Saturday, 9 [December]
Yesterday evening I finished Chapter Sixteen. I am very unhappy with it, taken separately, and extremely worried about its function within the book as a whole. I am more and more afraid that the whole Grodeck episode will seem like something “added on.” I wonder whether its links with the main “subject” are not too vague and, above all, too arbitrary. Does not the reader’s interest split at this point? Do not Nora and Paul take a back seat? Does not the whole story begin to seem too self-consciously fictional? It is true that from now on I abandon the Grodecks and return exclusively to Nora and Paul, but I wonder whether there is still enough time and space, within the setting of the book, to restore its center of gravity after it has shifted so much.
The whole afternoon and evening I struggled to write the chapter I began today―Chapter Seventeen—but so far (at midnight) I have written no more than four sentences. I am calling it a day. I am too tired and feel that, however much I forced myself, I wouldn’t overcome this new obstacle that has appeared in my path.
I am certainly going through a difficult period. Bad luck has hit me precisely when I should be reaching the end. Everything is plainly visible and clearly defined, everything should be straightforward―yet my pen is stuck. If I were not ashamed in front of Rosetti and the typesetters, I’d give it up completely. This book seems fated to drive me to despair, right up to the last moment.
Monday, 11 [December]
A strange laryngitis. I have never had anything quite like it before, though I often have a tiresome bout of tonsillitis. My voice has gone and I can hardly speak. I seem to have a slight temperature.
My general condition is bad, in addition to the period of idiocy in which I have been for several days. There is no point in saying any more about the novel. It remains at a standstill.
I seem powerless to do anything at all. Yesterday I had to write something for the Foundation (commissioned by Cioculescu), and although I racked my brain for ten hours, I could not come up with anything more than a bad journalistic piece that I am ashamed to have to sign. Today the article for M.VB.9—which never requires much application on my part, because I feel that, as it is not mine and no one will read it anyway, I can write it no matter how—also turned out shamefully uninteresting and badly written.
I lack inspiration, talent, wisdom, and vocation. I cannot see anything ahead of me and do not manage to express the simplest ideas. Something pulls me toward platitude, toward indifference.
On such days, when you are healthy, you should cut wood, go for a walk, drink, and screw.
But when you are ill, you should be thankful to lie dozing in an armchair.
Friday, 15 [December]
Call-up papers, dated today.
Saturday, 16 [December]
I still don’t know what will happen at the regiment. The colonel—an old school friend of Rosetti’s—said that I should report to him on Monday morning. If I am given time to finish the novel and see it come out, I shall accept the call-up with resignation and, in any event, without any drama.
What is terrible in the passage from civilian life to the barracks is that it takes place so suddenly. If I were given warning, if I knew now that I’d be called up on the 15th of January, for example, it would start to become bearable—not only because it would be a long way off (qui doit a terme, ne doit rien1), but because I would have time to prepare myself, to “soften” the blow. Moreover, I would be happy that I could have a skiing holiday—perhaps the last in my life, if there were war.
The novel has been marking time for a fortnight. I am still on Chapter Seventeen, the second to last. All three chapters that have still to be written are straightforward, clearly defined, and without difficulties. Yet it is impossible for me to write them. I don’t know why. Maybe because the novel has become unimportant to me. Maybe because I have entered a dark period—one of my well-known periods of imbecility. Having abandoned everything for a few days, I got up yesterday with a grim determination to work “at any cost.” But scarcely had I sat down at my desk when someone rang the doorbell. I opened the door, and it was the call-up order!
Yesterday evening, after a day full of anxiety, I nevertheless tried to write. My present inability to start and finish a sentence fills me with disgust. I write a word and cross it out, write it again and cross it out again. I don’t even think it is due to exaggerated doubts with regard to style. Rather, I have the feeling it is a nervous tic. The last few pages of my manuscript have been literally butchered. Two pages of manuscript, when written out again, amount to no more than a third of a normal page.
A little while ago, out of curiosity, I looked out at the manuscript of De două mii de ani to see if I used to write with the same difficulty. Well, no, I didn’t! In those days my manuscript was amazingly fluent: two or three words deleted or added per page; very few passages crossed out; nearly four hundred clear and legible pages composed without fretting and worrying, or at least without the visible kind that now makes my writing so hard to read. Why do I find it harder to write than I did six years ago? I ought to have more experience by now, greater skill and less fear of the written word—and yet I face obstacles that did not exist before. Is it because I used to write journalism then? Did the habit of writing an article every day—for which Albu sometimes gave me only an hour—make my pen swifter and more practiced? I don’t know, I can’t make it out. I look for all kinds of explanations. I ask myself whether this journal itself may not hamper my writing, whether it may not in the end be impossible to write a novel together with a journal, whose critical observations and ceaseless questioning may result in paralysis. But maybe this is not true, either. I try to pin the blame wherever I can. For example, the cyclamen flower I have had here for the last two weeks is driving me up the wall, because I haven’t been able to work since it came into the flat.
