It’s the poetry of a man who’s lonely, troubled, drunk on unexpected bursts of pure melody, and it is painfully simple for such a complicated man. Out of all his writings, I like the ‘Five Tales for a Small Voice’. The rest is tiresome and obscure. He has talent, I know. Everybody agrees. But I want a life without poisonings, fireworks and problems. A life of ‘good day’, ‘good evening’, ‘the bread is white’, ‘stone is hard’, ‘the poplar is tall’.
*
I glimpsed Majorie Dunton in a tram. I don’t think she saw me. And she was also here last Thursday. (Hacker from accounting brought her by motor car and I heard it from his mouth.) ‘Give her my regards, if you’re heading back together this evening.’ ‘No,’ Hacker replied, ‘I’m going back alone. Mrs Dunton is spending the night in Bucharest.’
On Friday, in the workshop, I dropped it on Dronţu. ‘Did you sleep well last night, Marin?’
Stupid question.
*
Sami Winkler called by to see me at the workshop, to ask me for a letter of recommendation for Ralph T. Rice.
‘Are you looking to be a miner?’
‘It’s not for me. It’s for some boys we’re training for going to Palestine. And they need a couple of months’ experience in a refinery. I thought you might be able to smooth the way in the head office. Unpaid work, you understand.’
I brought Winkler round to Piaţa Rosetti and introduced him to old Ralph. I think he’s going to do it.
‘I hope you don’t mind, Winkler, and excuse me for asking. Did you complete your thesis?’
‘I abandoned it a long time ago. It no longer interests me. I’ll stay another two or three years, then I’m leaving. I’ll be a farmer in some colony.’
‘Why a farmer? Don’t they need doctors over there?’
‘Doctors perhaps, but not diplomas. I’ll be working the land somewhere, in a colony, and when a doctor’s needed I’ll act as a doctor. I still know how to do a bandage.’
Winkler means what he says. For the last four years he’s worked from spring to autumn on a farm in Bessarabia organized by Zionists to train pioneers.
‘I’m not boasting, but I can plough very well.’
He says this simply, without giving himself airs, almost with indifference, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
‘Explain to me, please, why you’re leaving. In 1923 it would have been understandable. But today, now that things have settled down? I’ve the impression that everything has changed over the last five years. It’s safer, there’s more goodwill, more understanding. You can breathe, you can talk with people.’
‘Perhaps. But I’m leaving, not running away. I’m not leaving because it’s bad here and there it’s good, but simply because I can’t live anywhere in the world but there. I’m a Zionist, not a deserter. Listen, in 1923, in the middle of anti-Semitic unrest, Zionism was at its apogee, while today, when everything is calm and prosperous, Zionism finds itself in crisis. But I prefer this Zionism in crisis, because it’s made up of determined people, while the Zionism of 1923 was made up of frightened people.’
*
Evening at Costaridi’s. Long arguments about angst, contemporary neurosis, Gide, the war generation, Berdyaev … I’m amazed at the verve with which people can discuss angst while drinking a coffee. In 1923, in my green notebook period, I would probably have argued passionately. These days I experience a very specific discomfort in dealing with any broad problem, whether it’s angst or destiny or crisis … It’s the abuse of language that puts me off.
Look at Radu Şiriu, broad-shouldered, fit, pink and plump, declaring, with no sense of the ridiculous, as if in a Russian noveclass="underline"
‘I know nothing, I don’t understand anything: I’m experiencing a crisis.’
How does he manage not to choke on the poor taste of such a declaration? ‘It’s trivial,’ I remark to those around me.
‘Yes, trivial,’ says Ştefan D. Pârlea, picking up the remark from the other corner. ‘Yes, it’s in poor taste. So what? Is that what we need? To be delicate, spiritual, sceptical? A culture based on good manners — it disgusts me. Don’t feel any pain, because it’s in poor taste. Don’t scream, because of what the neighbours will say? Don’t live, it isn’t polite. Dear people, enough of this stupidity. We’ve had ten generations of sceptics who’ve checked themselves in the mirror all the time, with the excuse that they have a critical spirit. I want us to say, to hell with all these proprieties and let’s live. Stormily, without good taste, unrestrainedly and unfastidiously, but with a personal voice, with authentic feelings.’
Pârlea looks straight at me, with barely controlled violence. He polishes his glasses nervously, in order to see me better, his eyes shooting lightning that has been long gathering there to smite me. Beautiful forehead: proud, high, challenging, lit by his flashing eyes, which his short-sightedness makes that bit more intense. I’m attached to this adversity as to a friendship. I can’t explain it, I can’t understand it, but from the first day I sensed in this person an unshakable resolve. And, in a world of easy-going attachments, it’s no small thing to spontaneously earn serious enmity. A raw, healthy human enmity you can really count on.
And more, he’s the only person for whom these vague expressions — crisis, angst, authenticity — have vital meaning. His essay in The Thought — ‘An Invocation for the Barbarians to Invade as soon as Possible’ — showed for the first time the possibility of a spiritual position from which one could say with a measure of justification: ‘We, the young, who have come of age since the war.’ Pârlea’s cast of mind is too lyrical for my taste, while to him I must seem too sceptical. I would like only to make him understand that it’s not possible to be desperate and to hold debates at the Foundation on desperation, or to be anxious and to discuss angst. I’d like to tell him that these things, if they are real, are emotions, and that emotions are for living, not for chatting about. There is some demon of oratory in Pârlea’s nature which impels him towards speechifying, a thing I am altogether incapable of, since all my quarrels are with myself. To argue until two in the morning at Mişu Costaridi’s about ‘angst’ and then go home to bed is the height of comedy. Unfortunately Pârlea has no sense of humour.
S.T. Haim (a good friend of Pârlea’s — since when?) added his own Marxist spieclass="underline"
‘An “anxious generation” … How amusing you are, friends. The key to your problem lies elsewhere. You’re a generation of proletarians without class consciousness. There are fewer jobs, the scholarships are miserable, all the places are taken. You’ve been left out and so, for the sake of something to do, you engage in metaphysics. One day you’ll see that the bourgeois democratic state no longer accommodates you — and then you’ll join the revolution. That’ll blow your angst away, you’ll see.’
5
Only yesterday evening, leaving the office, I remembered it was 10 December. I was with Marin Dronţu, heading down towards Calea Victoriei. It was snowing sumptuously, with immense flakes, like a New Year’s Eve, and there was a real festive bustle in the street, the good-natured hum of a cheerful Sunday. At Capşa’s, on the corner, our way was blocked by a procession of students coming down from University Square.