The realm of human relationships in the world of writers and artists has always been, and remains, dominated by friendship, which is like snow on lambs in spring—it melts in the blink of an eye. Friendship is something entirely different, a different feeling, and it is rarer; amongst writers, as is well known, it is very rare. The greater the pride in one’s identity, the greater the loneliness to which the writer’s trade is, in turn, condemned. Friendship amongst writers has been so rare that it has become the stuff of legend. Faulkner said of Hemingway that he was the greatest, but it seems they never actually met. Tolstoy, who was a towering figure, struggled desperately to befriend Turgenev, to whom he was distantly related, but the attempt ended in failure, coming very close to a duel. Hemingway wrote that: ‘The true writer is a lonely man. And as he grows in the eyes of others, he sinks ever deeper into solitude. And if he is good enough, every day he is forced to confront eternity – or the absence thereof. For a true writer, every book is a new beginning, a fresh attempt to reach something that remains forever out of reach. His mission is to tread paths that have never been trodden before or to succeed where others have failed. But writing literature does not simply mean putting into other words what has already been said – precisely because the great writers of the past existed, we today are compelled to go further than we ever thought we could go, to venture out into the open sea, until we are left entirely alone”.
In the 20th century, the friendship between the poet René Char and the youngest ever winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Albert Camus, became legendary in the French literary world, yet they very rarely managed to meet, even after they had planned a project for a photo album of Provence and even after René Char had found Camus a house in the village of Lourmarin where he could move in and live, not only to write but for other purposes as well. In the life and work of Albert Camus, a writer of twentieth-century Europe, I have identified most strongly: in his passion for his parents, in his passion for the theatre, in his passion for the places of his childhood, in his inability to part with journalism, and in his ambition to withdraw, when he had no other choice, into himself. He was, of the twentieth-century literary world, the writer to whom I feel closest in spirit, and even today I never tire of rereading – for the umpteenth time? – his pages on literature, philosophy and theatre; and, above all, I never tire of returning to his unfinished novel, published by his wife and daughter, The First Man.
I entered journalism and literature swept up by the clamour and fury of friendship and, little by little, I left behind both the clamour and the fury, to be left with myself, soon accompanied by so many disappointments and the betrayal of so many friends, of whom I have spoken in the pages of this so-called ‘Diary’.
I did, however, have one Friend, my only friend, from the age of 18, and our friendship matured alongside him and came to an end when I was 78, whilst he, forced against his will to leave me, was 67. This friend was Adrian Păunescu. Our friendship encompassed our families and our children, as well as my wife and his wives and his lovers. The tears that theseso often clouded their eyes, and almost all his verses, and my debut as a novelist, which he inspired, and our shared struggle, and our journalism, and our ambition to be at the heart of events and always at the forefront, and his despair, and the necessity of livingto always start afresh, and the lack of recognition—sometimes from the profession, sometimes from the authorities—and the ambition to remain steadfast in the service of the ideal, to justify ourselves as Romanians, and, finally, so many countless joys which, though they proved fleeting, filled our souls with a strength that came to save us even when we were in despair – for we had indeed been in despair – we found solace in our telephone conversations at one, two and three in the morning or five in the morning, which he too had intended to publish in a book.
I had over a hundred arguments with Adrian Păunescu – definitive, forever, until the end of our lives, with no right of appeal – and we slammed the phone down on each other for the last time, only for one of our wives to pick up the receiver the next day or the day after, or a month later, to hear his voice or mine: ‘Put Adrian on!’ or: ‘Put Dinu on!’
— ‘Have you made up?’ was their prepared and expected reply, because they knew we’d have to have another row—for the one hundred and fiftieth time, once and for all, and for the rest of our lives.
