Guillaume Apollinaire “The Little Car”
Guillaume Apollinaire (left) and André Rouveyre
I initially wrote about Guillaume Apollinaire’s wonderful poem, “The Little Car,” and then hesitated to send it out, because, as I acknowledge at the outset and again at the end, it is not just about war, but about glorifying war. Yes, it says other things too; But in a world where nationalism and tribalism are rising, a world which too often seems to forget how destructive war can be, Apollinaire’s poem can be – well, it can tell us the wrong things. Wrong things? War is awful, terrible, hellish – and yet it exists, and men rush off to fight in it. Closing our eyes to this is not beneficial, I think; and poetry exists, in part, to enable us to see what we would otherwise ignore. So take this as an analysis of an ambivalent poem which recognizes the power of war to transform human beings and human society, a poem which at the same time partly resists the massive destruction and tragedy that always accompanies war….
The Little Car
Guillaume Apollinaire
On the 31st day of August in the year 1914
I left Deauville shortly before midnight
In Rouveyre's little car
Including his chauffeur there were three of us
We said goodbye to a whole epoch
Furious giants were looming over Europe
The eagles were leaving their eyries expecting the sun
Voracious fishes were swimming up from the abysses
Nations were rushing together to know each other through and through
The dead were trembling with fear in their dark dwellings
The dogs were barking in the direction of the frontiers
As I went I carried within me all the armies that were fighting
I felt them rising within me and spreading out over the regions through which their columns wound
With the forests the happy villages of Belgium
Francorchamps and Eau Rouge and the pouhons
A region through which invasions are always taking place
And the railway arteries along which those who were going away to die
Saluted one more time a life full of colours
The deep oceans where monsters were stirring
In old carcasses of wrecks
The unimaginable heights where men fight
Higher than the eagle soars
Man fights there against man
And falls suddenly like a shooting star
I felt within me new beings full of dexterity
Building a new universe and running it as well
A merchant of unheard-of-opulence and of prodigious stature
Was setting out an extraordinary display of stock
And gigantic shepherds were driving forward
Great dumb flocks grazing on words as they went
And at them barked all the dogs along the road
I shall never
forget this journey by night during which none
of us said a word
O
dark O u
departure tender O h r
when our 3 night of vil towards which d r
headlights failed before the war lages e i
B L A C K S M I T H S R E C A L L E D
E M O R N I N G
B E T W E E N M I D N I G H T A N D O N E I N T H
n V
e a r e r s a
L i s i e u x or else illes the
the very g o l d
blue en
r s t t y r e
a n d 3 t i m e s w e h a d t o s t o p t o c h a n g e a b u
And when having passed through Fountainbleau
During the afternoon
We got to Paris
At the moment at which the mobilization posters were going up
We understood my comrade and I
That the little car had brought us into a
New age
And that although we were both already fully grown men
We had nevertheless just been born
trans. Oliver Bernard
This is, in many ways, a strange poem. It has a picture – almost like from a children’s book – in the middle of it. And it is about war, taking a celebratory stance, that very much unsettles me, toward the start of a war. [And after drafting this essay, I wondered why I would be sending it out, and why I like the poem so much. As I say at the end, we don’t have to agree with what poems say to discover that they speak powerfully to us. I think there is an amorality to this posture I take, yet I would defend it in deference to a higher morality. As the Latin poet Terence wrote, trenchantly, "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto:" "I am human, and nothing human can be alien to me.”]
Apollinaire wrote this poem as a recollection of the start, in France, of the First World War. The journey he recounts in the poem was by car (hence the title of the poem), a journey that took place on July 31, 1914. The war, for France, began a day later with a general mobilization on August 1. Two days later, on August 3rd, Germany declared war on France.
This poem was published posthumously in a book called Calligrammes. It was Apollinaire’s third book of poetry; many of the poems in it were calligrams, or what we in English call ‘concrete poetry,’ where the shapes of the words on the page create an image which conveys in a visual form what the poem is ‘about.’ So with this poem, in which there is an image of a car made out of the words: an image comprised of the car, its driver (behind the steering wheel) and two passengers, and the road on which the car is proceeding.
