About five in the afternoon there was still a drop of wine in the bottle, still a tiny morsel of bread lying on the table. The three of us were as lucid, as bright, as gay as could be. We might have continued that way until midnight were it not for an unexpected visit from an Englishwoman and a young poet. The formalities concluded, I immediately inquired if they had any money on them, adding at once that we were in need of food. They were delighted to come to our rescue. We gave them a big basket and told them to gather whatever they could. In about a half hour they returned laden with food and wines. We sat down and fell to like hungry wolves. The cold chicken which they had bought disappeared like magic. The cheeses, the fruit, the bread we washed down with the most excellent wines. It was really criminal to toss those good wines off the way we did. Fred, of course, had become hilarious and uncontrollable during the feast. With each bottle that was opened he poured himself a good tumblerful and emptied it down his gullet in one draught. The veins were standing out at the temples, his eyes were popping, the saliva dribbled from his mouth. Reichel had disappeared, or perhaps we had locked him out. Our English friends took everything with composure and equanimity. Perhaps they looked upon it as the customary scene at the Villa Seurat which they had heard so much about.
BLAISE CENDRARS
(FROM THE BOOKS IN MY LIFE)
Against the advice of editor and publisher, I have insisted on the inclusion of this piece—as a substitution for passages on “Mona” of the Tropics. It was suggested that the essay called “Balzac and his Double” be used instead of this. But Balzac is long dead, and the halo which surrounds his name is still untarnished. Cendrars is still living, though gravely ill now and confined to a wheelchair. Alive or dead, he is, to my mind, vastly more important to our generation than Balzac ever could be.
For no contemporary author have I struggled harder to obtain a hearing than for Blaise Cendrars. And all my efforts have been in vain. I consider it a shame and a disgrace that no American publisher has shown the least interest in this undisputed giant of French letters. All we have of him, in translation, to my knowledge, are several poems, the novel called Sutter’s Gold (an early work), the African Anthology (a collection of African poems translated into French, by Cendrars) and the Antarctic Fugue, published in England, this being only part of a longer work, Dan Yack.
Yes, this chapter from The Books in My Life was written here in Big Sur and it was written from the heart. Cendrars is not easy reading—to an American like myself whose French is far from perfect. But he has been the most rewarding, to me, of all contemporary French writers. If, in the early stages of my career, it was Knut Hamsun whom I idolized, whom I most desired to imitate, in the latter stage it has been Cendrars. With the exception of John Cowper Powys, no writer I have come in contact with, gives more than he. He gives and he sends. He is inexhaustible. Among all living writers he is the one who has lived the most, lived the fullest. Beside him, for example, Ernest Hemingway is a Boy Scout.
And this is the writer we have chosen to neglect and ignore. I don’t understand it. I refuse to understand it. Those who criticize me for being too eulogistic have never read him—they have only dipped into him.
This is no commentary, this is an exordium. Read him! I say. Read him, even if at the age of sixty you have to begin to learn French. Read him in French, not in English. Read him before it is too late, for it is doubtful if France will ever again produce a Cendrars.
Cendrars was the first French writer to look me up, during my stay in Paris, and the last man I saw on leaving Paris. I had just a few minutes before catching the train for Rocamadour and I was having a last drink on the terrasse of my hotel near the Porte d’Orléans when Cendrars hove in sight. Nothing could have given me greater joy than this unexpected last-minute encounter. In a few words I told him of my intention to visit Greece. Then I sat back and drank in the music of his sonorous voice which to me always seemed to come from a sea organ. In those last few minutes Cendrars managed to convey a world of information, and with the same warmth and tenderness which he exudes in his books. Like the very ground under our feet, his thoughts were honeycombed with all manner of subterranean passages. I left him sitting there in shirt sleeves, never dreaming that years would elapse before hearing from him again, never dreaming that I was perhaps taking my last look at Paris.
I had read whatever was translated of Cendrars before arriving in France. That is to say, almost nothing. My first taste of him in his own language came at a time when my French was none too proficient. I began with Moravagine, a book by no means easy to read for one who knows little French. I read it slowly, with a dictionary by my side, shifting from one café to another. It was in the Café de la Liberté, corner of the Rue de la Gaieté and the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, that I began it. I remember well the day. Should Cendrars ever read these lines he may be pleased, touched perhaps, to know that it was in that dingy hole I first opened his book.
Moravagine was probably the second or third book which I had attempted to read in French. Only the other day, after a lapse of about eighteen years, I reread it. What was my amazement to discover that whole passages were engraved in my memory! And I had thought my French was null! Here is one of the passages I remember as clearly as the day I first read it. It begins at the top of page 77 (Editions Grasset, 1926).
I tell you of things that brought some relief at the start. There was also the water, gurgling at intervals, in the water-closet pipes. . . A boundless despair possessed me.
(Does this convey anything to you, my dear Cendrars?)
