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  Urmuz shortly before his suicide

  URMUZ

  AND "CET HOME DE TOUJOURS"

  Urmuz, the Romanian writer whose sparse but extraordinary work now appears for the first time in English — almost fifty years since he took his own life — may well be accepted by belated admirers in the West as one of the forerunners of Surrealism. For years I have been obsessed by the iniquity of his case — one of the many in European literature — but the texts were unobtainable in this country. Unable to translate and publish them, I had at least the opportunity of suggesting to Professor Richard Coe, at the time he was writing the first substantial study in English of Eugene Ionesco (London, 1961), that he mention the striking relationship between him and Urmuz — which he did.

  One should expect, in hope and fear, the inevitable sequence of academic papers. A valuable source can be found already in Miss Reinke's Zwei Welten und zwei Zeiten im Werke Eugene Ionescos (Köln University, 1964); another contribution will be available in a Ph.D. thesis soon to be presented at the Sorbonne by Mme. Mira Baciu-Simian, of the University of Hawaii. Both works try to show that Ionesco might not have been able to build his anti-theater had he not derived courage and inspiration from the tragic example of his Romanian precursor.

  Urmuz was born on 17 March 1883, the eldest of seven children of a provincial doctor, Demetru Ionescu-Buzau. For some strange reason he was given a mouthful of a name — Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzau — hence Tudor Arghezi's determination to confine him to a more reasonable nom de plume. Arghezi made four hectic attempts to persuade D. D. D-B. to be re-christened as Urmuz (Urmuz meaning both a snow berry and a glass bead), until in the end the civil servant, grudgingly, accepted his new identity.

  He was taken by his parents to Paris for one year (1888), then returned to Romania soon to become, at school, the terror of headmasters and teachers through his inexhaustible repertoire of mischief-making, practical jokes and defiant provocation of authority. Yielding to parental pressure he began studying medicine but soon gave this up because, he said, the cadavers he dissected refused to talk. "Every day I kept on pinching them, but not one of them would react." He then studied law as well as counterpoint and composition, and spent the last eighteen years of his lonely life as an obscure county judge in oppressive little towns and villages until he returned, in 1915, to the capital as a dutiful clerk in the High Court. How one wishes that one could have attended at least one of those Chekhovian trials merely to hear Urrnuz's summing-up! Did he write the judicial minutiae in the same style as he presented his characters? We shall continue to wonder. Three of his stories, The Funnel and Stamate, Ismail and Turnavitu and After the Storm, were published almost by force by Arghezi only a few months before Urmuz shot himself on 23 November 1923. Seven years later the valiant avant-garde periodical Unu, edited by a selfless poet, Sasa Pada, published a limited edition of Urmuz's writings as "ashes of stars".

  This labor of love led to a real cult among the exponents of modernism and literary panache. Pada urged his readers to "disinfect themselves" by "burning all pulp literature". Another poet of great daring, Geo Bogza (now an academician and author of a classic, The Book of the River Olt), proclaimed a "sexual vision of the whole living universe" — he also edited a little magazine called Urmuz. There were talented disciples, such as Jonathan X. Uranus (nowadays better known as the Greek-Orthodox priest, Pa'rintele Marcel Avramescu) and Grigore Cugler-Apunache, a former diplomat and a fine musician, now a member of the Lima Symphony Orchestra. Finally, one can still hear the term "urmuzism" being used as a synonym for the absurd.

  ADAM's indebtedness to Sasa Pana, still the High Priest of the Urmuzian cult, is immense. It was he who provided us with most of the iconography and with a copy of the police report on Urmuz's suicide. The official text is untranslatable; however, as the document had been drawn up by an inspector with no less evocative a name than N. Dezideratu, the temptation of rendering it even into crude English was irresistible. The punctuation has been faithfully respected:

