We'll Never Have Paris

by Andrew Gallix

  When, as he grew older, his body began to break down, the realisation that he would die like other humans destroyed his mental stability. Ignored by critics and diagnosed by psychiatrists, Isou saw himself as trapped in Kafka’s Castle. He could see no way out and his pain intensified.

  Amongst the many challenges of writing about Isou is the fact that he does not often stand still or always make sense: he is grandiose, exasperating, self-regarding, brilliant, piercing and poetic; often all in the space of the same page. So it was that when I started writing this book two years ago, I had no idea where it might take me.

  I started to learn Romanian, mainly to decipher Isou’s earliest diaries. He was a teenager during the war, like Anne Frank, and his account of life as a Jew under the German Occupation is adolescent, funny and frightening. As I read other accounts of the Romanian Holocaust, many still unpublished, I found myself lost in the murky shadows of wartime Romania and what it was like to be a Jew there. I thought I would be more sure-footed when I came to look at Isou in the context of post-war France, but his ideas and creativity often accelerate at such a pace that it could make you dizzy (his associates and disciples all report the same experience). His mental breakdown is still pretty much uncharted territory, with only occasional flashes of illumination from his wartime traumas to light the way.

  As I have been writing this book I have been reminded of Journey to the End of the Night, the great novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline which takes us through the madness of the mid-twentieth century through the eyes of its Chaplinesque anti-hero called Bardamu. Isou was an admirer of Céline, even though Céline was a pro-Hitler anti-Semite, who sometimes shocked the German authorities in Occupied Paris with his venom. Isou and Céline share, however, a visionary method. What brings them together as writers is the fact that — to quote André Gide (on Céline) –— they “do not describe reality but the hallucination which reality provokes”. It is perhaps worth mentioning here that I fell in love with Céline at the age of sixteen (reading Ralph Manheim’s translation), and his books were why I came to Paris in the first place, and started to properly learn French.

  For me the importance of Isou is that, like Céline, he gives us a ground-level account of history in real time. Following Isou’s own journey has taken me to Romania, Israel, Italy, Switzerland and Germany; to abandoned death camps and a run-down apartment in the banlieues of Paris — where the walls are hung with invaluable paintings that Isou gave to a former lettriste camp follower.

  Isou’s daughter, Catherine Goldstein, is also part of the story. As a schoolgirl she hated the Sunday afternoons she was forced to spend with him (he was long since divorced from her mother Jacqueline), when he would drill her in mathematics and as an apprentice genius. She is now a distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the University of Paris, and acknowledges that for all his eccentricity, Isou knew something that was true.

  In our conversations, Catherine and I have returned again and again to the Hasidic tradition of Jewish mysticism in which Isou had been raised, which he lived and breathed as a child. There is one singular belief in this tradition which Isou never lost sight of. This is a belief that is at the core of being an Ostjude, a Jew from the East, and it is contained in the formula that “man is the language of God”. You can find this belief at work in the paintings of Marc Chagall or the writings of Elie Wiesel, as well as countless rabbis and mystics from the Jewish Orient. From this point of view, for all its convoluted abstractions, Isou’s lettrisme does not necessarily make immediate sense, but it does suddenly come into focus.

  As I began to write this book, many of Isou’s closest lettriste associates cautioned me against it. They had various reasons: they did not want me to shatter their faith in their idol, they were worried that I would make them look foolish, I did not understand the hermetic art of lettrisme which they owned and, worst of all, it would be “an Anglo-Saxon work of biography” — the kind of book I had already written about French literary figures, most notably the Situationist Guy Debord, and so it would be vulgar, simpleminded and sensationalist. When I told Roland Sabatier, who has been a faithful lettriste since 1963, that I was going to travel back to Romania to retrace Isou’s steps, he told me that it would be a pointless “journey for no reason” as Isou never talked about the past.

