by Jeremy Reed
If Ducasse is considered a bohemian, then he was this without being poor. Granted a generous allowance by his father, he lived during his entire time in Paris in the fashionable neighbourhood of the Grands Boulevards, on rue du Faubourg, Montmartre, and rue Vivienne. Cushioned by an allowance, he had the advantage that his time was his own, and if like Proust, we are to assume that he wrote through the night, then presumably he saw little of Paris by day. This pattern would fit with his predominantly internalised landscape, and with the inherent human isolation at the heart of his work. Isidore clearly suffered from big city loneliness, and was additionally isolated by sharing nothing in common with his literary contemporaries. That he may also have been homosexual, and the supposition derives from the subject matter of Maldoror, rather than from concrete biographical data, would doubtless have added to his sense of painful isolation.
And what of the one photograph that has survived of Isidore Ducasse, the shot framing him possibly at the time of writing The Songs of Maldoror? The photograph, uncovered by a researcher from Tarbes, Jacques Lefrere in 1978, is presumed to be genuine, but Ducasse links are always open to question. The dark-eyed figure, with the slightly catatonic stare common to early sitters, and with naturally waved dark brown hair, confronts the lens with what looks like the vulnerability of someone intimidated by the process. Did it cross his mind at the time that he would be committing his image to posterity? All of the introspective shyness and sensitivity of the man are evident in his expression. But is this really the face of Isidore Ducasse? Certainly the photograph endorses the opinion of his school-friend Paul Lespès, that 'there was nothing attractive in his features.' The photo also bears out Lespès' description of Isidore as pale-faced, taciturn and slightly round-shouldered. Elegantly dressed in a bow-tie and collar, he looks the antithesis to the punky, street-wise Arthur Rimbaud, the only 19th century writer with whom he shares stylistic and thematic affinities. Although the low resolution image lacks definition, it still conveys the impression of someone with an obvious sleep-disorder. And despite Isidore being young, you can trace a conspicuous receding hairline at the front, and imagine him as he might have been in middle-age, doubtless morose and inveterately disillusioned. But what the photograph does is to provide a face for the book. No matter his desire for anonymity Ducasse, if it is him, was betrayed by the camera. We stare back at his quizzed, dissociated look, fascinated, but in doing so almost guilty of a voyeuristic act. Did he forget about the existence of the photograph in the largely successful attempt to conceal his traces? And why did it take so long to come to light?
The mystery of Ducasse's burial is consistent with the whole legend surrounding his name. After a service on the day after his death at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, he was provided with a temporary grave in the 35th section of the Cimetière du Nord. As far as we know no friends or relatives attended his funeral, and it wasn't until two years later, in 1873, that his father Francois Ducasse visited Paris and seemingly made enquiries about his son's effects. Clearly his father did nothing to secure a permanent grave for his son, who in the meantime had been exhumed and transferred to another temporary site in the same cemetery, this time in the 49th section. Eight years later in 1879 this particular section of the cemetery was reclaimed for development by the City of Paris, and Isidore's remains were to disappear under the foundations of a Republican housing-project.
It was usual under such circumstances that the remains of those disowned by relatives were transferred to the Pantin Ossuary, but there is no record of Ducasse's residue having been deposited there, or any subsequent clue as to his final place of interment. For Isidore Ducasse the vanishing trick had been achieved with consummate perfection. He had to all purposes de-realised, his body compounded into substrata, as part of the anonymous dead whose remains form the increasingly remixed foundations of the modern city. Both his death certificate and the negligence attendant on his burial point to what must have been a life characterised by extreme loneliness. This was a pattern established young. When he was only seven months old, his mother Jacquette Ducasse died in circumstances that hinted at suicide. As with Isidore's death, no record of the cause was issued, suggesting that his father, a high-ranking government official at the French Consulate, suppressed all information relating to his wife's death. Nor is there any trace of her grave. If indeed Jacquette did take her own life, then Isidore's father, doubtless alert to the repercussions of social disgrace, may have had his wife buried anonymously in the attempt to disguise the facts. What is of interest here is how closely the circumstances of Isidore's death, and his subsequent lack of a permanent grave repeat those of his mother's.
