What I Said (110)

In this space, you can read excerpts from Gheorghe Schwartz’s work “What I said” published at Mirador, Arad, 2019.

(110.) Acolada interview

<1) Dear Gheorghe Schwartz, I set up this dialogue, I hope, without hesitation, even in the days that announced the Apocalypse. How much? And if I had known, I still wouldn’t have told you! Did you expect it? Do you like movies that announce the end of the world, of civilizations? It’s a real fad: for about four decades, we’ve been meeting aliens invading the most beautiful of all possible worlds. Tarkovsky’s “Space Odyssey”, “The Guide” seem like films of innocence… Or are you, writer, like your character in a short prose, Julius Zimberlan, who returns home (he had his reasons…) without having laughed from the comedy at which the spectators cheered to tears?

To be honest, I didn’t really go to the cinema after 1989. I don’t really like sci-fi – although I also published a novel classified as sci-fi, The P effect (1983). This is because the characters in the productions assimilated to the science-fiction genre behave too much like us. The fact that they have one eye or three eyes does not essentially distinguish them from us. But if they were painted in a completely different way, we, the people of Earth, probably wouldn’t be able to understand them. Sci-fi authors were Leonardo da Vinci or Jules Verne and less the productions with thugs only slightly different anatomically from us, the real thugs.

<2) Three beautiful cities, exponential cities, appear in your worldly and literary existence: Lugoj, Timisoara, Arad. The history of the family, of the first formative years and then, inverting, your fictions complete the written and unwritten histories of the characters in the books. In what way have these cities left their mark, each one according to its name, on your life, on literature?

I try, as much as I can, to separate my experiences from my literature. Yes, I was born in Lugoj, yes, the metropolis of my childhood was Timisoara, yes, I have lived in Arad for almost half a century and all these cities are part of my privacy. But as my life was written by God, I, with all my paranoia, dare not compete with Him. (Actually, I don’t feel like I’m in competition even with mortals. I’m too proud for that.) So my geographic spaces are constructed by me, and thus I want them to be different from the ones I’ve trodden on. (…)

<3) Your work is impressive. The most important critics wrote about her. Confraternities, prose writers or poets, recognized you as valuable, a rare fact. And this, at the right time and constantly. There were no shortage of prizes, recognition came almost as a matter of course. Closer to us, the “Cei O Suta” cycle was considered a revelation of today’s literature. You have “travelled” through time, through ages, through civilizations and places of initiation. You told how many hours you spent in the library, reconstructing environments, conversations, environments with the ambition of someone who restores the history of the species, starting from a skeleton… You are an “old man”, Mr. Schwartz. How did you manage that, in a memoryless, desynchronized, fractured world of the “new”? And how are you? Lonely, “superior”, phlegmatic, cry at the cinema, do you like children?

Many questions in one… Not being part of any literary group, coming to Bucharest mostly between two trains, I have no way of being “recognized as a value” by all those you listed. Let’s get out of science fiction! I don’t even appear in two large dictionaries of Romanian authors, just like no television in Bucharest was really interested in me and what I wrote. And today, if you’re not on the “bottle”, you don’t exist. Not even the “monster” CEI O SUTĂ, the largest Romanian construction, is popularized. Not even as a curiosity… And what appears in literary magazines is read by the few around those editorial offices. To have recognition in Romania means to be written about in the local press, in tabloids, to be asked what you think about Simona Halep’s last game and where you spend your well-deserved vacation. To be successful as a prose writer, you must have a work behind you and a manager. You don’t have time to do both. So I remain, in the absence of a literary agent, only an author and I console myself that I WILL BE, WHEN I WILL NOT BE ANYMORE!

Back to the question: I don’t think I am either „superior”, nor phlegmatic, and I don’t really go to the cinema anymore. Rather, I am abysmal, increasingly abysmal. And faster and faster. But one thing is certain: yes, I really like children and, moreover, I have worked for over 50 (fifty) years with children with special needs. (Both in special preschool education, and in school education – in all functions – and teaching this specialization as a university professor.)

<4) Now is the time to ask you to tell me what book has interested you lately? Someone else’s, of course. Which you wanted to write, that is. Or, come on, which, if you liked it, you read it… already written?

In the more than twenty-seven years that I worked (also) at CEI O SUTĂ, I had to read a lot about how the Athenians ate, then how the Romans dressed, then… The necessary props. At the same time, for the “profane life”, I had to be up to date with specialized literature and I also published specialized books. So I have little time left for other readings. Now, freed from all this, I am more and more convinced of how aberrant literary hierarchies are, just as aberrant are all our hierarchies, regardless of the field. The vast majority of authors celebrated during their lifetime are then totally forgotten. (…) I feel close to Eugen Uricaru’s books and I look forward to the fifth volume of his pentalogy.

<5) And, to bring you back to earth, what changes did 1989 bring to your life and to your literature? How does the illusion/disillusion balance look, after a quarter of a century, “warm”?

Until 1989, I was a teacher at a school for children with special needs. In December 1989, I was “promoted” to all sorts of “management positions”. (Culture, diplomacy, television, higher education.) This forced me to spend my time differently. Delusions? Apart from the first days after the fall of Ceauşescu, I never had any illusions and, living the hundred generations through THE ONE HUNDRED, I lost my last hopes that it could be better: from the first documentary evidence , we will not find any progress of the individual man, apart from technical progress. (…) But, regardless of this, I consider myself extremely lucky: in the lives of THE HUNDRED, I have not come across any historical period in which someone did not experience at least one armed confrontation. As for me, since my parents had to wait for Hitler to fall in order to have another child, I had the extraordinary chance of not having witnessed any alarm. That I have experienced numerous miseries, that is something else, but at least not an invasion. Yes, I’m lucky!

<6) If you have been “travelling” in search of the characters in your fictions, I ask you: do you also like the “other” trips, with noise, among tourists of all kinds, among those in a hurry, who chew gum and doze in coaches, “ticking off” another new patch on the face of the earth? Has it happened to you to arrive a second time in a place and want it with a certain purpose, to relive everything, looking with different eyes?

Always when you get to a place you’ve been before, you get to another place. And I, as time goes by, become more and more sedentary: even the frequent trips to Bucharest cause me stomach pains. But yes, I want to travel, although the roads stress me out, but after that, ah! after that, when I return home, I feel enriched, full, happy. As happy as I can be.

Thank you!

(Lucia Negoiţă, in Acolada magazine, September 9, 2016.)