Immediately I think of two other passages, even more deeply engraved in my mind, from Une Nuit dans la Forêt,* which I read about three years later. I cite them not to brag of my powers of memory but to reveal an aspect of Cendrars which his English and American readers probably do not suspect the existence of.
1. I, the freest man that exists, recognize that there is always something that binds one: that liberty, independence do not exist, and I am full of contempt for, and at the same time take pleasure in, my helplessness.
2. More and more I realize that I have always led the contemplative life. I am a sort of Brahmin in reverse, meditating on himself amid the hurly-burly, who, with all his strength, disciplines himself and scorns existence. Or the boxer with his shadow, who, furiously, calmly, punching at emptiness, watches his form. What virtuosity, what science, what balance, the ease with which he accelerates! Later, one must learn how to take punishment with equal imperturbability. I, I know how to take punishment and with serenity I fructify and with serenity destroy myself: in short, work in the world not so much to enjoy as to make others enjoy (it’s others’ reflexes that give me pleasure, not my own). Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.†
These last two passages have probably been cited many times already and will no doubt be cited many times more as the years go by. They are memorable ones and thoroughly the author’s own. Those who know only Sutter’s Gold, Panama and On the Trans-siberian, which are about all the American reader gets to know, may indeed wonder on reading the foregoing passages why this man has not been translated more fully. Long before I attempted to make Cendrars better known to the American public (and to the world at large, I may well add), John Dos Passos had translated and illustrated with water colors Panama, or the adventures of my seven uncles.‡
However, the primary thing to know about Blaise Cendrars is that he is a man of many parts. He is also a man of many books, many kinds of books, and by that I do not mean “good” and “bad” but books so different one from another that he gives the impression of evolving in all directions at once. An evolved man, truly. Certainly an evolved writer.
His life itself reads like the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment. And this individual who has led a super-dimensional life is also a bookworm. The most gregarious of men and yet a solitary. (“O mes solitudes!”) A man of deep intuition and invi
ncible logic. The logic of life. Life first and foremost. Life always with a capital L. That’s Cendrars.
To follow his career from the time he slips out of his parents’ home in Neufchâtel, a boy fifteen or sixteen, to the days of the Occupation when he secretes himself in Aix-en-Provence and imposes on himself a long period of silence, is something to make one’s head spin. The itinerary of his wanderings is more difficult to follow than Marco Polo’s, whose trajectory, incidentally, he seems to have crossed and recrossed a number of times. One of the reasons for the great fascination he exerts over me is the resemblance between his voyages and adventures and those which I associate in memory with Sinbad the Sailor or Aladdin of the Wonderful Lamp. The amazing experiences which he attributes to the characters in his books, and which often as not he has shared, have all the qualities of legend as well as the authenticity of legend. Worshiping life and the truth of life, he comes closer than any author of our time to revealing the common source of word and deed. He restores to contemporary life the elements of the heroic, the imaginative and the fabulous. His adventures have led him to nearly every region of the globe, particularly those regarded as dangerous or inaccessible. (One must read his early life especially to appreciate the truth of this statement.) He has consorted with all types, including bandits, murderers, revolutionaries and other varieties of fanatic. He has tried at no less than thirty-six métiers, according to his own words, but, like Balzac, gives the impression of knowing every métier. He was once a juggler, for example—on the English music-hall stage—at the same time that Chaplin was making his debut there; he was a pearl merchant and a smuggler; he was a plantation owner in South America, where he made a fortune three times in succession and lost it even more rapidly than he had made it. But read his life! There is more in it than meets the eye.
Yes, he is an explorer and investigator of the ways and doings of men. And he has made himself such by planting himself in the midst of life, by taking up his lot with his fellow creatures. What a superb, painstaking reporter he is, this man who would scorn the thought of being called “a student of life.” He has the faculty of getting “his story” by a process of osmosis; he seems to seek nothing deliberately. Which is why, no doubt, his own story is always interwoven with the other man’s. To be sure, he possesses the art of distillation, but what he is vitally interested in is the alchemical nature of all relationships. This eternal quest of the transmutative enables him to reveal men to themselves and to the world; it causes him to extol men’s virtues, to reconcile us to their faults and weaknesses, to increase our knowledge and respect for what is essentially human, to deepen our love and understanding of the world. He is the “reporter” par excellence because he combines the faculties of poet, seer and prophet. An innovator and initiator, ever the first to give testimony, he has made known to us the real pioneers, the real adventurers, the real discoverers among our contemporaries. More than any writer I can think of he has made dear to us “le bel aujourd’hui.”
Whilst performing on all levels he always found time to read. On long voyages, in the depths of the Amazon, in the deserts (I imagine he knows them all, those of the earth, those of the spirit), in the jungle, on the broad pampas, on trains, tramps and ocean liners, in the great museums and libraries of Europe, Asia and Africa, he has buried himself in books, has ransacked whole archives, has photographed rare documents, and, for all I know, may have stolen invaluable books, scripts, documents of all kinds—why not, considering the enormity of his appetite for the rare, the curious, the forbidden?
