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Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) - pseudonym of Frédéric Louis Sauser |
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Swiss poet and novelist, who wrote in French and spent much of his life traveling restlessly. Blaise Cendrars did his best to fictionalize his past and his biographers have had much difficulties separating fact from fabulations: "truth is imaginary," he once said. Cendrars's most famous novels, Sutter's Gold and Moravagine, both from 1926, have been translated into more than twenty languages. I straighten my papers Blaise Cendrars was born Frédéric Louis Sauser in the small city of La Chaux-de-Fonds. His parents were both Swiss but later Cendrars claimed that his mother was Scottish, and he was born on an Italian railway train during his mother's journey back from Egypt. Cendrars's father, Georges-Frédéric Sauser, was an inventor and businessman. Cendrars was educated in Neuchâtel, and later in Basle and Berne. At the age of 15 he ran way home – according to a story he escaped from his parents but another version tells his family gave up keeping him in school. Cendrars worked in Russia as an apprentice watchmaker and was there during the Revolution of 1905. In 1907 he entered the university of Berne but settled in 1910 in Paris, adopting French citizenship. During his life Cendrars worked worked at a variety of jobs – as a film maker, journalist, art critic, and businessman. Before becoming writer he even tried horticulture and never stopped trying to earn his living by extra-literary activities. On September 28, 1915, in Champagne, a German shell blew off his right arm. In his 1951 afterword to Moravagine (1926) he claimed that the fictional character of the title gave him "the courage and the strength and the will to pick myself up in the battlefield in Champagne." After recovering, Cendrars learned to write with his left hand. In his autobiographical writings Cendrars told that in his youth he traveled widely in China, Mongolia, Siberia, Persia, the Caucasus and Russia, and later in the Unites States, Canada, South America, and Africa. These cosmopolitan wanderings Cendrars used as a way to discover inner truths. Some doubts have arisen whether he stoked trains in China, but perhaps this is more important from the biographical point of view than literary – the memoirs of Marco Polo, Cellini and Casanova and the autobiographical novels of Jean Genet and Henri Charrière are read in spite of reliability in all biographical details. Like the protagonist of Les confessions de Dan Yack (1928), Cendrars was a man of action, who avoided "literary" flavor in his prose, and a man of contemplation, who had almost obsessive need for exotic experiences. In Les Pâques à New York (1912, Easter in New York) he said: "Still, Lord, I took a dangerous voyage / To see a beryl intaglio of your image. / Lord, make my face, buried in my hands, / Leave there its agonizing mask." The poems was was prompted by his penniless stay in New York, and mixed despair with excitement of modern city living. Cendrars was considered along with Apollinaire,
whom he deeply influenced, a leading figure in the literary avant-garde
before and after World War I. In his early experimental poems Cendrars
used pieces of newsprint, the multiple focus, simultaneous impressions,
and other modernist techniques. La prose du Transibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France
(1913), a combination of travelogue and lament, was printed on
two-meter pages with parallel abstract paintings by the Russian-born
painter Sonia Delaunay. Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles
(1918) was in the form of a pocket timetable. Cendrars was closely
associated with Cubism but he also published poetry Jacques Vache's Lettres de guerre,
which was edited by Philippe Soupault, André Breton and Louis Aragon –
founders of surrealism in literature. The Russian-born French painter
Marc Chagall said once that the most important events in his life were
"my meeting with Blaise Cendrars, and the Russian Revolution." Cendrars
introduced him to his favorite bar, the Faux Monnayeurs behind the
Serbinne. He described his friend as "a genius split like a peach." Prose of the Transsiberian & of Little Jeanne of France
contains impressions from Cendrars's real or imaginary journey from
Moscow to Manchuria during the 1905 Revolution and Sino-Russian War. As
the train of the title speeds through the vast country, Cendrars mixes
with its movement images of war, apocalyptic visions of disaster, and
fates of people wounded by the great events. With Abel Gance he
cooperated in J'Accuse (1919), an antiwar documentary, and La Roue
(1921-24), originally a nine-hour movie of a railwayman, which is
acclaimed for its innovative cutting. One of his close collaborators
was the composer Erik Satie; he wrote the first draft of Satie's ballet Relâche (1924). Cendrars's scenario, entitled Après-dîner, was extended by Francis Picabia from one to two acts. The film segments were created by René Clair. Cendrars was in the audience on the opening night of Le Sacre du printemps(The Rite of Spring), composed by Igor Stravinsky. As the audience responded with boos and jeers, he defended the work so loudly that an annoyed neighbor pushed him through his orchestra seat. For the rest of the performance, he wore it around his neck like a collar.Cendrars traveled incessantly and after 1914 became involved in the movie industry in Italy, France, and the United States. During World War I Cendrars joined the army. He served as a corporal and lost in 1915 in combat on the Marne front his right arm. Cendrars's first wife was Féla Poznanska; they had three children. In 1924 Cendrars met in Paris the American writers John Dos Passos and Hemingway. Ten years later he became friends with Henry Miller; their correspondence was published in 1995 in English. Miller hailed him as the man "exploding in all directions at once." As the Italian Futurists, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and others, he was fascinated by the new technology and speed of travel, writing in telegraphic rhythm about poems dictated over the phone and the lettre-océan: "The ocean letter was not invented for writing poetry, / But when you travel when you do business when you're on board when you send ocean letters, / It's poetry". During a two-week stay in 1936 in Hollywood Cendrars recorded his impressions for Paris-Soir in series of articles which were collected in Hollywood, la mecque du cinéma (1936). It depicts with wry humour the movie industry and the town's people. Films were one of Cendrars's passions. In the 1930s Cendrars planned to travel round the world to film such phenomena as levitation and ritual dances. By 1925 Cendrars had ceased to publish poetry. He wrote the scenario for Darius Milhaud's ballet La création du monde
