Meetings with Max Jacob
Translator’s Introduction
Like his elder brother Giorgio De Chirico, Alberto Savinio — christened Andrea De Chirico in 1891 — was born in Greece, their Italian father having been an engineer for the Greek railway. He attended the Athens conservatory and then studied piano and composition with Max Reger in Munich. Moving to Paris in 1911, he was taken under the wing of Guillaume Apollinaire. His first significant literary work, Les Chants de la mi-mort (Songs of Half-Death), 1914, the libretto for a musical composition, was followed by novels, stories, and essays in Italian, among them Tragedia dell'infanzia (Tragedy of Childhood), 1920, and La Casa ispirata (The Haunted House), 1925. In the years following the Great War, Savinio lived in Rome, but returning to Paris in the mid-1920s — perhaps observing his brother’s fall from grace after having rejected the work that had brought him renown — he energetically took up the brush as well, exhibiting his paintings in 1927 at Bernheim-Jeune, the renowned gallery of Renoir, Bonnard, and so many others, which until recently had been directed by Félix Fénéon. By the mid-1930s Savinio was back in Italy, mainly occupying himself with writing until his death in 1952. While his music seems to have been forgotten, his paintings have found more and more proponents in recent years (in New York, thanks in great part to an exhibition at the Center for Italian Modern Art in 2017–18) and his writings, full of brilliance and irony, even more so. Most of the latter have been reprinted by the renowned Milanese publisher Adelphi.
Savinio’s intimacy with and ambivalence toward the Parisian avant-gardes provides the context for this brief memoir of Max Jacob, which was first published in the magazine Mercurio in 1945 and then later that year in Souvenirs, a collection of journalistic and occasional pieces, mostly dating to the 1930s, with Paris as the running theme — the book was originally meant to be titled Ricordi parigini. Savinio considered this gathering of mostly old writings a publisher’s confection, and it seems to have been with as much relief as irritation that he observed that, in the chaotic situation of post-liberation Italy, “the book was seen by very few and can be considered unpublished.” Adelphi brought it back to light in 2019.
On the surface a chronicle of a few scattered meetings, Savinio’s essay is really a history of his efforts to understand an enigmatic figure who fascinated him, whom he greatly admired, and yet who seemed to him so incomprehensible. Today we are apt to be shocked by Savinio’s homophobia and transphobia, but don’t lose sight of the fact that his rejection of Jacob’s religious mania presents no more or less of a barrier to his love for his literary and artistic comrade than his inability to sympathize with Jacob’s sexual being. This is a chronicle of an affection beyond judgment.
As for Jacob, his reputation as a poets’ poet (and as the most devoted among Pablo Picasso’s numerous Parisian poet-admirers) has never quite ensured a more-than-shadowy presence in the anglophone world. His writing aside, he must have been a striking figure, and he appears under various names as a character in novels by Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, and Pierre Reverdy, among others. The 1979 SUN Press selection of Jacob’s prose poems, with translations by John Ashbery, Michael Brownstein, and others, ought to be republished. Will the publication of Rosanna Warren’s biography in 2020 eventuate in deeper interest? Perhaps Alexander Dickow’s forthcoming (centennial!) version of Jacob’s 2022 collection Le Laboratoire central (The Central Laboratory) will have its effect. Born Max Jacob Alexandre into a nonobservant Jewish family in Brittany in 1876, the future poet made his way to Paris, where he practiced journalism (he would later earn his living primarily from painting) and plunged into the bohèmes of Montparnasse and Montmartre. In 1909 he experienced the mystical vision that would eventuate in his conversion to Catholicism; John Richardson has speculated that when “Picasso’s move from the Bateau-Lavoir had left Max Jacob feeling bereft, abandoned by the person he loved most in the world…Jacob cast around for a substitute for the artist. Only God would do.” The day after Jacob’s vision, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler arrived to arrange for the publication of a book with etchings by Picasso. This would be Saint Matorel (Saint Matthew), which concerns a Parisian metro worker who converts to Catholicism and attains sainthood, published in 1911. The most famous of Jacob’s many books, Le Cornet à dés (The Dice Cup), appeared in 1917. As for the rest, I leave the story to Savinio, except to remind the reader that the German occupation of northern and central Italy began in September, 1943, and to specify that it was on February 24, 1944, that Jacob was detained in Orléans; in the unheated military prison there he fell ill before being sent on to the notorious internment camp at Drancy, in the Paris suburbs, whence he was scheduled for shipment on to Auschwitz. He died in Drancy on March 5, 1944.
