Before proceeding further, there are two books on Cendrars which I would like to recommend to all who are interested in knowing more about the man. Both are entitled Blaise Cendrars. One is by Jacques-Henry Levèsque (Editions de la Nouvelle Critique, Paris, 1947), the other by Louis Parrot (Editions Pierre Seghers, Paris, 1948), finished on the author’s deathbed. Both contain bibliographies, excerpts from Cendrars’ works, and a number of photographs taken at various periods of his life. Those who do not read French may glean a surprising knowledge of this enigmatic individual from the photographs alone. (It is amazing what spice and vitality French publishers lend their publications through the insertion of old photographs. Seghers has been particularly enterprising in this respect. In his series of little square books, called Poètes d’Aujourd’hui‖, he has given us a veritable gallery of contemporary and near contemporary figures.)
Yes, one can glean a lot about Cendrars just from studying his physiognomy. He has probably been photographed more than any contemporary writer. In addition, sketches and portraits of him have been made by any number of celebrated artists, including Modigliani, Apollinaire, Léger. Flip the pages of the two books I just mentioned—Levèsque’s and Parrot’s; take a good look at this “gueule” which Cendrars has presented to the world in a thousand different moods. Some will make you weep; some are almost hallucinating. There is one photo of him taken in uniform during the days of the Foreign Legion when he was a corporal. His left hand, holding a butt which is burning his fingers, protrudes from beneath the cape; it is a hand so expressive, so very eloquent, that if you do not know the story of his missing arm, this will convey it unerringly. It is with this powerful and sensitive left hand that he has written most of his books, signed his name to innumerable letters and post cards, shaved himself, washed himself, guided his speedy Alfa-Romeo through the most dangerous terrains; it is with this left hand that he has hacked his way through jungles, punched his way through brawls, defended himself, shot at men and beasts, clapped his copains on the back, greeted with a warm clasp a long-lost friend and caressed the women and animals he has loved. There is another photo of him taken in 1921 when he was working with Abel Gance on the film called La Roue, the eternal cigarette glued to his lips, a tooth missing, a huge checkered cap with an enormous peak hanging over one ear. The expression on his face is something out of Dostoievski. On the opposite page is a photo taken by Raymone in 1924, when he was working on l’Or (Sutter’s Gold). Here he stands with legs spread apart, his left hand sliding into the pocket of his baggy pantaloons, a mégot to his lips, as always. In this photo he looks like a healthy, cocky young peasant of Slavic origin. There is a taunting gleam in his eye, a sort of frank, good-natured defiance. “Fuck you, Jack, I’m fine . . . and you?” That’s what it conveys, his look. Another, taken with Levèsque at Tremblay-sur-Maulne, 1926, captures him square in the prime of life. Here he seems to be at his peak physically; he emanates health, joy, vitality. In 1928 we have the photo which has been reprinted by the thousands. It is Cendrars of the South American period, looking fit, sleek almost, well garbed, his conk crowned by a handsome fedora with its soft brim upturned. He has a burning, faraway look in the eyes, as if he had just come back from the Antarctic. (I believe it was in this period that he was writing, or had just finished, Dan Yack, the first half of which [Le Plan de l’Aiguille] has only recently been issued in translation by an English publisher.¶) But it is in 1944 that we catch a glimpse of le vieux Légionnaire—photo by Chardon, Cavaillon. Here he reminds one of Victor McLaglen in the title role of The Informer. This is the period of l’Homme Foudroyé, for me one of his major books. Here he is the fully developed earth man composed of many rich layers—roustabout, tramp, bum, panhandler, mixer, bruiser, adventurer, sailor, soldier, tough guy, the man of a thousand-and-one hard, bitter experiences who never went under but ripened, ripened, ripened. Un homme, quoi! There are two photos taken in 1946, at Aix-en-Provence, which yield us tender, moving images of him. One, in which he leans against a fence, shows him surrounded by the urchins of the neighborhood: he is teaching them a few sleight of hand tricks. The other catches him walking through a shadowed old street which curves endearingly. His look is meditative, if not triste. It is a beautiful photograph, redolent of the atmosphere of the Midi. One walks with him in his pensive mood, hushed by the unseizable thoughts which envelop him . . . I force myself to draw rein. I could go on forever about the “physiognomic” aspects of the man. His is a mug one can never forget. It’s human, that’s what. Human like Chinese faces, like Egyptian, Cretan, Etruscan ones.
