Still at home because of my leg, which has not yet healed. It is worrying me.
They have revoked my permit. Our names in every paper, as if we were a bunch of delinquents.1
New Year’s Eve at Leni’s. Observed a host of things about her—but what’s the point of noting them down?
Finishing with her is a serious business. At thirty I’m no longer allowed to behave so childishly.
I ought to write the article for Revista Fundaţiilor. But will it be published? I don’t think I can possibly stay on at the Foundation. What will this new year bring me, having started on such a gloomy note?
Not a single phone call from anyone. Mircea, Nina, Marietta, Haig, Lilly, Camil—they’re all dead. And I understand them so well!
I had a moment of terror during the night. I woke up with the clock striking three in the next room: I think I had a fever, and my left leg was hurting; it felt more swollen than before. I checked the swelling with my hand, and I was suddenly frightened at the thought that it was “like a bag of pus.”
An abscess, I said to myself, and everything seemed clear and inevitable. I saw again the whole first chapter of Inimi cicatrizate. “Cold abscess,” “hot abscess,” “fistula,” “fistular abscess,” “at death’s door”—all of Blecher’s vocabulary. At last I understood how a fistula digs in, how it makes room for itself, how it can sink through flesh “right into the buttock,” as Blecher put it, and how I was never able to understand. . . .
Everything seemed clear. I wondered where I would find the money for the initial cost of my treatment: puncture, sanatorium, dressings. And I wondered who might give me a revolver to end it more quickly. Mircea, perhaps. But would he understand? Would he consent to do it, he who thinks of suicide as the ultimate sin?
These thoughts went on all night and all morning, and I took them with me into Dr. Cuper’s waiting room, into his surgery, until the moment when he finally explained that it was a local subcutaneous hemorrhage, a burst blood vessel, some clotted blood, circulation problems over quite a wide area—but nothing serious. The pain will persist for six or seven days, and the bruising for three weeks or so. Rest and treatment with x-rays. I actually had the first session there with Dr. Ghirnus.
Maybe the whole incident came at the right time to remind me that there are, or can be, worse misfortunes than an anti-Semitic regime.
I already knew it perfectly well—only I had forgotten.
In Charles Morgan’s Sparkenbroke there is an observation about a Jewish character: “Mais dans ses yeux noirs luisait une ardente imagination, refrodie par cette tristesse ironique qu'ont des civilisés parmi les barbares, et qui est particulière à sa race.’”2
I’ve finished with her. . . . But if the act itself was quite easy, done without harsh words and with almost a smile, I shouldn’t imagine that it will stay so simple.
Now come the hours of absurd disquiet, the choking need to see her, the obsession with the telephone that never rings, the temptation to pick up the receiver and call her, the hope of meeting her “by chance” in the street, the slight alarm on passing the theatre, the urge to look up to her window when I walk down her street (to see whether the lights are on and, if so, who is visiting her, or, if not, where she might be at that hour, etc. etc. etc.).
But all this—which I know so well—will have to be borne with resignation. I shall have to hold out until I regain that composure, that restful oblivion, which I have achieved a few times before but carelessly thrown away. For you must admit, old boy, you are too old and you have too many sorrows in life to remain caught up in this sad, banal, and trifling affair.
I won’t allow any excuses. It’ll be difficult, of course—the proof is that I’m telling you now, just an hour after the “farewell call,” when the anesthetizing effect has not yet worn off. It doesn’t hurt, but it soon will. No doubt at all about that!
I have avoided writing about my visit to Nae the day before yesterday. I came away with mixed feelings: fondness, irritation, doubts, repugnance.
There, in the fading evening light, he sat in his huge office at that long black table, with his head of hair now turning grey, his eye sockets seemingly deeper than before, his eyebrows also beginning to pale, and his face severe and glum. Indeed, he had just said something to me that could have come straight out of Charles Morgan’s novel: “Nothing is more vacuous, more threadbare, than irony—for life is too serious to be ironical with it.” For a moment I suddenly had the feeling that I had Sparkenbroke in person before me. I couldn’t help telling him this, with a certain show of emotion.
But later I found again my old Nae Ionescu: garrulous, quick-witted, childlike, now and then crafty.
“I was just telling them in Berlin . . . I was talking to one of their ministers, and I explained in detail the characteristics of the Hitler regime. The man listened in silence, then stood up and said: ‘Professor, I’ll go this very day to the Fiihrer and tell him I have spoken with the only man who has understood the National Socialist revolution.’”
Later Nae told me a host of “secrets” about the government, about the temporary ban on Adevărul, about various ministers, about the external situation (all “just between the two of us,” of course), and finally about perspectives for the future.
Goga’s anti-Semitic measures disgust him. He thinks they are a hollow mockery, issued in a barbarous spirit of raillery.
“How on earth can they say that a whole group of Romanian citizens are engaged in the white slave trade? That’s a calumny, and any Romanian citizen has a right to prosecute the minister for spreading it around. How can you drive a million people to suicide and social degradation without endangering the very foundations of the Romanian state?”
I tried to reassure him that the slow, or even the impetuous, killing of Jews would not have quite such grave implications of that kind, and that anyway the Iron Guard would surely not operate differently.
“Not in deeds, but in their mind,” was Nae’s reply. “You see, laugh as you will, there is a big difference between a man who kills you in a mocking spirit and one who does the same with pain in his heart.”
Etcetera, etcetera. Can I summarize a conversation with Nae? A million different things—a million judgments, naive assertions, clarifications, threats, solutions, explanations.
From all that, I did not take away any indication regarding myself.
Yesterday morning, a brief visit to Blank. I am so disoriented that I look everywhere for information and opinions.
“All we Jews can wish for,” he argued, “is the continuation of the Goga government. What would come after it would be infinitely worse.”
I realize that I am becoming a little apprehensive about what I write in this journal. It’s not impossible that I’ll be awakened one day by a house search, and there can be no more “scandalous” evidence than a personal diary.
Yesterday evening I wasted three hours, today four, with the manuscript in front of me. I force myself to take it up again, but it doesn’t work. I don’t know whether it is because I am dispirited, or disgusted with literature, or quite simply lazy.
In the end I gave myself up to reading instead: Malraux’s L'espoir. I’ll work some other time. . . .
I was determined enough to resist any “resumption” gesture on my part, but not sufficiently firm, nor sufficiently prepared, to resist a call from her. She ’phoned twice yesterday—and so I met her.
What now?
A big disaster in the theatrical world. At the S.C.I.A. an evening’s receipts are two to three thousand lei. It’s possible that the Regina Maria will shut by next Sunday.
And in such times I become a dramatist!
The Comoedia has announced a play by Sân-Giorgiu for one of its future premieres. Well, that’s another matter!
Massoff has been dismissed from the National Theatre, at the minister’s express request.3 It’s one of those wretched details that depress me more than a “general measure.” It is oppression on the quiet—cowardly and petty. And I cannot help thinking that I’ll be sacked from the Foundation in the same way, today, tomorrow, or the day after. . . . I await this calmly—after all, I’m not going to tie my whole life (or perhaps my death) to 5,935 lei a month.
If, amid all this filth, I didn’t have to bear my old personal unhappiness, how readily—or so I think—would I tear everything up and start life again from the beginning! Where? No matter where. In the Foreign Legion, for example. But thirty is not the age for adventure seeking, especially with my terrible weariness of life—weariness because I have not lived at all up to now.
It’s nearly two months since I last saw Mircea, nearly ten days since we last rang each other. Should I let things unravel by themselves? Should I wrap it all up with a final explanation? I feel such revulsion that I would prefer us both to stop speaking once and for all. I have nothing to ask him, and he certainly has nothing to say to me. On the other hand, our friendship lasted for years, and perhaps I owed it one harsh hour of parting.
I still indulge myself by listening to music in the evening. Yesterday, from Strasbourg, Mozart’s German Dances and a Schumann concerto for four cellos, which I did not know existed.
It’s a kind of narcotic, or a kind of bravado—as if I am saying that absolutely everything is not lost.
She was here yesterday evening. I kept expecting her to ring and say that she was not coming, that she couldn’t come. That seemed to me simpler. But she did come—with some violets that she took from the flap of her cloak, and which I still have here in a glass, on my bedside table. We listened to the Kleine nachtmusik and smoked a cigarette, then I took her in my arms. She did not resist or waver, but awaited everything with consent. As she closed her eyes in “abandon,” I looked at her before kissing her, as if I wanted to be sure it was really her.
But there is still something murky in all this, something awkward between us. I don’t have the strength to refuse, point-blank, things that life has taken away from me, things that it has forbidden me to have.
I went to Mircea’s today. I thought we would have it out, but as we spoke I realized that there is no point—that it may even be impossible. It’s all over between us, and we are both perfectly aware of the fact. The rest— explanations, excuses, reproaches—does not lead anywhere.
I told him that I am thinking of leaving the country. He approved of the idea—as if it were obvious, as if there were nothing else to be done.
Cuvântul has come out.4 I can’t hold back a quiver of surprise, almost of emotion, when I see its calligraphic title that I used to hold before me every morning and every evening for so many years. It seems both very familiar and utterly strange. As in the old days, whenever I see someone in the street or on a streetcar carrying a copy of the paper that used to be so much my paper, I have the feeling that he is a friend, someone from the same family.
How ironic that sounds today: “from the same family”!
Yesterday evening, for the first time in four years, the windows were lighted up in the editorial offices. I passed by feeling a little sad, but not too much. A sense of irreparability attenuates a farewell. Here, as in love, it is hard if you keep feeling that all is not over, that things can be taken up and put back together again. But when the break is final, when the departure brooks no return, the forgetting is quicker and the consolation easier.
Aderca has been moved to Cernăuţi as a reprisal.5 I read a letter he sent to his wife: no laments, almost no bitterness. He lives in a room rented for a thousand lei a month, and has fifteen hundred lei for food. That’s at forty-five years of age, after two wars and twenty books.
It’s no longer possible to enter the law courts. There were terrible fights yesterday, and apparently more of the same today. I don’t upset myself, I don’t get worked up. I wait—without knowing exactly for what.
The day before yesterday, a long night’s drinking at Mrs. T.’s. I danced all the time, either with her or with her sister; they were equally indiscreet in offering themselves. It was a “louche” atmosphere, which I did not have the energy to reject with the brusqueness it deserved.
And when I think that B. introduced me only so that I would have the opportunity to meet “un être rare.”6
A dream from last night.
I am in Sinaia, in a carriage together with Marietta Sadova and Lilly Popovici. We climb a steep road, looking for a villa where none other than Jules Renard lives. We pass alongside the villa, in the front yard of which are three gentlemen: Virgil Madgearu, Mihail Popovici, and, between them, a thin man with greying fair hair. I stop the carriage and ask:
“Vous ne savez pas si M. Jules Renard habite par là?”
“C’est moi!” the unknown man replies.7
I go up to Renard and speak to him with great emotion (Lilly and Marietta remain in the carriage and drive on, or anyway disappear from the dream). He suggests that we go for a walk in the town. We set off together while a young woman—his daughter? his wife?—asks if he will be back soon, gives him a lot of anxious, affectionate advice not to catch cold, not to tire himself, and so on.
On the way I talk in detail about his Journal and quote from it. In particular I quote a phrase he uses about the theatre: “une conversation sans lustre. ”8 The discussion lasts a long time in the dream. (I remember that it is not at all incoherent—well structured, rather.)
We come to a kind of café-restaurant. On the right, in a kind of separate room, there are a number of familiar faces—including, I think, Izi. We avoid them and sit at a table on the left, in a cubicle like those at the Corso.
That is all I remember. This morning, before waking up properly, I mentally repeated the whole dream and there were, I think, more details. But in the course of the day I forgot the dream, and it was only a short while ago, at the Philharmonic, that I remembered it again.
