There were also days when Vieru caved in, when his fever subsided, when he lost his appetite for the fight, when he trudged through the workshop, when it all looked empty, senseless, worthless, when he despaired of the drawing boards, when he was tired of arguing, when nobody mattered to him, whether friend or foe.
‘One day we’ll shut up shop,’ he said with indifference, worn out, after ten cups of coffee and hundreds of cigarettes, smoked nervously down to the filter.
Sometimes Ghiţă Blidaru would come by and his breezy presence would shake the master from his apathy. They always found something to fight about, as there were no facts or ideas which these two men, who had known each other so long, could agree on. The arrival of the professor was always invigorating. When he had left, the desire for work would return, as would the courage to curse fate and to have faith in it.
‘Just you wait, I’ll show them.’
And so he did. In spring, Rice turned up out of the blue. True, he didn’t look like a gift from heaven, but he had plenty of money and a pinch of craziness, which was exactly what he needed to get along with Vieru. And now, nearly six years later, Der Querschnitt is presenting in Berlin the work of the great architect of Uioara in Prahova.
Last night I stayed up late talking with Marin Dronţu, drinking a glass of wine and recalling all that had happened.
‘Where are they, the ones who cursed him, where are they? I’ll eat them alive!’
I think what draws me most to the master is his wounded pride. I myself had so many personal humiliations to overcome that I find the company of this man, who has been struck at from every direction, stimulating. He had bursts of mania and disgust, turning vengefully on everything, like a flame, like a blade. I preserve an old sense of obligation, an inevitable sympathy, for the isolated or beaten individual. The only pain which I understand directly and instinctively, without needing it explained, is the pain of discouragement.
I too had breathed the diffuse poison of hostility, I too knew what it was like to have someone swear at you over their shoulder, or to land a punch without a word, or to slam a door in your face.
I’d known all these things, day after day, breathing the same adversity, bearing down on you from all around, anonymously, stubbornly, without beginning or end. Today, recalling it, this drama looks puerile and overdone to me. But back then, along with the experience of my first lamentable years of university, it was a burden I suffered. Anybody I met could have been an enemy, every hand held out could have been about to strike you.
Even Blidaru I approached with apprehension. The uproar at the university, the street fights and the tension of that year of confrontation maintained my consciousness of the sin of being a Jew like an ever-raw wound. I turned this feeling into an obsession, a mania, and now I understand that my perturbation was excessive, and it must have been deadly tedious to anybody not involved. The naivety of those with something to hide – a crime, a disgrace, a drama – is that they imagine they are under suspicion. In reality, there’s a strong dose of indifference in the world, enough that you can go off and die and nobody will notice. In the case of Jews, their mistake is that they observe too much and thereby believe themselves to be under scrutiny. Back then, I felt interrogated by every glance cast my way. I felt hounded. I felt the urgent, comic need to denounce myself: I’m a Jew. I was sure that if I didn’t I’d sink into compromise, that I’d slide into a series of lies, that I’d sully the part of me that longed for truth. More than once I envied the simple life of the ghetto Jew, wearing his yellow patch. A humiliating idea perhaps, but comfortable and clear-cut, because they had finally put an end to the horrible comedy of uttering their own name like a denunciation.
I’ve never had a conversation with someone without wondering apprehensively whether they know I’m a Jew and, if so, whether they’ll forgive me or not. This was a real problem to me, and caused me an absurd degree of suffering and awkwardness. So, I had resolved long ago to renounce all equivocation and to clarify the matter from the outset, confessing everything brusquely and readily, which must often have seemed the mark of aggressive pride, when in fact it was only wounded pride.
I tried behaving this way with Vieru, right from the first day, to explain myself concerning this issue, but he quickly cut me short.
‘My dear fellow, it doesn’t concern me. It’s a personal matter and I beg you to keep it to yourself. Do you want me to tell you if I’m an anti-Semite? I don’t know. I’m not familiar with the matter, it doesn’t interest me, never could. But I’ll say one thing: any general judgement about a category of people gives me the shudders. I’m not a mystic. I have a horror of generalizations. I can only judge specific cases, individual people, detail by detail.’
I thought he was trying to be nice. Later though, getting to know him, I realized how sincere his opening declaration was. It wasn’t directed at me personally, but reflected his convictions. I subsequently found this to be true not only in Vieru’s attitude to anti-Semitism – in the end a minor matter for him – but in his attitude as an artist, a critic and an architect.
I think it was in the first year of the Uioara project that someone turned up one fine day to ask his opinion for a feature in The Universe about ‘the national character’. I cut out his reply and still have it today.
There is doubtless such a thing as a ‘national character’. In art, it is the lowest common denominator. The more specific the character, the more commonplace it is. That is why creation always requires overcoming such a character.
