A Brief History of Portable Literature

ALL DAY ON THE DECK CHAIRS

Francis Picabia shouldn’t have been so alarmed by Crowley’s postcard. In fact the traitor’s text wasn’t as dangerous as it might have seemed. Properly considered, it at most betrayed something that was not overly worrying. Many of the Shandies had, at the International Sanatorium, already realized that the portable ensemble would have to disappear sooner or later; this was a fact of life and, in fact, something very much to be desired, as the conspiracy would become the stunning celebration of something appearing and disappearing with the arrogant velocity of the lightning bolt of insolence.

Duchamp, receiving a letter from Picabia at the Sanatorium informing him of the traitor’s existence, tried to make him see as much. He wrote back saying that Crowley’s postcard was a rousing document, a capricious text, no less, a living, breathing embodiment of Shandyism.

Indeed, the postcard displayed a sublime concern for maintaining an industrious attitude among the Shandies, and this was profoundly portable: aside from the odd period of extraordinary laziness, the portables were always keeping busy, always trying to put in more work that speculated frequently on their lives as tireless artists. A large number of the texts they produced ended up featuring curious sections with recipes for how to work: the ideal conditions, the timing, the utensils. The massive correspondence they kept up among themselves — both oral and written — was always

partly animated by a desire to chronicle the work’s existence: to inform, to confirm it.

Additionally, the Shandies’ instincts as collectors served them well. They learned partly by collecting, as with the quotations and extracts from their daily reading, which they accumulated in notebooks they carried with them everywhere, and which they often read in their conspiratorial café meetings. Thinking was also a way of collecting for them, at least in the early days. They would meticulously note down their extravagant ideas; they’d advance mini-essays in letters to friends; rewrite plans for future projects; write down dreams; and they would carry numbered lists of all the portable books they read.

But how was it that the joyful, voluble, and zany Shandies willed themselves to become heroes? My view is that it was because of the way work can become a drug, a compulsion: “thinking is eminently narcotic,” as Walter Benjamin wrote.

A need for solitude — along with bitterness about that solitude — was very common among the Shandies, joyful, voluble workers that they were. To move their work forward, they had to be solitary, or at least not form any permanent bonds. Their negative feelings toward matrimony were clearly outlined in numerous pieces of writing. Their heroes — Baudelaire, Kafka, Roussel — never married. Some of the Shandies who functioned as bachelor machines were married, but ended up thinking their marriages “fatal” to them. The world of nature, of natural relations, did not appeal to them as bachelor machines. Generally, they all hated children. Walter de la Mare actually threw his son out the window and later wrote that, for him, what is natural (when bound up by the family) ushers in the falsely subjective, the sentimental. “It was,” wrote Walter de la Mare, “a bloodletting of the will, of independence, of freedom, in order to focus on the work.”

The Shandy way of working meant immersion, focusing on the job. “One is either immersed, or one’s thoughts float off,” wrote Juan Gris. This partly explains why the Shandies installed themselves in the Bahnhof Zoo, a stationary submarine: they were looking for this immersion, or focus on their work. Focus, however, entails risks and ends up creating Odradeks, golems, Bucharesters. Creatures of all kinds populated the solitude of those, who, in fraught coexistence with their doppelgängers, set themselves apart in order to work.

Not even in the International Sanatorium did the Shandies manage to escape being constantly harried by these creatures — a conspiracy parallel to HYDRE INTIME — and this prompted their decision to travel to Trieste, since they thought, naively, a Mediterranean setting would disorientate their pursuers (beings that must be more disposed to mysterious Czech mists than to the diaphanous blues of the Adriatic shores). But the Shandies didn’t take into account Trieste’s thick, obstinate mists and, following a hazardous stay in that city, they ended up making their way back to Paris.

Upon arriving in Paris, the Shandy travelers were anxious, having confirmed the existence of the parallel plot in Trieste. They were anxious and even deformed. Meyrink, for example, looked like a cabin boy. Littbarski was dressed like a Japanese sailor. Salvador Dalí was constantly scanning the horizon for his own personal Moby Dick. Rita Malú went around dressed as a frigate. Robert Walser looked like he’d stepped straight off the Potemkin.