—Barry Schwabsky
The leaden thud of four Nazi boots falling in the sinister night. The monstrous regularity of the German gait as they pass by in the street below. Thus walks the Golem in the astrological night. Compared to the mechanical quality, the automaticity of these footsteps, the gait of others is, so to speak, handmade. You might think these are human beings but in reality they’re cases of explosives mounted on pairs of automated legs moving according to the impulses of a malign and inexorable mechanism.
There are five of us, bent over the radio, sifting through the tangle of unfamiliar languages that crisscross at the lowest possible volume. The box emits a ribbon of utterances bristling with consonants, like a branch of thorns. Suddenly, with the emergence of a French voice, a clearing opens in the midst of this forest of languages. The voice says: “We have received word of the death, in a concentration camp in France, of the writer Max Jacob…”
For the other four, this report has no significance — no personal significance. But for me, yes. Just for me. Dreadful news, communicating many things all at once — many meanings: all that this more-than-war has meant, this wrath of God that the Golems have set loose on the world. War, and also deportation and the extermination of peoples; war, and also cruelty and torture; war, and also a throttling of whatever is human in this world, whatever has form, feeling, human dignity. The news that the freest man in the world, the writer with the lightest touch, the poet most skilled at the game — the news that Max Jacob has died in a concentration camp (he was Jewish by birth, and must have been around seventy years old) opens for me the appalling gullet, the gaping maw that’s widened to swallow, indiscriminately, goodness and honesty, life and memory, reality and fiction, poetry and prose, man’s very capacity to die a “natural” death. Even death, our last refuge — the German has deformed and murdered even death. Even death. Even death. M’entendez-vous, Jacob? Même la mort ils ont tué.
Alberto Savinio, Sodoma, 1929. Oil on canvas. Archivo Alberto Savino.
For many days — above all for many nights — I think of him, only of him. And yet we’d met only occasionally. We’d kept our distance over the thirty and more years of our long acquaintance. We were never really friends… Only now that he’s there and I’m still here — n’est-ce pas, Jacob?
I see again the salient points of a friendship that always remained in fieri, and there’s nothing I can do about it now but regret the lost opportunity.
He seemed like a clown. He could have been a fourth Fratellini brother. He turned up like an act in a variety show. The first time I saw him it was through a window, at the house of the Baroness d’Oettingen, the daughter of Emperor Franz Joseph. It was her wallet that had fed Les Soirées de Paris, the magazine that Guillaume Apollinaire edited, where I had the honor of seeing my first publication. On the other side of the glass between two drawing rooms, Max Jacob was offering a musketeer’s salute to his hostess, who, standing bolt upright, fixed him with the mad and severe eye of a Hapsburg. As I remember it, Jacob walked in with a pirouette. It was distressing, the histrionic attitude with which he attempted to adorn his necessary parasitism in those years of dire poverty.
One day — a frigid and crystalline winter afternoon — as we were walking together up the Boulevard Raspail, Jacob explained to me the secret mechanisms of the homosexual’s ways. He spoke with profound knowledge but also with so much “sincerity” that something seemed amiss. I realized that an excess of sincerity can also be a form of discretion. I understood that, behind sincerity, “one can also hide something.”
Max Jacob, At the Circus, 1912. Oil on canvas. The American Scholar.
Another time — an autumn evening in 1914, at Hélène d’Oettingen’s — Jacob, attired in full mourning, spoke of a friend’s funeral — an aviator killed in battle — which he had attended that same day. But in Jacob’s mouth, the funeral of his dead friend turned into a variety show parody of a funeral. Listening to Jacob, on riait aux larmes. But that laughter did not put any of us at ease. It was bitter, acidic. This way of turning everything into a joke reflected that poor and tragic joker’s inferiority complex.