Marietta’s play will not be performed after all; the dress rehearsal has been banned by ministerial order. Porunca Vremii denounced it on the grounds that Lucia Demetrius has a Jewish mother.
I am sorry for her but not unhappy about Marietta. She’ll have the chance to feel, in a way that directly affects her, the wild absurdity of her own “political ideas.”
An atmosphere of panic, of disorderly retreat. Always the same questions without an answer, always the same laments. It is tiring. The only way to forget is to get drunk. But I am too tranquil, too fond of staying at home, to do that every evening.
Apparently there are dozens, indeed hundreds, of groups in the city to promote all kinds of solutions: mass conversion, emigration, an association of pro-government “Mosaic Romanians,” etc., etc. They are desperate people, whose despair takes comical forms. I can’t take part in this agitation, this turmoil, except by shrugging my shoulders.
Sunday evening: alone at home. I have no one to see in this big wide city, nor anything to say to anyone, nor anything to hear from anyone. I read, without too much conviction. If my radio were not broken, I’d listen to some music. It’s a drug that agrees with me.
A few days ago I started work again on a French translation of De două mii de ani. Do I have some definite hope? No! But just as I buy a lottery ticket every month, which gives me a fraction of a thousandth of a chance of winning the “million” prize, I am preparing a text that one day, through some absurd fluke, might find a French publisher. Most important of all, it is mechanical work suitable for my free hours—so free and so disoriented, the poor things!
A long lunch yesterday at Vişoianu’s. Later, over coffee, Ralea.9
They are more disoriented than I am, a “mere individual.” If that is Romanian democracy—and there is none other—then it is a dead loss. I no longer have any hope, any expectation. They’ve given up completely. In their view, the next elections will double the success of the Iron Guard; the National Peasants won’t win more than 10 to 12 percent, with roughly the same for the Liberals.
After a five-hour session there, I left with my head in a whirl. The same grieved shrugging of shoulders, the same stupid consolations “of an external order,” the same more or less confidential tidbits of news: Ostrovski spoke, Nae Ionescu squinted, Micescu got into a tangle in Geneva, Eden won’t accept, etc., etc. That must be how people discussed the rise of Hitler in Germany, over black coffee after a good lunch. The last comforts on the eve of the final collapse.
I saw Belu Zilber1 for the first time in four years (he had coffee at Vişoianu’s); he is unchanged.
Sunday, a night of heavy drinking with Leni and Jenica Crutescu. I could drink all the time; I’d do nothing else.
Another drunken night. But it’ll be the last in the series—otherwise there will be no end. It’s a promise.
The days are getting longer. It’s still light at six in the evening. It frightens me to think that spring is coming, that a year has passed and I have done nothing at all. No book, no love.
The Goga government fell last night! A sudden reflex of satisfaction spreads over me, an irresistible easing of nervous tension. I said to myself—and I say it all the more after a night of troubled sleep—that things are very unclear and may remain just as grave (for us at least), that the anti-Semitic repression may continue. Nevertheless, I cannot stop myself rejoicing; it is such a consolation to see a great imposture suddenly go flat.
But what gave last night its dramatic tone—its nervous joy, its excitement, its cheerful restlessness, its optimistic agitation—was the news, or rather the rumors, about Germany.
Revolt, street-fighting in Berlin, three army corps in open battle with assault troops, etc. etc. etc. Incredible, but enough to make one dizzy. My old despondency tried to dismiss the reports, but my thirst for happiness—even momentary, even illusory—wanted to believe and began to believe.
Until two in the morning I was lost in the crowd near the Palace, latching onto now one, now another—Carandino,2 Camil, Ghiţă Ionescu—asking questions, passing on things I heard, convinced when they came from a skeptic, incredulous when they came from someone convinced. I couldn’t go home—I’d have wasted the whole night. For indeed, the atmosphere in the streets was feverish, stimulating, charged with expectation, doubts, and supposition.
Now, after some hours have passed and I have read the papers (unclear about Germany, where the situation is confused but not acute in any immediate sense), I am calmer and a little distrustful. I feel as I would after a night of boozing.
The night before last (the night of the crisis), Camil came across me in the Palace Square, where I was waiting to hear some news. He seemed taken aback by what was happening, and I liked having things to say with Camil “reduced to silence.”
“You ought to see how the Jews have overrun the Corso. The whole café is full of them. They’ve really ‘taken possession.’”
“What an anti-Semite you are, Camil! Come with me and I’ll show you how wrong you are, or how much you like getting things wrong.”
I took him by the arm. We went into the Corso, did a tour of the café, stopped at each table, and counted up the suspect faces. In all, there were fifteen Jews in a lively and jam-packed café full of groups heatedly arguing.
With a smile, Camil took everything back in the face of the evidence.
This morning Perpessicius—whom I met at the Foundation—told me about Cuvântul and how its editorial life is not much different from what it used to be. There are the same administrative squabbles, the same ironic hostility to Devechi, the same old pathetic stuff (which nevertheless constituted a family life).
But, in addition, there has been an influx of Legionary types. The relaunch dinner took place at the Legionaries’ restaurant.
Three days in Predeal at the Robinson villa, from Saturday morning until this evening.
I left Bucharest to escape the tiredness and exasperation and repugnance. So many wretched things, both little and big, which I felt were becoming unbearable. . . .
I return feeling restored to health and strength—or at least partly restored, despite the terrible night of insomnia and nightmares that I had on Saturday. (I find it so hard to get used to an unfamiliar house!)
The snow relaxes me, makes me younger, helps me forget. The Veştea course is the most exacting I have yet encountered in my brief skiing career. I fell innumerable times. But I think I also learned a few things. This morning I finally managed to ski from top to bottom of the highly uneven slopes, and, without falling once, to reach that little island of ice that marks the end of the course, just at the beginning of the forest.
Three days of skiing—and I return with calmer nerves, back where they belong. It’s just that this Bucharest, this life I lead . . .
Again a couple of days, Saturday and Sunday, in Predeal. Impressions of sun, much light, endless childhood—something resembling happiness. Nothing remains of my usual bitterness, of my stupid questions and futile regrets; nothing remains of that life made up of scraps, of broken promises, endless waiting, confused discontent, weary little hopes.
Here everything becomes simple again. Only a day at Balcic—naked, basking in the sun—has the same intensity.
Yesterday morning, with the snow bathed in sunlight, I no longer had any thoughts, any melancholy, any expectations. I was quite simply happy.
I wore only a shirt, and I would gladly have removed that too: it was a day for the chaise longue and bathing costume. I am returning with sunburnt cheeks, as in my best days of old.
As to the skiing, I am making visible progress. I descended—this time without falling once—the slopes that only last week intimidated me. I learned a kind of “christie,” which I find easy enough and which gives me an unexpected feeling of “maitrise” on the ground. It is true that, as soon as I leave the practice area and “venture” onto an unknown track, all my experience ceases to be of any help. Yesterday afternoon I kept falling on the way from Veştea to Timiş, where I went with Devechi, Lupu, and two people from their circle. But it was a useful outing, at least as a stamina-building exercise.
On Saturday I went skiing with Virgil Madgearu. Skiing turns everyone into a child again, even former ministers.
But, of course, we must become serious again when we return home. I have a mass of things awaiting me. I’m thinking of going back to my “Romanian Novel” essay. Since Roman is leaving for London, and since we still can’t get into the courts, I shall try now to spend my mornings working at the Academy
Emil Gulian, whom I met after a long time, is still the same disoriented boy full of personal questioning (loves, lassitudes, scruples, expectations), indifferent to political events, corrupted by poetry. . . . The Goga-Cuza “period” depressed him. He tells me he felt ashamed—and I believe him.
I saw Sân-Giorgiu the other day at the Foundation. He is unrecognizable. He no longer wears a swastika. He speaks of the mistakes made by their government.
“In short, old man, that’s not the way to do things either. . . .”
He is friendly and communicative. He tells me of his theatrical successes in Germany.
“Not even Ibsen had such a triumph: not one unfavorable review!”
The skiing was a splendid distraction. The last two Sundays I haven’t been to Predeal—where I don’t think there is any more snow—and I am beginning to feel the effects. I am not at all content with the life I am leading. I read a book by fits and starts, I write nothing, I don’t work, I waste my time at Roman’s or at the Foundation, and I come away restless and a nervous wreck. I’d like to work—but I don’t have the mettle to begin. It would require an effort of organization and discipline.
Will I go to Paris for Easter? Or to Balcic? Will I ever get back to writing Accidentul? Will I ever write that book about the Romanian novel?
I live by fits and starts, from day to day. I have no money, my clothes are wearing out, and I just wait for evening to come, for morning to come, for it to be Thursday, for it to be Sunday. What’s the point of it all? For how much longer?
I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m tired all the time, incapable of keeping at anything for a few hours. I spent a couple of days on my last review for the Foundation, deleting, reading aloud, losing the thread, overemphasizing the incidental, cutting short the main ideas. I read by fits and starts—no more than a quarter of an hour at a time. A few pages of Saint-Simon last night; today a bit of Carlo Gamba’s Botticelli, which I never manage to finish. Even these lines are hard for me to write. The letters dance before my eyes.
I wasted the whole of today tinkering around with a little drama review for Viaţa românească. The article I promised about Camil’s book gives me the frights.
All this is quite serious. I think of my novel, I think of my critical work—and I wonder how I’ll ever complete them, or even start them, with these tired eyes and this broken concentration.
If I had the money, I’d see an eye specialist again.
Headline in today’s Cuvântul:
“Pseudo-scientist Freud arrested in Vienna by National Socialists.”
Spring, oh unbearable spring—all week I lived in the hope of leaving for Balcic today. It’s a holiday, Annunciation Day. And if I’d made a long weekend of it and come back to Bucharest on Tuesday, I could quite easily have had a five-day break, with four whole days in Balcic.
I see myself in the courtyard at Paruseff, alone on a chaise longue facing the sea. I see myself in a track suit in a deserted Balcic, idling away the time at Mamut, on the pier or in a boat. . . . Everything would have been forgotten, everything healed. I have so much to forget, so much to heal.
But out of laziness, indecision, or stupidity, I stayed to drag myself around this springtime Bucharest, where I have no one except at home, where I am neither alone nor not-alone, where the days and the hours pass in lifeless exhaustion.
Waiting for what? Wishing for what? Maybe an effort of will, maybe a cold determination to work—not for the pleasure of it, but to escape this sense of futility.
Celia’s book has appeared,3 with the following words on the cover band: “The writers Liviu Rebreanu, Camil Petrescu, and Mihail Sebastian recommended this novel to the publisher.”
Epilogue: this morning Mrs. Rebreanu rang Camil Petrescu in alarm and asked how they could permit such effrontery; the names of Rebreanu and Sebastian alongside each other.
One day I’ll tell Rebreanu of this little incident—with a laugh, of course.
Last night I casually switched on the radio, not having gone near it since it broke down a couple of months ago. Its latest whim is that it picks up only Budapest on all wavelengths. But chance had it that last night I was able to hear a beautiful Mozart concert: the Double Piano Concerto, and the Symphony in A Major. A good hour of music—and the pleasure of again being alone. I have gone out so much recently—evening after evening!
Since I stopped being able to use the radio, I have no longer made a note of my musical itineraries. Actually, “itinerary” is too big a word— listening sessions, rather. The repertoire at the Philharmonic (where I still go regularly) is by now completely known to me. After three years that is hardly surprising. This year seems the poorest in musical terms: only the Goldberg Variations, played a fortnight ago by Kempff, has been a real event for me. This evening I’ll hear Backhaus: the Italian Concerto by Bach, and two Beethoven sonatas.
Ten days or so ago at Grindea’s, I listened on disc to a Stravinsky work that I did not know: the Histoire du soldat. Very witty, very ingenious. When it comes to the moderns, I’m afraid that I am most receptive to “ingenuity.”
