Bucharest, Steinberg, Tzara, Ionesco, Mihail Sebastian

Bucharest lies within my sense of the distant past, a place I know but have never visited. My grandparents were not far away. Saul Steinberg, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, came from there, and left. For Two Thousand Years by Mihail Sebastian, based on diaries he kept during the 1920s and 30s, shows why. Mihail Sebastian also left Romania (for Paris) for periods, but returned. He chronicles the arguments he had with his friends, while they were still his friends, mostly about anti-semitism.

Sometimes at the professor's course I feel like we're gathered together in a kind of ideological headquarters of an immense world war, waiting from hour to hour for telegrams about the catastrophe, dreaming of the new world that will be born from its ashes.

The author picture on the back cover shows a soft face with big eyes and full lips, a damp poet type with a widow's peak, looking up from a slightly tilted head.

Has anybody had greater need of a fatherland, a soil, a horizon with plants and animals? Everything abstract in me has been corrected and, for the most part, cured by a simple view of the Danube. Everything fevered has been soothed and ordered.

As a writer he is soft too, and modest. As a student he is ready to admire his teachers, as a jew ready to lay bare their anti-Semitism. Modesty is a rare gift among autobiographers and diarists. He is not wringing his hands. He thrashes it out with himself as he hears it thrashed out in his social circle. Here's his friend Maurice on a bus in Paris, spelling it out.

Whether dangerous or not, I'm still an anti-Semite. Or, to put it better, I'm against certain expressions of Judaic sensibility and psychology. I detest the agitated, convulsive, fevered aspect of the Jewish spirit. There's a Jewish way of looking at the world that distorts the proportions of nature, disturbs its symmetry, attacks the reality. The dreamlike tendency you were praising in Chagall is exactly what I denounce. My eyes are wide open. I don't like those who are only half awake. Your Chagall stumbles about between sleep and wakefulness, which disqualifies him from making art. A clear-headed Jew is a phenomenon. The great majority are sleepwalkers.

It was the sleepwalkers who left Bucharest. Mihail Sebastian, for the most part, stayed.

I've always believed that the only defeats and victories that matter in life are those you lose or win alone, against yourself. I have always believed it my right to have a locked door between me and the world, and to hold the key myself. Now look at it, kicked open. The doors are off their hinges, the portals unguarded, every cover blown.

He survived the war, the Holocaust, the 'Judaic taste for personal catastrophe', and was killed by a truck on his way to give his first lecture, on Balzac.

A Weakness for almost Everything and Journey to the Land of the Flies by Aldo Buzzi
Reflections and Shadows by Saul Steinberg
Villa Triste by Patrick Modiano

I was thinking of writing a story based on a dream a friend told me about an Italian pop singer called Mina, and thought I'd read something Italian. I passed by Moravia, Calvino, C. Levi, P. Levi and Dante before stopping at Aldo Buzzi: here was a sensibility of place, travel and food, beginning in Italy then rapidly over the Alps to Switzerland, France, England, America and Djakarta, full of grounded glances and unusual information or advice, for example that toothpicks seem to have been invented for the Japanese, that before travel a Russian will spend time in his room with a pair of shoes, and that you shouldn't trust a writer who doesn't mention food.

With his friend Saul Steinberg, Aldo Buzzi went to architecture school in Milan in the 1930s. I like to imagine them there, and in New York, two stick figures, stock figures, wearing hats and carrying umbrellas, looking out across a short perspective down the avenue to their younger selves. Aldo Buzzi didn't start writing till he was 70, and Saul Steinberg was an artist, so their writings are refreshingly non-determinate, dry, willing: you can take it on from here yourself.

This is my paradise: a road along the sea without traffic, a wide, irregular walkway along the beach, paved with tiles, on which one can walk comfortably even with bare feet. A low wall on the beach side, where one can sit.

A winter's day soon after Christmas in Ireland, which Buzzi as far as I know, did not visit, the sea running shallow and wide with tiny ripples. No traffic. Low wall. My friend behind a table in front of his house by the sea, facing southwest, offering free rum punch to passers-by. Among whom Mina, the Italian pop singer, tax exile in Switzerland, where I would place her in Nabokov's hotel, the Montreux-Palace, with views over the lake to the Alps, like the narrator of Modiano's Villa Triste, but the other way around: she is on her balcony looking across the lake to distant insecurities.

Mina, my friend said, she was here. He pointed at the ground under the table. Over a rum punch or two, Mina meets a local farmer, and, abandoning pop and tax and exile and luxury, settles with him. So that is why, just after Christmas each year since that dream, I give free punch to anyone who is passing by. 

Aldo Buzzi, who in Journey to the Land of the Flies returns frequently to the waitress he once saw in Crescenzago, where he had lunch on the way to Gorgonzola, would understand.