A Brief History of Portable Literature (6 page)

These happy stories are kindred in spirit to those Blaise Cendrars gathered in his
Anthologie nègre
: an impulsive, puerile book—lucid and hungry for destruction—that took him no more than five days to write. This is exactly the time it took the Shandies to disguise themselves as figures carved into the flagpoles of African huts and to regroup—secretly, ardently—in the dark, broken ice kingdoms of Prague.

POSTCARD FROM CROWLEY

But somehow every attempt always failed;
there was a traitor in the group.

—Jorge Luis Borges

“Here in Prague,” Crowley wrote to Francis Picabia (who’d been awaiting word in Paris), “we came close to turning into ghosts. Seeing that more than one of us went mad and felt a desire to traverse the thick walls, I came to think we’d all end up turning into invisible beings, only able to recognize ourselves at night by our white dance scarves.

“All of it was down to Céline’s antics. Having convinced himself that the conspiracy would be nothing without a traitor to jeopardize it, he decided to play that thankless role and systematically began to raise his voice during our stealthy café meetings.

“Not content with this, he began to write a book,
Le vrai nom du complot portatif
, which opened with a recollection that among the ancient Egyptians, everyone had two names: their inconsequential name (known to all) and their true or great name, which they kept hidden. After reminding the reader that the name of Rome was also secret, he went on to reveal the real name of our portable society. He did! That name which you now shudderingly recall!

“One afternoon, Valery Larbaud and five other colleagues visited Céline in his hotel and discovered this manuscript. To find it they had to go inside a tent he’d set up in the middle of his room. Enraged,
Larbaud reminded him of Quintus Valerius’s fate when, in the last days of the Republic, he was executed for revealing Rome’s true name.

“Duchamp, Tzara, Vallejo, everyone there, made it clear to him that he might share Quintus Valerius’s fate, but Céline’s response was to smile the twisted smile of one who knows how to make the foulest, most underhanded intentions smell sweet. Faced with this attitude, they burned the tent and, with it, the manuscript.

“Céline barely flinched. He seemed very comfortable in his role as the traitor, and, a few days later, he showed up again at Café Slavia, the place where we met every afternoon. He came in shouting, flanked by two professors from Madrid, even more bothersome and clingy than he was. One of them boasted of having translated Joyce into Spanish—which couldn’t but fill us with misgivings since, as you well know, it was quite a while ago that Joyce parted company with us, thinking he’d have to pay a monthly membership fee. The other professor, who went by the surname Diego, claimed he was a Castilian seafarer, and proceeded to discourse on Greenland’s solitary inlets, and about certain hot springs at the North Pole. An utter bore, believe me!

“We had a few truly awful days of being pursued by these clingy professors, who, in concert with the traitor, even came to defy us when we went out to Prague’s purlieus, its most sequestered spots. We couldn’t find a way to shake off these damned professors, who were clearly spying on us. This made many of our number feel like turning into ghosts or invisible beings. And this added to the numbers taking part in the secret expedition to the International Sanatorium, situated on the outskirts of the city, where I’m writing you from today.

“Here, away from the persecution of the traitor and his underlings, we’re on a run of extraordinary, feverish creativity. All thanks to this attempt to betray us. And also in part thanks to the owner and director of the Sanatorium, whom we call Mr. Marienbad, because he doesn’t want his true name revealed to anyone.

“I do not believe you’d like Marienbad. This is a man who always wears new clothes. He is a poor conversationalist, an indefatigable chatterbox. He wears an enormous, carefully sculpted beard that makes him seem all the more corpulent. He subsists on buttermilk, rice pudding, and slices of banana with butter. A lover of women, he conceals, with his unctuous ways, a brutal disposition, in turn betrayed by his flat feet, his spatula-like fingernails, his steady gaze, and ecstatic smile.

