There are men who cannot bring themselves to conform with the rest of human society, who cannot conceive of a secure and honorable career even at the hands of a tolerant age. They flee, they are eternally escaping from the fold by some particularly outrageous or suicidal action. Rimbaud having mastered the art of poetry in his twenties, deserted literature to lead caravans through the African desert. Apollinaire at almost as early an age had also mastered the traditional forms of his art, but with Rimbaud's example before him could not become "an explorer, a trapper, a robber, a hunter, a miner." Possessed of great energy, curiosity, and disrespect, he was from the start thrown upon the side of those who flout authority, court disorder and embrace the glitter and profusion of an intensely mundane existence.
To regard the spectacle of modern life and to sense the cleavage with the past and with the art or humanities of the previous day, is to be "modern". For many the word is hateful; and yet Apollinaire set out deliberately to be modern: to revalue the contributions of the past in terms of the phenomenal changes which the twentieth century and the Great War had brought in.
The barbarous new age he courted, adopting much of its method, the character of its institutions and its cruel philosophy. Perhaps he has interpreted his age best in his own personality, that is to say his life, a large and daring conception in itself.
"Vain to be astonished at his continual feast-making," says his friend the painter, Rouveyre, "at the rash exploits he undertook, at the crown of thorns he inflicted upon himself... He was a prodigious creator and all of his literary and social games, were of the most brilliant and lavish character, far more so than their objects. Like God, who could make man out of nothing, Apollinaire made many, with the same poverty of material." (Souvenirs de mon Commerce—A. Rouveyre, Paris, 1919, Mercure de France.)
Apollinaire was born in Monte Carlo in 1880. It is still a delicate matter to approach the facts of his life, to some extent, because of his confusing boasts and pretensions. We do know that his mother was Mme de Kostrovitzka, a lady of Polish descent who lived in France, and that Apollinaire (i. e., Wilhelm de Kostrovitzki) was baptized in Rome on September 29, 1880.
He received an extensive and preciose education. He lived with his mother in a chateau outside of Paris, a huge mansion that had a billiard room, music parlors, salons, and animals of all kinds: monkeys, dogs, snakes, parrots, canaries. Apollinaire travelled much when he was quite young, chiefly in Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe; he lived and studied in the Rhineland. Then he came back to Paris, with "all the poems he had been collecting in a cigar-box."
A literary career in Paris, is perfectly conventional by now. You run after the editors of newspapers, and finally you are allowed to contribute "feuilletons" to them. Then the magazines, the publishers, and you have "arrived." Apollinaire became a journalist and lived for a time by the veriest pot-boiling, some of which included translations of Aretino, an edition of the Marquis de Sade, introductions to pornographical classics, and even a great bibliographical work, called, "The Inferno of the National Library." But he soon became notorious in Paris. He gathered a motley horde of writers, painters and types (i. e., idiots, or freaks), and paraded from the right bank to the left, from the Montmartre to Montparnasse. His associates are now the most distinguished names of France, Henri-Matisse, Picasso, Dérain, Braque, Rousseau (the old man whom he "discovered" near the fortifications of Paris), and André Salmon, Marie Laurencin, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, "baron" Mollet, his secretary.
He was intensely conscious of the time-spirit. An original and rugged intellect, he disquieted those who were repelled by his lavish and heedless manner. For him the French literature of the Symbolist era, which de Gourmont still presided over, was dead, and he became, during that whole period from 1905 to the end of the Great War, the only living force in France. He predicted the sterile close of the literature of de Regnier and Paul Fort, "Prince of Poets" (!), heralding an age of boundless expansion and experiment, with new zones of experience, new forms, and a yet more complex and rich civilization.
Such ideas were in the air of Europe: there was Marinetti, in Italy: Cézanne had nearly brought his stupendous work to a close; and a group of painters, Picasso, Duchamps, Picabia, Braque, Dérain (the Cubists), launched their work upon a frightened world. The abstract investigations of the Cubists appealed to him powerfully. Apollinaire became their ringleader. His book, "The Cubist Painters," is an authoritative apology for this movement. But not content with this, he conceived little movements of his own, invented names for them, wrote up programs, and precipitated bad painters into careers. It was not all buffoonery. He may have placed silly, vacuous individuals at the head of the reviews he organized, "Les Soirées de Paris", Nord Sud (named after the new subway); but some of the best modern writing of the time, by Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, André Salmon, Paul Valéry, Apollinaire himself, and some extremely youthful poets who are now Dadaists, were included in them. His great charm in conversation, his uproarious wit, his complete shamelessness, made him idol of all who were drawn to him.
Alcools, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1913. It was the escape of a personality from the "eternal recurrence." The Symbolists had sought a kind of exalted, objective state; this false mysticism was accompanied by an attitude of fatigue, and preciose resignation. Even the language, in their hands had become crystallized, or static. Apollinaire's attitude was the complete reverse. A wonderfully happy man, his verse was lustier and sturdier. He had learned much from the reawakened interest in the "primitive" Italian painters. There was no false shading in his work. Every line was as direct as in a child's drawing. No one could use clichés or write of the most common diurnal experiences as freshly as he. His verse had also a certain heroic character, an air of prophecy.
