At first, the feeling in Paris is mutual. Having read Tzara’s manifesto Breton and the others have imagined the Romanian prankster as not just a great writer but also as a magnetic physical presence, rippling with taut Dadaist energy, and with a commanding voice to match. In fact, when a small, short-sighted man with the complexion of candle wax turns up unannounced at the apartment of Francis Picabia–a senior member of the Breton gang–the first reaction of the nanny who opens the door is to shoo this strange unhealthy-looking man away, as one might a suspected carrier of the flu or a travelling underwear salesman.
When the lady of the house comes to the door to see what is going on, Germaine Picabia tries to make the Romanian from Zurich understand that the apartment is quite full already: she has just had a baby and Francis has to sleep in the living room. But Tzara is not so easily put off. He cites a year-old invitation to Paris from Francis. He declines Germaine’s offer to book him a room in a hotel. He has no money, he explains.
Soon Tzara is merrily unpacking his bags in the Picabias’ rococo living room, emptying an arsenal of Dadaist publicity materials (and a large typewriter) onto their piano and Louis XV console. ‘These things are too important for you to touch!’ he hisses at the maid when she tries to help. Dada has arrived in Paris. It rather looks as if he intends to stay. Within days Tzara is cooing at the baby, proprietorially carrying him around in his arms and trying to teach him his first word: ‘Dada’, of course.
Tzara’s arrival at this particular juncture is fortuitous. Breton and his group are planning a poetry reading in a few days as a way of giving Littérature a much-needed boost. But they need help to make the whole thing go off with a bang. Tzara looks at the plans for the event and thinks the Paris group are being far too timid. If they want the public’s attention they have to do more than get a few well-meaning modernist poets to read out their latest work. They must provoke. It is the oldest avant-garde technique in the book, but provocation works. Tzara explains the stagecraft of Zurich Dada and demonstrates a few basic tricks of the trade: reciting several poems at once, whistling and shrieking at random, and so forth. The earnest young Parisians take notes. A rather more daring programme starts to take shape.
The audience that turns up at the Palais des Fêtes is larger than expected. Some have been lured there under false pretences: a public notice of the event advertises a lecture on France’s present exchange-rate crisis, attracting the merchant community that works nearby. Others are drawn by the promise of good poetry, the presentation of some of the latest artists, and perhaps a little good-natured buffoonery. The presence of Tristan Tzara is kept secret.
At first, the show falls rather flat. Attempts at provoking the audience only serve to cause mild amusement. It is not long before spectators start to leave, asking for their money back at the door. A few heckles are raised in response to a couple of paintings which poke fun at the audience. But the whole thing is far from riotous. It hardly qualifies as Dadaist spectacle. Breton’s own performance is not helped by him having a cold–and an attack of stage fright. By the time the musical interlude comes around, the whole thing looks like a failure.
But the second half goes better. First, Louis Aragon begins by declaiming a poem by Tristan Tzara, and, irritated at the poem’s complete nonsense, the audience begins to stir. ‘Good morning without a cigarette tzantzantza ganga’, Aragon pronounces, ‘boozdooc zdooc nfoonfa mbaah nfoonfa.’ A few shout at him to get off stage. Aragon persists. At the end of the recital, there is a dramatic announcement: the poem’s author will now appear in person. A ripple of expectation runs through the auditorium.
With the audience thus fired up, the surprise guest from Zurich finally makes his entry. Tristan Tzara walks on stage reading out loud a speech by Léon Daudet, a nationalist French politician and the founder of Action française, the kind of monarchist magazine one might easily finding lying around the de Gaulle family house, full of speculation on foreign plots to take over France. For some, this is too much. It is not just the speech to which they object. It is Tzara’s delivery, too: murdering the French language with his thick Romanian accent. This is not literature, this is a mockery of literature. To top it all, Breton and Aragon start energetically ringing two bells they found that morning, filling the hall with ear-splitting cacophony.
Finally, the audience’s patience breaks. ‘Back to Zurich! Shoot him!’ someone shouts. Breton and the others are pleased. It’s a start.
FIUME: Tzara would fit right in here. The atmosphere in Fiume grows more piratical with each month that D’Annunzio is in charge. The city becomes a haven for chancers and thrill-seekers.
