Blaise Cendrars

Anyone interested in the numerous French literary and artistic movements of the earlier part of the twentieth century will have appreciated Eric Robertson’s penetrating earlier contributions to a deeper critical understanding of the many ‘-isms’ of the period and some of their outstanding practitioners. The interaction of the verbal and the visual lies at the heart of his interests, expressed in studies of Cubism, Dada, Futurism, Surrealism, Situationism and major works on Arp and Miró. Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), who constantly reinvented himself through his writings, from the early poetry to the late autobiographical novels, is the subject of this admirably researched and engaging study.

Some of the terms used in my opening paragraph require qualification, mostly because they are too limiting: ‘French’ extends beyond France, in this case to Switzerland, where ‘Blaise Cendrars’, originally Frédéric Louis Sauser, was born; ‘novels’ is a problematic label for the narrative tetralogy he wrote in the 1940s. ‘Boundaries mean nothing to me’ might hark back to Aristophanes’ The Birds but remains entirely relevant to Cendrars. Generic boundaries, but also geographical ones. By the age of seventeen he was in Russia, by twenty-four in the United States, by thirty-seven in Brazil, each time for lengthy stays. That wonderful word ‘bourlinguer’, which I first learned from Cendrars more years ago than I care to remember, showed him already on a roll. This is indeed ‘experience as flux’.

Robertson lays out his ambition clearly:

Across its very considerable breadth, Cendrars’s literary œuvre is surprisingly homogeneous; it has myriad facets and ...