Like many another whelp of the golden age of the American car, I remember drive in movies. In that toddlerhood which comes back to me in bits, a kind of primeval soup of dreamlike images, I remember suffering the passion of Ole Yeller at some drive in probably located, at the time, in the York Pennsylvania metro area, and now no doubt a parking lot or dump. There the dog faithfully defended its owners, there the dog, in a drizzle of images (sound via a gizmo one attached to the car door – and how my father, psychorigid about all things appertaining to paint scratches and fingerprints on windows, approved this I do not know), lived out the last of his, alas, one dog life, and there we cried. It is an incident, the popcorn, outdoor screen, car, that comes together as a hieroglyph of a certain kind of life, dead now as an Egyptian mummy. I also remember a certain erotic feeling aroused by another film from about the same time, a Disney film called, improbably, The Love Bug – could it have been about a Volkswagen? I’m not looking this up on IMDB. Let personal myth remain personal myth.
In a novel the paperback version of which I often press on friends (where it is destined to gather dust, no doubt, an alien to be pitched out or traded when the time comes to get rid of the junk in the house), Lookout Cartridge, the narrator is obsessed by an image: “Or the Landslip Drive-in Movie, whose monumental screen under clean and clement American stars and in front of you and a hundred other cars without audible warning one summer night began to lower, to tilt back hugely and drop as if into a slot in the earth. The image became yours even more surely by disappearing. It disappeared with a distinguished rumble mixed with what still came out of the speaker draped over the edge of your car window. An actress and actor in the corrected colors of the spectrum had been touching each other’s colossal faces and their breaths kept coming faster and more intimately loud to bring right into your car this whopping slide of mouths and fingers and nostrils inserted into the night-pines and sea-sky above the locally well-known clay cliffs that had just enjoyed their first clear day in two weeks. But now for the first time since before World War II a section of cliff gives way and the famous faces are swept as if by their camera right up off the monumental screen…” The author, Joseph McElroy, was obsessed, in this stage of his career, with the media-mediated collectivity of images just beyond the proprioceptive zone, images that we barely but distinctly recognize as part of our “experience”, that word no longer denoting our face to face and tactile immersion in what is, but the immersion in what is represented, our, so to speak, zones of interest as subcontracted to the prevailing media regime. My experience of the drive in was renewed – and Adam’s was initiated – last night in a field outside of Jackson Iowa, easily reached by way of State Highway 71 from the Iowa Great Lakes region. Adam, on this trip to America, has been longing for a drive-in movie, an item on his extensive trip bucket-list. A storm made that impossible in Georgia. Here, though, was an apparently clear evening, so we drove out and Adam got the hotdog, popcorn, fries, coke and ice cream sandwich that lays a ring of sugar and fat around our spectatorship. I warned, just like Dad did long ago, against letting any of that stuff drip onto the car seat. The Drive-in movie screens look a little anamolous out there amidst the corn and soybean fields. The man at the booth told me that there were only 230 left in the whole of the States, and we both agreed it was Covid’s fault. Instead of a gizmo, what you do for the sound is you tune in to a dedicated FM channel. Sweet! And it was thus that we beheld the wonders of Disney’s Haunted Mansion, a remake, as Adam reminded us. It was fun and cheesy and at a certain point the clement sky was overshadowed by clouds and lightning began to play on the horizon – not a bad addition to a haunted house movie. Just as the hero was embracing the heroine in the inevitable ending, the rain began to fall. Thus, in an additional dollop to the memory this will become for Adam, the parents scouted their way cautiously through a cloudbuster of a storm, across various bridges. As a driver, I’m on the spectrum with the Ancient Mariner – so cautious I’m a danger, or at least an irritant, to the poor unfortunate behind me. So we crept the 14 miles to home. And so to bed.
13,000 years ago, the Lake
I look at from the dining room window would have been embodied in an ice sheet,
around 1300 feet thick, the 'Des Moines Glacial Ice Lobe'. A mere millenium
later, the ice wall had retreated north – glaciers have the attributes of
troops on a battlefield, they are always advancing or retreating – leaving the
depression into which water found its way.
The Ice Age! I love that
term, and associate it with the American contribution to geology – via Agassiz.
Who actually hypothesized the ice age in Switzerland.
‘On July 24, 1837, the
Societe Helvetique des Sciences Naturelles ha its annual meeting in Neuchatel
and Agassiz gave his opening addres known as the Discours de Neuchatel, which
is the starting point of that has been written on the Ice-Age.” This I break
off from Albert Carozzi’s “Agassiz’s Amazing Geological Speculation: the
Ice-Age.”