It has always been the good fortune of France that Paris draws gifted strangers from other lands, who bring real gold to her. Apollinaire, a weird mixture of what Slavic and Latin strains, laid rough hands on the language. His aberrations are superb. He could never resist the foreigner's impulse toward jeux des mots; and none are quicker than the French themselves to accept and enjoy the new puns and double-entendres. For the French have gone farther, their language has been more pawed over and revivified through foreign usage than ours. Apollinaire's exoticisms were not bizarre; they had the air of being conceived in conversation.
In the summer of 1914, Apollinaire was in Deauville, surrounded by a cosmopolitan horde of Poles, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs and Russians when the Great War began. He embraced the superb irony of these events with the utmost ardour; his attitude was precisely that which Pascal epitomizes:
"Why do you wish to kill brother?"
"Do I not live on the other side of the river?"
He went into the artillery, and was stationed at N?mes. He became Second Lieutenant Guillaume Apollinaire. There were dull months upon months in the barracks. There was also active fighting. He was three times wounded in the head, and trepanned. In the Fall of 1915, he lay in a hospital in Paris, recovering from a successful operation. It was at this time that he assembled the fragments of a novel over which he had been working for a period of years, The Poet Assassinated.
The poet, Croniamantal, is one of the few frankly epic figures of modern literature. Apollinaire had never really outlived the poet's age of twenty-five, and the preposterous life of his hero is drawn against the artistic and social foibles of his age. By no means mere satire in the 18th century sense. Apollinaire grows positively hilarious and intoxicated over his characters so that at times he is beside himself with sheer fun. Results: humor of extraordinary eloquence and sonority, and a form that is complete unrepresentative, with perpetual digressions and asides.
There have been so many tired men in France who wrote like flagellants. Flaubert made his waking hours a nightmare; Gautier was much too corseted; to Stendhal writing was a torturesome but resistless destiny; Villiers was a devout artisan; Mallarmé goaded himself into obscuracy and speechlessness.
We must go back to Stendhal to find such extreme opposition to naturalism. It is enemy of all that was Ibsen. Distortion or under-emphasis are employed to fantastic ends; when a puppet is uninteresting or wrung dry he is dismissed or killed. Here is the destructive side of it: Apollinaire runs all the risks, obeys no rules, and writes for fun.
In the following year he was dismissed from the army and pronounced unfit for anything but censorship service.
Discharged from the hospital, he bought himself the most immaculate officer's uniform, somewhat constricting for his already corpulent form and his double chin, and in a victoria rode up to the editorial offices of the Mercure de France. His manner was perfectly that of "a Marseillaise tenor in an opera comique." His friends were in an uproar over him. The art life of Paris, flared up again, under the guns. He broke loose again upon his maddest tours de forces. A great welcoming ball was given him, an orgy attended by a howling, cursing, fighting throng, in which men and women tore about like Chaplin in the films. There had never been such an outlandish and heterogeneous bazaar. Apollinaire was ravished at being the orchestra-leader of such disorders and follies. To stupefy them he gave a production of his preposterous play, Les Mammelles de Tiresias. From the point of view of "action," of living, these were his greatest moments. Even before the war, these carryings on had passed all boundaries and were a source of scandal all over the world. Apollinaire was the man of the day, for this desperate crowd. He made poets and painters. "He made men and women seem much madder than they really were." While they understood little his interior laughter, his rebellious imagination.
I have stressed Apollinaire's social adventures, regarding them as an aspect of his creative expression. Wholly absorbed in art, he was completely wanting in the false reverence and dignity which some affect. Believing in the new painting of Picasso, Braque, Dérain, he could as well hold a street demonstration, parading his friends as sandwich-men bearing cubist paintings.
In the last days of 1918 he was stricken with influenza and was taken off very quickly. All the fools and freaks stopped pirouetting.
Calligrammes, his book of war poems had just appeared, and it is agreed that his strongest and most singular expressions lie in these reactions to the war. All other artists were involuntarily baffled by their moral sentiments. Only Apollinaire, with his completely negative philosophy, his un-morality, his shame in all of the common virtues, could retort to this war with his gorgeous buffoonery and his ringing apostrophes. He seized the new meanings of the modern era, from the phallic zeppelins in the sky, the labels on his tobacco tins, the pages of newspapers, or the walls of old cities. If these things are unworthy, if the age is damnable, then Apollinaire is damned.
"Is there nothing new under the sun?" he asks. "Nothing—for the sun, perhaps. But for man, everything." He calls upon artists to be at least as forward as the mechanical genius of the time. The artist is to stop at nothing in his quest for novelty of form and material; to seize upon all the infinite possibilities afforded by the new instruments and opportunities, creating thereby the myths and fables of the future.
MATTHEW JOSEPHSON