Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918)

"There is only one way today of saving our unfortunate and holy Russia, and that is through pederasty...".

Who says edification can't be entertaining? In this slim volume we have nothing less than a richly erudite compendium of the amatory culture of the western world - to be cherished and passed on in the family, alongside your Bibles, Sades and Beardsleys.

A word to those who would be wise: have handy your OED and a box of tissues (or a sock, or, ideally, a still warm, well-worn satin show more lederhosen). show less

If you’ve read Anatole France, I would wager that he will almost immediately pop to mind in reading this collection of short stories. It was the first one that Apollinaire published under his pen name and said to remain his favorite among all his works. Not only does the prose echo France’s sarcasm and wit—albeit with a bit more acid—but the Apollinaire's obsession with arcane and erudite trivia (often of religious or medieval subjects), mimics that of the master as well. For France show more was, indeed, a mentor to the young émigré and his library contained a presentation copy of this work. The book’s dedication described the works within as “phials of phantasy” and that is indeed what they are. The writing is at once playful and humorous, enigmatic and philosophical. Apollinaire draws skillfully realized characters and his imagery is vivid; the stories are almost all entertaining and the best of them is thought-provoking as well. They address the nature of identity, particularly focusing on the role of religion in helping shape identity. He is likewise obsessed (it seems not too strong a word) with the meaning of heresy and its role in confronting deeply established religious beliefs and norms. In his not-infrequent existential musings, he offers his readers the opportunity to join him in questioning the limits of human imagination. Eccentric, even absurd, fairy tales, they are easy to read and if a bit too redolent of France’s style and tone, they are nevertheless equally easy to mine for plentiful seeds of Apollinaire's soon-to-emerge surrealism. show less

The Eleven Thousand Rods, or the Loves of a Hospodar, is an erotic novel by Guillaume Apollinaire (the great poet of Alcools and Caligrammes), published in 1907 and simply signed with his initials ("G. A."). It recounts the fictional story of the Romanian prince Mony Vibescu, on a journey that takes him from Bucharest to Paris, then throughout Europe, and finally to Port Arthur (in China), where he dies, flogged by an army corps, thus fulfilling his destiny for having broken an oath: "If I show more held you in bed, I would prove my passion to you twenty times over. May the eleven thousand virgins, or even the eleven thousand rods, punish me if I lie!" The hero's wanderings are punctuated by explicit scenes in which Apollinaire explores all facets of sexuality with a clear desire for eclecticism: sadism alternates with masochism, undinism/scatophilia with vampirism, pedophilia with gerontophilia, onanism with group sex, lesbianism with pederasty, and so on. The writing is brisk and the tone fresh, the humor dark, and the novel as a whole exudes an impression of "infernal joy," which finds its apotheosis in the final scene. The authorship of the text was long debated (it was never explicitly claimed), but its attribution to the author of Alcools is now beyond doubt, and Les Onze Mille Verges now occupies a lousy place in Apollinaire's complete works. show less

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), poet par excellence of the early 20th century Parisian literary world, inventor of the word "surrealism," champion of cubism and other innovative forms of modern art, wrote The Poet Assassinated in a hospital bed recovering from shrapnel wounds inflicted during World War One.

Reading this novella is like entering a dream world of a De Chirico cityscape or the montage of Max Ernst – and every couple of paragraphs the surreal panorama shifts – one of the show more most unique reading experiences one can encounter. With Apollinaire we have truly transitioned from the naturalism of Zola and the decadence of Huysmans into the Eiffel Tower world of modernity. Hello Picasso, hello Cubism, hello Dali Surrealism.

Apollinaire’s novella is comprised of 18 micro-chapters, all with one-word titles, such as Name, Nobility, Pedagogy, Poetry, Love, Fashion – like 18 pieces of torn paper, dropped randomly but not too randomly, fluttering down on a blank mat. In order to have a more intimate feel for the tone of this bizarre, whimsical work, please view Entr’acte, a short French 1924 black-and-white film by René Clair (easily located on YouTube) and featuring three well-known surrealist artists: Francis Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

How powerful is your imagination? The author provides the mythic outline of the life of our main character, the god-like, world conquering poet Croniamanta, a man born in a year where his birth was saluted with an erection – the Eiffel Tower (sexual image directly from the text) but Apollinaire invites us to fill in the blanks and create our own version of Croniamanta. After all, even the place of his birth is claimed by no less than 127 towns and 7 countries!

Respecting that mythic outline we are given the following: Croniamanta’s mother died in childbirth and his father put a gun to his head after losing a fortune in a Monaco casino. He was raised by a well-learned man urging him to love all of nature and schooling him in Greek and Latin, the French of Racine, the English of Shakespeare and the Italian of Petrarch. Also, he was introduced to fencing and horsemanship, so by age 15 Croniamanta imagined himself as both knight and lover. At 21, poems in hand and filled with a love of literature, Croniamanta sets off for Paris where his eyes devoured everything and he eventually smashed eternity to pieces.

The great poet proclaims he will never write a poem again that is not free of all shackles, even the shackles of language. Croniamanta then becomes famous but enemies of poetry are on the rise. At one point a prophet tells him the earth can no longer stand its contact with poets. This is born out with the discovery that the United States has started electrocuting people who claim poetry as a profession. To add to this horror, Germany forbids all poets from going outdoors and four countries -- France, Italy, Spain, Portugal -- put all poets in jail. In Paris mobs are reported to have strangled poets in public.

Standing tall before an angry crowd, Croniamanta denounces all haters of poets as swine and murderers. But an angry crowd is an angry crowd; they turn on Croniamanta and kill him. In the aftermath a sculptor creates a monument to the great poet – a hole with reinforced concrete, the void in the ground has the shape of Croniamanta; the hole is filled but filled in a unique way: the hole is filled with Croniamanta’s phantom.

This brief sketch is like describing Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory as a number of flaccid watches out in the desert. This is surrealism; this is the realm of dreams; this is where the umbrella meets the sewing machine on the operating table; this is a novella by Guillaume Apollinaire. One is obliged to enter the work itself with fresh, open imagination. show less