De Valera’s Irish nationalists and Béla Kun’s Hungarian Bolsheviks all think of visiting, hoping to find moral support or a stockpile of weaponry. Berlin Dada telegrams support. A Belgian poet sets up the League of Fiume, an anti-imperialist answer to the League of Nations. All the oppressed peoples of the world–from Catalans in Spain and Chinese labourers in California to Flemings in Belgium–will find a ready ally in Gabriele, it is claimed. There is even talk of a link-up with Moscow. A vibrant counter-culture is taking hold.
Rome tries hopelessly to rein in its former poet-propagandist. The longer Fiume is occupied by Italian irregulars, the greater the risk that the Yugoslavs decide to invade, possibly with French or British backing. But Gabriele is having too much of a good time playing the Renaissance despot to care very much about anything else. He orders Italian flags to be stitched with his personal slogan: No me frego–I don’t give a damn. Rather than worrying about invasion, his court is full of wild schemes to actually foment civil war in Yugoslavia.
On the ground, the line between loyalist Italian army units outside the city and nationalist legionnaires within is blurred. On Valentine’s Day the army holds a dance in the Quarnero Hotel, up the road in Abbazia. In contravention of the rules of the blockade, a special steamer service is laid on to carry D’Annunzio’s gang there and back. A few days later a fancy-dress ball is held in Fiume in return. Army officers stream in by motorboat and automobile.
And why wouldn’t they take the opportunity for a bit of fun? Fiume is, after all, a hedonist’s delight. Orgies are common. Cocaine is abundant (Gabriele is said to be addicted). The patisseries are excellent. The wine flows freely. When D’Annunzio is not leading his favourite legionnaires on a mountain hike or haranguing the crowds with his latest speech, or seducing one of his female acolytes, he is to be found getting drunk in his favourite restaurant, the Golden Platypus. The name is the idea of Guido Keller, D’Annunzio’s equally colourful deputy, a daring aviator with a penchant for public nudity which saw him arrested for indecent exposure several times before the war.
None of this is cheap. Ships in the Adriatic are raided and redirected towards Fiume to provide a source of income for the rebels. No crackpot moneymaking scheme is too wild. An aeroplane is sent to Paris with a cargo of contraband postage stamps to be sold on the black market. A tablecloth with a large ink stain said to have been the accidental result of one of Gabriele’s literary effusions is put up for sale for one thousand lire. Kidnapping becomes an accepted way of raising money. D’Annunzio once orders Guido Keller’s pet eagle to be briefly seized to make a more playful point about who is in charge.
Despite the perennial marches and speeches, popular support for D’Annunzio in Fiume fades as it becomes clear that the poet has no intention of reaching a reasonable deal with Rome to secure the city’s future. He wants to stay in charge in Fiume until there is a wholesale change of regime in Italy. For him, the city is just a springboard, a bargaining chip. In the meantime, living conditions in Fiume deteriorate. Counterfeit money floods in. Honest trade virtually shuts down. In a patriotic gesture, Italian industrialists are persuaded to buy the city’s shipyards to try and keep some activity going, but it is a hopeless task when no one knows what will happen even a week from now. In the meantime, the pleasure-seeking continues. A special hospital is set up for legionnaires whose sexua
l escapades have landed them with venereal disease.
In late February, hundreds of children are evacuated to Milan to be taken care of by ladies associated with Mussolini’s Fasci di Combattimento. D’Annunzio turns their departure into a public-relations triumph, claiming that the children’s forced departure shows the inhumanity of the Italian government’s blockade.
VIENNA: At last some good news on the home front. After three months, Sam’s parcels from Manchester have begun to arrive in Austria. A lifeline has opened up. On receiving one of the packages Anna Freud immediately writes a thank-you note. ‘It needed all my good bringing up’, she confesses in her somewhat German English, ‘not to eat all the good chocolates on the spot.’
She requests a small amount of sugar for the future, if possible. Her father Sigmund is bolder. ‘Dear Sam,’ he writes at the end of February, ‘I beg you to choose for me a soft Shetland cloth–pepper and salt, or mouse-grey or tête de nègre in colour, in sufficient quantity for a suit.’
