Accident

by Mihail Sebastian

  The Mihail Sebastian who emerged from the Second World War was an angry man. During the war, his friends had prospered by professing fascism, while he had been ostracized and consigned to a slum. Cioran had been living in Paris on a scholarship; Eugen Ionescu, in spite of his Jewish ancestry, had succeeded in escaping to France in 1942. Eliade had been rewarded for his collaborationism with plush diplomatic posts in Lisbon and London. Camil Petrescu had been named Director of the National Theatre for the duration of the war years. When the Red Army rolled into Bucharest at the end of August 1944, the collaborators began to greet Sebastian again. Some of the more conspicuous fascist supporters, such as Petrescu, made a public display of their friendship with the man they had not spoken to in five years in the hope of warding off anti-fascist retribution. Other Romanian intellectuals, however, held Sebastian, as a contributor to the notorious Cuvântul, partly responsible for bringing fascism to Romania.

  In the rush to dismantle the far-right state apparatus under watchful Soviet eyes, magazines, newspapers and government ministries offered Sebastian opportunities to contribute or work for them, as though his return to public life were perfectly natural, as though these same people had played no part in his oppression. But Sebastian’s vision of his country had changed. In the final pages of his wartime diary, the adjective “Balkan,” wielded as an insult, recurs in his descriptions of Romanians and their culture. He felt foreign to Bucharest intellectual life in a way he never had before; oppression had made him see the world as a Jew, a stance that in the 1930s he would have considered parochial and artificial. In late 1944, he turned down offers of at least half a dozen good jobs out of disgust at the “terrible (morally terrible) jostling, as people hurry to occupy positions, to assert claims, to establish rights.” Finally, he accepted a post as a press officer for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the new pro-Soviet government. He agreed to give a lecture series on the novels of Balzac at the Free Workers’ University. On May 25, 1945, hurrying across Bulevardul Regina Maria to make a class, Sebastian was hit by a truck and killed instantly. He was thirty-seven years old. In 1946 and 1947 the two remaining plays he had completed at the end of the war, Ultima oră (Breaking News) and Insula (The Island) were staged, with the former becoming a smash hit and an indispensable part of the repertoire of Romanian comedy. In 1947, King Michael abdicated under Soviet pressure and fled to Switzerland. Romania began to be absorbed into the Soviet Bloc and the era to which Mihail Sebastian and his work had belonged became part of history.

  The Accident, Sebastian’s fourth and last novel, continues to be widely read in Romania today and is available in translation in easily accessible paperback editions in German, French, Spanish and Italian. The present edition, astonishingly, marks the first publication of Sebastian’s fiction in English. The only previous English translation of his creative work was a stilted Cold War-era rendering of Breaking News as Stop News. A Comedy in Three Acts, released by the government publishing house in Bucharest in 1954.

  Sebastian’s posthumous reputation maybe summarized by saying that he has flourished as a playwright in Romania, a novelist in the rest of Europe and a diarist in English. With the exception of De două mii de ani, Sebastian’s creative work makes scant reference to Jewish themes, a fact at odds with his reputation in English-speaking countries, where the little that is known about him is that he was a Jewish writer who survived the Holocaust only to be run over by a truck. It is not surprising that the diary, which grapples with the themes of anti-semitism, the Holocaust and the treason of Romania’s intellectual class, should have been the first of his works to appear in English. Smuggled out of Romania by the Israeli Embassy in 1961, Jurnal 1935 – 1944 was published in Bucharest in 1996. As the critic Aureliu Goci points out, this massive, acutely observed, delicately evocative testimony of a man whose friends

