Guillaume Apollinaire

gigatos | June 7, 2022

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Summary

Guillaume Albert Vladimir Alexandre Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky, known as Guillaume Apollinaire, was a French poet and writer, critic and art theorist who was born a Polish subject of the Russian Empire on August 26, 1880 in Rome. He died in Paris on November 9, 1918 of Spanish flu, but was declared dead for France because of his commitment during the war.

Considered one of the most important French poets of the twentieth century, he is the author of poems such as Zone, La Chanson du mal-aimé, Le Pont Mirabeau, which have been the subject of several adaptations into song during the century. The erotic part of his work – mainly three novels (including one lost), numerous poems and introductions to licentious authors – has also passed to posterity. He experimented for a while with the practice of calligrams (a term of his own invention, although he was not the inventor of the genre itself, designating poems written in the form of drawings and not in the classical form of verse and stanzas). He was the champion of many artistic avant-gardes of his time, including cubism and orphism, in whose gestation he participated as a poet and theorist of the New Spirit. Precursor of surrealism, he forged the name in his drama Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917).

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Youth

Guillaume Apollinaire was born in Rome as Guglielmo Alberto Wladimiro Alessandro Apollinare de Kostrowitzky, in Polish Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Aleksander Apolinary Kostrowicki, herb. Wąż. Apollinaire was actually – until his naturalization in 1916 – the fifth given name of Guillaume Albert Vladimir Alexandre Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky.

Her mother, Angelika Kostrowicka (clan Wąż, or Angelica of Wąż-Kostrowicky), was born in Nowogródek in the Russian Empire (today”s Navahrudak in Belarus), to a family of Polish lower nobility. After the death of her father, honorary cloak and dagger cameraman to the Pope, she lived in Rome, where she became the mistress of a nobleman and had an unwanted pregnancy. Her son was born on August 25, 1880 and was declared to the town hall as having been born on August 26, 1880 to an unknown father and a mother who wanted to remain anonymous, so that the administration gave him an assumed surname: Dulcigny. A few months later, Angelika recognized him before a notary as her son, under the name of Guglielmo Alberto Wladimiro Alessandroi Apollinare de Kostrowitzky. According to the most likely hypothesis, his father was an Italian officer, Francesco Flugi d”Aspermont. In 1882, she gave him a half-brother, Alberto Eugenio Giovanni. In 1887, she moved to Monaco with her sons under the name Olga de Kostrowitzky. Very quickly, she was arrested and registered by the police as a gallant woman, probably earning her living as a trainer in the new casino. Guillaume was placed in a boarding school at the Collège Saint-Charles, run by the Marist Brothers. He studied there from 1887 to 1895, and proved to be one of the best students. He was then enrolled at the Lycée Stanislas in Cannes and then at the Lycée Masséna in Nice where he failed his first baccalaureate and did not reapply. During the three months of the summer of 1899, his mother put him and his brother in the Constant boarding house in the small Walloon town of Stavelot, a boarding house that they left on October 5, “at the drop of a hat”: since their mother had only sent them money for the train, they could not pay the hotel bill and had to flee in secret, once everyone was asleep. The Walloon episode had a lasting effect on his imagination and his creativity. Thus, the memory of the festive dances of this region (“C”est la maclotte qui sautille…”), in Marie, that of the High Fens, as well as the borrowing of the Walloon dialect, date from this period.

Diary of Paul Léautaud, January 20, 1919: “I see a lady [Apollinaire”s mother, in Léautaud”s office at the Mercure de France] come in, quite tall, elegant, with a look that is a bit different. Great resemblance of face with Apollinaire, or rather of Apollinaire with her, the nose, a little the eyes, especially the mouth and the expressions of the mouth in the laughter and in the smile.

In Paris

In 1900 he moved to Paris, the center of European art and literature at the time. Living in precarious conditions, his mother asked him to take a diploma in stenography to earn a living and he became a bank clerk like his half-brother Alberto Eugenio Giovanni. The lawyer Esnard hired him for a month as a ghostwriter to write the serial novel Que faire? in Le Matin, but refused to pay him. To take revenge, he seduces his young mistress.

In July 1901, he wrote his first article for Tabarin, a satirical weekly directed by Ernest Gaillet, then in September 1901 his first poems appeared in the review La Grande France under his name Wilhelm Kostrowitzky. From May 1901 to August 21, 1902, he was the tutor of the daughter of Elinor Hölterhoff, Viscountess of Milhau, of German origin and widow of a French count. He falls in love with the girl”s English governess, Annie Playden, who refuses his advances. This was the “Rhineland” period, which is reflected in his collections (La Lorelei, Schinderhannes). Back in Paris in August 1902, he kept in touch with Annie and went to see her twice in London. But in 1905, she left for America. The poet celebrates the pain of the spurned in Annie, La Chanson du mal-aimé, L”Émigrant de Landor Road, Rhénanes.

