Jacob, Max (1876-1944). Mystic and farceur, poet and parodist, Breton and Jew, night-owl and hermit, Jacob brought pathos, humour, and linguistic brio to the exercise of his Protean talents. In a remarkable trajectory, his life led him from Quimper (whose menu peuple figure repeatedly in his work) to the Montmartre of Apollinaire, Picasso, and Salmon, where he painted gouaches and had two visions of Christ, to Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire where, after his conversion to Christianity, he spent long periods of monastic solitude, and finally to the transit camp at Drancy where, after his arrest as a Jew, he died of pneumonia. With their dazzling word-play and parodic verve, the prose poems of Le Cornet à dés (1916) rank with the writings of Apollinaire as cardinal expressions of the spirit which, after the eclipse of the Symbolists, was to infuse the modernist movement in France. Ever willing to give the initiative to language, and to whatever might emerge from a memory nourished by eclectic reading—popular fiction, folk legends, devotional texts, and the Cabbala—Jacob turned his hand to verse poems (Le Laboratoire central, 1921), bizarre novels (Le Cabinet noir, 1922), religious texts (La Défense de Tartuffe, 1924). Bringing a touch of fantasy to everything he did, Jacob also composed Breton ‘chants’ under the pseudonym Morven le Gaélique, wrote interesting meditations on poetry, and maintained a vast correspondence through which he gave much valued advice and support to younger writers, who included Leiris and Jabès.
[Michael Sheringham]
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