my play with Ţoţa, or with Ţăranu as Bogoiu and—just imagine—Mircea as Jef. I’d sooner wait a year.
Frankly speaking, a year’s wait is the solution that would suit me best, because my ideal cast (Leni-Iancovescu-Timică) might be possible by then, and because I am now pretty fed up with the way the whole thing has been dragging on. I am longing to do something else: to read, to write a novel, to put behind me a joke which, I now realize, demands more of my time than it is worth. I feel disgusted when I see the proportions taken by something which has no right to be more than a trifle. Am I so unserious that I imagine this frolic in three acts has a right to preoccupy me, when each year in Paris, Vienna, and London thirty people write thirty comedies that are at least as enjoyable? No, it is time to be serious again.
But 1) I have no money; 2) I don’t know if there will be a war or revolution by this time next year; 3) I don’t know whether by next year a Jewish writer will still be able to put on a play, even at a private theatre. These are three reasons that spur me on.
I don’t know what I shall do.
Yesterday evening Mircea flared up in the middle of a fairly calm conversation about foreign policy and Titulescu,2 suddenly raising his voice with that terrible violence that sometimes surprises me:
“Titulescu? He should be executed. Put in front of a machine-gun firing squad. Riddled with bullets. Strung up by the tongue.”
“Why, Mircea?” I asked in surprise.
“Because he’s committed treason, high treason. He’s concluded a secret treaty with the Russians so that they can occupy Bukovina and Maramureş in the event of war.”
“How do you know that?”
“General Condiescu told me.”
“And is that enough? Don’t you think it’s a biased source? Don’t you think it’s based on fantasy?”
He stared at me with stupefaction, unable to grasp that anyone could doubt such a “truth.” Then I heard him whisper to Nina:
“I wish I hadn’t told him that.”
He’d have liked to add: “because he’s too blind to understand it.”
The whole incident depressed me. As I write it down, I notice that I no longer have the nervous tension that I felt yesterday, the sense of irreparable discord.
He’s a man of the right, with everything that implies. In Abyssinia he was on the side of Italy. In Spain on the side of Franco. Here he is for Codreanu. He just makes an effort—how awkwardly?—to cover this up, at least when he is with me. But sometimes he can’t stop himself, and then he starts shouting as he did yesterday.
He, Mircea Eliade, has a blind faith in what Universul writes. His informant is Stelian Popescu3—and he has a blind faith in him. The most absurd and trivially tendentious news items find in him a gullible listener. And he has a naive way of getting worked up and raising his voice, to spout—without so much as a smile—some baloney he has heard in town at the editorial offices of Vremea or Cuvântul. Titulescu has sold us to the Russians. Titulescu has given the Spanish Communists “twenty-five airplanes ordered in France.” If I shrug my shoulders in disbelief, he looks sorrowfully at me and gently shakes his head, as at someone completely lost to the truth.
I should like to eliminate any political reference from our discussions. But is that possible? Street life impinges on us whether we like it or not, and in the most trivial reflection I can feel the breach widening between us.
Will I lose Mircea for no more reason than that? Can I forget everything about him that is exceptional, his generosity, his vital strength, his humanity, his affectionate disposition, all that is youthful, childlike, and sincere in him? I don’t know. I feel awkward silences between us, which only half shroud the explanations we avoid, because we each probably feel them. And I keep having more and more disillusions, not least because he is able to work comfortably with the anti-Semitic Vremea, as if there were nothing untoward about it.
Nevertheless I shall do everything possible to keep him.
Was at Roman on Sunday and Monday. I left overwhelmed, exhausted, feeling that I wouldn’t be able to come back to life. Everything seemed pointless and absurd. It was humiliating to think that it could be such a problem for me to ring Leni or to take a call from her. The idea of putting on my play struck me as trifling.
Now it has all passed. In a way, I have forgotten. This afternoon I shall go to the law courts, this evening I shall go to the theatre, right now I am writing in this notebook—and meanwhile B lecher’s life at Roman continues as I have seen it. Will I ever again have the nerve to complain about anything? Will I ever again be so brazen as to have caprices, bad moods, or feelings of irritation? He is living in the intimate company of death. It is not a vague, abstract death in the long term, but his own death, precise, definite, known in detail like an object.
What gives him the courage to live? What keeps him going? He is not even in despair. I swear I don’t understand. How many times have I been on the verge of tears when I looked at him. At night I could hear him groaning and crying out in his room—and I felt there was someone else in the house apart from us, a someone who was death, fate, or whatever. I came away feeling shattered, bewildered.
If things had a penalty attached to them, I would not go on with my life as I have lived it up to now. I wouldn’t be able to. But I forget— and return to the unconscious existence of someone in reasonably good health.
I am beginning to miss Leni again. I held out for a couple of weeks, but each day I feel that I am giving way to my longing to see her. I hover around the telephone, fall asleep thinking of her, dream about her, wake up thinking of her. I know it’s stupid—I have only to read through this journal to see how stupid it is.
I met her Monday night around half past one, as she was getting out of a car with Froda outside their house. I didn’t even see her properly. I spoke indifferently enough; I didn’t feel in the grip of emotion. Later, after we had parted, all the memories and expectations opened up again.
I have to be rational and firm. But will I be?
I don’t know what the Iancovescu solution will do for the play. It is not at all serious. And this whole business has tired me. I’m a little weary of my manuscript. When I think of it, it seems conceited, cheap, frivolous, irritatingly hearty, compromisingly facile.
