Thinkers and Liars
November 20, 2006
THE NEW REPUBLIC
Joseph
Frank is a professor emeritus of comparative literature and Slavic languages
and literature at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of Dostoevsky:
The Mantle of the Prophet (Princeton University Press).
An
Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania
By
Marta Petreu
Translated
by Bogdan Aldea
(Ivan
R. Dee, 332 pp., $30)
I.
In the aftermath of World
War II, there was a great influx of refugees into the United States. Most came
from countries where populations had been uprooted by the course of battle, or
were escaping from a past that they were lucky to have survived. Some, however,
were trying to put behind them a different kind of past—one in which they had
collaborated with, or expressed sympathy for, the Axis powers that had been
defeated. A notable case of this kind was that of Paul de Man, the
distinguished professor of comparative literature at Yale University; another
eminent instance was Mircea Eliade, the much-admired historian of religion who
was chairman of the department of religion at the University of Chicago from
1957 until his death in 1986. Eliade had been a strong supporter of the Iron
Guard movement, the Romanian equivalent of the Italian fascists and the German
Nazis, but he attempted throughout his later career to conceal and deny his
affiliation with its ideas and his service in the pro-Axis Romanian government
of Marshal Ion Atones during the war.
Although Eliade's
history has attracted little attention in the United States, he appears, under
a fictitious name, in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein. It is well known
that the character Ravelstein is a fictional portrait of the late Allan Bloom,
a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago and the author of the
best-selling book The Closing of the American Mind. Another professor at
the university is a Romanian-born historian of religion, Radu Grielescu, with
an even greater international reputation than that of Ravelstein, and obviously
based on Eliade. The narrator of the novel, who may be roughly identified with
the author, is married to a Romanian woman. (One of Bellow's wives was in fact
a Romanian mathematician--in the novel she is an astronomer--and his earlier
novel The Dean's December is set in Bucharest.) The couple are
flatteringly cultivated by the highly civilized Grielescu, and a minor motif of
the book is the futile protest of Ravelstein against what he correctly divines
as the efforts of Grielescu to ingratiate himself with the narrator.
Both Ravelstein and the
narrator are Jewish, and the former has gotten wind that Grielescu, during the
1930s and 1940s, had been fervent intellectual spokesman for the ferociously
antisemitic Iron Guard movement. Indeed, he had "denounced the Jewish
syphilis that had infected the high civilization of the Balkans." During
the war he had served the pro-fascist Romanian government in its embassies in
England and Portugal; and he lived in fear that his previous Iron Guard
affiliations and sympathies would become known. “Grielescu is using you,"
Ravelstein tells the narrator. "In his own country he was a fascist, and
he needs you to cover this up here." The narrator admits that he had never
posed a direct question about his past to Grielescu, but refuses to believe
that he could ever have been a genuine Jew-hater.
This episode in Bellow's
novel is cited in a recent French study, which has not yet appeared in English,
titled Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: L'oubli du fascisme, written by
Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, a historian of Eastern European history and
culture. This revelatory book is an extremely erudite exploration of the
careers of the three writers named in the title, based largely but far from
exclusively on an analysis of the little-known (and, until fairly recently,
mostly inaccessible) journalistic and periodical literature in Romanian of the
1930s and 1940s. All these men were natives of that relatively obscure and
distant land, and all performed the astonishing feat of becoming world-famous figures.
Eliade's books on the
history of religion elevated him to a commanding height in the field, and he
attained fame as a novelist both in his own country and in France. E.M.
Cioran was widely hailed for his brilliantly disillusioned reflections on
history and culture, written first in Romanian and then in French, and he was praised
as one of the greatest contemporary stylists in his adopted language. Eugene
Ionesco pioneered the vogue of the theater of the absurd, and his comic but
also symbolically tragic plays were performed everywhere; eventually he was
elected to the Academie Francaise. All three had a past that they wished to
hide (though Ionesco's concealments did not arise from any sympathy with the fascist
tendency that the two others fervently championed). The aim of
Laignel-Lavastine's book is to investigate the truth about this past so far as
it can be ascertained from the surviving document sand the testimony of
contemporaries. It has now been supplemented by the appearance in English of a
work exclusively devoted to Cioran, An Infamous Past, by the Romanian
scholar and poet Marta Petreu, which was originally published in 1999.
Laignel-Lavastine begins
with a sweeping depiction of the political and cultural atmosphere of the late
1920s in Romania, the period during which the three men she deals with came to
maturity. The ideological climate of the time was defined in a series of
articles by the twenty-year-old Eliade called "A Spiritual Itinerary"—a
work that quickly became the lodestar of the new generation and promoted the
young Eliade to the position of its leader. Sweeping aside all the ideas of the
past that had been destroyed in the carnage of World War I, Eliade wrote:
"The myth of indefinite progress, the faith in the aptitude and power of
science and technology to establish widespread peace and social justice, the primacy
of rationalism and the prestige of agnosticism, all this has been shattered to
pieces in every area in which it has been contested." This criticism of
rationalism, materialism, and loss of religious faith was accompanied by praise
of the "life-force," and of the most extreme irrational experiences,
as providing the source of a new realm of values.
