Days pass slowly, but years quickly. Now it’s 1942! How distant it seems to me, how problematic and unreal! “The war will end in ’42,” people said at the beginning, a year or two ago—and I was terrified that it might last so long. “The war will end in 1942” was for me like “the war will never end.” 1942 was the opaque future, the remote unknown, the inscrutability of chance. And now here we are in 1942—with all our old questions and terrors.
A sentence from Hitler’s New Year message: “His [the Soviet enemy’s] attempt to overturn fate in the winter of 1941-1942, to move against us once again, must fail and will fail.”
To overturn fate! Three months ago there could be no talk of anything like that. Today the problem is posed. It has become possible, humanly possible. It is credible, or at least conceivable, and anyway not absurd or excluded in principle, that the Russians will “overturn fate.” It is possible that the front will move off in another direction, possible that there will be a fundamental change in the situation. Since the fall of Rostov, the war has taken on a new aspect. Perhaps more than this: it is a new war, a different war. Personally, I am inclined to look at things calmly and soberly, without illusions. I tell myself that the German army is still a formidable machine; that the winter is an enormous trial for the Germans, but does not spell the end. Moreover, the Russian offensive does not seem to be of the scale and violence of the shock delivered by the Germans; I can well imagine a German recovery in the spring, and even six months of major German successes from April to October. Only then, on the threshold of next winter, will the crisis become acute again. But if this has been my view until recently, if I have never allowed myself to be carried away by sensational expectations, I have to admit that now there are also elements that justify such expectations. Rostov marked the final point of the German offensive and the obligatory shift from war of movement to war of position. The removal of Brauchitsch showed that this shift corresponds to a deeper crisis of command, conception, and general policy in the conduct of the war. The Russians, by taking the offensive all along the front, have demonstrated that they will not agree to a winter armistice. Finally, the blows at Kerch and Feodosiya show that their army has a certain capacity to deliver sudden shocks in a totally unexpected operation. These, unquestionably, are new factors. Will they lead to an “overturning of fate”? I don’t know—and I personally tend to think not. But the question is posed.
In the Philippines the Japanese have taken Manila. In Libya the English have taken Bardia.
Nicuşor Constantinescu1 (whom I saw yesterday evening at Leni’s) has suggested that I write a play. He is prepared to sign it, to offer to have it performed by a theatre. The author’s share would be paid to me, and after the war the truth would be told. It is a moving gesture; I wonder whether I would be capable of it myself in such a situation. It is perhaps the greatest sacrifice a writer can agree to make. I tell myself that what literature means for N.C. is quite different from what it means for me; that he thinks of writing as something to be done for the fun of it; that nothing really engages him; that in the end he does not consider himself bound by any kind of artistic responsibility. I tell myself all this— and his proposal still seems of an unequaled devotion, disinterest, generosity. I want to use the opportunity he has offered me. It is a way of earning a few tens of thousands of lei, maybe even more. It could save me for a while, in terms of rent, debt repayment, housekeeping money, and so on. All day I have thought of nothing else. I must write a play fast. Fast! Will I be up to it? Not one of my older play projects can be used. “Freedom” is politically impossible: it could be performed only after the war. “Gunther” is also impossible, because it would give me away: it would be easy to see that the subject has been taken from Accidentul. That leaves Ultima oră and “News in Brief,” neither of which is well enough defined. Besides, Ultima oră might also create difficulties of a political order. And I fear that “News in Brief” is too serious for Nicuşor to put his name to it—implausibly serious, in fact. What is needed is a light comedy, not so much written as put together. It’s a question of dexterity, of professional skill. Will I succeed? Will I be up to it? Will I be lucky enough to come up with something? Will I be able to work so fast?
The last few days I have been reading Pascal’s Les Provinciales. I gave them up today for Pagnol. I’ll read a few plays to get a feel for the theatre again. I am determined to have no scruples about this. But will that be enough?
Fresh Russian landings in the Crimea, this time on the western coast. The Russians have retaken Yevpatoriya (which, to my surprise, I found on the map to the north of Simferopol), and also, apparently, the small locality of Erilgoch, eighty kilometers south of Perekop. But this evening’s German communiqué reports that the forces that landed at both Yevpatoriya and Feodosiya have been wiped out. In any event, what I am used to calling the psychological pendulum of the war has clearly swung toward London. I even feel there is again a quite exaggerated optimistic fever in the air. We shall see more of these, many more.
Otetea (whom I saw at Rosetti’s) spoke with emotion, stupefaction, and occasional fury about what happened in June in Iasi.2 Sometimes he covered his face with a gesture of impotence, fear, and loathing. His way of speaking moved me, but when I came away I couldn’t help thinking that he is still director of the Theatre in Iaşi. No two things are incompatible in this country.
I never stop thinking and searching for the play I want to write. Until yesterday evening I had nothing in my mind’s eye. Only vague ideas, insufficiently connected to one another. A stage setting, a scene, a situation—nothing coherent. Then I read two plays (Savoir, Duvernois3) that stimulated my theatrical fantasy, without offering anything solid. I found a clearer lead in an old issue of Gringoire, which had a summary of a play, Jupiter, performed by someone just starting up in Paris. “I too could write a play like that,” I told myself. So yesterday afternoon, while I was watching a film, I suddenly felt that I’d “found” it. I had an idea, a title (“Alexander the Great”), and two characters. I left the cinema in a kind of optimistic excitement (as I always do when I “see” a plan for a book or play). On the way home the idea took on shape and substance—but at a certain point I realized that it was altogether too sketchy, too thin and shaky to fill up three acts. I don’t feel capable now of writing an intimately poetic play for the stage. I couldn’t even do another Jocul de-a vacanţa. No, I need something more solid, more earthy, more full of content. I need a firm structure with many characters and incidents, a proper plot, a wealth of detail that makes full use both of Nicuşor’s name and of the National Theatre’s troupe. Ultima oră could be, or could have been, such a play.
I don’t know when (or indeed if) I had precisely these reflections. I don’t know how I came to link “Alexander the Great” and Ultima oră. I think it was all a question of a minute or even of seconds. Suddenly the two projects merged into one. Ultima oră became Act One, and “Alexander the Great” Act Two, of the same play. I don’t yet have Act Three— but there are so many comic elements in the first two acts that I think everything will sort itself out.
Et maintenant il s’agit de travailler.4 Will I be able to? Will it come easily enough? Scruples, as I said before, are not a problem. I could just do with some luck.
I have paid the rent. Ten thousand lei from Papa’s end-of-year bonus. Five thousand borrowed from Manolovici. Five thousand from Uncle Moritz—though I later promised to give that back by tomorrow evening. So by tomorrow I have to find five thousand lei to repay Moritz and one thousand to two thousand for the house.
The Wurm “coup,”5 which was supposed to happen today, has been postponed. I had so much faith in it that I made all kinds of calculations about how I would divide up the money. But I shouldn’t count on either “coups” or miracles. I must write the play. I must finish it at the latest by the first of February, so that it can be put on by the first of March. But until then I simply must get a loan of thirty to forty thousand lei from somewhere, to pay my most pressing debts and to have money for everyday expenses.
Last night I finished the plot of Act Two (finding new, unexpected incidents). The play’s outline is now almost complete, and I must get down to some serious work. I deeply regret that my holidays are over and that I have to turn up at school tomorrow.
I borrowed seven thousand lei from Marcu. I used five thousand to repay yesterday’s debt to Uncle Moritz—which left two thousand for housekeeping. Now I’ll have to find some money so that I can repay Marcel in a week’s time. That is how the days pass.
My play is making great and rapid progress. Today I wrote six long pages. The first three scenes of Act One are almost ready. New things pop up with each piece of dialogue, as I am easily carried away by the tennislike rallies. I enjoy writing more than I expected. I feel I have found the right tone for the play (though it is true that I shall later have to execute delicate, perhaps difficult, changes of tone). For the moment, what I wrote today seems to me excellent. When I reread it tomorrow morning, a calmer, more accurate eye will doubtless spot things with which I am less pleased. I rang Nicuşor, feeling stupidly afraid that he might have reconsidered. Now that his plan is becoming a real possibility (a week ago I couldn’t see myself writing a play), I begin to have bouts of fear, impatience, and doubt. I’ll have lunch with him tomorrow and try to define our plan of operations.
Lunch at Nicuşor’s. I spoke excitedly about the play, which I said I’ll be able to finish in two to three weeks. We discussed the possibilities for putting it on stage. The National might not be available for Nicuşor either, as his marriage leaves him open to any anti-Semitic attack. Things would be simpler at the Comoedia. On the other hand, he is also writing a play—or wants to write one (together with Froda)—and he will naturally want it to be performed. Two plays bearing the same writer’s name would be hard to put on in the same season. But it is too early to be thinking about all this. First I have to finish the play. All day I have held on to yesterday’s good impressions, especially as I wrote another two pages this morning at the same speed. But now, this evening, it is all beginning to seem infinitely stupid. What was yesterday lively, coherent, and full of verve is now only puerile, cheap, and obvious. Maybe I’m just feeling tired. It’s too early to lose heart.
For a few days, nothing new at the fronts. I can’t keep up with the war in the Pacific: I don’t have a good map, nor any precise knowledge about the possibilities and the significance of the situation there. Any tiny event on the Russian or North African front can be fitted into a familiar framework. In the Pacific, things seem too remote and indistinct.
An evening meal with Rosetti and Camil at G. M. Cantacuzino’s; he told me some things about Transnistria and Odessa, where he fought in the army. He thinks that the Russian offensive has no prospects; that there can certainly be no talk of a German catastrophe, only of a certain lack of success. He explains the Russian advances by the fact that the Germans withdrew major forces from the front to send elsewhere (e.g., Turkey), or simply for a period of leave. They’ll resume the offensive next spring, when they will reach the Volga and finish the Russians off. On n’est pas prince impunément.6
Cantacuzino’s view should be contrasted with that of Radu Olteanu,7 whom I also saw yesterday. He does not think that the Germans will be able to take the offensive next spring or summer; nor that they will ever be in a position to capture Moscow. He does not exclude the possibility that they will collapse even before April.
I have written little today-—hardly anything. For an hour I struggled with the temptation to make a major change in the plot by introducing a new main character (a passing presence in Act One, who could become the play’s central protagonist). But I resisted. I am afraid of complicating things and losing too much time. This play must be written fast, very fast, if I want it to appear this season and bring me in some money. I have school tomorrow, but for the rest of the week I’ll try to find some excuse to “play truant.” If I let the play drag on, it could escape me altogether.
Sollum has fallen. Rommel has retreated from Ajdabiya to El Agheila, where he is resisting. On the Russian front, the Soviet advances are not for the moment substantial, though a larger operation is shaping up in the center. Twice in the last few days the German communiqué has mentioned Kharkov—where there is fighting to the east of the city. In the Crimea the situation is confused. It is not clear whether the Russians are still at Yevpatoriya; it seems they may also have landed at other points along the coast.
In today’s papers there are hints of a German attack on Turkey and the Bosphorus. One gets the impression that a blow is being prepared and will soon come. Any day there could again be major events.
On Monday I wrote nothing. Yesterday, Scenes 5 and 6. Today, Scene 7. It’s going rather slowly. Besides, I work too little. I only have three to four hours in the evening free for work. If I had ten whole days, I might be able to finish. But school, money worries, and various errands keep slowing me down. I should write this play quickly, with my eyes closed, so that scruples and pangs of conscience do not have time to invade me. Sometimes I am seized by a terrible disgust for what I am writing—but I soon manage to repress it. C'est une vile besogne, mais il faut le faire.8
A day spent rushing around at the Finance Ministry and Revenue for the (semibotched) Wurm business. I don’t think it will work out—and my dreams of money are fading. Again I wonder what will become of me! Where can I borrow some money? To whom should I turn?
I haven’t been able to write at all. All day out and about—this evening, cold at home. The heating is out of order. All I did was copy out Scene 7, which I wrote yesterday. I’ll take tomorrow off with “flu” and try to get down to work. A short visit to Leni set me thinking. Froda is writing a play with Nicuşor, and they intend to have it performed at the National. I can’t believe, and can’t expect, that Nicuşor will give up his own play if there is a choice between that and mine. Meanwhile, though, I have to write. Who knows, maybe I’ll still get a few tens of thousands of lei in return for the manuscript.
Small debts to pay off (Marcu, Manolovici, Zaharia) and food expenses to meet for some time. It was a pleasure giving Zissu back his money. I’d like one day to write a novel or play that centered on money.
Yesterday and today I have written six scenes (twelve pages), but there is nothing of real substance in them. I am not pleased with the conversation between Ştefănescu and Andronic, which I thought would have more to it. I am thinking of redoing it if I have time. It is all going too slowly: not because I have artistic scruples, but because I don’t occupy myself enough with the play to the exclusion of everything else. At least if I could finish Act One more quickly.
Khalfaya has fallen—the last place held by the Axis in Cyrenaica. It remains to be seen how the struggle for Tripolitania will develop.
Today I have written only three pages—the (very short) fourteenth and fifteenth scenes. My young heroine Magda has entered the picture. Here I feel the need for a change of tone. Up to now I have written somewhat mechanically, in the style of a “situation comedy,” and I think I have some talent for that. The entrances and exits, the unfolding of events, seem to happen without the author. Once a certain situation is posed, a play is constructed automatically. Theatre writes itself. Unfortunately my workload starts to get very heavy in a week’s time—and I fear I won’t have enough time for my play. I don’t see how it will be ready by the first of February.
“New statement about the Jews,” shout the newspaper sellers in the street. All Jews, “without exception,” are obliged to work for five days on snow-clearing. “Any irregularity that is shown to have occurred will lead to expulsion of the Jews from the country.” “Jews who are found without proof of five days of snow work will constitute the first battalions of Jewish workers to leave in spring for Transnistria.”
The Germans report that they have retaken Feodosiya.
I wrote nothing yesterday and today. I fear that I have ground to a complete halt. I shouldn’t allow myself such dangerous standstills. It is true that I lack spare time, but this play must be finished quickly—or it won’t be written at all.
Fairy-tale snow—such as I don’t remember ever having seen in Bucharest. Maybe in childhood, in Brăila. When I went out this morning, the whole of Strada Antim was a river of snow. I reached with difficulty Piata Senatului, where a long line of streetcars were at great pains to advance along their route. Cars, trucks, and carts struggled in vain to start moving again. Snow, I thought to myself, is an elemental force of nature. All civilization and modern technology are powerless against major snowfall. If it were to keep snowing like this for three months, everything would be swallowed up.
An idea for a short story occurred to me as I was going to school.9 It would be called “Snow.” Like “Deschiderea stagiunii” [Opening of the Season]—my only previous short story—it would tell of a moment of rebirth for a man whose life has been a failure, then of his loss of momentum and his final abandonment of the effort. The hero would be a teacher. He gets up in the morning in a desolate conjugal setting. His journey to school, through a magnificent wintry landscape (my picture of the city today), awakens in him the desire to start a new life. In the classroom, which he enters full of enthusiasm, an oaf of a boy plays a stupid trick—and the rainbow disintegrates. The man suddenly turns back into a dry pedant, and everything is as it was before.
