A Brief History of Portable Literature (3 page)

THE PARTY IN VIENNA

“I had actually been invited.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby

At the beginning of 1925, the musician George Antheil appeared on the Shandy scene brimming with energy. With his announcement of Nicotechnica—a science invented by Antheil himself consisting of a fount of knowledge that categorically disproved the existence of the thriving secret society—he sowed seeds of uncertainty, as well as a certain despondency, among the portables. After that, amidst the confusion he had generated, Antheil published a curious tract that had the effect of revitalizing the Shandies, propelling them into a kind of highly creative secret euphoria with some extraordinary results, including a first-rate essay by the ill-fated Anthony Typhon in which he praised Despondency as an inexhaustible source of new and stimulating sensations.
*

It’s worth noting that Typhon’s own despondency was so great, he even eliminated the
h
’s from his first and last names. At the same time, he proposed George Antheil be given a medal, which led to Typhon’s immediate expulsion from the group, since if there was anything the Shandies to a man found appalling, it was insignia, medals, or honors of any kind.

Typhon fled to Martinique; there, he set up a stationery shop in a village where they spoke a strange local variant of Creole and no French and barely wrote at all. The little paper they did use, they bought from a dealer in the nearby municipality of Saint-Joseph, in the middle of the island. He soon bankrupted the business buying his own merchandise. He’d occasionally write letters to Antheil begging forgiveness in an extraordinarily sincere tone that was nevertheless always belied by his unswerving inclusion at the end of the missive, each and every time, of the same postscript: “I’ve recently been working on perfecting the game of Love, availing myself of coal tar,” and then he’d cynically turn his signature (Typ(h)on) into a drawing of an insignia or medal.

George Antheil—who years later would go on to compose the controversial
Ballet Mécanique
(a Shandy musical par excellence)—became accustomed to receiving Typhon’s letters and giving them no more than a minute of his time, now that the portable conspiracy required his attention twenty-four hours a day. It was Antheil, for instance, who found the ideal place for the group’s first secret meetings: Shakespeare & Company, the bookshop situated at number 12, Rue de l’Odéon, and run by Sylvia Beach.

George Antheil lived in the two-room apartment above the bookshop and often entered through the window. Shandily, he would scale the front of the building. Sylvia Beach, in her mediocre memoirs, says that the portables met in the bookshop every Friday, occasionally admitting some new member. Antheil was master of ceremonies. Apparently, he was also the inventor of the method for finding portable artists on the streets of Paris. For a year Antheil strolled the terraces of Montparnasse and Saint Germain, in perfect silence, making conspiratorial gestures, and distributing the alphabet manual for the deaf. Along with the alphabet, there were some instructions, incomprehensible at first sight: twelve phrases that only made sense when read vertically and the first letter of each phrase spelled out the following address:
SEPT RUE OD
ÉON
.

Apart from that, the first of the phrases, translated to Spanish (Si Hablas Alto Nunca Digas Yo), would have been of interest should anyone discover the word spelled out by its capital letters:

That is:
SHANDY
.

It’s important to bear in mind that more than referring to the book by Laurence Sterne, the word shandy invokes alcohol. Shandy is commonly drunk in London—a mixture of beer and either fizzy lemonade or ginger beer—and a pint of shandy with ice is thirst quenching in the summertime.

So, the address of a house on Rue de l’Odéon, and the word shandy. If anyone worked this out they’d understand that, by mysterious means, they were being invited to a house to drink shandy. And that person would soon go and have a look around the vicinity of number 7, Rue de l’Odéon. There, Blaise Cendrars would ask him the simple question: “Are you deaf?” “Yes,” he’d generally answer. Blaise Cendrars would point him in the direction of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and, departing at an unmistakably conspiratorial (leisurely) pace, would say: “As you can see, it’s not number 7 but number 12. Friday, at eight o’clock, we’ll be expecting you.”
†
 

Among the Shandies that Antheil and Cendrars brought in off the street Valery Larbaud stood out from the beginning as the heart and soul of the first world deaf conference held at Shakespeare and Company. Valery Larbaud was the portable artist par excellence. His sexuality was extreme, and he was vehemently opposed to any idea of suicide. Additionally, his fraught coexistence with doppelgängers was outstanding, as was his sympathy for negritude, his perfect functioning as a “bachelor machine,” his disinterest in grand statements, his cultivation of the art of insolence, and his passion for traveling with a small suitcase containing almost weightless versions of his work.

