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INTERVIEWER
It is claimed that you have served as a model [for the crowd of expatriate poets in Paris] and that you have strongly influenced certain American novelists.
CENDRARS
That’s absolutely false. If I’ve been able to influence this one or that without my or his knowledge, I haven’t served as a model. It’s Victor Hugo, it’s Maupassant who served as models for them when they came to establish themselves in Paris at the end of the other war. They came to France without an afterthought, be it as soldiers, ambulance drivers, diplomats; the war over, they sojourned for a time, short or long, in Paris, where certain ones stayed during the entire time between the two wars; they frequented Montparnasse, then Saintand if they were influenced it was rather by the ambiance, the air of Paris and the way of living in France rather than by this or that French author. John Dos Passos declared to me one day: “You have in France a literary genre that we don’t know at all in the United States, the grand reportage a la Victor Hugo.”
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 Download a PDF of the full interview |
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| Related Links |
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Guillaume Apollinaire, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Victor Hugo, Henry Miller, Robert Desnos, Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Flaubert, Jean Giraudoux, Sinclair Lewis, André Malraux, Gregório de Matos, Guy de Maupassant, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Gérard de Nerval, Nostradamus, Edouard Peisson, Jules Romains, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schopenhauer, William Seabrook, François Villon |
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