Cioran Notebooks

 A moralist is someone who appeals to the better side of human nature, an orator mindful of the primary choice between good and evil, someone who reminds us of our basic obligations and condemns our failings and mistakes. It’s a person who speaks like an angel. So at any rate—perhaps rather naively—we’re accustomed to thinking in Poland. In France, though, a moralist is a writer who speaks ill of others. The best moralist is he who hits hardest. This worthy tradition was born under the sign of La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort (and the greatest of them all, Pascal!); it is a tradition of malicious mockery that conceals a rarely expressed maximalist ideal of humanity with religious overtones. In the twentieth century it found a successor who didn’t resemble his venerable progenitors in the slightest (it’s true that Cioran notes with satisfaction that Prince La Rochefoucauld was a timid person by nature). This was a poor immigrant from Romania, an Orthodox priest’s son, a typical Central European intellectual in some respects, one of those scribes nesting in Parisian attics whose source of livelihood and precise origins are unknown; is he from Budapest or Bucharest? (The Parisians never ask in any case, since they couldn’t care less.)

An unusual book appeared in France in November of this year—the posthumously published diaries of Emil Cioran, entitled Cahiers, that is, Notebooks, which were prepared for publication by the writer’s longtime companion, Simone Boué (herself no longer living). The book caused a sensation for a simple reason. Cioran, the famed author of fascinating philosophical essays, bleak, exceptionally pessimistic works translated into many languages and grounded in the principle that “only he who was never born is happy,” suddenly produces what may well be his greatest book two years after his death (his dates are 1911–1995). It doesn’t precisely contradict his earlier work; still it serves as a kind of corrective, it supplements the earlier writings in fascinating ways. Cioran emerges here as a religious thinker, a personality richer than his previous essays had suggested. The earlier essays called to mind a scrupulously pruned French garden, while the diary reveals at times a different person, less consistent than he’d seemed earlier, a different, more complex philosopher, even at times a poet.

The Notebooks—they span the years 1957–72, so they don’t go all the way to the end—were published, like Kafka’s work, against the wishes of the author, who didn’t want his private notes made public (although he didn’t burn them! In our times you can’t rely on others, you have to destroy your manuscripts yourself). The book is uncommonly irritating—as it should be, a personal diary that doesn’t bother anyone has clearly been falsified. Cioran irritates us with his extreme narcissism (the book contains at least two hundred self-definitions), his ill humor, his hypochondria, his radical misanthropy: he experiences a shock of revulsion at the sight of common humanity each time he happens to enter a subway car or suburban train. This narcissism distinguishes him from La Rochefoucauld, who never wrote about himself.

He irritates us both with the obsessions themselves and with the conviction, articulated on more than one occasion, that great art is born only of obsessions. He arouses impatience, aggravation, and pity—but also admiration for the courage with which he reveals his own failings. But he doesn’t stop there; after all, that’s not so extraordinary, young American poets do little else in their flawed poems. In his diaries he constructs a brilliant philosophical treatise written in installments and filled with wrenching contradictions, the confession of a woeful, gifted child of his century.

Who was Cioran? He was born in a Romanian village, which he affectionately remembered as a lost paradise to the end of his life. The son, as I mentioned, of a provincial priest, he was extraordinarily talented and began publishing early on. He was also afflicted early on by his maniacally intense spiritual life, by various neurasthenias and by his greatest foe, an ominous monster called insomnia. (Or rather, Insomnia; this complaint, to which Cioran sometimes ascribes philosophical virtues, was to plague him for years to come.) He settled in France before the war, but only in the immediate postwar years did he begin writing in French (he had already written and published several books in Romanian). He soon won the reputation as one of the best stylists in French literature, although he retained his Romanian accent in speaking. A perfectionist, Cioran never spoke on French television or radio; he doubtless couldn’t tolerate the thought that the flawless stylist might mangle the spoken language by mispronouncing all the French variants of the vowel e.His fascist episode, a period of genuine enthusiasm for the Romanian Iron Guard, casts a shadow on his biography (in his diaries he notes that “my affirmations only add to my troubles, my negations are received enthusiastically”).

He developed an uncanny knack for attracting paradoxical living conditions to his apartment in the very heart of Paris (21, rue de l’Odéon). He never prospered and lived very modestly to the end (although in his diary of the sixties he notes with something like astonishment that he now owns five or six suits!). He didn’t accept literary honors; in his diary he notes that it doesn’t befit Job, after all, to receive literary awards … He was considered a recluse, an ascetic, and so he was, up to a point. At the same time, though, he led an exceptionally active “Parisian” social life and knew “all Paris” (le tout-Paris). He was at times considered “fashionable”; he became a specialist in suicide … He befriended Beckett (if two such eccentrics could really be friends), Ionesco, Henri Michaux, he knew Celan. Whom didn’t he know!

He attended Parisian parties (and reproached himself bitterly the morning after); when he came across friends, he could talk for hours on end without letting anyone else get a word in edgewise. But how he suffered afterward on that account! He loathed Parisian hypocrisy, the Parisian literary industry, Parisian snobbery—and at the same time he took to it all like a duck takes to water. Once, after visiting an exhibit of Jozef Czapski’s work (he knew him too, and, I think, admired him in his way), he wrote that the people at the show smiled not hypocritically, but sincerely, since they were Poles, not Frenchmen.

