Most of what we call insane is just stupid - some selected poems of Max Jacob

Max Jacob was a painter, friend of the famous (once the friends became more famous than him), and master, or at least writer, of the strange and irritating form, the prose poem.  Several months ago I read a chunk of his first book, The Dice Cup (1916), an inspired mix of puns, shaggy dogs, nonsense, and proto-surrealism. Now I have added The Selected Poems of Max Jacob (1999) as translated by William Kulik, a book that is less wacky and less fun, but more instructive.

This book has just 102 pages of Jacob’s pieces.  A third are from The Dice Cup, a third from the posthumous Last Poems (1946), and a third scattered through the 1920s and 1930s.  The date of Last Poems tells the sad end of the story of Max Jacob, who was both Jewish (though a Catholic convert) and openly gay:

Loving Thy Neighbor

Who’s watched a toad cross the street?  He looks like a very small man: no bigger than a doll.  He crawls along on his knees: do we say he looks ashamed?... no!  That he’s got rheumatism.  A leg draws behind, he pulls it forward. Where’s he headed like this?  He came up out of the sewer, poor clown.  No one noticed him on the street.  Long time ago no one noticed me.  Now the children mock my yellow star.  Lucky toad, you don’t have a yellow star.  (1946, ellipses in original)

This piece’s swerve to a more openly personal statement is hard to find in the poet of 1916, but common in the Jacob of the Occupation.  The “poor clown” – even before he said so, I knew that that was Max, or also Max.  That had been his role for decades.  A contemporary piece is title “’Max is a Lunatic’ (Everyone)” – and he is, he had been, but this poem ends with:

I think it’s time to go lie down.  Most of what we call insane is just stupid.

The middle of the book surprised me in two ways, first that Jacob wrote verse as well as prose poems – one is title “To Mr. Modigliani to Prove I’m a Poet” – and second that Jacob’s conversion to Catholicism was serious enough that he becomes something that I saw no hint of in The Dice Cup, a French Catholic writer.  He is a screwy version of the type, as he perhaps says directly in “Glass of Blood” (1921):

Our ideas at Brocken our hearts at Calvary
The ones the color of time
The others of blood
I drank half a glass of your blood
Threw the rest into the sea

Jacob declares himself a witch, dancing at the Brocken Walpurgisnacht, but only abstractly, in the realm of ideas.  He is a poet full of doubt and disillusion, but only about earthly things.  He does not doubt that the Christian God exists, but that the world exists.

But Jacob was a painter, too.  It is all representation.  Different kinds of representation.

A View in Perspective

Mountain view of the turreted white house
It’s dark, with one lighted window
And two turrets, two turtledove turrets.
Behind the window in the house
Is the fiery light of love!
Plenty of it, winged, eloquent
On the third story
In another room
Unlit, lies a dead man
And all the sorrow of death,
Sorrow’s plenty,
Sorrow’s wings,
Sorrow’s eloquence
View in perspective of a turreted white house.  (1921)

letting travesty take it into the realms of the absurd - Max Jacob taps into the police fund

Max Jacob was one of the great French weirdos of his time, a cubist poet in the sense that he was pals with Cubist painters.  Eventual Cubist painters, since Jacob somehow knew everyone – Picasso and so on – before they were famous.  He was a painter of some interest himself, but the paintings I feature here are portraits by Amedeo Modigliani, both from 1916, just before the publication of Le cornet à dés (1917), or The Dice Cup, all prose poems, whatever those are.  Those are these.

So, I stifled sobs of humiliation and wrote this page, letting travesty take it into the realms of the absurd.  (from “In Hill Country,” 67)

That is pretty close to a description of the work.

I read the translation by Christopher Pilling and David Kennedy (Atlas Press, 2000), which is just the first part of The Dice Cup.  They clearly had great fun.

The violator, vile rapist, took the rap: elated, the violated lady is in raptures! (from “The Pitiless Laugh of the Boa Constrictor,” 61)

“Pathetic!” my mother cut in, “this boy’s got a pathetic predisposition to parasitism, that’s to say paralysis.” (from “Paralysis-Parasitism,” 43)

Was the child scarred for life?  I don’t know, but he bellowed biblically enough when the cutlet was cut.  (from “Abraham’s Sacrifice,” 66)

These are all last lines of paragraphs that are not written this way, so they are almost like the punchlines of shaggy dog stories, except that there is no story. Or usually not.  “Adventure Story” is coherent:

So it’s true!  Here I am like Philoctetes!  abandoned by the boat on an unknown rock, because my foot hurts.  My misfortune is that my trousers were ripped off by the sea!  Having made enquiries, where else should I be but on the shores of modest England.  “I won’t be long finding a policeman!” and that’s just what happened: a policeman appeared, and one who spoke French: “You won’t recognize me,” he said in that language, “I’m the husband of your English maid!”  There was a reason why I didn’t recognize him: it’s because I’ve never had an English maid.  He led me to the neighboring town, hiding my nakedness with foliage as well as he could and, once there, found me a tailor.  And, as I wanted to pay: “No need,” he told me, “secret police funds” or “fun,” I didn’t quite catch the word.  (61)

I love that ending.  The other extreme, though, is more like a French Tender Buttons, where I have no idea how Jacob moves from sentence to sentence, or from word to word.

I hereby declare that I am world-wide, oviparous, a giraffe, parched, sinophobic and hemispherical.  I quench my thirst at the well-springs of the atmosphere which laughs concentrically and farts at my uncertainty.  (from “The Cock and the Pearl,” 28)

The first poem begins by asking “Doesn’t lightning have the same shape all over the world?” and ends with the poet “under police surveillance” (“1914,” 17).  The logic of the move from beginning to end is unclear, but the mood – the war, the threat – is clear.  Nonsense pierced with original images, wordplay that means nothing until suddenly it does, randomness as a principle of art, at least.

I will have to read more Max Jacob.