  – who happen to be the greatest minds of his country’s 20th century intellectual culture – day by day become fascists, is one of the masterpieces of Romanian literature. Its publication unleashed a polemic almost as furious as that ignited sixty years earlier by De două mii de ani, a sad irony that suggests that some Romanian intellectuals are not yet ready to accept the truth about the actions of many of their heroes during the 1930s. In fairness, intellectuals in Western Europe and North America also failed to hold these writers to account for their collaborationism. Eliade, ensconced in his professorship at the University of Chicago, lived on to be idolized by the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s for his expertise on Asian religions; his book The Eternal Return, written in English, sold over 100,000 copies. Yet, as late as 1968, Eliade inserted an admiring reference to Nae Ionescu into his academic work; in 1970, he praised the attitudes of the anti-Semitic Romanian poet Adrian Păunescu after the latter visited him in Chicago. Eliade’s Iron Guard past and “Hitlerian” views, which he never recanted, were so completely ignored that when he died in 1986, the eulogy at his funeral was delivered by Saul Bellow.

  Translated by Patrick Camiller, with excellent notes and an introduction by Radu Ioanid, the diary was published in English in 2000. Journal 1935 – 1944: The Fascist Years made Sebastian’s name much better known in both North America and Great Britain. The book’s success led to a play, The Journals of Mihail Sebastian, that was produced in New York in 2004. In 2006 the German translation of the diary was awarded the Geschwister-Scholl Preis, given annually for a work that supports civil freedom and demonstrates moral courage. The diary is instantly accessible, not only because of its intimacy and immediacy, but also because it belongs to the familiar genre of the Holocaust memoir; yet its unique flavour in this crowded field springs from Sebastian’s acutely tuned sensibility, his lyricism and romanticism. To appreciate these features at full stretch, one must read Sebastian’s novels.

  The Accident is often read as a study of an intellectual who has lost touch with his emotions. The protagonist’s family background is never elucidated. A hint that he might be of Jewish ancestry occurs in Chapter II, when a business acquaintance encountered in a night club invites him to the home of the Zionist leader Abraham Zissu. Paul declines, a decision that seems to echo Sebastian’s own preference for avoiding ethnic enclaves. Paul’s obsession with the young painter Ann, which leads to his exhausting journey across Europe – an act that today we might see as an extravagant form of stalking – is inseparable from the lift of his shoulders that signals his indifference. His emotional vacancy feeds his obsessiveness. Even though The Accident is the product of the years of Sebastian’s estrangement from the friends of his youth, the solution to Paul’s conundrum is one which few contributors to Cuvântul would disapprove: a trip to the mountains of Transylvania. The idea for the novel, however, originated in the image of Nora’s accident in the snowy Bucharest streets – an eerie presentiment of the author’s own death. Sebastian spent his twenty-ninth birthday, October 18, 1936, in the company of Mircea Eliade. As he went out to buy champagne, “I suddenly had the picture of a road accident into which I should have liked to be drawn. I could see the first chapter with a wealth of detail so pressing that I thought that, when I got home, I would be unable to do anything other than write, as if under the command of an imperious voice.”

  The novel that began in inspiration became an ordeal to finish. In September 1937, during a trip to Paris, Sebastian lost, or was robbed of, the suitcase that contained the only copy of his manuscript. He had to rewrite the first five chapters from memory. Given the stresses he faced as the pillars of his life as a lawyer, novelist, playwright and journalist were demolished, it is a testament to his determination that he completed the book. Much of it was written in resort towns in the mountains where he retreated to take skiing lessons. It is curious to think that as the clamps were being tightened on the country’s Jewish community, the sunburned author was swooping down mountain slopes, then returning to his cabin to compose his romantic love story; but it may have been this separation from the war that spared his creativity. By the time he was writi
ng the novel’s final pages, in January 1940, he was labouring under a military call-up notice (he did military service intermittently during these years) and was aware that, “What is happening to the Jews now in Hitler-occupied Poland is beyond all known horrors.”

