Woes of the True Policeman

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Works of J.M.G. Arcimboldi (Carcasonne, 1925) NOVELS

The Enigma of the Cyclists of the Tour de France—Gallimard, 1956.

Vertumnus—Gallimard, 1958.

Hartmann von Aue—Gallimard, 1959.

Sam O’Rourke’s Search—Gallimard, 1960.

Riquer—Gallimard, 1961.

Railroad Perfection—Gallimard, 1964.

The Librarian—Gallimard, 1966.

The Endless Rose—Gallimard, 1968.

The Natives of Fontainebleau—Gallimard, 1970.

Racine—Gallimard, 1979.

Doctor Dotremont—Gallimard, 1988.

ESSAYS

The Downtrodden: Articles and Notes on Literature—Gallimard, 1975. (Collection of critical texts written between 1950 and 1960 for newspapers and literary magazines.) PLAYS

For Lovers Only—Gallimard, 1975. (Dated 1957 and performed for the first time by the Little Theater of Revolutionary Action, Carcassonne, 1958.) The Spirit of Science Fiction—Gallimard, 1975. (Dated 1958 and performed for the first time by the Colombian Company of Rebels and Toilers, Cali, 1977.) POETRY

Railroad Perfection; or, The Fracturing of the Pursued—Pierre-Jean Oswald, 1959.

Doctor Dotremont; or, The Paradoxes of Illness—Le Pont de l’Epée, 1960.

TRANSLATIONS

Songs of Hartmann von Aue—Millas Martin, 1956. (Selection, translation, prologue, and notes on the oeuvre of Von Aue, minnesinger.)

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Two Arcimboldi Novels Read in Five Days

Hartmann von Aue (Gallimard, 1959, 90 pages)

At first glance, Hartmann von Aue is an examination of moments from the life of the German minnesinger, but the central character is really someone else: Jaufré Rudel.

Rudel, according to legend, fell in love with the Countess of Tripoli after hearing her praises sung by pilgrims returning from Antioch. He wrote some poems about her that were admired by all and increased his fame. But none of this was enough for the Prince of Blaye, and one day, driven by the desire to meet his beloved, he became a crusader and embarked for the Holy Land. During the voyage he fell gravely ill. As fate had it, he was still alive when the ship docked and he was taken to a Tripoli hospital. The countess heard the news and came to see him. Surprisingly, Jaufré Rudel regained consciousness, praised God for allowing him to set eyes on his beloved, and immediately thereafter died in her arms. He was buried at the house of the Knights Templar. Soon afterward, the countess entered a convent.

Von Aue listens over and over to this story and reflects on love and death. At moments he envies the Prince of Blaye and at moments he dimly despises him. He is a nobleman and a soldier and Rudel’s fate seems to him unworthy, almost a betrayal. But the next moment, Rudel crossing the seas and dying in the arms of his beloved appears bathed in the most seductive light. Von Aue dreams of such a fate for himself. He tries to fall in love with Spanish women who live in faraway places, but the very attempt strikes him as banal. Von Aue is incapable of action.

In the novel there are references to other minnesingers: the best known is Heinrich von Morungen, who, along with Von Aue, takes part in the Fourth Crusade. During the voyage, the Swabian knight and the Thuringian knight compete in feats of arms, hunting, music, and poetry. Fatefully, Von Aue shares the story of Jaufré Rudel with Von Morungen. Von Morungen is seized by excitement: the passion of Jaufré Rudel that Von Aue transmits to him changes his plans and his fealties and sets him on a new path. In Von Aue’s vague memories, the figure of Morungen, ardent and unhinged, continues on to the East, to India. The fragile figure of Jaufré Rudel blazes like a torch: he is the Cross of the World.

With the years, the soldier gives way to the poet and the poet to the scholar: Von Aue, taking refuge in castle or forest, famed as the poet and adapter of Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec and Yvain, bids farewell to the world without ever deciphering the transparent mystery of the Prince of Blaye.

Vertumnus (Gallimard, 1958, 180 pages)

The novel is set in an unspecified country in the Americas that sometimes resembles Argentina, sometimes Mexico, sometimes the American South. It is also set in France: Paris and Carcassonne. Time period: the end of the nineteenth century. Alexandre Maurin, landowner and man of strong character, orders his son to return to France. André, his son, objects, arguing that he was born in these lands and that his duty is to remain by his father’s side in times of trouble. Over the course of an endless afternoon with great black clouds hanging overhead, Alexandre Maurin warns André of the danger he faces if he stays. For some time now the local strongmen have been scheming to kill them all. André inquires about the fate of the seven boys who live with them, in the same house, sharing the same table, orphans or vagabonds whom Maurin has gathered up and raised in his own way. In a sense André considers them his brothers. Maurin smiles: they aren’t your brothers, he says, you have no brothers or sisters, at least as far as I know. The orphans will suffer the same fate as their father, that’s what Maurin has decided, but André, his only son, must be saved. Finally André’s departure is settled. Maurin and the seven orphans, by now armed to the teeth, accompany the youth to the railroad station: their parting is cheerful, the orphans brim with confidence and boast of their weapons, they assure him that he can go with his mind at ease, no one will touch a hair on his father’s head. The train trip is long and lonely. André doesn’t speak to anyone. He thinks about his father and the boys and believes that he has made an unforgivable mistake leaving them there. He has a dream: as death rains down all around them, his father and the orphans ride and shoot their rifles at a mass of enemies who stand motionless, gripped by fear. Then André reaches a port city, has an encounter with a woman in a hotel on a hill, boards a ship, is bored during the long crossing, arrives in France. In Paris he meets his mother, in whose house he lives for the first few days. His relationship with his mother is distant and formal. Later, with the money he’s brought from America, he rents a little house and begins his university studies.

