Mind you, it’s not Claude I’m raving against. Claude is a jewel, un ange, and no presque about it. There’s the bird-cage hanging outside the window, and flowers too—though it ain’t Madrid or Seville, no fountains, no pigeons.
No, it’s the clinic every day. She goes in one door and I in the other. No more expensive restaurants. Go to the movies every night and try to stop squirming. Can’t bear the sight of the Dôme or the Coupole any more. These bastards sitting around on the terrasse, looking so clean and healthy with their coats of tan, their starched shirts and their eau-de-cologne.
It wasn’t entirely Claude’s fault. I tried to warn her about these suave looking bastards. She was so damned confident of herself—the injections and all that business. And then, any man who would. . . . Well, that’s just how it happened.
Living with a whore—even the best whore in the world—isn’t a bed of roses. It isn’t the numbers of men, though that too gets under your skin sometimes, it’s the everlasting sanitation, the precautions, the irrigations, the examinations, the worry, the dread.
And then, in spite of it all— — —. I told Claude . . . I told her repeatedly—“watch out for the swell guys!”
No, I blame myself for everything that’s happened. Not content with being a saint I had to prove that I was a saint. Once a man realizes that he’s a saint he should stop there. Trying to pull the saint on a little whore is like climbing into heaven by the back stairs.
When she cuddles up to me—she loves me now more than ever—it seems to me that I’m just some damned microbe that’s wormed its way into her soul. I feel that even if I am living with an angel I ought to try to make a man of myself. We ought to get out of this filthy hole and live somewhere in the sunshine, a room with a balcony overlooking a river, birds, flowers, life streaming by, just she and me and nothing else.
Tribute To Blaise Cendrars
Je suis un homme inquiet, dur vis à vis de soi-même, comme tous les solitaires. From Une Nuit dans la Forêt.
THE REASON I always think of Cendrars with affection and admiration is that he resembles so closely that Chinese rock-bottom man of my imagination whom I have probably invented because of my hatred and contempt for the men I see about me in the world today. Cendrars himself gives the clue to his enigmatic character in an autobiographical fragment, a little book called Une Nuit dans la Forêt. “De plus en plus, je me rends compte que j’ai toujours pratiqué la vie contemplative.”
Turbulent and chaotic though his writing seems, the meaning nevertheless is always crystal clear. Cendrars anchors himself in the very heart of things. He is the most active of men and yet serene as a lama.
To bemoan the contradictoriness of his nature is to misjudge him. The man is all of a piece, one inexhaustible creative substance which enjoys a continuous fulfillment through giving. Many people would say that he is generous to a fault. I would not use the word generous in connection with Cendrars. He is beyond that. He is a vital force, a blind and pitiless urge, closer to nature than to man. He is tender and ruthless at the same time. He is antinomian. And always uniquely himself, always uniquely Blaise Cendrars.
If you will look at a list of his works you will see that more than half of them are exhausted. And if you study the titles of his works you will see that the man himself is inexhaustible. He is the most contemporary of contemporaries, dated and undated at the same time. He is so well informed that he is absolutely oblivious of what is going on. Cendrars is the crude ore of which the finest metals are made.
He can tell the most monstrous lies and remain absolutely truthful. In every yarn he spins there is more of vital substance and genuine fact than you can find in the whole panorama, for example, of Jules Romains’ magnum opus. In every book he gives us Cendrars seems to be making the gesture of bending down and picking up a handful of earth with his good left hand. In every book he seems to be embracing us with that mutilated arm through which the blood still courses warm and red. Cendrars knows only the reality and honesty of the heart.
His gestures, often rough and awkward, are nevertheless manly gestures. He never tries to please or to conciliate. He is the worst diplomat in the world, and consequently the best. He is not a realist, but real. In his peculiar inhuman way he does only what is human, responds only to what is human. If sometimes he seems like a charge of dynamite it is because his sincerity, his integrity, is incorruptible.
