The tenderness of Cendrars exudes from all pores. He does not spare his characters; neither does he revile or castigate them. His harshest words, let me say parenthetically, are usually reserved for the poets and artists whose work he considers spurious. Aside from these diatribes, you will rarely find him passing judgment upon others. What you do find is that in laying bare the weaknesses or faults of his subjects he is unmasking, or endeavoring to unmask, their essential heroic nature. All the diverse figures—human, all too human—which crowd his books are glorified in their basic, intrinsic being. They may or may not have been heroic in the face of death; they may or may not have been heroic before the tribunal of justice; but they are heroic in the common struggle to assert and uphold their own primal being. I mentioned a while ago the book by Al Jennings which Cendrars so ably translated. The very choice of this book is indicative of my point. This mite of a man, this outlaw with an exaggerated sense of justice and honor who is “up for life” (but eventually pardoned by Theodore Roosevelt), this terror of the West who wells over with tenderness, is just the sort of man Cendrars would choose to tell the world about, just the sort of man he would uphold as being filled with the dignity of life. Ah, how I should like to have been there when Cendrars eventually caught up with him, in Hollywood of all places! Cendrars has written of this “brief encounter” and I heard of it myself from Al Jennings’ own lips when I met him by chance a few years ago—in a bookshop there in Hollywood.
In the books written since the Occupation, Cendrars has much to say about the War—the First War, naturally, not only because it was less inhuman but because the future course of his life, I might say, was decided by it. He has also written about the Second War, particularly about the fall of Paris and the incredible exodus preceding it. Haunting pages, reminiscent of Revelation. Equaled in war literature only by St. Exupéry’s Flight to Arras. (See the section of his book, Le Lotissement du Ciel, which first appeared in the revue, Le Cheval de Troie, entitled: Un Nouveau Patron pour l’Aviation.)** In all these recent books Cendrars reveals himself more and more intimately. So penetrative, so naked, are these glimpses he permits us that one instinctively recoils. So sure, swift and deft are these revelations that it is like watching a safecracker at work. In these flashes stand revealed the whole swarm of intimates whose lives dovetail with his own. Exposed through the lurid searchlight of his Cyclopean eye they are caught in the flux and surveyed from every angle. Here there is “completion” of a sort. Nothing is omitted or altered for the sake of the narrative. With these books the “narrative” is stepped up, broadened out, the supports and buttresses battered away, in order that the book may become part of life, swim with life’s currents, and remain forever identical with life. Here one comes to grips with the men Cendrars truly loves, the men he fought beside in the trenches and whom he saw wiped out like rats, the Gypsies of the Zone whom he consorted with in the good old days, the ranchers and other figures from the South American scene, the porters, concierges, tradesmen, truck drivers, and “people of no account” (as we say), and it is with the utmost sympathy and understanding that he treats these latter. What a gallery! Infinitely more exciting, in every sense of the word, than Balzac’s gallery of “types.” This is the real Human Comedy. No sociological studies, à la Zola. No satirical puppet show, à la Thackeray. No pan-humanity, à la Jules Romains. Here in these latter books, though minus the aim and purpose of the great Russian, but perhaps with another aim which we will understand better later, at any rate, with equal amplitude, violence, humor, tenderness and religious—yes, religious—fervor, Cendrars gives us the French equivalent of Dostoievski’s outpourings in such works as The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov. A production which could only be realized, consummated, in the ripe middle years of life.
Everything now forthcoming has been digested a thousand times. Again and again Cendrars has pushed back—where? into what deep well?—the multiform story of his life. This heavy, molten mass of experience raw and refined, subtle and crude, digested and predigested, which had been lodging in his entrails like a torpid and amorphous dinosaur idly flapping its rudimentary wings, this cargo destined for eventual delivery at the exact time and the exact place, demanded a touch of dynamite to be set off. From June, 1940, to the 21st of August, 1943, Cendrars remained awesomely silent. Il s’est tu. Chut! Motus! What starts him writing again is a visit from his friend Edouard Peisson, as he relates in the opening pages of l’Homme Foudroyé. En passant he evokes the memory of a certain night in 1915, at the front—“la plus terrible que jai vécue.” There were other occasions, one suspects, before the critical visit of his friend Peisson, which might have served to detonate the charge. But perhaps on these occasions the fuse burned out too quickly or was damp or smothered under by the weight of world events. But let us drop these useless speculations. Let us dive into Section 17 of Un Nouveau Patron Pour l’Aviation . . .