Between 1902 and 1907, he worked for various scholarship organizations and at the same time published stories and poems in magazines. At that time, he took the pseudonym Apollinaire after the first name of his maternal grandfather, Apollinaris, which recalls Apollo, god of poetry. In November 1903, he created a monthly magazine of which he was editor-in-chief, Le festin d”Ésope, revue des belles lettres in which he published some poems; one also finds there texts of his friends André Salmon, Alfred Jarry, Mécislas Golberg, among others.

In 1907, he met the painter Marie Laurencin. They will maintain a chaotic and stormy relationship for seven years. At the same time, he began to live from his pen and befriended Pablo Picasso, Antonio de La Gandara, Jean Metzinger, Paul Gordeaux, André Derain, Edmond-Marie Poullain, Maurice de Vlaminck and the Douanier Rousseau, and made a name for himself as a poet and journalist, lecturer and art critic for L”Intransigeant. In 1909, L”Enchanteur pourrissant, his work decorated with reproductions of woodcuts by André Derain is published by the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. On September 7, 1911, accused of complicity in the theft of the Mona Lisa because one of his acquaintances had stolen statues from the Louvre, he was imprisoned for a week in the Santé prison; this experience marked him. That year, he published his first collection of poems, Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d”Orphée, with engravings by Raoul Dufy. In 1913, the Mercure de France published Alcools, the sum of his poetic work since 1898.

On December 24, 1913, Guillaume Apollinaire recorded Le Pont Mirabeau and Le Voyageur at the Archives de la Parole, sound documents preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and available in Gallica.

The war

In August 1914, he tried to enlist in the French army, but the review board postponed his application because he did not have French nationality.

He left for Nice where his second application, in December 1914, was accepted, which launched his naturalization procedure. Shortly after his arrival, a friend introduced him to Louise de Coligny-Châtillon, during a lunch in a restaurant in Nice. Divorced, she lived with her ex-sister-in-law at the Villa Baratier, near Nice, and led a very free life. Guillaume Apollinaire immediately fell in love with her, nicknamed her Lou and courted her in vain at first. Then she granted him her favors, then withdrew them, and when he was sent to Nîmes for training after his request for an engagement had been accepted, she joined him there for a week, but did not hide her attachment to a man she nicknamed Toutou. A correspondence was born from their relationship; on the back of the letters that Apollinaire sent at the beginning at the rate of one per day or every two days, then more and more spaced out, are poems that were collected later under the title of Ombre de mon amour and then of Poèmes à Lou.

His declaration of love, in a letter dated September 28, 1914, began in these terms: “Having told you this morning that I loved you, my neighbor of last night, I now feel less embarrassed to write you. I had already felt it at that lunch in old Nice, where your big, beautiful doe eyes had troubled me so much that I had left as soon as possible to avoid the dizziness they gave me.”

But the young woman will never love him as he would have liked; she refuses to leave Toutou and on the eve of Apollinaire”s departure for the front, in March 1915, they break up while promising to remain friends. He left with the 38th field artillery regiment for the Champagne front on April 4, 1915. Despite the vicissitudes of wartime life, he wrote as soon as he could to keep his spirits up and to remain a poet (Case d”Armons), and he kept up an abundant correspondence with Lou, his many friends, and a young girl, Madeleine Pagès, whom he had met on the train, on January 2, 1915, on the way back from an appointment with Lou. Once at the front, he sent her a card, she replied and thus began a rapid and heated correspondence which led in August, still by correspondence, to a marriage proposal. In November 1915, with the aim of becoming an officer, Wilhelm de Kostrowitzky was transferred at his request to the infantry, whose ranks were decimated. He entered the 96th Infantry Regiment with the rank of second lieutenant, and at Christmas he left for Oran to meet his fiancée for his first leave.

He also began, in July 1915, a correspondence with the poetess Jeanne Burgues-Brun, who became his wartime godmother. These letters will be published in 1948 by the editions Pour les fils de roi, then from 1951 by the editions Gallimard.

On March 9, 1916, he obtained his French naturalization but a few days later, on March 17, 1916, he was wounded in the temple by a shrapnel. He was reading the Mercure de France in his trench. Evacuated to Château-Thierry, he was transferred to the Val de Grâce in Paris. There he was trephined on May 10, 1916 and then began a long convalescence during which he stopped writing to Madeleine. At the end of October, his collection of stories, Le Poète Assassiné (The Murdered Poet) was published and the publication was crowned on December 31 by a memorable banquet organized by his friends in the Old Palace of Orleans.

