Max Jacob A Life In Art And Letters Rosanna Warren by Rosanna Warren 9780393078855, 039307885X instant download after payment.

I had never heard of Max Jacob. The figure intrigued me. He was Jewish, from Brittany. He was homosexual. He was Picasso’s first French friend, his initiator into French culture when the Spanish painter appeared in Paris just as he turned nineteen and hardly spoke French. At the conglomeration of studios in Montmartre known as the Bateau Lavoir, as Picasso (and Braque and Gris) reinvented painting, Jacob helped to reinvent poetry, and with his compressed, hard-edged ironic prose poems and synapse-skipping verse lyrics, he showed Apollinaire and many others the way out of the Symbolist haze. He lived in poverty, hand to mouth, reading palms, preparing horoscopes, and selling his gouaches. In 1909 he saw a vision of Christ on the wall of his shabby room in Montmartre; in 1915 he converted formally to Roman Catholicism with Picasso as his godfather. In 1921 he withdrew to live as a lay associate of the Romanesque Benedictine monastery of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire near Orléans, and stayed there until 1928, when he hurled himself back into worldly life in the capital. He was famous, friends with Cocteau, Coco Chanel, Prince and Princesse Ghika, and a gaggle of aristocrats. In 1936 he retreated once again to Saint-Benoît, and it was there that the Gestapo arrested him on February 24, 1944. He died of pneumonia on March 5 in the concentration-transit camp of Drancy outside Paris, thereby being spared transport to Auschwitz, where his brother and sister had already perished.

One weekend I rented a car and drove to Saint-Benoît, my ostensible purpose being to draw the Romanesque capitals of the basilica. But Max Jacob waylaid me. In the dusty village of Saint-Benoît where the eleventh-century church surges up from wheat fields, the spirit of the campy, mystical poet-painter took hold of me, and as if a ghostly hand had gripped mine, I found myself writing poems inspired by Jacob, to Jacob, in the pages of my drawing pad.