I had lunch at Hurtig’s house,1 where he described for me yesterday’s scene at Titeanu’s office.2
The principal secretary enters:
“Minister, the Writers’ Association has applied to join the National Front3—but there are a few awkward names.”
“Which ones?”
“Mihail Sebastian, Sergiu Dan . . . What is to be done?”
“You know the orders. We can’t compromise the movement. Delete them.”
So we were deleted. In today’s papers our names are missing from the Writers’ Association list. And to think that yesterday at the Foundation they got me to sign a membership application.
I don’t know why I wasted my Christmas holiday staying in Bucharest. I could have finished my novel, or gone skiing, but instead I frittered away days and nights doing nothing. So here I am at the end of the holiday, tired, listless, with no desire to work, idle, disoriented, full of regrets. Again I have no money—which reminds me that I am thirty-one, that life is passing me by, that I am wasting it, have already nearly wasted it.
Outside it is an unlikely spring day, warm and sunny, which makes me twice as sad.
The comical, absurd, and in fact terrible situation that I have been enduring for eight months with Zoe will now have to be acted out again with Leni.
She came here yesterday, took her clothes off, and then, when I caved in, behaved with a grace and simplicity that got us through a moment that seemed to offer no way out, no salvation.
She is very beautiful, much more beautiful than I could have thought in my most credulous moments of expectation.
What a pair are these lovers of mine, Z. and L., who differ and complement each other precisely through the ways in which they agree. What a life—complicated, to be sure, but also full—I could lead between the two of them!
A complicated life! Is there a life more complicated, more stupidly, more senselessly complicated, than mine is?
I look at it with a kind of resigned stupor, which is probably the only thing that stops me from putting an end to it all.
There is no more room in my life for anything but suicide, or perhaps a departure for good into a solitary existence somewhere.
Horror, disgust, something dirty, obscene, immeasurably somber.
How powerful my inertia must be to go on living after such a day!
Returned tonight from the Schuller, where I had gone skiing for five days. Too little time for an escape. But anyway, a respite. A deferment, a moment of pause. I tried not to think of anything, tried to forget. I knew it was not possible, but I tried to find at least some means of anesthetization.
And now comes the awakening?
Lunch yesterday at Blank’s, with Monsieur de Norpois. In fact his name is “Comte de la Rochefoucauld,” but he is a typical Norpois. I was tempted to ask him if he has read Proust and if he is not struck by the similarity. It would have been an impertinence, of course, but I don’t think I was in any event very tactful in my conversation with him.
I didn’t realize at first that he was “Ambassador of the Order of Malta at the Court of Bucharest.” As he talked all the time of his diplomatic passport, I thought he must be in the French diplomatic service—and for that reason I was amazed at his violent hostility to the Socialists (especially Blum), his ardent support for Franco, his disdain for the Spanish Republicans, and the joy with which he awaited a “Nationalist” victory. Feeling something close to indignation, I reminded him that France would now have another frontier to defend. I think I was a little aggressive, a little irritating. I should learn to listen calmly and politely, without reacting in too sharp a manner. For God’s sake!—I should have learned that much at least from my knowledge of Proust. I think that La Rochefoucauld-Norpois would have “given away” much more yesterday if I had inspired his trust and if—not feeling me as an opponent— he had been at his ease. Maurice Turbé, in such a situation, would have made himself seem perfectly modest, surprised, admiring, and obedient.
But even so, the guy was entertaining. He is so much the “diplomat in retreat”! (His very position as ambassador of a fictional entity makes him overdo the mannerisms of a diplomat.)
He speaks about everything with an air of false modesty, but a sense of self-importance is exploding beneath it—as he condescends to initiate you into great secrets, unofficially and a little “incognito.” “Vous savez, mais je n'en sais rien; je suis d'une totale ignorance. ”4 And when he said “totale ignorance” he seemed to be inviting you to read a mass of great mysteries behind his smile.
Tittle-tattle from the Italian or Spanish court, stupid little trifles spoken with a touch of mystery and briefly underlined: “et vous savez, ça c'est déjà de l'histoire. ”5 A kind of comical respect tinged with familiarity for the great European dynasties. “Victor Emmanuel est un grand roi. ” “Don Juan est marié à une charmante Bourbon. Des gens très sérieux. ” “Lors de la marche sur Rome, Victor Emmanuel a agi en chef de la maison de Savoie.”6 And, talking about Mussolini’s first interview with the king, he added: “Je le tiens d'une personne qui était présente et qui n'était pas le roi.”7
Aderca—whom I met last night at the Sephardi circle, where we both spoke about Baltazar at a kind of “festive” soiree—told me that he deplores the death of Codreanu, who was a great man, a real genius, a moral force without equal, whose “saintly death” is an irreparable loss.
Leni comes all the time—and I call her and receive her all the time. I don’t know where this whole business will lead me—but I’m glad that I have her beside me and have not lost her. But later? What then?
Nina and Mircea came round the evening before last. It was as if nothing had happened, as if between us there were not a year to be forgotten.
There were lots of graphic details about his life in the camp at Ciuc, and especially about his companionship with Nae, whom he mentioned with such warmth that I suddenly felt a longing to see him. How I regret that I didn’t manage to see him before he was rearrested!
I have been learning English for the past three weeks. I bought my first book the other day, and I shall try to go through it syllable by syllable. Lawrence’s Letters. It’s premature, of course, but I should like to have an “Albatross” volume among my books.
Otherwise, all as before: that is, absurd, humiliating, and unbearable. I don’t know where I find the strength each day to drag along this wretched life of mine. Probably from laziness—my only strength.
Yesterday Camil was made director of the National Theatre. After his appointment, we dined together at the Continental.
I’m apprehensive about what he will do. I’d like him to succeed; it’s one of the few great chances he’s been offered.
I have decided to return to my novel. I want to complete it. It is absurd for me to leave it unfinished for so long. All my activity as a writer (but am I still a writer?) is at a standstill because of it.
Besides, I have no money and I don’t know where to find any. The spring rent will soon be due. If I can send the novel off to the printer’s, I’ll immediately have twenty or maybe even thirty thousand lei.
By working I will also—for a time, at least—find a meaning again in this wreck of a life. At least if writing can still be that for me—a refuge!
If necessary, I’ll shut myself up indoors—and if that’s too difficult (Zoe, Leni, the Foundation, the telephone, etc., etc.), I’ll go away from Bucharest. I must.
Today I reread the manuscript, which I quite enjoyed. The first thing to do is to knock the reconstituted part into shape. I must set aside my regrets and the feeling that the loss is essentially irreparable, that the reconstituted part is inadequate if not a complete write-off; set aside my sighs and misgivings (are these not another form of laziness?); set aside everything and get straight down to work on what has already been written. In a few days—two, three, certainly no more than four—I must be able to give a typist the six chapters I have already written. Then the rest will have to follow. I won’t allow myself more than a month for everything. The aim is for the book to come out in March!
It’s a solemn promise, a binding vow, a question of how serious I can be.
Marietta Sadova wants to take Jocul de-a vacanţa on tour from 8 April to i May.
Of course I can’t refuse (there’s no plausible reason or pretext I could give), but this surprising turn of events is frankly a nuisance. The money I might make from it is derisory. And what I could lose, though not grave, is certainly not pleasant. I’m not so attached to this play (especially now that its “career” is over, without glory!), but nor can I bear to see it hauled around the country with a troupe of ham-actors cobbled together from somewhere, in wretched halls either three-quarters empty or filled with free tickets issued through district prefects, residential homes, garrisons, and revenue offices.
There is something sad, disheartening, and promiscuous in such a business, and I’d have liked my name not to be associated with it in any way. I tried to persuade Marietta to choose another play—when she was here yesterday—but for the moment she is refusing. In the end, if obstacles of some other kind don’t emerge, I’ll probably have to resign myself.
I had lunch today at Alice Theodorian’s, after a “break” of two months; it happened in the most comical circumstances (a few aspects of which might have been worth recording at the time). I was listening to her talk today when I suddenly glimpsed the whole network of relationships in which absolutely everyone I know is caught up, as if each of their lives were but a ramification of a common social life.
I need only take a single name or character, almost at random, to see how all the others are implied in his or her personal existence. From incident to incident, ramification to ramification, I start from Alice and arrive at Blank, Leni, myself, Lilly, Zoe, Maryse, Marie Ghiolu, Lupa, Nae, Mircea, Camil—and through Camil back to Alice, where the circle closes. But I can start again in another direction, another itinerary, drawing along other people and adventures, each with a certain autonomous importance, but always enmeshed in the same “system” of social relations.
For the first time I have realized how large is the surface over which my life unfolds, monotonous and cramped though it feels to me. For the first time it occurred to me that what we put into a three-hundred-page novel is ridiculously insignificant in comparison with the huge number of things involved in the most ordinary of our gestures. It is enough to say a name—Celia Seni, for example—and dozens of people, dozens of comedies, dozens of adventures start moving in an infinite number of rotations.
If I were to write a novel containing all this material (which I seem to have seen only now for the first time, in its full extent), how many thousands of pages would I need?
Will life allow me to write it sometime, later on?
Marietta’s tour is off, for the moment at least. I think she understood the danger of setting off with a troupe of obscure actors, put together from various bits and pieces. For a few days she struggled to assemble a worthy cast: Soreanu as Bogoiu, Valentineanu as Ştefan; she was even prepared to ask Elvira to play Madame Vintila. But Soreanu is busy with Duduca Sevastitia, and Camil doesn’t want to hand over Valentineanu— so Marietta preferred to postpone the tour till October, when she hopes she will get them both.
For the time being, then, my disgruntlement of the other day no longer applies. As for the autumn, we shall see.
The obliteration of Czechoslovakia has affected me as a personal drama. I was reading in the street an account of Hitler’s entry into Prague—and I had tears in my eyes. It is so abject and humiliating that it offends everything I have felt able to believe about people.
It would appear that—despite the denials in yesterday’s papers—Romania too received an ultimatum. For the moment it is being asked only to dismantle its industry and to revert to a strictly agrarian country supplying Germany alone, which would thus gain a monopoly on Romanian exports and imports.
If this is accepted, we shall have the Germans here by autumn at the latest. If it is not accepted, we shall have war in ten to fifteen days.
Meanwhile, Daladier and Chamberlain are making speeches in protest.
Everything seems grotesque. If you were watching from another planet, you’d feel like laughing. But like this . . .
Yes, it’s possible that there will be war this spring, and possible that I’ll die this spring in a trench somewhere.
Emil Gulian, with whom I spoke over the phone on Saturday, suggested that some of us get together and swear that whoever remains alive will edit the manuscripts left behind by the ones killed in battle.
I must confess that I am not particularly bothered about my manuscripts. What concerns me more are the books that I may no longer write—and especially this life, with which I have done nothing up to now.
By tomorrow I’ll probably be a soldier. It seems that the whole of the Second Corps has been mobilized. I went with Cicerone8 to the Twenty-first Regiment (we are both part of it), and a captain who is a friend of his said that all the contingents from 1928 to 1938 have been called up. Only some of the call-up papers have been sent out, but it is almost certain that there will be no more than a twenty-four-hour delay.
This turn of events has caught me rather unawares. I have no money. How am I going to pay the rent? What will I leave at home for daily expenses? What will I take with me?
If I at least knew that they’d have enough to eat at home, I’d go off with my mind at rest. This evening I ate at home, played belote with Tata, tried (with some success) to make them think I was cheerful and untroubled. Mama could scarcely hold back her tears. “I haven’t had any joy in life,” she said. Maybe she’s exaggerating. But she hasn’t had any great joys, and not the one she always awaits: to see us married, with grandchildren of whom she can feel proud.
As far as I am concerned, I don’t want to make plans of any kind. It’s best if I leave with my eyes shut.
I report to the regiment tomorrow morning. I don’t want to give this excessive importance. It could be just a call-up from which I’ll return in ten or twenty days—and that’s it. Then I’d feel embarrassed to have blown up an unpleasant incident into a full-scale drama.
But there are other possibilities. It’s all so confused that anything could happen—even war. Personally, I don’t think it will come to war. France and Britain will rest content with speeches. Italy will get some kind of concessions. We’ll cave in. Germany will continue its southeastward march. I have a feeling that “le coup de la Tchechoslovaquie” will be repeated in exactly the same way. Who said we are living “in the midst of adventure”? This adventure has started to become monotonous. Everything is predictable, everything looks the same.
But there is still a “margin” for accidents. There is a chance—let’s say 5 percent—that the machinery will break down after all and war will be unleashed. In that case, my departure tomorrow will have been a real departure. I have to take some measures for any eventuality.
I’ll stop my journal here for the time being. Perhaps the most sensible thing would be to destroy it, but I don’t have the heart. I’ll seal it well and give it to Benu to put in Uncle Zaharia’s safe—or better, perhaps, in Roman’s office. That’s also where I’ll get him to take my manuscripts. I see I am calm enough still to think that they are of some importance. Maybe I’ll find them again one day.
Although I have been free since Saturday evening, I haven’t got round to noting the ins and outs of my “discharge.” Two days spent in the rain, in the barracks yard, suddenly placed a value on my civilian life, and I felt that, if I ever regained it, I would know how to use it better and care for it more.
So here I am back—and nothing has changed. The same indifference, the same laziness, the same loss of sensitivity.
The Easter holidays will soon be here, and I’m afraid I’ll fritter them away, without going off anywhere and without doing any work.
Two days in Sinaia, at Roman’s villa. The car journey was refreshing. It’s enough for me to see fields, trees, open skies, and I forget my absurd everyday life.
I read, slept, and lazed about. I return in the mood for work.
From one of Conrad’s letters to Galsworthy:
“I have begun to work a little—on my runaway novel. I call it ‘runaway’ because I’ve been after it for two years . . . without being able to overtake it. The end seems as far as ever! It’s like a chase in a nightmare—weird and exhausting. Your news that you have finished a novel brings me a bit of comfort. So there are novels that can be finished— then why not mine?”
Good Friday! A glorious spring day. I’d like to spend it on a chaise longue, in the sun. This morning I had half a mind to leave for Balcic. I even went to Lares9 to ask for information. There’s a flight on Sunday morning and I could be back on Wednesday, without having neglected things at the Foundation. (If Cioculescu hadn’t been called up, if the Review hadn’t been left entirely in my hands, I would certainly not have let this holiday pass without going off somewhere to work. . . .)
I might still go away for the three days over Easter, but I’m not sure. I feel quite good alone at home. The telephone is keeping quiet and may leave me, if not to work properly, then at least to read, to write something, and to put some order into my papers.
