The Last Days of New Paris

AFTERWORD On Coming to Write The Last Days of New Paris

In the autumn of 2012 my publishers forwarded me a handwritten message. It was from someone of whom I hadn’t thought for many years. I’d known her slightly when we were both students at the same institution, though we’d been in different departments. It was close to two decades since we’d spoken. At first I didn’t even recognize her name.

Some online searching reminded me, and filled in blanks. When I’d known her she’d been studying art history, and it seemed that she’d gone on to teach the subject at universities in Europe, specializing in modernism. In the late ’90s, so far as I could ascertain, she’d gained a small degree of notoriety by putting on a short series of collaborations with scientists and philosophers, something between performances and avant-garde provocations, with titles like “Not River but Estuary: Steering Aurelius Upstream(s)” and “What’s Once and What Wasn’t Is Still.” I could find no details or descriptions of any of these events.

Around 2002 her online trail dried up. She seemed to disappear. Until she wrote to me.

Her message was terse. She’d read an essay I’d written some time previously that touched on Surrealism, and it had reminded her of my interest in the movement. On that basis, she said, she was contacting me on behalf of someone who very much wanted to meet me, and to whom, in turn, she was certain I’d find it interesting to speak. But there was, she said, a very limited window of possibility, “some doors opening only occasionally and briefly.”

She gave the name of a hotel in Farringdon, a room number, a date, and time (less than two weeks away), told me to bring a notebook, and that was all.

I’m not certain why I chose not to ignore the message. Curiosity, mainly, I think—I’ve received a fair number of eccentric invitations over the years, but none with this sense of vaguely aggressive urgency. In any case, after hemming and hawing, rather surprised at myself, resolved to walk away the instant I was made uncomfortable, I made my way to the—faded but not depressing—hotel. I knocked at the given door, at the given time.

To my surprise it was not my correspondent who opened it but an elderly man. He stood aside for me to enter.

He was well into his eighties, but he stood very straight. He still had half a head of hair, and it was not all gray. He was lean and still strong looking, in clean, faded and battered clothes in a very outdated style. He never lost his expression of suspicion, throughout the hours I was with him.

I asked after my acquaintance and the man shook his head impatiently and answered in growling French, “Ç’est seulement nous deux.” It was just we two.

My French is bad, but much better passive, listening, than speaking, which turned out to be just as well.

I introduced myself and he nodded and rather pointedly did not reciprocate.

He indicated me to sit in the room’s only chair, moving his bag from it. I hesitated to do so because of his age but he motioned again, impatiently, so I obeyed, and for most of the hours that followed he remained standing, sometimes pacing, sometimes shifting his weight a little from leg to leg, never losing his restlessness or energy. When he did sit, it was on the very edge of the made-up bed, and rarely for long.

He told me he understood I was a writer, and that I was interested in Surrealism and in radical politics, and that on that basis he had a story to tell me. I allowed that I was, but cautioned that I was by no means a specialist in the history of the movement. I told him that there were many people more expert than I, and that perhaps he and my acquaintance should seek out one of them.

The man gave one of what was to be his rare wintery smiles.

“Elle a déjà essayé,” he said. She had tried already. I was, he said, the fourth person she had contacted, in an increasing hurry as, according to that unclear schedule, time grew short. He let that sit a moment. So I was the best that she could come up with, and now it was my job to listen, to take notes, and ultimately to do with what he told me whatever I thought best.

He waited while I organized myself, got my pen and paper ready. I brought out my phone to record but he shook his head so I put it away again. He seemed to chop the air in front of me with his hands, organizing his thoughts.

“Your Paris,” he began, “is old Paris. In New Paris, things were different. There was a man in New Paris. He was looking down. It was night. Beyond a wall of ripped-up city, Nazis were shooting.”

Thus began thirty-nine extraordinary, indeed—the adjective isn’t hyperbolic—life-changing hours. Over their course, uninterrupted by sleep, growing more and more bleary and vague, fortified by crisps and chocolate and water and a nasty wine from the mini-bar, the man told me the last days of New Paris, the story that I have presented here.

He spoke in passé simple and imparfait: he was never other than ambiguous about whether what he was telling me was a story, though his explanations of the city’s quiddity, of its history, his descriptions of the streets and landscapes of New Paris, were completely vivid. At times he would hesitate and take my notebook from me and scribble an illustration of what he was describing. I still have them. He was no artist, but sometimes it helped me visualize. And very often it would provoke a memory in me, of some other image or poem or passage, and I would take it from him and draw myself, asking him, “Is this right? Did it look like this?” Sometimes much later I would go back to my own books, looking for a source I thought I could recall. Here I’ve reproduced those of my sketches that he implied were most accurate.