For months he has no news of his father. One day a lawyer appears and informs him of the existence of a bank account opened in his name, an account with enough money in it for him to live on, finish his degree, and tour Europe. The account is replenished each year with a remittance from America. Your father, says the lawyer, is a man of means. An example for young people. Before he leaves he hands him a letter. In it, Alexandre Maurin provides more or less the same explanation and urges him to finish his degree quickly and to lead a healthy, virtuous life. The boys and I, he says, are holding down the fort. After two years, André meets a traveler at a party who has been to the part of America where his father lives. The traveler has heard talk of him: a Frenchman surrounded by American boys, some of them wild and dangerous, who has the local authorities in a chokehold; the owner of vast grazing and croplands, orchards, and a couple of gold mines. He lived, it was said, in the exact center of his possessions, in a big single-story house of adobe and wood, its courtyards and passageways labyrinthine. About the wards of the Frenchman, who ranged in age from eight to twenty-five, it was said that they were many, though probably not more than twenty in number, and that some of them had already claimed various lives. These words cheer and trouble André. That night he can learn nothing else, but in the following days he obtains the traveler’s address and pays him a visit. For weeks, on every sort of pretext, André smothers the traveler with attentions, his seemingly limitless generosity touching his new friend. At last he invites him to spend a few days at the family seat in Carcassonne, which he has yet to visit. The traveler accepts the invitation. The train trip from Paris to Carcassonne is pleasant: they talk of philosophy and opera. The ride from Carcassonne to the family seat is by stagecoach and along the way André is silent. He’s never been there before and he’s assaulted by a kind of irrational and nameless fear. The house is empty but a neighbor and some servants inform them that old M. Maurin has been there. André realizes that they mean his grandfather, who he’d thought was dead. Leaving the traveler settled at the house, he sets out in search of his grandfather. When he finds him, in a village near Carcassonne, the old man is very ill. According to the family that has taken him in, death won’t be long in coming. André, who is about to complete his medical degree, treats and cures him. For a week, forgetting all else, he remains by the old man’s bedside: in his grandfather’s face, ravaged by illness and hard living, he seems to glimpse his father’s features, his father’s fierce joy. When the old man recovers he brings him back to the house, over his protests. The traveler, meanwhile, has struck up friendships with a few of the neighbors, and when André arrives he reveals that he knows why he was invited. André admits that at first his motives were selfish, but now he feels true friendship. With the arrival of fall, the traveler leaves for Spain and the north of Africa and André remains in Carcassonne, caring for his grandfather. One night he dreams of his father: surrounded by more than thirty boys, adolescents and children, Maurin crosses a field of flowers on horseback. The horizon is vast and of a dazzling blue. When he wakes, André decides to return to Paris. The years go by. André receives his degree and starts a practice in an elegant quarter of Paris. He marries a pretty young woman from a good family. He has a daughter. He is a professor at the Sorbonne. He stands for Parliament. He buys property and speculates on the stock exchange. He has another daughter. Upon the death of his grandfather — at the age of ninety-three — he has the family seat restored and spends his summers in Carcassonne. He takes a lover. He travels around the Mediterranean and the Near East. One night, at the Monte Carlo Casino, he sees the traveler again. He avoids him. The next morning the traveler shows up at his hotel. He has lost everything, and he asks for a loan in the name of their old friendship. Silently, André Maurin hands him a more-than-generous check. The traveler, moved and grateful, tells him that he’s spent five years in America and that he’s seen his father. André says that he doesn’t want to know anything about him. He no longer even touches the account that his father adds to each year without fail. But this time, says the traveler, I saw him in person, I spoke to him about you, I spent seven days at his house, I can give you all sorts of detail about his life. André says that none of that interests him anymore. Their parting is cold. That night, on his way back to Paris, André Maurin dreams of his father: all he sees are children and weapons and terrified faces. By the time he reaches Paris, he’s forgotten everything.