Today I read the first part of De douâ mii de ani (my usual habit of taking a book, at random from the shelf and not putting it down)—and it seemed very fine to me. Suddenly I saw myself in Paris, carrying a French translation of the book to someone or other—Benjamin Crémieux, René Lalou, Jean Paulhan, even Gide—and the idea didn’t strike me as absurd. I almost know what I'd say to them: “Lisez, monsieur, les premières 120 pages. J'ai l’impression qu’elles sont bonnes. Le livre est raté sur sa fin, mais il commence bien. Et de toute façon, je suis certain que, traduit en français, il ne passerait pas inaperçu."1
In last week’s Curentul magazine, there is a highly laudatory article about Corespondenta lui Proust and myself, signed P.S. Who is P.S.? It seems impossible to believe, but it’s Pamfil Seicaru. I wasn’t sure whether to thank him or not. In any case, yesterday I sent him a few lines in the post— more because a violent attack on him had appeared in Azi, precisely for his article about me. But I don’t think my letter contained any platitudes, and certainly not anything overfriendly.
I am swamped with things to do. Revistă Fundaţiilor takes up a lot of my time, especially now, when I have to read and approve the page proofs. Moreover, being strapped for cash, I am translating a play by Jean Sarment for the National Theatre (Les plus beaux yeux du monde.)
Two days in Balcic. I returned yesterday morning by plane. My journey there—on Sunday morning—had also been by plane. As usual, I stayed at Dumitrescu’s. I am getting to be a real old “Balcician.” I even stay at the same place: no longer at Paruşeff’s (he has sold his house, I was very sorry to hear) but at Dumitrescu’s.
I had three mornings there, all of which I spent at the sea. I return with a tanned face, as after a full holiday.
Of course, I no longer—or less and less—feel so awestruck at finding the same miraculous places in Balcic. I have grown used to them; they have lost their unfamiliar aspect. Nevertheless, there are moments when I tremble before them as before fantastic, fabulous, unimaginably distant apparitions. On Monday evening (alone with Cicerone Theodorescu) I went well beyond the Iunian villa and stood “in the moonlight,” with my eyes riveted to the sea, for one long hour as full as ten. Balcic has something that intoxicates me and tears me apart. I feel like lying on the ground with my arms outstretched and saying: “Enough, this is as far as I go.” I could remain like that for the rest of my life.
When night really set in, we went through the Tatar quarter to the outskirts, high on a hill, where we stayed a long time gazing at the moon-flooded sea, and at Balcic gleaming in the light.
Seen from there, my whole life seems misguided, idiotic, full of meaningless effort.
Friday was the Day of the Book: and I had to go there in the uniform of the Front.2
Did I have to? I don’t know. It may be that if I had taken a really hard look at things, I would have resisted. Maybe I wouldn’t even have placed my position at the Foundation in jeopardy. So many plausible pretexts can be found. Was it so hard for me to be sick that morning?
I feel ashamed, and I felt even more ashamed at the time. Do I have the right to judge anyone’s moral qualities when I didn’t have the strength to resist that comedy? What would I do in the face of greater pressures? How would I behave in a concentration camp? How much pride would I retain in front of a firing squad?
I am paying with my personal liberty for a 5,535-lei-a-month job! Doesn’t that seem rather a high price to pay?
Assuming that what I write may one day mean something to a still distant reader, will not this livery cancel out any moral significance, any moral value, in what I have thought, felt, and written?
I am a writer who wore livery. And to think that writers have died at the stake for refusing to put up with much less!
I feel disfigured and disqualified—as if I have forfeited the right to use the word “I” with that sense of self-esteem, of pride in oneself, which alone justifies the writing of it.
“I am a civilian,” I wrote in Cum am devenit huligan—and I was proud of what seemed to me a declaration of liberty, independence, and nonconformism. . . .
“Avez-vous remarqué,” Princess Bibescu (Antoine’s wife Elisabeth, not Martha) asked me at lunch on Saturday, “que les fanatiques ont les yeuxs clairs? Seul un homme aux yeux clairs peut être un fanatique. ”
“Et moi, madame?”
“Je me le demande. Vous les avez presque verts, mais pas assez pour un fanatique. Enfin, votre cas n'est pas résolu. ”3
That isn’t the only piece of wit that I remember from her conversation. At first sight she seemed quite stunning. “The most intelligent woman in the world” is something you might say off the top of your head. But I would retain it in this case, because no other woman I have known has ever given me such an impression of verve and nervous spontaneity. In two hours she said dozens of words of which Oriane would have been proud. (“Moi je m'ennuie une fois tous les vingt ans. Eh bien, avec Calimachi je me suis ennuyée pour les vingt ans. ”
“Les domestiques sont terrifiants. Ils sont les seuls à se rendre compte, avec une exactitude absolue, si quelqu'un est un homme de qualité ou non. Moi je voudrais fonder une société pour la protection des nouveaux riches, contre les domestiques. ”4)
But she says it all good-heartedly, without ostentation, almost without being aware of it. I’d like to see her again, though it’s possible that, once you get to know her, she might lose some of, I wouldn’t say her spell, but her extraordinary power to surprise you with each new word.
She is ugly, dresses with an amusing lack of taste and attention, appears to have no trace of feminine coquetry, and yet is not in the least vain about what she is: a princess, an Englishwoman from a great family, a friend of all considered in Europe to be the most illustrious, most refined, most eccentric. Her best friend is Léon Blum, but another “best friend” was Antonio Primo de Rivera (about whom she spoke a lot, with warmth and passion, though this does not prevent her from remaining on the extreme left: “Je savais qu'il allait être fusillé, et pourtant ma sympathie pour les républicains n'a pas fléchi”5).
I am enough of a snob, or perhaps enough of a child, not to be pleasantly bowled over by the fact that the woman sitting opposite me at table is a close friend of royalty and Socialist leaders, with the King of Spain (who calls her “ma petite Elisabeth”), and with the head of the Spanish Communists, who in 1931 did her the favor of allowing the Duke of Alba (“Jimmy,” as she calls him) to cross the frontier without being checked. I also like her for her philo-Semitism, which relaxes me in conversation in a way that would otherwise be difficult. “J’aime les Juifs. Je les aime passionement. Ce n’est pas pane qu’ils sont malheureux. Non. Je les aime parce qu’ils eloignent /’horizon.”6
I shall send her some flowers and add a few lines. I don’t know if it is the done thing, but I feel bound to tell her how she filled me with wonder.
I’ve been called up. This time I don’t think I shall get out of it. Nor do I want to. Since it has to be done anyway, it’s better to do it now than in July or in autumn maneuvers. Tomorrow morning they’ll give me my “things” again, and the next day it looks as if I’ll be off to Mogoşoaia, where my company—the Eleventh—has its training camp. I don’t know how it will go, but I am determined to remain very calm and resigned, even good-humored.
On Friday I was in Brăila between two trains. (I have a train pass again, thanks to Rosetti. I don’t know how, but the thought that I have this in my pocket gives me a peculiar sense of freedom: I can go off whenever I like. It is true that the capacity in which I have it is no longer that of a journalist but of a state employee. The distinction is without practical consequences but significant nevertheless. Since the decree issued by the Goga government, not a single Jewish journalist—do they still exist?— has been able to get back a train pass.)
Anyway, I was in Brăila—a Brăila with all the acacias in bloom, but heartrendingly sad, neglected, decrepit. Not one new building (or rather, a single horrible one, where the Diana Baths used to be): everything is as I knew it ten or twenty years ago, only older, more worn, more sunk in poverty. Even Bulevardul Cuza looked a wreck: I had preserved an impression of its majesty, but that is not what I found there.
I can’t say that I am making progress with my English. I’ve stopped my lessons with Mangeriu. Besides, he no longer has anything to teach us.
But I continue to read. I read quite easily Arnold Bennett’s Grand Babylon Hotel. Now I am reading, less easily, a novel by Joseph Conrad: Almayer's Folly. I have not used a dictionary for either. There are certainly dozens and hundreds of words I don’t know, but I don’t like reading with a dictionary (though I ought to); I prefer to be carried along by the rhythm of the sentences, whose general drift I always manage to understand. I would need something to compel me to work with a dictionary: a translation, for example, which I had to do meticulously, with a sense of responsibility. I intend to ask Rosetti if I can do a translation for Energia.
I collected my army things yesterday—some foul rags, which are impossible to keep indoors without all the windows open. All night I tossed and turned in bed, terrified at the thought of lice. It’s impossible for me to don such repulsive things. I forced myself to put together a uniform from various clean bits: my old tunic from 1933, my puttees from the same period, my summer boots. The trousers I got from Comşa.7
A little while ago I had a dress rehearsal. My God! What a wretched figure I cut! I look miserable, downcast, crushed, and disfigured. I am no longer myself: I am nothing, nothing, nothing. Something that can be killed off in a scramble, without the slightest importance; something that can be dragged through the mud, dumped in stables, abandoned in a field; something without a name, without identity, without eyes of his own, without a will or a voice, without life—a Romanian soldier.
Since I heard that I’d be going to a “training camp” in Mogoşoaia, I have lived with the illusion that I need only tell Princess Bibescu that I’m nearby and she would call me into her castle and offer me a room. I saw myself installed there as on a country holiday, and I counted the evening hours that would be left for reading after I returned from the training grounds. I also wondered if I shouldn’t begin work there on the Sadoveanu chapter in my “Romanian Novel.”
From the regiment I called Antoine Bibescu at the Athenee Palace to tell him what was happening, but I was informed that he was away in Strehaia.
I decided to write to him there, though I didn’t quite dare. But yesterday afternoon, around five o’clock, I received in the mail from Strehaia a book about Proust (Arnaud Dandieu) and a few affectionate lines from Antoine. Several hours later, when I returned after midnight from Ralea’s banquet (where I had gone to spend a final evening as a civilian), I found the following telegram: “WANT TO DISCUSS EXTRAORDINARY AND ADMIRABLE BOOK ABOUT PROUST—PLEASE LEAVE SATURDAY AT ONE—WILL SEND CAR TO COLLECT YOU IN STREHAIA AND YOU CAN STAY AS LONG AS YOU LIKE—BIBESCU.”
It felt like a telegram from heaven. There could have been no better pretext to speak to him of the training camp in Mogosoaia. I therefore wired him straight back: “SORRY CANNOT COME STREHAIA—AM CALLED UP AT 21 INFANTRY REGIMENT AND FROM FRIDAY WILL BE AT MOGOSOAIA TRAINING CAMP—LETTER FOLLOWS.”
The letter did follow this morning. I wrote at length about everything that has happened to me, and since Mogosoaia is a kind of Donciéres for me, I asked him—as Marcel would have asked Saint-Loup—to approach Martha Bibescu and ask her for hospitality.
At the same time I rang Dumbrăveanu’s wife and told her about my military experiences. She promised to call the princess, and at four in the afternoon she rang me with the reply: “The princess is sorry, but as she has not received any officer in the castle, it would be hard for her to receive a soldier.”
So that’s it. Maybe she is right. Maybe my being a soldier strips me of any other quality. I am neither novelist nor critic nor playwright nor friend: I’m nothing, a soldier—and a soldier cannot be received in a castle. I force myself to understand, force myself not to feel slighted, force myself to accept that she is right, and yet I shall keep from this episode a painful sense of having been insulted.
In any case, I am just now sending Antoine Bibescu another telegram: “IF YOU RECEIVE LETTER I SENT TODAY I BEG YOU WRITE NOTHING TO PRINCESS MARTHA—HER SECRETARY TELLS ME ON PRINCESS’S BEHALF THAT I CANNOT BE RECEIVED AT MOGOSOAIA—I KNEW IT WAS MADNESS—THOUSAND PARDONS AND IN FRIENDSHIP AS EVER.”
With that, my little princely comedy has come to an end; I shall return to my fate as a commoner. Tomorrow morning I leave with my kitbag on my back.
What is terrible about my situation as a soldier is not the physical tiredness but the moral degradation. I would have to lose my pride as a human being for such a life to appear bearable. Anyone, absolutely anyone—my doorman, the humblest street sweeper or shopboy—counts for more than I do beneath these clothes, which at best arouse one’s pity.
I effectively joined the army only last Friday, but it feels as if ten days have already passed since then. How terribly long is a day that starts at four in the morning, with the rising of the sun! And especially, how endless is such a day when you spend it in the training grounds, running, throwing yourself down, jumping, taking imaginary objectives by assault, then falling to the ground in moments of rest, in a kind of brute stupefaction from which you would like never to awake.
I came back home on Friday night, and when I saw again my white room, my gleaming bathroom, my clean bed, the terrace, the bookshelves, the light, I felt I was returning from an infernal molelike existence to a free, dignified, magnificent life above ground.
I tell myself that millions of people, tens and hundreds of millions, normally live in conditions that seem to me quite hellish—in filth, in promiscuity, in physical and moral squalor, exhausted, famished, and ragged—and I tell myself that it is not a bad thing to encounter, at least on army exercises, a fate which, if it doesn’t make you better, at least makes you more skeptical, less sure of yourself, more modest.
I am beginning to understand why the poor cannot make revolutions. Physical degradation destroys the resources of human dignity. Revolt is then a luxury.
I haven’t written anything here about my last days on call-up. I haven’t been able to. When I return home at nine in the evening, I am completely wiped out. A hot bath and cold shower liven me up for a few minutes, but then I drop, unable to read a page before falling asleep.
I have two alarm clocks, set five minutes apart to eliminate the possibility of an accident. It would be a disaster if I were late one morning for roll call. Besides, I have timed with such exactitude my fitting operations and my journey to the North Station—where I meet five comrades each morning before traveling together by taxi to Mogosoaia—that I have gradually succeeded in gaining an extra forty minutes of sleep. Now I wake up at 4:55 on the dot, not at 4:15 as in the first couple of days.
Everything becomes mechanical, every movement habitual, routinized, automatic. I found so many things unbearable in the first few days, and now I am growing indifferent to them. The physical brutalization is stronger than any moral revulsion. Little by little you lose not only the power to resist but even the taste, the fancy, the urge. . . . You let yourself be overwhelmed and dragged along. The morass of vulgarity at first disgusts you, but then you sink into it without realizing when.
This morning in the tent—where, because of the rain, the whole of our third platoon had gathered to disassemble a t.B 1932 submachine gun—didn’t I too guffaw at Mălai Vasile’s obscene jokes? Doesn’t the stupid, never-changing dialogue between Private Spiegelmann and Private Crişan begin to amuse me too? How long would it take for me to become birds of a feather with them, to lose all pride and share everything really abject in barracks life, made up of pranks, dodges, bad jokes, and everyday misery endured without self-respect?
Yesterday I ate the food from the bucket, out of curiosity. Another day I might eat out of hunger—and then each day out of habit. Habit kills everything: disgust, dignity, the need to be alone.
I like being with people who don’t laugh: one such, Săgeată Iulian, always has a rather severe look on his face, and another, Răduelscu, a sad, disarmed expression that I find heartrending.
