Comarnescu and Eugene O’Neil

Petru Comarnescu, one of the most original Romanian critics and cultural historians of the twentieth century, was born 120 years ago today. His journals, written over many years, chart his inner life with painful candour; however, they also contain one of the richest first-hand records of a transatlantic literary friendship - with the American playwright Eugene O’Neill.

Comarnescu was born in Iași on 23 November 1905. He studied philosophy at the University of Bucharest and completed his doctorate abroad, steeped in the ideals of Hellenistic balance and the American pragmatist idea of life as continual experience. He married Gina Comarnescu in the mid-1930s, though the marriage disintegrated painfully. 

A long research stay in the United States in the 1930s laid the foundations for his career as Romania’s foremost interpreter of American culture; on his return he joined the editorial and academic world centred on the Royal Foundations. War and the arrival of Communism disrupted his work. Many of his projects were blocked, staged productions suppressed and correspondence delayed or cut. Yet he persisted, publishing studies, teaching, translating and defending a broad humanistic view of art until his death in Bucharest in 1970. A little further biographical information is available at Wikipedia.

Comarnescu kept diaries for much his life, from 1923 to 1968. A three-volume set of these journals - titled Pagini de jurnal - was published in Romania by Editura Noul Orfeu in 2003. There is also a separate publication titled Jurnal, 1931‑1937 (1994) published by Institutul European. A review in Romanian of this can be found here. However, generally, there is a paucity of information online and in English about Comarnescu and his diaries. My only source, thus, is a 10-page paper by Adriana Carolina Bulz in HyperCultura (Vol. 1 No. 1/2015)- the journal put out by Hyperion University’s Department of Letters and Foreign Languages. Bulz’s paper is entitled: Eugene O’Neill’s Romanian Memory Revisited through Petru Comarnescu’s Diary and Correspondence. (To find this online google search: Eugene O’Neill’s Romanian Memory.)

The journals show, says Bulz, a mind continually drawn to the classical idea that goodness and beauty are inseparable, and to a belief in destiny that was not passive but combative. In a revealing entry he notes that ‘my existence is determined by an irrational play of contrary forces,’ yet insists that because fate is unknowable ‘we must fight, as the ancient heroes fought.’ These tensions animate his most creative years and frame the long passages where he reflects on the artists who sustained him. The diaries are also the key to understanding why he recognised something of himself in Eugene O’Neill’s tragic vision. Early entries describe his desire to ‘pour all the feelings, problems and contradictions’ of recent years into writing - a formulation that echoes O’Neill’s own practice of turning personal conflict into drama. 

The correspondence reproduced in the article shows how deeply O’Neill valued him. In May 1938 O’Neill praises Comarnescu’s article in Revue Hebdomadaire as ‘much superior to other criticism of my work,’ gives him permission to publish his translation of Strange Interlude and even declines copyright payment, asking only for a copy of the book. In November that year he appoints him his legal representative in Romania, grants him full rights to translate Mourning Becomes Electra – ‘the best thing I have done,’ he writes - and expresses confidence that it would have ‘the greatest success’ on the Romanian stage. Later letters reveal O’Neill’s delight at the Bucharest production of Mourning Becomes Electra, his gratitude to the theatre company, and his continuing trust in Comarnescu as ‘sole representative and translator.’ 

Against these letters, the diaries provide essential context. Translating Strange Interlude during the collapse of his marriage, he describes working ‘in these terrible times for me, so as not to go mad,’ finding in O’Neill’s characters ‘so many situations similar to those I was going through.’ When Communist cultural authorities began blocking productions and banning plays on ideological grounds - at one point invoking O’Neill’s Catholicism as justification - the diaries record his despair: ‘tragedy itself was no longer in fashion… destiny considered a bourgeois diversion.’ Yet even at his lowest, he sets his own anguished reflections beside O’Neill’s tragic characters, writing that between Hamlet, Hickey and himself ‘it would have been better never to be born,’ a formulation remarkably close to Edmund’s lament in Long Day’s Journey into Night, a play Comarnescu had never read at the time. 

In his final letter to the O’Neills in 1947, Comarnescu describes sending new volumes of translations, outlines the structure of his major study on the revival of tragedy and confesses, without false modesty, that he feels ‘nearer to [O’Neill’s] philosophy and art than any of his critics.’ The diaries confirm that this was not arrogance but a conviction built from years of immersion, affinity and hard scholarship.