In the last few days I have reread some pages of De două mii de ani. Will I ever again write anything that serious?
There’s a Milstein concert this evening. Maybe I’ll come away feeling clearer in the head, more in control of myself.
Celebrations in honor of Stelian Popescu at the Roman Arena. Perpes-sicius4 said to me yesterday evening: “A day of mourning.” And he added: “It’s the most shameful day in Romania since the war.”
Maybe I shouldn’t be downcast. Maybe, on the contrary, I should be glad that the whole Romanian right, the whole of “nationalism,” is regrouping around Stelian Popescu. It defines it as something disreputable, and in a sense is even consoling (from a very lofty vantage point).
Nae Ionescu sent him a congratulatory telegram yesterday, on behalf of Cuvântul. Should I feel depressed? Not really. I ought to go and tell him: “Now, professor, there’s no longer any doubt that your politics are wrong. Only a terrible mistake could put you side by side with Stelian Popescu.”
I wonder whether Nae Ionescu at least does not feel rotten deep down inside.
The Romanian Writers’ Association also sent a message of support. Neither Tudor Vianu nor Mircea signed it. But Mircea, in his naive way, thought that he was thereby showing solidarity with Nae—which earned him a serious rebuke when Nae found out. For a moment I considered resigning from the Writers’ Association, on the grounds that I can’t associate myself with celebrations in honor of a paper that insults Arghezi.5 But if Arghezi himself does not resign . . .
Sad, sad times. What a wave of triviality in which everyone is drowning—out of hypocrisy, cowardice, and self-interest!
Will the day come when it is possible to speak openly about these dark days? I’m sure it will, absolutely sure. I should like still to be here when it does.
Radu Cioculescu6 told me yesterday evening that he has broken off relations with a family of friends, because the wife—a schoolteacher—signed a manifesto for Universul.
This reminded me that he, Radu Cioculescu, also refused to accept tickets for and attend the concerts of the Berlin orchestra this summer, because he couldn’t agree to any contact with a Hitlerite institution.
A strange man. Probably the only radical Romanian there is.
Dined yesterday evening at the Continental, with Perpessicius, Şerban Cioculescu,7 Vladimir Streinu, Pompiliu Constantinescu, and Octav Şuluţiu. Together we constituted an association of literary critics. Perhaps we shall bring out a magazine. I’m not really sure what will come of it.
I’m so remote from all that.
Yesterday evening, at the Foundation, Davidescu8 explained to Perpessicius and Cicerone Theodorescu that Jews don’t know Romanian. One of his arguments was to quote the metaphor of a “crammed goose” from a book of mine.
Cicerone told me this little story, and when Davidescu approached me a little later to wish me good evening, I said to him:
“I’m sorry, Mr. Davidescu, but you know I never wrote anything like that—at least I don’t remember it.”
The discussion then continued quite amusingly for half an hour or so. I am too lazy to reproduce it in full. I get the impression that Davidescu suffers from a case of syphilis with anti-Semitic symptoms. He has a disturbing look in his eyes.
Back home later in the evening, I realized that I had been mistaken about the “goose.” So today I am sending the following note to Davidescu:
“Dear Mr. Davidescu, After I left you yesterday evening, I went home and searched for some two hours through my books to be sure whether I had or had not ever used that compromising image which you recalled with such fierce criticism. I hasten to inform you that you were right. The comparison in question can indeed be found in a book of mine. I had forgotten. You will easily find it in Femei, second edition, page 27, line 17.
“As a colleague, I am pleased to do you the favor of communicating the exact sentence. Here it is: ‘She breathed with difficulty and rolled her eyes a few times, as crammed geese are wont to do.’
“May I also draw to your attention the fact that this is the method by which an excellent foie gras may be obtained.
“I should have no rest if I did not hasten to correct my regrettably poor memory. I am delighted that, in so doing, I am able to restore one of the fundamental arguments in your political and critical system.
“I remain as always your admiring . . .”
Nae Ionescu’s telegram appeared in Universul—printed between others from Trandafirescu-Nămăeşti9 and Muche.1 that is no mere coincidence. It is a punishment.
Dem. Theodorescu,2 whom I met on Monday evening at the National, said to me:
“Yes, Sunday was the most wretched day in the political life of Romania. But you don’t know, Mr. Sebastian, what a profound disgust has come over me; you would have to be more familiar with Stelian Popescu.”
“All right. But then why did you also sign the congratulatory telegram?”
“What can I do? That’s life!”
I am at a dangerous point with regard to my play: I am beginning to like the third act. After violently disliking it for quite a while, after thinking at readings (once at Marietta’s, another time at Maryse’s) that it would be a certain disaster, after blindly agreeing to every suggested alteration— from Gulian or Haig or Iancovescu—now I am beginning to like it!
I would prefer to change only a few details. I’d simplify a few scenes and eliminate some dialogue—but leave intact the scenario, the unfolding of the plot, the general tone of the act. Only the first and the last scene should be revised more thoroughly: the first, to introduce Bogoiu and to justify the absence of the Major and Madame Vintila; the last, because it is really too hurried, as I knew from the first moment. Otherwise I am inclined to leave the third act as it is—even if in that case Iancovescu refuses to go on with it.
I prefer to make a mistake myself than to have others make one. As I have written it—and not they—I think I have more chance of seeing the truth. I should also mention my inability to redo my own manuscripts. Didn’t it happen like that with Oraşul cu salcîmi?