In the manuscript of De doud mii de ani I came across the following sentence (one of the few I deleted in the text of the book): “I write with difficulty, with numerous obstacles, with much hesitation and a constant fear of overstepping my thoughts. For a mistake in expressing yourself is a twofold blunder: it says something other than it should, and it ties you to what you made the mistake of saying.”
Sunday, 17 [December]
Six pages written. Nearly seven. It is true that I worked all day and that it is now past two in the morning. But at least I have got moving again. Tomorrow morning at nine, though, I must report to the regiment.
Will I be able to pick up the manuscript again tomorrow afternoon?
Monday, 18 [December]
The whole day wasted at the regiment. It was impossible to obtain a deferment. Only tonight, from ten until two, have I been able to return to the novel. I have written two pages, which bring Chapter Seventeen to an end. It lacks expression. But I fear it is worse than that: false, arbitrary, amorphous. I feel sorry for this book, which could have worked out differently if I had been more tenacious and events had been less antagonistic. But it is an ill-starred book—and there’s nothing more I can do to help it.
Tuesday, 19 [December]
All day at the regiment. I came back at 8:30, worn out and with my left arm numb from pain. They inoculated me at the infirmary, and this has given me a fever. It is impossible for me to write any more; almost impossible for me to think about the novel, which has left me with nothing but regrets. I should give it up, postpone it, submit to the inevitable. Can’t you see that something always stops this wretched book from breaking out of the circle of obstacles and misfortunes that surrounds it?
Wednesday, 20 [December]
A night of fever and insomnia. I didn’t sleep for a second. I can no longer feel my left arm. I went to the regiment with a temperature of 39 degrees [102 F.]. I’m fed up with explaining, requesting, complaining. I am still sick. This inoculation seems to me one of the most barbaric things in a soldier’s life.
At the barracks, or at least at the company supply room, there is a ref
ugee-type atmosphere. As I was still a civilian, in that sordid dormitory I looked like a refugee shut up in a camp.
This evening I listened to the Christmas Oratorio from Brasov, which has ended just as I am writing these lines.
I could have noted a lot of things (especially in connection with the Oratorio chapter in my novel), but I don’t feel capable of thinking, or of formulating anything.
Tomorrow morning at 6:30 I have to be at the regiment.
Saturday, 23 [December]
The army, the army—always the army. I don’t have a weapon and am receiving no instruction, yet I have to be at the barracks before seven each morning and to remain there until 7 p.m., if not 8 or 9. Altogether that means some fourteen hours a day wasted in a maddeningly pointless way. All of Rosetti’s efforts (not to speak of mine) to obtain eight days’ leave to finish my book have come to nothing. Only today (after a day of rushing around to do all kinds of chores for the colonel) have I been given four days off for Christmas.
Tomorrow I leave, or hope to leave, for Roman’s villa in Sinaia. At least I’ll have a day or two of skiing. And when I return, maybe I’ll pick up the threads of the novel that I have recently felt to be broken.
Thursday, 28 [December]
Monday and Tuesday in Sinaia—at Roman’s villa. All of Monday with Lereanu and Comşa in the mountains, where we reached Virful de Dor after an exhausting hike of six hours. Thick snow and ice made it impossible to ski. But the sun was full of youth, and the wind as gentle as a spring breeze. Only on the way back could we go a few hundred meters on skis. We returned by the light of the moon—a round, yellow moon, set against white mountains and a blue sky that was as tender and delicate as an April sky at twilight.
On Tuesday we spent a few hours in Predeal, at Ve§tea, where the same moon, so implausible for December, again took us by surprise. I returned on skis to the railway station. The snow was bluish beneath the moon.
Tomorrow morning, back to barracks. My novel is still not finished. Yesterday I read it all the way through, in order to get inside it again. Three days of uninterrupted work should be enough for Chapters Eighteen and Nineteen, the only ones still to be written, but for which the scenario is firmly set.
On Saturday evening, as I was passing by taxi along Bulevardul Dacia, I had an extraordinarily precise feeling that there in one of the blocks, on the sixth floor, was the locked flat of someone I knew—of Nora. Had I rung the bell, I would not have been surprised to hear the doorman say that she had gone off to the mountains.
Sunday, 31 [December]
The last evening of the year.
I thought of staying by myself and working, but I am not strong enough to do that. I feel alone and left out of consideration. I have never before felt so strongly that I am becoming a bachelor. Worse than a bachelor. Zoe is in Predeal, Leni I know not where. I think of them both with a certain sadness. And yet I do not need them.
My only regret at this year’s end (apart from the old incurable ones) is that I still haven’t finished the book. I now feel that there is nothing more to be done, that the last part is an irreparable failure. But one way or another, I should have liked to free myself of it, not to have it trailing after me into 1940.
Footnotes
1. Alexandra Hurtig: journalist.
2. Eugen Titeanu: undersecretary of state for press and information.
3. Frontul Renasterii Nationale (National Renaissance Front), the only political party allowed to function during the royal dictatorship of King Carol II (1938-1940).
4. “But you know, I don’t know anything about it; I am in complete ignorance.”
