We will meet those who paved the way for this novel about the most joyful, voluble, zany secret society that ever existed, a society of writers who seemed practically Turkish to judge by all the coffee and tobacco they got through, a society of gratuitous and outrageous heroes in the lost battle of life, lovers of writing when it becomes the most enjoyable experience possible, and also the most radical.
* Shandy, in the dialect of certain ridings of Yorkshire (where Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy, lived for much of his life), can mean joyful as well as voluble or zany.
DARKNESS AND MAGIC
I owe to a brief conversation with Marcel Duchamp and especially to Francis Picabia’s as-yet-unpublished book Widows and Soldiers the most valuable information regarding the key involvement of two femmes fatales in the foundation of the Shandy secret society in Port Actif.*
Picabia says that toward the end of the winter of 1924, in the city of Zurich, across the street from 1 Spielgasse — that is, across the street from the Cabaret Voltaire, where DADA was celebrating the happy fifth anniversary of its disappearance from the cultural scene — there was a balcony in the shape of a pygmy flute made from papaya branches, and on this balcony, under a full moon one night, a trench coat rested, inside of which fidgeted a beautiful Spanish woman with a rather horrible name, Berta Bocado, who was somewhat furtively watching the comings and goings of the old Dadaists (who, incidentally, were never aware of the Spanish woman’s eyes spying on them).
That night, Berta Bocado was like a camera with an open aperture: a passive, meticulous, pensive camera. She had just received a letter from her former lover — Francis Picabia — in which, after bringing her up to date, he asked her to try to become friendly with a Russian writer named Andrei Bely to ascertain whether — aside from having nervous breakdowns on enormous, towering historic rocks — he possessed ingenuity and a sense of humor. “Marcel (Duchamp) and I,” the letter concluded, “are both interested to know if Bely is one of ours. The information we have suggests that he lives on the same street as you and plays chess with Tristan Tzara at sundown. He seems to function like a bachelor machine. In his best novel, Petersburg, the protagonist is a conspirator and, at the same time, a bachelor machine who, in a positively inspired moment, eats a bomb and feels its pleasurable tick-tock in his gut. This Bely is probably a high-grade madman. We’d like you to become acquainted with him and tell us if he has anything in common with his novel’s protagonist. We await word.”
It’s unclear whether it was due to her being a femme fatale or simply due to her absentmindedness that Berta Bocado mistook another Russian for Bely. This Russian also lived on the Spielgasse and, from time to time, played chess with Tzara, Arp, Schwitters, and company, but he stayed home at night and wanted nothing to do with the old Dadaists. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was his name and, along with a certain Krupskaya, he was biding his time in Zurich waiting for revolution to break out in his own country.
A few days later, Berta Bocado sent some totally erroneous information to Picabia, thereby creating the misunderstanding that contributed so much to the consolidation of the portable secret society: “This is certainly a strange Russian, who even when the weather is fine goes out wearing galoshes and a quilted winter coat and carrying an umbrella. He keeps the umbrella furled and his pocket watch inside a grey suede protective sleeve, and he also keeps the penknife that he uses as a pencil sharpener stowed in a case; he even seems to have his face sheathed, because he always hides it with the upturned collar of his coat. He wears dark glasses, a wool shirt, stuffs his ears with cotton wool, and when he gets in a car, he orders the driver to put the top up. In a word, this individual displays a constant tendency to create something akin to a casing that isolates him and protects him from all manner of prying eyes. I believe he even has a mania about keeping his ideas encased. . I attempted to seduce him and the best I could manage was to be allowed up to his apartment, but once inside he began to behave very oddly: he barely looked at me and only seemed interested in a number of folders that he transported convulsively from one place to another in his study. Some of these folders he moved around repeatedly, others he hid. I suppose they contained manuscripts of his novels. And I say suppose because all this time he insisted, over and over again, that he was not a novelist, and, horrified, I would say almost terrified, he denied ever having written anything about conspirators who swallow bombs and other such things. It was clear that he wanted me to leave as soon as possible, and this — you know me — made me angry. I called him rude, but he replied mysteriously that he wasn’t rude, but simply a fan of transporting everything that seemed portable. .”
On receiving the letter, Picabia had the impression that behind the Russian’s strange conduct there might be a coded message he ought to decipher. He spent days trying to uncover a meaning to the frenetic moving around of files, until Duchamp, who didn’t yet know the content of the letter from Bocado, recounted a dream to him, supplying (without knowing it) the crucial clue he’d been trying so hard to find.
Duchamp said he’d dreamed four phrases, the first three constructed out of words subject to the realm of coincidence: phrases that reflected the language that might be expected of pickled chance — which, as is well known, was always his great specialty. The four phrases (except for the last) would be included years later in Andre Breton’s anthology of black humor:
Etrangler l’etranger.
Eglise, exil.
Rrose Selavy et moi esquivons les
ecchymoses des Esquimaux aux mots
exquis.
C’est Bely le plus vieux du Port
Actif.
This fourth and final phrase — the only one not constructed with words subject to the realm of coincidence — acquired a magical meaning for Picabia, who believed he saw in Port Actif (homonym for the French word portatif, meaning portable) a revelation, this word cryptically linking Duchamp’s dream with the Russian’s message and pointing him toward Port Actif, an African village situated at the mouth of the River Niger.
After not a little difficulty, Picabia managed to convince four of his friends — Duchamp, Ferenc Szalay, Paul Morand, and Jacques Rigaut — of the absolute necessity of setting sail for the coast of Nigeria. And on July 27, 1924, they boarded a ship at Marseille bound for the African shores and a future Shandy plot. (At the time, they didn’t know exactly what this plot would entail, but they had no doubt that clearly it ought to come to light, in the darkness of a continent darker than the still-opaque portable spirit.)
On arriving at Port Actif, Picabia says they felt, immediately, the alluring horror of the unknown world to which they’d traveled: “We felt transported to a new planet; I remember we disembarked at sundown, and a swarm of little black children overran the deck: they poked their shaved heads through our cabin windows, showing their beautiful eyes and bright glittering smiles; they reached out their slender hands, with palms like pink conch shells, to ask for money. . and soon we were in Port Actif’s great square, four-sided and beautiful, replete with guest houses, bars, and shops. Marcel, Paul, Ferenc, and Jacques all laughed in unison when they saw there was a place called Café du Louvre. We sat there, sampling micris, magnificent sugar-coated coffee beans from Harar. Two Negroes came over in hope of a sale and showed us agates from Ceylon, rock crystals from Tamojal, silver rings, gazelle antlers, ostrich feathers, and Nigerian shields. . But at nightfall, once the initial astonishment at that fascinating place had passed, we began to fear that nothing of any relevance was going to happen to us there. .”