  Sabatier is wrong. Isou’s life was an extraordinary voyage through the mid-twentieth century. Retracing his steps — recreating his story as a journey — is the only way to get near to seeing the world as he saw it, and then to understanding it as he understood it. Isou, like all Eastern Jews of his generation, feared most of all being consumed by and then lost to the murderous historical forces at work in his era. “Whatever I write,” he said in his autobiography, “I write it because I am a Jew, and I am afraid.”

  Isou wrote this seventy years ago, when he first arrived in Paris in August 1945. Much has changed in the city since then, but there is much here too that he would find familiar and unchanged, including Jew-hatred. That is not the only reason why I want to write about Isou — I am also captivated by his mad, capricious, overweening and sometimes (but not often) heroic self — but it is the reason why I feel the need to write this book right now.

  Le Palace

  Nicholas Rombes

  To understand what it’s like at Le Palace, in May 1978, you have to understand what it’s like in the red van, and to understand what it’s like in the van you have to understand Natalie. But no one understands Natalie. Natalie and her green hair. Her bruise-colored tattoos. How can you understand someone if she doesn’t understand herself? That was Roland’s theory at least. But I never saw it that way. Maybe that’s why Nat and I hit it off so well. That and the fact that she and I were both from Ohio and that she missed it as much if not more than I did. The street names in Ohio: Dutch Road. Mechanic Street. Cherry Lane. Finzel Road. But in Paris? Surrounding Le Palace? Montmartre, d’Uzès, Feydeau. They broke my mouth.

  Everything that happened back then happened, first, in Toledo, Ohio. There was no other world than Toledo, in 1978. It was the real world. The world of the present. And everything that happened made it possible, at last, for us to arrive in Paris.

  Which in turn replaced Toledo as the real world.

  *

  We were due at Le Palace, that glittery dump, at 7:00 and it was already 7:30. The van had broken down again on a terrible, guttered stretch of Rue Chauchat. By broken down I mean tire blown and ran out of gas, and by ran out I mean Roland wasn’t paying attention to the gas gauge. For all his talk of signs and mythologies he was a simple man. A simple man in belted khakis and worn penny loafers. And also: soft, deceptive eyes. And also: nobody who knew him called him Roland back then. To us, he was RB. How you read the gas gauge didn’t matter anyway because it had been stuck on one-quarter of a tank for months now. RB was the drummer and the driver of the van. Our sixty-three-year-old drummer. At that time, he was still at the Collège de France. He was also Nat’s occasional lover although Nat would not describe it that way and neither would RB. He who hated binaries ended up loving someone who was the opposite. For there was something between Nat and RB that I would call love even if they couldn’t see it for themselves. We’d all had the sentimentality pounded out of us by a remorseless shellacking of ego-blows, shattered hopes, and epic disappointments, both in our personal lives and in what Nat continued to refer to as the culture industry long after that phrase fell out of fashion. And so the word love never touched our lips.

  Even while standing at the side of the road at twilight with the wet taxis we could feel the end. RB had used bolts from his drum kit as makeshift lug nuts and as much as he’d wanted them to hold they hadn’t of course, having come loose, probably, miles back and flying off into the black dirt of some farmer’s field. And so there was Roland with his old, arthritic hands hunched in the dark beside the red van, his long unwashed hair some sort of temporary disguise that was threatening to become permanent. It was said that RB had ghostwritten tra
cts for a notorious Satanist (is there any other kind?) in the 1960s while vacationing in Biarritz during the Satanic-ritual-abuse hysteria which, he said, had only served to shield the real Satanists, who preferred adults to children. He’d read a repressed early draft of Le Roi en jaune, one that included a level of explicit, blood-onthe-crosses sensation that wrecked the mythology of it all.

  But this was 1978, not 1895, and Le Palace was to be our final show.