“A scientist, man of the world, and gymnastics buff, he goes around to the international gymnastics meets escorted by a number of his nurses, who, under his personal supervision, frequently win all the top prizes. Marienbad is something akin to a demagogical toiler, tirelessly churning out heavy tomes not in the least bit portable and filled with banalities; he is nonetheless growing accustomed to seeing his massive volumes published and immediately translated into several languages. Innumerable newspaper pieces have spread his name, and it would not be surprising if with his new venture, the Anonymous Kafka Society, he goes on to achieve even greater renown.

“And the thing is, Marienbad loves money. I’ve been able to find out that he kidnapped his wife a number of years ago, a rich Jewish hunchback with an enormous dowry, which he used to set up the International Sanatorium. Although his love of lucre is considerable, he lets us stay at the Sanatorium for free. Occasionally, one of us will make an effort and tell him a story, or simply engage him in conversation to give him a chance to let loose his balderdash. That’s more than enough to keep Marienbad happy.

“He’s a perfect fool, but his hospitality comes in very handy. Walter Benjamin, for instance, has used the time to start designing a promising machine that will be able to detect any book that might be boring or bothersome, that, even in miniature, wouldn’t fit into a small suitcase.

“It is a very complex machine, complete with contraptions frankly unfamiliar to me: tibaida lenses, focal compartments, copper cuffs, oval cylinders, metal buttons, metal stoppers, magnetized needles, bolts, and iron jugulars.

“Walter Benjamin is sure the design will be complete in less than a month. Apparently, the method for weighing texts consists of putting a book in this cylindrical penitentiary and letting an immense, round lens look it over. Portable books will be immediately released through this black cylinder, heavy in appearance; positioned vertically on the ground, it will have a large spherical light bulb on top with the words
CONTRA GRAND STYLE
on it. A blue light emanating from the bulb will be visible even in bright sunlight. The book’s emotional-mechanical vibration will turn the light bulb off for a fraction of a second, showing that the glass is colorless and that the light itself is actually blue. In turn, this light will reveal the inscription
VIVA VERMEER
at the machine’s highest point—in twenty-seven different languages if possible—thus saluting effusively the recently liberated portable books.

“Otherwise, I’ve also managed to find out that Tristan Tzara has begun writing a brief history of portable literature: a kind of literature that, by his reckoning, is characterized by having no system to impose, only an art of living. In a sense, it’s more life than literature. For Tzara, his book contains the only literary construction possible; it is a transcription made by someone unconvinced by the authenticity of History and the metaphorical historicity of the Novel. Employing greater originality than most novels, the book will offer sketches of the Shandy customs and life. Tzara’s aim is to cultivate the imaginary portrait (a form of literary fantasia concealing a reflection in its capriciousness), to endeavor in the imaginary portrait’s ornamentation.

“You also ought to know that Berta Bocado—moved by a sudden ambitiousness—is attempting to construct a total book: a book of books encompassing all others, an object whose virtues the years will never diminish. As ever, Bocado is being very absentminded, seeing as her book will be anything but portable.

“In fact, we’re all making things. More than artists—which has a hollow, pompous ring to it—we are artisans, people who make things. An air of happy creativity pervades the rooms at the International Sanatorium. We barely see each other, since, being artisans, we take refuge in our individuality; but occasionally a polar wind blows through, bringing us all together in the central courtyard, where we smile in our thick overcoats and exchange complicit glances. A word will occasionally break the silence, and we feel ourselves straighten up like spears scaling the lofty heights and we inundate the shadows. Victory is not ours, but we fight on—silence against silence—because we know heaven never scorns ambition.

“So go the days. The occasional furtive courtyard exchange gives me an idea of how things are going with the others; this is how I found out, for example, that Scott Fitzgerald has completed a novel about a person named Gatsby, a man confronting his past as he moves inexorably into nothingness.

