The Town with Acacia Trees

Introduction: Gabi Reigh

Introduction

Gabi ReighMihail Sebastian (1907–1945) was a prominent literary figure in the interwar period, an urbane young man who had studied law in Paris and whose novels and plays gained him celebrity and access to Bucharest’s most fashionable circles. He was also a member of the literary group Criterion that included the philosophers Mircea Eliade and E.M. Cioran and the playwright Eugen Ionescu. Sebastian died the same year that the Second World War ended, having escaped the pogroms that ended the lives of 400,000 Jews like himself, and having endured with dignity the rejection of former friends and fellow intellectuals during the last fifteen years of his life.

In response to the rise of antisemitism in Romanian public life, Sebastian wrote the novel For Two Thousand Years in 1934, depicting the challenges of living as a Jew in this new political climate. Norman Manea, another Jewish-Romanian writer, now a professor in the United States, recreates for us Sebastian’s position in the Criterion group in the 1930s: “He was a Jew who had become entirely assimilated, an exceptionally literary man devoted to Romanian culture, yet all of his friends were Orthodox Christians, there wasn’t another Jew amongst them, and there was something in the air, a new, nationalistic zeitgeist, and he found himself in this group where suddenly they all lowered their voices the moment he entered the room.”

The “interbellum period” has been described by many as a golden era of Romanian literature and philosophy. The writer Ioana Parvulescu describes the atmosphere of interwar Bucharest, the city that was known as the ‘Little Paris of the East’: “In interwar Bucharest people lived in extreme sophistication and in vulgar blindness, they were generous and they were callous, tolerant and fanatical, clear-sighted and deluded, evil and saintly, saintly and evil. Each one of them was different and no-one ordered them to think in the same way or say the same things. The wonderful thing about this world is that it was not a paradise nor was it hell, but an ordinary world, a world where everything was possible and a world like everywhere else under the sun.”

Parvulescu’s description captures the paradoxical nature of this golden era: the “extreme sophistication” of Sebastian’s fellow members of the Criterion group was eventually matched by their fanatical devotion to the Iron Guard, causing them to alienate Sebastian despite many years of friendship and fruitful collaboration.

However, although Sebastian has come to the attention of the world after the translations of For Two Thousand Years and his Journal, which documents his life under the Iron Guard, the rest of his literary works defy the categorisation of him as a victim. Novels such as The Town with Acacia Trees (1935), a playful, lyrical coming-of-age novel published a year after For Two Thousand Years, celebrate the pleasures and glory of ordinary life, steering away from contemporary conflicts. Sebastian was not merely interested in exposing the dark side of interwar society, as he had in For Two Thousand Years, but also wanted to depict the lives of modern young people just like himself, living in “a world like everywhere else under the sun”.

In some ways it seems strange, reading The Town with Acacia Trees, to think that it was written at a time when Sebastian’s life and reputation were being systematically destroyed by the people he felt closest to. Unlike For Two Thousand Years, it eschews politics completely. It is a novel about young people learning to love, discovering music, books, all the beautiful things that life has to offer. These are the same things, according to Sebastian’s Journal, that mattered the most to its author. Reading the entries from 1935, when Sebastian was adding his finishing touches to the novel, it is clear to see that he was still determined to cling on to the normal life of a metropolitan young man, his descriptions of antisemitic abuse buried amongst longer passages detailing his love affair with the actress Leny Caler, promenades through Cişmigiu park, “coffee and cognac” on the terraces of belle époque restaurants, dancing until dawn at Zissu nightclub and concerns as to whether his new glasses made him look ugly.

The Town with Acacia Trees follows the lives of a group of young people in a provincial town as they move from adolescence to adulthood. Its chief protagonists are Adriana and Gelu, whose relationship transforms over time from friendship into love. The narrative changes in its focalization, sometimes presenting the relationship from Adriana’s point of view and at other times providing us with Gelu’s perspective, thus enabling us to empathize with both characters while at the same time revealing their delusions and vanities. Like Sebastian’s other works, such as the novels Women (1933) and The Accident (1940) as well as the play A Star without a Name (1944), The Town with Acacia Trees is first and foremost an exploration of love, its thrilling intensity and inevitable transience.

