Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

  Sleepless hours add up until I can no longer count them. I should sleep for three days on end to recover. . . . I’ve hardly stopped drinking recently (the whole day on Friday at Condiescu’s, the whole night on Saturday at Siegfried’s). Almost every day I go to bed at two or three, when I return home from Zoe’s, a little drunk even if I haven’t been drinking.

  Yesterday, Sunday, I was at her place from five in the afternoon until after midnight, both of us naked (or almost naked), sprawled on her green blanket (in the grass, as she says). The telephone rang, the doorbell rang, and we held our breath until the danger had passed.

  Yesterday she told me “the story of her life.” How different from what I had imagined! This girl was close to suicide! This girl wanted to hang herself! This girl carries inside her an unhappy and—however much she denies it—unhealed love. She is so young, so beautiful, and so eager to die. She speaks with great simplicity, but with a despondency that no longer seems to allow of any hope. Yet she is twenty-five, and one day somebody or something will release her from this torpor and carry her back toward life. Why can’t I be the one?

  Sunday, 5 June

  Blecher has died. His funeral was on Tuesday, at Roman.

  I thought not of his death, which was a merciful release in the end, but of his life, which has been shaking me to the core. His suffering was too great to allow compassion or tenderness. That young man, who lived as in another world because of his terrible pain, always remained something of a stranger. I could never completely open up and show real warmth toward him. He scared me a little, kept me at a distance, as at the gates of a prison that I could not enter or he leave. I tell myself that nearly all our conversations had something awkward, as if they were taking place in a parloir.9 And each time we said goodbye, where did he return to? What was it like there?

  I won’t write today, and maybe never will, about what has happened between Zoe and me this last week. Our terrible nights on Wednesday and Friday!

  But she is an exciting girl—much more, an exceptional person. I don’t know if I love her, but Fm convinced that I could. In any case, after a fortnight I feel she weighs more in my life than Leni ever did in four years.

  Leni? Who’s that? She is so far away and means so little to me. I’ve seen her two or three times, and it was as if she had not been there. How refreshing it is to look at her with normal eyes, neither questioning nor stupefied, somewhat indifferent, somewhat bored.

  Monday, 4 July

  I’m a bit crazy. I have no money and live from day to day off little loans; sometimes I can’t put a hundred lei together, I can’t catch a streetcar or buy stamps for a letter. There are moments when I don’t know whom to ask, or above all how to ask (because I die with shame, and poverty makes me suffer more in my pride than in anything physical). But at the same time I’m planning a trip to Italy!

  This morning I went by chance with Tuţubei Solacolu into Citta; I looked through some brochures there and took a few away. Since then my head has been roaring with Italian names: lakes, mountains, valleys. Misura, Siusi, Carezza, Breyes.

  Isn’t it madness? Of course it is. At the moment all I have are three hundred lei, left over from a five-hundred note that I borrowed last night from Carol.

  But if I’m to leave on holiday on the 15th, and if I have to find the money for it, why should I pay 230 lei a day for a Romanian chalet on the Schuller, Ghilcoş, or Iacobeni instead of using it somewhere in Italy?

  My madness becomes sensible as soon as I do some detailed calculations. But they do make me dizzy. . . .

  I’ll try to get an airplane ticket to Venice—and if one is available, I’ll need fifteen thousand lei (without any extra charges), that is, two thousand lire. It’s a lot of money, and hard to find, but is it impossible?

  I haven’t written a line here for a month. Too much has been going on, and it’s been too muddled. Leni’s return, her visits, her departure, her letters. Then Zoe, Zoe, Zoe, always Zoe, every day Zoe. My mind will clear only on the day when I am alone and far away. But will I be?

  Bran, Sunday, 24 July

  I’ve been here in Bran since Thursday—I myself don’t know how I got here. I left Bucharest without a clear destination but with a thousand regrets. Why didn’t I arrange a trip in time to Italy? Why didn’t I write to Fraulein Wagner at Ghilcoş? Why not Iacobeni? Why not the chalet on the Schuller, like last year?

