Cendrars was planning to circumnavigate the world in a four-masted sailing ship when war intervened. Following the fall of France in May 1940, he retired to Aix-en-Provence and three “agonizing years of silence.”6
In Aix, he lived alone. In the kitchen of his small apartment, a portable Remington collected dust. His books remained unopened, though he immersed himself in the life of Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint of aviators—probably because his two sons, Odilon and Rémy, were fliers. In his garden he grew some salad greens and medicinal herbs. Though editors and journalists implored him to write, he wrote nothing.
There are certain events and experiences of which we choose not to speak. Not because they hold us in thrall, stilling the tongue. Nor because we fear they might reveal our flaws or frailty. Still less because we feel our words can never do them justice. Silence is sometimes the only way we can honor the ineffability and privacy of certain experiences. And so, in silence, we dwell upon, rather than seek to override or alter, the way things are. This, said Miriam Cendrars, was why her father could never write his book on the life of Mary Magdalene.
Cendrars would always refer to this work as his “secret book.” Entitled La Carissima, it was a fictional life of Mary Magdalene, “the lover of Jesus Christ, the only woman who made our savior weep.”7 Though the book was never written, Cendrars considered it “the most beautiful love story and the greatest love that have ever been lived on earth.” But the same experiences that compelled Cendrars to write this book also demanded silence. “His silence was its truth,” writes Miriam Cendrars. “Had he written it, it would have been, for him, a negation of this truth. Its truth is preserved in his silence.”8 One thinks of Wittgenstein, who fought in the same war as Cendrars, though on the other side. “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent....”9
On August 21, 1943, Edouard Peisson, a friend (“une main amie”) and fellow writer, dropped in on a regular visit. The men chatted about mundane things, then fell to reminiscing about the war. It was the spark that touched off a fire, for that same day Cendrars dusted off his Remington and began the first of his three great autobiographical novels.
I read L’Homme Foudroyé10 in a Livre de Poche edition when I was living in the Congo in 1964. The novel begins with a letter to Edouard Peisson, who was also living in Aix. This letter, which explains how a visit from Peisson inspired Cendrars’ return to writing, would become a text to which I would return many times in the years ahead, for it was a touchstone, a luminous example—in its tone, phrasing, and evocations—of how I wanted to write. Translating it into English and mindful of how much of its beauty is tarnished and betrayed in this process, I am no longer in the Wairarapa but back in Elizabethville, recalling the spellbinding impression these paragraphs made on me when I first encountered them.
My dear Edouard Peisson—this morning, you told me that the German officer who has been billeted at your place in the country came looking for you in your kitchen last night so that you might observe a perfect eclipse of the moon, only to leave you lying flat on your back while he went up to his room with an unlikely-looking whore he’d picked up in Marseilles... and you had remained there, alone, on the terrace, long into the night, contemplating the defeat... and you ended by saying how outrageous it was, the night heavy with dew and silence, the moonlight, the silver and black olives, the warm air perfumed with grass and pines on the encompassing hills, this star-filled August night, so clear, so silent, so peaceful, and this guy screwing his whore in your house. What humiliation!
As soon as you left, my dear Peisson, for reasons I cannot fathom, I began mulling over what you had just told me, and moved by these nocturnal reflections I found myself recalling other nights, equally intense, that I have known in different latitudes, of which the most terrible was the one I lived through, alone, at the front in 1915.
It was also summer and a beautiful starry night, though not the translucent sky of Provence but outside Roye, on a northern plain, among fallow fields and rank grasses, untended for more than a year, from which a milky aroma arose... opaque, ethereal, frayed... with stars riddling the landscape like ink spots on a torn piece of blotting paper, and everything becoming ghostly... no longer a moon in the sky... I was chewing a blade of grass... and the eclipse that I observed then, as you will see, was an eclipse of my very identity, and it is a miracle that I am still alive... this fear, that I have never spoken of to anyone yet would have confided to you in an instant had you been still around. Indeed, I leaned out the window just as you turned the corner of the street, perched on your bicycle. But with no chance of calling you back, rather than run after you I dusted off my typewriter and impulsively began writing the present narrative for you, my dear Peisson. You will understand my feelings, knowing that since June 1940, and in spite of your warm and frequent encouragement, and the self-interested solicitations of newspaper and journal editors—not to mention the misery my inactivity caused me—I have never written a line.
My dear Peisson, because you are the unwitting cause of my return to writing, allow me not only to pay homage to you in my opening story, but to consider you from today the godfather of my future work. I very much hope that you will do me the honor of accepting this title that is neither honorary nor gratuitous since it carries so much of the responsibility.
Even though I wish you to assume this responsibility, I ask myself how your brief visit this morning could release in me such a shock wave that I set about writing without a moment’s hesitation, and why I returned to writing today of all days. I have no answer to this question. But everything you recounted, of the night, the sky, the moon, the landscape, the silence, stirred in me so many memories, including echoes of the war whose presence pervaded your bitter reflections and the invasion of your privacy by a German lieutenant who not only abused your hospitality, violating your house with a common whore, but robbing you of your refuge as a writer. Then I was fired, in my solitude, for to write is to be consumed by fire.
Writing ignites a welter of ideas and throws light on chains of images before reducing everything to flickering embers and crumbling ash. But though flames set off a fire alarm, spontaneous combustion is a mysterious process. For to write is to be burned alive as well as to be reborn from the ashes.
SIX
Writing in Limbo
NOT LONG BEFORE PAULINE AND I WENT to Sierra Leone, a story broke in the English Sunday Times about the fate of an English yachtsman called Donald Crowhurst.1 His trimaran ketch, Teignmouth Electron, had been found adrift in mid-Atlantic. The life raft was lashed in place, the helm swung freely, and the sails lay folded on the deck ready to be raised. But Crowhurst had vanished.
Three blue-bound logbooks on the chart table revealed what had befallen him.
On October 31, 1968, Crowhurst had set sail from Teignmouth, Devon, in a bid to win the Golden Globe single-handed round-the-world race. His trimaran had been built and equipped in a hurry. There had been no time for intensive sea trials, and Crowhurst had sailed late with his course unplanned. To make matters worse, hatches leaked, steering gear malfunctioned, and the electrics failed. The reasonable course would have been to abandon the voyage. But loathe to admit defeat, Crowhurst began to work out an elaborate deception in which he would calculate and radio false positions, giving the impression that he had rounded the Horn in record time and was making excellent progress across the Pacific. In fact, he was sailing in circles in the South atlantic, well away from shipping lanes, awaiting an opportune moment to announce that he had reached the Cape of Good Hope and was again in the Atlantic on the final leg of a circumnavigation of the globe.
What brought Crowhurst to the realization that he would never be able to pull off the deception? Inconsistencies in his carefully forged logbooks? Guilt over having deceived those who loved him and had supported his enterprise? Doubt in his ability to remember every detail of his concocted story and remain consistent in everything he said on his return to a hero’s welcome in England?
In the ineluctable silence and solitude of the sea, the yachtsman began to lose touch with reality. Entangled in the web of lies he had spun, he saw that his voyage was doomed. By the time he sailed into the Sargasso Sea, he had retreated into a wholly private world. Becalmed, and having lost all track of time, he began to imagine that he could leave his body at