Lipstick Traces (36 page)

Isou’s declaration that his goal was to become god (“but,” he noted in 1958, “without renouncing the pleasures of suspicion and skepticism”) was not a joke; neither was his claim that anyone else who created a new form could become god as well. Just as dada called up millenarian ghosts, Isou too excavated the gnostic belief that those who gathered around the truth, they and no one else, would become the Gods of Truth, and inherit the earth. “He was the Messiah,” says Jean-Paul Curtay (today a doctor and a poet, in the late 1960s a member of Isou’s group). “He promised paradise: that the economy would be a horn of plenty, art a continual excitement, life a wonder.”

Cold on the page, it is hard to imagine anyone believed it—but in many ways, many did. What matters is not to take Isou’s declarations literally—though the more unbalanced among the lettrists, such as Pomerand, swallowed them whole—but to grasp, within a postwar context of social conformity and official artistic entropy (“This is a time,” Breton told Isou, “for adding to legends”), the power of Isou’s extremist appeals. Isou was not a dadaist; he was a politician. Throughout his early and mid-twenties his great role was to bring out the fanatic in anyone—especially in young people convinced of their own unacknowledged genius. In any time, this means a lot of young people; in Paris in the late 1940s the alternatives to lettrism included hanging out at the Deux Magots in order to learn what brand of cigarettes Simone de Beauvoir smoked. A few years later, Françoise Sagan and J. D. Salinger would offer young people self-pity and narcissism; Isou offered them heroism, comradeship, and, perhaps most important, their names in print. Isou himself, enemy of all conventional discourse, wrote hundreds, then thousands of pages explicating his theories; the productions of his followers, treatises and tracts on every kind of art filled with every kind of graph, chart, and equation, matched the master’s scholastic concentration
and his cabalistic hermeticism—if not his endurance. But the curls cascading down Isou’s smooth forehead were no less inspiring than his words. “Even today,” Michèle Bernstein said of the picture of Isou on her wall, “when my nieces come to visit, they always ask the same thing: ‘Who’s the pop star?’ ” Isou’s visceral message was that the world belonged to the young—if they could make it.

The most casual comparison of lettrism to the exploits of the Cabaret Voltaire or the Berlin Dada Club makes it obvious how unoriginal, academic, and precious Isou’s program was. Judged on the level to which he aspired, on the level of aesthetic purity and high art, lettrism was a screaming oxymoron, systematized dada. Judged as news, it was gossip. Judged as history, it was, absent anything better, something to do: if, as Roger Shattuck wrote from Paris in 1948, postwar French culture was a vacant lot and existentialism “a means of clearing the ground,” lettrism was merely “a temporary shack.” But these were not the only levels on which the small drama of lettrism was played out. A comparison of the first lettrists to those with whom they really shared the postwar terrain reveals an element that makes the story interesting, an element the lettrists cultivated and their true contemporaries ignored. That element was consciousness, and the terrain was still unnamed: pop culture.

Pop culture—the folk culture of the modern market, the culture of the instant, at once subsuming past and future and refusing to acknowledge the reality of either—began about 1948, in the United States and Great Britain. There, where the Nazis never arrived, the war years not only regimented society—through conscription, rationing, curfews, and vastly intensified production—they loosened it, breaking up old ties of social life. For a long moment, an entire level of patriarchal hierarchy was stripped away. Like so many soldiers in combat, on the home front some people experienced a sense of purpose, fellowship, and freedom they never knew before and would never know again. Ordinary housewives might not have come up with the words surrealist poet René Char found when, with the occupation of France ending, he confronted what it would mean to leave behind his life as a Resistance partisan—“I shall have to break with the aroma of these
essential years, silently repress (not reject) my treasure”—but they would have known what he meant. Photographs of wartime American female factory workers reveal smiles unlike any to be seen in the photojournalism of the years that followed: strong, almost surprised smiles radiating shared purpose, autonomy, and self-worth.

With the war over the women who owned those smiles were returned to a subservient life. The project of the postwar West—which can be read most clearly as a project in Betty Freidan’s
The Feminine Mystique,
the history of a propaganda campaign far more sophisticated than the concurrent demonization of communism—was to prove that real life was back, and to restrict the definition of real life to the pleasurable consumption of material goods within a system of male supremacy and corporate hegemony. The new freedoms discovered during the war were cut off from words and cut out of pictures; the most intense and complete days many had lived, at home and away, were turned into an anomaly, and those who could neither get over them nor, according to the new rules, talk about them, were charted as deviant cases. Thus all sorts of anarchic protests against the reorganization of social life appeared out of nowhere: refusals of the affective limits placed on the unlimited material future promised by the managers and promoters of public discourse, a future whose promises were fixed in advance. “How can we live,” Char wrote in 1947, “without the unknown before us?”

In July 1948 a bizarre, almost silent record began playing on a black music station in Harlem; soon it spread up and down the East Coast and across the country. It seemed to come out of the ether, not so much carried by the airwaves as floating on them, and no one knew what to make of it, except that it stopped time, and stopped hearts. It was “It’s Too Soon to Know,” the first record by the Orioles, five black men from Baltimore, led by a twenty-three-year-old truck driver who called himself Sonny Til. The song was written by Deborah Chessler, a young Jewish woman who one night found herself transfixed by a black vocal group called the Vibranaires. She became their manager, had their name changed, offered them her tune, and
with them made history—for if the title can be awarded with any certainty, which it probably cannot, this was the very first rock ’n’ roll record.

