Searching for Cioran

Paris, 1992–1994

Paris, 1992–1994 1992 May 13. Two evenings in a row with Cioran and Simone Boué. Yesterday I went just to say “hello” and stayed for supper, though I was dead tired after my trip from the States. Shared their potage. Simone is a great cook, the potage delicious. They are an irresistible couple, warm, easy-going, full of charm and tenderness for each other. We talked a lot; we laughed a lot. Today I was there again, from 6 to 11:30. Big dinner. I’m worried about him as an informant. His past is for him “de la préhistoire,” literally so. She is now his memory as far as dates, events, and names are concerned. She’s a good 158 Memoirs of a Publishing Scoundrel storyteller. He listens to her with a look of surprise as if the things she recounts did not happen to him but to someone else. He seems detached and estranged from his own past: the stranger he’s always wanted to be, now more than ever. Only now, ironically, not because he wills it, but because he cannot help it. He’s ill, no doubt about that, mind slipping out of control. The illness must have started about two years ago. I remember an incident which seemed inexplicable at the time. We had arranged for him to meet me at my hotel one day to work on my translation of The Heights of Despair. The rendezvous was set for 2:00 pm. I was very nervous. Working with the grand old man for the first time, what an experience that would be! Two o’clock came and went, and then 2:30, 3:00. No sign of Cioran. I went out in the street to look for him. I went back inside and asked if there was a message. Finally, I worked up my courage and called the apartment. He answered sheepishly and apologetically. He had gotten lost and had returned home. He was very sorry. I couldn’t believe my ears. The apology was so fantastic that it couldn’t but be true, and yet how strange! Lost in familiar territory, a fifteen-minute walk from the Odéon to the Panthéon, through all his old haunts. I didn’t make anything of it then. I asked him about Tears and Saints. What made him write it? At first, he couldn’t remember he had written it at all. “Which one of my books is that? When did I write it?” I reminded him that as a student he wanted to write a thesis on tears. He was glad to hear about that incident from his youth, just as he likes listening to Simone’s stories. She told me the story about the publication of Tears and Saints in Romania, how the typesetter was shocked by its content and took it to the director of the press to make sure he wanted to publish such an incendiary book, and the worried publisher then refused to publish it. It’s much better if I don’t ask specific questions about his past. He seems suspicious of anything that requires precise answers. He likes to talk on general themes. One has only to get him started. Today I mentioned exile. His interest revived, he talked at great length. Exile has been a lifelong obsession of his. His goal in life, to become a stranger. He talked at length about the “voluptuousness of exile,” the exquisite pain of being from nowhere, a main theme in his work. I asked him to connect this obsession with something specific in his personal history. He couldn’t or wouldn’t say. But he repeated that exile was for him a mental attitude which he had intentionally cultivated all his life. Exile as a means to ensure intellectual independence. That’s a clue; an oblique reference to his youthful involvement with the Romanian Legionnaire movement and his subsequent rejection of it? Leaving Romania was his escape; he never wanted to go back there. He likes being an apatride—a man without a country—a social status that best suits his frame of mind. Only an accident of fate brought him to France. He was temperamentally Paris, 1992–1994 159 more suited for Spain. However, he feels grateful toward France for harboring him, though he is not particularly fond of French culture. He explicitly distanced himself...