Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

  As it is not a novel built around situations, I have lost the very things that were its raison d'être-, the detailed psychological observations, the precise images and expressions, the appropriate shades of meaning.

  The old version seemed to me so good that, whatever else I wrote, the book could no longer be compromised. Now, if the reconstituted chapters are to be tolerable or even excusable, what follows will have to be very good, so good as to make up for and dominate the first part. But is that possible? Will I be capable of it?

  No, there’s no point in trying to console myself. The loss is irreversible—and perhaps it would have been more manly, more honest, not to try to pick things up from the beginning but simply to abandon it once and for all.

  It is very difficult to explain all the intrigues and machinations surrounding my play. Je ne sais pas me défendre7—that’s for sure—and I don’t even claim to be trying. But at least I should take what has happened as a lesson in life—though my life no longer has anything to do with any kind of lesson.

  In any case, “anti-Semitic pressures” on Sică are not sufficient explanation. I must add: 1) the very active intervention of Froda, who is more scared than anyone in this matter; 2) the fact that Leni is not especially keen to act in my play, and at the end of the day would be happier to take on something like Absente nemotivate [Unmotivated Absences]; 3) lastly, the fact that no one in the theatre really believes in my play, which strikes them as “interesting” but not a potential winner. With so many motives, was it even necessary to add Sân-Giorgiu’s fist and Creve-dia’s voice?

  Thursday, 11 [November]

  Yesterday evening, Radio Geneva had Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, which I have been wanting to get to know for such a long time. Admirable, as soon as I began listening.

  Quite a lot of Mozart recently (two exclusively Mozartian concerts with the Salzburg orchestra). This evening I’ll hear the Requiem at the Philharmonic, also for the first time.

  Otherwise nothing new; no expectations, nothing.

  Sunday, 14 [November]

  This morning in front of the Ateneu (on my way out of the Enescu symphonic concert), Nae Ionescu and Puiu Dumitrescu8 were discussing the governmental crisis.9 Who’ll be next? they asked each other, shrugging their shoulders, like me or you or him. . . .

  Whereas five years ago . . .

  Monday, 15 [November]

  Mircea has entered the electoral lists. That too is a sign.

  Sunday, 21 [November]

  Sunday, alone . . . I’d have like to spend the evening with someone, anyone. Celia and Thea did not answer the telephone. Mircea and Marietta are at the Viforeanus1 (another contact lost, the Viforeanus). Maryse and Gheorghe in Sinaia.

  Only Leni rang me this evening—but why should I keep picking up a story that leads nowhere? (Camil—to complete the list—was at a wedding; Carol in Vienna.)

  I went alone to the cinema and then walked in the streets. On Calea Victoriei near Djaburov, someone called out behind me:

  “Mr. Comarnescu, Mr. Comarnescu.” It was a wretched semijournalist, Emil Flamandu, whom I had met a few times cooling his heels in the Foundation’s waiting room. He spoke in a drunken mumble:

  “Mr. Comarnescu, did you do me that favor? You know, at the general’s, I asked you. . . Do you have an answer?”

  I explained that he had made a mistake. I was not Comarnescu but Sebastian, and he had never said anything to me about a “favor.” He couldn’t apologize enough—and went his way.

  I can easily see myself as a kind of Emil Flamandu later in life. When I wrote Deschiderea stagiunii three years ago,2 I had a quite precise feeling that T. T. Soru (also a kind of Flămându) was myself. And since then I have come down a lot; I have put up less resistance.

  I could drink all the time, so as to forget—and I have so much to forget. On Wednesday evening I almost forced Leni and Froda to come with me for a drink after the theatre, and I did indeed end up terribly drunk—one of the worst times in my life. I was like an animal, no longer thinking about anything, and I was happy.

  And yet, I’ll delay the ending as much as possible.

