SOURCE: "Homer of the Transsiberian," in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. III, No. 12, October 16, 1926, pp. 202-22.

At the Paris exposition of 1900—but perhaps this is all a dream, perhaps I heard someone tell about it; no it must have happened at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900—somewhere between the Eiffel tower and the Trocadero there was a long shed. In that shed was a brand new train of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, engine, tender, baggage coach, sleeping cars, restaurant car. The shed was dark, and girdered like a station. You walked up wooden steps into the huge dark varnished car. It was terrible. The train was going to start. As you followed the swish of dresses along the corridor the new smell gave you gooseflesh. The train smelt of fresh rubber, of just bought toys, of something huge and whirring and oily. The little beds were made up, there were mirrors, glittering washbasins, a bathtub. The engine whistled. No don't be afraid, look out of the window. We are moving. No outside a picture is moving, houses slipping by, bluish-greenish hills. The Urals. Somebody says names in my car. Lake Baikal, Irkutsk, Siberia, Yanktse, Mongolia, pagodas, Peking. Rivers twisting into the bluish-greenish hills and the close electric smell of something varnished and whirring and oily, moving hugely, people in boats, junks, Yellow Sea, pagodas, Peking.

And the elevator boy said the trains in the Metro never stopped, you jumped on and off while they were going, and they showed magic lantern slides and cinematograph pictures in the Grande Roue and at the top of the Eiffel Towel … but that must have been years later because I was afraid to go up.

I've often wondered about the others who had tickets taken for them on that immovable train of the Trans-Siberian in the first year of the century, whose childhood was also full of "Twenty Thousand Leagues" and Jules Verne's sportsmen and globetrottairs (if only the ice holds on Lake Baikal) and Chinese Gordon stuttering his last words over the telegraph at Khartoum; and Carlotta come back mad from Mexico setting fire to the palace at Terveuren full of Congolese curiosities, fetishes of human hair, ithiphallic idols with shells for teeth and arms akimbo, specimens of crude rubber in jars; and those magnates in panama hats shunted slowly in private cars reeking with mint and old Bourbon down new lines across the Rio Grande, shooting jackasses, prairie dogs, and an occasional greaser from the platform, and the Twentieth Century and Harvey lunchrooms and Buffalo Bill and the Indians holding up the stage and ocean greyhounds racing to Bishop's Rock and pictures of the world's leading locomotives on cigarette cards. O, Thos. Cook and Son, here's meat for your hopper. Uniformed employees meet all the leading trains. Now that Peary and Amundsen have sealed the world at the top and the bottom and there's an American bar in Baghdad and the Grand Llama of Thibet listens in on Paul Whiteman ragging the Blue Danube and the caterpillar Citroëns chug up and down the dusty streets of Timbuctoo, there's no place for the Rover Boys but the Statler hotels and the Dollar Line (sleep every night in your own brass bed) round the world cruises.

That stationary Trans-Siberian where the panorama unrolled Asia every hour was the last vestige of the Homeric age of railroading. Now's the time for the hymns and the catalogues of the ships. The railsplitting and the hacking and hewing, the great odysseys are over. The legendary names that stirred our childhood with their shadows and rumble are only stations in small print on a time table. And still … Or is it just the myth humming in our drowsy backward turned brains?

Does anything ever come of this constant dragging of a ruptured suitcase from dock to railway station and railway station to dock? All the sages say it's nonsense. In the countries of Islam they know you're mad.

In the countries of Islam they know you're mad, but they have a wistful respect for madness. Only today I was fed lunch, beef stewed in olives and sour oranges, couscous and cakes, seven glasses of tea and a pipe of kif, by the extremely ugly man with a cast in his eye and a face like a snapping turtle who hangs round the souks buying up fox skins, in the company of his friend the tailor, a merry and philosophic individual like a tailor in the Arabian Knights, all because I'd been to Baghdad, the burial place of our lord Sidi Abd el Kadr el Djilani (here you kiss your hand and murmur something about peace and God's blessing); for they feel that even a kaffir passing by the tomb may have brought away a faint whiff of the marabout's holiness. So a pilgrim has a certain importance in their eyes.

They may be right, but more likely this craze for transportation, steamboats, trains, motorbuses, mules, camels, is only a vicious and intricate form of kif, a bad habit contracted in infancy, fit only to delight a psychoanalyst cataloguing manias. Like all drugs you have to constantly increase the dose. One soothing thought; while our bodies are tortured in what Blaise Cendrars calls the squirrel cage of the meridians, maybe our childish souls sit quiet in that immovable train, in the dark-varnished new-smelling trans-Siberian watching the panorama of rivers and seas and mountains endlessly unroll.