“George Antheil is working on his
Ballet Mécanique
, a Shandy musical par excellence. At the same time, he has turned painter and draughtsman of the miniscule: of the thousand hairs in a braid or the iridescence of a coupling, for example. He sleeps in the same room as William Carlos Williams, who, less like an American every day, entertains himself trying to solve all the arcane mysteries, with recourse to a frame made of asymmetric, revolving, concentric discs, subdivided according to the Latin words on them.

“His ex-lover, Georgia O’Keeffe, is still scheming away. She says she has been going around the theatres of an invisible city, that her imagination—voracious as gravity—is the epicenter of her convulsive passions and aversions.

“Gombrowicz is writing his first book, some nonsense to do with a ballerina: seemingly an extraordinarily brief book, that is incoherent, absurd, and, in its own way, magnificent.

“Your beloved Duchamp is drafting an essay on miniaturization as a means of fantasy. The text seems to have been conceived as a continuation of something Goethe began writing, called ‘The New Melusine’ (which is part of
Wilhelm Meister
), about a man who falls in love with someone—in reality a tiny woman, who has temporarily been made normal size, and who, without knowing it, is carrying a box containing the kingdom that she’s the princess of. In Goethe’s story the world itself is reduced to a collectible item, an object in the most literal sense. For Duchamp—like the box in Goethe’s tale—a book is a fragment of the world, but it is also a small world in itself, a miniaturization of the world inhabited by the reader.

“All, as you can tell, have embarked on sharp, frenetic, desperate, portable projects—all, that is, except for Beta Bocado. Even Savinio (always the lead exponent of occasional slothfulness, that highly portable trait) has been working tirelessly and is immersed in a project as Shandean as it is unfathomable. So fed up has he become with encyclopedias that he’s making his own, for his own personal use. I personally think it’s a good thing; I mean, take Schopenhauer: he was so fed up with the histories of philosophy that he ended up inventing his own, for
his
own personal use.

“It seems increasingly clear to me that we, the portables, were placed on earth to express the most secret and recondite depths of our nature. This is what sets us apart from our tepid contemporaries. And I believe us to be profoundly linked to the spirit of the age, with the latent problems plaguing it and defining its tone and character. We are always dual in appearance, because of just how much we simultaneously embody the old and the new. The future that so profoundly concerns us, we are also rooted in. We have two speeds, two faces, two ways of interpreting things. We are a part of transition and flux. Versed in a new style, our language is voluble, zany, and cryptic. As cryptic as this postcard, which is nearing its end: a postcard that, at heart, claims to do no more than inform you of our great creative fever and our constant bid to exalt a love of brief literary creations; a postcard lauding free and unobstructed language and denouncing any book that makes universal or pretentious claims.

“I spoke to you about ‘the most secret and recondite depths of our nature.’ These corrosive secret depths are mentioned by Rimbaud in the following memorable verses:
HYDRE INTIME
, sans gueules, / Qui mine et desole
. This is what afflicted him and is so disturbing to us, poorly adapted to madness as we are.

“To finish, decipher this, my dear racing car: life here in the International Sanatorium is like a murder sweet as snow, that is, cold venom covering desolate icy expanses on white nights of venerable silk.

“Yours, with more to follow, from he who idles, twirls, and dwindles upon farewell’s futile brink.”
*
 

ALL DAY ON THE DECK CHAIRS

Francis Picabia shouldn’t have been so alarmed by Crowley’s postcard. In fact the traitor’s text wasn’t as dangerous as it might have seemed. Properly considered, it at most betrayed something that was not overly worrying. Many of the Shandies had, at the International Sanatorium, already realized that the portable ensemble would have to disappear sooner or later; this was a fact of life and, in fact, something very much to be desired, as the conspiracy would become the stunning celebration of something appearing and disappearing with the arrogant velocity of the lightning bolt of insolence.

Duchamp, receiving a letter from Picabia at the Sanatorium informing him of the traitor’s existence, tried to make him see as much. He wrote back saying that Crowley’s postcard was a rousing document, a capricious text, no less, a living, breathing embodiment of Shandyism.

