The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  This photo, the only one that I possess and that I have been able to look at in its smallest details—the arms that thicken markedly where they join the shoulders, the arched black eyebrows, the firmly outlined nose, the tunic with very ample folds under which the two breasts cannot be divined—this photo, which I would wager is a good likeness and in which, even though she is younger, the woman shown probably does not differ very much from the one I heard sing, gives me, in truth, almost nothing. It is not my aunt whom I rediscover in it, and it is not Tosca, either, whom I see in it. It offers me simply the image of the fresh and slightly sibylline creature who was apparently its subject and whom I have great difficulty in identifying as much with the singer whom I admired as with the heroine of the drama in which the torture chamber that was its main property seems so terribly modern now that Baron Scarpias are flourishing among our military (without lace jabots or powdered wigs, but in uniforms spotted like panthers, and that is the only difference). Perhaps the other photos that I have mentioned would have given me nothing more than such themes for sterile reverie, if I had them at hand, as I do this one?

  Strangely forgotten while I proceeded with this inventory (doubting its efficacy but finding some satisfaction in drawing it up, as though this procedure itself already included the discovery toward which it is theoretically only a patient advance), another portrait came back to my memory, a photoengraved reproduction that appears in one of the issues of the old magazine Musica that my sister gave me, as a high-priced gift, one day when I went to see her at Saint-Pierre-lès-Nemours. So easy was my access to this document (since all I had to do to reach it was to go, armed with the proper key, into the room called, in my house, the linen room) that to curb my desire to consult it would have been even more artificial than to make use of this memory aid. I therefore drew the incomplete series from the cupboard where it is put away among various revues, books, catalogues, programs, and papers of all sorts, including a heap of letters, postcards, and other notes that I preserve carefully without having done much more than pile them up. Leafing through it from one end to the other, I discovered, to my surprise, that there are in fact a good dozen portraits contained in these rather tattered issues, where I have also been able to read or reread many notices concerning my aunt which demonstrate to me that the beauty of her voice was no more a myth than any of the other gifts that allowed me to recognize in her an authentic creature of the theater.

  Vita, from L’Etranger. Three photographs show her to me in this role, one of which—the head, in profile—is exactly the image I had recalled, except that I had mistaken the character, attributing to the baker’s wife in L’Enfant roi (a naturalist work by Alfred Bruneau and Zola that my aunt was the first to perform) the profile which is in reality that of “Vita,” the sailor’s daughter, in an opera by Vincent d’Indy quite blatant in its mediocre philosophical aims, if I am to judge from the review that was given it by Musica and that was illustrated by the most attractive of the three photographs: my aunt standing and seen full face, an earthenware jar on her shoulder (which makes her sway a little) and noticeably more slender than in her other portraits, yet recognizable, her face marked by a mixture of strength, tenderness, and passionate gravity, the sort of face needed, no doubt, to play the part of that young girl whose name means that she is life itself, as the columnist did not fail to stress, for the sake of the naïfs for whom the word “vita” remained—so to speak—Greek. An easy mark, as I often am, I rose to the bait of this symbolic name: one morning, between sleeping and waking, I had the impression that “Vita” signaled to me in clear language what I am trying to rediscover behind the image of my aunt, and I thought that such a key word ought to be represented, in the algebra that I am elaborating here, by a special sign that would consist of a small black equilateral triangle resting either on one of its points (to sum up the word by recalling its initial V) or on one of its sides (to express what is fundamental about it by giving it the firm base of a pyramid). This did not exceed the limits of a brief dream, and it quickly seemed evident to me that I had not benefited from any illumination, but only recognized the obvious, by discovering that through my memory of her, always too imprecise, I am trying to seize what was intensely alive about the woman whom the journalists of not so long ago called “Mademoiselle Friché,” in accordance with proper custom. As for the infinitesimal black sign—concerning which I did not notice that, with its point down, it evokes a woman at the moment when nothing exists beyond her bushy triangle—it soon took on a meaning less associated with Pythagorean philosophy than that which it had as possible typographical mark: fully awake, and several days after that sort of cipher or monogram offered its services to my thoughts, I suddenly saw as obvious the idea that, positioned point upward, it would have some resemblance to that oriental motif in the form of an upside-down heart, the “tree of life,” according to what was told me, at the time of our intimacy, by the friend with whom I was still involved well after my emergence from the Hôpital Claude-Bernard and from whom I had wanted to know what the ornament was that I saw, at the level of her shoulder, against the damask whiteness of the material in which she was clothed that morning. Thus, while I, lagging behind the woman from Brussels who was veiled by the muslins of time and who had become a shade flushed with fabulous glimmers, had become taken with a dubious idealism, a subterranean sort of work was taking place, so well hidden that a moment would come when I could imagine myself deflected from the fleshless entity from whom I was seeking asylum, and recalled to burning reality, merely by the almost automatic transition from the too abstract sign I had invented to this emblem whose lanceolate design sums up something I have experienced in the present time of my desire or my embrace, and not in an anachronistic rumination.

