SOURCE: "The Burning Phoenix," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4769, August 26, 1994, pp. 9-10.

Fighting in the First World War as a Swiss national in "la Marocaine", the original Foreign Legion, Blaise Cendrars lost an arm during the assault on the Navarin Farm in Champagne on September 28, 1915. It was his writing arm that went, "planté dans l'herbe comme une grande fleur épanouie, un lys rouge, un bras humain tout ruisselant de sang, un bras droit sectionné au-dessus du coude et dont la main encore vivant fouissait le sol des doigts comme pour y prendre racine …" (La Main coupée).

Cendrars himself never took root. Right from the start, travel was his subject and the making of him; it gave him the opportunity to "make" his own sprawling biography (itinerant poet, novelist-adventurer, "style" journalist, bohemian business schemer), sometimes in the spirit of fictional invention, sometimes as a charming but down-right lie. So it is hard to answer his own question: "à qui était cette main, ce bras droit, ce sang qui coulait comme la sève?"

Born Frédéric Louis Sauser in the same year and place as Le Corbusier (La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 1887), Cendrars used to say he was born at the Hôtel des Etrangers on the Left Bank, the building where the Roman de la Rose was written. He may have been in Egypt as a child; we know that his family (his father was a dealer in clocks and timepieces) was in Naples by the time he was eight. He left his parents in his early teens (fleeing them, in his embroidered version, by climbing down from a fifth-floor balcony), journeying across Germany and Russia, where he ended up in St. Petersburg. There—probably, in fact, by his father's intervention—he worked for H.A. Leuba, a Swiss watch merchant, from 1904 to 1907, during which time, Jay Bochner writes in his excellent introduction to Ron Padgett's translation of the Complete Poems, he established "a lifelong pattern of alternating travel with long sessions in libraries".

Cendrars certainly ventured to Russia, Germany, Poland, Britain, the United States and Brazil. His poems and memoirs imply that he traveled even more widely. On the way, he worked. He claimed, as Barbara Wright wrote in a review of a translation of his novel L'Homme foudroyé (TLS, February 26, 1971), "to have fait 36 métiers, including those of farm worker, tractor driver, big-game hunter, prospector, juggler, smuggler…. In his bread-and-butter activities during the 1920s he seems to have been some sort of business agent, making and losing (or spending) fortunes with the greatest nonchalance."

For all his own capitalist activity, in his Russian period Cendrars forged a lifelong attachment to anarchism (there are some Poundian attacks on usury in the poems). Meanwhile, he gathered material for his most famous novel, Moravagine (published in 1926 but set against the background of pre-revolutionary insurrections in St. Petersburg), and the long railway poem, The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France (published in Paris in 1913 and printed as a 2-metre-high, multi-inked, multitypefaced "simultaneous" objet along with his friend Sonia Delaunay's abstract silk-screen painting). "A projected 150 copies were advertised as equaling", says Bochner, "at two metres a copy, the height of the Eiffel Tower, which is invoked in the last line of the poem and at the very bottom of the painting."

During his early travels, as a (half-serious) medical student at Berne University, Cendrars met Féla Poznanska, the Polish student who was to become his first wife and the mother of Miriam Cendrars. (The latter it is who has produced Blaise Cendrars, a substantial and comprehensive, if slightly eccentric, biography-memoir, which, as one would expect, is full of fascinating material. Even Miriam's tendency to mimic her father's direct, quasi-imagist, "telegraphic" style, and her propensity for flashbacks and "flash-forwards," grow on you after a while. Given the personal connection, this was always, after all, going to be an idiosyncratic book, though it is scholarly too, with a useful bibliography.)

Between October 1910 and March 1911, Cendrars was in Paris with Féla. The following year he produced his first great poem, Easter in New York, the fruit of a six-month, poverty-stricken stay in the city, from where Féla, staying with her sister, had sent him a ticket. It was in New York (where the young modernist found himself "desperate to find a way past" the retrograde European neo-symbolism that was wowing the American avant-garde at the time) that Freddy Sauser took on the name of Blaise Cendrars. This burning phoenix rose, Bochner tells us—by way of Saint Blaise, braise, cendres and the Latin ars—out of "a few smouldering lines" of Nietzsche: "And everything of mine turns to mere cinders / What I love and what I do".

