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FOUR

Writing under the Influence

ITALO CALVINO OBSERVES THAT WHEN WE READ, “we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something . . . that is . . . past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead.”¹ This was certainly the case for me in Paris. I plunged into reading Blaise Cendrars as if my life depended on it. Feverishly, I sketched a work of fiction about an imaginary figure that I had glimpsed in the pages of Cendrars’ Moravagine, Gide’s Voyage au Congo, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And there were moments, late at night, when I felt as if I was co-authoring Cendrars’ posthumous work, channeling him, a custodian of his afterlife.

The story of Moravagine echoes its author’s biography, which in turn kaleidoscopically reminds one of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud died a few months after the amputation of his right leg; the narrator of Moravagine loses his left leg in the war, and in a Cannes hospital he encounters the writer Blaise Cendrars who has had his right arm amputated.

Born Frédéric-Louis Sauser in the small watch-making city of La Chaux-de-Fonds (its two other famous sons were Le Corbusier and Chevrolet), Cendrars spent much of his childhood on the move. When the family returned to La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1901 and Freddy’s father enrolled him in a trade school, the fifteen-year old rebelled. Truant and restive, he ran up bills at local wine shops and kiosks, subscribed to dirty magazines, screwed around, and yearned for the exotic elsewhere he had glimpsed in Alexandria, Genoa, Naples, Brindisi, London, and Paris. Locked in his room one night by his anguished father, Freddy stole out of the house “like a sleepwalker,” sick in his stomach at the thought that he might never return. He boarded the first train out of Neuchâtel and ended up in Basel. From there he picked up a train to Berlin. After traveling aimlessly around Germany for several weeks, he arrived in Pforzheim and fell in with a Warsaw Jew and jewelry merchant called Rogovine. Together they headed east toward Russia and the first tremors of the revolution.

Cendrars’ Russian journeys would become immortalized in his epic of the open road, The Prose of the Trans-Siberian:

Back then I was still an adolescent

Barely sixteen though my childhood was already half forgotten

Sixteen thousand leagues from my birthplace

In Moscow, city of the thousand and three bell towers and the seven stations

And I couldn’t get enough of those seven stations and the thousand and three towers

My adolescence so ardent and crazy

That my heart burned, by turns, like the temple at Ephesus and Moscow’s Red Square at sundown

My eyes reconnoitering ancient roads

Though I was such a lousy poet

I did not know how to push myself to the limit, to go as far as I had to go.

In Paris a few years later, Cendrars declared the Hôtel des Étrangers his true birthplace and called for the complete erasure of his past. Since fire and ash are universal images of rebirth, and one’s previous life must be reduced to ashes if the phoenix is to rise, the young poet coined his name for its associations of embers, cinders and auto-da-fé. With Nietztsche’s smoldering lines in the back of his mind—Und alles wird mir nur zur Asche/Was ich liebe, was ich fasse (And everything of mine turns to ashes/What I love and what I do)²—Cendrars was also aware that Blaise and braise were near homonyms, and that the sobriquet Cendrars ironically merged ashes (cendres) and art (ars in Latin, as in arson).

Moravagine was first published in 1926. Raymond, the narrator, is a psychiatrist, recently transferred from Paris to the luxurious Waldensee Sanatorium near Berne in Switzerland. Rather than dismiss disease as essentially morbid, Raymond believes that what we classify as pathological conditions, and seek to combat or cure, are transitory, intermediary, and potential states of health. As such, they should be allowed to run their course. Conversely, “What is conventionally called heal is nothing more or less than a temporary aspect of a morbid condition, frozen into an abstraction.”

One of the patients confined in the Sanatorium is a certain Moravagine, allegedly the sole surviving heir of the last King of Hungary. Moravagine was admitted after murdering the prepubescent princess to whom he had been betrothed. Though Moravagine’s appearance is pitiful, even imbecilic, his voice is seductive. “It possessed me completely. I felt an immediate and irresistible liking for this tragic and singular little effigy who dragged himself along within his iridescent voice like a caterpillar in its own skin.” Moravagine becomes the means whereby Raymond will realize his views on the nature of disease. He will liberate this monster and accompany him out into the world. “At last I would live on intimate terms with a great human fauve, watching over, sharing in, accompanying, his life. Steeped in it. Participating in it... studying it.” And so, for several years, this improbable pair travel the length and breadth of Europe, much as Cendrars did in the company of Rogovine, getting caught up in the Russian Revolution, traveling through America, and winding up in the Orinoco before returning to Paris and the maelstrom of the First World War.

It did not take me long to see that the book I planned to write had already been written. What would endure, however, was a fascination with what it means to be possessed by another, by the shadow side of oneself, and how one might understand the connection between the characters that take over a writer’s life and the personae he or she might take on. Africa was, finally, my simile for these neglected or nocturnal aspects of myself³—the stillborn or unrealized aspects of my own personality that I wanted to explore, steep myself in, participate in, and study,

But even this search for myself in an Other had been anticipated by Cendrars. In his endnotes to Moravagine he writes:

I don’t believe there are any literary subjects, or rather that there is only one: man.

But which man? The man who writes, of course. There is no other subject possible.

Who is he? In any event it’s not me, it is the Other. “I am the Other,” Gérard de Nerval writes under one of the very rare photographs of himself.

But who is this other?

It doesn’t much matter. You meet someone by chance and never see him again. One fine day this guy resurfaces in your consciousness and screws you about for ten years. It’s not always someone memorable; he can be colorless and without character.

This is what happened to me with Mister X—Moravagine. I wanted to start writing. He had taken my place. He was there, installed deep down in me, as in an armchair. I shook him, struggled with him, he didn’t want to trade places.

He seemed to say, “I’m here and here I stay!” It was terrible. I began to notice that this Other was appropriating everything that had happened in my life, assuming character traits I thought of as mine. My thoughts, my favorite studies, my tastes, everything converged on him, belonged to him, nourished him. At great cost to myself, I fed and reared a parasite. In the end I no longer knew which of us was copying the other. He took trips in my place. He made love instead of me. But he never possessed any real identity, for each of us was himself, me and the Other. Tragic tête-a-tête.

Which is why one can write but one book, or the same book again and again. It’s why all good books are alike.

They are all autobiographical. It’s why there is only one literary subject: man.

It’s why there is only one literature: that of this man, this Other, the one who writes.