SOURCE: "Blaise Cendrars," in An Artificial Wilderness, William Morrow and Company, New York, 1987, pp. 143-55.

In the essay below, Birkerts provides a detailed summary of Cendrars's life and major works.

In the last phase of his career, when he was already in his sixties, Blaise Cendrars wrote and published a series of autobiographical works that are as singular as anything in literature. Coming after a lifetime of publications, these books—available in England as The Astonished Man (1970), Planus (1972), and Lice (1973)—form a kind of entryway through which we pass to meet a rare, titan-scale individual. The life we encounter is as vast and variously textured as a composition by Stravinsky, and is as difficult to assimilate at first contact. Here is Cendrars in his full amplitude: wanderer, sailor, scholar, collector, entrepreneur, anarchist, soldier, pivotal figure in the Paris avant-garde, trickster, intimate of Picasso, Apollinaire, Stravinsky, Dos Passos (who...