The outcome of cutting class

A Dangerous Life, Vol. 1: True tales from the life and times of Blaise Cendrars, the world’s greatest vagabond
by David J. MacKinnon, Blaise Cendrars

Gananoque, ON: Guernica Editions, 2024
$24.95  /  9781771839228

Essay by Jim Christy

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Born and raised in New Westminster, David Mackinnon, the translator of these tales, discovered a book by Blaise Cendrars while cutting a class at UBC.

Mackinnon, a voracious reader with adventurous tendencies, immediately realized he had found a kindred spirit. Cendrars travelled over a good part of the globe, published forty books, had his right arm shot off while fighting with the French Foreign Legion in the First World War and is credited by many scholars with inventing modern poetry back in the teens of the twentieth century. This he did by adjusting his lines to the rhythms of the new age. No one else was doing anything like it.

Cendrars knew Paris and Rio, Shanghai, Moscow and Vancouver and he wrote about all of them.

The stories in A Dangerous Life, the first volume in a series, reflect this wide-ranging experience but are not solely about himself. For instance, he relates a tale told him in the trenches by a London sewer man who tunneled his way into to the vault of a bank in London. Most of these stories are like grand reportage, the kind of writing that the gonzo journalists aspired to thirty or forty years later. Compared to him, Hunter S. Thompson was a cub scout.

Henry Miller said that Blaise Cendrars was the man Ernest Hemingway wanted to be.  

In a Rio prison, Cendrars interviews a serial killer, a maniac who pulled the teeth of his victims before killing them and a man who murdered his rival in a jealous rage, cut his heart out and ate it. When Cendrars met him, the man talked mostly about the violets he raised in the prison yard, and gave Cendrars a bouquet when he left.

He meets St. Exupery, Modigliani, la Goulue, explores the diamond mining territory in Brazil, meets an infamous woman with a jinxed diamond, and searches the Matto Grosso for the  legendary bandit, Lampeao who robbed the rich and gave the money to widows and orphans.

One night, while on a ship in the Atlantic, a fellow passenger, a “trencherman” dies and is given a burial at sea. In the morning the corpse is found floating behind the ship, and follows it all the way to Miami.  

Cendrars has been called a ‘fabulist’ and an outright liar. None of these nay-sayers have stated what exactly it was that he made up. A Parisian critic insisted Cendrars, who went to Russia at age fifteen to apprentice as a watchmaker, never left his desk in St. Petersburg, and made up all those stories about the country. On the other hand, the painter Marc Chagall who was born and raised in Russia wrote that Cendrars was fluent in Russian and was the only non-native he ever encountered who spoke it with no trace of an accent. Chagall also said that the one-armed writer “had an intimate knowledge of the vast country and all the Russian small towns.”

Cendrars wrote about New Zealand but one of his critics said he’d never been to that country. I myself met an antiquarian dealer in book shop in Christchurch who showed me the manifest of a ship that called at the nearby port of Lyttelton and which listed Blaise Cendrars as a crewman.

The English critic Lee Rourke opined that Cendrars wasn’t like any other writer and “reading him is like stepping into another universe.”

This book of stories provides a door to that other universe.

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Reviewer John Moore described Jim Christy as “a wild Steelhead in a Canadian literary seascape choked with schools of writers spawned in university creative writing departments operating like fish farms.” His biography, by Ian Cutler, was reviewed by John Moore for The British Columbia Review in 2019. George Woodcock described him as “one of the last unpurged North American anarchistic romantics.” He lives on the Sunshine Coast.

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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