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PARTISAN REVIEW
exception, attuned to the movement of Life, my divinity of those
times. For the one who, before thirty, did not experience the fascina–
tion with all f0n11s of extremism, I don't know whether to feel admi–
ration or contempt, whether to consider him a saint or a cadaver.
Years later Cioran further emphasized his distance from the Iron
Guard by speaking with undisguised contempt for the movement. The
problem, however, is not whether Cioran ever pledged the membership
oath
to
the Iron Guard. Too anarchic, too self- centered and undisciplined
to accept the Legionary rituals, Cioran, and many others, nevertheless
were intimately linked to the intellectual climate of unbound national fa–
naticism and anti-democratic furor that accompanied and favored the
Guard's activities. Although later Mircea Eliade would deny having been
enrolled in the Iron Guard, in 1937 he published an article in the
Guardist newspaper
Buna Vestire
titled, "Why I Believe in the Triumph
of the Legionary Movement," a most vibrant endorsement:
I believe in the destiny of the Romanian people. That is why I believe
in the victory of the Legionary movement. A nation that has demon–
strated huge powers of creation at all levels of reality cannot be ship–
wrecked at the periphery of history in a Balkanized democracy, in a
civil catastrophe.... I believe in the destiny of our nation. I believe
in the Christian revolution of the new man. I believe in freedom,
personality and love. Therefore, I believe in the victory of the
Legionary movement, in a proud and powerful Romania, in a new
way of life that will transform the riches of the Romanian soul into
universal spiritual values.
In truth, Eliade, the recognized spiritual leader of the Young
Generation, was not alone in his Guardist exaltation. Cioran himself con–
tributed to the ultra-nationalist and Guardist newspapers with articles eu–
logizing Hitler and Nazi Germany and urging Romanians to relinquish
their lukewarm psychology and enjoy the politics of delirium. While
young Eugene Ionesco remained a true democrat, equally opposed to
Bolshevism and Nazism, the great French
moraliste
E. M. Cioran - the
worshipper of Vladimir Soloviev and Leon Shestov, the man who later
would write superb pages about the Romanian-born Jewish poet
Benjamin Fondane who was gassed at Auschwitz - unambiguously en–
dorsed the totalitarians of the extreme right.
In their support for the Iron Guard's ideology, philosophers like Nae
Ionescu, Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran illustrated what Hannah Arendt
once rightly called "the temporary alliance between the mob and the