  I’d kept the chalet in mind as a fallback solution, but I’m glad I didn’t go there in the end. It would have depressed me too much to return to the place where, just a year ago, I wrote the lost novel.

  Bran, at first sight, seemed rather like Breaza. How hesitant I was about staying there! I walked a dozen times around Mr. Stoian’s villa, unsure whether to pay the deposit or not. If something made me decide, it was the beautifully clean and peaceful villa, with the forest a few steps away, a kind of park of its own, and a stream almost beneath the window. I hear it constantly, day and night, whispering with the sound of rustling leaves. It is restful, soothing, full of forgetting.

  I gradually explored Bran in several walks yesterday, the day before, and this morning. Of course, there is not the same sense of being in wild parts amid high mountains that I had on the Schuller or even in Ghilcoş. Everything here is calmer, gentler, more subdued. But nor is there any comparison with Breaza. The landscape is infinitely more varied, more colorful, more rich in surprises. I have done four longish walks, and each time I discovered something, a new aspect, a new forest. There are places where I feel I am in France, at Cluzes. The Queen’s castle, not typically Romanian at all, looks like a chateau in Haute-Savoie.

  I’m not “overwhelmed,” as I was the first year in Ghilcoş, nor do I have the sense of great solitude that the chalet on the Schuller gave me. But I am contented and have confidence in this Bran, from which I ask a little rest and some luck in my work.

  I allowed myself three days of repose, sleep, and idleness. Tomorrow I start working again. Will I make any headway? Will I be diligent enough? Will I manage to pick up the broken threads? I am anxious, as usual, but also determined not to give up. This month is my last chance to finish the book, which has been dragging on for two years, with so much heart-searching, so many regrets. Everything has been at a standstill because of it. When I see it come out, what I will feel is not that I have finished a book but that I have ended an overlong relationship that was beginning to wear me down.

  Tuesday, 26 [July]

  Yesterday three pages, today four. Of course, I still can’t consider that I am safely on my way. My main aim has been to keep to the work schedule I set myself for this week: I am at my table from nine to twelve in the morning, from three to six in the afternoon. The rest will be decided by chance and the Good Lord above. How terribly difficult it is to train myself to write! Whenever I set a blank page before me, I do so with fear and trepidation, with doubts and perhaps a little repugnance. . . . How beautiful it is outside on the lawn: green, bright, and sunny, calling you to idleness and reverie. All I have of the hardworking writer are the pangs of conscience; they take the place of real professionalism. And in order to still those pangs, so that I don’t have the unbearable sense of wasting time, I go back to work in a spirit of resignation. There is no enthusiasm—not yet, at least.

  Wednesday, 27 [July]

  A little better than yesterday: six pages. But they are insignificant pages, neither good nor bad, which can be either kept or discarded without spoiling or solving anything.

  I still don’t feel at the heart of the book; I don’t see my characters, feel them beside me. I grope along, hesitate, wait. . . .

  Sunday, 31 [July]

  It’s hard going, and it has certainly been slow. I’m into my seventh day of work—and maybe it’s not too bad that I’ve written only thirty-five pages. That makes an average of five a day, a satisfactory yield especially as I have been a little unwell and couldn’t work at all for two afternoons. On the other hand, it is worrying that the “sc
enario” of the novel has advanced so little. I’m still only on Chapter Five, which is becoming a kind of autonomous novelette within the book as a whole. I give too much space to episodes that should not count as more than incidental. The one with the photographs takes up twelve pages! That’s too much— especially in comparison with the part of the novel that has been lost and redone, where much more important events (precisely because I could reconstitute them in their entirety) have something elliptical and unintentionally concise, which makes the new pages seem digressive in contrast. I ought to be frightened when I think that I am still only halfway through the plot. At times—now, for example—I feel that everything remains to be done, and that all the work up to now counts for nothing.

