Anathemas and Admirations (54 page)

These Hindus have had the audacity to set illusion so high, to make it a substitute for self and world, and to convert it into the supreme given. Remarkable conversion, ultimate and inescapable stage. What is to be done? Every extremity, even liberation, being an impasse, how to escape in order to catch up with the Possible? Perhaps one must lower the terms of the debate, endow things with a shadow of reality, restrain the hegemony of clear-sightedness, dare to maintain that everything that seems to exist
does exist
in its way, and then, weary of wandering off the pointy change the subject. . . .

10

Mircea Eliade

I
FIRST MET ELIADE around 1932, in Bucharest, where I had just finished some sort of studies in philosophy. He was at that time the idol of the “new generation,” a magic formula we were proud to invoke. We scorned the “old,” the “dodderers” — anyone over thirty. Our intellectual leader waged a campaign against them; he demolished them one by one, striking almost always to the heart (I say “almost” because occasionally he missed his aim, as when he attacked Tudor Arghezi, a great poet whose only fault was to be acclaimed, consecrated). The struggle between generations seemed to us the key to every conflict and the explanatory principle of every event. To be young, for us, was automatically to have genius. Such infatuation, it will be said, is universal. No doubt. But I don’t think it was ever carried so far as it was with us: in it was expressed, was exacerbated, a determination to force History, an appetite to find our place within it and to affect the New at any price. Frenzy was the order of the day. In whom was it embodied? In someone who had returned from India, from the country that has always and specifically turned its back on History, on chronology, on Becoming as such. I should not point out this paradox if it did not testify to a profound duality, to a character trait in Eliade, equally solicited by essence and by accident, the timeless and the quotidian, mysticism and literature,, This duality involves no laceration for him: it is his nature and his luck to be able to live simultaneously or alternately on different spiritual levels, to ponder ecstasy and pursue anecdotes without making a fuss.

In the period when I knew him, I was already amazed that he could be studying Sankhya (about which he had just published a long article) and also be interested in the latest novel. Subsequently I have never failed to be amazed by the spectacle of a curiosity so immense and so intense; in anyone else it would be morbid. He has nothing of the grim and perverse obstinacy of the maniac, of the obsessive who limits himself to a single realm, to a single sector, and rejects all the rest as secondary and trivial The one obsession I recognize in him — and in truth it has diminished with the years — is that of the polygraph, the universal writer, hence of the anti-obsessive par excellence, since he is eager to fling himself upon any subject in his unquenchable thirst for exploration. Nicolas Iorga, the Rumanian historian —an extraordinary figure, fascinating and dismaying, the author of over a thousand works that in places are extremely lively but in general are confused, poorly constructed, unreadable, shot through with flashes of wit smothered in tedium — in those days Eliade admired him passionately, the way one admires the elements, a forest, the sea, the fields, fecundity itself, everything that burgeons, proliferates, erupts, and asserts itself. The superstition of vitality and productivity, especially in literature, has never left him. I may be speaking out of turn here, but I have every reason to believe that in his unconscious, he sets books above the gods: more than to the latter, it is to books that he addresses his worship. In any case, I have met no one who loved them so much as he. I shall never forget the fever with which, arriving in Paris just after the liberation, he touched them, caressed them, leafed through them; in bookstores he exulted, he
officiated;
it was something like enchantment, idolatry. So much enthusiasm presupposes a great depth of generosity, a defect of which one cannot determine the profusion, the exuberance, the prodigality — all qualities thanks to which the mind
imitates
and exceeds nature. I have never been able to read Balzac; to tell the truth, I stopped trying on the threshold of adolescence. His world is closed to me, inaccessible; I never manage to enter it; I am refractory to it. How many times has Eliade tried to convert me! He first read the
Comédie humaine
in Bucharest; he reread it in Paris in 1947; perhaps he is rereading it in Chicago now. He has always loved ample, exuberant novels that unfold on several levels, accompanying the “endless” melody, the massive presence of time, the accumulation of details and the abundance of complex and divergent themes; on the other hand, he has no use for anything, in letters, that is
exercise
, the anemic and refined games aesthetes play, the overripe,
faisandé
aspect of certain productions lacking in instinct and in juice. But one can also explain his passion for Balzac in another way. There are two kinds of minds: those that love process and those that love the result. The first are attached to the unfolding, the stages, the successive expressions of thought or of action; the second, to the final expression, except for which nothing matters. By temperament I have always been inclined toward the latter, toward a Chamfort, a Joubert, a Lichtenberg, who give you a formula without revealing the path that has led them to it. Whether out of modesty or out of sterility, they cannot free themselves from the superstition of concision; they want to say everything in a page, a phrase, a word; sometimes they succeed, though rarely, it must be said: laconism must resign itself to silence if it wants to avoid a fake enigmatic profundity. Still, when one lives this quintessentialized — or sclerotic — form of expression, it is difficult to wrest oneself away from it and to care much for any other variety. He who has frequented the moralists for a long time will have difficulty understanding Balzac, but he can divine the reasons of those who have a great weakness for him, who derive from his universe a sensation of life, of expansion, of freedom, unknown to the lover of maxims, a minor genre in which perfection is identified with asphyxia.

