Lipstick Traces (35 page)

Now there is no question that the fanatical symmetry of Isou’s system was absolutely teenage—or that, in the mid-1940s, it contained a real challenge to the accepted view of what art was, what it could do, and what it was for. Isou was ready: all that was left was to reach Paris, to him the capital of culture, announce his discovery, and change the world. With the help of local Zionists, he escaped from the Nazis in Romania; in August 1945 he arrived in the City of Light as a twenty-year-old crank.

He was, though, a crank with a sense of history, and a fierce sense of publicity. He wasn’t born “Isidore Isou”; he was born Jean-Isidore Goldstein, just as his Romanian-Jewish dada forebear was born Sami Rosenstock. Rosenstock gave himself the exciting new name “Tristan Tzara”; awarding himself a name almost as alliteratively memorable, Isou played Chubby Checker to Tzara’s Fats Domino.

That was not all. Isou was sexy—sexy in an androgynous manner far ahead of its time. His lower lip was enormous, enticing; his mouth was all sensuality, all come-on. His dark curls began in an elephant’s trunk and ended in a proto-D.A.; in some early 1950s photos he looks amazingly like Tony Curtis, whose internationally right, cuddly-delinquent
face would appear on the Hollywood screen about the same time Isou gained his first taste of fame. So I suggested to Michèle Bernstein, as we stood in her living room before Guy Debord’s first lettrist metagraphic (“a fancy word for collage”), which featured a torn photo of Isou. “No!” she said. “Elvis Presley!” Isou’s field of action may have been high art, his theories penumbratic; physically, instinctively, he was a hound dog.

Isou’s own description of his invasion of Paris—from his 1947
L’Agrégation d’une nom et d’un messie
(The Making of a Name, the Making of a Messiah)—gives something of the flavor of his monomania. Hitting the city with a suitcase full of manuscripts and a letter of introduction to Jean Paulhan, in 1945 managing editor of the Gallimard publishing house, Isou made straight for the offices of his—he was sure—patron-to-be; it being a Saturday, Paulhan was not in. Putting into effect his principle of “the minimum and the maximum” (derived from the mechanics of amplitude-ciselant: life, like art, had to be taken to extremes), Isou then claimed to be a Romanian journalist and demanded an interview with Gaston Gallimard himself. Once through the door he abandoned the minimum and pressed the maximum, offering his book-length “Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique, de Charles Baudelaire à Isidore Isou.” Gallimard agreed to consider it; Paulhan read it and, according to Isou, “expressed interest,” though perhaps “acknowledged receipt” pops up between the lines. But no decision was forthcoming—and so, Isou continues, he brought to bear his system of “calculated impatience,” retrieved his manuscript, and began taking it to other publishers. This brought no results.

It was only when Isou began to exploit his talent for publicity that he gained a foothold in Paris—and for that he needed disciples. His first was Gabriel Pomerand, whom he met at a canteen for Jewish refugees. Born Pomerans, Pomerand was an indigent, nineteen-year-old devotee of the surrealist saint Lautréamont; after making common cause with Isou he would style himself the “cantor of lettrism” and the “saint of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.” Expelled by Isou from the lettrist movement in 1956, he became an opium addict; he killed himself in 1972.

Impressed by the famous authors Isou claimed to have met—André Gide, Jean Cocteau—Pomerand agreed to double the membership of the lettrist crusade. In the dead of night, the two plastered the walls of the Latin Quarter with handbills denouncing socialist-realist and surrealist poets as reactionary
enemies of true creation. Nothing happened. They held a reading; few took notice.

Their chance for a coup came—with dada-trumps-dada serendipity—with the 21 January 1946 premiere of Tristan Tzara’s play
La Fuit
(Flight), which was to be preceded by a lecture by former surrealist Michel Leiris. Tzara was Isou’s hero, the father he had to kill, the false god: the perfect target. Isou and Pomerand rounded up everyone they knew and bought tickets; when Leiris began to expound on dada, with Tzara seated in the audience, they stood up. “We know about dada, M. Leiris—tell us about something new! For example—
lettrism!”
“Dada is dead! Lettrism has taken its place!” Understandably, Leiris had no idea what they were talking about. The cries went on: “Long live lettrism!” “You’re kidding! You’ve never heard of
lettrism?”
A shout came from the back of the room: “Throw the lettrists in the toilet!”

Rattled, Leiris broke off his talk and the play began. Afterward, Pomerand bulled his way onto the stage and demanded that the creator of an epochal breakthrough in the arts, one Isidore Isou, be permitted to explain his theories and recite his letter poems. Isou stepped forward; most of the audience walked out. A few people approached.

Thus did Isou make the papers for the first time—and brilliantly. A front-page article in the left-wing daily
Combat
put Isou into headlines: “
THE
‘
LETTRISTS
’
SHAKE UP A READING ON TZARA
.” More publicity and more recruits followed—and on that basis, according to Isou, Gallimard finally offered a contract. According to the word on the street, Gallimard did so because Isou’s followers threatened to burn down his offices—but such rumors were merely fuel for the fire. Six months after his arrival in Paris as a nobody, Isou was on his way.