This brief section begins with the recollection of a sentence of Rémy de Gourmont’s: “And it shows great progress that, where women prayed before, cows now chew the cud . . .” In a few lines comes this from Cendrars’ own mouth:
Beginning on May 10th, Surrealism descended upon earth: not the works of absurd poets who pretend to be such and who, at most, are but sou-realistes since they preach the subconscious, but the work of Christ, the only poet of the sur-real . . .
If ever I had faith, it was on that day that grace should have touched me . . .
Follow two paragraphs dealing in turbulent, compressed fury with the ever execrable condition of war. Like Goya, he repeats: “J’ai vu.” The second paragraph ends thus:
The sun had stopped. The weather forecast announced an anti-cyclone lasting forty days. It couldn’t be! For which reason everything went wrong: gear-wheels would not lock, machinery everywhere broke down: the dead-point of everything.
The next five lines will ever remain in my memory:
No, on May 10th, humanity was far from adequate to the event. Lord! Above, the sky was like a backside with gleaming buttocks and the sun an inflamed anus. What else but shit could ever have issued from it? And modern man screamed with fear . . .
This man of August the 21st, 1943, who is exploding in all directions at once, had of course already delivered himself of a wad of books, not least among them, we shall probably discover one day, being the ten volumes of Notre Pain Quotidien which he composed intermittently over a period of ten years in a château outside Paris, to which manuscripts he never signed his name, confiding the chests containing this material to various safety vaults in different parts of South America and then throwing the keys away. (“Je voudrais rester l’Anonyme,” he says.)
In the books begun at Aix-en-Provence are voluminous notes, placed at the ends of the various sections. I will quote just one, from Bourlinguer (the section on Genoa), which constitutes an everlasting tribute to the poet so dear to French men of letters:
Dear Gerard de Nerval, man of the crowd, night-walker, slang-ist, impenitent dreamer, neurasthenic lover of the Capital’s small theatres and the vast necropoli of the East: architect of Solomon’s Temple, translator of Faust, personal secretary to the Queen of Sheba, Druid of the 1st and 2nd class, sentimental vagabond of the Ile-de-France, last of the Valois, child of Paris, lips of gold, you hung yourself in the mouth of a sewer after shooting your poems up to the sky and now your shade swings ever before them, ever larger and larger, between Notre-Dame and Saint-Merry, and your fiery Chimaeras range this square of the heavens like six dishevelled and terrifying comets. By your appeal to the New Spirit you for ever disturbed our feeling today: and nowadays men could not go on living without this anxiety:
‘The Eagle has already passed: the New Spirit calls me . . .’ (Horus, str. III, v. 9)
On page 244, in the same body of notes, Cendrars states the following: “The other day I was sixty and it is only today, as I reach the end of the present tale, that I begin to believe in my vocation of writer . . .” Put that in your pipe
and smoke it, you lads of twenty-five, thirty and forty years of age who are constantly bellyaching because you have not yet succeeded in establishing a reputation. Be glad that you are still alive, still living your life, still garnering experience, still enjoying the bitter fruits of isolation and neglect!
I would have liked to dwell on many singular passages in these recent books replete with the most astounding facts, incidents, literary and historic events, scientific and occult allusions, curiosa of literature, bizarre types of men and women, feasts, drunken bouts, humorous escapades, tender idylls, anecdotes concerning remote places, times, legends, extraordinary colloquies with extraordinary individuals, reminiscences of golden days, burlesques, fantasies, myths, inventions, introspections and eviscerations . . . I would have liked to speak at length of that singular author and even more singular man, Gustave Le Rouge, the author of three hundred and twelve books which the reader has most likely never heard of, the variety, nature, style and contents of which Cendrars dwells on con amore; I would like to have given the reader some little flavor of the closing section, “Vendetta,” from l’Homme Foudroyé, which is direct from the lips of Sawo the Gypsy; I would like to have taken the reader to La Cornue, chez Paquita, or to that wonderful hideout in the South of France where, hoping to finish a book in peace and tranquility, Cendrars abandons the page which he had slipped into the type-writer after writing a line or two and never looks at it again but gives himself up to pleasure, idleness, reverie and drink; I would like to have given the reader at least an inkling of that hair-raising story of the “homunculi” which Cendrars recounts at length in Bourlinguer (the section called “Gènes”), but if I were to dip into these extravaganzas I should never be able to extricate myself.
