MAX JACOB

Thoroughgoing biography of a now-little-known French artist, writer, and collector of consequential friendships.

Overstuffed without being claustrophobic—in the manner of Roger Shattuck’s kindred study The Banquet Years—poet Warren’s book will introduce most readers to Max Jacob (1876-1944), someone, she writes, “I had never heard of.” Jacob was Breton, Jewish, gay, and Pablo Picasso’s first friend in Paris, and he served as an important link between the symbolists and the surrealists. He was a writer and painter himself, almost always broke, but he was generous with his money and time. To read this book is to confront a catalog of important writers, artists, and thinkers of the period, all of whom, it seems, Jacob knew: Modigliani, Éluard, Cocteau, Queneau, Leiris, Chagall, Braque…the list goes on. His homosexuality, which in those days could occasion scandal and imprisonment, was sometimes an issue, inasmuch as young men took advantage of his generosity and helped themselves to his money and social connections. He converted to Catholicism in an effort, it seems, to “cleanse his soul and ensure his salvation” while also clearing the slate for further erotic encounters: “As long as you don’t sin, you’re saved,” he wrote. “If you sin, you go to confession, you’re still saved.” The conversion, and his long residence in the monastic community of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, did not help when Vichy France and the occupying Nazis imposed racial laws on France that would have sent Jacob to Auschwitz had he not died of pneumonia before he could be transported there. Warren shows that, while not a giant like so many of his friends, Jacob was more central to France’s early-20th-century artistic and literary history than he has been given credit for. He was also a wonderful storyteller who, for one thing, composed a “mythic genealogy” linking a storied pistol of Picasso’s to Alfred Jarry when in fact the two never met.

An exemplary work of biography and intellectual history; essential reading for students of literary and artistic modernism.