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An Arcimboldi Novel Read in Four Days The Natives of Fontainebleau (Gallimard, 1970, 140 pages) A painter by the name of Fontaine returns to the city of his birth in the south of France after thirty years of absence. The first part of the book, briefly: the return trip by train, the view from the windows, the silence or loquacity of the other passengers, their conversations, the train corridor, the restaurant car, the step of the ticket inspector, assorted opinions on politics, love, wine, the nation, then night on the train, the countryside in the dark, and the moon. In the second part we see Fontaine two months later, settled on the edge of town in a little three-room house by a stream, where he lives in dignity and poverty. He has only one friend left: Dr. D’Arsonval, whom he has known since he was a child. D’Arsonval, who is well-off and fond of Fontaine, tries to help him financially but Fontaine refuses his help. Here we are given our first description of Fontaine: he’s short and lamb-like, with dark eyes and brown hair, his expression occasionally intense and his movements clumsy. During his absence he’s been all over the world but he prefers not to talk about it. His memories of Paris are happy and bright. In his youth Fontaine was a painter of whom great things were expected. Once (D’Arsonval remembers as he sets off on horseback for Fontaine’s little house), he was accused of imitating Fernand Khnopff. It was a trap set with malice and craft. Fontaine didn’t defend himself. He knew Khnopff’s work, but he preferred that of another Belgian: Mellery, the delightful Xavier Mellery, like himself the son of a gardener. That was the beginning of the end of his career. D’Arsonval visited him three years later: Fontaine’s time was devoted to the reading of Rosicrucian literature, to drugs, and to friendships that contributed little to his physical or mental well-being. He made a living by working some mysterious job at a big warehouse. He hardly painted at all, though once D’Arsonval was back working as a doctor in the Roussillon, he received invitations for various shows, presumably sent by Fontaine himself, from a group of painters who called themselves “The Occults”—shows that, as might be supposed, D’Arsonval did not attend. Soon afterward Fontaine disappeared. The third and last part of the novel is set in D’Arsonval’s library, after a long and lavish dinner. The mistress of the house has gone to sleep, and D’Arsonval’s four guests are single men: in addition to Fontaine, there is Clouzet, widower and fabulously wealthy merchant, an aficionado — like the host — of poetry, music, and the fine arts; the young painter Eustache Pérol, on the eve of his second and definitive trip to Paris, where he plans to stay and forge a career with the initial support of D’Arsonval and Clouzet; and finally the parish priest, Father Chaumont, who confesses himself ignorant of the delights of art. The postprandial conversation goes on until dawn. Everyone talks. Sometimes the discussion is calm, other times it is impassioned. Chaumont pokes fun at D’Arsonval and Clouzet. Eustache Pérol treats the priest like a spiritual outlaw. They bring up Michelangelo. D’Arsonval and Clouzet have been to the Sistine Chapel. Chaumont speaks of Aristotle and then of Saint Francis of Assisi. Clouzet recalls Michelangelo’s Moses and sinks into something that might be nostalgia or silent desperation. Eustache Pérol speaks of Rodin, but no one pays any attention to him: he’s reminded of The Burghers of Calais, which he’s never seen, and grits his teeth. D’Arsonval puts his hand on Clouzet’s shoulder and asks if he remembers Naples. Clouzet quotes Bergson, whom they met in Paris, and he and D’Arsonval laugh. Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe, whispers the priest. Soon the subject changes to Perol’s impending trip. Chaumont asks after his lady mother. Eustache Pérol confesses that she is beside herself. Clouzet says a few words about a mother’s love. D’Arsonval laughs in a corner of the library. They open another bottle of cognac. The only one who has done nothing but drink thus far is Fontaine. At four in the morning, when everyone is drunk (Father Chaumont dozes in an armchair and the others stroll around the library in shirtsleeves), he is moved to speak. He remembers his mother. He recalls his departure and his mother’s tears the night before as she packed his bag. He speaks of the joy of work. Of sublime visions. Of the monotony of life. Of his inability to decipher its mystery. Days in Paris, he says without rising from his seat and staring at the floor, are swift. But swift like what? like the wind? like amnesia? He speaks of women and sunsets, of terrible daybreaks and of blank, demonic faces. A heedless gesture, a word, and you’re sunk, the consequences will be unforeseeable, he says in a soft voice. He speaks of the death of his mother, of painters and of bars. He speaks of the Rosicrucians and the cosmos. One day, pressed by debt, he took a job in the colonies. He didn’t paint anymore — he had given it up, you might say — and in this new enterprise his rise was meteoric. No one could have been more surprised than he. In just a few years, he found himself in a position of responsibility that required constant travel. Yes, he had been all over Africa and even to India. Surprising countries, he says in response to the expectant looks of D’Arsonval and Clouzet and the dolorously skeptical gaze of Eustache Pérol. At a certain point, he says, a series of stupid mistakes obliged me to spend a month at a trading post in Madagascar. This was early in the year 1900. Life on the plantation and in the village was deadly boring. In three days his work was done and time passed with exasperating slowness. At first he occupied himself devising projects that might improve the living conditions of the natives, but he soon gave up the effort, thwarted by their passivity. Their lack of interest was universal. After their labors on the plantation, none of them wanted to do extra work. The apathy of the natives piqued Fontaine’s interest, and he decided to paint them. At first everything was exciting: with materials taken from nature, he made the colors and brushes. An employee of the company supplied him with the canvases: an old sheet and pieces of sacking and burlap. He began to paint; far now, he says, from the symbolist school, from the visionaries and the wretched Occults. Now it was his eye, his naked eye, that guided his hand. The divine innocence of the company man, he says. From the start, the painting escaped his control. He began with the sacking and burlap and saved the sheet for the grand finale. One night, as he gazed at the sacking by the light of an oil lamp, he realized that he had turned that poor Madagascar village into a vast, sumptuous palace crowded with passageways, stairs, and hidden corners. Like Fontainebleau, he says, though he had never been there. The next day he tackled the sheet. It took him eight days to finish it, painting around the clock: by day in the open air and by night in the dilapidated company offices. He went without food and sleep. On the ninth day he packed up his things and didn’t set foot outside his room. On the tenth day he departed in the ship that had come for him. A year later, settled in a small, friendly African city, he decided at last to take another look at his paintings. There were twenty small canvases and one big one, and together he called them The Natives of Fontainebleau. In the paintings, the village had, in fact, become a palace. The occupations of the natives had become the occupations of courtiers. The grand salons, their patterns of light and shadow, the statues, the mirrors, the murals, the heavy draperies: all seemed equally sunk in an unspecified illness. The floor oozed fever, the rugs seemed about to founder. In this setting, in an atmosphere at once oppressive and gay, his black subjects moved about, casting sidelong glances at the painter, at the future spectators of the painting, as if they were out in the open air. Fontaine seemed to hear again — to hear for the first time — the sounds of that village to which he would never return, sounds that he had mistakenly confused with those of any other African village. Now, thousands of miles away, he heard and saw it for the first time, and was horrified and amazed. The paintings, of course, were lost, adds Fontaine, except for the old sheet, which had accompanied him like an act of penitence each time he moved. After a long silence the voice of Chaumont, whom everyone had thought was asleep, is heard: you speak of sin, he says. D’Arsonval and Clouzet, suddenly full of unease, send for the carriage in order to set out immediately for Fontaine’s house to see this extraordinary painting. Pérol has fallen asleep, his face now peaceful and innocent. D’Arsonval and Clouzet each take Fontaine by an arm and go out into the courtyard, where the servant has already hitched up the horses. There, as day begins to dawn, they are served steamed milk, bread, cheese, cold meats. Fontaine stands and gazes up at the sky as he drinks a glass of wine. Father Chaumont joins them. The carriage traverses the sleeping town, crosses a bridge, enters a forest. At last they come to Fontaine’s little house: he takes the canvas from a chest, spreads it on the bed, and, without looking at it, steps away toward the window. From there he hears the exclamations of D’Arsonval and Clouzet, the murmurs of Chaumont. Soon afterward, as summer nears its end, he dies. When D’Arsonval clears out his few belongings, he searches for the painting but can’t find it.

