'Blaise Cendrars (real name Frédéric Sauser) was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in 1887. His father, an inventor-businessman, was Swiss, his mother Scottish. He spent his childhood in Alexandria, Naples, Brindisi, Neuchâtel, and numerous other places, while accompanying his father, who endlessly pursued business schemes, none successfully.
'At the age of fifteen, Cendrars left home to travel in Russia, Persia, China—and everywhere in between—while in the employ of a jewel merchant; he wrote about this apprenticeship several years later in his long poem, Transiberien. He was in Paris before 1910, where he met Guillaume Apollinaire, leader of the tumultuous avant-garde world of arts and letters at that time. Cendrars then traveled to America, where he wrote his first long poem Pâques à New-York. The Transsibérien(full title: La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France) was published the next year. Both these poems were of some moment in shaping the “modern spirit,” then in process of catalysis, as was his third and last long poem, Le Panama ou Les Aventures de Mes Sept Oncles, (1918), published in America in 1931 in a translation by John Dos Passos.
'Cendrars lost his right arm in the First World War, while serving as a corporal in the Foreign Legion. He refused an artificial arm and prided himself thereafter on one-handed skill at shooting, fast driving, typing, brawling. He worked in films after the war, as a writer and assistant director and later as a film maker on his own, sometimes a millionaire, more often broke.
'During the 1920s he published two long novels, Moravagine (1926) and Les Confessions de Dan Yack (1929), and on into the 1930’s published a number of “novelized” biographies or volumes of extravagant reporting, such as L’Or (1925), based on the life of John August Sutter (published in American in 1926 as Sutter’s Gold), and Rhum (1930), “reportage romance” dealing with the life and trials of Jean Galmont, a misfired Cecil Rhodes of Guiana.
'.... Cendrars... was sketched by Caruso, painted by Léon Bakst, by Léger, by Modigliani, by Chagall; and in his turn helped discover Negro art, jazz, and the modern music of Les Six. He published in 1921, when director of the Editions de la Sirène, his Anthologie Nègre—the first volume of a projected three-volume series gleaned from his travels in Africa and South America; almost-completed manuscripts of volumes two and three were destroyed by the Germans during World War II. At La Sirene he also put out a new edition of Lautréamont, who had died in 1870 at the age of twenty-four, bringing him [sic] to the edge of surrealist deification. As an assistant to Abel Gance in the filming of La Roue (1921), he put together the montage of the running train, and suggested Arthur Hönegger as composer of background music. ....
'In 1935 Cendrars discovered Henry Miller, with the first article on Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) to appear in France (in the review Orbes) and perhaps the first notice of importance anywhere: dated on New Year’s Day, it opens with the liturgical formula for the Christmas Eve announcement that a Savior to us is born, but reads instead: “An American writer to us is born: Henry Miller, who has just written his first book in Paris. A royal book, atrocious book, exactly the sort of book I love best...” The author, he wrote, was a one-hundred per cent American and solid realist... “ ... Plenty of Cendrars’ discoveries didn’t take; for example Ferreira de Castro, Brazilian of Portuguese origin, whose masterwork Cendrars translated in 1938 under the title of Forêt Vierge; or for that matter a number of other literary and artistic discoveries brought from South America; or for that matter South American itself, which failed to impassion Paris. Cendrars went so constantly to South America from 1924 to 1936 (usually taking along his Alfa Romeo racing car, whose body had been designed by Georges Braque) that he pretended the Route Nationale No. 10 ran from his house in Tremblay-sur-Mauldre direct to Asunción, Paraguay.
'His home base was always Paris, for several years in the Rue de Savoie, later, for many years, in the Avenue Montaigne, and in the country, his little house at Tremblay-sur Mauldre (Seine-et-Oise), though he continued to travel extensively. He worked for a short while in Hollywood in 1936, at the time of the filming of Sutter’s Gold.
'During the early months of World War II Cendrars was a war correspondent attached to the British armies, but with the fall of France in 1940 he retired to Aix-en-Provence (while his house at Tremblay was pillaged by the Germans). He stopped writing in 1944 when he began the series of reflective reminiscences, L’Homme Foudroyé (1945), La Main Coupée (1946), Bourlinguer (1948), Le Lotissement du Ciel (1949), that constitute his best and most important work. His last major work was published in 1957, entitled Trop, C’est Trop. He was disabled with illness soon afterward and died in January, 1961, in Paris.
.....
INTERVIEWER [some question about Cendrars' work habits. The essay is mostly excised and the gaps not always marked]
....
