Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

  I let him talk, feeling a wonderful satisfaction as he sank beneath the weight of all those platitudes, retractions, and courtesies. It all became clear to me in the end. The poor man is publishing a book and—as he put it without mincing his words—he would not like it to be reviewed in the manner of Pandrea.1

  “I’ll send you the book,” he said as we parted.

  What a man! I don’t remember ever meeting such an abject character. But let’s calm down! I can see I’m becoming pathetic.

  I have given up following the stages of my love affair (?) with Leni. So many contradictions, so many resumptions, so many blunders, so many discarded projects. I saw her yesterday—and I was quite simply happy at the fact. But it will pass, it will pass.

  Monday, 28 October

  1:00 a.m.

  A Piatigorsky concerto. Frescobaldi, Toccata. Boccherini, Sonata in A Major. Bach, Suite in C Major (unaccompanied cello; I think I heard it once from Leipzig last winter). Weber-Piatigorsky, Sonatina in A. Schubert, Arpeggione sonata. Scriabin, Poems. Glazunov, Spanish Serenade. Ravel, Habanera. De Falla, Dance of Terror.

  Thursday, 31 October

  Bach: Passacaglia in C Minor.

  Mozart: Piano Concerto in C Major. Soloist Wilhelm Kempff.

  Brahms, Symphony No. 1.

  Yesterday evening from Vienna, Beethoven’s fourth and fifth symphonies. Weingartner.

  The evening before last, from Juan-les-Pins, fragments from Ravel’s Ma mère l’oye and Haydn’s Farewell Symphony.

  A long lunch today at the Institut Français.

  Sunday, 3 November

  Kempff and the Philharmonic on Sunday at the Ateneu—three Beethoven piano concertos, in C minor (op. 37), in G (op. 58), and in E-flat (op. 73)-

  Some moments of overwhelming emotion, greater than any I have ever had before in music. And a kind of nervous tension, a kind of continual vibration, had me in its grip all day.

  It was nice to have Lilly2 beside me. Farther away, in a box, Jeni.

  Monday, 4 [November]

  A wonderful evening on the radio. From Zurich a concertino for cello and harpsichord. A sonata by a classical composer whose name I do not fully recall (Andrea something?), the Handel-Goldschlager Variations (for unaccompanied harpsichord), Adagio by Tartini, Rondo by Boccherini.

  From Warsaw a trio for piano, oboe, bassoon by Poulenc, remarkable for its humor and inventiveness (presto, andante, rondo.)

  Later, also from Warsaw, a sonata for orchestra by Corelli, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in C Major (very Mozartian—which still leaves one before I know all five), and lastly, Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony.

  An amusing visit to Dorina Blank, who offered herself with no talking in circles. A moving letter from Sulutiu.3 I’d never have guessed he was such a persistent “admirer.”

  Friday, 8 [November]

  Yesterday evening at the Philharmonic. Mozart: Symphony in E-flat (horribly played), Haydn: Cello Concerto in D Major (Cassado), Tchaikovsky: Variations on a Rococco Theme for Cello and Orchestra, Stravinsky: The Firebird.

  Evening

  What could I still hold against Leni after our talk today? She was nice, kind, and affectionate, without being falsely smart in any way. Little coquetry, a few impulsive outbursts, and above all no hypocrisy of any kind. She will come to my place if I ask her. She could scarcely say that it is hard to receive me at her place because of Froda, but she hinted at it pretty clearly. (Anyway, there was no need, because he phoned while I was there and the maid sort of stammered on the phone that “the lady is reading”—a lie that embarrassed Leni.)

  We walked in the street for half an hour or so, and I said a lot of foolish things. She, on the other hand, said something wonderful, which I shall try to recall. “It’s true I’m capricious, flirtatious, and frivolous. But I have never done anything merely out of coquetry, caprice, or frivolity.” I regret that I can’t remember her exact words. She found a much more suitable expression.

  So here I am at a peak of “happiness.” Satisfied?

  Friday, 15 [November]

  I have just returned from Galaţi, where I spoke yesterday evening at the Liberty circle.