The Surrealists were then interested in a painting by Giorgio de Chirico dating from 1914, which, after probably being entitled The Target Man, found its final title: Portrait (premonitory) of Guillaume Apollinaire. It owes this name to the profile present in the composition, with a white circle on the left temple. A target at the very spot where two years later Apollinaire was wounded. Apollinaire himself saw this as a sign of destiny, and the Surrealists followed, predisposed as they were to recognize certain premonitory gifts in De Chirico.

In March 1917, he created the term surrealism, which appeared in one of his letters to Paul Dermée and in the program for the ballet Parade that he wrote for the performance of May 18. On May 11, he was definitively declared unfit for military service by the medical commission and reclassified in an auxiliary service. On June 19, 1917, he was attached to the Ministry of War, which assigned him to the Censorship. On June 24, he had his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (subtitled Surrealist Drama in two acts and a prologue) performed at the Renée Maubel Conservatory, now the Galabru Theater. On November 26, he said he was ill and had the actor Pierre Bertin give his famous lecture L”Esprit Nouveau at the Vieux Colombier theater.

In 1918, Éditions Sic published his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias. His poem, La jolie rousse, dedicated to his new companion, appeared in March in the journal L”Éventail. In April, the Mercure de France publishes his new collection of poems, Calligrammes. On May 2, he marries Jacqueline (the “pretty redhead” of the poem), to whom we owe many posthumous publications of Apollinaire”s works. His witnesses were Picasso, Gabrièle Buffet and the famous art dealer Ambroise Vollard. Assigned on May 21 to the press office of the Ministry of Colonies, he was promoted to lieutenant on July 28. After a three-week leave with Jacqueline, in Kervoyal (Damgan, Morbihan), he returned to his office at the Ministry and continued to work on articles, a screenplay for the cinema, and rehearsals for his new play, Couleur du temps.

Weakened by his injury, Guillaume Apollinaire died on November 9, 1918 at his home, 202 boulevard Saint-Germain, corner of rue Saint-Guillaume. It was the Spanish flu that took him in a final asphyxia, “intestinal flu complicated by pulmonary congestion” as Paul Léautaud wrote in his diary of November 11, 1918. As his friends came to greet his body, Parisians marched under his windows shouting “À mort Guillaume!” (Death to William), referring not to the poet but to Emperor William II of Germany who had abdicated the same day. He is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery.

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History of his tombstone

In May 1921, his companions and close friends formed a committee to collect funds for Picasso”s execution of the funerary monument at his tomb. Sixty-five artists offered works, which were auctioned at the Galerie Paul Guillaume on June 16 and 18, 1924, bringing in 30,450 francs. In 1927 and 1928, Picasso proposed two projects but neither was accepted. The first was judged obscene by the committee. For the second – a construction of metal rods – Picasso was inspired by the “empty monument” created by the Benin bird for Croniamantal in The Murdered Poet.In the fall of 1928, he made four constructions with the help of his friend Julio Gonzalez, a painter, goldsmith and ironworker, which the committee refused; three are kept in the Picasso Museum in Paris, the fourth belongs to a private collection.

Finally, it was Apollinaire”s friend, the painter Serge Férat, who designed the granite monument-menhir over the tomb in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, division 86. The tomb also bears a double epitaph taken from the collection Calligrammes, three discontinuous stanzas of Colline, which evoke his poetic project and his death, and a calligram of green and white shards in the shape of a heart that reads “mon cœur pareil à une flamme renversée” (my heart like an overturned flame).

Influenced by symbolist poetry in his youth, admired during his lifetime by the young poets who later formed the core of the surrealist group (Breton, Aragon, Soupault – Apollinaire is the inventor of the term “surrealism”), he revealed early on an originality that freed him from any school influence and made him one of the forerunners of the literary revolution of the first half of the 20th century. His art is not based on any theory, but on a simple principle: the act of creating must come from the imagination, from the intuition, because it must be closer to life, to nature. The latter is for him “a pure source from which one can drink without fear of being poisoned” (Œuvres en prose complètes, Gallimard, 1977, p. 49).

But the artist must not imitate it, he must make it appear according to his own point of view. “I am a firm believer in excluding the intervention of intelligence, that is to say of philosophy and logic in the manifestations of art. The art must have for foundation the sincerity of the emotion and the spontaneity of the expression: one and the other are in direct relation with the life that they try to magnify aesthetically” says Apollinaire (interview with Perez-Jorba in La Publicidad). The artistic work is false in that it does not imitate nature, but it is endowed with its own reality, which makes its truth.