Many are the things which have been said against this writer . . . that his books are cinematic in style, that they are sensational, that he exaggerates and deforms à outrance, that he is prolix and verbose, that he lacks all sense of form, that he is too much the realist or else that his narratives are too incredible, and so on ad infinitum. Taken altogether there is, to be sure, a grain of truth in these accusations, but let us remember—only a grain! They reflect the views of the paid critic, the academician, the frustrated novelist. But supposing, for a moment, we accepted them at face value. Will they hold water? Take his cinematic technique, for example. Well, are we not living in the age of the cinema? Is not this period of history more fantastic, more “incredible,” than the simulacrum of it which we see unrolled on the silver screen? As for his sensationalism—have we forgotten Gilles de Rais, the Marquis de Sade, the Memoirs of Casanova? As for hyperbole, what of Pindar? As for prolixity and verbosity, what about Jules Romains or Marcel Proust? As for exaggeration and deformation, what of Rabelais, Swift, Céline, to mention an anomalous trinity? As for lack of form, that perennial jackass which is always kicking up its heels in the pages of literary reviews, have I not heard cultured Europeans rant about the “vegetal” aspect of Hindu temples, the façades of which are studded with a riot of human, animal and other forms? Have I not seen them twisting their lips in distaste when examining the efflorescences embodied in Tibetan scrolls? No taste, eh? No sense of proportion? No control? C’est ça. De la mesure avant tout! These cultured nobodies forget that their beloved exemplars, the Greeks, worked with Cyclopean blocks, created monstrosities as well as apotheoses of harmony, grace, form and spirit; they forget perhaps that the Cycladic sculpture of Greece surpassed in abstraction and simplification anything which Brancusi or his followers ever attempted. The very mythology of these worshipers of beauty, whose motto was “Nothing to the extreme,” is a revelation of the “monstrous” aspect of their being.
Oui, Cendrars is full of excrescences. There are passages which swell up out of the body of his text like rank tumors. There are detours, parentheses, asides, which are the embryonic pith and substance of books yet to come. There is a grand efflorescence and exfoliation, and there is also a grand wastage of material in his books. Cendrars neither cribs and cabins, nor does he drain himself completely. When the moment comes to let go, he lets go. When it is expedient or efficacious to be brief, he is brief and to the point—like a dagger. To me his books reflect his lack of fixed habits, or better yet, his ability to break a habit. (A sign of real emancipation!) In those swollen paragraphs, which are like une mer houleuse and which some readers, apparently, are unable to cope with, Cendrars reveals his oceanic spirit. We who vaunt dear Shakespeare’s madness, his elemental outbursts, are we to fear these cosmic gusts? We who swallowed the Pantagruel and Gargantua, via Urquhart, are we to be daunted by catalogues of names, places, dates, events? We who produced the oddest writer in any tongue—Lewis Carroll—are we to shy away from the play of words, from the ridiculous, the grotesque, the unspeakable or the “utterly impossible”? It takes a man to hold his breath as Cendrars does when he is about to unleash one of his triple-page paragraphs without stop. A man? A deep-sea diver. A whale. A whale of a man, precisely.