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Two Arcimboldi Novels Read in Three Days

The Librarian (Gallimard, 1966, 185 pages)

The protagonist’s name is Jean Marchand. He’s young, from a good family, and wants to be a writer. He has a manuscript, The Librarian, on which he’s been working for a long time. A publishing house, recognizable as Gallimard, hires him as a reader. Overnight, Marchand finds himself buried in hundreds of unpublished novels. First he decides to set his book aside for a while. Then he decides to give up his literary aspirations (the practice of writing, if not his passion for it) to devote himself to the careers of other writers. He sees himself as a doctor at a leper colony in India, a monk pledged to a higher cause.

He reads manuscripts, has long discussions with writers, gives them advice, calls them on the phone, inquires after their health, lends them money. Soon there’s a group of about ten whom he can consider his own, whose novels he’s been involved with. Some — a few — find publishers. Parties are thrown and plans made. The rest come imperceptibly to swell the ranks of a collection of unpublished manuscripts guarded jealously by Marchand. Among these manuscripts by others is his own novel, The Librarian, unfinished and perfectly typed, neatly bound, a beauty among grubby, smudged, crumpled, dirty originals; a lady cat among tomcats. Marchand dreams that in one magical and endless night the rejected manuscripts make love every way possible with his abandoned manuscript: they sodomize it, rape it orally and genitally, come in its hair, on its body, in its ears, in its armpits, etc., but when morning comes his manuscript hasn’t been fertilized. It’s sterile. In that sterility, Marchand believes, lies its uniqueness, its magnetism. He also dreams that he’s the leader of a gang that scavenges metal from mines and that the mountain they must plunder by the light of the moon is hollow, empty. His prestige at the publishing house grows, as it must. He has recommended the publication of a young writer who is the hit of the season. Marchand knows that for every writer he allows to breathe, there are five who endure with him (with the best Marchand, the most improbable) the airlessness and darkness of their labyrinthine works.

Eventually, one of his writers kills himself. Another turns to journalism. Another, of independent means, writes a second and a third novel that only Marchand will read and praise. Another is published by a small regional press. Another becomes an encyclopedia salesman. By this point Marchand has abandoned any scruples, any hesitation: not only does he maintain steady relationships with the writers but in more than one case he has become acquainted with their families (dear M. Marchand), their girlfriends and wives, their generous grandmothers, their best friends. In his imagination, his manuscript lives on in the novels that he stores at his house: the character of The Librarian enters the lives of the other characters — the characters from the other books — just as he works his way into the lives of the writers. Of the first ten, only one takes the tempestuous world of publishing by storm (and even so, Marchand controls him to the point of making him write stories that only he will read, rewrite novels whose discarded fragments only he will possess); as the years go by, the others find new interests, stop writing, readapt themselves, grow up. But the flow of new manuscripts is unceasing: Marchand takes on another ten writers, then another ten, and so on until his library is filled with manuscripts — strange ones, bad ones sometimes; surprising ones, delightful ones, dark ones sometimes — that he personally takes care to see are rejected by publishers. There comes a moment when Marchand reads only unpublished works: the novel gives brief plot summaries of about forty.

Marchand has dreams: a great fire in his building, described by Arcimboldi with the precision of an architect and a firefighter; the appearance of a thundering Messiah who publishes all the filched manuscripts and condemns him to burn in hell, the Librarian’s greatest fear; the hatching of a generation of novelists who are as quick as lightning and whom he’ll coddle and lead, step by step, into his library of rejected writers. The novel ends abruptly. Marchand dies of a heart attack. Present at his burial, along with the employees of the publishing house, are many former writers. A moving truck transports his collection of manuscripts to a warehouse. Arcimboldi describes the warehouse in great detail.

Racine (Gallimard, 1979, 140 pages)

A fragmented biography, divided into cold and seemingly unconnected bits; perhaps a collection of prose poems, as one critic notes. Scenes from the life of Racine, following one after another like closed and stifling rooms: the death of the girl Jeanne-Thérèse Olivier, recounted with evident pain despite the chilliness — the purported objectivity — of the prose; the death of Jeanne Sconin, mother of the poet, two years after the poet’s birth; the death of Marquise Du Parc, the poet’s lover, in the year of the publication of Andromaque; work with Boileau, the head of Boileau, his profile; friendship with Molière and their subsequent falling-out; the death of Jean Racine, the poet’s father; early mornings in 1644 when the poet was a five-year-old orphan living with his grandparents; the unfinished and lost tragedies, the incalculable spent energy; life in Uzès, the birds of Languedoc, the poet’s uncle Antoine Sconin; the lie that surrounds him like a barbed and dirty cloud; marriage to Catherine de Romanet; the accusation that he poisoned Marquise Du Parc for her jewels; the study of Latin; the premiere of Andromaque with Marquise Du Parc in the leading role; the period when Marquise Du Parc worked with Molière; La Champmeslé’s bed; children; life in Versailles; the great blocks of ice of the seventeenth century; the music of Lully and Port-Royal.

