The Difficulty of Being (14 page)

His little room was full of shades and shadows: those of his wife, of his mother, of ourselves, of others, who drifted around, gathered together and whom I did not recognize. His dead face lighted up the linen surrounding it. Of a laureate beauty, so radiant that we felt we were looking at the young Virgil. Death, in Dante’s robe, was leading him, like a child, by the hand.

While he was alive his corpulence was not noticeable. The same was true of his breathlessness which was not really breathlessness. He seemed to move among very delicate objects, on ground mined with goodness knows what precious explosives. A strange gait, almost as if he were walking under water, which I was to find a trace of once more in Jean Paulhan.

This air of a captive balloon gave him a certain resemblance to the character Sunday in Chesterton’s
The Man Who Was Thursday
and to the Roi Lune in
Le Poète Assassiné
.

This could still be seen in his remains which, though un-moving, soared. This essence of elder trees, of birds, of dolphins, of everything that repudiates weight, was freeing itself from his corpse, raising it, making in contact with the air a phosphorescent combustion, a halo.

Once more I saw him sauntering through the streets of Montparnasse, dotted with the white markings of hopscotch, carrying about him that store of fragile things of which I have spoken, avoiding breakages and uttering learned remarks. For instance that the Bretons were originally Negroes, that the Gauls did not wear moustaches, that
groom
was a corruption of
gros homme
, as pronounced in London, where the Swiss doormen, emulating France, were later replaced by little boys.

Sometimes he would stop, lift a finger of a marquis and say (for instance): ‘I have been rereading
Maldoror
. Youth owes far more to Lautréamont than to Rimbaud.’ I quote this remark among a thousand others, because it reminds me of what Picasso described to me: Picasso, Max Jacob, Apollinaire, all young, rambling about Montmartre, running down its steps, and shouting: ‘Long live Rimbaud! Down with Laforgue!’ a ‘meeting’ a thousand times more significant in my opinion than those which precede plebiscites.

One morning in 1917 (Picasso, Satie and I having just weathered the scandal of
Parade
), Blaise Cendrars rang me up to say that he had read in the revue
Sic
a poem signed with my name, which he was surprised that he did not know, that this poem was not in my style and that he was going to read it to me over the telephone, so that I might confirm that it was not by me. The poem was a fake. Over this fake Apollinaire made quite a rumpus. He exercised a jurisdiction in the world of letters and attached importance to his position. From café to café in Montmartre, from newspaper office to newspaper office he interrogated, suspected and accused everybody, except the guilty party who, much later, confessed his hoax to us. This had consisted in sending a poem to Birot, the editor of the review
Sic
, and baiting it with my signature, in such a way that he would print it without checking it, for this poem
was an acrostic; its capital letters spelled the words:
PAUVRE BIROT
.

Here am I sliding down the very slope that I deplore. So I will describe, as this can offend no one, the evening which ended the first performance of
Mamelles de Tirésias
at the Renée Maubel theatre.

Apollinaire had asked me for a poem for the programme. This poem, the title of which was
Zèbre
(
Zebra
), used the word
rue
in the sense of
ruer
(
to kick
). The cubists, headed by Juan Gris, thought that this
rue
was a street and, that evening after the show, demanded an explanation of what this street was doing there. It did not fit in.

At this tribunal, where we appeared side by side, Apollinaire changed over from the role of judge to that of culprit. For having entrusted Serge Férat with his sets and costumes, he was accused of having compromised the dogma by a flavour of caricature. I was fond of Gris and he of me. Everyone was fond of Apollinaire. But if I record this incident it is because it shows on what pinpoints we were balancing. The last prank was suspect, led to inquests and ended in convictions. It was ‘I’—Gris would say—‘who introduced the siphon into painting.’ (Only bottles of
anis del Oso
were allowed.) And Marcoussis, coming out of the exhibition of Picasso’s
Fenêtres
at Paul Rosenberg’s, declared: ‘He has solved the problem of window fastenings.’

Do not laugh. It is a great period and a noble one, in which in saying that a government that would punish a painter for such niceties can absorb the mind. And Picasso is quite right making mistakes in colour and in line would be a great government.

To come back to our poet. The penal session of
Les Mamelles de Tirésias
left him somewhat bitter. For a long time he remained attached to it by a kite-string. He became a kite.
Light, struggling, shaking this string, hollowing himself out, weaving from right to left. He’d tell me he was ‘fed up with painters’. And he would add: ‘they are beginning to bore me with their architectural diagrams.’ Amazing words in the mouth of one who was the originator of a victory over realism. But in this he wanted the sweep of Uccello and for painters to browse in that field poisoned with autumn crocus.

Except for Picasso, that eagle with ten heads, sovereign master in his kingdom, the cubists went as far as measuring the object. Yardstick in hand they compelled it in a humdrum way to serve them. Others brandished tracings, figures, the Golden Mean. Others erected mere scaffoldings.

Apollinaire went round their groups and was exhausted by them.

No doubt this weariness was the beginning of the decline that led him towards death. Nothing pleased him but exquisite surprises. He would complain. He pitied his generation, sacrificed, he said, falling between two stools. He would take refuge with Picasso, who never exhausts himself. He did not suspect for a moment, so true it is that genuineness is unconscious of itself, that he would soar away and become a constellation.

This constellation takes the shape of his wound, wound that a canvas of Giorgio de Chirico prophesied for him.

That is how things happen in our sphere. Everything unfolds according to a mathematical formula unacknowledged by mathematicians, which is our own. There is no stumbling at the last. Yet everything stumbles from end to end.

On that rock where soon only a few of us, escaped from shipwreck, will be left, Apollinaire sings. Beware, commercial traveller! It is the Lorelei.

