“Adventure in itself does not exist,” and dwells only “in the mind of the one who pursues it.”1 Writing from his Montmartre perch in early twentieth-century Paris, Pierre Mac Orlan (1882-1970)’s take on “adventure” —and on most any other thing involving human beings— is somehow both all-encompassing and tongue-in-cheek. He jars the modern mind, then stirs. What a relief!
His some 130 books, not to mention his sixty-five songs for the accordion, show a bit of range. He explores human penchants and the ubiquity of absurdity, but also erotica, war, criminality, and —as our opening excerpt suggests— the very notion of “adventure” and its manifest fruition, the adventure story.
Any would-be knight errant in this or any world soon confronts a choice, Mac Orlan proposes: to live or to write.
Amidst the tedious distinctions that might be drawn between kinds of people and their temperaments, Mac Orlan observes, only two matter in the case of the “adventurous.”
Spare a (passing) thought for our author’s first category. For we’ve all been conditioned to admire this figure, to embrace his aims, and even aspire to travel as he (yes, yes, its a presumptive “he,” a repetitive “him,” for Mac Orlan and his contemporaries) incessantly seems to do. The “active adventurer” pushes outward, a discontent, always leaving. When he’s not a tumbleweed drifting across the high plain, he adores the sea, its horizons, its beaches to cross, its islands, its sojourns in port cities. He accepts love, but is immune to others’ need of refuge and recovery. His arenas are abroad, in a vast beyond. He faces all manner of monster, and displays courage at moments when mere mortals would turn tail and run. Unschooled, and not even very clever, he nevertheless embodies capacity. He is dashing in appearance, and draws on bottomless reserves of energy.
He is impressive, in short, and exhausting . . . and decidedly not the star of Pierre MacOrlan’s show.
That star would be category number two, the “passive adventurer.” The gentle reader will by now not be surprised to learn that Mac Orlan reveals this figure to be a watcher, and something of a parasite.
When he’s not seeking out tales in many languages in sailors’ bars, as much as in archives, he’s marvelling over what we might call truth’s insider-relationship with fiction.
The passive adventurer lives to take in, and then to embroider what happened.
If he’s worth his salt —one of his favourite expressions, by the way— he invents not only new beginnings, middles, and endings for the premises and stories he has picked up, but also their blind alleys and dead ends.
You might have seen him about, the passive adventurer. Here and there.
In some candle-lit corner of the (your and his) imagination.
But he doesn’t get out much, in truth. Above all, the passive adventurer is reading.
“Installed in a comfortable apartment
like a pit in the centre of a fruit,
the passive adventurer awaits the anonymous actions
of those who were led by a bad star
into the troubles of adventure.”2
* watercolour and photograph (back table at the Café de Eland (one of only three independent bars in the city), Prinsengracht at Elandsgracht, Amsterdam, NL) by Kenneth Mills
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Pierre Mac Orlan, A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer, trans. Napoleon Jeffries (Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, [1920; 1951], 2013), 7.
A Handbook, 18.
Every passive adventurer needs the right chair!
Beautiful, Kenneth! This really touched me. What comes to mind here, with that moody candle photo, is that when the courageous, "pushing out" is over, when the tumbleweeds are too old to drift any more, they are so thankful for the passive adventurers, those who will listen to their tales. They write their memories, wanting more than anything to put the armchair travelers on the boat, the train, the back of a camel with them. It gives the once active adventurer a chance to feel, see, hear again their life experiences on the road. Thank you for writing this interesting piece.