A Brief History of Portable Literature

POSTCARD FROM CROWLEY

“Here in Prague,” Crowley wrote to Francis Picabia (who’d been awaiting word in Paris), “we came close to turning into ghosts. Seeing that more than one of us went mad and felt a desire to traverse the thick walls, I came to think we’d all end up turning into invisible beings, only able to recognize ourselves at night by our white dance scarves.

“All of it was down to Céline’s antics. Having convinced himself that the conspiracy would be nothing without a traitor to jeopardize it, he decided to play that thankless role and systematically began to raise his voice during our stealthy café meetings.

“Not content with this, he began to write a book, Le vrai nom du complot portatif, which opened with a recollection that among the ancient Egyptians, everyone had two names: their inconsequential name (known to all) and their true or great name, which they kept hidden. After reminding the reader that the name of Rome was also secret, he went on to reveal the real name of our portable society. He did! That name which you now shudderingly recall!

“One afternoon, Valery Larbaud and five other colleagues visited Céline in his hotel and discovered this manuscript. To find it they had to go inside a tent he’d set up in the middle of his room. Enraged,

Larbaud reminded him of Quintus Valerius’s fate when, in the last days of the Republic, he was executed for revealing Rome’s true name.

“Duchamp, Tzara, Vallejo, everyone there, made it clear to him that he might share Quintus Valerius’s fate, but Céline’s response was to smile the twisted smile of one who knows how to make the foulest, most underhanded intentions smell sweet. Faced with this attitude, they burned the tent and, with it, the manuscript.

“Céline barely flinched. He seemed very comfortable in his role as the traitor, and, a few days later, he showed up again at Café Slavia, the place where we met every afternoon. He came in shouting, flanked by two professors from Madrid, even more bothersome and clingy than he was. One of them boasted of having translated Joyce into Spanish — which couldn’t but fill us with misgivings since, as you well know, it was quite a while ago that Joyce parted company with us, thinking he’d have to pay a monthly membership fee. The other professor, who went by the surname Diego, claimed he was a Castilian seafarer, and proceeded to discourse on Greenland’s solitary inlets, and about certain hot springs at the North Pole. An utter bore, believe me!

“We had a few truly awful days of being pursued by these clingy professors, who, in concert with the traitor, even came to defy us when we went out to Prague’s purlieus, its most sequestered spots. We couldn’t find a way to shake off these damned professors, who were clearly spying on us. This made many of our number feel like turning into ghosts or invisible beings. And this added to the numbers taking part in the secret expedition to the International Sanatorium, situated on the outskirts of the city, where I’m writing you from today.

“Here, away from the persecution of the traitor and his underlings, we’re on a run of extraordinary, feverish creativity. All thanks to this attempt to betray us. And also in part thanks to the owner and director of the Sanatorium, whom we call Mr. Marienbad, because he doesn’t want his true name revealed to anyone.

“I do not believe you’d like Marienbad. This is a man who always wears new clothes. He is a poor conversationalist, an indefatigable chatterbox. He wears an enormous, carefully sculpted beard that makes him seem all the more corpulent. He subsists on buttermilk, rice pudding, and slices of banana with butter. A lover of women, he conceals, with his unctuous ways, a brutal disposition, in turn betrayed by his flat feet, his spatula-like fingernails, his steady gaze, and ecstatic smile.

“A scientist, man of the world, and gymnastics buff, he goes around to the international gymnastics meets escorted by a number of his nurses, who, under his personal supervision, frequently win all the top prizes. Marienbad is something akin to a demagogical toiler, tirelessly churning out heavy tomes not in the least bit portable and filled with banalities; he is nonetheless growing accustomed to seeing his massive volumes published and immediately translated into several languages. Innumerable newspaper pieces have spread his name, and it would not be surprising if with his new venture, the Anonymous Kafka Society, he goes on to achieve even greater renown.

“And the thing is, Marienbad loves money. I’ve been able to find out that he kidnapped his wife a number of years ago, a rich Jewish hunchback with an enormous dowry, which he used to set up the International Sanatorium. Although his love of lucre is considerable, he lets us stay at the Sanatorium for free. Occasionally, one of us will make an effort and tell him a story, or simply engage him in conversation to give him a chance to let loose his balderdash. That’s more than enough to keep Marienbad happy.

“He’s a perfect fool, but his hospitality comes in very handy. Walter Benjamin, for instance, has used the time to start designing a promising machine that will be able to detect any book that might be boring or bothersome, that, even in miniature, wouldn’t fit into a small suitcase.

“It is a very complex machine, complete with contraptions frankly unfamiliar to me: tibaida lenses, focal compartments, copper cuffs, oval cylinders, metal buttons, metal stoppers, magnetized needles, bolts, and iron jugulars.

“Walter Benjamin is sure the design will be complete in less than a month. Apparently, the method for weighing texts consists of putting a book in this cylindrical penitentiary and letting an immense, round lens look it over. Portable books will be immediately released through this black cylinder, heavy in appearance; positioned vertically on the ground, it will have a large spherical light bulb on top with the words CONTRA GRAND STYLE on it. A blue light emanating from the bulb will be visible even in bright sunlight. The book’s emotional-mechanical vibration will turn the light bulb off for a fraction of a second, showing that the glass is colorless and that the light itself is actually blue. In turn, this light will reveal the inscription VIVA VERMEER at the machine’s highest point — in twenty-seven different languages if possible — thus saluting effusively the recently liberated portable books.