On three occasions during our time together, he brought out some notebooks of his own. Battered, ancient, blood- and dirt- and ink-stained things. He would not let me read them in their entirety, but he would show me certain sections, certain dated entries in scrawled French, and let me copy out phrases or even other sketches of what he documented (those last he clearly had not drawn himself).

The man was an utterly compelling storyteller, but a disorganized one. I was captivated and adrift. He spoke with concentration and without hesitation, but—clearly feeling under immense pressure of time—he went too fast, and my notes, made in translation, would falter. He told events out of order. He doubled back on himself to fill in details he realized he had missed. Sometimes he would contradict himself, or veer between historical speculation and seeming certainty. He could be sidetracked and go off on a rumination or explanation of some detail of New Paris that, while rarely anything other than fascinating, was only tangentially related to the story he was telling.

About New Paris itself, he never spoke with anything other than the most wrenching, oneiric specificity. In his descriptions of the time before the S-Blast, of Marseille, of the Villa Air-Bel, he used a different register. Then he was recounting something told to him, something reconstructed, the result of investigations—investigations unfinished and full of holes, that I, dutifully, with much research, would later do my best to fill.

At first the man would be extremely peremptory with any interruption. As time wore on, particularly in the small hours, when I was startled into awareness of myself by the lonely sound of some car or solitary pedestrian from the night outside (we didn’t close the curtains), if I raised a hand to ask for clarification, to suggest the source of some manif he described, to query some historical detail, he would listen more patiently. I would ask questions, and he might answer, and our interaction became an interview of excursuses, at times for an hour or more, before returning to the main track of Thibaut and Sam’s journey through the ruins of New Paris.

The man never told me his name, and I did not ask him.

He never referred to Thibaut in anything other than the third person, including when he showed me the notebooks. Of course, however, I became certain that Thibaut was he. In these notes, I’ve proceeded on that assumption.

This was deeply jarring. Because if, I wondered, I believed he was Thibaut, did I believe he was telling me the truth?

Of course it was absurd. But sitting there in that cheap chair exhaustedly listening to the visitor tell me about life-and-death battles, while London’s late-night traffic muttered outside, it didn’t seem so. It seemed possible, then plausible, then likely. That I was speaking to an escapee from New Paris, describing some old struggle.

Escaped from his place how? Come here why? I couldn’t bring myself to ask him. I was too cowardly, or too respectful, or too something, and then the opportunity was gone.

It’s hard for me to reconstruct it now, but I think I thought that this was only one chapter. That the story of Thibaut and Sam, and the more partial and uncertain backstory of the Villa Air-Bel, and of how New Paris came to be, was the first part of a longer history; that he would tell me more stories, of the years subsequent, and perhaps details of other places in that art- and demon-fouled world.

But during a second day he grew more agitated, more uneasy, and spoke with more and more speed. He rushed to reach the end of his story, of what were not, it transpired, the last days of New Paris.

When he was at last done with that—his relief palpable—I allowed myself to get up, to go to urinate for the first time in a long time. I’m not sure, but now I feel as if I remember, from the bathroom, hearing a door creak open, and close again.

In any case when I came back into the bedroom, the man and his satchel and his notebooks were gone, leaving me with pages and pages of my own scrawl, anguish, excitement, deep confusion, and the hotel bill.

I never saw him again. Nor, even with the expensive help of a private detective, was I ever able to track down the erstwhile acquaintance who had introduced us. I had only my notes, and the task with which I’d been—obviously, if unstatedly—left. It’s taken much work, but I’ve tried at last to discharge it here.

What I’ve written—as those who summoned me certainly knew I would—has been carefully extracted, distilled, and organized as best as I am able from the voluminous notes I made from the man’s rush of narrative. In several places, I have filled it out, even sometimes corrected what he said, as the result of my own researches. Again, I’m sure this was my given role.