Now's the time for the Homeric hymns of the railroads, Blaise Cendrars has written some of them already in salty French sonorous and direct as the rattle of the Grands Express Européens. Carl Sandburg has written one or two. I'm going to try to string along some hastily translated fragments of Cendrars Prose du Trans-Siberien et de la Petite Jeanne de France. It fits somehow in this hotel room with its varnished pine furniture and its blue slop-jar and its faded dusteaten window curtains. Under the balcony are some trees I don't know the name of, the empty tracks of the narrow gauge, a road churned by motor trucks. It's raining. A toad is shrilling in the bushes. As the old earth-shaking engines are scrapped one by one, the myth-makers are at work. Eventually they will be all ranged like Homer's rambling gods in the rosy light of an orderly Olympus. Here's the hymn of the Trans-Siberian.

     I think I should not have known what to make of
     her performance, of her first number indeed, if I
     had never seen the pictures of Manet, Picasso,
     Cezanne and other moderns, far and near from us
     in time and place. I should have recognized of
     course the presence of design. But the language of
     this design would have been strange to me without
     the training of modern painting…. What she
     creates is never dependent on the music…. The
     completeness of Miss Enters's achievement
     consists in what very artist's achievement must
     consist in when it is successful: the whole
     translation of every element employed into her art.
 
     In those days I was still a youngster
     Only sixteen and already I couldn't remember my childhood
     I was sixteen thousand leagues away from my birthplace
     I was in Moscow, in the city of a thousand and three belfries and seven railroad stations
     And the seven railroad stations and the thousand and three belfries were not enough for me
     For my youth was then so flaming and so mad
     That my heart sometimes burned like the temple of Ephesus, and sometimes like the Red Square at Moscow
     At sunset.
     And my eyes lit up the ancient ways.
     And I was already such a bad poet
     That I never knew how to get to the last word.
     I spent my childhood in the hanging gardens of Babylon
     Played hockey in railway stations in front of the trains that were going to leave
     Now, all the trains have had to speed to keep up with me
     Bale-Timbuctoo
     I've played the races too at Auteuil and Long-champs
     Paris-New York
     Now, I've made all the trains run the whole length of my life
     Madrid-Stockholm
     And I've lost all my bets
     And there's only Patagonia, Patagonia left for my enormous gloom, Patagonia and a trip in the South Seas.
 
     I'm travelling
     I've always been travelling
     I'm travelling with little Jehanne of France
     The train makes a perilous leap and lands on all its wheels
     The train lands on its wheels.
 
     "Say Blaise are we very far from Montmartre?"
 
     We are far, Jeanne, seven days on the rails.
     We are far from Montmartre, from the Butte that raised you, from the Sacred Heart you huddled against
     Paris has vanished and its enormous flare in the sky.
     There's nothing left but continual cinders
     Falling rain
     Swelling clouds
     And Siberia spinning
     The rise of heavy banks of snow
     The crazy sleighbells shivering like a last lust in the blue air
     The train throbbing to the heart of lead horizons
     And your giggling grief….
 
     "Say Blaise are we very far from Montmartre?"
     The worries
     Forget the worries
     All the cracked stations raticomered to the right of way
     The telegraph wires they hang by
     The grimace of the poles that wave their arms and strangle them
     The earth stretches elongates and snaps back like an accordion tortured by a sadic hand
     In the rips in the sky insane locomotives
     Take flight
     In the gaps
     Whirling wheels mouths voices
     And the dogs of disaster howling at our heels….

And so he goes on piling up memories of torn hurtling metal, of trains of sixty locomotives at full steam disappearing in the direction of Port Arthur, of hospitals and jewelry merchants, memories of the first great exploit of the Twentieth Century seen through sooty panes, beaten into his brain by the uneven rumble of the broad-gauge Trans-Siberian. Crows in the sky, bodies of men in heaps along the tracks burning hospitals, an embroidery unforeseen in that stately panorama unfolding rivers and lakes and mountains in the greenish dusk of the shed at the Exposition Universelle.

Then there's Le Panama ou Les Aventures de Mes Septs Oncles, seven run-away uncles, dedicated to the last Frenchman in Panama, the barkeep at Matachine, the death place of Chinamen where live oaks have grown up among the abandoned locomotives, where every vestige of the [de Lesseps] attempt is rotten and rusted and overgrown with lianas except a huge anchor in the middle of the forest stamped with the arms of Louis XV.

It is about this time too, that I read the history of the earth-quake at Lisbon.

