The Marquis

One more quick dip into the British Pathé archives; here we set the coordinates for Biarritz in 1953, where ballet impresario Marquis George de Cuevas is lavishing huge sums of his (wife’s) money on the Cuevas Ball.

The dueling Marquis was no less spendy than Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg had been in the between-the-wars era, but mounting such a spectacle amid the austerity of post-war France was of questionable wisdom. Among the guests at the 18th century-themed ball were “50 princes, 35 marquesses, 95 counts, 20 dukes”, a collision of cluelessness and noblesse of a kind not seen since Louis XVI opened his Filofax on 14 July 1789 and jotted down “rien”.

Cuevas was trying to make a name for himself and even more so for his beloved ballet company, but managed to piss off more or less everyone in the process. The Baron de Redé, who evidently didn’t receive an invite, gleefully trashes the party in his autobiography. Even those pillars of moral probity at the Vatican denounced its extravagance as an insult to the poor. Cuevas defended himself as best he could. “When a movie producer invests thousands in an insipid picture,” he moaned, “no one seems to have anything against it.”

But if anyone had cause for complaint it was the poor beast of burden trudging mournfully through the spectacle, the burden in this case being party-sized partygoer Elsa Maxwell.

The Baron

When Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film Vampyr premiered in Berlin 80 years ago (in a cinema now serving as an Apple shop), it went to an early grave. Audiences jeered and a contemporary review noted, among other unfavourable comments, that the vampire theme was already passé. That was in 1932; God only knows what the reviewer would make of the current clot of bloodsuckers. But Vampyr proved as mortality-averse as its subject, rising again and now enjoying a reputation which, while falling short of the reverence for Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, has certainly improved. It is after all a highly compelling film, making use of simple yet convincing effects and trance-like atmosphere to create a kind of lucid nightmare.

The star of Vampyr was credited as Julian West, but his name was in fact Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, and he also co-produced the venture.  Gunzburg was born of the Russian nobility and known for his extravagant Parisian parties. Two years after Vampyr conspicuously failed to launch him as an actor (or producer), he was in the US, at the start of a highly successful career in upscale magazines.

Having written about him cursorily before, I longed to know more than the scant details introduced above. Therefore I’m grateful for the appearance of  the video presentation below which provides the richest overview so far of de Gunzburg’s unusual life.

It’s essentially a slideshow, with no moving images, not even from Vampyr (it originally came as an extra on that DVD) and it makes surprisingly little of Gunzburg’s sole cinematic outing. The rest of the baron’s career and private life were haphazardly documented. De Gunzburg evidently decorated with as much attention to detail as he dressed but sadly (for our purposes) didn’t court attention to the extent of inviting photographers to his digs. And so we get teasing mentions but no interior images of his Manhattan apartment, which was apparently full of memento moris, and a lakeside country house done out in a Tyrolean hunting lodge style.

Nicolas de Gunzburg died on this day in 1981.

Dress-down Friday: Djuna Barnes

Just one look, that’s all it takes. As with her lover Thelma Wood, one image suffices to convey the élan, the elegance, the self-possession of American writer Djuna Barnes.

For reasons not entirely apparent to me, Djuna is having a busy 2012. June marks 120 and 30 years since her birth and death, respectively, but they’re the kind of middling milestones I thought no-one but me cared about.

Barnes’s newspaper work is highlighted in a current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. While Nightwood and her other novels have been reassessed in recent years, this survey focuses on the articles, photographs and drawings Barnes produced as a journalist before leaving New York for Europe in 1921.

Berenice Abbott’s portrait of Djuna Barnes forms part of the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, soon to pitch up in Tacoma, Washington after previous stops in DC and NYC. Abbott is the subject of a major exhibition at Paris’s Jeu de Paume starting next week, which will no doubt include her various likenesses of Barnes. And finally, in September, the First International Djuna Barnes Conference will take place in London.

Places: Phoenix Park

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Looking at the three Places we’ve already covered,  a straight(ish) line can be discerned connecting them, passing from Italy through France to England. That’s pure coincidence, but warming to the idea that our Strange Flowers are pointing the way I herewith add another daisy to that string in Ireland (and unless I can find something in Greenland to write about, that’s as far as it goes).

