For the first time I am writing the figures for the new year: 1937. I spent New Year’s Eve without emotion, without despair and, it would seem, without any hopes.
I drank a lot, but with no real gusto. The party at Mircea’s was quite drab. We used to pass from one year to the next with greater ceremony. Is this another sign of aging?
On Thursday evening—the last day of the year—I visited Nae for the first time in a long while. There was nothing symbolic in this, though.
I wonder whether Nae is not losing control of himself completely. Is it an attack of megalomania, a case of pride accentuated by defeats, or quite simply a phase of acute mysticism? On such occasions in the past I used to find him quite colorful. Now he’s beginning to worry me. For the whole of the hour I spent there, he spoke of nothing but foreign policy.
“So, do you like the way the Serbs have been plotting against us?” Those were his opening words. “When I shouted for three years that we should come to a direct understanding with the Bulgarians, no one wanted to listen. Now we have the Serbs reaching an agreement with them— and we’re left high and dry. I told the King so many times, but he wouldn’t take the point. If we had a revolutionary court, he would be put straight up against a wall. How many wasted opportunities! A year ago the Germans made some extraordinary suggestions to me that we should do a deal with the Bulgarians; we’d have been off to Adrianopole and making an empire for ourselves.1 Two years ago I brought the King the Polish crown on a plate, but he wouldn’t listen. Now we’ll be forced to give ourselves to the Germans for nothing. I used to talk to them one way, and now they talk to us quite differently. We’ll fall into their hands for nothing.”
“But what about France?” I asked timidly.
“France will also go along with Germany. I told the Germans: you guys have got to do a deal with the French—otherwise it won’t work. And then Schacht went to Paris.2 Look, I’ll tell you something that will really amaze you. But be careful: nothing must leave these four walls. I negotiated for the French with the Germans; I had a mandate to do so. And do you know who gave it to me? Léon Blum. Only things are not going so well now with Léon Blum. But when a Daladier government is formed, it’ll all be settled straightaway. Look, I’ve got a letter here from Daladier. When he becomes prime minister, I’ll be off to Paris.”
I’ve been here at Roman’s villa since Monday evening. It’s a splendid house. At first it struck me as both sumptuous and severe, but I’m beginning to make friends with it. I think I could spend a whole lifetime here. But I’ll leave on Sunday—and go back to a Bucharest where I feel so disoriented. . . .
I came with the idea of writing, but it hasn’t been going too well. The day before yesterday, in some four hours of work, I barely managed to write three pages or so—and even those were full of corrections. Since then, nothing. My writing difficulties really trouble me, and I so much envy Mircea’s prolificness. My pen encounters so many obstacles, so many misgivings, so many hesitations. That’s not how a novel is written. Besides, I have to agree that novels are not my line. I can write delicate things marked by reflection, revery, and soliloquy—but I don’t find it easy to keep darting between characters and let them get on with their lives.
I thought a lot about this yesterday on a walk in the mountains. I have a certain lack of spontaneity, which no other quality can ever overcome. What I write is a little schematic, linear, and abstract, even when it is graceful and suffused with emotion (for I am so sentimental). So I can create stories of two hundred pages, with the tone of a private diary, but not a novel. I also think I could write very well for the theatre; it has a number of standard routines that help me along, because I am so lacking in imagination. Also, the distances are shorter in the theatre. . . . If I were not a Jew and my plays could be performed, I would most likely have become a “dramatist” and nothing else. As it is, though, the experience of my first play is quite enough.
As to the book I have started to write, I do not yet have a clear picture of it. All I have at the beginning is a vague, highly vague, overview and a clear plan for the first chapter. Further than that, I see nothing and know nothing. I am hoping that things will become clearer as I write. But I find it so hard to get moving! And I have so many other work obligations! Who knows how long I will be held up by this trifle of a book, which I thought might come out this spring! My slow work rhythm has always spoiled the best-laid of my literary projects. Still, I shall try to get down to work in Bucharest (no more going out, hardworking afternoons, sensible evenings), and from time to time I’ll take a short working holiday and spend it in Breaza or Sinaia.
My first day’s skiing. I’d never have thought it would be so easy. I felt a kind of childish vanity installed on the skis, in a perfect regulation outfit that I had improvised on the day I left Bucharest—but I didn’t think I would ever manage anything with my equipment, which looks rather like in the movies.
The day before yesterday in Predeal, where we had stopped for a few minutes at the Manolovici villa, I rather bashfully asked to be given detailed guidance (there were so many people there who had been skiing for years). Someone asked if I was going to learn or not: “Are you scared?”
And I answered quite frankly, without beating about the bush: “Yes.”
“Well, you’ll never learn then,” he answered, cutting short the discussion.
I did learn, though, by a kind of hit and miss. Feeling sure that I’d fall after a few meters, I stormily (yes, I like to say stormily) covered the beautiful slope of the Stîna Regală—and, funnily enough, I did so without falling down. Then I performed a lot of other bewildering “exploits.” We were descending for much of the way back, on skis—falling quite often, it is true, but in the end moving quite skillfully for the first day.
Wendy, who was my instructor, said:
“Bravo. You’ve got talent.”
And I wasn’t ashamed to feel flattered by this good mark, handed down with objectivity from the teacher’s desk.
What a happy morning! Life still has some things to say to me.
Since I got back on Sunday evening, there has been nothing in my personal life.
The book has remained where it was; I’ll try to start work again this evening.
I don’t see anyone. Nothing happens to me.
Mota and Vasile Marin have died in Spain.3 It’s hard for me to talk about that with Mircea. I sense that he’s in mourning. As far as I’m concerned, I feel sad when I think about what has happened. There’s more blindness than humbug in their camp, and perhaps more good faith than imposture. But then, how is it possible that they don’t realize their terrible mistake, their barbarous mistake? What aberration explains it?
I haven’t seen Marietta for a fortnight—nor am I in such a hurry to see her now. She’s been having an attack of anti-Semitism, which I haven’t witnessed myself but which Gheorghe told me about in detail: “The yids are to blame,” shouted Marietta. “They take the bread from our mouths; they exploit and smother us. They should get out of here. This is our country, not theirs. Romania for the Romanians!”
One day I’ll calmly try to explain to her why a woman who can think like that is completely and utterly unsuited for the role in my play.
Holban was cremated yesterday.4 It’s impossible to grasp that he has actually died, that I’ll never meet him again in the street or see him in a concert hall.
Also yesterday, a letter came from Blecher—a kind of “testamentary letter” giving me various instructions for his manuscripts after his death. He thinks it must now be very close. I wrote back with difficulty.
On Saturday night I stayed with Camil until two at the Splendid Parc; we talked about Leni and “our past sufferings.”
On Sunday morning there was a woman’s voice on the telephone:
“I should like to thank you for lnimi cicatrízate,5 which I have read on your recommendation.”
She wouldn’t say who she was.
“That’s all. I just wanted to thank you.” And she hung up.
Back in Sinaia. I arrived this morning: Dinu Noica was waiting for me at the station. (His extraordinary delicacy, his smooth gestures, his measured speech: what an admirable type of man. Compared with him, I feel hasty, vulgar, and insensitive. . . .)
I am renting a room opposite the park, modest but clean and pleasant. I want to stay until Wednesday—and above all I want to write. That’s why I’ve come. But will I be able to? Will it work?
The snow is beautiful as it gently falls. Ideal weather for skiing. But I won’t allow myself a Sunday’s skiing unless I earn it by working enough.
Yesterday I wrote all afternoon, and I also wrote this morning. It goes very slowly. Every sentence takes an enormously long time. I don’t know whether I’m too lazy or too punctilious. I’d like to be able to wander a bit, to give myself some space and be carried along by the flow of things, so that I’m not always looking back at what I’ve done and carefully calculating every step forward. If I go on at this rate, I’ll need a year to finish the book. Besides, I shouldn’t forget that these four days away have been altogether exceptional. Nor should I forget that I’m still on the familiar ground of the first chapter, to which I have given a lot of detailed thought. What will I do later, when I move on to the parts of the novel that are still unclear?
I don’t know. I would so much like it to come out for the Day of the Book, at the end of April, but I can’t believe it will. I can see myself still working at it this summer—and being forced to postpone other projects yet again. . . .
But don’t let’s moan and groan too much. I’m pleased to have this short break away from Bucharest. I’m alone—and as happy as I am still able to be.
I don’t know if I deserved this morning’s skiing. Anyway, I allowed it to myself, and I don’t feel any remorse. . . .
