Sibelius’s stories—the hundreds of stories that intersect willy-nilly, without apparently affecting one another, in The True Son of Job—are not guided by any principle, nor do they constitute an overall vision (as one New York critic absurdly supposed, comparing the book to War and Peace). The stories simply happen, period—produced by the sovereign power of chance unleashed, operating outside time and space, at the dawn of a new age, as it were, in which spatio-temporal perception is undergoing transformation and even becoming obsolete. When Sibelius explains the political, economic and military order of the new America, he is intelligible. When he expounds the new religious, racial, judicial and industrial order, he is objective and clear. Administration is his strength. But it is only when his characters and stories, be they borrowed or original, infiltrate and overrun the painstakingly assembled bureaucratic machinery that he reaches the summit of his narrative art. The best of Sibelius is to be found in his tangled, implacably unfolding stories.
And, from a literary point of view, that is all there is to be found.
After the publication of his novel, Sibelius withdrew from the literary scene as quietly as he had arrived. He wrote articles for various war games magazines and fanzines in the United States. And he helped to design a number of games: one based on the battle of Antietam, another based on Chancellorsville, an operational Gettysburg game, a tactical Wilderness 1864, a Shiloh, a Bull Run. . . .
THE MANY MASKS OF
MAX MIREBALAIS
MAX MIREBALAIS, alias MAX KASIMIR, MAX VON HAUPTMAN, MAX LE GUEULE, JACQUES ARTIBONITO
Port-au-Prince, 1941–Les Cayes, 1998
His real name was probably Max Mirebalais, although we will never know for sure. His first steps in literature remain mysterious: one day he turned up in a newspaper editor’s office; the next, he was out on the streets, looking for stories, or more often running errands for the senior staff. In the course of his apprenticeship, he was subjected to all the miseries and servitudes of Haitian journalism. But thanks to his determination, after two years, he rose to the position of assistant social columnist for the Port-au-Prince Monitor, and in that capacity, awed and puzzled, he attended parties and soirées held in the capital’s grandest houses. There can be no doubt that as soon as he glimpsed that world, he wanted to belong to it. He soon realized that there were only two ways to achieve his aim: through violence, which was out of the question, since he was peaceable and timorous by nature, appalled by the mere sight of blood; or through literature, which is a surreptitious form of violence, a passport to respectability, and can, in certain young and sensitive nations, disguise the social climber’s origins.
He opted for literature and decided to spare himself the difficult years of apprenticeship. His first poems, published in the Monitor’s cultural supplement, were copied from Aimé Césaire, and met with a rather negative reception from certain intellectuals in Port-au-Prince, who openly mocked the young poet.
His next exercises in plagiarism demonstrated that he had learned his lesson: this time the poet imitated was René Depestre, and the result, if not unanimous acclaim, was the respect of a number of professors and critics, who predicted a brilliant future for the neophyte.
He could have continued with Depestre, but Max Mirebalais was no fool; he decided to multiply his sources. With patient craftsmanship, sacrificing hours of sleep, he plagiarized Anthony Phelps and Davertige, and created his first heteronym: Max Kasimir, the cousin of Max Mirebalais, to whom he attributed poems borrowed from those who had ridiculed his first ventures into print: Philoctète, Morisseau and Legagneur, founding members of the Haiti Littéraire group. The poets Lucien Lemoine and Jean Dieudonné Garçon came in for the same treatment.
With the passage of time he became expert in the art of breaking down the work of another poet in order to make it his own. Vanity soon got the better of him and he tried to conquer the world. French poetry provided a boundless hunting ground, but he decided to start closer to home. His plan, noted somewhere in his papers, was to exhaust the expressive repertoire of négritude.
So, after expressing and exhausting more than twenty authors, whose collections, although extremely hard to come by, were placed at his disposal free of charge by the Apollinaire French Bookshop, he decided to let Mirebalais take charge of Georges Desportes and Edouard Glissant from Martinique, while Max Kasimir assumed responsibility for Flavien Ranaivo from Madagascar and Leopold-Sedhar Senghor from Senegal. In plagiarizing Senghor his art reached a summit of perfection: no one realized that the five poems that appeared in the Monitor in the second week of September 1971 signed Max Kasimir were texts that Senghor had published in Hosties noires (Seuil, 1948) and Ethiopiques (Seuil, 1956).
