The Last Days of New Paris Read online

  the Palais Garnier, its stairs dinosaur bones: Breton’s suggestion for the “irrational embellishment” of Palais Garnier, the opera house, was that it become a perfume fountain, and that its staircase be reconstructed “in the bones of prehistoric animals.”

  Le Chabanais: The extraordinary and macabre fate of Le Chabanais is manifest from Tristan Tzara’s proposed “embellishment” of 1933. Of the famous brothel, he demands, “[f]ill it with transparent lava and after solidification demolish the outside walls.” This, horrifyingly, is what has occurred in New Paris, setting around all those within. They are frozen, suspended, staring and unrotting in eternal surprise, like insects in amber.

  A vegetal puppet, stringy, composite floral thing: The vegetal puppets are manifs from a 1938 work of that name by the Spanish-Mexican anarchist and artist Remedios Varo. Twisted, anguished, fibrous and sliding figures against a dark background, here and there they wear faint traces of human features visible.

  Celebes: Max Ernst’s 1921 painting, Celebes, or The Elephant Celebes, is one of the most celebrated and instantly recognizable works in the Surrealist canon. The vast actualization of it—a strange, terrifying quasirobot elephant, derived in shape from an image Ernst once saw of a Sudanese corn bin—has become one of the most well-known in New Paris. It leaves a trail on its wanderings through the city, Thibaut told me. Where it stops to rest it leaves pools of sticky yellow grease.

  The sun over Paris isn’t an empty-hearted ring: The “sol niger,” the black sun, sometimes with a hole at its core, is an image borrowed from alchemy and popular with the Surrealists. Max Ernst painted it repeatedly, as part of his “forest” works, in the 1920s.

  smoke figures wafting in and out of presence: Wolfgang Paalen, the Austrian-Mexican painter, created the semiautomatic method that led to the “fumages” manifest here in the late 1930s, by holding his paper or canvas over a lit candle or oil lamp so the soot and smoke discolored it, moving it so the marks extended into vaguely recognizable shapes. Over these figures of evanescent schmutz he would then layer ink and/or paint, amending, adding details and texture.

  “The horse head.”: Thibaut was later to see her photograph of what Sam called “the horse head.” It was a tall and sinister robed figure, staring at the camera, fingering a crucifix in its bulky three-fingered hand. As much, he said, as the cast to a head was equine, it was canine, and savagely fanged. I believe this to be a manif from Leonora Carrington’s 1941 drawing, Do You Know My Aunt Eliza?

  Seligmann. Colquhoun. Ernst and de Givry: The Surrealists had a long interest in divination, the occult, the hermetic and alchemical and traditions of witchcraft. As well as Ithell Colquhoun, among many other figures who exemplify this tradition are Grillot de Givry (whose 1929 book Le Musée des sorciers, mages et alchimistes the Surrealists enthusiastically greeted) and Kurt Seligmann, and the inspirations Nicolas Flamel, Hermes Trismegistus, Agrippa and Joséphin “Sar” Péladan.

  “ ‘On Certain Possibilities of the Irrational Embellishment of a City.’ ”: The source of so much of the matter of New Paris, the extraordinary questionnaire-style article about the “irrational embellishment” of Paris, “Sur certaines possibilités d’embellissement irrationnel d’une ville” dates, as noted, from 1933, from issue 6 of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. The piece asks, of seven Surrealists, “[s]hould one keep, move, modify, transform or remove” thirty-one varied and eccentrically chosen Parisian sites (though none of those asked give answers for all of them). Those questioned are Andre Bréton, Paul Éluard, Arthur Harfaux, Maurice Henry, the redoubtable Trotskyist Benjamin Péret, Tristan Tzara, and Georges Wenstein. Not particularly widely cited in the English-language literature on the movement in our timeline, it is obvious from his story that in Thibaut’s, this piece has become central to the manifestational nature of New Paris.

