The Poet Assassinated

by Guillaume Apollinaire

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.