Part 1

THE POET ASSASSINATED

BY

GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE

AND NOTES BY

MATTHEW JOSEPHSON

NEW YORK

THE BROOM PUBLISHING CO.

1923

CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE I. RENOWN II. PROCREATION III. GESTATION IV. NOBILITY V. PAPACY VI. GAMBRINUS VII. CONFINEMENT VIII. MAMMON IX. PEDAGOGY X. POETRY XI. DRAMATURGY XII. LOVE XIII. MODES XIV. ENCOUNTERS XV. VOYAGE XVI. PERSECUTION XVII. ASSASSINATION XVIII. APOTHEOSIS

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE

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 Nîmes. 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

_To René Dalize_

I. RENOWN

The glory of Croniamantal is now universal. One hundred and twenty-three towns in seven countries on four continents dispute the honor of this notable hero's birth. I shall attempt, further on, to elucidate this important question.

All of these people have more or less modified the sonorous name of Croniamantal. The Arabs, the Turks and other races who read from right to left have never failed to pronounce it Latnamainorc, but the Turks call him, bizarrely enough, Pata, which signifies goose or genital organ. The Russians surname him Viperdoc, that is, born of a fart, the reason for this soubriquet will be seen later on. The Scandinavians, or at least, the Dalecarlians, call him at will, _quoniam_, in Latin, which means, _because_, but often serves to indicate the noble passages in popular accounts of the middle ages. It is to be noted that the Saxons and the Turks manifest with regard to Croniamantal, a similar sentiment, since they refer to him by an identical surname, whose origin, however, is still scarcely explained. It is believed that this is an euphemistic allusion to the fact stressed in the medical report of the Marseilles doctor, Ratiboul, on the death of Croniamantal. According to this official document, all the organs of Croniamantal were sound, and the lawyer-physician added in Latin, as did Napoleon's aide Major Henry: _partes viriles exiguitatis insignis, sicut pueri._

For the rest, there are countries where the notion of the Croniamantalian virility has entirely disappeared. Thus, the negroes in Moriana call him Tsatsa or Dzadza or Rsoussour, all feminine names, for they have feminized Croniamantal as the Byzantines feminized Holy Friday in making it Saint Parascevia.[1]

II. PROCREATION

Two leagues from Spa, on the road bordered by gnarled trees and bushes, Vierselin Tigoboth, an ambulant musician who was coming on foot from Liège, struck his flint to light his pipe. A woman's voice cried:

He lifted his head, and a wild laugh burst out: "Hahaba! Hohoho! Hihihi! thine eyelids are the color of Egyptian lentils! My name is Macarée. I want a tom-cat."

Vierselin Tigoboth perceived by the roadside a young woman, brunette and formed of nice curves. How charming she seemed in her short bicyclist's skirt! And holding her bicycle with one hand, while gathering sloes with the other, she ardently fixed her great golden eyes on the Flemish musician.

"_Vs'estez one belle bâcelle_," said Vierselin Tigoboth, smacking his tongue. "But, my God, if you eat all those sloes, you will have the colic tonight, I'm sure."

"I want a tom-cat," repeated Macarée and unclasping her bodice she showed Vierselin Tigoboth her breasts, sweet as the buttocks of the angels, and whose aureole was the tender color of the rose clouds of sunset.

"Oh! oh!" cried Vierselin Tigoboth, "As pretty as the pearls of Amblevia, give them to me. I shall gather a big bouquet of ferns for you and of irises, color of the moon."

Vierselin Tigoboth approached to seize this miraculous flesh which was being offered to him for nothing, like the holy bread at Mass; but then he restrained himself.

"You're a sweet lass, by God, you're nicer than the fair of Liège. You're a nicer little girl than Donnaye, than Tatenne, than Victoire, whose gallant I have been, and nicer than Rénier's daughters, whom old Rénier always has for sale. Mind you, if you want to be my love, 'ware o' the crablouse, by God."

MACARÉE

_They are the color of the moon And round as the wheel of Fortune._

VIERSELIN TIGOBOTH

_If you fear not to catch the louse Then I should love to be your spouse._

And Vierselin Tigoboth approached, his lips full of kisses: "I love you! It is pooh! O beloved!"

Soon there were nothing but sighs, the songs of birds and of russet and horned little hares, like elves, fleet as the seven-league boots, passing by Vierselin Tigoboth and Macarée, prone under the power of love behind the plumtrees.

Then Macarée was off on the old contraption.

And sad unto death, Vierselin Tigoboth cursed the instrument of velocity which rolled away and vanished behind the terraced rotunda, at the same moment that the musician began to make water while humming a jingle...

III. GESTATION

Macarée soon became aware that she had conceived by Vierselin Tigoboth.

"How annoying!" she thought at first, "But medicine has made much progress lately. I shall get rid of it when I want. Ah! that Walloon! He will have toiled in vain. Can Macarée bring up the son of a vagabond? No, no, I condemn this embryo to death. I should never even preserve this foetus in alcohol. And thou, my belly, if thou knewest how much I love thee since knowing thy goodness. What, wouldst stoop to carry such baggage as thou findest along the road? O too innocent belly, thou art unworthy of my selfish soul.

