Remarkable affinities

That two of the most original writers of the twentieth century lived in such proximity, in central Paris, that they would sometimes bump into each other during their solitary walks was the working of chance. But that they would end up knowing each other well, and admiring each other’s work, was both natural and inevitable.

Steven Matthews’s book seeks to sketch “some lines of the dialogue which clearly existed” between Samuel Beckett and Emil Cioran, to give an account of their personal relationship and to explore the remarkable affinities in their “thinking and writing … as they developed” in France after the Second World War. Each sailed from a different periphery of Europe; adopting French as their new language, and letting themselves be transformed by it as writers, they sought to capture and depict, from different angles, the “destitution of modern man”. The author’s working assumption is that the writing of each can be more clearly understood through the lens of the other’s work. By placing the Irish writer before the Romanian philosopher’s magnifying mirror, he hopes to obtain “potential insight into the governing minutiae of Beckett’s ideas”, and more specifically into his “skepticism and pessimism”, which he finds to be “so much a characteristic of Cioran’s thinking” as well. Beckett also resonated with Cioran’s thinking on le métèque (immigrant, outsider) and the condition of the exiled writer. The outcome is a neat, tightly argued book that aims to bring together philosophy and literature in a meaningful, mutually enlightening way. Beckett and Cioran is meant primarily for an academic audience, yet it is largely accessible to the generalist reader as well.

The author is a specialist in modernism and his knowledge of Beckett is vast and thorough. The work of Cioran, however, is less firm ground. Matthews writes, for instance, that “Cioran was accepted among Latin Quarter intellectuals in Paris, and particularly among the group around Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir”. Not only was Cioran not associated with this group, but “I never spoke with him”, he said of Sartre in an interview with Jason Weiss in 1983. It’s true that Cioran was frequenting Café de Flore (the group’s meeting place) during the 1940s, but that was just because “the Flore was the only heated cafe, at the time of the Liberation for example, when it was freezing outside”.

Similarly, Matthews writes that “In post-War Paris, Cioran was joined by fellow Romanian émigrés who included Benjamin Fondane”. That would have posed something of a challenge: Fondane was killed at Auschwitz in October 1944. These are just two examples out of many possible. Matthews’s uneven mastery of about one half of his subject matter undermines his book‘s ambitions and even reliability.

The post Remarkable affinities appeared first on TLS.