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Two Arcimboldi Novels Read in Seven Days

Sam O’Rourke’s Search (Gallimard, 1960, 230 pages)

At first, this sad and rambling novel most resembles a plagiarized version of James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish, or at best an adaptation. Despite the unremitting description of objects (beds, curtains, camp beds, guns, chairs, boxes of crackers, bottles, plates), very much in the style of the nouveau roman, the arc of James Hadley Chase’s story impresses itself with great force: some small-time crooks kidnap the daughter of a tycoon; before long, the bungling kidnappers lose their captive to another gang; the brains behind the new gang is a fat, surly woman (Mona); Mona’s deputies are her son (Chuck) and her godson (Jim, a.k.a. Kansas Jim). That same night — the night of the double kidnapping — we learn that Chuck is a dangerous psychopath and that he’s about to fall for the beautiful heiress, and that Jim is handsome and clever and hates the heiress with a passion: his reasons, explained at great length, fluctuate between a very personal sense of class struggle and an appreciation of the charms and natural camaraderie of chorus girls, whom he clearly prefers.

The rest of the gang consists of four drab and ruthless individuals: a black man, two ex-farmers, and a fifty-five-year-old Polish dancer. The daily existence of these characters is something that seems to fascinate Arcimboldi: their routines, their hideouts, their interests, their obsessions, the ease with which they “slide through cracks in time.” We soon learn all kinds of things about them: their favorite foods, their dreams, their favorite subjects of conversation, their hopes, their dark loves, their dark fates (cf. Victor Hugo, Les Miserables). Chuck and the kidnapped girl are like a kind of diabolical Romeo and Juliet, with Mona and the Pole (who sleep together once every two weeks, though almost without touching, masturbating each other from opposite sides of the bed with hands like insect antennae) as their antithesis: the old couple has attained or is about to attain wisdom, the state of a celestial Romeo and Juliet. Standing between the two couples in a space where everything is antagonism are the godson, the black man, sometimes the two ex-farmers: they are the spectators of love, the chorus that gives life and takes it away, that licenses it.

The two cities where the first part of the novel is set are described with seeming objectivity (another cascade of details), revealing glimpses of a dream landscape: clouds that hang incredibly low, at nearly the level of lightning rods; twisted, solitary trees (that Arcimboldi, for reasons unknown, calls Oklahomas) loaded with birds and rodents, greenish-black specters in desolate fields; illicit all-night gambling dens; seedy hotels with four beds to a room; farmhouses with barred doors and windows; cowboys who scan the valley from afar without dismounting. Down in the valley, the two cities glitter in the sun; up on the mountain, the cowboy smokes and smiles with an air of sadness, striking the same relaxed, careless pose that we’ve seen in so many movies.

Between the end of the first part of the novel and the start of the second, a washroom door is opened by someone unknown to reveal a dwarf brushing his teeth at a dwarf-sized sink. It’s at precisely this point that the second part begins: a private detective (Sam O’Rourke) kneels at a dwarf-sized sink brushing his teeth and staring at himself in the mirror — which is also dwarf-height — with an expression of infinite sadness on his face. Someone opens the door (presumably the same person who opened the door earlier and found the dwarf) and orders him to go in search of the missing heiress. The image of the detective on his knees brushing his teeth is one to which Arcimboldi will return over and over again: a man shrunk to his true size; the description of the washroom tiles (Hardee-Royston, green and gray flowers on a matte surface); the description of the single lightbulb hanging naked over the mirror; the shadow of the door as it opens; the bulky form in the doorway and the eyes of the stranger, invisible to O’Rourke but in which he intuits a gleam of surprise and fear; the gaze of O’Rourke, first in the mirror (in which he sees only the reflection of the stranger’s legs) and then upon turning to seek the face; voices that echo with strange limpidity; the water that runs in the chipped sink and trickles between the tiles.

O’Rourke’s search is limited to the two cities and the network of farms scattered between them. A single city, concludes Arcimboldi, is by its very nature unfathomable; two cities are an infinity. O’Rourke navigates this infinity with American simplicity and integrity. The senseless deaths (despite the author’s efforts to demonstrate — by the enumeration of causal events — that everything has a hidden meaning as unyielding as fate) follow upon one another with horrifying monotony. O’Rourke’s inquiries lead him to a church, an orphanage, the charred shell of a farm, a brothel. During the investigation, which is like a voyage, he makes new friends and enemies, reencounters forgotten lovers, is nearly killed, kills, loses his car, makes love with his secretary. The conversations that O’Rourke has with policemen, pickpockets, thugs, night watchmen, gas station attendants, informers, whores, and dealers are reproduced in full and concern the existence of God, progress, mathematics, life after death, the reading of the Bible, fallen women and saintly wives, flying saucers, the role of Christ on strange planets, the role of man on earth, the advantages of life in the country over life in the city (clean air, fresh vegetables and milk, guaranteed daily exercise), the ravages of time, miracle drugs, the secret recipe for Coca-Cola, the choice to bring children into this mixed-up world, work as a social good.