He has told us in one of his recent books how the Germans (les Boches!) destroyed or carried off, I forget which, his precious library, precious to a man like Cendrars who loves to give the most precise data when referring to a passage from one of his favorite books. Thank God, his memory is alive and functions like a faithful machine. An incredible memory, as will testify those who have read his more recent books—La Main Coupée, l’Homme Foudroyé, Bourlinguer, Le Lotissement du Ciel, La Banlieue de Paris.
On the side—with Cendrars it seems as though almost everything of account has been done “on the side”—he has translated the works of other writers, notably the Portuguese author, Ferreira de Castro (Forêt Vierge) and our own Al Jennings, the great outlaw and bosom friend of O. Henry.§ What a wonderful translation is Hors-la-loi which in English is called Through the Shadows with O. Henry. It is a sort of secret collaboration between Cendrars and the innermost being of Al Jennings. At the time of writing it, Cendrars had not yet met Jennings nor even corresponded with him. (This is another book, I must say in passing, which our pocket-book editors have overlooked. There is a fortune in it, unless I am all wet, and it would be comforting to think that part of this fortune should find its way into Al Jennings’ pocket.)
One of the most fascinating aspects of Cendrars’ temperament is his ability and readiness to collaborate with a fellow artist. Picture him, shortly after the First World War, editing the publications of La Sirène! What an opportunity! To him we owe an edition of Les Chants de Maldoror, the first to appear since the original private publication by the author in 1868. In everything an innovator, always meticulous, scrupulous and exacting in his demands, whatever issued from the hands of Cendrars at La Sirène is now a valuable collector’s item. Hand in hand with this capability for collaboration goes another quality—the ability, or grace, to make the first overtures. Whether it be a criminal, a saint, a man of genius, a tyro with promise, Cendrars is the first to look him up, the first to herald him, the first to aid him in the way the person most desires. I speak with justifiable warmth here. No writer ever paid me a more signal honor than dear Blaise Cendrars who, shortly after the publication of Tropic of Cancer, knocked at my door one day to extend the hand of friendship. Nor can I forget that first tender, eloquent review of the book which appeared under his signature in Orbes shortly thereafter. (Or perhaps it was before he appeared at the studio in the Villa Seurat.)
There were times when reading Cendrars—and this is something which happens to me rarely—that I put the book down in order to wring my hands with joy or despair, with anguish or with desperation. Cendrars has stopped me in my tracks again and again, just as implacably as a gunman pressing a rod against one’s spine. Oh, yes, I am often carried away by exaltation in reading a man’s work. But I am alluding now to something other than exaltation. I am talking of a sensation in which all one’s emotions are blended and confused. I am talking of knockout blows. Cendrars has knocked me cold. Not once, but a number of times. And I am not exactly a ham, when it comes to taking it on the chin! Yes, mon cher Cendrars, you not only stopped me, you stopped the clock. It has taken me days, weeks, sometimes months, to recover from these bouts with you. Even years later, I can put my hand to the spot where I caught the blow and feel the old smart. You battered and bruised me; you left me scarred, dazed, punch-drunk. The curious thing is that the better I know you—through your books—the more susceptible I become. It is as if you had put the Indian sign on me. I come forward with chin outstretched—“to take it.” I am your meat, as I have so often said. And it is because I believe I am not unique in this, because I wish others to enjoy this uncommon experience, that I continue to put in my little word for you whenever, wherever, I can.
I incautiously said: “the better I know you.” My dear Cendrars. I will never know you, not as I do other men, of that I am certain. No matter how thoroughly you reveal yourself I shall never get to the bottom of you. I doubt that anyone ever will, and it is not vanity which prompts me to put it this way. You are as inscrutable as a Buddha. You inspire, you reveal, but you never give yourself wholly away. Not that you withhold yourself! No, encountering you, whether in person or through the written word, you leave the impression of having given all there is to give. Indeed, you are one of the few men I know who, in their books as well as in person, give that “extra measure” which means everything to us. You give all that can be given. It is not your fault that the very core of you forbids
scrutiny. It is the law of your being. No doubt there are men less inquisitive, less grasping, less clutching, for whom these remarks are meaningless. But you have so refined our sensitivity, so heightened our awareness, so deepened our love for men and women, for books, for nature, for a thousand and one things of life which only one of your own unending paragraphs could catalogue, that you awaken in us the desire to turn you inside out. When I read you or talk to you I am always aware of your inexhaustible awareness: you are not just sitting in a chair in a room in a city in a country, telling us what is on your mind or in your mind, you make the chair talk and the room vibrate with the tumult of the city whose life is sustained by the invisible outer throng of a whole nation whose history has become your history, whose life is your life and yours theirs, and as you talk or write all these elements, images, facts, creations enter into your thoughts and feelings, forming a web which the spider in you ceaselessly spins and which spreads in us, your listeners, until the whole of creation is involved, and we, you, them, it, everything, have lost identity and found new meaning, new life . . .
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