A Brief History of Portable Literature (2 page)

HOTEL SUICIDES

It seems to be historically constant that among founding members of secret societies, there is always one who likes to contradict the rest. In the Shandy’s case, all of those who dined in Port Actif were great lovers of life except for Rigaut, who declared himself, from the outset, on the side of death (“
Vous
êtes
tous de poètes et moi je suis du côte de la mort
”), more concretely of suicide, a word that would not be banished from the Shandy’s language until the day Rigaut—after vacillating for two years—committed suicide in an opulent hotel in the city of Palermo.

He took so long to come to this decision that he had time to witness the famous wave of youthful suicides in Paris in 1924, a trend sternly criticized by some of those who’d dined in Port Actif: “This whole thing of taking one’s life nowadays,” wrote Szalay, “seems to be the exclusive domain of willfully moronic youths, and the most youthful and moronic of all—or, at least, the one closest to us—is our impetuous Rigaut; something will have to be done about extreme youth and suicide, two words that currently seem intertwined and that are very much at odds with the portable spirit.” And Paul Morand, with clear reference to his friend Rigaut, concluded a lecture in Reims with these words: “Sirs, suicide is ridiculous. If one wishes to take one’s life it ought to be done in a timely manner, that is, when one is still a child; doing it any later is slightly ridiculous, for one can no longer be timid after the age of seven.”

Rigaut paid scant attention to his friends’ words: since coming back from Africa, suicide had become his one and only sacrament. He’d taken his first steps toward this definitive gesture in Port Actif. Without telling anyone, he walked off into the jungle and disappeared into a dark night of large trees. There, surrounded by the lush silence of the leaves, he invented the pretext of being hopelessly in love with Georgia O’Keeffe, as this would make suicide all the more tempting. He was sure his beloved would reject him outright, which, as it turned out, was quite right. But, as I’ve said, this didn’t prevent him from taking two more years to commit suicide.

It is also the case that, feeling enormously wretched and suicidal brought Rigaut’s sense of humor back, as can clearly be seen in this announcement, which, on returning from Port Actif, he drew up in Paris, attempting to publicize his General Suicide Agency (a singular office in the history of portable literature):

“Among other benefits, the
GSA
at last offers a reputable means of passing away, death being the least excusable of moral failings. That is why we have organized an Express burial service: including a banquet, a farewell to friends and relations, photograph (or death mask if preferred), distribution of effects, suicide, placement of body in coffin, religious ceremony (optional), transport of body to the ceremony. The
GSA
pledges to carry out the last wishes of its esteemed clients.”

Two months after the publication of this advertisement, Rigaut abruptly left his suicide office and set sail for America. His fondness for wistful comedies led him to the door of none other than William Carlos Williams (whom he supposed was O’Keeffe’s lover), where he tried to show his profound desperation as a jilted lover.

We have some very interesting details from his ocean voyage, during which he struck up a friendship with an elegant passenger, the photographer Man Ray, who years later would go on to recount the whole thing unsparingly in an amusing book called
Travels with Rita Malú
. Rigaut would be described as a pitiful and histrionic gentleman, pandering to a desperation that, ultimately, even he didn’t believe in, as his sense of humor gave him away on several occasions. For example, when Rigaut disembarked in New York, he felt compelled to publish this ad in the local press:

Poor, mediocre youth, 21 years old, clean hands, seeks matrimony with woman: 24 cylinders, healthy, erotomaniac, or fluent in Annamese, if possible surnamed O’Keeffe. Contact Jacques Rigaut, 73 Boulevard de Montparnasse, Paris. No permanent address in New York.

Once the ad was placed, he made his way to the house of William Carlos Williams, who, on opening the door and seeing the future suicide’s unhinged and grotesque countenance, couldn’t hold back his laughter. There Rigaut stood, bearing a bouquet of orchids, wearing pale makeup and the expression of a victim of an amorous, heart-piercing fever. This spectacle was ripe for a photograph, and Man Ray, who had accompanied Rigaut to the house, didn’t hesitate. His snapshot, when it circulated among the early Shandies, confirmed that there was no place in their secret society for this unwittingly ridiculous or put-on desperation of extreme youthfulness.