French writer, theatre director and actor Antonin Artaud was, in the words of Susan Sontag, “one of the last great exemplars of the heroic period of literary modernism”. His harrowing writing forms a dark, precarious monument teetering at, and sometimes over, the edge of sanity. Like Nietzsche, his conception of what art could and should do for society and the individual started where most artists’ ended; like Nietzsche, as well, he would spend the last decade or so of his life in pitiful psychic disarray.

It was in the mid-1930s that the mental instability which had accompanied Artaud for much of his life, aggravated by drug usage, started to overwhelm him. “He didn’t laugh, was never puerile and although he didn’t say very much,” reported Georges Bataille, “there was something emotionally eloquent in his rather grave silence and terrible edginess.” Artaud’s efforts to bring his theatrical vision to skeptical Parisian audiences and horror of compromising his work had exhausted his neural reserves. Having acted in films since 1917 he played his last role in 1935. He abandoned an opium cure, and instead underwent gruelling abstinence on a boat to Mexico in early 1936 (taking part in a Voodoo ceremony in Haiti en route).

Once in Mexico, Artaud’s hope of finding some revolutionary spirit there to echo his own revolt against society was disappointed and his stay was marked by terrible drug withdrawals (although his experience of peyote was, he claimed, “the happiest three days of my existence”).

Back in Paris, Artaud’s mental and material decline accelerated and he was reduced to begging and sleeping on the streets, haunted by the threat of imminent apocalypse whose minutely timetabled progress he predicted. One day the wife of an artist with whom Artaud was acquainted gave him a cane, claiming it had once belonged to Saint Patrick. It was a dangerous thing to tell someone like Antonin Artaud. He was overtaken by a need to “return” “Patrick’s” staff to Ireland, whose population he hoped were more apt to rebel than the Mexicans. He arrived at the port of Cobh in August 1937, made his way to Galway and from there to the Aran Islands.

What exactly happened on his route through Ireland is difficult to determine, much of it pieced together from scant evidence and Artaud’s later testimony which frequently careened into incoherence. Like the fate of Arthur Cravan, it is a largely undocumented void which fiction has attempted to fill.

Patrice Trigano’s 2010 novelised account of Artaud’s life, La canne de Saint Patrick, imagines the writer’s erratic progress. Artaud, “vagabond of the absolute, exile from life”, obsessively counts each footstep, terrified that some disaster will befall him or the entire world if he should stop. “He trusts in the stick which accompanies him, because it’s the stick of Saint Patrick and of Jesus Christ [...] he, Artaud, King of the world, Artaud-become-God, will finally be able to reveal the derided truth.”

Irish artist Patrick Jolley explores his own conception of this delirious pilgrimage in the 2011 super 8 feature The Door Ajar. The text is drawn exclusively from Artaud’s own text, or as much as the director could “bear to read”. According to its creator, The Door Ajar “describes an adventure that is in part black joke, solitary performance, Mephistophelean pact, creative quantum leap, act of faith, calculated self martyrdom, and catastrophic delusion.”

September 1937 found Artaud in Dublin. He called on a publisher who concluded that his visitor “was travelling light in the upper storey” (just one of the moments of surreal comedy from the Irish Department of External Affairs’ Artaud file, as quoted in The Dublin Review). Artaud attempted to gain admission to the Milltown Institute, a Jesuit college; the police were called and in the ensuing mêlée his cherished staff went missing, much to his distress. He wandered the streets of the city and three days later he was arrested in Phoenix Park as a vagrant.

Comprising a huge green swathe of West Dublin, Phoenix Park was established in 1662 as a royal hunting ground on land which once belonged to the Knights Templar, its name having nothing to do with the mythical bird, rather a corruption of the Irish term for “clear water”. Successive powers have left their traces, from a viceregal residence to a an obelisk dedicated to Wellington to the more recent giant cross marking a visit by Pope John Paul II.

