Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

  But the deadline is approaching for me to start work—and I feel the first signs of fear.

  Sunday, 6 [August]

  Tomorrow morning sees the start of my work schedule. I think I am sufficiently rested. But I would like to be on my own: Fredanov and Comşa are both very pleasant, but I need to be alone. Today I read everything I have written up to now. The number of pages, and their density, mean that I can consider myself past the halfway mark.

  As for the rest, we shall see.

  Monday, 7 [August]

  Two and a half pages written. It’s true that I worked only three to four hours in all. I am too exhausted: I find it hard to pull myself together and concentrate. As always, it is difficult to get going.

  Tuesday, 8 [August]

  Very slow, very difficult, very unsatisfactory. Some three and a half pages in six hours of work, none of them at all interesting.

  But I have to be patient.

  Wednesday, 9 [August]

  Yesterday evening I listened to the general staff communiqué on the radio and suddenly felt that nothing matters any more. There will be large-scale mobilizations and, judging by the tension over Danzig, there could be war.

  I had a difficult evening and a troubled night—a kind of disgust or weariness at being human. This morning, however, I am again at my desk. At all costs the novel must be finished.

  Friday, 11 [August]

  Yesterday evening I had a real “anxiety attack,” and I don’t think I was the only one. The whole hotel seemed in a state of apprehension. The news is bad. There will be a coup in Danzig over the next few days, and war could break out this very month. The communiqués of the general staff, which I hear every evening on the radio, have something alarming about them.

  We are a long way from all that is happening there; it is as if we were on a ship—and the panic is all the greater for it.

  Late yesterday I listened to the Ninth Symphony and the Third Brandenburg Concerto, not only with emotion linked to the music, but above all with a sense of sadness at all the things we are losing in the most stupid, criminal, and demented manner.

  And I continue writing. It is still heavy going. Yesterday was a long rainy day, in which I worked for more than seven hours (I didn’t time myself exactly), and all I got out of it was a little over four pages. I am arduously climbing up to Gunther’s chalet, where I still don’t quite know what awaits me. But things will become clearer, if I have the time.

  Evening

  Six and a half hours of work, five pages written. I am beginning to work more normally, but I must point out again that this “normality” is a poor yield. I ought to get a move on, but I am incapable. I am arduously climbing up to the chalet. The action is brief, with no possible incidents (Nora and Paul climb up from Poiana to S.K.V.—that’s all), but I feel the need to write at a slow, relaxed pace, to make the distance greater between what they leave below and what they will find above. Nothing is more difficult than to indicate the passing of time, if you do not refer to any particular incidents. For all my complaints, however, I shall be able to work and reach the end, so long as I am left in peace. Gunther— completely unknown up to now, because I haven’t gone near him—is beginning to take shape, though not yet enough. He is still in shadow.

  Saturday, 12 [August]

  Only three pages written. (I have finally reached the chalet—or at least its threshold.) It’s only 5:30 and I should certainly go on working for a couple of hours, but I am too tired. I’ll go for a short walk, maybe to the Aria Vulturului, and try tomorrow to make up these hours spent “playing truant.” Then I should finish this eighth chapter, which I already have clearly defined in my head. I am looking forward to it with impatience, curiosity, and a lot of sympathy for Gunther.

  Sunday, 13 [August]

  Five pages written—but the chapter is still not finished. Here I am stopping work at seven, though I ought to see through to the end this chapter that I can already see so clearly, and that I feel at this moment so clearly and intensely. But I am tired. I don’t congratulate myself at all on the state of my health. I really must take it seriously and go to see an eye specialist. Someone in robust health would not get up from his desk—whether it took ten hours, twenty, or a hundred—until he had finished writing everything he could see with precision. As I advance, things become clearer, more precise, and more substantial. Gunther is stepping more and more into the light. But I still haven’t got to him.