There can be no question here of a study. That is not what I have undertaken. I limit myself to a few lines which trace
an outline, catch a pose, pin down the living insect, like that profile of Georges Auric in which I produced the likeness by the position of the eye, which is nothing but a dot. Others will analyse Apollinaire, his magic, based as it should be, on the virtue of herbs. He used to collect herbs from the Seine to the Rhine. The concoctions he made, stirring them with a spoon in a mess-tin on a spirit lamp, bear witness to the attraction exercised upon his episcopal self by sacrileges of every kind. One can imagine him equally well on his knees, serving the mass of the regimental chaplain, as presiding at some black mass, removing shell splinters from a wound, as sticking needles into a wax figure. On the Spanish Inquisitor’s seat as at the stake. He is both Duke Alexander and Lorenzaccio.

THE ABILITY TO BURST OUT LAUGHING IS PROOF
of a fine character. I mistrust those who avoid laughter and refuse its overtures. They are afraid to shake the tree, mindful of the fruits and birds, afraid that someone might notice that nothing comes off their branches.

Like the heart and like sex, laughter functions by erection. Nothing swells it that does not excite it. It does not rise of its own accord.

This excitement is subject to the same rules as that of the senses, for what makes one person laugh does not make another laugh. And I know those who burst into fits of laughter at the same time as myself, while some others who are there only make grimaces, cannot understand us and sometimes imagine that it is at them that we are laughing.

The automatism of laughter is ruthless. It often happens that laughter torments us during funeral ceremonies where it is officially frowned on.

Bergson attributes the cruel laughter at the sight of a fall to the break in the balance which dehumanizes man and changes him into a puppet. Other philosophers contradict his theory. They hold that man, on the contrary, accustomed to his artificial mechanism, is de-puppeted by the fall and suddenly shows himself as he is. It is, they say, this rude discovery of man by man that provokes the laughter.

What vexes me is that neither the one nor the other carry
their theory as far as the study of laughter at works of art. The shock of new works, causing a rupture between its customary outlook and the novelty with which it is faced, makes the public stumble. So there is a fall and laughter. This perhaps explains the laughter of crowds which, except by tears or insults, have no other way of expressing themselves.

I like jokes, but they must be long and realistic. If I invent names, places and events, I want them to be credible and pull their weight. I thoroughly enjoy playing this game with skilful players. The family I live with is given to laughter.
^*
It excels in such exercises of the mind. It abandons itself to them without reserve. As a result, many visitors take their fiction for fact and, without realizing it, help in their own mystification.

If a third person knows the rules, interferes and goes astray, in short if he indulges in
banter
, I freeze and wish the game would stop. For playing is not banter and funny stories do not make me laugh. They are worth nothing unless they take their natural place in the conversation. Nothing is more rare than for a circle to amuse itself and not confuse cleverness and idle nonsense.

As a rule everyone jumps to right and left, up and down. Everyone mixes things up and all talk at once. That is why I keep to the circle to which I am accustomed and which uses the same vocabulary as myself.

One of the last times I happened to dine with muddle-headed people, my neighbour talked to me of
La Duchesse de Langeais
, a film of Giraudoux’s based on Balzac, which was being shown at the
Biarritz
. As I mentioned Balzac, this lady told me I was mistaken, that the film was not being shown at the
Balzac
(a cinema at the corner of the
rue
Balzac), but at the
Biarritz
.

One lives much of the time with one’s head under one’s wing. One is reluctant to admit the degree of lack of culture and the mental disorder in which people flounder. As a precaution when walking through the crowd one uses a somewhat blind eye and a somewhat deaf ear. But fashionable society splashes us with mud and throws us down in the mire. So it is unhealthy to frequent it. For we come home wretched, besmeared from head to foot, disheartened to the marrow of our bones.

Stupidity dismays and does not invite laughter. Rather it saddens and makes us stupid by contact with it. We do not relax and stretch to our full capacity except with people who can return the ball. I like to talk. I like to listen. I like people to talk to me and to listen to me. I like laughter that gives off sparks when struck.

I remember a summer at Trie-Château, at the house of Madame Casimir Périer (Mme Simone) with Péguy, Casimir Périer and Alain-Fournier, who was writing
Le Grand Meaulnes
. We were convulsed with laughter until we got cramp, and when we were going to bed a word would set it off again, would throw us down onto the stairs leading to our rooms. It clutched us by the belly until the small hours.

I am a very good audience. At the theatre, at the cinematograph, I cry or I laugh without my critical mind being roused. Nothing disgusts me if some force shakes me, shoulders me, makes me let myself go.

On the other hand my critical mind exerts itself over works which attempt to stir other regions in me, which are not those of laughter nor of tears, and whence tears spring to the eyes through the sole gift of beauty.

I have great debates with myself and long periods in which I accept myself for what I am. This is one I am now passing through. Although I go off at a tangent it is none the less true
that I come full-circle. What would become of me without laughter? It purges me of my disgust. It ventilates me. It opens my doors and windows. It beats my upholstery. It shakes my curtains. It is the sign that I am not quite sunk by contact with the vegetable world in which I move.

Although I know, from films about plant-life, that the serenity of nature is a myth, that only its rhythm, different from ours, makes us believe in that serenity, that a garden is continually a prey to eroticism, to vice, to anxiety, to anguish, to hatred, to agitations of every kind, and that it
lives on its nerves
, I acknowledge that it has not the gift of laughter.

It is Dante’s
Inferno
. Each tree, each bush, shudders in the place assigned to it, in torment. The flowers it puts forth are like fires one lights, like cries for help.

A garden is ceaselessly fertilized, corrupted, wounded, devoured by great monsters equipped with armour, wings and claws. Its enemies mock at the artless weapons with which it blindly bristles. Its thorns give us a proof of its fears and seem to us more like permanent goose-flesh than like an arsenal.