Clearly, a maritime delirium. Larbaud collected toy boats, Prince Mdivani messages in bottles, and Pola Negri photographs of whales with prey gripped between their teeth. A maritime delirium led them to mistake Paris for a gigantic country house. This led to a number of incidents with those Shandies who had remained there, but the dust didn’t take long to settle. In Trieste, the portable travelers had intoned the first hymns to boredom and inconstancy in art (doubtless an anti-hysterical reaction to so much hard work). Those portables anchored in Paris’s terra firma only had to make a gesture in praise of idleness for the newcomers to consider brokering a peace that would reunify the secret society.

On the day Marcel Duchamp declared that parasitism was one of the fine arts, peace was made during a dinner at La Coupole in honor of Pyecraft, an H. G. Wells character; this fictional character was portable avant la lettre, seeing as he lost weight but not mass, and fearing he’d float up to the sky, he left home with flat discs of lead sewn into his underclothes, lead-soled boots, and a bag full of solid lead.

Carrying my own bag full of lead, I went last week to the island of Corsica, hoping to free myself of the portables for a few days. I thought a clear consequence of my Shandy obsession and my daily dedication to writing on the subject was the creeping paralysis overtaking my Olivetti Lettera 35. I felt I’d earned a rest and the right to lose myself in an always gratifying chapter of idleness.

But it was terrible what happened to me. I saw, for example, a miniature of Napoleon — Ajaccio’s local hero. I was not only immediately reminded of the Shandy enjoyment of anything small, but also the thought came to me of how small one of the portables, Robert Walser, felt when, in one of his books, he imagined himself as an infantry soldier in Bonaparte’s army: “I would only be a little cog in the machine of a great design, not a man anymore. .”

Everything I saw and thought, I instantly and unavoidably related to the world of the Shandies. For instance, I lay on a deck chair by the sea and immediately remembered that the portables spent whole days on deck chairs in the city of Trieste, not to relax after working so hard, but because they had no choice if they wanted to get free of their Odradeks (these creatures wouldn’t hover around as long as their hosts gave themselves over to indolence).

There was no way for me to forget about the Shandies, perhaps because my obsession was also portable; and also, after spending so many days and nights wading in Shandy waters, portability was like an ocean, seemingly endless. It carried on moving and taking me with it.

My patience ran out after I had a nightmare: slightly warped versions of Aleister Crowley’s experiences in Trieste appeared to me in my dream. The nightmare had a theatrical prologue featuring infinitely immoral spectacles, which were presented to me as puritanical. When the curtain fell — with Duchamp’s Shandean box-in-a-suitcase drawn on it — the character presenting the prologue disappeared, along with the immoral spectacles, and I saw silver deck chairs with golems slithering across them in pursuit of Odradeks, who, in turn, pursued femmes fatales, paddling from beach to beach in kayaks until reaching a black oily sea with professors from Madrid sailing miniature versions of ocean liners. The ships rather resembled Bucharesters rescued from the tombs of monks that had been ravaged in Sepastopol.

Suddenly, in anguish, just as the Odradeks, their golems, the femmes fatales, the Bucharesters, the monks, and the professors from Madrid all attached themselves stickily to my shoulders, I woke up. Looking in the mirror, I was relieved to see not Crowley but someone researching the secret Shandy society. No, I said to myself, I wasn’t Crowley. (I repeated this one hundred times.) After that, I decided I’d go back to Barcelona that very afternoon and simply try to forget the effort involved trying to put the Shandy world behind me.

Back, then, to my brief — or, if you prefer, my interrupted — history. In The Bucharesters—his account of his time in Trieste — the Satanist Aleister Crowley presents his research on Bucharesters as a pretext to hammer on mercilessly about the portables, though not expressly mentioning them. Instead, he uses the enigmatic term “Bocángels.”*

It’s an extremely annoying book, made up of twenty-seven fragments in which Aleister Crowley unscrupulously repeats, in twenty-seven different ways, that the Bocángels spent all day on deck chairs, and with what great difficulty he bore the weight of the sticky, not at all imaginary, tribe that had attached to his shoulders. This made him sway when he walked. It’s a book that seems custom made to mock anyone looking for information about the portables’ stay in the frontier city of Trieste. Here, for example, is an excerpt chosen at random:

