Post-festival thoughts: what visiting writers take away

“The tumult and the shouting dies, the captains and the kings depart.”

As do the writers. The international stars of AWRF 2012 have departed along with the golden gnomes who flanked their armchairs on the stage of the ASB Theatre, although the loss of these last might be assuaged by the arrival of by a giant gold-trimmed carousel outside in the square, which I only figured out right now might be related to the arrival of Mary Poppins – the show, not the nanny, or, as PL Travers might have said, “the show, not the book” (although I think she didn’t dislike the show based on her book as much as she did the movie).

Speaking of international authors who depart, do you sometimes wonder what image of New Zealand they take away? I remember Christos Tsiolkas telling me at an AWRF a few years back about how he had spotted a sign as he exited his hotel for a place called Café Olympus or Café Zeus or something and, assuming it was a Greek establishment, headed straight there to enjoy a Greek coffee -- only to find a Chinese family behind the counter.“Christos, this is Auckland, not Melbourne!”

The great poet and adventurer Blaise Cendrars (a passion I share with Donald Kerr, Special Collections Librarian at University of Otago) passed through New Zealand at some point between the wars, wild years for him which he spent criss-crossing the world by land and by sea. He wrote about his impressions of New Zealand in his book Dan Yack, published in 1929, a notably modern book for its time with a note on the first page to say that it was not written but dictated entirely into a DICTAPHONE (capitals his). He goes on to say, “What a pity that the pages of a book do not yet have sound. But it will come. Poor poets, let us keep working.”

Dan Yack is Cendrars’s alter ego, and this is what Dan Yack has to say about New Zealand back then:

"If there exists anywhere in this world a Land of Tenderness, it seems at first sight to be New Zealand. On these favoured isles great flocks of pedigree sheep and cattle graze the tender grass in the small valleys. From one end of the year to the other, nothing comes to disturb them. You can travel by car for days, or on horseback for weeks, without ever meeting a living soul: you can cross peaks, descend again into new valleys, without ever leaving the pasture-lands. Apart from a petrified cataract, a wild corner that looks like a miniature Switzerland (and is reserved for newly-weds who come to spend their honeymoon there, or old couples who come to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary), and what little remains of the primitive flora of the country --- a few groves of rare and curious tropical plants, notably the giant cruciferous ferns, which are as flourishing here as in Ceylon – nothing picturesque ever strikes the eye. The whole of the interior of the country is divided into rectangles by high fences, with five strands of barbed wire, which separate the pastures; valley dovetails into valley, hill follows hill, nothing comes to interrupt the uniformity, the monotony of the gleaming grass spread everywhere, this dark-green grass which reflects the sky like water, dominates the landscape and gives it an aspect of calm, repose, peace and a warm silence.

"With a little bit of luck, you might chance to stumble upon a cluster of tall eucalyptus trees full of the cooing of doves, and, sheltering beneath their shade, a farm, if you can call this brand-new bungalow a farm, inhabited as it is by a colonist rather than a peasant, and a middle-class housewife rather than a farmer’s wife; they dress for dinner every evening, he in a dinner jacket, she in an evening gown, to play the pianola together or huddle over the radio.

"This couple is always very young-looking, although it’s often an old established household, where the boys are passionately devoted to sport and the young girls cling superstitiously to the social conventions and to the protocol of French etiquette in the colleges and clubs on the coast. Tens of thousands of similar couples are scattered about the solitude of the country, leading exactly the same respectable and well-to-do life from one year to the another, and no external event ever comes to disturb the monotonous and sublime course of their sentimentality. Time has passed. They have grown old without realizing it. But they have preserved all the illusions of the heart and the vigour of the senses. They live a deux. For themselves. Egotistical and complacent.

"Thus, the mentality of each New Zealander is insular several times over, because each couple is isolated in their own personal feeling of contentment, each farm is a Robinson Crusoe’s island amidst the solitude of the pastures, and the twin islands, which appear like a double oasis on the waters, are not welcoming, but close ranks and defend themselves fiercely against any immigration. New Zealand has broken her moorings and remains in contact with the rest of the world only through a moral link that attaches her to Great Britain, of which country every New Zealander is immeasurably proud to be a distant descendant, thus adding a feeling of pride to his insularity and confirming him in his rejection of all human fraternization.

