I, Prodigy

By Mayo Mohs

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: VOL. I, 1907-1937, JOURNEY EAST, JOURNEY WEST

by Mircea Eliade

Translated by Mac Linscott Ricketts

Harper & Row; 335 pages; $17.95

At 74, Mircea Eliade remains one of the world's great authorities on the myths and symbols of religion. Teaching and writing (more than 50 books), he has always had a sympathetic ear for the exotic, and even erotic, spiritual quests of the young. In this candid autobiography, covering his first 30 years, the historian portrays himself as a scapegrace whose enormous appetite for life embraced both the intellectual and the sensual.

Eliade was born in Bucharest, when Rumania still turned its eyes West for cultural inspiration. One early encounter, when he was "four or five," was a portent of things to come. He saw a young girl who had "the largest eyes I have ever seen [and] black curls that fell to her shoulders." He knew even then, he claims, that "something extraordinary and decisive had occurred."

At school, he explored that subject gingerly at first, amid prodigious feasts on books (a lifelong lust) and feats of writing (his first novel). But carnal knowledge, too, became an irresistible pursuit. In Calcutta, where he journeyed to study with Surendranath Dasgupta, the celebrated historian of Indian philosophy, he was invited to live in the teacher's home. There he began an affair with Dasgupta's daughter.

Sent away, the chagrined young man retired to an ashram in the Himalayas, but asceticism flew the hermitage when a novice named Jenny arrived from South Africa. Soon she was suggesting that she and Eliade try out the sexual initiation rites of Tantric yoga. "Such rituals also entailed a great deal of risk," recalls Eliade deadpan. "It was, however, beyond my powers not to brave them."

Back in Bucharest, Eliade turned his Indian romance into an indelicately autobiographical novel, Maitreyi, which became a bestseller. Then he promptly dashed off, over the next two years, an entire trilogy of novels to follow it. He somehow managed to find time to keep two mistresses, one an emotional actress, the other the wounded victim of an earlier love affair, a young woman named Nina.

Forced ultimately to choose between the two, Eliade elected to move in with Nina, "to restore [her to] integrity," as he puts it.

Other men make that sort of commitment without creating a fuss, but Eliade embraced it with his usual intensity as a dramatic, self-sacrificial act.

Manifestly, it was still a long journey to world-class scholarship. Later volumes should be vastly enlightening, but it will be hard for them to top this portrait of the wise man as a young ego.

--By Mayo Mohs

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