One evening I came across Nina on the 16 streetcar. I was just about to ask a lady in front of me if she was getting off at the next stop (so that I could pass by). She turned her head, and it was her. I can’t say that I didn’t feel pleased to see her again. I’d have liked to kiss her.
Dinner at Mircea’s on Sunday evening. It was a long time since I had seen him. He’s unchanged. I looked at him and listened with great curiosity to what he said. The gestures I had forgotten, his nervous volubility, a thousand things thrown together—always congenial, straightforward, captivating. It’s hard not to be fond of him.
But I have so much to say to him about Cuvântul, about the Iron Guard, about himself and his unforgivable compromises. There can be no excuse for the way he caved in politically. I had decided not to mince my words with him. In any case, there’s not much left to mince. Even if we meet again like this, our friendship is at an end. . . . I couldn’t talk to him because of the Pencius, who came unexpectedly just as we were rising from the table. I don’t know when I’ll see him again.
Dinner at Ralea’s yesterday. It’s the second time I’ve seen him since he became a minister. Again we discussed his exit from the National Peasants. His explanations seemed inadequate for such a betrayal, even if it was committed out of honest conviction.
According to Ralea, the Iron Guard is still a great danger. He told me some incredible things. Three-quarters of the state apparatus has been “Legionized.”
Yesterday evening, the St. Matthew Passion at the Ateneu. By now I know it too well not to notice when it is badly performed. The lack of an organ began to bother me. The choruses were deafening, the soloists inadequate, the orchestra rusty, the general tone confused. It is no longer enough for me just to read the text; it has become too familiar to deliver by itself the emotion that I used to feel. I’d like to hear a proper Matthäus-Passion. But even so, I enjoyed again hearing the arias I have come to know. And I listened more analytically, more grammatically, more closely than before.
There are some simple things that I have always known, but that sometimes give me the arresting sense that I am discovering them for the first time.
On Tuesday, as I listened to the St. Matthew Passion, I couldn’t get the Evangelist’s words out of my mind: “Now, the first day of the feast of unleavened bread, the disciples came to Jesus, saying unto Him: ‘Where wilt Thou that we prepare for Thee to eat the Passover?’ And he said: ‘Go into the city to such a man, and say unto him, “The Master saith: My time is at hand, I will keep the Passover at thy house.’””
It was the feast that we too have been celebrating since yesterday evening, the bread we eat, the wine we drink. . .
I suddenly remembered that Jesus was a Jew—something of which I am never sufficiently aware, and which forces me to think again about our terrible destiny.
In the same way I stopped last autumn at Chartres Cathedral to look at the Circumcision of Jesus. It was just like at an ordinary bris: an old man, holding the ritual knife in one hand and the child’s “willy” in the other, looked like the “Moishe shoikhet” in Brăila.
I have been reading Nietzsche’s Daybreak since yesterday evening. Somewhere it talks of the “Jewish ballast” in Christianity.
How terribly ironic is that ballast, but somehow also a kind of consolation for us.
Cuvântul was closed down on Sunday.
What was the point of its reappearing? So that it would have time for two or three acts of infamy! So that it could speak of the “pseudoscientist” Freud? So that it could claim that the Jewish attorneys mutilated each other fighting at the law courts? I’d like to speak to the professor one day about all this: not to reproach him, but to bring back to mind a Cuvântul that once really did fight “with its visor raised.”
Restlessness, anxiousness, questions without answers. Iron Guard people arrested, a plot discovered or “staged,” rumors to your heart’s content— and not a single word in the papers, which leave it to you to believe whatever you like.
I want to go for ten days or so to Balcic, but I wonder whether it would not be unwise to leave town. I can’t forget that my Christmas holiday was cut short by that dreadful Goga government, so unexpected, so implausible, so absurd. Another such incident cannot be excluded—and I wouldn’t like to be caught a long way from home.
On Sunday—because all kinds of rumors were circulating about the arrest of Iron Guardists—I telephoned Mircea and then went to see him.
He was there, and Marietta came a little later. They were all indignant at the arrests and shutdowns, considering them mindless, arbitrary, and illogical. I should have liked to tell them that that is dictatorship (which they want too, so long as it does not strike them personally but allows them, and only them, to strike at others).
But I held my tongue. What good would it do, through irony or allusion, to begin the settling of accounts that I must one day have with them, openly and without sentimentality?
I have been here for a week. I found the same room that I had last year at the Dumitrescu villa.
Why haven’t I written a line since I arrived? Maybe because I have been haunted by the thought of those journal pages that I wrote here exactly a year ago, in the same room and facing the same sea with its thousand colors and sounds—but that I lost a few months later in Paris, together with the manuscript of the novel. I see the pages before me, as if it were just yesterday that I held them in my hand. . . .
How many things there have been to record! I let them all pass randomly, but now that my return is approaching I feel that I leave behind not a week of idleness but ten, fifteen.
Yesterday, naked in the sea. I went to Ecrene with Cicerone, Julietta (even today I don’t know her full name), her sister, and the major. On the beach at Ecrene, barefooted, undressed, I walked through the forest (an unlikely forest, fifty meters from the sea), pulled a branch from a wild pear tree in blossom, tore off a stem of bulrush as tall as a spear, wrestled, shouted, wilted in the sun—and returned late in the day to Balcic, sunburnt, with a fever in which I could feel mixed together the sea air, the wind, the few hours of revelry on the beach, the whole day of sun and childhood.
I still don’t know the name of the major’s wife. For some reason they call her “Iancu”—and I like that rather odd male name said to a melancholic woman. She is not beautiful. I’d even say she’s far from beautiful. But a certain meek tenderness, moving in a woman of her age (thirty-five?), gives her so much femininity. Their conjugal tragedy is simple: a husband who is both impotent and wildly jealous; a provincial life with no escape, watched over by the whole little town.
She came here one afternoon: she cried as she quietly told me everything, letting the tears run and wiping them away like a child. She stroked me, kissed me, but I declined her sallies, not sharply but firmly. Yesterday evening, as we returned from Ecrene, she told me of the sudden passion she could not help “having” for me.
No, Iancu dear, no.
Nae Ionescu was here over Easter. As my way to the center of town passes by his villa, I called on him. (I think he was actually here on my first day, last Saturday.)
Still the same perennial Nae! Suddenly, without leading up to it in any way, he told me everything he said to Nicholson—which was to get stuffed, of course. His inimitable tone of pert modesty! How childish he is, how he wants to shock people! And how much I enjoy helping him, with my air of forbidden admiration, constant amazement, and curious expectation. This childishness of his is one of the last things for which I am still fond of him.
To Nicholson (the Labour M.P. who was in Bucharest two weeks ago), he said that he would understand nothing in Romania if he judged it by the criterion of “individual liberty.” It wasn’t a value with which we were familiar; we’d just borrowed it from somewhere, but the natural, organic evolution of the Romanian people passed it by as something dispensable.
Very well—I’d have liked to say in reply to Nae—but when you say such things on the terrace of a magnificent villa in Balcic, or on the balcony of a sumptuous palace in Baneasa, when a Mercedes-Benz is waiting for you outside, when you get your clothes from London, your linen from Vienna, your furniture from Florence, and your toiletries from Paris, this theorizing is all terribly reactionary. Isn’t it somehow an unconscious act of defense?
When I opened the window yesterday morning, the first thing I saw was a young girl leaving the villa opposite mine and running down the street in white shorts, a white sports shirt, and an orange blouse, all gleaming in the sunlight.
She may have been an ugly girl (and later, when I saw her more closely at Mamut, she proved to be not at all out of the ordinary), but at that moment she was youth, freedom, morning itself.
Une jeune fille en fleur . . . (especially as I am reading Proust, as I usually do on holiday).
I learned to my surprise that Virginica Radulescu—the little tart I met five years or so ago at one of Carol's parties and with whom I had a bit of a fling (she was standing in for Mîntuleasa at the time)—has married an architect who is head over heels in love with her. I met them both in Balcic, and I couldn’t help remembering the dreadful story of Aurică Rosenthal and Geta—a rather similar incident.
Well, who should I meet Thursday evening walking by the Fishing Lake with Virginica and the architect? Je vous le donne en mille4 . . . It was Geta, of course, with her new husband. A secret solidarity of destiny, profession, and temperament.
Poor Swann. Poor Saint-Loup. There is always a new Odette, a new Rachel.
And you, who write these lines, are you sure you don’t have an Odette of your own in Bucharest, one to whom you even sent a couple of love letters from here, which she may have read on her way to or from a rendezvous?
Since I returned from Balcic a week ago, I have been leading the inexcusable life of an idler, who wears himself out by wasting his time. I haven’t managed to stay at home for a single evening. I’ve wasted my nights either with Nelly Ehshich (after Götterdämmerung), or with Cicerone (after the Rosenkavalier), or with Celia (an evening at the movies), or with Leni and Froda at the Melody (tonight I returned at four in the morning, not even too distraught to have watched her flirting all the time with Lazaroneanu, Hefter, and a hundred other guys to whom she flashed smiles, greetings, summonses, remarks . . .). I must give her her due: all of last week she was extraordinarily affectionate, coming to me no fewer than three times in seven days.
I promise to be more hardworking and sensible. I can’t bear myself when I become lazy and let myself go. Idleness is all very well at Balcic, the only place where it doesn’t demoralize me.
Nae Ionescu has been arrested. I haven’t been able to find out any details. Mircea doesn’t call, and I can’t very well keep insisting—that would seem indiscreet in present circumstances.
It seems he was arrested on Saturday morning. What will happen now, I don’t know. Is he really at Miercurea-Ciuc?5 Will he be kept there under house arrest? Will he be implicated in the trial of Codreanu? Will he lose his professorship?
I’m distressed at what is happening to him? What a strange turn of events!
Yesterday evening at Viaţa românească, Suchianu6 and I were talking with each other and moving toward the open window (it all lasted no more than three minutes or so). Then who should appear on the pavement below, walking slowly and in her amorous way with an elegant young man? Leni!
I don’t know if I gave a start, but in a split second I sized up the situation, felt the shock, made up my mind, left Suchianu hanging in midconversation, and reached the street door in a few steps. Leni and her flirt were just then in front of the building, and I called out:
“Leni!”
I think she was stunned, but I don’t really remember. All I could see were her big eyes and a kind of smile that said nothing.
“Leni, I’m glad to see you. I was at the Court of Appeal until seven o’clock for your case. It’s been postponed until the 17th of September.” (“The 17th of September,” she repeated, as if making a note of it.) “I rang you at home, but there was no answer. I ’phoned Rampa, but I couldn’t get hold of Mr. Froda to tell him. . . . Look, this is Viaţa românească here. I tell you so that you won’t think I was on lookout duty.”
All in a single breath. I kissed her hand and went back inside.
(I know the guy. He’s the architect who gave expert testimony at the Maryse-Anghelache trial.)
I felt dizzy. Or, to be more precise, I didn’t know what I felt. “Does it hurt?” I asked myself attentively, with some concern. I didn’t feel that it hurt, but there was a kind of agitation, an emptiness in my heart, an oppressiveness that was hard to define—come on, I’m familiar enough with all that! I had one clear thought: how lucky I was to have been at the window just at that moment. A second later and I wouldn’t have seen anything. I’d have remained in ignorance, continued to make a complete fool of myself.
(No other interpretations were possible, of course. A man with whom Leni goes for a walk at seven in the evening, on a little side street, is a man with whom she has already slept, or with whom she will sleep in the shortest possible time.)
I went away flummoxed from Viaţa românească, and all the way on the No. 32 bus (I was going to Mermoz and Lilly Pancu, the young couple I’d met at Easter at Balcic) I kept repeating stupid little phrases to calm myself down: just so that the time would pass more and more quickly. For the moment I had a single wish: that it should be nine o’clock, when she’d finally be at the theatre and therefore alone. Not that I wanted to see her (from that moment I knew I’d never see her again), but it was necessary for my immediate peace of mind that she should be alone. Alone, above all else. As for the rest, we’ll see . . .