In today’s Credinţa, Manoliu denounces me for working at the Foundation and naturally calls for my dismissal. The only thing that surprises me is that the attack has come so late.
A musical evening. From Radio Bucharest, on discs, Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D Minor. Later, from Warsaw, a symphony in G minor by Mozart, and Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. I thought József Szigeti was exceptional on the violin. And my radio sounded clearer and warmer than ever before! Now I am waiting for a Beethoven cello sonata from Vienna, which should start any minute now. Then to bed.
Twenty-nine years old. I feel neither happy nor sad—conscious that I still have some things to do, for which I have to go on living. Otherwise nothing. But I made a serious effort to greet this day with some solemnity, as a lucky day. I have such a need to create for myself little superstitions that augur well. I drank champagne at Mircea’s. Everything was fairly awkward.
It was a very nice morning—a marvelous day in a glorious October. That too I put down to my birthday. I also took the Enescu3 concert at the Ateneu as a good sign. I am most willing to be convinced that I am not a complete and utter goner.
This afternoon, a bungled visit to Leni backstage.
Then a visit to Nae (also half bungled).
Finally the cinema and a group dinner—ending in a painful political argument with Mircea.
But more about all this tomorrow.
I am starting a new year of life—but am I destined really to take on anything else?
The first two acts came back from the typist this evening. I read them for typing errors, and this has tired me. Everything seems lacking in fun, though it’s true that I’m not in the best of “humors.”
Yesterday evening I took the first two acts, typed, to Iancovescu. He told me today that he had read the first.
“I’m convinced,” he said, “that you are in love with Marietta. A role like that can be written only for a woman you love very much. It’s the nicest possible female role—the nicest but also the hardest. Not even Ventura could act it. When I told Ţoţa that I thought you were crazy about Marietta, he told me that he didn’t think so, but that you might be in love with Leni.”
This evening I ate at Mircea’s, and he told me some amusing details about yesterday’s party at Polihroniade’s house.4 Zelea Codreanu,5 whom everyone calls “Captain,” was also there. Marietta Sadova had come with Codreanu’s book and she asked him to sign it.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Marietta Sadova,” she replied, sure of herself. And since he didn’t seem any the wiser, she added:
. . from the National Theatre.”
“Mrs. or Miss?” he asked further, just as we do at the Day of the Book.
I think it was a bit of a blow for poor little Marietta—though (still according to Mircea) it didn’t stop her from looking at the “Captain” and listening to him all the time with an ecstatic smile. It is the same ecstatic smile with which she looks at Aristide Blank. Can I say that Marietta is a hypocrite? No. But she’s a strange mixture of harsh practicality and openhanded sincerity.
Another detail, as moving and as ridiculous. Haig brought along his whole oeuvre (poems, essays) for the “Captain” and wrote a special dedication for him.
After Codreanu left, Marietta and Haig said in one voice that they had lived through a magnificent day. “Colossal” was their exact term, I think.
In 1932 Haig was a Communist.
A snippet from Sunday’s conversation with Nae:
“Look, I’m finished—a broken-down failure of a man. My life divides into two: before 5 July 1933, and since 5 July 1933. Until that day I was a strong person. Since then I’ve been nothing.”
What happened on 5 July 1933? I think it was the day he broke up with Maruca Cantacuzino.6
At last we have got ourselves a house. May the gods keep smiling on me!
There is something of Mme. Verdurin in Marietta—not a lot, and not with the same comic violence, but it is there. This morning at the concert she said to me after Enescu had played the Brahms concerto:
“Aren’t you feeling a little ill? It has made me ill.”
And she had a happy look on her face; she was suffering—almost swooning—from happiness.
She is very dear to me, but one day I’d like to capture her studied social tactics in a character in a novel. For example, what subtle intentions could be deciphered from her behavior at this evening’s reception at the Blanks, when she obliged me to read the play again!
Again at Roman, Blecher spoke to me of a woman from Bucharest who knows and “admires” my books. Two years ago, when De două mii de ani was published, she wrote to him that she had discovered an author “more intelligent than Gide.” Last year, at a concert, she sat next to me and wanted to speak to me, but in the end did not dare. Her name is Maria Ghiolu—the wife of an engineer.7 They seem to be remarkably wealthy.
The day before yesterday, Blecher sent a letter asking me to phone Mrs. Ghiolu—but he also recommended a whole number of precautions. I should ring on Tuesday or Wednesday, not any other day, at eleven in the morning and not any other time.
I rang her just now. A weak, timid voice, whispering more than speaking, as if afraid that someone in the next room would hear. She gave me an appointment for Thursday at six, in the lobby of the Athénée Palace.8 That’s another “mystery” in this story. We’ll see.
I leave at one for Galaţi, where I’m due to speak on Léon Blum as a literary figure.
Yesterday evening at the Dalles Hall, a first-rate chamber concert with the orchestra from Berlin. A lot of Mozart—among other things, the first and the last movement of the Kleine nachtmusik. But I was especially moved by a “sinfonia concertante” for violin and viola, its melancholy supremely Mozartian.
But in recent weeks the musical side of things has been much richer than that. I don’t have the patience to note it all down.
