Cendrars

I've been threatening to read Cendrars for years, and so I finally picked his Moravagine out of the library--and am I ever glad about it.

He was a favorite of and a major influence on Henry Miller, and it's easy to see their parallels.  Miller was nothing if not ecstatically curious about the world. To read Miller was to feel the heat of existence when I found him as a young man--he'd created something so readily identifiable and tuned into my own searching that I could not put him down.

There is some of that recoil in Cendrars, at least in this book.

I am much older now, and not as impressed by certain writers as I once was--however, Miller has stayed with me like a mentor that cannot be forgotten or forsaken.  Perhaps Cendrars will become another passion.

In the end, why have I waited so long to tackle Cendrars?  I don't know, you get distracted, involved in other things, other people, other artists, and you're undisciplined to begin with, and then you get depressed and think it is all horseshit, which it often is, and then you have to go to work to make the rent and when you're finished you go to the bar because you're so tired you can't think, much less read--and so you put it off for another day.

You stop thinking, if you ever thought.

For long periods of time you stop reading altogether, and the days go by rapidly.  You sleep and sleep and sleep, and only occasionally awaken.

I did however read this long ago, an interview with Cendrars, when my initial curiosity about him arose.


TS