A Brief History of Portable Literature (8 page)

I’ve always enjoyed taking literally what Paul Klee tells us at the end of his ship’s log. It’s always been pleasing to me to believe that, indeed, Death showed up in the early hours, with its skeleton and its scythe, curious to find out what was going on inside that submarine. Three surprises awaited It. The first was finding that what was aboard the
Bahnhof Zoo
was reminiscent of Livy’s splendid description of the destruction of Alba Longa with its inhabitants roaming the streets, bidding farewell to the stones. The second surprise was seeing rainfall at the bottom of the sea and “a thick tear falling, deliberately overflowing itself, like a ghost of itself, making as though to extinguish itself with a vague gesture of forgetting, in a reasonable sea, where the rain was slow and slanting, and what was weeping was prose . . .”

As for the third surprise, it was considerable, and put to flight poor, powerless Death. Death decided to go into the Malabar Salon, and there discovered its puppet status. Death sat down and, before fleeing in terror, smoked some opium, sweating buckets, and, like any other spectator, impatiently awaited the end of the final scene to find out if there was any ever after.

THE ART OF INSOLENCE

I don’t know why they disembarked from the
Bahnhof Zoo
. Most likely it was fatigue that forced them up to the surface again. Fatigue and also a certain anguish, which is what we can gather from a document found in a false-bottom trunk stored in a loft in the house Crowley would later own; the document was discovered by the house’s subsequent owner, the Singer sewing-machine magnate, Edward Clark (also an ardent student of the history of the portable conspiracy), who died in strange circumstances a few days after finding the document and writing a brief text,
A Shandy Draws the Map of His Life
. This text, it seems, was inspired by some images from his dream about the years that Walter Benjamin toyed with the idea of making a map of his life.

Benjamin imagined this map to be gray and portable; he even designed a system of colored signs clearly marking the homes of his Shandy friends, the cafés and bookshops where they met, the single-night hotels, the underwater light of European libraries, the paths leading to different schools, and the graves they saw filling up.

“To lose one’s way in a city,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. . . . This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks. No, not the first traces, for there was one earlier that outlasted the others: the way into this labyrinth.”

The Shandy conspirators’ way into the labyrinth, it seems to me, is the central theme in Edward Clark’s document, the ideal complement to that document Clark found in the false-bottom trunk in the loft of the house that once belonged to Crowley. This document was a lecture on the anguish of the portable writer, and had originally been written by Bruno Schulz, who intended to read it out loud on the
Bahnhof Zoo
. But all evidence points to the fact that it fell into the hands of Crowley, who subtly altered it and, passing himself off as the poetess Elsa Tirana (a pseudonym for Cléo de Mérode, mistress to King Leopold of Belgium), read it in consummate cross-dress at Seville’s Ateneo, during the Góngora tribute that was set up by the Spanish Generation of ’27 poets.

The lecture considered anguish—as I said, the original text was by Schulz—but Crowley injected some sentences disclosing to the world the existence of the secret Shandy society. A comprehensive betrayal. To that end, Crowley backed up his reading by showing a crude imitation of Benjamin’s dream map. Among those in attendance, mingled with a sizeable delegation of professors from Madrid, a large number of Shandies could be seen listening cheerfully to the revelation of their secret, even though this meant the certain dismantling of all that was portable. Each had on their persons a thermometer and was accompanied by a black man or woman from Port Actif.

It should surprise no one that the Shandies were extremely cheerful. As previously eluded to, they had understood early on that if they wanted the conspiracy to work better, it first had to vanish from the map: that is, the conspiracy needed to appear in the eyes of the world like the stunning celebration of something appearing and disappearing with the arrogant velocity of the lightning bolt of insolence. And we must be mindful that insolence, when it becomes manifest, does so always in relation to others, as part of a movement that is mindful—intensely mindful—of the other. It is the expression of a rebellious, scandalous, immortal ego imposing itself as a way of exposing itself.

Grasping all of this led the conspirators to a pact of solidarity entailing a series of essential obligations, such as, for example, not visibly extending the existence of the conspiracy and, in brief, showing themselves swift and masterly in the art of abbreviation. This led them to close ranks against Crowley the traitor, which, in turn, gave him license to expose them to the world.

