“Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.”

—Blaise Cendrars

Like his contemporary Picasso, who also appeared to be locked in mortal combat with the tsunami of modernity, Blaise Cendrars’ kaleidoscopic lives can be viewed through the lens of successive periods, each of which mark Cendrars’ merging of art and life so radically, that the more he revealed, the more he appeared unfathomable, enigmatic and extraordinary.

Cendrars was born Frédéric Sauser to a sickly Anabaptist mother and a failed inventor of a father. By age 15, he is already a runaway, his choice of destination random and his vehicle of choice the train, taking him through Germany, onwards to St Petersburg, Russia, where he works as a jeweller, discovers the Imperial Library, witnesses the Tzars’ Guards shoot into a crowd of demonstrating citizens on Russia’s Bloody Sunday in 1905, and first picks up a pen to compose poetry. He later travels along the Transsiberian route by rail, selling coffins and knives and jewels, finds his way to New York and conjures up his epic poem, “Easter in New York”, that hits the turgid world of French poetry like a hurricane, starting his own review, Les Hommes Nouveaux. In 1911, he publishes “Prose of the Transsiberian”, his epic, Homerian saga of his adventures in Russia on 2 metre pages, illustrated by Sonia Delaunay. When placed end-to-end, the 150 pages are the same height as the Eiffel Tower. The poet vagabond has burst onto the Paris literary scene, like his contemporaries Chagall, Léger, Modigliani, and his old carnie pal, Charlie Chaplin. He develops a technique in his Kodak series of poems, where each poem is a “snapshot”.

The poet turns warrior at the outbreak of World War I, and then the inevitable cataclysm, as he is wounded by German machine gunfire, and loses his right arm.

Cendrars elects his strategy of choice – fugue - finding refuge with the tziganes, and peace of mind in the tranquil village of Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, where he is now buried.

In 1918, Cendrars buries his past with “I have killed”, describing his killing of a German soldier, and moves on, as writer and man, ready to mine the vein of the horrors he has endured, and the men he has crossed.

He emerges as Cendrars the novelist, charting adventures and political scandals with the international best-sellers Gold, Rum, Hollywood and Dan Yack. These are tales of adventure, greed and corruption. Moravagine, the tale of a serial killer, is another seismic event, not only a prophecy, but a diatribe against the corruption of culture by psychiatry. Cendrars is moulding a new style, literary reportage, in a hard-boiled version evocative of James Ellroy, writing on Hollywood, Basque people smugglers, the Marseilles mob as an insder who frequented these milieux.

While the Paris literary scene degenerates into movements and sub-movements; Cendrars moves on, takes his literary and physical distance, crosses the ocean to Brazil, becomes one of the prime movers in samba becoming Brazil’s national music.

In the late 1930s, Cendrars crosses another Rubicon, and writes a series of True Tales, commissioned by Paris-soir, where the real life adventurer becomes the first-person narrator of the adventures he is describing. Cendrars the adventurer and Cendrars raconteur are now one and the same.

In 1939, while preparing to sail around the world, war breaks out and Cendrars becomes a war correspondent. When France falls, he resorts once again to fugue. There is no truth, only action. He disappears to Aix-en-Province behind a wall of self-imposed silence. For three years. Reborn again after the war, retaking his position at his Remington N° 1 Portable at age 56, he produces some of his best work. At its nexus, a story of his life and times as self-portrait, in a spectacular triptych: Bourlinguer (Vagabond), Le Lotissement du Ciel (The celestial subdivision) and the Severed Hand. The prose is torrential, rhythmic, musical, and the energy is driven by atavistic blood and violence.

Adventurer, poet, interpreter of modernity, precursor of Marshall Mcluhan, soul mate of Robert Graves and Erich Maria Remarque, Blaise Cendrars fearlessly sought out the ultimate sense of life beyond appearances, and one forged through action. He frequently expressed an enormous compassion for the suffering of the ordinary man.

Blaise Cendrars died on January 21, 1961. Yet another fugue. And, behind him, as with the great Chinese ascetics, his personal thoughts are unknown to us, only his aphorisms and his koan-like observations, dropped like a thousand petals in late Spring. A man whose imagination and lust for the world could not be quenched, an ascetic whose message is contained in the following words:

“Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.”

—by David J. MacKinnon

About David J. MacKinnon:

From the day when he discovered Moravagine, the great Cendrarsian saga of madness, escape, revolution and the perils of psychiatry, David J. MacKinnon has ceaselessly tracked the paths of the man reborn out of his own ashes, from the Batignolles cemetery nearby Pigalle, to China, to Kerliou Brittany to Tremblay-sur-Mauldre and the alleyways of Aix-en-Provence. He translated a series of Cendrars’ radio interviews in Blaise Cendrars Speaks, and once attempted to send the vagabond-poet’s ashes inside an eel to the Sargasso Sea from a Loire estuary. MacKinnon now spends his waking hours decoding Cendrarsian hieroglyphics and messages within his 15-volume collected works and plotting potential uses of sargassum in the world that is yet to come.

David’s newest translation of Cendrars’ work, A Dangerous Life – Sewermen, Bank Robbers & the Revelations of the Prince of Fire: True Tales from the Life and Times of Blaise Cendrars, The World’s Greatest Vagabond, is forthcoming with Guernica Editions on November 1, 2024.

*A Dangerous Life – Sewermen, Bank Robbers & the Revelations of the Prince of Fire: True Tales from the Life and Times of Blaise Cendrars, The World’s Greatest Vagabond* by Blaise Cendrars, translated by David J. MacKinnon.

This essay series features seven Cendrars works, The Sewerman of London: a tale of a secret passage leading to the Bank of England, gleaned from a fellow legionnaire while trapped in the trenches of the Great War; River of Blood (J’ai saigné), the first-hand narrative of the killing fields of Champagne, and the day in 1916 he lost his writing hand to a German machine-gunner; Fébronio—Cendrars’ chilling and compelling interview with Brazil’s most infamous serial voodoo killer; The Diamond Circle: the tale of the discovery of a diamond with a curse; Hip-flask of blood (Bidon de sang): translation by Cendrars of an unpublished spaghetti-western novel by the bank robber lawyer Al Jennings; Le Saint Inconnu (The Anonymous Saint); Anecdotique: On Saint-Exupéry.

Translator David J. MacKinnon has brought Cendrars’ to brilliant life for English-speaking audiences, immersing readers in Cendrars’ attention to the forgotten of the world—of those who are not necessarily impoverished, but off the beaten track.