“What is your name?” he asked.
“Marietta Sadova,” she replied, sure of herself. And since he didn’t seem any the wiser, she added:
. . from the National Theatre.”
“Mrs. or Miss?” he asked further, just as we do at the Day of the Book.
I think it was a bit of a blow for poor little Marietta—though (still according to Mircea) it didn’t stop her from looking at the “Captain” and listening to him all the time with an ecstatic smile. It is the same ecstatic smile with which she looks at Aristide Blank. Can I say that Marietta is a hypocrite? No. But she’s a strange mixture of harsh practicality and openhanded sincerity.
Another detail, as moving and as ridiculous. Haig brought along his whole oeuvre (poems, essays) for the “Captain” and wrote a special dedication for him.
After Codreanu left, Marietta and Haig said in one voice that they had lived through a magnificent day. “Colossal” was their exact term, I think.
In 1932 Haig was a Communist.
A snippet from Sunday’s conversation with Nae:
“Look, I’m finished—a broken-down failure of a man. My life divides into two: before 5 July 1933, and since 5 July 1933. Until that day I was a strong person. Since then I’ve been nothing.”
What happened on 5 July 1933? I think it was the day he broke up with Maruca Cantacuzino.6
At last we have got ourselves a house. May the gods keep smiling on me!
Sunday, 25 [October]
There is something of Mme. Verdurin in Marietta—not a lot, and not with the same comic violence, but it is there. This morning at the concert she said to me after Enescu had played the Brahms concerto:
“Aren’t you feeling a little ill? It has made me ill.”
And she had a happy look on her face; she was suffering—almost swooning—from happiness.
She is very dear to me, but one day I’d like to capture her studied social tactics in a character in a novel. For example, what subtle intentions could be deciphered from her behavior at this evening’s reception at the Blanks, when she obliged me to read the play again!
Tuesday, 27 [October]
Again at Roman, Blecher spoke to me of a woman from Bucharest who knows and “admires” my books. Two years ago, when De două mii de ani was published, she wrote to him that she had discovered an author “more intelligent than Gide.” Last year, at a concert, she sat next to me and wanted to speak to me, but in the end did not dare. Her name is Maria Ghiolu—the wife of an engineer.7 They seem to be remarkably wealthy.
The day before yesterday, Blecher sent a letter asking me to phone Mrs. Ghiolu—but he also recommended a whole number of precautions. I should ring on Tuesday or Wednesday, not any other day, at eleven in the morning and not any other time.
I rang her just now. A weak, timid voice, whispering more than speaking, as if afraid that someone in the next room would hear. She gave me an appointment for Thursday at six, in the lobby of the Athénée Palace.8 That’s another “mystery” in this story. We’ll see.
I leave at one for Galaţi, where I’m due to speak on Léon Blum as a literary figure.
Yesterday evening at the Dalles Hall, a first-rate chamber concert with the orchestra from Berlin. A lot of Mozart—among other things, the first and the last movement of the Kleine nachtmusik. But I was especially moved by a “sinfonia concertante” for violin and viola, its melancholy supremely Mozartian.
But in recent weeks the musical side of things has been much richer than that. I don’t have the patience to note it all down.
Thursday, 5 November
For the last ten days, since we began moving into our new home at Strada Antim 45, I have been leading a disorganized life—much more disorganized than before. I do absolutely nothing, yet I feel overwhelmed by things to do. I am worn out, and wait as if for some well-earned holiday after months of effort. Everything happening to me takes place somewhere outside, as if it did not concern me. I feel as if I am dirty and dusty from a long journey, impatient to reach somewhere where I can brush or change my clothes, take a bath, become a different man. But I am not going anywhere, not expecting anything; nothing is awaiting me.
I look closely at myself (not too closely, though, out of prudence, cowardice, or fear that I may have to bear all the consequences) and tell myself that I am falling apart. In this state of disintegration I have the (semiconscious) stupidity to get involved with people who, not knowing me, “press forward” with a good faith that ought to make me feel ashamed. For example, why did I take that caper with Cella Seni as far as I did?9 She’s a nice girl, who put a lot of herself into this “incipient love”—and now I drop her with the most stupid indifference. Am I really so irresponsible in my actions with other people?