  Wednesday, 3 August

  Two days (Monday and Tuesday) lost on the review for Fundaţii and the proofs of the study of Proust, which arrived in galleys.

  Today I returned to the novel. Any interruption is dangerous, because it draws me away and makes it difficult to go back. So things went rather slowly: not even five pages—about four and three-quarters—in more than seven hours of work. But I enjoyed Paul’s stop in Cologne, and I especially liked my rethinking of the Belgian visa incident (Hergenrath, 23 July), a chance happening in the first chapter which I had thought I would take up again.

  Friday, 5 [August

  I thought I would finish Chapter Five today (which has taken so many unexpected turns), and I could indeed have finished it if I had resigned myself to a little effort. At the last minute, however, there were a few “scene” changes—Ann’s quite unexpected departure with Paul to Sinaia— which meant an addition to the chapter. So I decided to leave it until tomorrow, when I am determined to finish it, come what may.

  “Determined to finish it” is, frankly speaking, childish nonsense. I never know what will happen, and each morning I face the manuscript with the same trepidation. In the evening, when I count the five or six pages written in the course of the day (yesterday six, today only five, though I worked hard this morning and thought I would set a new record), I don’t have the feeling that they were too difficult to write, but the next morning I am still afraid and hesitant. Will I never firmly establish myself at the heart of the novel? Will I never, right up to the end, have the feeling that I am in control, that it can no longer get away from me?

  Saturday, 6 [August]

  So you see, qu’il ne faut jurer de rien.1 I didn’t finish Chapter Five—in fact, I wrote only four pages, and I’ve no idea when I’ll finish this chapter. Just now, at the end, I begin no longer to see properly what is happening. I am completely dissatisfied with my day’s work, and it frightens me to think that my holiday is passing and the novel is still at a standstill.

  Sunday, 7 [August]

  I have been thinking of a whole host of books that I could have written, that I promise to write. This always happens when I am caught up in work: I see possible themes, I decide not to waste any more time, I make all kinds of promises to be more assiduous. Later, of course, when I return to my impossible life in Bucharest, I forget everything, let myself go, and become disheartened.

  The truth is that when I have a publisher like the Foundations, where I could regularly publish one or even two books a year, it is unforgivable that I should put so much into all these reviews, for which I need only have an orderly schedule of reading and writing.

  With a regular life of that kind, would I find it difficult to write in three to four months the first volume of my book on the Romanian novel? These last few evenings I promised in a long conversation with myself to get seriously down to work on this.

  I can also envisage a few studies on “letters and journals” in French literature. The study of Proust’s correspondence may have been a beginning. But the list would contain Stendhal’s journal and correspondence (including Souvenirs d'égotisme and Vie de Henry Brulard), Flaubert’s correspondence, Goncourt’s Journal, Renard’s Journal, the Rivière-Fournier letters, Proust’s correspondence, and Gide’s Journal. Even that would mean a book of four to five hundred pages, all the more tempting to write since I could publish each chapter in the Review as I finished it and be paid for the work twice (though, of course, such work may be unpaid).

  I can also see a volume of criticism about several Romanian poets: Arghezi, Blaga, Maniu, Baltazar.

  Indeed, what works of criticism could there not be? But I tie everything to the appearance of Accidentul as the necessary prerequisite. I absolutely must see it published; only then will I have clear ground ahead. Consequently, even if I cannot stay here in Bran for more than another fortnight or so—which, given how slowly things are going, is certainly not enough for me to finish—I am thinking of leaving Bucharest again in September for two to three weeks, perhaps to Brasov, and this time completing the manuscript at any cost.

  Plans, plans . . . We’ll see what will come of them.

  Today I finally completed Chapter Five. Apart from the pages that were lost and then reconstituted, it has sixty pages that I have written in Bran. I didn’t think it would assume such proportions. From tomorrow I’ll have to go back to Nora, whom I haven’t seen for such a long time. I fear that I am losing the thread and no longer know how things will develop, in unfamiliar territory. Chapter Six exists only in very broad outline. It is the one that should take me into the book’s “plot,” properly so called. Perhaps I should prepare myself for major obstacles and resistances.