I was up on the Opler: the skiing area is much smaller and the slope much gentler than on the sheepwalk. I no longer had a giddy feeling. Everything seemed less fantastical than at the beginning. But I’m still enough of a child to be happy with so little.
As for work, I wrote more than six pages yesterday—in exactly seven and a half hours. It’s not a record, of course: it’s a smooth and normal output. I’ll certainly write all afternoon today as well. But as I spend more time at my desk, I realize that it’s going to be a long haul. I must stop setting deadlines and schedules for myself in advance. The only sensible plan is to work at a steady pace, without thinking about when I’ll finish. Anyway, I don’t think there is any chance of having it ready this spring.
This morning I got carried away with the review for Reporter (I fear I was too harsh with Dem. Theodorescu) and the article for bide pendent a.6 But I worked all afternoon until eight, and then from 9:30 till midnight, when I am writing these lines. Even so, the day’s yield is derisory: just three pages. Not even three.
I’m really furious with myself. It’s not admissible to write so slowly; not admissible to sit for hours to describe a single gesture. Will I never acquire greater ease, greater fluency? At my present rate, God knows when I’ll finish a book of two hundred pages, of which I don’t think I’ve written twenty up to now.
I came back from Sinaia on Wednesday evening. Am I content with the amount I worked? Yes, in a sense. The twenty pages I’ve written up to now are certainly not a lot—but they’re enough to make me feel that “the ice is broken.” Now I know that if I work systematically for forty days or so (“free days,” as they say in court, because I’m not counting the inevitable breaks), I’ll be able to finish this little story. I’m beginning to see it more clearly. I’m also beginning to take an interest in what happens. And some unexpected little things are indeed “happening” by themselves, through the course of events. Maybe it will finally result in a little book of which I don’t need to feel embarrassed.
One possible title is The Accident. It’s not too evocative, but I’ve never been good at choosing titles.
Yesterday evening there was a Kreutzberg dance festival. I can’t fully assess the value of it, because there must be a whole technique that may in the end successfully replace inspiration, emotion, and natural talent.
But the guy seemed extraordinary. I thought it a happy personal coincidence that the program included the romance from the Kleine nachtmusik. He danced it with the utmost grace. I thought of my play—and in Kreutzberg’s movements I saw what I would have liked to achieve in the way of rhythm and style.
There are curious aptitudes in Kreutzberg: now a mime, now a gymnast, now a true clown. There were moments when he reminded me perfectly of Grock. But in Till Eulenspiegel he was a figure out of Breugel.
Nae Ionescu was in a box. We chatted during the interval. Last week he was in Warsaw and Lvov, where he gave a couple of lectures for students. He spoke to them about the new Romania, basing himself—so he said—on the sacrifice made by Ion Moţa in going to Spain “not to fight but to die.”
There was also a Parisian journalist in his box—Odette Arnaud, who has come to Romania to write an investigative piece. I arranged to meet her tomorrow morning, because she wants an interview or something like that.
Nae spoke to her about his house, which he called “the finest in Bucharest.” He told us of the Florentine furniture he has bought for it, and two fountains he has had brought from somewhere or other. . . . There was something tactless and ostentatious in all this praise. I know how much childishness there is in it, but I think there is also a little boorishness. I felt it especially in the company of that Parisian, so modest and gracious without trying to be. . . .
The day before yesterday I went out to a café with Radu Olteanu7 and Benu. Radu thinks quite seriously that the possibility of an Iron Guard coup in the next few days cannot be dismissed. He thinks it quite possible that the Guard, being mobilized in Bucharest for the funeral of Mota and Marin, well armed, stirred by fasting, pomp, and parades, will take power into its hands. The Bucharest Garrison—whose young officers at least have become “legionarized”—would not put up any resistance.
I don’t take Radu’s fears too seriously. But I do register them. They are a symptom, if nothing else.
Nae did not give a lecture, no doubt as a sign of mourning. Tomorrow Mircea won’t be lecturing either.
Again in Sinaia. I arrived this morning, but I don’t think I’ll stay later than Tuesday. Besides, my literary ambitions are very modest: I want to complete the first chapter. Even now it is still not finished, because I haven’t written a line since my last séjour in Sinaia.
Apart from that, I want to do a little skiing—and to forget Bucharest.
I’ve already returned to Bucharest this morning, in Roman’s car. Yesterday was taken up with skiing. Three hours in the morning with Air. Roman and Miss Lereanu,8 four in the afternoon with Thea.
(I won’t write anything about Thea. It was the simplest kind of loving. But I have an intolerably serious way of behaving with women.)
The skiing exercises in the afternoon were very exacting. I fell a number of times. On the way back I fell so badly—there were several meters of ice-—that I tore my trousers at the knees and came away with a minor wound, just as in the first chapter of the novel.
As for the novel, I am ashamed to write about it. I have done absolutely nothing.
I left Sinaia feeling embarrassed toward Dinu and Wendy.9 I thought that on Sunday—and again on Monday—the evening was too adolescent, too frivolous. As I stretched out on the sofa with Thea, kissing and embracing her, I had the stupid look of an eighteen-year-old boy off to the cinema to paw his little flirt—or who, even worse, hides himself away with her in a friendly and discreet house.
Dinu and Wendy were our hosts, but I put them in the awkward situation of somehow patronizing a “louche” relationship with the wife of a friend of theirs. Everything was unclear: half joke, half excited pleasure. That’s a little demeaning for thirty-year-olds.
I considered it was all my fault, and I was a little ashamed of myself. On the other hand, I could understand Thea very well, alone as she was for four weeks in Sinaia after a quarrel with a vulgar and indifferent husband. Why shouldn’t she accept friendship or perhaps courtship (or perhaps even an adventure) from a man about whom—for literary or other reasons—she had already begun to feel a certain curiosity? We said goodbye on Monday night in front of her house, with a kiss I had neither requested nor expected and for which there was no longer the pretext of a continuing joke, since we were there alone. Probably for her, my passing through Sinaia was the start of a possible love affair. That would explain why, the day before yesterday at eight o’clock, she rang me from Sinaia to wish me a good morning—a call that gave me so much pleasure. . . .
I thought that was the end of the matter—nor did I consider it important enough to record at length in my journal—but then came yesterday evening’s conversation with Dinu. I ate just with him at the Splendid Parc and listened to a confession that was in many ways a revelation. I certainly won’t be able to capture all his hesitations, nuances, and details: I’ll just give a quick summary of what he said.
So then:
On Saturday 13 February, Dinu—who for some time has been discreetly wooing Thea—sets off for her villa but resolves on the way not to go inside. Two factors make him decide not to pursue his advances: 1) a determination in principle not to be unfaithful to Wendy, even though theirs is a free marriage; 2) the fact that the funeral of Mop and Marin is taking place then in Bucharest, and that this is too grave an event for him to allow himself such frivolity on the same day. But Thea is at the window of her house and sees him passing by; she calls out—and he enters. Once inside, he forgets the two moral impediments and tries to kiss her. Thea refuses him. He leaves feeling depressed—not so much at the rejection as at his own sense of weakness. It is a blot on his honor that he has attempted such a light-minded adventure on the very day of the funeral (in which, he tells me, he participated with emotion).
Sunday 14 February. Wendy is in Predeal. Thea is alone. Dinu has decided to go to her house that afternoon and to renew (perhaps with greater success) the attempt he failed to carry off the day before. But at twelve o’clock someone knocks on the door and puts in a quite unexpected appearance: it is I! For him, I am a welcome rather than an untimely visitor. He immediately glimpses the solution to the moral debate inside himself. He’ll do everything possible to throw Thea into my arms, and in any case will try to kindle the possibility of feelings between Thea and myself. In this way he will become a free man again, denied an adventure that he renounced in the most explicit manner. During the meal he tells me of the moral problems of living together with Wendy—but I don’t understand a lot of it. After an hour Thea, called from the restaurant where she had been eating, comes in and embraces me. The rest we know.
Bill Witzling has died. He’s being buried today in Brăila. He was tall and handsome and always struck me as hale and hearty—a man who made you happy that he existed. More than once I felt unworthy in comparison with him. The poor guy.
After Nae’s lecture on Friday (a recapitulation concerning space), Posescu told him in the staff room about some recent theories that seemed to confirm what he had been saying in the lecture. I didn’t listen very closely to their conversation and wasn’t quite sure of the nature of the problem—but all of a sudden Nae cheerfully turned to me and said:
“You see, Mr. Sebastian, that’s why Hitler is right.”