'A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be. Like Saint Jerome, a writer should work in his cell. Turn the back. Writing is a view of the spirit. “The world is my representation.” Humanity lives in its fiction. This is why a conqueror always wants to transform the face of the world into his image. Today, I even veil the mirrors.
.....
INTERVIEWER
'Will you cite some of the unusual reading you’ve done?
CENDRARS
'....
The latest book I’ve discovered is the great dictionary of the Customs Administration that we owe to an edict of Vincent Auriol, then Minister of Finance. It is entitled Répertoire général du tarif and appeared in 1937. Two quarto volumes. Weight fifty kilos. I take them every place with me because I’m going to need them some day soon when I begin to write La Carissima, the mystical life of Mary Magdalene, the only woman who made Christ weep.
Interiewer
'You need the customs tariffs in order to write that book?
CENDRARS
'My dear sir, it’s a matter of language. For several years, each time that I prepare to write a book, I first arrange the vocabulary I am going to employ. Thus, for L’Homme foudroyé, I had a list of three thousand words arranged in advance, and I used all of them. That saved me a lot of time and gave a certain lightness to my work. It was the first time I used that system. I don’t know how I happened onto it ... It’s a question of language. Language is a thing that seduced me. Language is a thing that perverted me. Language is a thing that formed me. Language is a thing that deformed me. That’s why I am a poet, probably because I am very sensitive to the language—correct or incorrect, I wink at that. I ignore and despise grammar, which is at the point of death, but I am a great reader of dictionaries and if my spelling is none too sure it’s because I am too attentive to the pronunciation, this idiosyncrasy of the living language. In the beginning was not the word, but the phrase, a modulation. Listen to the songs of birds!
Interviewer
'Where did your interest in folk literature begin?
CENDRARS
'......Much Alexandre Dumas is .... cloak-and-sword novels, love stories for typists—to a considerable degree all the stenographers of the world have the same mind. But there are also in every country some sorts of works that are exclusively reserved to the popular interest, such as The Key of Dreams, The Language of the Flowers, and a thousand others. If this sort of peddler’s literature is perhaps a little out of date in Paris, in a country such as Brazil (which is a new country, everything seems new to it), entire levels of the population, who have barely learned to read, are discovering these stories of sorcery, of werewolves, of the headless mule, of the White Lady, of phantoms, of black humor, of romance, fairy tales, novels of chivalry, nursery tales, and adventures of highwaymen, celebrated crimes of passion; a collection of marvels that is no more stale and trashy for that matter than are, in much more advanced countries, the detective novels of England, the gangster stories of the United States, the grand love films in all the cinemas of the earth, which themselves also constitute a part of the old foundations of folklore, of popular literature.
INTERVIEWER
'—the Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques. They are spoken of and cited precisely because these poems are at the base of modern poetry, are at the source of modern lyricism.
CENDRARS
'No, no, not at all, I’m not at the base of anything at all. It is the modern world which is at the base, “enormous and delicate” like the Middle Ages. And the source, it’s Villon. If the correspondence of Max Jacob were ever published, you would find sources and bases and points of departure and of arrival. ....
Poets don’t seem to have fun anymore. What troubles me more than anything else these days is to see the seriousness with which they approach everything.
INTERVIEWER
'Were you gay because your life was brighter in the good old days?
CENDRARS
'My dear sir, in the belle époque writers were paid one sou a line in the papers and an Apollinaire had to wait months and years before he could sign his articles and count on steady employment with regular pay. That was why he published pornography: to earn his bread. You can’t imagine how solidly closed all doors were to us. I have the impression that today you’re much better received. I run into young writers everywhere, on the papers, the radio, in the picture studios. Before 1914 those who wanted a job stood in line at the door, or at an employment window that never opened. The others contented themselves with playing the buffoon, the wild bull, in the streets. To hell with a job and a decent living. We laughed. The Paris girls were pretty.
'Everyone has a taste of it, it’s the right of every young generation. Fortunately the wild bull still exists and hasn’t been put in cans for exportation as corned beef. One counsel: when you see an open door, newspaper, radio studio, cinema, bank, anything—don’t enter. By the time you’re thirty you’ll be nuts because you left your laugh at the door. That’s my experience. Poetry is in the street. It goes arm in arm with laughter. They take each other along for a drink, at the source, in the neighborhood bistros, where the laugh of the people is so flavorsome and the language that flows from their lips so beautiful. “Il n’est bon bec que de Paris.”
.....