  Friday, 3 December

  What Harry Brauner told me yesterday about Marietta challenges everything I knew about her. She got thirty thousand lei from the National Theatre and twenty thousand from the promoters—and she kept it all, without giving anything to Lucia Demetrius. At the same time she sent the text of their play to Germany, signing it only with her own name, on the pretext that it would not be accepted because Lucia Demetrius is “Jewish” (!).

  Isn’t it incredible? (On this occasion, I learned that Lucia D.’s mother actually is Jewish. What good methods of investigation our Marietta has! And what timely use she can make of them!)

  Sunday, 5 [December]

  So it’s decided: Jocul de-a vacanţa will not be put on stage. I’ve known it ever since my return to Bucharest—but I still had some vague hopes. Now it’s all settled. Instead they’re putting on a play by Muşatescu. I received the news (which was not news but only a confirmation) with a feeling of bitterness. But there’s been enough time from last night till this morning to give the incident its correct proportions. Obviously it’s not at all pleasant. I’m too superstitious not to be troubled when something of mine is a failure; it’s as if a hand of cards were to go badly wrong. Since I left for Geneva, I’ve been having an unlucky streak. When will it end?

  The only serious aspect of it all is the money. I haven’t got any, and I don’t know where to look. I’m beginning to feel poverty as a humiliation. The play could have brought me in a hundred thousand lei—which would not have solved everything, but it would have given me a few months of peace.

  I’m waiting for Christmas to go and work somewhere in the mountains. Maybe I could write my novel in twenty days. By January or February I’d like to be handling the production: galleys, final proofs, dedication—in short, to feel that I’m doing something, that something is happening in my life.

  This morning I met Antoine Bibescu3 at the Enescu concert, and this afternoon I went for a stroll on the Şosea with Titu Devechi. I hadn’t seen either of them for years. Yet I had nothing to say to them, nor they anything to me. It was as if time had stood still. But goodness knows, that is not at all the case.

  The concert was very nice: violin concertos by Bach, Mozart, and Brahms. But there was only one moment of emotion: the last phrases of the andante in the Bach concerto.

  Tuesday, 7 [December]

  Yesterday (Saint Nicholas), Nina’s birthday. I rang in the morning to congratulate her.

  “The lady is at the general’s,” said the maidservant, “and the professor is lunching at his parents’.”

  Later I went there for dinner and discovered that Mircea had actually been away from Bucharest electioneering for a couple of days and had returned only that evening. The maid’s lie at lunchtime horrified me: a family-organized lie in which they did not mind involving the servant. It seemed even sadder than the knowledge that Mircea had been on the campaign trail, wandering from village to village with Polihroniade. Haig Acterian and Penciu were part of the same team. They took turns speaking, and it seemed that Haig spoke with grand, slightly theatrical gestures. I don’t know if Mircea made any speeches. It all seems so utterly grotesque. I can’t understand how they are not aware of the terrible farce. Marietta, who arrived later, came into the house singing the Iron Guard anthem: Ştefan Vodă. . . They’re beginning not to feel embarrassed in my presence.

  I am seeing a lot of Leni. It is a time when we are able to see eye to eye—and I am not serious enough to refuse. No doubt I'll pay for this light-minded behavior, as I paid on other occasions in the past.

  Camil said to me this morning on Calea Victoriei:

  "No Reinhardt, no Stanislavsky, not a single stage manager has discovered what I have discovered in the theatre. I am the greatest stage manager there is, because I have deep knowledge of the text as well as an exceptional
philosophical culture and an unusual nervous sensibility. These actors are fools: they can't even see how immensely fortunate they are to be working with me."

  I was quite disarmed. All I could do was smile—a little surprised but unprotesting.

  Lunch with Antoine Bibescu at the Athenee Palace. To be a prince, to possess a huge fortune, to frequent the most prestigious circles in Europe, to be on close terms with all the great French writers, to be performed with some success in Paris, London, and New.York—this is not enough to cure you of Bucharest's little vanities. Here is Antoine Bibescu burning to have one of his plays put on by Sică Alexandrescu.