All three men attended
the University of Bucharest, the center of Romania's cultural life, where they
became acquainted and competed for attention in the animated discussions that
took place in the cafes of the Calei Victorei, the main artery of the city.
Every conversation there was a personal challenge, and in a volume of critical
articles titled Non, Ionesco ironically depicts the various strategies
employed to make an impression. A neophyte might imitate Cioran and speak
"in response to everything or with complete irrelevance," or "in
a trembling voice, in which the emotion and acute interior tension were
expressed as the phrases interrupted each other, cite a passage from Unamuno or
Berdyaev." Matters were not so intellectually effervescent, however, for others
in the university, especially those of Jewish origin.
Of primary importance in
this context is the endemic anti-Semitism of Romanian culture, which has
deep historic roots. Encouraged by the rise of Nazism during the 1930s, the
indigenous anti-Semitism of the Iron Guard made life for Jewish students
at the university a continual torment. They were assigned special seats,
continually insulted verbally, and assaulted physically. Often it was necessary
for police to be called in to protect them as they left the lecture halls.
There is a moving passage in a novel from 1934 by Mihail Sebastian, also
a playwright and for a time a member of Eliade's inner circle, in which the
obviously autobiographical main character, who has been slapped in the face,
remonstrates with himself: "Tell yourself that you are the son of a nation
of martyrs... dash your head against the walls, but if you wish to be able to look
yourself in the face, if you don't wish to die of shame, do not weep."
The reigning academic
figure at the university, or at least the figure who exercised the most
influence on the writers we are concerned with, was a philosopher named Nae
Ionescu. He possessed a doctorate in philosophy from the University of
Munich, and he was a charismatic orator capable of producing an almost hypnotic
influence in his lectures to packed auditoriums. Depicted by Laignel-Lavastine
as more or less an intellectual charlatan whose brilliant performances were
cribbed and plagiarized from German philosophical sources, Ionescu nonetheless
succeeded in obtaining an indelible grip on the finest minds of the younger
generation. His lectures, according to Cioran, were only half prepared, so that
“we were present face to face with the working out of his thought. He
communicated this effort to us, the tension working in reciprocal manner....
Such professors are rare."
What did students absorb
from the teachings of this spellbinding professor? He traced the crisis of
modern man, which culminated for him in the emergence of the ideology of
democracy, to the fusion of the philosophical subjectivism of Descartes with
the mathematical method and scientific uniformitarian imposed by the
Renaissance. To this individualist perspective he opposed that of the submission
of the individual to the national collectivity—not the legal nation, but the
organic one, the community of blood and spirit, which was, according to him,
the only living and creative reality. Up to 1933, such proto-fascist ideas,
which formed the common coin of a good deal of the German philosophy of the
time, were not given any political application by Ionescu, who had been in
favor of the restoration of King Carol II in 1930. But in 1933 he went to
Germany and was much impressed by Hitler's rise to power. On his return he
protested, along with Eliade, the ban issued against the Iron Guard, one of
whose members had recently assassinated the liberal prime minister. It was in
1933 that the philosopher also made personal contact for the first time with C.
Z. Codreanu, the founder and leader of the Iron Guard, and apparently a
powerfully impressive personality.
The Iron Guard was as
vicious and brutal as other fascist formations—perhaps even more than some when
it came to murderous violence against the Jews—but it differed from the others
by containing, along with a strong nationalistic component, a religious one as
well. It combined, according to Laignel-Lavastine, “the Führerprinzip [the cult
of the Leader] with the Christian prototype of the apostle and the Balkan model
of the haidouks, those who meted out justice on the highways, a type of
Robin Hood of the Carpathians.” Each member of the Iron Guard was supposed to
submit himself to a discipline that would transform his character, and—at least
in theory—the movement was closer to some sort of religious sect than to a
customary political formation. This made it much simpler in later years for
Eliade, in his extremely untrustworthy memoirs, to sanitize his close
association with their on Guard by describing it as “having the structure and vocation
of a mystical sect rather than of a political movement.” In fact, the
organization offered candidates for all the elections and participated in all
the political campaigns. Still, as late as1980, Eliade stressed the religious
component of its ideology, which glorified terrorism and assassination as
examples of personal self-sacrifice. The Iron Guard, he wrote, was “the sole Romanian
political movement that took seriously Christianity and the church.”
II.
