A Brief History of Portable Literature (5 page)

“Dangerous, yes,” Marcel Duchamp says to me on the Portbou café terrace. “So I encourage you to tread carefully with this champagne cork, apparently so well-balanced in its disingenuous equilibrium on that curtain rail: this cork
also
comes with a golem.”

This memory is always evoked for me in the present tense. Suddenly I’m about to ask Duchamp what exactly he means by dangerous, but he’s vanished. I look everywhere for him, including in Walter Benjamin’s final resting place. Nothing but thin air. Will Duchamp turn out to be my Odradek? I thought to carry on talking about Odradeks, but now I see that the most prudent thing would be to end this chapter. Yes, perhaps it is the most advisable thing for me. After all, my history has to be a brief one, or none at all.

NEW IMPRESSIONS OF PRAGUE

Dark the negritude
of marble in the snow.

—Vladimir Holan

Even I have availed myself in one chapter or another of this book of the writing procedure Blaise Cendrars used in his famed
Anthologie nègre
(
An African Saga
). Cendrars’s sister Miriam showed him this procedure in her refined homage to gossip,
Inédits secrets
.

Miriam Cendrars says the
Anthologie nègre
’s creative process began in Prague during the course of a pleasant spring afternoon. Gustav Meyrink—a little unsettled since leaving Vienna because he’d yet to run into a single portable in the neighborhood—leaned out the window of his house and once more contemplated the street where he’d been born: that serpentine and lugubrious passageway at the end of which stood a Jewish cemetery, nowadays all but gone.

He stood with his elbow on the sill, thinking about what his life resembled. (Nothing, because this wasn’t life. If it were, it would resemble those winters from his childhood when everything artificial won out: the brightness of lights, the closed bedrooms, the exasperation . . .) Suddenly, Meyrink went back to contemplating the street: the lower ground-floor shops with their lights turned on all day, overshadowed by balconied, dirty stucco facades with their volutes and heraldic emblems. Then he saw himself converted into a camera with its shutter open—passive, meticulous—and he couldn’t help but think of his friends the portables, whom, for an instant, he feared he’d never see again.

This posture, so reminiscent of Berta Bocado on her balcony across from the Cabaret Voltaire, brought him luck, perhaps because it was, deep down, an intrinsically Shandy posture. Suddenly, he caught the image of a man shaving in the window across the passageway and realized right away it was Blaise Cendrars, lodged at Mrs. Pernath’s guesthouse. By way of a salute, joyful Meyrink did the first few steps of an African dance, until Cendrars noticed him and, mixing some dirt in with his shaving cream, soaped his face black. Meyrink then rattled an ebony totem and Cendrars—even more euphoric than his neighbor—did some off-the-cuff drumming. For an instant, the serpentine street in Prague’s Jewish quarter became the savage echo of a Congolese suburb.

It didn’t take them long to connect with the mulatta Rita Malú, the Cuban actress who’d installed herself in the guesthouse on the corner and who, at that moment, was leaning out her window observing a strange passerby; this person showed a clear inclination for blackness (wearing a black hat, a black suit, a black tie, black glasses, and black shoes) and was calling out her name. In the midst of these cries, resounding in the sunken hollow of the street, the actress noticed, in the reflection of a Bohemian cut crystal, Cendrars and Meyrink exchanging dark symbols. So she whistled out a habanera, which the two Shandies immediately registered, as, of course, did the strange passerby, who, taking off his glasses and hat, revealed himself to be black Virgil.

Recognizing one another, they all brandished their respective black hats as night fell, and, in the newly inaugurated darkness, a distant echo of tam-tams could be heard from the savage tribes of future Shandies. From the solitude of their remote African cabins, they would soon see their ancient legends become portable, thanks to the
Anthologie nègre
, which Blaise Cendrars conceived the very same instant as that triumphal hat dance.

It was nothing less than an apocryphal anthology, as Cendrars’s idea was to develop a book that pretended to be based on a compilation of popular African stories, when these legends were in fact a highly personal interpretation of the stories the Shandies told when they reunited in Prague.

Knowing Cendrars, the idea wasn’t that surprising. Given his habit of not listening when people told him stories, he instead plucked out two or three random words, using them to construct open fictions in his mind (tales very different from the ones he actually was told).

Thus, the famed
Anthologie nègre
was born, published two years later in Paris as “a compilation of short but very vivid entries (twenty-seven), which enabled the author, for the first time in Europe, to reproduce a set of stories that missionaries and explorers had transmitted orally among us.”

When it was published by the Au Sans Pareil Press in Paris, in 1927, all the French critics fell for it, greeting the work as “the first chance the lay public ever had to learn about popular African literature,” when in fact what the lay public read was an African literature fabricated by Cendrars, who was able to salvage words from his portable friends’ stories. The fraud went so unnoticed, the deceit was so all encompassing, that there was even a translation into Spanish by none other than Manuel Azaña.

A complete fraud. For example, the oft-repeated story “Death and the Moon”—a legend attributed to the Sande tribe and explored in great detail in the 1940’s by none other than Lacan—is simply the upshot of the association of images prompted by the words moon and death (plucked by Cendrars from what Rita Malú told him the evening they met in Prague).

Rita Malú mentioned there was a full moon and, a little later, confessed she’d been feeling slightly insane in recent days. In spite of the hot weather, she’d carried on feeling terribly cold, as if Prague were being gripped by a death freeze.

Moon and death. Cendrars retained these two words when Rita Malú stopped speaking and informed her about what it was she’d just unwittingly engendered. Rita Malú fell silent, as did black Virgil and Meyrink, both of whom had been caught up in a discussion about the pros of short stories, fragments, prologues, appendices, and footnotes, and the cons of the novel. They all stopped, allowing Cendrars to narrate the legend that would become the first tale featured in the
Anthologie nègre
.

An old man comes across a dead body in the moonlight. He assembles a great number of animals and says to them: “Who among you brave creatures will take charge of transporting this dead man and who will take charge of transporting the moon to the other side of the river?”

Two turtles stepped forward: the first, who had long legs, carried the moon and made it to the opposite shore safe and sound; the other, who had short legs, took the dead man and drowned.

And this is why the moon reappears day after day, and the man who dies never comes back.

This tale was punctuated by cannon fire, warning of the breaking up of the ice on the Moldova River. Spellbound, Meyrink shut his eyes to better hear Cendrars’s story. But at the end of the tale, as he struggled to open his eyes again, long lines of human faces passed before him, and he saw death masks of his own ancestors: men with short, straight hair, parted hair, curly hair, long wigs, and wavy toupees. Masks approached him through the ages, and increasingly familiar lineaments gradually came together in one final face: that of the golem, which broke the ancestral chain. The darkness became an infinite, empty space, with the mother of the human race at its center.

When Meyrink finally managed to open his eyes, he communicated what he’d seen to the others. Cendrars only retained the last few words (“the mother of the human race”), using them for the title and theme of the second tale in his
Anthologie nègre
, a chronicle he attributed to the Mossi tribe:

Three men appear before Oendé to tell him their wants. One says: I want a horse. The other says: I want dogs for hunting in the brush. The third says: I want a woman to delight in.

Oendé gives it all to them: to the first, his horse; to the second, the dogs; to the third, a woman.

The three men leave, but rains suddenly come, preventing them from leaving the scrubland for three days. The woman cooks for the three of them. The other two men say, Let us go back to Oendé. They arrive and they ask to be given women. Oendé agrees to change the horse into a woman, and the dogs too, and the men leave. But the woman made from the horse is a glutton, the woman made from the dogs won’t behave. The first woman, the one given by Oendé before, is fine: she is the mother of the human race.

This legend Cendrars kept to himself, unable to externalize it, because, as he was finishing composing it in his mind, there was a knock at the door. Salvador Dalí came in visibly excited, accompanied by Nezval and Teige, two young Czech poets who wanted to join the secret society. To judge by their radical, dazzling gazes, these two poets were very high-spirited bachelor machines. Their eyes were like highly illuminated, extraordinarily light suitcases.

Anticipating the general sentiment, black Virgil commented that he couldn’t look the two Czechs in the eye because they were so dazzling. Teige hastened to say, indeed, it was true, and there was a simple explanation: their eyes were a permanent homage to Edison, the inventor of the light bulb. He then gave the floor to his colleague Nezval to announce, very emphatically, that from that moment on, for them, the sexual attractiveness of women would be based on their spectral capacity and resources, that is, on their potential dissociation, their separate carnality and luminosity. The spectral woman, he concluded, will be the woman that can be dismantled.

Teige took the floor again, showing himself to be a cutting edge Shandy by the fact that he was altogether aware of the portable Odradek-golem secret. He spoke of Prague’s unusually warm air and of the presence in the city of a number of weird beings, quiet creatures pretending to sleep so no one would notice their deceptive, hostile selves. These, he said, came out when Prague’s night mist covered the streets, obscuring their quiet, barely perceptible, back-and-forth gesturing and posturing: they were as profoundly dark as the spongy flesh of zombies. Additionally, he concluded, these golems were relentlessly hunted by their own “Bucharesters”: beings from Romania and poor relations of Count Dracula.

Cendrars, who had listened in his own way—that is, distractedly—to the two Czech poets, then interceded to offer Nezval a pint of shandy with ice, at the same time telling him that, from his description of the woman who could be dismantled, he’d come up with a Zulu legend, “The Black Specter”:

Once upon a time, the wind was a person, specifically, a specter, until she turned into a feathered being. Because she could no longer walk, she flew. Indeed, flying, she lived on the mountainside. Once upon a time, she was a black specter, and that is why—once upon a time—she killed missionaries. Afterward, she turned into a feathered being, and from then on she flew and lived in a cave in the mountain. She goes to sleep there, wakes early and leaves; she flies far away; the next day, again, she flies far away. She comes back to her home because she feels the need for sustenance. She eats again, and again, and again; she comes back to her home, again, coming back to sleep.

As for what Teige had said, Cendrars said he didn’t believe a word, but it had been useful to him in composing the fourth story of his
Anthologie nègre
, “The Zombie’s Spongy Flesh” (a Babua legend). He was about to tell it, when the others asked him, in unison, to save it for later, seeing as they were all keen to go out into the streets to find as many members of the secret society as they could.

They set out on a relentless search through the bars of the Jewish quarter, but found no one. Then, they got lost on the outskirts and came to an old cemetery: a disordered jungle of jumbled tombstones piled up with dun leaves that seemed to grow out of the damp earth, vying with the wild grass to see which could grow tallest. Crows had taken over the bare trees and their cawing added to the air of nostalgic desolation about that place. On the far side of the cemetery, they saw the lights of an unsavory-looking bar: The Cabaret Zizkov. Inside the dive, someone talked to them about a foreigner who had turned into a dancing machine and was dancing alone in the bar’s basement. The description of the foreigner led them all to agree that it could be Aleister Crowley, and they asked the bar’s owner what they needed to do to see him.

He opened a narrow, round-arched door, and they descended a stairwell glittering with tiny crystals. The occasional lamp guided the Shandies’ steps and, at the foot of the stairs, the crypt widened out. The warm and quivering air called to mind the heart of central Africa.

They went another six- or seven-hundred feet in silence. At various points the wall was punctuated by lower overtures, and there were branches off the central passageway. The crystals were constantly changing color. As they got nearer to the place where Crowley was supposedly dancing, they realized black liquid was oozing from the crystals and occasionally dripping onto their faces. At last, they arrived at the spot where the potential Shandy could be seen dancing.

It was Crowley—no doubt about it. He had chosen a splendid locale that was draped with chrome-orange crystals, one that was quite wide and with high ceilings, with tropical grasses and hummingbirds. Crowley was practicing the serpent dance, which requires the lower half of the body (from the hips to the toes) to move and nothing else. Going down into the crypt and being hit by the liquid oozing from the crystals, Crowley had turned black, and was moving his knees in at least fifteen different ways, which, even for a black person, is really quite a number.

The Shandies let out a few cries of admiration. Witnessing the chaotic conclusion to this episode—all the Shandies, smudged with black, fled the Cabaret—Cendrars took two of their cries and began constructing a new legend for his
Anthologie nègre
: a Babatúa tale in which the soul of negritude is defined as “a soul in chains, impulsive and puerile, sweet and jumpy, hungry for destruction, and, at the same time, possessed of a lucid experiential intelligence condensed in happy stories.”