Back in Paris by the middle of 1912, Cendrars was introduced into the more exciting European avant-garde—literary and artistic—by Apollinaire, to whom he had sent a manuscript copy of Easter in New York, which is supposed by some critics to have had a dramatic effect on the senior poet's style in "Zone". For all that, Cendrars's relationship with other artists was never solely professional; the idea of "the career artist" was, anyway, anathema to him. As well as the Delaunays and Apollinaire, he knew Chagall, Braque, Léger, Modigliani (one of his closest friends, who painted his portrait several times), Picabia, Soutine, Arthur Cravan (Oscar Wilde's nephew, a poet and boxer), Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, Arthur Honegger, Poulenc, Satie, Cocteau and the film-maker Abel Gance. They must have been heady, as well as hard, times: with Cravan and the Delaunays, Cendrars would go to "Bal Bullier dances in 'modern' attire dipped in painters' colours". And then there were more worshipful attachments, like that to Remy de Gourmont, his literary hero and friend, who died, Cendrars was upset to hear, on the day he lost his arm. Gourmont's beautiful version of Venantius Fortunatus' Pange lingua (part of the medieval Latin liturgy) provides the epigraph to Easter in New York, which is also addressed to Christ on the cross, though in a more problematic, socialized and splintered way. This is the Gourmont extract, in Padgett's translation:

      Bend your branches, tall tree, relax your deep tension
      And let your natural hardness give way,
      Don't tear off the arms of the highest King….

And here is Cendrars below:

      Lord, the poor masses for whom you made the Sacrifice
      Are here, penned in, heaped up, like cattle, in poorhouses.
 
      Huge dark ships come in around the clock
      And dump them off, pell-mell, onto the dock …
 
      Lord, I'm in the neighborhood of vagrants,
      Good thieves, bums and fences.
 
      I think of the two thieves who shared your torture.
      I know you deign to smile on their misfortune,
 
      Lord, one wants a rope with a noose on the end,
      But they aren't free, ropes, they cost a couple of cents.
 
      This old robber talked like a philosopher.
      I gave him some opium so he'd get to heaven faster.
 
      I think also of the street singers.
      The blind violinist, the one-armed organ-grinder,
 
      The straw-hat, paper-rose singer; surely
      These are the ones who sing throughout eternity.
                             (Easter in New York, 1912)

By 1916, Cendrars was turning his own remaining hand, with which he had had to learn to write again, more and more to prose, producing some of the bouleversant surrealist pieces assembled in Modernities and Other Writings, in translations by Esther Allen. By 1920, he had dabbled in publishing (with Cocteau) and film-making (with Gance); in 1923, he collaborated on a ballet, La Création du Monde, with Léger and Darius Milhaud. By 1924, he had almost stopped writing poetry altogether. Over the next six years, starting his long journeys again, he combined five trips to South America with the production of his three greatest novels: Sutter's Gold, Moravagine and the two-part Dan Yack. From then, through the Second World War (during which, until the fall of France, he was correspondent with the British forces) until his death in 1961, he produced a steady but diminishing stream of volumes: of reportage (on the underworlds of Paris and Marseille, on Al Capone), travel-writing (Hollywood), a four-volume, phantasmagoric, fictionalized memoir (L'Homme foudroyé, 1945, La Main coupée, 1946, Bourlinguer, 1948, Le Lotissement du ciel, 1949), and sporadic fiction.

Even in death, in his own sepulchral ode, the geographical theme resurfaces—sparkling, too, where Pound's and Yeats's equivalent poems ("Pour l'élection de son sépulchre" and section six of "Under Ben Bulben") are full of bile and world-weariness respectively:

                           Là-bas git
                       Blaise Cendrars
                       Par latitude zéro
                 Deux ou trois dixièmes sud
           Une deux, trois douzaines de degrés
                       Longitude ouest
               Dans le ventre d'un cachalot
              Dans un grand cuveau d'indigo.