  Today, 23 November 1923, W, N. Dezideratul, Commissioner of Police of the 3rd Division, outer Bucharest. The policeman on duty no. 738, named Gheorghe Rosu, came to report that on the Kiseleff Avenue behind the "Buffet" Restaurant in a bush there lay a man who had been shot. Immediately we proceeded to that place and here behind the "Buffet" in a bush near the Jianu Avenue corner with Dumitru Ghika Street indeed we found an individual lying on the ground face upwards shot dead in the right temple while in his right hand he was holding a revolver marked S.M.T. dressed in a grey suit and a coat also grey with stripes black shoes and brown hat when searched there was found in his pockets several notes, letters and a membership card no. 10436 of the Civil Servants Association under the name D. Demetrescu-Buzdu assistant clerk High Court as well as 943 (nine hundred and forty three) lei in a black purse also there was found on him a gold watch without a lid and two keys.

  The corpse was left in the same position and by telephone no. 2118 dated 23.ii.923, 8 a.m. we announced the authorities after which the Public Prosecutor on duty arrived on the spot and ordered the removal of the corpse to the mortuary which was sent under order no. 12120 of 23.11.923 after establishing at first that his name was D. Demetrescu-Buzau of Str. Apolodor 13 where his family lives and he had committed suicide.

  After that we telephoned the Police Station no. 1 then Mr. Stoicescu, a higher Civil Servant in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, brother-in-law of the above-named who after being notified of the case made a written statement signed by him and endorsed by us which is hereby attached and from which it is clear that Mr. D. Demetrescu-Buzau clerk at Bucharest High Court had been suffering from nerves in the past few months in a high degree which determined him to end his life.

  This being so the present minutes with one special declaration one membership card two letters one card of the Military Hospital, 2 bills nos. 172 and 183 two visiting cards with name D. Demetrescu-Buzau Magistrate one receipt for 3000 lei 2 notebooks several little notes and visiting cards one gold watch without lids two large keys and a small key one black leather purse with 943 (nine hundred and forty-three) lei and one revolver marked S.M.T with five unused bullets are forwarded through the legal channels to those in charge.

  And as such I have drawn up the above minutes according to the regulations.

  Commissioner of Police

  (ss) N. Dezideratul

  Assistants

  (ss) Cojocaru

  (ss) I. Popescu

  The Urmuzian bibliography is bound to grow — covering studies of linguistic implications and literary affinities. Unavoidably, disparities in interpretation will occur; Urmuz's only surviving sister, Mme. Elena Vorvoreanu, has written some invaluable reminiscences and commentaries (Spicuiri — "Gleanings", 1967). She remembers the affectionate son and brother whose devastating sense of fun made not only for his own happiness but also for that of the entire family. Unlike most literary critics who insist on the author's morbid disposition, she believes that not one of his grotesque characters ever haunted him. Urmuz, she says, was always struck by the sound value of certain words and by the unpredictability of most human actions. There was a drama, and this was caused by the daily drudgery of copying out one interminable legal document after another, his only escape being that he would sometimes intersperse the dreary phraseology with tormented musical staves. Incapable of coping any longer with his failure as a creative musician he brought his life to an abrupt end.

  Mme. Vorvoreanu very kindly supplied us, in writing, with as many details as she could remember; alas, the aspect that interested us most — his work as an unfulfilled composer — is still shrouded in mystery. The few data we submit might possibly prove useful for a critical edition of Urmuz's writings. First of all
the identity of the main character in The Fuchsiad - we actually knew him. He was Theodor Fuchs (1880- 1953), pianist at the Royal Court, a close friend of the Queen-poet Carmen Sylva and Enesco's favorite accompanist, who would call him, endearingly, "Fuchserl". He wrote symphonies, concertos, sonatas, songs on poems by Carmen Sylva, and finally was imprisoned for years in shabby cinemas, accompanying the silent-film era. He always looked somewhat virginal and pathetic and Urmuz, who never missed a concert, must have been struck by the musician's innocent and clumsy appearance. As to the compositions alluded to in the same "epic", they correspond to real published works by contemporary composers: Acteon by Alfred Alessandrescu and Polyeucte by Constantin Nottara. Unfortunately Urmuz's own compositions (entrusted to a friend, Dr. Traian Popescu, who died before the war) have all disappeared, except for a few bars from a Sonata which we reproduce here: (omitted)

