Isidore

by Jeremy Reed

  Poetry has gone underground. It has disappeared like the goddess to join the king of the underworld, the patron of darkness, of shadow-men who leave no imprint on the asphodels. I am responsible for the lives I have created; they draw closer, cold-water denizens in their imaginal fish-glitter, alive at a temperature that is too zeroic for humans to reach, lunar cold, mineral, planetary in its blue cool.

  'A meadow, three rhinoceroses, half a catafalque, these are descriptions. They can be memory or prophecy. They are not the paragraph I am on the point of completing.'

  The variations are endless. A blue river, a red parasol open in a white dinghy at Valvins, a black marble tomb covered with carnations. Where I conclude the sentence is arbitrary. It arrests the limitless possibilities arising from a group of images that could be reorganised in any number of permutations.

  They will say I ended in the madhouse and that my novel is molten lava; crazy, black, devouring. Imaginative involvement does this — it demands that the author follows his own downward slide rather than steps aside to direct his work independent of his being.

  If I were in Montevideo now I should be within reach of the surf. It would not cure me, but its protective, insulating wall of sound would lift me up above its smash-line into clear, dazzling light. In Paris that wash hits my window only when it snows, or when a bright shower falls from a luminous April sky.

  Occasionally medical orderlies dressed in white smocks with red crosses on their arms, and carrying stretchers, hurry towards the sound of an explosion. As yet, the insurrection is contained. It is my own head that has the city spin like a cone of fire. I seldom eat. When I drink red wine my mind swims in an alcoholic sea like a crimson fish.

  I have this notion as I huddle here in a blanket that it is Isidore Ducasse who will die and not the Comte de Lautréamont. It is he who was always suspect — Isidore who never detached himself from his mother, and who was last seen riding bareback across the grasslands outside Montevideo. Only I shall not be there to live on as Lautréamont, the autonomous satellite who has sat at the piano, the writing-desk, and created a life for Maldoror. Fictions live like paper tigers, the resonant come alive in red and black flame when the right generation decants blood on to the page.

  I could invent a death for myself: the narrative of a person without an identity — a death so far removed from the ways in which we envisage our end that it would alter the concept of dying. But I insist it is a fiction, for that is the closest we come to reality.

  My invented death suggests a fabricated life, but that is for you the reader to decide. My only awareness is now, in the ultraviolet leads extending into the unconscious, and in the infra-red slow exposures of consciousness. To divert you, I have suggested a death that may or may not be plausible — how it occurs is dependent on the potential of language to falsify.

  It begins with a concertina effect. A gable collapses at night, its dull slow-motion attempt to remain horizontal in the air is only a momentary thing before the accelerative process brings it down flat. You are asleep at the time and mistake it for surf blasting across a shingled gradient. You may be one surface lower, dreaming again that you are an aquatic egg in the womb and that a shock to your mother's system has registered in a cataclysmic way. The hum is terrible — it sets up a vibration that almost discharges you. But the volume of sound stays. You try to associate it with a dream falling back like a wreck into the vortex, only it will not disperse in depth, taking you down with it, but remains in the air, intransigent, building to a consistency that seems trapped at roof-top level, before you stumble awake to find the red flare already pointing its flames skywards. It is nearer this time. A street away, and it must be the tobacconist's shop with the proprietor's apartment above, which is lit. This little man, with his Polish descent and dusty black suit, has a printing press in the cellar. He used to publish pornography — algolagnic books with explicit lithographs depicting young girls being disciplined with pliant canes. Their dishevelled froth of petticoats revealed the black stockings and garters that were clearly his obsession. Had he got clear of the flames, or did the smoke catch him asleep, so that he never saw the blankets crumple with fire?

  The conflagration is a factual incident in my drift towards a union with my imagined subjects. What there is of Maldoror — six cantos which encapsulate an imaginary universe — is now so much printer's ink and paper. Whatever copies exist will be destroyed by the city's blaze.