For the last ten days, since we began moving into our new home at Strada Antim 45, I have been leading a disorganized life—much more disorganized than before. I do absolutely nothing, yet I feel overwhelmed by things to do. I am worn out, and wait as if for some well-earned holiday after months of effort. Everything happening to me takes place somewhere outside, as if it did not concern me. I feel as if I am dirty and dusty from a long journey, impatient to reach somewhere where I can brush or change my clothes, take a bath, become a different man. But I am not going anywhere, not expecting anything; nothing is awaiting me.
I look closely at myself (not too closely, though, out of prudence, cowardice, or fear that I may have to bear all the consequences) and tell myself that I am falling apart. In this state of disintegration I have the (semiconscious) stupidity to get involved with people who, not knowing me, “press forward” with a good faith that ought to make me feel ashamed. For example, why did I take that caper with Cella Seni as far as I did?9 She’s a nice girl, who put a lot of herself into this “incipient love”—and now I drop her with the most stupid indifference. Am I really so irresponsible in my actions with other people?
I am ashamed—I swear that I am ashamed.
And I am so lacking in energy, good sense, and manliness that I feel everything is going badly—not because I’m a wreck, but because . . . I don’t yet have a telephone. Yes, however funny it seems, I wait for them to reconnect me, with the feeling that that will sort out everything.
What will stop me sinking? I don’t know. Is there still anything, can anything still happen to pull me out of this?
Had lunch at Mircea’s yesterday. A discussion of foreign policy—as calm as could be. I tried to speak dispassionately, as if it were a matter of precise facts, not of opinions, impressions, and attitudes.
I especially remember one thing that Mircea said. These were his exact words:
“I prefer a little Romania, with some of its provinces lost but with its bourgeoisie and elite saved, rather than a proletarian Greater Romania.”
He was calm. He didn’t seem to realize the enormity of what he was saying.
Iancovescu has finally announced the next premiere. It will be a translation—Nine Thousand somethings—with Maria Mohor, produced by Popa. Not a word about my play. No phone call, no explanation, no apology.
So the Iancovescu-Marietta solution has fallen through, without any assistance from me. Although it was a solution on which I was never all that keen, the truth is that I did nothing at all to sabotage it. At one point, indeed, I let myself be drawn right into it and did everything possible for things to work out. I hope Marietta won’t have reason to blame me now—even if the play is performed by Leni. But will it be performed?
I saw Leni the evening before last, when I went out with her and Froda. It was the third time I had met her since the summer. She is lovely and obnoxious, just as I have always known her. I danced with her at the bar—and then suffered like a fool because Lăzăroneanu1 (with whom I bet she has slept, is sleeping, or will sleep) came over to our table. I simply cannot start those senseless torments all over again. In the end I was quite all right for those twenty days in which I didn’t see her or speak to her on the phone. So now I should begin another twenty days or so of silence.
“In principle” we agreed that I should read her the play, but she has to ring me to fix a time for the reading—and she certainly won’t do that. So things will again be left at that for I don’t know how long.
One evening I went to the Gambrinus2 with Camil. I think it was Monday, after the Münzer concert. We spoke about Romanian literature. I recall without smiling his statement:
“Dear Sebastian, there is only one writer today who is capable of producing a great novel—and I am he.”
I find it impossible to explain his candor: he is such an intelligent man, and yet so profoundly naive.
My bad memory for music is extraordinary. Just now (n p.m.) I was listening to Beethoven’s fourth symphony and, apart from a few phrases in the scherzo, I no longer remember anything, even though I have surely heard the symphony several times in my life. The last three weeks or so have been a real musical feast. Enescu, Münzer, and Hubermann concerts. How many things I’ve heard! The violin concertos by Brahms, Beethoven, and Bach; Beethoven’s Romance in F Major, Chausson’s Poème, Beethoven’s Third Symphony and Coriolan Overture, a Brahms symphony (I don’t remember which one), Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony.
The Kreuzer Sonata, an Enescu sonata, a Franck sonata (“surtout jouée par Enesco"), a Brahms sonata (once with Enescu, a second time with Hubermann), the Spring Sonata with Münzer at the piano, two Scarlatti sonatas, Beethoven’s fifteen Eroica Variations, and a large amount of Chopin.
Now, though very tired, I am waiting for a tremendous program from Stuttgart, due to begin in five minutes: Bach (Concerto for Flute, Violin, and Harpsichord in A Minor), Haydn (Piano Sonata in B Minor), Schubert (Rondo in A Major for Violin and String Quartet), Mozart (Concertone in C for Two Violins and Orchestra).
It has been perhaps one of the last magnificent days of autumn. I went to a soccer match at the O.N.E.F. (Venus against CFR), not for the match but for the scenery, which I guessed in advance would be gleaming. I wasn’t wrong. A weary, powdered, tender light—and far off a bright, steamy, silvery mist from which the city detached itself in an unreal way, as in a painted canvas or a mounted photograph. And how many colors! I didn’t know there were so many red houses in Bucharest. From the stadium they look as if they are made of toy bricks. And the leafless trees jut out of the mist as from a damp exhalation of their own. Everything was very delicately drawn, but with an explosive wealth of color. The red grounds, the multicolored billboards, the still-green grass, the football shirts mingling black, white, and blue, the huge crowd: it was all quite dizzying. At the beginning of the second half, the referee blew his whistle for a minute’s silence in memory, I think, of a foreign player who died recently. Suddenly there was a massive silence—a silence of some twenty thousand people. The noise of the city could just be heard in the distance.
