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PARTISAN REVIEW
If
we compare the two poets with each other, we can see a curious
and interesting interchange of national poetic styles. Apollinaire sought
for-and achieved-some of the songlike lyricism of the German
lied;
George sought for, and also achieved, some of the marmoreal quality
that has marked French poetry since the triumph of the classical
tradition.
Guillaume Apollinaire was a mercurial, happy-go-lucky person with
a great gusto for life and an almost childlike excitement before the new,
the strange and the exciting. His real name was Wilhelm de Kostro–
witzsky, and he was the illegitimate son of an Italian nobleman and a
young Polish girl of good family who ran away with him from her con–
vent. Apollinaire's ancestry was the subject of considerable speculation
among his friends. Picasso, as a joke, started the rumor that he was the
son of a Catholic bishop; and Apollinaire never denied the story. Mod–
ern scholarship, however, has now triumphed over all of Apollinaire's
reticences as well as his amused penchant for harmless myth-making.
Apollinaire's father vanished mysteriously when he was about five
years old; his mother, after this time, had a series of "protectors." One
cannot help thinking, in reading about Apollinaire's childhood, of the
very similar description of Lafcadio in Gide's
Les caves du Vatican.
And the wayward charm of Apollinaire's personality does seem to re–
semble the impression created by Gide's seductive young scoundrel.
Apollinaire, however, was not as fortunate as Lafcadio financially; for
he had to earn his living from an early age as tutor, hack writer of
erotica, and free-lance critical journalist.
A spell of tutoring in Germany immersed Apollinaire in the Rhenish
atmosphere reflected in some of the poems in
Alcools,
and it led to the
unsuccessful pursuit of a young English governess employed by the same
family. The young lady fled Apollinaire's importunities to--of all places!
---'California; it must have seemed like the end of the world in 1904.
She is still alive there, quite astonished at the posthumous fame of her
young suitor and her own reflected glory.
When Apollinaire returned to France from Germany in 1903, his
gift for friendship and his literary ambitions quickly brought him into
contact with the group of young writers and artists who are now among
the great names of modern times. Picasso mentioned Marie Laurencin
to Apollinaire, and when the two met the result was a famous liaison
that lasted four years and turned the poet into an art critic. Apollinaire
was one of the first to write about Picasso; and his
Meditations tfsthe-
