Women

Introduction: Gabi Reigh

Introduction

Gabi ReighIosif Mendel Hechter was born in 1907 to a Jewish family in the port of Brăila, eastern Romania. After leaving his provincial hometown for Bucharest, where he began a law degree in 1927, he changed his name to Mihail Sebastian and began building a reputation as a journalist, essayist, novelist and playwright. From his first year at university, Sebastian caught the attention of Nae Ionescu, a professor of philosophy and journalist who became his mentor. With Ionescu’s encouragement, Sebastian soon became a regular contributor to the newspaper Cuvântul (The Word).

From 1930 to 1931, Sebastian spent a year in Paris, where he undertook doctoral studies. During his time there, Sebastian travelled widely through Europe and recorded his impressions of Geneva and Vienna, as well as the French capital, in articles he regularly sent to Cuvântul. In one of these articles, he remarks on the idealized image of Paris engraved in the imagination of his audience: “Haven’t we all lived with the legend of Paris, the hub of the universe? Haven’t we been told in schools, haven’t we read in books, haven’t we been reminded by magazines that it is France that does and undoes the destiny of Europe? Isn’t it true that for us, to a great extent, to be French is to be European?”

According to Diana Georgescu,1 the years Sebastian spent in France had a formative effect on him, shaping his identity as a writer: “Travel functioned as a device that shuffled the various dimensions of his identity, eliciting identifications as both Romanian and Jewish in travel accounts that are imbued with the awareness of coming to an emblematic European metropolis from the provincial margins of Europe.”

Soon after returning from Paris, Sebastian published his first two fictional works, Fragments from a Found Notebook (1932) and Women (1933), both of which feature French settings and touch on his life abroad. But these do not present Paris as seen through the rose-tinted glasses of the awestruck tourist, but portray its reality, as experienced by him during his stay there. In Women, Ştefan Valeriu, fallen on hard times, moves to an impoverished district of Paris, renting an apartment in a “black, cadaverous row of houses, where white paint had peeled away like leprous skin, with an enormous courtyard full of weeds and too many children”. Far from being the “hub of the universe”, “his” Paris is inhabited by “quasi-painters, quasi-poets, quasi-critics”, “dubious people, united in their poverty”.

The action of Women moves between France and Romania, its four separate stories bringing snapshots from Ştefan Valeriu’s life, told through different voices. The first (‘Renée, Marthe, Odette’) and the last (‘Arabela’) deal with his romantic relationships. In ‘Émilie’ he is a detached observer, watching the relationship between an old school friend and a French girl unfold, while in ‘Maria’ he is entirely absent, placed in the same position as the reader as the invisible “listener” to a woman’s story.

This structure allows Sebastian to shift the focus away from his principal male character at certain points and to create a sense of empathy with the women he encounters. ‘Maria’ is written as a letter to Ştefan from the woman he loves, and the epistolary form, reminiscent of Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman, gives us her own account of her humiliations and disappointments during her relationship with a younger man. In ‘Émilie’, Ştefan atones for his guilt for his involvement in a Parisian factory worker’s tragedy by attempting to understand her and tell her story: “I apologize to the reader for these crude details, but, to be frank, I care little about the reader and very much about Émilie Vignon. I want to tell the story of her life and to understand something about the soul of this girl whom I have previously walked past without noticing.”

Even though the stories are tied together by the presence of one man, the novel is just as concerned with the thoughts and feelings of the women in his life. The same desire to understand the female experience is conveyed in his later novel, The Town with Acacia Trees (1935), where the focalization of the narrative once again flits between his heroine Adriana, and her lover Gelu, thus offering us two perspectives on a relationship.

The experimental structure of Sebastian’s novels, moving between different narrators and perspectives, demonstrates the influence of Modernism on his work, but this same openness to alternative points of view was also characteristic of his own life. At the time when he was writing Women, he was a member of the Romanian literary group Criterion that included the philosophers Mircea Eliade and E.M. Cioran and the playwright Eugène Ionesco, but by the mid-1930s many of its members had become seduced by the Iron Guard’s nationalistic rhetoric and Sebastian was ostracized for being a Jew. In response to this change in atmosphere in Romanian public life, Sebastian wrote the novel For Two Thousand Years in 1934, depicting his challenges surviving in this new political climate. He asked his old friend and mentor Nae Ionescu to write a preface to the work. Ionescu agreed yet, shockingly, wrote a preface laden with anti-Semitic rhetoric, attacking the very premise of the book. Surprisingly, Sebastian decided to include the preface, deeming this openness to the other’s perspective as “the only intelligent revenge”.2