Apollinaire is characterized by a subtle play between modernity and tradition. It is not a question for him of turning towards the past or the future, but to follow the movement of time. He uses for it much the present, the time of the speech in his poems notably in the collection Alcools. He situates his poems either in the past, or in the present but always addresses men of another time, often of the future. Moreover, “One cannot carry everywhere with oneself the corpse of one”s father, one leaves him in the company of other dead. And one remembers, one regrets it, one speaks about it with admiration. And if we become fathers, we should not expect that one of our children will want to double for the life of our corpse. But our feet are only detached in vain from the ground which contains the dead ” (Aesthetic meditations, Part I: On painting).

Thus, the calligram substitutes linearity for simultaneity and constitutes a visual poetic creation that unites the singularity of the writing gesture with the reproducibility of the printed page.Apollinaire advocates a constant formal renewal (free verse, monostiche, lexical creation, mythological syncretism).Finally, poetry and art in general are a means for the artist to communicate his experience to others. Finally, Apollinaire dreamed of forming a global poetic movement, without schools, that of the beginning of the twentieth century, a period of renewal for the arts and writing, with the emergence of cubism in the 1900s, Italian futurism in 1909 and Dadaism in 1916. He also gave Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay”s painting the term “orphism”, which is still a reference in the history of art. Apollinaire maintained friendships with many artists and supported them in their artistic careers (see the lecture “La phalange nouvelle”), such as the painters Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and Henri Rousseau.

His poem Zone influenced the contemporary Italian poet Carlo Bordini and the current known as “narrative poetry”.

Behind the work of the poet, we often forget the work of storyteller, in prose, with stories such as The Murdered Poet or The Seated Woman, which show his eclecticism and his willingness to give a new genre to the prose, in opposition to realism and naturalism in vogue in his time. At his death, many sketches of novels or stories were found, which he never had time to complete.

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Critical works and chronicles

References:

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Diary and drawings

In 1941, a Guillaume-Apollinaire prize was created by Henri de Lescoët and was originally intended to allow poets to go on vacation. In 1951, the western part of the rue de l”Abbaye in the 6th arrondissement of Paris was renamed rue Guillaume-Apollinaire.

A postal stamp, of a value of 0,50 + 0,15 franc was emitted on May 22, 1961 with the effigy of Guillaume Apollinaire. The cancellation “First day” took place in Paris on May 20.

In 1999, Rahmi Akdas published a Turkish translation of The Eleven Thousand Yards, under the title On Bir Bin Kirbaç. He was sentenced to a heavy fine “for obscene or immoral publication, of a nature to excite and exploit the sexual desire of the population” and the book was seized and destroyed.

His name is mentioned on the commemorative plaques of the Paris Pantheon in the list of writers who died in the First World War.

The Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris holds Guillaume Apollinaire”s personal library, acquired by the city in 1990, which includes some 5,000 works of great variety. The donation of Pierre-Marcel Adéma, Apollinaire”s first true biographer, as well as that of Michel Décaudin, a specialist in the writer, who offered his working library, have made it possible to expand the Guillaume Apollinaire collection.

It was only on September 29, 2013 that Guillaume Apollinaire”s work entered the public domain in France, after 94 years and 272 days.

In 2016, the Musée de l”Orangerie in Paris devoted an exhibition to his relationship to the art world under the title Apollinaire, le regard du poète.

The sale of a hundred memorabilia including several African sculptures, from his former apartment at 202 Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris, took place in Corbeil on June 24, 2017.

On October 1, 2018, to celebrate the centenary of Apollinaire”s death, the magazine Adieu published, in total media silence (including from the poet”s thurifers), a completely unpublished poem by Apollinaire titled for the occasion “A sentry passes by.”

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In music

His poems have been set to music by many classical composers, including Francis Poulenc (Banalités 1940, Montparnasse 1945…), Claude Balif ( Le cortège d”Orphée op. 1b, for lyric soprano (or baritone) & piano, 1945-1948) or Dimitri Chostakovitch (symphony no 14 op. 135, 1969)

Antoine Tomé set five of his poems to music in his album Antoine Tomé chante Ronsard & Apollinaire. Guillaume, was set to music by Desireless and Operation of the sun with the release of the album in 2015 and the creation of the show in 2016. The Belgian composer Raymond Micha (1910-2006) set the poems Fagnes de Wallonie, Marèye and l”Adieu to music.

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