This is the first of a four-volume "memoir" by Swiss modernist Blaise Cendrars and the first joy of this book is finding a copy (the first three volumes are very hard to locate). Cendrars appears in many modern poetry anthologies and its his early poems that really made his reputation but along the way he enjoyed many other careers. According to Cendrars he made and lost many fortunes as a film director, speculator, etc... While readers may, at times, be suspicious as to the veracity of much of what these "memoirs" contain (it seems impossible that one man could have done all that Cendrars claims to have done), Cendrars' sheer outrageousness, his utter refusal to remain true to the facts (and what are "facts" anyway?), is simply one of the many charms of these autobiographical narratives.
One of the mysteries of these memoirs is that although Cendrars knew just about every artist working in France before & after WWI (Picasso, Cocteau, Modigliani, Braque) he rarely mentions any of them. Instead of going on about the famous people that he knew as most memoirists would, he chooses to go on about the unknowns (his foreign legion buddies, his cinematographer, fishermen, maids, gypsies, and other under-appreciated & unsung human beings). But this is Cendrars charm; he knows that you know the "greats" of modernism already anyway, and one of his many tasks is to undermine the very idea of what qualifies as "great".
Ultimately, Cendrars is not interested in the professional aspects of "art" or "literature" (and all of the pretensions that go along with these terrains), rather he is interested in the influence of art on everday life and/or the relation of art to everyday life. For Cendrars life is a series of impostures & antic gestures designed to relieve the tedium of actual living. For Cendrars, one suspects, art is the antidote to living. (At one point he says "writing is an abdication of life.")
Cendrars is an author, like Sir Richard Burton & like Joseph Conrad & like Ernest Hemingway, who will appeal to the manly side of a reader's sensibility. His favorite topics are war & travel & women. But he writes about these topics like no one else. When writing on WWI, for instance, he is not interested in the politics of the whole thing nor in the individual battles nor in the loss of the old order, rather Cendrars (born Swiss and fighting for the French Foreign Legion) as always is interested in adventure for adventure's sake and in how various adventures (including writing) save us from the thrall of the ordinary.
With Cendrars you get a love of adventure and unadorned salt-of-the-earth existence (even though he adorns "salt-of-the-earth existence" with all kinds of romantic notions of his own), and so the attraction to love & war is at once an attraction to adventure and a chance to commune with his fellow humans on a larger than life project (the only kind of project that he sanctions). He treats his two favorite topics in much the same way. He romanticizes & demystifies both. "War," he concludes, "is a drug designed to counteract the fear of living." But one could easily replace "war" in this sentence with "love" or "art". Each of these, for Cendrars, are forms of existential escapism, and all are to be approached with equal amounts of caution. Really the cure-all for Blaise Cendrars (his name, a pseudonymn, is derived from the French words for "embers", "ashes", and "art") is ceaseless change. In one particularly memorable episode Cendrars recounts a night of lovemaking by comparing the act to a ship crashing through rough seas. But the entire affair lasts only one night. "Human pain," he concludes,"results from the attempt to make impermanent things permanent." Cendrars demystifies each thing that he encounters but he also keeps things spiced with his own epic sense of bravado/grandiosity/comedy for what is ultimately being crafted here is a self that is at one with its epic (and the main point of the epic seems to be that all rules have been suspended & everything is there for the taking). Love & war & art & modernity in Cendrars eyes are all just hoaxes, but Cendrars' sense of the absurd allows him to get the most out of each kind of hoax.
Though this is marketed as a memoir, its really more of a collage of war & travel writings as well as a collection of portraits of the many people that he met while doing the many things that he did (...colonel in the French Foreign Legion during WWI, documentary filmaker in Africa, patron to many of Marseilles' many dens of vice, chronicler of gypsy life...). The amazing thing is that Cendrars was an active man (one might even say hyperactive) who also happened to be one of the early twentieth century's most important poets. As a poet he is hypervigilant of the fact that many writers fall "prey to [their] obsessions" as well as become "victims" to the "distortions of [their] vocations" ( as a species Cendrars finds writers to be the least trustworthy people on the planet) but the thing that comes across in Cendrars poetry & prose is that despite the many liberties taken with objective fact he never seems to let the vocation get the better of him. Or, one might say, that, as a writer, he knows all the tricks of the trade and he takes great pleasure in exploiting these tricks, but he never loses of the fact that they are just tricks.