Although we know little of Isidore's childhood, the traumatic event of his mother's death must have come as a profound shock to someone so acutely sensitive. Her death would have comprised the first catastrophic rip in his psyche. Thereafter he was brought up by a draconian, officious father, who when he was thirteen sent him off to receive his education in France; a man who cared so little for his son, as to not even make provisions for a grave. There is strong reason to suspect that the comfortable allowance granted Isidore during his Paris years, was Francois Ducasse's means of compensating for the guilt he felt over his wife's suicide, as well as a tacit way of silencing his son. If Isidore himself was a suicide, and his father's position in Montevideo was such that he may have had information leaked, it would go a long way to explain both his reluctance to visit Paris, and his failure to retrieve his son's remains from their precarious occupation of a temporary grave in the Cimetière du Nord. Clearly wishing to avoid the embarrassment of Isidore having died 800 francs in debt to the publishers Lacroix and Verboeckhoven, Francois Ducasse settled with Lacroix, little suspecting that by doing so he was contributing to his son's eventual claim on posterity. That the debt was cleared, allowed copies of the anonymously published The Songs of Maldoror to go back on sale in Brussels; the book having been originally denied publication in France on account of its unremittingly subversive contents.
It's unlikely that Francois Ducasse ever enquired of the nature of his son's writings, or else presumably he would have moved to have had Maldoror pulped. As a diplomat, little given to imagination, he would doubtless have viewed the role of poet as a redundant one in a capitalist society. He had right from the start conceived of Isidore as a runaway; a renegade youth who had failed to follow him into government office. The only way to deal with the situation was to wipe him from memory, or better still erase every trace of his son's existence.
What Francois Ducasse hadn't allowed for was his son's reinvention of himself as Lautréamont. When he embarked on the return passage to Montevideo, it must have seemed as though his son no longer owned to an identity. Nobody to his mind was going to search for an obscure book published as a limited edition in Brussels without the author's name. Francois Ducasse must have imagined that it was all over. His disowned and largely degenerate son was conveniently dead at 24 and consigned to an unidentifiable grave. In this respect things couldn't have worked out better. He had his retirement to look forward to, as well as the considerable fortune he had amassed in the course of his career.
What he couldn't have anticipated happening the year after his death, at the age of 80 in 1889, was the Genonceaux reprint of Maldoror creating an underground storm around its author's name in France.
Les Chants de Maldoror had originally been published, price thirty centimes, by Balitout, Questroy et Cie, 7 rue Bailiff and 18 rue de Valois, in August 1868, with Chant I finding its way into Evariste Carrance's anthology Parfums de l’âme. At no time had its author's name been assigned to the work. Did Isidore Ducasse keep a copy of The Songs of Maldoror among his possessions as some tangible proof of his identity as a writer? We do know that he asked the publisher for 20 copies, saying that these would be sufficient, and that he cared enough to send copies of the book to two of his former school friends, Paul Lespès and Georges Minvielle, without a dedication or any acknowledgement of authorshi
p. In his brief reminiscences of Isidore Ducasse, Lespès remembered associating the style and scorching imagination at work in the book with the Isidore Ducasse he had known at the Lycée. The recognisable signature was of course the internal motif of attack that sustains a type of writing reliant on a powerful stream of brutally extravagant metamorphoses. Isidore had on a number of occasions been hauled out in front of the class and ridiculed for this abrasively unorthodox method of writing. Likewise, the author's preoccupation with mathematics, and his fascination with both the beauty and savagery of the natural world were themes that Lespès readily linked to the Ducasse of his youth.