Starting from today, I shall be free every afternoon. This is a great favor, all the more surprising in that the regimental commander, Colonel Mardare, is said to be a stern disciplinarian. I don’t know to whom I owe this exceptional arrangement. He was told about me by Mişu Fotino8 (who brought him a theatre program with my photograph and “biography”: “Look who you’ve got here in the regiment!”), and by a Colonel Manolescu, who had himself been set up. Also, Antoine Bibescu’s telegrams—one sent direct to the colonel, another to me via the regiment—must have created something of a sensation. I don’t know what was in the one to the colonel, but mine sounds really over the top: “TO THE WRITER MIHAIL SEBASTIAN 21ST INF. REGT BUCHAREST—HAVE INTERCEDED WITH REGIMENTAL COMMAND TO GRANT YOU 60 HOURS LEAVE TO COME STREHAIA ON IMPORTANT MATTER—BIBESCU.”
At first the telegram both amused and frightened me; it was so unmilitary, so fanciful, and so venturesome. It must have done the rounds of the battalions before it came into my hands, open and read by all and sundry. But then I pondered that—at least from what I had been given to understand by the lieutenant and my captain—things did not have for them the importance I had assumed. In their eyes, all this remains “civilian matters,” “business between civilians.” The fact that I am a writer, that Antoine Bibescu is also a writer, doesn’t impress them at all; indeed, it arouses in them a slight feeling of contempt. Didn’t Lieutenant Neguti say the day before yesterday, while he was explaining the submachine gun, that what we do in the barracks is much more interesting than anything anyone might do in “civvy street”?
Another telegram today from Bibescu, delivered to my home this time: “WHY NOT COME TO CORCOVA FOR FEW DAYS? HAVE WIRED COLONEL 21ST MOGOSOAIA—BIBESCU.”
At the same time I received an envelope, also from him, containing just a telegram sent by Martha Bibescu from Mogosoaia to Strehaia: “SEBASTIAN INTROUVABLE MOGOSOAIA—TENDRE MARTHA.”9
I can’t say that this flood of telegrams doesn’t amuse me.
I think I’ll go to Strehaia on Saturday.
I am back from Corcova, where I stayed from Saturday evening until this morning. I think whole pages could be written about these two days. If I were not so tired, the pleasure of being lodged in the Bibescu household (albeit for such a short time) would certainly have been more intense. Elisabeth Bibescu is, without doubt, “somebody.” And her husband is interesting at least in Proustian terms and for “what goes on behind the literary and theatrical scenes in Paris.”
Maybe I’ll try after all to note something here about those days in Corcova. But only if the army leaves me in peace. Tomorrow morning at five I’ll be in Mogoşoaia-—a soldier again.
I cannot note here everything that happens day by day at the regiment. What makes an “army journal” almost impossible is the terrible physical tiredness. In the evening, when I get back from Mogoşoaia, I simply do not have it in me to write a few lines, nor even to pick up the receiver and telephone someone. Today is Sunday, and after a good night’s sleep (nearly nine hours), I am still more dead than alive. But I will try to write the review for Viaţa românească.
Sometimes in the morning, when I am running in fields with the kitbag on my back, panting, sweating, breathless, my heart ready to burst, I tell myself that death in war must be indescribably restful—a death that stops you short, a death that means you will no longer have to stir at the order: “Jump!,” a death that finally allows you to sleep . . .
There must be something incurably civilian inside me, which military people find irritating by instinct. Otherwise I cannot explain Lieutenant Neguti’s obvious dislike for me; it reminds me of the antipathy shown by Captain Keicik in 1932.
In principle I am supposed to have afternoons off (by written order of the colonel). But the lieutenant has done everything he can to cancel in practice this rather favorable dispensation. On Tuesday because of firing practice, on Wednesday because of night exercises, on Friday because of more night exercises, I had to stay the whole day (and night) in Mogosoaia. It seems, however, that the major has been ordered by the colonel to make sure I am free in the afternoon—which seems to have put the wind up Neguţi. Let’s hope I won’t have any incidents before discharge day.
I am quite good with a gun. On Tuesday morning, at Cotroceni, both my “random” fire and my “precision” fire were satisfactory. Just think, I felt a little proud!
On Wednesday morning I was on guard duty from six till one, at a bridge over Lake Mogosoaia. (I found it rather amusing that I was acting as sentry on the lands of Martha Bibescu. Twice her husband drove over the bridge, just a meter away from me.)
I don’t quite know what I was guarding there. (No one in the army quite knows what they are guarding.) Maybe I was guarding the lake and the forest from poachers. “Entering the forest, fishing and bathing strictly prohibited. Prince G. V. Bibescu.” What I find really amusing in that notice is the signature.
Seven hours of guard duty—that’s seven hours of loneliness, without a book in your hand, without writing paper, without the right to smoke, without the possibility of sitting down. I don’t know if I have ever felt the hours dissolve so slowly, pass me by and pass through me, then vanish somewhere into nothingness. I said to myself: it is the morning of 31 May 1939, six o’clock, seven o’clock, eight o’clock—this day, this hour, will never exist again.
To pass the time I tried to make a kind of recapitulation of my musical repertoire. I “mentally” searched for the phrases lodged in my memory. But at that time I was unable to recollect the short phrase in Schumann’s cello concerto that had followed me for a whole year.
In fact, my memory for music is execrable. The only thing I know reasonably well is the Kleine nachtmusik. Sometimes I can recall a few motifs from the piano concerto I gave Leni for the New Year. Also a phrase from The Marriage of Figaro. That’s all I remember from all my Mozart. As to Beethoven, I think I accurately know only two themes from the violin concerto, a phrase from the Kreutzer Sonata and one from the Ninth Symphony (associated with a typical gesture of Georgescu’s that helps me recall it). Otherwise, only isolated fragments that come to me quite by chance, and which I never know where to place. From Bach, a single aria from the St. Matthew Passion and the beginning of the violin concerto in A; the rest is lost in oblivion. Strangely enough, I feel the presence of certain pieces (for example, Franck’s Sonata or the beginning of his Symphonic Variations, Reger’s Variations on a Theme by Mozart, Schumann’s Fourth Symphony, Brahms’s Violin Concerto, or Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole). It is as if I see their outline, their contours, their shape—yet it is impossible for me to recall them.
At yesterday’s medical visit (an anti-tetanus jab I couldn’t get out of ), a second lieutenant from another company called me over and, quite irregularly, introduced himself first:
“I am a reserve officer. By profession I am a schoolteacher, in Sibiu. I have read your work for many years. I am happy to meet you; please allow me to shake your hand and congratulate you.”
I listened all the while standing at attention. I was more embarrassed than happy. I have begun to distinguish almost instinctively between my civilian life and my army life—and this incident seemed to confuse the two.
A lot could be said about the men in my company. The ones I like most are simple people not on special reduced-length service: Sergeant Plăcintă Gheorghe, for example. Those who irritate me, on the other hand, are the ones known by the almost regulation term “Bucharesters”: that is, smart kids, always talking and joking, with more than a little guile. (Guile is the only basis of distinction in the barracks.)
I still wonder what Antoine Bibescu wants from me. Maybe he thinks I could be a kind of agent for his plays in Romania; that I could place them and get them performed. The day before last, when I dined with him and his wife at the Capşa, he almost suggested ceding me all royalties on a play of his, Jeux d'enfants (“et de vous intéresser aussi à sa carriere européenne’1), if I would agree to translate it and place it with someone like Sicâ. I agreed in principle to translate it—but I firmly rejected his monetary proposals.
Anyway, I think he is completely wrong about my potential as an “agent.” He doesn’t know how lacking I am in contacts and influence, nor, above all, how little the theatre interests me. I am all too well aware that his friendly overtures (nearly every day I receive from him a message, a book, an invitation . . . ) represent not an intellectual interest but an interest tout court—though I don’t yet know exactly what it is. His offer to get my “Proust’s Correspondence” published in the Nouvelle revue française may therefore be no more than a tactical act of friendliness out of which nothing is likely to come.
Nevertheless, for someone defter than I am, someone more enterprising and more adroit (for I am disastrously maladroit), relations with the Bibescu household could well be of practical interest.
I am a civilian again. But my last day on call-up was so irksome that it cast a pall of loathing and disgust over the whole period. I had no idea that the “handing over of weapons” could become a tragedy. There I was, already in civilian clothes in the regimental yard, walking with weapon in hand from the company to the armory and back again, dozens of times, to convince either the major in charge of the armory or the lieutenant that the rifle barrel was not rusty and could be “taken back.” When I left there, I no longer had the strength to whistle with relief. From the whole business I shall preserve a sense of misery and decay. Nor can I at least say that I am glad to be back in my civilian life. I am completely penniless, alone (I don’t see or want to see anyone), with no desire to work or do anything. Who knows, maybe a few days of Balcic could put me back on my feet.
On Sunday I was at Grozăveşti—in Romanati—for the funeral of poor General Condiescu.2 It is so hard to accept the death of someone I have known. And the passage from life to death always seems to me so absurd, so disarming!
I owe quite a lot to the general—including my position at the Foundation, which doesn’t help me live but doesn’t let me die. So many other people, rich or poor, who claim to be my friends (Roman, Blank, Ralea, Bibescu . . .) have done nothing for me, whereas “Squire” Nicu—perhaps in memory of the Cuvântul years, perhaps out of real literary sympathy (as he often said)—always made me feel I could rely on him. Now that he’s gone, I feel great affection for that honest, sentimental man, a little muddled but kind and upright.
From Grozăveşti I went with Rosetti and Camil to Cîmpulung, where we stayed the night. On Monday morning we drove up the Rîul Tîrgului valley to the foot of the Iezer. We were in the middle of the forest, alone, with the odor of fir trees around us and no sound other than the water. I wished I could stay there and never return.
Serious money problems. I don’t know how I’ll solve them, how I’ll pay the rent, where I’ll find the money to go off somewhere and write.
A fortnight ago, Suchianu told me that Nae Ionescu had “begged” Armand Calinescu to grant him an audience,3 and that, when he was given one, he “threw himself on his knees” and asked pardon for all he had done.
The story sounded idiotic, and I didn’t even bother to remember it.
But now I have heard through Mircea that Nae was indeed in Bucharest, that he did have a very heated conversation with Armand, though Armand apparently remained quite calm and restrained, whereas Nae lost control of himself. They were due to have another talk the next day, but it was canceled on orders from above and Nae was actually sent back to Ciuc during the night. At the moment he is in Brasov, in the hospital.
I can’t be sure where the truth lies. But what I gather from all this is that the poor professor—far from calmly awaiting “the unfolding of events” (which would have meant that he still believed in his destiny)— is struggling to find a way out of the impasse in which he finds himself.
How terrible is that man’s fate. I can’t help thinking very often about him.
Two days in Balcic. I came back yesterday evening. For two days at least I was able to think about nothing, to forget that I am broke, to forget my rent, the landlord, and so on.
But now I am back, I wonder how I can escape this tight corner. I shudder at every sound of the lift, every footstep in the hall outside: is it not perhaps the landlord, or the doorman, or someone from the block administration, to demand the rent that fell due yesterday?
I would need to find fifty thousand lei—but from where? from where?
I am very lonely. I haven’t seen Zoe for a week, and my mind is made up not to see her again. She rang this morning, but I think she will understand and give up. It’s better for both of us—and in any event it’s better for her.
Leni left yesterday morning, while I was away in Balcic. Anyway, we hadn’t met at all over the past month. There is no longer any talk of love between us.
I’m not sad. I am lonely. I don’t expect anyone, or anything. To feel I am doing something, I read Sadoveanu with the thought of writing the first chapter of my critical work for the Foundation. I don’t even know whether I shall write it; or even whether I shall read all the books I have collected. Time is passing, passing—and nothing more can happen in my life.
Plagued with money troubles. (I made some 25,000 lei last week, with God knows what fretting, what anxiety, what rushing around, but, of course, hardly anything is left of it and I haven’t even paid the rent in fall.)
I am exhausted, as in my worst days in the past. My eyes worry me, in particular. I can’t read for more than half an hour without a tired feeling in them.
I am overwhelmed with things that I let drag on and am unable to complete; there are a thousand intricate matters at court (including an appeal deadline that out of indolence I let slip—I don’t make a good lawyer!); a host of things to be written for the Foundation, for Viaţa,4 for Muncă şi voie-bună, for Independent—all postponed from day to day; and a mass of urgent reading that frightens me. Rarely have I felt more shattered, more drained, more gloomy.
And yet, amid the giddiness of the past two weeks, I feel literary projects bursting out almost in spite of myself, ever more necessary, ever more imperious.
Since I have been reading Sadoveanu (only five volumes so far, unfortunately), my book on the Romanian novel has begun to be more than a chore. I am sure it will be a pleasure to write. But when?
Accidentul cannot go on being a problem. I must either finish it during a month’s holiday or else give it up forever. It’s absurd to think that this little book has kept me at a standstill for two and a half years. I had no right to invest so much time and nervous tension in a book which, without any play on words, is becoming a kind of personal “accident.”
I feel this all the more sharply now that I can glimpse a major novel of many hundred pages, with many characters and a broad compass. On Sunday I kept thinking of this book as I climbed Piatra Mare (a moment of intense emotion at the Seven Steps), and now, when I am in the street or on a streetcar, I see all kinds of incidents that branch out and join together.
1) Margit/director Hellmann—departure from Oradea, car journey through Romania—nights in hotels in various provincial towns. A stay in the Pension Wagner. Rendezvous, departure for Gheorghieni.
2) An actress—the Lilly type, but with the reputation of Marioara Voiculescu. In love with a young man, a shady character. Scenes at theatrical rehearsals. Departure on tour. They are due to meet in a certain town. The boy doesn’t show up. In despair she goes to Bucharest, searches for him, abandons the tour.
3) The young man in love with Margit has secluded himself in the Pension Wagner for political reasons. (You can see Georoceanu’s ascent in Cristianul Mare, when the police were looking for him in Brasov.)
Scorching days, stifling nights. I won’t leave Bucharest even for a day, because I want to go away for a whole month next Saturday (probably to Stîna de Vale), and until then I shall spend every free hour on a translation I am doing for Biblioteca Energia. It’s a biography of Lincoln, not too big, not too hard, but it goes rather slowly. Still, I translate without difficulty, and I am almost no longer surprised at what might be some kind of record: to be a translator from English after just six months. Once again Rosetti was my savior. The ten-thousand-lei advance on the translation helped me pay off part of the rent, and the final fifteen thousand lei—for which I shall ask even if I don’t finish everything by Friday—will take care of the month’s holiday.
My health is worrying, unstable, full of strange turns. A sustained effort of a few hours is enough to wipe me out. Yesterday evening, when I went out at nine (in this deserted, sun-baked Bucharest), I felt at my last gasp. Fortunately I had eight hours’ sleep—the first such night since I don’t remember when.