  The Accident combines interior monologues that display, in a concise way, the influence of Marcel Proust with the crisp, telling dialogue that Sebastian was mastering in his plays. The book’s careful crafting is evident in embedded details such as the old man stroking his beard mentioned by Ann in her impromptu lecture to Paul at Lake Snagov, which later becomes the key to confirming her history of infidelity. In the Transylvanian scenes another pivotal element appears: the protagonist’s lyrical immersion in nature. It is the region’s natural wonders that cure Paul of the over-intellectualized “sickness” of the city. This theme is compatible with much nationalist thinking of the inter-war years, in which the nation’s natural attributes promise an “authentic essence” that acts as an antidote to the ills of a corrupt or decadent civilization. The two female protagonists embody this pattern. While neither is native to the capital, Ann has become a creature of the city, a prisoner of her ambition who subordinates her body to the demands of her career. Her identity as “this blonde girl in boyish slacks” underlines her estrangement from her female essence. By contrast, Nora evokes the motherland, the nation in female form. She is a teacher of French, the language that Romanian intellectuals saw as the bridge to their culture’s ancestral home in the Latin West. From the beginning, in spite of the fact that she has just suffered a fall from a tram, she cares for Paul in a way that is conspicuously maternal. Although sexually emancipated, Nora respects the emotional seriousness of her relationships with men, an attitude that crystallizes in her discomfort at leaving her encounter with Paul as a one-night stand. She is older than he, while Ann is younger. Where Ann’s figure is boyish, Nora’s lines are reassuringly solid. Observing her in their room in Gunther’s cabin, he notes that, “her body was strong, with a slight heaviness in its long, firm lines. Nothing adolescent here, Paul thought, watching her.” The reference to adolescence may be read as a reflection on “boyish” Ann and the immature urban world she represents. Although she is famous, Ann’s surname is not revealed; by contrast, Nora’s last name, Munteanu, contains the word munte, “mountain.” Her mother lives in Cernăuţi, the birthplace of Mihai Eminescu, Romania’s national poet. Cernăuţi – which today is Cernivitsi, Ukraine – was located in Bukovina, whose reunion with the motherland in 1919 was seen by many Romanians as central to the fulfillment of the country’s historic destiny.

  If, in spite of the heavy thematic cargo they bear, these women come across as vital, persuasive characters, it is because they were nourished by two of the most important women in Mihail Sebastian’s life. Ann was almost certainly inspired by Lena Caler, an actress revered in her day, with whom Sebastian was besmit-ten: his desire to create roles for her was instrumental in his decision to write for the theatre. Sebastian and Caler had an off-again on-again relationship from the time they met in 1935 until the end of his life. Her countless infidelities drove him to despair, but she was one of the few friends who stood by him during the Second World War. Their sexual liaison appears to have continued, at least intermittently, even after her marriage to the theatre director Scarlat Froda. When The Accident was published, Froda made an emotional phone call to Sebastian, telling him he knew who Ann was based on. Nora, on the other hand, is sometimes seen as a portrait of the painter Zoe Ricci, a supposition that can be only partly correct because Sebastian had been writing The Accident for over a year when he met Ricci and, six months later, became romantically involved with her. The physically slight, Italian-descended Ricci was not a maternal figure like Nora; yet Sebastian himself linked her with his character. He noted of Ricci’s telling him during a romantic moment how nice it was not to be alone: “That’s something Nora could have said. She actually says it in a way. So here is life, a year later, repeating a situation in a novel ...” On February 21, 1940, a few days after the novel’s publication, Sebastian, finding that he, Lena Caler and Zoe Ricci were all in Braşov on the same day, wrote: “As in the final chapter of The Accident.” Nora, more of a composite than Ann – who, as Paul Cernat points out, is given Zoe’s profession – is a character to whom Ricci contributed; but she was not inspired by her.