Indeed, the postcard displayed a sublime concern for maintaining an industrious attitude among the Shandies, and this was profoundly portable: aside from the odd period of extraordinary laziness, the portables were always keeping busy, always trying to put in more work that speculated frequently on their lives as tireless artists. A large number of the texts they produced ended up featuring curious sections with recipes for how to work: the ideal conditions, the timing, the utensils. The massive correspondence they kept up among themselves—both oral and written—was always
partly animated by a desire to chronicle the work’s existence: to inform, to confirm it.

Additionally, the Shandies’ instincts as collectors served them well. They learned partly by collecting, as with the quotations and extracts from their daily reading, which they accumulated in notebooks they carried with them everywhere, and which they often read in their conspiratorial café meetings. Thinking was also a way of collecting for them, at least in the early days. They would meticulously note down their extravagant ideas; they’d advance mini-essays in letters to friends; rewrite plans for future projects; write down dreams; and they would carry numbered lists of all the portable books they read.

But how was it that the joyful, voluble, and zany Shandies willed themselves to become heroes? My view is that it was because of the way work can become a drug, a compulsion: “thinking is eminently narcotic,” as Walter Benjamin wrote.

A need for solitude—along with bitterness about that solitude—was very common among the Shandies, joyful, voluble workers that they were. To move their work forward, they had to be solitary, or at least not form any permanent bonds. Their negative feelings toward matrimony were clearly outlined in numerous pieces of writing. Their heroes—Baudelaire, Kafka, Roussel—never married. Some of the Shandies who functioned as bachelor machines were married, but ended up thinking their marriages “fatal” to them. The world of nature, of natural relations, did not appeal to them as bachelor machines. Generally, they all hated children. Walter de la Mare actually threw his son out the window and later wrote that, for him, what is natural (when bound up by the family) ushers in the falsely subjective, the sentimental. “It was,” wrote Walter de la Mare, “a bloodletting of the will, of independence, of freedom, in order to focus on the work.”

The Shandy way of working meant immersion, focusing on the job. “One is either immersed, or one’s thoughts float off,” wrote Juan Gris. This partly explains why the Shandies installed themselves in the
Bahnhof Zoo
, a stationary submarine: they were looking for this immersion, or focus on their work. Focus, however, entails risks and ends up creating Odradeks, golems, Bucharesters. Creatures of all kinds populated the solitude of those, who, in fraught coexistence with their doppelgängers, set themselves apart in order to work.

Not even in the International Sanatorium did the Shandies manage to escape being constantly harried by these creatures—a conspiracy parallel to
HYDRE INTIME
—and this prompted their decision to travel to Trieste, since they thought, naively, a Mediterranean setting would disorientate their pursuers (beings that must be more disposed to mysterious Czech mists than to the diaphanous blues of the Adriatic shores). But the Shandies didn’t take into account Trieste’s thick, obstinate mists and, following a hazardous stay in that city, they ended up making their way back to Paris.

Upon arriving in Paris, the Shandy travelers were anxious, having confirmed the existence of the parallel plot in Trieste. They were anxious and even deformed. Meyrink, for example, looked like a cabin boy. Littbarski was dressed like a Japanese sailor. Salvador Dalí was constantly scanning the horizon for his own personal Moby Dick. Rita Malú went around dressed as a frigate. Robert Walser looked like he’d stepped straight off the
Potemkin
.

Clearly, a maritime delirium. Larbaud collected toy boats, Prince Mdivani messages in bottles, and Pola Negri photographs of whales with prey gripped between their teeth. A maritime delirium led them to mistake Paris for a gigantic country house. This led to a number of incidents with those Shandies who had remained there, but the dust didn’t take long to settle. In Trieste, the portable travelers had intoned the first hymns to boredom and inconstancy in art (doubtless an anti-hysterical reaction to so much hard work). Those portables anchored in Paris’s terra firma only had to make a gesture in praise of idleness for the newcomers to consider brokering a peace that would reunify the secret society.

