Night Report

“Cobweb handwriting, traced long and fine with quiet disdain and resignation: a young person of quality.” James Joyce, “Giacomo Joyce”

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“As for the form of the work: it has none. It is liquid lava. It is mad, dark and consuming. But does not this unheard-of blasphemy of Providence anticipate, with the incomparable authority of prophecy, the final and imminent cry of the human conscience before its Creator?” Léon Bloy on “Les Chants de Maldoror”

Isidore Ducasse (1846 - 1870), who styled himself as Comte de Lautréamont and cultivated the poet maudit as a very young genius, created a unique work under the auspices of the Paris Commune. It not only anticipated surrealism, but also announced the horror of the Black Century. It functioned like a catechism for all kinds of anarchic apotheoses. Anyone who wanted to be terribly wild in literary terms in the last hundred years referred to the Comte, i.e. to a student who had dropped out of college and initially published anonymously and at his own expense.

“In the autumn of 1868, Ducasse published the first song anonymously and at his own expense ... with Questroy et Cie.” Wikipedia

The reception of the “Songs of Maldoror” began with a huge delay; but then it never stopped. The history of the edition and its impact provides a number of examples of delayed shipments. In 1869, the title appeared in the preview of the Brussels publisher Albert Lacroix, but not in stores. Ducasse died a year after his debut failed to appear.

I had discovered a pornographic version of the “Cantos” at Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey. The abbey overlooks a bay in the tidal flats of Normandy. Both the Counter-Reformation and the monarchist restoration, which was meant to avert the French Revolution, drew important impetus from Saint-Michel.

Together with Professor Goya, I (the brilliant philologist) reveled in the obscenities of the secret version. The North Hessian demigod CC is incarnate in Goya. His central organ is a tool of enlightenment. At the time, I knew nothing of his immortality. I considered Goya a mortal who, at least, delivered what others only promised.

My intelligence unfolds on the tightrope of my arousal. Sex was a medium for my talent.

I lived in an order dictated by Goya. As I said, I had no idea. He controlled my clothing, and I considered every piece to be freely chosen. Only my philological genius remained untouched by Goya.

I wore black lace lingerie. Goya, too, had been naked for a long time. He looked as if sculpted by Michelangelo. The uninitiated would call him a perfect man, but Goya was more than just a man.

I experienced a rapture of surrender while Goya bestowed every pleasure upon me. A lack of dominance and stamina are the causes of sexual catastrophes, as is male post-coital exhaustion.

I lacked the reliability of male desire in almost every connection—except with Goya. I was the leading expert in Germany on Wanda von Sacher-Masoch. I was among the luminaries of the reception of Uwe Johnson, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, William Seward Burroughs, and Jürgen Ploog.

“You are divine,” I said, little realizing how right I was.

The writings on Lautréamont comprised some 6,000 titles. Many authors wondered how “automatic” Ducasse’s writing style was. The key term: Écriture automatique. Ré Soupault mentions her husband, Philippe Soupault, somewhere, “who, in 1917, while convalescing after military service, discovered the ‘Cantos’ in a picturesque Parisian bookstore under the heading ‘Mathematics.’

The work became the great discovery of the Surrealists. Socially speaking, one could even have imagined the Renault heir, Philippe Soupault, as a potential Marcel Proust. Soupault could have easily financed Surrealism out of petty cash. He was too aristocratic for the upstart André Breton, who foolishly vilified Soupault.

Proust bought his beer at the Ritz. His sensitivity to noise was legendary. He obtained information in unusual ways. Sometimes, during a morning drive, he would ask a handsome servant for a report from the previous night. He was interested in the colors of the feathers on ladies’ hats. One of his informants was Soupault, who, like Marcel, was the son of a prominent physician. Soupault’s brother, Robert, himself a surgeon, dedicated Marcel’s Brother, a treatise. The two colleagues met in the spa town of Cabourg-Balbec, which Marcel Proust had made famous. The artist, still a boy, presents himself as a sophisticated observer during his summer holidays. He notices the “unfriendly” hills on the beach at Balbec. He places the stationmaster “among tamarisk trees and roses.” He smiles down at the “artificial marble” of the monumental staircase in the grand hotel where he is staying. He suspects that the director, “a fat man in a tuxedo,” enjoyed a “cosmopolitan childhood.”