His diary is a hymn in praise of solitude and silence; the great conversationalist Cioran loved only quiet. For all that, you have to admire the diary’s honesty. Cioran frequently speaks badly of himself: he doesn’t pass over his countless minor treacheries in silence, he mocks himself, the failed Buddhist halted halfway on the road to mysticism, the disciple of Tao who knows half of Paris. But he betrayed only himself, only his cherished self-image. He longed to be an Asian sage despising the minor matters of this world while making his way toward Nirvana or what the Stoics called ataraxia—but he was forever wrangling with rude barbers, pushy shopgirls, dilatory cashiers, and finally, with himself. He had a litigious nature but was drawn to the Stoic—or Buddhist—ideal of passivity and inner calm.

He likewise dreamed of achieving complete indifference to the fate of his own books. More than this—he dreamed of giving up writing completely and reaching maximal happiness and satisfaction through absolute passivity and intentionally aimless meditation. Nonetheless he would call his publisher to remind him to stock his books in Parisian bookstores, and he suffered when an American editor rejected his essay on Paul Valéry, just as any other writer would in his place. Cioran didn’t want to be who he was; he didn’t want to be Romanian, or a writer, or a crank. Above all, he was revolted by the Parisian man of letters he’d become!

He never abandoned the dream of being “the hangman’s son” with which he used to shock his friends. At the same time, though, he led the thoroughly correct life of a bourgeois intellectual. He wanted to be demonically other, but without effort (he didn’t wish to torture himself, or others, like de Sade or Artaud). He would have preferred to inherit infamy from his parents the way others inherit the color of their eyes. Other people dream of receiving a fortune, he longed for a family disgrace.

He admired Simone Weil and they shared a certain secret similarity; both were drawn to “decreation,” that is, the dissolution of—their own—existence. Suicide was Cioran’s greatest philosophical obsession. At times he dealt with it pragmatically and wrote that those who think about killing themselves never actually do it. Opposites in so many respects—the selfish, lazy (in the Eastern style) Cioran versus Weil the tireless activist serving the oppressed—both saw themselves as hampering God.

“My son would undoubtably be a murderer,” the childless Cioran commented. But he also told a friend who was soon to become a father that he was taking a monstrous risk: “Your son may become a murderer.” The continuation of life on earth struck him as insanity, and each new pregnancy was a mistake.

“I go to my Doubt each day the way other people go to the office,” he wrote once in his diary. Diary writing stands under the sign of Doubt, written—in this passage—with a capital letter. The great prompter of doubt is death. Why—why should I do this or that, think this or that, say this or that, when death will come inevitably? Friends’ funerals were torture for Cioran; a cremation at Père Lachaise acts on him more forcibly than all his readings of ancient skeptics and cynics. Yet sometimes there’s a certain majesty in this as well; even an insignificant neighbor whose loud radio had bothered the writer for years undergoes an exceptional metamorphosis in death. Thus we discover the baroque Cioran, who lives constantly with the thought of death; and insomnia stands revealed as death’s cousin, its emissary.

The official world, both political and academic, has been infected by lies; truth lives only in doubt, in opposition, in solitude, in an anarchistic relationship to life. It’s not difficult to discern in this a trace of the writer’s very private resentment. His early, misguided support of Romanian fascism (a ghastly mistake committed by so many prominent Romanian intellectuals, not just by Cioran) surely led him to shun any form of affirmation. Once bitten … To interpret Cioran this way—and it’s an easy reading, a little obvious, too easy—deprives him of much of his dark charm, reduces him automatically to “one of many” intellectuals.

But Cioran’s drama can be interpreted differently, more individually, as the record of a single, distinctive soul; the story of his love for poetry forms one thread in this thousand-page book. In a nutshell—it is the story of poetry slowly being strangled by skepticism, by doubt. Cioran has his favorite poets: Dickinson, Shelley, Dowson. But he turns to them ever more rarely, grows ever further from poetry. He can’t bear Rilke’s letters, and prefers the cynicism in some of Gottfried Benn’s letters. Poetry’s rival is bitter, mocking, illusionless prose. The only poet who speaks to him in the end is Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach’s music always astounds him, commands him to cross to the other side, the side of joy, affirmation, and God (only Handel’s Messiah has a comparable effect). But just for a moment.

In the diary, Cioran becomes exceptionally laconic whenever moments of poetry appear—as signaled by music or long walks in the lonely landscapes of the French countryside. Doubt, on the other hand, is eloquent; urged on by the author’s voice, Doubt’s pronouncements cut the way Spinoza cut lenses. Cioran’s diary is essentially a platform designed for Doubt’s benefit. In the diary, poetry leads a marginal, almost conspiratorial existence; it dwindles and fades. But even its modest presence lends Cioran’s posthumously published book the charm of novelty, since precisely this love affair with poetry and music permits us to revise our earlier portrait, derived from the essays, of the Parisian misanthrope.

Adam Zagajewski

 A Defense of Ardor