“Otherwise, I’ve also managed to find out that Tristan Tzara has begun writing a brief history of portable literature: a kind of literature that, by his reckoning, is characterized by having no system to impose, only an art of living. In a sense, it’s more life than literature. For Tzara, his book contains the only literary construction possible; it is a transcription made by someone unconvinced by the authenticity of History and the metaphorical historicity of the Novel. Employing greater originality than most novels, the book will offer sketches of the Shandy customs and life. Tzara’s aim is to cultivate the imaginary portrait (a form of literary fantasia concealing a reflection in its capriciousness), to endeavor in the imaginary portrait’s ornamentation.

“You also ought to know that Berta Bocado — moved by a sudden ambitiousness — is attempting to construct a total book: a book of books encompassing all others, an object whose virtues the years will never diminish. As ever, Bocado is being very absentminded, seeing as her book will be anything but portable.

“In fact, we’re all making things. More than artists — which has a hollow, pompous ring to it — we are artisans, people who make things. An air of happy creativity pervades the rooms at the International Sanatorium. We barely see each other, since, being artisans, we take refuge in our individuality; but occasionally a polar wind blows through, bringing us all together in the central courtyard, where we smile in our thick overcoats and exchange complicit glances. A word will occasionally break the silence, and we feel ourselves straighten up like spears scaling the lofty heights and we inundate the shadows. Victory is not ours, but we fight on — silence against silence — because we know heaven never scorns ambition.

“So go the days. The occasional furtive courtyard exchange gives me an idea of how things are going with the others; this is how I found out, for example, that Scott Fitzgerald has completed a novel about a person named Gatsby, a man confronting his past as he moves inexorably into nothingness.

“George Antheil is working on his Ballet Mécanique, a Shandy musical par excellence. At the same time, he has turned painter and draughtsman of the miniscule: of the thousand hairs in a braid or the iridescence of a coupling, for example. He sleeps in the same room as William Carlos Williams, who, less like an American every day, entertains himself trying to solve all the arcane mysteries, with recourse to a frame made of asymmetric, revolving, concentric discs, subdivided according to the Latin words on them.

“His ex-lover, Georgia O’Keeffe, is still scheming away. She says she has been going around the theatres of an invisible city, that her imagination — voracious as gravity — is the epicenter of her convulsive passions and aversions.

“Gombrowicz is writing his first book, some nonsense to do with a ballerina: seemingly an extraordinarily brief book, that is incoherent, absurd, and, in its own way, magnificent.

“Your beloved Duchamp is drafting an essay on miniaturization as a means of fantasy. The text seems to have been conceived as a continuation of something Goethe began writing, called ‘The New Melusine’ (which is part of Wilhelm Meister), about a man who falls in love with someone — in reality a tiny woman, who has temporarily been made normal size, and who, without knowing it, is carrying a box containing the kingdom that she’s the princess of. In Goethe’s story the world itself is reduced to a collectible item, an object in the most literal sense. For Duchamp — like the box in Goethe’s tale — a book is a fragment of the world, but it is also a small world in itself, a miniaturization of the world inhabited by the reader.

“All, as you can tell, have embarked on sharp, frenetic, desperate, portable projects — all, that is, except for Beta Bocado. Even Savinio (always the lead exponent of occasional slothfulness, that highly portable trait) has been working tirelessly and is immersed in a project as Shandean as it is unfathomable. So fed up has he become with encyclopedias that he’s making his own, for his own personal use. I personally think it’s a good thing; I mean, take Schopenhauer: he was so fed up with the histories of philosophy that he ended up inventing his own, for his own personal use.

“It seems increasingly clear to me that we, the portables, were placed on earth to express the most secret and recondite depths of our nature. This is what sets us apart from our tepid contemporaries. And I believe us to be profoundly linked to the spirit of the age, with the latent problems plaguing it and defining its tone and character. We are always dual in appearance, because of just how much we simultaneously embody the old and the new. The future that so profoundly concerns us, we are also rooted in. We have two speeds, two faces, two ways of interpreting things. We are a part of transition and flux. Versed in a new style, our language is voluble, zany, and cryptic. As cryptic as this postcard, which is nearing its end: a postcard that, at heart, claims to do no more than inform you of our great creative fever and our constant bid to exalt a love of brief literary creations; a postcard lauding free and unobstructed language and denouncing any book that makes universal or pretentious claims.

“I spoke to you about ‘the most secret and recondite depths of our nature.’ These corrosive secret depths are mentioned by Rimbaud in the following memorable verses: HYDRE INTIME, sans gueules, / Qui mine et desole. This is what afflicted him and is so disturbing to us, poorly adapted to madness as we are.

“To finish, decipher this, my dear racing car: life here in the International Sanatorium is like a murder sweet as snow, that is, cold venom covering desolate icy expanses on white nights of venerable silk.

“Yours, with more to follow, from he who idles, twirls, and dwindles upon farewell’s futile brink.”*

* For the reader intrigued about to how such a long text could fit on a postcard, I’d like to make clear that Aleister Crowley’s handwriting was very, very tiny, and he succeeded in fitting all these words onto the back of a photograph of Prague, thereby fulfilling that longstanding Shandean ambition of attaining microscopic script. But the most notable thing about the postcard is that HYDRE INTIME — the portable society’s secret name — appeared for the first time in writing. This greatly alarmed Picabia who immediately suspected that if there really were a traitor, it was by no means Céline, but rather Crowley himself.