(1923, The Creation of the World). This African-chic spectacle was
presented by the Swedish Ballet in Paris. None of the participants knew
much about Africa. Sets and costums were designed by the Cubist artist
Fernand Léger. When Stravinsky's ballet Les Noces premiered on 13 June 1923, along with his Pulcinella,
at the Quai Anatole-France, Cendrars was there, on the restored barge
made into a restaurant, as was Picasso, Sergei Diaghilev, Darius
Milhaud, Jean Cocteau, and Tristan Tzara. Cocteau was dressed as a
captain and wandered among the crowd whispering "We're sinking." Cendrars's famous prose works from the 1920s include L'or
(Sutter's Gold), a fictionalized story of John Sutter, a Swiss pioneer,
who started the great gold rush in the northern California, built there
his own empire but died in poverty. According to a literary anecdote,
Stalin kept this book on his night table. The American engineer John D. Littlepage tells in his book In Search of Soviet Gold
(1937), that Stalin was very interested in the 1849 gold rush in
California, and read everything on the subject that he could lay
his hands on, among others, Sutter's Gold. Sutter's Gold can be read as the author's exploration of his inner self, like the semi-autobiographical novel Moravagine ('Death to the vagina'), which followed a madman, a descendant of the last King of Hungary, and a young doctor on their worldwide adventures from the Russian Revolution and to the First World War. Moravinge's madness becomes comparable with the dissolution of world and the chaotic disorder of life. "There is no truth. There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible imaginable contingency and contradiction. Life." Moravigne dies in an another asylum and the manuscript of the story finds it way to Cendrars, one of the characters in the story. The Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein tried to arose Hollywood's interest in Sutter's Gold on
his trip there in the 1930s. The director William Wyler obtained a
scenario that Eisenstein had prepared and read plays based on the life
of Sutter, including Bruno Frank's The General and the Gold and Caesar von Arx's John Augustus Sutter.
Cendrars offered Wyler his services as a screenwriter, and hopefully
wrote: "Should this film be succesful, I have several other first-class
American scenarios." After Universal engaged William Anthony McGuire, Cendrars offered to read the script "absolutely gratis." However, Wyler was pulled off the project and Howard Hawks was assigned to it. Eventually James Cruze directed the film version, which was released in 1936. It was one of the studio's major flops of the year, and started the exit of Carl Laemmle from the chairman's office. Most of the action footage was reused in Mutiny on the Blackhawk (1939). During the German occupation of France from 1940 to 1944 Cendrars
was listed as a Jewish writer of "French expression." His younger son, a pilot,
was killed in an accident while escorting American planes in Morocco.
Cendrars started to publish in the late 1940s memoirs, which combined
travel fantasies with colorful episodes from his life. Henry Miller wrote in The Wisdom of the Heart (1941), that "Cendrars in 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 Mars, to Neptune, Vega, Saturn, Pluto, Uranus." In L'homme foudroyé (1945, The Astonished Man) Cendrars walks around between lines of World War I trenches, spends time with gypsies in a travelling theatre, and attempts to drive across a South American swamp. "I am haunted by no phantoms. It is rather that the ashes I stir up contain the crystallization that hold the image (reduced or synthetic) of the living and impure beings that they constituted before the intervention of the fire. If life has a meaning, this image (from the beyond?) has perhaps some significance. That is what I should like to know. And it is why I write." In 1949 Cendrars married Raymone Duchateau, an actress who he had first met the late 1910s. Cendrars's final novel was Emmène-moi au bout du monde! (1953, To the End of the World), set in the Parisian theater world of the late 1940s. In 1957 he had a stroke. Cendrars received the Paris Grand Prix for literature in 1961, a recognition which almost came too late. Blaise Cendrars died a few days later on January 21, 1961, in Paris. For further reading: Cendrars et le cinéma by Jean-Carlo Flückiger (2017); Le Paris de Cendrars by Olivier Renault (2017); The American Fictions of Blaise Cendrars by Jonathan David Ingle (dissertation, 2017); Blaise Cendrars Speaks..., edited with an introduction by Jim Christy (2016); Album Cendrars, edited by Laurence Campa (2013); L’odyssée Cendrars by Patrice Delbourg (2010); Henri Miller, Blaise Cendrars: deux âmes soeurs by Nelly Mareine (2009); Shades of Sexuality by A. Leamon (1997); Blaise Cendrars by Miriam Cendrars (1985); Blaise Cendrars by M. Chefdor (1980); Blaise Cendrars: Discovery and Re-creation by J. Bochner (1978); The Inner Theatre of Recent French Poetry: Cendrars, Tzara, Peret, Artaud, Bonnefoy by Mary Ann Caws (1972); Situation de Blaise Cendrars by J.C. Lovey (1965) Selected works:
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