Like many a European
scientist, Louis Agassiz eventually came to the United States – in search of
proof for his glacial hypothesis. Carozzi sees, exactly, the romantic aesthetic
behind Agassiz’s striking proposal.
“During his stay in
America, Agassiz never lost sight of the traces glacial action, which had
caught his attention the moment he land in the fall of 1846. Here is a striking
account of his first impression:
"When the steamer
stopped at Halifax, eager to set foot on the new continent full of promise for
me, I sprang on shore and started at a brisk pace for the heig above the
landing. On the first undisturbed ground, after leaving the town, I w met by
the familiar signs, the polished surfaces, the furrows and scratches... so well
known in the Old World; and I became convinced of what I had already
anticipated as the logical sequence of my previous investigations, that here
also this great agent had been at work.”
We could be reading the
words of Dr. Frankenstein, in search of his great agent.
Hard to believe in ice on
this sunny morning. But I must mention one other great agent in this dimly
rhapsodic string: Marianne Moore. Her poem, the Octopus, is, to my mind, the
most enigmatic of the American attempts to saw the epic into a form fit for the
American tongue. It was one of John Ashberry’s totems, with its bristle of
indirections and the babble of its mysterious citations. No other poem gets so
close to seeing America as a poem, a geological, botanical, political epic,
with all its bloody edits. Eliot might quote Dante; Moore would quote “W. P.
Taylor, Assistant Biologist, Bureau of Biological Survey, U. S. Department of
Agriculture.”
Hard to believe in ice. The
lake bears its speedboats, water skiers, and lilly pads, made of some foamy
material, perfect tabs for young swimmers to leap around on. Last night, in the
storm, it was all bustling with white caps, and today it is placid and flat.
We’ll soon take a boat and dock over at Arnold’s Park and go to the Nutty Bar.
The Ice. It is melting in
the background, the planetary background, even as I type. But I like to think
of Agassiz and Moore today. Vacation is made of blissful, intentional
ignorances.
The fir trees in “the
magnitude of their root systems,”
rise aloof from these
maneuvers “creepy to behold,”
Leon Edel makes a
shrewd juxtaposition between the fate of Charlotte Verver in the Golden Bowl
and the consequent voyage to America of the hero of his biographical trifecta, Henry James, quoting Fanny Assingham: “I see
the long miles of ocean and the dreadful great country. State after State –
which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible.”
Henry James’s travels
in the U.S. in 1904, 21 years after he’d been there last, make up that bundle
of impressions, The American Scene. James is the Silenus of expatriates – we all
bow down to his altar, sooner of later. State after State – this was the great “subject”
he was after, another writer – like Kerouac or Whitman, Mailer or, why not,
Jane Smiley – in search of the real American thing, a story to pull out of the
terrible vastness. On his first day, disembarked in New Jersey, James could
already feel it:
Nothing was left, for
the rest of the episode, but a kind of fluidity of appreciation a mild, warm
wave that broke over the succession of aspects and objects according to some
odd inward rhythm, and often, no doubt, with a violence that there was little
in the phenomena themselves flagrantly to justify. It floated me, my wave, all
that day and the next ; so that I still think tenderly for the short backward
view is already a distance with "tone" of the service it rendered me
and of the various perceptive penetrations, charming coves of still blue water,
that carried me up into the subject, so to speak, and enabled me to step
ashore.”
What expat come home
has not surfed on that wave? Has not felt some lost familiarity in its motion
and temperature? Some intervening distance that puts one on one side, the stranger
at the party?
But Charlotte Verver
and Henry James came home from a Europe that was truly distant – when distance
was the experience of days and tossing currents, not of today’s menu of movies
and tv shows and jet lag – an utterly new experience of time. I arrived in
Atlanta a little sick, but soon cast off the threatened cold and plunged as directly
as I could, with a casting off of newspaper headlines, into the “subject”. It is
a plunging that requires cars, and getting used to vast, cathedral like grocery
stores all over again. For Adam, the New Jerusalem is all about his bucket list
of fast food places, as well as going, in Atlanta (and Athens, visiting his
cousins), to comic book stores and parks and even visiting the King memorial
down on Auburn Street. We are in Iowa now, and the bucket list consists of swimming for three hours a day in Lake Boji and amusement park rides in Arnold’s Park.
Myself, I am pretty
amazed by the unconscious affluence here, the cheapness in the Walmart and the
expensiveness of the restaurants; I’m tickled by the voices, by the way that
the grocery store clerk can decide to tell you the story of her dog’s funny
habits while ringing you up, just because; and I’m amazed at feeling so very
American myself, as through bursting through the thin layer of the French quotidian.
