Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

In 1936, however, he had written that “to me, it is a matter of complete indifference whether Mussolini is or is not a tyrant. Only one thing interests me: that this man has transformed Italy in fifteen years, turning a third-rate country into one of the world powers of today.” That was five years before Paul de Man, a young and addled intellectual on the make in Belgium, penned the anti-Semitic, profascist newspaper articles that recently provoked such a furor. But Eliade was older and wiser; and not least for that reason, his views of the time, when he believed sincerely in Mussolini and in Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (the “Captain” of the Iron Guard), deserve the same scrutiny. Of course, Eliade could not predict the terrible consequences of his views; he had been obsessed since his youth with the relation between the sacred and the profane. And it is difficult to know whether his views evolved in the many years that he lived in the West. What we do know, through his own writings, is that his skepticism of the Western model of democracy never left him.

Eliade’s brilliant scholarly work concerned myths and archetypes, and so it is not surprising that, despite his persistent anti-communism, the scholar admitted to an interviewer that Mao could be seen as “the last emperor,” “the guardian and interpreter of the right doctrine and, in everyday life, the person responsible for his people’s peace and well-being”; or that “the myth of Stalin reveals a nostalgia for the archetype”; or that Lenin’s tomb, though it is not at all religious in essence, became symbolic of a “lost, or confusedly desired, higher state.” It would have been a welcome surprise if Eliade, in his later autobiographical writing, had come to contradict his earlier positions, to reassess his involvement with totalitarian ideology. Surely his Journals were his last chance, but he did not take it.

Perhaps some exoneration will be found in Eliade’s unpublished writings. In any event, in the context of the recent political changes in Eastern Europe, which were stimulated and led not least by writers and artists who fought courageously against tyranny, the portrait of Eliade that we now possess is especially regrettable. For, as we know, the number of intellectuals who were on “the wrong side” in the last half-century is not negligible. Even now, during the chaotic transition to a civil society, there are intellectuals in those newly liberated societies who speak about the necessity of “good doctrine” and “iron discipline,” about the need for a powerful state, a sacred authority, and so on. The fight against the canonization of Power is as difficult as ever. Had Eliade testified truthfully to his involvement with totalitarian ideas and actions, his testimony would have had a great impact, especially at this moment.

II

The fourth volume of Eliade’s journals, a book of modest length, ends shortly before his death in 1986. It fits smoothly into the series, and has the same structure: the most important events of the day are laconically noted and linked to his teaching, to his scholarly and literary work, to his travels, to conferences, and to the people he meets. As Larry McMurtry noted about an earlier volume, “This is not a journal of personality, much less of gossip. Eliade doesn’t give the impression that he is too good, either for personality or for gossip, but merely that he is too busy, too absorbed by the work at hand.”

Though Eliade’s journal summarizes his every activity (it even includes a datebook, which it sometimes resembles), it does reveal moments of melancholy, even of suffering. With advancing age, discretion, impersonality, and other strategies of evasion are sometimes abandoned. In the entry for November 19, 1983, for example, we find the following admission: “I can’t lift heavy books from the shelves, I can’t rummage the file folders …. Why have I been punished for — and through — those things I have loved all my life: books and writing?” Melancholy is usually associated with a lack of energy: “I suffer from melancholy provoked, as usual, by … what I must do now immediately.”

The reader of Journal IV is often aware of the burdens of age and illness, the diminution of the extraordinary capacity for work that Eliade had maintained throughout his long life. The presentiment of the end is stoically treated with daily intellectual activity, and an often Olympian effort at retrospection. “I’m afraid my exaggerated [candor] and [modesty] minimalize a certain conduct (from earliest youth) which was not lacking in grandeur and nobility,” Eliade wrote in June 1980.

If there are underlying themes running through the feverish daily activity described in the Journal, they are the two subjects that obsessed him, in this last period as in his whole life: books and Romania. As Wendy Doniger correctly emphasizes in her affectionate epilogue to Journal IV, “The primary focus is books; people come second.” The drama of the approaching end focuses more on the books that Eliade will not be able to write than on the people from whom he must part. Here he speaks of the inevitability of the end, there he divides up his library with supreme calm and meticulous care; and together such passages create a moving portrait of the essential scholar. The people close to him must have found it difficult to accept his devotion to the books he lived with so closely, but books were the ruling passion of his life, from an adolescence of insatiable reading (he developed a system of gradually cutting back to a minimum of sleep in order to make more time for reading and writing) through his insomniac old age, when the magic in books still had the power to invigorate him.

For a student of magic like Eliade, there was an odd premonitory relationship, an interdependence, between the destruction of books and the coming of death. A dream that he recorded on July 21, 1979 included typically surrealistic scenes: an elegant gentleman in a coffee shop surrounded by a multitude of bizarre little animals, a manuscript reduced to a sandwich for mice that cannot be stopped from eating it, his own futile panic, and so on. This nightmare came true, in a way, in the strange fire that destroyed his office library at Chicago’s Meadville/Lombard Theological School in December 1985, four months before his death. Dream and reality seemed to join in a somber warning that time was running out.

It seems probable, as Doniger suggests, that Eliade considered his work more important than his life, and that he saw the destruction of his books as a warning that “it is not long now.” Still, he did not conclude that his life had lost its meaning, and he published his many memoirs and journals. This perdurability can also be seen in the relationship that Eliade maintained with Romania, and with what might be called Romanianism. To the end of his life, he wrote his literary works and his memoirs in Romanian. His relationship with the Romanian language and culture (as well as with Romanians living at home and abroad — it is notable how many he met with, or kept in touch with, from like-minded thinkers to communist officials or former Legionaries, from admirers and students of his work, friends and relations, to all kinds of strangers) reflects a lively and lasting interest, and more, a deep sense of affiliation.

In a meticulous monograph on Eliade, Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, which appeared in 1988, Mac Linscott Ricketts, who is also the translator of some of these volumes, made a useful observation about Romanianism:

Romanianism … was a term that in the mind of the [Romanian] public was associated with the ultra-right-wing political philosophies and programs. All the parties of the extreme right … invoked it in their propaganda. Ordinarily it signified chauvinism, anti-Semitism, policies for restraint of minorities, anti-communism, and enthusiasm for Italian fascism and German National Socialism. Eliade believed the word, which he found in the writings of nineteenth-century nationalists he admired. … had signified originally something “above” politics, and that it had been debased by political parties in the twentieth century.