Actually it was Picabia who wasn’t there, and who, paradoxically, has written most about the Viennese party. Though he doesn’t give any of the gathering’s names, he says they were exactly twenty-seven in number, and then he informs us that twenty-seven was the Shandy number par excellence: “Stephan Zenith turned twenty-seven that March 27th in Vienna. And twenty-seven is also the number of years Rita Malú had been confined in a remote Somalian asylum. It was the intervention of the generation of Spanish poets of ’27 that put paid to the portables’ stellar voyage. I was married one December 27th. The painting by Paul Klee dedicated to the number twenty-seven admirably encapsulates the light and shadow of the secret society; anyone can go see it at the home of Countess Vansept, who lives at number 27 on a Paris street and has twenty-seven grandchildren, etc. .”
Picabia’s account of the party is especially interesting for its description of the soiree’s final few minutes, in which we find an image of F. Scott Fitzgerald far removed from the one we’ve had of him until now as an alcoholic: “We had struck up a stupendous conversation vis-à-vis our artistic tastes and all agreed that we were in favor of brevity when it came to literature, that we’d rather even the most brilliant books didn’t go on too long. We suddenly saw a glint in Scott’s eye. Some kind of rare elation seemed to have taken hold of him. He seemed in a feverish state and was struggling to talk about literature. The monocle he’d taken from Tzara kept falling off, and the movement he made to put it back on was becoming more and more strained. Intrigued, we decided to watch him more closely, and it was then that we saw a small gold box at his side. He was constantly leaning down over it on the pretext that he had a cold. We realized he’d swapped literature for winter sports, that is, his nose was sliding across the white snow of the purest cocaine.”
Meanwhile, the neighbors (certain by now that such an uproar couldn’t, on this occasion, be made by just one man) called the police. Valery Larbaud informed Littbarski of his desire to publish an annotated edition of his pathetic wine-soaked little quarto, which was roundly cheered by the whole gathering, especially black Virgil, who, immersed in an extraordinary euphoria (confirmation that all the waiters were drunk), took up his master’s old sawn-off shotgun and, by way of a one-gun salute, put four holes in the roof. All the portables took flight, all except Scott Fitzgerald, who stayed on and kept Littbarski company (for his part, he was visibly shaken by his servant’s behavior).
Scott Fitzgerald lowered himself unhurriedly onto a sofa and when the neighbors and police showed up, he lit a Virginia cigar. Pretending to be playing chess with his host, among the broken glasses, he said in an extraordinarily elated tone:
“I had actually been invited.”
And he didn’t hesitate to transfer the phrase, word for word, into the novel he was writing at the time.
* Nicotechnica: A Denial. Since this isn’t the most interesting of texts, I didn’t refer to it in the Essential Bibliography at the end of this Brief History. A version does exist in Spanish, published by Janés (Barcelona, 1951), in a bungled translation by Venancio Ramos; a frenzied chapter in praise of tobacco is of some interest.
† Seven, twelve, and eight add up to twenty-seven, which, as we’ll see, was the Shandy number par excellence.
‡ A facsimile copy, under the dubiously translated title Supongo (I Suppose) was included in Papeles de Son Armadans, CCLXXI (Palma de Mallorca, October 1979).
LABYRINTH OF ODRADEKS
The memory is so intense that I always remember it in the present tense: Sitting on the terrace of a café in Portbou, watching the last summer evening of 1966 draw to a close, Marcel Duchamp is telling me about the party in Vienna, black Virgil’s gunshots and the Shandy society, of whose existence I’ve known nothing about until this point. The café is a short distance from the guesthouse in which, twenty-seven years before, Walter Benjamin was compelled to commit suicide.
Drinking Pastis, Marcel Duchamp tells me the moving story of the involuntary suicide and explains that the portable history would have gone off quite differently had it not been for Walter Benjamin’s providential intervention on the murky dawn the Shandies, fleeing Littbarski’s apartment, began to scatter, totally disoriented. They fled through a ghostly Vienna in which, suddenly, a chunk of wall fell to the ground, looking like a man walking along, and the ice around them turned into the shapes of rigid faces.
In those moments of panic and dispersal, seeing the Shandies fleeing in all different directions, and knowing it would be extremely difficult to regroup, Benjamin managed to come up with an instruction that would bring them all back together in the city of Prague; he recommended they take rooms at guesthouses in Gustav Meyrink’s neighborhood and that they should try, through fortuitous street encounters, to make contact again.
None of the Shandies forgot his instructions, understanding immediately during their terrified flight, and this meant that the Shandy journey could carry on: a journey that sought no goal, no fixed object, and that was clearly futile. They were like medieval pilgrims for whom the journey was all; arriving in Canterbury, Jerusalem, or Santiago de Compostela mattered little. They traveled merely so they could tell each other stories.
The north wind picks up, sending us inside the café, where I open a bottle of champagne; the cork, after violently crashing against the ceiling, bounces off the top of a piece of furniture and comes to rest in perfect equilibrium on the top of a curtain rail. All the customers are dumbfounded at this, and the landlord forbids anyone from touching the cork, as he wants to show it to all his clientele. Smiling, Duchamp says this cork is my Odradek. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard the word, and I ask what it means. In a tone of strict confidence, Duchamp introduces me to one of Shandyism’s most enigmatic aspects: the existence of certain dark occupants lodged within each of the portables’ inner labyrinths.
Apparently, it was in the infinite labyrinth of the city of Prague that the dark occupants, also known as Odradeks, began to show themselves. Due to their fraught coexistence with doppelgängers, each of the Shandies had one of these dark occupants lodged within them — up until that point they’d been discreet companions for the most part, but in Prague they began to turn demanding and take assorted forms, sometimes human.
Alone or in pairs, the portables began arriving in Prague. And on taking rooms at guesthouses in the Jewish quarter, they began to feel the increasingly active presence of the dark occupants, along with the anguished certainty that their most authentic and intimate selves were being torn away, premeditatedly and against their will, merely so the ghostly figures could take plastic form.