Lucia Joyce

The park appears frequently in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, a book whose long gestation was coming to a close at the time of Artaud’s arrest. Joyce draws extensively on the park’s long history and illustrious associations in the book. During 1937 Joyce was also making regular visits to his daughter, Lucia, who was being treated for schizophrenia in Paris by a certain Dr Achille Delmas, whose written works included Pathological Psychology of Suicide. Just two years earlier she had been found wandering the streets of Dublin, filthy and manic, just like Artaud.

Declared “a destitute and undesirable alien”, Artaud was deported to France where he began a grueling ordeal of asylums and therapy which would include primitive shock treatment. His most sympathetic carer turned out to be the same Dr Delmas in the same Paris clinic as Joyce’s hapless daughter.

Dr Delmas’s death in 1947 signalled the start of Artaud’s own terminal decline. The following year he died alone in the clinic, holding a shoe. He had been taking huge doses of chloral, but it is unclear if he deliberately killed himself.

Lucia Joyce, still institutionalised, died in 1982.

Pages: Frederick Rolfe’s Reviews of Unwritten Books

Even among the exceptional works of singular English writer Frederick Rolfe, a.k.a. Baron Corvo, this is an oddity. First, it’s not one book, but four. Second, although of relatively recent vintage this set is all but impossible to get hold of (during our tour of Berlin, I enthused in passing about the unexpected treasures held by Berlin’s main library, the Staatsbibliothek; this is a perfect example). Third, its authorship is far from straightforward.

What we’re looking at is Frederick Rolfe’s Reviews of Unwritten Books, a limited-edition anthology of eleven articles ostensibly written by Rolfe, posthumously published and annotated by Rolfe biographer Donald Weeks in 1985. Written around the beginning of the 20th century, most of them were originally printed in the London-based Monthly Review. They could have all been effortlessly encompassed by one book with room for more (there were 24 “Reviews” in total). Rolfe himself tried and failed to get them published in book form during his lifetime, but in issuing these four slim, elegant volumes, Weeks was evidently more concerned with crafting new artefacts for the Corvo cult than bringing these writings to a broader public.

In discussing the life and legacy of Rolfe a while back, I suggested that his signature work, Hadrian the Seventh, was a fascinating reflection of his personality while being something of a chore to read. These articles, written around the same time (1903/04) consequently come as a complete revelation. Where Hadrian was weighed down by Rolfe’s sense of aggrieved entitlement, these Reviews are light in the best possible sense, borne aloft on wit and invention.

The idea behind the “reviews” is the kind of arch, high-concept, Postmodern lark that Borges, for instance, wouldn’t get round to until well into the 20th century. It finds illustrious figures departing from their accustomed places in history or antiquity to comment on people or events which arose after their deaths, usually centuries hence; the resulting “book” is subsequently “reviewed”. And so we discover write-ups of Plato discoursing on Wagner, Sir Francis Bacon discussing wireless telegraphy, Tacitus assessing American democracy and Lionardo (sic) da Vinci admiring the Forth Bridge, St Gotthard Tunnel and other examples of modern engineering.

Witness Machiavelli commenting on the Boer War, a conflict which would have been fresh in the memory of the contemporary reader: “The object of the belligerent is to damage the enemy. He ought to do so in every possible way. He ought not to fight as a gentleman, but merely as a man.” It certainly sounds like something Machiavelli would have said. An appraisal of Walt Whitman’s poem about the Spanish-American War brings the conceit to the fore. “But who can write a Whitmaniac song which will bear comparison with the least of Whitman’s? We may make the attempt. It looks easy. But we fail to reproduce more than caricature.” There follows, of course, a “Whitmaniac” verse, supposedly Whitman’s own, and a convincing counterfeit at that. The levity and generosity of spirit here hardly seem to come from the same pen as the exhausting catalogue of injury that is Hadrian the Seventh.

That’s because they generally didn’t.

Although these pieces bear Rolfe’s name (and Weeks perpetuates the deception by including his name in the title) his contribution was comparatively minor. Most were originally written by a certain Sholto Douglas, who approached Rolfe and asked him to place them in a magazine under his own name. This he did, adding his own amendments but honourably passing on payment to their true author. Douglas claims that Rolfe “ruined” them in the process. Perhaps he is referring to the liberal use of archaisms (“cognosce”, “rapine”, “adscititious”) and invented words (“delectament”, “oceanicalised”,”existimated”). They certainly bear Rolfe’s imprint; Hadrian is littered with similar vocabulary.

