The Last Days of New Paris Read online

  When he was at last done with that—his relief palpable—I allowed myself to get up, to go to urinate for the first time in a long time. I’m not sure, but now I feel as if I remember, from the bathroom, hearing a door creak open, and close again.

  In any case when I came back into the bedroom, the man and his satchel and his notebooks were gone, leaving me with pages and pages of my own scrawl, anguish, excitement, deep confusion, and the hotel bill.

  —

  I never saw him again. Nor, even with the expensive help of a private detective, was I ever able to track down the erstwhile acquaintance who had introduced us. I had only my notes, and the task with which I’d been—obviously, if unstatedly—left. It’s taken much work, but I’ve tried at last to discharge it here.

  What I’ve written—as those who summoned me certainly knew I would—has been carefully extracted, distilled, and organized as best as I am able from the voluminous notes I made from the man’s rush of narrative. In several places, I have filled it out, even sometimes corrected what he said, as the result of my own researches. Again, I’m sure this was my given role.

  Perhaps some readers will deem it unseemly for me not to have restricted myself to the most terse and dispassionate, even verbatim, reportage of what was told me. To them, I can only say that I am, more than anything else, a writer of fiction, and both the woman who contacted me and the man who met me knew that. Perhaps they were indeed merely making do, and would have preferred another reporter: perhaps, though, they wanted the story to be told with something of the register of fiction, to communicate a certain urgency that narrative can bring, that was vividly there in the man’s exposition. I’ve called the story “a novella” here, for decorum’s sake, and to justify the way in which I’ve told it. I don’t know if they would approve.

  I’ve also appended a section of references. In organizing this report, and to understand even a little of the generative power of the S-Blast, I spent a very long time trying to source the manifs that the man described. Many, of course, were fairly obvious. The derivation of others he told me himself, often explaining that “Thibaut” knew. In some cases I have followed him in making them explicit within the story: others are in the notes below. The origin of a few of the manifs he did not reveal, or perhaps know.

  During the course of our conversation, he mentioned many other phenomena and animate manifs, some of which I recognized or later identified, and all of which I recorded in my long notes on the city’s history, demonology, manifology, my drafts of an encyclopedia of New Paris. They are not dealt with here, as they featured in his story only as asides. All his offhand descriptions kept me breathless with a sense of how the war- and dream-ruined city must teem. The explorer in New Paris might encounter nudes descending staircases or brides stripped bare, composites in dark lines from Emmy Bridgewater, the nocturnal cats of Alice Rahon. Her mouth and eyes might be stopped up by butterflies, an assaulting echo of Winged Domino from Roland Penrose. Her watch could melt. Wilhelm Freddie’s mummy-wrapped horse-head figure might come for her; or a ripple-skirted dress from Rachel Baes, or Seligmann’s scuttling woman-legged stool; a swan-neck on dancer’s legs, manif from Teige. She might watch Picabia’s layered people crawl through each other, or see the hauling exhausted rattling red shapes of Eileen Agar’s reaping machine. A clergyman could crawl along her path, manifest from the film of Germaine Dulac. She might face Lise Deharme’s young girl in tatters. Hunt the spindly animal skeletons of Wols. Pick from trees laden with meat thrust between the paving slabs. Hide from darkly glowing solarized presences from Lee Miller and Man Ray.

  The point, I hope, is clear. The streets of New Paris throng.

  Of those manifs mentioned in this narrative, there are, I’m sure, many I’ve failed to identify. If I understand it correctly, it’s in the nature of the S-Blast that the bulk of its results are random, or manifest from the work of unknown artists—by which in Surrealist fashion, I mean people. These I could never possibly know. Other manifs I may not have recognized as such during the telling. There were also presences I feel sure derive from works I’ve seen, but that I’ve been unable to recall or track down. Someone more knowledgeable about art than I am may fill in the holes.

  The literature on Surrealism is, of course, vast—there are far too many excellent books to list more than a fraction. Besides a huge stack of volumes of reproductions, several dictionaries and encyclopedias of Surrealism, collections of its manifestos and texts, a few of the volumes that I found particularly helpful in making sense of New Paris, as it was described to me, and in identifying the manifs, included Michael Löwy’s Morning Star; Franklin Rosemont and Robin Kelley’s edited Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora; Penelope Rosemont’s edited Surrealist Women: An International Anthology; Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijałkowski’s edited Surrealism Against the Current; and Anne Vernay and Richard Walter’s edited La Main à plume: Anthologie du surréalisme sous l’Occupation.