After sketching in this
background, Laignel-Lavastine moves on to follow the careers of her three
protagonists during this period. Cioran was born of a clerical family in what
had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and as a lycée student was one of
the few who took advantage of the well-stocked German library. As his notebooks
show, he imbibed the very best of both old and new German philosophy, as well
as Russians such as Dostoevsky and Shestov. In 1933, at the age of twenty-two,
he began to publish articles in the anti-Semitic weekly Vremea, in which
Eliade also regularly appeared. Cioran's contributions were distinguished by an
extreme cultural and ethical pessimism derived from Schopenhauer, as well as by
an antirationalism absorbed from Nietzsche, Simmel, and Scheler. Petreu
stresses the influence of Spengler, to whose thoughts on the decline of the
West, she argues, Cioran remained indebted all his life. His writings were also
characterized by an anguished concern over the status of Romania on the world
scene. By what means could his country succeed in raising itself above the
mediocrity in which it seemed to stagnate? How could it "emerge from a
thousand years of sub-historical vegetative life," as he wrote in 1936?
Like other students of
Nae Ionescu, Cioran had begun to sympathize with the Iron Guard without
accepting some of its ideological presuppositions; and he always refused to
affiliate completely with a political movement. But a decisive moment in his
life was a Humboldt fellowship to Germany in 1933, where he lived until the
summer of 1935. He was tremendously impressed by the new dynamism that Hitler
had imparted to German life, and compared it sadly to the inertia at home.
"To tell the truth," he wrote to a friend shortly after arriving,
"there are things here that please me, and I am convinced that a
dictatorial regime would succeed in conquering our native morass." He
admired Hitler more and more as time went on, and he expresses such
admiration in no uncertain terms in the articles that he sent back for his
Romanian readers. “There is no contemporary political figure," he wrote,
"for whom I feel a greater sympathy and admiration than for Hitler,"
who had succeeded in infusing "a messianic inspiration to a domain of
values that democratic rationalism had rendered banal and trivial. “Along with
many others, he attended the popular courses of the philosopher Ludwig Klages,
an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer, whom he compared to Ionescu, and placed on
the same level as Heidegger. (Klages wrote a huge three-volume work to
demonstrate that reason had always been a dissolving and corrupting force in
human life.)
On returning home,
Cioran performed his obligatory military service in the army, and then,
starting in 1936, taught philosophy for year in a lycée. During these years he
published three books, two on religion and the third—the most scandalously
provocative work that ever came from his pen—titled The Transfiguration of Romania.
Here he raises the problem of the integration of minorities, and not only
defends Romanian xenophobia but also attempts to develop a rigorously
systematic and historical anti-Semitic argument to prove that the Jews are
inassimilable. "The feeling of animosity toward strangers," he
declares, "is so characteristic of Romanian national sentiment that the
two are forever indissoluble.... We have lived for a thousand years under their
domination [that of strangers], and not to hate them, not to get them out of
the way, would be proof of a lack of national instinct."
As for the Jews, Cioran
writes that "every time that a people becomes conscious of itself, it
fatally enters into conflict with the Jews." One can learn to live
with other minorities, such as the Hungarians and the Saxon Germans, but this
is impossible with the Jews "by reason of the particular structure of their
mentality and of their inherent political orientations." Cioran repeats
the usual litany of anti-Semitic charges, but attempts to give them a logic and
consistency they would not otherwise possess, linking them to essential
characteristics of the Jewish mentality. (His book was written after Hitler had
passed the Nuremberg laws in Germany.)
Most of Petreu's book is
devoted to a very thorough and quite critical analysis of this work, the only
purely political tract that Cioran ever produced. His anti-Semitism and
xenophobia were commonplace in Romanian thought, but Petreu views his political
ideas as quite independent in the context of a period dominated by a conflict
between "occidentalism" and "autochthony" (a reliance on native
traditions). Cioran rejected both: neither a capitalist transformation along
European democratic lines nor a re-affirmation of the national values embodied
in rural life met with his approval.
Instead, he was in favor
of increased industrialization and expressed considerable admiration for Lenin
and the Russian Revolution, though of course abhorring its materialist ideology.
Moreover, the transformation of Romania could only be nationalist, and it was
here that he coincided with the Iron Guard, proclaiming in 1937 his confidence
in the group's "heroism which begins in brutality and ends in
sacrifice." He met Codreanu several times, but wrote to Eliade in 1935
that "no political doctrine receives my ultimate approval." Cioran
left Romania again in 1937, having applied for a study grant to Spain, the land
of Unamuno. But the civil war made that impossible, and so he spent three years
in France instead.
III.