I ought to ask a doctor, but I don’t have the courage. Maybe in the autumn, if I somehow get to Paris.
Since I have had Mozart’s Concerto in A-flat here with me (Leni left it when she went away), it has become daily more beautiful. The andantino is one of the purest, saddest, and most limpid pieces in the whole of music.
Yesterday afternoon Petrica from Brăila came to offer me—just imagine!—a “deal” from which I could make 30,000 to 35,000 lei. While waiting for a telephone call, I put on the Mozart concerto for him—and since we both felt moved as we listened, I suddenly glimpsed a possible scene in my future novel: a businessman, precise, exacting, and unscrupulous, but also very intelligent and sensitive, makes a strike, and as he waits (the waiting should be intense, maybe full of risks or even dangerous, but apparently calm) he plays some Bach on the gramophone.
The hero could be a kind of Mihail Mircea, with elements of Wieder and Blank—if I don’t use Blank for a completely different character.
Moreover, since I was talking with Petrica yesterday about Judge Doiciu, I thought of creating room in my novel for a great legal tussle, which might even form the pivot of the action. Doiciu could then serve as my model for a certain type of judge.
But the possibility of war still impinges on all this. It may even break out in August, though by now we are too tired to await it in a state of alarm.
On Thursday evening I had a meal in a garden restaurant on Strada Calarasi with Mircea, Nina, and Giza. It was like the best times of old.
In a deserted Bucharest, depopulated, shuttered, burnt by invisible white flames, I translate and translate.
Last night, with all the doors and windows flung wide open, there was not the faintest breath, not the most distant murmur in the whole house or perhaps the whole city.
And yet I manage to keep going. I even feel fresher than I did a while ago—maybe it’s the thought of leaving at the end of the week that encourages me.
I didn’t leave Bucharest: I fled. After a day of rushing around, I packed in fifteen minutes, jumped into a taxi with my suitcases not properly closed and my overcoat and gabardine fluttering behind me, arrived at the station two minutes before the train’s departure, and raced madly to my carriage (followed by the porters, who picked up everything I dropped: one my left glove, the other my right). When the train pulled out I felt completely dazed. I couldn’t believe I had made it.
Last night I slept nine hours, without waking up once. When did such a miracle happen to me last? Of course, I still don’t feel rested. How many nights will I need to catch up on my sleep and become normal again? For the moment I am incapable not only of writing but even of thinking about writing. In principle I shall allow myself a week of holiday. Then we’ll see.
This morning I went for a trip in the mountains with Comşa. We walked for nearly five hours, up to some rocky peaks that the local papists have named Golgotha, but which must be called something else by the peasants.
My room is clean, white, and luminous, with a view over the whole glade that constitutes Stîna de Vale proper. “You have a room with a fine view,” said the boy who helped me move my things from Room 47 (where I slept last night) to Room 43 (where I’ll be from now on). Beate Fredanov is staying in Room 45—an honest, pleasant girl who won’t get in my way, I hope. The road from Stîna de Vale station up to here is served by an indescribable “shuttle bus.” There is also a forest train, which is worth every penny.
I am still on holiday. After a few exploratory walks (Aria Vulturului, Muncei Custuri), and after a longer trip to Golgotha, I went on a proper excursion yesterday to the source of the Somes, or rather to Cetatea Redesii, a huge cave through which the Some? passes still warm. I left at seven in the morning (with Fredanov, Comşa, and Furnarache) and returned at eight in the evening—ten hours of walking, three of rest. It is a splendid region, where each turn of a corner opens up new countryside, different mountains, valleys, and forests.
Some color is coming back into my face, my eyes are less tired, and my brow looks less of a wreck than when I arrived.
But the deadline is approaching for me to start work—and I feel the first signs of fear.
Tomorrow morning sees the start of my work schedule. I think I am sufficiently rested. But I would like to be on my own: Fredanov and Comşa are both very pleasant, but I need to be alone. Today I read everything I have written up to now. The number of pages, and their density, mean that I can consider myself past the halfway mark.
As for the rest, we shall see.
Two and a half pages written. It’s true that I worked only three to four hours in all. I am too exhausted: I find it hard to pull myself together and concentrate. As always, it is difficult to get going.
Very slow, very difficult, very unsatisfactory. Some three and a half pages in six hours of work, none of them at all interesting.
But I have to be patient.
Yesterday evening I listened to the general staff communiqué on the radio and suddenly felt that nothing matters any more. There will be large-scale mobilizations and, judging by the tension over Danzig, there could be war.
I had a difficult evening and a troubled night—a kind of disgust or weariness at being human. This morning, however, I am again at my desk. At all costs the novel must be finished.
Yesterday evening I had a real “anxiety attack,” and I don’t think I was the only one. The whole hotel seemed in a state of apprehension. The news is bad. There will be a coup in Danzig over the next few days, and war could break out this very month. The communiqués of the general staff, which I hear every evening on the radio, have something alarming about them.
We are a long way from all that is happening there; it is as if we were on a ship—and the panic is all the greater for it.
Late yesterday I listened to the Ninth Symphony and the Third Brandenburg Concerto, not only with emotion linked to the music, but above all with a sense of sadness at all the things we are losing in the most stupid, criminal, and demented manner.
And I continue writing. It is still heavy going. Yesterday was a long rainy day, in which I worked for more than seven hours (I didn’t time myself exactly), and all I got out of it was a little over four pages. I am arduously climbing up to Gunther’s chalet, where I still don’t quite know what awaits me. But things will become clearer, if I have the time.
Evening
Six and a half hours of work, five pages written. I am beginning to work more normally, but I must point out again that this “normality” is a poor yield. I ought to get a move on, but I am incapable. I am arduously climbing up to the chalet. The action is brief, with no possible incidents (Nora and Paul climb up from Poiana to S.K.V.—that’s all), but I feel the need to write at a slow, relaxed pace, to make the distance greater between what they leave below and what they will find above. Nothing is more difficult than to indicate the passing of time, if you do not refer to any particular incidents. For all my complaints, however, I shall be able to work and reach the end, so long as I am left in peace. Gunther— completely unknown up to now, because I haven’t gone near him—is beginning to take shape, though not yet enough. He is still in shadow.
Only three pages written. (I have finally reached the chalet—or at least its threshold.) It’s only 5:30 and I should certainly go on working for a couple of hours, but I am too tired. I’ll go for a short walk, maybe to the Aria Vulturului, and try tomorrow to make up these hours spent “playing truant.” Then I should finish this eighth chapter, which I already have clearly defined in my head. I am looking forward to it with impatience, curiosity, and a lot of sympathy for Gunther.
Five pages written—but the chapter is still not finished. Here I am stopping work at seven, though I ought to see through to the end this chapter that I can already see so clearly, and that I feel at this moment so clearly and intensely. But I am tired. I don’t congratulate myself at all on the state of my health. I really must take it seriously and go to see an eye specialist. Someone in robust health would not get up from his desk—whether it took ten hours, twenty, or a hundred—until he had finished writing everything he could see with precision. As I advance, things become clearer, more precise, and more substantial. Gunther is stepping more and more into the light. But I still haven’t got to him.
On my evening walk (to Muncei), I met a shepherd from Meziad and started chatting with him. I ought to find the time to record what he said to me. It was disturbing for what it revealed about “the human condition,” simply but also with a certain pathos.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll go on an “excursion” to Meziad—a diversion, if you like, from my work schedule, but I may come back feeling refreshed.
I was convinced that I would finish Chapter Eight today at least—since I wasted the whole of yesterday in Meziad—but now I am wasting today as well, along with five and a half working hours. For I must abandon the two pages I wrote this morning, as well as the half-page I wrote this afternoon. I was very pleased with them, and everything seemed to be going well (I even said to myself that I’d write four or five pages to make up for yesterday’s break), but then I suddenly realized that I was on a false path and had to turn back. The whole section was misdirected.
Nora should set off at night on skis, in a kind of desperate state of giddiness. Only then does Gunther’s chalet become a miracle, a salvation. In the version I wrote this morning she was calm and composed as she put on her skis and thought of the next day. But at that moment there is no “next day” for Nora. Unless I grasp that, I’ll botch the whole passage and risk giving an artificial tone to the encounter with Gunther. I shouldn’t forget that the whole episode with Gunther has something artificial, and that I need infinite tact if the somewhat literary, somewhat “made-up” character is not to become thoroughly phony.
But none of this will redeem my further lost day. So little time is left until the end of the month, and it scares me, yes, scares me, to think that I might leave here without having finished it.
I have eliminated yesterday’s two pages and replaced them with another two that I wrote this morning, which seem much closer to the mark. But I have been at a standstill for the last hour, unable to move forward. The resistance is stupid and incomprehensible. The whole scene seems to me clear and straightforward: it shouldn’t be difficult to write. Yet difficulties appear without rhyme or reason, just where I expect them least.
I am not happy with my morning. It rained—a dull persistent rain that I gladly welcome because it keeps me indoors, gives me a taste for work and creates quiet in the hotel—and yet all these favorable conditions were not much help.
I’ll go down to lunch and wait and see what I’ll do this afternoon.
Evening
I have worked from three o’clock until now—that is, a quarter to eight. I have finished the chapter. I wanted to finish it at all costs. I don’t know how it has worked out. I feel a little dazed. Maybe I’ll see more clearly tomorrow.
It doesn’t work, no, it doesn’t work. I don’t mean the chapter that I finished yesterday (having reread it today, I find it acceptable and anyway won’t go back over it). I mean the new chapter, the ninth, which I was due to start today. It is stuck and simply won’t budge, though at least the first part seems clear and—or so I thought—simple.
The weather is ideal for writing: rain, the forest hidden from sight, the whole hotel slumbering, perfect quiet. Yet here I have been, from nine in the morning until five in the evening, trying to open the same chapter, starting dozens of sentences, erasing, replacing, and going back over them, deleting them again, incapable of moving a single step forward.
I am disgusted. I don't mean to say that I am losing heart. I realize that the only thing that can still see me through to the end of this wretched book is stubbornness—I mustn’t let go of that, at least.
Gunther’s chalet (in which Nora finally settled yesterday) is becoming a stage set. I realized this fifteen minutes ago, and in the space of fifteen minutes I feel I have sketched a whole play in my head that I could sit down and write immediately. I see things so precisely that I have already distributed the roles.
Gunther is called Gunther Grodeck (I don’t know if I’ll keep the name in the novel, but I probably will in the play, if I write it). He can be played by Tomazoglu. He doesn’t have a fair complexion, nor is he as young or does he have the same childlike beauty as Gunther—but he does have the character’s intensity of feeling. Grodeck Senior can be played by Bulfinski, and Hagen by Storin. The whole drama unfolds between those three. A girl too is involved, but she is not Nora. The Gunther episode, insofar as it is capable of becoming a play, will deviate completely from the novel. The starting point is all they have in common.
Grodeck Senior is a big industrialist. But the fortune is his wife’s, who has been dead for two years, and all or most of it will be inherited by Gunther. Gunther is still a minor: he will be twenty-one in March. He has gone to live high up in the mountains and wants to remain there. He is waiting to come of age so that he can take possession of the fortune and put a stop to his father’s exploitation of the forest for lumber. I am not yet quite sure of the reasons for this decision. The basis is a terrible hostility toward his father, who may not even be his real father. Then there is the mysterious Hagen (mysterious for me too). Was he the lover of the deceased Mrs. Grodeck? Perhaps. In any case, he was the only person with whom the young woman was on good terms in the Grodeck family—she who had come from distant parts (maybe the Austrian Tyrol) to a Saxon settlement in Sibiu or Brasov.
These are the characters. I don’t really know yet what will happen to them. But I can feel them with every nerve, so strongly that I think I need only set off to find my way through to the end.
I wanted to write this note now (at eleven in the morning), in order to get it off my chest. I felt that otherwise I would not be able to continue working on the novel.
As regards the novel, I have recovered from the depressing breakdown of the day before yesterday. I went out in the rain, furious with myself, with the book, with everything, and walked as far as Bäita and back, along the road to the general store—a trip of some two hours. I tried to put some order into this ninth chapter and divided it into three distinct scenes, precisely to mark out the ground for the next day. Then the name Hagen came into my mind (Götterdämmerung), and I suddenly saw a whole new character come into being. I could feel that there would be any number of secrets in Gunther’s chalet. Everything, it seems, was triggered by the name Hagen—his looks, his clothing, his behavior, even his still not completely clear life story.
Yesterday I wrote five pages. What I’ll manage today, I don’t know. I really ought to finish the chapter, and would if I were serious.
Last night I dreamed of myself off at war. We were attacking an enemy patrol, which fired at us from a kind of house—or shop, rather—with its doors and windows shut. We followed every movement they made, separated from them by only a few meters.
The dream ran on from yesterday’s troubled evening. A long conversation with Longhin5 (recently made president of the Court of Appeal, having been provisional secretary-general at the Justice Ministry) frightened me. It seems that last week there was a real war atmosphere in Bucharest. Germany sent a sharply worded demand for an explanation of our troop mobilization. Armand wired the King on his cruise ship. France and Britain warned that war might break out not in Danzig but through a Hungarian attack on ourselves. By Friday evening the catastrophe appeared imminent. Longhin, who was just preparing to leave for Stîna de Vale, was told by Iamandi to stay where he was. The next day, however, things calmed down and he was able to leave. But no one knows anything, and everything—même le pire6—seems possible.
Maybe it is madness on my part to remain here in the forest writing literature. But these things are too dear to me. If I die in the war, I’d like it not to be before I have finished the book. It’s nothing much really, I know it’s nothing very much, but when I am immersed in it I feel that these characters—Nora, Paul, Gunther, Hagen—are alive. I wouldn’t want to lose them, at least not before reaching the end of their story and putting it somewhere secure (in a safe, for example).
Evening
I have finished Chapter Nine. Four pages yesterday, three and a half today. I must confess that I haven’t been assiduous enough, attentive enough. Yesterday I kept daydreaming about the play, drawing up the cast list, going over and over the same things. It took a great effort to break from this “reverie” and force myself to remain with the novel.
Today the play (which weighed on me yesterday like some pressing matter) has moved into the distance. Ah! if only thinking were enough to see things in literature! The misfortune is that you also have to write; that’s where the agony begins.
Concerning Chapter Nine, I was happier with the first part than I am with the pages I wrote today. Gunther will certainly be an interesting character, but also, I fear, a little “artificial,” a little “too obvious.” I can see him—or, rather, am beginning to see him—very well. But that may not protect him from a certain degree of unreality (which wouldn’t harm him and may even be necessary), as well as from a visibly literary kind of fictitiousness.