At Mermoz’s, where I thought I’d stop by for half an hour, a Balcic-style party was awaiting me. There was the whole of our group from late April, plus two young women—one of them Zoe Ricci, the painter I met last November at Lena Constante’s.
We had some drinks. I had decided to get drunk, and never was an evening’s boozing more timely. The memory of Leni faded. From time to time it still hurt, like a sore spot that suddenly throbs again for a while. Maybe it’s not quite right to say that “it hurt.” I just saw again the brief scene that took place at seven o’clock. It had all been so sudden; I hadn’t even noticed the color of her dress.
I spent all evening close to Zoe Ricci—at first by chance, later because I found it pleasant. Soon our mutual attraction was being helped along in the usual way by the other people there, who teased us, drew attention to silences, gave an occasional prod, and turned a simple joke into the beginning of a relationship.
We went onto the balcony, which looked onto open fields. Mermoz’s house was on the outskirts of Bucharest. Beyond there was grass, trees, a few solitary houses, some telephone poles. It was quite similar to the “zoned” landscape in the grounds of the Herald Hospital.
We sat chatting for a long time, Zoe in a chaise longue, I at her feet. She seems very young. Her body, in particular, is extremely youthful. She has slanting eyes, slightly overdefined cheekbones, a child’s mouth. She kisses timidly, but also with a kind of desperation. Later, at her place—for we left the others without too much embarrassment and went to her third-floor studio flat on Piaţa Rosetti—she cried in my arms:
“How nice it is not to be alone.”
That’s something that Nora could have said.7 She actually says it in a way. So here is life, a year later, repeating a situation in a novel. . . .
I don’t know what will come of the incident with Zoe. Certainly not love, J’en sors,8 and I’m not aching to start again. But she’ll help me “d’en sortir. ”
Anyway, whereas I might have spent a night of insomnia and suffering, I spent one of wine and love. So it’s not so serious. . . . And when I think about it, the affair with Leni had to finish in any case, so this ending is perhaps not the worst that could have happened.
Baltazar has gone mad. Creeping general paralysis. They’re admitting him tomorrow. What a terrible business!
“You have a face that’s easily forgotten,” Zoe said to me the day before yesterday, when I went to see her again.
I started. Nora said the same thing: “You have a face that’s hard to remember.”
I don’t know where this new affair will lead me. I accept it with a certain lack of responsibility. I don’t know how it may end. For the moment I’m happy that she is so young, so beautiful. Naked, she is miraculously beautiful. Her breasts are small, firm, and tender—rather like a teenager’s. Her face is serious, and she has a severe way of looking at you—something sad and disconsolate in her expression. But her body is lively, youthful, athletic, undulous. I felt good listening to her breathe in my arms, stroking her dark, slightly wiry hair. I especially liked it when she made simple and unrealistic plans for a summer holiday together, in a mountain village somewhere, just the two of us, working alone during the day (she painting, I writing) and making love at night.
That is happiness, my impossible happiness . . .
Sleepless hours add up until I can no longer count them. I should sleep for three days on end to recover. . . . I’ve hardly stopped drinking recently (the whole day on Friday at Condiescu’s, the whole night on Saturday at Siegfried’s). Almost every day I go to bed at two or three, when I return home from Zoe’s, a little drunk even if I haven’t been drinking.
Yesterday, Sunday, I was at her place from five in the afternoon until after midnight, both of us naked (or almost naked), sprawled on her green blanket (in the grass, as she says). The telephone rang, the doorbell rang, and we held our breath until the danger had passed.
Yesterday she told me “the story of her life.” How different from what I had imagined! This girl was close to suicide! This girl wanted to hang herself! This girl carries inside her an unhappy and—however much she denies it—unhealed love. She is so young, so beautiful, and so eager to die. She speaks with great simplicity, but with a despondency that no longer seems to allow of any hope. Yet she is twenty-five, and one day somebody or something will release her from this torpor and carry her back toward life. Why can’t I be the one?
Blecher has died. His funeral was on Tuesday, at Roman.
I thought not of his death, which was a merciful release in the end, but of his life, which has been shaking me to the core. His suffering was too great to allow compassion or tenderness. That young man, who lived as in another world because of his terrible pain, always remained something of a stranger. I could never completely open up and show real warmth toward him. He scared me a little, kept me at a distance, as at the gates of a prison that I could not enter or he leave. I tell myself that nearly all our conversations had something awkward, as if they were taking place in a parloir.9 And each time we said goodbye, where did he return to? What was it like there?
I won’t write today, and maybe never will, about what has happened between Zoe and me this last week. Our terrible nights on Wednesday and Friday!
But she is an exciting girl—much more, an exceptional person. I don’t know if I love her, but Fm convinced that I could. In any case, after a fortnight I feel she weighs more in my life than Leni ever did in four years.
Leni? Who’s that? She is so far away and means so little to me. I’ve seen her two or three times, and it was as if she had not been there. How refreshing it is to look at her with normal eyes, neither questioning nor stupefied, somewhat indifferent, somewhat bored.
I’m a bit crazy. I have no money and live from day to day off little loans; sometimes I can’t put a hundred lei together, I can’t catch a streetcar or buy stamps for a letter. There are moments when I don’t know whom to ask, or above all how to ask (because I die with shame, and poverty makes me suffer more in my pride than in anything physical). But at the same time I’m planning a trip to Italy!
This morning I went by chance with Tuţubei Solacolu into Citta; I looked through some brochures there and took a few away. Since then my head has been roaring with Italian names: lakes, mountains, valleys. Misura, Siusi, Carezza, Breyes.
Isn’t it madness? Of course it is. At the moment all I have are three hundred lei, left over from a five-hundred note that I borrowed last night from Carol.
But if I’m to leave on holiday on the 15th, and if I have to find the money for it, why should I pay 230 lei a day for a Romanian chalet on the Schuller, Ghilcoş, or Iacobeni instead of using it somewhere in Italy?
My madness becomes sensible as soon as I do some detailed calculations. But they do make me dizzy. . . .
I’ll try to get an airplane ticket to Venice—and if one is available, I’ll need fifteen thousand lei (without any extra charges), that is, two thousand lire. It’s a lot of money, and hard to find, but is it impossible?
I haven’t written a line here for a month. Too much has been going on, and it’s been too muddled. Leni’s return, her visits, her departure, her letters. Then Zoe, Zoe, Zoe, always Zoe, every day Zoe. My mind will clear only on the day when I am alone and far away. But will I be?
I’ve been here in Bran since Thursday—I myself don’t know how I got here. I left Bucharest without a clear destination but with a thousand regrets. Why didn’t I arrange a trip in time to Italy? Why didn’t I write to Fraulein Wagner at Ghilcoş? Why not Iacobeni? Why not the chalet on the Schuller, like last year?
I’d kept the chalet in mind as a fallback solution, but I’m glad I didn’t go there in the end. It would have depressed me too much to return to the place where, just a year ago, I wrote the lost novel.
Bran, at first sight, seemed rather like Breaza. How hesitant I was about staying there! I walked a dozen times around Mr. Stoian’s villa, unsure whether to pay the deposit or not. If something made me decide, it was the beautifully clean and peaceful villa, with the forest a few steps away, a kind of park of its own, and a stream almost beneath the window. I hear it constantly, day and night, whispering with the sound of rustling leaves. It is restful, soothing, full of forgetting.
I gradually explored Bran in several walks yesterday, the day before, and this morning. Of course, there is not the same sense of being in wild parts amid high mountains that I had on the Schuller or even in Ghilcoş. Everything here is calmer, gentler, more subdued. But nor is there any comparison with Breaza. The landscape is infinitely more varied, more colorful, more rich in surprises. I have done four longish walks, and each time I discovered something, a new aspect, a new forest. There are places where I feel I am in France, at Cluzes. The Queen’s castle, not typically Romanian at all, looks like a chateau in Haute-Savoie.
I’m not “overwhelmed,” as I was the first year in Ghilcoş, nor do I have the sense of great solitude that the chalet on the Schuller gave me. But I am contented and have confidence in this Bran, from which I ask a little rest and some luck in my work.
I allowed myself three days of repose, sleep, and idleness. Tomorrow I start working again. Will I make any headway? Will I be diligent enough? Will I manage to pick up the broken threads? I am anxious, as usual, but also determined not to give up. This month is my last chance to finish the book, which has been dragging on for two years, with so much heart-searching, so many regrets. Everything has been at a standstill because of it. When I see it come out, what I will feel is not that I have finished a book but that I have ended an overlong relationship that was beginning to wear me down.
Yesterday three pages, today four. Of course, I still can’t consider that I am safely on my way. My main aim has been to keep to the work schedule I set myself for this week: I am at my table from nine to twelve in the morning, from three to six in the afternoon. The rest will be decided by chance and the Good Lord above. How terribly difficult it is to train myself to write! Whenever I set a blank page before me, I do so with fear and trepidation, with doubts and perhaps a little repugnance. . . . How beautiful it is outside on the lawn: green, bright, and sunny, calling you to idleness and reverie. All I have of the hardworking writer are the pangs of conscience; they take the place of real professionalism. And in order to still those pangs, so that I don’t have the unbearable sense of wasting time, I go back to work in a spirit of resignation. There is no enthusiasm—not yet, at least.
A little better than yesterday: six pages. But they are insignificant pages, neither good nor bad, which can be either kept or discarded without spoiling or solving anything.
I still don’t feel at the heart of the book; I don’t see my characters, feel them beside me. I grope along, hesitate, wait. . . .
It’s hard going, and it has certainly been slow. I’m into my seventh day of work—and maybe it’s not too bad that I’ve written only thirty-five pages. That makes an average of five a day, a satisfactory yield especially as I have been a little unwell and couldn’t work at all for two afternoons. On the other hand, it is worrying that the “scenario” of the novel has advanced so little. I’m still only on Chapter Five, which is becoming a kind of autonomous novelette within the book as a whole. I give too much space to episodes that should not count as more than incidental. The one with the photographs takes up twelve pages! That’s too much— especially in comparison with the part of the novel that has been lost and redone, where much more important events (precisely because I could reconstitute them in their entirety) have something elliptical and unintentionally concise, which makes the new pages seem digressive in contrast. I ought to be frightened when I think that I am still only halfway through the plot. At times—now, for example—I feel that everything remains to be done, and that all the work up to now counts for nothing.
Two days (Monday and Tuesday) lost on the review for Fundaţii and the proofs of the study of Proust, which arrived in galleys.
Today I returned to the novel. Any interruption is dangerous, because it draws me away and makes it difficult to go back. So things went rather slowly: not even five pages—about four and three-quarters—in more than seven hours of work. But I enjoyed Paul’s stop in Cologne, and I especially liked my rethinking of the Belgian visa incident (Hergenrath, 23 July), a chance happening in the first chapter which I had thought I would take up again.
I thought I would finish Chapter Five today (which has taken so many unexpected turns), and I could indeed have finished it if I had resigned myself to a little effort. At the last minute, however, there were a few “scene” changes—Ann’s quite unexpected departure with Paul to Sinaia— which meant an addition to the chapter. So I decided to leave it until tomorrow, when I am determined to finish it, come what may.
“Determined to finish it” is, frankly speaking, childish nonsense. I never know what will happen, and each morning I face the manuscript with the same trepidation. In the evening, when I count the five or six pages written in the course of the day (yesterday six, today only five, though I worked hard this morning and thought I would set a new record), I don’t have the feeling that they were too difficult to write, but the next morning I am still afraid and hesitant. Will I never firmly establish myself at the heart of the novel? Will I never, right up to the end, have the feeling that I am in control, that it can no longer get away from me?