The Russians have retaken Mozhaisk, the Germans’ most advanced point before Moscow. Mais ça ne change pas beaucoup.1
I left a letter for Zissu at his office: “Dear Mr. Zissu, Please accept ten of the twenty thousand lei I owe you. I shall try to settle the rest very soon. Once again I thank you for the favor and assure you that I will remember it.”
The play is being neglected. I have to focus on the course at Onescu that begins on Friday. I can’t forgive my stupidity in agreeing to do it. I am determined to start working hard again on the play very soon.
21 January. A year since the start of the Revolt.2
Both the liceu and the college are closed for five days. The students, pupils, and younger teachers (I’ll be in a later group) are off clearing snow. We get used to the most grotesque situations: when they are not tragic, when they are not deadly, we look on the funny side of them.
Otherwise it is a welcome holiday for me. I’ll be able to work on the play again. Today I wrote the scene with Magda, which has been the first serious difficulty up to now. I think I dealt with it reasonably well. The rest of Act One seems simple.
The night of 23 to 24 January a year ago! Machine guns, eerie silence in the streets, my terrible loneliness, the telephone calling in the void. Yesterday evening a baby of two or three months was left in swaddling clothes at our door. I was afraid of complications with the police: statements, questioning, investigations. There was no trouble in the end. But I had a half-hour of tragicomedy.
In Libya the British have retreated from Ajdabiya. I was reminded, against my will, of the Italian-German recovery last spring. Is it possible that the British will for a second time lose their grip on the situation?
In Russia a Soviet offensive in the north has broken right through to Kholm. The Germans say it is a gamble, the British a major victory. We’ll have to wait for things to become clearer.
I had hoped to finish Act One today, but I was not diligent enough and wasted the whole evening playing belote. I’ll try again tomorrow. In any case, it has all been going too slowly for what I originally intended.
I have finished Act One. By six in the evening I hadn’t managed to write a single line, but from six until now (eleven-thirty) I wrote quickly, almost without rereading. I am not sure how it has worked out. I fear that the whole act is too long, and that the plot and construction are rather labored. I may read it to someone as a check. To Benu, perhaps.
I read Act One to Benu last night. A satisfying impression. Roughly an hour of continuous reading. It all seems fluent, natural, well put together. At some points we burst out laughing. If there had been more of us, I think all the “effects” would have worked. I had lunch today with Nicuşor, to find out if I can rely on him. I don’t think I can. I’ll have to find another solution. The play he is writing with Froda is nearly finished; it will probably be ready before mine. He wants to put it on at the Studio, during the current season. I can’t ask him to wait for my sake. I’ll have to find someone else to put his name to it if I want to push it through quickly (and I do want to, for the simple reason that I can’t make long-term plans; this play is a joke and a business proposition that have to be wrapped up quickly). But it is too early to be thinking about all this. First I have to finish it; I’ll look for solutions later on.
I have started to write Act Two. In fact I haven’t yet got to the heart of it, because I have done only the radio lecture that opens the act. I hope I’ll be able to do more work on it tomorrow. I have no right to squander these few days off.
Steps are being taken to mobilize Jews for the snow. Today there were raids in the streets and in people’s houses. I hesitate to present myself. I delay it as long as I can. First I’d like to finish the play—but am I not asking too much?
Rommel is attacking in Libya (with a halt today). It is not impossible that he will get back into Benghazi. On the Russian front the Germans are counterattacking in places—especially, it seems, in the center. Nothing is clear for the moment. In the Pacific the pace of things has slowed somewhat.
Until eight in the evening I was unable to write a line. The heating was frozen up, and you can’t sit in the house even with an overcoat. I had to go to a cinema to warm up. But then I worked from eight until now, two in the morning. Only five pages: Scene 1 and half of Scene 2. But I have the other half in a rough copy that needs only to be written out.
I spoke with Rosetti, and later with Cicerone, about the possibility of staging a play that I might write. I was fairly vague, so as not to give myself away. Rosetti is doubtful, and Cicerone refuses to consider the question. I can very well understand him.
Nothing new at the fronts.
“Nothing new at the fronts”—I wrote on Thursday evening, but at that moment Rommel had already been back in Benghazi for twelve hours. Without a radio, the only news I get is late and incomplete.
Act Two is still pretty heavy going. I also have a bit of flu. Our heating comes on and off, as the fancy takes it. The cold is demoralizing me.
So, two months of winter have passed. Even with the heavy snow that still covers the city, there are already glimpses of spring somewhere over the horizon. It is hard to believe that anything essential can change in the war during the five or six weeks of winter that remain. As the season favorable to the Axis approaches, I grow more fearful of the coming dangers.
I am at Scene 5 (Magda and Andronic), the most difficult one in Act Two and perhaps in the whole play. I have written half of it (satisfactorily, I think), and I’ll try to finish it tomorrow. The rest of the act looks more straightforward, because I shall now be returning to the situation comedy. For Act Three I have come up with some solutions that are not yet fully clear but will, I think, work well.
Yesterday I wrote only a couple of snatches of dialogue. But today (just now, at one in the morning) I have finished Scene 5. Both yesterday and today have been days of discouragement. A certain disgust with writing. How I can work now at literature! I am too tired to record everything that is on my mind. Maybe tomorrow. And if I forget it, so much the better.
Rommel has retaken Derna. The British offensive in Libya is falling apart. No sign of a counterattack. Will Tobruk hold out at least? Will defensive lines be reformed at the Egyptian frontier? It is all deeply disturbing. The British stupidity enrages and depresses you. The whole face of the war has changed as a result of the grotesque happenings in Africa— especially as the Russian front is unaltered while Singapore is under siege and perhaps about to fall.
I was summoned to the police on Tuesday afternoon, so that they could warn me to dismiss the maid. “Jews do not have a right to hire servants.” Two painful hours of fear, ridiculous and out of all proportion. My Romanian-Jewish inhibitions have a paralyzing effect.
Nicuşor Constantinescu, whom I saw yesterday, insists that I finish the play and give it to him. As I understood it, he doubts whether his own play will be accepted at the National—and if it isn’t, he will put it on at a private theatre and give mine to the National. I don’t know what will come of all these plans and expectations. The first thing to do is finish it—then we shall see. I have decided to read him next Thursday or Friday what I have written. I’ll force myself to finish by then at least Act Two. Everything would go faster and more easily if I weren’t tied up at the school and college (an unforgivable stupidity), and if I didn’t also have to do the five days of snow work.
I started the college course this morning. The class was a failure. I thought I was a good speaker, and maybe I am—but I need a direct link with the class to be able to speak. Yesterday everything was amorphous, opaque, inert.
Nothing new at the fronts. The Japanese are a mile from Singapore! In Africa it is not yet known whether there is a British front and, if so, where it exists. In Russia there have been local actions of no importance.
The play is going slowly, unforgivably slowly. I haven’t even finished the scene with the director. I feel all the worse about it because I have arranged a reading with Nicuşor. I’d have liked to have Act Two finished.
Yesterday evening I finished the scene with the director. That leaves three more, including the only important scene, the one with Bucşan. I hope it won’t cause me too much difficulty—though you never know where difficulties will arise. Then there will remain Act Three, which still has no real shape.
Yesterday at Nicuşor’s I read what I have written of the play, with an audience of Leni, Froda, and Nelu. Disappointing. Not a success with anyone. No smiles. A brick wall of attentive but bored well-wishers. Act One, which I considered a “hit,” raised a vague appreciation from Nicuşor—“interesting”—a smile from Nelu, and not even that from Leni. Froda, who was bored, praised me for reading well. Act Two went down even worse. At the end, everyone told me that it was too literary and too long; that it needed to be cut and changed—in short, a failure. Tomorrow I’ll try to give it more thought. I’m too tired now. (How exhausting it is to read or “act” a play!) Maybe this reading was, after all, necessary for me. Maybe it will help me see things more accurately.
The Japanese landed last night on the actual island of Singapore. It can’t hold out much longer.
I have thought a lot about the play and the lessons to be drawn from yesterday’s reading. Whether people agree or not, I’ll leave Act One unchanged. I at least—and why shouldn’t I say it to myself?—consider it a perfect act of comedy and, technically speaking, a real “hit.” As for Act Two, the conclusions are simple.
1) Magda is too screwy and too arbitrary a character. She must be given a civil status, a reality. Otherwise—especially given the realism of the play as a whole—she will appear much too artificial.
2) Her exultation needs to come down a shade.
3) The scene between Magda and Andronic is too long and cumbersome. It will have to be simplified.
In general, yesterday’s disappointment has put me out of sorts, but it has also concentrated my mind. I am less excited, but at a higher level. I think that Nicuşor’s plan is unworkable. Act One has frightened them; they think the whole press will be up in arms. There may be something in that. Anyway, the name that is put to the play will have to be completely untouchable. Someone new to the scene, whose personal effacement will take some of the sting out of any attacks. Georgică Fotescu would be a good choice. But whatever happens, I shall have to give up the idea of staging it during the present season. It would be quite good if I could present it to the National in March-April-May, so that I could pick up an advance and have it performed next autumn or winter.
Yesterday I had a bite to eat with Şerban Cioculescu. He doesn’t know what he should want. A German victory? That would mean a protectorate. A British-Russian victory? That would mean sanctions. I could do nothing to ease his conscience.
Tomorrow morning Benu and I begin five days of snow work.
Thursday, 12 February
The Japanese have occupied Singapore. Impossible to calculate the consequences. The whole face of the war has changed. The moment is as grave as that of the fall of France in 1940. It hurts us less (then it was a personal, physical pain, a cardiac pain, a blow straight to the heart), but it is just as grave. Perhaps it does not spell the end. Perhaps the British will not succumb and the war will not be over. We now have a new war ahead of us, which could last for five, ten, or fifteen years. What will become of us? What will happen to our lives?
The other day I read Fox’s speech in 1800—the Fox who, alone in the House of Commons, argued that it was impossible to defeat Napoleon and that a compromise peace was the only option. He was wrong, of course, but it took fourteen years for this to become apparent. Wdl we have to wait so long? Will we be able to? Will we be allowed to?
At the last moment, an order issued by someone or other has excused academics from snow work. So I have remained at home.
On Friday evening the Gneisenau, Scharborst, and Prinz Eugen happily passed from Brest through the Straits of Dover, right under the noses of the British. “The most mortifying blow to the prestige of the Royal Navy since the seventeenth century,” commented the Times.
The British are having a run of ill luck; they have seldom looked so uncomfortable. Nor is it just a matter of their feeling “uncomfortable”; some serious questions are inevitably raised about the whole future of the war. Beyond all this bitterness, our old hope flutters stubbornly on— but it is tinged with a certain melancholy.
For three days I haven’t gone anywhere near the manuscript of my play. I am completely exhausted. Je m’épuise à ne rien faire.3 I lose myself in all kinds of wretched little things, at school, at the college.
How old I am! What a grub’s life I lead! How gloomy and stale! I find it hard to take my physical decline. I am disgusted when I look in the mirror.
A mindless, tiring week. I did nothing, wrote and read nothing, yet had the constant feeling that I was overwhelmed with things to do, exhausted by work. The college course—though not serious—takes up too much of my time and attention. Moreover, I received a number of invitations, which I accepted out of inertia and later endured with repugnance. Thursday at Gruber’s,4 Friday at Leni’s, yesterday at our place: three “society” evenings. And on top of those, lunch yesterday at Zissu’s. I’ll probably never get out of his clutches, unless I tell him plainly one day that he disgusts me.
The war is at a standstill. Nothing new at the fronts—or anyway, nothing important. The Japanese keep scoring successes. Nothing in Libya or in Russia. Today it will be eight months since the start of the Russian-German war, but the situation remains undecided. The front has scarcely changed. The Russians report advances, the Germans report encirclements, but neither appears to be serious. We shall have to wait for spring and summer. I wait with anxious unease.
Nicuşor has offered to work with me on my play. He suggests various solutions for Act Two and Act Three. He assures me that we will have a hit on our hands, and has even offered an advance of fifty thousand lei. I don’t think I’ll accept. I am sorry to say that I still have some literary prejudices, and an absurd, ridiculous “artistic conscience.”
Yesterday evening a Rador dispatch reported that the Struma had sunk with all on board in the Black Sea. This morning brought a correction, in the sense that most of the passengers—perhaps all of them—have been saved and are now ashore.5 But before I heard what had really happened, I went through several hours of depression. It seemed that the whole of our fate was in that shipwreck.
The other day, George Brătianu told Rosetti that unless Germany defeated the Russians by summer, and unless it organized the economy of the occupied territory, it would collapse by next winter—because it wouldn’t be able to take another winter. Such views and forecasts lack foundation. This war keeps creating new conditions that no one can foresee even one day ahead, let alone three months.
Stefan Zweig has committed suicide. He shouldn’t have done it; he didn’t have the right. I reread the following sentence from an interview he gave in 1940: “I would be suspicious against any European author who would now be capable to concentrate on his own, his private work.” All the less do we have the right to make individual gestures—even if we consider them liberatory. That’s how it seems to me, though who knows?
For a month now at the Baraşeum,6 Jewish actors have been performing a revue with great public success. All the seats are sold ten days ahead. I went yesterday with Benu (at the insistence of Sandu Eliad, Ronea, and Beresteanu), and I was amazed at the text and the audience. Is it possible that Jews who have experienced all these appalling tragedies still write, act, listen, and applaud such miseries? They asked me to write a play too (and of course I would for money—because I have to find the rent in March), but I don’t feel capable of writing in response to such exacting demands.
In the last few days I have been thinking that there is a solution for “Alexander the Great” that would address both my own doubts and Nicuşor’s suggestions. I write the play as I want to write it, then I give it to Nicuşor and give him complete freedom to change and perform it as he wishes. We split the author’s share fifty-fifty. This strikes me as an acceptable solution, especially if he keeps to the fifty-thousand-lei advance. We’ll sort things out again after the war.
I finished Act Two this evening—satisfactorily, I think. But I really must change, in fact completely rewrite, the scene between Magda and Andronic, which I realize is a nonstarter. With some changes, Act Two will unfold at the same dramatic, nervous pace as Act One. The real difficulties begin with the final act, which threatens to lose the rhythm of the play. We shall see.
The Germans have contradicted the Russian report of a major victory in the north, where it is said that the German 16th Army has been encircled and almost completely destroyed.
March! Perhaps it will not yet bring major changes in the shape of the war, for spring comes with difficulty after such a hard winter. The dangerous season will begin in April to May. For the moment the Russian attacks seem to have become intense again. Yesterday evening’s German communiqué noted heavy fighting all along the front: in the Crimea, “Russian attacks supported by tanks and aircraft”; in the Donets, “an attack with sizable forces.” Still, I don’t think that major turnarounds can be expected from now on.
N. Davidescu (!!!), back from Germany, met Rosetti and said that the Germans are losing the war, that only the British can emerge victorious, that the situation in Germany is desperate, and so on. Davidescu the Anglophile!
The five days of snow work have been increased to ten. Intellectuals may be exempted for a thousand lei a day. Where can I get twenty thousand lei for Benu and myself? I can’t even think of it. We’ll go out in the snow, and that’s that!