I find it amusing to think of the little details that gave birth to Gunther—and of how different he has turned out from what I envisaged. The one who first made me think of him was Margit from Ghilcoş, who told me of a winter she once spent ill, on a chaise longue, at the Wagner villa. Then there was the inscription I found high on the Schuller, in memory of a Saxon boy (Walter Maschendorfer?) who died at the age of sixteen. Then there was Blecher—though I thought of him more in order to avoid any resemblance to my hero. Gunther’s name I took from one of the children who went up the mountains in July 1937. And now see how strange and unexpected is the person who emerges from all this.
It may be that Gunther interests me too much. For I risk shifting my attention from the book’s main story to what should be no more than an episode. In any event, I tell myself, I must begin tomorrow to return to Paul, whom I have left rather abandoned. I am afraid of losing him now, just toward the end.
I won’t escape from this play until I have written it. Again today I wasted a huge amount of time thinking about it. It’s possible that I could write it over the winter, to be performed in February/March. There could be a role for Mme. Bulandra. (I’ll call her Aunt Augusta.) But I am afraid that, if I do write in such a part, it will detract from the role of Grodeck Senior. One of them will have to represent the “Grodeck spirit” with profundity, severity, and intolerance. And I can easily see the graceful phantom of the young Mrs. Grodeck (Gunther’s deceased mother) floating over the whole play.
What I don’t see yet is what will happen to the girl who goes into Gunther’s chalet, at the beginning of Act One. Similarly, I don’t know whether the whole drama will unfold up there in the chalet, or whether it will come down to Sibiu or Brasov (where the “Grodeck factories” are located) in the second part. If it does, the play might have four acts.
The first two acts are almost clear. The first is the “winter evening” of the novel (Chapter Nine), evidently with certain alterations due to the fact that the emphasis now falls on Gunther, not on people from outside. The second act, set a few days later, will be the arrival of Grodeck Senior; it too will become clearer as the novel progresses. After that, the direction is open. . . .
As to the novel, I am very dissatisfied with myself. Not even three pages in a whole day: that’s inadmissible. I don’t blame myself for the fact that these two and a half pages are completely and utterly uninteresting. The Good Lord is the one who decides that. But I cannot forgive myself for having written so little.
Time is passing, young man. You must understand that. You must understand that in Bucharest you won’t have these long free days, free from dawn till dusk.
A German-Soviet nonaggression pact!
I feel it as a stunning blow. The whole course of world politics has suddenly changed. Just try to grasp, from Stîna de Vale with newspapers three days old, what is happening in the world!
Last night and early this morning I struggled to put some order into the chaos of my papers. If the present European chess game were a stage play, one would consider that the plot had been excellently handled. The Russians are settling accounts, a year late, for what was done at Munich—and they are settling them with the other side of the coin. Everything is perfectly symmetrical. In September 1938 Britain and France came to an understanding with Hitler, over the head of Russia and against it. In August 1939 Russia comes to an understanding with Hitler, over the heads of France and Britain—and against them. In September 1938 the immediate price was Hitler’s pocketing of Czechoslovakia. Now it is Danzig. Nothing is lacking for Act Two to resemble Act One, with roles reversed. But it is hard to judge things just from the point of view of dramatic construction. The Russians haven’t made their move only for the sake of its technical beauty.
So then?
So then, I have no idea. Will France, Britain, and Poland maintain their opposition over Danzig? If they do, there will most likely be a war, because I can’t see why Hitler should go back on his firm stand on Danzig, now that he knows he is covered on the Russian flank. Will they give up their opposition? Then Danzig will become German in two, three, or five days—and Hitler will immediately, automatically, start turning the screws on Bucharest. In that case I think the whole of southeast Europe will fall.
Where am I in all this? The hotel is in a state of disorder. Everyone is leaving, or talks of leaving. Longhin is in a panic and wants to catch the train this very day. The lady in Room 44 has received a telegram for her to hurry back to Bucharest. By tomorrow the hotel will be empty of people from the capital. I cut an absurd figure, of course, with my manuscript, but it is so hard for me to drop it and leave!
Yesterday I wrote all day (a little over six pages). I keep at my desk, but I don’t rule out the possibility that I will decide to leave in five minutes’ time, if the news somehow grows worse.
Just after I wrote the last note, I went downstairs to ring Rosetti and ask him for some political news. I didn’t get much (“easing of tension,” he says, but I’ve no idea what that means), but he did tell me to return to Bucharest. Comarnescu has been called up, and they have urgent need of me at the Revistă. I’ll leave tomorrow at one and be in Bucharest by Friday morning.
I am quite simply desolated. I’m sick of this novel, which I now have to interrupt without knowing when I can return to it. I’ll try to finish Chapter Ten today, so that it won’t be left completely up in the air.
Evening
No, I didn’t manage to finish the chapter. I didn’t even write three pages (pretty awful ones at that), though I kept at work all morning and afternoon. I am too agitated, too anxious. This is not how I wanted to be leaving here. In Bucharest I’ll make a balance sheet of these seventeen days of writing. I’ll try not to lose hold of the novel, and do everything possible to start work again soon and see it through to a satisfactory conclusion.
In the evening, a farewell walk to Muncei. I wish I could have been alone, but even so I return from there feeling a little emotional. Tomorrow I’ll spend a few hours in Cluj, then catch the evening train to Bucharest.
I realize that it will be hard for me to work regular hours here in Bucharest. The Foundation, Roman’s office, the restaurants, the telephone are stronger than my desire to be alone.
Yesterday I had dinner at the Continental with Rosetti, Camil, and Lassaigne;7 and today lunch (also at the Continental) with Soare, Corin, Camil, and Carol. Black coffee with Vişoianu, Titubei, Mrs. Ralea, and Mrs. Bratescu-Voinesti. This evening I am invited—I don’t know why— to Alice Theodorian’s. Things can go on like this forever unless I stop in time.
I’ll lose the novel if I let it slip away from me now—and I won’t have any excuses. No excuse other than war. . . I still have the feeling that it won’t break out, though in that case the Germans will have carried off another Munich-style victory—one that we will be the first to pay for.
How great it was at Stîna de Vale! In fact I could have remained there, because there was nothing at all at the Foundation that needed to be done urgently. But when I think of it, maybe it was rather light-minded or even irresponsible to stay hidden in a mountain gorge in these terrible days.
On Monday evening war seemed inevitable. Yesterday peace seemed possible. This morning things are again confused. Will Hitler give way? Or is a last-minute betrayal being prepared in London? Are we heading for another Munich? Personally, when I look calmly at what is happening, I think that Hitler has pushed his blackmail to the limit and that, if Britain resists, he will back down a split second later. Rationally speaking, I have thought continually over the last few days that there will be peace (through a rebuff to Berlin). “Rational!” The word doesn’t have much weight. There is a “margin” of the unknown, a limit beyond which things are more powerful than the will and initiative of human beings.
If I had a radio, I’d listen to music. A lot of Bach, a lot of Mozart—only that can save me from anguish.
“Mon roman cesse de m’interesser lorsque je cesse d’y travailler, ”8 Gide noted, at a time when he was working without much inclination on Uecole des femmes. Yesterday evening I came across this phrase by chance (I was cutting the pages of Volume 15 of his Oeuvres completes), and I felt it as a warning. If I don’t get straight back to my manuscript, I shall lose it.
A gloomy letter from Poldy, who has enlisted as a volunteer and probably gone off already.
Rosetti rang to tell me that Danzig was annexed this morning. War starts today. It may have begun already.
I don’t know where I have found the terrible calm that I feel in this hour.
Strange days of war. The first moment was overwhelming: when the first dispatches appeared yesterday morning about the bombing of Warsaw, I felt that everything was crashing down. I quickly wrote a letter to Poldy, not even knowing whether it would reach him, but feeling a need to say something, to embrace him and offer my best wishes. But I didn’t have it in me to finish the letter; I couldn’t find a word that said everything. I had an intense and painful feeling of farewell—and broke into tears alone.
Lunch at the Capşa (Rosetti, Ralea, Vişoianu, Camil, Lassaigne, Comamescu, Pastorel,9 Steriadi,1 Oprescu,2 Cantacuzino3) seemed lugubrious. People laughed, cracked jokes—and I couldn’t understand how such thoughtlessness was possible. All day and all evening (right up to three o’clock), I went about trying to find more news—but it was all vague and strangely lacking in precision, realism, and evidence. The bombing reported by both the Germans and the Poles seems to be an invention. At the present moment, though thirty-six hours of what seemed like “the beginning of war” have passed, the war may not yet have actually started. The French and British are still at the stage of diplomatic notes (though Chamberlain’s speech yesterday seemed to burn all the bridges).
Everything is confused and uncertain, still not started, still not decided. What I find completely implausible is this brightly lit Bucharest, animated and filled with people, with packed restaurants and lively streets, a Bucharest at best curious about what is happening but not panic-stricken and not aware that a tragedy has begun.
I don’t know how to pass the time. If I had a radio, I’d listen to news and music.
Yesterday morning I forced myself to read some manuscripts for the Foundation, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. But I was suddenly seized by the thought that these might be my last hours of liberty, or even of life, and that it was absurd to waste them in this way. I went into town, feeling dazed and disoriented.
In the afternoon I began writing out again the first part of Chapter Five—but then I dropped that too. One book more or less: what can it matter now?
The whole of today I waited for something decisive to clarify the situation. But nothing is heard from anywhere. So here I’ll be this evening, alone at home reading André Gide’s journal and probably turning in early.
All this on the 2nd of September 1939.
Yesterday morning at eleven Britain declared war on Germany. At five in the afternoon came France’s declaration of war. So far, however, there does not seem to have been any military engagement. Are they still waiting for something? Is it possible (as some say) that Hitler will immediately fall and be replaced by a military government, which will then settle for peace? Could there be radical changes in Italy? Are they waiting for Italy’s neutrality to be made clear? Or will Italy be forced to follow behind Germany? What will Russia do? What’s happening to the Axis, about which there is suddenly silence in both Rome and Berlin?
A thousand questions that leave you gasping for breath, and that you would like to have cleared up at once. I rush around, make telephone calls, ask questions, thrash about, keep turning things over in my mind. I should get a grip on myself and wait calmly for events to unfold, without hysterics, without despair.
I’ll try to stay in, to work, read and write, to reflect alone, with clearheaded resignation, on all that is happening. Above all, I must not complain. Above all, I must not go mad with anxiety.
Let’s take everything with sadness, but also with self-respect.
For the moment all is quiet on the western front. In Poland the Germans are continuing their advance; no one seems to be resisting them. The Polish communiqués strike me as downhearted. No one knows what will happen in Romania. The most terrible stories and predictions are whispered around. Yesterday there was one devilish hour at the Foundation. Lassaigne, who had just been at the French embassy, told us that we were at the point of going to war alongside France. Germany is demanding all our grain and all our oil! France and Britain want to land troops in Constanta! But we won’t accept either one or the other! That’s war for you.
I don’t know what to believe. I come home dazed and disoriented, filled with anxiety. What is certain is that I won’t be at my desk for much longer. I’m bound to be in the army soon. Big call-ups are taking place all the time, and people say this will lead to a general mobilization in all but name. For the moment I am not in one of the categories on today’s call-up list. But it can’t be ruled out that the general staff will issue another communiqué, from one day to the next.
I wait. And while waiting I do all kinds of things without enthusiasm, without perseverance. I ought to make a decision: either to read a long book, or to settle down to a translation for the Foundation, or to continue work on Accidentul—so that I finally stick at something in an orderly way. Yesterday evening I tried to read a Dostoevsky novel, but then I gave it up to read some Thomas de Quincey in English, and ended by again writing out the beginning of Chapter One—most reluctantly, however, because the version I reconstituted two years ago seems to me extraordinarily stupid.
Camil Petrescu asked me to suggest that Rosetti arrange an interview with Ralea and Armand, about a question of “capital” importance. He intends to leave the National Theatre and take charge of the technical side of our anti-aircraft defense. He is convinced that only he can save us from disaster. He refused to divulge his plans to me—but he is determined to lay them before the prime minister, or perhaps even the King. He also told me that he has close links to the general staff of the Second Corps, and that any military operations of ours in Dobrogea will follow his instructions.
I listened to him and am unsure what attitude to take. Sometimes I’m afraid I will burst out laughing; sometimes I ask myself with sudden concern whether he has not gone off his head. And, beyond all that, there is the most amusing possibility of all: that he is right.
The mornings are bearable, but the nights are difficult, full of apprehension, poisoned by foreboding. Yesterday I felt deep inside me that this life is over, that I’ll have to abandon everything beyond recall. I don’t know if I’ll die or not, but I do know that when I go off to war it will completely change my life, and that any return will not be a real “turning back.”
I [don’t] think I am reconciled to it.
I leave this evening for the recruitment center in Brăila, to put my military papers in order. Very many of those called up for service in May have received individual orders. It’s quite probable that I am among them.
It seems that I haven’t been called up yet. I am part of that mysteriously safe category “D.i”—which in March, too, left me as a civilian. Obviously my liberty is only provisional and revocable; obviously I can be called up from one day to the next, and in the event of a general mobilization (which I think likely), no letter on earth could save me (and I wouldn’t want it to). But for now, the fact is that I remain at liberty. Never has a “for now” been more precarious and more treasured.
Things have been continuing in the same way. The Germans advance in Poland while the French and the British stay where they are. Krakow fell the day before yesterday. Warsaw is said to have fallen this evening.
Bucharest, which went through a couple of days of panic, has calmed down. The restaurants, cinemas, and streets are full. Who would say that we are in a city of Europe at war?
Some people—Camil for one—think that peace is a possibility and may even be imminent. The Germans will propose it through the Italians—and the others will have no alternative but to accept. Although I am beginning to think anything is possible, that seems to me an absurd solution. I can’t see France and Britain losing a moral-political battle without firing a shot; it could simply wipe them out of history.
No, no. I shouldn’t start planning for peace or thinking of the books I shall write. I shouldn’t look ahead to a winter of skiing, reading, or traveling. It will be a winter of war, a year of war, years of war, and I’ll live them to the bitter end.
On Wednesday evening I went down alone to the port in Brăila—and saw a picture-postcard Danube beneath the moon. Even the empty white ships in the deserted port looked as if they were made of cardboard.
There was absolutely no one in the whole port—except myself and a watchman, who kept such a worried eye on me (a spy? a saboteur?) that I was forced to return to town, though I would gladly have stayed there a while longer.
“You’re getting old,” said Moni Liebsiech, who had stopped me in the doorway of a shop on Strada Regală. Yes, I’m getting old. Everything tells me this in Brăila—the houses, the streets, the people, the photographs from my youth that make me feel bad when I linger over them at Aunt Caroline’s.