Eliade, as already
noted, found no difficulty at all in accepting the ideology of the Iron Guard,
which he viewed in the light of his own preoccupation with religion and
spirituality. The difference between him and
Cioran, whose book The Transfiguration of Romania Eliade prepared for
the press as a service to his friend, is clearly illustrated in a letter in
which Eliade is full of praise for the section on the Jews and other
minorities, but objects to Cioran's contemptuous remarks about the Romanian
village as containing nothing but "a biological reserve." For Eliade,
it was the source of national-religious values that had existed for centuries--an
were again being revived by the Iron Guard. In a series of more than fifty
articles between 1934 and 1938, he praised "the Captain," as Codreanu
was called, for inspiring such a movement and urged young intellectuals to join
the cause. "The significance of the revolution advanced by Corneliu
Codreanu is so profoundly mystical," he declared, "that its success would
designate the victory of the Christian spirit in Europe."
Eliade's adhesion to the
cause, however, was by no means instantaneous. It was only in December 1935
that he decided that “the primacy of the spiritual does not imply the refusal of
faction." In 1936 he began openly to support the Iron Guard; but his aim
was “to provide its ideology with a more solid philosophical foundation.” One
is reminded of Heidegger's attempt to provide Hitlerism with what the
philosopher considered a worthier intellectual grounding. Eliade carries on a
continual battle against the ideas of the Enlightenment and traces the degeneration
of Romania to its attempt to adopt such alien notions: “Being a foreign
importation, the democratic regime concerns itself with matters that are not
specifically Romanian—abstractions like the rights of man, the rights of
minorities, and the liberty of conscience.” Far better a dictatorship like that
of Mussolini, which is always preferable to a democracy because, if the latter
goes to pieces, it will "inevitably slide toward the left" and thus
toward communism.
An important event of
these years for Eliade was the return of the coffins of two of his friends,
both prominent Iron Guardists, killed fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil
War. A huge semiofficial demonstration was organized to honor their remains,
and Eliade wrote three articles, one published in the journal of the Iron Guard
itself, to consecrate the glory of their sacrifice. As usual, he endows this
event with his own pseudo-religious aura. “The voluntary death of Ion Mota and
Vasile Marin," he wrote, "has a mystic significance: the sacrifice
for Christianity." By this time he had become an active partisan of the
Iron Guard; and when the Guard fell out of favor with the government in 1938,
leading to the arrest of Codreanu and several hundred of his most prominent
followers, Mircea Eliade was among them.
The conditions of their
detention in a camp, once an agricultural school, were far from onerous, and
courses were organized by Ionescu and Eliade, who also managed to write a novel
there, called Marriage in Heaven. His wife's uncle was a general close
to King Carol II, and since Eliade suffered from a tubercular condition, he was
soon allowed to move to a mountain village and returned home early in December.
Later that month Codreanu was killed, presumably while attempting to escape,
and the Iron Guard movement was sternly repressed. Eliade had lost his
university post, but he confided Cioran that he "regretted nothing,"
and he wrote a play, Iphigenia, that exalted the ideas of sacrifice and
death for one's country in words literally reproducing those he had used about
the two Iron Guardists who had sacrificed themselves for Franco.
Life for Eliade in his
native land was becoming difficult, and his correspondence reveals that he was
seeking to go elsewhere. He made efforts in the direction of the United States
and France with no success, and finally had to settle for a post as cultural attaché
in London before Romania entered the war against the Allies. The English
were quite well informed about his past, and classified him as "the most
Nazified member of the legation," possibly a spy for Germany. When he
was transferred to Portugal, there was some discussion as to whether he should
be allowed to leave the country, and he was filled with indignation at being
stripped and searched before his departure. He spent four years in Lisbon,
where the dictatorship of Salazar, which he called "a Christian form of
totalitarianism," was much closer to his political tastes than
anything he could find elsewhere. While performing his tasks in the embassy, he
also wrote a hagiographical but scholarly biography of Salazar, who deigned,
much to his delight, to grant him an audience, and then entrusted him with a
message to deliver to General Antonescu. Eliade's trip to Bucharest in July
1942 was the last time he was to see his native land.
IV.
The third member of the
trio was Eugene Ionesco, and the jacket of Laignel-Lavastine's book contains a
photograph taken in 1977 in Paris at the charming and peaceful little Place
Furstenberg, just anew steps away from the swarming crowd at St.-Germain-des-Pres.
The picture captures the three exiles talking together in the friendliest
fashion, and has aroused a good deal of criticism, because it would appear that
all three were guilty in a similar fashion of the "oubli du
fascisme," the forgetfulness about fascism, indicated by the book's title.
The text makes clear, however, that Ionesco's politics had always been fiercely
hostile to the fascist temptation. Indeed, his famous play Rhinoceros (1959)
is based on his horrified fascination with what he saw taking place as the
members of his generation each yielded to the fascist spell.
The play depicts a small
provincial village where the inhabitants gradually become transformed into
rhinoceroses that destroy everything in their path. Ionesco's journal records
the process by which, as he wrote, "I saw how my brothers, my friends,
gradually became strangers. I felt a new spirit germinating within them; how a
new personality was substituted for theirs." These new personalities were
those of "the ideologists and semi-intellectuals" who mutated into
"rhinoceroses"; a character called "the Logician" in the
play, presumably based on Nae Ionescu, precipitates this transformation.