  I don’t think it is immodest that I enjoy being able to hold the attention of a hall full of people for an hour—while speaking of things that are alien or indifferent to them. During the lecture I had great fun with a host of things that I came up with as I was carried along by the rhythm of speaking.

  Wednesday, 27 [November]

  How many things I should have noted down! But I don’t think I have ever been quite so swallowed up in things (things I don’t even carry through to the end: instead I bustle about making them more complicated and putting them off. . .).

  I should say a word or two, and even more, about Nae’s inaugural lecture. This year he is giving a course on “political logic.” His introduction was a little testament of the Iron Guard faith. He flattered the students with an electioneer’s persistence, praising “the political generations” as being in the right against “the bookish generations,” whose great sin, in his eyes, is that they are bookish. Politics means action, life, reality, contact with existence. Books are abstract. So you are right to do what you are doing; the truth is with you, rah, rah, rah!

  At the end (Ghiţa4 was there, overwhelming in his silence, as well as Mircea and Vasile Băncilă5) I reminded him of his article from May 1928, “What Young People Think,” in which he asserted in discussion with Petrovici6 that the orientation of the younger generation should be sought not in the street—where the agitators and window-breakers are—but in libraries and the representative values they contain.

  “Yes, that’s how it was then,” he replied imperturbably. “Now it’s completely different. Then it was the hour of the intellect—now it is the hour of politics.”

  Poor Nae! How rapid is his descent. . . .

  To stay with politics, I should also record the short sharp discussion I had with Mircea after the theatre on Monday evening, at the Continental. It was not the first. And I have noticed that he is sliding ever more clearly to the right. When we are alone together we understand each other reasonably well. In public, however, his right-wing position becomes extreme and categorical. He said one simply shocking thing to me, with a kind of direct aggressiveness: “All great creators are on the right.” Just like that.

  But I shan’t allow such discussions to cast the slightest shadow over my affection for him. In the future I shall try to avoid “political arguments” with him.

  I should also note the trial of Credinţa, at which my pleading went down well.71 could sense this not only from the court’s attention, but also from the congratulations of the people sitting on my bench and the irritation of those on the opponents’. I sensed it from the silence and from the nervous flow that suddenly raised the proceedings above the previous level of jokes and skirmishes.

  Of course, everyone who spoke in defence of Credinţa was at pains to inform the court that I was a yid. Medrea8 promised to beat me up. I told Maryse,9 only half joking, that I am waiting for the day when Vulcănescu, Gabriel, Titel, and Tell1 make their peace with Sandu Tudor, Stancu, and Medrea, and discover that the Jews are alone responsible for the quarrel—especially myself, who has aroused discord among the Christian fraternity. It sounds like a joke, but it’s plausible enough.

  Otherwise nothing. I become more dull-witted every day and seem no longer to expect any salvation.

  Tuesday, 17 December

  2:30 a.m.

  I am dead tired. Tomorrow morning I have to be writing at my desk by eight at the latest, but I must record here and now the startling admission that Maryse made to me. I shall try to write it down exactly as she said it.

  “You don’t know how much I’ve suffered because of you. I wanted to sleep with you, come what may. You obsessed me. One week was complete torture—even physically, you know. Do you remember when I came to collect you from the Rampa2 and we left together in the car? That day I was determ
ined to speak openly with you, because I saw that otherwise you didn’t or wouldn’t understand. I had made up my mind to take charge of all the most awkward details: to find a room for us to meet, to take you there, to make all the preparations. . . . But it was the day you had a toothache! If you hadn’t been in pain, I would certainly have been yours. I wouldn’t have hesitated to tell you—and you wouldn’t have been able to refuse. No man ever refuses.

  “In the early days—after the first evening we were at Zissu, do you remember?—I decided to go to your place one day, to undress, lie down, and wait for you. You’d have found me there and had no choice. But meanwhile you gave me a copy of Femei, and I saw that even then I’d only have been repeating an episode from the past. I felt disgusted with myself and called it off, especially as you’d have thought I was copying your heroine.

  “Then at the Corso, when we had lunch together, I had come to say everything and to ask everything of you, but you asked me to let you continue writing an article of yours. I never had any reservations, but you refused to understand. . . .

