Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

  Wednesday, 1 November

  I am beginning to understand what it means “to get free of a book.”

  These characters of mine tire me with their obsessiveness; they eat away at me and wear me out. I’d like to forget about them, to escape. I walk with them in the street, sit with them at table, doze off with them.

  Sometimes I am afraid they will wriggle away from me before I finish the book, but at other times it pleases me to think that I’ll get away from them, that I’ll be free to forget them.

  I try to remember whether other characters, in my other books, obsessed me so much. The ones in Oraşul cu salami are another matter: I never saw them for one moment. But the rest? I don’t remember whether they took so much out of me in the way of nervous tension. But if they did, how could I have forgotten them so completely? How could they have become so indifferent to me?

  Thursday, 2 November

  Only just now, this morning, have I finished Chapter Eleven. If I had kept at it, I would have finished yesterday. But I didn’t want to: I was afraid of continuing into the evening. All the time I wrote in an overwhelming state of nervous tension. To say it all—however childish—I was afraid for my heart, which I felt scampering away like Gunther’s, about to burst.

  When I reread the chapter this morning, I found it less exciting, less intense, and certainly less demonic than it seemed yesterday. A night’s sleep clarifies a lot of things, makes them appear more subdued.

  Yesterday began badly, with a splitting headache that lasted until evening and ruined my schedule. I had to go out in the morning to get some painkiller. As I walked down toward the Timis, I passed the monument to Saulescu (only now do I realize how horrible it is, with that bird that looks like a little owl from behind), and then I came back past the railway line. The view is magnificent: the Schuller and Piatra Mare are in clouds, but the lower slopes are green and white, with snow-covered fir trees. I feel happy and alone there.

  I recovered only toward evening, when I managed to do some more serious work. Five and a half pages, plus another two this morning— which concludes the chapter I began on Tuesday.

  Friday, 3 [November]

  The short chapter I finished this morning (which I shall call IIA for the time being) has four pages. I wrote three yesterday afternoon and one just now. I have been writing very slowly, with great difficulty and a thousand obstacles that are still not resolved. It is certainly not in its final state. Besides, I had not been planning for it; I had intended to go straight from Chapter Eleven to the Christmas Oratorio chapter. But I felt the need to insert a chapter which, though not constituting an episode (that is, a distinct scene in the story), would create a little time and distance from the events. Right from the beginning of the book, the action has unfolded chronologically—day by day, almost hour by hour. But here I needed a jump, a caesura. I hoped that this little unforeseen chapter would provide it. But I don’t know whether I have got what I wanted. We’ll see later.

  At midday yesterday I went for an exciting walk to Plestera, where winter has really set in. I was alone in the snow for an hour.

  This afternoon I shall “attack” the chapter dealing with the descent to Brasov and the Christmas Oratorio—a long chapter in which a lot of things happen, and which carries the book into its final section. I am not really worried, but I do feel a little uneasy, a little apprehensive.

  Sunday, 5 [November]

  The Christmas Oratorio chapter has eighteen pages up to now: five written on Friday afternoon, five yesterday, eight today And, you realize, the “concert” hasn’t even begun. I’m still not sure how long it will turn out to be. The “scenario” is in place, however, and I have a feeling that I won’t experience the same difficulties that I had yesterday (so idiotic that the day’s work felt wasted).

  I’d gladly go on writing now, but it is past eight o’clock and my train leaves at ten—I haven’t even packed my luggage yet. I am breaking off at a moment when I feel in full flow. I hope this good working mood will come back to me.

  To be concluded—maybe in Bucharest. I could have noted a thousand things in connection with this chapter, but after eight, nine, or ten hours of work I always feel a need to take some distance. In this way I delay noting things and then never manage to write them down later.

  Bucharest. Thursday, 9 [November]

  Don’t ask me what I have done since Monday. I haven’t done anything. I have been in Bucharest. That’s enough for time to slip by without my knowing when or why.

  I haven’t even managed to sort everything out at the Revistă. The next issue has been completed, but I don’t have everything in proof, nor do I even know how many pages are missing. I also still have to write something myself, and to put together the “review of the reviews” section.

  Tomorrow I leave for Predeal—only tomorrow!—and leave things still up in the air. But that means I will have to return very soon.

  What is depressing in Bucharest are the telephone calls, the going-out, the first nights, the dinner invitations. On my first day back I felt that—in comparison with my simple life in Predeal—I was entering one big madhouse.

  The day before yesterday I sent a clean copy of 176 pages to the printer’s. I still have sixty pages to write out again, and the last four or five chapters to compose.

  Predeal. Sunday, 12 [November]

  I arrived on Friday evening. It felt like returning home. The whole villa was asleep, but Room 1 was waiting with its lights on. And to make me feel even more “at home,” there was a letter from Marie Ghiolu on the bedside table.

  To stop writing for five days does not mean only to waste five working days. It is more serious. You lose the right tone, you move away from your characters, you can’t find them again, they no longer recognize you.