I am ashamed—I swear that I am ashamed.
And I am so lacking in energy, good sense, and manliness that I feel everything is going badly—not because I’m a wreck, but because . . . I don’t yet have a telephone. Yes, however funny it seems, I wait for them to reconnect me, with the feeling that that will sort out everything.
What will stop me sinking? I don’t know. Is there still anything, can anything still happen to pull me out of this?
Friday, 6 [November]
Had lunch at Mircea’s yesterday. A discussion of foreign policy—as calm as could be. I tried to speak dispassionately, as if it were a matter of precise facts, not of opinions, impressions, and attitudes.
I especially remember one thing that Mircea said. These were his exact words:
“I prefer a little Romania, with some of its provinces lost but with its bourgeoisie and elite saved, rather than a proletarian Greater Romania.”
He was calm. He didn’t seem to realize the enormity of what he was saying.
Iancovescu has finally announced the next premiere. It will be a translation—Nine Thousand somethings—with Maria Mohor, produced by Popa. Not a word about my play. No phone call, no explanation, no apology.
So the Iancovescu-Marietta solution has fallen through, without any assistance from me. Although it was a solution on which I was never all that keen, the truth is that I did nothing at all to sabotage it. At one point, indeed, I let myself be drawn right into it and did everything possible for things to work out. I hope Marietta won’t have reason to blame me now—even if the play is performed by Leni. But will it be performed?
I saw Leni the evening before last, when I went out with her and Froda. It was the third time I had met her since the summer. She is lovely and obnoxious, just as I have always known her. I danced with her at the bar—and then suffered like a fool because Lăzăroneanu1 (with whom I bet she has slept, is sleeping, or will sleep) came over to our table. I simply cannot start those senseless torments all over again. In the end I was quite all right for those twenty days in which I didn’t see her or speak to her on the phone. So now I should begin another twenty days or so of silence.
“In principle” we agreed that I should read her the play, but she has to ring me to fix a time for the reading—and she certainly won’t do that. So things will again be left at that for I don’t know how long.
One evening I went to the Gambrinus2 with Camil. I think it was Monday, after the Münzer concert. We spoke about Romanian literature. I recall without smiling his statement:
“Dear Sebastian, there is only one writer today who is capable of producing a great novel—and I am he.”
I find it impossible to explain his candor: he is such an intelligent man, and yet so profoundly naive.
Wednesday, 11 [November]
My bad memory for music is extraordinary. Just now (n p.m.) I was listening to Beethoven’s fourth symphony and, apart from a few phrases in the scherzo, I no longer remember anything, even though I have surely heard the symphony several times in my life. The last three weeks or so have been a real musical feast. Enescu, Münzer, and Hubermann concerts. How many things I’ve heard! The violin concertos by Brahms, Beethoven, and Bach; Beethoven’s Romance in F Maj
or, Chausson’s Poème, Beethoven’s Third Symphony and Coriolan Overture, a Brahms symphony (I don’t remember which one), Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony.
The Kreuzer Sonata, an Enescu sonata, a Franck sonata (“surtout jouée par Enesco"), a Brahms sonata (once with Enescu, a second time with Hubermann), the Spring Sonata with Münzer at the piano, two Scarlatti sonatas, Beethoven’s fifteen Eroica Variations, and a large amount of Chopin.
Now, though very tired, I am waiting for a tremendous program from Stuttgart, due to begin in five minutes: Bach (Concerto for Flute, Violin, and Harpsichord in A Minor), Haydn (Piano Sonata in B Minor), Schubert (Rondo in A Major for Violin and String Quartet), Mozart (Concertone in C for Two Violins and Orchestra).