  Things keep coming back to me. My father's repressed limp, the sparkling granulations of my mother's face-powder, the violet crescent under Monsieur Flammarion's left eye, and the stiletto, sheathed low down on the ankle as I had first observed it in my confrontation with the Queen of Hearts. And who were the real men? Those who lived on inside my head, isolated by a particular that impressed the memory cells, or those living organisms pursuing their day in the immediate present, unconscious of my imposing a drag on things they had forgotten, caught up in new planes of experience as they stepped out of a portico under limes into bright sunlight?

  I try to convince myself that there is a way of disappearing which is more like life than death. If we could maintain the narrative we might get through with a referential schema of things, like a man who has crossed a stream and placed his wet footprints on the sandy bank. There would be something, no matter how little, to go on — a right foot, a left, another pronounced right, a less defined left, and then a petering out. But those few blotched steps would be sufficient to serve as a guide to memory. From those alone one could rethink one's life, dream it again so that the sharp angles became blurred, and what remained was a silvering, like the unreal light in childhood when we wake too early and a blackbird sings in the apple tree, and tor a brief moment its song is our only claim on consciousness.

  In between the intervals of noise there are periods of quiet. Since I have begun to compose with my mind, committing nothing to paper in my bare room, I have evolved a new method of composition, one that demands committing visual flashes to memory. Storing them as a brain camera might.

  This is my conception of a future novel, one which resonates inwardly, builds up a series of inner pictures, and continues once I am on the other side of the light.

  I have begun to compose a dialogue with my shadow. He and I are living independent of the troops, the siege, the accelerated footsteps in the street. My system compensates for my inability to play the piano. I spend my time composing the narrative of an impossible death.

  He had conceived of death as constellated in the future. To get there would require a journey. It was the presence of a blue-bottle in the room, ink-stained and squat in a sunbeam, the gauze wings vibrating involuntarily, that convinced him death was closer than the blue pulsation he was observing, for it was inside him and required no journey to reach. And had he not already experienced a death? Was he not an impostor who had repressed and subverted another's life, and should he not have learnt from the other's death? It was Isidore Ducasse who argued with him in the blue sunbeams; it was he who by some malign dispensation demanded recompense for never having lived. Lautréamont was running out of power. The fever must have been on him for a long time, for when he tried to get up he had the sensation of being composed of light. He could fly around the room if only he allowed himself to levitate. It was easy. The ceiling was as reachable as the floor — it required just the slightest push to get there and rest, looking down on the dishevelled bed.

  Someone must have come into the room, for a bowl of soup had been placed on the bedside table. His first thought was to search for the pages he had written, a reflex action that had his hands feel under the bed before he remembered his new method of committing everything to memory. In his mind he saw himself reclaiming his pictorial narrative; restoring it to an ordered sequence, then taking it apart again and magnifying it into incongruously juxtaposed images.

  There was somebody else in the room. He must have come in out of the November air, for there was a scent of cold fog and smoke
on his clothes, that smell a cat brings in from the night of grasses, damp leaves, a barn's mildewed beams. The young man was unnaturally tall and stooped, his green eyes showed from beneath straw-blond hair which he was in the habit of pushing out of his eyes. He was nervous, hesitant, someone who had come here for a particular purpose. He stood in front of the oval mirror in which I used to conduct shadow-plays and checked his appearance. I watched his image steady and undergo a cool process. It settled into its reflection as ice fits the contours of a pond. The face was deliberating something, for its expression was grave, profound, deliberate in killing an equivocal concept and finally resolved in its intention. I noticed the immaculate choice of clothes: the white blouse, the black suit, the soft boots unmarked by the street, the very things I should have chosen. His movements denoted both challenge and fear.