  “ ‘Chemical-blue, twisted machines of jujube-trees of rotten flesh?’ ”: The description of the manif inhabitants of the forests that Thibaut quotes comes from the Martinican poet and theorist of Négritude Aimé Césaire, from his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), published initially in 1939, and in expanded version (in our reality), with a fervent encomium from Breton, in 1947. Césaire, in his original, is not merely describing but invoking the ghosts that manifest in New Paris: “Rise, phantoms, chemical-blue from a forest of hunted beasts of twisted machines of jujube-trees of rotten flesh of a basket of oysters of eyes of a lacework of lashes cut from the lovely sisal of human skin.”

  a feathered sphere the size of a fist: The feathered lookers that feed on the sight of Thibaut and Sam are manifs of the 1937 painting Object-Phantom by the astonishing Czech artist known as Toyen, after rejecting the name Marie Čermínová, (and, in Czech grammar, the feminine gender). Toyen’s work seems to have had a strong influence on the topography and inhabitants of New Paris, after the S-Blast.

  a winged monkey with owl’s eyes: The monkey on the windowsill is instantly recognizable as a manif of the beast crouching at the feet of the semi-nude woman in a doorway in Dorothea Tanning’s 1942 painting The Birthday.

  It stands like a person under a great weight…hedgerow chic: They did not invent the game of “Consequences,” but at 54 rue du Château in the late teens or early 1920s, the Surrealists certainly developed it, giving it the name by which we now know it—“Exquisite Corpse.” They raised it to a, perhaps the, central place in all their methodologies. Simone Kahn describes the technique and its importance: “On one of those idle, weary nights which were quite numerous in the early days of Surrealism…the Exquisite Corpse was invented…The technique of transmission was readily found: the sheet would be folded after the first player’s drawing, three or four of its lines passing beyond the fold. The next player would start by prolonging these lines and giving them shape, without having seen the first. From then on, it was delirium.” “[W]e had at our command an infallible way of holding the critical intellect in abeyance, and of fully liberating the mind’s metaphorical activity,” Breton said.

  There are countless beautiful examples in the archives. Some are simple lines of black ink on paper; some are carefully colored; some are much more complex and time-consuming cut-and-paste works. Grotesque, playful, sinister, combining the iconography of politics, the components of a bestiary, industrial machinery, and dream grammar. The collaborations include the work of Oscar Dominguez, Yves Tanguy, Pierre Naville, Jeannette Tanguy, Gerardo Lizárraga, Greta Knutson, Valentine Hugo, Breton, Max Morise, André Masson, Nusch Éluard, Picasso, Man Ray, Duchamp, and many others.

  The exquisite corpse of which Thibaut and Sam became unlikely companions—which can be seen as the frontispiece of this book—is manif of a 1938 composite collage of stuck-together engraved images by André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Jacqueline Lamba. It stands, a tottering pile of parts, and looks out from below its caterpillar hat with a vatic melancholy.

  everyone…feels as if they are on the mezzanine of a snake-flecked staircase: Thibaut was very specific about this anxiousness he felt in the moment described, putting me in mind of Pierre Roy’s 1927 or 1928 oil painting, Danger on the Stairs, of a large snake descending and crawling, toward the viewer.

  They are in rubble full of birdcages…a baby’s face the size of a room: The shooting ranges are manifs from Toyen’s various drawings of that title, dating from 1939 to 1940, variations of the flat, troubling, and troubled landscapes. All the components and inhabitants of these stretches Thibaut described to me are from these images: the giant baby’s head, for example, is depicted in Tir IV / The Shooting Gallery.

  a storm of birds: Birds recur throughout Surrealist iconography, and this collective bird mentioned, the dancing figure Thibaut saw in the sky, may be Loplop, Max Ernst’s “Bird Superior.”

  Chabrun, Léo Malet and Tita: The role of these and other stalwarts of La Main à plume, the clandestine Surrealist group, is, of course, more dramatic in New Paris (not that it was uninteresting or
without incident in ours).

  Thibaut had fought the Carlingue once, alongside Laurence Iché: I tried repeatedly to persuade Thibaut to speak more of his Main à plume comrades but he was resistant, burdened, it seemed to me, with a respect and mourning that muted him for reasons he could not articulate: their death clearly weighed very heavily on him. Particularly Iché’s. In our timeline, Iché survived the war and lived until 2007. For reasons I can’t explain, including to myself, I did not tell him this.

  The manifs he described fighting alongside, that Iché was able to bring forth and direct, come from her poem “I Prefer Your Uneasiness Like a Dark Lantern,” published—in our reality—in Au fil du vent in 1942. There she writes of “[t]he eagle-headed caterpillar,” “the wind-haired eagle,” and “the bath of shredded mirrors.”