An artist, if he is anything, is an individual. But to be an individual means embodying your own truths, suffering your own experiences, and inventing your own style. But these things can only occur by renouncing facility, and the most unfortunate facility comes from these so-called national characters, formed by the sedimentation of collective mediocrity, which lies there ready-made. National character is by definition that which remains in a culture after you have removed the personal effort involved in thinking, the personal experience of life and the triumph of individual creation. That’s all.
Two weeks of abuse, polemics and revulsion ensued, to which Vieru did not respond. But from Berlin, where he was delivering a paper at the Institute of Current Affairs, Professor Ghiţă sent him a blunt telegram:
Read your views in The Universe. You’re a wretched fool.
To which he replied:
Wretched fool, perhaps. But not of the common kind. My style’s my own.
3
Yesterday, the professor’s opening lecture. The atmosphere of an important happening, with a note of festivity and tension in the air, as in an arena where, from one moment to the next, something decisive will be thrashed out. The banging of the desktops, voices calling out from one end of the hall to the other, people noisily taking leave of one another, familiar faces, unfamiliar faces – all mixed together confusedly, humming with curiosity and impatience.
Vieru, on his own in the back row, irritated, was drumming his fingers on the bench. I was afraid he’d be recognized, which would have caused a rather tiresome commotion during a lecture that would discuss him enough as it was.
Marin Dronţu was absent. ‘I’m not coming. It makes me sick. Look, I admit I can’t be objective when it comes to the master. I’m not a critic and I don’t know about that sort of thing. I love the master and believe in his destiny. So what do you expect me to gain from Ghiţă Blidaru’s lecture? Whatever he says, whether he’s right or not, it’ll just make me bitter. And I don’t want to be bitter.’
Basically the professor’s lectur
e – though he advertised it as vehement – was not vehement. It was clear that it was merely the threshold of an entire system of explanations and categorization going well beyond the particular case of Uioara.
I transcribe here from the notes I managed to jot in haste.
Let’s be clear: the issue here is not the value of the architect Vieru’s project in Uioara. Perhaps it shows the mark of genius. What is questionable, however, is its significance in relation to the Romanian spirit and, for this lecture, to the Romanian economy. My question is whether a person has the right to exercise genius when this goes against the needs of the land on which he lives. Further: if someone, as an individual, may interfere in the latent process of the collective life-force, modifying it, imposing upon it an alien, though perhaps superior, project. In fact, the claim to superiority becomes entirely spurious when two differing structures are involved. A shower of rain isn’t superior to a drainpipe, nor a drainpipe superior to a fork. You cannot establish a scale of values between differing phenomena. The crime of an idiot tiger aspiring to be a paramecium would not be less than the crime of a genius paramecium dreaming of being a tiger. A betrayal, a degradation, is involved in both cases, and you won’t find it written anywhere that, from the point of view of life, the degradation of a paramecium is less tragic than that of a tiger.
At Uioara, in five years, a daring man has replaced a settlement of viticulturists with an industrial complex. Based on what calculation? For the sake of the prejudice that values a smokestack above a grapevine. Well, this is a monstrous judgement. Neither a smokestack nor a grapevine, taken alone, mean anything. They only become meaningful when brought into a family, a structure. Outside of this structure, they remain discrete, dead abstractions. The abstraction of a smokestack in Uioara and the no less abstract grapevine in Manchester.
This blindness to the laws specific to life, this blindness to the ways specific to living, is a perversion of those historical roots which must be traced all the way back through the nineteenth century, to the roots of the French revolution and, further, to the roots of reform. Our lectures over the past years have sketched the general framework of the problem. I propose this year that we study several particular aspects of the Romanian economy, deformed by the revolutionaries of 1848 and liberalism to the point of smothering the most elementary local features.
It was a beautiful lecture, and Vieru had to admit it. We took a walk together afterwards.
‘Decidedly, I’m never going to see eye to eye with Professor Ghiţă. He’s a seminarian, a theologian. A man who’s happy when he can be subject to something, whatever it may be. With a thousand Moldovans and a thousand Muntenians like him, I’m not surprised that for centuries this place has been dominated by whoever imposed their will: Turks, Russians, Phanariote Greeks. His whole life consists of subjugations. “Subject to the demands of life,”’ as he’d say. Subjugation to everything above and beyond you. For my part, the day I start to believe that by the very fact of being a man I’m condemned to be circumscribed in this way, I’ll shoot myself. If I’m not free, then I’m nothing. Free to think, free to ascribe values or fix hierarchies. The world can be understood through critical discrimination or through rigorous examination. And, conversely, it can go permanently dark if we give up on thinking and take refuge in mystical intuitions.’
