I.D. Sârbu and the power to transform a camp barrack into a university lecture hall

I.D. Sârbu’s sense of humour was the source of many a frown. He told stories, he invented, he laughed. He graded his effects with erudition, transforming soldierly jokes into subtle morals, with the knowledge of a winegrower who ennobles wine. Sometimes he’d pour water into the wine. He praised gossip as a literary genre, like the hymn, the ode or even the epic, which, at least in his case, was similar in size and richness of episodes. The good-natured cleverness was eventually transformed into self-irony. He told us how, in the Cluj of his youth, he used to meet the sculptor Romulus Ladea and a large group of artists – the pack, he said – in a pub, just to practise his laughter. The moment one of them got up and left, his friends would mercilessly scissor him.

When it was just I. D. Sârbu and Romulus Ladea, the latter complained: “Gary, dear, I’d go and take a piss, but I’m afraid you’ll talk behind my back to the waiter.  […]

While Dr. Sergiu Al-George struggled to turn the hut into a temple, playwright Ion D. Sârbu treated it like a university lecture hall. A former student of Lucian Blaga and assistant to Liviu Rusu at the University of Cluj, he gave lectures on the philosophy of culture, aesthetics and psychology, with a huge audience, an inexhaustible capacity for improvisation, and the ease and energy with which he spoke. He seemed like an erupting volcano, spewing not lava but ideas and combinations of plastic, vivid, conquering words. Because he didn’t have to submit to scientific rigour, he was brilliant. When he couldn’t remember a particular cultural fact, he invented something far more interesting. Every lapse of memory became an act of creation. Lectures were given on the bedposts and the audience sat wherever they could. The most devoted listener was the architect Nae Rădulescu. He competed for a place at the master’s feet with three young Saxons from Brașov: Schmidt, Zimmerman and Herzog. Nae Rădulescu sipped the words from his lips and sat still for hours, anxious not to miss anything he said, while the Saxon troika took notes on the bottom of their scales or on the soles of their boots. For the ones from Brașov, all three of them students at a technical college, every syllable uttered by the professor was a terrible novelty. Ion D. Sârbu once talked about the configurationist school of psychology and, with inimitable humour, described Koehler’s experiments with monkeys. As the monkeys evoked varied in intelligence, Gary Sârbu amused himself by naming them after his beloved ones. He named the dumbest after his ex-wife, who had left him for a Communist dignitary in Cluj. His wickedness immediately became a scientific fact, recorded on scales and memorised by the Saxons.

 (Source: Florin Constantin Pavlovici, Torture for All. Memoirs, edited by Lidia Vianu, Contemporary Literature Press, Bucharest, 2014, pp. 176, 243-245)