What is remarkable is that this same man has also given us some of the shortest sentences ever written, particularly in his poems and prose poems. Here, in staccato rhythm—let us
not forget that before he was a writer he was a musician!—he deploys a telegraphic style. (It might also be called “telesthetic.”) One can read it as fast as Chinese, with whose written characters his vocables have a curious affinity, to my way of thinking. This particular technique of Cendrars’ creates a kind of exorcism—a deliverance from the heavy weight of prose, from the impedimenta of grammar and syntax, from the illusory intelligibility of the merely communicative in speech. In l’Eubage, for example, we discover a sibylline quality of thought and utterance. It is one of his curious books. An extreme. Also a departure and an end. Cendrars is indeed difficult to classify, though why we should want to classify him I don’t know. Sometimes I think of him as “a writer’s writer,” though he is definitely not that. But what I mean to say is that a writer has much to learn from Cendrars. In school, I remember, we were always being urged to take as models men like Macaulay, Coleridge, Ruskin, or Edmund Burke—even de Maupassant. Why they didn’t say Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, I don’t know. No professor ever believed, I dare say, that any of us brats would turn out to be writers one day. They were failures themselves, hence teachers. Cendrars has made it clear that the only teacher, the only model, is life itself. What a writer learns from Cendrars is to follow his nose, to obey life’s commands, to worship no other god but life. Some interpreters will have it that Cendrars means “the dangerous life.” I don’t believe Cendrars would limit it thus. He means life pure and simple, in all its aspects, all its ramifications, all its bypaths, temptations, hazards, what not. If he is an adventurer, he is an adventurer in all realms of life. What interests him is every phase of life. The subjects he has touched on, the themes he has pursued, are encyclopedic. Another sign of “emancipation,” this all-inclusive absorption in life’s myriad manifestations. It is often when he seems most “realistic,” for example, that he tends to pull all the stops on his organ. The realist is a meager soul. He sees what is in front of him, like a horse with blinders. Cendrars’ vision is perpetually open; it is almost as if he had an extra eye buried in his crown, a skylight open to all the cosmic rays. Such a man, you may be sure, will never complete his life’s work, because life will always be a step ahead of him. Besides, life knows no completion, and Cendrars is one with life. An article by Pierre de Latil in La Gazette des Lettres, Paris, August 6, 1949, informs us that Cendrars has projected a dozen or more books to be written within the next few years. It is an astounding program, considering that Cendrars is now in his sixties, that he has no secretary, that he writes with his left hand, that he is restless underneath, always itching to sally forth and see more of the world, that he actually detests writing and looks upon his work as forced labor. He works on four or five books at a time. He will finish them all, I am certain. I only pray that I live to read the trilogy of “les souvenirs humains” called Archives de ma tour d’ivoire, which will consist of: Hommes de lettres, Hommes d’affaires and Vie des hommes obscurs. Particularly the last named . . .
I have long pondered over Cendrars’ confessed insomnia. He attributes it to his life in the trenches, if I remember rightly. True enough, no doubt, but I surmise there are deeper reasons for it. At any rate, what I wish to point out is that there seems to be a connection between his fecundity and his sleeplessness. For the ordinary individual sleep is the restorative. Exceptional individuals—holy men, gurus, inventors, leaders, men of affairs, or certain types of the insane—are able to do with very little sleep. They apparently have other means of replenishing their dynamic potential. Some men, merely by varying their pursuits, can go on working with almost no sleep. Others, like the yogi and the guru, in becoming more and more aware and therefore more alive, virtually emancipate themselves from the thrall of sleep. (Why sleep if the purpose of life is to enjoy creation to the fullest?) With Cendrars, I have the feeling that in switching from active life to writing, and vice versa, he replenishes himself. A pure supposition on my part. Otherwise I am at a loss to account for a man burning the candle at both ends and not consuming himself. Cendrars mentions somewhere that he is of a line of long-lived antecedents. He has certainly squandered his hereditary patrimony regally. But—he shows no signs of cracking up. Indeed, he seems to have entered upon a period of second youth. He is confident that when he reaches the ripe age of seventy he will be ready to embark on new adventures. It will not surprise me in the least if he does; I can see him at ninety scaling the Himalayas or embarking in the first rocket to voyage to the moon.