  On my evening walk (to Muncei), I met a shepherd from Meziad and started chatting with him. I ought to find the time to record what he said to me. It was disturbing for what it revealed about “the human condition,” simply but also with a certain pathos.

  Maybe tomorrow I’ll go on an “excursion” to Meziad—a diversion, if you like, from my work schedule, but I may come back feeling refreshed.

  Tuesday, 15 [August]

  I was convinced that I would finish Chapter Eight today at least—since I wasted the whole of yesterday in Meziad—but now I am wasting today as well, along with five and a half working hours. For I must abandon the two pages I wrote this morning, as well as the half-page I wrote this afternoon. I was very pleased with them, and everything seemed to be going well (I even said to myself that I’d write four or five pages to make up for yesterday’s break), but then I suddenly realized that I was on a false path and had to turn back. The whole section was misdirected.

  Nora should set off at night on skis, in a kind of desperate state of giddiness. Only then does Gunther’s chalet become a miracle, a salvation. In the version I wrote this morning she was calm and composed as she put on her skis and thought of the next day. But at that moment there is no “next day” for Nora. Unless I grasp that, I’ll botch the whole passage and risk giving an artificial tone to the encounter with Gunther. I shouldn’t forget that the whole episode with Gunther has something artificial, and that I need infinite tact if the somewhat literary, somewhat “made-up” character is not to become thoroughly phony.

  But none of this will redeem my further lost day. So little time is left until the end of the month, and it scares me, yes, scares me, to think that I might leave here without having finished it.

  Wednesday, 16 [August]

  I have eliminated yesterday’s two pages and replaced them with another two that I wrote this morning, which seem much closer to the mark. But I have been at a standstill for the last hour, unable to move forward. The resistance is stupid and incomprehensible. The whole scene seems to me clear and straightforward: it shouldn’t be difficult to write. Yet difficulties appear without rhyme or reason, just where I expect them least.

  I am not happy with my morning. It rained—a dull persistent rain that I gladly welcome because it keeps me indoors, gives me a taste for work and creates quiet in the hotel—and yet all these favorable conditions were not much help.

  I’ll go down to lunch and wait and see what I’ll do this afternoon.

  Evening

  I have worked from three o’clock until now—that is, a quarter to eight. I have finished the chapter. I wanted to finish it at all costs. I don’t know how it has worked out. I feel a little dazed. Maybe I’ll see more clearly tomorrow.

  Thursday, 17 [August]

  It doesn’t work, no, it doesn’t work. I don’t mean the chapter that I finished yesterday (having reread it today, I find it acceptable and anyway won’t go back over it). I mean the new chapter, the ninth, which I was due to start today. It is stuck and simply won’t budge, though at least the first part seems clear and—or so I thought—simple.

  The weather is ideal for writing: rain, the forest hidden from sight, the whole hotel slumbering, perfect quiet. Yet here I have been, from nine in the morning until five in the evening, trying to open the same chapter, starting dozens of sentences, erasing, replacing, and going back over them, deleting them again, incapable of moving a single step forward.

  I am disgusted. I don't mean to say that I am losing heart. I realize that the only thin
g that can still see me through to the end of this wretched book is stubbornness—I mustn’t let go of that, at least.

  Saturday, 19 [August]

  Gunther’s chalet (in which Nora finally settled yesterday) is becoming a stage set. I realized this fifteen minutes ago, and in the space of fifteen minutes I feel I have sketched a whole play in my head that I could sit down and write immediately. I see things so precisely that I have already distributed the roles.

  Gunther is called Gunther Grodeck (I don’t know if I’ll keep the name in the novel, but I probably will in the play, if I write it). He can be played by Tomazoglu. He doesn’t have a fair complexion, nor is he as young or does he have the same childlike beauty as Gunther—but he does have the character’s intensity of feeling. Grodeck Senior can be played by Bulfinski, and Hagen by Storin. The whole drama unfolds between those three. A girl too is involved, but she is not Nora. The Gunther episode, insofar as it is capable of becoming a play, will deviate completely from the novel. The starting point is all they have in common.