The First World War would prove to be enormously destructive. Millions died in it, and it is not clear now – nor was it clear then – what the purpose of the war was. Apollinaire himself would die of a head wound he suffered in 1916: injured in the temple, his skull was drilled open (the procedure was known as trepanning) and although he survived he was greatly weakened, so much so that he succumbed to the Spanish flu in the pandemic which raged across Europe and indeed around the world in 1918. But let us not get ahead of ourselves: This poem is about the very start of World War One, as Apollinaire experienced it.
Four things make the poem so strange. One I have already mentioned: it is a calligram, a visual poem. Second, it is celebratory: we are accustomed to think (rightly, I believe) that war is destructive, and that it should be bemoaned and not celebrated. [Walt Whitman welcomed the war with his early “Beat! Beat! Drums!” but would later see it as a locus of injury and death, as in “The Wound-Dresser,” which I wrote about in an earlier email.] Third, it is predictive, seeing the yet-to-happen war as an event of transformational power. As William Butler Yeats would write about an event occasioned by that war, “All is changed, changed utterly:/ A terrible beauty is born.”
The fourth thing: It seems to me, although of course the poem is written in French and we are reading an English translation (although I do read French), that Apollinaire is partly writing in the vernacular. As Wordsworth had put it so trenchantly a century before Apollinaire wrote (Wordsworth ushered in the new movement away from ‘poetic diction’), poetry should be written in a “selection of the language really spoken by men.” There are poetic passages in “the Little Car,” but the spoken vernacular is the armature of the poem. Of course, the Apollinaire poem also has, as we shall see, all sorts of ‘poetic diction’ and imagery. What makes the poem so unusual, in part, is this conjoining of both the vernacular and the poetic.
The vernacular and the specificity of journalism – ‘who what where when how’ – are on exhibit in the opening lines of the poem:
On the 31st day of August in the year 1914
I left Deauville shortly before midnight
In Rouveyre's little car
Including his chauffeur there were three of us
This is the start of journey which will end in Paris in the last stanza of the poem. The poem goes on to recount how Apollinaire and his friend Rouveyre and their driver set out from a harbor/beach/resort city on the English Channel in a vehicle and drove through northern France toward the nation’s capital.
Although there may be facts and the vernacular at the start, the poem quickly turns to poetic diction, replete with an abundance of metaphors:
We said goodbye to a whole epoch
Furious giants were looming over Europe
The eagles were leaving their eyries expecting the sun
Voracious fishes were swimming up from the abysses
Nations were rushing together to know each other through and through
The dead were trembling with fear in their dark dwellings
What do we see in these lines? In them, Apollinaire recognizes, to quote a recent Nobel Prize winner, that ‘the times they are a-changin’.” An epoch is over: war is replacing peace, and more importantly, modernity is transforming everything.
Modernity? Let me step away from the poem and fill in a bit of Apollinaire’s biography. He hung out with painters. Boy, did he hang out with painters. Picasso was his roommate. Apollinaire was a reviewer of art shows – the finest art critic of his time. He popularized the term ‘cubism’ to describe a new group of painters and what they tried to do with paint: Picasso, of course, and Braque and Gris and Léger and Metzinger and Duchamp. [I had a footnote here by the term ‘cubism,’ but I am not sure it will survive email, so here it is: Both “cubism”—its first nascent appearance was in 1907 in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and then as the guiding force of Georges Braque’s Houses at Estaque in 1908 – with its emphasis on fresh lines of vision’ and “ collage” – invented by Picasso in 1912, although here his colleague Georges Braque may have preceded him – are the proper contexts for the strange admixture of vernacular and poetic diction that we encounter early in this poem. ] Apollinaire invented another term you will be familiar with, ‘surrealism,’ when he described the cutting-edge ballet, Parade, by Erik Satie. He knew Gertrude Stein and Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau and Henri ‘Douanier’ Rousseau. He knew everybody, and in whatever way and venue ‘modernist art’ was invented, he was there and was one of the inventors.