Sebastian’s decision to publish his book with this preface sealed his fate as a persona non grata, exposing him to criticism from both camps: while his novel made him a target for fervent nationalists, who saw it as an “insult to national security and patriotic feelings”3, his decision to include the controversial preface made others revile him for being “Ionescu’s lap dog”. After years of success, Sebastian found himself an outsider. Arguably, Women is also a novel about outsiders. In ‘Renée, Marthe, Odette’, Ştefan is a Romanian tourist at an Alpine resort, “self-conscious about his accent”, and his lover, Renée, is a French-Tunisian yearning for the glamour of Paris. The eponymous heroine of the last story, Arabela, is a woman of “easy virtue” with a “dubious childhood”, while Maria, afraid of social disgrace, hides her s****l relationship with Andrei. But it is in ‘Émilie’ that we find the greatest misfits of all, Irimia C. Irimia, an “ungainly giant”, and his shy, awkward companion, a girl ridiculed by all her friends.

It is possible to see certain echoes of Sebastian’s own experiences in Paris in his characterization of Irimia C. Irimia’s struggle to adapt to life abroad. The Romanian law student comes to Paris to perfect his French, but he is a slow learner and finds himself unable to connect with the natives. Cristina A. Bejan writes that “while studying law in France, Sebastian initially struggled with bouts of melancholia and developing his confidence using the French language”.4 In a letter to his friend Camil Petrescu, another writer, he expresses these feelings of alienation: “I feel like a stranger and I will most likely remain one for a long time [...] To start with, I have difficulties speaking French and I make only very slow progress [...] At the moment, I can only float uneasily on the surface of things and watch them like a tourist…”5

However, in the same way as Sebastian began to feel marginalized due to the rise in anti-Semitic sentiment in the 1930s, Irimia C. Irimia is presented as being not only an outsider in France, but also in his own country. Sebastian explores the social changes in early twentieth-century Romania by presenting Irimia C. Irimia’s attempts to escape his peasant background through education, while never being fully accepted by his peers:

“Poor Irimia! What cruel joke of fate must have brought him, a peasant from Ialomiţa, into that class of worldly young men at Lazăr College? What ill-conceived calculation had turned him away from his fate as a ploughman and brought him there, to be tortured by things he did not understand?”

Looking back on Irimia’s failures at school and the taunts of his classmates, Sebastian considers the limits of this new social mobility: “I thought that I could see in Irimia’s submission the melancholy of the domesticated animal, forced to endure and forget, but retaining somewhere, in the deepest folds of the soul, the taste for another life, the call of another horizon.”

For Sebastian’s alienated characters, love offers the hope of connection. Émilie, who had previously always been cast as the “chaperone” for her various friends’ “amorous expeditions”, enjoys a brief period of happiness by Irimia’s side and rescues him from loneliness.

We never hear Émilie’s voice in her story; she is merely the tragic victim that exposes Ştefan’s youthful superficiality, the depth of her relationship with Irimia contrasting the narrator’s ephemeral affairs. Her story teaches Ştefan a lesson in compassion, in the same way that all his encounters with the women in the novel reveal something about his character and shape it in some way.

Yet his feelings towards these women are coloured by what Marianne Devoken described as a “[Modernist] ambivalence towards powerful femininity”,6 ranging from sympathy and admiration to contempt and hostility. In contrast to his compassionate portrayal of Émilie, Ştefan’s treatment of Renée, his lover, reveals his “cruel streak”, mirroring some of his accounts of brief dalliances with women in his Journal and in For Two Thousand Years. Initially enthralled by the thrill of the chase, Ştefan withdraws from Renée as she becomes more assertive and passionate.

This wariness of powerful women can also be seen in Ştefan’s response to his object of desire, Madame Bonneau, an older woman who beguiles him at the same lakeside resort. Despite his attraction to her, Madame Bonneau’s cool sophistication intimidates Ştefan, therefore he tries to “wear down [her] confident composure” with “courteous impertinence”, but eventually accepts his defeat when she exposes his emotional manipulation: “Her reply is clear and precise, disarming. Ştefan Valeriu’s irony remains suspended, without a target, like someone ready to unlock a door with the master key only to find it wide open. Her response − just this response − has destroyed in one stroke the entire victory of the past three days, checkmate in one move.”

