Blaise Cendrars is a sort of French Jack Kerouac, a compulsive traveller, vagabond and adventurer who has a virtually religious awe for life in the raw, the only eternal source of poetry. In The Astonished Man we see him slinking around at night between lines of First World War trenches for the sheer thrill of it, filling a Marseille bar with tramps and beggars, hanging out with gypsies in a travelling theatre and attempting to drive across a South American swamp. For a while he holes up in a cliff-top chateau to finish a novel but he never gets this done because he’s too interested either in his various schemes (filming elephants in Africa or cloud-formations from above, or inventing and marketing a new motor-fuel that will put the world’s oil magnates out of business) or simply in friends and friends of friends, the local people, cafés. After all, he tells us, loafing about, star-gazing, appearing to do nothing at all, is ‘my own way of working’.


The Astonished Man is autobiographical but then, as Cendrars never shied away from spinning extravagant yarns about his own past (he claimed, for example, to have stoked trains in China, a country he never actually visited), it’s hard to tell how much poetic license he’s given his account. In fact, the motif of invention is quite prevalent throughout the book. In the trenches soldiers live their lives in their imagination. Only their death is real because they are no longer there to invent it. Cendrars knows that lies, too, form part of the personality. Life may be the source of poetry, but the equation works backwards as well: humanity, Cendrars the storyteller proudly clamours, lies in fiction.

‘Besides, the people of whom I speak are so dead, so distant from the present time, that in the powerful words of St. Paul, «I see these things as in a glass darkly.» That is to say, they are stripped of all feelings of love or hate. I am haunted by no phantoms. It is rather that the ashes I stir up contain the crystallizations that hold the image (reduced or synthetic?) of the living and impure beings that they constituted before the intervention of the fire. If life has a meaning, this image (from the beyond?) has perhaps some significance. That is what I should like to know. And it is why I write.’ p145