Searching for Cioran

Prelude

Prelude imagining cioran In the era of biography, no one wraps up his wounds without running the risk of having the bandage torn off and the wound exposed for all to see; and if they fail to expose the wound, we go away disappointed. —Cioran, The Temptation to Exist The following pages are adapted from an informal diary I kept of my acquaintance with Cioran, and his companion, Simone Boué, during the last years of his life, during his slow decline and final passing away in a geriatric hospital in Paris in June 1995. They also record my tribulations as a biographer, a member of what the narrator in The Aspern Papers calls the “dreadful race of publishing scoundrels.” My project required more than just burrowing for documents in libraries and archives. Like Henry James’s scholar-turned-thief, I needed the tact of a diplomat and the nerve of a smuggler, besides the ordinary skills of a translator, critic, and cultural historian. What began as a scholarly endeavor soon grew into a full-blown drama around a dying man’s bed. 152 Memoirs of a Publishing Scoundrel The passage of years has only confirmed Cioran’s insight that we live in an “era of biography.” Fiction writers now jostle with biographers and memoirists in the practice of “life writing.” But whereas novelists try to dress—somehow—what Cioran called the “wounds of life,” biographers still try to tear away the bandage and expose festering horrors to the cruel eyes of an avid reading public. Countless importunities, indelicacies , and indiscretions are committed in the name of truth. The specter of Henry James’s snoopy narrator in The Aspern Papers stalks the would-be biographer, partly as threat, partly as mockery. I became a biographer by accident. In 1988, E. M. Cioran first refused, then agreed, to let me translate into English his first Romanian book, On the Heights of Despair (1934). I finished it in the summer of 1990, while on vacation in Mallorca. Every day, exhausted and exhilarated after hours of work on Cioran’s text, I would take my solitary evening walk along the rugged Mallorcan coast at Colonia de San Pere, watching the sun set behind the Sierra Tramuntana across the Bay of Alcudia. I was not alone. Cioran had already started to obsess me. In the blaze engulfing the mountains, I saw apocalyptic images from his Heights of Despair. My ears burned with the exalted, raging words of an angry young man. I found the mixture of defiance, outrage, and vulnerability in his youthful, passionate prose extremely erotic; my daily struggle to master it had become like a sexual tryst. Imagining the author is part of any reading experience. I began imagining Cioran when I started translating him. For me, at the time, Cioran was a totally unknown author, since I had not even known his full name until shortly before I was handed his book to translate. I could not have been a more innocent or more ignorant reader in my first literary encounter with Cioran. In Communist Romania where I grew up, the past Cioran belonged to, the interwar period, was a mystifying dumb-show, both shadowy and shady. People raised their eyebrows, rolled their eyes, grimaced suggestively, but nobody talked. Especially about Cioran. He was persona non grata in Romania from 1947 to 1989. His name was not pronounced, his works were banned. Yet I suspect that my ignorance was to some extent self-imposed. My first impulse when I arrived in the United States in the late 1970s was to break all ties with my Romanian past. I earnestly, and perhaps naively, tried to erase the bruising memories of the tragic and absurd Communist world from which I had escaped. I suffered from what the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz ironically calls “the privilege of coming from strange lands where it is difficult to escape history.” I didn’t know it then, but I was repeating, in my own, less flamboyant way, Cioran’s gesture of exile thirty years earlier . He too had completely severed his Romanian connection, even ceasing to speak his native language. But by the time Cioran arrived in my life in the late 1980s, I had understood that it was difficult to escape history, that in fact I had a moral obligation Prelude 153 not to. Looking into Cioran’s past was a unique opportunity to recover...