  Yesterday was very heavy going. I’d got it into my head that I had to wrap up the concert at any price, and after six hours of work (with an hour on the chaise longue, in wonderful sunny weather) I did indeed finish it, with midnight already past. But that yielded only six pages, and I don’t think they are a success.

  Moreover, it may have been difficult in principle to write without listening. It is true that I worked all the time with the score in my hand, but to feel it properly I would have had to know it, to hear it. My memory for music is too poor for me to have something in my head after listening to it just three times (I don’t think I’ve heard the Christmas Oratorio more than three times).

  Publication before Christmas now looks unlikely. I may receive the proofs of the first nine chapters this week, but will I have time to do a fair copy of the other chapters and, above all, to write the finale?

  Maybe it’s a mistake to speak of the “finale”? Who knows, there may still be a hundred pages to write before then. The outline of the last few chapters already exists, but I’ve no idea what unexpected things may turn up.

  Besides, I have to be in Bucharest again on Wednesday, for the Revistă. Wdl it ever be allowed me to write a book straight through from beginning to end, without interrupting it, without losing it, and without becoming disconnected from it?

  Monday, 13 [November]

  A wonderful spring day. Twenty-five degrees above zero [78 F.]. There is a soft, pure light—without melancholy

  This morning I went to Creasta Cocosului. The ground was still wet from the melted snow (you’d have thought it was March!), but where the sun had been shining there was green grass and moss. I threw myself down and lay in the sun. How easy it always is to recover this bliss.

  In the afternoon, another hour in the sun on the chaise longue.

  I am wasting time—but I don’t feel any pangs of conscience. Everything I wrote yesterday (not even five pages) was bad. Today I feel it will be even more difficult. Last week I was like a well-tuned instrument; everything I wrote had the right tone. Now I feel out of tune: everything is false, clumsy, ungenuine. Sometimes I see things, feel and hear them, but the phrase fails me. It falls like lead, colorless and un
feeling.

  For a moment it occurred to me to return to Bucharest. What’s the point of staying here if I don’t write, when so many other things are waiting for me there? Maybe these standstills should be accepted as one accepts insomnia. Nevertheless I shall stay on—at least until tomorrow evening. The Christmas Oratorio chapter, for which I had such high hopes because it was so rich in detail and incident, has turned out a complete failure. But failure or not, I shall at least finish it.

  I have decided to split it in two. It will consist of Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen. The thirteenth I consider already complete. (I say “consider” because in fact I am well aware that it lacks something, but yesterday evening and this morning I struggled in vain to find a better way of ending it.) Now I am starting on Chapter Fourteen. I feel no enthusiasm and have no confidence in it. I shall write it in a spirit of resignation.

  Midnight

  In the end, the day was not as bad as I expected. I wrote six pages and— much more important—came up with new incidents for the final chapter of the novel. So far I haven’t been able to see this conclusion very well, but today I could quite precisely outline the whole “scenario” for it.

  Paul will meet Ann again in this last chapter, and this meeting will mark the final break between them and the forgetting of each other.

  Tuesday, 14 [November]

  It’s not advancing, not at all.

  I wasted the whole morning on writing and crossing out, and was left with not so much as a line that could be used. I consoled myself with the thought that I might catch up in the afternoon. (That’s what happened yesterday.) But now I feel there is no chance of that. I really have ground to a halt. Why should I resist? What’s the point of keeping at it?

  I leave for Bucharest on the five o’clock train. So much is waiting for me to do there. The novel will stay on hold for a few days. In the meantime, perhaps a way forward will open up by itself.

  Sunday, 19 [November]. Bucharest

  In the five days I have been in Bucharest, I have managed to do scarcely anything on the novel. Wasted days and nights. All I have done is again write out Chapters Ten to Thirteen; I’ll send them to the printer’s tomorrow. To make a fair copy is, for me, a strictly mechanical operation. Again I must confess my powerlessness to alter a text once I have written it; I am unable to put right even the simplest things. It is therefore pointless and imprudent for me to make a note in the margin and promise to go back over a certain passage. Pointless, because it is impossible for me to go back over it. Imprudent, because I deceive myself with the thought that I will complete the text at the copyediting or “proof correction” stage, and therefore leave things poorly expressed, in a provisional state that I later will be forced to accept as definitive.

  Maybe it would be worth trying to explain this incapacity of mine to go back over a first draft. Is it just laziness? I don’t think so.

  There is something irrevocable in a scene that, by writing it down, I have lived once and for all, and that I can no longer repeat at any price.

  This may also explain the failure of all my attempts to reconstitute the lost chapters. What I did manage to remember and write down two years ago, after my return from Paris, remains as it was then: inadequate, desiccated, featureless, lacking in warmth and depth. I haven’t been able to add anything, to rectify anything. This is where my great fear lies. I ask myself whether, in the book as a whole, the reconstituted pages will not prove too inert for the rest to come alive.

  Friday, 24 [November]

  The governmental crisis seems to be more than a crisis of government.8 There is talk of a German ultimatum. Radio London claims that German troops have been massing in Slovakia, ready to attack us. I don’t know what will come of it all. The specter of disasters is again becoming plausible.

