Blaise Cendrars
Cendrars, Blaise (pseud. of Frédéric Sauser) (1887-1961). Born in Switzerland to a father of French anabaptist origins and a Scottish mother, Cendrars led a life of wandering and adventure which was the basis of much of his writing in verse and prose. His Vol à voiles (1932) was long taken as a source for information about his early life, but Cendrars himself spoke of it as a ‘divertissement’, and like most things that he wrote or said about himself (and others) it is better viewed as a playful fictional construct loosely related to reality. He worked in St Petersburg from 1904 to 1907 and returned there in 1911 prior to going to New York in December of that year, where his stay lasted until June 1912. These experiences contributed to two of his most famous poems—‘Les Pâques à New York’ (1912) and ‘La Prose du Transsibérien’ (1913)—which alone place him among the foremost poets of the avant-garde in the Paris of 1912-14. The latter is in itself a poem-object, or in Cendrars's own terms ‘un livre simultané’, being published on one long unfoldable sheet which carried the accompanying paintings of Sonia Delaunay, thus taking its place in the history of painting also. The former may have, to some extent, influenced Apollinaire's ‘Zone’. Cendrars certainly allowed it to be said that it had, after Apollinaire's death.
In August 1914 he enrolled in the Foreign Legion and lost an arm in the battle for the Marne in September 1915. Something of his experiences can be found in his La Main coupée (1914), although, bizarrely, the title does not allude to his own loss.
In the field of poetry, his Du monde entier (1919), Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (1919), Documentaires (1924)—originally entitled Kodak, but changed for legal reasons—and Feuilles de route (1927-8) are the best of his contribution to the modernism of the period. The omnipresent themes of wandering and the world as poem, together with a narrative strand, are the characteristic marks of this author, whose impact on French poetry is over by the 1930s. His L'Anthologie nègre (1921) also contributed to the contemporary cult of the primitive and the exotic in avant-garde art.
His prose works, of which the best-known are L'Or (1925), Moravagine (1926), Le Plan de l'aiguille and Les Confessions de Dan Yack (both 1929), Rhum (1930), L'Homme foudroyé (1945), and Bourlinguer (1948), also mix truth and fiction (whatever their nominal genre) in a way that owes much to their author's gifts as a ‘raconteur’ and his notions of ‘divertissement’. As one critic has put it: ‘the most famous imaginary hero created by the Swiss writer could well be Blaise Cendrars.’
[Ian Revie]
Bibliography
- J. C. Fluckiger, Au cœur du texte (1977)
- J. Bernard (ed.), Cendrars, l'aventurier du texte (1992)