Rolfe was definitely responsible for the critique of Cicero’s planned oration at the trial of Joan of Arc, which namechecks his most famous avatar. “It really was very fortunate for her, on the whole, that this oration never was delivered [...] her subsequent rehabilitation at the hands of Pope Callistus the Third and beatification at the hands of Pope Leo the Thirteenth and canonization by Pope Hadrian the Seventh would have been rendered impossible.”

Frederick Rolfe is a shadowy figure of late-Victorian and Edwardian literature; Sholto Douglas stands in the shadow of the shadow, clearly a witty and original thinker who might today share Rolfe’s cult renown had he also shared his collaborator’s fanatical persistence. Whatever the authorship of these Reviews, the dizzying interplay of past, present and possibility, of fact, fiction and fantasy produce a work which was way ahead of its time and which recommends itself to a much wider audience. In The Quest for Corvo, A.J.A. Symons claims “the Reviews remain unworthy of revival”. Symons is, unusually, completely wrong.

♦

Frederick Rolfe’s Reviews of Unwritten Books | Tragara Press, 1985 |Find on WorldCat

Madame wishes…?

Dread, decay, disease; androgyny, artifice, anomie…Rachilde′s 1884 novel Monsieur Vénus seethes with Decadent enchantments, as the opening passage makes clear:

Mlle de Vénérande was groping for a door in the narrow passage that the concierge had pointed out.

This seventh floor was not lit at all, and she began to be afraid at suddenly finding herself in the midst of a hovel of ill repute, when she remembered her cigarette case, which contained the wherewithal to shed some light. By the glow of the match she discovered number 10 and read this sign:

Marie Silvert, flower maker, designer.

Then, as the key was in the door, she entered, but the smell of apples cooking choked her and stopped her short on the threshold. No smell was more odious to her than that of apples, and so it was with a shiver of disgust that she examined the garret before revealing her presence.

Seated at a table on which a lamp was smoking on a greasy pan, a man, apparently absorbed in very intricate work, sat with his back to the door. Around his body, over his loose smock, ran a spiraling garland of roses, very big roses of fleshy satin with velvety grenadine tracings. They slipped between his legs, threaded their way right up to his shoulders, and came curling around his neck. On his right stood a spray of wallflowers, and on his left a tuft of violets.

On a disorderly pallet in a corner of the room, paper lilies were piled up.

Some branches of defective flowers and some dirty plates, topped by an empty bottle, were strewn between two chairs with broken straw seats. A small cracked stove sent its pipe into a pane of a hinged skylight, and brooded over the apples spread before it, with one red eye.

The man felt the cold that the open door had let in; he pulled up the shade of the lamp and turned around.

“Am I mistaken, Monsieur?” asked the woman visitor, disagreeably surprised. “Marie Silvert, please?”

“You’re at the right place, Madame, and for the time being, I’m Marie Silvert…”

Raoule could not help smiling; coming from a male-sounding voice, this answer had something grotesque about it, something that the embarrassed pose of the boy, his roses in his hand, did nothing to change.

“You make flowers, you make them like a real flower maker?”

“Of course! I have to. My sister is ill. See, over there in that bed, she’s sleeping…Poor girl! Yes, very ill. A high fever that makes her fingers shake. She can’t supply anything decent…Me, I know how to paint, but I said to myself that if I worked in her place I’d make a better living than if I drew animals or copied photographs. Orders are not exactly pouring in,” he added by way of conclusion, “but I still manage to get through the month.”

He stretched his neck to check on the sleep of the sick woman. Nothing moved under the lilies. He offered the young woman one of the chairs. Raoule drew her seal-skin coat around her and sat down with the greatest repugnance. She was no longer smiling.

“Madame wishes…?”

Translati0n by Melanie Hawthorne; illustration by Majeska found at Gentress Myrrh-murings

 

(Barely) on the road

Writer Neal Cassady would have turned 86 today; but proving that you’re never too old (or too dead) to get some book learnin’, Cassady last week posthumously received the high school diploma he never quite managed in his lifetime.

