Out of the blue, one of the New York suicides had a profound effect on Rigaut. His best friend in the city, a concierge at the Ritz, hanged himself in the hotel lobby. Downcast and ashamed, Rigaut took his briefcase and hurried back to Paris, where he became hefty and his shadow (errant and voluminous) wandered the streets of Montmartre; he tried desperately to delay a suicide that seemed to him increasingly inevitable. He moved from one hotel to the next, accompanied by a beautiful black woman, Carla Orengo, and dragging a heavy trunk that was, actually, a writing bureau with two shelves for huge tomes, three drawers for documents, a compartment for the typewriter, and a folding table. Man Ray thinks that the weight of this trunk, which Rigaut realized wasn’t portable, could have been one of the reasons why he made up his mind, finally, to commit suicide, choosing the Grand Hotel in the city of Palermo as the place to do it.*
It was at the end of 1926 that Rigaut installed himself in this hotel, having taken measures to ensure he’d never return to Paris. In the trunk’s drawers were all manner of barbiturates, which he constantly ingested, trying to kill himself, plunging into a great orgy of pills as though he’d now taken a liking to death, which previously he’d so feared.
The morning he was supposed to leave his hotel to go to Kreuzlingen for a detoxification cure, he was found dead. In spite of his extreme weakness, he’d dragged himself and his mattress to the door adjoining Carla Orengo’s room. This door had always been open, but was found locked with a key. (One final gesture on a mattress, as grotesque as it was indecipherable.)
Man Ray says that when the news arrived in Paris the Shandies thought that thereafter, in the bosom of the secret society, they ought to avoid other capricious suicides and disseminated an array of texts about the perfection of Rigaut’s suicide. They thought that if they said this one was impossible to improve upon, future portables would discard the idea of trying to better Rigaut. Blaise Cendrars, for example, wrote: “In the hotel in Palermo, the key, the bolt, and that closed door formed — in that moment and indubitably forever — an enigmatic triangle: both offering and denying us Rigaut’s deed. In any case, an insuperable suicide. My friends, I recommend not attempting to better it, for that would be an impossible task, and there would be nothing worse than killing yourself and making a fool of yourself, and, to top it all off, not even knowing you’d done that.”
In the opinion of Maurice Blanchot — in Faux Pas, he briefly but lucidly analyzed the portable phenomenon — the proliferation of texts that sought to eradicate suicide weren’t attempts to convince others, but rather the authors themselves. Blanchot was very likely correct in a number of cases. For example, in the poem Prince Mdivani wrote in a stationary submarine, “And the Mattress?” his quill must have trembled, or he was going insane, or, simply, he was in a deep panic at feeling tempted by suicide. Whatever it was, he wrote these inept verses dedicated to Rigaut’s barbiturates: “Phanodorme, Variane, Rutonai. Hipalène, Acetile, Somnothai. Neurinase, Veronin, Goodbye.” Paul Morand, never less than witty, construed this poem as “something truly brilliant, as it has revealed to me the possibility of realizing suicide in the process of writing.”
To realize suicide in the process of writing. What came into the world as an ironic comment ended up becoming a principle agreed upon by all members of the secret society. It was very clear, from then on, that suicide could only be realizable on paper. Antonin Artaud, for example, responded in this way to a surrealist inquiry, where those interrogated had to give their opinion on the subject of taking one’s life: “But what would you say to an anterior suicide, one which made you retrace your steps, not to the side of death, but to the other side of existence. This is the only suicide that would have value for me. I have no appetite for death, but I have an appetite for not existing, for never having fallen into this interlude of imbecilities, abdications, renunciations, and obtuse encounters. .”
Although initially, as we’ve seen, each Shandy with his drama was to understand that he’d come down on the side of death, soon it would become clear that suicide was not a solution, but nor was it nothing. It could only be realized in the same space as writing: whether, as we’ll see, by repeating the most radical silence, or indeed by transforming oneself into a literary character, or by betraying language itself, or by drinking liquor strong as molten metal, or by steering off into trompe l’œil or optical illusions, or certain kinds of smoke and mirrors. These were portable solutions to suit all tastes, to put aside this language of death that, two years before, wandering around Montmartre, carrying a trunk and some sort of bundle, Rigaut had discovered. He had done so deep in impressions of Africa (those of Port Actif), where, it seems, the whole thing began.
* The exact name is Grand Hotel et des Palmes. Following Rigaut’s suicide, it became a pilgrimage site for anyone in possession of the portable secret. It can be visited nowadays and is well worth the trip — it has other points of historical interest such as being a clear reflection of Sicily’s splendor and misery during its transition from the House of Savoy to the Republic. I ought finally to sound a note of caution: the hotel is run by a group of academic elephants, who only show visitors the room where Wagner once spent the night, making out that Rigaut was never there.
THE PARTY IN VIENNA
“I had actually been invited.”
At the beginning of 1925, the musician George Antheil appeared on the Shandy scene brimming with energy. With his announcement of Nicotechnica — a science invented by Antheil himself consisting of a fount of knowledge that categorically disproved the existence of the thriving secret society — he sowed seeds of uncertainty, as well as a certain despondency, among the portables. After that, amidst the confusion he had generated, Antheil published a curious tract that had the effect of revitalizing the Shandies, propelling them into a kind of highly creative secret euphoria with some extraordinary results, including a first-rate essay by the ill-fated Anthony Typhon in which he praised Despondency as an inexhaustible source of new and stimulating sensations.*
It’s worth noting that Typhon’s own despondency was so great, he even eliminated the h’s from his first and last names. At the same time, he proposed George Antheil be given a medal, which led to Typhon’s immediate expulsion from the group, since if there was anything the Shandies to a man found appalling, it was insignia, medals, or honors of any kind.
Typhon fled to Martinique; there, he set up a stationery shop in a village where they spoke a strange local variant of Creole and no French and barely wrote at all. The little paper they did use, they bought from a dealer in the nearby municipality of Saint-Joseph, in the middle of the island. He soon bankrupted the business buying his own merchandise. He’d occasionally write letters to Antheil begging forgiveness in an extraordinarily sincere tone that was nevertheless always belied by his unswerving inclusion at the end of the missive, each and every time, of the same postscript: “I’ve recently been working on perfecting the game of Love, availing myself of coal tar,” and then he’d cynically turn his signature (Typ(h)on) into a drawing of an insignia or medal.