“Trieste or the province as spectacle. I write in a bad mood after having walked the length of the Aqueduct and greeted Mr. Italo Svevo, the person least like the Bocángels of anyone. The afternoon is cold and the sky is clear, despite the sirocco that has been weighing on the city since this morning. It seems impossible that the consumptive carnival happening here — which began this afternoon with a bal masque—can resist the cold and damp. It’s a poor carnival, and my playmates, my beloved Bocángels, have spurned it. The only things they like are the deck chairs. Elusive sky of Trieste! Unhappy city where I would rather not have been, because I found in an evil hour that every Odradek has its golem and every golem its Bucharester! The latter, I would like to emphasize, are beings from Romania, tiny, terrifying, and constantly attached to their masters, the golems. Here in Trieste, I would rather not be, because my own personal Odradek frequently settles on my left shoulder, accompanied by its corresponding golem, with a Bucharester also attached. On my right shoulder, my femme fatale and a professor from Madrid named Bérgamo attempt to offer the appropriate counterweight so I won’t sway fiercely when I walk. Even so, I’m always swaying. The extraordinary epaulettes of my black satin jacket — black is the color of wisdom, being a concentration of all extant colors — did nothing to disguise the weight on my shoulders. On this day I decided (purely on a whim), to set out on an adventure, which, paradoxically, would be nothing if there weren’t so many obstacles to overcome, or if the weight of the beings weren’t so great, those beings who brazenly (resting on my shoulders) tried to impede it.”

It’s impossible to read Crowley and not feel constantly incredulous at all the fireworks, for instance, the unleashing of so many Bucharesters. Nonetheless, when we compare his text with Walter Benjamin’s (The Last Moment of European Intelligence) or Man Ray’s (Travels with Rita Malú), or Tristan Tzara’s, it is surprising to see that the three concur, to a large degree, with Crowley’s speculations.

“In Trieste,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “the rooms of the hotel I lived in were almost all taken by Tibetan lamas who had come to the city for a pan-Buddhist convention. The number of doors left slightly ajar caught my eye. What at first seemed like coincidence ended up seeming mysterious to me. Then I found out they were members of a sect sworn never to dwell within closed spaces. I’ve never been able to forget the fright I felt. Someone whispered in my ear that these Tibetan lamas were, in fact, our Odradeks, and could be seen by day in the streets of Trieste, moving in the background, hidden in shacks, bordellos, cheap restaurants, pretending to be beggars, one-eyed men, out-of-work sailors, thugs, drug dealers, or doormen at brothels.”

Man Ray wrote: “During our stay in Trieste, we weren’t shocked by monstrousness itself, but rather just how evident it was. This is why we took refuge on the deck chairs — what a relief to regress back to infancy and discover laziness anew! We were careful not to move too much. And slowly, inexorably, it became clear that we were accompanied on our travels by the shadows of a parallel conspiracy, phantasmagorical but perceptible, led by beings that were not of flesh and blood; unlike ours, this conspiracy had an objective: it sought nothing less than the destruction of our secret society. Weird bastards they were, not of women born, dwelling, variously, in lofts, stairwells, corridors, vestibules, and also on our shoulders, even, sometimes, inside our brains.”

In the opinion of Maurice Blanchot — who looks briefly at the portable phenomenon in Faux Pas—the “weird bastards” referred to by Man Ray were no less than the forms assumed by forgotten things; these things become distorted, unrecognizable, but nevertheless travel with us, alongside us: things in sad abandoned places, occasionally penetrating our brains, gathering together in perfect silence (“the silence of the stealthy,” to quote Tristram Shandy, “who listen in on those, who, at one time, thought they were the only stealthy ones”).

But in my opinion, there’s also the chance these phantasms in the brains of the portables may have simply been the literature they produced. In any case, what’s beyond question is that all the portables were aware of the existence of the parallel conspiracy, which shows they placed a very high value on art’s secret demand: that the artist must know how to surprise, and be surprised by, what, though impossible, is.

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.

* “This world, republic of wind / whose monarch is an accident.” These are lines from a sonnet by the Spanish poet Gabriel Bocángel (1603–1658). When I’d nearly finished my book, the daughter of Francis Picabia and Germaine Everling suggested “Bocángels” could be an indirect reference to these lines by the Spanish poet, since, according to her, the Shandies often used the term “republic of wind” for their ephemeral portable movement.