Feeling American does
not mean feeling kin to the official face America shows the world, or the unofficial
American buzz on social media. I know that’s there. That’s always there. But
that is not the wave. The wave is what I am interested in, more, at the moment.
“Truth is stranger
than fiction” – such is the truism. About truisms, one never says that they are
stranger than fiction – on the contrary, a truism banalizes truth. They are,
definitionally, obvious, self-evident. They are even, according to the Oxford
English Dictionary, hardly worth stating. The energy used to state them could
be used elsewhere – for discovery, for instance. Invention. To bring to light
something previously not known. Not known to be true. Truism then exists on the
lowest level of organization, as material to use in organization and not itself
to be organized. It is not “worth” paying attention to, or at least for too
long. In this way, some critics say – Karl Kraus being the chief of this number
– the truism can operate as a disguise.
Truism, under the pressure
of such intelligence, an intelligence that I would suggest is “modern”, reveals
itself as unheimlich, uncanny. It brings out, so to speak, the truth’s
unconscious lie, in bringing out the system in which the truth operates.
I mentioned Kraus, but
I could mention Swift. Swift is, of course, an odd liminal figure in the rise
of the modern, being committed as he was to the ancient. But the tools he employed,
from picaresque satire to the essay-prank to the adventure novel, are all very
modern – as is his prose, a prose that could have been recommended by the
historian of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat. As a complete social fact, a
surroundsound of all possible circumstances, the modern can only be fought, by
the reactionary – and Kraus falls in
this character often enough – by taking
up shock, the most modernist stylistic device. It is a style that begins to
diffuse through cultures that, for one reason or another, contain massive
demographics that are existentially offended by the modern.
I diverge, I diverge
from the question I meant to pose at the very beginning, the question about the
truism about the true: by what measure is the truth stranger than fiction? In
fact, the formalists say that making strange, estrangement, is one of the great
devices of art to advance the “true” – in the sense of the authentic. Truth,
here, emerges from the particular to the level of the entire circumstance, or
the Gestalt. Skhlovskii defines that
strangeness as a form of de-routinization. A part of the world – a tree, say –
is given a presence that seems to depart from the routines to which trees in
the human world are subject – chopping them down, planting them in groves or
along streets, cooling ourselves in their shade, etc. The tree in Tolstoy’s
short piece, Three deaths, for instance, is given a more tragic and meaningful
death than the two human beings who also die in the sketch, even though the
tree is in no way anthropomorphized.
And is this only a
fictional device? Isn’t it rather one of the great devices of journalism? Here
is a field where, surely, the claim that fiction is less strange than truth is
abundantly verified by the truths that pour off the newspaper page or, now, the
cable tv – internet!
Yet these outrageous,
scandalous or simply weird truths gain that quality partly through the aids of
fiction, through being mediated by devices that are, in their nature,
rhetorical. The ancestor of the news, that unwelcome primitive at our table, is
rumor. And rumor, as any glance at the recent history of the U.S. – or any “Western”
country – will show, is a mighty force still, not a vanquished oral phenomenon
of the villages. The blood of the serfs runs within us.
2.
There are the truths
that we know, and the truths that we fear.
Although rumor is
characteristically “word of mouth”, the letter and the vocable are not so
easily divided, one from the other.
In B. Janine’s “memories of a private detective”, published
in Police Magazine in 1935, there is a story about a detective agency in Paris
that drummed up business by sending anonymous letters to various likely
clients, and then sending advertisements for the agency that mentioned, among
the agency’s specialties, the tracking down of the truth of anonymous letters.
This strategy was
eventually exposed by the police, with the help of another private detective: “This
singular agency had to close its doors. Its director confessed that by this
little game, he had garnered 100,000 francs per month.”
France has a strong
culture of the anonymous letter. Poison pen epistoliers even have a nickname: corbeau –
crow – from the movie by Clouzot, which was based on the famous case of Angele
Laval, who between 1917 and 1921 flooded
her village, Tulle, with 13,000
inhabitants, with a constant stream of anonymous
denunciations – at least one hundred letters have been counted - that caused a panic. “ The apotheosis of this
odious campaign was achieved in 1921, when a large poster was pasted up on the
door of a local theater, on which were listed the names of 14 illegitimate
couples, which is, at that time, evidently of the nature to provoke a scandal.”