So, the six to seven hundred people on the Struma did go down with the ship. It seems that only one passenger—or, according to another report, four passengers—escaped. There has been no official statement. We didn’t really know any of those who set sail. Two or three vague, distant acquaintances. Not one I can recall and hold in my mind’s eye. (Possibly Schreiber, my former pupil in the 7th Year.) But the death of them all pains me.
We had decided to report tomorrow morning for snow work. We have been put off until the day after tomorrow.
Spring is in the air. It is still cold and overcast—but clearer and less misty. I have a sense of coming back to life, and at the same time a vague but profound sense of danger and fear.
“In the Crimea, on the Donets front, and to the south of Lake Ilmen, heavy defensive fighting continues”—said yesterday evening’s German communiqué. This evening’s communiqué repeats the same formula: heavy defensive fighting. Is something serious happening on the Soviet front? It would seem so from the tone of the German dispatches and communiqués. But the Russians are maintaining an impenetrable silence.
We leave for the snow work tomorrow morning at six. We have prepared our things. I feel rather weary (I’ve been in bad physical shape for some time), but I hope I’ll bear up to everything. I’m more worried about Benu, with his sciatica.
The first day of snow work. Dropping from tiredness. We left home at five-thirty this morning and returned at eight in the evening. The work itself is a joke (it is at a marshaling yard outside Grivita station). What wears you out is the standing around, the journey there, the waiting, the formalities. On the way home we couldn’t even cling to the outside of the packed streetcars as they went by. Never has Strada Antim seemed so far away.
Very tired, but not like yesterday. Things are starting to get more organized—which greatly reduces the time spent on various formalities (roll call, certificates, rubber stamps, etc.). We left at six-thirty this morning and were back home by six. If we were fitter, we might not be so tired. I have lost the habit of physical effort. The work detachment itself is a farce, perfectly resembling the Poligon detachment in October 1940, except that the work is even more absurdly poindess than it was there. We shift snow from one place to another—a completely senseless operation. If I hadn’t seen so many others in the last few years, I would have died with laughter.
As I handed over my shovel this evening, it occurred to me that millions of people around the world had been doing the same things that I had. I go home to sleep, eat, and forget. But what about those in the prison camps, in the internment camps? Where do they go? There is an inexplicable good humor in my work detachment. Each of us lives in the midst of danger and is aware of it. Each knows that tomorrow may bring greater miseries than the ones endured up to now. Each has left at home worries, bitterness, fears, and terrors. And yet, all are bound together by a kind of ironic youthfulness and martyrlike courage, which may be the expression of great vitality. I must say, we are an astonishing people.
Batavia has fallen. Not much of Java is left. The Japanese are still victorious more or less everywhere. On the Russian front the Soviet attacks seem to have weakened in the south. No major change anywhere.
Aunt Caroline has died: the last connection to our old Brăila, the last link to a whole past that is now lost forever. I am old. Tata left for there tonight.
There is a snowstorm. Winter has returned. Today in the open (even though we returned at two, as it was Sunday), I felt more exhausted and frozen than ever. The first five days of work are over. That leaves another five, which seems an enormous length of time. The farce of the work detachment no longer has anything new to say to me.
In the morning I worked at Grivita station, clearing fresh snow from the platforms. In the afternoon we went back to “Sector 6,” where it is less exposed and we can do what we like. The main operation was to move snow from one line to another. Spring returned around noon, when the sun came out. With a little imagination you could think you were at a hut somewhere in the mountains.
Rangoon has fallen. Java is now totally lost, and it seems that the Dutch there have capitulated. Nothing new on the Russian front.
I worked on the “snow train”—an operation that looked terribly difficult when we saw others doing it in the first few days. In fact it is not only simpler but even more stimulating than I expected. We played around filling some wagons, treating it all as fun and games. I also think I am getting fitter as a result. Last week I would not have been able to do as much as I did today. Imperceptibly I am becoming a railway worker— worse, a platform sweeper and track clearer. I am hardly even sensitive any more to the grotesque side of the situation. Only once, when I saw the Constanta train passing a few hundred meters away, did I catch myself thinking that two years back I could have been one of its passengers, one of those looking from a carriage window at men on the line with pick and shovel, at men without a name or an identity.
How terrible it is that, after these ten days that will pass—that have already nearly passed—the old miseries and fears await us. In the evening, as I came home on the streetcar, I saw it announced in the paper that Jews will have to pay the special reunification tax at four times the regular rate.
The tenth day of snow work. It was more of a struggle than the others. On Wednesday and Thursday we had sunshine, but today was cold and overcast, with bluish-grey skies. I can still feel the cold in my bones. I am very very tired. But I have in my pocket a “Romanian Railways certificate” with ten blue stamps and one pink, which shows that I “worked on snow-clearing at Bucharest-Grivita Station from 4 to 13 March 1942.”
In three days I have seen all the regulars: Rosetti, Camil, Aristide, the Roman office, the school, Zissu, Leni, Nicuşor, and so on. Nothing has changed; everything is the same as ever. I am the only one who is changed in any way: changed by sun and open air. Tanned and a little thinner, I have something of how I used to look after a ten-day holiday in Balcic or Predeal. I really do feel physically restored. But the tan will go, and I’ll soon return to my grubbish form. One might almost say it was better in the snow!
All kinds of troubles and woes. I find it hard to wade through them; I feel listless and disgusted, with no wish to carry on.
In Russia the German communiqués keep reporting “heavy defensive fighting” and “massive Soviet attacks.” The Ides of March find the winter counteroffensive in full swing—but the German front is holding almost intact. I don’t think anything essential can happen in this regard. We must wait until late spring or early summer (May-June, because April may still be too soon). Will a new German offensive be launched then? In his speech yesterday, Hitler said that he would finally crush the Russians “in the coming months.”
Beate Fredanov suggested that I write a play about the Struma—a suggestion that has set me thinking, especially as it links up with my old idea of a play about some shipwrecked people trying to start a new life on an island somewhere.
Nothing new at the fronts. “Heavy defensive fighting” is what the German communiqué invariably says.
Vişoianu, whom I saw today, thinks that yesterday’s speech about Transylvania is a local initiative and does not reflect German pressure on the Hungarians. He also told me some funny things about what Mircea Eliade is up to in Lisbon.
Nine months of war in Russia. Nothing new at the fronts. In today’s Universul, a German dispatch speaks of the future “summer campaign”— the first time, I think, that this term has been used. Until now the formulation has been “spring campaign.”
A pleasant afternoon with Branişte at a tavern. We talked at length about the Alice-Alcibiade comedy. He knows a host of things and recounts them intelligently. Beneath his naive appearance, il sait toujours à quoi s’en tenir.7
Yesterday and today have been disturbed days because of the rent. Will we be able to stay where we are? Will we have to move? Kazazian wants 150,000—and I don’t even know if she’ll give us an agreement for a year. It’s hard to imagine anyone more sordid, more vile and grasping. Nor am I sure there will ever be a day of judgment, either in heaven or on earth.
Rosetti told me a funny story about Russo,8 who for some time has been trying to get space for a grave at Bellu, with a particular position, size, vicinity, and price. The episode could be used for Danacu (Dâracu) in a novel.
I have read two plays by Galsworthy, Escape and The Roof, both written in the same manner. It could, as a type of scenario, provide me with a model for my play with the shipwrecked people.
The Russian attacks have entered a “period of stagnation,” according to DNB. “Weak attacks on Kerch.”
A week of anxiety, depression, and humiliation—in connection with the house, the landlord, and the rent. I’ll have to accept the exorbitant demands without even asking myself where I’ll find the money. I feel helpless in all these drawn-out discussions and negotiations; I don’t know how to defend myself. When I should be forceful and unyielding, I am bitter and sarcastic. Bitter and sarcastic with Mrs. Kazazian! I am ashamed of how unfit for life I am. I give away anything to avoid conflict. I allow people to cheat and prey on me, just to be left in peace. Lack of vitality? Disgust with human beings? Or just apathy and impotence? I feel sad at heart when I think of all these troubles.
For some time I have also had a fresh sense of dread and anguish. I am afraid of any stranger who appears before us.
Nothing new at the fronts. A British landing at Saint-Nazaire, which sounds more like a raid than an offensive action. It is a period of waiting. You wonder when and how the transition will take place from Russian offensive to German offensive. For the moment the communiqués invariably report Soviet attacks, some weaker, some stronger, all of which are furiously beaten off.
Winter again. It snowed all night long. White streets, a morning snowstorm. The German communiqué says that frost has returned to the Russian front. “Heavy defensive fighting,” according to the usual formula.
In the fortnight since I returned from snow work, I have made constant efforts to overhaul Act Two of my play. I don’t think I have succeeded. Again I have to admit that what I don’t manage at the first draft I will never succeed in doing. I have written, recopied, cut, redone, and altered Scene 5, the one with Magda and Andronic. I have turned it this way and that, and still it is bad. I have now decided to leave it as it is and move on to Act Three. Later, when I have acquired some distance from it, I’ll make another attempt at revision. I am beginning Act Three without relish and without confidence. This play ought to be fun—and it isn’t. I feel it becoming too unwieldy.
April, but not yet spring. The snow of yesterday and the day before has not all melted. Clouds and snow.
Nothing new at the fronts. “Powerful attacks, heavy fighting”—you wonder when we will see the offensive phase that the Germans keep announcing. Perhaps April will not change much either, especially if the weather stays bad.
The first night of Seder. I’d have liked us to have a proper Seder nacht,9 I sometimes think that our links with Judaism can be restored.
A spring day—a little too cold, but white, blue, transparent. Toward evening I Went for a walk by the lakes with Lereanu and Comşa.
A brief note from the English teacher, who is deserting us without explanation. Zissu and Aristide, to whom I imprudently recommended him, will certainly have paid him better. I didn’t think he was capable of such inelegance. This way of proceeding makes me angry, and I am upset at having lost him as a teacher. I made a lot of progress with him, and I’m sure that I’ll lose a lot without him.
Will April pass without any developments in the war? I cannot believe it. April ’40 was used for the Norwegian campaign. April ’41 for Serbia and Greece. Why shouldn’t April ’42 be used in Turkey? Or (absurd as it strikes me) in Sweden?
It appears that the deportation of Jews from Dorohoi has started again. Gaston Antony tells me that a statute concerning the Jews is in preparation and will soon be published. Baptized Jews, he says, will have a better position in law and will, in any event, be protected from deportation. Gaston tells me that he alone in his family has not been baptized. It is an absurd, grotesque comedy. I spent this evening at the Baraşeum, where a play was in rehearsal. The auditorium was filled with Jews—but in the whole theatre (according to Bogoslav) only two or three practice the faith: the rest are Catholics, Orthodox, or Protestants.
With fifteen hundred lei I won at poker the last few evenings, I bought one of Mozart’s Milan quartets and Bach’s third Brandenburg concerto— to give myself a little happiness on this spring morning, so sunny and so bursting with youth. Life is somewhere alongside me, outside me.
So far I haven’t written a line of Act Three. But I have come up with some incidents that might prove useful. I need an act with riches of its own, and if possible with new characters. This evening I thought that if I set this act too in the editorial office, the difficulties would be considerably reduced. I would have the people from Act One, and especially an already-created atmosphere. The brisk pace of the early part would suddenly be regained. On the other hand, I cannot draw Bucşan in full unless he is in his own setting. In the office where he is economic dictator, he will be more powerful and more overwhelming than elsewhere. (This is true especially of the scene with Minister Brănscu, if I decide to employ him in the end.) But this raises the problem of how I would then introduce Andronic and Magda, who would fit much more credibly into the editorial office. Each of the two settings (newspaper or Buchan’s office) has advantages and disadvantages, situational plausibility but also situational implausibility. One solution might be for Act Three to have two tableaux, the first in Bucşan’s office, the second at the newspaper—but in that case other difficulties and discrepancies would arise.
Well, we shall see. For the moment I am happy that the play—which once completely sickened me—is beginning to interest me again. Not too much—but maybe enough for me to finish it.
Nothing new in the course of the war. A period of waiting and preparing. No one can say what will happen. We just realize that there are stormy times ahead; probably huge efforts, terrible blows, great battles. Only in the autumn will we, perhaps, be able to grasp their significance and outcome. Until then we will need strong nerves, staying power— and good luck. Once this general assessment has been made, all the rest— discussions, prognoses, information, opinions—becomes pointless.
I borrowed the Lekeu sonata from Lena for a few days—and I listen to it all the time. It reminds me of Franck at many points. Very beautiful, I must say.
I haven’t written anything for Act Three; I just haven’t had the resolve. There is a lot of material, not yet well organized. I promise myself that as soon as I finish Act Three, I shall get down to “Freedom.” I also keep thinking of the shipwreck play, which is becoming clearer in my mind. Meanwhile the material for the novel is growing and falling into shape. Never have I had so many literary projects on which I could set to work. In a well-ordered life with relatively calm conditions, I think I could write from morning till evening every day for months. But who knows what will come of all this?
Nothing new at the fronts. The German communiqués of the past few days have mentioned a new Russian attack at Kerch, and local German attacks in the center. Situation unchanged. In today’s papers, a kind of DNB weather bulletin shows that winter has ended but that spring is not favorable to an offensive either, because of rain, melting snow, fog, and mud. Does this mean that the offensive will be postponed until June?
The trial at Riom has been called off.1
Despite everything, there are certain things that France cannot commit, even if it wants to, even if it tries. A country that produces Jules Renard cannot fall too low in the moral order. Or can it? Maybe I am mistaken. Maybe things cannot be understood from afar. Poldy would know what to say. Nevertheless, it seems to me that France feels rather awkward when it comes to base deeds; they are not its style. N’est pas infăme qui veut.2
I was with Leni in a streetcar yesterday evening when a woman accompanied by a major (doubtless her husband) looked with recognition at Leni and discreetly pointed her out to him. She was visibly surprised and happy at the encounter. At the market the woman stood up to get off the streetcar but then suddenly turned and offered Leni her hand—with a shy and affectionate gesture, like a schoolgirl. The major also greeted her with an air of enchantment. Both would have liked to speak, to say something—but the gesture said everything for them. So, that too is possible.
A lot more could be written about Leni, if she were still of interest to me. She readily tells me of the affairs she had three or four years ago—affairs for which I would have felt like killing her if I’d known at the time, but which now leave me cold. How grotesque, too, was that absurd affair of mine!
Yesterday evening, for the first time in six or seven years, I reread to my great surprise Oraşul cu salcîmi. As it happened, I had with me some of my pupils’ exercise books from 5th Year, with summaries of their month’s reading. Among these was an intelligent summary of Oraşul cu salcimi, full of ingenious observations on its possible relations with other of my books. I read this with amusement, then took the book down from a shelf with the intention of leafing through it. But I couldn’t put it down. It used to disgust me: I refused to speak about it, it irritated me just to read the title, and I considered the whole thing a foolish error. Well, now I think I was unjust. Reading it now, with the characters, scenes, and incidents almost entirely forgotten, I find the book captivating. How youthful it is! Beyond all the elements of naivete, it has a certain freshness, a certain poetry, that move me. Or am I so old that the book’s youth gains an exaggerated value, beyond literature? I don’t know. The fact is that I spent three enjoyable hours reading it.
