Autobiography: Mircea Eliade

...Arthur A. Cohen IT WILL come as a surprise to American readers of Mircea Eliade to learn from his rich and absorbing autobiography that until his thirtieth year when this first volume breaks off, Eliade was regarded in his native Romania as a novelist, storyteller, journalist, sometime mythologist, but not at all the genius historian of world religions that he became...

...The fact is that Eliade's Yoga (1936) quickly established itself as innovative and authoritative and although it had been Eliade's rhythm until then to move between science and the imagination, between the myths of others and his own, by the time of the Second World War that rhythm was broken, never again to be efficiently reestablished...

...Seriousness does not mean life without wit, abandon, sheer pleasure, but none of these human reliefs is separate from the stream in which all life runs...

...There is little doubt from the earliest pages that Eliade understood himself to be the child of choice and election and perhaps from these earliest experiences of domestic trust and investment, he derived the archetypal intuitions that mark his life...

...ERIC COCHRANE teaches history at the University of Chicago...

...Eliade will tell us nothing about his religious life quite clearly because he does not think of religion-as he understands its phenomenology-as a separate subject-matter of living, as though one minute life is profane secular-ity and the next redolent with sanctity...

...A man of fierce modesty and privacy, his sense of self-so critical to the finest autobiographies-is always present and alert...

...All on the surface...

...As much then as we would wish to know how the mind of Eliade works, how he did his research, how he devised his speculative language and tracked his discoveries, there is precious little of this in his autobiography (much more is to be found in the marvelous volume of-Eliade's conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet, L'Epreuve du Labyrinthe which should be translated promptly...

...But even more than a literary itinerary, the reader wants some sense of the lure of the homeland, the topography and cul-tural ncestry of Romania...

...All this is surface structure...

...After all it is that deep well, even more than the depths of ancient India, that nourish Eliade, that persuade him to hold on, to take up a complex love affair, to press forward as litterateur and scholar rather than return to India as he had first thought likely...

...Unlike Czeslaw Milosz who adopts the intelligent strategy in his Native Realms of weaving the history of Polish culture and literature into the narration of his own origins and roots, Eliade has forgotten our ignorance...

...Somehow it all seems external to Goethe, but in fact what has been done is that a subtle art has been devised, an art which , like the gushing rivulets of a concealed and deep well, spill with apparent randomness but return to the same invisible source...

...At precisely such moments when one thinks the savant will reveal his method, the novelist in Eliade kicks the struts from beneath the intellectual scaffolding and new images, new tales, new wonders of human friendship and affection replace reflection and the narrative presses on...

...Eliade has no need of our approval in order to endure...

...So Eliade...

...Reading the autobiographies of the great and famous, it is inevitable that the reader has formed some sense of the personality whose life and times are unfolded...

...Darwin writes in order to inform his children about the education that made for his discovery...

...It was feared by his closest friends that his considerable success as a novelist would compromise the reception accorded his magisterial study of Yoga...

...Eliade is no sententious self-server...

...He is willing to write about himself, but he guards his real origins and we must honor his reticence...

...Journey East, Journey West is superbly narrated by a man who is not yet ready to confide his secrets...

...If there is criticism to be made of this swift-moving, thoroughly fascinating and enriching autobiography, it is to be located in the odd fact that Eliade has written the original text in his native Romanian...

...His interest is quite different...

...His autobiography abounds with references to the classics of Romanian literature, the cultural heroes of Romania between the wars, the nationalism of the Iron Guard and the politics of reaction and anti-Semitism, the novelists and poets of his day, none of whom we know...

...He says to himself, undoubtedly correctly, that more is to come, that another masterpiece is beyond the present one...

...There, Goethe reveals nothing about the substance of our knowledge of his genius, but rather sets forth with immense affection and intimacy the detail of his household, the occupation of his town by French soldiers, his experience of theater, nature, and the arts...

...Innocently cast as an autobiography, places, travels, wanderings, friendships, discipleship, books written and books read-those indispensable elements of autobiography as an account of the work of Chronos, yield to something else, autobiography still, but not autobiography as it is conventionally organized...

...ARTHUR A. COHEN is the author of several books, including In the Days of Simon Stem and Acts of Theft (Harcourt, Brace...

...Their fears were not unfounded...

...John Stuart Mill recounts the exigent educational routine that shaped his philosophic temperament...

...Quite the opposite...

...Journey East, Journey West, fluently translated and handsomely published, is essentially an autobiographic bil-dungsroman...

...There is hardly a page without its self-doubt and its vindication, but all this is deeply embedded in a skein of event, personality, scene that obliges the reader to see and hear, rather than to judge...

...All in all, Eliade, interpreter of the primary myths of masculine adventure and discovery, first lived them, then made them into fiction as the initial gesture of distancing their occurrence and finally raised them to the subject-matter of scientific discourse that they (and he) might enter an eternal order where not history, but the rhythm of nature and the universe, hold sway...

...The seriousness is that time present always gathers up the presuppositions of the past that are buried not only in the shallow soil of forgetful-ness but in the deeps of the spirit and the mysteries of culture...

...If one knows anything of Eliade's sense of the holy (or as the prefers to call it, "the sacred"), there is no significant event in human life that does not refract and diffuse rays profane and sacred in one...

...Intended initially for the emigre and exile audience of fellowRomanians as well as for home consumption of those fortunate enough to come , upon the book in Communist Romania, Eliade has assumed that all the world is familiar with things Romanian...

...Do not for a moment think that all this is set forth as such...

...The scientist and savant prevailed over the storyteller although happily the latter has periodically reemerged, yielding the odd novel such as the perplexing and mysterious Forbidden Forest (1946) or the little masterpiece, The Old Man and the Bureaucrat (1977...

...The seriousness of life is the given of Eliade's autobiography...

...Alas, quite the contrary...

...The tale of Eliade le jeune is one apostrophized in all the great literatures that Eliade has himself appropriated for the West: initiation by trials and proofs, ordeals by nature and by man, visitations of extraordinary fortuity that yield illumination and clarity, passage into an alien world that he conquers and from which he withdraws, times of personal sequestration and silence, times of loquacity and engagement...

...Philistines manage to be philis-tines wherever they are and the publication of Eliade's first major scientific study of Tantric Yoga on the heels of a suite of novels and years as a columnist for the most important nationalist Bucharest newspaper produced a barrage of philistine idiocy...

...Eliade appears to have no particular sensus religiosus and yet by some intellectual attraction out of the mass of books he reads by day and night he is drawn to the literature of the Orient and becomes first an Indologist and student of Sanskrit under the great Indian scholar Surendranath Dasgupta and then a historian of world religion...

...What is one to make of an autobiography of the greatest living interpreter of the ancient life of God and the myths of human origins and destiny, who hardly mentions his interest in religion, certainly not his own Romanian Orthodox heritage...

...No rite of passage-puberty, graduation, sexuality, travel, birth, sickness, madness, death-can ever be reported as a mere event in one's life, since all events are endowed with meanings that individuate the primary structure of the race of man and allude to the great trials and exaltations of serious life...

...REVIEWERS STEVEN ENGLUNDVs study of the nation ideology of France', 1770-1914, will be published next year...

...only Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit adopts the strategy that Eliade has chosen for his own autobiography...

...Eliade conceives himself as though a subject in his fictions, marshaling a narrative of personae and events that describe from the vantage-point of his mature years the coming to be of a young Romanian litterateur and savant, child to an army officer and an indulgent mother making ends meet on a modest pension, raising their children, and electing one-Mircea-to bear their hopes and fears...