Zoe called round this afternoon. I read her the Gunther chapter, not too seriously, more as a joke, but not totally excluding the possibility—which I mentioned to her ten days ago when I returned from Stina—that I’d like her to play the part of the girl that I am thinking of writing.
So I read her the chapter, and not only did she understand it very well, but her vision of it was so accurate that she offered me some most valuable suggestions for the play. Until today I had not been able to envisage this girl, who enters Gunther’s chalet in Act One, and I had not known what would happen to her. Zoe helped me to see her—more, she outlined her role in the play.
Gunther has to die—says Zoe—but his death will be a victory both for himself and for Nora; for him, because the Grodeck clan will have been conquered; for her, because she will have broken with her oppressive past and (by entering Gunther’s chalet) moved toward a new life.
We talked for whole hours about the play—and again I felt how the need to write oppresses me, weighs me down, robs me of my peace of mind.
I think of the Jews in Poland who have fallen under Hitlerite occupation. Anyone who has a revolver or a rifle will shoot as much as he can— and keep the last bullet for himself. But what about the others?
Camil Petrescu tells me that he refuses to write the military chronicle that Vinea has asked him to do for Facia.
“No, old man, I’ve had enough of dishing out my ideas for nothing. I won’t speak up unless I’m offered a place in the government.”
He has no respect at all for Gamelin, and now he commiserates with the French and the British because they don’t have a Camil Petrescu.
When I hear all this, I don’t know how to keep a straight face—but nor can I stop myself from agreeing.
Today the Russians signed an accord with Japan. At 4 a.m. they entered Poland to occupy what had been left by the Germans.
How happy are people with an idée fixel They, at least, can keep calm and still think they understand. For Communists, even for our own, things are in order and “the revolution is marching on.” Whatever the Soviets do is the right thing.
For the Legionaries (a term that is being resurrected), a German victory is assured and a perfect life will arrive in its wake.
And I? I who believe in neither the one nor the other, and who try to make up my mind not with prejudices but with facts? Isn’t it enough to drive you out of your mind, to make you give up in despair? Don’t you have to tell yourself that from now on absolutely everything is lost?
What is there left to do in these days, which may be my last? I’d like to listen to music all the time—it’s my only drug. We’ll die one day like chickens, with our throats slit. I ought to await the looming disaster more sturdily, more alertly.
Titel Comarnescu tells me of a political conversation he had recently with Mircea, who is more pro-German than ever, more anti-French and anti-Semitic.
“The Poles’ resistance in Warsaw,” says Mircea, “is a Jewish resistance. Only yids are capable of the blackmail of putting women and children in the front line, to take advantage of the Germans’ sense of scruple. The Germans have no interest in the destruction of Romania. Only a pro-German government can save us. A George Brătianu/Nae Ionescu government is the only solution. The Soviets are no longer a danger, both because they have abandoned communism—and we shouldn’t forget that communism is not identical with Marxism, nor necessarily Judaic—and because they (the Soviets) have given up on Europe and turned their eyes exclusively to Asia. What is happening on the frontier with Bukovina is a scandal, because new waves of Jews are flooding into the country. Rather than a Romania again invaded by kikes, it would be better to have a German protectorate.”
Comarnescu assures me that these are Mircea’s exact words. Now I understand perfectly why he is so reticent with me when it is a question of politics, and why he appears to take refuge in metaphysics to escape “the horrors of politics.”
Just look at what he thinks, your ex-friend Mircea Eliade.
I was in court, waiting my turn for an adjournment, when a woman pale with fright leaned across the counsels’ bench and whispered to someone: “They’ve shot Armand Calinescu; it was on the radio.”
I took a taxi and raced home, where I found everyone downstairs at the Pascals, panic-stricken around the radio, though it was broadcasting a normal musical program. What had happened? Half an hour before, the announcer had broken in with a cry of alarm and then hastily said a few unclear words about the killing of the prime minister. After a pause, service resumed and another announcer said that “the interruption to the broadcast was because of an unfortunate incident.”
I was convinced that it had all been a bad joke. Rosetti said on the phone that he thought the same, but that in any case he knew nothing about it. I went into town, and nowhere was there the slightest sign of unrest. The afternoon papers came out at four, as usual.
Back at my place in Calea Victoriei, however, I received a call from Alice Theodorian with news from Armand’s sister-in-law (whom I met myself at Alice’s the day before yesterday). Yes, Armand was murdered today in his car between one and one-thirty; a group of Legionaries had waited beneath a timber cart and opened fire several times when his car approached. At the same time, another group burst into the radio station and broadcast the news. Both groups were captured—but Armand is dead.
If it is true, the situation is disastrous. It is a question not only of the internal situation (which could be dealt with one way or another), but also of the Germans and the Russians, who might enter the country “to establish order” and “to protect their kith and kin.”
From one hour to the next, one day to the next, we could lose everything: a roof over our heads, bread to eat, our modicum of security, even our lives.
And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to be done about it.
It is a wonderfully sunny autumn day. I lie on the chaise longue on my terrace and look at this city, which can be seen so well from above. The streets are full of life, cars drive along in every direction, traffic policemen direct the traffic from their boxes, the shops are open for customers—the whole machinery of this great city seems to be working normally, and yet somewhere at its heart a terrible blow has been delivered, without yet being felt. It is as if we were in a city strewn with dynamite due to explode in five minutes’ time—a city which, for the moment, carries on unawares, as if nothing has happened.
A short while ago I saw a group of Polish refugees coming toward my block. They were raggedly dressed, each carrying a battered backpack, but they were alive—do you know what I mean?—alive and saved. Maybe we (Benu, Mama, Tata, myself) won’t even be that by this evening, tomorrow, or the day after—not even refugees who have escaped the fire with nothing but their lives.
I am probably one of those who are made to await death with resignation, to accept it. I don’t see any defensive gesture I could make; no thought of escape or refuge crosses my mind.
The assassins—six or nine, I still don’t know—were “executed at the scene of the crime” and left on the pavement for a day and a night, with a placard saying: “Traitors to the country!”
Yesterday morning I went there (the other side of the Elefterie Bridge). Thousands of people came by streetcar, by car, by bus, or on foot. It was like a big fair. They were laughing and joking. A company from my regiment only just managed to keep the crowd at a distance from the killers’ dead bodies. (If I had been called up, I might even have been there myself, on guard!) Those who were unable to squeeze through to the front saw nothing. A lady beside me said:
“They should keep order, put us in two rows so that everyone can see.”
People from nearby had brought some wooden stepladders, and those who wanted a better view paid two lei to climb up and look over the rest.
“Don’t do it!” said one guy who had paid his two lei but had been disappointed. “Don’t do it! All you can see are their feet.” It all seemed appalling, humiliating, shameful. Apparently the same spectacle took place in Craiova, Ploiesti, and Turnu Severin. Radio London said last night that there have been “dozens of executions,” but it is whispered that there have been not dozens but hundreds. Some even give a precise figure: four hundred. It seems that all the Legionaries in the camps and prisons have been executed.
I wonder what has happened to Nae. Rosetti asked and was told that he’s been “missing for two days.” What does “missing” mean? Escaped? Taken elsewhere and kept under guard? Shot?
I rang Mircea, also feeling anxious about his fate. He himself answered, and I told him about the proofs of an article of his for the Revistă. But I found out what I wanted to know: he is alive.
It seems that the assassination was planned when the Germans were advancing with dizzying speed to the Polish-Romanian frontier. With the Germans already in northern Bukovina, nothing would have been easier for them than to enter the country at the moment of Armand’s assassination, especially as a plot had been organized among the Bukovinan Romanians to be “liberated by their brothers.” It was all supposed to be a perfect copy—in both design and execution—of the assassination of Dollfuss.4
What spoiled the plan was the unexpected entry of the Russians into Poland, and especially their quite unexpected arrival at the Polish-Romanian frontier, which meant that Romania had no common border with the Germans. That is the only thing which, for the moment, saves us from immediate disaster.
I am at my wit’s end. There is nothing to think, nothing to foresee. Let us wait and, if possible, not lose our heads too much.
I came home last night with a heavy heart, terrified at all that is happening and all that might happen. The number of dead is still not clear: tens, hundreds, or thousands.5
At Rîmnicu Sârat, at two o’clock in the morning, Misu Polihroniade, Tell, and the others were shot (“machine-gunned,” according to Nina) and thrown into the prison yard for all to see. In the other towns it was the same story (at least as reported by Constandache6 and Onicescu, who had been in different places and—again according to Nina—seen things with their own eyes). At yesterday’s rehearsals at the Studio, Marietta was in tears in her dressing room, saying that “all the kids at Ciuc” have been shot, as well as the ones at Vaslui. Among them were Belgea and Garcineanu. It’s thought certain that Nae will be shot by this evening. Rosetti, whom I saw in the evening at Camil’s, confirms this. Only late at night was I rung and told that Nae is alive—ill in bed at home, but alive.
I cannot judge this drama politically. I am horrified as a human being. I know that all these people, whether collectively or separately, would have calmly witnessed Legionary terror and killed us with the utmost indifference. I also know that their blindness went beyond all limits. And yet, and yet, I feel sad, troubled, overwhelmed by a bitter taste in the mouth.
I stayed home alone, both yesterday evening and this evening, and the first thing I did back in my room was listen again to Mozart’s andante, which serves me as a refuge. Then I read some of Dubnow’s History of the Jews: the pages about Venice, Padua, Prague, Vienna, and Frankfurt in the sixteenth century. As I read, I felt that I was moving away in time. It is good to know you are from a people that has seen many things down the ages—some even more terrible than what is happening today.
Misu Polihroniade as a martyr for a political cause? Nothing destined him for that. It’s a mistake, a misunderstanding, a tragic joke. He didn’t want that, didn’t believe that, never imagined that. How life makes of us more than we wish or are able to be! How few things actually depend on us! What a chain of remote, unforeseen consequences is within one of our gestures, one incident, one chance event. That guy wanted a deputy’s seat in parliament—at least as a junior minister. And then he ends up a revolutionary. I think that, right up to the last moment, he couldn’t understand why things had taken the turn they did, where exactly they had started to go wrong.
I went to Mircea's yesterday afternoon. I had already seen Nina at the Foundation, pallid, tear-stained, wringing her hands in despair.
"They're going to kill Mircea," she said. "Don't let them kill Mircea."
I went to see them because I know that right now no one has the courage to visit them. Everything pulls us apart, of course, absolutely everything, but I told myself that it will give them a little heart to speak to someone, even if that someone is me. I found him much calmer and at ease. Rosetti will talk to Ralea and lamandi, maybe someone even higher, to get Mircea out of harm's way. We made our laments together— but in different ways. I think I am morally more entitled to feel distressed than he is. For, in one way or another, he willed it, he assented to it.
But today his attitude is pessimistic. “Attitude” is to put it too strongly: rather, remnants of attitudes, barely controlled rages, deep aversions, a terrible hatred that would like to scream but cannot. He said that the current repression is criminal “now that the enemy is at the gates.” But wasn’t the assassination of Armand Călinescu also committed “with the enemy at the gates”? I put the question to him and he shrugged his shoulders.
I didn’t call round to argue with him, nor to be in the right. We shall never settle accounts between us. Or maybe later, when everything has become more remote—if we are still alive then. I have the feeling that what he awaits now, as a kind of desperate revenge, is a German or Russian invasion.
“I believe in the future of the Romanian people,” he said, “but the Romanian state should disappear.”
I left feeling irritated. My attempt to communicate with him, to be of some use by making him feel that he was not abandoned, had been a failure.
A disturbing letter from Dinu Noica. I wrote on Rosetti’s behalf suggesting that he publish his thesis at the Foundations. His reply is negative. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with F.R.
“We haven’t seen each other for a long time, dear Mihai, and you don’t know how much I enjoy the pleasure of refusal. How could I not be delighted to refuse one of the things to which I used to be most attached!”
At the same time he wrote a letter to Rosetti (which I read this morning)—a perfectly straightforward refusal, without any ostentation or bravura. It is his way of disowning everything that has happened, his way of remaining faithful to his “ideas.” They are the one and the same ideas that require nothing of Mircea, for example, yet compel Dinu Noica to change his life, his gestures, his everyday behavior.
Leni has slept with “Handsome Bubi,” or so Zoe claims. Zoe is mad about “Handsome Bubi,” or so Leni claims. I listen to them both—and laugh. It is a chain of comic situations in which I, without wanting to be, am one link. “Handsome Bubi” hears confessions from the one and the other, learning that I in turn was mad now about Leni, now about Zoe. The whole story is like a vaudeville show, in which I don’t seem to have the most flattering role. The tenor’s part is already taken. But anyway, all this has been going on for several months—and it is only now that I hear about it. Calmly enough, though, to be able to smile.
A splendid autumn day, after a few weeks of cloudy weather. I’d like to lie on the chaise longue in the sun, or go for a walk somewhere on the Stina, or be on the pier in Balcic.
The war still exists, but somewhere far away, on another continent.
Thirty-two years. I feel old, ugly, worn out. It gives me no pleasure at all to look at myself in the mirror. Sometimes I feel disgusted at the sight of this man, pale, baggy-eyed, and balding, but still with a kind of air of haggard youth. I try not to think of my life—either that which is past, or that which lies ahead. There is a sense of futility that fills me with despair, and that I would like to avoid, to forget.
Leni was here yesterday, and I let her talk again about the affair involving Bubi, Zoe, Leni, and myself. Again I couldn’t help noticing the comedy in this quadrille.
I cannot deny, however, that I still have pangs of feeling and a certain embarrassment at everything that has happened, and everything I failed to anticipate.
I want to go to Predeal next week, for ten to fifteen days, and to finish the novel in that time. Rosetti wants to publish it himself, and I can't refuse him, but I would have preferred Ocneanu, even if it would have been less secure financially. The Foundation's style of book cover, impersonal, austere, and uniform as it is, is quite suitable for a study or an essay, but I fear it would do disservice to a novel.
But it goes without saying that no consideration, however well grounded, will make me offend R. by refusing him the book once he has asked me for it.
Besides, the only important thing in all this is that the novel should appear—as soon as possible. I must get free of it—and I have the feeling that I would thereby also get free of many other old matters that are connected with it.
Maybe in the end I shall manage to leave on Sunday afternoon for Predeal for five or six days, and later for another five or six days. Will that be enough for me to finish the novel? I don’t know, but it will have to be. I have so many things waiting to be done, calling out to me. I keep thinking of the play (which could not bear for long not to be written). More and more, I also think of my future novel, which is occupying more space as it grows both deeper and denser.
If I go, I shall stay at the Robinson villa, where Craciun has the kindness to take me in for only three hundred lei a day. I have fond thoughts about that welcoming, luminous, almost elegant house, and I hope it will also be favorable to my book.