In May 1915, called by the “just” war, I abandoned Paris and returned to Italy. Here’s what I knew about Max Jacob by then: a Jew from the Breton coast, Max Jacob was first and foremost a creature of Montmartre, even if he often and gladly enough ventured as far as the distant quarter of Montparnasse. From time to time he might even let himself be seen in central Paris, and up to the sumptuous avenues that radiate out from the Arc de Triomphe. He lived nearly at the top of the hill of Saint-Denis, at the feet of mills that had somehow outlived the time of Murger, where cats yowling their love songs languished in wait of an imminent death. Jacob lived down there, in rue Ravignan, in a basement, along with a couple of turtles that he fed with his own hands. For this purpose he would gather, from steps and courtyards, salad leaves fallen from the housewives’ shopping bags. Jacob’s tiny hands — like a child’s — attended as well to other tasks, such as sewing together bits of cloth cadged from his friends to make the suits that he wore with all the seriousness and hauteur that André de Fouquières, arbiter in those days of Parisian elegance, modeled his most celebrated fashions. Costumed as a funereal harlequin, Jacob maintained, in both speech and comportment, an opulent tone, and it was a pleasure to hear him weave florid praises in the direction of some fine lady or other, turning his highly polished sentences, ending with a coda worthy of a madrigal. So much verbal delicacy matched rather poorly, in truth, with the physical impression made by this fate-battered dormouse. But without a hair on his head and four teeth in his mouth, how else should he reach for the ultimate degree of Adonism? As a writer, Max Jacob was a virtuoso of that literary genre known as quelquonqueries, alongside which he composed short poems and prose pieces, dedicating himself to the combination of assonances, puns, and ambiguities. In this pastime he serenely entertained himself with the blessed satisfaction of a Japanese juggler.
Surhomme à l’eau, surhomme à l’eau, surhomme à l’œuvre.
Max Jacob in France. The American Scholar.
It would be well to add that the publishers of the day were hardly fighting each other over Max Jacob’s manuscripts; but that did not bother him in the least. Taking it upon himself to sell his books at cafés and the houses of his friends, he derived from them the modest earnings that sufficed to sustain a man whose needs were so small and who had been reduced to an extreme thinness. He alternated the exercise of the lyre with that of the brush. Employing as a pictorial medium fecal matter diluted with urine, he painted with these odd materials landscapes of the Seine and outlines of the Eiffel Tower, which he peddled according to the same system he used with his books. A little later the miracles began.
One evening Max Jacob met Jesus Christ in person, among the crowd at a movie theater where they were screening the adventures of Fantômas. A few days later, a severe-looking man appeared to him on the wall of his basement and, having stared at him fixedly for some time, his arms crossed over his chest, disappeared without a word. One evening, as Jacob was making his way back home to the rue Ravignan, a Madonna in a niche in the wall along one of the streets near there stepped out of the niche as Jacob was passing by, and, looking at him and smiling, said, “Mon pauvre Max, que tu es moche!” After this third warning Jacob went to the fathers of the Sacré-Cœur which rises, with all its cupolas, nearby. The good fathers took him in and catechized him so that, reaching the hour of conversion, the ultimate courtier and poet of nullerie repudiated the shadowy doctrines of the Torah and purified himself with the waters of baptism. It was around that time I lost track of him.
I no longer saw Max Jacob but I kept meeting up with his books — indeed my encounters have been more frequent with his books than with the man.
Pierre de Belay, Prophetic Portrait of Max Jacob, 1932. Watercolor on paper. MBAQ.
In the summer of 1920, when I found myself in the midst of one of the most “Napoleonic” panoramas in Europe, Jacob’s Cinématoma, which had just recently been published, fell into my hands. It’s a character study, or rather a snapshot of characters. As for the reference to the cinema in the title, it’s far from accidental. The protagonists of Cinématoma, their adventures, their conversations follow each other through the book’s pages with the same spectral precision of people, animals, landscapes, things moving past us on screen: with an implacable exactitude. In Cinématoma Max Jacob achieves this incredibly important result: to completely disappear, as an author, behind the figures of his characters. My saying that should not be taken as an indication that Max Jacob is to be counted as a belated participant in the naturalist school of writers, because in fact there is as great a difference between Jacob and a naturalist as there is between Prince Albert of Monaco and a sponge diver. But if by naturalism one means a minute and faithful transcription of aspects and characteristics by a writer exercising the utmost control and endowed with the most perfect observational instruments, and executed with the most refined devices of art and mind, then in that case Jacob deserves more than anyone the label of naturalist writer.