Altogether, Cendrars's was a very considerable body of work that was to earn him, in those last years (though his fame was much eclipsed and came rather late in the day), a number of prizes from his adoptive country. There is something rather pathetic about the idea of André Malraux visiting, in 1958, the apartment of the paralysed Cendrars (who had suffered two strokes) to give him the award of Commander of the Légion d'Honneur, as if those formative lines of Nietzsche had been realized.

Looking at the poetry more closely, though, you wouldn't think so. Elastic (his first collection proper was actually called Nineteen Elastic Poems), resisting abstraction, grounded on the quotidian and on the conversational tones of their imagined speaker, full of "found, cubist, assemblage and collage techniques" (Bochner) and—what is rare in this type of avant-garde formalism—full of colour and lived experience, Cendrars's poems are anything but burnt out. Just as most of his prose is concerned with the life of the adventurous male, so the verse (straightforwardly rendered by Padgett, with an appendix of the French texts), eschewing the interior life, is about, and goes out into, the physical world. The "Prose" in The Prose of the Trans-Siberian, Cendrars explained, springs from the low Latin prosa—projection, or speaking forth.

Fulfilling a bridging role between different poetic traditions, Cendrars now seems a very contemporary poet; it is, for example, worth comparing the lines from Easter in New York above with Geoffrey Hill's "Crucified Lord, you swim upon your cross / And never move"; or The Trans-Siberian with Amy Clampitt's "Babel Aboard The Hellas International Express"; or Cendrars's Tonga-talk poem "Mee Too Buggi" with Craig Raine's "Gauguin." Cendrars did, after all, always make much "of the mania of being so self-possessed and up-to-date", as one critic has put it.

But the tradition, mainly American, in which he is most at home—that of the longish-lined, expansive but quirky poem of everyday life, rhetorical but streetwise, sometimes street-talking—as articulated by, say, Frank O'Hara or John Ashbery—was one extant in his own life-time, and one that he sought out. Whitman's Leaves of Grass, translated into French in 1909, had a tremendous effect on French poets of the time. Cendrars, Miriam tell us, characteristically "fait à Guillaume [Apollinaire] un fantastique récit des funerailles de Whitman, qu'il tient, ditil, d'un témoin qui a assisté à la cérémonie. Avec ses trois mille cinq cents participants, et les pédérastes qui étaient venus en foule, et la claironnante fanfare, et l'orgie qui ensuivit, ce fut un mémorable enterrement …"

Yet the most attractive poems are not the great long poems of 1912–14—Easter in New York, The Trans-Siberian and Panama, a tale of seven uncles dispersed across the globe, narrated by the nephew—so much as those in the later volumes and batches that represent Cendrars's "documentary" phase: the Black African Poems published in magazines in 1922, Kodak and Travel Notes (both published in 1924). Exotic, sexy, mixing a quiet lyricism with "modern"—trains, ships, radios, the laboratory—and "primitive" subject-matter (Cendrars was instrumental in bringing the fetish for African fetishes to Paris and Picasso), dandyish in the spirit of Valery Larbaud's Barnabooth, these "snapshots" or "ocean letters" belie their own lightness; by making less of the poem as an art object (so different to the monumentalism of that early project with Delaunay), they achieve their own artistic substance in the act of recording, as in "The Thousand Islands" from Kodak:

      The sun disappears on the horizon of Lake
      Ontario
      The clouds bathe their folds in vats of purple violet scarlet and orange
      What a beautiful evening murmur Andrea and
      Frederika seated on the terrace of a medieval castle
      And the ten thousand motorboats reply to their ecstasy.

