Radical Shadows

by Bradford Morrow

  August 1 1970

  Bad night. I tried to ponder serious subjects and failed altogether. Nonetheless, as soon as sleep desisted, I realized that I was conscious, that I had just emerged from a state of plenitude and of nothingness: for sleep is nothing but that very contradiction. One is torn from sleep, one is banished from it: consciousness is in exile. Only unconsciousness is a homeland.

  People accept without excessive terror the notion of eternal sleep; on the other hand, an eternal waking (which is what immortality would be, if such a thing were conceivable) is unbearable, in thought as in fact: it gives you the shivers.

  August 31 1970

  The French were a great nation so long as they had strong prejudices, which they expressed intensely and accumulated grandly. In them avarice was a sign of greatness. They hoarded money and, simultaneously, virtues.

  The French peasantry is disappearing. A fatal blow to France, which is thereby losing her reserves, her capital. She will never recover from this.

  Avarice was a safeguard for France.

  September 5 1970

  Christianity will be lost unless it undergoes terrible persecutions from now to the end of the century. The Church ought to work in secret for atheists to come to power: only they could still save it.

  November 16 1970

  Skepticism: delight in the dead end.

  In the Absolute, it matters little whether one is a saint or a swindler.

  November 18 1970

  I am a pupil of Job but a disloyal pupil, for I have not been able to acquire the Master’s certainties, I have followed him only in his lamentations …

  November 20 1970

  This afternoon Celan will be honored at the German Institute. He was a charming man, no doubt about it. And yet what an impossible man too! After an evening with him, you were exhausted, for the necessity to control yourself, to say nothing which might wound him (and everything wounded him) ultimately left you weak and quite dissatisfied with both him and yourself. You were annoyed with yourself for having been so cowardly, for having humored him to such a degree, and for not having ultimately exploded.

  Homage to Celan, at the German Center. The actor who read his poems—if only the actors who read poems in France were there to hear how poetry should be read.

  (A French poet who read three pages in his own way, as an introduction to the event, thought fit to repeat the word exorbitant three times, applying it to the attention with which Celan must be read. I almost hissed him, but neither the moment nor the solemnity of the occasion lent themselves.)

  Even Celan, who had something to say, was haunted to an astonishing degree by questions of language. The word was an obsession for him—and, a just punishment, what is least real in his poetry derives from that verbal acrobatics he ended with.

  Poetry at present is perishing from language, from the excessive attention it pays to it, from this fatal idolatry.

  Reflection on language would have killed even Shakespeare.

  Love of words, yes; but not this eternal dwelling upon them. The former passion generates poems; the second, parodies of poems.

  November 20 1970

  A splendid, divine morning in the Luxembourg. I saw people walking up and down, and I said to myself that we the living (the living!) are here only to graze the surface of the earth for a while. Instead of looking at people’s faces, I looked at their feet, and for me all these beings were merely footsteps, footsteps going in all directions, a chaotic dance over which it would be pointless to linger … I had reached that point in my reflections when, looking up, I caught sight of Beckett, that exquisite man, whose presence has something singularly beneficial about it. His cataract operation, made on just one eye for the moment, was entirely successful. He is beginning to see at a distance, which he could not do previously. “I’ll end up an extrovert!” he told me. Let future commentators discover the reason, I added.

  December 7 1970

  The Torah, Mosaic law, has been nicknamed a “portable fatherland.”

  May 22 1970

  Every form of attachment is a sin against perspicacity.

  June 6 1971

  Liberation, liberation—

  To suppress prohibitions, to free yourself is all very well, but don’t you risk, thereby, coming to a time when you will have nothing left to free yourself from.

  October 23 1971

  Without failure, no spiritual fulfillment.

  November 17 1971

  The disaster of being Romanian.

  The drama of insignificance.

  March 30 1972

  I have always dreaded, and admired, people who sleep badly.

  I have just read that Lenin suffered from insomnia. Now I have a better understanding of his excesses, his obsessions, his intolerance.