Cendrars is a voyager. There is hardly a corner of the globe whereon he has not set foot. He has not only voyaged about the world, but beyond the world. He has been to the moon, to Man, to Neptune, Vega, Saturn, Pluto, Uranus. He is a visionary who does not spurn the ordinary means of travel, of locomotion. Usually he travels incognito, adopting the manners and the speech of the people he is visiting.
He carries no passport and no letters of credit, neither letters of introduction, to be sure. He knows that wherever he lands it is the same rigmarole. It is not a question of confidence in himself, nor even of faith in his lucky star—it is a question of accuracy.
When he describes his celestial voyages he proceeds simply and honestly, as if he were describing a trip to Formosa or Patagonia. The world is one, the same in dream as in waking life. One plasma and one magma. Frontiers exist only for the timid ones, for the poor and mean at heart. Cendrars never uses the word “frontier”: he speaks of latitude and longitude.
He inquires about the climate, or the nature of the soil, what do you use for food, and so on. He is almost frighteningly natural, almost inhumanly human. “L’action seule libère. Elle dénoue tout.”
He has friends everywhere, even among the Hottentots. And yet he is the most solitary of men. Of all the men I have ever met he is the most liberated—yet thoroughly earthbound. To use the word “cosmic” with reference to him would be to insult him; it would imply that he accepted life. Cendrars does not accept.
He accepts nothing. He says neither “Yes” nor “No.” He walks over such questions rough-shod. He becomes terrifyingly silent. And that is why perhaps he is the most marvellous talker I have ever listened to. His talk is not of loneliness, as with most men—it is of the absolute moment, of nothingness, of evanescence and metamorphosis.
And so it is fecund, magical, toxic. His talk is pure destruction to everything that is not of the moment; it is a mirage born of the peculiar spiritual atmosphere which he has created about him and in which he lives. He follows it thirstily, like the wanderer in the desert.
But he is never lost, nor is he ever deceived. Nor does he ever leave his body, as do those strange seekers of wisdom in Tibet. Wherever Cendrars goes his body accompanies him—and his hunger and his thirst.
If it has been a tight squeeze he returns looking emaciated; if it was plain sailing he comes back with ruddy face and that sort of starry gleam in his eyes which is unforgettable. One is tempted to say of him that he is hallucinating. Cendrars not only creates longing, he answers it too.
His talk is that of a man ceaselessly emptying his pockets. He does not talk words; he talks things, facts, deeds, experiences. He needs no adjectives, just verbs and nouns—and conjunctions and conjunctions and conjunctions.
His nationality is obscure. He is a melting-pot of all races, all peoples. Once I was going to dedicate a book to him—“To Blaise Cendrars, the first Frenchman to make me a royal gesture!”—but I realized as I wrote the phrase that it would be an injustice to Cendrars to call him a Frenchman.
No, he is, as I said before, the Chinese rock-bottom man of my imagination, the man that D. H. Lawrence would like to have been, the man of the cosmos who remains forever unidentified, the man who renews the race by putting humanity back into the crucible. “Je méprise tout ce qui est. J’agis. Je revolutionne,” says Cendrars.
I remember reading Moravagine, one of my very first attempts to read French. It was like reading a phosphorescent text through smoked glasses. I had to divine what he was saying, Cendrars, but I got it. If he had written it in Tegalic I would have gotten it. Even in such a work as L’Eubage one gets it, gets it quick in the guts—or never.
Everything is written in blood, but a blood that is saturated with starlight. Cendrars is like a transparent fish swimming in a planetary sperm; you can see his backbone, his lungs, his heart, his kidneys, his intestines; you can see the red corpuscles moving in the blood-stream.
You can look clean through him and see the planets wheeling. The silence he creates is deafening. It takes you back to the beginning of the world, to that hush which is engraved on the face of mystery.
I always see him there in the hub of the universe, slowly