But Ionesco, too,
possessed a past that he wished to keep hidden, though it was relatively
anodyne compared with that of the other two. For one thing, there was the
question of his family. Ionesco's father was a Romanian lawyer with a French
doctorate, and his mother was presumably French. But there appears to be some
question about her origins: she may not have been a French citizen at all, and
was probably of Jewish ancestry. None of this is mentioned in Ionesco's
autobiographical writings; but he spoke of his mother to Mihail Sebastian,
whose friendship, unlike that of all the others, he continued to cultivate, and
who comments that "I had long known that his mother was Jewish from
hearsay." This conversation occurred in 1941, just fifteen days after
an Iron Guardist pogrom, horrifying in its slaughter, had taken place in
Bucharest.
Ionesco taught French
literature at the University of Bucharest, and became well known in the 1930s
when his book Non was given a prestigious literary award. In it, he
scathingly attacked the eminences of Romanian literature for their
"ethno-linguistic nationalism and historicism." Meanwhile, he was
keeping a journal that nourished much of his later work, in which we see him rejecting
the collectivisms both of fascism and communism. In 1938 he received a grant to
study in Paris from the director of the French Cultural Institute who, a few
months earlier, had given one to Cioran; but though the two lived in the same
section of Paris and had common Romanian friends, they carefully avoided each other's
company.
At this time Ionesco was
much influenced by Emmanuel Mounier, the founder of the journal Esprit,
and a liberal Catholic who attempted to steer a middle course between left and
right and fathered a doctrine known as "personalism." It was
anti-capitalist and highly critical of the weaknesses of liberal democracy, but
it also stressed the importance of preserving the rights of the individual personality
not as a political entity, but as a moral-spiritual one. Mounier has been
sharply criticized for having contributed to the undermining of the respect for
democracy that marked the pre-war years in France; but what impressed Ionesco
was his emphasis on safeguarding the moral responsibility of the individual.
Both Cioran and Ionesco sent home articles describing their impressions of
Paris: the former depicted the city and France itself as " a nation
fatigued and worn-out, at the twilight of its history," while the latter
spoke of them as "the ultimate refuge of humanity."
After the outbreak of
the war in September 1939, Ionesco decided to return to Romania—a decision he bitterly
regretted. He remained there until the summer of 1942, desperately trying to
leave again without success. During this period the Romanian government was taken
over by General Antonescu, who for five months shared power with the Iron
Guard. They instituted a reign of terror "of an indescribable
savagery," particularly against the Jews, but also massacring other
opponents and kidnapping former members of the government and prominent
intellectuals to be executed. Antonescu, disturbed by the chaos, finally
suppressed the Iron Guard with the help of German troops. Meanwhile new laws
against the Jews were added to those already in existence, and applied to “converts”
of the past and present as well as those clinging to their faith; all were
excluded from teaching, as well as from any other professional office or
occupation, except those with special permission from the head of state.
Ionesco became frantic, as his notebooks reveal; and after several futile
efforts to obtain passports and visas, he appealed to friends in several
ministries for help. As a last resort, they arranged for him to become press attaché
at the Romanian embassy in Vichy (France by this time had been defeated).As he
put it, "I am like an escaped prisoner who flees in the uniform of the jailer."
This is the second part
of his Romanian past that Ionesco kept concealed: these Vichy years are never
mentioned in his autobiographical writings. A full account of them is given in Laignel-Lavastine's
book, using the documents now available from his dossier in the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs in Bucharest and references in his letters of the time. It is
quite clear, to cite the text, that this "was a strategy of
survival"; and though he hated every moment of his duties, he performed
them conscientiously enough to receive a promotion to cultural secretary in the
spring of 1943.
Much of his time was
given to encouraging the translation and publication of Romanian writers, and
to maneuvering among French journals in the complicated maze created by the collaborationist,
semi-collaborationist, and purely literary publications. Ionesco carefully
avoided the first and preferred those that attempted to preserve a literary
autonomy, even if it was necessarily limited. He also secretly employed as a
translator, using a pseudonym, a Romanian-Jewish poet whose works had been
illustrated by Brancusi and Victor Brauner. Very far from being lenient toward her
subjects, Laignel-Lavastine does not omit other duties performed by Ionesco
that might be considered "compromising"; but she concludes that his
record is "in general quite honorable." Still, those were years that
he wished to forget.
V.