The most painful moment I experienced with him was not long before he left us—and me ‘forever’—when he returned from Chișinău after a final, exhausting journey, having been invited to attend the ceremony in the Academy Hall in the capital of Bessarabia, where he was to be honoured with the title of member of the Academy, in the presence of the President of the country, the Prime Minister, members of the government and members of the Academy. When the President of the Academy presented him with the insignia of the title of academician, he felt unwell and simply fainted. In his own country, he had not been recognised by the Academy, not even by his friends who were presidents of the Academy, nor by the President of the country, nor by the Prime Minister. He who was, and remains, the greatest poet of the Romanian language of the twentieth century, after Arghezi. The account, choked with emotion, of this incident that caused him to faint in the auditorium of the Academy in Chișinău resonated in my soul like a confession drowned in tears, andtook place a few days after two presidents of the Romanian Academy – one who had led the Romanian Academy as president for eight years and as vice-president for four years, making a total of twelve consecutive years, and the other, for a further eight consecutive years as president; and both of them, I repeat, had come to his home, whilst he was ill, in Dionisie Lupu, to present him with… a certificate entitled the Cultural Distinction, after having hoped for so many years—two decades—that he was to be elected a member of the Romanian Academy… soon. He died before that ‘soon’ could come to pass, and the friend who led the Romanian Academy for twelve years, year after year following his death, attended his peaceful memorial service and presided over the other memorial services as well, forgetting to even propose him as a posthumous member of the Academy, as his family had hoped. So, year after year, he presided over the memorial services for the great poet.
Now you understand the distinction I make between ‘Amicity’, which dominates the Romanian literary world, and ‘Friendship’.
At the age of 86, I am left with the memory of this Friendship, the only one until the moment when, three and a half years ago, whilst visiting Israel for the fifteenth time, I received a telephone call in Tel Aviv from the Archbishop of Râmnic, Dr Varsanufie, inviting me to a meeting in Râmnic to discuss the compilation of a commemorative volume dedicated to Archbishop Gherasim of Râmnic, who had passed away whilst still in office, aged 99 years and four months, the country’s oldest serving clergyman!
The phone call took me by surprise because I could not have expected it; although I had been officially invited, I had not attended the enthronement of Archbishop Dr Varsanufie, I knew very little about him and what I had learnt had done nothing to endear him to me; indeed, it seemed to me that his installation might even prove detrimental to the Orthodox Church of Oltenia, the Oltenia beneath the mountains. That is how I met him a few days later, with these feelings in mind, during a brief visit to Râmnic, and after he had invited my wife and me to see the building site he had opened a few months earlier within the vast grounds of the Archdiocese, amazed by his projects which, in the three years following that visit, brought about absolutely revolutionary changes throughout the Archdiocese – in a space that had remained frozen in the canons of a bygone era – my wife said to our host: ‘Your Eminence, please know that I feel very guilty because we did not want you and we hated you, as we loved your predecessor very much, but having listened to you and seen what you have achieved, I realise that we are on the verge of falling completely in love with you!” Thus began the second true friendship of my life, accompanied by the sorrow of having come to know him so late in my own life—a sorrow drowned out by the joy of meeting a scholar of the lineage of Calinic of Cernica, the man who brought splendour to this Archdiocese, founded as a new Severin, the leading see throughout Orthodox Oltenia and one of the two great dioceses decisive for the destiny of Romanian Orthodoxy, the other being the Diocese of Buzău.
It was a revelation for me to discover in this high-ranking hierarch the pragmatic virtues, as I was saying, of Calinic of Cernica and of the great patriarch, Justinian Marina of Vâlcea. That is how I learnt that Dr Varsanufie was elevated to the rank of bishop at the age of 33! by Patriarch Teoctist, whom I knew well and held in high esteem, and I thus realised that the patriarch’s choice had been an inspired one.
In just three years as archbishop, Dr Varsanufie built seven monasteries, published books of great significance for Romanian Orthodoxy, restored the palace built by Calinic and gave it a new splendour, turned the park of the Archiepiscopal Monastery into a paradise of shrubs and flowers, planted hundreds of apple trees, hundreds of walnut trees, hundreds of cherry, apricot, peach and plum trees, and rebuilt from the ground up, thereby ennobling, all the outbuildings from Calinic’s time and his own house, enriched Râmnic and the now-famous park with busts of the great hierarchs and bishops of the past, led by the bust of Antim Ivireanul, the first in the country’s history, and the bust of Patriarch Justinian, also the first in the history of the Church; he gilded the spires of the Cathedral; he established cultural magazines in which, alongside Orthodox dogma, works of contemporary Romanian literature find their place; he established an annual fair for monastic handicrafts; invited believers to performances at the Archdiocese’s first Christian theatre; finally, I must say that ‘the project is expanding rapidly, encompassing Orthodox buildings from the Loviștea region all the way to the village where Patriarch Justinian was born, to whom he has dedicated a monastery and built a house-museum based on photographs. He established the Cross of Râmnic, a medal that will shine alongside the medals of the Metropolises of Transylvania and Moldavia.