Meanwhile the movie of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road should finally complete its glacial progress to cinemas this year. It’s amazing that the sizeable Beat heritage industry has waited so long to film the book which features Cassady’s most famous double, Dean Moriarty. Like Herbert Huncke and Bob Kaufman, it was Cassady’s fate to have his own writing barred from the Beat canon, his life serving instead as an exemplar of the rage for existence that the Beat Generation venerated.

This documentary clip is a vivid depiction of the charged, hyperkinetic presence and appalling traffic skills which so inspired Kerouac. Actually it’s difficult to say what was more terrifying about Cassady — his driving or his dancing.

Take zero

The Berlinale film festival starts this week, and although this year’s programme seems to offer little with a Strange Flowers flavour, it’s at least reminded me to mention some film bits.

Maya Deren, Take Zero, a 30-minute tribute to the pioneering experimental filmmaker, premiered a few days ago at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. It’s a more straightforward documentary-style approach than last year’s half-hour Deren encomium, Maya Deren’s Sink by Barbara Hammer. For a short film, Jaime Ballada and Gerard Gil’s work has had a very long gestation, which explains why Deren’s husband and collaborator Alexander Hammid appears on screen even though he died in 2004. Maya Deren, Take Zero also features footage from the unfinished film Deren made with Marcel Duchamp, Witch’s Cradle. View the trailer here.

It’s a reckless gambit for any director to describe his film as “90 minutes of nonsense” but that’s how Italian filmmaker Davide Manuli labels his feature La leggenda di Kaspar Hauser, which also premiered in Rotterdam (I might be quoting him out of context…judge for yourself). After transplanting Samuel Beckett to Sardinia in a 2008 film, Manuli performs a similar trick on the ultimate lost boy, Kaspar Hauser, who was born two centuries ago this year (possibly…like everything else involving Kaspar Hauser, it’s difficult to confirm). Manuli’s movie has UFOs, drugs and Vincent Gallo in not one but two roles.

Following up on some previous bites: the Anita Berber biopic seems to have disappeared without trace, ditto the feature about Edward James which I mentioned a while ago. Meanwhile The Lady Who Went Too Far, the biopic of Lady Hester Stanhope by the writer and producer of The King’s Speech, has been put back to next year. This may allow Madonna to step into the breach with a threatened film treatment of another 19th century English noblewoman who, like Lady Hester, explored the Middle East. Lady Jane Digby travelled extensively and had affairs with crowned heads; her idea of settling down was to take up with a Bedouin sheikh. So there’s more than enough to work with, and with Madonna behind the camera what could possibly go wrong?

Dress-down Friday: Umm Kulthum

I was shopping in the Gaza Strip when I first encountered Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. Walking through a market in Gaza City at the end of the last millennium, I was struck by numerous stalls selling what appeared to be pirated CDs with an arresting, almost unvarying image: a woman d’un certain âge, raven hair piled high, with dark glasses and long gown, holding a scarf.

Heading home with a couple of those discs was the start of an enduring fascination with the mythology and artistry of the woman who remains by some distance the most famous and most beloved singer in the Arab world. When she died on this day in 1975, it unleashed an unprecedented wave of mourning; her Cairo funeral was one of the biggest public gatherings in recorded history.

The word “iconic” is applied to much that is merely distinctive, but for Umm Kulthum the description is barely sufficient. Her likeness, particularly as she appeared in her later years, is instantly recognisable and like any true icon, it can be rendered in just a few strokes. Endlessly adaptable, it appears thousand-fold in high art, kitsch (ironic and otherwise), on stamps, in murals, as graffiti and adorning the millions of cassettes and CDs which relay her art throughout the world. Her unchallenged dominance of Egypt’s recent cultural history and association with Egyptian nationalism means that successive waves of rulers and activists have claimed her for themselves. Most recently, her statue in Cairo was adopted as an icon of revolution, with one symbolically bandaged eye representing protesters blinded by security forces.

Of course it is not her image alone, but above all her transcendent gifts that ensured Umm Kulthum’s fame. Her concert appearances generally lasted several hours, each piece a journey circumscribed only by the singer’s huge range and unparalleled mastery of improvisation.

