Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

  Sunday, 22 March

  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

  Tuesday, 24 March

  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.”

  Sunday, 29 March

  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.

  Monday, 30 March

  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.

  Wednesday, 1 April

  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.

  Friday, 3 April

  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?

  Saturday, 4 April

  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.

  Sunday, 5 April

  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.

  Wednesday, 8 April

  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?

  Sunday, 12 April

  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!

  Wednesday, 15 April

  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.

  Thursday, 16 April

  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.

  Friday, 1 May

  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?

  Saturday, 23 May

  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.

  Wednesday, 27 May

  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.

  Wednesday, 3 June

  Today, after such a long interval, I have reread the first two acts of “Alexander the Great.” They (eve
n 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.