  Friday, 10 [December]

  Yesterday evening, a Casals-Enescu concert at the Philharmonic. (Schumann’s Cello Concerto, Brahms’s Double Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra.) Very sincere, very pure emotion. In general, I find it so hard to be completely present during a concert! A host of thoughts and images pass through me, some of them quite stupid and meaningless, and when I catch myself wandering off, I scold myself like a schoolchild and return to the concert with a kind of determination to be more assiduous and attentive and to understand more of what I hear.

  Antoine Bibescu asked me on Sunday morning whether I had a natural inclination for music. I replied that I didn’t: that I had come to music out of curiosity, to enter a domain unknown to me. I think I started to love it through application and effort; only very rarely do I have moments of true abandon. Besides, I’m not sure that what is called “abandon” is the best way of listening to music. I do not trust the muddled, slightly capricious reverie in which I reel about during a concert. On the contrary, I try to listen to each phrase with an analytic or grammatical mind. I try to listen to a piece of music as I would read a book.

  Casals brings tears to my eyes. I cannot even bring myself to applaud. I am ashamed to show my “approval.” What a magnificent lesson in art, and perhaps in life too! No fuss at all, no dazzle, no verve: everything simple, austere, uncommunicative, as in a great solitude.

  Friday, 17 [December]

  In yesterday’s Buna Vestire (year I, no. 244, dated Friday, 17 December 1937): “Why I Believe in the Victory of the Legionary Movement,” by Mircea Eliade.

  “Can the Romanian people end its days . . . wasted by poverty and syphilis, invaded by Jews and torn apart by foreigners . . . ?

  “. . . the Legionary revolution has the people’s salvation as its supreme goal. . . as the Captain has said.

  “. . . I believe in liberty, in personality, and in love. That is why I believe in the victory of the Legionary movement.”

  Evening

  Looking at her a short while ago as she spoke in the dressing room, I closely observed each of her features and gestures. She is ugly: a narrow brow, Jewish nose, large mouth, a wart on her thick lower lip. She is thin, her breasts are small and worn out, her arms are too slender, her skin without luster. I also know her hurried way of talking, her artless intonation, her bursts of laughter (which suddenly illuminate her, it is true). I know everything, and none of it pleases me.

  She is a woman with neither height nor beauty, no more desirable than last year’s Wendy (my young client from the Zig-Zag—“Wendy and Julie”), at best “amusing” or completely insignificant. And yet I love her.

  “I love her.” Let’s not exaggerate. I too am a kind of flotsam carried along by events, by the fear of being alone, by the slothfulness of living. Sometimes I see in her a smile, an incipient emotion, a look that waits and asks . . . and then I don’t have the heart to refuse her.

  My pathetic visits to the theatre. The doorman, the dresser, the stagehands, Iancovescu, Roman—what can they think of this poor wretch who, for no apparent reason, comes every other evening to the dressing room to smoke a cigarette?

  Sunday, 19 [December]

  In normal circumstances, what has happened to me in the last three to four years would have been, I won’t say gratifying, but in no way catastrophic. Grave, to be sure, but for that very reason useful.

  To have lost a position (Cuvântul4), a man to whom I felt responsible (Nae Ionescu), a number of friends (Ghita Racoveanu, Haig, Marietta, Lilly, Nina, and the closest friend of all, Mircea), to have lost absolutely everything: this may, at thirty years of age, turn out to be not a disaster but a maturing experience.

  Should I not feel grateful to life for creating a void around me, for withdrawing all the habits and conveniences I had accumulated over time, for putting me back at square one, not with the thoughtlessness I had at twenty but with the lucidity of my thirty years?

  Should I not tell myself that I am ending (totally and forever) a certain period and beginning a new one that will lead me toward different people, perhaps another love, or perhaps another solitude?

  Yes, I certainly should. But something is missing for it to be like that—the one thing, in fact, from which there is no escape in my destiny. For all the rest can be built up anew.