However distinct Eliade’s taste for huge syntheses, it is just as clear that he might also have excelled in the fragment, in the brief and brilliant essay; indeed, he has done so: witness his first productions, that multitude of succinct texts he published both before his departure for India and after his return. In 1927 and 1928, he contributed regularly to a. Bucharest daily. I was living in a provincial town, where I was completing my secondary studies; the paper was delivered there at eleven in the morning. During recess I would rush to the kiosk to buy it, and that was how I became familiar with the more or less exotic names of Asvaghosha, Ksoma of Koros, Buonaiutti, Eugenio d’Ors, and so many more. I much preferred the articles about foreigners because their works, not to be found in my little town, seemed so mysterious and definitive; happiness for me was the hope of reading them someday. Eventual disappointment was therefore remote, whereas it was within arm’s reach with the native writers. How much erudition, how much vigor and verve were poured out in those fugitive articles! I am sure that they were throbbing with life, with interest, and that I am not exaggerating their value by the distortions of memory. I read them as an enthusiast, it is true, but as a lucid enthusiast. What I particularly valued was the young Eliade’s gift for making every idea vivid, contagious, for investing each with a halo of hysteria — but a hysteria that was positive, stimulating, healthy. It is clear that this gift is entirely that of a certain time of life, and that even if one still possesses it beyond that time, one prefers to display it only when one takes up the history of religions. . . . Nowhere was it more evident than in those “Letters to a Provincial Reader” that Eliade wrote after his return from India and that appeared in installments in the same daily. I don’t think I missed a single one of those letters; I read them all — indeed, we all read them, for they concerned us, they were addressed to us. Most often we were taken to task, and each of us waited our turn. One day mine came. I was invited to do nothing less than liquidate my obsessions, cease invading the periodicals with my grim notions, deal with other problems than that of death, my fixation then as always. Would I yield to such a challenge? I had no intention of doing so. I was reluctant to admit that one could address any problem other than this one: I had just published a text on the “vision of death in northern art,” and I planned to persevere in the same direction. In my heart of hearts I blamed my friend for not identifying himself with something, indeed for identifying himself with nothing, for trying to be
everything
since he was unable to be something — for being, in short, incapable of fanaticism, of delirium, of “depth,” by which I meant the faculty of giving oneself up to an obsession and standing by it. I imagined that to be
something
was to assume an attitude totally, and therefore to reject availability, entertainment, any perpetual renewal To create a world for oneself, a limited absolute, and to cling to it with all one’s might — that seemed to me the ultimate intellectual duty. It was the notion of commitment, of
engagement
, if you will, but engagement that had the inner life as its sole object, a commitment to myself and not to others. I reproached Eliade for being elusive because he was so open, so mobile, so enthusiastic. I also reproached him for not being interested exclusively in India; it seemed to me that India could effectively replace all the rest, and that it was a falling-off to be concerned with anything else. All these grievances were embodied in an article with the aggressive title “The Man without a Destiny,” in which I assailed the instability of this figure I so admired, his inability to be a man of one idea; I set forth the negative aspect of each of his virtues (which is the classical way of being unjust and disloyal to someone), I blamed him for mastering his moods and his passions, for being able to use them as he liked, for spiriting away the tragic, and for being unaware of “fatality.” This formal attack had the defect of being too general: it might have been launched against anyone. Why should a theoretical mind, a man absorbed by problems, figure as a hero or a monster? There is no affinity of substance between ideas and tragedy. But at the time I thought that every idea must incarnate itself or turn into a lyric cry. Convinced that discouragement was the very sign of awakening, of awareness, I castigated my friend for being too optimistic, for being interested in too many things, and for manifesting an activity incompatible with the demands of true knowledge. Because I was abulic, I believed myself more advanced than he, as if my abulic were the result of a spiritual conquest or a will-to-wisdom. I remember telling him once that in a previous life he must have fed entirely on greens, to be able to preserve so much freshness and trust, and so much innocence, too. I could not forgive him for the fact that I felt older than he; I held him responsible for my acrimony and my fiascos, and it seemed to me that he had acquired his hopes at the expense of mine. How could he function in so many different sectors? It was his curiosity — in which I saw a demon or, with Saint Augustine, a “disease” — that was my invariable grievance. But in him curiosity was not a disease; on the contrary, it was a sign of health. And I blamed him for that health and envied it at the same time. But here I must be permitted a little indiscretion.