Clearly, an out-and-out Shandy. He was your typical learned and worldly gentleman, who didn’t turn up his nose at friendships, aspired to an international culture, a world of broad horizons and lofty origins: a splendid ideal marking the period between the wars. He apparently showed a precocious vocation for travel: he loved the smell of leather in trains and the successive landscape, which appeared motionless, yet would still pass by. He was only five years old when he crossed a border for the first time—the one between France and Switzerland—and he was surprised not to see that red and lilac line one sees on maps (which he had scrutinized so attentively, his first game).

He was, like any good portable, also enthusiastic about miniature things. In her memoirs, Sylvia Beach tells us Larbaud had an enormous army of toy soldiers and complained that they were beginning to crowd him out of his rooms, but he made no effort to control them. “The soldiers perhaps accounted for another obsession of his—his colors. They were blue, yellow, and white, and so were his cufflinks and his ties. His colors flew from the roof of his country house whenever he was in it (which was not often, since he preferred to be in Paris or traveling about).”

Larbaud was also a traveler of words: “I fixate on winding clocks to make sure they tell the right time, putting things where they belong, polishing those things that have gotten tarnished, bringing to light things relegated to the shadows, mending and cleaning old toys from forgotten civilizations in people’s lofts . . .” It was in one such loft that Larbaud decided on the phrase that came to be used to swear in new members to the secret society, a definition from
Tristram Shandy
: “Gravity: a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind.”

And if we add to all this his passion for discovering unexplored, portablist literary territories (Savinio, Littbarski, Gómez de la Serna, Stephan Zenith, and a very youthful Borges were among those he invited to join the secret society), we get a rough picture of this writer whose figure (although outshone in this century’s cultural panorama) is fundamental to understanding how portable literature consolidated itself. It was Larbaud, in fact, who organized the Shandy party in Vienna, in March, 1925.

A month before, Larbaud went to scout out the city as a possible location for a party; having to be top secret, it called for certain special conditions. For the illustrious traveler arriving in Vienna at that time, the most important—and the gravest—man then living there was Karl Kraus. Nobody had the slightest doubt about that. Here was a writer who went on the offensive against everything substandard, everything rotten. He edited a review to which he, and he alone, contributed. Everything submitted by other people struck him as inopportune. For the review, he never accepted invitations to collaborate on projects, and he didn’t answer letters. Every word, every syllable published in
Die Fackel
was written by him. Every claim he made was rigorously correct. Never since has there been such scrupulousness in literature. He concerned himself—scrupulously—with each and every comma. Anyone who wanted to uncover any kind of erratum in
Die Fackel
could spend entire weeks torturing himself in search of just one. Best simply not to try.

But it so happened that a little before Larbaud’s arrival in Vienna, an injudicious young writer named Werner Littbarski set out to find that elusive erratum, and with the help of his black Brazilian servant Virgil, after several sleepless days and nights, he found it. Littbarski had a champagne celebration, just him and Virgil, but he imagined a multitude of friends visiting, whose voices and cries he imitated, making a considerable din, once again upsetting the neighbors, who for a long time had known this to be Littbarski’s great specialty: throwing make-believe mass parties in his apartment.

In the days following the triumphant discovery of the erratum, Littbarski, usings his father’s old printing press to publish an anti-Krausian review entitled
Ich Vermute
, went some way to reinforcing his neighbors’ image of him as a madman.
‡
The review’s one and only edition contained twenty-four pages written entirely by Littbarski, except for one opinion piece by Virgil, which opened as follows: “Today I have ceased to hold any kind of opinion about anything.” Littbarski’s review featured insults against Kraus, jokes of questionable taste, ads for strong liquor, Indian postcards, mysterious “safe-conduct passes,” pornographic tales, drawings of elephant tusks, comic vignettes with Kraus’s grandmother as the main character. In short, it was an obscene display of boundless aggression.