  Iché modeled at various times for several artists, including her father, the sculptor René Iché, a resistance activist with the Groupe du musée de l’Homme. In 1940, she was the model for his bronze La Déchirée—The Torn—a statuette of a semi-naked, blind woman reaching for the sky. This histrionic allegory for France under Nazi occupation was smuggled to London, where it was given to de Gaulle. He kept it on his desk, and it became something of a symbol of the Resistance. In our reality, the statue later disappeared (Thibaut had never heard of it, so its fate in his world I don’t know). This was not a great loss to art.

  Sacré-Cœur: It was Breton who suggested, as one of his “irrational embellishments,” that Sacré-Cœur should become a tram depot, painted black. He also claimed it should be transported to the northern region of France, the Beauce. This, obviously, did not occur.

  a ladder of sinewy muscled arms: The ladders of thick arms gripping each other, emerging from the earth and supporting each other at each elbow, leaning against walls, are manifs from an ink drawing by Tita, Les Bâtisseurs de ruines, printed in Transfusion du verbe in 1941. Other aspects of the landscape of New Paris, as Thibaut described them to me, also seem derived from illustrations from that journal—stones like praying mantis claws, a windowed hand growing from the ground, manifs from Aline Gagnaire’s illustration in the same issue, for example.

  A huge featureless manif woman holed by drawers…dolls crawling crablike: The drawered, headless woman Thibaut imagines Sam considering is from Dalí’s 1937 painting The Burning Giraffe. That famous giraffe has also, he told me, more than once galloped through New Paris, pouring out smoke, but the huge propped-up women, extruding drawers from their legs and chests, leaves shedding in drifts from the tree-boughs where should have been their heads, are the more dangerous and threatening manifs. Their drawers slide open and shut hungrily.

  The dolls mentioned are manifs of Hans Bellmer’s notorious and grotesque sculptures of young women’s body-parts reconfigured into lubricious and frightening formations.

  “ ‘My pajamas balsam hammer gilt with azure.’ ”: Simone Yoyotte, from whose poem Thibaut’s pajamas were a manif, was from Martinique. She was a collaborator of the Parisian Surrealist Group before her death in 1933, at the age of twenty-three. More important, she, along with her brother Pierre, was an activist in the Légitime Défense (Self-Defense) group. It was in their journal, of the same name, that this poem was published, in 1932. The group was formed on Rue Tournon in 1932 by the Martinican poets and philosophers Etienne Léro, Jules Monnerat, René Ménil, and five others, including the Yoyottes. None were above the age of twenty-five. The extraordinary, explosive journal, with its uncompromising anticolonial, Marxist and Surrealist interventions, was later to be described by Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the so-called “fathers” of Négritude, as “the most insurrectional document ever signed by people of color.”

  Trapped in their Marseille hinterland…the Surrealists had drawn new suits, a cartographic rebellion: The origin story of the “Marseille game,” the deck of cards that the captive Surrealists created and described to Parsons, is the same in our timeline as in Thibaut’s. The full details of the cards and the artists who depicted them were as follows:

  BLACK STARS, FOR DREAMS:

  Ace; Oscar Dominguez

  Genius—Lautréamont, the author of the Surrealist favorite The Songs of Maldoror; Wilfredo Lam

  Siren—Lewis Carroll’s Alice; Wilfredo Lam

  Magus—Freud; Oscar Dominguez

  RED FLAMES, FOR LOVE AND DESIRE:

  Ace; Max Ernst

  Genius—Baudelaire; Jacqueline Lamba

  Siren—the Portuguese Nun, the supposed author of a set of passionate love letters of the seventeenth century (now thought to be fictional); André Masson

  Magus—the poet and philosopher Novalis; André Masson

  BLACK LOCKS, FOR KNOWLEDGE:

  Ace; André Breton

  Genius—Hegel; Victor Brauner

  Siren—Hélène Smith, the nineteenth-century French psychic; Victor Brauner

  Magus—Paracelsus; André Breton

  RED WHEELS, FOR REVOLUTION:

  Ace; Jacqueline Lamba

  Genius—the Marquis de Sade; Jacques Hérold

  Siren—Lamiel (the heroine of the novel of the same name, by Stendhal); Jacques Hérold

  Magus—Pancho Villa; Max Ernst

  The jokers were images of Père Ubu, the monstrous swearing clown-tyrant of the plays of that beloved Surrealist precursor Alfred Jarry. The image chosen was by Jarry himself.