Yesterday at Carol’s, who’d broken his leg a few days before and had it in plaster. An anti-Semitic conversation with Camil, more anti-Semitic than ever.
This morning at eight, a woman’s voice on the phone.
“I am Thea’s sister. Thea asked me to let you know that she has returned to Bucharest.”
Yesterday evening, there was a little party at our place. Mircea, Nina, Marietta, Haig, Maryse, Gheorghe, Lilly, Dinu.
I wonder if this won’t be the last time I ask them round. The situation is becoming more and more painful. I don’t feel I can stand the duplicity that our friendship has required since they went over to the Iron Guard. Mircea’s recent articles in Vremea have been more and more “Legionary.” I avoided reading some of them. The latest one I read only this morning—though it came out on Friday and everyone has been talking to me about it.
Is friendship possible with people who have in common a whole series of alien ideas and feelings—so alien that I have only to walk in the door and they suddenly fall silent in shame and embarrassment?
I haven’t been to Mircea’s for ten days or so, nor to Marietta’s for over a month. Maybe we’ll spare ourselves a stormy farewell and let things break up by themselves over time. . . . I’ll have to read again the last chapter of Cum am devenit huligan.
In the last issue of Cuget clar [Clear Thinking], Iorga translates with approval a short article of mine for Independenţa (the one with Petre Bellu)— doubtless without realizing that it was I who wrote it, because it was signed “Flaminius.” So there I am, translated by Niculae Iorga. Quite a tricky situation.
In the same issue, in the very next item, a regular correspondent lays into Sergiu Dan, Camil Baltazar, and Mihail Sebastian as “those corruptors of the mind.”
Yesterday and the day before, with Mrs. Ghiolu at Roman. Blecher is ever closer to death. I don’t know how much longer it will last. Now he’s suffering from a fresh abscess, which needs to be lanced or left to burst by itself. The whole thing is terrible—but, like last time, I saw that it was becoming bearable, à force d’obéissance. Bearable for others, I mean— not for him, who wears a constant grimace from the pain.
As to Mrs. Ghiolu, I don’t quite know what to think about her. The fact that she went to Roman is somehow proof that she is less frivolous than I imagined.
Friday evening from Stuttgart, a work by Beethoven, of which I had been unaware: the Choral Fantasia (Op. 80). The first part was quite similar to one of his piano concertos, while the appearance of the choruses at the end had a surprise effect. Altogether very beautiful.
A long political discussion with Mircea at his home. Impossible to summarize. He was lyrical, nebulous, full of exclamations, interjections, and rude remarks. . . . I’ll take from all that just his (frank) declaration that he is passionate about the Iron Guard, that he has high hopes for it and expects it to be victorious. loan Vodă the Cruel, Mihai Viteazu, Stefan the Great,1 Bălcescu,2 Eminescu,3 Hajdeu4—all these are supposed to have been Iron Guardists in their day. Mircea refers to them as all of a piece!
At the same time I can’t deny that it was entertaining. In his opinion, the students who carved up Traian Bratu5 last night in Iasi were not Iron Guardists but either. . . Communists or National Peasant supporters. Literally. As regards Gogu Rădulescu (Mr. Gogu, as Mircea ironically calls him),6 the liberal student who was beaten with wet ropes at the Iron Guard headquarters, that was all well and good. It’s what should be done to traitors. He, Mircea Eliade, would not have been content with that; he’d have pulled his eyes out as well. All who are not Iron Guardists, all who engage in any other kind of politics, are national traitors and deserve the same fate.
One day I may reread these lines and feel unable to believe that they summarize [Mircea’s words]. So it is well if I say again that I have done no more than record his very words—so that they aren’t somehow forgotten. Perhaps one day things will have calmed down enough for me to read this page to Mircea and to see him blush with shame.
Nor should I forget his explanation for joining the Guard with such passion:
“I have always believed in the primacy of the spirit.”
He’s neither a charlatan nor a madman. He’s just naive. But there are such catastrophic forms of naiveté!
I’m off tomorrow morning to Brăila, where things look tragic with Babie and Auntie Caroline.
When I returned from Brăila on Wednesday evening, I found a note on the table: “Miss Leni Caler rang and asked you to ’phone her as soon as you’re back in Bucharest.” Of course, I didn’t ’phone her. But on Thursday evening I met her at the opening night at the Regina Maria.
“I thought you were a polite person, Mr. Sebastian.”
“I am, Miss Leni Caler, but I’ve been very busy today and haven’t had a spare moment.”
She certainly understood—it was hardly difficult—how much indifference there was beneath my jocular politeness.
In a few words she said what she wanted to ask me. Would I like to read the play this Saturday evening for herself, Froda, and Sică Alexandrescu? I agreed on two conditions: i) absolute discretion, and 2) the right on my part to cancel the reading if I was not free.
I was glad to be the one with the reservations.
So, yesterday evening I read the play at last—with less emotion than I think I would have done it last summer or autumn. Maybe without any emotion at all. I didn’t stress any of the lines that had some hidden meaning for her. I did not look at her, smile in secret understanding, or spark tender emotion within her. Not once did I accept her as my partner in a reading that contained so many partnerships of feeling.
I read the play as it might be read before a readers’ panel. If possible, they want to put it on stage this spring, in April. I don’t know if that is an acceptable arrangement. How many evening performances would it ensure for me? Thirty at the most. You’re never going to have a big success at the end of a season. It would be preferable to leave the play until autumn, to have it open in November and take in Christmas, with time for a tour at the end of winter. That is undoubtedly the best solution. If the opening is postponed till November, I’ll agree wholeheartedly that they should take on the play—for an advance of, say, thirty thousand lei.
We argued over the casting. They proposed Lungeanu, and this is exactly how I replied:
“Under no circumstances Lungeanu. Even if it meant the play was not performed for ninety-nine years, I still wouldn’t give him the part.”
In the end we agreed on Vraca. I think that would give me a really excellent cast: Leni, Vraca, and Timică. For Jef there is a recent young discovery: Mircea Axente. He would seem to be perfect for the role.
I was amused by their reaction to the reading. With each new reading I find how difficult it is to be enlightened about your own mistakes or qualities. Everyone sees them differently. Iancovescu thought Act Two was the best; they thought it the worst. In Act Three, Iancovescu asked me to delete the argument between Corina and Ştefan, on the grounds that it rang “false.” Now Froda wants me to delete the “dream scene.” What struck Iancovescu as magnificent seems to Froda melodramatic. I listened to them with a smile. They all talk with the same conviction, the same expert assurance—only they say things that flatly contradict each other. To whom should I listen? In the end I think I’ll listen only to myself.
Anyway, I no longer take the fate of my play very seriously. It’s too old now for me to get excited about it. I look at things from a money angle. I’d be thrilled to get quite a large sum so that I can i) pay Mama’s creditors and finally end that nightmare, 2) have a quiet holiday to finish my novel, 3) get up to date with the rent, 4) restock my wardrobe a little, 5) buy myself some furniture.
Maybe I’m naive to expect so much. But I think I’m being honest with myself when I say that I have no other ambitions (“of an artistic nature”). Je sais bien à quoi m'en tenir.7
But this play’s a real headache. Not one simple, clear-cut situation. I was at Leni’s yesterday evening, and we talked in great detail about the possibility of its being performed in their theatre. But at lunchtime today I’m called up by. . . Madame Bulandra. I had to arrange a reading for her too, this Friday afternoon. Good Lord, what will come of all this now?
To see Leni again was not as dangerous as I once imagined it would be. Now that I know where I stand with her, I think I’m cured of any sentimentality. When she was there between Froda and Sică, I looked at her without emotion, with a little irony and a certain indifference. There are no big differences between her and Eugenia Zaharia. And could I ever love Eugenia Zaharia?
There has been only one change in Leni’s apartment: a fish tank has appeared on a shelf. I enjoyed watching the little fishes swim through the water, and I couldn’t help thinking how symbolic was that fish tank in the Leni-Froda household.
Today’s issue of Memento spreads a vile rumor that the fish tank is a present from Sică. Even if that’s not true, it is a plausible detail—and anyway rather delightful.
No, I’m no longer risking my “heart” at all in that stage galley. Maybe I’ll board it as a playwright, but not as just another lovesick individual.