He came to the attention of the powerful. As a society columnist he went on covering the soirées of Port-au-Prince, with greater enthusiasm if anything, and now he was greeted by the hosts and introduced in various ways (much to the confusion of the less literary guests), as our treasured poet Max Mirebalais, or our beloved poet Max Kasimir or, as certain jovial military men used to say, our esteemed bard Kasimir Mirebalais. He did not have to wait long for his reward: he was offered the post of cultural attaché in Bonn, which he accepted. It was the first time he had left the country.
Life abroad turned out to be awful. After an unbroken series of illnesses that kept him hospitalized for more than three months, he decided to create a new heteronym: the half-German, half-Haitian poet Max von Hauptman. This time he copied Fernand Rolland, Pierre Vasseur-Decroix and Julien Dunilac, whom he presumed were little known in Haiti. From the manipulated, made-over, metamorphosed texts rose the figure of a bard who even-handedly explored and sang the magnificence of the Aryan and the Masai races. After three rejections, the poems were accepted by a Parisian publisher. Von Hauptman was an immediate success. So while Mirebalais spent his days enduring the boredom of his work at the embassy or undergoing endless medical tests, he was coming to be known, in certain Parisian literary circles, as the Caribbean’s bizarre answer to Pessoa. Naturally no one (not even the poets who had been plagiarized, some of whom could well have come across the curious texts of von Hauptman) noticed the fraud.
Mirebalais, it seems, was excited by the idea of being a Nazi poet while continuing to espouse a certain kind of négritude. He decided to pursue von Hauptman’s creative work in greater depth. He began by clarifying—or obscuring—his origins. Von Hauptman was not one of Mirebalais’ heteronyms. Mirebalais was a heteronym of von Hauptman, whose father, so he said, had been a sergeant in Doenitz’s submarine fleet, cast up on the Haitian coast, a Robinson stranded in a hostile land, protected by a few Masai who sensed that he was their friend. He married the prettiest of the Masai girls, and Max was born in 1944 (which was a lie: he was born in 1941, but fame had gone to his head, and since he was enhancing the truth, he thought he might as well take three years off his age). Predictably, the French did not believe him, but neither did they take exception to his outlandish claims. All poets invent their past, as the French know better than anyone. In Haiti, however, reactions were diverse. Some saw Mirebalais as a pathetic fool. Others promptly invented European fathers or grandfathers of their own: shipwrecked seamen from German, English or French vessels, adventurers gone astray in some corner of the island. Overnight, the Mirebalais-von Hauptman phenomenon spread like a virus through the island’s ruling class. Von Hauptman’s poems were published in Port-au-Prince, affirmations of Masai identity ran riot (in a country where Masai ancestry is so rare as to be probably non-existent) accompanied by legends and family histories. A pair of adepts of the New Protestant Church even tried their hand at plagiarizing the plagiarist, without much success.
Fame, however, is quick to perish in the tropics. By the time he returned from Europe, the von Hauptman craze had been forgotten. Those who wielded real power—the Duvalier dynasty, the few wealthy families and the army—had little time for the preoccupations of an idealized, bogus half-breed. Dazzled by the Haitian sun, Mirebal
ais was sad to discover that order and the struggle against Communism carried more weight than the Aryan race, the Masai race and their common destiny in the universal realm. But quite undeterred, he prepared himself to unleash another heteronym upon the world, in a gesture of defiance. And so Max Le Gueule was born: the crowning glory of the plagiarist’s art, a concoction of poets from Quebec, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Cameroon, The Congo, the Central African Republic and Nigeria (not to mention the Malian poet Siriman Cissoko and the Guinean Keita Fodeba, to whose works, kindly lent by the old manic-depressive owner of the Apollinaire French Bookshop, Mirebalais initially reacted with howls and later with trembling).
