Max Jacob and the Great War

Abstract

The following piece is excerpted from The Wounded Word: A Literary Biography of Max Jacob. Jacob was born in 1876 to a nonobservant Jewish family in Quimper, Brittany. After succeeding brilliantly at the lycée, he went to Paris to pursue advanced study in the École Coloniale and in law school. He gravitated quickly, however, to a life in the arts. He met Picasso in 1901, and their intense friendship became the nucleus for the community of modern art at the ramshackle studios in Montmartre, Le Bateau Lavoir. Jacob experienced a mystical vision of Christ on the wall of his shabby room in 1909 and formally converted to Catholicism (with Picasso as his godfather) in 1915. He is most famous for his collection of radical prose poems, Le Cornet à dés (1917) (The Dice Cup), but he published many other collections of poems in verse and prose, novels, short stories, plays, and esthetic meditations. He spent two long periods of retreat in association with the Benedictine monastery of St. Benoît in the Loire Valley (1921–28, and 1936–44). He was arrested by the Gestapo in February 1944, and died on March 5, 1944 of pneumonia from the rough conditions of the camp at Drancy. He was lucky; his name was on the list for the next transport to Auschwitz.