The trial of the arsonists began yesterday,8 so I’ll be tied down for two weeks at the Court of Justice. I’m in a completely absurd state of nervous tension there. Why didn’t I turn out to be more thick-skinned in life?
This morning I met Marie Ghiolu as arranged at a private viewing at the Mozart. I’d just been to the Imre Ungar concert, where I’d heard a prelude and fugue by Bach, a Mozart sonata, and Beethoven’s Appassionata.
Mrs. Ghiolu was especially beautiful and shone with elegance. She was wearing a hat and a magnificent ermine collar. I felt very dull in my wretched overcoat.
This morning I was at the Comoedia Theatre, where a shorthand-typist was waiting so that I could dictate Act Three.
In the manager’s office there was a fish tank like the one at Leni’s. These people are certainly keen on symbols.
The first real day of spring. The first day with a light coat.
That too is a joy: to leave off a heavy old overcoat and go out in a light grey one in which you think you look elegant—or anyway in which you feel so much younger!
In the morning, a brief visit to Thea at the magnificent house of her sister, a Mrs. Nadler, in the Filipescu Park. Thea was nice and affectionate, even a touch indiscreet.
All afternoon at the Court of Justice, where the arson trial is still going on. What am I doing there? I’m the only “counsel” there who doesn’t pick up any money, and probably the only one who feels he is so utterly wasting his time. At the age of thirty I still don’t dare say about myself that I am a counsel without putting it in quotation marks.
A spring Sunday, unbearable in its beauty. I started the morning well at a Cortot recital (Franck, Ravel, Debussy, Bach), but then continued stupidly by playing rummy all day at Carol’s. Am I not thickheaded?
I feel alone as I wait for joys that will never come. I think of twenty-year-old boys going today with their sweethearts to Robinson or Nogent- sur-Marne, from where they'll return weary to a springtime Paris so youthful and sensual.
Never more than on a day like today do I feel how pointless my whole life has been.
And I’m too disgusted with everything to write a page of my journal.
There was only one thing to do today—to be with Thea (who was out of town somewhere) and to make love without too many explanations.
Was in Brăila on Tuesday for Baba’s funeral.9 She died on Monday, after wandering a whole day in the direction of Baldovineşti, where the gendarmes found her collapsed from fatigue in the middle of the night on the railway. She was ninety-two years old. If she hadn’t got lost, I think she might have lived many a year longer.
I heard the news without emotion, and it was also without emotion that I attended the funeral. But a whole world has gone with her—and our whole childhood has lost one of its main heroic figures. Poor Baba: what a long life she had! It’s not surprising she lost her memory.
Last Friday, a reading at the Bulandras. I regret not having jotted down my impressions there and then. Now they seem too old and uninteresting. They liked my play but had some reservations. I’m tired of all these points that keep coming up—whether with Iancovescu or Froda or Bulandra.
I’ll leave it on hold again for the time being. No new moves, no insistence, just a studied indifference: that’s the only attitude to take.
The weather is splendid—but the arson trial is still going on. It doesn’t prey on my mind so much, but it still means I am wasting three or four hours a day. When it’s over, I’ll make a quick getaway to Breaza or Sinaia.
There has been a lot of music recently. The F minor concerto with Cortot and the E minor with Ignaz Friedmann—both by Chopin. Then, again with Cortot, all the preludes, a nocturne (“our” nocturne, from Brăila, in E-flat), a scherzo, a fantasia, the B minor sonata, three waltzes— a whole Chopin recital.
Debussy’s Children’s Comer, a sonatina by Ravel, the Prelude, Choral and Fugue by Franck.
Yesterday evening at the Philharmonic, Brahms’s Violin Concerto (with which I am becoming familiar) played by Thibaud, one of Handel’s Concerti grossi, and Beethoven’s seventh symphony
A host of other things in recent weeks, which I neglected to note down.
This morning at the Ateneu, a Thibaud concert with the Philharmonic: Mozart’s D Major Violin Concerto (with a fleetingly melancholic adagio), the Chausson Poème, the Beethoven concerto.
I took Leni with me. She was elegant enough for me to find her pleasing—but forgotten enough for me not to get carried away. In short, she was not all that important to me.
Lunch at Maryse’s—then to the trot racing at Floreasca. A spring day—a day of idleness.
Blecher has been in Bucharest since yesterday morning, in Room 15 at the Saint-Vincent de Paul Hospital. He came because of the abscess, which still has not drained even though they performed two butcherlike punctures at Roman.
He told me about the train journey, and it made me shudder. They left home well after dark, with the moon already up, passed through deserted streets, encountered Iron Guardists who were amazed to see the moving stretcher, waited in the stationmaster’s office, boarded the train through the window, and arrived in Bucharest in the morning, where the porters refused to take him off through the window.
What terrible suffering! Everything becomes absurdly pointless in the face of such pain.
He thought he was about to die. At one point he decided to commit suicide. He tore up all his papers and manuscripts: eighty pages of a new novel and seventy pages of a journal.
I hardly felt like criticizing him for it.
After that, I am ashamed to talk here about Leni. She has again become “engaging,” but this time I’ll firmly resist. She’s a nice tart, but I mustn’t forget that she’s a tart before being nice.
Mircea was at the Jooss ballet on Wednesday. He told Comarnescu that he found it disgusting because of its “Jewish spirit.” He thought the show was Semitic.
That’s all he found to say.
Our friendship is rapidly breaking up. We don’t see each other for days at a time—and when we do, we no longer have anything to say.
Last Friday evening, the Matthäus-Passion from Leipzig. I’d been afraid that spring would pass without my hearing it. Nothing could have consoled me for that. Not only is it a great musical joy; it has become a superstition that seems to bode well for me. I enjoyed it immensely, but I listened with less gravity than before. I’m beginning to be familiar with it. There are passages that I await, anticipate, and then follow as they are played. It no longer holds any surprises, and I no longer listen with the old diffidence. Everything seems to me more intimate, less ceremonious, less austere, more Mozartian than before. Once again, I was happy to discover the tenor aria in Part One: Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen,1 and so many other things.
Made a long speech yesterday at the Court of Justice—more than an hour and a half. I had a lot of difficulties to resolve, in attitude, tone, and so on. I had to prosecute the case, yet at the same time I didn’t want to push too hard. In that respect at least I think I succeeded. I felt that others were listening to me, and for an hour and a half their attention never seemed to waver. But maybe I am wrong. Paul Moscovici, who heard part of the speech, told me this morning that he hadn’t been satisfied with it. He said that the “ironic amenity” of my speech had not been the right tone for that court. Probably he is right. He also said that the judges had not listened very closely. That’s more serious, if it’s true.
Still, I’m glad that he gave me his opinion. It makes me watch myself more closely and stops me from feeling too pleased with my “talents”—though I don’t think I’ve ever got carried away with too much self-admiration.
Yesterday I was at the Military Court, where some Iron Guardists are on trial for kidnapping and torturing the liberal student Aurelian Rădulescu in the Guard’s headquarters. Nae Ionescu made a witness statement. I copy from the newspaper what he had to say: “Professor Nae Ionescu, replying to a question from Counsel Vasiliu-Cluj, set forth a theory of constituted organisms, whose particular sensibility means that they have a right to respond to an action whose consequences affect that organization.
“[. . .] in reply the witness pointed to the fact that, in Western student centers, at Oxford and Cambridge, corrective beatings are commonly applied in student associations.
“[. . .] in reply the witness tried to justify beatings from an educational point of view, saying that he himself had often received one and that it had proved beneficial.”
On Thursday evening, a Hermann Scherchen concert at the Philharmonic: Beethoven’s Symphony No. i, Mozart’s Serenata nottuma (a delightful piece, but how much I prefer the Kleine nachtmusik!), and Mahler’s fifth symphony—a splendid, unexpectedly beautiful work, despite my fear that it would be pretentious, grandiloquent, and absurd.
Exhausting days in court, not so much because of the physical effort as because of the nervous tension.
Bogza’s arrest has really shaken me.2 It seemed to me an act of madness, which would pass as soon as things were explained. I was sure that he’d be released after a night with the police. Chasing newspaper editors, making phone calls, driving around by car—it all depressed me. Again I felt how deplorable was my alarmist temperament.
A conversation with the examining judge (Cornel Stănescu from Office No. VII, a smug flunky type affecting moral outrage) left me groping for words. I tried to convince him and read some of Bogza’s less scandalous poems—but none of it had any effect. The man was slavishly obeying orders, or else he just has the cruelty of an imbecile. Maybe I made a fool of myself talking to him so heatedly. In any case, he was laughing away.