Earlier popular black harmony groups—the 1930s Mills Brothers, the early-1940s Inkspots, the 1947 Ravens—made their music according to the rules of well-ordered rhythms, close ensemble singing, shaped tones, recognizable lyrics. These were white, bourgeois, altogether orderly modes of communication. They suggested definition, suppressed ambiguity, presented the listener with a finished fact—and a finished fact says “all is well” or it says “there’s nothing you can do about it.” The Orioles’ sound reached the listener as the voice of another world; it demanded that you finish the sound, fill in the silences with your own wishes, fears, fantasies. With its falling sighs, its constant hesitations, the sound implied that against every accepted promise, everything was in doubt.

“The only accompaniment,” Charlie Gillett says of the Orioles’ most distinctive records, “was a guitar played so quietly its only purpose might have been to prevent the group from [coming] to a complete stop. Sonny Til seemed to try to withdraw himself from the situation, refusing to become involved.” Framed by high, drifting moans that faded almost before they could be registered, Til’s fragile tenor was so emotionally distant, so aurally crepuscular, that it did not sound like singing at all. It was a voice that seemed to treat the forming of a word as a concession, a voice less of someone singing than of someone thinking about the possibility of singing, as if to say, “What would it mean to care?”

The records were constructed, felt through, out of lacunae. Til’s always aborted desire to commit himself, his inability to believe that anyone could ever make a commitment to him, made a metaphor for the evasion of any confrontation with any sign of things-as-they-were; he wanted to care, Til’s sound said, but he didn’t. The feeling was delivered whole, with a passion so plainly repressed it implied not revolt but suicide. When Til sings, lifting every second phrase out of its syntax and almost into onomatopoeia,

Though I’ll cry

When she’s gone

I won’t die

I’ll live on

If it’s so

It’s too soon

Way too soon

To know

you don’t believe he’ll outlive the song.

The Orioles were in their time but not quite of it. The biggest black record of the late 1940s was “Open the Door, Richard,” a broken-beat novelty number, Stepin Fetchit in a tuxedo. It was a top-ten hit for no less than seven artists, both Count Basie and the Three Flames took it to number one in the same month, and one has to stop over that weird fact—impossible since the advent of rock ’n’ roll, it speaks for a world in which only a very few songs were heard, in which only a very few conversations were permissible, or comprehensible. But one has to look beyond music to see how strange the Orioles really were.

In the early 1980s, the detritus of late 1940s and early 1950s advertisements was resurrected by a host of American and British collage fanzines (all of them inspired, in one way or another, by the recoding spirit of punk), and what these magazines showed, be they the kitchen-table
Tacky World
or the slickly printed
Stark Fist of Removal,
was so clear, so single-minded, it now looks like an art project commissioned by the CIA. It’s not just that every person pictured is white, middle-class, and well-off; black people in post-1960s American TV commercials were white, middle-class, and well-off. It is the sense of confidence that is so unsettling.

The smiles on the faces of the men are easy, unconcerned; the fulfillment of every desire is taken for granted. The smiles on the faces of the women have come a long way from those of the wartime factory workers: they are pursed, determined. There is a hint of resentment beneath the surge toward gratification, unfulfilled desire puts the necessary edge into the ads, constitutes the subliminal hook, and so together the men and women make a world that is both open and closed, a world that cannot be touched. In 1958
The Family Physician
published an illustrated guide titled “You Can Beat the Atomic Bomb” (note the active verb; twenty years later it would be “You Can Survive”): a couple is fleeing radioactive fallout. They are dressed for a night on the town—in fact they seem to be out on the town, having
already heard the news, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs as casually as one might open an umbrella against the rain.

It would be specious to connect the Orioles’ quiet refusals to the Bomb—but perhaps not so to connect those refusals to the monochromatic orchestration of confidence that accompanied them. That orchestration did not include the Orioles. In 1948, or for that matter in 1958, downtown hotels in Baltimore would not have admitted them, restaurants would not have served them, and had Sonny Til, with new money in his pocket and his combat medals on his sharkskin suit, persisted in a demand for entrance, the police would have been called and the nigger thrown in jail. Penned in on itself, the black ghetto produced a culture of violence, hedonism, and despair; with the Orioles, Gillett writes, “the harsh, fast life produced a slow, gentle response.” Sonny Til became an artist of the reverie, always one step removed, a mole in the ground.

Sonny Til fantasized; he ran his fantasies down. As he fell back and his fantasies slipped out of his grasp, he communicated the notion that the real world could be different from the apparent—that the apparent world, the world of ordered rhythms and distinct words, was not real. There was no confidence; there was only an erotic concentration on loss, hopelessness, and failure. Til imagined what it would mean, what it would feel like, to love, to be loved, to hurt, to be hurt, to say no, to say yes. He could, he said, do none of it—but because he was imagining, he spoke with more purity than real life ever allows. His music was an affirmation, an emotive utopia, where everything could be said; it was a negation, a nowhere, where nothing could be done.

Negation was accompanied by nihilism—which, once glamorized in the media, was understood by young people eager for new myths as a promise of freedom. In 1947, four thousand motorcyclists invaded the quiet town of Hollister, California, and held a party; the town was partially destroyed. In 1948, four Paris teenagers, “les tragiques de Lagny,” joined in an inexplicable scheme involving sexual jealousy, a supposedly imminent Soviet invasion of France, and a nonexistent fortune; three of them held a trial to decide the fate of the one who claimed to have the money, sentenced him to death, and carried out the sentence. In 1958, Charley Starkweather, nineteen, and his girlfriend, Caril Fugate, fourteen, murdered ten people in Nebraska and Wyoming, including Fugate’s mother, stepfather, and baby half-sister; among the other victims was a couple about the same age as the killers.