The Last Days of New Paris

Chapter Six

1941

Jack Parsons was drunk.

The Surrealists were playing a game. He watched them sourly. Varo drew a snake coiled on a wheeled cart. She scribbled it in seconds. From where he was sat, Jack alone could see what she was drawing.

“Allons-y,” she said. She held it up and turned it around, for one second, to show it to Lamba, who drew her own quick version. Which she showed to Lam, who showed his own rendition to Yves Tanguy, and so on. The glimpses were diminishing echoes, evolving from corkscrew serpent on its chariot to a spiral on a square.

The frivolity disgusted him. But though Parsons could not say why, watching excited him.

His hosts played games of whispering, hearing and mishearing each other’s words. They played games of attention and chance. They played games of absurdity and misunderstanding. Fry watched with affectionate interest; Miriam with fascination. Mary Jayne smoked in the doorway, her arm around Raymond. He radiated disdain.

The games produced strange figures, and sentences that made no sense but that too made Parsons’s breath come quick. Do what thou wilt.

The Surrealists drew and hid what they drew, folded paper to obscure it. They passed their papers around and added to each other’s unseen images. Watching, Parsons breathed out in time to a gust of wind that rattled a forgotten painting in a tree’s canopy outside.

Oh, he thought with a rush, as they passed their papers again. Each drew a head and hid it and passed it; each drew a body and passed it again; each drew legs or a base. Oh, I get it. I get it.

He rocked in his chair. He understood the link between his Colquhoun, the occultist, the hermeticist, tapper into the world’s backways, and the Colquhoun close to this austere, courteous Breton. The connection of the golden dawn and animals and pleromic beyond to the woman committed to the liberation of dreams.

From an overlap in the middle of a Venn diagram, Colquhoun watched him.

Maybe, he thought, in the suburbs of this oppressed town, this edge of an edge, maybe at this moment in a room full of the stateless, in a nation from which they wanted out, maybe here while they played foolish games to thumb their noses at perpetrators of mass murder, maybe an engine that he had built to do the math to make a clay man walk, to make words and numbers intervene as presences, might tap something else, too. Something that might trouble the Nazis.

“I know a game,” he said. No one looked at him.

He ran upstairs, returned with all his mechanisms. The Surrealists were on another round. Parsons watched them draw while he connected cords to batteries and muttered powerful words.

“What are you making?” Fry said, looking at the mess of mechanics. “Is that art?” He looked triumphantly at Miriam. The Surrealists kept passing their papers.

“Right,” said Jack. “It’s an art thing.” He turned switches, he checked gauges. He placed crystals, vacuum tubes, bits of paper at strategic places in the room. “Wait, just one second. Just a moment. Before you all unfold.”

The Surrealists looked up in mild surprise. They did as he asked. Jack held his breath and nodded and wired up the wood and metal box at the center and turned a final switch.

Static came rushing through them all. Breton frowned, Lamba laughed, Varo showed her teeth. Everyone looked at Jack Parsons.

And he gasped as they opened their papers because he had already understood what the game was, how it worked, what it would unveil. The artists flattened out what they held, and what they had drawn, in planless collaboration, were impossible things.

Figures neither evolved nor designed. Coagula of fleeting and distinct ideas and chance. Parsons’s battery clicked. The room began to fill with something unseen.

These weren’t demons they’d drawn, not the goats and beasts of Hell. They were objective chance, chimeras for this era.

Jack saw a figure with the head of a singing bird, its body a clock with the pendulum swinging, its legs a mass of fish tails deftly done in pen and ink. A sketched-out bear face on a coffin, walking on clown’s feet. A mustached man, rendered as if by a child, his body a buxom leopard’s, rooted like a plant. Exquisite corpses, tasting new wine.

The artists laughed. The needles on the gauges swung as Parsons’s battery filled. He could feel energies coiling out of these heads, these drawings, this room, into his wires.

It wasn’t just drink making people giddy now. Not just the exquisite corpses they drew, nor any other game. It was the sense of something ending, a shutter closing. A noose—yes—tightening. A last song.

They played again, made beasts of collective unconscious. It grew darker with every round. Outside the trees waved their twig fingers as if clutching for art. They gave up wood memories. Parsons could feel the images that had hung from them slip into his machine.

He blinked rapidly, glimpsed things fleet past him, glimmers, presences as if from the Surrealists’ papers, their games. No one else looked up.

The room was filling with history, with this ebbing movement, of Surrealism, of Marx and Freud and coincidence, the revolution of cities, liberation, and the random. Knowledge poured out of everyone and left them still knowing, and drunker, their defenses down.

And in the hills where he hid, Hans Bellmer shook. His dolls and his inkwork charged the battery. Marc Chagall dreamed and the needles spasmed. On her island, Claude Cahun looked at Suzanne Malherbe with utter urgency and they shared anger and love, a determination. A thread stretched from each of them to the Villa Air-Bel.

Around the world, the dreams and images, the work of all these women and men, the rage of Simone Yoyotte and the Martinican rebel students, the fury and delight of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, the fascinations of Georges He-nein, the red chaos of Artaud, the imaginings of Brauner, the constructs of Duchamp, of Carrington, of Renée Gauthier, of Laurence Iché, of Maar and Magritte, Étienne Léro, Miller and Oppenheim, Raoul Ubac and Alice Rahon, Richard Oelze and Léona Delacourt and Paul Nougé, Paalen, Tzara, Rius, of hundreds of women and men never heard of and never to be heard of but who were the spirit of this spirit, the inspirations behind and unsung practitioners of this ferocious art, echoed in France. Rushed in. Through the glass. Into Jack Parsons’s battery.

The older work of renegades, the poems of Aragon before his capitulation to the man of steel. The heroes of the past breathed dead breath into the machine, the singer of Maldoror, Rigaut, the ghosts of Rimbaud, the ruminations of Vaché, which never went away, had never gone and never would and which were always and forever part of France, all flared up like tracer bullets. And came down again, plugholing into a collection.

Into the machine.

The box hummed like a wasp; otherwise the room was quiet. People came slowly back from wherever they had been.

Everyone blinked except Raymond. He stared at the box.

Mary Jayne sighed. “Did you enjoy yourself?” she said.

Parsons laughed. “Oh yeah,” he said. His voice shook. “It was terrific. Thank you for having me.”

Breton closed his eyes. “This,” he said in French, “was an excellent night.”

“We’re glad you came,” said Varian Fry to Jack.

“Me, too. More than I can say.”

Jack listened to French night birds. Here he was in the moonlight with a battery full of distillate, of this overlapping thing, this Surrealism. That was a freedom right there.

Parsons knew how to take a substance, render it, burn it and use it.

What can I power with this? he thought. He would build a freedom machine. Home, he thought. I’ll tell Von Karman. We’ll build a new rocket. Armed with this. We’ll blow that fucking Reich away.

In the early morning Miriam and Mary Jayne sat in the garden drinking ersatz coffee, full of shyness they could not explain. They prodded the grass with their toes.

They heard Jack Parsons’s first shout and looked up. He raised his voice and bellowed again and hammered on the window with his fist.

They ran up the stairs and entered his room to see him tousled and undressed and screaming. Aghast, throwing clothes out of his suitcase, looking for the battery.

Which was not there.