  “We’re fucked,” RB had said, in that soft, nasal way of his, the draft of a passing taxi carrying his words away. In French of course. It was one of his favorite phrases and so it didn’t mean much. Crouched down by the blown tire I could see his body breathing and felt a sudden and deep sympathy for him. His old man shoulders. His pink silk neck scarf loose and dirty. His time in the desert unlearning theory had unleashed something in him that he was finding hard to put away. Like many men of his generation he was acutely aware that he was no longer needed, that he was obsolete, that the forces of deconstruction that he himself had loosed had now, paradoxically, made him irrelevant. Plus the Satanists were back in fashion again as the Seventies petered out, and darker than ever. I walked over and put my hand on RB’s shoulder and offered to help.

  He stood up slowly and looked at me with his wet eyes that said what his mouth had said moments ago, and I realized that his we’re fucked was meant in a more universal sense, as in we’re fucked in this universe. The thing about Roland is that there was never anything cynical or nihilistic about what he said. The fuckedness he was talking about was something that bound us all together, made us a team, gave us a reason.

  “Let’s go then,” he said, climbing back into the driver’s seat. It turns out we made it to Le Palace by 8:00 and we weren’t even due to take the upper stage until 9:00. It was a warm night, ten years after May ‘68. Like I said. And here we were, booked at Le Palace, RB’s hands and shirt stained in black oil and exhaust dust, and Natalie — I’ve left Natalie with her pale grass-green hair out of this for good reason — on the verge of some sort of epochal breakdown, and me in my American denim wondering how we were going to make a complete set out of just three songs, the only songs we knew.

  But as we took the stage all fear drained away. Roland at his drums. Nat at her keyboard. Me at the mic. The famous and the not-famous mixing in the crowd, the black Paris night leaking in, the swell of a century pushing at the walls. Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering RB liked to say, and yet the rhythm that night was not of suffering but of joy, the terrible joy of RB’s last days, and of Nat and her green hair beckoning us deeper into some morally fucked jungle, the red van outside like a fading portal to Hell; Le Palace itself suddenly free from the dead weight of its own legend, our music like the wail of an alien drone.

  A palace of noise, with many rooms. It was Natalie who took us deeper into the blackness, deeper than we had ever gone before, and with us the audience. Curtains of sound and gradually her Minimoog became a sonic weapon slaughtering the sorts of thoughts that held so many of us hostage to the worst parts of ourselves. Gradually the chants of mort, mort, mort were countered by vie, vie, vie and we all paused. RB flung his drumsticks into the audience. Natalie’s Minimoog gradually ascended and levitated twenty feet above the stage and floated out above the audience. And though my mouth was closed you could hear my song, our song, the last song we would play together.

  Two years later RB would be dead, run down by a laundry truck of all things. And Nat would become a teacher and then disappear into the jungles of Peru. Paris would once again become a closed city, saboteurs controlling the streets at night. As for me, I adopted Roland’s daughter, the daughter no one knew about, and raised her and took care of her, as I promised Roland I would. I see her now, from my small balcony, walking down Rue Biot, on her way to visit. She will pause and wave. Papa! The sun will catch her watch and I will unlatch the door in anticipation of her arrival.

  Petite vilaine

  Susana Medina

  Living from hand to mouth

  was a prerequisite to Rue Marguerite Duras.

  She might transmigrate to the Louvre

  as Brexit is no game,

  though, argh, the Far Right

  has also been on the rise in France.

  Duras said:

  “Sometimes I think Le Pen should be killed.

  Not me. But if there was someone brave enough to do it.”

  Did Beckett meet her?

  Did Córtazar meet her?

  A punk tried to plunge into Córtazar’s grave.

  He was restrained.

  There might have been chance encounters.

  In any case, many of her special friends

  are now all gathered in the same point in space,

  which she once circled on the map of Paris.

  It was the time of interrailing

  and urchin shenanigans,

  café au lait at Gare du Nord, every year,

  and she learnt to dematerialize croissants

  from nearby tables,

  and on one occasion,

  after two cafés au lait,

  on checking into the toilet,

  a glimpse of the brasserie’s innards and an exit sign

  which led to

  an irresistible industrial spiral staircase

  which flew into the streets.

  An intrepid traveller,

  down she went, fast, fast,

  green velvet ivy cap hat,

  skin and gaze so young,

  bill unpaid.