Saturday, 14 [November]
It has been perhaps one of the last magnificent days of autumn. I went to a soccer match at the O.N.E.F. (Venus against CFR), not for the match but for the scenery, which I guessed in advance would be gleaming. I wasn’t wrong. A weary, powdered, tender light—and far off a bright, steamy, silvery mist from which the city detached itself in an unreal way, as in a painted canvas or a mounted photograph. And how many colors! I didn’t know there were so many red houses in Bucharest. From the stadium they look as if they are made of toy bricks. And the leafless trees jut out of the mist as from a damp exhalation of their own. Everything was very delicately drawn, but with an explosive wealth of color. The red grounds, the multicolored billboards, the still-green grass, the football shirts mingling black, white, and blue, the huge crowd: it was all quite dizzying. At the beginning of the second half, the referee blew his whistle for a minute’s silence in memory, I think, of a foreign player who died recently. Suddenly there was a massive silence—a silence of some twenty thousand people. The noise of the city could just be heard in the distance.
“She’s sleeping with someone called Berlescu, a kid of around twenty,” Camil said at table today, with a studied disinterest that didn’t conceal his premeditation and, perhaps, satisfaction. I’d like this incident to help me forget everything once and for all.
Monday, 16 [November]
Had a long telephone conversation this morning with Mrs. Ghiolu; it lasted more than half an hour. She said some things full of childish admiration, which gave me quite a lot of pleasure. She has recently read Cum am devenit huligan and was “won over” by it.
“What you write frightens me a little, as if you must have the strength to dominate other people. I think you exert an influence over them from which there is no escape. And you are such a self-possessed man! Vous êtes probablement d'une sécheresse de coeur. . .3 I’d so much like to be your friend. I have always dreamed of friendship with a man, but a pure, loyal friendship. Do you think that’s possible? I keep thinking of you, and I’ve spoken of it with my husband and my friends. Do you have time for us to be friends? Do you want us to be friends?”
She spoke to me in the same (or almost the same) way that Leni did two years ago. Maryse too spoke to me like that. So did Dorina (a few levels down). And when each has got to know me, a disappointed indifference has been the result. The only one who keeps at it is Maryse, though she too is flagging.
On Saturday evening, Enescu played a sonata by Veracini (enchanting: I heard it last year with Thibaud, but I’d completely forgotten it), a sonata in A minor by Bach (absolutely wonderfully played), and a sonata by Mozart. The evening before, Hubermann played the Franck sonata. I’m tired of so much music, but it’s been my only consolation recently.
Saturday, 21 [November]
“Wendy and Julie” are two young Englishwomen who were dancing and singing at Maxim’s until a few days ago, when the owner terminated their contract and left them lost and penniless in a Bucharest where they don’t know a soul. The British consul sent them to Roman—and Roman has passed them on to me. I hope that I’ll eventually get quite high compensation for them—something like 25,000 lei—with the help of Comarnescu and Sadoveanu4 at the Theatre Board.
The whole story has been quite fun. I’ve met a whole series of fancy men, pimps, and artistic “agents” swarming around “Wendy and Julie”; I’ve been behind the scenes in the bar, read an employment contract, learned how the establishment is run. It’s quite alluring. Wendy, whose real name is Flora Moss, was born in 1911. She has a fiancé in Copenhagen, a policeman by the name of Gunard. I saw a photo of him yesterday evening when I went up to her room. In civilian clothes he looks like a famous sportsman, especially with the long pipe dangling from his teeth. In Danish police uniform he is even more impressive. “For my dear Wendy, for always, Gunard” he wrote on the edge of the picture.
Wendy is slim, with smaller breasts than I have ever seen before, naturally reddish hair, and a snub nose. She has a childlike gaiety that I find enchanting. Yesterday evening I had promised to stay with her. Of course I didn’t stay—and I left her feeling sad, like a child who has been promised an outing to the cinema and then sent to bed.
Julie (Wendy calls her “Miss Julie,” which I think she picked up at the bar) is rather plainer, but also very English. Her fiancé, Reginald, lives in London and works as a salesman in a china shop.