MUNICH: It is a big risk for a party which used to fit all its followers in the back room of one of Munich’s lesser restaurants. But one evening in late February, the German Workers’ Party hires out the whole first floor of the Hofbräuhaus–big enough for a couple of thousand braying beer-swillers–for the launch of a manifesto cooked up over the last few weeks between Hitler, one of the lecturers from the political education course he took last year, his new father figure Dietrich Eckart (the Peer Gynt man), and Drexler, the party chairman.
Posters advertising the meeting are plastered up all over town, printed in red so as to grab the public’s attention (and to annoy socialists who think they have a monopoly on the colour). They make no mention of the German Workers’ Party and name only one speaker, a populist rabble-rouser called Johannes Dingfelder. Dingfelder’s name will attract a good crowd. If a few hecklers come along, no harm done. As any avant-gardist knows, hecklers are good for a group trying to make a splash.
Only once Dingfelder has finished does Adolf stand to read out the party’s new manifesto. He is met with cries of ‘Get out!’ by a few hecklers in one corner. The disturbance makes it hard for the rest of the audience to hear what the figure at the front of the room is saying, his forelock swinging up and down, his hand sawing, his little moustache neatly trimmed. From a distance, he looks like Charlie Chaplin.
Rather like Benito’s manifesto in Milan last year, Adolf’s twenty-five points veer between radical nationalism–all Germans must be united in a single country, Versailles must be revoked, Jews must be forbidden from German citizenship, only German newspapers are to be allowed–and a radical communitarian socialism. The public interest is to be put before any individual interest. Unearned income is to be banned (with the death penalty for those who lend money at interest) and war profits are to be confiscated. In the future, large companies will be required to share their profits with their workers. The pension system is to be overhauled to give workers greater security. Access to education will be improved for the poorest and public health boosted by mass calisthenics, as suggested by Marinetti in Italy.
The main newspapers barely report the party’s manifesto. The day after Hitler’s speech, even the Thule Society’s newspaper has more important front-page news. Under the headline ‘A Secret Jewish Document’ it excitedly reviews a new German translation of the Protocols.
PARIS: After the moderate success of Dada’s first Paris outing, planning gets under way for something more spectacular. At Tzara’s instigation the story is spread–with the help of a couple of gullible newspaper journalists–that Charlie Chaplin himself will be speaking at this latest event, and that both Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Prince of Monaco have officially converted to Dadaism. It is nonsense, of course, but then what else is there these days?
It is not long before Breton and others start to have doubts. Where is this all leading? Who will have the last laugh? It is no surprise that Action française should pronounce Dada an ‘inconsistent farce’ produced by a bunch of spoiled children, inspired by a foreign German and Jewish culture. But it hurts when André Gide declares Dada a spent force: ‘With this single word “Dada” they have expressed in one go everything they had to say.’
Breton begins to worry that all these Dadaist events are turning the group into little more than a troupe of music-hall entertainers. Tzara thinks André should lighten up. When Tzara receives a nasty anonymous letter written in the style of an insider, everyone is immediately put under suspicion of being a closet saboteur (something Tzara rather delights in).
Inevitably, esprit de corps suffers.
THE HAGUE: Informal discussions about what to do with the Kaiser continue. Some suggest his internment on the Dutch colonial islands of Java or Curaçao. But nothing comes of it. In the end the Dutch persuade the Kaiser to provide an undertaking to at least not leave the province of Utrecht without permission and to steer clear of politics.
Wilhelm explains to his aides that the coming months are bound to bring a turn of events in his favour. The Bolsheviks will invade Poland, Versailles will be smashed, and a new world order will take shape based on the defence of Europe against the barbarian hordes from Russia. Germany will need an experienced leader. Him.
NEW YORK: Marcus Garvey provides his latest update to UNIA members and Black Star Line shareholders on the progress of the Yarmouth. After the travails of January, the ship is now back in Havana, Cuba, he says, where more shares in the company are being sold and the ship’s cargo is being unloaded as planned. In fact, various problems mean the unloading is delayed by a month, and the company’s profit on the first leg of the trip reduced to nil.