But to come back to the relation between his writing and his sleeplessness . . . If one examines the dates given at the end of his books, indicating the time he spent on them, one is struck by the rapidity with which he executed them as well as by the speed with which (all good-sized books) they succeed one another. All this implies one thing, to my mind, and that is “obsession.” To write one has to be possessed and obsessed. What is it that possesses and obsesses Cendrars? Life. He is a man in love with life—et c’est tout. No matter if he denies this at times, no matter if he vilifies the times or excoriates his contemporaries in the arts, no matter if he compares his own recent past with the present and finds the latter lacking, no matter if he deplores the trends, the tendencies, the philosophies and behavior of the men of our epoch, he is the one man of our time who has proclaimed and trumpeted the fact that today is profound and beautiful. And it is just because he has anchored himself in the midst of contemporary life, where, as if from a conning tower, he surveys all life, past, present and future, the life of the stars as well as the life of the ocean depths, life in miniscule as well as the life grandiose, that I seized upon him as a shining example of the right principle, the right attitude towards life. No one can steep himself in the splendors of the past more than Cendrars; no one can hail the future with greater zest; but it is the present, the eternal present, which he glorifies and with which he allies himself. It is such men, and only such men, who are in the tradition, who carry on. The others are backward lookers, idolaters, or else mere wraiths of hopefulness, bonimenteurs. With Cendrars you strike ore. And it is because he understands the present so profoundly, accepts it and is one with it, that he is able to predict the future so unerringly. Not that he sets himself up as a soothsayer! No, his prophetic remarks are made casually and discreetly; they are buried often in a maze of unrelated material. In this he often reminds me of the good physician. He knows how to take the pulse. In fact, he knows all the pulses, like the Chinese physicians of old. When he says of certain men that they are sick, or of certain artists that they are corrupt or fakes, or of politicians in general that they are crazy, or of military men that they are criminals, he knows whereof he speaks. It is the magister in him which is speaking.
He has, however, another way of speaking which is more endearing to me. He can speak with tenderness. Lawrence, it will be remembered, originally thought of calling the book known as Lady Chatterley’s Lover by the title “Tenderness.” I mention Lawrence’s name because I remember vividly Cendrars’ allusion to him on the occasion of his memorable visit to the Villa Seurat. “You must think a lot of Lawrence,” he said questioningly. “I do,” I replied. We exchanged a few words and then I recall him asking me fair and square if I did not believe Lawrence to be overrated. It was the metaphysical side of Lawrence, I gathered, that was not to his liking, that was “suspect,” I should say. (And it was just at this period that I was engrossed in this particular aspect of Lawrence!) I am sure, at any rate, that my defense of Lawrence was weak and unsustained. To be truthful, I was much more interested in hearing Cendrars’ view of the man than in justifying my own. Often, later, in reading Cendrars this word “tenderness” crossed my lips. It would escape involuntarily, rouse me from my reverie. Futile though it be, I would then indulge in endless speculation, comparing Lawrence’s tenderness with Cendrars’. They are, I now think, of two distinct kinds. Lawrence’s weakness is man, Cendrars’ men. Lawrence longed to know men better; he wanted to work in common with them. It is in Apocalypse that he has some of the
most moving passages—on the withering of the “societal” instinct. They create real anguish in us—for Lawrence. They make us realize the tortures he suffered in trying to be “a man among men.” With Cendrars I detect no hint of such deprivation or mutilation. In the ocean of humanity Cendrars swims as blithely as a porpoise or a dolphin. In his narratives he is always together with men, one with them in deed, one with them in thought. If he is a solitary, he is nevertheless fully and completely a man. He is also the brother of all men. Never does he set himself up as superior to his fellow man. Lawrence thought himself superior, often, often—I think that is undeniable—and very often he was anything but. Very often it is a lesser man who “instructs” him. Or shames him. Lawrence had too great a love for “humanity” to understand or get along with his fellow man.
It is when we come to their respective fictional characters that we sense the rift between these two figures. With the exception of the self portraits, given in Sons and Lovers, Kangaroo, Aaron’s Rod and such like, all Lawrence’s characters are mouthpieces for his philosophy or the philosophy he wishes to depose. They are ideational creatures, moved about like chess pieces. They have blood in them all right, but it is the blood which Lawrence has pumped into them. Cendrars’ characters issue from life and their activity stems from life’s moving vortex. They too, of course, acquaint us with his philosophy of life, but obliquely, in the elliptic manner of art.
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