What follows are certain interesting paragraphs the false Tirana read in Seville: “I’m here to say I don’t like you at all, mainly because there are twenty-seven of you, which is unacceptable, given that this number belongs exclusively to us. . . . As you can see, Shandy writers have a touch of the exorbitant, of the unacceptable about them. It’s both laughable and pathetic that to become manifest, anguish requires the work of a portable, sitting at a desk, writing letters on a piece of paper. Shocking it may seem, but only in the way that a prerequisite for a madman in his solitude is the presence of a sane witness. . . . Anguish means I no longer have anything to say about anything, but it would haunt me no less if I tried to give this lecture a justifying aim. . . . This aim could consist of me standing in front of you and saying a few words to try to forget, momentarily, my anguish. Clearly, I haven’t managed that. This lecture could have me acting like a traitor and unmasking the presence of the many Shandies among the respectable public. Clearly, I
have
managed that. . . . And I am pleased, to tell the truth, because all that is portable will never rear its head again. Having come this far, I’m off, and I’ll take my Portuguese hat and my intimate hydra with me. I believe I’ve written these words as the day draws its images, whispering over them, never to return.”

When the lecture finished, it was roundly applauded by the professors from Madrid, seeing that—as Elsa Tirana was one of Marinetti’s foremost disciples—they thought the lecture must be avant-garde. But their applause only infuriated the portables, who decided to go around spreading all manner of malicious lies about the professors: a breakneck procession of gossip that sowed panic in the Ateneo.

Emilio Prados, in an attempt to quell that orgy of calumny and gossip, went over to the person he thought was the leader of that insolent group, García Lorca, and took issue with the lowliness of gossip in literary terms. Glaring at Prados and leaning on the shoulder of the beautiful black woman he had with him, Lorca explained that Marcel Proust wrote novels comprised solely of gossip and the same went for Henry James.

Along came Duchamp, a refreshing glass of shandy in hand, explaining to Prados that they only told stories so someone would repeat them, and that they would stop telling them when they were no longer fresh. If the stories ceased to be fresh, that was because, upon being heard, they no longer spun and wove. Then Luis Cernuda, grinning ear to ear, joined his Shandy colleagues, adding: “Let me tell you: gossip is part and parcel of this transitory state; a link in a chain whose other links are only partial reiterations. Gossip—narrative as pure transitoriness—also presents the impossibility of identical repetition, the inevitability of endless transformation.”

Prados was stunned by these words and cast around for help; several professors came over and surrounded García Lorca. Someone took advantage of this moment to take a photograph, in which the Granadian poet can be seen, looking like a detainee, between Alberti and Chavás.

But then all the black men and women broke into song. It was quite the scandal, the triumph of insolence as fine art. For a few minutes the gossip reached a crescendo, between songs and fireworks that were set off all around the room. Only then did Dámaso Alonso sense that Shandyism could literally be true. He went over to Rita Malú to ask if she was also part of the portable conspiracy.

“Impossible,” said Rita Malú, “because the Shandies are all angels, and I am not.” He then inquired as to where those angels lived. In
Letters from Mogadishu
, Rita Malú says that she gave the following answer, putting him on the right track: “Men, you men, your testicles are brimming with angels.”

A phrase that puts us precisely on the right spermy track as to the potential energy, the very essence of Shandyism, which didn’t disappear even when Crowley—after leaving the Ateneo—opened the window of his Seville residence and, with a histrionic flourish, dissolved the secret society. It was an energy that didn’t disappear but rather, in its scattering, became more potent; the experience of literature is living proof of this scattering, proof of that which escapes unity for good reason. We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that the scattering of the secret society—and with it, of portable literature—would mark the moment when it began to approximate itself and finally began to be genuinely portable.

A SHANDY DRAWS THE MAP OF HIS LIFE

“I travel to know the geography of myself.”

—Journal entry of a madman,
quoted by Marcel Réja in
L’art chez les fous
(Paris, 1907)

Together, all the Shandies make up the face of one imaginary Shandy. The incidents that configured their tragic face can be read in the lines of this portable portrait, the map of their imaginary life. In this face—in all the Shandy faces for that matter—there have been deep lines since youth, lines that will gradually widen until they become emptiness itself. This unique mask—the synthesis of all portable masks—will be found in the tenuous light of a visit to Seville that pays homage to the majesty of time. (Time has ravaged this singular, solitary face, the face of the last Shandy.)

In most of the portraits his eyes are downcast. His right hand is held near to the face. The oldest example I know shows him in 1924, not long after his nervous breakdown beside the enormous towering rock where the concept of eternal recurrence came to Nietzsche. He has dark, wavy hair and a high forehead. He looks young, almost handsome; his eyes downcast—with the gentle, dreamy gaze of the shortsighted—seemingly floating toward the picture’s lower left-hand corner.

In the photograph of him at the party in Vienna, his wavy hair has receded just a little, but no trace of his youth and beauty remain; the face has flattened out, and the upper torso seems not just puffed, but burly, enormous. The hand—clenched into a fist with the thumb between two figures—covers his mouth, the fleshy lower lip. The gaze is opaque, or simply more inward, and there are books behind his head.