So you see, qu’il ne faut jurer de rien.1 I didn’t finish Chapter Five—in fact, I wrote only four pages, and I’ve no idea when I’ll finish this chapter. Just now, at the end, I begin no longer to see properly what is happening. I am completely dissatisfied with my day’s work, and it frightens me to think that my holiday is passing and the novel is still at a standstill.
I have been thinking of a whole host of books that I could have written, that I promise to write. This always happens when I am caught up in work: I see possible themes, I decide not to waste any more time, I make all kinds of promises to be more assiduous. Later, of course, when I return to my impossible life in Bucharest, I forget everything, let myself go, and become disheartened.
The truth is that when I have a publisher like the Foundations, where I could regularly publish one or even two books a year, it is unforgivable that I should put so much into all these reviews, for which I need only have an orderly schedule of reading and writing.
With a regular life of that kind, would I find it difficult to write in three to four months the first volume of my book on the Romanian novel? These last few evenings I promised in a long conversation with myself to get seriously down to work on this.
I can also envisage a few studies on “letters and journals” in French literature. The study of Proust’s correspondence may have been a beginning. But the list would contain Stendhal’s journal and correspondence (including Souvenirs d'égotisme and Vie de Henry Brulard), Flaubert’s correspondence, Goncourt’s Journal, Renard’s Journal, the Rivière-Fournier letters, Proust’s correspondence, and Gide’s Journal. Even that would mean a book of four to five hundred pages, all the more tempting to write since I could publish each chapter in the Review as I finished it and be paid for the work twice (though, of course, such work may be unpaid).
I can also see a volume of criticism about several Romanian poets: Arghezi, Blaga, Maniu, Baltazar.
Indeed, what works of criticism could there not be? But I tie everything to the appearance of Accidentul as the necessary prerequisite. I absolutely must see it published; only then will I have clear ground ahead. Consequently, even if I cannot stay here in Bran for more than another fortnight or so—which, given how slowly things are going, is certainly not enough for me to finish—I am thinking of leaving Bucharest again in September for two to three weeks, perhaps to Brasov, and this time completing the manuscript at any cost.
Plans, plans . . . We’ll see what will come of them.
Today I finally completed Chapter Five. Apart from the pages that were lost and then reconstituted, it has sixty pages that I have written in Bran. I didn’t think it would assume such proportions. From tomorrow I’ll have to go back to Nora, whom I haven’t seen for such a long time. I fear that I am losing the thread and no longer know how things will develop, in unfamiliar territory. Chapter Six exists only in very broad outline. It is the one that should take me into the book’s “plot,” properly so called. Perhaps I should prepare myself for major obstacles and resistances.
I can’t help thinking that, if I hadn’t lost the manuscript, I would now have 171 pages written—that is, material that could have been safely sent to the printer’s. But I should put regrets to one side and see what can be done from now on.
A day lost in wavering. I am always afraid to start. I reread what I had written before, skimmed several times the chapters that concern Nora— on the pretext of getting to know her again, of regaining the tone that best suits her, but in reality because I didn’t have the will to get seriously down to work. Out of superstition (Mircea once told me it was good to start working on Monday), I have nevertheless written a few lines.
Tomorrow I shall have to be more resolute. Just shut your eyes and press on: that’s the only way a book can be finished.
Last night I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to reverse the order of the fifth and fourth chapters, precisely to smooth the transition from Ann to Nora. Besides, whatever I do, the Ann chapter will interrupt the flow of the book; it will be a digression from which it will be a little difficult to return.
There are no inspired days, but—alas!—there are bad days when everything you write, or force yourself to write, comes out dull, clottish, inert. You can’t see anything ahead; it is all, if not false, then flat, otiose, unmeaning. I write a sentence, then wonder whether to leave it or cross it out. I cross it out, then afterward everything seems better than the one with which I have replaced it.
So that’s how I wasted the whole of today. I wrote three to four pages against my inclination, but they are so colorless, so inexpressive, that I am embarrassed to look at them again. This chapter, the sixth, doesn’t want to get started.
Am I lazy? I don’t think so. Or, in any case, I am no lazier than I used to be. I sat dutifully at my desk for the regulation six hours (maybe half an hour less), but to no avail. And everything is dull and inert before me. I’ll wait patiently for some light to appear—though, of course, there is only one possible way of waiting: “la plume ferme au-dessus du papier,”2 as Renard said, and the poor man knew what he was talking about.
All day yesterday, all morning today, I didn’t even pick up my pen, didn’t even dare to approach the manuscript. I have ground to a halt.
Only this afternoon did I try to get back to it. But it’s seven now and growing dark, and I have to break off with not even three pages written. But now it’s a question not of counting pages but of knowing whether I shall be able to write, or whether I shall be “stuck” here for a long time to come.
Work accidents that cannot be foreseen.
It’s still hard going. Friday three pages or so, yesterday five, but today again only three. Now, when things are nevertheless a little clearer, it should flow more easily. But it doesn’t want to. I need whole hours for the simplest movement, the slightest gesture. I long for things to ease up a little. I wish I didn’t feel so many obstacles, so much resistance. Maybe it’s all a bad habit of mine. Maybe it would be simpler if I let the pen rush on ahead and skip over some difficulties, which, if need be, could be looked at again later. But I cannot leave a sentence until I feel it is complete.
I have finished my third week of work, and the yield has been decreasing: thirty-five pages in the first week, twenty-five in the second, only twenty in the third. Why is this?
The morning was looking good, but I stopped work at 11:30 to go out a bit in the sun—I haven’t had a proper fill of it for ten days or so— and this afternoon I can no longer find the good disposition in which I thought I would be able to write. Of course, if I were to stick to it I’d eventually manage to do something, but I am near the end of a chapter and I don’t want to spoil it—all the more so as the whole chapter is weak. Until tomorrow, then. Now I’ll allow myself an hour in the chaise longue.
I have had all kinds of dreams during the time here, some of them most peculiar: Nae Ionescu, Corneliu Codreanu, Silvia Balter, Leni, Maryse . . . I say them over to myself a few times before opening my eyes; I try to remember them and promise to note them down when I am awake—but then I lose them: they become too vague, and I can no longer extract anything from them.
In today’s Timpul the new season at the Comoedia is announced as opening with Jocul de-a vacanţa. Rehearsals on the 20th of August.
I don’t say either yes or no. I have grown used to expecting nothing in relation to the theatre. We shall see.
An intricate, absurd dream, from which all I remember is that Romania went to war to occupy “Pocutia.” I asked myself: war with whom? With Poland? With Czechoslovakia? And where might Pocutia be?
The streets were decked with flags. I seemed to be in Brăila, racing uphill with Poldy on Bulevardul Cuza, toward the center of town. I no longer remember if I was on a bicycle, but I do know that the faster I went, the more I felt in my mouth, between my teeth, a kind of contraption that turned with a deafening sound, like a dentist’s little wheel.
There were other marvels galore, which I have since forgotten.
No news anywhere about Mircea. Nor is there anyone I can ask. But as I don’t see his name under any articles in Vremea, I assume he is still under arrest. Rosetti, in a letter to me from the day before yesterday, spoke of “Mircea’s deportation.” Does that mean to Miercurea?
I have finished Chapter Six. It has thirty pages, though they are full of defacements. I wouldn’t be wrong to say that it is the least successful chapter so far. It has gone badly, and apart from a few moments of walking in the street there is nothing in it that satisfies me. But maybe it will get lost in the general effect.
From now on I don’t know what to do. I have only three days left in Bran—which gives things a provisional feel and may make it hard for me to work. Still, tomorrow morning I shall try to be at my desk as usual. Chapter Seven, which is also no more than a transition, shouldn’t cost me too much effort. Only when I’ve reached the top of the Schuller with my characters will I be on the other side of the book.
I leave for Bucharest this evening, in the car of the lawyer Virgil Sefanescu (last-minute relations, but very friendly . . .).
The last few days I haven’t done any work at all. In the same way that I began my month in Bran with three days of complete holiday, I decided to end it with three days of the same.
I lay on the chaise longue in the sun, I bathed in the stream, I started an English novel (Meredith, I see, goes down very well on holiday), I played all kinds of games: chess, backgammon, billiards, table tennis, and volleyball. Like the schoolboy I am.
And now I am returning. I’d like to start my life differently from how I left it a month ago in Bucharest.
My first day in Bucharest, an exhausting day. I was awakened early by the buses, the street shouts, the suffocating heat. Where are my good nights in Bran? Where are the mornings with the smell of the forest? Where is that calm, intense silence, broken only by the rumbling of the stream?
How much resistance I would need not to succumb to the pressure of the horrible life I rediscover here! It makes me furious to think that I could have stayed another week there, because I could have handed in the continuation of my study of Proust (which I returned to write) in a month’s time. Cioculescu told me only today over the phone that he doesn’t need it right away. What a stupid business!
I dropped by Marietta’s to see if there was any news of Mircea. (He was not answering his telephone.) He has been at Miercurea-Ciuc since the first of August.
On this occasion I saw Marietta unrestrained: she is choking with anti-Semitism. Not even the fact that she was talking with me, nor the fact that I was in her house, could stop her from ranting and raging against potbellied Jews and their bloated, bejeweled women—though she did make exception for about a hundred thousand “decent” Jews, probably including myself since I have neither a potbelly nor a bloated wife.
Otherwise her language was just as in Porunca Vremii. I didn’t hesitate to tell her so. And I left there feeling poisoned.
The rehearsals start tomorrow.3 I did a reading today with Leni and Sică, to check the text for any possible changes.
It frightens me how little Leni understands at certain points. The last scene in Act Two went completely over her head. She asked me to remove some things that had moved me a lot as I was writing them, and which—since I had loved her at that time—I had written for her.
“Do you really want to keep that?” she asked me today, about some lines that she literally had not understood. (“I haven’t met him, but I have been waiting for him. I have always expected to find him, in every man I’ve known . . .” etc.)
I don’t want to sound like an author peculiarly wedded to his text, whose “heart bleeds” for it. I think I am more skeptical, more sensitive to ridicule. I lost a novel that meant a lot to me, and I didn’t die—all the less will I die for a play that they’ll screw up in the theatre. But I’m amazed to see how difficult it is for her to grasp the simplest shades of meaning.
What upsets me more is that Sică has arranged things beforehand so that my play will not run for more than three weeks; the first night is scheduled for the 15 th of September, and on the 7th of October Leni leaves on tour with Ionescu R. Maria. Does it bother me that a hit has been ruled out in advance? Will the play be successful? I don’t know. Let’s suppose it won’t. But if there is even a small chance of a hit—even 5 percent, let us say—then I don’t see why it should be denied me. The chances are even slimmer in the lottery, but that doesn’t stop me playing it.
At the end of the day I tell myself that none of this matters. I shouldn’t work myself up about it. I should let them do what they like, as they like, and tell myself that the play is mine but the show is theirs. Once that distinction is made, I can consider myself free and unattached.
It’s not out of the question that they’ll take the play off the schedule. I am grateful to Zoe, who helped me understand how unacceptable is the deal proposed by Sică. I have absolutely nothing to gain from a shoddy premiere followed by a three-week run and disappearance from the publicity boards. If this play doesn’t bring me some money, it brings me nothing. I’m not such a child as to turn the theatre business into a question of “literary prestige.”
I got home around eight, rather fed up at having promised to go out later with Zoe. How good it would be—I thought—if I could stay home, read a little, and have an early night. I had decided to pluck up my courage and tell Zoe, when she rang a quarter of an hour later as arranged, that I would stay home and beg her to forgive me.
The telephone rang, and before I said a word she told me that she was not at home:
“I’ve been kidnapped. I’ll explain to you.”
So I am free. So I can stay quietly at home. So I can read a bit and have an early night. Exactly as I wanted.
