Monday, July 18, 2022

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.       

“THE 25th HOUR” by C.Virgil Gheorghiu (Written in Romanian as Orla 25; first published in French as La Vingt-cinquieme heure in 1949; English version as The 25th Hour translated from the Romanian by Rita Eldon and published in 1950)

 

           

Here I am once again displaying my bibliophilic mentality. I am about to discuss a novel which, 70-odd years ago, was an international bestseller and which is still much-reprinted in France, but which now appears to be completely forgotten in the English-speaking world. It’s likely you’ve never heard of it. I refer to Romanian author Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu’s first novel The 25th Hour. Though originally written in Romanian as Orla 25, it was first published in France in 1949 as La Vingt-cinquieme heure, with a preface written by the esteemed philosopher and critic Gabriel Marcel. But it was immediately banned in Gheorghiu’s home country. Part of the reason was that Romania’s government was then Communist, and the authorities were angered by Gheorghiu’s unflattering view of the Soviet army’s behaviour when it entered the country. In Paris, Time magazine’s correspondent reported that, day after day, large crowds were lining up to buy the novel. The blurb of my English-language edition, published in 1950, declares that 350,000 copies had been sold in the French version alone.

            So here are my questions. What was it that made the novel so popular at the time? What nerve did it hit? And why is it now on the way to being forgotten?


 

            As a narrative The 25th Hour is a comparatively simple, episodic tale, covering over 13 years. We are given no specific dates, but the years are clearly from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s, that is, from before the Second World War to about three years after.

Johann Moritz (also known by his Romanian name Ion) is a simple field hand in the village Fantana. He wants to emigrate to America, but Romania is at odds with its neighbour Hungary, and is conscripting troops to build defences on the border. A local police officer, who lusts after Johann’s wife Susanna, manages to get Johann conscripted and sent away as an “undesirable” along with Jews who are being conscripted. Johann is mistaken for a Jew. They toil as slave labour digging a canal, until Johann, who can speak Hungarian, joins a party of Jews who are escaping across the border. In Budapest, Johann is at first looked after by a wealthy Hungarian family, but then he is arrested and tortured on suspicion of being a Romanian spy. By now the Second World War is on, and Nazi Germany’s ally Hungary is asked to contribute workers for German industry. The Hungarian (quasi-Fascist) government gets the bright idea of sending refugees and resident foreigners rather than Hungarian citizens. So Johann is packed off to a German factory where he performs back-breaking manual labour for many months. He is often beaten up. Then a Nazi “racial expert” turns up and decides that Johann is really an Aryan, so Johann is fitted out with an SS uniform, and spends his time guarding the factory where conscripted labour toils behind barbed wire. He is even allowed to marry a German wife. He makes friends with a French prisoner and a small group, and helps them escape. Nazi Germany is slowly collapsing and the end of the war is nigh. Johann and his French friends make their way to American lines and are treated well, up to a point, when they are referred to internment camps. But Johann is Romanian, and Romania spent most of the war on the Axis side – so Johann is treated like an enemy. He thinks his effort in freeing fellow prisoners will gain him credit, but officially, having been part of the SS damns him. So begins the round of his being interrogated and interrogated and shuffled from camp to camp. In the end he has been sent to dozens of camps, all far from home.

Finally he is allowed to return to his Romanian village. He sees his wife Susanna for the first time in 13 years. She, like many other women in the area, has been raped and raped both by retreating Germans and by the invading Red Army. Russians and local Communists have shot all the bourgeois, including the local Orthodox priest. Susanna has three children, one by Johann and the other two by rape. The novel ends with a photographer trying to get a photo of the reunited family, telling them to smile, smile.

That is all they can do in the circumstances.

To understand this story, you have to understand that Johann is big-hearted, naïve and essentially a simpleton. Even in torture, punishment, privations, hunger and endless interrogations, he is always frank, unable to tell a lie, thinks the best of people and hopes all will turn out well. At no point does he fully understand the forces that are working against him – the power of the state, bureaucracy, prejudice, the opportunism of other people and the way war barbarises people. He simply does not have the mental capability to realise what is happening in the world. Ideologies mean nothing to him. He is a born victim. One thinks of Wozzeck helplessly caught up in the military machine. Johann Moritz is the innocent, humble everyman who suffers. To underline his simplicity of mind, Gheorghiu writes most often in simple, short declarative sentences, which remind me irresistibly of Liam O’Flaherty’s peasant stories such as his novel Famine, or for that matter the Cossack peasant saga that is Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flow the Don


 

But Gheorghiu knows that a man of such simple mind cannot sustain a whole novel, so beside Johann Moritz he creates another character – an articulate intellectual who can spell out the author’s main thesis. This is Traian Koruga, whose story runs parallel with Johann’s. Traian is the son of the village’s Eastern Orthodox priest. He attends university and becomes a journalist and author, very alert to the way things are going in the political world. He marries a wealthy Jewish woman, Nora - or rather she marries him, to disguise her ethnicity at a time when Jews are being rounded up for extermination. Traian and Nora go through events as horrific as those Johann suffers. All the while, Traian gives commentary in conversations with fellow prisoners, in answering American officers in internment camps, in petitions he writes, in polemics signed “The Witness” and in a book he is fitfully writing called The 25th Hour. For in his view the 25th hour will be when humanity ceases to be truly human. Apparently (and dare I say a little incredibly) Traian is able to quote, in conversation and at length, many, many illustrious sources. In reading this novel I judiciously kept track of all the authors he thus quotes - T.S.Eliot (twice), C.S. Northrop, Thomas Aquinas, W.H.Auden (twice), Lewis Mumford, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Savage Landor, Jawaharlal Nehru, John Henry Newman and Rainer Maria Rilke. You will notice that quite a few of these people (Eliot, Aquinas, Auden, Newman and Rilke at least) had either a religious tendency or full-blown religious belief. And in essence Traian’s thesis (and the author’s) is a religious one.