Cioran was also in Paris
at the outbreak of the war and decided to return to Bucharest in the autumn of
1940, though he, too, eliminated these months from accounts of his life. The
reason is quite simple: he arrived when the Iron Guard had practically taken
over the government; and on the very day that it was committing the atrocities
already mentioned, he spoke on the radio with ecstatic praise for the "Legion"
(as the movement was also called). "Codreanu," he said, had
"instilled honor in a nation of slaves; he has given a sense of pride to a
spineless herd." He also published several articles along the same lines
and, preparing his return to France, obtained an appointment as cultural attaché
to the Romanian embassy in Vichy. Cioran took up his new post in March 1941, but
broke all records for the brevity of his service, which lasted only two and a
half months. Meanwhile, he managed once again to obtain a study grant with the
help of his former benefactor, now at the College de France, and returned to
live and write in occupied Paris.
During these years, he
spent a good deal of time with another ex-Romanian intellectual of Jewish
origin, Benjamin Fondane (actually Vecsler), who had become a fairly well-known
literary critic and poet through his works in French. In a letter to his
parents in 1946, cited by Petreu, Cioran writes that “[Fondane]proved to be
more gentle and more generous than all my Christian friends taken together....
In the long run, all ideas are absurd and false; only the people are there,
regardless of their origin or religion.” When Fondane was finally denounced and
arrested, Cioran went with Jean Paulhan to plead for his release. Surprisingly
enough, they were successful in his case; but Fondane refused to leave without
his sister, who had also been taken into custody, and they both perished in
Auschwitz.
There can be little
doubt that, as Laignel-Lavastine notes, "the arrest of Fondane shook
Cioran profoundly," and left an indelible impression on his ideas and his
values. He later wrote an admiring essay about his friend, and in addition
helped Fondane's wife to reedit his works after the war as well as to complete
an important unfinished book on Baudelaire. He also wrote an article asking
that Fondane's name be included among those deported writers whose names were
inscribed in the Pantheon. Laignel-Lavastine criticizes him for having called
Fondane "Moldavian" rather than Jewish (as if this were not
understood), and because other phrases might be interpreted as containing
traces of his own previous anti-Semitism. But actions, such as his intervention
for his friend's release, speak louder even than such words; and this is not
the only instance in which suspicion is cast on any genuine transformation of
sentiment in Cioran.
No such problem arises
with Eliade, because no transformation of any kind took place. Quite the contrary. Eliade kept a notebook
throughout the war that is now deposited in the University of Chicago library,
and which, since it was never intended for publication, he did not undertake to
revise so as to blur and distort his opinions and actions. It is an astonishing
document, revealing a self-adulation merging on megalomania and a fervent
commitment to the triumph of Hitler, Mussolini, and Antonescu over the
"Anglo-Bolsheviks." Comparing himself with Goethe, whose genius he
admired, Eliade concludes: "My intellectual horizons are vaster."
Despite the consolation of such reflections, he was terribly depressed
by the course of the war. After the defeat of the Germans and their Romanian
allies at Stalingrad (which he called "a tragedy"), followed by the
invasion of North Africa and the British victory over Rommel, Eliade was upset
to such an extent that he notes: "Insomnias, nightmares, depression."
For him, the triumph of
the Allies meant "the abandonment of Europe to the Asiatic hordes." Even though Jews were being slaughtered right
and left in his homeland, not to mention elsewhere--and Eliade's diplomatic
position kept him perfectly well informed--not a word about any such events
appears in his pages. As the handwriting on the wall became more and more
legible, he resolved not to return home, but to take another tack. "I have
decided to ‘penetrate' Europe more deeply and with more determination than I
have done until now," he writes. Several months later, he sees himself
operating as "a Trojan horse within the scientific arena, “whose aim was
"scientifically to validate the metaphysical significance of prehistoric
life." This is exactly how he behaved after Antonescu was overthrown and
he was discharged from his position at the Romanian embassy. He had influential
scholarly connections in Paris, particularly the cultural historian Georges Dumezil,
and he used this influence as well as others to obtain temporary teaching
appointments. He had begun to write his Treatise on the History of Religions
in 1944 and his influential The Myth of the Eternal Return a year later;
both appeared in French in the immediate postwar years, and launched Eliade on
his way to international fame and a permanent post in Chicago.
VI.
The great value of
Laignel-Lavastine's book is her thorough investigation of the Romanian
background, and in a much larger framework than the one provided by Petreu. The
chapters devoted to the postwar years of her three protagonists, though of great
interest in themselves and barely touched on by Petreu, deal with more familiar
and easily accessible material. A good deal of criticism has been leveled
against her book, but none, to my knowledge, has really undermined the factual
basis of her indictment, even though she may be faulted on matters of detail.
A different question
arises when she discusses the issue of whether Eliade and Cioran ever underwent
any sort of "true transformation “of their earlier views, or only engaged
"in a secret game of projections, calculations, and concealments."