The next day the arrest warrant was upheld. I realize that I spoke with too much obvious feeling. An attorney should not appear so involved in a case. But will I ever be able to do anything—anything at all—without some passion?
Besides, I don’t need to blame myself. It was a lost cause anyway: if the warrant was upheld, it could only have been because someone else ordered it. For the other counsels, V V. Stanciu and especially I. Gr. Perieţeanu, showed much greater detachment in presenting the case— and we still lost. To lose in such a trial (where legal justice, not to mention the other kind, cries out to heaven) is enough to make you forever disgusted with the Bar. Personally, though, I didn’t need anything else to make me feel disgusted.
It was not so much the confirmation of arrest as the judges’ attitude that aroused my indignation. All the time Puiu Istrati had a mockingly skeptical smile on his face, looking as absent as someone propping up a bar in a café. I felt that, whatever was said, the verdict had been fixed in advance—fixed by his position on the bench, his lack of sensitivity, his force of habit, his indifference. What power in the world can jolt the shriveled conscience of a judge with the mind of a bureaucrat? And to think that Bogza’s liberty is in the hands of such people! They are the state, the constitutional authorities, justice, morality, truth. . . .
Poor Bogza! He is certainly not aware of anything that is happening—he who is so naive, so childlike, so harebrained!
I used to think that there could be no disagreement on such questions among people of the same background as mine; that, once a threshold of sensitivity was reached, certain things were accepted as a matter of course. Well, how astounded I was at lunch today to realize that Mircea Eliade sides with Puiu Istrati rather than Bogza!
First of all (Mircea says), Bogza is not a writer. He’s not even a member of the Writers’ Association—and he’s more of a journalist than a writer. Second, his poetry is pornographic and pathological.
“Why should I be up in arms over Bogza’s arrest?” he shouted. “They’ve arrested him? So what? He’ll spend a month in jail and that’ll be the end of it. What’s really serious is that those youngsters are being martyred with ten years’ imprisonment. . . .”
“Which youngsters, Mircea?”
“The nationalist youngsters. Yes, they’re being made martyrs of. And for what? Because they beat Gogu Rădulescu’s arse a couple of dozen times? In Oxford and Cambridge, where students have the sensibility of a constituted organism . . .”
I couldn’t take the rest: not only because it seemed stupid to hear him repeating Nae word for word, but because I was scared at the way his mind was succumbing to platitude.
I stopped him.
“Mircea, old man, I think we should change the subject. It’s Sunday. I haven’t seen you for four weeks. Let’s talk about something else—otherwise I feel we won’t reach the end of our lunch. That would be a pity.”
And we did change the subject.
But is friendship possible under such circumstances?
This morning at the Ateneu there was a Bustabo concert, an American girl of sixteen in a white dress with a big behind—the Lola Bobescu type. Tartini’s Concerto in D Minor, Beethoven’s C minor sonata, Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole, Szymanowski’s Nocturne and Tarantella.
Yesterday evening, from Lyons P.T.T., a Mozart bassoon concerto.
On Friday evening, a Fenerman recital: Locatelli sonata, Beethoven sonata, Fauré’s Après un rêve, Albéniz’s Tango, a Frescobaldi sonata.
Thursday evening, Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, conducted by Perlea.
This last week, of course, I haven’t given attention to anything literary. But I did have the idea of a little essay that I may write sometime in the future: “On the Mediocrity of the Theatre.”
A play by Denys Amiel (Ma liberté) and various thoughts about my own play have made me see once again how impoverished, how conventional, how schematic, how facile and mediocre the theatre is as a genre—at least the “psychological” drama in three acts.
On my way home today, my heart beat fast at the thought—doubtless absurd, but which I may never shake off—that I may find a package from Paris with the missing manuscripts.3
I cannot stamp out the childish wish that this bad dream will end. I cannot convince myself that I really have lost the red folder forever, with its hi pages. Everything is still so vivid, so present within me. . . . I can’t let it go. I can’t believe it. Yesterday I opened the drawers that I had locked on my departure, and it occurred to me that in one of them I would come across the red folder and the yellow notebook. Maybe it really wouldn’t have surprised me to find them there. And now, as I write, I feel that I have them somewhere in my room, among the books on the shelves or the papers on my table—and that I need only look to have them in my hand.
Each time I think of that accursed moment when I first noticed the suitcase was missing, I have the same feeling of gloom, the same refusal to believe it. It seems absurd, ridiculous, farcical—and I well understand why I laughed that night in the face of disaster. I’d laugh again now.
I compare my present situation with that of two months ago, and I can only rue the collapse. I have lost so much—I who had so little to lose.
A bungled trip, a lost novel, a play withdrawn from rehearsal, probably for good. I was facing an autumn of riches, a winter of hard work. I was looking forward with curiosity to so much that seemed certain to happen—and now I no longer look forward to anything. I’m left with Roman’s office, the articles for Independent^ a revulsion against being awake and conscious, a terrible desire to drink, sleep, and forget. I feel at the end of my tether. No one in the world can do anything for me. I have so few deep reasons to live that a happening such as this (which for someone else, in a different situation, would be painful but not disastrous) becomes a reason to think of death.
And today is my thirtieth birthday.
On Saturday evening I went out with Leni and Froda, first to the Carul cu Bere then to the Melody. I drank a lot, on purpose. (I’d like to drink all the time, so as to forget. . .)
At the Melody, while the three of us talked about this and that, I was “feeling up” Leni beneath the table; she not only “let it be done” but discreedy helped me along. I spent the whole evening with my hand between her thighs. I watched her, but nothing gave her away. She was talkative, cheerful, attentive, pleasant, and self-assured. And her husband was sitting next to her. And she looked him in the eyes. And that is the woman I loved like a dog for two years.
I too finally know Leni the petite putain charmante,4 the one everyone but I has known—of course.
In all likelihood my play will not be performed. There are anti-Semitic pressures that the theatre has no reason to resist. The national conscience does not allow a play by Mihail Sebastian to appear on stage in Bucharest. Well, that’s all right: there are enough plays by Fodor László, Pius Fekete, or Franz Molnár.
Sân-Giorgiu literally said to Camil: “I have five thousand lancers at my command, and I’ll never accept for one moment the staging of Sebastian’s play. I’ve informed Sică of my decision.”
For the moment I’m not fully aware of the factors that led to the removal of my play from the repertoire. I don’t think that Sân-Giorgiu’s threats are sufficient explanation, nor are Iorga’s articles in the press. There must be a whole set of machinations. But I don’t have the patience or the tenacity to clarify matters. I’ll let them take their divinely appointed course. I give up.
On Sunday evening I went to the Comoedia to see the Caragiale play.
Conabie, much less eager to please than he was this summer, addressed me in the second-person singular.5 Axente, the typist, asked me with false concern:
“But isn’t your play still due to be performed?”
No, it isn’t. If it had been, Conabie wouldn’t have spoken to me in that familiar way, and Axente wouldn’t have been so offhand. Pathetic trifles at which I laugh, but I can’t help noticing them.
Zaharia Stancu offered me (through Camil, because we don’t speak to each other) an engagement at Lumea românească. I turned it down, of course. But how sad when something like that becomes possible or plausible, in any event not absurd: that I should be in the employ of Zaharia Stancu!
Camil told me of a conversation he had with Toma Vlădescu. Then he started probing:
“But what’s all this with you and Toma Vlădescu?”
I had to remind him that in 1931, when I was on good terms with T.V., he (Camil) got me involved in his dispute with V.—without asking or consulting me.
I don’t have any regrets, of course. But isn’t it rich that today I am still “at daggers drawn” with Toma Vlădescu, whereas Camil has lunch with him and asks me in an angelic voice: “What’s all this . . .”?
What childish aspects I must still have if I retain such trifles and even record them here?
Nevertheless, I can’t just sit around forevermore lamenting what happened and what has become of me. There is something stupid in it all, but I have to swallow it and move on. My inclination to do nothing is too strong, and I could encourage it further with another shrug of the shoulders.
So let’s draw a circle round the disaster and see what can be done from now on. In the first place, I have to accept that the manuscript is lost for good and stop expecting that it will turn up. (Yesterday evening at the Foundation, as I opened the door, I caught sight of a package on Cioculescu’s desk and felt an absurd shudder of hope that it was my papers, my books.)