“She’s sleeping with someone called Berlescu, a kid of around twenty,” Camil said at table today, with a studied disinterest that didn’t conceal his premeditation and, perhaps, satisfaction. I’d like this incident to help me forget everything once and for all.
Had a long telephone conversation this morning with Mrs. Ghiolu; it lasted more than half an hour. She said some things full of childish admiration, which gave me quite a lot of pleasure. She has recently read Cum am devenit huligan and was “won over” by it.
“What you write frightens me a little, as if you must have the strength to dominate other people. I think you exert an influence over them from which there is no escape. And you are such a self-possessed man! Vous êtes probablement d'une sécheresse de coeur. . .3 I’d so much like to be your friend. I have always dreamed of friendship with a man, but a pure, loyal friendship. Do you think that’s possible? I keep thinking of you, and I’ve spoken of it with my husband and my friends. Do you have time for us to be friends? Do you want us to be friends?”
She spoke to me in the same (or almost the same) way that Leni did two years ago. Maryse too spoke to me like that. So did Dorina (a few levels down). And when each has got to know me, a disappointed indifference has been the result. The only one who keeps at it is Maryse, though she too is flagging.
On Saturday evening, Enescu played a sonata by Veracini (enchanting: I heard it last year with Thibaud, but I’d completely forgotten it), a sonata in A minor by Bach (absolutely wonderfully played), and a sonata by Mozart. The evening before, Hubermann played the Franck sonata. I’m tired of so much music, but it’s been my only consolation recently.
“Wendy and Julie” are two young Englishwomen who were dancing and singing at Maxim’s until a few days ago, when the owner terminated their contract and left them lost and penniless in a Bucharest where they don’t know a soul. The British consul sent them to Roman—and Roman has passed them on to me. I hope that I’ll eventually get quite high compensation for them—something like 25,000 lei—with the help of Comarnescu and Sadoveanu4 at the Theatre Board.
The whole story has been quite fun. I’ve met a whole series of fancy men, pimps, and artistic “agents” swarming around “Wendy and Julie”; I’ve been behind the scenes in the bar, read an employment contract, learned how the establishment is run. It’s quite alluring. Wendy, whose real name is Flora Moss, was born in 1911. She has a fiancé in Copenhagen, a policeman by the name of Gunard. I saw a photo of him yesterday evening when I went up to her room. In civilian clothes he looks like a famous sportsman, especially with the long pipe dangling from his teeth. In Danish police uniform he is even more impressive. “For my dear Wendy, for always, Gunard” he wrote on the edge of the picture.
Wendy is slim, with smaller breasts than I have ever seen before, naturally reddish hair, and a snub nose. She has a childlike gaiety that I find enchanting. Yesterday evening I had promised to stay with her. Of course I didn’t stay—and I left her feeling sad, like a child who has been promised an outing to the cinema and then sent to bed.
Julie (Wendy calls her “Miss Julie,” which I think she picked up at the bar) is rather plainer, but also very English. Her fiancé, Reginald, lives in London and works as a salesman in a china shop.
Both speak French correctly but with an irresistible accent. As soon as they have the money, they want to go to Sofia to take up a contract. I regret that I can’t spend more time talking with them. But it’s not possible—Wendy is in love with me. She explained in all seriousness the difference between a camarade (stress on the first syllable, pronounced like a Romaniană) and an ami. “Avec un camarade on ne couche pas. Avec un ami on couche. ”5
Went to quite a homely little tea party yesterday at Mrs. Ghiolu’s. Her house seemed gorgeous, but I didn’t look at it all that closely. Entertaining company. On my right, a daughter of Stelian Popescu’s (Mrs. Popescu-Necşeşti), who said that she knows me from the Criterion and that she had asked Mrs. Ghiolu to invite me sometime just with her. Opposite, a youthful Princess Cantacuzino. As I was leaving, I heard that she is very left-wing, being the daughter of Labaiyre, the governor of the Banque de France.
As to Mrs. Ghiolu, I thought her less interesting than at our first meeting at the Athénée Palace, when I was really struck by her. (For I am so plebeian and naive that the event seemed to me really extraordinary.)
She is a “Jeni” type of woman: dark, plumpish, with shaved eyebrows that irritate me. I think that greater repose in her appearance would suit her better, that she is made to be serious, attentive, and submissive. She doesn’t have that restless, aggressive quivering that is a feature of slim blondes.
But is it not remarkable that this rich society woman, with a young, handsome, athletic, and wealthy husband, can have a passion for Blecher? And is her timid admiration for someone like me not moving and childlike?
Things will work out with Celia Seni because of my sovereign laziness.
“You are too vile for me not to end up loving you,” she said to me the evening before last, as we were on our way back from the Philharmonic concert. That’s almost a definition of love. Is it not for the same reason—because she is so “vile”—that I love Leni and love her so helplessly?
It’s been a week of which I feel ashamed. Whole days wasted, dizzy nights. I have done nothing and let myself be taken to any occasion that got me out on the town.
Tomorrow I leave for the baptism of Silvia’s child in Brăila, but then I am determined to force myself to do a week of serious work. I’d like to write a book, and for that maybe I should go somewhere over Christmas. But I have so many vague plans for Christmas! From time to time I feel a piercing call which I do not yet want to accept, not yet—and I would like so much never to be forced to accept it. It is something for which I pray to God with the last remnant of my hopes.
Yesterday evening from Stuttgart, Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto and Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D Minor (with Edwin Fischer).