     But I think
     The Panama panic is of a more universal importance
     Because it turned my childhood topsyturvy.
     I had a fine picture-book
     And I was seeing for the first time
     The whale
     The big cloud
     The walrus
     The Sun
     The great walrus
     The bear the lion the chimpanzee the rattlesnake and the fly
     The fly
     The terrible fly
     "Mother, the flies, the flies and the trunks of trees!"
     "Go to sleep, child, go to sleep."
     Ahasuerus is an idiot
 
     It's the Panama panic that made me a poet!
     Amazing
     All these of my generation are like that
     Youngsters
     Victims of strange ricochets
     We don't play any more with the furniture
     We don't play any more with antiques
     We're always and everywhere breaking crockery
     We ship
     Go whaling
     Kill walrus
     We're always afraid of the tse-tse fly
     Because we're not very fond of sleep….

Fantastic uncles they are; one of them was a butcher in Galveston lost in the cyclone of '95, another washed gold in the Klondike, another one turned Buddhist and was arrested trying to blow up the Britishers in Bombay, the fourth was the valet of a general in the Boer War, the fifth was a cordon bleu in palace hotels, number six disappeared in Patagonia with a lot of electromagnetic instruments of precision; no one ever knew what happened to the seventh uncle.

It was uncle number two who wrote verse modelled on Musset and read in San Francisco the history of General Sutor, the man who conquered California for the United States and was ruined by the discovery of gold on his plantation. This uncle married the woman who made the best bread in a thousand square kilometers and was found one day with a rifle bullet through his head. Aunty disappeared. Aunty married again. Aunty is now the wife of a rich jam manufacturer.

And Blaise Cendrars has since written the history of General Johann August Sutor, L'Or, a narrative that traces the swiftest leanest parabola of anything I've ever read, a narrative that cuts like a knife through the washy rubbish of most French writing of the present time, with its lemon-colored gloves and its rosewater and its holywater and its policier-gentleman cosmopolitan affectation. It's probably because he really is, what the Quai d'Orsai school pretended to be, an international vagabond, that Cendrars has managed to capture the grandiose rhythms of America of seventy-five years ago, the myths of which our generation is just beginning to create. (As if anybody really was anything. He's a good writer, leave it at that.) In L'Or he's packed the tragic and turbulent absurdity of '49 into a skyrocket. It's over so soon you have to read it again for fear you have missed something.

But the seven uncles. Here's some more of the hymn to transportation that runs through all his work, crystallizing the torture and delight of a train-mad, steamship-mad generation.

     I'm thirsty
     Damn it
     Goddamn it to hell
     I want to read the Feuille d'Avis of Neuchatel or the Pamplona Courrier
     In the middle of the Atlantic you're no more at home than in an editorial office
     I go round and round inside the meridians like a squirrel in a squirrel cage
     Wait there's a Russian looks like he might be worth talking to
     Where to go
     He doesn't know either where to deposit his baggage
     At Leopoldville or at the Sedjerah near Nasareth, with Mr. Junod or at the house of my old friend
     Perl
     In the Congo in Bessarabia on Samoa
     I know all the time tables
     All the trains and their connections
     The time they arrive the time they leave
     All the liners all the fares all the taxes
     It's all the same to me
     Live by grafting
     I'm on my way back from America on board the Volturno, for thirty-five francs from New York to Rotterdam.

Blaise Cendrars seems to have a special taste for the Americas, in the U.S. preferring the sappier Southern and Western sections to the bible-worn hills of New England. Here's poem about the Mississippi, for which Old Kentucky must have supplied the profusion of alligators, that still is an honorable addition to that superb set of old prints of sternwheel steamboats racing with a nigger or on the safety valve.

     At this place the stream is a wide lake
     Rolling yellow muddy waters between marshy banks.
     Water-plants merging into acres of cotton
     Here and there appear towns and villages carpeting the bottom of some little bay with their factories with their tall black chimneys with their long wharves jutting out their long wharves on piles jutting out very far into the water
     Staggering heat
     The bell on board rings for lunch
     The passengers are rigged up in checked suits howling cravats vests loud as the incendiary cocktails and the corrosive sauces
     We begin to see alligators
     Young ones alert and frisky
     Big fellows drifting with greenish moss on their backs
     Luxuriant vegetation announces the approach of the tropical zone
     Bamboos giant palms tulip-trees laurel cedars
     The river itself has doubled in width
     It is sown with floating islands from which at the approach of the boat water-birds start up in flocks
     Steamers sailboats barges all kinds of craft and immense rafts of logs
     A yellow vapor rises from the too warm water of the river
 
     It's hundreds now that the 'gators play round us
     You can hear the dry snap of their jaws and can make out very well their small fierce eyes
     The passengers pass the time shooting at them with rifles
     When a particularly good shot manages to kill or mortally wound one of the beasts
     Its fellows rush at it and tear it to pieces
     Ferociously
     With little cries rather like the wail of a new-born baby.