"… This success, this maintaining of a precarious civilization at the furthest ends of the earth, this specialized and material activity, this total absence of moral grandeur, this lack of ambition, this extravagant practice of sports and games, this cult, this adulation of the body, this voluntarily restricted horizon, this intransigence, this lack of tolerance in the manifestations of social life, these concessions to nothing but well-being and personal comfort, this lack of humanity, these narrow prejudices and this complicated ceremonial which lays down the different degrees of worthiness of human beings, this situation of a group of people at the ends of the earth, this voluntary insularity, exclusive and individual, this optimism a deux, this mutual admiration in the bosom of the family, this complaisance in the face of everything concerning love, this communal salacity, this erotic curiosity which affects the young people very early and which still shakes couples in their extreme old age, this self-satisfaction, this pride, this arrogance, this selectivity, this refusal to cross-breed, this fine health of the body – in brief, all that the New Zealander of today considers to be his conquest and his achievement, the manifest signs of his independence from old Europe, and even this independence itself .. when one looks at all this close to, making allowances for a certain materialistic aspect that modern life tends to take on more and more in every region of the globe, and especially in the most far-flung places, where this contemporary trend towards uniformity and massiveness is increasing day by day; one perceives that nothing has changed in these islands, that New Zealand has made no progress at all, and that life continues as in the time of the cannibals and expresses itself through a whole series of laws, interdictions, repressions and cruel dreams under the aegis of the great god Taboo."

-- from Dan Yack, 1929

With Blaise Cendrars in Provence

I almost wrote "Reading Blaise in Provence" but actually it wasn't true: what I did with Blaise Cendrars during my four days in Provence which followed my four days in Prague (see previous post) was to carry him around in the form of two books I found in a bookstore in Aix-en-Provence, one of those pleasant bookstores mixing the old and the new, the upstairs with tall windows framed by provençal sky-blue shutters, bookshelves full of poetry and no cash register; and an urbane downstairs for literary novelties where I encountered, among other things, my first ultra-poches.

Ultra-poches means "extreme pocket books", or, better yet, "pocket books beyond your wildest dreams". These are not gimmicky little books about fashion astrology or "Catfucius says", but real, hard cover, unabridged novels, only small, not much larger than -- what would be appropriate here -- a box of Gitanes cigarettes, something they achieve by being printed on bible paper and formatted to be read vertically. They were invented in the Netherlands a couple of years back and only made their debut in French bookstores a few months ago, where they seem to have right away struck a chord as their stand was 90% empty, offering only a handful of crime novels, mostly Michael Connelly, and one Swann's Way. The Cormac McCarthys, the Hugh Lauries touted on the display placard, all gone. I chose one of the remaining ones at random (I hope you don't believe that) and here it is, posed next to my mouse for scale:

I was actually looking for a different Marcel and that's Marcel Pagnol, the great novelist and filmmaker who was born back at the turn of the century between Aix and Marseille near one of those massive outcrops called (I love this) massifs that dot the region. "I was born in the town of Aubagne, under a Garlaban covered with goats, at the time of the last goatherds" is how he puts it in the book I was looking for, My father's glory, about the summer vacations his family used to take on the Massif during his childhood, which I have wanted to read since having seen and loved Yves Robert's very sad, sentimental, funny movie version.

When I got upstairs where I thought Pagnol might be, whom did I stumble into instead but Blaise Cendrars, the audacious, emphatic, disenchanted, lyrical adventurer and avant-garde poet who captured my heart (and that of Apollinaire, who credited Cendrars's poetry with revolutionising his own) many years ago with his two great 'river-poems' (they flow on forever) Prose of the Transsiberian and little Jeanne of France, and then Le Panama: or, the adventures of my seven uncles. And here they were in a shiny new Complete Poetry, which I took away, along with a little biography which proclaimed itself a "literary discovery", or, the word being the same in French, a "literary uncovering", not quite a " between the covers" but almost as good.

It turned out to be somewhat difficult to read, from being seriously imprinted with the zapping culture (la culture zapping as the French have it) of the eighties, when this "Literary Discovery" series was born. You know what I mean -- those books where each page has three different fonts and the margins are stuffed with cut-out photos, art, quotes reproduced in autograph.

Still, it looked fantastic lying around every day on the bed of the house where we were staying, the yellow fingerpainting of Cendrars by a beautiful Brasilian modernist named Tarsila do Amaral almost picking up the tone of the blanket. A bit more sulphurous, perhaps, or maybe that was due to its being superimposed on an old black and white photo of Cendrars squinting into the sun, cigarette jutting from his mouth, wearing a wrinkled workshirt which yells out "Cargo boat full of prostitutes and tuberculars" (as the book describes the vessel for one of his Atlantic crossings):

In one of the bits I did read, I learned that I had not lost out completely on taking home a book that would be a souvenir of Provence:  Blaise Cendrars lived self-exiled in Aix-en-Provence from 1940 to 1943, after the Gestapo in the occupied north had seized all the copies of his latest book, and the proprietor of the hotel where he used to live in Paris wired him "Your Aunt Amelie keeps coming looking for you".