I shall jump instead to the last book received from Cendrars, the one called La Banlieue de Paris, published by La Guilde du Livre, Lausanne. It is illustrated with one hundred and thirty photographs by Robert Doisneau, sincere, moving, unvarnished documents which eloquently supplement the text. De nouveau une belle collaboration. (Vive les collaborateurs, les vrais!) The text is fairly short—fifty large pages. But haunting pages, written sur le vif. (From the 15th of July to the 31st of August, 1949.) If there were nothing more noteworthy in these pages than Cendrars’ description of a night at Saint-Denis on the eve of an aborted revolution this short text would be worth preserving. But there are other passages equally somber and arresting, or nostalgic, poignant, saturated with atmosphere, saturated with the pullulating effervescence of the sordid suburbs. Mention has often been made of Cendrars’ rich vocabulary, of the poetic quality of his prose, of his ability to incorporate in his rhapsodic passages the monstrous jargon and terminology of science, industry, invention. This document, which is a sort of retrospective elegy, is an excellent example of his virtuosity. In memory he moves in on the suburbs from East, South, North, and West, and, as if armed with a magic wand, resuscitates the drama of hope, longing, failure, ennui, despair, frustration, misery and resentment which devours the denizens of this vast belt. In one compact paragraph, the second in the section called “Nord,” Cendrars gives a graphic, physical summary of all that makes up the hideous suburban terrain. It is a bird’s-eye view of the ravages which follow in the wake of industry. A little later he gives us a detailed description of the interior of one of England’s war plants, “a shadow factory,” which is in utter contrast to the foregoing. It is a masterful piece of reportage in which the cannon plays the role of vedette. But in paying his tribute to the factory, Cendrars makes it clear where he stands. It is the one kind of work he has no stomach for. “Mieux vaut être un vagabond,” is his dictum. In a few swift lines he volplanes over the eternal bloody war business and, with a cry of shame for the Hiroshima “experiment,” he launches the staggering figures of the last war’s havoc tabulated by a Swiss review for the use and the benefit of those who are preparing the coming carnival of death. They belong, these figures, just as the beautiful arsenals belong and the hideous banlieue. And finally, for he has had them in mind throughout, Cendrars asks: “What of the children? Who are they? Whence do they come? Where are they going?” Referring us back to the photos of Robert Doisneau, he evokes the figures of David and Goliath—to let us know what indeed the little ones may have in store for us.
No mere document, this book. It is something I should like to own in a breast-pocket edition, to carry with me should I ever wander forth again. Something to take one’s bearings by . . .