But instead of resenting her, Ştefan “laughs, unable to figure out if this art of hers of finding always the most self-assured and dignified pose is a strategy or an instinct. But, strategy or instinct, it’s all the same, since from this power of self-control her beauty springs clear, even clearer in this afternoon sun.”

Ştefan’s suspicion of confident women in the first section of the novel transforms into admiration, an attitude which permeates the rest of the book. The majority of the female characters are often presented as wiser, more self-assured and more insightful than the male narrator, and his encounters with them expose his inadequacies. The most important affair of Ştefan’s life, described in the final part of the book, is with Arabela, an acrobat-turned-cabaret singer, and his love for her springs from a respect for her independence and pragmatism which contrasts with his own fecklessness: “Arabela dealt with everything – contracts, accounts, arguments, all sorts of tedious details – while I, after a few days of panic (‘What to do?… What to do?’), returned to my usual wanderings through the suburbs of Paris, with occasional stops in art galleries and bookshops, from which I came back exhausted, but incredibly calm, for I knew that I had someone else to bear ‘all of life’s hardships’ (as Arabela liked to call them, whenever we had a serious conversation) on my behalf.”

Another important lesson Ştefan learns from these women is to accept the transience of love. His third brief romantic dalliance at the Alpine resort is with the eighteen-year-old tomboy Odette, who “loves him as if they will spend together an eternity, not just an hour”. Even his long-term, committed relationship with Arabela ends abruptly, anticlimactically, as if built on the understanding that the expiration of love is inevitable. This idea of love as fleeting, unstable, is expressed by Sebastian in his Journal, particularly in relation to his affair with the actress Leny Caler, who starred in his plays. While Sebastian dreams of “how simple love could be, how restful”, he knows that ultimately it will make him emotionally vulnerable: “I am well aware that [my ‘amatory sufferings’] will not last, that I shall forget them, that they are derisory and that one day they mean so little as to appear ridiculous. …[Yet] knowledge is not a cure, just as precise knowledge of the exact stages of typhoid fever does not spare you from suffering them.”7

While the characters in Women accept love’s evanescence, they cannot escape its memory or fully heal from this “fever”. There is an undercurrent of nostalgia in the novel, a “search for lost time” that is implied by the frequent references to photographs and music that could bring back the essence of those vanished moments of happiness. After Odette exits from his life forever, Ştefan finds some photographs left behind in her hotel room, their vibrancy contrasting with her absence: “Here was Odette, flustered, her dress ruffled by the breeze, her blue beret at a jaunty angle, her arms thrown in the air, ready to catch an invisible ball…”

Maria, too, accepts that her relationship with Andrei is likely to end but fears the dissolution of its memory: “The idea that things, people, feelings could vanish from one day to another, consumed entirely by time, terrifies me, and as they begin to slip away I become obsessed by their potential eternity, any signs that they could be made to halt and remain.”

For her, the songs that they listened to in the early days of their courtship are priceless because of “the memories held inside them”, just like the photographs that she treasures from those happier times: “I have a whole trunk of photographs from that time and I often look back at them – even today – without regret, without reproach, for the sake of all the things that happened then, finding happiness in the discovery of every new detail in those pictures which I know by heart and where everything is fixed and charged with emotion, every single thing, his white shoes, my broken belt […] and everything is intact, fresh, comforting – how can I tell you? – not like the desperate evocation of things lost, but like the gentle, quiet recollection of a familiar landscape, that you revisit again with the same longing, knowing that it belongs solely to you.”

Like Maria’s photographs, the four stories in Women are a “quiet recollection” of love and loss, depicted ‘without regret, without reproach’, a testimony to transience.

1 Diana Georgescu, ‘Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity: Mihail Sebastian’s Travel Reportage’, Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe, ed. Wendy Bracewell & Alex Drace-Francis (Central European University Press, 2008)

2 Mihail Sebastian, How I Became a Hooligan (1935)

3 Quoted from the newspaper Porunca Vremii (The Commandment of the Age) in Mihail Sebastian, How I Became a Hooligan (1935)

4 Cristina A. Bejan, Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

5 Quoted in Diana Georgescu, ‘Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity: Mihail Sebastian’s Travel Reportage’, Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe, ed. Wendy Bracewell & Alex Drace-Francis (Central European University Press, 2008)

6 Marianne Devoken, ‘Modernism and Gender’, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge University Press, 1999)

7 Mihail Sebastian, Journal 1935-44, transl. Patrick Camiller (Pimlico 2003)