(Find me at 50 Watts Books.)

Blaise Cendrars' Moravagine, published in France in 1926, is one of my favorite books. NYRB Classics has thankfully kept it in print.

8/9/2007: This 1970 Doubleday 'Projections' edition of Cendrars' Moravagine is one of the main reasons I started blogging—I want to share images like this! The jacket was designed by Seymour Chwast (I need to buy all his journals; see them here). I'm going to email Chwast soon to see if he remembers designing it. I took this copy to the MLA Convention in Philly a few years ago to show to NYRB, which had recently reprinted the book. One of the marketing people loved it; one of her younger assistants hated everything about it.

This is the actual back cover of the dustjacket:

The previous owner taped a drawing of Cendrars onto the front endpaper:

***

8/17/08: Here is Paul West's review of Moravagine, reprinted from his book Sheer Fiction by permission the publisher, McPherson & Company:

Blaise Cendrars (Frederic Sauser) is not a familiar name to the reading public or, for that matter, to many people of advanced or specialized taste. The publicity machines have done nothing for him since the Twenties and Thirties, when, in fact, he published himself with a satanic gusto that's rare even today. Having fled from his parents at fifteen, he sampled Russia, China, Persia, New York and Paris, then joined the French Foreign Legion and lost an arm in World War I, always refusing an artificial limb. Thereafter he conducted his harum-scarum career with even greater panache. He commuted regularly between Paris and South America, taking along an Alfa Romeo racing car whose body had been designed by Braque. He got himself painted by Leger, Modigliani, and Chagall, and helped "discover" jazz, Negro art, Henry Miller, and the innovative music of Les Six. Proudly one-handed at everything except, perhaps, the clap, this ferocious Scottish literary nomad was one of the most original and anarchic of the surrealists, and ranks among those who have made a career of their temperaments. He died in 1961, aged 74.

Moravagine, first published in 1926, is an extraordinary and unnerving fusion of rant and pensiveness, plot and schizophrenia, impassioned luridity and deadpan itemization. It's a short history of the world embodied in a magniloquent ogre called Moravagine, a convicted murderer horribly stunted in physique who pours out his soul in several languages in a manner both farcical and odiously poignant. Sole descendant of the last King of Hungary, mad, and an anarchist as well, he enables Blaise Cendrars to compose an alias autobiography as well as to hold a distorting mirror up to the first decade of the twentieth century. The result is farouche, hypnotic, and deliciously vile, for if Cendrars felt anything steadily (beyond the urge to shift about and the compulsion to test his physical prowess) it was modern civilization pullulating all round him while he tried to wolf it down. Modernism flows into Moravagine's head like a sargasso from Hades; he cannot resist it, but, Canute-like, tries to, only to end up submitting completely to the destructive ecstasy it provokes in him. Moravagine is the man who ate Zeitgeist and died of it.

The novel opens with a garotting and ends with Blaise Cendrars's "discovery" that the Nazis have destroyed the cache of his hero's manuscripts. In between, as it were in demonstration of Remy de Gourmont's dictum that "a brain isolated from the world can create the world for itself," the narrator explains how he helped Moravagine escape from an international sanitarium (where he first saw him, in the act of masturbating onto a goldfish in its bowl) and toured the world with him for ten years. The whole thing takes place in Cendrars's head, and Moravagine is just as much in touch with the world when incarcerated as when out on the run.

All that is lacking is the commonplace or, rather, a commonplace response to it: Moravagine -- who once cut the eyes out of his family portraits and his dog, who became sexually involved with a stovepipe and a lead ingot, and then disembowelled his mistress -- now enrolls at the University of Berlin, there combining meditation with exploits worthy of Jack the Ripper. Then he and Cendrars are in Russia on the eve of the 1904 revolution, forever retreating along some Trans-Siberian Railway of the mind that eventually gets them to the Finland Station, Liverpool, New York, New Orleans, Arizona, the Gulf of Mexico and thence, through shipwreck, up the Orinoco, where they encounter Blue Indians (who all suffer, as they're almost bound to in a Cendrars novel, from a skin disease of syphilitic origin). Then they are back in Paris, with Moravagine planning to fly round the world while Man-Friday Cendrars enlists in the French army. Their odyssey ends in 1917 when Moravagine, believing he is on the planet Mars, dies in the same room as did the Man in the Iron Mask.

These picaresque ballistics are exhilarating, but the book's appeal is in Cendrars's indefatigable mental exhibitionism, lugubrious and caustic, bigoted and visionary, in turn. He spares nothing -- women, politicians, psychiatrists, the law, Jews, paper money, Sarah Bernhardt, funerals, the French family, the USA -- and yet in his tirades is always grateful because his very antagonism warms his mind, as do thoughts of the bellies of aphrodisiac honey ants, "these Sacred Heart medals, these Lizst rhapsodies, this phosphate, these bananas," an early airplane ("the most beautiful possible projection of the human brain"), a large reddish orang-outang clad in white flannels and a Byronic shirt; Alfred de Vigny's Poet's Diary; morphine and madness, vowels and vertigo, and Kay-ray-kuh-kuh-ko-kex (the only word in the Martian language, at least according to Moravagine).

