Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters by Rosanna Warren

Abstract

Reviewed by: Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters by Rosanna Warren Ernest Suarez (bio) Rosanna Warren, Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters (W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), 720 pp. In a 2017 interview with me, Rosanna Warren noted that people “have often asked” her “Why does an American woman get intrigued by a French, Jewish, very homosexual artist and poet?” As a 20 year old studying painting in Paris during the summer of 1973, Warren had become entranced with Max Jacob, a Frenchman who had helped invent modernism and who had died a prisoner during World War II. The Nazis had arrested him for being Jewish. On the surface Jacob and Warren might seem like an unlikely pairing. He had been small, spindly, bald—a deeply spiritual, superstitious gay Britton Jew-turned-Catholic. He was a relatively unimportant painter; his greatest achievements were in poetry. Warren was beautiful, young, statuesque, the heterosexual daughter of two secular, award-winning American writers. She wanted to become a painter; poetry was a secondary interest. Later that summer she: Innocently went off to the Loire Valley, to Saint-Benoît, thinking I would draw the Romanesque capitals of this famous basilica. But in the little bookstore there, I bought a couple of Jacob’s books and was totally entranced. During the time I was drawing the basilica, he seemed to take me over. I wrote a couple of poems to him. It was as if a ghostly hand had taken my hand and written the poems, poems addressed to him. They were in English and among the first poems I showed to anybody outside my family. They were among the first poems I published and they made it into my first book. Because of this sequence of publication, I began emerging in public [End Page 318] more as a writer and the course of my life changed from painting to writing. It was his fault! During the decades after that fateful visit, Warren has become one of the foremost poets writing in English, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. (She also is a former president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, the organization with which we’ve both been closely involved for years.) Jacob’s writing, on the other hand, has been relatively unknown in the United States, though poetry aficionados often credit his 1917 collection, Le cornet à dés (The Dice Cup), with revolutionizing the prose poem. In October of 2020 Norton published Warren’s Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters. Jacob had helped change the trajectory of Warren’s career almost 50 years earlier. Now Warren, whose biography of Jacob was over 30 years in the making, has helped reconfigure his literary reputation. Such are the twists and turns of literary history and the necessity of comprehending them, though challenges abound. Postmodernism, in its different guises, has satirized, diminished, and even severed correlations between the actual and art. In the academy theoretical and sociological approaches dominate literary study. Jacob’s eccentric emphases on the subconscious and play, and his disinterest in linearity, would seem to undermine the causal links on which A Life in Art and Letters depends. Yet Warren’s biography reminds us of the importance of the relationship between an individual artist’s life, persona, and creative practices. Understanding Jacob’s experiences reveals a great deal about how a person can be both an insider and an outsider within the sweep of history and about how vital aesthetic innovations materialized during the early 20th century. Jacob—born on July 12, 1876—was raised in a bourgeoisie family of secular Jews in Quimper, a town of about 17,000 inhabitants in northwestern France. He moved to Paris in 1894, “at the peak of Symbolism.” By the end of the 19th century the movement’s most influential poets—Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Verlaine—were dead. The painter Moreau died in 1898 and Gauguin followed in 1903. A new generation was eager for change and during the new century’s first decade Jacob, Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, André Salmon, and...