  He went to the window as though he were long familiar with the view over the city, and propped himself up on his elbows, staring out at the winter panorama. He must have done this often during the years I had lived here, for his movements suggested a perfect knowledge of the room, an intimacy with space, a calculation of footsteps that were accustomed to the proportions of the room. This man had been careful with his hands; their only flaw was a rose-thorn of royal-blue ink ingrained on the right index finger. For a moment I imagined he had come to interrogate me about the manuscript. Who was this insane Maldoror? And what was the extent of his perverse crimes against humanity? I could here the proposed questions rapped out in a mute but lethal staccato. He would establish my guilt as a propagator of psychological upheaval on a universal scale. I had dared to anticipate the future — my imagination had smoked the bees out their hive, set them irascibly buzzing in a malevolent black string. It was obvious that the young man was an informer, an interpreter, a member of the military police. He would manifest an implacable patience, a mathematical coldness in his determining, an unshakeable belief that I would concede to his condemnation of my work as inspired by madness.

  He continued to stare out of the window. The violet dusk had deepened to a blue-black density. One watery star became two before there was the sound of rain settling in — a brisk tapping on the skylight, a hurried punctuation of crystals sparkling on glass. For an instant I was back in my father’s house, inhaling the aphrodisiac sea-breeze and listening to Alma close the white shutters at nightfall. Correspondingly I was in flight across a beach, running to outpace the stooped young man whose features had grown into the more refined facial characteristics of the person who was treating my attic with the familiarity of home.

  I was startled. He had taken off his tight-fitting black jacket and stood there in a white blouse. He was untying his red bow, stringing the creases out of it and twisting it into a noose. His eyes met mine once and hammered their concentration like rivets into the back of my mind. One of my last visitors had mentioned seeing a young man hanged from a lamppost by the mob. They had rouged his cheeks and painted his mouth before stringing him up. All day they had toyed with him like a puppet, pushing the body backwards and forwards like a child's swing, or letting it oscillate from side to side. The mob had been too congested to disperse; they crowded in like a jackal pack hungry to strip the flesh from the bone.

  When I looked again his breath and eyes were on my face, narrowing in an indefinite suspension. Something was pressing down on me. I had the illusion that I was under water and fighting the apprehension of falling asleep before I could break the surface with the force of my head. It was a long way down, a searing spiral — pane after pane of water shattered into exploding prisms. I saw the pages of my book unleaf into an aquatic storm, the ink remaining unsmudged despite their immersion. They were forming a paper-dance, a choreographed tilting of pages into a symmetrical geometry, now a pyramidal formation, now a pentagram, a hexagon, the attenuated figure of a dancer suddenly snapping tight into the rectangle of a book.

  The tighter the constriction, the more relaxed I grew. I was headed somewhere my intruder could not follow. Light was flooding in, a sense of fluid mobility, a luminous core pulsating with the radial energy of the sun. I was already beyond pain before his hands relaxed their grip. I watched him from the vantage-point of the ceiling put on his jacket, hurry down the stairs and escape into the insurgent mob that was invading the street.

  *

  Postscript:

  Death Certificate No. 2028

  Isidore Ducasse, the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont, has ever since the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death, in 1870, aged 24, remained one of literature's great enigmas.

  Rather like the novelist Anna Kavan, a name invented to airbrush out earlier incarnations as Helen Woods and Helen Ferguson, Ducasse was determined to leave few if any clues to his identity. 'I shall leave no memoirs' he wrote on the first page of his Poesies, a warning repeated by Anna Kavan in her desire to remain the world's best kept secret. While Kavan who died of a heroin overdose in 1968, set about systematically destroying her private journals in the years preceding her death, we have no knowledge as to whether Isidore Ducasse kept a diary, or any personal record of his life. What we do know is that both writers have placed themselves largely in the domain of biographical disinformation.

  The intensely private worlds inhabited by Ducasse and Kavan respectively, and the analogy is useful here, in that both have acquired cult reputations, has contributed in part to their legendary underground status. Ducasse, like Kavan, seems to have placed his ultimate trust in the work's autonomous survival, a belief quite opposite to the contingency needs of popular writing, in which the author is essential to the promotion of his product. Ducasse must have been only too well aware that in writing The Songs of Maldoror, he had outstripped his contemporaries by over a century, and there's every reason to believe that Kavan likewise anticipated an enduring future for Ice, the novel she published in the year of her death, at the age of 67.