Yes . . . but I am a jealous person. And now I feel uneasy. Now I am troubled by the thought that she has gone out with someone else. “I’ve been kidnapped” says a great deal. Tonight she’ll return home with her kidnapper. She’ll doubtless sleep with him. All that should be a matter of complete indifference to me. In the end, separation is the only possible outcome of our affair. And I can’t refuse her the right to find a man to sleep with.
What’s the point, I ask myself, of complicating your wretched life with such regrets, with such impossible hopes, with such insane hopes, which all eventually leave the same taste of ashes?
I keep dreaming of Nae Ionescu. Last night I saw him after his return from Miercurea-Ciuc. We seemed to be in the schoolyard in Brăila. We were talking heatedly—he with great violence, because I was denigrating the Iron Guard. Then a lot of things happened—it was a long dream— but I don’t remember any more.
The rehearsals have started. I still haven’t been there—nor shall I go unless I cannot avoid it. I have no feeling of enthusiasm. I’m not at all happy with the business deal we have agreed to. I have to make an average of 24,000 lei an evening for them to keep the play on after the 7th of October. Only if I make that average will the tour be postponed. I have a sense that I am being quite simply hoodwinked. All Sică’s big successes—plays that stayed up on the boards for two months—made no more than an average of 15,000 to 17,000 lei. But I can’t put up a fight with these theatre people. They’ve licked me before we start.
I went to see Aristide Blank this morning, and I gave him ten thousand of the twenty thousand lei he lent me before I left for Bran. That leaves me with empty pockets, but I’m glad that my account with him is clear. Apart from that, I have to admit that he behaved perfectly in the circumstances. He gave me the money and took it back as discreetly as he might have offered or accepted a cigarette. If he hadn’t, I would have died of shame.
I went to see Nina the other day. Only Joyce, who shouted with joy when she saw me, reminded me of the time when I felt somehow at home in that house. Nina and I were ill at ease.
Naturally I deplore all that has happened, I feel sorry for Nae and sorry for Mircea, I’d like to know they were at liberty. But I can’t believe that their “action” was anything other than a miscalculation on Nae’s part and childish nonsense on Mircea’s. Half farce, half ambition. I don’t see any more in it.
Autumn. It’s only seven o’clock but already quite dark. For the last hour I’ve been reading with the light on.
In today’s Timpul there was the first advertisement for the premiere. “Co-moedia theatre. Wednesday, 14 September 1938. Opening of the winter season. Jocul de-a vacanţa, by Mihail Sebastian. With Leni Caler, George Vraca, Mişu Fotino, and V. Maximilian.”
All day I read in Renard’s Journal and the Goncourts’ Journal their notes about rehearsals and premieres. I especially enjoyed what the poor Goncourt brothers had to say about the disastrous flop of their first play, Henriette Maréchal. It was a prophylactic reading.
This afternoon I go to a rehearsal for the first time. I promise to stay calm, to take things as they come, not to make a tragedy of anything. It would be ridiculous to blow this theatrical business out of proportion; it has a point only if I can look at it with relative indifference.
Again they tell me that at least twenty-five plays like mine are written each year in Europe—so the whole thing can have the significance of only a minor incident.
Although it was originally announced for the 14th, the premiere is now scheduled for the 16th of September. But from what Leni says, I don’t think it will happen before the 20th.
Marga the day before yesterday, Carol Pascal yesterday—because they had seen De ce nu mă săruţi? and enjoyed it—asked me:
“Does your play also have music?”
Plopeanu’s wife asked Leni the other evening:
“Jocul de-a vacanţa? Another play with schoolgirls?”
What a difficult legacy I have: recollections of Absente nemotivate and Elly Roman’s music from De ce nu mă săruţi?
My play doesn’t even have any schoolgirls or any music. . . . What a letdown for the audience.
Theatrical mentality: Froda, who is no fool and actually likes the play, suggested to me a few days ago:
“How about changing the scenery in the third act? The audience gets bored with plays where there is only one stage setting.”
He doesn’t understand that this “one stage setting” is actually part of the play’s poetry—however much of that it may contain.
To my amazement, Thursday’s rehearsal was not a catastrophe. I left there feeling rather buoyed. In general, I get the feeling that things hold together; but there are still a million details that need to be adjusted and put right.
Leni’s performance is moving. I say this after two days of calm reflection since the rehearsal, and at a time when I finally feel no love of any kind for her. As regards her acting, I think I am more inclined to be severe. Nevertheless (unless the surprise that things don’t look catastrophic has made me err in the opposite, optimistic direction), I do believe that she was moving. It was a very simple performance, but also very nuanced, with something loyal in the quarrelsome scenes, something faintly ironic in the moments of reverie. Nearly all the time she acted within the limits of the role; only very occasionally did I feel a need to call her back “to order,” “to earth.”
Maximilian is Maximilian. Not for a moment was he Bogoiu. All the time outside, all the time ham-acting.
Vraca was very good at some moments—those of idleness—and very bad at others which required some frivolity, a little fantasy. If I don’t manage to get him changed, the long final scene in Act One will be completely ruined—and with it the whole play.
Some of the others were amusing, others inexpressive, but none unacceptable.
To return to Leni, I must point out that she spoke most beautifully and sincerely those very passages that she had asked me to delete.
“I haven’t met him, but I have been waiting for him . . . etc.”
It had something muffled and melancholic, a kind of resignation that opened out—without too much fire—toward an unexpected hope.
How strange and subordinate is the profession of actor, in which you can do something very well without even understanding it. Maybe that is precisely the mark of a true actor. Maybe that is what people call “instinct.”
(Yesterday I went to Leni’s to read the role with her one more time.
“Why does Corina feel her pulse in Act Three,” she asked me. “Is it because it beats harder since she has been in love with Ştefan?”
“No, Leni dear. It’s because, being alone for the first time, she has the time, the curiosity, and the need to turn inward and observe herself, know herself. She puts her hand on her pulse as she might put her hand on her heart—a heart that she did not know she had.”
“Do you think so?” Leni wonders, remaining thoughtful and a little incredulous.
Yet that moment—whose meaning clearly escapes her—she acted to perfection.)
Sandina Stan, beautiful, vulgar, good to fuck, says to me:
“I’m delighted finally to be acting in a play of ideas.”
And I don’t even dare laugh.
Agnia Bogoslav (who plays Agnes, and says her few words very funnily) came timidly into the box from which Sică and I were following the rehearsal.
“Excuse me,” she said to Sică, “would you please urge Mr. Sebastian to write a few more lines for me. I have so few. . .”
“Okay, okay,” he replied jokingly. “I’ll ask him to write you a couplet.”
I laughed at that girl for being so keen to have me lengthen her role—but when I thought about it, her childlike behavior seemed touching. It was an actor’s childishness, made up of posturing but also of passion. The theatre is perhaps the only place where people do not flee from work but actually seek it out.
Leni had reached the moment of the lines:
Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes
Et jamais je ne pleure, et jamais je ne ris.4
when Sică leaned toward me and asked very softly:
“Who are those lines by?”
Yesterday afternoon I had tea in private with Marie Ghiolu, Miss Lupa,5 and, later on, Mrs. Cantacuzino. Loads of things to note down, but I don’t have the time now.
Marie is very beautiful (maybe really beautiful for the first time since I’ve known her) but a little hotheaded, if not altogether hysterical.
“Don’t I have beautiful legs?”
And she lifted her dress to show me her calves.
It’s true that there were just the two of us.
Victor Ion Popa’s play flopped disastrously at the Regina Maria last night.
The terrible thing about the theatre is that people don’t realize what they are doing; the merciless lights of the premiere are needed for the truth suddenly to leap to their eyes.
I went away feeling annoyed that I had wasted the evening, and a little worried about what is in store for me. Is it possible that I too went so badly wrong in writing my play?
Mitică Theodorescu said to Froda the other day:
“How on earth can you be putting on Sebastian’s play? It’s inadmissible.”
“It’s a good play,” said Froda.
“It can’t be good,” Mitica stubbornly retorted. “How can it be? Listen to me: it’s bad, very bad.”
“Well, but you don’t know it; you haven’t even read it.”
“I don’t need to read it. I tell you: it’s really bad.”
The smart jackal!
The first posters went up on Saturday. Now they’re all over town, wherever you go. I took a couple myself: one to send to Mama in Paris, the other for me to keep. I stuck it to the wall with drawing pins and stared at it in a childish way. I liked looking at it. . . . Then—with the same good humor—I did something equally stupid: I went to the photographer’s to have my picture taken for the program.
But now the mood has passed. I feel bored and indifferent: I no longer look forward to the premiere, nor do I have any unease or the slightest curiosity about it.
This afternoon I went to the rehearsal—and everything seemed stupid to me. What a meal they are making of it! They put a thousand intentions and gestures into each piece of dialogue. I get the feeling that their eyes are on me, on the empty auditorium, on the prompter—calling us as witnesses to what is happening. No naturalness, no conviction, not an ounce of truth.
I won’t go again tomorrow. I leave it in the lap of the gods. In fact, I am thinking of not going at all, even of heading off to Balcic for a few days to get as far as I can from this business, which is all the odder today, when war may be just around the corner. The radio is right now broadcasting Hitler’s speech in Nuremberg. My own set is broken, but snatches of the broadcast drift up from the floor below, or maybe from across the way. I can’t make out what he is saying, but I easily recognize Hitler’s guttural voice and especially the cheering that constantly interrupts him: cheers and roars that are quite simply insane.
On such a day, am I supposed to take a mere play seriously?
This morning’s press dispatches are alarming. The Sudetenlanders issued a six-hour ultimatum, and the six hours have passed. Now war is the only possibility left. We may have it by this evening. Maybe we already have it as I am writing.
In town, people were saying that the Germans have already entered Czechoslovakia, so far without meeting any resistance. Is it possible that I could be a soldier tomorrow?
I went to yesterday’s rehearsal after all, this time with Froda. The only act that went well—to everyone’s surprise, of course—was the third act, which none of them wanted to believe in at the reading.
The first two acts, on the other hand, are acted stridently, superficially, always incorrectly. Fotino’s entrance is unacceptable. Can’t a comic scene ever be acted without laying it on thick?
Those ham-actors frighten me! When I think that they call themselves “artists,” I wonder that the irony of the term does not frighten them. I felt I was in the middle of a company in disorderly retreat. Each one for himself! Let the play crash, the show perish—so long as I am a success, so long as I’m all right, so long as I am applauded.
Froda laid it on the line to Sică until he made him turn yellow. I could feel in Sică, too, the wounded pride of a ham-actor. After a moment of panic—when the whole show seemed in danger of collapse—he called someone from administration.
“Tell the papers this, I say. Premiere on Wednesday evening. And two rehearsals a day till then.”
It would have been a happy solution. For a lot of things can be put right in a week of rehearsals. At the very least the lines can be learned properly—because at the moment no one, except perhaps Leni, has really got on top of them. What kind of interpretation can there be under the terror of memory exercises?
“Interpretation”—a stupid word, which means nothing at all in the theatre. No one interprets anything. Everyone comes with his own gestures, his own grunts, his own homespun coughs—and then applies them to his role. That’s all.
In three acts, I don’t think there was one piece of dialogue that didn’t sound false. I should have gone through it piece by piece, setting the right tone and clarifying what was meant. But that’s a craft that is beyond me. I ought to curse and shout, shake and threaten, risk everything, spare no one’s feelings, no one’s prestige. I should fight with no holds barred, determined to quarrel forever, if necessary, with each turn and all together, with Sică, with Siegfried, with the prompter and the stage hand, with absolutely everyone. Maybe that’s the only way I could get the play back on its feet and defend it.
But is it worth it? Do I believe in it enough to take it that seriously?
No, I don’t. It’s a joke, a game. And it would be grotesque to forget that. Maybe I’ll have more serious things in life to defend. I hope that, even in my career as a writer, there are more honorable battles in store. After all, between De două mii de ani and Jocul de-a vacanţa there are differences that I have no right to forget. In the one, there was something very close to the bone; in the other, there is childishness, trifling stuff, a mere nothing.