  Grodeck Senior is a big industrialist. But the fortune is his wife’s, who has been dead for two years, and all or most of it will be inherited by Gunther. Gunther is still a minor: he will be twenty-one in March. He has gone to live high up in the mountains and wants to remain there. He is waiting to come of age so that he can take possession of the fortune and put a stop to his father’s exploitation of the forest for lumber. I am not yet quite sure of the reasons for this decision. The basis is a terrible hostility toward his father, who may not even be his real father. Then there is the mysterious Hagen (mysterious for me too). Was he the lover of the deceased Mrs. Grodeck? Perhaps. In any case, he was the only person with whom the young woman was on good terms in the Grodeck family—she who had come from distant parts (maybe the Austrian Tyrol) to a Saxon settlement in Sibiu or Brasov.

  These are the characters. I don’t really know yet what will happen to them. But I can feel them with every nerve, so strongly that I think I need only set off to find my way through to the end.

  I wanted to write this note now (at eleven in the morning), in order to get it off my chest. I felt that otherwise I would not be able to continue working on the novel.

  As regards the novel, I have recovered from the depressing breakdown of the day before yesterday. I went out in the rain, furious with myself, with the book, with everything, and walked as far as Bäita and back, along the road to the general store—a trip of some two hours. I tried to put some order into this ninth chapter and divided it into three distinct scenes, precisely to mark out the ground for the next day. Then the name Hagen came into my mind (Götterdämmerung), and I suddenly saw a whole new character come into being. I could feel that there would be any number of secrets in Gunther’s chalet. Everything, it seems, was triggered by the name Hagen—his looks, his clothing, his behavior, even his still not completely clear life story.

  Yesterday I wrote five pages. What I’ll manage today, I don’t know. I really ought to finish the chapter, and would if I were serious.

  Sunday, 20 [August]

  Last night I dreamed of myself off at war. We were attacking an enemy patrol, which fired at us from a kind of house—or shop, rather—with its doors and windows shut. We followed every movement they made, separated from them by only a few meters.

  The dream ran on from yesterday’s troubled evening. A long conversation with Longhin5 (recently made president of the Court of Appeal, having been provisional secretary-general at the Justice Ministry) frightened me. It seems that last week there was a real war atmosphere in Bucharest. Germany sent a sharply worded demand for an explanation of our troop mobilization. Armand wired the King on his cruise ship. France and Britain warned that war might break out not in Danzig but through a Hungarian attack on ourselves. By Friday evening the catastrophe appeared imminent. Longhin, who was just preparing to leave for Stîna de Vale, was told by Iamandi to stay where he was. The next day, however, things calmed down and he was able to leave. But no one knows anything, and everything—même le pire6—seems possible.

  Maybe it is madness on my part to remain here in the forest writing literature. But these things are too dear to me. If I die in the war, I’d like it not to be before I have finished the book. It’s nothing much really, I know it’s nothing very much, but when I am immersed in it I feel that these characters—Nora, Paul, Gunther, Hagen—are alive. I wouldn’t want to lose them, at least not before reaching the end of their story and putting it somewhere secure (in a safe, for example).

  Evening

  I have finished Chapter Nine. Four pages yesterday, three and a half today. I must confess that I haven’t been assiduous enough, attentive enough. Yesterday I kept daydreaming about the play, drawing up the cast list, going over and over the same things. It took a great effort to break from this “reverie” and force myself to remain with the novel.

  Today the play (which weighed on me yesterday like some pressing matter) has moved into the distance. Ah! if only thinking were enough to see things in literature! The misfortune is that you also have to write; that’s where the agony begins.

  Concerning Chapter Nine, I was happier with the first part than I am with the pages I wrote today. Gunther will certainly be an interesting character, but also, I fear, a little “artificial,” a little “too obvious.” I can see him—or, rather, am beginning to see him—very well. But that may not protect him from a certain degree of unreality (which wouldn’t harm him and may even be necessary), as well as from a visibly literary kind of fictitiousness.