Both speak French correctly but with an irresistible accent. As soon as they have the money, they want to go to Sofia to take up a contract. I regret that I can’t spend more time talking with them. But it’s not possible—Wendy is in love with me. She explained in all seriousness the difference between a camarade (stress on the first syllable, pronounced like a Romaniană) and an ami. “Avec un camarade on ne couche pas. Avec un ami on couche. ”5
Went to quite a homely little tea party yesterday at Mrs. Ghiolu’s. Her house seemed gorgeous, but I didn’t look at it all that closely. Entertaining company. On my right, a daughter of Stelian Popescu’s (Mrs. Popescu-Necşeşti), who said that she knows me from the Criterion and that she had asked Mrs. Ghiolu to invite me sometime just with her. Opposite, a youthful Princess Cantacuzino. As I was leaving, I heard that she is very left-wing, being the daughter of Labaiyre, the governor of the Banque de France.
As to Mrs. Ghiolu, I thought her less interesting than at our first meeting at the Athénée Palace, when I was really struck by her. (For I am so plebeian and naive that the event seemed to me really extraordinary.)
She is a “Jeni” type of woman: dark, plumpish, with shaved eyebrows that irritate me. I think that greater repose in her appearance would suit her better, that she is made to be serious, attentive, and submissive. She doesn’t have that restless, aggressive quivering that is a feature of slim blondes.
But is it not remarkable that this rich society woman, with a young, handsome, athletic, and wealthy husband, can have a passion for Blecher? And is her timid admiration for someone like me not moving and childlike?
Things will work out with Celia Seni because of my sovereign laziness.
“You are too vile for me not to end up loving you,” she said to me the evening before last, as we were on our way back from the Philharmonic concert. That’s almost a definition of love. Is it not for the same reason—because she is so “vile”—that I love Leni and love her so helplessly?
It’s been a week of which I feel ashamed. Whole days wasted, dizzy nights. I have done nothing and let myself be taken to any occasion that got me out on the town.
Tomorrow I leave for the baptism of Silvia’s child in Brăila, but then I am determined to force myself to do a week of serious work. I’d like to write a book, and for that maybe I should go somewhere over Christmas. But I have so many vague plans for Christmas! From time to time I feel a piercing call which I do not yet want to accept, not yet—and I would like so much never to be forced to accept it. It is something for which I pray to God with the last remnant of my hopes.
Monday, 23 [November]
Yesterday evening from Stuttgart, Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto and Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D Minor (with Edwin Fischer).
Brăila has never before seemed so sad, provincial, godforsaken. The streetcar stopped f
or nearly fifteen minutes on the corner of Strada Unirea, waiting to “cross.” Then, on Strada Galaţi, it didn’t move at all because of repairs to the line—and we had to get off and change. In the town center the clock was stopped at 5:20, though it was 10:30 in the morning, and a little farther the clock on the Greek church showed 11:20. A November cold, few people, old houses—not one new person, not one new building, empty shops.
I went with Petrică to the port, and this prevented me from being emotional. But it was still a pleasure to see again the ships, the willows, the heavy chains, the cables. Everything in the town seemed detached from a long time ago, from a previous life.
Thursday, 26 [November]
Yesterday evening Rosetti6 showed me a letter from General Zwiedenek,7 written on behalf of the Queen to the Foundation. In it he asked about the conditions under which a novel of hers might be published in translation.
“Until now Her Majesty’s works have been printed by Editura Adevarul, which has also made an offer for the present novel.
“Considering, however, that the Romanian national sentiments of that publishing house are not assured, Her Majesty Queen Maria has instructed me to approach your good self.”
Literally!
Prodan8 called Marietta and Lilly to his office in the last few days to rebuke them for verbally obstructing the work of the National Theatre. Among other things he said:
“So what do you want—that I should resign and pack my bags? That Mr. Mihail Sebastian should be appointed in my place? Well, that’s not going to happen. It can’t happen, because he’s a Jew.”
Impossible to explain that sudden outburst. But I can’t say it doesn’t amuse me.
Journal 1935–1944 Page 13