Is it possible for me to rewrite the manuscript? I sometimes think so when I consider its broad outlines, for I remember the succession of events in it with sufficient clarity. The difficulties begin as soon as I think about the details: I’ll never be able to reconstruct those. I wasted whole hours for one word, one shade of meaning, one description of a gesture. I certainly won’t recover anything if I try to remember sentence by sentence. On the other hand, if I write at all freely—without remaining faithful to the first version—I’ll always suffer from the thought that it is well below my previous standard, and I won’t be able to achieve anything this time.
Also, if I was so pleased with the five chapters I wrote before, it was because I saw them growing and was myself surprised at each new element. Isn’t it too depressing to write something that no longer holds any secrets for you?
Anyway, I’ll try nevertheless. I’m determined not to go out in the evening any more, not to waste any more nights. This year I’ll stop being a “first-nighter.” And were it not for the three thousand lei from Independenţa, I’d give up going to concerts.
I’d like to do work that is a little more dull and mechanical. I think I’d feel good in the army.
On my way home tonight I felt an irresistible need to remember my novel. Thinking that I could reconstitute there and then at least the fifth chapter, I sat at my desk and wrote until three o’clock. Some passages I can recall quite easily, others have disappeared without a trace. There are gaps that I find quite disconcerting. I can see the missing pages well enough, I know where each bit, each sentence fitted on the page (top, bottom, middle), and I seem to have retained the rhythm of the sentences: I hear them, I have the measure of them, I can feel them breathing. And yet I am unable to write them down. With every sentence that I recall only in a mutilated form, I feel all that I am sacrificing, all that I have lost.
What am I to do? It seems out of the question to work through it methodically from beginning to end. For the time being, I’ll try to save what can still be saved: that is, the passages still present in my mind, the ones I can still find alive and unspoiled. Then I’ll see if anything can be done with all the sheets that have the value of a mere outline.
I won’t promise myself anything. It’s an attempt, not a hope as well.
I have just finished rewriting Chapter Five. It had thirty-two pages in the lost version; now it has only twenty-four. As I haven’t left out any of the action, the eight-page difference can be explained only by my sacrificing details that I could not and will not be able to recall.
I feel as if I’ve pulled some half-burnt sheets of paper from a fire. It is shaming and embarrassing to read them again. Everything seems dry, inexpressive, and hurried. I’ll put these twenty-four pages aside. They’ll serve as a rough outline if I one day decide—and have the time—to go on writing this ill-starred book.
Tomorrow I’ll try with the same haste, the same resignation, the same lack of illusions, the same indifference, to reconstitute the rest of the chapters—in the order in which they come.
I’ve forbidden myself to make any plans or promises until I’ve completed this first task.
Yesterday evening at the Ateneu, while Enescu was preparing to play again La fontaine d'aretuse (which he played admirably and had been asked by the audience to repeat), Mrs. Ciomac leaned across to me and asked:
“Would you be capable of repeating something you had put all your soul into the first time?”
I was on the point of saying a categorical “No!” when I remembered that for several days I had been trying without success to do precisely that—dear, oh dear!
Sometimes I think it is working nevertheless—that the book will be saved in the end. Some passages I have recalled almost intact; others I am writing again, perhaps no worse than the first time. In general, the pages I manage to rewrite without great loss are the neutral ones that I did not like in the old version either. (Oh dear, how resigned I am! I’m beginning to speak of an old version!)
But my despair comes back whenever I approach something that I achieved with great difficulty, and which was so much to my liking before. Anne’s entrance into the bar, the atmosphere of the bar, the decor, the moments of waiting—no, I’ll never relive them with the emotion, the surprise, the melancholy that I felt the first time up there on Mount Schuller.6 Some sentences took me whole hours before. Now I feel they are lost, drowned. And again I feel like giving it all up and forgetting about it.
I’ve finished it all. Of the eighty-six pages I had to reconstitute (because twenty-five made up the fragment published in R.F.R. and were therefore saved intact), I have lost twenty-eight for good.
The material loss is considerable for a short novel (which is what my book is meant to be), and quite dreadful if I consider not only the number of pages but also their content. The reconstituted pages are insipid, with neither color nor tone. I have not recovered anything of what seemed to me intense, at times passionate, in the lost manuscript. Some passages in it moved me in a childlike way whenever I read them. Now I feel cold and indifferent.
As it is not a novel built around situations, I have lost the very things that were its raison d'être-, the detailed psychological observations, the precise images and expressions, the appropriate shades of meaning.
The old version seemed to me so good that, whatever else I wrote, the book could no longer be compromised. Now, if the reconstituted chapters are to be tolerable or even excusable, what follows will have to be very good, so good as to make up for and dominate the first part. But is that possible? Will I be capable of it?
No, there’s no point in trying to console myself. The loss is irreversible—and perhaps it would have been more manly, more honest, not to try to pick things up from the beginning but simply to abandon it once and for all.
It is very difficult to explain all the intrigues and machinations surrounding my play. Je ne sais pas me défendre7—that’s for sure—and I don’t even claim to be trying. But at least I should take what has happened as a lesson in life—though my life no longer has anything to do with any kind of lesson.
In any case, “anti-Semitic pressures” on Sică are not sufficient explanation. I must add: 1) the very active intervention of Froda, who is more scared than anyone in this matter; 2) the fact that Leni is not especially keen to act in my play, and at the end of the day would be happier to take on something like Absente nemotivate [Unmotivated Absences]; 3) lastly, the fact that no one in the theatre really believes in my play, which strikes them as “interesting” but not a potential winner. With so many motives, was it even necessary to add Sân-Giorgiu’s fist and Creve-dia’s voice?
Yesterday evening, Radio Geneva had Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, which I have been wanting to get to know for such a long time. Admirable, as soon as I began listening.
Quite a lot of Mozart recently (two exclusively Mozartian concerts with the Salzburg orchestra). This evening I’ll hear the Requiem at the Philharmonic, also for the first time.
Otherwise nothing new; no expectations, nothing.
This morning in front of the Ateneu (on my way out of the Enescu symphonic concert), Nae Ionescu and Puiu Dumitrescu8 were discussing the governmental crisis.9 Who’ll be next? they asked each other, shrugging their shoulders, like me or you or him. . . .
Whereas five years ago . . .
Mircea has entered the electoral lists. That too is a sign.
Sunday, alone . . . I’d have like to spend the evening with someone, anyone. Celia and Thea did not answer the telephone. Mircea and Marietta are at the Viforeanus1 (another contact lost, the Viforeanus). Maryse and Gheorghe in Sinaia.
Only Leni rang me this evening—but why should I keep picking up a story that leads nowhere? (Camil—to complete the list—was at a wedding; Carol in Vienna.)
I went alone to the cinema and then walked in the streets. On Calea Victoriei near Djaburov, someone called out behind me:
“Mr. Comarnescu, Mr. Comarnescu.” It was a wretched semijournalist, Emil Flamandu, whom I had met a few times cooling his heels in the Foundation’s waiting room. He spoke in a drunken mumble:
“Mr. Comarnescu, did you do me that favor? You know, at the general’s, I asked you. . . Do you have an answer?”
I explained that he had made a mistake. I was not Comarnescu but Sebastian, and he had never said anything to me about a “favor.” He couldn’t apologize enough—and went his way.
I can easily see myself as a kind of Emil Flamandu later in life. When I wrote Deschiderea stagiunii three years ago,2 I had a quite precise feeling that T. T. Soru (also a kind of Flămându) was myself. And since then I have come down a lot; I have put up less resistance.
I could drink all the time, so as to forget—and I have so much to forget. On Wednesday evening I almost forced Leni and Froda to come with me for a drink after the theatre, and I did indeed end up terribly drunk—one of the worst times in my life. I was like an animal, no longer thinking about anything, and I was happy.
And yet, I’ll delay the ending as much as possible.
What Harry Brauner told me yesterday about Marietta challenges everything I knew about her. She got thirty thousand lei from the National Theatre and twenty thousand from the promoters—and she kept it all, without giving anything to Lucia Demetrius. At the same time she sent the text of their play to Germany, signing it only with her own name, on the pretext that it would not be accepted because Lucia Demetrius is “Jewish” (!).
Isn’t it incredible? (On this occasion, I learned that Lucia D.’s mother actually is Jewish. What good methods of investigation our Marietta has! And what timely use she can make of them!)