It has been my lot to prowl the streets, by night as well as day, of these God-forsaken precincts of woe and misery, not only here in my own country but in Europe too. In their spirit of desolation they are all alike. Those which ring the proudest cities of the earth are the worst. They stink like chancres. When I look back on my past I can scarcely see anything else, smell anything else but these festering empty lots, these filthy, shrouded streets, these rubbish heaps of jerries indiscriminately mixed with the garbage and refuse, the forlorn, utterly senseless household objects, toys, broken gadgets, vases and pisspots abandoned by the poverty-stricken, hopeless, helpless creatures who make up the population of these districts. In moments of high fettle I have threaded my way amidst the bric-a-brac and shambles of these quarters and thought to myself: What a poem! What a documentary film! Often I recovered my sober senses only by cursing and gnashing my teeth, by flying into wild, futile rages, by picturing myself a benevolent dictator who would eventually “restore order, peace and justice.” I have been obsessed for weeks and months on end by such experiences. But I have never succeeded in making music of it. (And to think that Erik Satie, whose domicile Robert Doisneau gives us in one of the photos, to think that this man also “made music” in that crazy building is something which makes my scalp itch.) No, I have never succeeded in making music of this insensate material. I have tried a number of times, but my spirit is still too young, too filled with repulsion. I lack that ability to recede, to assimilate, to pound the mortar with a chemist’s skill. But Cendrars has succeeded, and that is why I take my hat off to him. Salut, cher Blaise Cendrars! You are a musician. Salute! And glory be! We have need of the poets of night and desolation as well as the other sort. We have need of comforting words—and you give them—as well as vitriolic diatribes. When I say “we” I mean all of us. Ours is a thirst unquenchable for an eye such as yours, an eye which condemns without passing judgment, an eye which wounds by its naked glance and heals at the same time. Especially in America do “we” need your historic touch, your velvety backward sweep of the plume. Yes, we need it perhaps more than anything you have to offer us. History has passed over our scarred terrains vagues at a gallop. It has left us a few names, a few absurd monuments—and a veritable chaos of bric-a-brac. The one race which inhabited these shores and which did not mar the work of God was the redskins. Today they occupy the wastelands. For their “protection” we have organized a pious sort of concentration camp. It has no barbed wires, no instruments of torture, no armed guards. We simply leave them there to die out . . .
But I cannot end on this dolorous note, which is only the backfire of those secret rumblings which begin anew whenever the past crops up. There is always a rear view to be had from these crazy edifices which our minds inhabit so tenaciously. The view from Satie’s back window is the kind I mean. Wherever in the “zone” there is a cluster of shabby buildings, there dwell the little people, the salt of the earth, as we say, for without them we would be left to starve, without them that crust which is thrown to the dogs and which we pounce on like wolves would have only the savor of death and revenge. Through those oblong windows from which the bedding hangs I can see my pallet in the corner where I have flopped for the night, to be rescued again in miraculous fashion the next sundown, always by a “nobody,” which means, when we get to understand human speech, by an angel in disguise. What matter if with the coffee one swallows a mislaid emmenagogue? What matter if a stray roach clings to one’s tattered garments? Looking at life from the rear window one can
look down at one’s past as into a still mirror in which the days of desperation merge with the days of joy, the days of peace, and the days of deepest friendship. Especially do I feel this way, think this way, when I look into my French backyard. There all the meaningless pieces of my life fall into a pattern. I see no waste motion. It is all as clear as “The Cracow Poem” to a chess fiend. The music it gives off is as simple as were the strains of “Sweet Alice Ben Bolt” to my childish ears. More, it is beautiful, for as Sir H. Rider Haggard says in his autobiography: “The naked truth is always beautiful, even when it tells of evil.”
My dear Cendrars, you must at times have sensed a kind of envy in me for all that you have lived through, digested, and vomited forth transformed, transmogrified, transubstantiated. As a child you played by Vergil’s tomb; as a mere lad you tramped across Europe, Russia, Asia, to stoke the furnace in some forgotten hotel in Pekin; as a young man, in the bloody days of the Legion, you elected to remain a corporal, no more; as a war victim you begged for alms in your own dear Paris, and a little later you were on the bum in New York, Boston, New Orleans, Frisco . . . You have roamed far, you have idled the days away, you have burned the candle at both ends, you have made friends and enemies, you have dared to write the truth, you have known how to be silent, you have pursued every path to the end, and you are still in your prime, still building castles in the air, still breaking plans, habits, resolutions, because to live is your primary aim, and you are living and will continue to live both in the flesh and in the roster of the illustrious ones. How foolish, how absurd of me to think that I might be of help to you, that by putting in my little word for you here and there, as I said before, I would be advancing your cause. You have no need of my help or of anyone’s. Just living your life as you do you automatically aid us, all of us, everywhere life is lived. Once again I doff my hat to you. I bow in reverence. I have not the right to salute you because I am not your peer. I prefer to remain your devotee, your loving disciple, your spiritual brother in der Ewigkeit.
The Henry Miller Reader Page 38