As might be expected, the search for the heiress never ends. The cities, A and B, increasingly resemble each other. Mona’s gang, once the ransom is collected, tries to flee but something nameless (and ominous) stands in the way. They end up settling in B, where they buy a nightclub in the suburbs. The nightclub is described as a castle or a fortress: from a secret room the heiress and Chuck watch the sunsets and the Oklahomas stretching into infinity. O’Rourke loses himself doubly: in the cities and in momentous and futile conversations. And yet, at the end of the novel, he has a dream. He dreams that Mona’s entire gang is climbing a flight of stairs. Mona is in the lead and Kansas Jim brings up the rear. In the middle is the kidnapped heiress with Chuck’s arm around her waist. They climb slowly but with steady and unfaltering steps — the stairs are wooden and uncarpeted — until they come to a hallway, dark or faintly lit by a yellowish bulb covered with fly droppings. There’s a door. They open it. They see a dwarf sink. Kneeling at the tiny sink is O’Rourke, brushing his teeth. They remain on the threshhold without greeting him. O’Rourke turns, still on his knees, and gazes at them. The novel ends a few lines later with some disquisitions on love and repentance.

Railroad Perfection (Gallimard, 1964, 206 pages)

Novel consisting of ninety-nine apparently unrelated two-page dialogues. All the dialogues take place aboard a train. But not the same train, or even during the same time period. Chronologically, the first dialogue (page 101) takes place in 1899, between a priest and a clerk for a foreign company; the last (page 59) in 1957, between a young widow and a retired cavalry captain. Following the order in which they appear in the book, the first dialogue (page 9) takes place in 1940, between a landscape painter and a surrealist painter whose nerves are shot, presumably on a train to Marseille; the last (page 205) takes place in 1930, between a woman traveling with two children and an old woman who is deathly ill but who never dies, among other reasons because the dialogue, like those that precede it, is interrupted: in general, the reader encounters conversations that he doesn’t see begin (and whose beginnings he can’t even imagine) and that after two pages will inevitably be cut off. Still, the careful reader will find clues that occasionally explain how a conversation started, what motivated it, the reasons behind it. Although most, at least on the surface, arise from the monotony of the trip, some have a more specific origin: a remark about the crime novel that a passenger is reading, a significant political or social event, a third person who has attracted the attention of two passengers. Each dialogue is given a short title that sometimes informs us of the profession of the speakers or their marital status or the destination of the train or the year or the age of the travelers, but not always, so that some chapters begin simply with a notation of the time: 3 a.m., 9 a.m., 11 p.m., etc. In addition, the careful reader will soon realize (though a second or third reading is often required) that this isn’t a collection of stories or of ninety-nine fragments connected solely by train travel: as if this were a mystery novel, we learn to recognize at least two travelers through the fragments of dialogue, two ambiguous characters who, despite changes of job, age, and sometimes even sex (but then the young woman who works as a secretary at a chocolate factory in the Jura is no such young woman), are the same person, and both are fleeing, or chasing each other, or one is chasing and the other is hiding. It’s also possible to piece together the clues to solve a crime, though the order in which the dialogues are presented tends to muddy the waters (conversation between the prefect of Narbonne and the Turkish intellectual, page 161; conversation between the train conductor and the sailor from Toulon, page 95; conversation between the proofreader whose mother has died and the town architect of Brest, page 51; conversation between the Italian immigrant and the watchmaker from Geneva, page 87; conversation between the fifty-year-old whore and the twenty-year-old whore, page 115); it’s possible to spin a comic tale (conversation between the bride and groom off on their honeymoon, page 27; conversation between the man of independent means and the owner of vineyards in the Roussillon, page 77; conversation between the vaudeville performer and the highway engineer — or is he a German spy? or a Strasbourg bohemian? — page 109); a story of devotion (conversation between the elderly baker and the elderly country doctor, page 153; conversation between the soldier on leave and the woman of mystery, page 163; conversation between the stutterer from Lille and the Paris taxi driver, page 171); the story of a trip — to Spain, the Maghreb? — that ends in the death of the traveler (conversation between the professor of medieval literature and the traveling salesman, page 143; conversation between the woman of mystery and the married woman, page 69; conversation between the twenty-year-old athlete and the twenty-eight-year-old college graduate, page 181; conversation between the bridge player and the Englishwoman of a certain age, page 197); and the story of a house that burned down (conversation between the gravedigger from the south and the gravedigger from the north, page 39; conversation between the housewife who likes to write poetry but doesn’t like to read it and the proofreader whose mother has died, page 119; conversation between the man who has never taken trains and the old man who was an only child, page 191). But the truly important story, the one that somehow encompasses and obliterates and supplants all the others, is the story of the chase. From the beginning, the reader is presented with a number of questions: is the pursuer motivated by love or hatred? is the pursued motivated by love or fear? how much time elapses from the start of the chase until the present day? at the end of the book is the chase still on or has it imperceptibly ceased at some point between 1899 and 1957? is the pursuer a man and the pursued a woman, or is it the other way around? what is the story and what are its outgrowths, elaborations, offshoots?

6

Friendships of Arcimboldi

Raymond Queneau, whom he considered to be his mentor and with whom he quarreled at least ten times. Five times by letter, four times over the phone, and twice in person, the first time with curses and insults, and the second time with scornful gestures and glares.

Georges Perec, whom he admired deeply. Once he remarked that Perec must surely be the second coming of Christ.

Raoul Duguay, Quebecois poet, with whom he maintained a relationship based on mutual hospitality: when Duguay was in France he stayed with Arcimboldi, and when Arcimboldi traveled to Canada or taught college classes he stayed with Duguay. On the subject of Duguay’s working life: he might be a professor at a Texas university for three months and a waiter at a bar in Vancouver for the next three months. Which is something that might seem perfectly normal in America but that never failed to astonish Arcimboldi.