  I find it amusing to think of the little details that gave birth to Gunther—and of how different he has turned out from what I envisaged. The one who first made me think of him was Margit from Ghilcoş, who told me of a winter she once spent ill, on a chaise longue, at the Wagner villa. Then there was the inscription I found high on the Schuller, in memory of a Saxon boy (Walter Maschendorfer?) who died at the age of sixteen. Then there was Blecher—though I thought of him more in order to avoid any resemblance to my hero. Gunther’s name I took from one of the children who went up the mountains in July 1937. And now see how strange and unexpected is the person who emerges from all this.

  It may be that Gunther interests me too much. For I risk shifting my attention from the book’s main story to what should be no more than an episode. In any event, I tell myself, I must begin tomorrow to return to Paul, whom I have left rather abandoned. I am afraid of losing him now, just toward the end.

  Monday, 21 [August]

  I won’t escape from this play until I have written it. Again today I wasted a huge amount of time thinking about it. It’s possible that I could write it over the winter, to be performed in February/March. There could be a role for Mme. Bulandra. (I’ll call her Aunt Augusta.) But I am afraid that, if I do write in such a part, it will detract from the role of Grodeck Senior. One of them will have to represent the “Grodeck spirit” with profundity, severity, and intolerance. And I can easily see the graceful phantom of the young Mrs. Grodeck (Gunther’s deceased mother) floating over the whole play.

  What I don’t see yet is what will happen to the girl who goes into Gunther’s chalet, at the beginning of Act One. Similarly, I don’t know whether the whole drama will unfold up there in the chalet, or whether it will come down to Sibiu or Brasov (where the “Grodeck factories” are located) in the second part. If it does, the play might have four acts.

  The first two acts are almost clear. The first is the “winter evening” of the novel (Chapter Nine), evidently with certain alterations due to the fact that the emphasis now falls on Gunther, not on people from outside. The second act, set a few days later, will be the arrival of Grodeck Senior; it too will become clearer as the novel progresses. After that, the direction is open. . . .

  As to the novel, I am very dissatisfied with myself. Not even three pages in a whole day: that’s inadmissible. I don’t blame myself for the fact that these two and a half pages are completely and utterly uninteresti
ng. The Good Lord is the one who decides that. But I cannot forgive myself for having written so little.

  Time is passing, young man. You must understand that. You must understand that in Bucharest you won’t have these long free days, free from dawn till dusk.

  Wednesday, 23 [August]

  A German-Soviet nonaggression pact!

  I feel it as a stunning blow. The whole course of world politics has suddenly changed. Just try to grasp, from Stîna de Vale with newspapers three days old, what is happening in the world!

  Last night and early this morning I struggled to put some order into the chaos of my papers. If the present European chess game were a stage play, one would consider that the plot had been excellently handled. The Russians are settling accounts, a year late, for what was done at Munich—and they are settling them with the other side of the coin. Everything is perfectly symmetrical. In September 1938 Britain and France came to an understanding with Hitler, over the head of Russia and against it. In August 1939 Russia comes to an understanding with Hitler, over the heads of France and Britain—and against them. In September 1938 the immediate price was Hitler’s pocketing of Czechoslovakia. Now it is Danzig. Nothing is lacking for Act Two to resemble Act One, with roles reversed. But it is hard to judge things just from the point of view of dramatic construction. The Russians haven’t made their move only for the sake of its technical beauty.

  So then?

  So then, I have no idea. Will France, Britain, and Poland maintain their opposition over Danzig? If they do, there will most likely be a war, because I can’t see why Hitler should go back on his firm stand on Danzig, now that he knows he is covered on the Russian flank. Will they give up their opposition? Then Danzig will become German in two, three, or five days—and Hitler will immediately, automatically, start turning the screws on Bucharest. In that case I think the whole of southeast Europe will fall.