So it’s decided: Jocul de-a vacanţa will not be put on stage. I’ve known it ever since my return to Bucharest—but I still had some vague hopes. Now it’s all settled. Instead they’re putting on a play by Muşatescu. I received the news (which was not news but only a confirmation) with a feeling of bitterness. But there’s been enough time from last night till this morning to give the incident its correct proportions. Obviously it’s not at all pleasant. I’m too superstitious not to be troubled when something of mine is a failure; it’s as if a hand of cards were to go badly wrong. Since I left for Geneva, I’ve been having an unlucky streak. When will it end?
The only serious aspect of it all is the money. I haven’t got any, and I don’t know where to look. I’m beginning to feel poverty as a humiliation. The play could have brought me in a hundred thousand lei—which would not have solved everything, but it would have given me a few months of peace.
I’m waiting for Christmas to go and work somewhere in the mountains. Maybe I could write my novel in twenty days. By January or February I’d like to be handling the production: galleys, final proofs, dedication—in short, to feel that I’m doing something, that something is happening in my life.
This morning I met Antoine Bibescu3 at the Enescu concert, and this afternoon I went for a stroll on the Şosea with Titu Devechi. I hadn’t seen either of them for years. Yet I had nothing to say to them, nor they anything to me. It was as if time had stood still. But goodness knows, that is not at all the case.
The concert was very nice: violin concertos by Bach, Mozart, and Brahms. But there was only one moment of emotion: the last phrases of the andante in the Bach concerto.
Yesterday (Saint Nicholas), Nina’s birthday. I rang in the morning to congratulate her.
“The lady is at the general’s,” said the maidservant, “and the professor is lunching at his parents’.”
Later I went there for dinner and discovered that Mircea had actually been away from Bucharest electioneering for a couple of days and had returned only that evening. The maid’s lie at lunchtime horrified me: a family-organized lie in which they did not mind involving the servant. It seemed even sadder than the knowledge that Mircea had been on the campaign trail, wandering from village to village with Polihroniade. Haig Acterian and Penciu were part of the same team. They took turns speaking, and it seemed that Haig spoke with grand, slightly theatrical gestures. I don’t know if Mircea made any speeches. It all seems so utterly grotesque. I can’t understand how they are not aware of the terrible farce. Marietta, who arrived later, came into the house singing the Iron Guard anthem: Ştefan Vodă. . . They’re beginning not to feel embarrassed in my presence.
I am seeing a lot of Leni. It is a time when we are able to see eye to eye—and I am not serious enough to refuse. No doubt I'll pay for this light-minded behavior, as I paid on other occasions in the past.
Camil said to me this morning on Calea Victoriei:
"No Reinhardt, no Stanislavsky, not a single stage manager has discovered what I have discovered in the theatre. I am the greatest stage manager there is, because I have deep knowledge of the text as well as an exceptional philosophical culture and an unusual nervous sensibility. These actors are fools: they can't even see how immensely fortunate they are to be working with me."
I was quite disarmed. All I could do was smile—a little surprised but unprotesting.
Lunch with Antoine Bibescu at the Athenee Palace. To be a prince, to possess a huge fortune, to frequent the most prestigious circles in Europe, to be on close terms with all the great French writers, to be performed with some success in Paris, London, and New.York—this is not enough to cure you of Bucharest's little vanities. Here is Antoine Bibescu burning to have one of his plays put on by Sică Alexandrescu.
Yesterday evening, a Casals-Enescu concert at the Philharmonic. (Schumann’s Cello Concerto, Brahms’s Double Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra.) Very sincere, very pure emotion. In general, I find it so hard to be completely present during a concert! A host of thoughts and images pass through me, some of them quite stupid and meaningless, and when I catch myself wandering off, I scold myself like a schoolchild and return to the concert with a kind of determination to be more assiduous and attentive and to understand more of what I hear.
Antoine Bibescu asked me on Sunday morning whether I had a natural inclination for music. I replied that I didn’t: that I had come to music out of curiosity, to enter a domain unknown to me. I think I started to love it through application and effort; only very rarely do I have moments of true abandon. Besides, I’m not sure that what is called “abandon” is the best way of listening to music. I do not trust the muddled, slightly capricious reverie in which I reel about during a concert. On the contrary, I try to listen to each phrase with an analytic or grammatical mind. I try to listen to a piece of music as I would read a book.
Casals brings tears to my eyes. I cannot even bring myself to applaud. I am ashamed to show my “approval.” What a magnificent lesson in art, and perhaps in life too! No fuss at all, no dazzle, no verve: everything simple, austere, uncommunicative, as in a great solitude.
In yesterday’s Buna Vestire (year I, no. 244, dated Friday, 17 December 1937): “Why I Believe in the Victory of the Legionary Movement,” by Mircea Eliade.
“Can the Romanian people end its days . . . wasted by poverty and syphilis, invaded by Jews and torn apart by foreigners . . . ?
“. . . the Legionary revolution has the people’s salvation as its supreme goal. . . as the Captain has said.
“. . . I believe in liberty, in personality, and in love. That is why I believe in the victory of the Legionary movement.”
Evening
Looking at her a short while ago as she spoke in the dressing room, I closely observed each of her features and gestures. She is ugly: a narrow brow, Jewish nose, large mouth, a wart on her thick lower lip. She is thin, her breasts are small and worn out, her arms are too slender, her skin without luster. I also know her hurried way of talking, her artless intonation, her bursts of laughter (which suddenly illuminate her, it is true). I know everything, and none of it pleases me.
She is a woman with neither height nor beauty, no more desirable than last year’s Wendy (my young client from the Zig-Zag—“Wendy and Julie”), at best “amusing” or completely insignificant. And yet I love her.
“I love her.” Let’s not exaggerate. I too am a kind of flotsam carried along by events, by the fear of being alone, by the slothfulness of living. Sometimes I see in her a smile, an incipient emotion, a look that waits and asks . . . and then I don’t have the heart to refuse her.
My pathetic visits to the theatre. The doorman, the dresser, the stagehands, Iancovescu, Roman—what can they think of this poor wretch who, for no apparent reason, comes every other evening to the dressing room to smoke a cigarette?
In normal circumstances, what has happened to me in the last three to four years would have been, I won’t say gratifying, but in no way catastrophic. Grave, to be sure, but for that very reason useful.
To have lost a position (Cuvântul4), a man to whom I felt responsible (Nae Ionescu), a number of friends (Ghita Racoveanu, Haig, Marietta, Lilly, Nina, and the closest friend of all, Mircea), to have lost absolutely everything: this may, at thirty years of age, turn out to be not a disaster but a maturing experience.
Should I not feel grateful to life for creating a void around me, for withdrawing all the habits and conveniences I had accumulated over time, for putting me back at square one, not with the thoughtlessness I had at twenty but with the lucidity of my thirty years?
Should I not tell myself that I am ending (totally and forever) a certain period and beginning a new one that will lead me toward different people, perhaps another love, or perhaps another solitude?
Yes, I certainly should. But something is missing for it to be like that—the one thing, in fact, from which there is no escape in my destiny. For all the rest can be built up anew.
Stupefying results in yesterday’s elections to the Chamber. A great success for the Iron Guard: they’re talking of thirty to thirty-five deputies. In any case, hundreds of thousands of votes, whole districts swung over to them. It is Germany’s “September 1930” all over again.
Yet it was a bright sunny morning, and in the streets, out in the open air, there was a kind of allégresse in which I allowed myself to be heedlessly caught up.
Lunch at the Capşa—long, fine, copious—with Blank, Ionel Gherea, Mrs. Theodorian.5 It was perhaps a sign of irresponsibility, because our fate may be decided this very day. I realize that we no longer have anything to win, anything to defend, anything to hope for. All is virtually lost. There will come prisons, dire poverty, maybe escape, maybe exile, maybe worse.
Yet I am sufficiently unserious to look at events with a kind of amused curiosity, as if I were watching an exciting football match. For there is no question that it is exciting. Right now (ten o’clock) the government has only 37 to 38 percent on paper, and it does not look as if the figures can be falsified at this late stage. If some miracle of arithmetic does not occur this very night, we’ll see a Romanian government fall for the first time in elections. Unless the whole regime collapses by tomorrow morning—which is also a possibility.
But to what extent, I ask, can all this change one letter, one comma even, in a destiny that is not mine but all of ours?
Yesterday’s agitation ended with an hour of calm: alone at home, listening to music with only my desk lamp on, the rest of the room in semidarkness. From Geneva, a Bach organ chorale; from Breslau, a fugue and toccata by Bach for orchestra, and finally Max Reger’s Variations on a Theme by Mozart, which I heard for the first time last week at the Philharmonic. Everything was quite beautiful and, above all, soothing.