Apollinaire saw change coming, not just in art but in society. It is all summed up in the first line of the stanza we are considering: “We said goodbye to a whole epoch.” Did he know that not only art but modern warfare with its machine guns and airplanes and barbed wire and trench warfare were coming, too? No, but he felt it. Everything was changing. “Furious giants were looming over Europe.” And the eagles and the fish knew it, knew it as both something new under the sun and something “voracious” (although that adjective specifically refers to the fish, and to the appetite for destruction that he senses they embody). Both the eagles, now leaving their nests to fly high into the light, and the deep-sea fish are rising, moving upward toward something momentous. I think he foresaw the cataclysm that would be World War One on this night-before-the-war, for even “The dead were trembling with fear in their dark dwellings.”
Whenever I read this stanza, what stands out to me is the line “Nations were rushing together to know each other through and through.” What can this mean? That war reveals the heart and soul and purpose of a nation? What can this mean? That war reveals the heart and soul and purpose of a nation? That only through martial conflict can we begin to ‘know’ reality? I never can explain exactly what this line ‘means,’ but then that is for me the heart of poetry: what is otherwise unutterable, in the poem stands before us incapable of explication, yet fully comprehended.
Then follows the longest stanza of the poem, a strange stanza in a strange poem. Part of it picks up on the metaphorical imagery we have just looked at, but part of it reproduces the vernacular tone and language with which the poem began:
The dogs were barking in the direction of the frontiers
As I went I carried within me all the armies that were fighting
I felt them rising within me and spreading out over the regions through which their columns wound
With the forests the happy villages of Belgium
Francorchamps and Eau Rouge and the pouhons
A region through which invasions are always taking place
And the railway arteries along which those who were going away to die
Saluted one more time a life full of coloursThe deep oceans where monsters were stirring
In old carcasses of wrecks
The unimaginable heights where men fight
Higher than the eagle soars
Man fights there against man
And falls suddenly like a shooting star
I felt within me new beings full of dexterity
Building a new universe and running it as well
A merchant of unheard-of-opulence and of prodigious stature
Was setting out an extraordinary display of stock
And gigantic shepherds were driving forward
Great dumb flocks grazing on words as they went
And at them barked all the dogs along the road
As the stanza begins, the dogs are literally barking as the car drives by. Yet these are also the ‘dogs of war’ that are howling as violence is about to be unleashed upon the populace of Europe. The eagles of the previous stanza, and the voracious fishes (now limned as “monsters” of the deep, arising out of the wrecks of the past), reappear here, conjoined with the tranquil countryside. As he car drives inland through the countryside the poet imagines land to the east, where much of the war will be fought: “the forests the happy villages of Belgium/ Francorchamps and Eau Rouge.” (I should note here that the poem is written after the event of the car ride and the beginning of the war; Apollinaire knew what transpired afterwards when he wrote the poem, but I treat huis narration nonetheless as an event contemporaneous with the start of the war.) But even as the poet imagines those happy villages he understands that war is coming, as it has always come: “pouhons” is a Belgian term for an spring of gasified water: the most famous ‘pouhon’ is in the town of Spa in Belgium. This is “A region through which invasions are always taking place,” the poet tells us with historical accuracy and immense predictive power (although, of course, the poem is written in retrospect.).
The language of war, the territory of the war that is about to begin, are specified. “And the railway arteries along which those who were going away to die/ Saluted one more time a life full of colours…” The poet knows that the troops will shortly be going off to war; these are the same routes invasion and counter-attack always take, now become the place where he foresees that rail lines will carry the troops toward battle. (The same rail lines would carry Jews to their death in concentration camps in the next world war.) Apollinaire knows fully that death is coming. He refers to the ancient Roman phrase, morituri te salutant, which means “we who are about to die salute you.”
Monochromatic death will replace the vibrancy of the world of colors, the world of forests and happy villages that he recalls as he traverses the French countryside. The fish stir and rise from the deeps, the eagles fly on high, yet even higher than them men will soar in the heroism that the coming war will enable. He feels all of this within him, within a consciousness which imagines through feeling the future which will come along with the war itself. We should note that he, Apollinaire the male poet who imagines the heroism of troops, is female here, pregnant with futurity, with armies marching. “I felt them rising within me and spreading out over the regions through which their columns wound.”