The result was excellent; the reception non-existent.
This time Mirebalais’ pride was wounded; for some years he withdrew to the dwindling, spectral Society section of the Monitor, and was obliged to supplement his income by taking up an obscure position in the Haitian Telephone Company.
The years of relegation were also years of poetic labor. The works of Mirebalais multiplied, as did those of Kasimir, von Hauptman and Le Gueule. The poets gained in depth; the differences between them became more clearly marked (von Hauptman the bard of the Aryan race, a fanatical mulatto Nazi; Le Gueule the model of the practical man, hard-headed and militaristic; Mirebalais the lyrical poet, the patriot, calling forth the shades of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Dessalines and Christophe, while Kasimir celebrated négritude, the landscapes of the fatherland and mother Africa, and the rhythm of the tam-tams). The similarities emerged more clearly too: they were all passionately devoted to Haiti, order and the family. In religious matters there was some disagreement: while Mirebalais and Le Gueule were Catholic and reasonably tolerant, Kasimir practised voodoo rites, and the vaguely Protestant von Hauptman was definitely intolerant. Clashes among the heteronyms were organized (especially between von Hauptman and Le Gueule, who were always spoiling for a fight), followed by reconciliations. They interviewed one another. The Monitor published some of the interviews. It is not absurd to suppose that one night, in a moment of inspiration and ambition, Mirebalais dreamed of constituting the whole of contemporary Haitian poetry on his own.
Feeling that he had been pigeonholed as picturesque (and this in a context where all the literature officially sanctioned by the Haitian regime was picturesque to say the least), Mirebalais made one last bid for fame or respectability.
Literature, as it had been conceived in the nineteenth century, had ceased to be relevant to the public, he thought. Poetry was dying. The novel wasn’t, but he didn’t know how to write novels. There were nights when he cried with rage. Then he began searching for a solution, and he didn’t let up until he found one.
In the course of his long career as a society columnist, he had come across a young fellow who was an extraordinary guitarist. He was the lover of a police colonel and lived rough in the slums of Port-au-Prince. Mirebalais sought him out and became his friend, without a precise plan at first, simply for the pleasure of hearing him play. Then he suggested they form a musical duo. The young man accepted.
And so Mirebalais’ last heteronym was born: Jacques Artibonito, composer and singer. His lyrics were plagiarized from Nacro Alidou, a poet from Upper Volta, Germany’s Gottfried Benn, and the Frenchman Armand Lanoux. The arrangements were the work of the guitarist, Eustache Descharnes, who ceded his copyright, in exchange for God knows what.
The duo’s career was uneven. Mirebalais had a bad voice but insisted on singing. He had no sense of rhythm but insisted on dancing. They made a record. Eustache, who followed him everywhere with an utterly resigned docility, seemed more like a zombie than a guitarist. Together they toured all the venues in the country, from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haîtien, from Gonaîves to Leogane. After two years, they could only get dates in the dingiest dives. One night Eustache hanged himself in the hotel room he was sharing with Mirebalais. The poet spent a week in prison until the death was declared a suicide. He received death threats on his release. Eustache’s colonel friend promised publicly to teach him a lesson. The Monitor would no longer employ him as a journalist. His friends turned their backs on him.
Mirebalais withdrew into solitude. He worked at the humblest jobs and quietly pursued what he called “the work of my only friends,” composing the books of Kasimir, von Hauptman and Le Gueule, whose sources he diversified—whether out of sheer pride in his craft or because by this stage difficulty had become an antidote to boredom—effecting extraordinary metamorphoses.
In 1994, while visiting a military police sergeant who fondly remembered Mirebalais’ society columns and von Hauptman’s poems, he just escaped being lynched at the hands of a ragged mob, along with a group of military officers who were preparing to leave the country. Indignant and frightened, Mirebalais retired to Les Cayes, capital of the Département du sud, where he rhapsodized in bars and served as a broker on the docks.
Death found him composing the posthumous works of his heteronyms.