Isidore Isou, whom he saw mostly between 1946 and 1948, and with whom he broke ties upon the appearance of the book Réflexions sur M. André Breton (Lettristes, 1948). As far as Arcimboldi was concerned, Isou was a “Romanian fuck-stick.”

Elie-Charles Flamand, whom he knew between 1950 and 1955. By this time the young Flamand was already extremely interested in esotericism, which in 1959 got him excommunicated by the surrealists. He and Arcimboldi shared a taste for certain poetic and kabbalistic interpretations of texts. According to Arcimboldi, Flamand was so unobtrusive that when he sat down it was practically as if he had remained standing. (This observation of Arcimboldi’s can be found in an Agatha Christie story.)

Ivonne Mercier, librarian from Caen, whom he saw from 1952 to 1960. He met Miss Mercier while on holiday in Normandy. For a year their contact was strictly epistolary, though frequent, consisting of two or even three letters a week. At the time, Miss Mercier was engaged and hoped soon to be married. The sudden death of her fiancé brought them closer. Ivonne Mercier traveled to Paris an average of six times a year. Arcimboldi, meanwhile, made only one more trip to Caen in his lifetime, in the summer of 1959, the year of the publication of the novel Hartmann von Aue and the poetry collection Railroad Perfection; or, The Fracturing of the Pursued. In 1960 Ivonne Mercier married a builder from the Normandy coast and broke off her visits to Paris. They continued to write for a few years, though very sporadically.

René Monardes, childhood friend from Carcassonne whom Arcimboldi always visited on his trips back to town. Monardes, a wine wholesaler, remembered Arcimboldi as a sincere and bighearted person. He had never read any of his books, though he kept some on the bookshelf in the dining room. Even after Arcimboldi had left France, Monardes claimed that he occasionally came back to visit. Once every two years. He comes, we have a glass of wine, maybe eat some figs under the arbor, I fill him in on the news, not that there’s much of it these days, and then he leaves. He’s still a nice guy. Not a big talker, but a nice guy.

7

Epistolary Relationships of Arcimboldi

Robert Goffin, ten letters dated between 1948 and 1951. Subjects: eroticism, painting, motoring, the weather, Belgian and French cyclists, scams and great scam artists.

Achille Chavée, fifteen letters, 1953 to 1960. Various subjects. Literature, as they say, is noticeable for its absence. In the letters, Chavée rallies Arcimboldi: courage, young man, courage.

Cecilia Laurent, of the Center for Atomic Energy Research, Paris. Forty letters, postcards, telegrams, all dated 1960. In one postcard Arcimboldi confesses that he wants to kill her. In the next letter he takes it back: what I really want to do is make love with you. To penetrate you = to kill you. That same afternoon he sends her a telegram: never mind, forget what I said, I didn’t mean it.

Dr. Lester D. Gore, of the Nuclear Energy Institute, Pasadena, California. Ten letters, dated 1962 to 1966, of a pseudoscientific nature. From one of them it may be deduced that Arcimboldi tried to visit Gore during a trip to the United States in 1966, but that in the end they were only able to speak by phone. (Was he trying to gather material for a scientific novel, as he explains in a subsequent letter?)

Dr. Mario Bianchi, head of the Plastic Surgery Department, St. Peter’s Hospital, Orlando, Florida. Eight letters, dated 1964 to 1965, of a pseudoscientific nature. Arcimboldi expresses an interest in techniques of facial surgery, in nerve elongation, in techniques for bone implants, in “photographs of the inside of the face, the inside of the hands.” And he explains: “color photographs, of course.” Dr. Bianchi expresses an interest in knowing whether any of Arcimboldi’s novels have been translated in the United States, and mentions an upcoming trip to Paris with his wife and son during which they might meet in person.

Jaime Valle, professor of French literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma of Mexico. Five letters dated between 1969 and 1971. Subjects relating to the purchase of real estate, oceanfront properties, cabins in Oaxaca, hippies, peyote, María Sabina. Regarding Mexican literature: surprisingly, Arcimboldi has read only Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo, in Anne Fontfreda’s translation, Paris, 1951. And a bit of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It’s life in Mexico that interests me, not Mexican literature, he says. The last letter is a long defense of B. Traven, scorned by Jaime Valle as popular and facile.

Renato Leduc, whom he meets through a mutual friend, the exiled Panamanian Roberto Dole, black, homosexual, and pacifist. Ten letters dated between 1969 and 1974. Subjects: life in Mexico, the desert, the tropics, the places where it rains most and least. Leduc’s responses are clear and to the point. He goes so far as to send Arcimboldi photographs and maps, newspaper clippings and tourist pamphlets. He even presents him with a copy of his book Fábulas y poemas, 1966, and Arcimboldi promises to translate it, though nothing further is heard of the project.

Dr. John W. Clark, plastic surgeon, Geneva, Switzerland. Twenty letters between 1972 and 1975. Subjects: skin grafts, The Island of Dr. Moreau, the ultimate facelift.

Dr. André Lejeune, Lacanian psychoanalyst. Eighteen letters between 1963 and 1974. Discussions of literature from which it may be deduced that Dr. Lejeune is a reader to be reckoned with, as well as a shrewd and mordant critic. The final letters contain veiled threats. Arcimboldi discusses killings, people who talk about killings, blood, and silence.

Amelia De León, Mexican professor of French literature whom Arcimboldi meets on a brief trip to Oaxaca in 1976. Ten letters, all with some exotic postmark, like Mauritania or Senegal; all dated 1977. In them, Arcimboldi makes constant though oblique references to age, to the joys of being twenty-nine and about to turn thirty, which was the case of Professor De León in 1977. Her letters are cold and academic: Stendhal, Balzac, etc.