This involves matters of interpretation on which opinions may differ. Such a
question, as she concedes, applies only "very weakly" to Ionesco, who
was more a victim of circumstances than of any ideological commitment he had
reason to regret. In later years the picture on the book jacket of the three
men engaged in friendly conversation could create a wrong impression, even
though it approximates at least a modicum of the truth of what became their
relation.
In the immediate postwar
years, many of the Romanian intellectuals in Paris (not all, to be sure)
clustered around Eliade, whose hotel room became "one of the principal
rendezvous of the exile." Ionesco showed up at such gatherings, as he told
a friend, only in order “to escape from [his] undermining solitude," while
at the same time declaiming against this group as "an affair of
Legionnaires [Iron Guardists] who have not repented." Moreover, aside from
the need to overcome the "painful isolation" that he felt, the Romanian
political situation had changed entirely, and he now found himself more or less
partially in agreement with his ancient enemies. A communist government had
taken over Romania in 1947, and Ionesco could join the others in deploring this
imposition of the collectivism--of the right or the left--that he had always
abhorred.
All through his later
life he actively supported democratic causes, affixing his name to petitions to
support the Prague Spring, the Afghan resistance against Russia, and the right
of Soviet Jews to emigrate, and joining movements such as Amnesty International. He was tireless in his support of Israel, thus
bucking a strong current of French gauchiste opinion. He joined Arthur
Koestler, Leszek Kolakowski, and Czeslaw Milosz, among others, in his anti-communism.
He is depicted as thus "sliding to the right," but doing so in
defense of the values in which he had always believed: the liberty of man,
humanism. As more or less of a gauchiste herself, however, Laignel-Lavastine
cannot resist a dig at "the rather reactionary side of the old
academician, which sometimes brings on a smile or a reaction of annoyance"
when "his anti-communism becomes in the end a little ridiculous."
This is a nasty thrust that does her little credit.
Eliade's remarkable
career illustrates his skill and success at playing "the secret game of
projections, concealments and calculations." Reference already has been
made to the falsification of the memoirs and journals that is illustrated all
through the volume; but his Iron Guard past nonetheless caught up with him from
time to time. His application for appointment to the French Center for
Scientific Research, though sponsored by a formidable array of prominent
scholars, was turned down because a renowned medieval historian of Romanian
origin wrote a detailed letter about his early commitments. Similarly, safely
installed in Chicago in 1973, Eliade was invited for a lecture in Israel by
Gershom Scholem, whom he had met at colloquiums in Ascona, Switzerland, initially
sponsored by Jung (whose political past is also very suspect). In 1972 a small
Israeli journal of the Romanian emigration had published an article revealing
part of Eliade's connection with their on Guard, but without citing any written
sources. Scholem was troubled, but Eliade wrote a letter piling lie upon lie,
indignantly denying that he had ever published a line in praise of the Iron
Guard and relying on the inaccessibility of the Romanian material at that time.
The invitation to Hebrew
University was withdrawn, though Scholem, presumably incapable of believing in
such duplicity, urged Eliade to visit him personally and offered to arrange an
interview with the author of the article to clear up matters of disagreement.
But Eliade prudently cancelled the trip, and never visited Israel then or
later. Part of Eliade's strategy was to cultivate friendships with prominent
Jewish scholars and intellectuals, as Ravelstein/Bloom had rightly charged.
Saul Bellow spoke at his funeral in 1986. His novel indicates that he may have
had some regrets at having done so.
Nothing blatantly
anti-Semitic can be found in Eliade's postwar writings, but the prejudice is
transposed into a much more scholarly key in his theory of religion. One of the cornerstones of his doctrine was that
archaic man lived in a world of cyclical time, whose recurrences were
marked by festivals of one kind or another in which "sacred time,"
the time of religious experience, was re-created. The modern world has
largely lost this ability to relive "sacred time" because the Hebrews
(as Eliade now calls them) broke with the cyclical time of "the eternal
return" by linking God with linear time. "The Hebrews," he
writes, "were the first to discover the significance of history as the
epiphany of God," and this discovery of history ultimately led to all
the ills of the modern world. Daniel Dubuisson, a French analyst of
Eliade's views on mythology, concludes that this summary notion of history “especially
invents a new accusation against the Jews, that of an ontological crime, a
capital crime and without doubt unpardonable.” Eliade thus remained true to
himself in this erudite disguise during his later years, when his worldwide
fame reached its apogee and his death was mourned with sanctimonious reverence.
The most complicated
case of all was Cioran, whose later writings are shot through with passages
that may be read as implicit expressions of regret for his earlier convictions,
but who never seemed able to repudiate them publicly. He was much more forthright
in his correspondence and in private conversation. In a letter to a friend,
Cioran declared in 1971 that "when I contemplate certain of my past
infatuations, I am brought up short: I don't understand. What madness!"
This would certainly seem to indicate their rejection on his part. In
conversation with the author of a book about the commandant of Auschwitz, he
said: "What Germany did amounts to a damnation of mankind."