  Vita, without makeup and her head slightly tipped back (the same portrait from which is extracted the profile reproduced in another issue of Musica), the whole of Vita here, in a photomontage occupying a double page of the magazine and assembling, against a forest background that looks like a sacred wood, the most prominent singers of the year 1903 in theater costume, a strange carnival in which all characters and all periods are placed side by side. A beautiful brunette with a resounding laugh—Carmen with mantilla and castanets as I saw her on the stage of the Monnaie in Brussels. Heavy and sad in her folkloric clothing, Senta, the Nordic lover of the Dutchman Volant. The very same photograph that I recall having seen at my sister’s house: the basket-carrier of Pêcheurs de Saint-Jean. The stupid look and the excessively fat body under the clinging tunic, a hetaira in Camille Erlanger’s Aphrodite. Eleanor from Fidelio (more graceful than when one sees her with her pannier). The Sicilian Santuzza from Cavalleria Rusticana, with very large earrings which one can assume are gold. Floria Tosca, less radiant than the version I fashioned from memory, but attesting to the truth of the image about which I had asked myself if, at least in part, I had not invented it. Claire Friché resting her elbows on a piano surrounded by a few other people: her face, with large cheekbones and slanted eyes, looks slightly Mongolian; her hat, of a very boisterous 1900 style, suits her so badly that it resembles something peculiar that might have come from another planet to alight on the top of her head. With this portrait, which supposedly shows the artist in a simpler guise, I am done—I think—with this gallery, so unequal and diverse that it muddles rather than defines the figure whom I would not want to abandon before having deciphered it.

  Great art in flesh and blood. Vita. The tree of life. What was intensely alive about Mademoiselle Friché, as about the aforementioned Sandier or Sanguier, who, during my nights as an invalid, alternated with the lamentable Kipouls. The voice that my Aunt Claire so quickly ruined, too proud of proving what a surprising range it had by adopting ordinarily incompatible practices, too happy, also, to lavish it with all her strength every time the occasion presented itself. The sumptuous flesh on which, had she been more of a coquette, she might have prided herself, despite the visible excess of health that made it d
ifficult for her to tackle roles more refined than those of the uninhibited lover or the mother possessed by every passionate feeling inspired in her by the fruit of her womb. Art and life, voice and flesh, in other words what I had been yearning for more intensely than ever, since I thought I was finished as a writer, and since, aware of my aging in its most tangible aspects, I had begun to consider with dismay and disgust the evolution of my physical being.

  In my brain—the brain of a survivor, deaf, because of his lack of courage, to all reasons for repeating his error—a revival of the very thing of which I had despaired appeared on the horizon of the twofold dream ironically animated by those two masks of a dance of death: the actress in retirement, whose talent as well as her beauty had become mere memories; and the grotesque creature naïvely expending, for futile purposes of literary vainglory, the little life he had. Art that does not split hairs. Life as an opera, with love inflecting the line of the melody and death giving all its amplitude to the finale. Lyric art, connected to life more directly than any other, if opera is a festivity in whose splendor the players of the game compete with the witnesses of their performances, all either in costume or dressed up, and if there is no work of art offered to the audience thus gathered together that, in one way or another, and in the gravest or most lighthearted tone, is not an appeal for effusion. The adamantine luster of art and the tumultuous nudity of life; fiction and reality; over-there and right-here, whose conjoining—“for real,” and not in allegory or only for a moment—is perhaps my great problem, the only quadrature on which to base myself in order to reconcile myself . . .

  Having started from nothing, or from the slim hypothesis according to which my burlesquely transfigured cousin was merely a delegate from the period in which my Aunt Claire reigned, I soon allowed myself to be invaded by that absent woman whose image, at first excluded, has little by little imposed itself and has ended, if not by becoming entirely real, at least by materializing in photographs. As though, obstinately, I had sought to rejoin this deceased figure, when—shortly after my return from Tuscany—the curtain fell on the living love duet I had been singing with so uncertain a voice, or else to discover behind the features of my relative what was once upon a time Beauty for me, in order to turn it into a law for myself and be no longer so helpless, or even to attach myself to an image the description of which or the very search for which would be in itself beauty, I set about resuscitating her, and it is a long waking dream that for months and months now has taken over from the initial dream. Along the way, certain irresolute ideas have crystallized around this image, which seems to me today to have appeared armed from head to toe as early as on those nights neither of waking nor of dreaming during which I was at the mercy of two indefinitely repeated divagations.