  “I’m telling you this now because I think it has passed. It’s no longer topical. I wanted it too much then for it to give me any pleasure now. I tell you, I was crazy. With Gheorghe, and with Gheorghe’s mother, I spoke of nothing but you. How much I could suffer!

  “What? Do you think I wouldn’t have been unfaithful to Gheorghe? Do you think I’m not unfaithful to him? Well, I am, with one man or another—not very often, but when I fancy someone, what am I supposed to do? I think I’d be stupid to refuse that. I love him, but I don’t think that has anything to do with it. Just once, in Constanta, when I spent three days alone with a guy who was after me and whom I fancied a lot myself, I did resist—I don’t know whether it was from stubbornness or stupidity. Anyway, I haven’t gotten over it even today.”

  [Monday,] 30 December

  Sceaux

  I am in Paris and still do not quite realize it. I think I shall only recover my reason in ten days’ time, after I have left.

  There seems indeed to be something unreal in this return that cancels five years of my life, as if they had never existed. On Saturday evening I had dinner at Fanny Bonnard’s in Yerres. I found her the same as ever, and it seemed completely absurd to think that there are five years between us. A curious feeling of old age.

  One morning I went for a walk in the area around rue de la Clef. Nothing at all has changed—not even myself, for I am not bringing back after these five years anything more than I already knew and experienced in 1930 as a young man of twenty-two to twenty-three. I walked up rue Soufflot, saw again the Sainte Geneviève Library, continued along rue Clovis, rue Mouffetard, rue Monge, rue de la Clef, and rue Lacépède, and went into the Jardin des Plantes where I lingered for a while beneath the great cedar. I am honestly unable to convince myself that the time has gone by.

  But I don’t intend to write in this notebook, which I have brought along for no purpose.

  Maybe I shall sum it all up in Bucharest.

  And now, having failed to do it at the right time, I no longer feel like summarizing here the recent stages of my love affair with Leni. We love each other—we said as much and parted in complete harmony, with an embrace. I wonder what will become of me in Bucharest. I have a talent for making my unhappy life as complicated as possible.

  Footnotes

  1. Poldy (Pierre) Hechter: Sebastian’s elder brother, a doctor. He lived in France.

  2. When Sebastian’s publisher invited Nae Ionescu to write an introduction to For Two Thousand Years, Ionescu contributed a viciously anti-Semitic piece.

  3. Nae Ionescu: chief Iron Guard ideologist and professor of philosophy at the University of Bucharest, early mentor of Sebastian.

  4. Following the assassination in 1933 of Prime Minister I. G. Duca by members of the Iron Guard, Nae Ionescu was placed under police surveillance and the publication of his newspaper Cuvântul was suspended.

  5. Nina Mares: first wife of Mircea Eliade.

  6. Petru Manoliu, Sandu Tudor, and Zaharia Stancu were editors at Credinţa, which a year earlier had harshly criticized Nae Ionescu and the Criterion association.

  7. Members of the anti-Semitic League of the National Christian Defense (LANC) and of the Iron Guard were campaigning for the disbarment of Jewish attorneys.

  8. Istrate Micescu: lawyer, minister of justice in the anti-Semitic government of Goga-Cuza (1937-1938). The movement to which Sebastian refers is the Iron Guard.

  9. Scarlat Froda: theatre director and literary critic.

  1. “Benu”: Andrei Sebastian, the writer’s younger brother. He changed his surname after his brother did. He eventually emigrated from Romania with Sebastian’s diary.

  2. Constantin Argetoianu: politician, prime minister September-November 1939.

  3. Al. Vaida-Voevod: a leader of the National Peasant party. After splitting from his party, he founded the anti-Semitic Vlad Tepeş League, which had as its slogan “numerus valachicus,” a kind of numerus clausus.

  4. Gheorghe Tătărescu: leader of the Liberal party, prime minister January 1934-December 1937, November 1939-July 1940.

  5. Alexandra Averescu: marshal, prime minister March 1926-June 1927.

  6. George Brătianu: leader of the right-wing faction of the Liberal party.

  7. Jozef Beck: Polish minister of foreign affairs.

  8. Karl Radek: member of the executive committee of the Communist International (1920-1924), executed during the Stalinist purges.