Other poems in Kodak show how taxonomy drives Cendrars's documentary technique: "The California quail / The rabbit known as the jackass / The prairie hen the turtledove the partridge / The wild duck and wild goose / The antelope / It's true you still see wildcats and rattlesnakes / But there aren't pumas anymore." If zoology and scientific examination in general is one of his methods of proceeding, or appearing to proceed—remembering Zola in a skewed, rebellious sort of way (as did his concern for the poor and abused)-another is plain, or, in the case of "Menus", sumptuous and weird presentation:

     Pickled shark fins
     Stillborn dog in honey
     Rice wine with violets
     Cream of silkworm cocoon
     Salted earthworms and Kava liqueur
     Seaweed jam….

But this is not, as with Zola, a case of the artist trying to give an objective, "measured" picture of the world; indeed, most of the "fact" in Kodak was lifted from Le Mystérieux Docteur Cornélius, a second-rate contemporary popular novel by one Gustave Le Rouge, to be transmuted by Cendrars into seemingly ingenuous poems with their own "real" fabric. One assumes that Cendrars planned the discovery of this, five years after he died, by writing twenty years earlier in a memoir of how he had shown Le Rouge a volume of poems "scissor-and-pasted out of the latter's adventure novels". Travel Notes, on the other hand, says Bochner, is "definitely Cendrars's own trip, the journal of his first voyage to South America".

One of the two keynotes, in all this, is production, of one sort or another; there are manufacturing city poems as well as luxuriant island poems, internal combustion poems as well as landscape poems, lists of goods as well as animals. Behind every line you hear, if not cicadas in some tropical scene, the rattling of machines. ("In the years 1910 and 1911", says Cendrars, "Robert Delaunay and I were perhaps the only people in Paris who were talking about machines and art and who were vaguely conscious of the great transformations of the modern world.")

The other note, almost the note not struck, is of a pastoral latency that puts interpretation at its ease; of an image, immediate but strangely inert, which the poet presents without comment or formal pressure, as if to say "there is this other life too", beyond machines, beyond machine-poems. As it would be with the driver of a coach in Tampa, "asleep with his mouth open"; or with old Jupiter, at a sign from his master, bringing out "a little lacquered stand / A bottle of sherry / An ice bucket / Some lemons / And a box of Havana cigars/ … No one spoke / The sweat was streaming down their faces". These, production and latency, are the twin poles of Cendrars's art as a whole. The sheer, diverse fact of the burgeoning physical world, the crowd of images alone, is sufficient for him; the reader must supply the unifying idea if he wants to, or just take it "as read".

Some—like John Dos Passos, who translated Panama, hailing Cendrars as "the Homer of the Transsiberian", and Henry Miller, who also championed him—were able to. Others, like the English poet F. S. Flint (one of the contributors to Des Imagistes, the first Imagist anthology, published under Pound's editorship in 1914), reviewing Nineteen Elastic Poems in the TLS in 1919 under the headline "A New Decadence", were not:

M. Cendrars is as sensitive to impressions and as clever as any minor poet; but … he now pretends to look out with one eye half-opened on a world for which it is really not worth while finding a definite form and expression…. There never was any other unity than that made by the artists, and you are not creating new art by allowing the spectacle of modern life to pour pell-mell through you without selection or arrangement…. We are not afraid of audacities, but we do want composition. Mallarmé is said to have left out the first half of the comparison; but the composition was there, and it was clear, if you had wit enough to divine the missing half. M. Cendrars leaves out indifferently the first or the second half, or both, and he does not trouble to compose, so that you are left wondering whether he has any intentions at all—except to pull your leg.

What this suggests is how much the old modernists would abhor today's postmodernists. The wild, brilliant texts collected by Monique Chefdor in Modernities and Other Writings—including Profound Today, I Have Killed, In Praise of the Dangerous Life and The End of the World Filmed by the Angel of Notre Dame—certainly bear out her view that Cendrars was "at once on a par with his contemporaries and far ahead of them, anticipating the present postmodern moment".

