34
PARTISAN REVIEW
Happiness,
your previous collections of fiction published here in English.
[s it also present in your new novel,
The Black Ellvelope?
NM:
Certainly more so, this time, in a more obvious way. In the very
last scene of the novel, a character even speaks directly about exile,
quoting the foreboding lines in Cavafy's famous poem: ''I'll go to an–
other country, go to another shore ... "
PR:
How did
The Black Envelope
come to be written? How, as you in–
timated, was it "saniti zed" before its first publication, and what is it that
is "encoded" in it?
NM:
[n Romania, the book was considered scandalous by the censor
and was rejected several times. I told the story of writing the novel, of
the struggle with successive censors, and of the mutiliated form in which
it finally appeared, in "The Censor's Report," an essay included in my
book
011
Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist.
A nightmarish story. But to
rewrite the novel now, in America, taking into account what had been
cut off then and what happened in the meantime there, and thinking
about my new American readers here, has been almost as difficult and
painful as the craziness of the Romanian adventure of the book.
PR:
We have been fortunate enough to receive a manuscript copy of the
novel from Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux, which will publish it this spring.
There is a difference in tone between
The Black Ellvelope
and your earlier
stories published in America. How does the novel reflect the life in
Romania which you left behind? For many of us who do not know
what it is like to live under "the heavy lid of terror," could you explain
a little about it, although, as you say, you have "encoded" this experi–
ence in your writing?
NM:
The sudden collapse of "real socialism" was the result of a long,
inner degeneration, of a deep process of decay. The novel is preoccupied
with capturing the impulses, the revolts and the apathy of this closed
universe of suspicion, lies, masks. It is an ambitious book, because it tries
to describe the predominant larval state of confusion and waiting, where
large and small events tend to be resorbed into a perpetual pulverization,
into a nebulous, leaden and petty atomization, dissipating the epic. It is
not easy for a fiction writer to describe this absence of epic and still to
animate a strong plot, colorful characters, to interject black humor and
poetry, into a self-sufficient textual structure . This fractured world, this
pathology of depersonalization demand a "fractured" style, a "shocked
