Skip Canell speaks in his memoirs about his Odradek, who turned out to be nothing less than a sword swallower: “Not long after arriving in Prague, in a guesthouse in the city center, I was in my room, sitting at the desk I’d cobbled together, when I heard the door open. I turned, thinking some colleague of mine must have found out where I was, and saw my self coming into the room, approaching and sitting at the desk facing me, propping his head in his hand and beginning to dictate what I was writing. We spent a number of hours like that, until, finally, I managed to bring myself to ask him who he was. He was a sword swallower, he said, and a devotee of the dagger. We had dinner in the guesthouse dining room, where something genuinely astonishing took place: the poor sword swallower absentmindedly gulped down a fork, and I had to take him to a clinic, where, after a spectacular operation, a doctor removed it. I’ve never seen the Odradek again, but I have the sensation that he is swirling around me and might at any moment reappear.”
In another guesthouse in Prague’s Jewish quarter, the Spanish painter Juan Gris wrote down the following in a music notation book: “I find myself profoundly unsettled, as I wait to run into one of my friends here in the city of Prague. In the old houses of this neighborhood I feel spectral movements. I have come to understand, to my astonishment, who the hidden rulers of the alleyway are where I’m staying. Strange characters live here, similar to shadows: beings not of woman born, whose ways of thinking and acting are pieced together from random fragments. When they pass through my spirit, I feel more inclined than ever to believe that dreams have an abode all their own; I think they inhabit or hide inside dark truths latent in my soul, when I’m awake, like the vivid impressions of brightly colored tales.”
When Stephan Zenith arrived in Prague, he also discovered that he was giving lodging to a dark occupant, whose form, in this case, wasn’t exactly human. Terrified, he decided to leave the city though not before leaving the following illuminating note to Witold Gombrowicz, with whom he’d been sharing a room:
“I’m leaving, because I am afraid of myself, and what is certain is that Prague is making a powerful contribution to this. Bid farewell to our colleagues on my behalf should you manage to run into them, and tell them larger forces have compelled me to go back to New York. I’d like them to know I had a wonderful time at the party, except for when that guy went crazy with the gun. As I say, I’m leaving because I’m afraid of myself, now that I believe something akin to a spool of black thread is lodged within me — and sometimes without. It tries to make me say things I neither think nor will ever think. The spool is flat and star-shaped; in fact, it seems covered in threads: old threads, of course — interwoven, knotted together — but also other kinds of threads that are other colors, also interwoven and knotted together.
“But it isn’t simply a spool; a small pole sticks straight up out of the center of the star, and another attaches to this at a right angle. With this latter pole on one side, and one of the beams of the star on the other, the ensemble manages to stay upright, as though standing on two limbs. Often, when one goes out of the guesthouse door and finds it leaning there in the stairwell, one feels the urge to talk to it. One naturally addresses it with simple questions, treating it rather like a child (perhaps because it is small).
“And what’s your name?”
“Odradek,” it says.
“And where do you live?”
“Domicile unknown,” it says, laughing; the laughter, of course, is of someone who has no lungs. It sounds more or less like the whispering of fallen leaves. . I’m frightened, Witold, and that’s why I’m leaving. Perhaps, away from Prague, I’ll manage to shake off my Odradek.”
On the basis of this text, the dark occupants quickly came to be termed Odradeks in the Shandy lexicon. And being in Prague too, George Antheil and Hermann Kromberg echoed Zenith’s text, speaking frankly of Odradeks, referring to their respective dark occupants. In George Antheil’s case, the Odradek wasn’t a spool but a pin stuck in a ribbon, while for Hermann Kromberg, it wasn’t a tiny object but became a spectral figure again.
“Here in Prague,” wrote Antheil, “while running into my colleagues again, I have come to understand that I only experience minor sensations — those associated with very small things — intensely. My love of futility is the reason why. Perhaps my scrupulous attention to detail. But I do rather think — I’m not sure, I never analyze such things — that it’s because minimal things, having absolutely no social or practical importance, do have, merely due to this absence, absolute independence from unclean associations with reality. Minimal things — and my Odradek is one — always feel unreal to me. These useless things are beautiful, because they’re less real than “useful” things, which go on and on. The marvelously futile, the gloriously infinitesimal, stays where it is, doesn’t cease to be, living free and independent. Like the mere existence of my Odradek, which is this pin here before me, stuck in a ribbon. The mystery never becomes so clear as in the contemplation of small things that, as they move, admit that mystery’s light perfectly and stop to let it pass.”
By contrast, the German writer Kromberg’s Odradek wasn’t a miniature, but (as I said) a spectral figure: someone who posed as a poet and infiltrated the portables by traveling with them to Vienna and afterward to Prague, where he installed himself in the same hotel as Kromberg. This was the terrible Aleister Crowley, who many will know as a friend of Pessoa’s, but he was other things as well — a mountaineer, a Satanist, a philosopher, lion tamer, pornographer, cyclist, heroin addict, chess player, spy, occultist — that is, a very lively Odradek, as demonstrated by the fact that he obliged the sedentary Kromberg to go abroad to Vienna and Prague. In the latter city he abducted him, used dark arts to force him into initiations of sexual magic and to scale the highest peak in Kashmir.
“What am I doing here in Kashmir?” wrote a desperate Kromberg in his travel journal, “when I like nothing better than my own hearth and to receive letters from my nomadic friends when they are off in far-flung places? I never wanted to join up with them in Vienna, but the malign influence of my Odradek drew me to that city, and then urged me onward to Prague, whence I set out for Kashmir; in Kashmir, I am currently living in the cold and in fear for my life, possessed by an inner demon that, as far as I can see, is a traveler.”
Sedentary Kromberg went mad in Kashmir, losing his way, but not losing his travel journal. If we go along with certain accounts, Kromberg, not far from the highest summit in the region, thought he’d stumbled across a hat that Pessoa had left in the snow years before. But Pessoa had never brought any hat to those icy, remote expanses, which has led more than one person to suspect that Kromberg was losing his mind, something confirmed when, on resuming his ascent, he said that he felt overcome by the flapping and cawing of crows. This in spite of the fact that there were no crows anywhere.
Finally, reaching the summit, Kromberg cried out in horror when he saw his Odradek was there, that it had overtaken him. Dressed in rigorous black, Aleister Crowley — who two years later in Seville would dissolve the secret society — greeted him with laughter, holding aloft a black flag on which, over the most ferocious skull, he had embroidered the slogan: ONWARD TO A SILKY PROSE.
Kromberg’s companions tried in vain to calm him, to convince him that there was no one on the summit. That night he wrote down everything he thought he’d seen — the Portuguese hat, the crows, the Odradek with the flag — and, depositing his diary in the snow, he went out and lost himself in the darkness of the Himalayan summit, never to be seen again.