  June 19 1972

  To turn from Romanian to French is like turning from a prayer to a contract.

  September 1 1972

  Non-consent to death is the greatest drama of mortals.

  At twenty, all I could think about was the extermination of the old; I persist in believing such a thing urgent, but now I would add to it that of the young; with age one has a more complete vision of things.

  October 21 1972

  My compatriots—elegiac swindlers.

  November 14 1972

  Without the notion of a failed universe, the spectacle of injustice under every regime would put even an indifferent man in a strait-jacket.

  ***

  AFTERWORD

  CIORAN

  In the spring of 1990, I was invited to attend the Salon du Livre in Paris, on the occasion of Albin Michel’s publication of my first volume in French, Le thé de Proust.

  The year before my trip there, I had got to know a friend of Cioran’s, Edouard Roditi, a fabled pilgrim of letters. It seems he had written to Cioran about me. One day he showed me a surprising message that had come from Cioran, in French, dated 25 September 1989.

  “Mon cher ami,

  “Thank you for your letter, which has come at just the right moment. Just a few days ago I was struck, or rather deeply shaken, by Norman Manea’s piece. It is the best thing I have read on the Romanian nightmare … I left Romania fifty years ago, and it is mainly out of masochism that I take an interest in my origins. How can one explain that the shallowest of all nations should have such a destiny?”

  Cioran was referring to my essay “Rumänien in 3 (kommentierten) Sätze” (“Romania—Three Lines with Commentary”), which had just appeared in the German magazine Akzente. The same issue had also carried a piece by Cioran entitled “Begegnungen mit Paul Celan” (“Encounters with Paul Celan”), a coincidence which probably prompted what he wrote to Roditi regarding “the right moment.”

  Naturally, I wrote Cioran. I always considered him a great writer, even if I had some doubts about his philosophy. He answered with an extremely cordial letter in which he did not forget to stress that his leaving Romania had been the most intelligent act of his life. (“C’est de loin l’acte le plus intelligent que j’aie jamais commis”). And, of course, he advised me to come to live in Paris, too (“the ideal place to bungle one’s life”).

  When I telephoned him upon arriving in Paris, he invited me and my wife over to 21 rue l’Odeon, for dinner.

  This fierce cynic, who delighted in overturning axioms and canons, values and virtues, was a short, thin, frail man, both amiable and courteous. He who had once written that he would commit suicide if he were a Jew, and who rejected God while admiring the Führer and the Romanian Fascist “Captain,” came across as modest, gentle, polite. The sharpshooter so adulated by French literati lived in a student garret. He told us that until a lift was installed a few years earlier he had heroically scrambled up the stairs several times a day—even after midnight when he returned from his long solitary walks that were well known to the district policeman.

  My intention was not to ask him anything but to leave him at the mercy of his own nature and words. Still, if the
opportunity had arisen, I should have been happy for us to discuss, for instance, the “barbarity of enthusiasm,” one of his many striking phrases in Le mauvais demiurge. I thought that, even for a nihilistic prophet of the apocalypse, it might have been interesting to consider the relationship between his youthful enthusiasm for barbarism and his later determined skepticism towards civilization, progress and democracy. But we did not come to such complicated and important matters. He seemed to have prepared himself for a relaxed Mozartian evening, drugged with beauty like the Parisian spring. His gaze and gestures, seeking and bestowing admiration, were directed with a delicate touch of gallantry towards my wife, Cella …

  Yet, his conversation did not lack in sarcasm. Although he was briefly exhilarated by the anti-Ceausescu “revolution” of 1989, Romania still remained to Cioran “the space of failure, where things were ruined for good”—comments he repeated with visible pleasure. Less expected, given that this was our first meeting, were his caustic remarks about old friends—especially the Romanian philosopher Noica. With excitement in his voice, he enjoyed describing the servility and grotesque flattery in the Maestro’s dealings with fellow professors, students and friends; nor did he hold back from telling us, virtual strangers, about some embarrassing visits that the author of The Romanian Sense of Being used to make in his way around Paris. According to Cioran, who seemed more condescending than disgusted, the “transcendental” thinker Noica played the role of a loyal defender of the “Greatest Son” of Communist Romania. “What is this you’ve got against Ceausescu, eh?” Noica (in fact, Cioran’s old comrade) is supposed to have asked with almost pious astonishment. Apparently, Noica also kept a little notebook in which he jotted down the names of everyone he met and talked to in Paris, so that later, returning to Romania, he showed gratitude to his connections in the Secret Police who gave him a passport to travel abroad.