  The Transylvanian setting acquires layered meanings. Paul and Nora’s skiing holiday may begin as a recuperative expedition to the mountains that harbour the vigorous natural world exalted by partisans of the “Romanian soul,” but the entrance of the Grodeck family complicates this picture. The counterpoint between the Grodecks and the mountains creates dramatic tensions that express the conflict between Sebastian’s nationalist intellectual roots and his awareness of belonging to an ethnic minority. Closely identified with classical music, the manifestation of German culture that Sebastian adored, Gunther Grodeck rescues Teutonic civilization from the grim images of Hitler’s Germany that appear during Paul’s train odyssey. Even if the portrait is ultimately tragic – the artistic Gunther is doomed to die – it establishes the positive attributes of German culture; at the same time, the Grodecks become a trope for the presence of minority groups within the most traditional precincts of Romanian life. Transylvania appears as a zone of multiplicity and mutual enrichment. The love triangle of Gunther’s parents and Hagen mirrors that of Paul, Nora and Ann: in each, the unhealthy original couple is pried apart by an individual identified with the mountains. While Gunther and Hagen inhabit opposite extremes of cossetted sensitivity and feral toughness, Nora balances civilization with nature; she transmits this lesson to Paul. The novel does not abandon the rhetorical glorification of the mountains: they dominate the final chapters and confirm Paul’s cure from his malaise. But the nationalist overtones, including the allusions to the composer Richard Wagner, a favourite of the Nazis, are reconciled with a panorama that seems to make a desperate, almost paradoxical assertion that “national essence” and ethnic diversity are mutually compatible. Hagen may share his nickname with the most destructive character in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, yet the sympathetic light in which he is eventually seen suggests that different cultures can coexist. In the scene in Chapter XV where Nora parades at the edge of the ski run with Gunther on her left and Paul on her right, she is not only reacquainting two neurotic intellectuals with nature, she is also incarnating the Romanian motherland’s capacity to harmonize the country’s disparate ethnic groups.

  The novel’s final scenes, set in Braşov, include references to Romania’s largest minority, the Hungarians (who numbered about 2.5 million at this time, compared to about 700,000 Germans). A headline in untranslated Hungarian (a language few Romanians can read) both makes clear and conceals Sebastian’s ultimate pessimism. Seeing the headline, Paul thinks “that extraordinary events might have taken place in the world during the two weeks he had spent in the mountains, and that the headline, printed in large letters, might be announcing a crucial event that would change the fate of mankind.” Once he finds newspapers he can read, Paul decides that he is mistaken: “nothing’s happened. Truly nothing.” In fact, it is here that he makes an error. The agreement announced by the headline, reached on January 7, 1935, was the Treaty of Rome, in which the government of France made its peace with Benito Mussolini’s Italy. This capitulation of the values of civilization to those of fascism undermines the resolutions made by Paul and Nora at the novel’s close. They begin their new life unaware that the process that will lead to Europe’s destruction has already begun. Sebastian’s decision to insert this dark omen into the novel’s conclusion, yet make it invisible to most readers, is typical of the double-edged vision he conveyed with such delicacy and humanity.

  STEPHEN HENIGHAN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mihail Sebastian (1907 – 1945) was one of the major Central European writers of the 1930s. Born in southeastern Romania, he worked in Bucharest as a lawyer, journalist, novelist and pl
aywright until anti-semitic legislation forced him to abandon his public career. His long-lost diary, Journal 1935 – 1944: The Fascist Years, was published in seven countries between 1996 and 2007, launching an international revival of his work. Sebastian’s novels and plays are available in translation throughout Europe, and also have been published in Chinese, Hindi, Bengali and Hebrew.

  The Accident is Sebastian’s first work of fiction to appear in English.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Stephen Henighan’s books include Lost Province: Adventures in a Moldovan Family, A Grave in the Air, The Streets of Winter and A Report on the Afterlife of Culture. A nominee for the Governor General of Canada’s Literary Award, he teaches at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

  1

  Romanian Orthodox Epiphany, celebrated on 6 January, is the most important religious holiday after Christmas and Easter. January 24, the date on which two of the country’s three constituent regions united in 1859, is also a national holiday.

  2

  Abraham Zissu was a millionaire Bucharest socialite and leader of the Romanian Zionist movement.

  3

  Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627 – 1704): French bishop and royalist preacher.

  4

  Popular summer and winter mountain resort north of Bucharest.

  5

  Transylvania, where these scenes are set, had a significant German-speaking minority at this time.

  6

  Capital city of Transylvania.

  7

  Raoul Duffy (1877 – 1953): Popular French painter and decorator.