NORTH AMERICAN POETS
JIM O’BANNON
Macon 1940–Los Angeles, 1996
Jim O’Bannon, poet and football player, was equally susceptible to the allure of force and a yearning for delicate, perishable things. His earliest literary endeavors are indebted to the Beat esthetic, to judge from his first book of poems, Macon Night (1961), published in his hometown, in the short-lived City in Flames series. The texts are preceded by long dedications to Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Kerouac, Snyder and Ferlinghetti. O’Bannon didn’t know these poets personally (at the time he hadn’t left his home state of Georgia), but he maintained a profuse and enthusiastic correspondence with at least three of them.
The following year he hitchhiked to New York City, where he met Ginsberg and a black poet at a hotel in the Village. They talked, drank and recited poems. Then Ginsberg and the black guy suggested they make love. At first O’Bannon didn’t understand. When one of the poets started to undress him and the other began to stroke him, the terrible truth dawned. For a few seconds he didn’t know what to do. Then he punched them away and left. “I would have beaten them to death,” he was to say later, “but I felt sorry for them.”
In spite of the blows he had received, Ginsberg included four of O’Bannon’s poems in a Beat anthology, which was published a year later in New York. O’Bannon, who by that time was back in Georgia, wanted to sue Ginsberg and the publisher. His lawyer advised him against taking legal action. He decided to go back to New York and personally administer the lesson. For days he roamed the city in vain. Later, he would write a poem about the experience: “The Walker,” in which an angel crosses New York City on foot without encountering a single righteous man. He also wrote his major poem of estrangement from the Beats, an apocalyptic text that transports the reader to various scenes from history and places in the human soul (the siege of Atlanta by Sherman’s troops; the death throes of a Greek shepherd boy; daily life in small towns; caves inhabited by homosexuals, Jews and African Americans; the redeeming sword that hangs over every head, forged from an alloy of gold-colored metals).
In 1963 he traveled to Europe on a Daniel Stone Fellowship for the Development of Young Artists. In Paris he visited Ètienne de Saint-Ètienne, who struck him as dirty and embittered. He also met Jules-Albert Ramis, the great neo-classical French poet and admirer of all things American. It was to be the beginning of a lasting friendship. In a rented car, O’Bannon toured Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece. When the money from the Fellowship ran out, he decided to stay in France. Jules-Albert Ramis found him work at a hotel in Dieppe which belonged to his family. The hotel turned out to be “more like a cemetery,” but the job left O’Bannon plenty of free time for writing. The grey skies over the English Channel gave his inspiration wings. At the end of 1965 an almost unheard-of publisher in Atlanta finally accepted his second book of poetry, the first he felt entirely satisfied with.
But he did not return to the United States. One rainy afternoon, a tourist from Brunswick, Georgia, named M
argaret Hogan, came to the hotel. It was love at first sight. Two weeks later, O’Bannon had left his job and was traveling through Spain with the woman who was to be his first wife and his only muse. They were married in a civil ceremony six months later in the French capital; an emotional, melancholic and declamatory Ramis gave the bride away. By then O’Bannon’s book had received mixed reviews and prompted a range of comments in the United States’ media. Some Beat poets, though not the movement’s main figures, reacted in kind to the attacks of the ex-Beat O’Bannon. Others, including Ginsberg, remained indifferent. The book, The Way of the Brave, combines a singular vision of nature (a strangely empty nature, devoid of animal life, turbulent and sovereign) with a clear bent for personal insults, defamation and libel, not to mention the threats and bragging that recur, one way or another, in every poem. Some spoke of the “rebirth of a nation,” and a few enthusiastic readers believed that they were witnessing the emergence of a new Carl Sandburg for the second half of the twentieth century. Among the poets of Atlanta, however, the book met with a cool and aloof reception.
Meanwhile, in Paris, O’Bannon had joined the Mandarins’ Club, a literary group led by Ramis and composed exclusively of his young disciples, two of whom were working on a translation of The Way of the Brave, soon to be published under the same imprint as Ramis’ own books, a fact that was to play an appreciable role in bolstering O’Bannon’s reputation among North American poetry critics, attentive as ever to what was happening across the Atlantic.
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