In another photograph, taken at the bottom of the sea, he’s standing immersed in thought in the
Bahnhof Zoo
, looking very elderly in a white shirt, tie and trousers over which dangles the chain of his pocket watch; his disheveled figure gives the camera a truculent look.

Finally, in the clear light of a room in Seville, he is consulting the final pages of a volume held open on a table by his left hand; it’s as though he’s looking toward the lower left-hand corner of the photograph; he seems, surprisingly, much younger than three years before and gives the impression of having achieved his goal of becoming a proficient reader of maps, composed of imaginary streets along which one can happily drift; it’s as though his gaze were already wandering through the final pages of that volume where he might have found the map of his life, a labyrinth in which every connection with a Shandy conspirator may be figured as an entrance into the morass of the portables’ invisible city, a space where losing oneself takes practice. The art of wandering the streets of the imagination reveals the true nature of the history of the modern city and leads us to the doors of the singular building where the last Shandy lives.

This person is someone who approaches life like a space in which to draw a map, someone who in Port Actif—when the secret society was being founded—was already considered melancholic, cut out for no other human state than solitude. (That is, solitude in the great metropolis or spent as a wanderer, fully at leisure to daydream.) This person considers himself melancholic, since he came to earth when Saturn—the slowest turning planet, the planet of digression and dilation—was in the ascendant. And under the auspices of this sign, he gets lost—like any good wanderer—in the labyrinth of Odradeks, with the Moldova ice slowly breaking up.

Since being slow is a feature of a melancholy temperament, the Shandy spends all day in Trieste on deck chairs. His slowness comes out in the way he reads the world. The melancholic person knows how best to read the world precisely because he is obsessed by death. Albeit, on the submarine, his vision of death gives him the sense that it is his melancholy that the world gives in to.

Once he gets to Seville, he considers the way that the more lifeless things are, the more potent and ingenious the mind contemplating them becomes; inert in the face of approaching disaster, in his melancholy, he is galvanized by the passion that exceptional objects awaken. He begins collecting books as well as passions, he knows that the hunt for books, like sexual pursuit, enriches the geography of pleasure. This is another reason to drift in the world. As well as first editions and distinctively baroque books, he collects miniatures: postcards, pennants, toy soldiers. . . . The love of small things underlies his liking for brevity in literature; his library is full of short books evocative of the cities he has become familiar with: Port Actif, Paris, Palermo, New York, Vienna, Ajaccio, Prague, Trieste, Seville.

Prague, on the map. This is the city in which the Shandy learns to journey around inside his room while sitting at his desk, staring at a blank page, and receiving a visit from his Odradek. Hunched over his papers and wrestling with the work at hand, the Shandy notices that a darker and inferior being has settled on his shoulder, an Odradek that attacks his soul, squeezing, narrowing yet rejuvenating it, and, after a fashion, taking years off of it. At first, the Shandy evades this violation by pretending no one’s visited him, but soon he comes to understand that this spreading of a semi-dark inferiority over his person is the most pointed and most creative of all violations; so he gives in to his Odradek, knowing he’ll become lost with him in the chaos that will finally give birth to portable literature.

Palermo, on the map. This is the city in which the Shandy life is a drawing of death. The Shandy will never go to Palermo, he’ll send someone in his place: a suicidal emissary who will convert a Sicilian hotel into a forbidden place in his memory.

Paris, on the other hand, is the underwater light of the days of his portable training. Silver bridges over the Seine link the intricate paths of a journey leading him through the days of his Parisian apprenticeship, to a convoy of stars, and from there, back down to earth once more, to the opaque nothing of an insolent farewell in Seville.

Seville is not on the map. On this southern tip, the last Shandy—a Saturnine hero with his ruins, his miniatures, his defiant visions and his relentless penumbra—thinks his intensity, his exhaustive melancholic attention will set natural limits on how long he can continue to elucidate his ideas on literature and life; he decides to conclude the book he’s working on in order to finish just in time: before it self-destructs. This is the decision of a person who knows that history in its true countenance swiftly passes by, and that the past can only be retained as an image emitting—like the lightning bolt of insolence, in its visible moment—a radiance that will never be seen again.

Only because the past is dead are we able to read it. The last Shandy knows that only because it is fetishized in physical objects can history be understood. Only because it is a world can a book be entered. For the last Shandy—for whom his book is another space in which to wander—his real impulse when people look at him is to lower his gaze, bow his head toward his notebook, look off into a corner, or better yet, hide his head behind the portable wall of his book.