So the premiere will be on Saturday. Sică immediately went back on his decision to postpone it; too many people advised him otherwise. Each of them used the same argument: don’t worry, you’ll see it will be a success.
That’s easy for everyone to toss out, because none of them carries any responsibility for it. “It will be a success.” I can just hear Beresteanu6 saying that—and I wonder what kind of art it is in which even Bereşteanu can have opinions and make predictions.
“It will be a success.” But there are two days left till the premiere— and no one is sure of his part, no one knows what to wear, no one knows when to enter, when to exit, when to speak and when to be silent. . .
“Dans les choses théatrâles, ” Goncourt says, “c’est abominable ces hauts et ces bas, et sans transition aucune.”7
Yesterday evening’s rehearsal was infinitely better. It was even satisfactory. Now and then I was carried away with emotion like a child. Some of the spectators (Fifi Harand,8 Mrs. Maximilian, Zissu) were straining to follow the performance. It amused me to hear them laugh, to see them wipe away a furtive tear. (At this afternoon’s rehearsal, Beate Fredanov had a really good cry in Act Three. But it’s true that that girl cries so easily. . . . )
Yesterday Timus seemed quite won over, but I shouldn’t suspect him of any friendly feeling! It’s so awkward not to like it, so convenient to show one’s approval. . . .
Sică was happy. Jubilant.
“That’s a play, sir, that’s a real play. It’ll certainly travel abroad. We’ll translate it into French.”
I made him repeat the wonderful words of praise a few times—though, of course, they won’t stop him cursing me to the skies if the play isn’t a success. I can almost hear his voice: “Who the hell got me mixed up with these intellectuals?”
In general terms, then, in very general terms, I may have come away satisfied. In the details and finer shades, though, a million things remain to be done. I have to accept the situation as it is—and to look at everything with indifference. That’s why I can’t complain: I feel no emotion, no impatience, no nerves of any kind. Not yet, anyway.
I went out yesterday with Leni, after the evening rehearsal. I dined just with her at the Wilson, and we went home late, around three o’clock. She had acted her part so beautifully, had been so simple, so intense, and so sincerely emotional that I felt for her a rekindled tenderness, as in the early days of my love for her. We stopped in front of a poster and read our names printed alongside each other. We seemed to be alone on the deserted boulevard.
An hour to go till the premiere. How much I could write! But I’ve had an anxious day, all of it—from one to seven—coincidentally spent in court on Leni’s case. A day in court usually wears me out—and it had to be today!
I regret not being able to note everything there is to be noted, at least in connection with tonight’s dress rehearsal.
Now all that remains is to wait.
A big success—really big. Dozens of curtain calls, a warm, vibrant atmosphere in the audience.
I went to the cinema and watched a film in complete calm, as if nothing exceptional had been happening this evening.
Then I showed up toward the end, in time to feel the lively atmosphere of celebration and satisfaction.
This morning’s reviews were full of praise. The matinee performance was sold out, and there are scarcely any seats left for this evening. Dozens of telephone calls, dozens of congratulations.
I certainly feel pleased, but I don’t think it has gone to my head. I’m still fairly skeptical—and, above all, very tired. Too tired to note now what should be noted about the premiere.
Maybe tomorrow.
The reviews (Viitorul, Semnalul. . .) continue to be good. Yesterday the box office closed after it had sold every possible extra ticket. The matinee netted thirty thousand lei, the evening performance sixty thousand.
But I still don’t believe it will be a great success with the public, or that it will be kept on for what is called a series. I don’t have the patience to list the reasons for this now, but I am perfectly aware of them.
Today’s reviews are overwhelming. Ionel Dumitrescu in Curentul, Carandino in Romania, write with an enthusiasm, friendliness, and ardor that leave me speechless. . . . No, I wasn’t at all expecting such a reception. Even in Universul there is a review that, though perhaps not well meaning (its tone is cold and somehow sulky), is full enough of praise. So far, no one has said anything against it. In a way that makes me uneasy. Je ne demandais pas tant.9 . . . Neamul românesc, Porunca Vremii, Frontul—which ought to attack me violently, as they have in the past—remain silent, at least for the time being. Is this because the success is too great to be contested? Or, on the contrary, is it the kind of silence that precedes and paves the way for a thundering outburst?
Yesterday evening, which is usually the quietest of the week, had receipts of 24,000 lei. Beresteanu, who checked the figures, assures me it was 26,000. That seems to be a great deal. (On the same evening, Popa’s play made a little under 5,000.) Camil couldn’t believe that the figure of 24,000 was correct; it seemed to him enormous.
It may be embarrassing to inquire about each day’s receipts, but when so many people live constantly obsessed with them, when everything in the theatre depends on them, you cannot help feeling curious yourself.
This morning I found Beresteanu with the plan for the tour spread out in his office, and with a series of letters to provincial impresarios.
“You see what troubles we’ve got! Now we’ll have to postpone the tour.”
But I still ask myself whether it will be a lasting success. Act Three doesn’t go smoothly—maybe in part because of the production. There is so much stress on the comic effects in the first two acts, and so much laughter, that Act Three remains suspended in a void.
I went to the Sunday evening performance and felt upset at the childish, absurd way in which people were laughing. I too laughed like a fool, caught up in the general atmosphere of jollity—it’s hard to resist a packed theatre, with the boxes, balconies, and stalls all in fits. But although I too laughed, at the same time I felt dismayed. What can those people understand of the play if they rollick about as at any old farce! The proof that they don’t understand anything is that Act Three leaves them baffled. They are still laughing when the curtain rises—but after the first few exchanges, and especially after the first scene, they realize that their laughter is out of place and their mirth is left hanging. Quite possibly this third act will stop the play from being taken on for a really long series.
Rosetti did not at all like either the play or the performance. He didn’t tell me so straight out, but he hardly needed to. It was enough that he didn’t ring me once after the premiere. When I saw him yesterday, his congratulations were so evasive, so awkward, that I almost felt I had to apologize for the play, as if it were something shameful.
Of course, Vxşoianu didn’t like it either. (He was in the same box with Rosetti, and he hasn’t shown any sign of life since then.)
That’s all to the good; it brings me back to earth. It’s time I remembered all the things I have never liked in the play; time to keep telling myself that all this fuss may be agreeable but should not be taken too seriously.
What a strong impact the theatre makes! I have written five books but have never before had this sense of being in direct touch with “the public,” of having reached it, engrossed it, moved it. A first night was enough for a whole current of curiosity, impatience, and friendly feeling to appear. I receive dozens of telephone calls, dozens of messages, from the most surprising and unexpected places.
This evening’s receipts: 32,000 lei! Apparently this is altogether unusual.
It was a nice packed audience, with a good ear for the play. Almost a concert audience. People laughed less wildly; they smiled more. From time to time I had the feeling that I was at a session of chamber music.
But it is time I freed myself from the theatre. It would be a good thing if I never showed myself there again. It is high time I returned to serious matters.
War may break out from one hour to the next. Czechoslovakia mobilized last night. France also seems to have mobilized, without actually using the term “general mobilization.” During the night, war was imminent. There was an atmosphere of panic in town around three o’clock: or perhaps not even panic, but a kind of weary pallor of people who have given up.
Now we have a moment of syncopation. Chamberlain has returned to London with the Hitlerites’ new demands. Will they be accepted? Will we have a “German peace” that suppresses freedom in Europe— who knows for how long, perhaps for a whole historical epoch? Or will they not be accepted? If so, we will have war. It’s all a matter of days, maybe less, a matter of hours or minutes.
Things are slowing down at the theatre. Yesterday seventeen thousand lei!—a most worrying figure. Can the “success” have passed so rapidly? There are many possible explanations. It rained, there was bad political news, people were feeling the pressure of events, and so on.
But reasons can always be found for a lack of success, whereas no explanation is required for a really great success. And that will probably not be the case with my play.
Yesterday was a sellout. But I don’t think it is going to be a “great success,” or a success and nothing but. Yesterday’s matinee seems to have been very poorly attended, and today’s brought in only around fifteen thousand lei—half last Saturday’s figure. Maybe things will pick up again this evening—though it is the first evening of Rosh Hashanah—but I fear that tomorrow, Monday, will be really bad. I no longer dare to make calculations, to engage in childish plans. . . . The hundreds of thousands of lei of which I dreamed, mainly in jest, can no longer be dreamed of even as a joke.
I passed by the theatre and watched a few scenes from Act Two. I was appalled at how badly they were acted: with no conviction or poetic fire, with jabbered lines, bits left out and others added, as if at one of the worst of the rehearsals. I fled in horror.
A telephone call from Poldy, who is in Paris. He thinks that France will order a general mobilization tonight, and that war will break out on Saturday. He asked what he should do with Mama. He wants to send her back to Romania, but I’m terrified at the thought that, God forbid, war might erupt when she is somewhere en route—in Italy, for example. Alone, speaking only Romanian, terrified, penniless—what would she do? How would she cope?
On the other hand, she can’t remain at Sceaux, because Poldy and Benu would have to enlist on the first day and she would be left alone.
Mother dear, if only this war could pass your heart by! Or at least if you could lose in it only what is lost anyway! If only I could pay everything for you all! That’s the final consolation for which I ask.
Peace. A kind of peace. I haven’t the heart to rejoice. The Munich Agreement does not send us to the front, it lets us live—but it prepares terrible times ahead. Only now will we start to see the kind of pressure that the Hitlerites exert.
It seems logical to expect a move to the right in France and a powerful anti-Semitic lurch in Romania. I can easily envision a new Goga-Cuza government, or perhaps even a gradual transition to a Legionary regime, suitably decked out.
But we shall see . . .
Yesterday I didn’t even dare call in at the theatre. Thursday evening had been alarming: eleven thousand lei. I was dejected and had pangs of conscience toward the people at the theatre, as if I had pushed them into a bad business deal. Everyone said that I shouldn’t panic, that the theatre was empty because people had been anticipating at any moment the outcome of the events in Munich—and, at the same time, because defense exercises had plunged the whole city into darkness and given it a sinister appearance, with streetlights off, windows blacked out, sirens wailing, bells tolling, and so on.
Yesterday I didn’t go and ask at the theatre: they just said that Friday had been one of the worst days of the week.
Well, this morning, to my great astonishment, I came across Axente the typist and was told:
“You beat us yesterday at the Comoedia: we took in 24,000 at the Regina Maria, and you netted 26,000.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. But I plucked up courage and went to ask the theatre cashier. Yes, it was true!
Could there be a change of fortune? Could it still be something of a success?
Last night was a year since I arrived in Paris—and since my luggage and manuscript were stolen.
Yesterday I spoke to Ocneanu about the novel.1 I think I’ll publish it with him. He’s the only publisher with whom it is possible to work. I just wonder what I’ll do about the contract with Delafras.
Today I read Chapter Six, which I hadn’t touched since Bran and had forgotten. It seemed much better than at the time of writing it, when I had been so dissatisfied.
I’d like the novel to appear in late November or early December. But for that I’d have to do nothing but write, day and night, from the 15th of October. No law courts, no Foundation, nothing else.
The advertisement for the play in today’s Timpul says “last performances.” I wonder why. The tour with Ionescu G. Maria has been postponed until the 19th of October, and Jocul de-a vacanţa could play all the time until then—especially since, even if it hasn’t gone brilliantly, it has hardly been a flop either. Monday and Tuesday were quiet (today is Yom Kippur), but Saturday and Sunday made a little over forty thousand lei—which is not all that bad.
With regard to both Zoe and Leni, complete withdrawal. It’s more sensible, more simple—even if, God alone knows, it’s no fun at all.