Insisting on the maximum even before his first book appeared, Isou began placing exclusive interviews with luminaries of literary Paris: Gide, François Mauriac, and others. That the conversations were entirely made up displeased the publication in which they ran, so Isou began his own:
La Dictature lettriste
(The Lettrist Dictatorship), there and gone with a single number, but the first of many lettrist reviews.

Today, one has the luxury of taking the title as an effusion of simple puerility, or flat megalomania. In 1946 it was appalling. Every day, the papers were full of stories exposing Frenchmen who collaborated with the Nazis, with reports on unthinkable Nazi crimes and dispatches from the Nuremberg trials; in this context the flaunting of the word “dictatorship” was worse than the punk celebration of the swastika, and it worked on the same levels. Isou’s provocation was a way of getting attention; it was an argument that, in the world everyone accepted without questioning, one dictatorship had been replaced by another; it spoke for an authentic flirtation with the fascist abolition of limits. The result was more publicity and more adepts.

Isou produced books on the theater, on himself, on love: the latter was
La Mécanique des femmes
(The Mechanics of Women), which in 1949 made his name a password on the Left Bank. In his preface Isou more or less dared the police to arrest him (the brochure was in essence a sex manual), announcing that he was sure the police would not arrest him—after all, hadn’t he already issued a far more subversive manifesto, a call for a “Lettrist Revolution”? The minister of the interior took the bait: he banned the book and had Isou picked up. Hauled before a magistrate, Isou declared that his work made a “useful contribution to the education of youth”; the judge ignored the Socratic jibe and packed Isou off to a state psychiatrist. Meanwhile,
The Mechanics of Women
topped the black-market charts.

After hours at the Tabou—once Boris Vian’s jazz band packed up, Sartre, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty had stumbled on home, and Juliet Greco vanished into the night—Pomerand mounted the tables, shook a tambourine, and recited letter poetry. He passed the hat among drunken tourists and turned the proceeds over to the Messiah. In the cafes, more serious work continued. Submitting to the mechanics of invention—and thus, if one divined the rules correctly, making cultural history by definition—the lettrists pushed their post-dada letter poetry into “estheperist” poetry, a poetry of the final element, a proto-language based on linguistic particles “that have no immediate meaning, where each element
exists in so far as it allows one to imagine another element which is either nonexistent or possible”
—a typically mathematical isouienne formula that soon produced extraordinary results. They replaced both visual art and narrative prose with metagraphics (later “hypergraphics”), a neo-hieroglyphics where sentences were interrupted
or completed by pictures and vice versa, “thus introducing into alphabetic writing not only the art of painting, but the graphics of all peoples or social categories past and present, as well as the graphics or anti-graphics of every individual imagination.” In 1950, with his
Saint ghetto de prêts,
subtitled “grimoire” (book of spells or, alternately, gibberish), Pomerand raised the metagraphic to the level of a cosmic pun. It was a fabulous production: every word was shifted by a picture, every picture subverted by a word, and what the situationists would call “the insubordination of words” was dramatized even in Pomerand’s title. With the substitution of the word “prêts” (loans), the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés—the lettrist stomping ground, the “protagonist” of the book—became a place where people lived on borrowed time; with the substitution of the word “ghetto,” it became a place no one could leave. But as one turns the pages, the neighborhood becomes a labyrinth, where every chance encounter with a word, a picture, a building, or a person seethes with legend and possibility, opening into a secret utopia accessible to anyone capable of recognizing it. “Saint germain des prés is a ghetto,” Pomerand began. “Everyone there wears a yellow star over his heart . . . Saint germain des prés is a mirror of heaven.”

As the years went on, the lettrists replaced poetry, music, dance, the novel, philosophy, theater, cinema, architecture, photography, theology (“All will be gods—all will be masters”), radio, television, and video with new forms based on the same principles of particle physics that Isou first applied to poetry. They are doing it now, as I write, still in their self-made ghetto—but in postwar Paris the lettrists remained best known for replacing civility with noise. Because Raoul Hausmann had in fact invented letter poetry in Berlin after the First World War (in 1968, past seventy, Hausmann gave a demonstration, growling “
OFFEAHBDC/BDQ
” through a long speaking tube, then hefting it like a harpoon and highstepping, finally hammering it to the floor: “You don’t think I remember this 1918 crap by heart, do you?”), Isou and his followers attacked the originator as a plagiarist—to Hausmann’s eternal bafflement and fury, though there survives a wondrous 1946 tape of Hausmann and various lettrists debating the question entirely through imaginary letter languages. It is said that in 1971, as Hausmann lay dying, Isou sent him a weekly letter, each containing only the repetition of a single word: “Ordure, ordure, ordure.”

The lettrists attacked Gide (“old bitch,” “faggot”) and Isou’s benefactor Paulhan (“the style of a toad”). André Breton was savaged as a windbag leaking “flabby rage,” hysterically attempting to maintain his place in times that had passed him by: “He offers himself, himself and his generation, to every faith, to every hope, to every boutique. One has learned not to be fooled—and there he stands.” Existentialism was dismissed as a pallid, vulgarized melange of Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and Jaspers—a not entirely inaccurate assessment. The culture war was on.