Brăila has never before seemed so sad, provincial, godforsaken. The streetcar stopped for nearly fifteen minutes on the corner of Strada Unirea, waiting to “cross.” Then, on Strada Galaţi, it didn’t move at all because of repairs to the line—and we had to get off and change. In the town center the clock was stopped at 5:20, though it was 10:30 in the morning, and a little farther the clock on the Greek church showed 11:20. A November cold, few people, old houses—not one new person, not one new building, empty shops.
I went with Petrică to the port, and this prevented me from being emotional. But it was still a pleasure to see again the ships, the willows, the heavy chains, the cables. Everything in the town seemed detached from a long time ago, from a previous life.
Yesterday evening Rosetti6 showed me a letter from General Zwiedenek,7 written on behalf of the Queen to the Foundation. In it he asked about the conditions under which a novel of hers might be published in translation.
“Until now Her Majesty’s works have been printed by Editura Adevarul, which has also made an offer for the present novel.
“Considering, however, that the Romanian national sentiments of that publishing house are not assured, Her Majesty Queen Maria has instructed me to approach your good self.”
Literally!
Prodan8 called Marietta and Lilly to his office in the last few days to rebuke them for verbally obstructing the work of the National Theatre. Among other things he said:
“So what do you want—that I should resign and pack my bags? That Mr. Mihail Sebastian should be appointed in my place? Well, that’s not going to happen. It can’t happen, because he’s a Jew.”
Impossible to explain that sudden outburst. But I can’t say it doesn’t amuse me.
A tooth extraction has kept me indoors since yesterday evening. I can see that I’ve lost the taste for reading and writing, and my staying at home—which would once have delighted me—now gets on my nerves.
I’m in a grey mood, neither expectant nor despondent, without either longings or loves.
At the Brailowsky recital on Monday evening, I was introduced to Cella Delavrancea, who happened to have the seat next to mine.
“I imagined you to be different. More lively and dark. I was looking at you just now and you seemed like a schoolboy. And you ought to have had a dark complexion. Your writing is so self-assured, so firm. . . .”
I smiled wearily. How many times have I been told the same things?
When I bumped into Camil Baltazar9 at Alcalay on Saturday evening, he said to me:
“If you don’t write a study of my work in the Revista Fundaţiilor in the next three months, I’ll never speak to you again.”
Just like that.
Domnişoara Christina has been out for three days or so. Mircea is disgusted. He thinks that the bookshops are persecuting him, that the publishers are scheming against him, that Ocneanu is making fun of him, that Mişu at Cartea Românească is full of perfidy. Ciornei didn’t put his book in the window. Alcalay did, but it’s not visible. Cartea românească is sabotaging it.
Does it just seem so, or have I really never had such worries? I don’t say it with pride, but I have never asked anyone to write an article, never engaged in literary politics, cultivated anyone’s favor, or tried to evade anyone’s hostility. Maybe it all has to do with my old tendency to laziness, but to some extent it is also because I am aware that my destiny as a writer—if I have one—will be decided a long way from all these little “games.”
Whether from pride or from laziness, my indifference is the same— at least in the literary field.
I have just come back from the Philharmonic, where I heard Franck’s Piano Concerto in G Major and his Symphonic Variations, with Arthur Rubinstein. Schumann’s Fourth Symphony (which I heard this evening with a pleasure it has never given me before) and Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel. Altogether a fine evening of music.
Yesterday, at the Ateneu, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.
On Monday evening, Casals: Beethoven’s Variations on a Theme by Handel, the Boccherini concerto, a Bach suite, and three chorales.
Apart from these, more Enescu: the third Brahms sonata, a Schumann sonata, one by Mozart, and one by Bach.
Nothing is happening to me except for music.
A lot of incidents—but nothing significant. I’m not desperate: I am numb and try not to feel anything. The days pass—that’s all.
Will I write the book I have been thinking about for some time, without really knowing what might come of it and where it might lead me?
“For some time”: to be precise, since the 18th of October, my birthday! When I left Mircea’s that day, to buy a couple of bottles of champagne, I suddenly had the picture of a road accident into which I should have liked to be drawn.1 I could see the first chapter with a wealth of detail so pressing that I thought that, when I got home, I would be unable to do anything other than write, as if under the command of an imperious voice. Let’s call that inspiration.
I did try to write—I don’t remember whether it was that evening or a few days later—but it didn’t work out.
Nevertheless, since then I have kept thinking of the possibility of such a book. There are a few little things, a few little ideas, that have started to come together around that first image—and to stick to it.
For example, my walk with Cella Seni—the evening she stole an apple on Strada Acadamiei (which made me feel younger as a reflex)—made me feel again like writing a short story. Disheartened as I am, it may be that I shall find some joy in that. It will be a short novel or a long short story, a récit. Maybe I’ll start on it over the Christmas holidays. But I’d need to get out of Bucharest—and I wonder whether I’ll find enough money for that.
Yesterday evening at the Vişoianus,2 Marietta called for a legal ban on all foreign films.
“Let them speak Romanian!” she said with a certain violence. I thought she was joking. I pointed out how barbarous are films with a sound track in a language other than the one in which they were filmed.
Marietta grew pale and raised her voice, though it was a kind of “head voice,” somewhat dulled by choking as she seemed about to burst into tears.
“This scandal should be stopped once and for all. We are in Romania, and they should speak Romanian.”
It seemed tiresome to enter into such a discussion, so I merely said with an irony that she failed to grasp:
“Marietta, my dear, you are in the most disturbing phase of nationalism.”