8

Hobbies and Training

The piano. Arcimboldi learned to play the piano when he was forty-five. His teachers were Jacques Soler and Marie Djiladi. He never had a piano at home or felt the need for one. And yet when he went out at night and came upon a piano at a bar or a friend’s house he would do anything to be allowed to play it. Then he would sit down and run his fingers over the keys and although he played very badly he forgot everything and sang — in a cracked and barely audible voice — blues, ballads, love songs.

Magic. From the time he was very young he was interested in magic tricks. His apprenticeship was anarchic and ad hoc. He never followed any particular method. At the age of fifty he decided to apply himself to the School of Thought, which should really be called the School of Hidden Words, and involves guessing the objects that an audience member is carrying in his or her purse or wallet. For this trick it’s necessary to have an assistant who uses coded language to inquire after the objects. But it can also be performed without an assistant, according to the magician Arturo De Sisti, by working solely from a person’s external appearance, an alphabet that leads via unexpected yet clear channels to the things he keeps in his pockets. In this case the hidden words aren’t those uttered by an assistant but those spoken by a tie, a handkerchief, a shirt, a hat, a dress, a necklace: words barely whispered, concise words that hardly ever lie. This is not, let it be said, a matter of judging by appearances, but rather of establishing a correlation, a continuity, between what is in plain sight and what — by virtue of its small size or for the sake of convenience — is tucked away. He also developed an interest in the art of making people disappear. Theories on this tricky maneuver were developed by many schools, from the Chinese to the Italian and the Arab to the American (which was itself divided into two schools: the classic school that made people disappear and the modern school that made trains disappear). It’s not known which school interested Arcimboldi. No one ever saw him make a person disappear, though with some friends he talked about it quite a bit.

9

Sworn Enemies of Arcimboldi

Lisa Julien, whom he met in 1946 and with whom he lived from 1947 to 1949. Their breakup was violent: Arcimboldi, in a conversation recorded in 1971, acknowledged having slapped Miss Julien twice, first with his open palm and then with the back of his hand. Between the first and second blows there were punches (Arcimboldi ended up with a black eye), kicks, scratches, and strong words that the writer describes as a limit experience. From beneath the hail of blows, he says, he managed to catch a curious and distracted glimpse of pure nothingness. Miss Julien’s hatred was lasting: in a rare interview conducted in 1992 by a pseudoliterary scandal sheet as part of a feature titled “The Long-Suffering Companions of Creative Men,” she referred to the writer as “that loathsome, impotent dwarf.”

Arthur Laville, reader for Gallimard and art critic for various European and American trade publications, who saw the main character of The Librarian as a malicious portrayal of himself. Laville, in an uncharacteristic fit of rage, launched a feud with Arcimboldi that lasted from 1966 to 1970. He was also presumably the author of a number of anonymous death threats and countless phone calls during which he showered the writer with insults and mockery or was silent, breathing heavily and noisily. At the end of 1970, Laville’s anger subsided as abruptly as it had arisen. In 1975 they ran into each other in a hallway at Gallimard and exchanged civil remarks.

Charles Dubillard, patriotic poet, huckster, and inveterate Pétain supporter. In 1943 he gave a public thrashing to the young Arcimboldi, who, it’s worth mentioning, had done nothing to avoid the fight, assuring the friends who tried to talk him out of it that nothing in the world would deprive him of the pleasure of bashing out the brains of that fascist pig Dubillard. In 1947 they met again, this time in Paris, at a poetry reading at which Dubillard, converted to Gaullism, read a poem about the hills of Languedoc, the traces of time, and the light of the motherland (according to Arcimboldi every messiah of fascism got his start and finish under the rustling petticoats of the motherland). The fight, this time, was at the back door of the hall. Arcimboldi was alone, which meant that no one tried to stop him. Dubillard was accompanied by three college friends, one of whom ended his brilliant career as a socialist minister in the eighties, and together they tried to convince Arcimboldi, first, that times had changed, and second, that Dubillard was much stronger and bigger than he and therefore, objectively speaking, it wasn’t a fair fight. They fought anyway, and Arcimboldi lost again. Their next encounter was in 1955, at a well-known Paris restaurant. Dubillard had given up literature and become a businessman. This time all they did was shove each other and shout insults, until Arcimboldi’s friends broke things off by taking him away. Their final encounter was in the fall of 1980. Dubillard was out for a walk with his grandson and his grandson’s nanny and they ran into Arcimboldi. The latter considered spitting at the boy but he thought better of it and contented himself with spitting at a wheel of the baby carriage. Dubillard showed no reaction. They never saw each other again.

Raoul Delorme, concierge of the building where Arcimboldi lived from 1959 to 1962. Amateur writer of poems about horses and meticulous crime stories in which the killer is never caught. For a while Arcimboldi tried to convince some magazines to publish his work. According to him, Delorme might have been an extraterrestrial boy scout, or perhaps just a telepath. There soon sprang up between them a cool and contained hatred. Delorme, according to Arcimboldi, performed Black Masses in his cramped concierge quarters: he defecated on books by Gide, Maupassant, pissed on books by Pierre Louÿs, Mendès, Banville, shot his wad between the pages of books by Barbusse, Hugo, Chateaubriand, all with the sole intent of improving his French.

Marina Libakova, architect, literary agent, and poet. One month of passion and five years of hard feelings. One night, according to Madame Libakova, in her house in Thézy-Glimont where they were spending the weekend, Arcimboldi, without provocation or explanation, tossed into the fire a poetry manuscript that she had kindly and eagerly presented for his consideration. 1969–1973. She also admits that Arcimboldi asked her forgiveness for his stupidity something like three hundred times over the course of those five years. No letters were preserved.