'I was already known enough among poets to have mocked them and to have disturbed their assemblies at the Closerie des Lilas, at the Café Fleurs, at the Procope; and so I didn’t need to publish something in order to be known by the poets. But to have published Les Pâques à New-York, in October 1912, brought me the enmity of the bonzes and the pontiffs who, the following year, when I published La Prose du Transsibérien, “the first simultaneous book,” in June 1913, called me an epigonus and accused me of plagiarism. It was not good to be a young authentic among all those old glories on the tail of symbolism, who all took themselves for sacred bards. .... At that time, Apollinaire was the only poet that I went to see. He was always kind to me and he got work for me so I could make a few sous. Don’t listen to the evil gossips! They say today that he was influenced by me, and I say I couldn’t care less. I sang of the Eiffel Tower. He sang of the Eiffel Tower. And plenty of others have sung of it since.
INTERVIEWER
'All the same, it is an extremely mystifying thing, Apollinaire’s change of poetic orientation after your meeting.
CENDRARS
'...[Whatever the influence I might have had on Guillaume Apollinaire...[it] was Robert Goffin who hung up this bell and there have been I don’t know how many people come along to ring it, as if it’s a crime to experience the influence of someone. I have, sometimes, the impression in regard to this alarm bell that I’m not dealing with critics, with students of poetry, with historians, but with amateur detectives who measure, mark, take fingerprints.
INTERVIEWER
'You’ve announced thirty-three forthcoming books. Why thirty-three?
CENDRARS
'The list of thirty-three books that I’ve been announcing for forty years is not exclusive, restrictive, or prohibitive; the number thirty-three is the key figure of activity, of life. So this is not at all in ink. If might be an index, but it is not The Index. It doesn’t include the titles of novels which I will never write—the other day I was surprised to discover that La Main coupée, which I published in 1946, had been on this list since 1919. I had completely forgotten that! On the list are books that I will take up again and that will appear in the future. Also listed are the ten volumes of Notre pain quotidien, which are written but that I left in various strongboxes in South American banks and which, God willing, will be found by chance some day—the papers aren’t signed, and are left under a false name. I’ve also listed a group of poems that I value more than my eyes but that I haven’t decided to publish—not by timidity or pride, but for love. And then, there are the books that were written, ready for publication, but which I burned to the great detriment of my publishers: for example, “La vie et la mort du soldat inconnu” (five volumes). Finally, there are the bastards, the larvae, and the abortions which I will probably never write.
INTERVIEWER
'John Dos Passos devoted an essay to you in Orient Express, and he called you the Homer of the Transsibérien.
CENDRARS
'When John was married, I was in the Périgord. I was in the process of hatching my book on Galmot. He came on his honeymoon directly from New York to Monpazier, of which Galmot was a native. Monpazier is a historic little city. It’s a fortified village, built by the kings of England, that dates from 1284. It’s very small, six hundred twenty-five inhabitants at most. It’s laid out like an American city. There are two principal arteries and all the cross streets cross these two principal arteries at right angles. One could number them as in America, I think there are twenty-one. I was staying in the best hotel in the vicinity, the Hôtel de Londres, where one eats like a god. It’s kept by Madame Cassagnol—her husband is a double for Charlie Chaplin. Madame Cassagnol wears a mustache and the pants of the household. When John Dos Passos told me he was coming, I said to Madame Cassagnol, I have some friends who are arriving directly from New York to stay here with you. Try to distinguish yourself. And I didn’t give another thought to either the menu or the wine. For a week Madame Cassagnol fed us on that good Périgordine cuisine, setting up the menus herself, progressively, giving us a surprise each day:.... as much strong red wine as you wanted, a bottle of Monbazillac for two, coffee, liqueurs, all for twelve francs fifty, plus fifty centimes extra for the surprise of the last day. The last day, the day of the departure of John and his wife, we ate a wild swan. I didn’t even know there might still be wild swans in France, even in migration. What an astonishing country is the black Périgord!
'I’ve seen John often, but always in Paris. It’s curious, by the way, but never, never, never have I met one of my friends among American writers in the United States, as often as I’ve gone there. They are never home, as if by chance; and if I’ve insisted I’ve been told over the phone that the master for whom I was asking was on vacation, or on a tour, or in Europe. I’ve tried in vain to find one at his newspaper, his club, or at his publisher’s. The response was the same everywhere: He isn’t here! I used to hang up the phone with a bizarre feeling. I don’t want to draw from it any conclusion disparaging to anyone, but I finished by admitting to myself that American writers are not free in their country and that those who come back from Europe don’t have an easy conscience, reproaching themselves with little frolics painful to recall. They have a fear of public opinion and, con
trary to the English, don’t even have a bread-and-butter courtesy. It’s a typically American complex.