  Just why the visitor and the woman wanted the history of New Paris told I have no idea. I feel it may be germane, somehow, that a good number of the manifs seem to originate in artworks that, in our world, post-date the moment of the S-Blast in theirs. What that might say about the relations between our realities—whether there are certain pieces that insist on being born, whatever the contingencies of a timeline, whether there are certain manifesting forces that reach across what might otherwise seem impermeable barriers of ontology, taking or leaving traces—I don’t know.

  Three weeks after my meeting in the hotel, I was in a café in Stepney considering our encounter. I chanced to look up, straight through the storefront, at a man standing outside, looking through the glass at me. That is, I think he was looking at me. I can’t be sure. Food was displayed on shelves in the window, and from where I sat, an apple blocked my view of the man’s face. I could see him beyond it, coated and hatted, unmoving. The apple obscured his eyes, his nose, his mouth. Still, I think he was staring at me.

  I drew breath at last and he was gone, too fast for me to ever see his face.

  Perhaps some understanding of the nature of the manifs of New Paris, of the source and power of art and manifestation, may be of some help to us, in times to come.

  In any case, having been told the story of New Paris, there’s no way I could not tell it.

  NOTES

  Some Manifs, Details, and their Sources

  “It’s the Vélo!”: The bicycle-woman is from Leonora Carrington’s 1941 pen-and-ink work, I am an Amateur of Velocipedes. Though Thibaut was scandalized at the sight, in her drawing, Carrington also depicted a rider on her figureheaded machine.

  As everyone gathered watched the black virtue: The phrase “black virtue”—“La Vertu noire”—was my informant’s. Based on this, and on his description of the presence-filled darkness behind the glass, the chaos of colors in the house seems to have been a manif of Roberto Matta’s oil painting of the same name.

  There are worse things than garden airplane traps: Around 1935, Max Ernst painted more than one Garden Airplane Trap, landscapes in which vivid, feathery, fungal, anemone-like flowers overgrow broken planes.

  Flocks of bat-winged businessmen and ladies: Winged figures are hardly culturally unprecedented, but the particular flying bourgeoisie described seem to me emergent from Ernst’s 1934 collage, Une semaine de bonté: from the Tuesday of that “week of kindness,” its figures cut from catalogues and chimera-ed with draconic wings.

  mono- and bi- and triplane geometries: The horrifying colorless aerial shapes that predate like antimatter are from René Magritte’s 1937 painting, Le Drapeau noir. It’s been claimed that the work was inspired by the bombing of Guernica: in the skies of New Paris its manifs seem like remorseless machinic iterations of some Thanatos.

  Huge sunflowers root all over: Though he did not explicitly refer to it, there was something in the scale of the sunflowers Thibaut described and the unease with which he described them that ma
kes me suspect the progenitor of these oversized specimens of what Dorothea Tanning called the “most aggressive of flowers” is manifest from her 1943 painting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, in which a colossal, balefully glowing specimen threatens two girls.

  up-thrust snakes that are their stems: These snake-held, eye-and-heart-petaled plants, the Lovers’ Flower, were drawn for André Breton (“quite clumsily,” he gracelessly reports) by “Nadja,” the woman we now know to be Léona Delacourt, and reproduced in his 1928 quasi-novel named for her.

  human hands crawl under spiral shells: Dora Maar’s uncanny photo-collage Sans Titre (1934) is the source of the shelled hand manifs. In the war notebooks he showed me, Thibaut describes a fishing village of tents below the Quai d’Auteuil. “People dredge with wire, bring up spiral crustaceans that crawl the wet sand sluggishly on human fingers and thumbs. Painted nails. The locals boil them. They winkle steaming hand-meat from the shells and eat without cannibal shame.”