In October 1922, as the Fascist gangs were converging on Rome with their hoes and shovels, I, stuck in bed with a painful attack of sciatica, read Le Roi de Béotie, and to say that that book of Jacob’s was a balm to my sufferings is no faint praise. The book’s first part, titled Par le gros bout de la lorgnette, comprises small essays, small stories, and small theater pieces, which — for their highly lucid, concentrated, and “anonymous” way of bringing aspects of things to our attention, as if, in fact, through the wrong end of a telescope — connect back to the caractères of Cinématoma. As for the second part, titled Nuits d’hôpital et l’Aurore, it takes its subject from the following event in its author’s life.
One January evening, as Max Jacob was on his way to the opera, decked out in top hat and tails (borrowed garments, certainly), he was hit by a car, which knocked him over, fracturing his clavicle. The vehicle’s passengers picked him up and drove him to the hospital. There, seated in a metal chair, half-naked, in a chilly waiting room, he had to wait two hours before being seen, and not even by a doctor, but by a nurse. Finally some attentive medical personnel arrived, who, to begin the treatment, plunged him into a tub of cold water. In this way unlucky Jacob, beyond the broken clavicle, contracted bronchial pneumonia, thereby doubly justifying his admission to and long stay in the Lariboisière hospital. Finally beginning to mend, and since the doctors advised warm weather, Jacob collected a bit of money from some devoted friends and headed to the Côte d’Azur to convalesce. Now with great tact and measure, Max Jacob manages to take the edge off this distressing episode, in the telling, with such a sense of poetic resignation that to find an equivalent one would have to reach for that other “poor devil,” François Villon himself. Thus, from the fever dreams, from the frightful delirious visions, from the strange lucidity of suffering which is so often a stimulus to poets, from the pain of others mirrored in one’s own, the writer little by little rises higher, casting off all restraint until his lyric voice bursts into such chants and praises of the Mediterranean that, if only Nietzsche could read them, he would see that his journey there had not been in vain. The style of Le Roi de Béotie justifies its author’s motto: Toujours mieux écrire.
Max Jacob, The Artist’s Studio, 1928. Gouache on paper. AIC.
In the spring of 1923, I myself was a convalescent. While getting myself back to health among the peaks of the Pistoiese Apennines, I encountered yet another book by Max Jacob, its title inspired by the photographic apparatus: Le Cabinet noir. It was my fate to read Jacob’s books among valleys and gorges. Le Cabinet noir is a series of letters each followed by a brief commentary. In some ways it resembles those collections of soldiers’ letters gathered by certain respectable men for the edification of the bourgeois of the home front. His letters mimic the styles of priests, of the lower classes, of simple folk of all sorts. I could be wrong, but this poking at the most hidden and jealous recesses of human folly seems like a dangerous game. Or shouldn’t one be afraid that having placed such a faithful mirror before one’s foolish neighbor, the latter would eventually notice the trick, and smash the mirror using the head of its maker? Besides which, the field of human stupidity is so vast, yes, and it really does convey the idea of infinity, but it lends itself less to laughter than to sympathy and mortification.
There was also a missed encounter with Max Jacob. This took place in June, 1924. I’d arrived in Paris a few days earlier. Everyone I met spoke with profound abhorrence of the assassination of Matteotti… I’d just come from Italy; I myself am Italian. Not only do the sins of fathers fall upon their children, but the crimes of a nation’s leader fall on every single member of that people. What a burden Mussolini had put on us as Italians! I was staying at the home of my friend René Berger, in rue Pergolèse, near the avenue de la Grande-Armée. Where are you now, my Italianizing friend Renato Pastore, you who took your Italianism so far as to speak French with an accent, speaking the name of the city of your birth, Nancy, as Nànci?
One day René Berger told me that Jacob was running a sort of cabaret in the vicinity of the Palais-Royal. We decided to go there and see him that very evening.