The last few days have been terrible. I was as tired as a packhorse. Each day there was business in court (not all happily resolved—the loss of Leni’s case with Mr. Serbescu was especially distressing), and each day I had to rush to the printer’s in alarm that, because of me, the Revistă might not appear on time. Everything I do—office, court, editing—I do with absurd tension and unease, in panic and disorder, with neither method nor mastery. Am I really incapable of putting a little order, I won’t say into my fragmented life, but at least into my work?
When I came home yesterday, and the day before yesterday, I was not only dropping from fatigue but ashamed of the state I had reached.
I am so inconsiderate that over the last few days I have not even paused for a moment to think of Poldy, who has probably already left Sceaux for his regiment (as he anticipated in a letter I received on Saturday), or anyway for a training center in the Pyrenees.
He must come out of this war in one piece. I would like him to understand that this is his duty. I would like to tell him straight that his life (at least with regard to Mama) also has to make up for my failure of a life.
A little music—Enescu, Franck’s Sonata, a couple of Beethoven pieces, one Mozart, one Bach, one Faure; a Brandenburg concerto (the fifth, I think), Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, more beautiful than ever—and a two-day excursion to Cimpulung with Rosetti, in the miraculous weather of a glorious autumn. These have been my only relaxation, my only escape.
The Robinson villa. I am in the room that Suchianu had two years ago. There is only one other lodger in the whole villa—an Italian diplomat, it would seem.
In this quiet I hope to be able to work. I have arrived feeling very weary, with a kind of tightness in my chest (am I a heart case? I keep wondering). But I think that I shall rest and write at the same time. What shatters me in Bucharest is the disorder, the rushing around.
This morning there was a disgusting meeting at the Writers’ Association. Had it not been for Ralea’s candidacy (which he anyway withdrew at the last minute—those democrats make themselves scarce at the first sign of danger), I wouldn’t even have gone along. Herescu the president!7 What a farce!
Midnight
I have finished Chapter Ten, the one I broke off when I left Stîna de Vale. I worked all day, from nine in the morning until now, with a break at midday and another in the evening, to eat and to walk for an hour through Predeal.
The result: ten pages. That’s a record. Don’t let’s talk about quality. I can’t tell what they are like, and I could almost say that it doesn’t interest me. I want to write and to be over with it. May God take care of the rest.
Three degrees below zero (26 F.]—snow. It also snowed yesterday morning, though by evening the weather had become autumnal again. Now it is well and truly winter. If it stays like this for a couple of days, we’ll all be skiing.
Yesterday I went out en skieur. Why is it that all I have to do to feel more youthful is put on my skiing boots and costume?
Since yesterday we have a new lodger in the villa: a fairly young woman (thirty-two?), not beautiful but with a certain distinction. A brunette. She reads books in French (Sparkenbroke), and also, I think, Polish newspapers. Maybe she is a refugee.
So there are three of us at table and later in the foyer room, but we do not speak to one another. I cannot describe how comfortable this silence makes me feel.
What I like most in the villa is the brightly lit foyer, with its wall-length window, its flowered armchairs, and its scattering of delightful prints (Utrillo, Suzanne Valadon, Pissarro, van Gogh).
Evening
Only seven hours’ work and only five pages written. I must understand that it won’t be easy to repeat yesterday’s performance. I am tired and have to call a halt. The Gunther episode is absorbing. I don’t want to continue haphazardly but to have things clearly in view. I am halfway through Chapter Eleven. I hope to finish it tomorrow.
I am beginning to understand what it means “to get free of a book.”
These characters of mine tire me with their obsessiveness; they eat away at me and wear me out. I’d like to forget about them, to escape. I walk with them in the street, sit with them at table, doze off with them.
Sometimes I am afraid they will wriggle away from me before I finish the book, but at other times it pleases me to think that I’ll get away from them, that I’ll be free to forget them.
I try to remember whether other characters, in my other books, obsessed me so much. The ones in Oraşul cu salami are another matter: I never saw them for one moment. But the rest? I don’t remember whether they took so much out of me in the way of nervous tension. But if they did, how could I have forgotten them so completely? How could they have become so indifferent to me?
Only just now, this morning, have I finished Chapter Eleven. If I had kept at it, I would have finished yesterday. But I didn’t want to: I was afraid of continuing into the evening. All the time I wrote in an overwhelming state of nervous tension. To say it all—however childish—I was afraid for my heart, which I felt scampering away like Gunther’s, about to burst.
When I reread the chapter this morning, I found it less exciting, less intense, and certainly less demonic than it seemed yesterday. A night’s sleep clarifies a lot of things, makes them appear more subdued.
Yesterday began badly, with a splitting headache that lasted until evening and ruined my schedule. I had to go out in the morning to get some painkiller. As I walked down toward the Timis, I passed the monument to Saulescu (only now do I realize how horrible it is, with that bird that looks like a little owl from behind), and then I came back past the railway line. The view is magnificent: the Schuller and Piatra Mare are in clouds, but the lower slopes are green and white, with snow-covered fir trees. I feel happy and alone there.
I recovered only toward evening, when I managed to do some more serious work. Five and a half pages, plus another two this morning— which concludes the chapter I began on Tuesday.
The short chapter I finished this morning (which I shall call IIA for the time being) has four pages. I wrote three yesterday afternoon and one just now. I have been writing very slowly, with great difficulty and a thousand obstacles that are still not resolved. It is certainly not in its final state. Besides, I had not been planning for it; I had intended to go straight from Chapter Eleven to the Christmas Oratorio chapter. But I felt the need to insert a chapter which, though not constituting an episode (that is, a distinct scene in the story), would create a little time and distance from the events. Right from the beginning of the book, the action has unfolded chronologically—day by day, almost hour by hour. But here I needed a jump, a caesura. I hoped that this little unforeseen chapter would provide it. But I don’t know whether I have got what I wanted. We’ll see later.
At midday yesterday I went for an exciting walk to Plestera, where winter has really set in. I was alone in the snow for an hour.
This afternoon I shall “attack” the chapter dealing with the descent to Brasov and the Christmas Oratorio—a long chapter in which a lot of things happen, and which carries the book into its final section. I am not really worried, but I do feel a little uneasy, a little apprehensive.
The Christmas Oratorio chapter has eighteen pages up to now: five written on Friday afternoon, five yesterday, eight today And, you realize, the “concert” hasn’t even begun. I’m still not sure how long it will turn out to be. The “scenario” is in place, however, and I have a feeling that I won’t experience the same difficulties that I had yesterday (so idiotic that the day’s work felt wasted).
I’d gladly go on writing now, but it is past eight o’clock and my train leaves at ten—I haven’t even packed my luggage yet. I am breaking off at a moment when I feel in full flow. I hope this good working mood will come back to me.
To be concluded—maybe in Bucharest. I could have noted a thousand things in connection with this chapter, but after eight, nine, or ten hours of work I always feel a need to take some distance. In this way I delay noting things and then never manage to write them down later.
Don’t ask me what I have done since Monday. I haven’t done anything. I have been in Bucharest. That’s enough for time to slip by without my knowing when or why.
I haven’t even managed to sort everything out at the Revistă. The next issue has been completed, but I don’t have everything in proof, nor do I even know how many pages are missing. I also still have to write something myself, and to put together the “review of the reviews” section.
Tomorrow I leave for Predeal—only tomorrow!—and leave things still up in the air. But that means I will have to return very soon.
What is depressing in Bucharest are the telephone calls, the going-out, the first nights, the dinner invitations. On my first day back I felt that—in comparison with my simple life in Predeal—I was entering one big madhouse.
The day before yesterday I sent a clean copy of 176 pages to the printer’s. I still have sixty pages to write out again, and the last four or five chapters to compose.
I arrived on Friday evening. It felt like returning home. The whole villa was asleep, but Room 1 was waiting with its lights on. And to make me feel even more “at home,” there was a letter from Marie Ghiolu on the bedside table.
To stop writing for five days does not mean only to waste five working days. It is more serious. You lose the right tone, you move away from your characters, you can’t find them again, they no longer recognize you.
Yesterday was very heavy going. I’d got it into my head that I had to wrap up the concert at any price, and after six hours of work (with an hour on the chaise longue, in wonderful sunny weather) I did indeed finish it, with midnight already past. But that yielded only six pages, and I don’t think they are a success.
Moreover, it may have been difficult in principle to write without listening. It is true that I worked all the time with the score in my hand, but to feel it properly I would have had to know it, to hear it. My memory for music is too poor for me to have something in my head after listening to it just three times (I don’t think I’ve heard the Christmas Oratorio more than three times).
Publication before Christmas now looks unlikely. I may receive the proofs of the first nine chapters this week, but will I have time to do a fair copy of the other chapters and, above all, to write the finale?
Maybe it’s a mistake to speak of the “finale”? Who knows, there may still be a hundred pages to write before then. The outline of the last few chapters already exists, but I’ve no idea what unexpected things may turn up.
Besides, I have to be in Bucharest again on Wednesday, for the Revistă. Wdl it ever be allowed me to write a book straight through from beginning to end, without interrupting it, without losing it, and without becoming disconnected from it?
A wonderful spring day. Twenty-five degrees above zero [78 F.]. There is a soft, pure light—without melancholy
This morning I went to Creasta Cocosului. The ground was still wet from the melted snow (you’d have thought it was March!), but where the sun had been shining there was green grass and moss. I threw myself down and lay in the sun. How easy it always is to recover this bliss.
In the afternoon, another hour in the sun on the chaise longue.
I am wasting time—but I don’t feel any pangs of conscience. Everything I wrote yesterday (not even five pages) was bad. Today I feel it will be even more difficult. Last week I was like a well-tuned instrument; everything I wrote had the right tone. Now I feel out of tune: everything is false, clumsy, ungenuine. Sometimes I see things, feel and hear them, but the phrase fails me. It falls like lead, colorless and unfeeling.
For a moment it occurred to me to return to Bucharest. What’s the point of staying here if I don’t write, when so many other things are waiting for me there? Maybe these standstills should be accepted as one accepts insomnia. Nevertheless I shall stay on—at least until tomorrow evening. The Christmas Oratorio chapter, for which I had such high hopes because it was so rich in detail and incident, has turned out a complete failure. But failure or not, I shall at least finish it.
I have decided to split it in two. It will consist of Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen. The thirteenth I consider already complete. (I say “consider” because in fact I am well aware that it lacks something, but yesterday evening and this morning I struggled in vain to find a better way of ending it.) Now I am starting on Chapter Fourteen. I feel no enthusiasm and have no confidence in it. I shall write it in a spirit of resignation.
Midnight
In the end, the day was not as bad as I expected. I wrote six pages and— much more important—came up with new incidents for the final chapter of the novel. So far I haven’t been able to see this conclusion very well, but today I could quite precisely outline the whole “scenario” for it.
Paul will meet Ann again in this last chapter, and this meeting will mark the final break between them and the forgetting of each other.
It’s not advancing, not at all.
I wasted the whole morning on writing and crossing out, and was left with not so much as a line that could be used. I consoled myself with the thought that I might catch up in the afternoon. (That’s what happened yesterday.) But now I feel there is no chance of that. I really have ground to a halt. Why should I resist? What’s the point of keeping at it?
I leave for Bucharest on the five o’clock train. So much is waiting for me to do there. The novel will stay on hold for a few days. In the meantime, perhaps a way forward will open up by itself.
In the five days I have been in Bucharest, I have managed to do scarcely anything on the novel. Wasted days and nights. All I have done is again write out Chapters Ten to Thirteen; I’ll send them to the printer’s tomorrow. To make a fair copy is, for me, a strictly mechanical operation. Again I must confess my powerlessness to alter a text once I have written it; I am unable to put right even the simplest things. It is therefore pointless and imprudent for me to make a note in the margin and promise to go back over a certain passage. Pointless, because it is impossible for me to go back over it. Imprudent, because I deceive myself with the thought that I will complete the text at the copyediting or “proof correction” stage, and therefore leave things poorly expressed, in a provisional state that I later will be forced to accept as definitive.
Maybe it would be worth trying to explain this incapacity of mine to go back over a first draft. Is it just laziness? I don’t think so.
There is something irrevocable in a scene that, by writing it down, I have lived once and for all, and that I can no longer repeat at any price.
This may also explain the failure of all my attempts to reconstitute the lost chapters. What I did manage to remember and write down two years ago, after my return from Paris, remains as it was then: inadequate, desiccated, featureless, lacking in warmth and depth. I haven’t been able to add anything, to rectify anything. This is where my great fear lies. I ask myself whether, in the book as a whole, the reconstituted pages will not prove too inert for the rest to come alive.
The governmental crisis seems to be more than a crisis of government.8 There is talk of a German ultimatum. Radio London claims that German troops have been massing in Slovakia, ready to attack us. I don’t know what will come of it all. The specter of disasters is again becoming plausible.
I can’t go off to Predeal. I don’t dare leave. Who knows what may happen from one day to the next, from one hour to the next? I’ll try to work here. Today I’ll actually get down to Chapter Fourteen.
Publication before Christmas is very doubtful indeed, both because I myself have not had the tenacity to finish the book, and because the printers, who have a backlog to clear, are taking a long time to process things. More and more I realize that it was a mistake to give a novel to the Foundation. I, who publish one novel in three or four years, am stupid enough to bury it with a publishing house that is better at factory-style production than at organizing a proper launch. The Foundation will publish twenty-six titles in December. Mine would be the twenty-seventh. Who will look after it, who will even care? So far I have received galleys only for the first three chapters—pathetically little. It depresses me to read them. Again the reconstituted chapters make me feel down at heart. They seem stupid, and I know there’s nothing that can be done.
Maybe it wasn’t the right time to get myself a radio, just when I have to finish my novel and do nothing other than write and write. But I have been planning it for so long, and if I put it off any longer who knows when I would do it. I have had it since Saturday evening (a large Philips with 4+1 tubes) and listened to coundess pieces. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven on all the wavelengths.
Yesterday there was Schumann’s piano concerto from Paris, a program of Mozart from London (a symphony, a flute concerto, and—what seemed a welcoming sign—the Kleine nachtmusik). From Budapest, a Bach cantata with the proportions of a small oratorio. This morning, from a German station (to which I listened with some pangs of conscience), the Egmont Overture and a Boccherini cello concerto. Plus dozens of shorter pieces from all over the place. And now, as I write this note, a Mozart symphony from Budapest.
But I must put a stop to this musical excess and get back to the novel—switch the radio off. . . .
A conversation last night with Camil Petrescu. We were both worried about the situation. We wondered whether the Soviets, after polishing off Finland, would not come to us next.
“Only Germany can defend us against the Russians,” Camil said. “In the end, what we must wish is that we won’t be divided, that we will remain under the same scepter. If Germany takes all of us, that’s still all right. The situation of the Czechs, for example, is very good.”
