I dream of a life reduced to a few carefully chosen relationships, perhaps three or four, and only those I find strictly necessary and which serve my personal needs. The rest held at a distance, in the well-guarded zone of brief greetings in the street, from where no effusions, confessions and emotionalism can reach you. The first concession, the first weakness, is fatal.

Take Arnold Max, for example. Yesterday he spoiled my whole afternoon, dragging me up and down streets, in order to tell me of his endless problems in art and life.

‘Interesting fellow.’ But I, for one, am not a novelist and to hell with all these ‘interesting’ fellows, I’ve no use for them.

Another of those fevered types. He’s thirty-three but looks twenty-two, small, slight, with a face like that of a frightened badger, his raincoat flapping in the wind, pockets stuffed with pieces of paper (laundry receipts, verses, beginnings of poems, love letters, modernist manifestos). I’m curious what logic underlies the association of the ideas he articulates in conversation.

‘Greetings … Lucky I met you, come on Thursday evening to Costaridi’s, everyone will be there … You know, I’ve discovered a great novelist; the greatest of them all, he’s fabulous … Leon Trotsky. The episode of the dead person in Finland from Mein Leben is Dostoyevsky, pure Dostoyevsky … That imbecile Costaridi was telling me about that Moréas of his again … I can no longer breathe with the number of windbags that have sprung up in this generation. Listen, about Moréas … I’ll say it loud and clear: Tardieu’s dead. There’s a scheme involving Herriot and then there’ll be a social revolution … Stănescu told me once that his socks cost 600 lei a pair.’

He talks a tremendous amount, with a strange, nervous volubility, in which you hear a dozen thoughts, ideas and memories muttering at once. Each thought remains uncompleted. He trails them behind him like so much torn paper, snagged on random words or images.

I have the impression that he speaks from a fear of silence, from a fear of finding himself alone.

‘What do you think about when you’re alone?’

‘What do you mean, alone?’

‘Just now, for example, before you bumped into me. You were walking along the street, no? And there was no one with you. Therefore, you were alone. So, what were you thinking about?’

He stops dead for a moment, trying to remember.

‘Wait a minute … What was I thinking about … I don’t know …’

Arnold Max, the-man-whom-nothing-happens-to. He doesn’t love, he doesn’t go to the theatre, doesn’t go out, isn’t interested in people or books. There’s no woman in his life, no friends. Nothing. A desert haunted by moods, by problems.

He’s always writing, adding things, erasing. I wonder if he’s ever calmly and patiently listened to his own verses. He doesn’t have the time. He has to be writing them. His life is plunged in them, immersed in them, besieged by them. Suddenly, in mid-sentence, he pulls a piece of paper or a visiting card from some pocket, from which he reads for half an hour, with a kind of fury or enthusiasm to devour it all, poem and paper. It’s all the same to him whether you listen or not. He reads on with a certain cold illumination, ready to brave an ocean of indifference. Most of all his own indifference, which is greater than his passion for poetry, half-simulated in order to give some sense to the terrible void in which he lives and from which he flees.

It’s the poetry of a man who’s lonely, troubled, drunk on unexpected bursts of pure melody, and it is painfully simple for such a complicated man. Out of all his writings, I like the ‘Five Tales for a Small Voice’. The rest is tiresome and obscure. He has talent, I know. Everybody agrees. But I want a life without poisonings, fireworks and problems. A life of ‘good day’, ‘good evening’, ‘the bread is white’, ‘stone is hard’, ‘the poplar is tall’.

*

I glimpsed Majorie Dunton in a tram.