The Last Days of New Paris

Chapter Four

1941

“I can’t believe it.” Mary Jayne Gold’s voice shook. “After the trouble he gave me? He brings someone here we’ve never even met? Has he lost his mind?”

“I don’t know,” said Miriam Davenport. “You saw him—he’s in a queer way.”

Mary Jayne put her finger to her lips as Fry stomped back. He glowered at the two women. Davenport was dark and short, Gold tall and fair. An absurdly perfect juxtaposition, standing to either side of the dark wood table by bundled herbs and half-drunk bottles of wine.

“I’m sorry but it is not the same,” he said at last. “I heard you. Mary Jayne, I’m sorry but Raymond is a criminal. He broke in here.” Mary Jayne stood with her hands on her hips. “Whereas this Jack, this Jack Parsons… he’s just a lost young man—”

“You have no idea who he is,” said Miriam.

“He was so excited about that Colquhoun woman,” Fry said.

“Whom you also don’t know,” said Miriam.

“No. But André told me about her. And Parsons is interested in the movement… I’ve only asked him to join us for supper.” Now he beseeched. “I think he’ll amuse André and Jacqueline.”

“Wasn’t it you who told me we can’t be inviting every lost soul?” Davenport said.

“Something’s coming to an end,” Fry said. “Don’t you feel like that?” He was startled by his own words.

He was the man who had chosen to vacate the villa himself rather than compromise it, being as he was an object of attention. The man who, in agonies, forbade his good friend Victor Serge from lodging there, deeming the communist dissenter too great a danger. Now it was Fry bringing home foundlings.

“Parsons said he was a rocket scientist,” Miriam said.

“So he’s a fantasist,” said Fry helplessly. “He’s harmless.” He barely knew what he was saying. “I think it’ll be all right. It’s only supper.”

The room in the old house was beautiful and fading. Jack Parsons looked out to the sprawling grounds, where a woman and a man chatted by the pond. Another man had climbed into a tree, was removing pictures from its branches, where they had been hung in strange exhibition.

Parsons had come to France by trains and planes, planes and boats, the pulling in of favors, the paying of bribes. And at moments, when everything had militated against him, when the timing was quite wrong, the official obstruction too implacable, when his urgent, incompetent wanderings had seemed doomed, he had asserted his will.

As many times before, in the U.S., he had flexed the muscles of the mind. As Aleister Crowley had taught him. As he whispered spells when the rockets he made went up. He was used to carefully, intensely interpreting after all such actions, to see if or how the world had responded, in if any subtle ways.

Now in Europe, no such assiduous parsing of aftermaths was necessary. Here the effects were astonishing.

He would speak commands to the universe. He would say to the train guard, “You’ve already seen my ticket,” would strain to make himself slightly invisible to police, to make time drag enough for him to make his connections. He would have been delighted with an instant’s uncertainty, a stuttering of wheels on the track. Instead the officials would usher him to a fine seat. The police would release their grip, and stand back to let him run. The train might lurch right back to where it had been three or four seconds before.

Do what thou wilt. Magic was welling up here from below. It made him feel exhilarated but sick. Its deployment made him queasy. Maybe I can even read minds here, he thought.

When he crossed the border, a few miles out to sea, when he came into French waters lugging his cobbled and home-tooled equipment, Jack had felt the presence intensify. Something in France was quite wrong or quite right.

He had, of course, nudged Varian Fry’s mind, tweaked him to let Parsons visit.

“Let’s give this one more try.” Jack spoke, in his absence, to Von Karman, his boss and friend.

Theodore Von Karman took Jack to work in the Aeronautical Laboratory. Von Karman indulged and liked him, forgave him what he thought eccentricities with respectful good humor. Mostly they talked rockets and math, at first. Politics was to come. A disciple in the Ordo Templi Orientis, Jack was not accustomed to admiring the mass of humanity: Von Karman he could not fail to.

Von Karman had looked sick as news had started to emerge from Europe. “It is trouble,” he said.

It was Von Karman who told Jack, without knowing that he was doing so, that there were words in Prague that might alter the storm of Europe. A presence he might invoke. Von Karman thought it only folklore. Jack, though, knew the truth, because of his other teacher. Von Karman nurtured his mathematics, the rigor of his rockets; Crowley nurtured his spirit, taught him of the other laws. One told Jack of the power in Prague; the other gave him the insight to know that it was, indeed, power.

Now Jack could not get to Prague. But now, too, there was this not-coincidence, this house of Surrealists. They, too, were faithful to revolt and objective chance. Perhaps in their presence he might find, speak words close in transmogrifying power to those he had originally sought and planned to articulate.

“They want to set free the unconscious,” Fry had told him. “Desire.” He shrugged. “You’d have to ask them,” he added, but Parsons did not think he would. With that gloss he understood why Colquhoun would be in both this group and in Crowley’s order. Their aims were the same.

I’m leader of the Agape Lodge. Anointed by the great wizard himself, the young scientist was Crowley’s chosen. I’m an apostle of freedom. Like these guys. Here to help my friend.

Jack Parsons was attuned to the unholy. He could tell there was magic from Hell in the ground of France, that someone was raising. He was certain that it could help him.

So he checked his tools and dressed for dinner. When he entered the dining room, everyone turned to look, and he hesitated.

Come on, he told himself. You’re here for a reason.

Painters, poets, anarchists, Reds. A poised blond woman gave Parsons her hand and introduced herself as Jacqueline Lamba. Jack nodded as politely as he could and followed her to meet her husband.

