The Accident, Sebastian’s fourth and last novel, continues to be widely read in Romania today and is available in translation in easily accessible paperback editions in German, French, Spanish and Italian. The present edition, astonishingly, marks the first publication of Sebastian’s fiction in English. The only previous English translation of his creative work was a stilted Cold War-era rendering of Breaking News as Stop News. A Comedy in Three Acts, released by the government publishing house in Bucharest in 1954.
Sebastian’s posthumous reputation maybe summarized by saying that he has flourished as a playwright in Romania, a novelist in the rest of Europe and a diarist in English. With the exception of De două mii de ani, Sebastian’s creative work makes scant reference to Jewish themes, a fact at odds with his reputation in English-speaking countries, where the little that is known about him is that he was a Jewish writer who survived the Holocaust only to be run over by a truck. It is not surprising that the diary, which grapples with the themes of anti-semitism, the Holocaust and the treason of Romania’s intellectual class, should have been the first of his works to appear in English. Smuggled out of Romania by the Israeli Embassy in 1961, Jurnal 1935–1944 was published in Bucharest in 1996. As the critic Aureliu Goci points out, this massive, acutely observed, delicately evocative testimony of a man whose friends
— who happen to be the greatest minds of his country’s 20th century intellectual culture — day by day become fascists, is one of the masterpieces of Romanian literature. Its publication unleashed a polemic almost as furious as that ignited sixty years earlier by De două mii de ani, a sad irony that suggests that some Romanian intellectuals are not yet ready to accept the truth about the actions of many of their heroes during the 1930s. In fairness, intellectuals in Western Europe and North America also failed to hold these writers to account for their collaborationism. Eliade, ensconced in his professorship at the University of Chicago, lived on to be idolized by the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s for his expertise on Asian religions; his book The Eternal Return, written in English, sold over 100,000 copies. Yet, as late as 1968, Eliade inserted an admiring reference to Nae Ionescu into his academic work; in 1970, he praised the attitudes of the anti-Semitic Romanian poet Adrian Păunescu after the latter visited him in Chicago. Eliade’s Iron Guard past and “Hitlerian” views, which he never recanted, were so completely ignored that when he died in 1986, the eulogy at his funeral was delivered by Saul Bellow.
Translated by Patrick Camiller, with excellent notes and an introduction by Radu Ioanid, the diary was published in English in 2000. Journal 1935–1944: The Fascist Years made Sebastian’s name much better known in both North America and Great Britain. The book’s success led to a play, The Journals of Mihail Sebastian, that was produced in New York in 2004. In 2006 the German translation of the diary was awarded the Geschwister-Scholl Preis, given annually for a work that supports civil freedom and demonstrates moral courage. The diary is instantly accessible, not only because of its intimacy and immediacy, but also because it belongs to the familiar genre of the Holocaust memoir; yet its unique flavour in this crowded field springs from Sebastian’s acutely tuned sensibility, his lyricism and romanticism. To appreciate these features at full stretch, one must read Sebastian’s novels.
The Accident is often read as a study of an intellectual who has lost touch with his emotions. The protagonist’s family background is never elucidated. A hint that he might be of Jewish ancestry occurs in Chapter II, when a business acquaintance encountered in a night club invites him to the home of the Zionist leader Abraham Zissu. Paul declines, a decision that seems to echo Sebastian’s own preference for avoiding ethnic enclaves. Paul’s obsession with the young painter Ann, which leads to his exhausting journey across Europe — an act that today we might see as an extravagant form of stalking — is inseparable from the lift of his shoulders that signals his indifference. His emotional vacancy feeds his obsessiveness. Even though The Accident is the product of the years of Sebastian’s estrangement from the friends of his youth, the solution to Paul’s conundrum is one which few contributors to Cuvântul would disapprove: a trip to the mountains of Transylvania. The idea for the novel, however, originated in the image of Nora’s accident in the snowy Bucharest streets — an eerie presentiment of the author’s own death. Sebastian spent his twenty-ninth birthday, October 18, 1936, in the company of Mircea Eliade. As he went out to buy champagne, “I suddenly had the picture of a road accident into which I should have liked to be drawn. I could see the first chapter with a wealth of detail so pressing that I thought that, when I got home, I would be unable to do anything other than write, as if under the command of an imperious voice.”
The novel that began in inspiration became an ordeal to finish. In September 1937, during a trip to Paris, Sebastian lost, or was robbed of, the suitcase that contained the only copy of his manuscript. He had to rewrite the first five chapters from memory. Given the stresses he faced as the pillars of his life as a lawyer, novelist, playwright and journalist were demolished, it is a testament to his determination that he completed the book. Much of it was written in resort towns in the mountains where he retreated to take skiing lessons. It is curious to think that as the clamps were being tightened on the country’s Jewish community, the sunburned author was swooping down mountain slopes, then returning to his cabin to compose his romantic love story; but it may have been this separation from the war that spared his creativity. By the time he was writing the novel’s final pages, in January 1940, he was labouring under a military call-up notice (he did military service intermittently during these years) and was aware that, “What is happening to the Jews now in Hitler-occupied Poland is beyond all known horrors.”
The Accident combines interior monologues that display, in a concise way, the influence of Marcel Proust with the crisp, telling dialogue that Sebastian was mastering in his plays. The book’s careful crafting is evident in embedded details such as the old man stroking his beard mentioned by Ann in her impromptu lecture to Paul at Lake Snagov, which later becomes the key to confirming her history of infidelity. In the Transylvanian scenes another pivotal element appears: the protagonist’s lyrical immersion in nature. It is the region’s natural wonders that cure Paul of the over-intellectualized “sickness” of the city. This theme is compatible with much nationalist thinking of the inter-war years, in which the nation’s natural attributes promise an “authentic essence” that acts as an antidote to the ills of a corrupt or decadent civilization. The two female protagonists embody this pattern. While neither is native to the capital, Ann has become a creature of the city, a prisoner of her ambition who subordinates her body to the demands of her career. Her identity as “this blonde girl in boyish slacks” underlines her estrangement from her female essence. By contrast, Nora evokes the motherland, the nation in female form. She is a teacher of French, the language that Romanian intellectuals saw as the bridge to their culture’s ancestral home in the Latin West. From the beginning, in spite of the fact that she has just suffered a fall from a tram, she cares for Paul in a way that is conspicuously maternal. Although sexually emancipated, Nora respects the emotional seriousness of her relationships with men, an attitude that crystallizes in her discomfort at leaving her encounter with Paul as a one-night stand. She is older than he, while Ann is younger. Where Ann’s figure is boyish, Nora’s lines are reassuringly solid. Observing her in their room in Gunther’s cabin, he notes that, “her body was strong, with a slight heaviness in its long, firm lines. Nothing adolescent here, Paul thought, watching her.” The reference to adolescence may be read as a reflection on “boyish” Ann and the immature urban world she represents. Although she is famous, Ann’s surname is not revealed; by contrast, Nora’s last name, Munteanu, contains the word munte, “mountain.” Her mother lives in Cernăuţi, the birthplace of Mihai Eminescu, Romania’s national poet. Cernăuţi — which today is Cernivitsi, Ukraine — was located in Bukovina, whose reunion with the motherland in 1919 was seen by many Romanians as central to the fulfillment of the country’s historic destiny.