Searching for Cioran

Paris, 1995

Paris, 1995 January 11. A month later. After Bloomington and California, now Paris. Listening to music on Radio Classique on a dark, rainy afternoon, cozy in this quaint but slightly ghostly apartment—Mircea Eliade’s Paris apartment, lent to me by his (second) wife, Cristinel. His spirit seems to be floating around. The room is filled with pictures of him; there is a big one on the mantel from which he stares with forbidding eyes. I prefer to sit so that I don’t see it. His library is so impressive I want to cry. I picked up a collection of mystical texts. Since translating Tears and Saints, I’ve become very interested in mysticism. Odd to be in this apartment as a chronicler of these people’s 206 Memoirs of a Publishing Scoundrel lives. Eliade. Cioran. I feel like an intruder; I hope I shall do them and myself justice. A difficult task lies ahead of me. Simone has promised to let me read Cioran’s papers before she donates them to the Doucet Foundation. But when is the appropriate moment to ask her? She’s so preoccupied with Cioran in the hospital, all her energies focused on keeping him alive. Tactics, wait and see. Patience. March 6. Back from Switzerland where a four-day snowstorm turned the sublime but civilized landscape into a muffled, white claustrophobic world. Felt the last lines of Joyce’s “The Dead”: “His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” Today I went to see C. at the hospital. I find him disturbingly weaker, with a pale, thin face, the cheeks sunk in, the chin protruding like a bird’s beak, his green eyes like washed watercolors. He’s been running a low fever for ten days now. His eyes stare intently into space without a particular object to focus on. Sometimes, a glint of recognition and a smile at a familiar face—or is it just a pleasing face? Does he recognize and identify? When Ken came to visit, he stared at his face, a strange man’s face, very intently, searchingly, with a worried look as if trying to place him in time and not succeeding . The private nurse, Ana, a stocky, no-nonsense woman, tries to engage him in simple conversations. He answers docilely or politely with a “yes” or “no” or just a move of his head. He is like a little boy who wants to be good and then maybe the nightmare will go away. The impish spirit is still there, though. Ana jokes about the many women eagerly coming to visit him, he smiles and gives her a wink. I hear about one admirer I haven’t seen yet, a pale, almost albino blonde Austrian who once in a while arrives from Vienna, stalks the hospital, sneaks into his room when nobody is around, sits staring at him or smothers him with kisses. She is apparently a crazed fan who for years has kept coming back, followed him around in the streets or waited at his door for a glimpse of him. Once, on a cold winter night, Simone noticed her as they went out for dinner, and she was still at the corner of the street when they returned, so she took pity on the poor woman and asked her up for a cup of tea. March 11. Dinner out with Ken and Simone. She tells about the summer of 1947 in Dieppe. After some time together, she left to go and visit her parents, and he went to a nearby village to translate Mallarmé into Romanian. Failing to do so, he decided to give up Romanian and rode his bicycle back to Paris, where he started the Précis de décomposition. He has mentioned this episode of his “conversion” in many interviews. It is part of the Cioran lore, so to speak. The year is different, however: 1945 for him, 1947 for her. She also mentions something I have not heard before. That same year, Paris, 1995 207 they went to a lecture by an Indian mathematician at the Sorbonne. As they came out, C. reasserted his decision to give up Romanian. His mind was made up, he said. Had Romanian been universal, like a mathematical language, things would have...