Existence, Cendrars wrote, is "idiotic, imbecile and vain" while consciousness is "a congenital hallucination." And yet, as this pioneering novel shows, he recognized the virtues in the fact there is nothing else to turn to, and so developed an intricate relish for the All, evil not left out. Moravagine -- the very name is like a hell, coupling as it does the Latin for delay with the Latin for sheath to produce a slow birth -- Moravagine is a demented hymn to Creation, a seminal work in which a semi-gangster mentality anticipates many of the ironic-fantastic literary modes of our own day with a bumptious, carefully deployed bitingness no one has quite equalled.

***

From the publisher (and I agree completely): "...half the pleasure of reading West's belles lettres is the discovery of several writers' works you've never read, and which you're thereafter compelled to plunge into with abandon. The other half, of course, is the pleasure of reading a master stylist with language and wit at his complete command."

Also reviewed in Sheer Fiction:

• Juan Goytisolo, Makbara [reprinted July 2008 by Dalkey Archive]


• Mario Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter


• Carlos Fuentes, The Old Gringo


• Alejo Carpentier, Reasons of State


• Mário de Andrade, Macunaíma ["It's as if someone had unearthed Pan from the whimsical texts of Levi-Strauss and orchestrated the result in the fashion of Villa-Lobos. A hallucinatory poet suckled on Apollinaire and Laforgue..."]


• Osman Lins, Avalovara


• Julio Cortázar, A Certain Lucas


• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude & Autumn of the Patriarch


• José Donoso, The Obscene Bird of Night


• Augusto Roa Bastos, I The Supreme


• Ariel Dorfman, The Last Song of Manuel Sendero


• Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers


• Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game


• Günter Grass, Dog Years


• Heinrich Böll, Group Portrait With Lady


• Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries


• Arno Schmidt, The Egghead Republic and Evening Edged in Gold


• Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T.


• Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and A Moment of True Feeling


• Jakov Lind, Numbers


• Lautréamont, Maldoror (Lykiard translation)
  


• Louis-Ferdinand Céline, North


• Samuel Beckett, Texts For Nothing and The Lost Ones


• Michel Tournier, The Ogre


• André Schwarz-Bart, A Woman Named Solitude


• Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics and T Zero


• Primo Levi, The Periodic Table


• Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke and Pornografia


• Ludvik Vaculík, The Guinea Pigs and The Axe


• George Konrád, The Case Worker


• Vladimir Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave and A Russian Beauty


• William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck, Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, and The World within the Word,


• Walter Abish, How German Is It


• Guy Davenport, Tatlin!


• Evan S. Connell, Points for a Compass Rose


• Ivy Compton-Burnett, The Last and the First


• Michael Ayrton, Fabrications


• G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr [Also see McPherson's Hali and Collected Stories]
  

Sheer Fiction also contains six essays:

--A Rocking Horse on Mars
--The Shapelessness of Things to Come
--The Fable's Manger
--In Defense of Purple Prose
--The Jazz of Consciousness
--The Tiger in the Music Room, the Mollusk in the Zoo

From "In Defense of Purple Prose" (1985):

Human beings need pageantry every bit as much as they need austerity.... We hear it all the time for minimal prose, though, the complimentary epithets for which never vary: taut, clean, crisp, tight, terse, lean, as if all we ever wanted were the skeletal. Is it because humans dread obesity, or fullness, or the relentless tug of gravity, that the righteous cult of the vacant has done so well? It takes a certain amount of sass to speak up for prose that's rich, succulent, and full of novelty. Disgust, allied with some anti-pleasure principle, rules the roost and fixes taste. Out of these narrow and uninspected notions, the self-righteous have wrung moralistic criteria for esthetic deeds, which is understandable in a basically puritan country that is profoundly corrupt but hates to admit it. Purple is immoral, undemocratic, and insincere; at best artsy, at worst the exterminating angel of depravity. The truth would seem to be that, so long as originality and lexical precision prevail, the sentient writer has a right to immerse himself or herself in phenomena and come up with as personal a version as can be. A writer who can't do purple is missing a trick. A writer who does purple all the time ought to have more tricks. A writer who is afraid of mind, which English-speaking writers tend to be, unlike their European counterparts, is a lion afraid of meat.

Also available from McPherson & Company:

--Sheer Fiction, Volume Two
--Sheer Fiction, Volume Three
--Sheer Fiction, Volume Four

Or all 854 pages as a 4-volume cloth set.

***

NYRB edition with cover illustration by Odilon Redon,
"Death: I am the one who makes you real; let us embrace"

An excerpt from Moravagine, in the voice of Moravagine himself, losing his mind in prison:

First, the five vowels, wild, apprehensive, watchful as vicugna: then, following down the spiral of the corridor, ever narrower and lower, the edentate consonants, rolled in a ball in a scaly carapace, sleeping, wintering through the long months; farther still, the fricative consonants, smooth as eels, nibbling at my finger-tips; then the weak ones, flabby, blind, often slobbering like white worms, and these I pinched with my nails, scratching their fibrils of prehistoric turf; then the hollow consonants, cold, cutting, corticate, which I gathered on the sand and collected like shells; and, at the very bottom, flat on my belly, leaning over a fissure, there among the roots, I felt God knows what poisoned air whipping at me, stinging my face, while tiny animalcules skittered over my skin in the most ticklish places; they were spiral-shaped and shaggy like a butterfly's proboscis and let off sudden, raucous, husky sounds.

Further reading:

--Paul La Farge's introduction to the book, also included in NYRB's edition.
--Kit Maude on Blaise Cendrars on ReadySteadyBook

(c) Roger-Viollet