Music pervades Sebastian’s novels and plays an important role in The Town with Acacia Trees. This is not surprising as his journal entries often begin with detailed descriptions of the concerts he had listened to on the radio that day – Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and especially Bach – broadcast from concert halls in Prague, Warsaw, Stuttgart, Vienna. Just as the hours Sebastian spent listening to this music in his Bucharest apartment insulated him from the horrors of the world outside, Adriana’s group of friends found refuge from the obligations and restrictions of the adult world in her room, listening to gramophone records or to their young host playing the latest sonatas on the piano. Sebastian was influenced by the French modernists and his rendering of this communal experience of music as something that binds the friends together and creates shared memories echoes Proust’s description of it as “a means of communication between souls”:

“No, none of them understood anything at all. And yet, despite these faltering first attempts, full of mistakes, Songs for the Fair Agnes became an emblem of their togetherness. When the winter, drifting by too swiftly, had passed and altered them in ways they’d never dreamed, the four friends would summon up its memory from those melodic chords which none of them had at first understood. It was enough to listen to a fragment, to hear the mere snatch of a chord, for all those evenings of shifting friendships and confused expectations to surge towards them.”

There is a sense of romance and lyricism in Sebastian’s descriptions of what it means to be young and in love in the first decades of the twentieth century. The intimacy between these friends, edging towards love, is woven from music and quietude, “warm evenings at home, long silences around the table, the drowsy steam rising from the teapot”. But although Sebastian sensitively explores these tender emotions, he undercuts any sentimentality with irony and humour. As much as he shows empathy for his protagonists, he also observes them with bemused detachment, exposing their youthful absurdity.

Through the use of free indirect style, he conveys the self-absorption of fifteen-year-old Adriana as she enters adolescence. Adriana’s grandiose image of herself as “a tragic infanta, in her finest gown, withering with tuberculosis and loneliness in an echoing palace” or the descriptions of her “collapsing in tears on the corner of the open piano” echo Jane Austen’s characterization of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, another young woman whose unrestrained emotions verge on the ridiculous. Like Austen, Sebastian is also an accomplished satirist, turning his critical eye to every minor character in this provincial world, from bourgeois ladies attending their daughters’ musical recitals, to feckless teenage boys such as Gelu’s friend Buţă, to famous composers prone to compulsive lying. It is these characters’ self-deception that is the real target of Sebastian’s subtle mockery; the composer Cello Viorin, for instance, rewrites his disastrous romantic relationships, casting himself as the irresistible Byronic hero, while Buţă, having failed his exams five times, pours his energy into discovering the special “equation” that will make him win at roulette every time, convinced that any day now, with “a hundred francs at Monte Carlo, the world will be at [his] feet”. Each of them has created a poignantly fragile fantasy world and Sebastian portrays their folly with a mixture of mirth and tenderness.

The Town with Acacia Trees is a novel that mixes lyricism and humour, a novel that straddles two worlds – a world of traditional, conservative values and a modern world, struggling to be born. The tension between these is enacted through the juxtaposition of the two locations of the novel, the provincial town of D… which resembles Brăila (Mihail Sebastian’s hometown) and Bucharest, the capital city. Sebastian deftly captures the topography of each town, describing places which are still recognizable to us today. Brăila, one of Romania’s most important port towns since the 19th century, was known as “the town with acacia trees” due to its tree-lined boulevards where Adriana and her friends promenaded in the evenings. The genteel life of this town revolved around its public garden (known as the Great Garden of Brăila) and the prestigious Maria Filotti Theatre, where Sarah Bernhardt once performed. Mihail Sebastian conjures a town where people have close ties with each other, status is important and where the younger generation can only escape the watchful eye of their conservative elders when they drive to its outskirts, to the Danube wetland, a wild, untamed place away from civilization, where they can express their forbidden s****l desires.

On the other hand, Bucharest is presented as a modern urban centre where the characters can reinvent themselves and lose their inhibitions. It is in this liberal ‘Little Paris of the East’ that Adriana wanders the streets unchaperoned, seduced away from her childhood attachment to Gelu by the composer Cello Viorin and it is there that, once reunited, Gelu and Adriana finally consummate their relationship. While she studies at the conservatoire in Bucharest, Adriana can live her life as an independent woman for a few months, before she returns to provincial Brăila where she becomes once again her parents’ ‘property’.