At last an hour to myself. I’ve been here since the evening before last, in a villa together with Carol, Grindea,6 Iova, the Blanks—too many for me to take.
I hoped to find a room somewhere in Poiana or Timis, but I wasn’t lucky and I didn’t know how to look. It’s impossible for me to work here with all these people around. I’m not even trying. But with what pleasure, what painful pleasure, I would write! A short while ago, as I walked down the boulevard, I felt the whole novel alive inside me, like an open wound.
So many things that have happened to me recently in Bucharest, so many stupid turns in my never-ending story with Leni, would find in the book a revenge, a solution, an answer.
Again the lost chapters come into my mind. Impossible to forget, impossible to regain them.
The only moments of relaxation are when I am skiing. Yesterday at Poiana, today at Timiş, I was happy as long as I kept skiing. Thick snow, dazzling scenery, the pleasure of flying on skis and leaping over an undulation of the ground, and finally the triumph of stopping almost correctly (or anyway without falling) at the end of the course. . . .
I leave for Bucharest this evening, in three hours’ time. It seems that a Goga government has been, or is about to be, formed. (Someone spoke from Poiana with Miron Grindea, who talked of an absurd list of ministers: Goga7 as head of government and the War Ministry, Gh. Cuza,8 Munca, General Antonescu somewhere or other. A typical government of panic!) I don’t know what will happen. We are waiting. But it seems more serious to wait in Bucharest. I can’t be so irresponsible as to ski while the whole of our lives from now on is being decided.
But nor can I be so ungrateful as to deny so soon the joys of skiing.
Yesterday and today I performed real feats of bravery in Poiana. Not only did I ski down from Poiana to Prund without falling too often, but in Poiana, especially today on the “exercise field,” I solved all kinds of problems that have initiated me into the tricks of the trade. I can now “slalom” reasonably well without sticks. I also tried a slope at the base of the Schuller, which is certainly the fastest slope I have “attacked” until now, and I completed the whole course without incident, executing a perfect turn to the left and a quick regulation stop. On the other hand, I fell badly on the road back—very near the end, which made it even more comical, and anyway at a point near Solomon where there was no longer any difficulty. I am all in (it’s not easy to descend, braking all the time, for three-quarters of an hour), but I am proud of myself.
I said today, after I had done my first successful “slalom” exercise, that literature will never give me the same joy. And I wasn’t lying.
Nevertheless—to be quite honest—all these initiations into skiing also interest me from the point of view of the novel. I have more and more material for the scenes at Gunther’s cabin on the Schuller.
I reread the manuscript the evening before last. I suffer line by line when I see how pockmarked my poor manuscript has become—but on the whole the reading has not discouraged me. I’ll have to rewrite more carefully everything I have redone so far, but it can certainly be used, even in the deplorable state in which it is today. Everything may perhaps go well from now on, though not, of course, without difficulty.
I’d love to finish writing this book. The poor thing has had too much bad luck for me not to be fond of it. This is probably the kind of tender feeling one keeps for unhappy children.
The Goga government has been installed—and, contrary to what I thought before arriving in Bucharest, it is not a temporary maneuver but a stable formula. It will hold fresh elections, it will govern the country, and it will carry out the Cuzist program to which each minister referred in his speech. For the first time in an official speech one could hear the vocabulary of Porunca Vremii: “yid,” “the Jews,” Judah’s domination, and so on.
The first measures of state anti-Semitism are expected for tomorrow or the day after: a citizenship review, probably elimination from the Bar and in any case from the press.
Will I lose my position at the Foundation? It’s quite possible—especially if, as today’s papers suggest, the Foundations are brought under the Ministry of Propaganda, with Hodoş at its head. But even without that, it is hard to believe that a Cuzist regime will tolerate a Jew in a “cultural position”—even one as lowly as mine.
I don’t know what the atmosphere is like in town. Consternation, bewilderment, alarm, or fear? The papers are lifeless, inexpressive, without any note of protest. I think it is only now that we will start learning what censorship means.
In these conditions, is it not a childish stupidity to be writing literature?
I still haven’t been into town. My fall yesterday was more serious than I thought at first. My left thigh is swollen and bruised. I walk, or rather hobble, with difficulty, and treat myself with lead acetate. At one moment I was afraid I’d broken something. That’s all I need.
Late at night, when I got back from Brasov, I listened to a Mozart piano concerto from Stuttgart—one I don’t think I’ve ever heard before.
This evening from Paris, a sonata in B-flat by Mozart. And finally, as I write this note (eleven o’clock), something that sounds like Mozart— probably a symphony—also from a French station.
A lot of Mozart, really a lot. Perhaps it’s the only thing that can console me for everything that’s happened.
(It wasn’t a symphony but the Flute Concerto in G Major—by Mozart, though, so at least I got that right.)
Dimineaţa, Adevărul, and Lupta have been banned for the time being.
Petre Pandrea, the county prefect, somewhere in Moldavia.
Victor Eftimiu9 has resigned from the Peasant party and joined the Gogists.1 Apparently he’ll be given the Theatre Directorate.
Camil Petrescu ’phoned me and commented on Eftimiu’s conversion:
“You know, if he’s really appointed to the theatre, I’ll join the Iron Guard the next day and won’t even say ‘hello’ to you again.”
“All I ask, Camil old boy, is that you ring and tell me in advance, so that I don’t say ‘hello’ to you. That’ll make things easier for you.”
Train passes are being withdrawn from journalists. Jews have been forbidden the occupation of journalist.
“At the end of the day,” says Camil, “you have to admit there have been too many abuses.”
“I admit it—how couldn’t I? I admit everything.”
All day at home reading Charles Morgan’s Sparkenbroke. A book so remote from the present day! It seems a million miles away!
Footnotes
1. Adrianopole: the old name for the Turkish town of Edime, near Turkey’s frontier with Greece.
2. Hjalmar Schacht: economics minister in Nazi Germany 1934-1937.
3. Leaders of the Iron Guard who fought on Franco’s side in the Spanish civil war. Their death was used by the Iron Guard as a major propaganda device.
4. Anton Holban: novelist.
5. Scarred Hearts, a novel by M. Blecher.
6. L’Indépendence Roumaine, for which Sebastian wrote music reviews under the pen name Flamimus.
7. Lawyer.
8. Angela Lereanu: secretary at Roman’s office.
9. Constantin Noica and his wife. Noica was a journalist and a philosopher who became a strong supporter of the Iron Guard and later, under the Communist regime, the founder of an opposing school of thought.
1. Medieval rulers of Moldavia and Valachia.
2. Nicolae Bălcescu: historian, leader of the 1848 revolution.
3. Mihai Eminescu: nineteenth-century poet, considered the creator of the modern Romanian language, a profound anti-Semite.
4. Bogdan Petriceicu Hajdeu: nineteenth-century writer, anti-Semitic.
5. President of the Iasi University who was stabbed by a group of Iron Guard students.
6. Gogu Rădulescu was in fact a Communist sympathizer.
7. I know very well what I should stick to.
8. Involving arson to extract insurance payments.
9. Sebastian's grandmother.
1. I would keep watch by my Jesus.
2. Geo Bogza had been charged with disseminating pornography because of the content of one of his books.
3. In Paris a month earlier, Sebastian had lost the draft manuscript of his novel Accidentul.
4. Charming little slut.
5. In this case expressing a slight sense of social superiority rather than personal warmth.
6. The local German name for Mount Postavaru.
7. I don't know how to defend myself.
8. Puiu Dumitrescu: powerful personal secretary to King Carol II.
9. A forthcoming election was to decide the fate of Prime Minister Tătărescu, who was supported by the king but had run afoul of public opinion.
1. Mariana and Petra Viforeanu: members of the Criterion literary group.
2. The Opening of the Season, Sebastian’s sketch about theatrical life.
3. Prince Antoine Bibescu: close friend of Sebastian's.
4. The newspaper where Sebastian had worked.
5. Alice Theodorian: friend of Sebastian’s.
6. Miron Grindea: journalist.
7. Octavian Goga, prime minister December 1937-Febraary 1938, leader with A. C. Cuza of the heavily anti-Semitic Goga-Cuza government.
8. Gh. Cuza, son of A. C. Cuza and a member of the Goga-Cuza government.
9. Playwright.
1. Members of the Goga-Cuza National Christian party.