Carlin Romano: The Nazi skeleton in writer's closet
WHERE have we seen this story before? An influential European writer and thinker, celebrated in his mature years for works of sophisticated philosophical nuance, turns out to have been an anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler creep in his 20s. The standard query immediately presents itself: Will the nefarious politics destroy the reputation?
Marta Petreu's An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), inevitably hurtles humanists of a certain age back to other names and scandals -- Paul de Man, Martin Heidegger, Mircea Eliade -- with its expose of the expatriate Romanian anointed by Susan Sontag in her 1968 introduction to The Temptation to Exist as ''the most distinguished figure'' then writing in the lyrical, aphoristic, antisystematic tradition of Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Cioran, a lapidary ironist born in Romania in 1911, fled to Paris on a scholarship in 1937. (Petreu reports that Cioran faced possible prosecution for a newspaper piece urging a ''St Bartholomew's Day Massacre'' of older Romanian intellectuals.)
After a brief repatriation to Romania in 1940 following the fall of Paris, he returned to his beloved Left Bank in early 1941 and lived there until his death in 1995.
For much of that time, Petreu and other biographers tell us, he operated like an eternal student, renting hotel rooms, eating at student cafeterias and cadging money from better-off friends. A lifelong insomniac, Cioran liked mixing with street people and prostitutes, though he also met everyone in the Parisian literary world. Having decided to stop writing in Romanian after World War II, he ended up France's foremost stylist of existentialist one-liners (''To be is to be cornered'').
Sontag gave no evidence in her essay of knowing Cioran's one systematic (anti-Semitic and fascist) work, The Transfiguration of Romania (1936). To her, Cioran concerned himself with ''the absolute integrity of thought''.
Hostile to Enlightenment reason, intolerant of tolerance, morose about the decline of European civilisation, a decadent with an amoral slant on life, Cioran combined the idiosyncratic qualities and paradoxical prose outsiders often seek in bringing a French intellectual to international fame.
For Petreu, Cioran's life and work look less majestic. To this brilliantly thorough philosophy professor at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, the slippery ''fanatic without convictions'' (as Cioran later dubbed himself) is the older, probably repentant successor to the messianic firebrand who applied Oswald Spengler's philosophy of cultural development to 1930s Romania with unparalleled brutality and fervour....
Marta Petreu's An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), inevitably hurtles humanists of a certain age back to other names and scandals -- Paul de Man, Martin Heidegger, Mircea Eliade -- with its expose of the expatriate Romanian anointed by Susan Sontag in her 1968 introduction to The Temptation to Exist as ''the most distinguished figure'' then writing in the lyrical, aphoristic, antisystematic tradition of Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Cioran, a lapidary ironist born in Romania in 1911, fled to Paris on a scholarship in 1937. (Petreu reports that Cioran faced possible prosecution for a newspaper piece urging a ''St Bartholomew's Day Massacre'' of older Romanian intellectuals.)
After a brief repatriation to Romania in 1940 following the fall of Paris, he returned to his beloved Left Bank in early 1941 and lived there until his death in 1995.
For much of that time, Petreu and other biographers tell us, he operated like an eternal student, renting hotel rooms, eating at student cafeterias and cadging money from better-off friends. A lifelong insomniac, Cioran liked mixing with street people and prostitutes, though he also met everyone in the Parisian literary world. Having decided to stop writing in Romanian after World War II, he ended up France's foremost stylist of existentialist one-liners (''To be is to be cornered'').
Sontag gave no evidence in her essay of knowing Cioran's one systematic (anti-Semitic and fascist) work, The Transfiguration of Romania (1936). To her, Cioran concerned himself with ''the absolute integrity of thought''.
Hostile to Enlightenment reason, intolerant of tolerance, morose about the decline of European civilisation, a decadent with an amoral slant on life, Cioran combined the idiosyncratic qualities and paradoxical prose outsiders often seek in bringing a French intellectual to international fame.
For Petreu, Cioran's life and work look less majestic. To this brilliantly thorough philosophy professor at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, the slippery ''fanatic without convictions'' (as Cioran later dubbed himself) is the older, probably repentant successor to the messianic firebrand who applied Oswald Spengler's philosophy of cultural development to 1930s Romania with unparalleled brutality and fervour....