  each shark is hollow-backed, with a canoe seat: In 1929, the Belgian journal Variétés printed the results of several Surrealist games. In “If, When,” one player writes a conditional and another, without looking, a main clause, which are then combined into a new proposition. “If,” Elsie Houston mooted, “tigers could prove how grateful they are to us,” then, the photographer Suzanne Muzard concluded, “sharks would allow themselves to be used as canoes.” As in New Paris, it seems, sharks might sometimes do.

  the stumps of its struts, forty storeys up: Just as the Eiffel Tower is the most iconic image of Paris in our own world, so its astoundingly truncated, floating pinnacle is in Thibaut’s. In his Paris and the Surrealists, George Melly remarks of the tower in passing that during one discussion about “embellishing” Paris, “it was proposed that ‘only the top half be left.’ ” I’ve been unable to find any other mention of this mysterious suggestion, which clearly cleaved with the dynamics of the S-Blast.

  an impossible composite of tower and human…a pair of women’s high-heeled feet: The helmeted figure that investigated the young Thibaut appears to be manifest from a 1927 exquisite corpse created by André Breton, Man Ray, Max Morise, and Yves Tanguy.

  enervation infecting house after house: I have not found a specific source in Céline’s work for the manif of enervation mentioned. The overall sense described, of course, permeates his work.

  Enigmarelle, foppish robot staggered out of an exhibition guide: Enigmarelle was a freakish machine figure with ringletted hair and a vacuous wax smile. The Surrealists were fascinated by the “Man of Steel,” supposedly created by the American inventor Frederick Ireland in 1904, and popular in vaudeville. They promised it would attend their 1938 exhibition (it did not). What was without question a fake in our world appears to have become, in New Paris, real.

  The dreaming cat: The bipedal cat is manifest from The Cat’s Dream, an image by Nadja. It’s unclear whether the animal is dangerous, constrained as it is by a weight tied to its right leg, and with its tail tethered by rope to a metal ring that, according to Thibaut, floats constantly behind it and above its head like an unlikely balloon.

  sagelands, smoothed alpine topographies like sagging drapes: It took me some time to realize from his description and the areas’ odd name that the “sagelands” are places where geography has come to manifest certain paintings of Kay Sage, with their frozen, twisted, melancholy rippling coils and rock forms.

  Under one lamppost, it is night: This isolated outpost of manif night, with its streetlight, seems certainly to be from Magritte’s painting series The Empire of Light (1953–54).

  Jacques Hérold set a black chain on fire: It was in May 1944, in our timeline, that the journal Informations surréalistes was published with a cover by Jacques Hérold: a simple, stark image of a flaming chain.

  a dream mammal watches him with marmoset eyes: Thibaut made no mention of the source of the image of the clawed beast, and I did not think to try to track it down. But during quite other researches I came across Valentine Hugo’s drawing The Dream of 21 December 1929, of that year, and it was clear that it was from there that the animal was manifest. The image also includes a drowned woman: it’s possible that the prey, as well as the predator that Thibaut disturbed, was manif.

  Redon’s leering ten-legged spider: The Smiling Spider, with a gurning, almost chimpanzee-like face, dates from the 1880s, in its original charcoal and later lithograph form. Odilon Redon was one of the Surrealists’ revered recent predecessors, and more than one of his “noirs,” his “black things,” have been sighted in New Paris: Thibaut described to me watching Redon’s great sky-gazing eye-balloon rising sedately over the smoking ruins of a battle between Nazi soldiers and forces of the Groupe Manouchian.

  such prim Delvaux bones…prone Mallo skeletons: Manifs from the work of Belgian artist Paul Delvaux seem to be relatively common in New Paris, in particular skeletons such as those described here, to which, if not as obsessively as he did his big-eyed nude women, he repeatedly returned. To quote the title of his 1941 image, the whole of New Paris could be considered “la ville inquiète”—the worried, apprehensive, anxious, unquiet city. The uneasy city. A city also inhabited by other, fitting, trembling bone figures, ripping themselves apart as they lie shaking, reconstructing themselves repeatedly. They are manifest from Maruja Mallo’s 1930 Antro de fósiles—Den of Fossils.

  The Musée de l’Armée is being emptied…by curious undergrowth: Paul Eluard’s idea, from Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution number 6 in 1933, has clearly manifested. The “irrational embellishment” he suggested for Les Invalides was that the area “be replaced by an aspen forest.”

