Max Jacob by Rosanna Warren

Author:Rosanna Warren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

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YET MAX JACOB had a way of springing back to life like Harlequin in the puppet theater; just when he’d been knocked out and cast aside, he popped up again. In January he alarmed Leiris with his tales of poverty. But by the end of the month, back at Saint-Benoît, his health restored, he wrote to thank Leiris for his solicitude, reporting that the operetta had cleared up his debts and that a stipend from the publisher Kra for a new novel would pay his expenses, along with several thousand francs he expected from Gallimard for Filibuth. He had also begun to paint his “blessed gouaches” again; Malraux had just bought a batch for 700 francs.169

Leiris was much on Jacob’s mind. Back in the monastery, Jacob set to work on the book that would become L’Homme de chair et l’homme reflet (The Man of Flesh and the Reflected Man). He built the story around the two young men who most interested him at this point, Jean Dubuffet (Georges, the Man of Flesh) and Michel Leiris (Maxime Lelong, the Reflected Man). And as he had done in Le Cabinet noir, he plundered his astrological files to compose personality types. On February 3 he wrote Roland-Manuel to say he’d squandered the better part of a day reading his letters in the Aries file, when he’d really meant to look up “Mr. X” (unnamed) for the portrait he needed for the eighteen-year-old hero of the new novel.170 Mr. X was Michel Leiris, Roland-Manuel’s wife’s cousin. Meanwhile he cautioned Leiris not to let Roland-Manuel know how much they corresponded: one senses a certain excitement in Jacob’s juggling so many friendships and crushes.171 A week later Jacob warned Leiris that he was using phrases from the young man’s letters to create a character in his novel. Having already turned a real letter to Leiris into fiction, he took care now to ask for a kind of permission, disingenuously assuring him that the man in the novel wouldn’t resemble him.172 In fact, the egotistical Maxime Lelong, the Reflected Man, turned out to have a good deal in common with the real-life model who bore the same initials. When the novel appeared, Leiris protested (but a decade later copied a whole passage of the portrait into his journal).173

Jacob was so thoroughly a lover and writer, his loves flowed into his writing, and his writing flowed into his loves. At times he could hardly tell the difference.

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