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

The fact of Eliade’s nationalist affiliation, its magnitude and its durability, should be stressed not only because he spent more than half of his life outside Romania, writing in other languages and living as an émigré of international renown, but also because he represents a case of broad significance for Romanian intellectual life, even for the fate of Romania as a whole today, yesterday, and perhaps tomorrow. Eliade was not a scholar who built an impenetrable wall of books between himself and the real world. He was always concerned with the fate of his native land, and he possessed a clear vision of the social and political ideal that he wished for Romania.

It is understandable that Eliade often thought, toward the end of his life, about his relationship with the country that he left but could never abandon. “I kept thinking of what I would have suffered had I remained in the homeland as professor and writer,” he noted on October 10, 1984. “If it hadn’t been for that felix culpa: my adoration for Nae Ionescu and all the baleful consequences (in 1935–40) of that relationship,” he continued with odd candor. The thought was repeated (and the formulation about his “happy guilt,” too) in the last pages of his Journal, on August 29, 1985: “I think of myself: without that felix culpa I’d have remained in the homeland. At the best, I’d have died of tuberculosis in a prison.”

Now, Nae Ionescu was, in the words of Professor Virgil Nemoianu of Catholic University of America, “a minor but lively Socratic thinker [who] advocated a kind of vitalistic existentialism (an irrationalism that was not foreign to concepts borrowed from Orthodox Christianity) … and ended up as a supporter of the Iron Guard ….” It would be naïve to imagine that Eliade’s adoration of this mentor of the fascists in Romania was the only reason he could have been arrested and convicted in the postwar period (although it would have been sufficient cause). If an excuse for his arrest and conviction by the communists was needed — thousands were arrested without ever knowing what their crimes were supposed to have been — it could easily have been found in his journalistic activity during the time that the Legion of the Archangel Michael, and after it the Iron Guard, was active in Romanian political life.

The Legion of the Archangel Michael was the original name of the Romanian fascist movement that later became famous as the Iron Guard. Among the many crimes it committed was the often mentioned barbarous “ritual murder,” on January 22, 1941, of 200 Jews at the Bucharest slaughterhouse, as the “mystical” murderers sang hymns. (Marshal Ion Antonescu, once the fascists’ ally, eventually dissolved the Iron Guard in 1941, though anti-Semitic murders did not cease under his military dictatorship.) At that time the left-wing press called Eliade a “fascist” and a “Legionnaire.” Indeed, a number of serious charges could have been brought against him after the war by the communist authorities. There were his attacks on communism and on the Soviet Union, his disputes with the left-wing press, and his scandalous sanctification of the “martyrs” of the Spanish Civil War (those who fought for Franco, naturally).

Just as serious was Eliade’s eulogy of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, the dictator of Portugal, whom he apparently wanted to propose as a “model” for Antonescu. His book on Salazar was written and published in 1942, when he worked at the Romanian embassy in Lisbon. In other words Eliade’s file would have been filled to bursting if the communist authorities had wanted to justify severe punishment. Of the accusations of “fascism” continually brought against Eliade by the left-wing press, Ricketts writes shrewdly that “in a sense, Eliade’s critics — unjust though they were — saw more clearly than he himself the direction in which his thinking was taking him.”

If his health had withstood the hard years of imprisonment, Eliade would have been freed in the 1960s, like others who shared his way of thinking, and like them he would have been the “beneficiary” of the far more malignant policy of “retrieved” values that formed the basis of the new cultural policy of Romanian communism. He would have been allowed to publish at least some portions of his old or his new books. He would have been favored with respect and with the “tolerance” reserved for “useful” Romanian intellectuals. He might even have received the calculated “encouragement” of communist officials, who found the old ideas of their former right-wing nationalist opponents useful sources of justification for their own new ideological orientation.

For the ideological apparatus of Ceau sescu’s Party initiated, in the mid-1960s, a systematic study of the Iron Guard experiment. The communists envied the Guard’s former popularity, and they adopted its slogans as their own: “the national revolution” in place of the “international” one; the totalitarian state centered around a Conduc ator, or Leader; the discrediting of democracy; anti-intellectualism; the repression of liberalism; and so on. The enemy of Ceau sescu’s nationalist-Communist Party was not right-wing extremism, it was democracy. The democratic and rationalist directions in Romanian thought (that is, the principles of the democratic-bourgeois revolution of 1848, the sarcastic humor of the great Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale, the legacy of the important literary critic and social thinker Eugen Lovinescu, and so on) came to be a favorite target of the “witch-hunters” in Bucharest, along with the “decadent influences” of the West, around which the omnipresent Securitate tried to throw a cordon sanitaire.

But Eliade never returned to Romania. In the West, his status as an anti-communist probably protected him for a while from unpleasant questions about his relationship to fascism. In the end, however, the questions came. They were raised not by the communist enemy, but by the democratic society that Eliade had always regarded with deep skepticism. And they required a reply, not least because public opinion is stimulated by unsatisfactory answers to probe further. Eliade’s confrontation with his past was not pleasant, even if it was not as dramatic as it might have been under a totalitarian system.

III

Echoes of these confrontations appear in the last volume of the Journals. On June 6, 1979, Eliade writes:

I learnt that Furio Jesi has devoted a chapter of calumnies and insults to me in his book that has come out recently, Cultura di destra [Culture of the Right]. I learned long ago that Jesi considers me an anti-Semite, fascist, Iron Guardist, etc. Probably he accuses me also of Buchenwald …. It makes no difference to me if he abuses me in his book (I shan’t read it, and therefore I won’t respond to it).

His annoyance is so great that he drops his cool scholarly attitude and denounces as libelous a book that he has not even read, that he does not intend to read, so as not to be obliged to reply to it; and he invokes Buchenwald in a wry tone that is, to put it mildly, inappropriate.

A few weeks later, on July 4, 1979, he has resumed his blasé mask, and we find an evasive reply in his Journal. “Barb neagr relates to me that Jean Servier said to him recently: that from Israel they have received precise instructions that I am to be criticized and attacked as a fascist, etc. Jean Servier, says “Barb neagr , was indignant …. I believe it, but there’s nothing to be done.” Is this annoyance — passed off as irony, transmuted into tired self-pity — a sign of vulnerability, or guilt, or some higher detachment from the claims of ordinary life? To those who knew Eliade as an affable émigré of delicate sensibilities and stylized civility, always sociable and receptive (“the last man in the world to have a totalitarian thought,” said one of his friends), such accusations were inconceivable. But it is not easy to triumph over such an accusation, if you cannot prove it false.