It's unfortunate that Lespès wasn't interviewed about Isidore Ducasse until 1928, when he himself was close to 80, by which time the surrealists having claimed Lautréamont for their own, had invented the myth of him being pathologically insane. Whether Lespès' account is coloured by Breton's psychological identikit of Lautréamont as the mad progenitor of hallucinated poetry, it does at least ensure that a) the author wasn't a fiction, and that b) he had manifested symptoms at school of a highly nervous disposition. According to Lespès, Ducasse kept himself apart, suffered acute migraines, was subversive, eccentric, fucked up, and 'not quite right in the head'.
I take this as a more accurate snapshot of Ducasse, than the myth established by various apocryphal sources that he was the victim of an incestuous family, and that his upbringing had left him generically psychotic. Rather it was the extreme nature of Isidore's imagination that separated him from the world, and not his madness. There is no evidence in any way of Ducasse having been sociopathic or dysfunctional. The few letters of his which have survived are formal, business-like and to the point. He oversaw the printing of both Maldoror and the two booklets of his Poesies, and seems to have kept his business affairs in order.
Nor, as we have pointed out, was his life in Paris aggravated by poverty. Like Rimbaud he was to be totally disparaging of his achievements as a poet, and to renounce any sympathies with Maldoror as his poetic creation. In fact the revisionist author of Poesies appears as a stringent moralist, intent on cleaning up his act and removing himself from any personal associations with the policy of evil he had so powerfully advocated in Maldoror. He had moved on fast, and even if he had lived, it's unlikely that he would ever again have returned to a vision that he had effectively exorcised. In a letter to his publisher written in March 1870, just eight months before his death, he noted, 'I have completely changed method, to sing exclusively of hope, expectation, CALM, happiness, DUTY.' In the same letter he referred to Maldoror as having 'gone down the drain.' It was no longer his direction: he had burnt his fuses.
What, we ask, brought about this radical change of policy in both Ducasse and Rimbaud? If Ducasse's book was consigned to critical neglect, and picked up only one contemporary review, then Rimbaud's equally abortive attempt to self-publish A Season In Hell met with a similar lack of success. Unable to pay the local printer, with money advanced him by his mother, his book circulated amongst friends only as a consequence of the handful of advance copies given him by the printer. By then, Rimbaud's disillusionment with poetry was irreversible; and like Ducasse the future of his work was left to chance, word of mouth and the selflessness of friends who recognised its value.
It's possible that Ducasse like Rimbaud was frightened of the mental consequences of what he had created. He had clearly pushed his vision to breaking point in writing Maldoror, and may have feared disintegrating if he went down that road again. He had said too much too soon, and his vision no matter how perverse had been total. Maldoror had cooked in the pan like a black omelette, and Ducasse in turn had spat out the scorched ingredients.
It has been suggested that Isidore's father supplied him with money, because his son was seriously ill, but there's again nothing to substantiate this theory. If he had been tubercular, or suffering from any form of congenital illness, then Lespès would surely have remarked on it in his reminiscences. Isidore had made his one and only journey back home in the summer of 1867, and whether he fell ill there — his father had been close to death from yellow fever a decade earlier — is something open to speculation. There is no mention of illness in the few letters of Isidore's which have survived from 1869 and 1870, but these are letters written to a publisher and lack the intimacy necessary for such a confession. The only acknowledgement of impaired health he makes, is to mention his headaches in a letter to his banker Monsieur Darasse, and to note that he can be found at home at any hour of the day. This letter written on 22 May 1869, expresses the prickly contempt Isidore felt for his father, and not only mentions the latter's eccentricity, but goes on to observe 'the inappropriateness of certain melancholy remarks, easily excused in an old man, and which, on first reading, seem to impose on you the necessity in the future, of modifying your strict role as banker...'
While Isidore's allowance wasn't stopped, there was clearly a move on his father's part to have it discontinued. Rumours that the family suffered from hereditary insanity, find little pedigree in Francois Ducasse's case, although mental illness may have been a trait Isidore inherited from his mother. The tendency to view Isidore as the progeny of a lineage as neurotically strained as that of Poe's creation Roderick Usher is fuelled more by the tempo of the work, than by any biographical basis.