That talent was evident from a very early age, but the stage was considered no environment for a girl so Umm Kulthum’s father dressed her as a boy for concert appearances. When this ruse was no longer sustainable her performance persona — jejune, even gauche — reflected her rural background. But rather than make simplicity her trademark, à la Piaf, she instead amped up the glamour, cribbing her style from the wealthy women in whose houses she sometimes performed.

At her height, ‘The Lady’, as she was frequently referred to in Egypt, was a regal stage presence, sophisticated yet conservative. She would appear in a bejewelled floor-length gown, the silk scarf clutched in her hand a constant presence, rising and falling on euphoric waves of song. The signature dark glasses were a shield against intense and prolonged exposure to stage and studio lighting. This is a woman who was actually blinded by her own fame.

Umm Kulthum retains near-total recognition in the Arab world. My neighbourhood in Berlin is known for a highly visible Turkish community, but there is an enclave of Middle Eastern and North African businesses near me where the majority of shops are adorned with Arabic script; in just one block there are two separate businesses trading under her name.

When pieces from her jewelry collection were auctioned in 2009, they achieved extravagant multiples of their reserve prices, the Umm Kulthum provenance representing a gold standard of renown. A museum dedicated to her memory in Cairo displays her gowns and accessories like the relics of a Sufi saint.

For more on Umm Kulthum, listen to this NPR radio documentary, watch this documentary narrated by Omar Sharif or read this interview with Virginia Danielson, author of The Voice of Egypt. There are also many hours’ worth of Umm Kulthum’s video and audio recordings online (though a word of warning: her name is transliterated in multiple different ways; “Umm Kulthum”, “Om Kalsoum” and “Oum Kalthoum” are among the most common variants). If you listen to nothing else, at least take in this electrifying clip which shows how audiences encouraged Umm Kulthum to ecstatic improvisational heights.

And finally, the imperishable, imperial glamour of Umm Kulthum:

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Before Whale Cay

The other day I was babbling about the wonders to be found among the archives of newsreel studio British Pathé. Case in point: four clips featuring Marion Barbara Carstairs, referred to as ‘Miss Betty Carstairs’ (she herself preferred Joe).

Joe Carstairs, then, born on this day in 1900, was a pioneering speedboat racer, “the fastest woman on water”.  We’ve spoken about her before, inspired by Kate Summerscale’s excellent 1997 biography, The Queen of Whale Cay.

The four Pathé clips, filmed over four successive years, are fascinating not just because they are (to the best of my knowledge) the only footage of Carstairs competing. They also show her at a crucial juncture in her career, moving from triumph to ignominy as the heedless buzz of the 1920s wears off.

In many ways, Carstairs was a larger-than-life embodiment of that decade. After all, as Summerscale says, “Joe loved everything the children of the 1920s loved: speed, machines, fancy-dress parties, treasure hunts, cabaret, nightclubs, cocktails, dancing, motor cars, sex, and — above all — boyishness.” Few of course took boyishness to such lengths. Not for Carstairs a simple page-boy bob and a slim-hipped silhouette; Carstairs could be, and frequently was, taken for a man.

The first clip shows Carstairs in 1928 tearing across Windermere at “over 60 miles an hour!” as the titles proclaim. It was the kind of reckless display that endeared her to the public and the press, whose attention she initially relished.  The following year she’s presenting Estelle IV, the latest weapon in her compulsive drive to go faster on water than anyone ever had – man or woman. This quest would consume huge portions of her inherited fortune.

She returns in 1930 with a new Estelle, but even from this brief clip it is clear that the wind has changed. The 1920s are over, the press has turned on the cross-dressing Carstairs and she no longer seems comfortable in the spotlight, smoking nervously, warily returning the camera’s insistent gaze. Finally, in 1931, comes the humiliation of an accident while competing in Southampton in which she “takes a ducking” as the titles phrase it; the note of relish is unmistakable. She would retire from racing later the same year.

Carstairs was driven from the UK by hostile press (plus some tax issues), but if living well is the best revenge, living well and ruling over your own tropical “kingdom”, as she did on the Bahamian island of Whale Cay, must have been pretty satisfying as well.