All Vienna took pity on Littbarski; if it had been said before that he was mad because he threw make-believe parties, now, to top it off, he was trying to make a laughing stock of Karl Kraus, which could only upset people and discredit him further socially, and intellectually.

But on his mission as secret Shandy ambassador, Valery Larbaud arrived in Vienna and saw in Littbarksi the ideal host for this international party. (The party had to happen away from Paris and Shandyism’s other nerve centers, and furthermore, it mustn’t draw the attention of citizens who weren’t part of the secret portable movement.)

Larbaud saw right away that one of Littbarski’s make-believe parties could conceal an actual party, full of conspirators from around the world. Their presence in Vienna would go perfectly unnoticed if they knew to disappear in the dawn mist, at the right moment.

Convinced that this energy of Littbarski’s—so unproductive, so crazy and portable—could easily be channeled in the direction of the luxurious and useless Shandy planet, Larbaud sent him a letter. Though mostly incoherent, the letter did include a secret “key” that would give birth to new friendships and connect the members of a small, clandestine society that imperceptibly, implacably, was expanding.

“I understand, my friend,” Littbarski wrote back. “I understand. And please be aware that your key is of interest to me. You are opening the door to one of those pavilions that, since I was a child, has undergone fewer changes than other kinds of quarters. But that isn’t the only reason I still feel attached to them: it’s the solace, too, emanating from the fact that they are uninhabitable for anyone waiting to establish himself permanently somewhere. The truth is that anyone struggling to establish a firm foothold in the world could never inhabit them. The possibility of dwelling in these places is limited. Vienna is born in them, and I was born in Vienna, to see them reborn.

PS
: Indeed, I am single, and, yes, my servant is black.”

It seemed to Larbaud that Littbarski had played with two meanings of the word lodge. The houses in Vienna also had glass-domed pavilions outside that were used for household clutter. He also had meant to indicate that he understood perfectly that the offer of a “key” would bring him into contact with portable literature, that is, with a non-existent literature, seeing as none of the Shandies knew what it consisted of (though paradoxically this was what made it possible). It was a literature to whose rhythm the members of the secret society danced, conspiring for the sake of—and on the basis of—nothing.

According to what I know about the preparations for the party in Vienna—and the fact is, I know very little, the only place I’ve found reference to them is in Miriam Cendrars’s
Inédits secrets
—one of these typically Viennese lodges provided the setting for Littbarski and Larbaud’s first encounter: one in which Littbarski decided, for the first time in years, to tell anyone about an odd novel he was writing entitled
A Bachelor Opens Fire
(a bibliographical rarity nowadays). This was a text he’d been working on since time immemorial, ever since he’d had the use of reason, to be precise. What made the novel so odd wasn’t how long he’d invested in it but rather the fact that he himself thought he’d only written one decent page in all that time: a miserable wine-soaked little sheet of paper that he showed to Larbaud. Girding himself with patience, Larbaud read it:

“Feeling bored, little Hermann stood looking out the window of the concierge’s office managed by his parents. A child he’d never seen before came and stood in front of him, and in a gesture Hermann found brazen and defiant, the child joyfully emptied a whole bottle of French champagne onto the sidewalk. Hermann would never forgive the boy.”

When, out of sheer courtesy, Larbaud inquired about the novel’s plot, Littbarski gave the following answer: “It’s the story of Hermann, a man who gratuitously wastes his life despising a person, and that person’s crime, if he’d ever committed one, was to pour away a bottle of champagne as a child. Hermann gives himself body and soul to embittering his enemy’s life, even avoiding marriage so as not to waste a single minute on trivialities, anything other than the relentless persecution of that French-champagne squanderer. From time to time, Hermann snipes at the other’s life, that is to say, he makes certain opportune incursions (he steals his enemy’s wife, lodges complaints against his business, chops his mother up into small pieces, kills his dog, sets fire to his house, etc.), brief but sharp shots fired by the bachelor from vantages where the despised man can’t spot him. The poor despised man goes through his life in the novel confused and frightened because even the weight of the years can’t slow the hate directed at him by a stranger of whom the only thing he knows is that, operating invisibly and out of reach, he dedicates himself with peculiar obstinacy (and considerable success) to embittering his life.”