  Mired in my various labors, having recovered from the naïveté that for a long time had caused me to believe in the magic of traveling, and no longer even desiring to go anywhere at all, engaged in an adventure that was not a way out, either, since I did not want to, or could not, sever the ties that bind me to my companion or settle into duplicity, I had—almost by accident—consumed the sort of provision for suicide that for long months had served me as an emergency supply or viaticum. Having emerged from the coma, and my initial exaltation having subsided, I had said to myself that soon it was all going to start up again, even more difficult than before: it would be impossible, now, to rely on the idea of that provision, which I would not be able to reproduce without expending a good deal of patience and cunning and which, besides, it would be better not to reproduce, if I did not want to become a specialist in failed suicide (knowing that I would never have the courage to make the decisive gesture, the one that would have consisted, for instance, in consuming the poison not at home, but locked in my office at the Musée de l’Homme at an hour when no one could have saved me). Since I did not envisage repeating the act, this time without remission, what remained was for me to rediscover some reasons for living, problematic as that was. In what direction to turn, if not toward the domain concerning which I had the proof that, whether fortunately or not, for me, it was my chosen domain? Having appeared when I was still in total chaos, weren’t the English aesthetes, the retired actress, and even that laughable dramaturge (whom the singer would soon eclipse) directional arrows for this, all pointing in the same direction: toward art—but illustrated by these various phantoms as a way of life rather than regarded on its own, as though its insertion into existence had been at the center of my preoccupations?

  When I was still a child, those who were for me the “great artists,” whom one always mentioned with emotion, were neither writers, nor painters, nor sculptors, nor composers of music—distant celebrities whom no one I knew had even seen—but the great performers, and particularly the actors or singers, who seemed to me very real people, though clothed in the dress of legend because of their vocation itself and the fact that my parents scarcely spoke of them except from the perspective of memory and as people whose transcendent species had more or less disappeared: Adelina Patti or rather “la Patti” (whom my mother, as a girl, had heard at the Théâtre Italien), Sybil Sanderson, the English or American soprano (whose millionaire name is close to that of Sangar, sister of Ivan Ogareff and femme fatale in Michel Strogoff), the Wagnerian tenor Van Dyck (who was incomparable in singing the story of the Grail), Coquelin the elder (creator, with unequaled panache, of Cyrano de Bergerac), the refined monologist Anna Judic, Sarah Bernhardt in her great period (or some other sacred monster of whom it was told how fans had unharnessed her horses in order to escort her by pulling and pushing her carriage themselves), specialists in melodrama such as Tailhade and the actor who played the roles of traitors in so convincing a way that people would wait for him at the stage door in order to beat him up, others, still, whose names I could cite, names almost forgotten by our contemporaries but always magical when I happen to utter them in my mind.

  Not only were creatures of this kind haloed by all the annals of the theater, but I also situated them in a sort of golden age: the great era that my father and mother had known and of which a few very rare artists of my time would allow me, just barely, to form for myself a pale idea. The private lives of some of them—of these days or in earlier times—gave rise to pieces of gossip that added a somewhat coarse note to the mythology: this one had ruined his voice by going to Les Halles too often, to carouse till dawn; that one, who spent lavishly, died in poverty after appearing before audiences of sovereigns; one actress, one evening, had gone on stage dead drunk; another chanced to take home with her a handsome on-duty fireman she had spotted as she was performing a drama or tragedy. By contrast, those whom people liked to cite for their regular life seemed endowed with a true sainthood, without which they would not have been able to face unharmed a career so sown with temptations.

  About some, they confined themselves to reporting a picturesque anecdote, suited to inspiring respect, provoking complicitous laughter, or drawing tears: the risks, for example, taken by a certain performer in the role of a robber, when, in order to gather material, he had haunted the worst slums and associated with the dangerous hooligans who were a constant presence there; the experience of that celebrated baritone whose unreliable memory had obliged him, one evening, to sing a good portion of an opera aria without pronouncing the words; the final wretched poverty of those two brothers or friends in whose home someone had afterward found a large banknote slipped between two pages of a program or piece of music by a too discreet patron whose guests had been charmed by their number as duettists. Parallel to the wonders accomplished behind the limelight, these episodes were presented as examples demonstrating that there is something naturally epic about theater people, even if they are neither actors “brought up on the boards” nor the buffeted passengers of a “chariot of Thespis,” like that of the traveling actors in Captain Fracasse. Isn’t an epic halo just what I need when, behind a work that I admire, I want there to stand a “beautiful character”? A natural acto
r or a fiery virtuoso, a genius exposed to poverty or other sufferings, a pioneer of a heroic epoch, a fire-stealing poet or a revolutionary one, a writer at the tragically conditioned game of torero, a creator rebelling against all compromise—aren’t these the avatars of that figure which I have made into my model and which, after many hesitations, I have stripped of its showy adornment and rationalized, but certainly also gentrified, since I had, to a certain degree, to suffer the influence of the age, which impels one to make adjustments by which the gap between oneself and what one has dreamed may be after a fashion reduced? The artist who pays with his person and whose life is tossed about by the same winds as his art: it was he whom, even from my hospital bed, I had rediscovered in his first form, through the intermediary of the old actress with whom I identified. Since I could not begin living again without taking everything back to its beginnings, concerning what remains at the very heart of my interest, did I not have to encounter—scarcely back up out of my abyss—the woman who was (even though safe from all scandal) the “great artist” of my childhood, my aunt, the singer Claire Friché?