Saturday and Sunday were rather quiet (a little over thirty thousand lei), but yesterday and Monday were really very bad. By eight o’clock they’d sold around five thousand’s worth. I didn’t ask what the total receipts are up to now. I went into the auditorium for a moment during Act One; there were quite a lot of people in the stalls—probably many complimentary tickets—but the balconies were empty.
How sad is a play that is nearing its end. A novel is less ostentatious, creates less of a stir, but it also drops out of circulation more slowly and insensibly, without a sudden wrench. For better or worse, the play will continue this week, because they don’t have anything else to put on until the tour begins. But its “career,” as they say in the theatre, has come to an end.
Last night Sică seemed a little disheartened.
“Please,” I said to him, “don’t start blaming me.”
“I have nothing to blame you for. I’m very glad we put on your play, but I’m depressed about the audience. Again I conclude that we can’t fill the seats for anything subtle. Not only was your play good, not only was it well performed, not only did the premiere make a big impact, but the whole of the first week indicated general enthusiasm, a surefire success. Tell me! What can be made of all this?”
As if Leni and Zoe were not enough to complicate my life, now there is Alice Theodorian. She ’phones me ten times a day (even at night); she always asks me to eat with her, is insistent, allusive, provocative.
It’s all getting too comical. What an irony of my fate: to be Jewish and to look an “homme à femmes”!2
In this respect, yesterday was completely idiotic. There was Zoe at lunchtime (Tata was in Brăila). Leni came in the evening, and later I also went to Alice Th.’s. It is too difficult to know what’s what with each of them. And when I think that, in a more orderly life, I’d have been the most faithful and least frivolous man in the world. . . .
I am being torn apart in so many ridiculous affairs, none of which is going anywhere.
Mama arrived yesterday morning, after spending twenty-four hours in a kind of “quarantine” at Jimbolia. Through Ralea, I had to get a telegram sent from the Ministry of the Interior before she could continue her journey home. It seems that not only Jimbolia but all the other frontier crossings are filled with Jews who have come to a dead end, unable either to return to the country they have traveled from, or to enter Romania—even though all are Romanian passport holders. No explanation or justification is given for this barbarous behavior.
“We are living in terrible times!” lamented Ralea, clearly feeling embarrassed.
But that embarrassment does not prevent him from being an accomplice—a passive accomplice whose conscience is torn, but one who finds it quite easy to bear the conflict.
I dread to think what awaits us from now on!
Sunday evening’s was the last performance. They’ve played the dirty trick of putting Ionescu G. Maria back on for the last two days before the tour, yesterday and today. So now the impression is given that I’ve been taken down from the boards and replaced with an old play—as if it would have been such a disaster to keep me on for another couple of days! For a moment I was quite indignant. But then it passed. In the end, I don’t want to make a tragedy out of anything that’s happened to me at the theatre.
It’s been an adventure—and now it’s over. I didn’t gain a lot from it, but nor did I lose much.
On Saturday evening, at the last performance but one, I watched the whole play for the first time since the Sunday immediately after the premiere. I’ve seen bits of each act at various times, depending on when I dropped by the theatre on my way back from the cinema or to see Leni. But I have only twice seen the play from beginning to end. I’m used to it by now, and it is almost impossible for me to judge it. The image of this production has almost completely covered the image I originally had of it. At first the differences between my conception and the stage performance were quite glaring. Little by little, however, the actors’ gestures (even if they were wrong) and their tones of voice (even if they were false) substituted themselves for what I had imagined at the time of writing. Sometimes I’d have liked to protest, to get them back on the right track, to restore my original text, to force them to act the play I actually wrote—but it would have meant too great an effort, and I wasn’t even sure it was worth it.
On Sunday evening I again watched the third act—for the last time! I was in the balcony, from where the stage appears far off and for that very reason somehow magical, and sometimes I shut my eyes to listen to the words. Maybe it was the thought that this really was the last time, that none of these words would be spoken again, that they would remain in a typewritten file or, at best, in a printed book—maybe all these thoughts, with their sense of leave-taking, made me listen with emotion for the first time. I said to myself that something was dying, departing forever, breaking loose from me. Never again will I see the audience’s heads turned toward the stage, in the silence of an occupied auditorium, in the darkness broken only by the footlights, listening, taking in, echoing, answering the words written by me. Never again will I hear that laughter rise in warm animation toward the stage.
Next to me a girl was crying. She is the last girl who will cry for Jocul de-a vacanţa.
Leni leaves tomorrow on tour. She came here today. I don’t know if she is beautiful; surely not. But she has gleaming white skin, soft young flesh.
“Wait for me in your new home on the 17th of November,” she said as she left.
And I do have the feeling that I will wait for her, though I realize it is not possible. The last deadline in this old love affair is approaching.
I have been in my studio flat for two days now. I ought to keep in mind that this is one of my old dreams—and to be contented. But for the last few days I have been feeling gloomy. No hope, no expectation, no decision.
It’s a large white room with a lot of light, on the eighth floor. It is right on Calea Victoriei—which I don’t like in principle—but from this height it cannot be said that I live on any street in particular. The terrace is quite spacious—easily enough for three open chaises longues— and from there I have a semicircular view of half of Bucharest. It is reminiscent of the entrance to New York harbor. I float among buildings.
I don’t want for the mom3
Last night Zoe interrupted me while I was writing. I can no longer continue the note I began yesterday. Nor do I remember exactly what I meant to write.
She was the first woman to enter this apartment. I couldn’t help feeling a surge of tenderness. I undressed her and lay her on the bed, let her purr beneath the blanket like a cat in the warmth, and went down to buy some cakes at Nestor. How good it is to know that a young woman is waiting for you upstairs in your room!
But, of course, none of that has any meaning.
This morning there was a stupid matinee performance of Jocul de-a vacanta at ten o’clock. (The tour did end on Thursday, and Leni came back then.) I have so little confidence in my play that I don’t think it is good even for a six o’clock matinee.
I didn’t go to the theatre—not as a sign of protest, but out of honest indifference.
But Mama, Benu, and Tata went instead and passed by here on their way from the theatre. Mama brought me two chrysanthemums: it is good that the first flowers to enter this flat came from her.
Corneliu Codreanu was shot and buried during the night, together with Duca’s assassins and Stelescu’s assassins.4 Attempting to escape. It has all been too sudden and unexpected for me to have a clear idea of what might happen next.
Once again I have to say that the situation inside the country is unexpectedly stable and may point toward a return to normality. The external situation is so adverse and confused that it stands in the way of even a timid attempt at optimism.
Stupor and silence. A kind of dumbfounded silence. I get the feeling that no one has yet recovered from the consternation of the first minute.
It would be in the logic of things if all this hushed fright burst out in an anti-Semitic explosion. It’s a safety valve whose use cannot be excluded, even on the part of the government. And again we may be the ones who pay.
Celia was here and—without my realizing how we came to speak of it— she told me a lot of things about Zoe, about Zoe’s “past.”
In particular, she gave me numerous details about a love affair in which I did not find it hard to recognize the grand amour of which Zoe herself told me last summer. He is one Bisco Iscovici—and Celia, who knows him very well, helped me not only to “see” him clearly but to reconstitute the whole story of their love. Suddenly I had the feeling that Zoe, this admirable girl whom I see so often, who slept in my bed on Saturday afternoon and rolled head over heels naked on the floor, just like a child, this girl with whom I went to the cinema last night, is a stranger to me.
This feeling scares me a little. It’s as if familiar things around me on which I depend had suddenly lost some of their solidity, had changed their color, their dimensions, their reality. . . .
On Tuesday, on St. Nicholas’s Day, I sent Nina a flower for her birthday, together with a few lines in which I said that I hesitated to visit them because Mircea, though back in Bucharest for some time, had not given me any sign of life.
Yesterday at the Foundation I found a letter of thanks from her, a letter of simple politeness, neither cold nor friendly but precisely indifferent: “The difficult trials through which we have passed, Mircea and I, have made us cut ourselves off from the world.”
I understand them very well. They must consider themselves in mourning since the death of Codreanu. If they were to have me round, they might feel they were betraying a cause. Certain things are beyond repair and leave no room for memories.
Nae has signed a declaration of solidarity with the 318 “comrades from Vaslui.” A facsimile of the text appeared in all the morning papers. When I saw Nae’s handwriting in the picture—clear, decisive, almost print-quality writing that I know so well—I had a vague sense that these matters also personally concern me a little.
This morning at the Foundation, Mircea was in a group with Cioculescu, Biberi, and Benador. I went up to say hello and, to my surprise, Mircea stood up and embraced me.
A reflex gesture? Old memories stronger than recent events?
Dinu Noica sent Comarnescu a letter from Paris, in which he announced that, after the killing of Codreanu, he has decided to join the Legion. He therefore considers null and void all the contracts he has with the Royal Foundation, and is prepared to return in the shortest possible time all the sums he has received as advances.
I can clearly recognize Dinu Noica in this.
On the other hand, Mircea called on Rosetti to tell him that he remains a writer and man of science, that he wants to publish books, and that he wants—more than ever before—to occupy himself with the oriental institute that is to be created within the framework of the Foundations.
That’s not a bad thing either.
Yesterday the National premiered Wilde’s Bunbury, in a translation done by myself. (No one knew this, because Sadoveanu, of course, did not want to risk putting my name on the poster. Nor am I too proud myself of an English play translated from a French translation.) All the same, it is amusing to hear on stage sentences that you have written yourself. I felt a certain author’s curiosity (as if the text belonged to me), but also a complete detachment from what was happening on stage.
Footnotes
1. Immediately after taking power, the Goga-Cuza government initiated a series of anti-Semitic measures, including the revocation of Romanian citizenship for Jews and the elimination of Jewish lawyers from the bar association. Sebastian here refers to the withdrawal of his train pass, which he had received as a journalist.
2. “But in his black eyes was an ardor of imagination, cooled by that ironic sadness of the civilized among the barbarians which is peculiar to his race.” Charles Morgan, Sparkenbroke (London and New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 244.
3. loan Massoff, the National Theatre's literary secretary, was Jewish.
4. Cuvântul was banned on several occasions for its pro-iron Guard articles.
5. Felix Aderca, a Jewish novelist, was also a civil servant whom the Goga-Cuza government was unable to dismiss because he was a decorated veteran of World War I. He was forced to move with his job to the provinces.
6. A rare creature.
7. “You don’t know if M. Jules Renard lives nearby?”—“I am he.”
8. “A conversation without sparkle.”
9. Mihai Ralea: minister of labor, March 1938-July 1940.
1. Herbert (Belu) Zilber: a friend of Sebastian’s, Communist economist and journalist who later was imprisoned as the victim of an East European Communist show trial.
2. N. Carandino: journalist.
3. Cella Serghi: novelist.
4. I give you a thousand guesses.
5. Both Nae Ionescu and Mircea Eliade were interned in the Miercurea-Ciuc camp for their Iron Guard activities.
6. D. I. Suchianu: movie critic and journalist.
7. Nora is a character in the novel Accidentul.
8. I extricate myself.
9. A visiting room in an institution.
1. One should never swear anything.
2. With the pen held firmly above the paper.
3. The state’s anti-Semitic measures went through phases of severity. Sebastian’s play was produced during a time of lessened strictures.
4. I hate the motion that moves the lines/And never do I cry, never do I laugh.
5. Luli Popovici-Lupa: a friend of Nae Ionescu's.
6. Administrator of the Comoedia Theatre.
7. In theatrical matters, all these highs and lows without a transition are abominable.
8. Actress.
9. I didn't ask for that much.
1. Accidental.
2. A ladies' man.
3. Sentence incomplete.
4. Mihai Stelescu, a former leader of the Iron Guard, split with Codreanu and created another fascist organization, Cruciada Romanismului. Condemned as a traitor by his former comrades, Stelescu was set upon in his hospital bed, shot many times, and axed to pieces.