Traian believes that modern, mechanised society dehumanises people, fails to see the value of individual people, sees only the mass, and in the process categorises people in order to control them. As he says in the novel’s prologue [Prologue, Tranche 15]:

Contemporary society, which numbers one man to every two or three dozen mechanical slaves, must be organised in such a way as to function according to technological laws. Society is now created for technological, rather than human requirements. And that’s where the tragedy begins.” He adds “The twenty-fifth hour [is] the hour when mankind is beyond salvation – when it is too late even for the coming of the Messiah. It is not the last hour. It is one hour past the last hour.” When he speaks of “Moloch Technocracy” he conjures up an image of people enslaved by machines as in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Traian is aware that human beings can, once they conform to a humane-less regime, do anything without remorse. He says “The Germans used to burn the corpses of prisoners from the concentration camps and then, as soon as they had shut the doors of the cremating ovens behind them, they used to go off daily and have lunch without the slightest feeling of repulsion. There are men here who own mattresses stuffed with the hair of women killed in concentration camps, and on these same mattresses they have made love to their mistresses, and begotten children with their wives – on these mattresses stuffed with the hair of burnt and murdered women. They were not squeamish. They did not feel sick. They were perfectly happy.”[Part 4, Tranche 145]. When he is very near suicide, and after having witnessed the death of his father the priest, he tells an American orderly “Western Civilization has but one gift left to offer: handcuffs. ” [Part 4, Tranche 157]

Gheorghiu makes two things painfully clear. First he (through his mouthpiece Traian) believes that “Western Civilization” includes everything from the USA to [Soviet] Russia. The Americans in this novel on the whole treat prisoners well, feeding them and looking after them in the refugee camps – but they categorise people as fervently as the Nazis and Communists do, relentlessly interrogating, not really listening to what individuals have to say, all the while fitting people into discrete groups where they can be shuffled around more easily. The dehumanising process is as present in American democracy as it is in Soviet totalitarianism.

Second, at the time he was writing, and in what we would now call the beginning of the Cold War, Gheorghiu believes that a real war is about to break out between the USA and the USSR. He speaks of “Western Brigades” forming. But this he sees simply as two forces preparing to tear apart what is essentially the same dehumanising culture.

So, to circle back to my own questions. What was it that made the novel so popular at the time? What nerve did it hit? More than anything, it gave a picture of Central and Eastern Europe swarming with DPs (displaced persons) – people unable to go home or not wanting to go home or having lost their whole family and home in the war. People who lived in makeshift camps in their hundreds of thousands. In 1948 when Gheorghiu was writing, these were current realities which would have been known even to those in Western Europe. And it was very topical in its understanding of the threat posed by the Soviet Union and the fear of another war. The Cold War could easily turn hot. Possibly, too, the general thesis of mechanisation and bureaucracy leading to dehumanisation was one that would have been felt by people who had been bombed, suffered wartime regulations and were still having their food rationed.

And why is it now on the way to being forgotten? Largely the way history has gone, the way Europe has developed and changed. But also, I would guess, the very simplistic way the central narrative of Johann is told, and the heavy didacticism of Traian’s stilted commentary. Well-meaning they were once, perhaps, but now they do not read well.

 


 

A word on the author: Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu (1916-1992) was, like Traian, the son of a Romanian Orthodox priest living in a village. Like Traian, he was a brilliant scholar and learnt many languages. For two years during the war he worked in the Romanian civil service. But Romania fought for three years on the Axis side. When Soviet Russia took over and then set up a Communist regime, Gheorghiu was in a DP camp in Western Europe. Luckily for him, he was able to spend the rest of his life in Paris. He wrote a total of 26 books, increasingly religious, and was finally ordained an Orthodox priest (in Paris) in 1963. His most famous book remained The 25th Hour, and he used the title as part of the title of later works, such as De la vingt-cinquieme heure a l’heure eternelle (From the 25th hour to the eternal hour) in 1965. His last book, published in 1986 was called Mémoires: Le témoin de la vingt-cinquième heure (Memoirs: Witness of the 25th Hour) in which he gave a factual account of the number of camps he had been interned in after the war. The 25th Hour itself was not allowed to be published in Romania until 1991, when the Communist regime had been toppled.


 

Ridiculous Footnote: In 1967, a truly dreadful film was made out of The 25th Hour. I know this because I saw it as a teenager when it was new. It was one of those bland, international productions produced by Carlo Ponti, scripted by Wolf Mankowitz (who should have known better) and directed by the French director Henri Verneuil.  So who did the producer pick to play Johann Moritz? Why of course Hollywood’s standard man-of-the-earth Anthony Quinn, who was always cast as sensual-ethnic-type, be it Zorba the Greek or pirate or Spanish revolutionary or Mexican bandit. Johann Moritz’s wife Susanna was played by Italian glamour-puss Verna Lisi, looking nothing like a Romanian peasant; and philosophical Traian Koruga was Italian Serge Reggiani, who at least got a few words in, but not too many. The film was advertised as a wonderful love story of a man trying to get back to his glamorous wife. It flopped something awful.

 

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