Perhaps some readers will deem it unseemly for me not to have restricted myself to the most terse and dispassionate, even verbatim, reportage of what was told me. To them, I can only say that I am, more than anything else, a writer of fiction, and both the woman who contacted me and the man who met me knew that. Perhaps they were indeed merely making do, and would have preferred another reporter: perhaps, though, they wanted the story to be told with something of the register of fiction, to communicate a certain urgency that narrative can bring, that was vividly there in the man’s exposition. I’ve called the story “a novella” here, for decorum’s sake, and to justify the way in which I’ve told it. I don’t know if they would approve.

I’ve also appended a section of references. In organizing this report, and to understand even a little of the generative power of the S-Blast, I spent a very long time trying to source the manifs that the man described. Many, of course, were fairly obvious. The derivation of others he told me himself, often explaining that “Thibaut” knew. In some cases I have followed him in making them explicit within the story: others are in the notes below. The origin of a few of the manifs he did not reveal, or perhaps know.

During the course of our conversation, he mentioned many other phenomena and animate manifs, some of which I recognized or later identified, and all of which I recorded in my long notes on the city’s history, demonology, manifology, my drafts of an encyclopedia of New Paris. They are not dealt with here, as they featured in his story only as asides. All his offhand descriptions kept me breathless with a sense of how the war- and dream-ruined city must teem. The explorer in New Paris might encounter nudes descending staircases or brides stripped bare, composites in dark lines from Emmy Bridgewater, the nocturnal cats of Alice Rahon. Her mouth and eyes might be stopped up by butterflies, an assaulting echo of Winged Domino from Roland Penrose. Her watch could melt. Wilhelm Freddie’s mummy-wrapped horse-head figure might come for her; or a ripple-skirted dress from Rachel Baes, or Seligmann’s scuttling woman-legged stool; a swan-neck on dancer’s legs, manif from Teige. She might watch Picabia’s layered people crawl through each other, or see the hauling exhausted rattling red shapes of Eileen Agar’s reaping machine. A clergyman could crawl along her path, manifest from the film of Germaine Dulac. She might face Lise Deharme’s young girl in tatters. Hunt the spindly animal skeletons of Wols. Pick from trees laden with meat thrust between the paving slabs. Hide from darkly glowing solarized presences from Lee Miller and Man Ray.

The point, I hope, is clear. The streets of New Paris throng.

Of those manifs mentioned in this narrative, there are, I’m sure, many I’ve failed to identify. If I understand it correctly, it’s in the nature of the S-Blast that the bulk of its results are random, or manifest from the work of unknown artists—by which in Surrealist fashion, I mean people. These I could never possibly know. Other manifs I may not have recognized as such during the telling. There were also presences I feel sure derive from works I’ve seen, but that I’ve been unable to recall or track down. Someone more knowledgeable about art than I am may fill in the holes.

The literature on Surrealism is, of course, vast—there are far too many excellent books to list more than a fraction. Besides a huge stack of volumes of reproductions, several dictionaries and encyclopedias of Surrealism, collections of its manifestos and texts, a few of the volumes that I found particularly helpful in making sense of New Paris, as it was described to me, and in identifying the manifs, included Michael Löwy’s Morning Star; Franklin Rosemont and Robin Kelley’s edited Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora; Penelope Rosemont’s edited Surrealist Women: An International Anthology; Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijałkowski’s edited Surrealism Against the Current; and Anne Vernay and Richard Walter’s edited La Main à plume: Anthologie du surréalisme sous l’Occupation.

Just why the visitor and the woman wanted the history of New Paris told I have no idea. I feel it may be germane, somehow, that a good number of the manifs seem to originate in artworks that, in our world, post-date the moment of the S-Blast in theirs. What that might say about the relations between our realities—whether there are certain pieces that insist on being born, whatever the contingencies of a timeline, whether there are certain manifesting forces that reach across what might otherwise seem impermeable barriers of ontology, taking or leaving traces—I don’t know.

Three weeks after my meeting in the hotel, I was in a café in Stepney considering our encounter. I chanced to look up, straight through the storefront, at a man standing outside, looking through the glass at me. That is, I think he was looking at me. I can’t be sure. Food was displayed on shelves in the window, and from where I sat, an apple blocked my view of the man’s face. I could see him beyond it, coated and hatted, unmoving. The apple obscured his eyes, his nose, his mouth. Still, I think he was staring at me.

I drew breath at last and he was gone, too fast for me to ever see his face.

Perhaps some understanding of the nature of the manifs of New Paris, of the source and power of art and manifestation, may be of some help to us, in times to come.

In any case, having been told the story of New Paris, there’s no way I could not tell it.