Apollinaire on the Edge: Modern Art, Popular Culture, and the Avant-Garde (review)

The four essays collected here illuminate equally major works by Apollinaire and neglected aspects of his output. The keynote chapters, placed first and last, are on Le Bestiaire, published in 1911, and Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Apollinaire’s wartime musical comedy. The original edition of Le Bestiaire, signed by the poet and his illustrator, Raoul Dufy, was a commercial flop; Gallimard, however, have subsequently paired Le Bestiaire with Alcools in a single pocket-sized volume that has sold well over a million copies. Whatever the format, Dufy’s charismatic woodcuts dominate the page and risk overshadowing Apollinaire’s concise and witty allegories. Willard Bohn devotes much attention to the pictures, but he also expertly elucidates interplay between word and image, identifying topographical, mythological, heraldic, and historical references in the woodcuts that echo richly polysemic connotations in the poems. His focus is mainly specific and particular, catching detail and diversity, leaving others to explain the wider significance of cohesive narrative threads running through the book. On Les Mamelles de Tirésias Bohn refers to contemporary press reports and the original annotated actors’ scripts to cast new light on changes in the play between its premiere in 1917 and its publication the following year. Thérèse, the rebellious wife, initially ended up begging her husband to take her back, but the finale of the published, definitive version is more sympathetic to women’s rights, making Thérèse more confidently assertive while also celebrating the complementary forces of uninhibited male and female sexuality. Apollinaire was physically diminished by gas attacks and a head wound, but in 1918 he was evidently still as forward-looking and creatively dynamic as ever. Bohn also addresses Apollinaire’s ability to tap the poetic potential of prosaic experience and banal statements. Remy de Gourmont (in ‘Le Problème du style’, 1902) advised that writers should include a dose of conventional expression in literary experiments so that readers could find their bearings and not feel lost and alienated. Apollinaire raised the stakes by testing the shock value and literary qualities of clichéd observations and off-duty jottings when they themselves became the raw material of experimentation, shaped as verse, titled ‘Quelconqueries’ and printed in avant-garde magazines. Militant banality was a radical antidote to Symbolist obscurity, but the results cited by Bohn suggest that Apollinaire was always inescapably a poet. Another chapter highlights Apollinaire’s interest in playground songs and nursery rhymes. A series of commentaries demonstrates how children’s rhymes contribute patterns, imagery, and turns of phrase to poems in Alcools and Calligrammes, enhancing their seductively candid tonality and their subliminal impact. This book thus enters disparate territories, true to its origin as a series of lectures. The chronological parameters of its critical bibliographies and references to ‘forthcoming’ publications long available suggest that it may have languished some time in a publisher’s drawer. The book is unified, however, by a constant tone of confident erudition, a warmly communicative style, and excellent English translations of all extracts from the original French. These qualities will make it useful to a wide and lasting readership.