These "other writings"—as distinct from the Modernités proper, a more journalistic though no less strange and unrestrained series on the painters of the day—may represent a more lasting achievement than many of the poems. They take the form, mostly, of staccato, gnomic utterances on such subjects as war, the camera, crowds, apocalypse, chemistry, biology, commercial iconography and techno-sexual mania. Velocity (of machines, of social life, of travel, of trade) is one significant concept in these intense, associative, high-focus pictures chronicling the "altered state" of emergent modern society; another is perspective, an adjusted perspective ready to look at new types of social and physical space and render that vision formally. To get any sense of what Cendrars is about in these pieces (because their fragmentariness works by cumulative total effect rather than, as with most of the poems, through the projection of a series of more discrete images), you have to quote at length. The difference, remembering Pound's phanopoeia—"a casting of images upon the visual imagination"—as well as Cendrars's role in the development of the cinema through his relationship with Gance is akin to that between photography and cinematography:

The terrible blast of a whistle furrows the continent. Here is Egypt on camelback. Choose Engadine for winter sports. Read Golf's Hotels under the palm trees. Think of four hundred windows flashing in the sun. You unfold the horizon of a timetable and dream of southern islands…. Watches set themselves. From every direction ocean liners move towards their connection. Then the semaphore signals. A blue eye opens. The red one closes. Soon there is nothing but colour. Interpenetration. Disk, Rhythm, Dance, Orange and violet hues devour each other. Checkerboard of the port…. Barrels of fire. Cinnamon. European women are like subaqueous flowers confronting the stern labouring longshoremen and the dark red apotheosis of machines. A tram slams into your back. A trap door opens under your feet. There's a tunnel in your eye. You're pulled by the hair to the fifteenth floor. Smoking a pipe, your hands at the faucets—cold water, hot water—you think of the captain's wife, whose knee you will soon surreptitiously caress. The golden denture of her smile, her charming accent. And you let yourself slip down to dinner. The tongues are stuffed. Everyone must grimace to be understood. Gesticulate and laugh loudly. Madame wipes her mouth with her loincloth of a napkin. Boeuf Zephir. Cafe Euréka. Pimodan or Pamodan. Seated in my rocking chair I'm like a Negro fetish, angular beneath the heraldic electricity. The orchestra plays Louise. To amuse myself, I riddle the fat body of an old windbag that is floating at the level of my eyes with pinpricks. A deep-sea diver, submerged in the smoke from my cigar, alone I listen to the dying music of sentimentality that resonates in my helmet. The lead soles of my boots keep me upright and I move forward, slow, grotesque, stiffnecked, and bend with difficulty over the swamp life of the women. Your eye, seahorse, vibrates, marks a comma, and passes.

                            (Profound Today, 19)

Though their sensibilities were totally different from that of Cendrars (he celebrated the dissociation, diversity and transmutation, the change in the old order that they bemoan), and their aesthetics more complex, the Anglo-American modernists certainly traversed his route. Considering Cendrars's role within modernism as a poet and a novelist (and, indeed, as a grand fibber), one is driven back to some other remarks of Pound's in "How to Read" (collected in his Literary Essays, edited by Eliot) where, making a distinction between "charged" poetry and "cumulative" prose, he argues that some poets are still able to get a prose-like effect "by a greater heaping up of factual data; imagined fact if you will, but nevertheless expressed in factual manner". To some degree, this distinction mirrors what have been seen to be Cendrars's own structures, formal and material, in the poetry itself, their being in between "production" and "latency".

Was a similar kind of in-betweenness suffered personally by Cendrars through the loss of his arm—a charged sense of the missing portion being there but not really being there, not being able to function authentically? The vision contiguous to that personal disability certainly bespoke the times, it reflected the climate of thought, all the more so because the vision was there prior to the injury. "We are the amputees of space", as Cendrars put it in the Trans-Siberian—proleptically, two years before he lost his arm—in a phrase that has lots of resonance for modernist preoccupations and formal practice.

For all that, Blaise Cendrars's preoccupations were adventurous rather than introspective; certainly not the type, anyway, in Yeats's disdainful but self-knowing phrase in "The Scholars", to cough in ink or wear the carpet with his shoes.