  The evening continued after midnight, amid anecdotes and paradoxes, under the spell of a host who was not stinting on verve. “What you need now are some literary prizes. Awards! In Paris you arrange literary glory over dinners. At restaurants, the best restaurants.” He could not possibly accept, as he saw it, the scandalous slipshoddedness of a publisher who failed to arrange fancy promotional lunch and dinner parties for an author who had come all the way across the ocean. His physical frailty seemed offset by a robust high-born suppleness. He had an open, welcoming air and was enamored of Paris and his local quartier, happy to enjoy the benefits of a civilization that he never ceased to mock.

  Nevertheless, the French publishing house did something for its guest. The next day, Albin Michel had arranged a photo session with Mme. Giles Rolle, a well-known professional. “I know your fellow countryman, Emil Cioran. I have photographed him, too,” she cheerfully told me. “Some of the pictures came out really well—disastrously well.” Cioran had looked at them with delight in his eyes, continued Mme. Rolle, and then torn them all up. “Forbidden! Prohibited! Me, Cioran, smiling? No one should ever see Cioran smiling.”

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t in touch with Cioran after that trip to Paris. Some years later I heard of his long slow agony, the senility in which the former iconoclast and cynic was peacefully slumbering. The exile who had learned perfect French, becoming France’s most brilliant contemporary stylist, had suddenly lost his linguistic refuge and started to speak again in Romanian, the language he had been so happy to abandon half a century ago. Was it a new form of Alzheimer’s disease? It certainly was, as the Romanian writer Ion Vartic acutely remarked, a “successful regression,” about which Cioran had always dreamt. A way of regressing to the state of the unborn and, in the same time, a way of unknowingly returning from exile, coming home to his pre-birth homeland. “Unconsciousness is a homeland,” Cioran himself had written.

  Then, in a kind of irony of fate, the world’s major newspapers announced the death of this skeptic who had always stressed his indifference to glory and his boredom with the paradoxes of posterity.

  In a New York Times obituary Susan Sontag—one of the first in America to write about Cioran—observed that he had practiced “a new kind of philosophizing: personal, aphoristic, lyrical, antisystematic.” She illustrated this with a characteristic Cioran quote: “However much I have frequented the mystic, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.” It was a quotation that combined his rebellious vitality with the provocative mirage of his phrases, their twisted glowing spikes, the antilethargical shudder, the icy irradiation of his ever-youthful prose, his gnomic solitary thought.

  I, too, was asked to characterize Cioran. I recalled that one evening we spent together, and the question I did not manage to ask him. In a few sentences, I tried to relate Cioran’s evolution to the evolution of our contemporary world, to the watershed represented by World War II. In the issue of the New York Times dated 22 June 1993, my comment appeared as a laconic statement: “He was a brilliant rebel and a challenging misanthrope who tried again and again to awaken us to the nothingness of human existence.”

  Soon after his death, a stormy controversy (called by some participants “Cioran’s second death,” although it might have been seen rather as a rebirth) arose in the French and Romanian press. It focused on the political extremism of his youthful misanthropy and rebellion, his involvement with Romanian fascism, his outrageous statements about Hitler and Zelea Codreanu, the “Captain” of the infamous Iron Guard, that extreme right-wing Romanian movement of the 1930s, that claimed to be “Christian-Orthodox.”

  Readers were reminded that he wrote in 1937, “No other politician of today inspires a greater sympathy than Hitler … Hitler’s merit consists in depriving his nation of its critical spirit,” or what he said, in 1940, at the commemoration of his beloved “Captain,” whom he saw as a kind of new Messiah: “With exception of Jesus, no other dead figure was more present among the living.”