  Ducasse's classic The Songs of Maldoror was probably written in 1867, while its author, sustained by an allowance given him by his father, lived in a Paris hotel at 23 rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. It's arguable that Isidore, who was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on 21 February, 1846, adopted the name Lautréamont, not only as an alias under which to write, but as a pointer to his identity as an exile. The whole explosive landscape of Maldoror, both in its inner and outer topologies, and in their reliance on an exhaustive repertoire of imagery sprung from the natural world, owes its origins in part to Isidore's childhood in Montevideo. It would be true to say that when Ducasse first came to France in 1859, to begin his education at the Imperial Lycée at Tarbes, his book arrived with him as an explosive awaiting detonation in his unconscious. Ducasse was by nature a psychic terrorist, and certainly the most dangerous the 19th century was to produce. If The Songs of Maldoror went largely unnoticed on its publication in 1869, then its author had allowed for the time-lapse. The book had arrived as a manufactured virus in the literary organism, and its subsequent infiltration would be slow, but virulent. For Isidore, the book's existence was sufficient. He was to exit life a year later, the cause of his death unknown, and his death certificate (no. 2028) signed by the hotel proprietor J. F. Dupuis and A. Milleret one of his staff.

  Ducasse's death on Thursday 24 November 1870, in his hotel room at 7 rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, at the time of the siege of Paris, was the first stage towards the reclamation of his work. It was necessary for Isidore Ducasse to die for Lautréamont to be born. The wasted youth described on his death certificate as "homme des lettres" had died 800 francs in debt to his publisher and of unspecified causes. Did he commit suicide, a gesture in keeping with the ferocious self-contempt sustained by his fictional creation Maldoror, was he murdered on account of his homosexuality, or did he die a victim of disease or the chronic food shortage that had Parisians resort to eating rats during the winter of 1870?

  All we know is that his death was biographically inconclusive, and that like most people whose work outlives them, it seems never properly to have
happened. Something within the collective psyche resists the death of its cultural heroes, showing our reluctance to let go of those who indelibly fingerprint their image on time.

  When Anna Kavan died in her bathroom, with the syringe still in her arm, she too in that moment triggered the beginnings of an eponymous legacy that has ensured the survival of her work. If Kavan's death was attributable to the misregulation of heroin, then Ducasse's was officially described as sans autres renseignements. But if his death was a secret affair, then surprisingly his address wasn't. In July and August 1870, two consecutive numbers of the Revue Populaire, announced not only the publication of Ducasse's Poesies, but advertised the booklet as available from the author at 7 rue du Faubourg-Montmartre. Having paid for the publication of both Maldoror and Poesies, Ducasse was clearly anxious to sell copies; but may have made himself vulnerable by giving out his address. As I have stated, Maldoror was dangerous, and coming as, it did without apology or explanation, and as an implosive holocaust of moral and sexual aberrations, there's the possibility that the book may have been picked up by a psycho, who in turn plotted to kill its author.

  The facts we do have relating to the person Isidore Ducasse, tend to enforce the picture of him as a social misfit, an outsider roomed up in a hotel, and singularly obsessed by the hallucinated power of his visions. Probably using Ducasse's first publisher Albert Lacroix as his source, Leon Genonceaux in his introduction to the 1890 edition of Maldoror, tells us that Ducasse wrote at night, seated at his piano, and that he declaimed his work to the accompaniment of violent discordant music. This acutely demonstrative method of writing out loud in conjunction with hitting the keyboard, sounds almost like the beginnings of a primitive rock and roll, a comparison legitimised by the increasing modern-day importance attached to Ducasse as a subversive archetype by a range of underground and gothic musicians.