On the day Marcel Duchamp declared that parasitism was one of the fine arts, peace was made during a dinner at La Coupole in honor of Pyecraft, an H. G. Wells character; this fictional character was portable
avant la lettre
, seeing as he lost weight but not mass, and fearing he’d float up to the sky, he left home with flat discs of lead sewn into his underclothes, lead-soled boots, and a bag full of solid lead.

Carrying my own bag full of lead, I went last week to the island of Corsica, hoping to free myself of the portables for a few days. I thought a clear consequence of my Shandy obsession and my daily dedication to writing on the subject was the creeping paralysis overtaking my Olivetti Lettera 35. I felt I’d earned a rest and the right to lose myself in an always gratifying chapter of idleness.

But it was terrible what happened to me. I saw, for example, a miniature of Napoleon—Ajaccio’s local hero. I was not only immediately reminded of the Shandy enjoyment of anything small, but also the thought came to me of how small one of the portables, Robert Walser, felt when, in one of his books, he imagined himself as an infantry soldier in Bonaparte’s army: “I would only be a little cog in the machine of a great design, not a man anymore . . .”

Everything I saw and thought, I instantly and unavoidably related to the world of the Shandies. For instance, I lay on a deck chair by the sea and immediately remembered that the portables spent whole days on deck chairs in the city of Trieste, not to relax after working so hard, but because they had no choice if they wanted to get free of their Odradeks (these creatures wouldn’t hover around as long as their hosts gave themselves over to indolence).

There was no way for me to forget about the Shandies, perhaps because my obsession was also portable; and also, after spending so many days and nights wading in Shandy waters, portability was like an ocean, seemingly endless. It carried on moving and taking me with it.

My patience ran out after I had a nightmare: slightly warped versions of Aleister Crowley’s experiences in Trieste appeared to me in my dream. The nightmare had a theatrical prologue featuring infinitely immoral spectacles, which were presented to me as puritanical. When the curtain fell—with Duchamp’s Shandean box-in-a-suitcase drawn on it—the character presenting the prologue disappeared, along with the immoral spectacles, and I saw silver deck chairs with golems slithering across them in pursuit of Odradeks, who, in turn, pursued femmes fatales, paddling from beach to beach in kayaks until reaching a black oily sea with professors from Madrid sailing miniature versions of ocean liners. The ships rather resembled Bucharesters rescued from the tombs of monks that had been ravaged in Sepastopol.

Suddenly, in anguish, just as the Odradeks, their golems, the femmes fatales, the Bucharesters, the monks, and the professors from Madrid all attached themselves stickily to my shoulders, I woke up. Looking in the mirror, I was relieved to see not Crowley but someone researching the secret Shandy society. No, I said to myself, I wasn’t Crowley. (I repeated this one hundred times.) After that, I decided I’d go back to Barcelona that very afternoon and simply try to forget the effort involved trying to put the Shandy world behind me.

Back, then, to my brief—or, if you prefer, my interrupted—history. In
The Bucharesters
—his account of his time in Trieste—the Satanist Aleister Crowley presents his research on Bucharesters as a pretext to hammer on mercilessly about the portables, though not expressly mentioning them. Instead, he uses the enigmatic term “Bocángels.”
*

It’s an extremely annoying book, made up of twenty-seven fragments in which Aleister Crowley unscrupulously repeats, in twenty-seven different ways, that the Bocángels spent all day on deck chairs, and with what great difficulty he bore the weight of the sticky, not at all imaginary, tribe that had attached to his shoulders. This made him sway when he walked. It’s a book that seems custom made to mock anyone looking for information about the portables’ stay in the frontier city of Trieste. Here, for example, is an excerpt chosen at random:

“Trieste or the province as spectacle. I write in a bad mood after having walked the length of the Aqueduct and greeted Mr. Italo Svevo, the person least like the Bocángels of anyone. The afternoon is cold and the sky is clear, despite the
sirocco
that has been weighing on the city since this morning. It seems impossible that the consumptive carnival happening here—which began this afternoon with a
bal masque
—can resist the cold and damp. It’s a poor carnival, and my playmates, my beloved Bocángels, have spurned it. The only things they like are the deck chairs. Elusive sky of Trieste! Unhappy city where I would rather not have been, because I found in an evil hour that every Odradek has its golem and every golem its Bucharester! The latter, I would like to emphasize, are beings from Romania, tiny, terrifying, and constantly attached to their masters, the golems. Here in Trieste, I would rather not be, because my own personal Odradek frequently settles on my left shoulder, accompanied by its corresponding golem, with a Bucharester also attached. On my right shoulder, my femme fatale and a professor from Madrid named Bérgamo attempt to offer the appropriate counterweight so I won’t sway fiercely when I walk. Even so, I’m always swaying. The extraordinary epaulettes of my black satin jacket—black is the color of wisdom, being a concentration of all extant colors—did nothing to disguise the weight on my shoulders. On this day I decided (purely on a whim), to set out on an adventure, which, paradoxically, would be nothing if there weren’t so many obstacles to overcome, or if the weight of the beings weren’t so great, those beings who brazenly (resting on my shoulders) tried to impede it.”

It’s impossible to read Crowley and not feel constantly incredulous at all the fireworks, for instance, the unleashing of so many Bucharesters. Nonetheless, when we compare his text with Walter Benjamin’s (
The Last Moment of European Intelligence
) or Man Ray’s (
Travels with Rita Malú
), or Tristan Tzara’s, it is surprising to see that the three concur, to a large degree, with Crowley’s speculations.

“In Trieste,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “the rooms of the hotel I lived in were almost all taken by Tibetan lamas who had come to the city for a pan-Buddhist convention. The number of doors left slightly ajar caught my eye. What at first seemed like coincidence ended up seeming mysterious to me. Then I found out they were members of a sect sworn never to dwell within closed spaces. I’ve never been able to forget the fright I felt. Someone whispered in my ear that these Tibetan lamas were, in fact, our Odradeks, and could be seen by day in the streets of Trieste, moving in the background, hidden in shacks, bordellos, cheap restaurants, pretending to be beggars, one-eyed men, out-of-work sailors, thugs, drug dealers, or doormen at brothels.”

Man Ray wrote: “During our stay in Trieste, we weren’t shocked by monstrousness itself, but rather just how evident it was. This is why we took refuge on the deck chairs—what a relief to regress back to infancy and discover laziness anew! We were careful not to move too much. And slowly, inexorably, it became clear that we were accompanied on our travels by the shadows of a parallel conspiracy, phantasmagorical but perceptible, led by beings that were not of flesh and blood; unlike ours, this conspiracy had an objective: it sought nothing less than the destruction of our secret society. Weird bastards they were, not of women born, dwelling, variously, in lofts, stairwells, corridors, vestibules, and also on our shoulders, even, sometimes, inside our brains.”

In the opinion of Maurice Blanchot—who looks briefly at the portable phenomenon in
Faux Pas
—the “weird bastards” referred to by Man Ray were no less than the forms assumed by forgotten things; these things become distorted, unrecognizable, but nevertheless travel with us, alongside us: things in sad abandoned places, occasionally penetrating our brains, gathering together in perfect silence (“the silence of the stealthy,” to quote
Tristram Shandy
, “who listen in on those, who, at one time, thought they were the only stealthy ones”).

But in my opinion, there’s also the chance these phantasms in the brains of the portables may have simply been the literature they produced. In any case, what’s beyond question is that all the portables were aware of the existence of the parallel conspiracy, which shows they placed a very high value on art’s secret demand: that the artist must know how to surprise, and be surprised by, what, though impossible,
is
.