I don’t know whether she understood my allusion to her adventure last Friday, when she recited some verse at an Iron Guard festival (“under the spiritual patronage of the legionaries fighting Marxism in Spain”) held to raise funds for their “Green House.”3 Nor do I know whether, if she did understand my allusion, she would have been bothered by it. The poor girl feels that she can’t hope for anything better under the present regime. Maybe there would be room for a Leni Riefenstahl in a state run by Zelea Codreanu. Anyway, Marietta has put herself forward.
Literature. Anişoara Odeanu has sent me her novel: “A book that ought to have at least ten epigraphs from De două mii de ani.” In fact, her manuscript contained not ten but two epigraphs. But Camil insisted that she get rid of them. “It’s not good for there to be too many epigraphs,” he said. Indeed, one is enough—especially as it is from Ultima noapte,4. . . What a delightful man Camil is!
Two branches of lilies . . . from Celia.
I think it’s a year today—that is, precisely fifty-two weeks—since I sent two branches of lilies to someone else—to her.
Projects: 1) Leave for Breaza on the 2nd of January, stay there until the 20th, and start writing a novel for publication in March or April; 2) Immediately start the necessary reading for the first volume of “The Romanian Novel,” start drafting it in February-March for publication on the Day of the Book; 3) Discuss with Ocneanu the publication of a volume of chronicles and essays, perhaps to come out in February or at Easter.
This morning at the Philharmonic, Wilhelm Kempff: Mozart, Beethoven (Concerto in E-flat). Thursday evening the Brahms concerto. This evening at nine I’ll try to pick up Breslau: the Christmas Oratorio.
Came back yesterday evening from Roman, where I had been for the second time to see Blecher.
Maybe it’s because I’m getting used to it, but he seemed better than last time. If I lived close by him, I’d probably end up thinking that his tragedy was normal. There are no tragedies lived on a daily basis. I know a little about that from my own life. After twenty-four hours you start getting used to it—that is, accepting it.
As for Blecher, he is much more downcast. He spoke to me of his death, which he thinks is close at hand.
“I tell myself that Jules Renard died in 1911,” he said. “At a distance, death becomes so inconsequential. I just have to imagine that I too died a long time ago, in 1911. I’m not scared of death. Then I’ll rest and sleep. Ah, how well I’ll stretch out, how well I’ll sleep! Listen, I’ve begun to write a novel. But I don’t feel that I absolutely must complete it. If I die first, I don’t think I’ll even regret not having finished it. What a minor thing literature is for me, and how little of my time it takes up! Recently I’ve thought of taking my own life. But it’s difficult: I don’t have the means. The simplest would be to hang myself—but I’d still have to bang a nail into the wall, and then Olimpia would come and I wouldn’t be able to take it any further. I asked her to buy me some caustic soda on some pretext or other—but my parents didn’t allow her to. How stupid I was not to buy a revolver when I could still walk and buy myself one.”
The next day-—that is, yesterday morning—he apologized to me for what he had said.
“Please forgive me. I don’t know what came over me. I don’t like to complain. I have a horror of sentimentality.”
What move and gladden me most are his undepleted reserves of innocence, humor, and exuberance. With what goodwill and application did he play a number of tangos and foxtrots for me on his accordion! Was he striving to find a joy lost beyond recovery?
He told me of various games last summer, when Geo Bogza5 came to visit him. They played boats, for example, Blecher giving the signal for departure while Bogza hauled his bed along. They slapped a notice up on the wall: “It is forbidden to climb up to the mast and spit into the machine room.”
He showed me a photograph album (Solange, Ernest, Creaţa, scenes from Berk, from Leysin, from Tekirghiol6). I had to stop myself from crying at a picture of him as a splendid young man of seventeen. “J’étais beau gosse, hein?”7
I left at four o’clock. But why did I not have the courage to embrace him, to say more things, to make a brotherly gesture—something to show that he isn’t alone, that he isn’t absolutely and irredeemably alone?
Alone is what he is, though.
This morning Mrs. Ghiolu burst out crying on the phone as I told her about Blecher. I still don’t really know what there was between them. I think she is ruled by her memory of him: it haunts and frightens her at the same time that it is a source of consolation. For his part, he loved her and still does love her, and he suffers because of her absence. But he is too proud to say anything.
“One day I ran off to Bucharest even though I was ill with a temperature of 40 degrees [104 F.], using all kinds of ruses just in order to see her. And she hasn’t made it to Roman once in two years. Would married life be a worse illness than mine?”
While I was on the phone today conveying Blecher’s greetings to Ocneanu, Petru Manoliu simply took the receiver out of my hand and said to me:
“A happy new year, Mr. Mihail Sebastian!”
I didn’t have the presence of mind to hang up. That kid’s mad—or is he just a character?
Dined on Sunday evening at the Cina with Soare Z. Soare.8 How many illuminating, amusing, and spontaneous things he told me about Leni! I listened and was secretly surprised at my forbearance. I think I can honestly say that it diverted me more than it saddened me.
She makes eighty thousand lei a month at Sică’s9—for which she sleeps with him, on Froda’s advice and with his complicity. Soare and Muşatescu1 have nicknamed Sică: Alexandrescu-Farado, because each day he buys her a flower from the Farado shop.