What he said seemed too serious for me not to note it here (word for word, I think)—though I have so many other things to do.
I’ll pass over all of yesterday’s funny “Camilisms”; I am used to them, and I wouldn’t have opened this notebook just for them:
“Romania’s one big mistake was not to have listened to Camil Petrescu, who as long ago as 1930 wrote that we need an air force.”
“Even the Finns could have been saved if they had known my articles.”
If he were a minister, he would bury the whole of Romania underground—and then invite the Russians to bomb us.
All this is funny, but not of much moment. I hear tens and hundreds of enormities and let them pass. (“My dear man, I am the greatest actor the world has seen since Garrick. Moissi, what does he add up to? Just an actor with a pleasant voice. But I, apart from my intense voice, have a colossal power of expression.”) But the idea that this man, so thoughtless but also so intelligent, can accept in advance German domination as a possible salvation—the “German scepter,” as he puts it—seems truly memorable for what it says both about Camil Petrescu and, more generally, about the atmosphere these days.
1 a.m.
At last I have finished Chapter Fifteen, which I began on Thursday evening (after I had finished Chapter Fourteen, with which I felt so profoundly dissatisfied that I was loathe to note anything about it here).
At any rate, I have put an end to my old superstition that I absolutely must leave Bucharest in order to write. On Thursday I was on the point of leaving for Predeal, when I decided to make an attempt (a stubborn one, this time) to stay where I was and strictly organize my work habits.
I “shut off” the telephone (which no longer rings at all), told my people at home to tell anyone who asked that I was away, and went neither to the Foundation nor to Roman’s office—and, with these barriers, I succeeded in writing eight pages on Friday. It didn’t go so well yesterday, when I managed only four pages, nor today, when I did the same. It is true, however, that I was working on an uneven chapter with which I had not even reckoned at the beginning, that I did not have a prior “scenario” for it, and that, right up to the last minute, I did not really know where it would lead me. From now on, things are more clearly defined and, I hope, more straightforward. But even so, I need to count on at least another week’s work.
Wasted days. Of Chapter Sixteen—which should go very easily, because it consists of events and dialogue—I have written only three pages. Three pages in four days! I am ashamed to think of this standstill, which nothing can justify.
The proofs have been catching me up; the whole of the rest of the book has been set and is at its third proof stage, while I am stuck en route. Why? I don’t know why Everything has a clear shape, and the scenario of the four chapters still to be written is firmly fixed. The only problem now should be the purely material one of writing—and yet here I am in a depression from which I have been struggling for' days to escape. There is no point in poisoning myself with coffee and cigarettes; no point in stupefying myself with music (a Mozart flute concerto and a Johann Christian Bach symphony, tonight from Hamburg); no point in inflicting sleepless nights on myself as a punishment. It simply isn’t advancing; it refuses to advance.
Yesterday evening I finished Chapter Sixteen. I am very unhappy with it, taken separately, and extremely worried about its function within the book as a whole. I am more and more afraid that the whole Grodeck episode will seem like something “added on.” I wonder whether its links with the main “subject” are not too vague and, above all, too arbitrary. Does not the reader’s interest split at this point? Do not Nora and Paul take a back seat? Does not the whole story begin to seem too self-consciously fictional? It is true that from now on I abandon the Grodecks and return exclusively to Nora and Paul, but I wonder whether there is still enough time and space, within the setting of the book, to restore its center of gravity after it has shifted so much.
The whole afternoon and evening I struggled to write the chapter I began today―Chapter Seventeen—but so far (at midnight) I have written no more than four sentences. I am calling it a day. I am too tired and feel that, however much I forced myself, I wouldn’t overcome this new obstacle that has appeared in my path.
I am certainly going through a difficult period. Bad luck has hit me precisely when I should be reaching the end. Everything is plainly visible and clearly defined, everything should be straightforward―yet my pen is stuck. If I were not ashamed in front of Rosetti and the typesetters, I’d give it up completely. This book seems fated to drive me to despair, right up to the last moment.
A strange laryngitis. I have never had anything quite like it before, though I often have a tiresome bout of tonsillitis. My voice has gone and I can hardly speak. I seem to have a slight temperature.
My general condition is bad, in addition to the period of idiocy in which I have been for several days. There is no point in saying any more about the novel. It remains at a standstill.
I seem powerless to do anything at all. Yesterday I had to write something for the Foundation (commissioned by Cioculescu), and although I racked my brain for ten hours, I could not come up with anything more than a bad journalistic piece that I am ashamed to have to sign. Today the article for M.VB.9—which never requires much application on my part, because I feel that, as it is not mine and no one will read it anyway, I can write it no matter how—also turned out shamefully uninteresting and badly written.
I lack inspiration, talent, wisdom, and vocation. I cannot see anything ahead of me and do not manage to express the simplest ideas. Something pulls me toward platitude, toward indifference.
On such days, when you are healthy, you should cut wood, go for a walk, drink, and screw.
But when you are ill, you should be thankful to lie dozing in an armchair.
Call-up papers, dated today.
I still don’t know what will happen at the regiment. The colonel—an old school friend of Rosetti’s—said that I should report to him on Monday morning. If I am given time to finish the novel and see it come out, I shall accept the call-up with resignation and, in any event, without any drama.
What is terrible in the passage from civilian life to the barracks is that it takes place so suddenly. If I were given warning, if I knew now that I’d be called up on the 15th of January, for example, it would start to become bearable—not only because it would be a long way off (qui doit a terme, ne doit rien1), but because I would have time to prepare myself, to “soften” the blow. Moreover, I would be happy that I could have a skiing holiday—perhaps the last in my life, if there were war.
The novel has been marking time for a fortnight. I am still on Chapter Seventeen, the second to last. All three chapters that have still to be written are straightforward, clearly defined, and without difficulties. Yet it is impossible for me to write them. I don’t know why. Maybe because the novel has become unimportant to me. Maybe because I have entered a dark period—one of my well-known periods of imbecility. Having abandoned everything for a few days, I got up yesterday with a grim determination to work “at any cost.” But scarcely had I sat down at my desk when someone rang the doorbell. I opened the door, and it was the call-up order!
Yesterday evening, after a day full of anxiety, I nevertheless tried to write. My present inability to start and finish a sentence fills me with disgust. I write a word and cross it out, write it again and cross it out again. I don’t even think it is due to exaggerated doubts with regard to style. Rather, I have the feeling it is a nervous tic. The last few pages of my manuscript have been literally butchered. Two pages of manuscript, when written out again, amount to no more than a third of a normal page.
A little while ago, out of curiosity, I looked out at the manuscript of De două mii de ani to see if I used to write with the same difficulty. Well, no, I didn’t! In those days my manuscript was amazingly fluent: two or three words deleted or added per page; very few passages crossed out; nearly four hundred clear and legible pages composed without fretting and worrying, or at least without the visible kind that now makes my writing so hard to read. Why do I find it harder to write than I did six years ago? I ought to have more experience by now, greater skill and less fear of the written word—and yet I face obstacles that did not exist before. Is it because I used to write journalism then? Did the habit of writing an article every day—for which Albu sometimes gave me only an hour—make my pen swifter and more practiced? I don’t know, I can’t make it out. I look for all kinds of explanations. I ask myself whether this journal itself may not hamper my writing, whether it may not in the end be impossible to write a novel together with a journal, whose critical observations and ceaseless questioning may result in paralysis. But maybe this is not true, either. I try to pin the blame wherever I can. For example, the cyclamen flower I have had here for the last two weeks is driving me up the wall, because I haven’t been able to work since it came into the flat.
In the manuscript of De doud mii de ani I came across the following sentence (one of the few I deleted in the text of the book): “I write with difficulty, with numerous obstacles, with much hesitation and a constant fear of overstepping my thoughts. For a mistake in expressing yourself is a twofold blunder: it says something other than it should, and it ties you to what you made the mistake of saying.”
Six pages written. Nearly seven. It is true that I worked all day and that it is now past two in the morning. But at least I have got moving again. Tomorrow morning at nine, though, I must report to the regiment.
Will I be able to pick up the manuscript again tomorrow afternoon?
The whole day wasted at the regiment. It was impossible to obtain a deferment. Only tonight, from ten until two, have I been able to return to the novel. I have written two pages, which bring Chapter Seventeen to an end. It lacks expression. But I fear it is worse than that: false, arbitrary, amorphous. I feel sorry for this book, which could have worked out differently if I had been more tenacious and events had been less antagonistic. But it is an ill-starred book—and there’s nothing more I can do to help it.
All day at the regiment. I came back at 8:30, worn out and with my left arm numb from pain. They inoculated me at the infirmary, and this has given me a fever. It is impossible for me to write any more; almost impossible for me to think about the novel, which has left me with nothing but regrets. I should give it up, postpone it, submit to the inevitable. Can’t you see that something always stops this wretched book from breaking out of the circle of obstacles and misfortunes that surrounds it?
A night of fever and insomnia. I didn’t sleep for a second. I can no longer feel my left arm. I went to the regiment with a temperature of 39 degrees [102 F.]. I’m fed up with explaining, requesting, complaining. I am still sick. This inoculation seems to me one of the most barbaric things in a soldier’s life.
At the barracks, or at least at the company supply room, there is a refugee-type atmosphere. As I was still a civilian, in that sordid dormitory I looked like a refugee shut up in a camp.
This evening I listened to the Christmas Oratorio from Brasov, which has ended just as I am writing these lines.
I could have noted a lot of things (especially in connection with the Oratorio chapter in my novel), but I don’t feel capable of thinking, or of formulating anything.
Tomorrow morning at 6:30 I have to be at the regiment.
The army, the army—always the army. I don’t have a weapon and am receiving no instruction, yet I have to be at the barracks before seven each morning and to remain there until 7 p.m., if not 8 or 9. Altogether that means some fourteen hours a day wasted in a maddeningly pointless way. All of Rosetti’s efforts (not to speak of mine) to obtain eight days’ leave to finish my book have come to nothing. Only today (after a day of rushing around to do all kinds of chores for the colonel) have I been given four days off for Christmas.
Tomorrow I leave, or hope to leave, for Roman’s villa in Sinaia. At least I’ll have a day or two of skiing. And when I return, maybe I’ll pick up the threads of the novel that I have recently felt to be broken.
Monday and Tuesday in Sinaia—at Roman’s villa. All of Monday with Lereanu and Comşa in the mountains, where we reached Virful de Dor after an exhausting hike of six hours. Thick snow and ice made it impossible to ski. But the sun was full of youth, and the wind as gentle as a spring breeze. Only on the way back could we go a few hundred meters on skis. We returned by the light of the moon—a round, yellow moon, set against white mountains and a blue sky that was as tender and delicate as an April sky at twilight.
On Tuesday we spent a few hours in Predeal, at Ve§tea, where the same moon, so implausible for December, again took us by surprise. I returned on skis to the railway station. The snow was bluish beneath the moon.
Tomorrow morning, back to barracks. My novel is still not finished. Yesterday I read it all the way through, in order to get inside it again. Three days of uninterrupted work should be enough for Chapters Eighteen and Nineteen, the only ones still to be written, but for which the scenario is firmly set.
On Saturday evening, as I was passing by taxi along Bulevardul Dacia, I had an extraordinarily precise feeling that there in one of the blocks, on the sixth floor, was the locked flat of someone I knew—of Nora. Had I rung the bell, I would not have been surprised to hear the doorman say that she had gone off to the mountains.
The last evening of the year.
I thought of staying by myself and working, but I am not strong enough to do that. I feel alone and left out of consideration. I have never before felt so strongly that I am becoming a bachelor. Worse than a bachelor. Zoe is in Predeal, Leni I know not where. I think of them both with a certain sadness. And yet I do not need them.
My only regret at this year’s end (apart from the old incurable ones) is that I still haven’t finished the book. I now feel that there is nothing more to be done, that the last part is an irreparable failure. But one way or another, I should have liked to free myself of it, not to have it trailing after me into 1940.
Footnotes
1. Alexandra Hurtig: journalist.
2. Eugen Titeanu: undersecretary of state for press and information.
3. Frontul Renasterii Nationale (National Renaissance Front), the only political party allowed to function during the royal dictatorship of King Carol II (1938-1940).
4. “But you know, I don’t know anything about it; I am in complete ignorance.”
5. “And you know, that’s already history.”
6. “Victor Emmanuel is a great king.”—“Donjuán is married to a charming Bourbon. They’re very serious people.”—“During the March on Rome, Victor Emmanuel acted as head of the House of Savoy.”
7. "I have it from someone who was there and who was not die king."
8. Cicerone Theodorescu: poet.
9. The Romanian national airline.
1. "Sir, please read the first 120 pages. I have a feeling they are good. The book is botched toward the end, but it begins well. Anyway, I'm sure that a French translation of it would not pass unnoticed."
2. King Carol introduced the uniform of the National Renaissance Front. It was mandatory for government employees.
3. “Have you noticed that fanatics have clear eyes? Only someone with clear eyes can be a fanatic.”—“And I, madam?”—“I wonder. Your eyes are almost green, but not enough for a fanatic. Well, your case is still open.”
4. “I get bored once every twenty years. But with Calimachi I was bored for the twenty years.”
“Domestics are terrifying. They are the only ones who can tell, with complete precision, whether someone is a person of quality or not. I should like to found a society for the protection of the newly rich against domestics.”
5. “I knew they were going to shoot him, yet my sympathy for the Republicans did not weaken.”
6. “I like Jews, I like them passionately. Not because they have had an unhappy time of it—no. I like them because they move the horizon forward.”
7. loan Comşa: friend and law firm colleague of Sebastian's.
8. Actor.
9. "Sebastian cannot be found in Mogosoaia. Fondly, Martha."
1. "And for you to interest yourself in its European career."
2. General N. M. Condiescu: novelist, president of the Romanian Writers’ Association.
3. Armand Calinescu: prime minister 1937-1939, coordinator of the repression against the Iron Guard.
4. Viaţa romdneasca, a literary magazine.
5. Vasile V. Longhin: judge from Brăila.
6. Even the worst.
7. Jacques Lassaigne, French art critic.
8. “My novel stops interesting me when I stop working on it.”
9. Pastorel Teodoreanu: poet and writer.
1. Jean Steriadi: artist.
2. George Oprescu: art critic.
3. loan Cantacuzino: poet.
4. The Austrian chancellor, murdered in July 1934 by Austrian fascists in an abortive coup d’état.
5. Two hundred fifty-two Legionaries were shot in retaliation for the murder of Prime Minister Armand Calinescu.
6. V. Constandache: journalist.
7. N. I. Herescu: a philologist and newly elected president of the Writers’ Association.
8. On this date the Argetoianu government was replaced by one headed by Gh. Tătărescu.
9. The journal Muncă şi voie-bună.
1. To owe in the long run is not to owe at all.