  “They’re called wolf-tables…Manifest from an imagining by a man called Brauner.”: The most famous iteration of the “loup-table,” the “wolf-table,” of the Romanian artist Victor Brauner, was the physical object itself that he made, in our reality, in 1947. Whether or not he physically made it in that of Thibaut, too, I don’t know, but he had imagined the furniture-beast at least twice before the S-Blast, in his 1939 paintings Psychological Space and Fascination, which Thibaut appeared to know. As Thibaut mentions, in both these earlier renderings, as in the later sculpture, the predator’s snarling head—“screaming over its shoulder at death,” as Breton put it—and tail and ostentatious scrotum appear more vulpine than lupine. Breton considered Brauner’s wolf-table to be a uniquely sensitive tapping of fear, of anticipation of the war to come.

  a barnacled book: Initially I presumed that the “book that has rested underwater” was Prospero’s grimoire, but in later conversation Thibaut corrected me: it is the manif of a 1936 object made by Leonor Fini.

  a spoon covered with fur: The spoon that Thibaut half expected to find often accompanies a similarly furred cup, he said, and is of course manifest from Meret Oppenheim’s famous assemblage, sometimes known as Breakfast in Fur. A reasonable minority of the spoons left in New Paris are, apparently, now furred.

  “ ‘Those who are asleep…are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe.’ ”: Géographie nocturne’s opening line, which Thibaut quoted, is from Herakleitos. It, along with La Main à plume, was printed in 1941.

  “Ithell Colquhoun?”: Colquhoun, in our reality, was an unusual and minor artist who had been expelled from the London Surrealist Group in 1940. She retained a lifelong fascination for the occult, particularly Kabbala, and was a member of various magically inclined orders and groups over the years. She was later the author of the odd hermetic novel Goose of Hermogenes.

  “ ‘Confusedly…forests mingle with legendary creatures hidden in the thickets.’ ”: Robert Desnos’s description of the forest dates from 1926, from the piece “Sleep Spaces.”

  those rushing futurist plane-presences: Launched with a manifesto in 1929, “aeropittura”—“aeropainting”—was a heavily fascist-influenced iteration of second-generation futurism in Italy. It was associated with Benedetta Cappa, Enrico Prampolini, “Tato” (Guglielmo Sansoni), Fortunato
Depero, Fillia and Tullio Crali. It offered its quasi-abstraction in breathless service to imagined speed and bombastic propaganda, and to quasi-religious fascist iconography, such as Gerardo Dottori’s 1933 portrait of Mussolini, Il Duce. It was the frenetic angular plane-presences of aeropittura that appear to have manifested occasionally in New Paris.

  “Fauves?…The negligible old star?”: The fauvism of André Derain, referenced here, was tolerated and, to a degree, celebrated in the Vichy regime. New Paris is home to a few too-bright figures walked vaguely from his images. A short and elliptical six-line poem by Gertrude Stein gives its name—and, in New Paris, its unpleasant manifest quiddity—to the manif known as the negligible old star.

  A giant’s pissoir: It was Paul Éluard, in 1933, in the collective discussion on the “irrational embellishment” of Paris, who suggested the trans­mogri­ficat­ion of the Arc de Triomphe into a urinal.

  a great sickle-headed fish…a woman made up of outsized pebbles: The fish with its huge orange crescent head was one of many manifs emerged from the vivid monsters of Wilfredo Lam. The figure of the stone woman cropped up more than once in Thibaut’s testimony. He sketched it for me, and it was from that that I was able eventually to identify the manif as Meret Oppenheim’s 1938 painting Stone Woman. And there is, indeed, something particularly arresting about the simple image, even among so much strangeness. I’m not able to express exactly what it is. But I think it may lie in the fact that because we have heard, many times, in fairy tales, of people being turned to stone, and because we’ve seen statues, we know what we think something called a “stone woman” must look like. But Oppenheim’s reclining, resting woman is composed instead, jarringly, of a handful of loosely coagulated pebbles. We sense their tactility, we know how they will fit in our hands. But the chop of the water at her ankles shows that the woman is appropriately tall, and that these carefully rendered smooth stones are wildly out of scale. That problematic of scale, as much as the fact that the woman is rock, is what is so jarring.