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Max Jacob
Max Jacob, an unclassifiable
French author of the early twentieth century, has nonetheless been
classified as a Cubist, a Dadaist, and a Surrealist. He rejected the first
label, and the Surrealists rejected him (along with Satie), but he wasn’t
really a Dadaist either.
The groups of literary history are just devices
by which new authors band together to bring attention to their works.
These ladders should be kicked away as soon as possible, since they impede
reading more than they help it. After the dust has settled, coterie
membership doesn’t help a mediocre poet any, and it doesn’t even harm a
good one much. It does make sense to include Jacob in a century-old
French tradition of eccentric minor poets whose works are superior to
those of the major poets.
Jacob’s best friend in poetry was
Apollinaire, and most of his other friends were painters -- Picasso among
them. Along with Apollinaire he represents a milder, more humane version
of Modernism than those which came before and after them. A Jew from
Brittany, he spent his life in Paris and converted to a lax and eccentric
version of Catholicism in 1914, but was sent to a death camp anyway in
1944.
He thought of himself, in my
opinion correctly, as the third master of the French prose poem, after
Aloysius Bertrand and Rimbaud (but ahead of several more famous poets who
had tried their hand at the form). His poems were of many different
flavors – whimsy, satire, parody, dream – and some among them do in fact
recombine the elements of experience into nonsequential and impossible
forms, as cubism does. Some of Jacob's poems are quite obscure, whereas
others seem as if they would have worked as newspaper squibs to be read
over breakfast.
Jacob was a socialite, and like
all socialites, he had a very sharp eye for the gossip, feuds, jealousies,
resentments, and the other foibles of his kind, as below. From now on,
whenever I hear about a particularily silly academic or literary
pissing-match, I will think of the principals snatching the pillows from a
commode and tossing them at one another's heads.
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The Customs of the
Literati
Max Jacob
(“Mœurs Littéraires”
from Le Cornet à dés)
When a pack of
gentlemen meets a different pack, it would be strange if greetings
were not interspersed with smiles. When a pack of gentlemen meets a
single gentleman, if there are formal greetings, they
will trail off -- and perhaps the last of the pack will make none at
all.
It seems that I wrote that you bit a woman on the nipple and drew
blood. If you think that I wrote that, why did you just greet me?
And if I thought that you would do such a thing, why would I greet
you? Now we’re at the home of a large bespectacled woman wearing a
knit shawl. You shook my hand, but when we found ourselves in the
room where her commode was kept, you threw cushions
from the commode at my head. (Louis
Quatorze cushions). People say that I was throwing cushions too, just so they
can blame me too, but I don’t know whether that’s really true.
When my pack meets you, if I am the last one and make no greeting,
don’t let yourself think that it’s because of that business with
the cushions. And if my pack meets your pack and smiles are
exchanged, don’t let yourself think that one of them comes from me.
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(My own rather free translation.
Criticisms are invited.) |
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Max Jacob, Le Cornet à dés,
Gallimard, 1945.
Moishe Black and Maria Green,
trs., Hesitant Fire: Selected Prose of Max Jacob, Nebraska, 1991.
Michael Bullock, tr., Max
Jacob: Double Life and Other Pieces, Oasis, 1989.
William Kulik, tr., The
Selected Poems of Max Jacob, Oberlin, 1999.
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I am emersonj at gmail dot com.
Original materials copyright John J
Emerson
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