The order referring Noica’s case to the courts was issued on December 1, 1958 and mentions that the detainee “kept up relationships with the legionnaires Cioran Emile and Eliade Mircea among others.” It was claimed that he received from them “documents hostile to the popular democratic regime of the People’s Republic of Romania, documents he then reportedly spread widely among his circle of friends and acquaintances during secretly organized meetings in his home.” The philosopher was accused of “writings whose content is hostile to the government,” of transmitting them to his friends and associates in his country and “by illegal means” to “legionnaires that fled to France for the purpose of publishing them.” He was said to have set the tone for hostile conversations “in the pursuit of the violent overthrow of the popular democratic regime of the People’s Republic of Romania.” The hostile documents referred to by the penal investigator of the Securitate who drew up the charges were books published in France by Cioran and Eliade; a manuscript of Noica’s entitled Povestiri din Hegel (Tales from Hegel), another manuscript on Goethe; and, of course, Cioran’s NRF “Letter to a Faraway Friend” and Noica’s unpublished response.
Then followed the interrogations, the torture, the forced confessions, the manipulations: a sinister system of incarceration for the prisoners and terror for their families.
After Stalin’s death and the famous Khrushchev report, the Soviet bloc seemed to enter a period of relative détente. In his novella of the same name, Ilya Ehrenburg called this period “the Thaw.” Still, the Communist Party lived by its own meteorology: spring in Moscow, Prague, or Bucharest remained an iffy proposition, and cataclysms took no account of the seasons — we need only recall the autumn of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.
Not for the first time, Romania found itself in 1958 in a byzantine situation. Having succeeded in convincing Khrushchev to withdraw from Romania the troops stationed there through the Warsaw Military Pact, the country’s leaders needed to prove that they were in complete control of the country. In 1954, Molotov told Gheorghiu Dej, General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party: “You won’t last three days without the presence of the Soviet army in Romania.” The Romanian Communist Party needed to show itself master of the situation, so as to avoid internal rebellion and any attempt to depose the Stalinist group in power, as had already occurred in neighboring countries. Internal terror was about to stiffen.
This was the atmosphere on February 15, 1960 when testimony at the Military Tribunal began in the sinister Noica trial. Referring to the accusations and to Noica’s Povestiri din Hegel manuscript, the military prosecutor emphasized its “fascist content” and the “attempt to rehabilitate ideology with the practice of fascism.” Noica’s manuscript about Goethe supposedly “rid [Goethe’s] works of everything useful to the people, larding them instead with foreign [that is, legionary] theses.” The “Letter to a Faraway Friend,” received by the accused in an “illegal” manner from abroad, was said to have a “subversive content, full of irony.” As for Noica’s reply, it would be shown to be “far more hostile than the article by Cioran Emile.”
The prosecutor added for the edification of the audience that “Cioran Emile is an old man with dull teeth, whereas Noica is the spitting image of a hungry wolf with razor sharp fangs.”
Noica was condemned to twenty-five years’ hard labor while others also received stiff sentences. They would be paroled after four years, during yet another period of “liberalization,” but many would then be forced to become informers for the Securitate. Noica published three conversion texts and undertook “the collaboration” he had earlier asked for in his letter to Cioran. He would go on to publish the rest of his writings under Ceau
sescu’s regime, becoming a sort of guru to young intellectuals hungry for culture. Today he is considered Romania’s most important postwar philosopher.
On his first visit to Paris in 1972, the philosopher surprised his friends and admirers in the Romanian exile community when he asked them to take him off the pedestal where they had placed him, saying, “I have eliminated the ethical from my universe.” After their reunion, Cioran would say of his old friend: “He has the soul of a disciple, a perfidious disciple. How could he ever understand that I have abandoned everything he defends? I can’t discuss anything with someone who teaches illusion, who does not suffer with and from the passage of time, and learns from it nothing at all. I ask of my friends that they do me the favor of growing old.” The reference to the political illusions of youth and the status of the disciple are reminders of the old nationalist ideological obsessions of writers who were supporters of the extreme nationalist, pro-Nazi Iron Guard.
Mircea Eliade was comparably severe with a Noica entrenched in his roles as hermit and mentor and indifferent to the always more terrible reality around him, convinced as he was that Ceausescu represented the “national way.” Eliade also alluded to Noica’s bitterness at his and Cioran’s guilty silence during the heinous trial in Bucharest that, without intending to, Noica’s old comrades had provoked. Eliade’s justification — that had they said anything publicly they could have been accused by the communists of being “legionnaires”—seems willfully naïve, since despite such pathetic prudence the communists unmasked their past as right-wing legionnaires anyway. The simplest solution would have been to acknowledge publicly their former erring ways and disavow them, thus freeing themselves to attack totalitarianism of every stripe, including the communist dictatorship.
When, in later years, he came upon the draft of his 1957 reply to Cioran, Noica exclaimed: “How savage life is, how savagely beautiful.” It is not incongruous, perhaps, to take up his exclamation ourselves in paying deserved homage to an eternally young Lady NRF, on the celebration of her glorious anniversary.
Translated by John Anzalone, October 2008
BERENGER AT BARD
In the fall of 1989, at Bard College, New York State, I started a course entitled “Eastern European Writers.” I had selected mostly authors who, like me, were exiles: Milosz, Koestler, Kundera, Danilo Kiš, Ionescu. I was thus trying to liberate myself from the confusion of the oriental-communist degeneracy (whose imminent implosion I, in fact, did not foresee) and still remain connected to my distant homeland.
The besieged man had finally escaped from the Colony of Rhino. He had got tired of shouting by himself, crouched in the cell of his room and deafened by the trampling of the street guards: “I will resist, I will not surrender! It’s my duty! I will stay that way to the end, no matter what, to the very end!”
He had finally run from the black wind of disaster; he had not resisted. The big words had fled too, as guilty as he. The prisoner did not prove to be a “superior” man, as he had dreamed of being. He was just a poor lost man, too attached to petty survival.
The passage from the state of contraction in Rhinoromania of the ninth decade to the state of expansion on the great stage of the free Carnival had not been easy. The liberating shipwreck had also been a siege fraught with doubts and anguish.
In 1989, the transitional passage suddenly unfolded into bracing sunshine, under a clear and fresh sky.
July 9, 1989 was a glorious day in the wanderer’s calendar. The small brown Honda, battered and tenacious, drove heroically through the gates of the American college — a paradisal enclave of trees and flowers and small houses in which teachers and students were practicing the traditional didactic Glass Bead game.