5. “And you know, that’s already history.”
6. “Victor Emmanuel is a great king.”—“Donjuán is married to a charming Bourbon. They’re very serious people.”—“During the March on Rome, Victor Emmanuel acted as head of the House of Savoy.”
7. "I have it from someone who was there and who was not die king."
8. Cicerone Theodorescu: poet.
9. The Romanian national airline.
1. "Sir, please read the first 120 pages. I have a feeling they are good. The book is botched toward the end, but it begins well. Anyway, I'm sure that a French translation of it would not pass unnoticed."
2. King Carol introduced the uniform of the National Renaissance Front. It was mandatory for government employees.
3. “Have you noticed that fanatics have clear eyes? Only someone with clear eyes can be a fanatic.”—“And I, madam?”—“I wonder. Your eyes are almost green, but not enough for a fanatic. Well, your case is still open.”
4. “I get bored once every twenty years. But with Calimachi I was bored for the twenty years.”
“Domestics are terrifying. They are the only ones who can tell, with complete precision, whether someone is a person of quality or not. I should like to found a society for the protection of the newly rich against domestics.”
5. “I knew they were going to shoot him, yet my sympathy for the Republicans did not weaken.”
6. “I like Jews, I like them passionately. Not because they have had an unhappy time of it—no. I like them because they move the horizon forward.”
7. loan Comşa: friend and law firm colleague of Sebastian's.
8. Actor.
9. "Sebastian cannot be found in Mogosoaia. Fondly, Martha."
1. "And for you to interest yourself in its European career."
2. General N. M. Condiescu: novelist, president of the Romanian Writers’ Association.
3. Armand Calinescu: prime minister 1937-1939, coordinator of the repression against the Iron Guard.
4. Viaţa romdneasca, a literary magazine.
5. Vasile V. Longhin: judge from Brăila.
6. Even the worst.
7. Jacques Lassaigne, French art critic.
8. “My novel stops interesting me when I stop working on it.”
9. Pastorel Teodoreanu: poet and writer.
1. Jean Steriadi: artist.
2. George Oprescu: art critic.
3. loan Cantacuzino: poet.
4. The Austrian chancellor, murdered in July 1934 by Austrian fascists in an abortive coup d’état.
5. Two hundred fifty-two Legionaries were shot in retaliation for the murder of Prime Minister Armand Calinescu.
6. V. Constandache: journalist.
7. N. I. Herescu: a philologist and newly elected president of the Writers’ Association.
8. On this date the Argetoianu government was replaced by one headed by Gh. Tătărescu.
9. The journal Muncă şi voie-bună.
1. To owe in the long run is not to owe at all.
1940
Monday, 1 January 1940
From Zurich, a long divertimento for orchestra by Mozart. Let’s take it as a good sign for the new year.
I began New Year’s Eve in the most stupid way, at Carol’s, in a Jewish “family” group, vulgar, noisy, without grace or charm or even the excuse of being my family. I continued with Camil, Elvira Godeanu, and Marietta Deculescu to Poldy Stern’s funny little apartment, where we found a group of young girls (seventeen to eighteen years old), slovenly, a little hysterical, with a kind of exaggerated cynicism that did not dispel their terrible youth. At first I felt scared, then old, and then I got some drink inside me. I returned home at six in the morning, without the usual disgust of my wasted nights.
I worked from 7 p.m. until just now (midnight) and did not manage to write more than a page. I am still on Chapter Eighteen, having so far written only six pages of it. It is true that the regiment stops me from writing, but it is also true that when I have a day off and finally sit down at my desk, I do not have the patience to stay fixed in front of the manuscript, giving it my full attention without reverie, without distraction, and without the breaks I all too easily allow myself. Most ridiculous of all is that, with the last section now under way, three or four days of serious work should be enough for me to wrap it up.
Tomorrow
morning, though, I’ll be back at the regiment.
Tuesday, 2 January
I have no talent for landscape. When I speak about the weather, the light, the forest or mountains, I am unforgivably short on expressions and color. In general, my vocabulary is poor. A word keeps following me, and I cannot escape it and find other equivalents. The whole book is filled not only with words but also with phrases that are repeated dozens of times: “It seemed to him that. . .“He had the feeling that. . .“suddenly,” “briefly,” “he thought”—it infuriates me how often I find these in one chapter, without being able to do anything about it. And in addition there are the repeated gestures, the persistent asides. It indicates a serious lack of imagination and inventiveness, with regard not so much to the actual incidents (which can be quite bold, even far-fetched at times) as to the vocabulary and mode of expression.
Thursday, 4 January
From Paris, the Ravel quartet played by the Calvet Quartet.
I think that my exclusive preference for Mozart, Bach, Haydn, and, to some extent, Beethoven is becoming a kind of musical indulgence or even indolence. With them I am on familiar ground. I can listen to them with pleasure, without an effort of attention, almost without any active collaboration. I think I am not sufficiently curious and discerning to go beyond this. I ought to be a more disciplined, a more patient listener.
Journal 1935–1944 Page 33