The Poet Assassinated

There are men who cannot bring themselves to conform with the rest of human society, who cannot conceive of a secure and honorable career even at the hands of a tolerant age. They flee, they are eternally escaping from the fold by some particularly outrageous or suicidal action. Rimbaud having mastered the art of poetry in his twenties, deserted literature to lead caravans through the African desert. Apollinaire at almost as early an age had also mastered the traditional forms of his art, but with Rimbaud's example before him could not become "an explorer, a trapper, a robber, a hunter, a miner."

Possessed of great energy, curiosity, and disrespect, he was from the start thrown upon the side of those who flout authority, court disorder and embrace the glitter and profusion of an intensely mundane existence.

To regard the spectacle of modern life and to sense the cleavage with the past and with the art or humanities of the previous day, is to be "modern". For many the word is hateful; and yet Apollinaire set out deliberately to be modern: to revalue the contributions of the past in terms of the phenomenal changes which the twentieth century and the Great War had brought in.

The barbarous new age he courted, adopting much of its method, the character of its institutions and its cruel philosophy. Perhaps he has interpreted his age best in his own personality, that is to say his life, a large and daring conception in itself.

"Vain to be astonished at his continual feast-making," says his friend the painter, Rouveyre, "at the rash exploits he undertook, at the crown of thorns he inflicted upon himself... He was a prodigious creator and all of his literary and social games, were of the most brilliant and lavish character, far more so than their objects. Like God, who could make man out of nothing, Apollinaire made many, with the same poverty of material." (Souvenirs de mon Commerce—A. Rouveyre, Paris, 1919, Mercure de France.)

Apollinaire was born in Monte Carlo in 1880. It is still a delicate matter to approach the facts of his life, to some extent, because of his confusing boasts and pretensions. We do know that his mother was Mme de Kostrovitzka, a lady of Polish descent who lived in France, and that Apollinaire (i. e., Wilhelm de Kostrovitzki) was baptized in Rome on September 29, 1880.

He received an extensive and preciose education. He lived with his mother in a chateau outside of Paris, a huge mansion that had a billiard room, music parlors, salons, and animals of all kinds: monkeys, dogs, snakes, parrots, canaries. Apollinaire travelled much when he was quite young, chiefly in Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe; he lived and studied in the Rhineland. Then he came back to Paris, with "all the poems he had been collecting in a cigar-box."

A literary career in Paris, is perfectly conventional by now. You run after the editors of newspapers, and finally you are allowed to contribute "feuilletons" to them. Then the magazines, the publishers, and you have "arrived." Apollinaire became a journalist and lived for a time by the veriest pot-boiling, some of which included translations of Aretino, an edition of the Marquis de Sade, introductions to pornographical classics, and even a great bibliographical work, called, "The Inferno of the National Library." But he soon became notorious in Paris. He gathered a motley horde of writers, painters and types (i. e., idiots, or freaks), and paraded from the right bank to the left, from the Montmartre to Montparnasse. His associates are now the most distinguished names of France, Henri-Matisse, Picasso, Dérain, Braque, Rousseau (the old man whom he "discovered" near the fortifications of Paris), and André Salmon, Marie Laurencin, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, "baron" Mollet, his secretary.

He was intensely conscious of the time-spirit. An original and rugged intellect, he disquieted those who were repelled by his lavish and heedless manner. For him the French literature of the Symbolist era, which de Gourmont still presided over, was dead, and he became, during that whole period from 1905 to the end of the Great War, the only living force in France. He predicted the sterile close of the literature of de Regnier and Paul Fort, "Prince of Poets" (!), heralding an age of boundless expansion and experiment, with new zones of experience, new forms, and a yet more complex and rich civilization.