Ghiţă Blidaru and Mircea Vieru are divided by a whole history, an entire worldview. Were it not for the picturesque aspect of each, Vieru with his blond faun-like head, Ghiţă Blidaru like a wintry wolf, were it not for their colourful and contrasting lives, with their passions, struggles and loves, what fine characters in a Platonic dialogue those two would make, these two ideological poles! ‘The drama of modern Romanian history’, as portrayed by two heroes. Utterly schematic, but representative nonetheless.
To put it crudely, Romanian culture has remained stuck with the same intellectual problems which arose when the first railroad was built in 1860. With the problem of identifying with the west or the east, with Europe or the Balkans, with urban culture or the spirit of the countryside. The issues have always remained the same.
The poet Vasile Alecsandri formulates them with naivety, Ghiţă Blidaru and Mircea Vieru formulate them with a critical spirit. Yet the rural type and the urban type are the only categories that remain permanently valid in Romanian culture. I believe you can always easily distinguish the devotees of one or the other of these two orientations, anywhere, in Romanian literature, in politics, in music, in journalism … The choice is clear for Vieru. He’s the urban type par excellence. One of those Europeans who have been shaped by Cartesianism, the bourgeois revolution and civic culture, a new nation on this continent, and one that transcends any national borders.
‘I believe in the identity of man. I believe in permanent, universal values. I believe in the dignity of intelligence.’
I’m convinced these three short sentences sum up the basis of Vieru’s thinking. I once asked him if the war, from which he returned with two poorly mended wounds, had not turned his intellectual certitudes upside down.
‘Rather the contrary. I fought seriously, because I like to take everything I do seriously. But I always knew what it was all worth. After I was wounded the second time, I woke up one night in a field hospital, dumped on a stretcher in a corner, beside a German corporal, also wounded, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen and who told me he was waiting for the war to end so he could go to Paris, to work on his thesis about the connections between Goethe and Stendhal. We talked about this all night and helped each other to reconstruct a map of Beyle’s pilgrimage through Europe between 1812 and 1840. The next morning we were going to go our separate ways for good, me to one hospital, he to another, and perhaps both to our graves – but, in the meantime, that night, our most urgent problem was that one. In two years of war, that meeting was the finest thing that happened.’
*
I can see the master living just as easily in accordance with such principles, such simple laws. What I find hard to understand is not Ghiţă Blidaru’s thinking and his life, but how the two mesh. They seem so contradictory to me!
This man, who has passed through libraries, through universities, through metropolises, strives to remain a ploughman in his thinking. ‘That’s all I am,’ he tells me. Perhaps that’s true. But in the same evening I listened to Bach’s second Brandenburg Concerto on his gramophone and, for the treason to be complete, good old Couperin’s Les Folies françoises. He has a fine understanding of art, down to the slightest nuances and the finest shades. And then there’s that Brueghel, the only painting in his study. What is it doing in the house of a ploughman from Vâlcea, who never tires of reminding me what he is?
So Ghiţă Blidaru inhabits an environment his thinking rejects, lives by values he denies, enjoys victories that he disputes.
‘Europe is a fiction,’ he’s been saying in his university course for six years, while never ceasing for a moment to love the spirit of this fiction. Brueghel belongs to this fiction, and Bach, and certainly Couperin.
Nevertheless, having passed through and loved them all, Ghiţă Blidaru inevitably returns to his grapevine, in the name of which he was lecturing the other day at the university.
The miracle by which this man manages to think, effortlessly, unaffectedly, like a peasant, is not something I can comprehend. His vision of life seems to open towards as much sky and earth as is visible between the handles of the plough. He requires no more than that. He believes in natural laws which are made and unmade from on high, he believes in hierarchies which no one has the right to c
hallenge, and in the limitless dominion of the land over man. ‘You are what your land makes you, no more.’
For me – tired of having believed excessively in my right to assert myself against life, as though shouting ‘Stay still!’ – this notion of ease, of submission, of renunciation, was a lesson in modesty and the beginning of peace.
But I wonder why his own pride, which I reckon to be immense, does not revolt. Or how his desire for adventure doesn’t protest, or how his instinct for vehemence, struggle and wandering does not assert itself, and how these passions are tamed. Is it because his intelligence has set the example by sacrificing itself?
Because this intelligence, which is fiery enough to start a revolution, seems determined to bury the passions in ashes, to die one day with the simplicity of mind of a peasant who has never left behind the sickle blade with which he has cut grass for seventy years out of eighty.
4
I came across Phillip Dunton at the company offices in Piaţa Rosetti. He’d delivered some reports for Rice and was hurrying to catch the two o’clock train back. We stopped on the stairs to shake hands.
‘And how’s Marjorie doing?’
‘She reads and sits by the stove. It’s terribly cold in Uioara. It was freezing, like in mid-winter. But didn’t you see Marjorie here last week? She was at Ghiţă Blidaru’s opening lecture too. She came specially: said she couldn’t miss it. It was about Uioara, wasn’t it?’
For Two Thousand Years Page 13