  The critic Ion Bibery, in his Etudes sur la litterature roumaine contemporaine (Paris, 1937), did solid pioneering work when underlining the similarities of theme and structure between Kafka and Urmuz. When we recently came across Kafka's Die Sorge des Hausvaters, we were struck by the following passage: "At a first glance Odradek appears like a flat bobbin in the shape of a star and seems indeed wound about with thread, but it turns out to be nothing but bits of broken cotton tangled and twisted, of all kinds and colors. Of course it is not just a simple bobbin since from the centre of the star there rises a transversal tipcat to which another one is joined at right angles. With the help of this on one side and of the rays of the star on the other the whole is able to stand up as if on two feet:' Perfectly reminiscent of Urmuz's "maypole in the middle to which the whole Stamate family is tied..." Unknown to each other, although they were writing at exactly the same time, Kafka and Urmuz expressed with an identical precision in despair what Jacques Vache (another suicide) called "a theatrical of universally joyless inutility" or what, at a later stage, Camus was to describe as "le sentiment de l'absurde" (Le Mythe de Sisyphe).

  Miron Grindea

  THE FUNNEL AND STAMATE

  A NOVEL IN FOUR PARTS

  I

  A well-ventilated apartment consisting of three main rooms with a glazed verandah and a doorbell.

  In the front a magnificent drawing-room whose back wall is covered by a bookcase of solid oak at all times tightly wrapped up in wet sheets... In the middle a legless table, based on calculus and probabilities, supports a vase containing the eternal essence of "things in themselves," a clove of garlic, and a statuette representing a Transylvanian priest who holds a syntax and a tip of twenty coppers in his hand... The rest is of no importance — except that this room, always sunk in darkness, has neither doors nor windows, and only communicates with the outside world through a tube which from time to time emits smoke, and through which one can see, during the night, Ptolemy's seven hemispheres, and during the day two men descending from monkeys, as well as a final string of dry lady's fingers and the infinite and useless Auto-Kosmos...

  The second room, a Turkish interior, is ostentatiously decorated and contains all that is rare and fantastic in oriental luxury... Innumerable precious carpets, hundreds of old weapons, still showing stains of the blood of heroes, line the pillars, while its huge walls are, according to oriental custom, repainted every morning, and at other times measured with a compass to avoid accidental shrinkage.

  A trap in the floor on the left, leads to a subterranean reception-room; from the right, with the help of a perambulator started by a crank, one penetrates a cool canal. One of its extremities ends nowhere, the other ends on the opposite side in a low-ceilinged room with earthen floor and a maypole in the middle to which the whole Stamate family is tied...

  II

  This dignified, unctuous, elliptically shaped gentleman, with an excessive nervousness due to his work as a borough councilor, is compelled to masticate crude celluloid almost all day long, which he spits out afterwards in crumbs full of saliva over his only child, a fat and blasé four-year-old called Bufty... The little boy, from excessive filial piety, pretends not to notice anything, and drags a stretcher along the dry ground while his mother, Stamate's legitimate and short-haired wife, participates in the communal joy by making up madrigals which she signs with a thumb-print.

  All these occupations, although fatiguing in themselves, amuse the whole family, and whenever their audacity goes as far as irresponsibility, the three of them look with binoculars through one of the holes in the canal, into Nirvana, which is situated in the same district as the Stamates, starting near the grocery shop on the corner; or else they bombard Nirvana with bread pellets or maize stalks. At other times they enter the drawing-room and open a number of specially-built taps until the overflowing water reaches their eyes and they enjoy themselves so much that they let off pistols into the air.

  As for Stamate himself, one of the pursuits which takes up a great deal of his time is entering churches in the evening and taking instant pictures of the elderly saints, which he sells afterwards to his credulous wife and particularly to his son Bufty who has his own private income. Stamate would not have practiced this illicit commerce for anything in the world had he not been completely destitute; he was even forced to join the army at the age of one in order to be able to help, as early as possible, two of his hard-up younger brothers with over-protuberant hips, which had cost them their jobs.