But for me, this hierarch, 36 years my junior, has also become the spiritual father I needed, and who helps me face, with confidence, the future that still lies ahead of me. Under his inspired guidance regarding my writing, I dictated, whilst almost blind, three novels: The Hatred in the Fox’s Eyes, Corrida and The Grand Prize at Monte Carlo, which, in my view, represent a somewhat different yet hopeful connection to the demands of today’s European—and especially French—novel, the hierarch being a close acquaintance of two of the leading figures in this literary world: Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt and Pascal Bruckner. Dr Varsanufie of Râmnic is, for me today, the closest conversational partner who constantly reminds me of my late-night conversations with Adrian Păunescu.
In a world marked by the loneliness of a society spiritually maimed by the onslaught of globalisation at any cost, and in a social climate such as that of Romania today—which is unjustly threatened by the loss of national identity and spirit— I have the chance to stand firm—as long as I can, and thanks to my age, confident in myself and my ideals—at my writing desk, and thanks to this spiritual father who understood that it is fundamental for the Christian Church to be the Church that reaches out, first to extend a hand to the faithful to help them remain dignified and not fearful, to remain convinced that every human being is made or born in the image and likeness of God, and not a slave to God.
Having reached this point, I feel obliged to ask my spiritual father today—who is, in fact, the first spiritual father I have ever had—to accept them by his side, as soul mates, and not merely as passing acquaintances; out of creative solidarity, and not out of self-interest; my first editor, from my very first book right up to and including the Peasant Trilogy, the literary critic and historian Professor Valeriu Râpeanu, PhD; and my current editor, Ovidiu Enculescu, who has also undertaken the reissue of my entire body of Romanian fiction predating the aforementioned titles, leading me to believe that his publishing house, is, for me, a publishing house so very much like the Maison de Galimard, which nurtured the work of Albert Camus and looked after that great French, European and undoubtedly global writer of the twentieth century. I cannot fail to emphasise, with deep gratitude, the care with which this publisher has welcomed me from the very beginning and has welcomed each of my books, so often giving me the feeling that I am not alone.
Now, as I come to the end of these pages, I feel morally obliged to mention that, apart from the three Friends mentioned and described earlier, I have had – and still have – four, five or six, if I think about it properly, Friends from the wider world, if I may put it that way, they are the ones who have stood by me and helped me to face important moments in my life with dignity, and to cross, with confidence, the dramatically precarious bridges I was forced to cross in order to move forward, and which have helped me in the truest sense of the word. They are: Ion Antonescu (‘the Marshal’) from Țara Loviștei, a relative of mine; Engineer Gheorghe Niță, director of mining operations in the southern half of Romania, from Severin to Caraorman, the son of a village schoolteacher; from Oltenia, like myself, who left us too soon, just like Adrian Păunescu, Constantin Dinculescu and Gheorghe Soica, my brothers in Vâlcea dreams; C.B., a benefactor who does not wish to reveal his name; Engineer Ioniță Nicolaescu, the father of the wines from Sâmburești, whom I nicknamed my ‘godfather’ at my mid-life wedding, agricultural engineer Constantin Gib, who too departed so young for the world of the righteous where he deserves to be, and finally, I hope to add to this list General Olimpiodor Antonescu, whom I have chosen to be the current president of the ‘Niște Țărani’ National Foundation for Rural Civilisation.
The friendship I have been asked to discuss in this chapter of my Journal—which also includes Vartan Arachelian, the writer and historian—is a feeling, I realise, is so rare that I do not know whether the modern world will ever find the place for it that it otherwise deserves—a place that is difficult to define unless one has the power to fulfil it.