INTERVIEWER
'It is claimed that you have served them as a model and that you have strongly influenced certain American novelists.
CENDRARS
'That’s absolutely false. If I’ve been able to influence this one or that without my or his knowledge, I haven’t served as a model. It’s Victor Hugo, it’s Maupassant who served as models for them when they came to establish themselves in Paris at the end of the other war. They came to France without an afterthought, be it as soldiers, ambulance drivers, diplomats; the war over, they sojourned for a time, short or long, in Paris, where certain ones stayed during the entire time between the two wars; they frequented Montparnasse, then Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and if they were influenced it was rather by the ambiance, the air of Paris and the way of living in France rather than by this or that French author. John Dos Passos declared to me one day: You have in France a literary genre that we don’t know at all in the United States, the grand reportage à la Victor Hugo.
INTERVIEWER
'That’s an astonishing statement.
INTERVIEWER
'And Faulkner, you know him?
CENDRARS
'No, I don’t know Faulkner. I’ve never met him. Malraux asked me to do a preface for the translation of Light in August; I didn’t want to do it, finding it too regional, too literary, and written as one doesn’t write any more, too well.
INTERVIEWER
'Was it in New York that you met Hemingway?'
CENDRARS
'No, at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris. I was drinking; he was drinking at a table next to mine. He was with an American sailor on leave. He was in uniform—probably that of a noncombatant ambulance aide, unless I’m mistaken. It was at the end of that other war, the “last of the last.” We talked between tables; drunks like to talk. We talked. We drank. We drank again. I had an appointment in Montmartre, at the home of the widow of André Dupont, a poet killed at Verdun. I went there every Friday to eat bouillabaisse with Satie, Georges Auric, Paul Lombard, and sometimes Max Jacob. I brought my boozer American friends with me, I thought I’d give them something good...[to] eat. But the Americans aren’t fond of good food; they have no good food at home, they don’t know what it is. Hemingway and his sailor didn’t care for my arguments—they preferred to drink until they weren’t thirsty any more. So I planted them in a bar on the rue des Martyrs, and I ran to treat myself at my friend’s widow’s house.'
INTERVIEWER
'Haven’t you said that you fortify yourself in love and solitude?
CENDRARS
'In truth, artists live alongside, on the margin of life and of humanity; that’s why they’re very great or very small.
INTERVIEWER
'On the margin of humanity? You don’t then consider yourself as an artist?
CENDRARS
'No. I’ve already had thirty-six professions, and I’m ready to start something entirely different tomorrow morning.
INTERVIEWER
'You’ve never had trouble earning your living. During the occupation, you lived for the most part on the sale of herbs and plants which you grew in your garden at Aix-en-Provence.
....
INTERVIEWER
'And what do you think of Jean-Paul Sartre?
CENDRARS
'I have no opinion of him, Sartre doesn’t send me his books. Existentialism? As for its philosophical doctrine, it was Schopenhauer who put us on guard against the professors of philosophy who, after completing the official course of studies, meditate, write, think, draw up manifestos—and Sartre is a professor. Philosophical plays are boring in the theater, and Sartre displays his theses on the stage. The novels of the school are well written or badly written, those of Sartre are neither one nor the other. The young writers today—I’ve seen a great deal of them since my return to Paris and I ask myself where and in what they are specifically existentialist? Is it because they disguise themselves each evening to go to Saint-Germain-des-Prés the way their fathers dressed up each evening to go out in society or to their club? It’s a fashion which will pass, which has already passed. I don’t get carried away by the noise of a parade. But the world gets bored with itself. The cinema, radio, television ... The truth is, few enough people know how to live and those who accept life as it is are still more rare.
INTERVIEWER
'I don’t know what can be said exactly of this invasion of literature by the professors, but one thing certain is that Jean-Paul Sartre’s movement hasn’t produced any poets. It’s not made up of poets. No poet has come out of it.....
'You say that there are other things in life to do besides writing books, but you are, all the same, an extraordinary worker.
CENDRARS
'It’s you others who are extraordinary! You all want us to write books without ever stopping. Where does that lead? Tell me ... go take a walk through the Bibliothèque Nationale and you will see where that leads, that route. A cemetery. A submerged continent. Millions of volumes delivered over to the worms. No one knows any longer whose they are. No one ever asks. Terra incognita. It’s rather discouraging....'
My latest hero
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