  The main square

  suddenly materialized an out-of-breath overweight waiter

  who’d been chasing her.

  And catching her eyes, he yelled:

  Petite vilaine!

  And the words

  sounded so beautiful and archaic,

  she beamed a smile.

  And out-of-breath, he grinned back.

  And what a tough job!

  And the debt was settled,

  and the moment glowed

  and survived

  recorded in the Annals of the Absurd.

  And off she glided

  to the angels of Montparnasse Cemetery,

  a rendezvous with her beloved word magicians,

  exquisite corpses feted with plants, metaphysical pebbles

  and tube tickets.

  Existentialism is Gay

  Isabel Waidner

  In the summer of 2004 I took a short adult learning course called “Existentialism”, or “Existentialist Philosophy” — I can’t remember for sure and neither can I find any trace of it online. The course was run by Birkbeck but held at the London School of Economics on the Strand. I lived in Camden at the time. I’d been reading European philosophy since my late teens (Camden public libraries held and may still hold significant Euro philosophy collections, including works in German original). I’d been attending open lectures at Goldsmiths for years (“feminism” stood for “queer” at Goldsmiths, we all flocked there). But this was my first foray into a university setting as an officially enrolled student — I was thirty, although I looked younger. There were no formal entry requirements to the course, and, crucially, I was entitled to a substantial discount (75% off, or maybe it was even free) as a housing benefit claimant. I worked full-time in retail, but needed my Central London rent topped up.

  Tuesday evenings at the LSE, keen adult learners, tables arranged in a U probably. I have no recollection of the lecturer (a sobering realization — I’m a university lecturer now). What I remember is Frank. I hadn’t seen Frank for a couple of years, but like me, they were here to swat up on existentialism.

  Frank and I used to work together in a café on D’Arblay Street, Soho. Kitchen staff, cooking potato mash by the bucketload, “lifting” Somerfield’s readymade pasta sauce with curly parsley and a splash of tamari. Microwaves pinging. Mountains of washing up. Frank disengaged from the more physical tasks — mopping the floor, cleaning the toilets, taking the bins out, taking th
e biscuit — for existential reasons. Frank didn’t go there, they counted themselves out. Instead, they stood by the counter, poised, performing their own brand of mild-mannered gender and sexuality, not lifting a finger. Fair enough, we all thought, including the manager. I picked up the slack and still I thought “fair enough”. I still do. We’d created a working environment which supported idiosyncrasy and subcultural flair in that café.

  Frank! Fancy meeting you here — What you up to? (This, during small group work in “Existentialism, Week 1”.) Shooting a film. Want to be in it? Sure — And you, what you up to? Oh, nothing, I said. Writing a novel. Editing a journal — the ICA bookshop is stocking it. Want to contribute to the next issue? At the time, I didn’t ask Frank why they’d signed up for a course on, of all things, existentialism. What was in it for a British Malaysian Fine Art graduate in their mid-twenties? And what, for that matter, was in it for me (an EU working-class self-identified writer)? I haven’t asked myself that until now — what was the investment?

  When I came to the UK in 1996 for the sole purpose of coming out, I brought one book — the recently published red-and-black Rowohlt paperback edition of Sartre’s Tagebücher: Les carnets de la drôle de guerre (September 1939-März 1940), in German. I still have it, this is its blurb (Google translate, my edit):

  The reservist Jean-Paul Sartre, weather observer of an artillery unit, pursues his favourite occupation. He writes. For up to thirteen hours a day. The stupid stupefying military environment in which the thirtyfour-year-old — already a star in on the fictional heaven literary firmament at the time — inspires him: in his diary, the only one he ever kept, he notes observations, literary stories, philosophical reflections. We find bacteria germs of later works, such as entire sections from Being and Nothingness or his autobiographical novel, The Words. The diaries are the fascinating document of the young genius. The paperback edition contains — for the first time in German translation — the lost but recently rediscovered first book of the diaries.