I should probably not have dared to write “The Man without a Destiny” if a special circumstance had not determined me to do so. We had a mutual friend, an actress of great talent who, unfortunately for her, was obsessed with metaphysical problems. This obsession eventually compromised both her talent and her career. On the stage, right in the middle of a scene, her essential preoccupations would overwhelm her, invade her, seize her mind, so that what she was saying suddenly seemed of an intolerable inanity. Her performances suffered; she was much too obsessed to be able to change, or to want to change. She was not dismissed, merely given minor parts that would cause her no difficulties at all She took advantage of this to devote herself to her interrogations and her speculative tastes, bringing to them all the passion she had deployed in the theater. Seeking answers, she turned in her confusion to Eliade, then — less inspired — to me. One day, unable to stand it anymore, he sent her away and refused to see her again. She came to tell me her disappointments, and after that I saw her often, listening as she talked. She was dazzling, it is true, but so all-absorbing, so wearing, so insistent, that after each of our meetings I would go to the nearest bistro and get drunk, exasperated and fascinated. A peasant girl (for she was an autodidact who had grown up in a godforsaken village) who talked to you about Nothingness with such brio, such fervor! She had learned several languages, dabbled in theosophy, read the great poets, experienced a good number of disappointments, though none had affected her so much as the last. Her merits, like her torments, were such that at the beginning of my friendship with her, it seemed to me inexplicable and inadmissible that Eliade should have treated her so cavalierly. Regarding his behavior toward her as inexcusable, I wrote, to avenge her, “The Man without a Destiny.” When the article appeared on the first page of a monthly, she was delighted by it, read it aloud in my presence as if it were some glamorous
tirade
, and then proceeded to analyze it paragraph by paragraph. “You’ve never written anything better,” she told me — misplaced praise she was actually bestowing on herself, for was it not she who had somehow provoked the article and provided me with its elements? Subsequently I understood Eliade’s weariness and exasperation with her, and the absurdity of my excessive attack, which he never held against me, which even amused him. This character trait deserves note, for experience has taught me that writers — all afflicted with prodigious memory — are incapable of forgetting an overly wounding impertinence.