The marriage of Baby, Alice’s daughter. Wedding at the Biserica Amzei Church, buffet lunch at the Delea Veche, then a visit to Alcibiade, who is ill. I looked carefully and with amusement at all the people in the Delea Veche, and I ran over the story of each one separately, of all together, and of the house itself—all mingled in a terrible, grotesque, absurd comedy. What extraordinary material for a novel!
I have suddenly found another subject for a play. It came into my head this morning (don’t ask me how), and I kept tossing it around all day— in the street, on the streetcar and bus—until I returned home in the evening and wrote d'un trait3 the whole scenario for Act One. I was in such a state of excitement that I didn’t have the patience to write down the scenario for the other two acts. I went out, rang Leni, and went to her place with the intention of telling her about my find. The evening before, I had said to myself that a play was needed for Leni, Stroe, Ronea, and Marian. Well, I wanted to tell them, I have the play! Even funnier, during the eight to ten minutes I was on a No. 40 bus going toward Bulevardul Mărăşesti, I mentally outlined the scenario for Act Two and Act Three, and came up with a number of unexpected incidents. So when I reached Leni’s, I gave her a complete exposition. Great enthusiasm. Both Leni and Froda said it was a great coup! That’s all very well, but I still have to write it. Right now I am holding four plays, not one of them (not even “Alexander the Great”) written. I can be a writer for the theatre, even an inventive one, but I need to have greater tenacity, greater professionalism. We shall see.
A splendid spring night—blue, silver, transparent, airy, slightly unreal. How fantastic Balcic must be in this light! If the war did not extract us from life, if we did not have this constant sense of reclusion, perhaps such a spring—or at least such a night—would not be wasted even on a person like myself, who for a long time has felt himself to be lost.
April has passed without changes. What will May bring us?
If I were not so tired—exhausted by several bad nights and several days of hectic effort—I would try to write here this evening. I feel as if I am choking with bitterness, tedium, rebelliousness, and disgust. If I were to write, I might possibly cleanse myself. To keep a journal is a matter of routine. (It’s not the first time I’ve realized this.) If you don’t write anything for ten days, it is very difficult to begin again on the eleventh. But I do want to return to this notebook, to record some things that have happened or that I have thought in the last few weeks. Maybe tomorrow.
I have definitely lost the habit of keeping a journal. Over the last few days I have kept promising to write—and kept abandoning the idea. I still don’t feel capable this evening of formulating a proper sentence— but as I anyway have a pen in my hand (I have spent the last two hours completing part of the census return), I shall jot down a few things at least.
Last week I translated five Shakespeare sonnets. I was delighted that I found this technically quite easy. I felt a kind of passion for all the sonnets, which struck me as splendid in the original and highly open to poetry in translation. It was as simple as a crossword puzzle—and as intoxicating as a wave of youthful lyricism. I walked in the street reciting verses, seeking rhymes, counting syllables. (How many people must have seen me talking to myself in the street or on a streetcar!) But now I have stopped, now I have calmed down. For several days I have been on Sonnet LXXI (“No longer mourn for me when I am dead”), and I cannot get started again. I don’t find rhymes, I cannot match the verse—and what I do find is impossibly flat. I’d be sorry to have to abandon it. I’d be all the sorrier because this game has become a new drug for me, which takes me a little away from life’s troubles.
I have to pay five thousand (but I may get off with one thousand) for five days of snow work, even though I worked ten. At first I was furious. Rosetti and Solacolu couldn't believe it when I happened to tell them. They said it was a farce. And a farce it is—though a serious one. Now I am resigned to it.
Nina has been in Bucharest for two or three weeks. Obviously she didn't try to get hold of me, nor I of her. In fact I don't know what I could say to her. It seems that Mircea will be appointed to Rome; his political views (he’s more of a Legionary than ever) make him useless in Lisbon. I have been told (by Rosetti) that he gets 400,000 a month. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but even 200,000 wouldn’t be bad. I must admit that, when I heard this, I felt a moment’s indignation, disgust, and cheerless envy. While he is off living a magnate’s life, in paradises of life, peace, luxury, comfort, and dream, while he lives the “new order” to the full, I am stuck here with a wretched prisoner’s existence.
When the war is over—assuming that I survive and we meet again— I will be able to balance his years of prosperity only with my grim years of humiliation and failure.
Nothing can ever excuse failure. Successes, even when resulting from moral infamy, remain successes.
Today, after such a long interval, I have reread the first two acts of “Alexander the Great.” They (even the second one) seemed excellent. Now that I have finished with school and exams, I’d like to get down to work—but before anything else I really must write Act Three. It is ridiculous to be stuck en route with a play two-thirds written, the more so when I think of the straightforwardness of the subject and the richness of the situation. Only when I finish this will I be able to think of the play with Leni. What is bad is that I have still not settled on the scenario for Act Three. Until this evening I didn’t even know whether it would take place at the newspaper or in Bucsan’s office. Now I think I have decided—for good?—in favor of the editorial office. Tomorrow I’ll try to get started.
I haven’t translated any more sonnets. I am waiting for another wave of lyricism before I begin again. With Benu, Comşa, and Lereanu, on the other hand, we have finished reading Cymbeline and moved on to Henry the Fourth, Part One. It is going fairly easily. Recently my reading has been quite varied. I have revisited, after ten or eleven years, Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man—this time in the original. Less moving than the first time.
It is now June, but the gates of victory are still closed. I couldn’t say that we know more today than we knew or suspected in March. After Kerch and Kharkov, the situation is still roughly the same. Only if Rommel’s offensive was successful (which does not seem to be happening) and if the offensive against the Soviets could develop also through Iran, only then would we find ourselves in a truly novel phase of the war. As it is, the development of the situation is still more or less predictable, by analogy with what happened last year.
I feel down at heart. Rumors, prognostications, interpretations. Everyone is saying that new anti-Semitic laws will be introduced any day now. A nine-o’clock curfew. Yellow insignia. A ghetto here in Bucharest. A ghetto at the Berşad (?)4 barracks in Transnistria. You don’t want to believe it, you refuse to listen, but you are left with doubts deep inside you. The air-raid alert on Thursday to Friday night, and the rumors of bombing, frighten me less in themselves than because of the overheated, hysterical climate they might produce—as they did last year. I shudder when I remember.
I keep thinking of Poldy. There the terror is mounting. How is he? How is he managing? He is so alone!
The absurd unreality of our life. We still read books. We still have the strength to laugh. We hold celebrations. We go to the theatre. On Wednesday evening I went to the Baraşeum. And at eleven in the morning. . . .
Sometimes it seems that our plight no longer has anything to do with the war. The war is somewhere on a different level, in a different order of events. You discuss it, you follow it on the map, you comment on it— but whatever happens there, everything remains grave and threatening for us.
But we are alive. And we must not lose the will to live.
Two years since the French armistice. And we are still breathing! It is true that we carry with us the weariness of these terrible two years—but we are alive. Until when? There is an appearance of calm, but so many horrors lurk beneath it. Rumors of another anti-Semitic outbreak mingle with reassuring denials, both equally vague and irresponsible. I don’t know where they come from, what worth and significance they have. And times passes slowly, so slowly. I count the days, the hours.
Tired. In a bad physical condition. My eyes do not help me read. Headaches. Otherwise I would work—reluctantly perhaps, but I would still work.
The 22nd of June. A year since the start of the war in Russia. When you look back, you realize that nothing could have been foreseen. This should cure us of our absurd game of predictions. And yet there does seem to be a certain rhythm to the war, with its almost regular sequences of fever and calm, of ebb and flow. If this keeps up, the second year of war might resemble the first. Personally, I don’t believe that something decisive is bound to happen in the short term. Autumn will not necessarily bring the denouement any more than it did last year.
For the time being (apart from the offensive against Sebastopol), the Russian front is in abeyance. But the battle in Africa, after two weeks of wavering, has suddenly been propelled forward. Yesterday the British abandoned Tobruk. I wonder whether Rommel is not aiming at much more than that. It may be that preparations are being made to turn the Middle East into a huge wing of the war in Russia.
Eugen Ionescu left Romania yesterday. A miraculous event.
Tiring discussions, commentaries, suppositions, interpretations! You try to understand what will happen from now on. What may be the consequences of the fall of Tobruk? When will Sebastopol fall? Why is the German offensive being delayed? Is an Anglo-American landing possible? Will the war not shift for the time being toward Suez? What will Turkey do? So many questions that you raise and set aside. There are arguments for each hypothesis. I’d like to be able to drop the war for a while. I’d like to escape this obsession with it. I am tired. I’m afraid of neurasthenia. I wish I could have a little freedom, a little oblivion.
We still don’t know if the British disaster in Libya has bottomed out. The fighting is now in Egypt, beyond Sidi el-Barrani, at Mersa Matruh. If Rommel calls a halt, the whole operation will remain in the usual framework of the African war. But if he occupies Alexandria and gets as far as Cairo, the whole face of the war will be fundamentally altered. Sebastopol still has not fallen.
I have tried for hours and days on end to write Act Three of “Alexander the Great,” but to no avail. On the one hand, the final act has brought the play to a standstill; on the other hand, I myself am in a period of total lack of inspiration. I am apathetic, lethargic, lacking in energy and spontaneity, opaque, inert, dislocated. Everything I put on paper is dull, wooden, pointless. Evidently the scenario for Act Three is not a happy one. I even have doubts about where it is set. (I originally placed it in the editorial office but then began it in Bucşan’s office, without knowing whether I would eventually return to the newspaper.) However good or bad, though, I’d like to finish the act, at least so that I can put it to one side. But I don’t manage to do this.
The truth is that I don’t manage anything: not even to read a book in a disciplined way from beginning to end. I feel bitter, drowsy, disjointed, disgusted with myself. I am waiting for a little grace to appear from somewhere.
Mersa Matruh has fallen. The road to Alexandria lies open. The whole British system in the Middle East seems to have crumbled.
July-August. The difficult months of the war. Sixty days in the middle of hell. In Africa, Rommel is 190 kilometers from Alexandria. It seems that the British, who so far have beat a hasty retreat, are today trying to fight back. Will they be able to?
Sebastopol has fallen.
The struggle for Alexandria goes on. I have been expecting its fall to be announced at any moment. But at present the front is still holding at El Alamein. Yesterday’s German communiqué reported that Rommel has taken the position and advanced beyond it, but today’s communiqué speaks of “strong fortifications” and “major strengthening” at the same point. Is it possible for the British to recover? What happens there is crucial. The whole aspect of the war could change in a flash. I can’t even be sure that, as I write these lines, the die has not already been cast.
An almost overwhelming vision of a new play suddenly thrust itself forward amid a series of unfocused thoughts. It was feverishly intense, so simple and powerful that it has left me feeling a little dizzy. I wish I could write it down at once, automatically, with my eyes shut. But God knows what will come of this, as of so many other ideas.
Yesterday I wrote the scenario for the play I visualized so giddily on Saturday evening. To be frank, my excitement yesterday at noon seemed naive after a night’s sleep. The spell had passed. I felt that it was all no longer so mysterious, and I was a little embarrassed by myself. But as I wrote the scenario I became animated again—not only because I succeeded in putting Saturday’s intense yet confused thoughts on paper, but also because I made them clearer, more extensive, more sharply defined. So here I am holding another scenario—the third, not counting “Alexander the Great.”
Will I write them? When?
Again I must deplore the slowness with which I write. I don’t think anyone has less vivacity, less freedom of movement, less spontaneous ease than I have. Certain things I lack completely. Sometimes, when I see ideas in a kind of dazzling light, I have the impression that everything could be done miraculously in a few hours, as if by a process of unconscious dictation. But when I pick up my pen, everything becomes opaque again—and then the absurd, flat, dull work of writing begins, which takes days, weeks, months, sometimes years.
As far as “Alexander the Great” is concerned, the end now seems closer. Act Three, which I began reluctantly and have been writing without confidence, seems to be taking shape in an interesting way. Today I worked quite well. I still have to write two scenes in all—the last two— but the fate of the whole act depends upon them, because if they are not a success, everything I have done up to now will fail and the whole act will have to be written differently. It seems a question more of skill and tact than of dramatic material. The situation of my heroes is at the moment a little artificial, but a pirouette could save everything.
In Egypt the main fighting is at El Alamein—seemingly at a lower intensity than before. The British resistance appears to be growing firmer. In fact the German communiqués and dispatches all discreetly pass over the African front (which was such a grave issue last week) and stridently emphasize the Russian front, where the start of a major offensive has been officially announced. Fighting is taking place between Kursk and Kharkov, up to the region of the Don.
A long intricate dream last night, from which I remember only the setting and the broad framework. I was one of a three-man delegation to congratulate Mrs. Antonescu on the marriage of (I think) her son. We were received in a vast rectangular hall, with many flowers. After a while the hall was filled with guests, most of them in evening dress. In an adjoining hall, larger and more sumptuous than the first, an entertainer and then a girl sang some English songs. I remember that Leibovici Camil was one of the guests, among a group of (I think) girls known to me from Brăila, and that they made a sign for me to come closer. Meanwhile, however, without a change in the setting, we were no longer at Mrs. A.’s, but at Princess Bibescu’s, waiting for Valentin B. to return from an air raid or a competition, with a decoration or a trophy. And I did indeed see Valentin Bibescu, in evening dress with a male entourage, stride across the hall and on past me.
Yesterday evening at Capşa, where I had gone to collect Rosetti, as arranged. At the next table were Ion Barbu and Onicescu, with the evening papers spread open in front of them. Barbu, following a map of the African front, was very disappointed by Rommel’s halt. Onicescu tried to cheer him up:
“Any piston, however powerful, draws back after it has delivered a blow. That’s what is happening at El Alamein.”
Barbu did not seem altogether recovered.
“And then,” Onicescu continued, “can’t you see what has happened in the north? They’ve destroyed an American convoy of fifty ships.”
“That’s more like it!” Barbu shouted, and his whole face lighted up.
I found both of them most amusing. They were like two Jews engaged in café politics—with the same fears and enthusiasms—but on the opposite side of the barricades.
In Russia, Voronezh has fallen and the Don has been crossed at several points. The German offensive seems colossal. Camil Petrescu assures me that they’ll be at the Volga in a week. I bet that it would be the first of August. In Africa, things remain halted at El Alamein.
Last night I read The Two Gentlemen of Verona. After Measure for Measurer, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and Twelfth Night, I have few of that kind of comedy left to read. Meanwhile I continue the royal plays with Benu, Lereanu, and Comşa: we have finished Henry the Fourth and read the first three acts of Henry the Fifth. The more I get into Shakespeare, the more enchanted I become. I have given some pleasant thought to the idea of writing a book about him. Maybe I’ll start right now to sort my reading notes into a series of files. Before writing such a book (but when? when?), it would be enjoyable—and also, I think, useful—to give some lectures on Shakespeare.
