Cioran as a black sheep

 

At a table next to Sartre, who confidently draws on his pipe, sits a quiet young man, chain-smoking cheap Gauloises. Modestly but correctly dressed with coat and tie, his fedora hat carefully placed on top of a heavy navy overcoat folded next to him on the red velvet bench, there is a vaguely foreign, un-French air about this man, something formal and old-fashioned which strikes an odd note in the bohemian atmosphere of the café. He has a remarkable face: a head of light-colored hair like a lion’s mane, brushed backward, piercing green eyes under a permanently frowning brow and a pinched, willful mouth set in a square jaw which he pushes forward in a moue of great determination. He comes every day, from eight to twelve in the morning, two to eight in the afternoon, and nine to eleven at night. “Like a clerk.”1 He smokes and listens to the heated arguments at the next table. He always sits next to Sartre but never says a word to him. Simone de Beauvoir is also there. Whenever she takes out a cigarette, the young man stands up, bends towards her ceremoniously, and, still silent, lights it for her. She thanks him with a nod of her head; he nods back respectfully and sits down. Every day that winter the silent ceremony is repeated. No one ever asks who the foreign-looking young man is. Every day, he sits without a word next to the “idol” of the French cultural scene. Is he never “tempted” to speak to the idol?2

The young man’s name is Emil Cioran. At the time we see him eavesdropping on Sartre and his group, he is a Romanian doctoral student, in Paris on a renewable fellowship since 1937. But he hasn’t yet written a single line of his thesis. He never will, in fact. He is not really a student; he is a writer. Nor is he as young as he seems: though thirty-three is not old for a doctoral student, some of Cioran’s apparent youth is a feature of his foreignness, which he will cultivate as a permanent aspect of his persona.

He is not even a French writer, yet. His equivocal position on the margins of Sartre’s group, gravitating around the axis of French intellectual authority, always silent but always present, sums up this ambitious and divided young man, in quest of a center that will focus his own creative energy. In Romania, he is well known, the published and controversial author of five books and numerous articles. In Paris, in 1943–44, he is nobody, just an exile from Eastern Europe, hoping to make a name for himself in the City of Light. He is finishing a book about Nazi-occupied Paris as symbol of the final decay of Western civilization. But the book, written in Romanian, will remain, forgotten or abandoned, in manuscript form until its publication in 1991. For the young Romanian suddenly decides, the very next summer, to abandon his native language and to write henceforth in French, at last to break into, as it were, the conversations of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. (...)

In retrospect, young Cioran’s silent position next to Sartre at the Flore was not at all accidental. Cioran chose it deliberately. He watched and waited like a spy, quietly measuring his forces against Sartre’s to find out his own worth. “My path was the reverse of Sartre’s,” he said later, even though his essay on Sartre in the Précis, “On an Entrepreneur of Ideas,” shows how much Sartre’s model was on his mind.7 He could speak as well as Sartre, he had read much more, he would write as well as they—Sartre’s circle—were writing. His silence was not shyness or intimidation, but inordinate pride. With his body strategically placed on the margins of fame, Cioran made a statement. He was nearly inside the magic circle of Sartre and French cultural life, which had enormous prestige in the eyes of European intellectuals, especially marginal Europeans like Romanians. Just outside the circle, or rather on its border-line, the ambitious interloper worked silently and tenaciously in isolation for another five long years—scribbling away like Dostoevsky’s underground man, in the cheapest hotel rooms in the Latin Quarter—to gain the place at the table he had marked out for himself, next to Sartre, publicly recognized in France. But unlike Dostoevsky’s underground man, whose “revenges” were never more than pathetic failures to impress imaginary opponents, Cioran’s “revenge” was a blazing success. Hailed by Nadeau as a “twilight thinker,” by André Maurois as the new “moralist or immoralist,”8 by Claude Mauriac for “masterly language . . . closer to Pascal than Vigny,”9 the Romanian-born Cioran had not merely arrived on the French literary scene; he blazed across it like the meteor, symbol of obscurely powerful poetic genius, in Mallarmé’s poem, “calme bloc icibas chu d’un desastre obscur”10 [calm [granite] block fallen down here from some dark disaster].

This is the story my book has to tell: how an unknown young man from the margins of Europe, with a fanatic will to transform himself, achieved fame “in a country where prestige is everything.” Tnis biography covers the crucial first stages of his career, from 1911, the year of his birth, to 1949, the year of his consecration as a French writer, which marks his final break with his Romanian roots.
(...)
Emil Cioran first saw the light of day on April 8, 1911, the second of three children born to Emilian Cioran, one of the Orthodox village priests and his twenty-two-year-old wife, Elvira Comanici. They already had a three-year-old daughter, Virginia (Gica), and two years later Cioran’s younger brother, Aurel (Relu), would be born. As the oldest son, Cioran was given his father’s name.
Emil(ian) is not a traditional peasant name. It is a Roman, Latin name—as are Virginia and Aurel(ian)—chosen by the parents expressly for its Roman connection.

The choice of a Roman name for a Romanian child in multi-national Transylvania of the Austro-Hungarian empire was a political statement. Like many other children of educated Romanians, the Cioran children were given names that were meant, first, to affirm the Latin origins of the Romanian people, as opposed to the non-Latin origin of the other nationalities of the region, the Hungarians and Germans, and, second, to suggest that as the descendants of the Romans, the original colonizers of the province, the Romanians had more right to exist on its territory than the other populations, who arrived later during the Middle Ages.

Cioran’s first name thus already marks the newborn child twice, investing him with a split identity. As a Roman name, it claims that he is a son or citizen of Rome, legitimizes his birth, placing him in a noble, heroic lineage. However, as a Romanian name—that is, the kind of name used by a certain class of Romanians—it sets him apart as marginal and lower caste in another empire, the Austro-Hungarian, where the Romanians’ right to be is questioned and their existence merely tolerated. In its former capacity, the name participates in a national fiction of self-definition and survival; in the latter, it denotes a historical reality.

On the other hand, his family name marks him literally as a black sheep even among his own people. According to the genealogist Mihai Rădulescu, “cioran” derives from a Slavic word for black and was applied to black sheep (and their shepherds) who ranged far away beyond the Carpathians in winter, sometimes as far as the Crimea.19 If any Cioran might be said to have fulfilled the destiny of his etymology, it was E. M. Cioran, whom we might call a “black sheep” in spades.

Furthermore, generations of Romanians in Transylvania had been haunted by a need for self-definition which they hoped would lead to political self-determination.

Like all other Romanian nationals born in pre–World War I Transylvania, Cioran inherited at his birth an “identity problem” which was existential in a literal sense, since the very existence of Romanians in the Austro-Hungarian province was questioned on political and historical rather than metaphysical ground.

Searching for Cioran Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston