A Brief History of Portable Literature (7 page)

We need only look at what Tristan Tzara says, in his
Portable History of Brief Literature
, when he confirms the existence of the parallel conspiracy: “We’d left Prague in search of a Mediterranean setting where we might shake off our relentless pursuers, but they had the temerity to arrive in Trieste ahead of us. We knew they took ether, and this delivered them faster than an express train. Their conspiracy danced at the top of a stairwell of cliff-faced steps. Meanwhile, our shoulders began to turn to rubber—as though all the water content of our bodies were dripping onto them—and seemed to want to propel us upward. Over our mouths, there was something like a mouth of ice; that is the name—Mouth of Ice—by which we began to refer to the unnamable conspiracy traveling with us and, more than once, assuming the form of that figure we find on the last and terrible page of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym,’ that figure whose skin was the perfect whiteness of the snow . . .”

The group left Trieste and went to Paris feeling sure that, with the help of the portables who’d stayed there, it might be easier to rid themselves of the Mouth of Ice; but it turned out that the perfectly snow-white conspiracy had also suffocated the Paris community of portables (using sphinxes of fire). This led many of the Shandies to take refuge at the bottom of the sea and to resume their creative endeavors in a submarine called
Bahnhof Zoo
, forgetting the deck chairs of those days of literary leisure, leaving behind the fleeting brilliance of an idle chapter.

BAHNHOF ZOO

Only two texts exist that tell us anything about the days the Shandies spent in the submarine Prince Mdivani had hired. One of them—written by the prince himself—is unreliable. The text consists of ravings, facile and absurd, seeking to describe a submarine voyage to the ends of the earth. In fact, the
Bahnhof Zoo
didn’t move, nor could it, from the port of Dinard in Brittany, because it was little more than a war relic, a remnant of the first global conflict, which, before the prince took it on, had been a Chinese restaurant. The other text—the ship’s log kept by Paul Klee—is far more reliable, though it does veer off at the end into a lyrical vein, casting something of a shadow over the real historical facts.

As I said, Mdivani’s text is pure ravings. I don’t know if he was obsessed with enthralling his readers, or if he simply wanted to make something back on his investment. Either way the prince certainly invented enjoyable—though clearly unlikely—adventures, beginning in Zanzibar and ending at the bottom of the sea in a Never-never Land. Here is a brief example of the prince’s remarkable ravings: “Sailing for Balboa under a full moon one night, the clouds like mackerel bones, blurred Herculeses, mauve crepuscules, dreadful for the deranged travelers. The Panamanian coast looked like that of Wales.”

As for Paul Klee, I think we should be grateful for his attempt to offer an account and excuse the way he veered off at the end, which more than anything, was due to the fact that he had recently discovered poetry. Also, he was thoughtful enough to veer off later on in the book, so we get to find out almost everything we’d want to know about the
Bahnhof Zoo
. The pages in which he veers off are actually very lovely. I enjoy taking what’s expressed in them literally: the image of poor Death visiting the submarine, for example.

Klee begins his ship’s log explaining where the name
Bahnhof Zoo
came from. He tells us, in Berlin in those days, the city’s best known meeting point was Bahnhof Zoo. A mass of people could be seen at any time of day or night, awaiting lovers and friends beneath the clock that presided over that place. For Prince Mdivani,
Bahnhof Zoo
was the most appropriate name for his old submarine, seeing that in Berlin—beneath that clock (made in Zurich by a company called Crazy Ship)—he’d waited on a number of occasions to meet a femme fatale, who, in the end, left him feeling terribly wretched and pushed him toward the decision to hire a static submarine as consolation, where he and his portable friends could have lots of fun.

The word Zoo also evoked Noah’s Ark, so similar to the submarine, since never before had such a variety of wild portable beasts gathered together. The historical partygoers from Vienna were joined at the last minute by people as distinctive as Marianne Moore, Cyril Connolly, Carla Orengo, Ezra Pound, Josephine Baker, Jacobo Sureda, Erich von Stroheim, Rozanes the jeweler, and Osip Mandelstam, among others, as well as the eccentric captain of the ship who declared his name to be Missolonghi. (He was in fact none other than Robert Walser, who, after years skirting around the edges of madness, had finally plunged into its abyss.)

“This Missolonghi,” writes Paul Klee, “wore a fur-lined jacket with the collar up, a blue cap, and the look of a colossus with his curved form silhouetted against the ship’s hatch, he was constantly angry with those he believed to be the longshoremen, shouting a continuous stream of invective and orders at them in an incomprehensible language.”

The people he believed to be longshoremen were in fact a group of English poets, friends of Rozanes the jeweler and great admirers of Baudelaire; they gave themselves the task of overseeing the smooth running of the Macao Salon, a luxurious opium den done up like a ransacked Norwegian palace, and, along with the puppet theatre, one of the
Bahnhof Zoo
’s main attractions.

The Macao Salon—presided over by a very large witch from China—was the setting for the incident between Rita Malú and Carla Orengo. Orengo, hearing Rita Malú was in love with Francis Picabia, waited for her to enter a deep opium dream and shaved off all her hair, leaving her completely bald. Quite the scandal, a dire incident—soon to be followed by another: Max Ernst, secretly in love with Orengo and briefly touched by madness, wrote to Alfonso
XIII
of Spain offering him Josephine Baker’s amatory services. At the same time, he proposed that he become a member of “a secret society of a portable area, a freed-up large beach of the imagination at the very center of language, needing no other key than playing along.” The letter was intercepted in time by Henri Michaux, who helped Ernst regain his sanity, reminding him that it was the madness of the Shandies to make this immobile voyage at the bottom of the sea.

Michaux was convinced that submerging oneself in the depth of the port of Dinard should be understood as a journey downward. For Michaux, this meant plunging into the abyss of what sustains us, plumbing the depths of our foundations. According to him, when we go down to what is truly below, we lose our points of reference, and those audacious enough to go downward in a radical way will see for themselves how that which is above closes over them, and at the same time how that which is open in a closed space (like the
Bahnhof Zoo
) takes on a dark and distant indeterminacy.

But not all of the Shandies who submerged in search of the opium salon fully understood these perspectives that had opened up in the depths. For many of them, this was an exotic, but straightforward, trip down to a den at the bottom of the sea, until they realized it was an instinctive movement appropriate—in fact perfectly appropriate—for the portable sentiment. Furthermore—and paradoxically—the Shandy voyage could continue, immobilizing oneself in what lies beneath in order, to fully regain mobility in that which is above.

“Days of great excitement they were,” writes Paul Klee, “and an awful lot of smoke. All of the portables, following previously agreed upon instructions, remembered to bring a cane with them onto the
Bahnhof Zoo
; César Vallejo’s was particularly noteworthy: it was made of mahogany and at some point swelled up, and a pair of breasts appeared. It was just a cane, but, right then, it became suddenly feminine. So entranced were we by Vallejo’s cane that, there beside the piano in the Macao Salon, we made it into the Shandy herald.”

Cane and piano also took lead roles in one of César Vallejo’s poems. Written on board the
Bahnhof Zoo
, the poem has until now been considered exceedingly hermetic when, in fact, it is a diaphanous approximation of the static voyage (downward and within) of portable opium.

“This cane is a piano that travels within, / travels by joyful leaps. / Then it meditates in iron repose, / nailed with ten horizons. // It advances. Drags itself under tunnels / beyond, under tunnels of pain, / under vertebrae naturally fugacious. // At times its tubes go, / slow yellow yearnings to live; / they go in eclipse, / and insectile nightmares delouse, / now dead to thunder, the heralds of geneses. // Dark piano, on whom do you spy / with your deafness that hears me, / with your muteness that deafens me. // Oh, mysterious pulse.”

Colette, Cocteau, Varèse, and Antheil always played the piano in strict rotation, sadly, in the Macao Salon, which was always very busy. But Antheil fell in love with Pola Negri and had to be replaced by Erik Satie. In his eagerness to win the femme fatale, Antheil began carrying out oceanographic studies, sounding the watery depths in a diving suit, cataloging unknown mollusks, etc. Any activity, as long as it won her attention.

Pola Negri, initially utterly indifferent to the vivacious musician, ended up taking pity on him when he fell ill, and, then, remembering she was a femme fatale, began to seduce him in his sickbed. For a few days, they shared the same divan in the Macao Salon, until the evening when he suddenly began to notice she was afflicted by some strange ailment. Indeed, she was unwell, for she didn’t know how to love. The water was killing her. The Shandies realized that they were afflicted, and so were the femmes fatales. The sun very much setting on the secret society at this point, its pangs well advanced, and the presence of this affliction, in turn, disclosed the presence of water, of nothingness, of death. George Antheil was visibly moved. “A dead woman is very weird,” he said.

Death by drowning, I’d add, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot’s verse homage to Pola Negri’s disappearance.
*
Deep down (in the sea and in their consciousness), every single one of the group paid homage to this death, just as all noticed that the Odradeks were also afflicted by that strange ailment. In an opium dream, Paul Klee claimed he’d seen his Odradek take to the air from the divan shrouded in mauve smoke and flee the
Bahnhof Zoo
, swimming underwater to Saint-Malo, taking a seat on Chateaubriand’s tomb and, there, at the foot of a blue anchor painted onto a whitewashed wall, watching the ships go by, he took a revolver from its pocket, placed it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. “For a moment,” writes Paul Klee, “the Odradek remained seated, looking at the grave, the radiance of the sea and the ships. But soon after, everything, including him, vanished into the Breton sunset.”

This story and a great many more, came to be staged in the puppet theater of the submarine’s Malabar Salon. All of the Shandies remembered the celebrated beginning of Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister
, in which the eponymous character tells of being introduced to the marvelous world of hand-spectacle. (As a child, his father gave him a portable puppet theater. So there was no way the
Bahnhof
Zoo
could do without the fascinating puppet universe. To the portables, the puppets were useful as a metaphor for being happy and in motion; the puppets’ actions didn’t depend on their own consciousness. They were able to postulate the starting points of a wise pilgrimage among the crags and cliffs of knowledge, the high illuminations of grace. The puppets served, additionally, as a way for Shandies to tell their continuous stories, an essential pleasure in all voyages.

Some of these stories were especially interesting, such as the one presented by René Daumal, who reflected on the death of literature using an old wardrobe. His spectacle concluded with the following wise words, uttered by a puppet meant to be the Phantom of the Opera: “Properly considered, literature comes alive when someone, sitting down to write a simple letter, hesitates for a few moments, wondering how to make what he proposes to say credible. And in the worst-case scenario—taking into account that people will one day cease to write letters—literature will still never die, that is, as long as the poets know how to read as well as how to write: Poets will never die, precisely because they die.”

Death, the language of death, language, and the death of language were the most common themes of the performances at the Malabar. And when word came of Jacques Rigaut’s disappearance in Palermo, a dramatization of his death by Georgia O’Keeffe became a favorite among the portable audience.

It was narrated in a cruel and coldhearted manner, seeing that Jacques Rigaut was presented on stage going mad and finally throwing himself grotesquely onto a mattress made to resemble a canoe, paddling upstream against death. Tasteless and unfair, it provoked critical responses. Frederico García Lorca’s stood out in particular; without ever having personally met Rigaut, he decided to rise to his defense and put on one of the
Bahnhof Zoo
’s loveliest ever puppet shows.

García Lorca moved the action from Palermo to Granada, specifically to the Alhambra Hotel, where Rigaut—wan and Andalucian—playfully experienced his own death accompanied by the tragic tap dance of several ballerina “pill puppets” (their sparkling blue blinded everyone in the audience). Following the dazzling, barbiturate dance of death, an electrical contraption appeared on stage, invented by Lorca himself, its objective when turned on being to radiate a very intense cold that would chill the blood. At that moment—and while the audience’s only thought was to find some way to wrap up warm—the curtain fell, with a painting on it by Lorca of an infinite yellow-sand avenue. In the foreground, where the avenue began, a Sudanese marionette could be seen: a black beggar woman with gray matted hair singing “Nessun Dorma.” While practicing the art of divination, she announced the Shandy conspiracy’s dark future.

Another of the most interesting puppet shows came courtesy of Stephan Zenith, who turned the puppets into quick-change artists, using them to represent (with remarkable brevity and ingenuity) the most extraordinary parts of the most select Shandy biographies. For every part, a different costume. All at high speed, worthy of Fregoli. There were six or seven scenes for each biography, seeing that life—sorry to say—isn’t worth much more than that.

After these speedy transformations came the final scene, which was the same for everyone: A skeleton with a scythe appeared, pretending not to seek its victim but knowing it would actually find him, the two then bumped into each other, and Death would mow down the portable’s abbreviated life at the roots.

This scene always brought a sad and resigned applause from the audience. The fact is, if one thing had become evident, there aboard the
Bahnhof Zoo
, it was that the conspiracy could, at any moment, enter into its final agony: there were signs now that Death was tightening its net.

Poor, powerless Death. “It boarded the submarine,” says Klee, “only to scramble away in dismay. And sailed for dry land, navigating terrifying Breton rocks along the way.” We come to the end of Klee’s ship’s log: not wanting to go into detail about why the immobile voyage reached its end, he resorts to poetic imagery telling us that, in spite of Death’s visit, the portables managed to frighten Death away, thereby delaying the final agonies of their heroic conspiracy.