Sleepless nights, as I have never had before. Sometimes I haven’t slept a wink until six, and felt exhausted when I got up in the morning. It is not only because of the dog days but above all because of all the exasperation that has accumulated for so long inside me—and is now taking its revenge. But I must get a grip on myself. I still need my nerves.
In Russia the Germans are advancing toward and beyond the Don. The Russians are in retreat there but are counterattacking in other sectors. The war is in one of its most intense phases. The center of hell. Still waiting at El Alamein.
I have finished “Alexander the Great”—at last!—or, to be more precise, I have finished Act Three. The play still needs some touching up, but that should be easy to do when I copy it out. This does not mean that I am satisfied with the work I have done. In fact, if I think of my original intentions (a light play, written quickly for immediate performance to earn some money), I have failed. It has turned out quite differently: not good enough to count in my writer’s corpus; not common enough to be a big hit; not innocuous enough to pass as such into one of today’s repertoires. But I shouldn’t grouse—not today, at least. For better or worse, I have finished it and therefore become available for something else. I’ll have a go at the play for Leni. A possible title would be Insula.
I don’t know exactly what is happening at the fronts. The German communiqués are vague, even if the press dispatches are enthusiastic. The propaganda speaks of disasters and final decisions, but things do not seem as grave as all that. Fighting continues at Voronezh, where the Russians are resisting and counterattacking. To the south, the Germans have occupied Voroshilovgrad and now have Rostov under attack. Another offensive is aimed at Stalingrad. Just from reading the papers, I have the impression that, however boisterous the style, the situation is not really so acute.
Yesterday I opened Montaigne by chance (I needed to trace some Latin verse), and I couldn’t put it down. What delights! Not for a very long time—perhaps never—has he seemed so lively, so enchanting, so direct and familiar. Yesterday I read “De l’inutile et de l’honnête,” and today I began “De l’éxperience.” Everything, almost every line, seemed subversive and liable to censorship in today’s world.
Not a thought for the play I finished yesterday. No affection for it. I feel it as something alien, yet I shall have to concern myself a little with it.
An air raid at ten this evening. Why? you ask yourself. From where? The Russians are at the Don, the British have their work cut out in Egypt—so who is still so keen to fly over these parts? The sirens caught me at Piaţa Natiunii, where it was impossible to find shelter nearby. I lay at full length in the grass, with everyone else who had got off the buses and streetcars. For the first time I witnessed operations in the open air. The firing was quite powerful. Tracer bullets, searchlights, exploding shells—the whole thing, beneath a moon slightly blurred by smoky white clouds—resembled a huge fireworks display. I didn’t see a single airplane. The alert lasted an hour—after which I went straight home and read the last two acts of The Tempest.
I have learned with surprise, and with pleasure (from a commentary by Duval), that Shakespeare read Montaigne and was passionately fond of his Essays. I seem to like him all the more now, because I am reading both of them at once.
A letter from Antoine Bibescu, in reply to the letter I sent him a week ago to ask if he would receive me for a while at Corcova. “Vous êtes at-tendu avec joie et impatience.”5 It remains to be seen whether I can obtain the necessary permission; Rosetti has already offered to try. I think a few days in Corcova would do me a lot of good. I don’t feel well physically (the accumulation of sleepless nights, tiredness, a cold—all kinds of things), and my nerves are completely gone. I live with too many obsessions and idées fixes.
Since yesterday evening I have a little quartet by Mozart for strings and oboe. It’s not one of his key works—a playful sketch, rather. But it is nice enough, and I think I could go on listening to it indefinitely. It’s like sonorous froth—a little insubstantial, but delicate and full of grace.
I heard a while ago—but omitted to mention it in this journal (is it becoming so unimportant to me?)—that Mircea Eliade is in Bucharest. He did not try to get hold of me, of course, or show any sign of life. Once that would have seemed odious to me—even impossible, absurd. Now it seems natural. Like that, things are simpler and clearer. I really no longer have anything at all to say to him or ask him.
The fall of Rostov seems imminent. The Germans report they have reached the outskirts of the city.
In Russia the situation on the southern front after the fall of Rostov seems to have become more and more serious. The Germans have crossed the lower Don at several points and are rapidly advancing over the wide plain now open to them. Even if they do not immediately attack the Caucasus (which cannot yet be known), they will try to seal it off by drawing a line from the Azov to the Caspian.
Mac Constantinescu,6 whom I met yesterday, told me that all of them (Vulcânescu and so on) gathered at Mircea Eliade’s and also “called me to mind.” The expression amused and irritated me at the same time. “What, were you having a seance?”—I regret not having asked him.
On Sunday I read aloud for Benu the last two acts of my play. A wretched impression. It all seemed to be absurd, bungled, without any charm. How often I wanted to break it off halfway through! But three days have passed since then—and I think I am now seeing things more sensibly. To be sure, the play is no great shakes. It could not even be put on stage in its present form, though I don’t think it would require too many changes. I’ll leave it for the time being, shut it up in a drawer, and get down to something else (if my health allows it, because I again have problems with my eyes and with sleeping). But later, in a few months’ time, I’ll try to look over it again.
I have read a Dreiser novel with great interest: The Financier. It is powerful, solid, and large. But he lacks a little poetry, the mysterious magnetism of a Balzac, to be a really first-rate writer. Anyway, it is enough to put me off any novel I have written or may ever want to write. Meanwhile I am getting on with my Shakespeare and Montaigne. Finished Richard II, begun The Comedy of Errors. Also read the last two acts of Hamlet, which I had left unfinished.
July passed terribly slowly—hour by hour, minute by minute. I draw time after me, I drag myself along behind it. I live with my eyes on clock and calendar: another day, and another, and another. It is exhausting. “For now hath time made me his numbering clock,” says Richard II in prison. Our prison is more oppressive. I wish I could forget a little, be a little indifferent. I’d like to have a week of clear and simple living, without any obsessions.
The first of August last year! What a terrible day it was! In comparison, we are now—or ought to be—grateful.
Summer. Lazy, inert, long, heavy days. I lead a grub’s life. My only way of being awake is insomnia. But when I am lucky enough to sleep, I fall into a kind of general lethargy. I no longer ask myself anything. I couldn’t stand it. Will I ever wake up? Will I ever come back to life? Will I ever again be a living person?
Again there is great concern about what is in store for us in Romania. Are new blows being prepared against the Jews? Today’s papers—as if responding to a signal—are full of official statements concerning Jews (work, requisitioning, criminal offenses, threats, etc.). According to the Interior Ministry, “the authorities have established that most violations of the law . . . and most acts of sabotage . . . are committed by Jews.” On the other hand, Bukarester Tageblatt has a long article showing that between this autumn and the autumn of 1943 Romania plans to become “judenfrei,” through our deportation to the Bug. There is an oppressive climate, charged with forebodings, fears, and terrors that you don’t even dare think through to the end.
And Poldy? What is happening with him? Suddenly there is talk of mass deportations of Jews from France to Poland. The nightmare is ever darker, ever more demented. Will we ever wake up from it?
Again I have not slept the last few nights. Disgusting insomnia, with dogs howling and barking in the yard next door, with flies buzzing around the room, with bedbugs crawling all over the bed, the walls, and me. A great revulsion. But I must rise above it if I want to go on living.
Big roundups in town. This morning, apparently, the whole city was studded with checkpoints and patrols. I don’t think Jews were the only ones targeted.
Today I looked at the map for the first time in two or three weeks in order to locate all the places mentioned in the German communiqué: Armavir, Krasnodar, the River Laba, the Sal and Don regions, Kalach. There has been an important advance from the south, but the situation still seems confused and undecided, at least in that sector. As to the rest of the front, there is no change. The German communiqué indicates a powerful Soviet offensive at Rzhev—but nothing major can reasonably be expected.
I have reread A High Wind in Jamaica, which I first read ten or twelve years ago in French. Some difficulties with the vocabulary (because of the nautical terms), but what a beautiful, unusual book! The same strange mixture of innocence and cruelty that stunned me, I think, the first time.
Slowly, all too slowly, I have begun to write the first act of Insula. I’m on the third scene. I can’t even say I have got to the real subject of the play. All I have done so far is a kind of preliminary setting of the scene. In fact I fear that the whole scenario for Act One is the outline of a sketch.
No big changes at the front. The German advance in the Caucasus is continuing, but now it has reached the mountains and slowed down. Piatigorsk, which fell a few days ago, is almost in the center of the peninsula. This looks impressive on the map, but the Germans probably won’t try to cross the mountains—not yet at least. For the moment they are moving across the peninsula to the Caspian, with some two or three hundred kilometers still to go. The offensive at the bend in the Don and toward Stalingrad is being maintained. The Russians are resisting, but the attack is expected to become more intense here. In the center and toward the north, the Germans are on the defensive. In general, nothing decisive. The situation is roughly the same as it was.
What people say about the war is not interesting. Predictions, wishful thinking, fears—all are equally arbitrary. On Friday evening I dined with Vişoianu and the lawyer Gad, and on Monday I had lunch with Devechi. Although each had a different orientation (Devechi, malgré tout,7 can’t help remaining Germanophile, even if he denies it), each repeated the same formulas, the same arguments, the same pieces of information. It is uninteresting—one might even say mindless. And it is so tiring. But you never have enough of discussing the same things over and over again. The war is following us like our own shadow.
I haven't written another line of the play all week. What did grip me, quite out of the blue, was a taste for my old plan for a novel. Suddenly things have become real, with living people and an attractive story. There are a number of series of events that I would like to bring together in the same framework, but until now I have not clearly seen how to do this. All at once everything seems to be taking shape and expanding. It will not be one epic episode but a fresco, or better a "saga," of a whole era from 1926 to the present day, which takes in not only my new heroes (whom I can already see very well) but also many characters who were not fully drawn in De două mii de ani and will now acquire reality. This time I shall probably work differently from my usual way. My books have all been written without drawing from a file, without a guiding plan, often even without a vague preliminary notion of the paths to be taken and the goal to be reached. But if I really am going to write a largescale work, I shall have to organize my material. A kind of pleasure at inventing things that I felt jostling inside me forced me to pick up my pen, not to “formulate” anything but to jot things down in haste. So at present I have filled nearly six sheets of paper with a rough summary of the material for the first five chapters. Together with what still remains to outline, this will mean a novel of three hundred pages. But in no case will I leave things at that, because the characters in this first episode interest me more for what they will become later (ten or fifteen years later) than for what they already are. This novel too, however, like all my other projects (three plays, a translation of the Sonnets, a book about Shakespeare), depends on so many things! First of all, there is the question of my health and physical resilience. Am I not too run-down to carry the load of all my work projects? Maybe not. Maybe some things are still capable of repair—though not, alas! the essential ones.
The German advance in the Caucasus is becoming slower and slower. Yesterday evening’s communique speaks of stubborn resistance, difficult terrain, and tropical heat. The truth is that the acute phase of the struggle for the peninsula has passed, thereby diminishing the enthusiasm or the depression of observers on either side. The psychological balance is again shifting toward Britain. The game is still the same. But I don’t think it will be long before the Germans start another major offensive in one of the sectors (maybe Stalingrad or even Moscow)—and then the corresponding depressions and enthusiasms will again be de rigueur. Perhaps only later, in the autumn, will it be possible to make all the important (if not final) calculations.
“The Jews hand in their bicycles!”—the main text on this afternoon’s newspaper boards. I burst out laughing without meaning to. The joke about the Jews and the cyclists automatically came to mind.
Starting from tomorrow, Jews will pay twenty lei for a loaf of bread instead of the fifteen lei for Christians.
A British landing in Dieppe! The first moment of emotion (full of all manner of fabulous hopes, dormant inside us beneath all the disappointments)—but then, very soon, a return to reality. It is not an invasion, not even an offensive, only a local incursion—more energetic than the one at Saint-Nazaire, but with no greater significance. It is, as they say, a “combined raid,” involving tanks, aircraft, and artillery. Some of the landing forces have by now reembarked; the rest are continuing to fight.
A loaf of bread costs not twenty but thirty lei for Jews. For us that means one thousand lei more a month—quite a lot in our poor household calculations. But for the really impoverished Jews, it is a calamity. Nevertheless, so long as we are still at home, everything is bearable.
I am continuing with Shakespeare, though not at the same rhythm. I have read Richard III and Romeo and Juliet.
The German report on the Dieppe operation indicates that everything was over by four o’clock yesterday afternoon, that the landing forces amounted to a division and were repelled with heavy losses on the British side. All the Axis press considers this proof that a landing to open a “second front” is impossible. I don’t know the opposite point of view or the account given by London, but in any case I don’t understand very well the purpose of the operation. Whatever the explanation, one is left with some suspicion that it was not really serious.
Nothing new at the fronts.
The week ending today brought three anti-Semitic measures: expensive bread, confiscated bicycles, and—the day before yesterday—a ban on having servants after the first of October. It is disturbing that a kind of sequence is being established, in which new oppressive measures become automatic. You wonder what will come next.
I shall force myself to leave for Strehaia tomorrow evening. I think it has finally become possible, after endless interventions and obstacles.
I am leaving for Corcova. A grotesque farce should be written about the adventures I had before I finally obtained the necessary papers. Once upon a time, that much effort would have sufficed to organize a journey around the world.
I met Paul Sterian8 in the street—a Paul Sterian grown fat, almost porcine. He was so confused and embarrassed at meeting me, so eager to rush off and escape, that I did not want to rush off now myself without noting the incident.
I returned this morning from Corcova, rested and recovered, calm, suntanned, with that holiday look of which I used to be so proud. Ten days of the free life, in the sunshine and open air, can still make a new man of me. I am not yet so worn out as to be unable to respond to such a call from life. I thought I was on my last legs. But not so. I am still alive. I still have healthy reflexes. Life can be brought back out of all my decay, apathy, and collapse.
But in Bucharest I find the same woes and troubles—with some new ones added. I am well aware that I won’t be able to stay in my present “form.” Tâchons de vivre pourtant.9
I must try to stop myself from being overwhelmed by troubles old and new. I must pull myself together. If I could draw up and stick to a regular program of work (reading and writing), perhaps I would avoid letting myself go again. It makes no sense, and is of no use to anyone, simply to relapse into our common exasperation. I am in hell—but in this hell I must discover an area of solitude, to the extent that this is possible. It tears me apart just to pass by Sfîntu Ion Nou, where Jews picked up from their homes are kept while awaiting deportation. It breaks my heart to see them, and I feel ashamed to turn my head. There are atrocities that cannot be observed with one’s eyes open. They are too unbearable, like great physical suffering. Words are no longer any help at all.
Poldy is somewhere in the countryside, in the Garonne. This gives me a certain feeling of relief. We know almost nothing about how he is, but he does seem to be safer than before.
I haven’t found half an hour to note anything down about Corcova.
It would have been amusing to keep a journal in Corcova, but I can no longer reconstruct it now from memory. I don’t regret this. It was a holiday—and it’s just as well that I didn’t interrupt it even for a daily journal entry. Here I am in a round of events that do not allow me to go back, even in my thoughts, to Corcova.