This meeting in a New Jersey doorway was also the start of a friendship between the North American poet and Man Ray. The latter (already friends with Duchamp) would in turn initiate a long lasting relationship with O’Keeffe and the exquisite Shandies. O’Keeffe, on her return from Port Actif, had patiently been enlisting from among the most select artists in New York, a city that, thanks to the nascent portable furor, was putting aside its provincialism.

Those who stood out among Georgia O’Keeffe’s friends were Walter Arensberg, Pola Negri, Prince Mdivani, Skip Canell, and Robert Johnson. This last seemed to Man Ray to be “marked by traces of a hollowing out, a rift, and the foreshadowing of death.” And he was clearly a very odd character.

For a long time, Johnson had been showing up to all engagements carrying a very light briefcase, which everyone thought contained his paintings in miniature, until it was discovered that it was a picnic case containing a soup tureen, four trays, twelve dishes, six glasses, and a baroque silver teapot.

But the oddest thing about Johnson was that, though reminiscent of Rigaut in certain ways, unlike him, he seemed in an enormous hurry to leave this world. On meeting him, Rigaut felt surprised, ashamed, and extremely unsettled in the face of a far more determined suicide. “Take a good look at me tonight,” Johnson said, “because I doubt you’ll see me again. In a few hours, I’ll no longer exist.” And indeed, soon after returning home, Johnson decided to finish the task he’d started long ago: consisting of a delicate piece of silversmithery. Johnson polished the handle of his baroque silver teapot until it was perfectly rounded and used it as a projectile with which to blow out his brains.

What Johnson could never have imagined was that his death transformed him into a kind of Werther in New York; the city—from one day to the next, in imitation of Paris—began to teem with suicidal youths. Dazzled by that death by baroque silver teapot, they flung themselves from suspension bridges, but not before writing droll letters to judges outlining the many reasons for giving up this life.

One of these suicidal youths, the brother of the sculptor Gaudier-Brezska, was thoughtful enough to dedicate the following admirable poem to his judge: “Tomorrow, the end. / The end, tomorrow. / Until tomorrow, the end. / The end, tomorrow. / To the end, tomorrow.”

The wave of suicides was so huge that Skip Canell, a close friend of Johnson’s, asked Rigaut—since he was a recognized authority on the subject of suicides—to publish without delay a call to young people, urging them to desist from such suicidal inclinations. So it was that, at the end of December, 1924, a letter to the editor appeared in the pages of
The New York Times
, written by Jacques Rigaut.

There’s nothing to live for, nor is there anything to die for. I would like, Mr. Editor, for this letter to make clear to the youth of your city that the only way to show disdain for life is to accept it. Life isn’t worth the trouble it takes to leave it. . . . Suicide is very comfortable, too comfortable:
I
haven’t committed suicide. I wouldn’t want to leave regretting not having taken with me the Statue of Liberty, or love, or the United States. I send my most energetic protest against this absurd wave of suspension-bridge suicides. Youth of New York: choose sumptuous hotels if you want to leave this life. Some hotels are, frankly, rather literary. (After all, the world of letters rests in the hotels of the imagination.) In Europe they’ve known this for a long time and consider suicides elegant only if they happen in places like the Ritz.

This letter led to an outrageous increase in the number of suicides as well as letters to judges (the opposite effect to what Skip Canell had hoped for). A letter written by Canell’s most beloved nephew is famous: “Your Honor, I’m pleased to tell you that I’ve chosen to commit suicide on the day when I’m due to inherit a large fortune from my uncle.”

According to Man Ray, Jacques Rigaut’s letter helped the Shandies uncover a new characteristic: a radical rejection of any idea of suicide as a benighted romantic tic. “Rigaut’s text,” he wrote, “made clear that, of all of us, he was the only one who believed in suicide. The rest of us were sure that a hydroplane, for example, was a million times more attractive than the wind-blown mane, the suicidal indigestion, of Heinrich von Kleist beside the green bay of the Wannsee.”