  In our timeline, the designs were published in the Surrealist journal VVV in 1943, in New York, some reworked a little. Mostly this was just a matter of tidying up the images, but there were more substantial changes. The Ace of Revolutions, for example, became a wheel seemingly balanced on a spatter-pattern of blood, rather than, as in Lamba’s original design, a waterwheel churning blood. The radical-melancholy and foreboding sense of blood as a motor for change was thus, uncha­racte­risti­cally for the movement, bowdlerized away.

  In the reality of New Paris, the cards were never published, though they did, obviously, appear within the city, in card form no less, as immensely powerful manif items, capable of invoking their geniuses, their sirens and magi. Thibaut claimed to me that it is not just the face cards but the aces and number cards that were present in Paris. What they manifest, and how, he did not know.

  “A lobster. With wires…”: It would be surprising if Salvador Dalí’s absurdly iconic Lobster Telephone of 1936 did not appear in Thibaut’s reconfigured world.

  scratch-figures etched with keys: In the 1930s, Brassaï famously photographed the images scrawled on and scratched crudely into Paris walls. In New Paris, the faces (as they mostly were) he obsessively captured in black and white are live, and full of motion. If, Thibaut said, you put your ears close to the walls, they move their scratch mouths, and whisper to you in a cementy language no human understands.

  a great shark mouth…smiling like a stupid angel: This manif is from a text by Alice Rahon, from 1942, in which she describes, at the horizon of the city, “a great shark mouth appear[ing] with the smile of a stupid angel.”

  It is a sandbumptious: The sandbumptious is a freakish beast manifest from the work March 7 1937—4 (Sandbumptious) by the extraordinary Grace Pailthorpe. Pailthorpe, now an obscure figure, was described in 1936 by Breton as “the best and most truly Surrealist” of the British Surrealists (which could be read, admittedly, as damning with faint praise). She had been a surgeon in France during the First World War, and went on to be a pioneer in British psychoanalysis. Born in 1883, she turned to painting late, at the age of fifty-two, when she met the artist Reuben Mednikoff, who was to become her partner (in another overlap between the worlds of the occult and Surrealism they met at a party hosted by Victor Neuberg, a Satanist and one of Crowley’s lovers). Pailthorpe and Mednikoff were expelled from the London Surrealist Group in 1940 in a bout of toxic infighting (Conroy Maddox called Pailthorpe an “Ogre”) but the spirit of her work clearly remained allied enough in spirit to be made manifest in New Paris after the S-Blast.

  the Lion of Belfort: The Lion of Belfort
is one of the Parisian sites irrationally embellished in 1933, but none of the suggestions from the article exactly concord with Thibaut’s description here. The stone figures through which Thibaut walked seem, rather, perhaps to be refugees from the “Lion of Belfort” section of Max Ernst’s collage novel Une semaine de bonté.

  the Statue of Liberty: The semi-living replacement of the—real—statue in the Jardin du Luxembourg is manifest from a grotesque 1934 collage of the Statue of Liberty by Czech Surrealist Jindřich Štyrsky.

  where the Palace of Justice once was…sawdust swirls from the windows and doors of Sainte-Chapelle: The form taken by the Palace of Justice in New Paris is a combination of the “irrational embellishments” suggested by Benjamin Péret, who proposed that it be replaced by a swimming pool, and by André Breton, who wanted it replaced by a huge graffito visible from planes above. It was Tristan Tzara who proposed that the Sainte-Chapelle be filled with sawdust.

  the squat square towers to either side of its sunburst central window: The two towers of New Paris’s Notre-Dame have been irrationally embellished somewhat as per Breton’s suggestion: he suggested they be replaced by glass containers full of blood and sperm. Why the blood appears to be a blood-vinegar mix, and why the towers are silos, rather than the giant bottles of his suggestion, Thibaut did not claim to know.

  Arno Breker’s looming, kitsch, retrograde marble figures: Josef Thorak and Arno Breker, the Austrian-German and German “official” Nazi artists, were sculptors specializing in grandiose sinister “Aryana,” held to be the antipode of “degenerate,” especially “Jewish” art.

  Hélène Smith…glossolalic channeler of a strange imagined Mars: The Surrealists described the medium Hélène Smith (pseudonym for Catherine-Elise Muller), the manif of their dream of whom Thibaut’s card summoned, as a “muse” of automatic writing. It was in a trancelike state that she would “channel” a deliberation-free scrawl she called Martian script. Thus she described the lives of extra-terrestrials—Martians and “Ultra-Martians,” extraordinary manif figures Thibaut also glimpsed on the Île de la Cité.