  In 1995, Gallimard published Cioran, l’heretique, Patrice Bollon’s balanced critical analysis of Cioran’s life and work. The book provoked a violent debate in the French newspapers. Jean-Paul Enthoven wrote that “the second death of Cioran promises his orphans a vast loneliness”; Bernard-Henry Levy described a meeting, in 1989, at which Cioran seemed very cautious in talking about his past and quite uncomfortable when asked about his extreme right-wing militantism of the thirties and forties. Cioran was passionately defended by Edgar Morin, Andre Comte-Sponville and Francois Furet. The latter wrote: “Cioran is a great writer and a great moralist, whatever his ephemeral commitment to the Iron Guard was.” Finally, Alain Etchegoyen explained, on a French television program, without any trace of irony, that “Cioran’s main regret was well and nicely expressed through his silence and his pessimism. Opposite to the penitent Stalinists, he had the merit of discretion. The Stalinists maintained their arrogance, which isn’t necessarily a philosophical habit.”

  In Romania the debate was enhanced by the publication, after the collapse of communism, of Cioran’s entire work, including a part of his yet unknown correspondence. And the appearance, after his death, in France, of two posthumous books, Mon Pays (Gallimard, 1996), and Cahiers, 1957-1972 (Gallimard, 1997) was, of course, extensively commented on in both countries. These books show that, unlike his fellow Romanian intellectuals with whom he was associated in the right-wing political movement (Eliade, Noica), Cioran was, after the war, continuously obsessed with his “guilty” youth. He viewed his political commitment to the extreme right-wing “Revolution” as a mixture of craziness and stupidity, due to the suffocating environment of his mediocre and apathetic homeland, an oppressive dead end, without past or future. “My Country! I wanted, by hook or by crook, to cavil at her but she wasn’t even there for me to cavil to,” he wrote in the early 1950s. Thinking again and again about his country, his countrymen and himself, Cioran concludes, in obvious disgust: “I hated my country, I hated everybody and the entire univ
erse: so that, in the end, nothing was left to hate but myself: which I did, in the devious way of desperation.” And he adds: “When I look back … it is another man whom I abjure now, everything that means ‘Me’ is now elsewhere, at two thousand leagues from what I was.”

  As ambiguous or superficial as his statements may still sometimes be (he thinks, for instance, that the “error” of the Iron Guard was “to conceive a future for a place without one,” transferring their guilt onto the country and its people, even while he still believes the Iron Guard’s martyrs “achieved for themselves a destiny which exempted their country from having one”), it’s obvious that, after the war, Cioran was ashamed and burdened by his past political commitment, and that he kept a distance, in fact, from any political connections.

  Yet, what still proved to be a never-ending, complicated and troubled process was the impossibility of taming his genuine, innate nihilism. For better or worse, his nihilism remained the energetic spiritual force behind his creative writing, behind his originality and style. He kept his lonely struggle alive, as a writer, as a performer, a clownish philosopher mocking philosophy, I would say, a solitary apatride with a Buster Keaton mask, and as a seducer, of course, even if the seduction was rarely obtained through virtuous means. He was ever the Devil’s advocate.

  The Romanian writer Marta Petreu remarked recently, in a rigorous, brilliant essay, “Doctrina legionara si intelighentia interbelica” (Apostrof, 1998), that Cioran was a heretic even as he was a supporter of the Iron Guard. Knowing too well that the political project of the Iron Guard meant, in the end, a total suppression of freedom, he still wanted to be a “free man.” Claiming for himself the right to rebel, to be different, unique, above the mob. His “elitism” seemed to be, as Marta Petreu emphasizes, the essential reason for his ultra-reactionary political views of the 1930s and 1940s. “An epoch of boundless liberties, of ‘sincere’ and extreme democracy, lingering indefinitely, would mean an inevitable collapse of humankind. The mob wants to be ordered about,” Cioran wrote in 1937.