Yes he is a sort of Brahman à rebours, as he says of himself, a Brahman who is the envoy plenipotentiary of the active principle itself. He is the man of the dream which he is dreaming, and he will be that until the dream ends. There is no subject and object.
There is. A transitive mode which is expressed by the intransitive; action which is the negation of activity. Cendrars is the eye of the navel, the face in the mirror which remains after you have turned your back on it.
Another interesting thing about him—he does as little as possible. It is not that he is lazy—far from it!—nor that he is gripped by the futility of things. It is rather because he is a piece of human radium buried in the maggot pile of humanity.
At the very bottom of the pile he can still assert his full strength. He does not need to get up and walk or shout; he has only to be, only to radiate his inexhaustible vitality. He is the incarnation of the very opposite principle which governs the world, like the lie which reveals the truth. He is all those things which we know only by contrast, and so he has not even to move his little finger.
The slightest voluntary movement and he would be done for, he would explode. And Cendrars knows it. He has an almost geologic wisdom, which is why he is never logical, never ruthful, never serious, never hopeful, never confident, never trustful, never anything. He is never, never, never. He is.
You reach to him by leaning backward, by receding, by putting minus in front of you. You can never meet him face to face, never seize him by putting your arms out. You must relinquish, sink back, close your eyes.
He is at the beginning of the road, not at the end. Meet me yesterday, he says, or the day before yesterday. It is no use setting the alarm—you will never get up early enough to meet him.
If he had wanted to be anything he could have been it most successfully. He does not want He is like the sage in the Chinese story who, when asked why he never performed the miracles attributed to his disciple, replied; “The Master is able to do these things, but he is also able to refrain from doing them.” His disinterestedness is always a positive, active quality. He is not inactive—he refuses, he rejects.
It is this instinctive, ordained defiance in Cendrars which makes the word “rebel” sound ridiculous when applied to him. He is not a rebel, he is an absolute traitor to the race, and as such I salute him. The salute is wasted, of course, because Cendrars doesn’t give a damn whether you salute him or not.
Would you salute a tree for spreading its foliage? Whether you are at the bottom or the top is all the same to Cendrars. He doesn’t care to know what you are trying to do; he is only interested in what you are. He looks you through and through, pitilessly. If you are meat for the gristle, fine! he devours you.
If you are just suet, then down the sewer you go—unless that day he happens to be in need of a little fat. He is the epitome of injustice, which is why he appears so magnanimous. He does not forgive, or pardon, or condemn, or condone. He puts you in the scales and weighs you. He says nothing.
He lets you do the talking. With himself he is equally rigorous. “Moi, l’homme le plus libre du monde, je reconnais que l’on est toujours lié par quelque chose, et que la liberté, l’indépendance n’existe pas, et je me méprise autant que je peux, tout en rejouissant de mon impuissance.”
He has been accused of writing trash. It is true that he does not always write on the same level—but Cendrars never writes trash. He is incapable of writing trash. His problem is not whether to write well or badly, but whether to write or not write. Writing is almost a violation of his way of living.
He writes against the grain, more and more so as the years go on. If, on the impulse of the moment, or through dire necessity, he takes the notion to do a piece of reportage, he goes through with it with good grace.
He goes about even the most trivial task with pains, because fundamentally he does not recognize that one thing is trivial and another important. If it is not anti-human, his attitude, it is certainly anti-moral. He is as much ashamed of being disgusted or revolted as of being exalted or inspired. He has known what it is to struggle, but he despises struggle too.
His writing, like his life, is on different levels. It changes color, substance, tempo, just as his life changes rhythm and equilibrium. He goes through metamorphoses, without however surrendering his identity. His behavior seems to be governed not merely by internal changes—psychic, chemical, physiologic—but by external ones also, chiefly by interstellar configurations.
He is tremendously susceptible to changes of weather—the spiritual weather. He experiences in his soul genuine eclipses; he knows what it means to fly off at a tangent, or to sweep across the sky like a flaming comet. He has been put on the rack, drawn and quartered; he has pursued his own shadow, tasted madness.
It seems to me that his greatest tribulation has been to accept the quality of the grandiose which is written in his destiny. His struggle has been with his own fate, with the grandeur which for some reason he has never wholly accepted. Out of desperation and humility he has created for himself the more human role of the antagonist.
But his destiny was laid down in royal colors. He does not fit in anywhere because his whole life has been lived in defiance of the pattern which was ordained. And desperate and tragic, even foolish as such a course may seem, it is the very inmost virtue of Cendrars, the link which binds him to the human family, which makes him the wonderful copain he is, the marvellous man among men whom even the unseeing recognize immediately.
It is this challenge which he carries around in him, which he hurls now and then in his mad, drunken moments; it is this which really sustains those about him, those who have had even the least contact with him.
It is not the blustering, heroic attitude, but the blind, tragic defiance of the Greeks. It is the resistance to fate which is always aroused by a super-endowment of strength, by a super-wisdom.
It is the Dionysian element which is created at the moment of greatest lucidity: the frail, human voice denying the god-impulse because to accept it would mean the death of all that is creative, all that is truly human.
It is on this wheel of creation and destruction that Cendrars turns, as the globe itself turns. It is this which isolates him, makes him a solitary. He refuses to spread himself thin over an illusory pattern of grandeur; he muscles deeper and deeper into the hub, into the everlasting no-principle of the universe.
Into the Future
TO APPROACH the world of Lawrence two things must be steadily borne in mind: first, the nature of his individual temperament, and second, the relation between such a temperament and the times. For Lawrence was both distinctively unique and at the same time a figure representative of our time.
He stands out among the constellations as a tiny, blazing star; he glows more brilliantly in the measure that we understand our age. Had he not reflected his epoch so thoroughly he would have already been forgotten. As it is, his importance increases with time. It is not that he grows bigger, or that he moves nearer the earth.
No, he remains where he was at the beginning: he remains just a tiny bit above the horizon, like an evening star, but as night comes on, and it is the night which is coming on stronger and stronger, he waxes more brilliant. We understand him better as we go down into the night.
Before me lie the notes from which this book on Lawrence will emerge. They make a huge, baffling pile. Some of them I don’t understand myself any more. Some of them I see already in a new light.
The notes are full of contradictions. Lawrence was full of contradictions. Life itself is full of contradictions. I want to impose no higher order upon the man, his works, his thought, than life imposes. I do not want to stand outside life, judging it, but in it, submitting to it, reverencing it.
I speak of contradictions. And immediately I feel impelled to contradict this. For example, I wish to make it clear at the outset that a man like Lawrence was right, right in everything he said, in everything he did, even when what he said or did was obviously wrong, obviously stupid, obviously prejudiced or unjust. (He is at his very best, to illustrate what I mean, in such writing as the studies on Poe and on Melville.)
Lawrence was opposed to the world as is. The world is wrong, always was wrong, always will be wrong. In this sense Lawrence was right, is still right, and always will be right. Every sensitive being aware of his own power, his own right, senses this opposition. The world
