When I telephoned him upon arriving in Paris, he invited me and my wife over to 21 rue l’Odeon, for dinner.
This fierce cynic, who delighted in overturning axioms and canons, values and virtues, was a short, thin, frail man, both amiable and courteous. He, who had written that he would have killed himself had he been a Jew and who rejected God while admiring the Führer and the Romanian fascist Zelea Codreanu, the “Captain” of the Iron Guard, came across as modest, gentle, polite. The sharpshooter so adulated by French literati lived in a student garret. He told us that until a lift was installed a few years earlier he had heroically scrambled up the stairs several times a day — even after midnight when he returned from his long solitary walks that were well known to the district policeman.
My intention was not to ask him anything but to leave him at the mercy of his own nature and words. Still, if the opportunity had arisen, I should have been happy for us to discuss, for instance, the “barbarity of enthusiasm,” one of his many striking phrases in Le Mauvais Demiurge. I thought that, even for a nihilistic prophet of the apocalypse, it might have been interesting to consider the relationship between his youthful enthusiasm for barbarism and his later determined skepticism of civilization, progress, and democracy. But we did not get on to such complicated and important matters. He seemed to have prepared himself for a relaxed Mozartian evening, drugged with beauty like the Parisian spring. His gaze and gestures, seeking and bestowing admiration, were directed with a delicate touch of gallantry towards my wife, Cella ….
Yet, his conversation was not lacking in sarcasm. Although he was briefly exhilarated by the anti-Ceau
sescu “revolution” of 1989, Romania still remained to Cioran “the space of failure, where things were ruined for good”—comments he repeated with visible pleasure. Less expected, given that this was our first meeting, were his caustic remarks about old friends — especially the Romanian philosopher Noica. With excitement in his voice, he enjoyed describing the servility and grotesque flattery in the Maestro’s dealings with fellow professors, students, and friends; nor did he hold back from telling us, virtual strangers, about some embarrassing visits that the author of The Romanian Sense of Being used to make in his way around Paris. According to Cioran, who seemed more condescending than disgusted, the “transcendental” thinker Noica played the role of a loyal defender of the “Greatest Son” of Communist Romania. “What is this you’ve got against Ceausescu, eh?” Noica (in fact, Cioran’s old comrade) is supposed to have asked with almost pious astonishment. Apparently, Noica also kept a little notebook in which he jotted down the names of everyone he met and talked to in Paris, so that later, returning to Romania, he was able to show these notes, as a sign of gratitude, to his connections in the secret police who had given him a passport to travel abroad.
The evening continued after midnight, amid anecdotes and paradoxes, under the spell of a host unstinting in verve. “What you need now are some literary prizes. Awards! In Paris you arrange literary glory over dinners. At restaurants, the best restaurants.” He could not possibly accept, as he saw it, the scandalous slipshod behavior of my publisher who had failed to arrange fancy promotional lunch and dinner parties for an author who had come all the way across the ocean. His physical frailty seemed offset by a robust high-born suppleness. He had an open, welcoming air and was enamored of Paris and his local quartier, happy to enjoy the benefit of a civilization that he never ceased to mock.
Nevertheless, the French publishing house did something for its guest. The next day, Albin Michel had arranged a photo session with Mme. Giles Rolle, a well-known professional. “I know your fellow countryman, Emil Cioran. I have photographed him, too,” she told me cheerfully. “Some of the pictures came out really well — disastrously well.” Cioran had looked at them with delight in his eyes, continued Mme. Rolle, and had then torn them all up. “Forbidden! Prohibited! Me, Cioran, smiling? No one should ever see Cioran smiling.”
Unfortunately, I wasn’t in touch with Cioran after that trip to Paris. Some years later I heard of his long, slow agony, the senility in which the former iconoclast and cynic was peacefully slumbering. The exile who had learned perfect French, becoming one of France’s most brilliant contemporary stylists, had suddenly lost his linguistic refuge and had started to speak in Romanian again, the language he had been so happy to abandon half a century ago. Was it a new form of Alzheimer’s disease? It certainly was, as the Romanian writer Ion Vartic remarked acutely, a “successful regression,” about which Cioran had always dreamed. A way of regressing to the state of the unborn and, at the same time, a way of unknowingly returning from exile, coming home to his pre-birth homeland. “Unconsciousness is a homeland,” Cioran himself had written.
Then, in an irony of fate, the world’s major newspapers announced the death of this skeptic who had always stressed his indifference to glory and his boredom with the paradoxes of posterity.
In a New York Times obituary, Susan Sontag — one of the first in America to write about Cioran — observed that he had practiced “a new kind of philosophizing: personal, aphoristic, lyrical, antisystematic.” She illustrated this with a characteristic Cioran quote: “However much I have frequented the mystic, deep down I have always sided with the Devil, unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.” It was a quotation that combined his rebellious vitality with the provocative seduction of his phrases, their twisted glowing spikes, the nervous shudder, the icy irradiation of his ever-youthful prose, his gnomic solitary thought.
I, too, was asked to characterize Cioran. I recalled that one evening we spent together, and the question I did not manage to ask him. In a few sentences, I tried to relate Cioran’s evolution to the evolution of our contemporary world, to the watershed represented by World War II. In the issue of the New York Times dated June 22, 1993, my comment appeared as a laconic statement: “He was a brilliant rebel and a challenging misanthrope who tried again and again to awaken us to the nothingness of human existence.”
Soon after his death, a stormy controversy (called by some participants “Cioran’s second death,” although it might have been seen rather as a rebirth) arose in the French and Romanian press. It focused on the political extremism of his youthful misanthropy and rebellion, his involvement with Romanian fascism, his outrageous statements about Hitler and Zelea Codreanu.
Readers were reminded that he wrote in 1937, “No other politician of today inspires a greater sympathy than Hitler … Hitler’s merit consists in depriving his nation of its critical spirit,” or what he said, in 1940, at the commemoration of his beloved “Captain,” whom he saw as a kind of new Messiah: “With the exception of Jesus, no other dead figure was more present among the living.”
In 1995, Gallimard published Cioran, l’herétique, Patrice Bollon’s balanced critical analysis of Cioran’s life and work. The book provoked a violent debate in the French newspapers. Jean-Paul Enthoven wrote that “the second death of Cioran promises his orphans a vast loneliness”; Bernard-Henry Levy described a meeting, in 1989, at which Cioran seemed very cautious in talking about his past and quite uncomfortable when asked about his extreme right-wing militantism of the 1930s and 1940s. Cioran was passionately defended by Edgar Morin, André Comte-Sponville, and François Furet. The latter wrote: “Cioran is a great writer and a great moralist, whatever his ephemeral commitment to the Iron Guard was.” Finally, Alain Etchegoyen explained, on a French television program, without any trace of irony, that “Cioran’s main regret was well and nicely expressed through his silence and his pessimism. Opposite to the penitent Stalinists, he had the merit of discretion. The Stalinists maintained their arrogance, which isn’t necessarily a philosophical habit.”