  9. Fashionable restaurant in Bucharest.

  1. Societatea Scriitorilor Români: the Romanian Writers' Society.

  2. Sebastian refers here to the anti-Semitic riots organized by student members of LANC, the Iron Guard, and the Vlad Tepeş League.

  3. Leni Caler: actress and friend of Sebastian's.

  4. Gheorghe Nenişor: theatre critic, Sebastian’s friend and husband of Maryse Nenişor.

  5. A night club in Bucharest.

  6. Aristide Blank: a wealthy banker involved in the arts, a well-known member of the Romanian social elite.

  7. Relaxation.

  8. Streets in Bucharest.

  9. Barbellion: pen name of the British writer Bruce Frederick Cummings. His Journal of a Disappointed Man was fashionable reading at the time.

  1. “This way of casting light upon a trivial event—from different heights and with different powers, candle or headlamp, until all the psychological values it is capable of displaying appear in depth—is characteristic of the Proustian method.”

  “This pursuit of volume through diversity of form . . .”

  “Is it not simpler to attribute to his study of aristocratic values, rather than to snobbism, his penchant for the company of families whose roots go deep into the past and which the years have carried alive down to our own times with strange modifications of their spiritual texture?”

  2. “I thought I could detect as many as seven themes in the first sentence. For there Ruskin places alongside one another, mingling them and making them move and shine together, all the main ideas (or images) which appear in some disorder throughout his lecture. It is his mode of procedure. He passes from one idea to another without any apparent order. But in reality, his guiding imagination follows its own deep affinities, which impose a higher logic in spite of himself. Indeed, it turns out that he has obeyed a kind of secret plan which, when revealed at the end, retrospectively imposes a kind of order on the whole and makes it be seen rising magnificently in stages up to the final apotheosis.”

  3. Nicolae Crevedia: especially anti-Semitic LANC journalist.

  4. Rabidly anti-Semitic newspaper.

  5. Leader of the Liberal party.

  6. Novelist, director of the National Theatre under the Antonescu regime.

  7. Novelist, friend of Sebastian’s.

  8. Ionel Jianu: Jewish art critic.

  9. Mircea Eliade: novelist, historian of religions, ardent supporter of the Iron Guard, friend of Sebastian’s.<
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  1. Marietta Sadova: actress, fanatical supporter of the Iron Guard, wife of Haig Acterian.

  2. Haig Acterian: theatre producer, active Iron Guard member, husband of Marietta Sadova.

  3. Virgil Montaureanu: publisher.

  4. Victor Ocneanu: publisher.

  5. Petru Comarnescu: art critic, friend of Sebastian’s. Henri Soreanu: journalist.

  6.Excelsior: economics weekly, published in Romanian and French.

  7. Comarnescu had been attacked by Credinţa

  8. Titu Devechi: journalist and close friend of Sebastian’s. Octav Onicescu: mathematician, friend of Nae Ionescu.

  9. Th. Solacolu: translator and poet.

  1. W. Siegfried: stage designer.

  2. Daughter of Aristide Blank.

  3. Actress.

  4. Actress, wife of the actor Ion Iancovescu.

  5. Friend of Sebastian’s.

  6. Gheorghe Nenişor was in charge of arts criticism for L’Indépendence Roumaine, a French-language daily.

  7. The Town with Acacias, a novel by Sebastian published in 1935.

  8. A publishing house in Bucharest.

  9. Iron Guard journalist and ideologist.

  1. Petre Pandrea: left-wing journalist.

  2. Lilly Popovici: actress and friend of Sebastian’s.

  3. Octav Şuluţiu: writer.

  4. Gheorghe Racoveanu, Iron Guard journalist.

  5. Iron Guard follower of Nae Ionescu.

  6. Ion Petrovici: philosopher, minister of education in the Goga-Curza government December 1937-February 1938, minister of culture in the Antonescu government December 1941-August 1944.

  7. A trial for slander involving members of the former Criterion association.

  8. Corneliu Medrea: sculptor.

  9. Maryse Nenişor: wife of Gheorghe Nenişor.