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 lecture — 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.