  III

  One day, deep in his usual philosophical researches, Stamate had for a moment the feeling that he had laid his hand on the other half of the "thing in itself", when suddenly he was distracted by a female voice, the voice of a siren that goes to one's heart as it wafts from afar, fading into an echo.

  To his astonishment, as he was running in the warm and scented evening breeze towards the communication tube, Stamate saw a siren with seductive voice and gestures stretching her lascivious body on the hot sand of the seashore. Fighting with himself in order not to fill prey to temptation, he hurriedly rented a sailing ship and, making for the open sea, he, with all the sailors, blocked his ears with wax...

  But the siren became more and more provocative... She followed him across the waters with perverse songs and gestures until a dozen Dryads, Nereids and Tritons had had time to emerge from the deep and carry, on a superb shell of mother of pearl, a decent and innocent rusty funnel.

  The plan of seducing our serious and chaste philosopher could be considered successful. Stamate hardly had time to steal into the communication tube before the princesses of the sea placed the funnel near his house with their wonted grace; then bursting into mad laughter they disappeared playfully and lightly across the waters.

  Baffled, maddened, disintegrated, Stamate just managed to steer his perambulator through the canal... However, without losing his sang-froid entirely he threw several clods of earth into the funnel and, after gulping down a stew of garden sorrel, he threw himself face down on to the ground out of sheer diplomacy; he stayed like that for eight clear days, the length of time which he considered would, according to the civil law, be necessary before he could recover the funnel.

  After this lapse of time, resuming his daily tasks and vertical posture, Stamate felt a newly-born person. Never until then had he known the divine thrill of love. He now felt a better being, more tolerant, and the turbulence he was experiencing at the sight of the funnel gave him a pleasure mixed with suffering which made him cry like a child... He shook the funnel like a human rag and after greasing its main holes with iodine he took it with him and fixed it with knots of flowers and lace next to, and parallel with, the communication tube. Then also, and for the first time, exhausted by emotion, he passed through the tube like lightning and stole a kiss from it.

  After that the funnel became a symbol for Stan-late. It represented the only creature of female sex endowed with a tube of communication which would enable him to satisfy both the love urge and the high interests of science. Forgetting altogether his sacred marital and parental duties, Stamate began cutting every night, w
ith a pair of scissors, the knots that kept him tied to the pole and, in order to give free rein to his infinite lust, he began going more often through the funnel, floating through it, pushing himself from a specially- built springboard and then landing on his hands at a tremendous speed on a mobile wooden ladder. After this he would sum up the results of his observations about the outer world.

  IV

  Every great happiness must come to an end... One night Stamate, coming to perform his usual sentimental duty, noticed to his surprise and disappointment that, owing to hitherto impenetrable causes, the funnel's far end had shrunk so much that any communication through it was virtually impossible. Confused and at the same time suspicious, he lay in wait, and the following night, although he could hardly believe his eyes, he saw with horror that a panting Bufty had been allowed to enter and come out of the funnel. Petrified, Statnate hardly found the strength to go away and tie himself to the maypole again, but the next day he took a supreme decision. First he hugged his devoted wife — then, after spraying her hastily with paint, he stitched her in a waterproof bag to keep the family cultural tradition intact. Later, in the middle of an icy and obscure night, he got hold of both the funnel and his son Bufty, threw them into a tram-car which happened to be passing by, and with a gesture of disgust pushed them into Nirvana. Some time passed and his paternal feeling proved to have grown stronger. Thanks to his calculi and chemical experiments, he succeeded in arranging for Bufty to be employed there as deputy senior clerk.

  As for our hero, Stamate, he searched the communication tube for the last time and, rather ironically and condescendingly, peeped once more through the Cosmos. Then, climbing into his crank-driven perambulator for a final journey, he headed towards the mysterious end of the canal. Turning the crank handle with growing persistence, there he runs like a madman to this very day, shrinking his size in the hope that he will sometime in the future penetrate and disappear into the small infinite.