Happy towns, eagles soaring, voracious fish rising, armies marching…. “Man fights there against man.” It ends well and badly, both: death and heroism, men falling like shooting stars. We are, I think, back in Homeric times in his vision of the forthcoming war. For war is heroic, and its protagonists rise high and then fall heroically as the battle continues. Again, we want to note that metaphor of pregnancy, as futurity grows within him. “I felt within me new beings full of dexterity/ Building a new universe and running it as well.” He is summing up modernity in art, but also and more visibly the new world that will emerge from the bloody battles to come.
But Guillaume Apollinaire is not a simpleton. Just as he knows war is a locus of heroism, he knows that we are sold a bill of goods when we go to war. And that all too often we are gullible, led by shepherds who are moving us – “dumb” us – to our own destruction by means of rhetoric. We consume words as if we are sheep and the words are the grass growing beside the road. Note that these lines also recognize we are ‘sold’ war, as the merchants of destruction sell us dreams of – what? – nationalism and heroism and glory. The selling takes place through words. We consume them, docile and as willing to be led as sheep. Two images, the rich merchant selling us things, and a flock of sheep lead by figures so large they are hard to comprehend, dominate these rather cynical lines.
A merchant of unheard-of-opulence and of prodigious stature
Was setting out an extraordinary display of stock
And gigantic shepherds were driving forward
Great dumb flocks grazing on words as they went
And at them barked all the dogs along the road
The stanza ends as it began, with barking dogs.
I wrote at the start that this is a strange poem, and so it is. We encounter profound ambivalence here. The poem is a celebration of war as the entrance to something new and heroic (as my reference to Homer and the long-gone, heroic world of the Iliad indicated) and a simultaneous recognition that war is some sort of mercantile product sold to the gullible. The dogs keep barking as the three men ride onward toward the night.
Ah, they are riding. In a car. A little car. Now the poem soars. The image which appears before our eyes as we read the poem is both apt and funny; for all the talk about war, we are suddenly in a small car speeding along the dark French roads.
Let’s unpack the image. There is a road – the top and bottom lines.
I shall never
forget this journey by night during which none
of us said a word
O
dark O u
departure tender O h r
when our 3 night of vil towards which d r
headlights failed before the war lages e i
B L A C K S M I T H S R E C A L L E D
E M O R N I N G
B E T W E E N M I D N I G H T A N D O N E I N T H
n V
e a r e r s a
L i s i e u x or else illes the
the very g o l d
blue en
r s t t y r e
a n d 3 t i m e s w e h a d t o s t o p t o c h a n g e a b u
Most of their headlights are out, the lines tell us. It is night – the last night before the war, which will begin the next day. They are driving past villages – earlier he wrote of “the happy villages of Belgium,” although here the villages are of north-central France. As the poem tells us these things, the calligram uses the words to portray two riders and their chauffeur, who is steering the car with a steering wheel composed of the word “hurried.” The floorboards of the car are figured for us with a description of the mobilization as newspaper headlines would proclaim it: “BLACKSMITHS RECALLED.” The bottom of the car’s chassis presents us with the time of the mobilization, “BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND ONE IN THE MORNING.”
You can see the car and its riders, can’t you? The wheels remind us of the towns the car is passing through, Lisieux the blue and Versailles the gold; the “or else” is the putative axle between wheels. (Ah, cubism. The axle which goes between sets of wheels here links the front and back wheels [A realist might say this is the drivetrain, linking the front and back axles: but it looks like an axle to me!].) Then the concluding line with the image of three flat tires endured on the journey representing the road on which the car and its passengers are hurrying along, the road on which those flat tires occurred. Hurrying yet delayed. Minor catastrophe and the need to move forward, onward.
I love the image. I’m not much for concrete poetry: words alone are sufficient for me, or pictures alone. I don’t need them combined, since so often the combination is less than either is in isolation. In addition, concrete poetry often seems like a gimmick to me, a refuge for those who cannot make words do what words can do so well when imaginatively composed. But here the image is funny, a wonderful ballast to the heavy metaphorical elements the poet has been throwing at us. We are not overwhelmed, here, by the fishes, or the eagles, or the heroism, or the death, or the docile sheep: we are just riding along in a little car through the night.