Cendrars never seems to be a "writer" serving up "writing" for writings sake. Cendrars ultimately seems to be serving something more dear to him than art, he seems to be serving his sense of life, and his sense of life is marked by two things: an insatiable hunger for more of it & an almost religious awe before all things even though this religious, almost mystic, reverence for life is easy to miss as it is almost always buried beneath a potpourri of sensual detail & earthly delight & endless fictional/nonfictional digressions/transgressions. (Although its quite possible that this religious awe is just another mask, just another part of the Cendrars mythos, as worked on & crafted as any of his other personae.)
Cendrars is "modern" in the sense that he understands that the old ways of ordering the world no longer work, but unlike other "moderns" he is in no rush to find a new order for Cendrars embraces disorder, chaos, & anarachy as man's natural element. He knows exactly who he is & exactly what he is doing with words & why what he is doing is different than what others have done. In his earthy kinetic prose he captures the frenetic pace and the disorienting effects of modern life as well as its enchanting allure. Reading Cendrars one gets the impression that he feels that the whole of modern life were placed before him for the sole purpose of inducing one phantasmic state after another. One senses that he purposefully upsets genres, but not because he wants to make an artistic statement or breakthrough, but because he has no patience with the confines of established rules & genres nor for the commonplaces of accepted writerly decorums (all of which he enjoys smashing). Rather, Cendrars is a liberator who feels that art should serve (respond to & capture & create) life & that form should serve content and not the other way around; new life needs new forms and so Cendrars ceaslessly invents.
There are certainly plenty of innovators among the moderns, but Cendrars' motive for innovation makes him almost entirely unique among them. Hemingway, who also tried to create an art that was much more responsive to the rhythms of real life, is the most obvious precedent, but Cendrars embraces much more of life than Hemingway was ever able to and Cendrars has a much more complex vision of the interrelatedness of art & life. What both men share is a sense of living & writing as performance but Cendrars has much more fun with the great game than Hemingway ever did. Cendrars embraces both the high & (especially) the low, both the sublime & the abject, both the profound & the ridiculous in a way that Hemingway does not. And he combines all of his interests in his own modernist cocktail shaker. If Hemingway is the modern equivalent of a classical tragedian mourning the loss of traditional values like courage & discipline & honor, Cendrars is the equivalent of a classical comedian reveling in the newfound freedoms & energies & absurdities of the new epoch.
Cendrars is not a self-promoter as so many of the moderns were; he lacks the self-interest & ambition of the artist who always has one eye on public & critical opinion. Cendrars is not completely immune from this kind of concern but what he promotes is life, not art (or, maybe its more accurate to say that what he promotes is the interconnectedness and/or co-dependence of art & life). What he has, and what is rarely encountered elsewhere among the more renowned moderns, is a rare kind of curiosity for and geuine passion for all kinds of "life" & "art" that comes primarily from living such a rich and varied existence, but also from reading all kinds of books for all kinds of reasons and this sets him apart from other writers whose lives & interests seem narrow and self-important in comparison. Said in another way, Cendrars knows too much to be fooled into believing that "art" is anything but shameless self-promotion and he prefers the company of the unpretensious who know this to the company of the self-important artistes who don't. And yet Cendrars' vision is, nonetheless, "artistic" and his earthy persona is something that is as carefully crafted as any other modernist work.
The intangible thing is perhaps this: Despite his hyper self-conscious posing, Cendrars always comes across as being more interested in people and how they really are than in art (something that cannot be said of most "modern" writers) and so what he does seems to be something much less categorizable & much less reducible than most "art" ultimately is, and thus he is a writer that is rarely mentioned in the usual literary places. Restless readers hungry for unique visions (those interested in countermodernisms, anti-modernisms or postmodern modernisms), however, will respond to Cendrars immediately.
But the uncontainable energy of the man, and his insatiable creativity, really need no lengthy introduction, it is all expressed best by Cendrars himself in virtually every sentence that he writes: "The moment the steamer berthed, I jumped on the dock, then leapt into a taxi to be driven to a cafe in the Old Port with as much haste as if I were an opium smuggler anxious to get rid of his hot merchandise, I, who always come back from my trips overseas with a burst of laughter, often a wad of banknotes, and, as naturally as possible and without anyone knowing, a couple of poems..."
As with any unorthodox writer, it is an all or nothing affair: you find the writer & his vision(s) to be completely engaging and immediately part of your pantheon of favorite things or you do not. For me, there is no greater pleasure than finding yet another hard-to-find Cendrars novel or memoir. Lucky for me, it seems that every few years another few Cendrars titles become available in English translation.
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Richard Jones
vivid and beautiful prose; the French Hemmingway
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