A Brief History of Portable Literature (4 page)

When he finished, Larbaud asked him what Karl Kraus had done when they were children to provoke such hatred. The question didn’t surprise Littbarski, who answered: “He poured champagne over my powers of reason. Fair grounds, wouldn’t you say?” Larbaud, choosing to believe that what he’d just heard was a metaphor, moved on to what he was actually interested in, proposing they organize a party that would bring together in Vienna the secret society’s most incisive members. “They’re coming from far and wide,” said Larbaud, “and the only real requisite is that they pass unnoticed by the citizens of Vienna.” That said, he asked if they might swap suitcases; an enigmatic petition, to which Littbarski said yes. Even Miriam Cendrars found it difficult to explain: “Whenever he spoke to me about the preparations for the party, Larbaud would go quiet at this point. It made him uncomfortable and anxious to speak about this swapping of the suitcases. He never wanted to explain it to me. Perhaps—if anyone decides to research deeply into the secret society’s unknown history and to write a book about it—I may come to understand the mystery of the swapping of the suitcases. I’m confident it will happen, and I’ll see the day. Until then, without any further information, I’ll stick to my suspicion that Larbaud’s silence can be explained by the fact there was something very important in the suitcases.”

I’m sorry for Miriam Cendrars, but I’ve found it impossible to ascertain the truth about the Vienna suitcase swap. Still, I’d like to remind Ms. Cendrars that the Shandies, never thinking themselves important, didn’t carry things of importance in their light luggage, only miniature works, every single one of which (without exception), reflected their utter disdain for what’s considered important. I wouldn’t want anyone to think my words here are a diversionary tactic to cover up the fact that I’ve failed in my research. It’s just that I believe the suitcase matter is neither an enigma, nor particularly important; in fact, I don’t even think this history of the portable literature is.

As I was saying, after the suitcase swap, Littbarski was enthusiastic at the prospect of the party, explaining that a number of things about his apartment allowed for evacuation within minutes if circumstances required. A back door was camouflaged by centuries of ivy growth and totally unknown to his neighbors. What could be better? Larbaud must have thought. Right then and there, they agreed on a date for the party, on March 27th, 1925. “An explosion of stellar conversations and the cherries of vagabond greetings,” one of their helpers, Vicente Huidobro, said. In his diary, we find the following sketch:

“Under a full moon in Vienna one night, when everything is as everything is beheld. An astrological and ephemeral house, falling from universe to universe. All the portable mob’s bigwigs were there. Explosion of disguises, artifices and Viennese gondolas. An absolute explosion of stellar conversations and the cherries of vagabond greetings. Drinks and distant diamonds. The planets were coming to fruition in the firmament, and our eyes beheld the essence of birds, the water lilies’ beyond, the hereafter of butterflies. The vessel of our secrets navigated the stealthy, starry nocturne. And Paris was this kaleidoscope: Duchamp, Scott Fitzgerald, Dalí, Man Ray, Larbaud, and Céline. Oh! and George Antheil. Peru was pure swordplay: César Vallejo. The waiter: black Virgil. Snow of yore swirled over the New York lodge: marvelous Georgia O’Keeffe, Pola Negri, Skip Canell, and Stephan Zenith. Spain, or Juan Gris, and Rita Malú, recently hitched in Havana. Prince Mdivani in the mist and Gustav Meyrink in the Bohemian cut crystal. Savinio’s veils in the Eternal City, and Tristan Tzara with poisoned bear honey in Zurich. Berta Bocado or her silk needle. Walter Benjamin and/or the internal vertigo of Gombrowicz, and the rainbow of the piano-playing backsides of the irate neighbors. Huidobro wasn’t there.”

Actually it was Picabia who wasn’t there, and who, paradoxically, has written most about the Viennese party. Though he doesn’t give any of the gathering’s names, he says they were exactly twenty-seven in number, and then he informs us that twenty-seven was the Shandy number par excellence: “Stephan Zenith turned twenty-seven that March 27th in Vienna. And twenty-seven is also the number of years Rita Malú had been confined in a remote Somalian asylum. It was the intervention of the generation of Spanish poets of ’27 that put paid to the portables’ stellar voyage. I was married one December 27th. The painting by Paul Klee dedicated to the number twenty-seven admirably encapsulates the light and shadow of the secret society; anyone can go see it at the home of Countess Vansept, who lives at number 27 on a Paris street and has twenty-seven grandchildren, etc . . .”

Picabia’s account of the party is especially interesting for its description of the soiree’s final few minutes, in which we find an image of F. Scott Fitzgerald far removed from the one we’ve had of him until now as an alcoholic: “We had struck up a stupendous conversation vis-à-vis our artistic tastes and all agreed that we were in favor of brevity when it came to literature, that we’d rather even the most brilliant books didn’t go on too long. We suddenly saw a glint in Scott’s eye. Some kind of rare elation seemed to have taken hold of him. He seemed in a feverish state and was struggling to talk about literature. The monocle he’d taken from Tzara kept falling off, and the movement he made to put it back on was becoming more and more strained. Intrigued, we decided to watch him more closely, and it was then that we saw a small gold box at his side. He was constantly leaning down over it on the pretext that he had a cold. We realized he’d swapped literature for winter sports, that is, his nose was sliding across the white snow of the purest cocaine.”

Meanwhile, the neighbors (certain by now that such an uproar couldn’t, on this occasion, be made by just one man) called the police. Valery Larbaud informed Littbarski of his desire to publish an annotated edition of his pathetic wine-soaked little quarto, which was roundly cheered by the whole gathering, especially black Virgil, who, immersed in an extraordinary euphoria (confirmation that all the waiters were drunk), took up his master’s old sawn-off shotgun and, by way of a one-gun salute, put four holes in the roof. All the portables took flight, all except Scott Fitzgerald, who stayed on and kept Littbarski company (for his part, he was visibly shaken by his servant’s behavior).

Scott Fitzgerald lowered himself unhurriedly onto a sofa and when the neighbors and police showed up, he lit a Virginia cigar. Pretending to be playing chess with his host, among the broken glasses, he said in an extraordinarily elated tone:

“I had actually been invited.”

And he didn’t hesitate to transfer the phrase, word for word, into the novel he was writing at the time.

LABYRINTH OF ODRADEKS

The memory is so intense that I always remember it in the present tense: Sitting on the terrace of a café in Portbou, watching the last summer evening of 1966 draw to a close, Marcel Duchamp is telling me about the party in Vienna, black Virgil’s gunshots and the Shandy society, of whose existence I’ve known nothing about until this point. The café is a short distance from the guesthouse in which, twenty-seven years before, Walter Benjamin was compelled to commit suicide.

Drinking Pastis, Marcel Duchamp tells me the moving story of the involuntary suicide and explains that the portable history would have gone off quite differently had it not been for Walter Benjamin’s providential intervention on the murky dawn the Shandies, fleeing Littbarski’s apartment, began to scatter, totally disoriented. They fled through a ghostly Vienna in which, suddenly, a chunk of wall fell to the ground, looking like a man walking along, and the ice around them turned into the shapes of rigid faces.

In those moments of panic and dispersal, seeing the Shandies fleeing in all different directions, and knowing it would be extremely difficult to regroup, Benjamin managed to come up with an instruction that would bring them all back together in the city of Prague; he recommended they take rooms at guesthouses in Gustav Meyrink’s neighborhood and that they should try, through fortuitous street encounters, to make contact again.

None of the Shandies forgot his instructions, understanding immediately during their terrified flight, and this meant that the Shandy journey could carry on: a journey that sought no goal, no fixed object, and that was clearly futile. They were like medieval pilgrims for whom the journey was all; arriving in Canterbury, Jerusalem, or Santiago de Compostela mattered little. They traveled merely so they could tell each other stories.

The north wind picks up, sending us inside the café, where I open a bottle of champagne; the cork, after violently crashing against the ceiling, bounces off the top of a piece of furniture and comes to rest in perfect equilibrium on the top of a curtain rail. All the customers are dumbfounded at this, and the landlord forbids anyone from touching the cork, as he wants to show it to all his clientele. Smiling, Duchamp says this cork is my Odradek. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard the word, and I ask what it means. In a tone of strict confidence, Duchamp introduces me to one of Shandyism’s most enigmatic aspects: the existence of certain dark occupants lodged within each of the portables’ inner labyrinths.

Apparently, it was in the infinite labyrinth of the city of Prague that the dark occupants, also known as Odradeks, began to show themselves. Due to their fraught coexistence with doppelgängers, each of the Shandies had one of these dark occupants lodged within them—up until that point they’d been discreet companions for the most part, but in Prague they began to turn demanding and take assorted forms, sometimes human.

Alone or in pairs, the portables began arriving in Prague. And on taking rooms at guesthouses in the Jewish quarter, they began to feel the increasingly active presence of the dark occupants, along with the anguished certainty that their most authentic and intimate selves were being torn away, premeditatedly and against their will, merely so the ghostly figures could take plastic form.

Skip Canell speaks in his memoirs about his Odradek, who turned out to be nothing less than a sword swallower: “Not long after arriving in Prague, in a guesthouse in the city center, I was in my room, sitting at the desk I’d cobbled together, when I heard the door open. I turned, thinking some colleague of mine must have found out where I was, and saw my self coming into the room, approaching and sitting at the desk facing me, propping his head in his hand and beginning to dictate what I was writing. We spent a number of hours like that, until, finally, I managed to bring myself to ask him who he was. He was a sword swallower, he said, and a devotee of the dagger. We had dinner in the guesthouse dining room, where something genuinely astonishing took place: the poor sword swallower absentmindedly gulped down a fork, and I had to take him to a clinic, where, after a spectacular operation, a doctor removed it. I’ve never seen the Odradek again, but I have the sensation that he is swirling around me and might at any moment reappear.”

In another guesthouse in Prague’s Jewish quarter, the Spanish painter Juan Gris wrote down the following in a music notation book: “I find myself profoundly unsettled, as I wait to run into one of my friends here in the city of Prague. In the old houses of this neighborhood I feel spectral movements. I have come to understand, to my astonishment, who the hidden rulers of the alleyway are where I’m staying. Strange characters live here, similar to shadows: beings not of woman born, whose ways of thinking and acting are pieced together from random fragments. When they pass through my spirit, I feel more inclined than ever to believe that dreams have an abode all their own; I think they inhabit or hide inside dark truths latent in my soul, when I’m awake, like the vivid impressions of brightly colored tales.”

When Stephan Zenith arrived in Prague, he also discovered that he was giving lodging to a dark occupant, whose form, in this case, wasn’t exactly human. Terrified, he decided to leave the city though not before leaving the following illuminating note to Witold Gombrowicz, with whom he’d been sharing a room:

“I’m leaving, because I am afraid of myself, and what is certain is that Prague is making a powerful contribution to this. Bid farewell to our colleagues on my behalf should you manage to run into them, and tell them larger forces have compelled me to go back to New York. I’d like them to know I had a wonderful time at the party, except for when that guy went crazy with the gun. As I say, I’m leaving because I’m afraid of myself, now that I believe something akin to a spool of black thread is lodged within me—and sometimes without. It tries to make me say things I neither think nor will ever think. The spool is flat and star-shaped; in fact, it seems covered in threads: old threads, of course—interwoven, knotted together—but also other kinds of threads that are other colors, also interwoven and knotted together.

“But it isn’t simply a spool; a small pole sticks straight up out of the center of the star, and another attaches to this at a right angle. With this latter pole on one side, and one of the beams of the star on the other, the ensemble manages to stay upright, as though standing on two limbs. Often, when one goes out of the guesthouse door and finds it leaning there in the stairwell, one feels the urge to talk to it. One naturally addresses it with simple questions, treating it rather like a child (perhaps because it is small).

“And what’s
your
name?”

“Odradek,” it says.

“And where do you live?”

“Domicile unknown,” it says, laughing; the laughter, of course, is of someone who has no lungs. It sounds more or less like the whispering of fallen leaves. . . . I’m frightened, Witold, and that’s why I’m leaving. Perhaps, away from Prague, I’ll manage to shake off my Odradek.”

On the basis of this text, the dark occupants quickly came to be termed
Odradeks
in the Shandy lexicon. And being in Prague too, George Antheil and Hermann Kromberg echoed Zenith’s text, speaking frankly of Odradeks, referring to their respective dark occupants. In George Antheil’s case, the Odradek wasn’t a spool but a pin stuck in a ribbon, while for Hermann Kromberg, it wasn’t a tiny object but became a spectral figure again.

“Here in Prague,” wrote Antheil, “while running into my colleagues again, I have come to understand that I only experience minor sensations—those associated with very small things—intensely. My love of futility is the reason why. Perhaps my scrupulous attention to detail. But I do rather think—I’m not sure, I never analyze such things—that it’s because minimal things, having absolutely no social or practical importance, do have, merely due to this absence, absolute independence from unclean associations with reality. Minimal things—and my Odradek is one—always feel unreal to me. These useless things are beautiful, because they’re less real than “useful” things, which go on and on. The marvelously futile, the gloriously infinitesimal, stays where it is, doesn’t cease to be, living free and independent. Like the mere existence of my Odradek, which is this pin here before me, stuck in a ribbon. The mystery never becomes so clear as in the contemplation of small things that, as they move, admit that mystery’s light perfectly and stop to let it pass.”

By contrast, the German writer Kromberg’s Odradek wasn’t a miniature, but (as I said) a spectral figure: someone who posed as a poet and infiltrated the portables by traveling with them to Vienna and afterward to Prague, where he installed himself in the same hotel as Kromberg. This was the terrible Aleister Crowley, who many will know as a friend of Pessoa’s, but he was other things as well—a mountaineer, a Satanist, a philosopher, lion tamer, pornographer, cyclist, heroin addict, chess player, spy, occultist—that is, a very lively Odradek, as demonstrated by the fact that he obliged the sedentary Kromberg to go abroad to Vienna and Prague. In the latter city he abducted him, used dark arts to force him into initiations of sexual magic and to scale the highest peak in Kashmir.

“What am I doing here in Kashmir?” wrote a desperate Kromberg in his travel journal, “when I like nothing better than my own hearth and to receive letters from my nomadic friends when they are off in far-flung places? I never wanted to join up with them in Vienna, but the malign influence of my Odradek drew me to that city, and then urged me onward to Prague, whence I set out for Kashmir; in Kashmir, I am currently living in the cold and in fear for my life, possessed by an inner demon that, as far as I can see, is a traveler.”

Sedentary Kromberg went mad in Kashmir, losing his way, but not losing his travel journal. If we go along with certain accounts, Kromberg, not far from the highest summit in the region, thought he’d stumbled across a hat that Pessoa had left in the snow years before. But Pessoa had never brought any hat to those icy, remote expanses, which has led more than one person to suspect that Kromberg was losing his mind, something confirmed when, on resuming his ascent, he said that he felt overcome by the flapping and cawing of crows. This in spite of the fact that there were no crows anywhere.

Finally, reaching the summit, Kromberg cried out in horror when he saw his Odradek was there, that it had overtaken him. Dressed in rigorous black, Aleister Crowley—who two years later in Seville would dissolve the secret society—greeted him with laughter, holding aloft a black flag on which, over the most ferocious skull, he had embroidered the slogan:
ONWARD TO A SILKY PROSE
.

Kromberg’s companions tried in vain to calm him, to convince him that there was no one on the summit. That night he wrote down everything he thought he’d seen—the Portuguese hat, the crows, the Odradek with the flag—and, depositing his diary in the snow, he went out and lost himself in the darkness of the Himalayan summit, never to be seen again.

Salvador Dalí’s Odradek had a markedly merry and musical air. Furthermore, it was emphatically erotic: nothing less than a self-pleasuring Chinese violin, a melodic instrument with a vibratory appendage, whose function was to be introduced—abruptly and brusquely—into the anus, but also, and preferably, into the vagina. Following insertion, an expert musician would slide his bow over the strings of the violin, playing not the first thing that came into his head, but a score expressly composed with masturbatory aims; through an astute bestowing of the frenzied sections—interspersed with moments of calm—the musician would bring the instrument’s recipient to orgasm at the precise moment the rapture notes were attacked in the score.

Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s Odradek wasn’t exactly erotic. It showed itself in a hotel mirror in Prague, giving the writer a considerable fright: “Looking in a mirror that suddenly reflects me, I find myself truly resembling my father. Am I going to be my father? Does this mean my whole life has been a fantasy lived in another person’s name? Are we nothing more than our ancestors, and never ourselves?”

He spent the day he wrote this in a state of constant unease; for a Shandy, nothing is worse than the insolent irruption of an Odradek, above all if the Odradek shows up intending to make a nuisance of itself. There were clearly also kind and timid Odradeks, but these tended to be boring. In general, Odradeks were somber, pathetic, trouble-making objects or creatures who took pleasure in frightening their hosts or victims.

That day, Gómez de la Serna had a fright like never before, but he was able to take courage and keep a sense of humor about him, and ended up giving his father’s ghost the boot; he smashed every mirror in his Prague room.

But what were the portables doing in Prague if they had planned neither conference, nor manifesto, nor terrorist act, and had no plans for another party, or anything at all? I’ve already said that, in my opinion, the portables traveled for the mere pleasure of it, and so they could tell each other stories; but the fact is that their journey—like any novel or poem—was in constant danger of not making sense, and perhaps this was what most appealed to them about the trip.

Speaking of risks, I ought to point out that they proliferated in Prague. Very quickly, the Shandies had the unforgettable impression that at certain hours of the night or at dawn, mysterious voices not belonging to their Odradeks began to regularly whisper hushed and mysterious advice. At times, a light tremor, impossible to explain, passed through the old walls of the Jewish quarter, letting out noises that would course through the brickwork, coming out from the drainpipes. If anyone had bothered to look in that labyrinth of the Odradeks, they would have found bouquets of wilted myrtle: bridal bouquets, swept along in the unclean water, in which also hid the quiet, barely perceptible play of gestures and postures of those golems that were attached to the dangerous Odradeks.