This morning the people at Sfîntu Ion Nou were loaded into trucks and driven off somewhere. I am told that there were scenes of terror and despair. Some were left there for the moment, until a final decision is made about them. One of these is Sandu Eliad.
Zissu is interned at Tirgu Jiu.1 This morning I went to visit his wife. The sympathy I have for him in principle (as the Central Office victim) was not enough to cover entirely the sense of a bad comedy which that woman always arouses in me.
Radu Cioculescu, back from Russia, thinks the war will last another two years because the Germans are in excellent morale, are well prepared for the winter, and have all their fighting spirit intact.
The fighting at Stalingrad is continuing. “The City’s Fate Is Sealed,” “Stalingrad Living Its Last Moments”—the same headlines in the papers for nearly a fortnight. Yesterday evening, however, the German communiqué mentioned Russian counterattacks (beaten off, naturally) to the northwest.
The train with the deported Jews left yesterday afternoon after halting a few hours at Chitila. A truck loaded with food and clothing set off too late, first for Chitila, then for Ploiesti—after which it turned around and came back. A dazed stupor. There is no room for feelings, gestures, or words.
By chance I was with Aristide at the Bellu cemetery. He was taking flowers for Mafalda (it is twenty-two months today since the earthquake). But I thought of the millions of dead who have no name or grave. I thought especially of those long convoys of Jews, neither alive nor dead, who have been hurled into a satanic agony. A big earthquake would come as a godsend. Mafalda had the good fortune to die in a few seconds. It was a moment of terror—not days, weeks, months, and years.
Jews will have no bread every fifth day. Their sugar ration has been cut from two hundred grams to one hundred, while for Christians it remains at six hundred grams.
I told Camil about the train carrying the deportees. For a moment, he too seemed to shudder. But no . . .
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I think that the Russians committed the same atrocities when they built the Volga Canal—and my conscience is at rest.”
It seems that Stalingrad is not expected to fall to a direct assault. Fighting is going on for each kilometer. One can see that the offensive has slowed, and that there is an awkward note in the propaganda. But I think to myself that Stalingrad will not finally decide anything, any more than did the other cities (Kiev, Smolensk, Kharkov, Sebastopol) on which all eyes were turned for a while. While the situation in Stalingrad remains grave, we have the feeling that it is a crux of the war. But when it is resolved—either through the city’s escape (which is hard to believe) or through its fall (much more likely)—we will realize that it was all just another episode in an ongoing war.
I have reread Ultima oră with unexpected pleasure. In the end, it is an excellent comedy. I know its defects and what needs to be redone, but I realize that in three days I can make of it more than something merely presentable. It does not even have to be “redone”; only some technical adjustments are necessary. I’d like it to be put on stage (because my money problems again threaten to become serious), but the difficulties are considerable, and anyway I don’t feel I have the strength to see it all through.
Yesterday evening’s German communiqué states that assault troops have entered Stalingrad from the south.
Last night, two air-raid alerts. Bombs fell and there was a lot of antiaircraft fire. But I’ve no idea exactly what happened.
The German communiqués of yesterday evening and today speak of “ground gained” in Stalingrad, but without giving any details. On the other hand, the press dispatches, the supplements to the communiqués, and the newspaper commentaries indicate that the city is on the point of falling; the central station has been captured, the city center is in the attackers’ hands, and fighting continues in the streets and houses. It would all seem to be a question of hours.
After two days in which the most fantastic rumors have spread in the street, on streetcars, and so on about Sunday’s bombing (fifty dead, eighty dead . . . ), an official communiqué states that the total number of victims was fourteen. All the bombs fell in the suburbs or even farther out.
Last night, in various districts, Jewish families were picked up and taken away. I don’t know how many or why. But from now on, none of us can be sure when we go to bed at home that we will still be there the next morning.
The number of families taken away last night was 105 or 107 (I don’t remember exactly): parents, children, brothers, sisters. The reason was irregularities in the performance of compulsory labor.
Solacolu tells me that Stalingrad fell yesterday but that Berlin has delayed announcing this for reasons of propaganda. They are preparing a high-flown communiqué that will have the maximum surprise effect.
The families picked up on Thursday night were deported this morning. Until the last moment it was thought that the measures would not be carried out; we still can’t believe in such a calamity. But last night another batch of Jews (I don’t know who or how many) were picked up from their homes. Gradually, methodically, the deportation plan is being put into operation.
The fighting continues in Stalingrad. After Rador’s definite assurance on Thursday that the city had fallen, after it became common knowledge on Friday that the resistance was over (Alice had information from army headquarters), and after a communiqué announcing final victory was expected on Saturday evening—the fighting is still going on. Yesterday and today the German communiqué has reported Soviet counterattacks to the north of the city. The whole battle is a dramatic event.
Yesterday was Yom Kippur. A day of fasting—and of trying to believe and hope.
A sentence from this morning’s Rador dispatch from Berlin: “The German command . . . has been deliberately avoiding a full-scale assault. . . and preferred to advance methodically, even if this means the German people and the whole world still have to wait for the great news of success in Stalingrad.” I get the feeling that, however euphemistic this sentence may be (in not directly saying that the capture of the city is no longer absolutely imminent), it does express a reality. I think the Germans are really not throwing everything into their effort. Not only the battle of Stalingrad but the whole of this summer’s campaign has been conducted economically, as in a war marked by hesitancy rather than decisiveness. It may be that the Germans could have done more and done it sooner if they had been prepared to pay the full price to achieve it. I expected that their war effort would by this summer have reached a biological outer limit (which is precisely why I thought an exhaustion crisis likely this winter)—but I wonder whether I was not mistaken. I wonder, that is, whether the relatively small number of their achievements is not due precisely to the fact that they have been sparing in their use of reserves. But who really knows? No, absolutely nobody knows. This is why I am so irritated by the futile game of commentary and prediction. “Notts avons encore pour deux ans,”2 Jacques Truelle said to me when I had supper with him and the Bibescus at the Athénée. “It will all be over by December or January,” said Branişte, back on a short leave from Tiraspol. Both of them had their arguments. We all have our arguments.
It would be amusing to note here many things about the Bibescus (whose circle I have reentered since Strehaia). Telegrams, letters, invitations, conversations, echoes crossing one another in the Corcova-Bucharest-Posada triangle: it is exactly as if I were a key figure in their life. But I know the habits of the clan (Proust helps me in this), the code to their slang, the inanity of a pompously declared liking for something that one day suddenly disappears without trace and makes way for some new craze. At the present moment, Antoine Bibescu and Elisabeth seem prepared for any sacrifice, any token of devotion. But this is the same A.B. whom I did not manage to see in Geneva for as much as five minutes; the same A.B. who, a couple of years ago, left me without saying a word one Sunday morning in the lobby at the Athénée Palace, even though he had invited me to lunch! There is a touch of madness in them, the same touch that makes them colorful and captivating. I am enough of an impressionable commoner for such a comedy to amuse me, though I am not really in the mood for it at the moment.
A very nice letter from Martha Bibescu about Antoine: sober, severe, lucid—the first letter from her that has not been showy. But what I am to do with this world of luxury, I who have to pay the rent tomorrow, I who don’t know where to find the 100,000 lei for another three months’ rental agreement?
At Tiraspol, according to Branişte, one of the most widely read books is Accidentul. The reason for this is quite simply that it can be bought there, and people read what they find. Cârâbas3 took thirty copies of Accidentul to put on sale there, and some of the officers read the book and liked it. Branişte let out to them that the author was Jewish.
“Well, fancy that! You can’t even tell!”
I paid a couple of visits to Mircea Stefânescu, who has agreed in principle to adopt my Ultima orâ. I left him the manuscript, and he’ll give me his final answer once he has read his way through it. For me it’s just a question of money. Poverty is closing in on me, as in the worst moments before.
Yesterday I was in a group with Leni at the Jewish theatre, to see Stroe’s revue. Everything there—stage, actors, theatre, audience—seemed completely crazy. Death is breathing down our necks and we have a Jewish theatre, with girls in low-cut dresses, jazz, verse songs, gags, and knockabout sketches. Where is reality? The specter of the trains heading for Transnistria haunts me all the time.
Yesterday I was in town with Antoine Bibescu. He wanted at all costs to go to the theatre—not one but two. He said he couldn’t stand seeing the same show from beginning to end, so he got tickets for the National (where they are playing Noaptea furtunosă and Conu Leonida4) as well as for the Cocea sisters’ theatre, which is doing a play by Denys Amiel. This alone struck me as pretty eccentric. I also found it personally quite embarrassing to make a sudden appearance at two theatres on the same evening, after two years in which I have not set foot in a Romanian theatre. “Make an appearance” is the right expression: both entrances seemed highly successful, and I don’t think a single person there did not turn his eyes toward us. Antoine, dressed in a white drill suit, shuffled around in a pair of slippers. When we set off, I tried to persuade him to dress properly—but I failed.
“Pourquoi voulez-vous que je change de costume? II fait chaud—et je m’ha-hille comme ga. Quant à mes pantoufles, c’est si commode. En Roumanie les gens ne savent pas s’habiller.”5
At the National we saw Conu Leonida, after which we crossed the road, where Act One had already begun. The packed auditorium watched this gentleman’s entrance in a beach suit as he calmly walked to the front and propped himself up a meter from the stage. I followed him, amused and embarrassed in equal measure, fully savoring the fun of the situation but also worried about the consequences. I had told him before not to speak aloud during the performance, so at least from that point of view things went almost normally—except that occasionally, when he didn’t understand a line, he turned to me and said:
“Qu’est-ce qu’il dit? Qui est-ce? Comment s’appelle la femme en vert, etc?”6
We left after Act One and spent the rest of the evening much more agreeably, walking along Calea Victoriei and then sitting very comfortably on a stone wall in front of the lattice work on Piaţa Ateneului. “He’s crazy! He’s off his rocker!” people said (or felt they had to say) to me as they passed by. In fact, though a little battiness is part of this strange man’s character, he is not strictly speaking mad. Romania and Bucharest represent for him a kind of barbarian province, a weird and colorful colony from which he feels (and is) so far removed that he does not make the least effort to please the natives. He lives among them as among negroes, yellow men, or redskins, sometimes showing an interest in local customs but without feeling obliged to respect them. He told me that Asquith had been terribly bitter when he learned that Elisabeth was going to marry a Romanian. “Pour lui, c’était comme si elle avait épousé un chinois. ”7
I think that Antoine Bibescu feels the same about the whole of Romanian society. He is like an Englishman suddenly landed among colored people.
Yesterday evening I had an experience that was perhaps more revealing about the Romanian theatre than any other one might have been. Conu Leonida and Amiel seen in the space of twenty-five minutes. The performance of Conu Leonida was lively, genuine, and good fun—Amiel was, in Romanian, false, trivial, and absurd: Dina, Tantzi, and Critico engaged in psychology! C’était à hurler!8 Romanian theatre is lost as soon as it rises above the ordinary. Perhaps that is true of everything here, not just the theatre.
“Si Stalingrad tient jusqu’au premier octobre, les Allemands sont perdus,”9 Antoine Bibescu said to me a month ago in Corcova. And here we are at the first of October. Stalingrad is still holding out—but the Germans are not lost. All the predictions we make, all the dates we set, all our calculations are arbitrary. The war is a mystery that may not become clear until the last moment. And no one knows when that last moment will be: in five weeks, five months, or five years.
“The Jews will be exterminated,” Hitler said in his speech yesterday. He hardly said anything else. On the course of the war, on short-term perspectives, on the length of the struggle, on the key issues—nothing. The war is again at a standstill. With the exception of Stalingrad—where the fighting has been extremely intense the last two or three days—all the fronts are relatively quiet. It is as if this war were the normal state of things, which did not necessarily have to reach a resolution and might drag on indefinitely without any change. This may explain the sense of weariness that has gripped us the last few days.
This morning saw the departure of our maid Octavia, an eighteen-year-old peasant girl who felt so good in our home. She cried like a child. Our life will be even more difficult. All kinds of daily troubles—small ones, to be sure, but insoluble—will now appear: sweeping the floor, washing the dishes, laundry, shopping. Poor Mama is too ill and tired, and we are too awkward. We’ll sweep, make the beds, and wash the dishes, but who will do the laundry? Still, you have only to think of deportation and all this becomes bearable. It’s not tragic; it’s only grotesque.
Today it occurred to me that a play could be written on the basis of Balzac’s Beatrix. Two splendid female roles, and great scenic development.
Nothing new at the fronts, or anyway nothing really important. The fighting goes on at Stalingrad. It is hard to follow events just by reading the papers. There is talk of Soviet attempts to relieve the city, but I can’t locate them on the map. As things stand now, you would say that neither side expects anything other than the onset of winter.
The first days at school have tired me beyond all measure. After four hours of teaching I feel exhausted. What bad health!
Strada Sfintu Ion Nou again has the tragic air of early September. Two schools are full of families picked up last night for deportation to Transnistria. In the windows you see pale countenances, dazed looks, but also sometimes a smiling young face or a laughing child, and you don’t know which is more painful: the despair of some or the indifference of others to their fate. Long lines of people wait in the street and on the pavement to see once more their relatives inside. It is a harrowing sight. And you cannot shake off the thought that the same fate may be reserved for us all.
I kept thinking that I would manage to get enough money for a few months of peace. But now my hopes have gone. Having dreamed of half a million, I have now returned to my petty calculations. I still have seven thousand to eight thousand lei at home—but then what will I do?
Lack of friendship on the part of Mircea Ştefănescu, who has still not found the time to read my play. It would be absurd to think that he will help me put it on. That’s another door closed.
Yesterday evening’s German communiqué does not mention the Stalingrad front. Clearly, all the dispatches and commentaries are trying to shift attention to other sectors: Terek, Ilmen, Leningrad. Does this mean they have given up the idea of capturing the city? Or, because it will take more time, are they going to keep quiet about it until they are finally able to announce victory? In any event, the hour of victory has unquestionably been overtaken by the change of season. Autumn is well and truly here. We have had the first day of rain and cold.
Aristide showed me some lines attacking me in a book of Efimiu’s that came out a few days ago.1 I am a “russet contributor to an Orthodox newspaper,” an “unbaptized Jew in the service of the Orthodox Nae Ionescu,” and so on. One day Eftimiu will be a champion of extreme democracy and I still a hooligan. As I grow older, I realize that misunderstandings are irrevocable. Cuvântul is a part of my life that remains perpetually open. Nothing, neither my writing nor my life, will ever close it.
The other day I finished Act One of Insula. Today I began Act Two. I work without conviction, because I know it is pointless. Leni will act in a play by Froda and Nicuşor—and Insula, a circumstantial piece that could be acted only by Leni, only today and only at the Baraşeum, will have no use or purpose. If I do nevertheless write it, it will be so that I do not drop yet another project halfway through. All my abandoned literary projects depress me. But if I am frank about it, is Insula a literary project? It seems to me more like a pretext for a show. There was also the hope of earning some money from it, at a time when I need money so much and don’t know where to turn.
The war continues as a state of mind. It is a great calamity that we always have on our backs. From a military point of view, however, this is a moment of general standstill. For three days the communiqués have been completely trivial.