She has slept with someone called Walter from Via [?]. She has slept with Izu Brănişteanu—and sleeps with him whenever Rampa needs some publicity. She slept with Elly Roman in Vienna while Froda discreetly walked up and down the street outside the hotel. She used to have orgies with Froda and Blank. Then with Froda and Wieder.
In general, Froda has acted docilely through all her love affairs—and has encouraged or even incited them when some profit was to be had. He has been less patient when her caprices have not involved money. He threw Coco Danielescu out of the theatre (the actor who committed suicide a year ago) because he had also slept with Leni.
So who hasn’t the dear girl slept with?
I never realized before how much she resembles Odette and Rachel. But I think I am ceasing to resemble Swann. In June 1935 I’d have screamed with pain if someone had told me all this. In those days I screamed for much less. But now I don’t think I’m doing too badly—in this respect, at least.
I keep delaying a note here about the various things that have happened recently between Celia2 and Camil. They seem to me sensational for an understanding of him. I won’t note them down this evening, either. Tomorrow or another time—especially as in the meantime there may be fresh details, priceless incidents.
Footnotes
1. The journal of the Royal Foundations.
2. The last two are novels by Camil Petrescu: Patul lui Procust (The Procustean Bed) and Ultima noapte de dragoste, prima noapte de război (Last Night of Love, First Night of War).
3. Eventually Jocul de-a vacanţa (The Game of Holidaymaking).
4. Chapter of Sebastian’s novel Femei [Women].
5. Chapter of Sebastian’s novel The Town with Acacias.
6. Characters from Sebastian’s novel For Two Thousand Years.
7. Saşa (Sacha) Roman: lawyer, in whose office Sebastian worked as a clerk.
8. Marietta Sadova.
9. The main concert hall in Bucharest.
1. For comparison, at the time five thousand lei was the monthly income of a middle-class businessman; a luxurious three-bedroom apartment rented for eight thousand lei per year.
2. Carol Grünberg.
3. Petre Constantinescu-Iaşi: a university professor who was condemned for pro-Communist activities.
4. A character from Camil Petrescu’s novel Patul lui Procust.
5. Argumentative.
6. Menny Toneghin: editor and writer.
7. An acquaintance of Sebastian’s from Brăila.
8. Alfred Hefter: journalist from Iaşi.
9. M. Blecher, the writer, was crippled by illness.
1. A trial involving the wife of Sever Pleniceanu.
2. Toni and Lucia Sturza Bulandra: actors.
3. George Vraca: actor.
4. Eugen Lovinescu: literary critic.
5. And I’m really fine, sir.
6. Novel by André Gide.
7. Right-wing journalist sympathetic to the Iron Guard.
8. Ion I. Mota: a leader of the Iron Guard.
9. Ion Sân-Giorgiu: extreme right-wing journalist and playwright.
1. Pamfil Şeicaru: journalist, owner of the Curentul newspaper.
2. Novelist, literary critic.
3. In English in the original.
4. The most difficult thing is to pick up your pen, dip it into ink, and hold it firmly above the paper.
5. Writer and poet.
6. Sentence incomplete.
7. Emil Gulian: poet and Sebastian’s friend.
8. Referring to a rash of attacks, thefts, and kidnappings in that year in the area near the Danube.
9. Iacob Niemirower: chief rabbi of the Federation of Romanian Jewish Communities until 1939.
1. Political scientist.
2. Nicolae Titulescu: pro-Western minister of foreign affairs, target of an intense Iron Guard press campaign.
3. Lawyer and politician, director and owner of the newspaper Universul.
4. Literary critic.
5. Tudor Arghezi: major Romanian poet. .
6. Literary critic, translator of Proust, and brother of Şerban Cioculescu.
7. Literary critic, brother of Radu Cioculescu.
8. Nicolae Davidescu: journalist and poet.
9. Journalist at Universul.
1. Ion Muche: anti-Semitic journalist at Porunca Vremii.
2. Writer and journalist.
3. George Enescu: well-known Romanian composer.
4. Mihai Polihroniade: Iron Guard journalist and theorist.
5. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the principal leader of the Iron Guard.
6. A Romanian princess.
7. Friend of Sebastian’s and wife of Stavri Ghiolu.
8. Famous hotel in downtown Bucharest.
9. The writer Cella Serghi, wife of Alfio Seni.
1. Ionel Lăzăroneanu: lawyer with literary inclinations.
2. Pub in downtown Bucharest, famous for its beer.
3. You probably have a coldness of heart. . .
4. Ion Marin Sadoveanu: writer.
5. You don't sleep with a comrade; you do with a friend.
6. Alexandra Rosetti: director of the Royal Foundations, Sebastian’s close friend and benefactor.
7. Eugen Zwiedenek: general, head of the military staff of Queen Maria, and under Ion Antonescu head of the government agency in charge of the Aryanization of Jewish properties.
8. Paul Prodan: director of the Romanian National Theatre.
9. Novelist.
1. The first reference to what would become Sebastian's novel Accidental.
2. Constantin Vişoianu: diplomat and politician, close friend of Sebastian’s, after World War II one of the leaders of the Romanian emigration to the United States.
3. Iron Guard headquarters.
4. Camil Petrescu’s novel Ultima noapte de dragoste, prima noapte de război (Last Night of Love, First Night of War).
5. Writer and journalist.
6. Lake near the Black Sea.
7. I was a handsome kid, no?
8. Theatre producer.
9. Sică Alexandrescu, theatre producer.
1. Teodor Muşatescu, playwright.
2. Cella Serghi.