"What shall I say, o belly? thou'rt cruel, thou partest children from their parents. No! I love thee no longer. Thou'rt naught but a full bag, at this moment, o my belly, smiling at the nombril, o elastic belly, downy, polished, convex, sorrowful, round, silky, which ennobles me. For thou makest noble, o my belly, more beautiful than the sunlight. Thou shalt ennoble also the child of the Flemish vagabond and thou art worthy of the loins of Jupiter. What a misfortune! a moment ago I was about to destroy a child of noble race, my child who already lives in my beloved belly."

She opened the door suddenly and cried:

"Madame Dehan! Mademoiselle Baba!"

There was a rattling of doors and bolts and then the proprietors of Macarée's lodging came running out.

"I am pregnant," cried Macarée, "I am pregnant!"

She was sitting up in bed, her legs spread apart. Her skin looked very delicate. Macarée was narrow at the waist and broad-hipped.

"Poor little one," said Madame Dehan, who had but one eye, no waistline, a moustache, and limped. "After confinement women are just like crushed snail-shells. After confinement women are simply prey to disease (look at me!) an egg-shell full of all sorts of rubbish, incantations and other witch-spells. Ah! Ah! You have done very well."

"All foolishness," said Macarée. "The duty of women is to have children, and I am sure that their health is generally improved thereby, both physically and morally."

"Where are you sick?" asked Mademoiselle Baba.

"Shut up! I say," exclaimed Madame Dehan. "Better go and look for my flask of Spa elixir and bring some little glasses."

Mademoiselle Baba brought the elixir. They drank of it.

"I feel better now," said Madame Dehan, "After so much emotion, I need to refresh myself."

She poured out another little glass of the elixir for herself, drank it and licked the last few drops up with her tongue.

"Think of it," she said finally, "think of it, Madame Macarée ... I swear by all that I hold sacred, Mademoiselle Baba can be my witness, this is the first time that such a thing has happened to one of my tenants. And how many I have had! My Lord! Louise Bernier, whom they nicknamed Wrinkle, because she was so skinny; Marcelle la Carabinière (the freshest thing you ever saw!); Josuette, who died of a sunstroke in Christiania, the sun wishing thus to have his revenge of Joshua; Lili de Mercœur, a grand name, mind you, (not hers of course) and then vile enough for a chic woman, as Mercœur put it: 'You must pronounce it Mercure,' screwing up her mouth like a chicken's hole. Well she got hers, all right, they filled her as full of mercury as a thermometer. She would ask me in the morning; What sort of weather do you think we'll have today?' But I would always answer: 'You ought to know better than I...' Never, never in the world would any of those have become enceinte in my house."

"Oh well, it isn't as bad as that," said Macarée, "I also never had it happen to me before. Give me some advice, but make it short."

At this moment she arose.

"Oh!" cried Madame Dehan, "what a well-shaped behind you have! how sweet! how white! what embonpoint! Baba, Madame Macarée is going to put on her dressing-gown. Serve coffee and bring the bilberry tart."

Macarée put on a chemise and then a dressing gown whose belt was made of a Scotch shawl.

Mademoiselle Baba came back; she brought a big platter with cups, a coffee pot, milk-pitcher, jar of honey, butter cakes and the bilberry tart.

"If you want some good advice," said Madame Dehan, wiping away with the back of her hand the coffee that dribbled down her chin, "You had better go and baptize your child."

"I shall make sure and do that," said Macarée.

"And I even think," said Mademoiselle Baba, "that it would be best to do it on the day he is born."

"In fact," Madam Dehan mumbled, her mouth full of food, "you can never tell what may happen. Then you will nurse him yourself, and if I were you, if I had money like you, I should try to go to Rome before the confinement and get the Pope to bless me. Your child will never know either the paternal caress or blow, he will never utter the sweet name of papa. May the blessing of the Holy Papa at least follow him all his life."

And Madame Dehan began to sob like a kettle boiling over, while Macarée burst into tears as abundant as a spouting whale. But what of Mademoiselle Baba? Her lips blue with berries, she wept so hard that from her throat the sobs flooded down to her hymen and nearly choked her.

IV. NOBILITY

After having won a great deal of money at baccarat, and already rich, thanks to Love, Macarée, whose corpulency nothing could conceal, came to Paris, where above all, she ran after the most fashionable modistes.

How chic she was, how chic she was!

* * *

One night when she went to the Théâtre Français a play with a moral was presented. In the first act, a young woman whom surgery had rendered sterile lamented the fatness of her husband who had the dropsy and was very jealous. The doctor went out saying:

"Only a great miracle and great devotion can save your husband."

In the second act, the young woman said to the young doctor:

"I offer myself up for my husband. I want to become dropsical in his stead."

"Let us love each other, Madame. And if you are not unfaithful to the principle of maternity your wish will be granted. And what sweet glory I shall have thereof!"

"Alas!" murmured the lady, "I no longer have any ovaries."

"Love," cried the doctor at this, "Love, madame, is capable of working the greatest miracles."

In the third act, the husband, thin as an I, and the lady, eight months gone, felicitated each other on the exchange they had made. The doctor communicated to the Academy of Medicine the results of his experiments in the fecundation of women become sterile as a result of surgical operations.

* * *