  I can’t help thinking that, if I hadn’t lost the manuscript, I would now have 171 pages written—that is, material that could have been safely sent to the printer’s. But I should put regrets to one side and see what can be done from now on.

  Monday, 8 [August]

  A day lost in wavering. I am always afraid to start. I reread what I had written before, skimmed several times the chapters that concern Nora— on the pretext of getting to know her again, of regaining the tone that best suits her, but in reality because I didn’t have the will to get seriously down to work. Out of superstition (Mircea once told me it was good to start working on Monday), I have nevertheless written a few lines.

  Tomorrow I shall have to be more resolute. Just shut your eyes and press on: that’s the only way a book can be finished.

  Last night I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to reverse the order of the fifth and fourth chapters, precisely to smooth the transition from Ann to Nora. Besides, whatever I do, the Ann chapter will interrupt the flow of the book; it will be a digression from which it will be a little difficult to return.

  Tuesday, 9 [August]

  There are no inspired days, but—alas!—there are bad days when everything you write, or force yourself to write, comes out dull, clottish, inert. You can’t see anything ahead; it is all, if not false, then flat, otiose, unmeaning. I write a sentence, then wonder whether to leave it or cross it out. I cross it out, then afterward everything seems better than the one with which I have replaced it.

  So that’s how I wasted the whole of today. I wrote three to four pages against my inclination, but they are so colorless, so inexpressive, that I am embarrassed to look at them again. This chapter, the sixth, doesn’t want to get started.

  Am I lazy? I don’t think so. Or, in any case, I am no lazier than I used to be. I sat dutifully at my desk for the regulation six hours (maybe half an hour less), but to no avail. And everything is dull and inert before me. I’ll wait patiently for some light to appear—though, of course, there is only one possible way of waiting: “la plume ferme au-dessus du papier,”2 as Renard said, and the poor man knew what he was talking about.

  Tuesday, 11 [August

  All day yesterday, all morning today, I didn’t even pick up my pen, didn’t even dare to approach the manuscript. I have ground to a halt.

  Only this afternoon did I try to get back to it. But it’s seven now and growing dark, and I have to break off with not even three pages written. But now it’s a question not of counting pages but of knowing whether I shall be able to write, or whe
ther I shall be “stuck” here for a long time to come.

  Work accidents that cannot be foreseen.

  Sunday, 14 [August]

  It’s still hard going. Friday three pages or so, yesterday five, but today again only three. Now, when things are nevertheless a little clearer, it should flow more easily. But it doesn’t want to. I need whole hours for the simplest movement, the slightest gesture. I long for things to ease up a little. I wish I didn’t feel so many obstacles, so much resistance. Maybe it’s all a bad habit of mine. Maybe it would be simpler if I let the pen rush on ahead and skip over some difficulties, which, if need be, could be looked at again later. But I cannot leave a sentence until I feel it is complete.

  I have finished my third week of work, and the yield has been decreasing: thirty-five pages in the first week, twenty-five in the second, only twenty in the third. Why is this?

  Tuesday, 16 [August]

  The morning was looking good, but I stopped work at 11:30 to go out a bit in the sun—I haven’t had a proper fill of it for ten days or so— and this afternoon I can no longer find the good disposition in which I thought I would be able to write. Of course, if I were to stick to it I’d eventually manage to do something, but I am near the end of a chapter and I don’t want to spoil it—all the more so as the whole chapter is weak. Until tomorrow, then. Now I’ll allow myself an hour in the chaise longue.

  I have had all kinds of dreams during the time here, some of them most peculiar: Nae Ionescu, Corneliu Codreanu, Silvia Balter, Leni, Maryse . . . I say them over to myself a few times before opening my eyes; I try to remember them and promise to note them down when I am awake—but then I lose them: they become too vague, and I can no longer extract anything from them.