In The Town with Acacia Trees, it is particularly the female characters who inhabit two worlds, where their identity is divided between the traditional roles their parents expect them to claim and the freedom the modern world promises them. Sebastian depicts these women’s struggle to define themselves as they chafe against the constraints of bourgeois society. One of the things that seems strikingly modern about the novel is the frankness with which it explores female sexuality. The opening chapter, entitled ‘First Blood’, candidly and sympathetically describes Adriana’s physical passage into womanhood and subsequent chapters portray her desires for sensual fulfilment, confused and tinged with shame by her inexperience and conventional morality. Adriana’s story of self-discovery finds a tragic counterpart in the fate of her school friend Lucreţia, a young woman forced by her family into a loveless marriage. Ioana Parvulescu noted that “the novels of the 1930s break down taboos surrounding sexuality” and nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the description of the doomed forbidden love between Lucreţia and her teacher, Sister Denise.

Sebastian’s tone in describing this affair is non-judgemental, compassionate. The homosexual love is perhaps the most tortured in the novel, but the writer, with a quiet resignation, eventually puts an end to all the characters’ romantic hopes. The skill of Sebastian’s writing is that by immersing us in Adriana’s perspective we initially see her in the same way she sees herself, as free to follow all her desires and live her life in any way she wants. But gradually we realize that this is an illusion, that she is like an animal born in an enclosure that finally discovers its boundaries. The adolescent years filling the novel are merely a reprieve before her parents will find her a suitable husband, that inevitable moment when, as her mother reflects, “she too would leave the family home on the arm of another Mr. Iuliu Dunea and… laugh at her own foolishness, if she could even remember it.” Sebastian is keenly aware that there is still a double standard in this society, that while the women are still bound by the expectation to marry, the men’s lives are less constrained and offer more opportunities. At the end of their affair, Gelu remains in Bucharest, living the life of the unattached young bachelor, and admits that “his heartache had been a mere footnote in Adriana’s tragedy”, that while she has submitted to marriage and respectability, he is free to search for new experiences, new loves, a “new Adriana”.

Nevertheless, despite its transience, love brings colour and meaning into the characters’ lives just as much as it did for the author. Sebastian’s creation of these fictional worlds where passion, music, literature, conversations and shared silences are the only things that matter can be seen as his triumph over the world of prejudice and political intrigue he had found himself in, a refusal to allow it to contaminate his imagination and to deny him the simple pleasures of being young.

In The Town with Acacia Trees, Adriana and Gelu, his invented lovers, follow Sebastian and Leny Caler’s footsteps in their jaunts through Bucharest as they temporarily escape their provincial town, yet in the world of the novel their happiness is undimmed by the ugly shadows of persecution. For them, the interwar age truly is a golden era, a time when their fragile romance is given the space to flower like the acacia trees that line the boulevard where they promenade in the evenings. It is only out of the corner of their eyes that they can see all the destruction and suffering that has come before their time and that waits for them in the future: the green oasis outside their town – a project interrupted by the First World War and now left to decay; the old postcards of Bucharest’s Athenaeum theatre, “complacently eternal”, which Adriana imagines being sent by young ladies to lovers that never returned to them; or her last glimpse of Buţă, the irrepressible buffoon, conscripted for the next war, his head shaved, shoved in the back of a military van like one “of the stray dogs that roamed around the slums, shaggy and unfettered, for many years, until one day, to the sound of children clapping, housewives jeering and the howling of the other hounds in the truck, the dog catcher’s noose tightens around their necks”. Yet Sebastian, in his mercy, allows his protagonists to turn their eyes away from this gloom, to be the self-absorbed young people they deserve to be, allowing their emotional dilemmas to engross them completely, with no consideration for the past or future.

Like Austen, Mihail Sebastian “let other pens dwell on guilt and misery”. Instead, in The Town with Acacia Trees, he celebrates all that life still has to offer. Even in his most political works such as For Two Thousand Years, Sebastian resisted being reduced to a victim. In its first chapter, after antisemitic abuse forces him out of a law lecture, he writes:

“I walk out into the street. I see a beautiful woman. An empty carriage rattles past. Everything still in its rightful place, like always: a cold December morning.”

Part I