In Kodak there are poems about New York, Alaska, Florida, hunting wild turkey and duck in a country of birchtrees off in the direction of Winnipeg, a foggy night in Vancouver, a junk in a Pacific harbor unloading porcelain and swallows' nests, bamboo tips and ginger, the stars melting like sugar in the sky of some island passed to windward by Captain Cook, elephant hunting in the jungle roaring with torrents of rain; and at the end a list of menus featuring iguana and green turtle, Red River salmon and shark's fins, suckling pig with fried bananas, crayfish in pimento, bread-fruit, fried oysters, and guavas, dated en voyage 1887–1923. 1887 must be the date of his birth.

Dix-Neuf Poémes Elastiques. Paris. After all, Paris, whether we like it or not has been so far the center of unrest, of building up and the tearing down of this century. From Paris has spread in every direction a certain esperanto of the arts that has "modern" for its trademark. Blaise Cendrars is an itinerant Parisian well-versed in this as in many other dialects. He is a kind of medicine man trying to evoke the things that are our cruel and avenging gods. Turbines, triple-expansion engines, dynamite, high tension coils, navigation, speed, flight, annihilation. No medicine has been found yet strong enough to cope with them, but in cubist Paris they have invented some fetishes and grisgris that many are finding useful. Here's the confession of an enfant du siêcle, itinerant Parisian.

     I am the man who has no past.—Only the stump of my arm hurst,—
     I've rented a hotel room to be all alone with myself.
     I have a brand new wicker basket that's filling up with manuscript.
     I have neither books nor pictures, not a scrap of aesthetic bric-a-brac.
     There's an old newspaper on the table.
     I work in a bare room behind a dusty mirror,
     My feet bare on the red tiling, playing with some balloons and a little toy trumpet
     I'm working on THE END OF THE WORLD.

I started these notes on the little sunny balcony at Marrakesh with in front of me the tall cocoa-colored tower of the Koutoubia surmounted by three high balls banded with peacock-color, gilded each smaller than the other, and beyond the snowy ranges of the high Atlas; I'm finishing it in Mogador in a shut-in street of houses white as clabber where footsteps resound loud above the continual distant pound of the surf. It's the time of afternoon prayer and the voice of the meuzzin flashes like brace from the sky announcing that there is no god but God and that Mahomet is the prophet of God; and I'm leaving at six in the morning and there's nothing ahead but wheels and nothing behind but wheels. O, Thomas Cook and Son, who facilitate travel with their long ribbons of tickets held between covers by an elastic, what spells did you cast over the children of this century? The mischief in those names: Baghdad Bahn, Cape to Cairo, Transsiberian, Compagnie des Wagons Lits et des Grands Expresses Internationals, Christ of the Andes, the Panama Canal, mechanical toy that Messrs. Roosevelt and Goethals managed to make work when everyone else had failed; a lot of trouble for the inhabitants of the two Americas you have dammed up within your giant locks. The flags, the dollars, and Cook's tours marching round the world till they meet themselves coming back. Here in Morrocco you can see them hour by hour mining the minaret where the muezzin chants five times a day his superb defiance of the multiple universe.

If there weren't so many gods, tin gods, steel gods, gods of uranium and manganese, living gods—here's Mrs. Besant rigging a new Jesus in Bombay, carefully educated at Oxford for the rôle—red gods of famine and revolution, old gods laid up in libraries, plaster divinities colored to imitate coral at Miami, spouting oil gods at Tulsa Okla., we too, might be able to sit on our prayer carpets in the white unchangeable sunshine of Islam. The sun of our generation has broken out in pimples, its shattered light flickers in streaks of uneasy color. Take the train, they're selling happiness in acre lots in Florida. So we must run across the continents always deafened by the grind of wheels, by the roar of aeroplane motors, wallow in all the seas with the smell of hot oil in our nostrils and the throb of the engines in our blood. Out of the Babel of city piled on city, continent on continent, the world squeezed small and pulled out long, bouncing like a new rubber ball, we get what? Certainly not peace. That is why in this age of giant machines and scuttleheaded men it is a good thing to have a little music. We need sons of Homer going about the world beating into some sort of human rhythm the shrieking hullaballo, making us less afraid.