There can be no question
that, unlike Eliade, the issue of his previous fascism and anti-Semitism
tormented the complicated, involuted, self-questioning Cioran, whose thought
was always directed toward undermining all of mankind's certainties, including
his own. The analysis of the postwar Cioran given here is the most complex and
controversial in Laignel-Lavastine's book. He is depicted as both evading any
overt responsibility for his past and also, "unlike Eliade," weighed
down by feelings "inseparable from a desire for expiation and a sense of
diffuse guilt ... [an] ‘oppressive sensation’ with which he admits sometimes
awakening in the morning, ‘as if I bore the weight of a thousand crimes.’”
As in the case of
Eliade, Cioran's past sometimes came back to haunt him. Paul Celan, the great
German poet of Romanian origin whose parents died in a Romanian camp and who
had himself been deported to a labor camp, was also living in Paris and
translated one of Cioran's works, Precis de decomposition (A Short
History of Decay), into German in 1953. The two saw each other from time to
time, and Cioran came to the poet's aid when Celan was fighting off accusations
of plagiarism. Yet when a Romanian critic on his way through Paris laid out the
particulars of Cioran's past, Celan refused to have anything more to do with
him. Despite this break, Cioran was deeply disturbed when he heard of the
poet's suicide. It is suggested that this relationship with a Jewish writer may
also have been meant as the same sort of "cover" that Eliade exploited
so successfully; but there is nothing to support such a suspicion except that,
when Cioran was once asked whether he knew Celine, he mentioned Celan instead.
One has the feeling here that, despite her own evident intention to be as fair
as possible in stressing Cioran's "ambivalence," Laignel-Lavastine is
pushing matters too far.
The same problem arises
when she comes to Cioran's attitude toward the Jews. When, for example, a new
edition of his most anti-Semitic book, The Transfiguration of Romania,
was published in Romania, he insisted that the chapter on the Jews be
eliminated, along with a number of remarks about them scattered through the
text: "I completely renounce a very large part [of the book] which
stems from the prejudices of the past, and I consider as inadmissible certain
remarks about the Jews," he wrote to a friend. Nothing could be more
explicit. Even more, in one of his later French books he included a section on
the Jews called "Un peuple de solitaires" ("A Solitary
People") that was hailed as philo-Semitic. But Laignel-Lavastine believes
this to be an illusion, because on comparing this text with what Cioran had
written years ago, she finds that the image now given of the Jewish people and their
history is much the same as that provided earlier—except that what had been
evaluated negatively in the past is now given a glowingly positive spin.
Moreover, Cioran continually identifies his own situation with that of the
Jews, writing that "their drama [that of the Jews] is mine." In 1970
he mused that "I lacked an essential condition fully to realize myself: to
be Jewish."
This obsessive
self-identification with the Jews is interpreted as “the reversed expression of
the same psycho-pathological phenomenon" that had earlier led to Cioran's
worst excesses. Perhaps so; but to glorify the Jews instead of vilifying them
surely indicates some sort of change. Also, the objection is made that while
Cioran often expresses regret about his errors of the past, he never does so
except in general terms, without attempting to explain why they are now
rejected. For Laignel-Lavastine, Cioran’s tantalizingly ambiguous relation to
his past is hardly a genuine attempt to come to terms with the practical
consequences of the ideas he once espoused and still, on occasion, seemed to toy
with in a rhetorically half-amused fashion. She wonders whether, as was the
case with Eliade, he was merely "translating into an acceptable language
ideological motifs and attitudes [that are]ideologically disqualified in the
West." Petreu is much more affirmative on this issue, and cites someone
who visited Cioran during his last days, when he was suffering from Alzheimer's
disease: "From his hospital bed, desperately trying to overcome the symptoms
of his disease, Cioran stumblingly told his guest: `I ... am not ... an ...
anti- ... Semite.'"
Let me add my personal
testimony at this point. During my years in Paris I met Cioran and saw him on a
number of occasions, and we had a good many conversations (particularly but not
exclusively about Russian literature, in which he took a passionate
interest).Whatever the twists and turns of his troubled conscience, the brilliantly
sardonic, self-mocking, and fascinating personality that I knew could not have
been a conscious manipulator who would set out deliberately to deceive.
If there is a general
criticism to be made of Laignel-Lavastine's excellent book, it is that Cioran
is pursued too relentlessly, perhaps in an effort to counteract his devoted
admirers in France and elsewhere—the late Susan Sontag, for example, who
introduced him to the United States. A lack of knowledge of the Romanian
background allowed him to be seen innocently and too exclusively in the light
of his soaring philosophical speculations. But if these are now shadowed by the
political commitments that he himself later found incomprehensible, the
reliable evidence of his genuine struggle to cope with his past deserves more
sympathy. In Cioran's case, compassion is not the enemy of truth.
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