MAX JACOB by MARIA GREEN

FOREWORD

This Web-Site is based on my Max Jacob collection. I started it when in 1979 I was invited by the review Les Littératures au Tournant du Siècle to write an article on Max Jacob’s critical reception. I collected so much material, books, special issues, articles, photocopies by and on Max Jacob that they enabled me to publish not only the article in 1982, but also to do foundation work for my first Bibliography of Max Jacob, published in 1988. I worked with the help of Interlibrary loans and doing research in Canadian, American, French, British, Danish, German, Swedish and Hungarian libraries.

When I was annotating several Max Jacob correspondences and an Anthology of his prose in English translation, I took notes, classifying the poet’s writings, according to themes, on index cards. In his letters, Max Jacob wrote often about his friends and certain authors whose books he was just reading. I did research on those friends and authors as well and took notes on cards with the same method. Finally, his opinion of his poems and his detailed description of his particular astrological method for writing his prose work, along with the assessment of his publications by critics (whom he called ‘esthéti-chiens’), became the third group of my collection.

My large collection of works by and on Max Jacob helped me to publish a second and recently a third Bibliography, with the contribution of Christine Andreucci. In the three bibliographies, I encouraged Max Jacob scholars to turn to me for photocopies, and I had many requests from France, England, the U.S.A. and Italy. However, I thought that after my death nobody would do this service and the collection of about ten thousand cards would become useless. To overcome this problem, I decided to put my cards with my notes on computer and produce, with the help of the University of Saskatchewan, a Web-Site that would be available to present and future scholars.

Typing out 670 pages, verifying and correcting four times the whole text was an arduous task, but, at the same time a labour of love. I hope that Max Jacob scholars all over the world will find it useful and will share it in the same spirit with others.

I would like to express my thanks to all those who helped me to complete this project.. Hélène Henry kept the work up-to-date, providing me with all new French publications. Christine Andreucci, Andrea Bedeschi, Moishe Black, Elizabeth Carr, Bertrand du Chambon, Didier Gompel, David Kennedy, Anne Kimball, Adriano Marchetti, Neal Oxenhändler, Christopher Pilling, Noriyuki Nishiyama, Una Pfau, Dominique Prédal, Dr. Alain Ségal, Rosanna Warren sent me their publications, special issues, unpublished letters, photocopies and Hélène Seckel the very useful catalogue of the Max Jacob et Pablo Picasso exhibition. From the Hungarian National Library, I received everything they had in connection with my favourite poet. Guillemette Andreu, Claude Bourdois, Suzy Fels, and Dr. Alain Ségal invited me to their homes to show me their collections. For technical help, I am grateful to Mike Bone, Larry Fillo, Mawuli Kuivi and Dastageer Sakhizei. For help from the University of Saskatchewan, my thanks go to Hans Michelmann and Linda Schoen. Without the work of John Wallace and the Arts and Science Computer Labs, of the University of Saskatchewan, this Web-Site would never have been produced.