Out of the blue, one of the New York suicides had a profound effect on Rigaut. His best friend in the city, a concierge at the Ritz, hanged himself in the hotel lobby. Downcast and ashamed, Rigaut took his briefcase and hurried back to Paris, where he became hefty and his shadow (errant and voluminous) wandered the streets of Montmartre; he tried desperately to delay a suicide that seemed to him increasingly inevitable. He moved from one hotel to the next, accompanied by a beautiful black woman, Carla Orengo, and dragging a heavy trunk that was, actually, a writing bureau with two shelves for huge tomes, three drawers for documents, a compartment for the typewriter, and a folding table. Man Ray thinks that the weight of this trunk, which Rigaut realized wasn’t portable, could have been one of the reasons why he made up his mind, finally, to commit suicide, choosing the Grand Hotel in the city of Palermo as the place to do it.
*
 

It was at the end of 1926 that Rigaut installed himself in this hotel, having taken measures to ensure he’d never return to Paris. In the trunk’s drawers were all manner of barbiturates, which he constantly ingested, trying to kill himself, plunging into a great orgy of pills as though he’d now taken a liking to death, which previously he’d so feared.

The morning he was supposed to leave his hotel to go to Kreuzlingen for a detoxification cure, he was found dead. In spite of his extreme weakness, he’d dragged himself and his mattress to the door adjoining Carla Orengo’s room. This door had always been open, but was found locked with a key. (One final gesture on a mattress, as grotesque as it was indecipherable.)

Man Ray says that when the news arrived in Paris the Shandies thought that thereafter, in the bosom of the secret society, they ought to avoid other capricious suicides and disseminated an array of texts about the perfection of Rigaut’s suicide. They thought that if they said this one was impossible to improve upon, future portables would discard the idea of trying to better Rigaut. Blaise Cendrars, for example, wrote: “In the hotel in Palermo, the key, the bolt, and that closed door formed—in that moment and indubitably forever—an enigmatic triangle: both offering and denying us Rigaut’s deed. In any case, an insuperable suicide. My friends, I recommend not attempting to better it, for that would be an impossible task, and there would be nothing worse than killing yourself and making a fool of yourself, and, to top it all off, not even knowing you’d done that.”

In the opinion of Maurice Blanchot—in
Faux Pas
, he
briefly but lucidly analyzed the portable phenomenon—the proliferation of texts that sought to eradicate suicide weren’t attempts to convince others, but rather the authors themselves. Blanchot was very likely correct in a number of cases. For example, in the poem Prince Mdivani wrote in a stationary submarine, “And the Mattress?,” his quill must have trembled, or he was going insane, or, simply, he was in a deep panic at feeling tempted by suicide. Whatever it was, he wrote these inept verses dedicated to Rigaut’s barbiturates: “Phanodorme, Variane, Rutonai. Hipalène, Acetile, Somnothai. Neurinase, Veronin, Goodbye.” Paul Morand, never less than witty, construed this poem as “something truly brilliant, as it has revealed to me the possibility of realizing suicide in the process of writing.”

To realize suicide in the process of writing. What came into the world as an ironic comment ended up becoming a principle agreed upon by all members of the secret society. It was very clear, from then on, that suicide could only be realizable on paper. Antonin Artaud, for example, responded in this way to a surrealist inquiry, where those interrogated had to give their opinion on the subject of taking one’s life: “But what would you say to an anterior suicide, one which made you retrace your steps, not to the side of death, but
to the other side of existence
. This is the only suicide that would have value for me. I have no appetite for death, but I have an appetite for not existing, for never having fallen into this interlude of imbecilities, abdications, renunciations, and obtuse encounters . . .”

Although initially, as we’ve seen, each Shandy with his drama was to understand that he’d come down on the side of death, soon it would become clear that suicide was not a solution, but nor was it nothing. It could only be realized in the same space as writing: whether, as we’ll see, by repeating the most radical silence, or indeed by transforming oneself into a literary character, or by betraying language itself, or by drinking liquor strong as molten metal, or by steering off into trompe l’œil or optical illusions, or certain kinds of smoke and mirrors. These were portable solutions to suit all tastes, to put aside this language of death that, two years before, wandering around Montmartre, carrying a trunk and some sort of bundle, Rigaut had discovered. He had done so deep in impressions of Africa (those of Port Actif), where, it seems, the whole thing began.