André Breton. A fleshy-faced man with sweeping hair. He looked at the young American with half-closed eyes of almost languid intensity. Parsons met the stare with his own. “I wanted to ask you something,” Parsons began. “About Ithell Colquhoun.”

“Je ne parle pas anglais.” Breton shrugged, and walked away.

Jack frowned and took a glass of wine. A slight dark-skinned man introduced himself. “Wilfredo, Wilfredo Lam.” Remedios Varo, a painter, black-haired, with an intense gaze, nodded at Jack without much interest. A cool, tall woman, Kay Sage, inclined her head. Jack said hello to them all and kept watching Breton, who would not talk to him. A vivid-eyed man called Tanguy laughed too loud. These Surrealists wore battered evening clothes.

“Jack Parsons,” Fry said to a small smiling gentleman, Benjamin Péret, who greeted Jack with a lopsided mouth, while Mary Jayne and Miriam watched. “He’s stranded among the Nazis.”

“The Nazis? You know of Trotsky?” said Péret.

“I guess.”

“He says these fascists are dust that is human.” Péret nodded vigorously. “He is right.”

“What would they think of you, Parsons?” someone said.

They sat to heavy vegetable stew seasoned only with salt. Parsons breathed deep and drew strength from the hex-fouled land outside. Do they even know? he thought. That something’s happened?

He sat in the Villa Air-Bel with the artists and radicals, writers, the philosophers that bleeding-heart Americans wanted to smuggle out of France. What am I doing here? He looked at his food in despair.

“Foreigners need to carry seven pieces of paper all the time,” Mary Jayne Gold was saying. Why was she looking at him like that? Had he invited this information? Jack had lost track.

“You don’t say,” said Jack. “That’s crazy.”

“Varian says you’re a scientist.”

“Yeah. I work with…” He made his hand zoom through the air. “Rockets.” I make bombs fly with fucking Greek fire. And you will thank me.

“Do you know our guests made a pack of cards?” Miriam said.

“I did not know that.”

“Yes,” said Lamba. She laughed. “We will play with you.”

Trapped in their Marseille hinterland, this pre-exile, the Surrealists had drawn new suits, a cartographic rebellion. Black Stars for dreams; black Locks, Keyholes, for knowledge; red Flames for desire; and Wheels for revolution. They had enshrined beloveds as face-cards: de Sade, Alice, Baudelaire, Hegel, Lautréamont.

“There’s talk of having them printed, eventually,” Fry said with an effort.

“Play is resistance,” said Lamba, with her heavy accent.

That’s how you rebel? Parsons realized his disgust must show. In a town full of Gestapo, informers, fascists, fighters. That’s it?

Breton was looking at him at last, in challenge.

“I saw two boys in town,” Miriam was saying to someone. “They each had two fishing rods, crossed over their backs. Do you get it? Deux Gaulles—it’s a pun, de Gaulle. They’re stating their opposition.”

Get me out of here, Parsons thought.

“What is it exactly brings you here, Mr. Parsons?” Mary Jayne was brittle. “This is a very odd time to travel.”

Parsons could not keep track of the visitors, though their names and expertise and philosophical positions were all announced to him in what felt like mockery.

When, late, a thin, tough-faced young man came in, Mary Jayne shouted with pleasure and went to him. Miriam glowered and made to rise, but Varian Fry, though he frowned at the newcomer, put his hand on hers to hold her back.

Raymond Couraud, his arm in Mary Jayne’s, stared slowly around the room. Breton pursed his lips and looked away.

“I did tell André that you were asking about Ithell Colquhoun,” Parsons heard Fry say. The name got his attention. Breton was nodding at him with a moment’s interest. He spoke and Fry translated. “She did come to visit him a while ago. That’s why he put her work in that little volume.”

That was all. These people are nothing, Parsons thought. Nothing.

“It’s bad for us,” Von Karman had said to him, of his family, of the Jews of Europe. “My great-great-however-many-times-great grandfather,” he had said, “was Rabbi Loew. You know Rabbi Loew, Jack? From Prague. He made a giant clay man and figured out how to bring him to life to keep the Jews safe. You know what that made him? The first applied mathematician.”

Von Karman liked that joke. He repeated it often. It pleased Jack, too, but for different reasons. Von Karman was right: to make life was to speak aleph where there was silence, to add one to a zero. Jack read everything he could find on Loew, the efforts and triumphs of that devout man.

Between the trajectories of rocket falls, rainbow-shapes and gravity, between his imaginings of the screamings across the sky that he would send the Nazis, Parsons, with exhausting care and thoroughness, developed an arithmetic of invocation, an algebra of ritual. A witching plan.

I’ll go to Prague, he decided at last. He checked his proofs. I’m an engineer: I’ll make an engine. I’ll do the math in the grounds of the ghetto. I’ll bring back this golem.

He could do it. He looked forward to its swinging steps, its thick clay hands cleaving storm troopers, its purging of the city. That would shake up this war. Screw it, he thought. I’ll do it for Theo.

And now here he was trapped in France by war and devil-science. In the room Fry had lent him, before descending, Jack Parsons had unwound the jury-rigged engine he had constructed to make his mathematics actual, to unfold the world. Batteries; sensors; an abacus; wires and circuits; transistors.

Colquhoun, Crowley’s most desired and this guy Breton’s collaborator, she had to be a gate, right?

But look. Look around this absurd room in this violent halfway town. Jack was among fops and artists. His time had been wasted.