My theory that Ducasse may have been murdered on account of his homosexuality is also speculative. While the writing in Maldoror tends to accentuate same-sex relations, there's no certainty that Isidore was homosexually inclined. But there's something about his isolation, together with the clues offered by his work that has the theory gel. As far as we know, Isidore lived in an exclusively male world. There is no mention of him ever having had a woman friend, let alone a girlfriend, and the only known recipients of copies of Maldoror were his old school acquaintances from Tarbes. It would have been unusual for a young man living alone in Paris to reach the age of 24 without some form of attachment to a woman.
I believe that what Isidore had to hide was his sexuality; and that his solitude was conditioned by his difference. Was he like the hermaphrodite, so memorably evoked in the second canto of Maldoror, ashamed of his particular sexual orientation? The wired sadism at work in Maldoror may have been Isidore's way of compensating for the guilt he felt at his own sexual leanings. It would explain too, why he seems to have trusted nobody, and as we know it, to have lacked any form of confidante. Secrecy may have taken him into the underworld, with all its vicious recriminations of blackmail, or worse the possibility of physical violence.
Isidore Ducasse may have met his end from a soldier, or he may have been set-up and killed himself as a consequence. In the year of his death France was ignominiously defeated by Prussia, and with Paris under siege, lawlessness and starvation prevailed. The death of an obscure poet, whatever the causes, wouldn't have been the subject of an investigation, unless presumably his father had pressed for enquiries. Isidore presumably died as he had lived: incognito. His father appears to have explained away his son's death by saying that it happened in the war. This convenient way of liquidating the memory of his son, was confirmed by the recollections of Prudencio Montagne, who had known both Isidore and his father. Writing of Francois Ducasse's silence on his son's death, Montagne tells us : 'I heard no mention of The Songs…, neither then or when I grew up. All Ducasse told me, one day, circa 1875, was that Isidore had died in '70. I was always under the impression he'd been killed in the war.'
By then, death certificate (no. 2028) was officially off the record, and would never be re-admitted to the database.
It was now up to Lautréamont to make it alone from almost impossible resources. By all rights the pseudonymously published The Songs of Maldoror, as well as the two booklets comprising Poesies, should, like the details of their author's life, have disappeared for good. The chances of their survival seemed zero. But books like Maldoror have a way of infiltrating the system like terrorists, no matter the slow acid-eaten deterioration of paper
and print. Maldoror's very outrageousness, was in fact to ensure its destiny.
Only ten copies of the first edition of Maldoror were known to have been bound due to Isidore's failure to meet the publisher's costs, and while the Genonceaux reprint did attract some notice, it was not until 1920 when Blaise Cendrars, who was then director of Editions de la Sirène, republished Maldoror, that the book was for the first time linked to a sympathetic movement. Quickly co-opted by the surrealists, Maldoror's programme of unabating social revolt was as a book to prove seminal to the development of Breton's own revolutionary credo. Breton's declared aim to place poetry in the service of the revolution carried with it the same uncompromising dynamic as that voiced by Lautréamont's defiant antagonist Maldoror.
In its fragmentary nature, and with its continuously intercut narrative, the story falling back on itself before it can develop, Maldoror finds its closest affinity with the disruptive and equally subversive novels of Jean Genet. Both writers succeed in creating fractured homoerotic collages in which evil is celebrated as a form of moral freedom, and in which narrative plot is subordinated to a preoccupation with rich poetic imagery. There's as much a sense of interrupted progress in The Songs of Maldoror as there is in Genet's Our Lady Of The Flowers, the writing constantly stalling on itself and deepening at the expense of progression. The process can be called narcissistic: the writer fascinated by his self-multiplying imagery proceeds to verticalize rather than horizontalize experience. He is caught up in his own creative reflection, and temporarily blinded by it. Genet is Lautréamont's successor in his method of using the image to de-narrate the text, and in making the criminal into the exalted hero of his fiction.