Yesterday evening, everyone awaiting deportation at Sfîntu Ion Nou was set free. People returned from the dead. I have heard that there were wild scenes at the moment of their release; people were howling and fainting. Someone shouted: “Long live Greater Romania!” “Long live the Marshal!” What these releases mean, I don’t know. Second thoughts? A mere postponement? Wdl they give up the deportations for good? An article in Sunday’s Bukarester Tageblatt repeated the assurance that by autumn 1943 there will no longer be any Jews in Romania.
The military pause continues. Nothing new at the fronts. Stalingrad has completely dropped out of the news.
Antoine Bibescu, in a letter I received yesterday, asked me whether I needed ten thousand lei and said that he could send it to me. I wrote back at once, saying that I didn’t need anything.
In today’s Universul, the Berlin correspondent spoke of adjustments at the front in view of the approaching winter; the offensive will be resumed next spring, when the Bolsheviks will be annihilated. But if the German army is already entering its winter break, the hibernation will begin nearly two months earlier than in 1941.
For the first time something was published today about the deportation of Jews (“expatriation of certain elements”—as the official statement puts it). The Council of Ministers has decided that, from now on, the “expatriation” operations will be carried out by a special body, and that all such measures have been suspended until this comes into being. Can we feel reassured? If so, for how long?
The Germans have been on the offensive at Stalingrad for the past two days. It seems to be a final effort to capture the city. Titel Mânciulescu (whom I met just now on a streetcar) said that it will all be over in two or three days.
I have taken back my play manuscript from Mircea Ştefânescu, who hasn’t read it. I preferred to put an end to an embarrassing situation.
I keep trying to write Act Two of Insula. After a few days of complete inertia, I seem finally to have got things moving. But what’s the point? I don’t think I’ll do a play suitable for Leni and the Baraşeum.
Act Two of Insula is making progress, and I may finish the first tableau by Sunday. It is even possible that this first tableau will acquire the dimensions of an act—which would, to some extent, force me to rearrange the play. I am happy enough with what I have written recently (in particular, today, because I am simply too exhausted to write anything on days when I am at school). Maybe the tone is at times too serious for Leni and for what a Baraşeum audience can take. But the way I have started it means that it will not be cut to their size but will be a play pure and simple. Quite likely it will remain in my drawer, and in the end that would not displease me. But I do need money so badly: if it were not for this, I wouldn’t even think of putting it on. A stage performance, a published book, an article—any sign of myself in public is an act of presence and acceptance. Well, I don’t consider myself present—and I don’t accept.
“Fighting continues in Stalingrad” was the laconic report in yesterday evening’s German communiqué. Again the rhythm of the offensive has slackened. Again the imminence of the city’s fall has been toned down.
“An enemy counterattack has been repelled in Stalingrad,” said yesterday evening’s German communiqué. In Egypt, according to what Rosetti said yesterday, the British have taken the offensive.
I feel that Act Two of Insula is coming along much better than I expected. The attic tableau is acquiring the dimensions and dramatic coherence of a full act.
It occurs to me that if Act One is speeded up at performance, it could be presented as a prologue, followed by three acts.
The headline in today’s Universul: “The Fate of Stalingrad Sealed.”
Yesterday morning I finished Act Two of Insula. I read it in the evening to Leni, Scarlat, and Jenica—an illuminating experience. For I became aware that it is well constructed theatrically and, despite the comic rhythm, finely written. I think I may like it more than Jocul de-a vacanţa. There are longueurs in Act Two—even a certain monotony and times when it drags—but in general I feel that I have a rich situation, three well-planted characters, and a few roads open to Act Three (if there is not to be a fourth act). Their reaction was, of course, less favorable. They liked Act One a lot—which was to be expected, because it is a sketch. Act Two, where the tone becomes rather more serious and the situations acquire a certain psychological depth, pleased them at first but then started to weary them. There can be no question of a performance in the near future. Scarlat does not want one, and Leni doesn’t dare to want one. He is keeping room for his play and Nicuşor’s, whereas she, the poor girl, has lost her bearings. Instinctively she feels that Insula is a lively play and that her role has a certain warmth and intensity. But it all strikes her as too refined, too subtle, too “intellectual.”
“Why can’t you write more ordinarily?” she said to me with sincere regret.
I can’t explain to her—nor would she believe—that Insula is a simple play without intellectual pretensions, a real comedy with just a little poetry here and there. But poetry, even in minimal doses, scares her in the theatre.
There is no news about the British offensive in Africa. All we know is that it is in full swing. The German commentaries suggest that it is of enormous proportions. We shall see.
Frances D.2 would have been another one of my women if I had permitted myself such a thing. She is frankly ugly but young, clever, humorous, and—last but not least—from Yorkshire. What would I not have done for Yorkshire!
My love games are one of the most stupid tortures. They are humiliating, dangerous, futile, and meaningless—and yet I cannot give them up once and for all. I know they lead nowhere, can lead nowhere, and that they are doomed to end in the most grotesque way, but each time I embark on the same ridiculous farce, with some weird combination of imposture and good faith, as if I were trying it all out for the first time. It is hard to be a has-been, and seriously to accept that fact. What is unforgivable in my case is that I drag into such false situations people who have done nothing wrong except to know me: Celia, Leni, Zoe. This afternoon was so painful that I feel disgusted with myself. Et maintenant, il faut s’en tirer.3
Here we are in November, and nothing has changed in the course of the war. October passed almost without military events. Stalingrad is still holding out, and the other fronts are not moving. Some people, of course, go on living: money, work, love—everything is for them more or less normal, at most hindered, and in any event fitted into their lives. For me, the war has suspended everything. I wait as I would for a train, meanwhile tossing around between torpor and exasperation. I have never known how to wait quietly for something. When I was an attorney, an afternoon of waiting in the courtrooms used to seem a terrible ordeal. Now my whole life is one long wait.
No news of the British offensive in Africa. Great caution in both sides’ propaganda. The fighting continues, but so far remains stationary. If the British liquidate this front (as they might logically do after all their experiences), anything is possible. It could even bring the end rushing on. But if they do not succeed (which is what we tend to think, after all they have done so far), nothing more can be expected for another year.
L. is a delightful girl. Even if age has not left her features unmarked, her body still has a delightful youth, warmth, and firmness. She also has the most charming mixture of tact and impudence. Anyone who resigns himself to having her as a capricious and welcome gift, without making any demands, is a lucky man. The error begins with the first grain of jealousy, which in her case is so out of place. When she sleeps with another man, and then again with you, she doesn’t deceive either you or him. She just likes to fuck—and puts into it all her candor and grace. But I am forbidden such pleasurable compounds of sensuality and indifference.
A British advance—even victory, it seems—in Egypt. They report 9,000 enemy prisoners, 600 aircraft, and some 250 tanks destroyed or captured. The German and Italian communiqués both admit retreating to a second line, but do not treat this as important. In general, yesterday’s and today’s papers have put out propaganda preparing for the announcement of a retreat. We cannot believe anything yet. Over the past two years in Africa, we have seen the most dramatic turnarounds from one day to the next.
The Ministry of Propaganda has ordered the removal of books by Jewish writers from libraries and bookshops. Today, at Hachette, I saw two printed boards with huge letters: Jewish Writers. There too, of course, I was presented as a troublemaker or criminal, with my parents’ names, my date of birth, and a list of my books. Only my distinguishing features were not mentioned. At first I laughed (especially as the whole board was full of mistakes), but then I thought that this kind of poster does us no good. I fear that it will attract attention to us, and who knows what that might lead to. For two years I have not been to the theatre or gone to restaurants; I avoid walking around the city center; I don’t see anyone or try to get in touch with anyone; I keep to myself as much as possible and let others forget about me—and now here is my name in all the bookshops!
The Americans and British have landed at several points in Morocco and Algeria. It seems to be a major operation, preceded by a declaration in French from Roosevelt. There is fighting in Rabat, Oran, and Algiers. Pétain’s troops are resisting. I don’t yet know what attitude the Germans will take. Rommel’s situation will become terrible if he must also face an attack from Tunisia. For the moment he has retreated to somewhere between Fouka and Mersa Matruh, roughly 120 kilometers from his original position. The retreat seems to be continuing, and the number of prisoners to be growing. The British are calling it a disaster. The DNB Agency speaks of “war of movement” and a skillful retreat.
We still don’t know the details of what is happening in Africa. Certainly the pace of events has speeded up—events that may be absolutely decisive or may be no more than important. We shall be able to see more clearly in a few days’ time. For the moment we are at fever pitch, still dizzy from the first shock of it all.
Algiers already surrendered yesterday evening. It is more than a surrender; it is an accord worked out a long time ago between the Anglo-Americans and the insurgent French forces. The insurrection and landing have been running in parallel, both in Morocco and in Algeria. No news about Tunisia. In Egypt, Rommel is continuing to retreat. He seems to have abandoned Mersa Matruh and crossed the Libyan frontier, leaving behind a number of encircled infantry divisions. Is it a rout? Does he have a plan? Can he still have a plan? The answer depends on what Hitler decides about the whole matter; for it is no longer a local battle but affects the main lines of the war as a whole. I await that decision with some anxiety! Will he march into the unoccupied part of France? (I am thinking of Poldy.) Will he force Pétain into some kind of military collaboration? Or will he do nothing for the time being (which is hard to believe)? Yesterday he gave a traditional speech at a Nazi party festival in Munich; but it was overtaken by events and therefore appeared inconclusive, except perhaps in its confusion. Only one section was clear: that which again threatened the extermination of the Jews.
Darlan is “in American hands,”4 though I don’t know whether as prisoner or ally. In any event, Pétain has taken over supreme command of the French army. In Oran and Casablanca there were brief cease-fires for a few hours, then renewed fighting, but it does not seem possible that the resistance will last long. The occupation of Algeria is proceeding apace. Nor is there much resistance in Morocco. Roosevelt has asked the Bey of Tunisia to allow Allied troops to cross Tripolitania, evidently so that they can fall on Rommel’s army from the rear. According to the Italian communiqué, he is continuing to retreat. But where is he now? Where will he stop? Berlin has given no sign of a response to the major events, but I think that something is brewing beneath the silence.
We must try to control our emotion, to look at things coolly and clearly. Frenzy is exhausting; certain joys wear you out. Of course it is hard not to rejoice, but now is the time to keep calm. Yesterday evening I read over last June’s pages from this journal, when Rommel was “at the gates of Palestine.” I remember the Axis frenzy of excitement at that time. Everything—even the most fantastic plans—seemed simple, straightforward, original. The Germans saw themselves grabbing the whole of the Middle East, on three continents, in one enormous pincer movement. And today the reality has turned right around. Triumph and collapse at a distance of four months from each other.
Where will today’s triumph lead the Allies? What will happen over the next four months? I ask these questions on the evening of a day full of such great hopes.
I keep thinking of the threats that Hitler made yesterday. He wants to exterminate us—and that is perhaps the only thing he is certainly capable of doing. The thought suddenly crossed my mind that one night— a night like this—we might all be butchered in our homes. And meanwhile the air would be buzzing with the news of victory.
This morning (the anniversary of the armistice in 1918), German troops marched into Lyons, Vichy, and other parts of unoccupied France. In terms of the war, I don’t think this will change anything. But my mind is on Poldy, and it is hard for me to think of anything else.
The thought of Poldy dominates everything. What is he doing? Through what dangers is he living? How much longer will he be able to stay where he is? In what conditions? Hundreds of questions that haunt me day and night, especially as the situation in France is so confused. No one knows what the new regime will be like. Will there still be a government? Or is it an occupation pure and simple? Will there still be any distinction between the two zones? I am afraid of the German fury. There, as here, they could find in a massacre of the Jews a kind of psychological safety valve for everything they have had to swallow during the last four days. Here too, all kinds of dark rumors about us are being whispered around: that Killinger has demanded a resumption of the deportations, that the Germans want two trainloads of Jews to be deported every day to Russia, and so on. Enthusiasm, amazement, and anxiety are mixed in equal doses, perhaps dominated, however, by the “electrifying news”5 from which we have not yet awoken.
In Algeria and Morocco the fighting has come to a complete end. In Libya, Rommel is still in retreat. The Germans and Italians seem to have sent a not very sizable force of aircraft to Tunisia. The Americans, approaching from Philippeville, are a hundred kilometers or so from the Tunisian frontier. The spectacle is dramatic and on a grand scale. Tout n'est. pas encore couru.6 There is more to be seen yet.
The British are at Bardia and Tobruk. Rommel is still retreating. Will he try to make a stand before Benghazi? Or will he prefer to use El Agheila again?
Camil Petrescu is down in the dumps. He replied with a wan smile to the news that Rosetti gave him yesterday evening. And he somehow came up with a phrase straight out of a Camil anthology: “I too will bet on a British victory, when it is absolutely certain.”
A conversation with Paul Sterian. (Aristide, whose library is being taken away and put up for sale, had asked me to try to get the order rescinded.) Sterian received me at his office in the ministry, with two civil servants in attendance. When I entered, he wasn’t quite sure what to do: to stand up or to remain seated. He found a middle way: he stayed in his chair, but sketched out a vague half-movement of rising.
“What is it you want, Mr. Sebastian?”
The “Mr.” was a warning to me and a demonstration to his assistants. He repeated it two or three times in the course of the interview, which could not have lasted more than five minutes. I explained to him very briefly (because I swear I felt myself choking at the farce of it) what was at issue.
“Yes, why shouldn’t the library be sold? What? He’s expecting a British victory?”
The question was a kind of denunciation—for the witnesses present in the room. He said it to me with a mocking smile, which testified to his confidence in a German victory.
I left feeling sad and humiliated, furious at myself for having gone, depressed at the whole encounter after eight years with a Paul Sterian grown rich and prosperous, powerful and full of himself. How distant our lives seemed from each other as I entered his sumptuous office for a moment, I a kind of humble petitioner, poor, weary, and helpless, my clothes worn thin. To compare us at all is somehow distressing, though there is also a funny side to it. I am now trying to view the whole thing as an episode out of Balzac.
I gave the opening lecture in my Shakespeare course, for which nine students have enrolled. Another ten or eleven people, friends of mine, came along as an amicable gesture. The situation could be embarrassing—but it seems to me that I came out of it unworthily. I shall give up the course and hand the money back; it was a failure, though I don’t think I made a fool of myself. I spoke for an hour, with warmth and pleasure, as I do when I find the right tone. But I hadn’t come there to score a success. I thought I would find a solution to my money shortage. I was mistaken. That’s all.
Yesterday evening and today I read Julius Caesar. I am returning to Shakespeare and plan to finish my reading of him.
In Africa the pace of events seems to have slackened, though there is still activity everywhere. But since we have grown used to major blows every day, to lightning changes, our suddenly aroused thirst for the sensational is somehow disappointed. Rommel is continuing to retreat. The British are at Derna and will probably reach Benghazi in a few more days. It remains to be seen whether the battlefront will not be, as it was last year, at El Agheila. In Tunisia the British report advances but do not give any geographical details. The Germans and Italians are at Bizerta and Tunis, probably to cover the back of Rommel’s army. A battle is likely somewhere, either in Tunisia or in Tripolitania. In Russia it is winter: torpor and confusion. No large-scale events.