There is a reason the poem is called “The Little Car” and not ’Auguries of a Coming War.’ The calligram is, for all of its seeming frivolity as an image that is almost juvenile, the heart of the poem. Riding into the future is part of our lives. There may be overtones of the poetic, but it is a trip like any other, and yet at the same time it is a trip that is memorable and transformative.
The rest of the poem is recapitulation. We started with a place, and now we end with a place, Paris, having gone through Fontainbleau. The mobilization which beckoned is starting. A mobilization towards which the poet has been hurrying.
And when having passed through Fountainbleau
During the afternoon
We got to Paris
At the moment at which the mobilization posters were going up
We understood my comrade and I
That the little car had brought us into a
New age
And that although we were both already fully grown men
We had nevertheless just been born
That little car? It was not so little after all. It not only brought them to Paris, it “had brought us into a/ New age.” At the start of the poem they “We said goodbye to a whole epoch” and now they are saying hello to a new one.
How does one end a poem such as this? I think Apollinaire does it brilliantly by referring to what he and his companion Rouveyre realize as they reach their destination. He is, and will be, reborn in this new age. He will be recreated by this coming war, even though ostensibly he is a “fully grown” man. Just as the car is much more than a conveyance to get them from one point to another, just as one epoch gives way to a new age, so the poet realizes that this voyage and the forthcoming war form the occasion for a change, a rebirth, a new beginning.
Do I like Apollinaire’s view of war in this poem? No. It comes too close to what the Marine Corps advertises about Marines, that war tests and even purifies men. But even as I resist it, I learn something in reading this poem, something that would be inaccessible to me if I only read what accords with my views and my likings. The world is not shaped to or by my liking. Some things exist even if I would prefer them not to be.
There is something magical about the poem, and the magic does not disappear even when I know that the poet will die of wounds suffered in the war whose arrival he is celebrating. Yeats wrote about the death of the son of a good friend of his in the First World War, a pilot who imagines his death as his plane is shot down:
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
This poem balances things for me, the heroism and excitement of war, the terrible destruction which ensues, the foolish things for which men fight. It captures a moment, and a feeling, I normally pretend to myself doesn’t exist. But it does exist, in Apollinaire.
Finally, I conclude – and not with happiness, though I love this poem – that Apollinaire is more visionary than I. He foresaw that there would be consequences for those who, like himself, were at the forefront of art and consciousness, who pushed forward into areas the rest of humanity do not want to think about.
But I don’t want to leave Apollinaire here. He was someone who inhabited the role of artist, the seer of the future, someone not hemmed in by conventional thinking. To my dismay he glorifies the struggle, but also realizes how destructive being engaged in the struggle, being on the cutting edge of the struggle, can be. He knows he deserves adulation, but ultimately what he asks for is pity. It is hard, fighting to remain on the cutting edge of change.
So let us conclude with lines from another of his poems. These lines appear near the ending of his last poem, concerning those who, like himself, “fight always on the frontiers/ Of the illimitable and the future.” These lines are deeply sad and at the same time brave. They come from “The Pretty Redhead,” as translated by James Wright. First, there are lines that tell us how hard his task has been; then, the last lines below conclude the poem:
All we want is to explore kindness the enormous country where everything is silent
And there is time which somebody can banish or welcome home
Pity for us who fight always on the frontiers
Of the illimitable and the future
Pity our mistakes pity our sins
……………………..
But laugh laugh at me
Men everywhere especially people from here
For there are so many things that I don't dare to tell you
So many things that you would not let me say
Have pity on me
I know that there are things I do not want Apollinaire to say, like that war can breed heroism, or that it can usher in a new age. But he, who died as a consequence of the war he writes about in “The Little Car,” also knew that in each of our hearts we can summon up pity for those who struggle, whether in the actuality of war or in the metaphorical conflict where the new seeks to break through the old. Walt Whitman wrote, famously, “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then, I contradict myself, ( I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
No matter how he disquiets me at times, I love Apollinaire for being able to contain the contradictions entailed in being human. And to write about himself and his times playfully and seriously, in the moment and yet with remarkable historical perspective. Only a very great poet could do that.