  Tuesday, 21 [December]

  Stupefying results in yesterday’s elections to the Chamber. A great success for the Iron Guard: they’re talking of thirty to thirty-five deputies. In any case, hundreds of thousands of votes, whole districts swung over to them. It is Germany’s “September 1930” all over again.

  Yet it was a bright sunny morning, and in the streets, out in the open air, there was a kind of allégresse in which I allowed myself to be heedlessly caught up.

  Lunch at the Capşa—long, fine, copious—with Blank, Ionel Gherea, Mrs. Theodorian.5 It was perhaps a sign of irresponsibility, because our fate may be decided this very day. I realize that we no longer have anything to win, anything to defend, anything to hope for. All is virtually lost. There will come prisons, dire poverty, maybe escape, maybe exile, maybe worse.

  Yet I am sufficiently unserious to look at events with a kind of amused curiosity, as if I were watching an exciting football match. For there is no question that it is exciting. Right now (ten o’clock) the government has only 37 to 38 percent on paper, and it does not look as if the figures can be falsified at this late stage. If some miracle of arithmetic does not occur this very night, we’ll see a Romanian government fall for the first time in elections. Unless the whole regime collapses by tomorrow morning—which is also a possibility.

  But to what extent, I ask, can all this change one letter, one comma even, in a destiny that is not mine but all of ours?

  Wednesday, 22 [December]

  Yesterday’s agitation ended with an hour of calm: alone at home, listening to music with only my desk lamp on, the rest of the room in semidarkness. From Geneva, a Bach organ chorale; from Breslau, a fugue and toccata by Bach for orchestra, and finally Max Reger’s Variations on a Theme by Mozart, which I heard for the first time last week at the Philharmonic. Everything was quite beautiful and, above all, soothing.

  Brasov, Sunday 26 [December]

  At last an hour to myself. I’ve been here since the evening before last, in a villa together with Carol, Grindea,6 Iova, the Blanks—too many for me to take.

  I hoped to find a room somewhere in Poiana or Timis, but I wasn’t lucky and I didn’t know how to look. It’s impossible for me to work here with all these people around. I’m not even trying. But with what pleasure, what painful pleasure, I would write! A short while ago, as I walked down the boulevard, I felt the whole novel alive inside me, like an open wound.

  So many things that have happened to me recently in Bucharest, so many stupid turns in my never-ending story with Leni, would find in the book a revenge, a solution, an answer.

  Again the lost chapters come into my mind. Impossible to forget, impossible to regain them.

  The only moments of relaxation are when I am skiing. Yesterday at Poiana, today at Timiş, I was happy as long as I kept skiing. Thick snow, dazzling scenery, the pleasure of flying on skis and leaping over an undulation of the ground, and finally the triumph of stopping almost correctly (or anyway without falling) at the end of the course. . . .

  Tuesday,
28 [December]

  I leave for Bucharest this evening, in three hours’ time. It seems that a Goga government has been, or is about to be, formed. (Someone spoke from Poiana with Miron Grindea, who talked of an absurd list of ministers: Goga7 as head of government and the War Ministry, Gh. Cuza,8 Munca, General Antonescu somewhere or other. A typical government of panic!) I don’t know what will happen. We are waiting. But it seems more serious to wait in Bucharest. I can’t be so irresponsible as to ski while the whole of our lives from now on is being decided.

  But nor can I be so ungrateful as to deny so soon the joys of skiing.

  Yesterday and today I performed real feats of bravery in Poiana. Not only did I ski down from Poiana to Prund without falling too often, but in Poiana, especially today on the “exercise field,” I solved all kinds of problems that have initiated me into the tricks of the trade. I can now “slalom” reasonably well without sticks. I also tried a slope at the base of the Schuller, which is certainly the fastest slope I have “attacked” until now, and I completed the whole course without incident, executing a perfect turn to the left and a quick regulation stop. On the other hand, I fell badly on the road back—very near the end, which made it even more comical, and anyway at a point near Solomon where there was no longer any difficulty. I am all in (it’s not easy to descend, braking all the time, for three-quarters of an hour), but I am proud of myself.