This evening I read Insula. (I have been so busy the last two to three weeks with the translation of Bichou and the preparation of my course that I have put Insula to one side, though anyway there is no more I can do on it for the moment.) Everything looks clearer after three weeks. Act One is excellent. Act Two is botched: not bad, botched. It will have to be rewritten, with the same material. The biggest problem is that Act One is pure comedy whereas Act Two verges on drama. The change in tone is too marked, almost as if they were not two acts of the same play. The initial situation is too comical to allow such a serious tone later on. If I continue writing the play (and I don’t feel I can continue without an assurance that it will be performed), I shall have to shed all the ballast from Act Two.
Since Friday morning, Benghazi has been back in British hands. Clashes between patrols are taking place at Ajdabiya. We shall see whether Rommel, who has quickly retreated all the way from El Alamein, will make a stand at El Agheila. In Tunisia the fighting has the character of skirmishes; a battle is expected for Tunis and Bizerta. In Russia the German communiqué reports Soviet attacks in the Caucasus, at the bend in the Don, and at Stalingrad.
As yesterday and the day before, this evening’s German communiqué speaks of “heavy defensive fighting” to the south of Stalingrad and at the bend in the Don, as well as of (repelled) Soviet tank attacks at Lake Ilmen. I don’t know what the Soviet communiqué says, and there is no way of telling how large the battle has been. In Africa I am told that the British First Army has occupied Gabès—which would open the gates to Tripolitania from the rear, before the battle for Bizerta takes place. But who really knows?
I have been ill since last Tuesday, when I came home at lunch with a temperature of 39 degrees [102 F.]. A few days of fever (38 to 39) have exhausted me. Today I no longer have any, but I am so weak I can hardly stand.
There were major events all last week, but I couldn’t record them here or follow them personally. The occupation of Toulon by the Germans and the scuttling of the French navy mark a serious turn. In Russia the Soviet offensive is continuing south of Stalingrad, at the bend in the Don, and at Kalinin.
Nothing new at the fronts. Waiting. In Tunisia the British and Americans are approaching Tunis and Bizerta, where they will meet German-Italian resistance of unpredictable strength. In Russia, Timoshenko’s offensive appears to be fading without major operational results. This would repeat what happened last September at Rzhev and last May at Kharkov. But no one can know whether major events are in store in December, similar to the ones we saw in November.
I went out this morning for a short walk, after eight days at home. I feel extremely weak and tired.
I read with pleasure (but also with some sense of monotony) Jane Austen’s Emma. Graceful, simple, full of humor, but rather slow and too detailed— like a Dutch painting.
Depression, gloom, disgust, revulsion. I haven’t properly regained my health, and now Mama has fallen ill. The lack of a maid is more oppressive than ever. Autumnal weather, dark and damp. I have no money. Just a thousand lei left—and then? How will I pay the rent at Christmas? How will I meet the household expenses until then? No prospects, no expectations, no hopes. I’d like to sleep, to die, to forget.
Days of lethargy and disintegration. It’s not even despair. Everything is bitter. Profound disgust with yourself, with other people, with “events,” with life. You don’t even have the energy to commit suicide, but if you had a loaded revolver in your hand, you might pull the trigger. What do I need to come back to life? Money? A woman? Work? A book? A house? I don’t know. Everything is joyless, tasteless, colorless, meaningless. The only thing I could do now would be to play cards, for hours or days on end—until my mind is completely numb.
I don’t think I have ever felt so acutely, and at the same time both a sense that my life is over and a desperate wish to come back to life. I did have, and still do have, some dispositions to happiness: a certain élan, an indefinable lyricism, a great belief in light, serenity, and life, a certain warmth, an endless capacity to love—but all have been ruined and lost. There is a curse that pursues me from afar. The war is a catastrophe that sometimes overwhelms (and makes me forget) my old unhappiness, but at other times deepens and accentuates it, keeps it alive like still bleeding wounds. I feel annoyed with myself for writing so badly (maybe I shouldn’t write at all when I can’t keep myself under control), but I feel a need to speak, to shout, to release—if only by screaming— something of my horrible nightmare.
In Clermont-Ferrand the Jews were arrested yesterday and sent to labor camps. According to the dispatch, this measure will be extended to other départements. What will Poldy do? This is always my only thought.
Yesterday and the day before, I went out in the evening to get some air. Clear starry nights, not too cold. But, I don’t know why, the darkened city seems to me gloomier than ever. I feel the prison, the walls, the barbed wire—and ourselves struggling amid them. Here, or in France, the circle keeps tightening around us. Is there an escape? I am beginning to think not. There are only brief postponements: a day, a week, a month—another day, another week, another month—but our fate will be the same.
A calm appraisal of the war (one conducted without either excitement or depression) forces me to see it as a long, hard, and slow business. Peace cannot be reasonably expected in the near future. The end may be certain, but it is a long way off. The war has reached a phase in which the Germans cannot do much more than they have done up to now— but the Allies still cannot bring their resources to bear. The Germans have great staying power, and the British and Americans are not strong enough to deliver knockout blows. We are entering a long process of attrition, which will last until there is a decisive change in the balance of forces. Meanwhile the Russians continue to attack, but (though the situation is still confused) they do not seem capable of fundamentally altering the front. In all likelihood, the winter will be extremely difficult for the armies in the east, but not completely intolerable. So then spring will come, and the cycle will start again. Until when? God knows.
But there is still room for miracles.
I really am living from day to day. I have a thousand lei in my pocket— and I don’t know where I’ll find another thousand the day after tomorrow. I haven’t smoked for ten days. And I have meanwhile drawn little sums from school: 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 lei, in back pay from previous months. It looks as if tomorrow they’ll give me my January pay (about 6,000, I think). After that, I don’t know at all. I won’t pay the rent on the 26th, but it will have to be paid one day or another, in a week or two. With what? From where? I have asked Sică for some work. For the moment I am translating Topaze. I’d happily do work on the side, without feeling gloomy or resentful about it, if it would bring in what’s needed at home. (By chance I found out that Sică has been getting the author’s royalties for Bichou; some 10,000 lei an evening. I got 22,000 total, and I’d start the same work any time at the same rate. Maybe some people would do it for even less.) Without feeling desperate, I think to myself that this is what is called a failure: I, at thirty-five years of age, with no job, no money, no real friendship, no escape. Everything I have done has failed miserably. My clothes are tattered; my boots look worse and worse. I have grown lean. I am tired, finished, useless. How far is there to go before I put out my hand and beg?
The war goes on: nothing dramatic, no major changes. For the past eight days Montgomery has been back on the offensive at El Agheila; Rommel hastily retreated, but it is not very clear to where. Will he stop before Tripoli? Will he defend Tripoli? Will he retreat to Tunisia? In Russia the Soviet offensive is continuing in more or less the same zone, without major advances but also without slowing down. Each day the German communiqué reports that attacks have been “driven off,” “destroyed,” or “crushed.” The daily repetition of these three expressions greatly weakens their meaning. The Germans have gradually created a kind of slang, a kind of communiqué code, which we manage to understand but which draws a curtain of mist over the reality of the war.
The Soviet offensive persists all along the front (Terek, the Volga-Don region, Kalinin-Toropets, Velikiye Luki, Lake Ilmen). On Sunday, moreover, a new offensive was started at a point that the newspaper reports imprecisely call “the middle Don.” The official German communiqué issued yesterday evening contains an unusual passage: “On the middle Don, the enemy has been attacking for several days with a very powerful concentration of armor, and has managed to penetrate the local defensive front. This breakthrough cost huge Bolshevik casualties. To avert a threat to their flank, the German combat divisions took up prepared positions to their rear and thereby foiled an extension of the initial enemy success. The fighting is continuing with undiminished intensity.”
One day, soon after peace comes, I may write a chronicle of the war years: “Events, Texts, People”—in the genre of Cum am devenit huligan. A kind of personal memorial to this terrible journey. But will we reach the end of it?
For money I’d be prepared to do anything in the theatre (of course, without signing it or taking literary responsibility). Translations, adaptations, falsifications, vile tricks. I’d happily cobble together any kind of play (farce, melodrama). A few days ago I greatly enjoyed reading Soare’s and Vlàdoianu’s rubbish (Pâmînt [Earth]), with its sublime, methodical, formulaic triviality. If I wrote like that, I would have the dual satisfaction of earning money and poking fun at myself. I suddenly thought that an adaptation of one of Ionel Teodoreanu’s novels (Lorelei, for instance) could be a real hit on the stage. In fact, its success would be guaranteed. False nobility, false intellectuality, falsely blasé attitudes. With Vraca as Catul Bogdan and Mimi Botta as Lorelei, it would easily run for 150 shows. This afternoon I actually went to Madeleine’s to suggest that we work on it together, with the idea that she would sign it alone and present it to a theatre. But while she was busy making some tea, I happened to leaf through Teodoreanu’s latest (or next-to-latest) novel and found a passage of such abject anti-Semitism that disgust proved stronger than my theoretical cynicism. I no longer said anything to Madeleine—and I dropped the project. After all, some things are just too dirty to touch even in the theatre.
“The defensive battle on the middle Don is continuing with undiminished ferocity,” said yesterday evening’s German communiqué. There are no details that would allow you to locate the action on the map.
No news of Emil Gulian.7 I rang Ortansa and found her at her wit’s end. “Just so long as he’s alive,” she said. His last letter is dated the 15th of November. On the 18th there was the attack between the Volga and the Don—and since then, not a sign. It would be too terrible to lose him. Why he of all people? Mircea Eliade wanted this war. He waited for it, wished for it, believed in it, still believes in it—but he is in Lisbon. And Emil Gulian dead? At a front where he didn’t know what he was doing?
The first day of Christmas. At home all day. No one rings me and I don’t try to contact anyone. My solitude is ever greater.
Of the 3,500 lei I still had yesterday, 2,000 have gone on a Bach concerto. Recklessness? No. I too felt the need to buy something in a town that yesterday seemed invaded with happy people doing their last-minute shopping—a sight that has always humiliated me, because I have always been, and above all felt, so poor. The concerto (in D minor for piano and orchestra) is of a wonderful gravity and, at the same time, a wonderful brilliance. I listened to it twice yesterday and three times today. The andante begins and ends with a phrase of Wagnerian intensity.
It is almost certain that Emil is a prisoner. An orderly on leave from the front told Vivi that his officer—who escaped by a miracle—saw Gulian at the moment of his capture. Colonel Stancov, phoning from Rostov, confirmed the news. Now begins the uncertainty. Will he remain alive? Will he return?
Why do I not write? Why do I not work? A half-written play (Insula) is waiting to be completed. Two complete scenarios for a play are on file. I have a novel planned to the last detail. I won’t even speak of Shakespeare’s sonnets, to which I have not returned for so long, or of the “chronicle” that occurred to me a short while ago but is so tempting. I put everything off—until when? And meanwhile, time passes to no avail. I know only too well why I can’t write. Bad health. Frayed nerves. Lack of a comfortable house. Inability to remain alone with myself, in hours filled with meditation. Worries about money—and about so much else besides. Yet Jane Austen wrote on her knees in her father’s dining room, surrounded by a family who did not know what she was doing. Maybe. I am not Jane Austen.
I don’t think that Darlan’s8 assassination (on Christmas Eve, in circumstances not yet made public) will have any influence on the course of the war, even in the limited sector of Tunisia. There are probably moves toward a deal between De Gaulle and Giraud,9 which will solve the problem of North Africa at a political level. The war in Tunisia is still at the stage of waiting and preparing. In Tripolitania, Montgomery has occupied Sirta. Will he meet resistance at Misurata?
The fighting continues in Russia, especially in the southern sector, but we are not able to follow it. The communiqués are vague and totally lack geographical precision. The tone of the propaganda deliberately matches the confusion. The Russians are always attacking, but always advancing slowly The whole operation is of a scale and complexity that we can grasp in theory, but its evolution on the ground escapes us. My own view is that the Germans will eventually reestablish a front line and will not give up Millerovo or Kamenskaya or, above all, Rostov. They will hold them, as they have held Rzhev and Velikiye Luki for the past year. At some point, however, the collapse will become due. But when? Next summer? Next autumn?
Footnotes
1. Nicuşor Constantinescu: theatre director, playwright.
2. Andrei Otetea, a historian, was referring to the Iagi pogrom.
3. The French playwrights Alfred Savoir and Henri Duvernois.
4. Now it is a question of working.
5. The Wurm Brothers company was in dispute with the Finance Ministry. A resolution would bring Sebastian a sizable fee.
6. You can’t be a prince without paying for it.
7. A legal expert and translator.
8. It's vile work, but it has to be done.
9. Sebastian was teaching at the Onescu school, established in 1941 for Jewish students who were expelled from Romanian schools.
1. But that doesn’t change much.
2. The Iron Guard rebellion against General Antonescu.
3. I exhaust myself doing nothing.
4. Solomon (Charles) Gruber: lawyer and personal secretary to Wilhelm Filder-man.
5. In fact only one passenger survived. A heated parliamentary debate in Great Britain followed this tragedy.
6. Baraşeum was a Jewish theatre founded in 1940, after Jews had been excluded from Romanian theatres. It functioned during the duration of the war.
7. He always knows what is to be believed.
8. Demostene Russo: historian.
9. A Jewish ritual meal conducted on the first and second nights of Passover.
1. The Riom trial was staged by the Vichy regime against Léon Blum and other French politicians accused of being responsible for the 1940 defeat.
2. Infamy is not open to anyone who wants it.
3. At one go.
4. Not clear in the original text. Sebastian was questioning if the ghetto was indeed in Bersad.
5. “You are awaited with joy and impatience.”
6. Graphic artist.
7. Graphic artist.
8. The novelist Paul Sterian was a high-ranking official in the Antonescu administration.
9. But let’s try to go on living.
1. Concentration camp used for the internment of those thought to be hostile to the Antonescu regime.
2. "We have another two years to go."
3. Ion Carabas: bookseller.
4. Onoaptea furtunosă [A Stormy Night] and Conu Leonida faţă cu Reacţiunea [Squire Leonida Facing Reaction], two plays by Ion Luca Caragiale.
5. “Why do you want me to change what I’m wearing? It’s hot—and this is how I dress. As for my slippers, they are so comfortable. People in Romania don’t know how to dress.”
6. “What’s he saying? Who is that? What’s the name of that woman in green, etc.?”
7. “For him, it was as if she had been marrying a Chinese.”
8. You felt like screaming!
9. “If Stalingrad holds out until the first of October, the Germans are lost.”
1. See Victor Eftimiu, Frăţia de arme (Bucharest, 1942), p. 340. The phrases cited by Sebastian are in fact condensations of passages from the book.
2. Frances Dickinson was an employee of the British Council.
3. And now I have to extricate myself from it.
4. In English in the original.
5. In English in the original.
6. All is not yet over.
7. Sebastian's friend Emil Gulian died on the eastern front.
8. François Darlan: French admiral, high-ranking official of the Vichy regime.
9. General Henri Giraud assumed governing powers in North Africa after Darlan’s assassination.