A tone of injured pride runs through this meeting. Marcus Garvey and his organisation have come in for criticism: some black leaders think him too radical, too ambitious. Garvey accuses them of wanting an easy life. They seek approval from whites, rather than doing what it takes to reclaim their future for themselves. They talk; the UNIA acts. Without naming names–William Du Bois cannot be far from many people’s minds–Garvey’s warm-up speaker at the meeting notes that ‘the New Negro is getting tired of the doubting Thomases and the pessimists’. All leaders of new movements from Jesus Christ to Abraham Lincoln have had to face down their critics before being recognised in the end for the greatness of their ideas.
Garvey defends his mission to take control of black people’s future everywhere, pointing to what Zionists are doing for the Jewish people and Irish campaigners are doing for the cause of Irish freedom. What counts, he says, is results. ‘Nine months ago, the UNIA did not have one nickel’, he tells his followers. ‘Today the UNIA is the richest Negro organization in the United States of America.’ He provides the address of the association’s bank in case anyone wants to check.
TORONTO, CANADA: A new face at the newspaper: a young man who claims to have seen action in Italy and to have worked as a journalist before.
Ernest gets the job at the Toronto Star Weekly through the most unlikely twist of fate. Among the audience at a war talk Ernest gave in Petoskey last autumn was the wife of a wealthy Canadian with publishing connections, Harriet Connable. By January, Ernest has moved to Toronto, going skating with the Connables’ daughter Dorothy (to whom he presents a book by D’Annunzio) and spending time with the Connable boy, for whom he has been hired as a companion. By February, he is writing for the Star, earning the ‘shekels’ he needs to finance another summer by the lake, or else get him the train fare to San Francisco from whence he can work his way to Yokohama as a deckhand. His first signed article for the Star is about getting a free shave at the barber’s college. Others follow, somewhat irregularly, mostly about boxing and trout-fishing.
In March, he writes an article rather closer to the bone, aimed at those Canadian slackers who dodged the draft during the war by taking well-paid work in the United States. Hemingway has advice for such men, who made a quick buck while others died, and who now want to pass themselves off as having done their bit. Buy a threadbar
e trench coat and worn-out shoes to look the part of the true war vet. Learn a few army songs to whistle absent-mindedly on the tram, as if remembering the good old days spent knee deep in mud. Buy a good history of the war, so you know what happened at Ypres better than those who were actually there. ‘If anyone at the office addresses you as “major”,’ he suggests, ‘wave your hand, smile deprecatingly, and say “No; not quite major”.’ This should do the trick: ‘After that you will be known to the office as Captain.’
‘Go to your room alone at night’, Hemingway advises any draft dodgers amongst his readers, ‘stand in front of your mirror and look yourself in the eye and remember that there are fifty-six thousand Canadians dead in France and Flanders. Then turn out the light and go to bed.’
ST. LOUIS: A failed marriage behind her and fed up with her job at the Old Chauffeur’s Club, Josephine decides to try her luck singing and dancing. She falls in with the Jones Family Band, a local outfit that make their money playing restaurants around the city.
One day, a touring troupe called the Dixie Steppers arrive in town for a week’s engagement at the Booker T. Washington Theater. Word gets around they are on the lookout for local talent to incorporate into their show. Josephine adds two years to her age to get an audition, saying she is fifteen, which is barely believable. But she impresses the manager so much he decides to give the girl with the funny smile a role in a short skit as part of the entertainment. Josephine is to play Cupid.
The role does not work out quite as intended. Her entrance is dramatic. But it soon goes wrong. Josephine, suspended from the ceiling on a rope and pulley, wearing pink tights and two little wings, and armed with a quiver and arrows, gets stuck in mid-air. The mechanism will not budge. While the lovers exchange their promises of evermore, Josephine is left to try and wiggle her way off stage as best she can. But the audience love her. She smiles at them with a big toothy smile, laughing along at her own misfortune. In later performances, Josephine is allowed to dance, and she does so with a vibrancy and energy that puts the other girls on stage in the shade. She shimmies and she shakes. It is almost unseemly how good she is, for a girl who is used to getting by stomping around on the pavements of St. Louis, or else in the city’s restaurants. Perhaps her dancing is more funny than it is sensuous. Whatever it is, it works.
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