  I can’t go off to Predeal. I don’t dare leave. Who knows what may happen from one day to the next, from one hour to the next? I’ll try to work here. Today I’ll actually get down to Chapter Fourteen.

  Publication before Christmas is very doubtful indeed, both because I myself have not had the tenacity to finish the book, and because the printers, who have a backlog to clear, are taking a long time to process things. More and more I realize that it was a mistake to give a novel to the Foundation. I, who publish one novel in three or four years, am stupid enough to bury it with a publishing house that is better at factory-style production than at organizing a proper launch. The Foundation will publish twenty-six titles in December. Mine would be the twenty-seventh. Who will look after it, who will even care? So far I have received galleys only for the first three chapters—pathetically little. It depresses me to read them. Again the reconstituted chapters make me feel down at heart. They seem stupid, and I know there’s nothing that can be done.

  Monday, 27 [November]

  Maybe it wasn’t the right time to get myself a radio, just when I have to finish my novel and do nothing other than write and write. But I have been planning it for so long, and if I put it off any longer who knows when I would do it. I have had it since Saturday evening (a large Philips with 4+1 tubes) and listened to coundess pieces. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven on all the wavelengths.

  Yesterday there was Schumann’s piano concerto from Paris, a program of Mozart from London (a symphony, a flute concerto, and—what seemed a welcoming sign—the Kleine nachtmusik). From Budapest, a Bach cantata with the proportions of a small oratorio. This morning, from a German station (to which I listened with some pangs of conscience), the Egmont Overture and a Boccherini cello concerto. Plus dozens of shorter pieces from all over the place. And now, as I write this note, a Mozart symphony from Budapest.

  But I must put a stop to this musical excess and get back to the novel—switch the radio off. . . .

  Sunday, 3 December

  A conversation last night with Camil Petrescu. We were both worried about the situation. We wondered whether the Soviets, after polishing off Finland, would not come to us next.

  “Only Germany can defend us against the Russians,” Camil said. “In the end, what we must wish is that we won’t be divided, that we will remain under the same scepter. If Germany takes all of us, that’s still all right. The situation of the Czechs, for example, is very good.”

  What he said seemed too serious for me not to note it here (word for word, I think)—though I have so many other things to do.

  I’ll pass over all of yesterday’s funny “Camilisms”; I am used to them, and I wouldn’t have opened this notebook just for them:

  “Romania’s one big mistake was not to have listened to Camil Petrescu, who as long ago as 1930 wrote that we need an air force.”

  “Even the Finns could have been saved if they had known my articles.”

  If he were a minister, he would bury the whole of Romania underground—and then invite the Russians to bomb us.

  All this is funny, but not of much moment. I hear tens and hundreds of enormities and let them pass. (“My dear man, I am the greatest actor the world has seen since Garrick. Moissi, what does he add up to? Just an actor with a pleasant voice. But I, apart from my intense voice, have a colossal power of expression.”) But the idea that this man, so thoughtless but also so intelligent, can accept in advance German domination as a possible salvation—the “German scepter,” as he puts it—seems truly memorable for what it says both about Camil Petrescu and, more generally, about the atmosphere these days.

  1 a.m.

  At last I have finished Chapter Fifteen, which I began on Thursday evening (after I had finished Chapter Fourteen, with which I felt so profoundly dissatisfied that I was loathe to note anything about it here).

  At any rate, I have put an end to my old superstition that I absolutely must leave Bucharest in order to write. On Thursday I was on the point of leaving for Predeal, when I decided to make an attempt (a stubborn one, this time) to stay where I was and strictly organize my work habits.

  I “shut off” the telephone (which no longer rings at all), told m
y people at home to tell anyone who asked that I was away, and went neither to the Foundation nor to Roman’s office—and, with these barriers, I succeeded in writing eight pages on Friday. It didn’t go so well yesterday, when I managed only four pages, nor today, when I did the same. It is true, however, that I was working on an uneven chapter with which I had not even reckoned at the beginning, that I did not have a prior “scenario” for it, and that, right up to the last minute, I did not really know where it would lead me. From now on, things are more clearly defined and, I hope, more straightforward. But even so, I need to count on at least another week’s work.

  Thursday, 7 [December]

  Wasted days. Of Chapter Sixteen—which should go very easily, because it consists of events and dialogue—I have written only three pages. Three pages in four days! I am ashamed to think of this standstill, which nothing can justify.

  The proofs have been catching me up; the whole of the rest of the book has been set and is at its third proof stage, while I am stuck en route. Why? I don’t know why Everything has a clear shape, and the scenario of the four chapters still to be written is firmly fixed. The only problem now should be the purely material one of writing—and yet here I am in a depression from which I have been struggling for' days to escape. There is no point in poisoning myself with coffee and cigarettes; no point in stupefying myself with music (a Mozart flute concerto and a Johann Christian Bach symphony, tonight from Hamburg); no point in inflicting sleepless nights on myself as a punishment. It simply isn’t advancing; it refuses to advance.