Alberto Savinio, Il riposo di Hermaphrodito, 1929. Oil on canvas. Tornabuoni.
We arrived at the Caveau de la Révolution around eleven o’clock. It was a grim underground locale at the bottom of a steep and slippery staircase. At that hour it was deserted, its habitués would arrive after midnight. We were greeted with a shake of the hips by an amphibious being in partly male, partly female dress, aggressively rouged, and with a great shock of reddish hair rising like smoke from the head.
On hearing the name Max Jacob, the androgyne furrowed their brow and after a moment responded, “I see… You gentlemen want to speak to the Baroness… Here at the Caveau de la Révolution, each of us is addressed by title… I am the Marchioness.”
After this introduction the repellent amphibian invited us to sit and enjoy some cherries preserved in alcohol while we awaited the arrival of the Baroness. Berger and I did not have to look at each other; we said we’d be back later, and with heavy hearts and anguished souls hurried out of that locale where the men were titled as noblewomen.
A few months later I heard that Max Jacob had moved to Liège as a tutor to the two young sons of a Belgian family.
In 1926 I returned again to Paris, and shortly after, I did encounter Max Jacob in person. He was now a well-known author, and his paintings, no longer stercoraceous but painted in fine colors from Lefranc, were selling. He no longer had to stitch his suits together himself. We met at the home of J.N., who had an art gallery near the rue La Boétie. This fellow was of homosexual disposition, and the paintings sold in his shop were all more or less anacreontic in character. The assistant at this gallery was named Simona. One morning J.N. arrived to find all the paintings turned toward the wall. When asked the reason for this strange inversion, Simona replied, “J’ai pensé bien faire, monsieur: ici tout est inverti.” In J.N.’s gallery Max Jacob’s paintings held the place of honor.
Remembering that I had once been active as a musician, Jacob wanted me to play something. I sat at the piano and played Beethoven’s Appassionata. When I finished, Jacob, with his usual grace, slightly false but with a refined baroqueness, coiled like the draperies of a Bernini, said to me, “D’une musique si connue, vous avez fait une musique neuve.” We never saw each other again.
Max Jacob, À l’Opéra, 1918. Gouache and ink. Invaluable.
There’s only our imaginary encounter left to tell. At J.N.’s house Jacob said to me that, one day in 1924, we had met in Rome. He was passing in a taxi on the Corso and was in tails, because he was going to see the Pope. I was on foot but also in tails, because I was also going to see the Pope. Max Jacob called out to me and had me sit next to him in the “carriage.” Together we went to receive the benediction of the Holy Father.
Jacob would not let me contradict him. This man who was so soft, so light, so jemenfoutiste, reddened with insistence. It was in vain that I persisted in repeating that, just like an inoculation, so too does the benediction of the Holy Father leave some trace on a person; and as for my body…
Do you see? My relations with Max Jacob were always indirect, as if through smoke and mirrors; a kind of masculine flirtation, as if to avoid real contact, perhaps out of fear that the encounter would lead to conflict.
Which doesn’t mean that when a few months ago, in the winter of 1944, a voice on the radio announced, “We have received word that in a concentration camp in France…”
I mentioned the Holy Father. By an association of ideas it comes to me that…
Gregory XVI, who reigned only a few years and was preceded by the memorable Pius IX on the throne of Saint Peter, said that on our entry into heaven we will let out three “Ohs!” of wonder. The first “Oh!” will be because in heaven we will not find the people we expected — the popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and so on. The second “Oh!” will be because we will find in heaven many of those we never expected to see there, such as thieves, murderers, usurers, whores, sodomites, etc. The third “Oh!”…
But never mind about the third “Oh!”
In heaven, among those who provoke our second “Oh!” of wonder, we will certainly see le pauvre Max.
Only we’re not going to heaven.
Rome, Winter 1944
***
Thank you to Juliette Neil for providing comments on the translation.
Alberto Savinio, Apparition du Printemps, 1929. Oil on canvas. Tornabuoni.
Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next month by Black Square Editions, New York. Also forthcoming is a chapbook from The Song Cave, and his poetry will soon be visible in New York's Times Square as part of a collaboration with visual artist Raúl Cordero.