He had fought in the first World War and lost an arm, immediately afterwards teaching himself to write with his left hand and in 1918 publishing I killed, where he described a hand-to-hand combat with a German soldier (an excerpt quoted in the book: "I killed the Boche, I was sharper and quicker than he was. I acted, I killed. As a man does who wants to live."); this war he passed in silence, a recluse in a beret and shabby jacket who passed his time at the public library when he wasn't standing in line for his ration of potatoes.

But before all that, back in the Belle Epoque Blaise Cendrars blazed a path across the continents of the known world and the literary map, announcing his destiny with this name -- yes, Cendrars means cinders -- which he invented for himself in his twenties, in New York, poor, hungry, even sick, but "that won't stop me from writing. I am ready."

Arriving back in Paris the year Marcel Duchamp presented his scandalous painting "Nude descending a staircase", he produced the poem which brought modernism hurtling into the literary scene like the locomotive it describes speeding through a Russia in the throes of the Revolution of 1905. It was inspired by Cendrars's first great adventure, eight years before. Aged seventeen, he had run away from his boarding school near Basel, catching the first international train to come into the station and ending up in St. Petersburg, making friends with anarchists and spending time with the librarian of the Imperial Library, who told him he was a poet.

The poem is called The prose of the Transsiberian and little Jeanne of France (Jeanne is a prostitute), and here are a couple of my favourite verses from it, translated by Ekaterina Likhtik:

The sky is like the shredded tent of a poor circus in a small fishing village
In Flanders
The sun is a smoky oil lamp
And at the very top of a trapeze a woman makes a moon.
The clarinet the piston a sharp flute and a bad tambourine
And here is my cradle
My cradle
It was always next to the piano when my mother like Madame Bovary played Beethoven sonatas
I spent my childhood in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon
And skipping school, in the railroad stations in front of departing trains
Now, I have made all the trains run behind me
Basel-Timbuktu
I have also bet on the races at Auteuil and at Longchamp
Paris – New York
Now, I have made all the trains run the course of my life
Madrid – Stockholm
And I lost all my bets
There is now only Patagonia, Patagonia, that suits my immense sadness, Patagonia, and a journey to the South Seas
I'm on the road
I've always been on the road
I'm on the road with little Jehanne from France
The train makes a perilous jump and falls back on all of its wheels
The train falls back on its wheels
The train always falls back on all of its wheels

“Blaise, tell me, are we very far from Montmartre?”
We are far, Jeanne, you've been on the move for seven days
You are far from Montmartre, from the Hill that nourished you from Sacre-Cœur that cradled you
Paris has disappeared and its enormous flame
There is nothing but continuous ash
Falling rain
Rising peat
Whirling Siberia
Heavy rebounding sheets of snow
And the bell of madness that quivers like the very last wish in the bluish air
The train beats at the heart of the heavy horizons
And your sorrow sneers…
“Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?”
The worries
Forget the worries
All the railroad stations cracked askew on the road
The telegraph wires on which they hang
The grimacing lampposts gesticulate and strangle them
The world expands elongates and retracts like an accordion tormented by a sadistic hand
In the shreds of the sky, locomotives in a fury
Flee
And in the holes,
The dizzying wheels the mouths the voices
And the dogs of misfortune that bark at our parcels
The demons are unchained
Scrap iron
All is in false harmony
The broom-room-room of the wheels
Jolts
Bouncing back
We are a storm in the skull of the deaf… 

This is just a fraction of the poem, but you can read the rest of it on the website The drunken boat.

As I said, I didn't get around to reading the Complete Poetry when I was in France; I read it when I was back at home. And the funniest thing happened. As I was reading it, one night in bed, I kept smelling tobacco, not just any tobacco but pungent French cigarette tobacco. I looked around. I was alone. My husband was still in Europe; Jean-Paul Belmondo was not on the deck outside my window.

I read some more. The odour didn't go away. I looked around again. Still alone. The cat had not taken up smoking in our absence. Turned my attention back to the book. Still there. I brought the book up to my nose. And then it hit me. I opened the tube of lotion I had bought in the pharmacy in Avignon which was on the bedside table. I sniffed it. I sniffed my hands. Somehow I had bought French hand lotion that smells like tobacco.


Was this a new French fashion? The next day, for fun, I googled "tabac perfume women". 0.05 seconds later, up came the result: Tabac blond Caron.

Why, c'est moi!
 
Complete poems by Blaise Cendrars or try his cult novel Moravagine   
My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle: Memories of Childhood by Marcel Pagnol
My Father's Glory (DVD of the movie version by Yves Robert)