When Angele was put under investigation, she really showed her true psycho
colors: she « convinced her mother
to commit a double suicide with her in a local pont. But everything indicates
that, in reality, she never had any intention of putting the quietus to her
life. Her mother drowned herself under Angele’s eyes who watched her drown
without ever immersing herself totally in the water.”
Surrealism, as we all
know, was just realism in France.
Rumor by letter has a
voice – or a distinct graphology. A criminologist named Edmond Locard became a
celebrity for, among other things, his graphological detecting – notes,
letters, jottings all revealed their authors before his eyes. The slant of the “t”,
the capital letter “E” – these, given a larger writing sample, would sort
themselves out prettily, leading to the perpetrator.
In one of his famous
interwar cases, he intervened in another corbeau-esque panic in 1933 in Toulon. In this
case, the accused was again a woman – Germaine Pouliot – and Locard pursued her
relentlessly through the “buckles of her Ts”. These letters apparently lead to
Germaine – although she had an odd defender in Aux Ecoutes. Aux
Ecoutes fascinates me: that Maurice Blanchot edited this scandal sheet, known
for publishing rumors and for orienting itself to an audience of stock market
punters, is rather like Maurice Blanchot editing National Enquirer in its glory
years. Alas, in Blanchot scholarship, attention has fixed on his essays in the
paper, his columns, rather than the context.
In the Toulon case,
the “corbeau” was particularly malevolent with the wife of a well known lawyer,
Madame Septier, accusing her of adultery and general lasciviousness. The
journalist from Aux Ecoutes takes as his starting point, oddly enough,
that Toulon is a veritable Sodom, where bourgeois families go to church and
then the local brothel together – etc. What really infuriates this anonymous
journalist, however, is the supposed method of the famed Locard.
“Dr. Locard, in his
report, claimed that all the buckles of the T were always shortened in the
anonymous letters, as in the letters of the accused. To the courtroom Madame de
Rous showed him one of the threatening letters, which contained 26 instances of
the letter T. 17 times the “always” of Dr. Locard is wrong.”
In spite of this,
Germaine Pouliot was condemned – although the sentence was only a suspended six month sentence. But as Aux Ecoutes noted,
in 1934 – by which time Blanchot was the editor – the sentence was overturned
when it was discovered in Pouliot’s dossier some documents containing certain words resembling those of the poison letters
that were definitely not Pouliot’s letters. The judge of the appeals court agreed,
as did the prosecutor. As the newspaper noted: “Rarely has the problem of the
responsibility of experts and the reform of expertise been posed in terms as
troubling as this!”
3.
In the intersection
between rumor and text culture, between the courtroom and the mailbox, it is
true: the methods of truth are as strange as the methods fiction. Or, to quote
from the “Postman of the Truth” concerning letters, purloined or not – a matter addressed by the great masters, from Poe to Lacan to
Derrida -“it belongs to the structure
of the letter to be capable, always, of not arriving…”
A good book. One review remarked: “Complex analyses — always accompanied by a great attention to the sources, the texts — develops the thesis according to which these provocations [of the anarchist movement] translate a crisis as to the capacity of language to transmit a « realistic » perception of social relations ; a crisis that touched, of course, on the confidence in parliamentary rule, but also, more generally, on the status of communication — thus, of literature…”
Salvation, which I once thought of as bourgeois mystification, I now think of as a historical necessity. I grow old, I grow old.
I liked the idea of mi-revolutionnaires and illegalists. So I started to research the “affaire Duval.” Which brought me to an address: 31 Rue de Monceau.
A pretty and expensive part of Paris, today. A pretty and expensive part of Paris in the 1880s, too.
I have been thinking about addresses in Paris. I’ve been thinking of city novels and addresses. I’ve been thinking that in the streets of certain cities, certain capitals, there are ghosts. Ghosts of historic events. And ghosts of faits divers. The outlaw event, the irregularity. Didier Decoin wrote: “what seduces us are the “little people” of the fait divers.” In opposition to a history of great events and great people.
An opposition that, like the old regime that forged it, has not entirely crumbled.
That’s pure speculation on my part. Nobody else says it.
Duval, by profession a locksmith, was a member of the Batignolle Panther, an anarchist group whose choice of totem animal did not, I believe, influence the choice of the same totem for the Black Power militants of the 1960s. However, under the surface, leftist touches leftist, situation situation, courtroom theatre, courtroom theatre. Who knows what rumors Huey Newton might have heard?
It was in 1886 when the Duval affair reached the Paris papers. Duval and a mysterious man named Turquais or Turquet, resolved to put into practice the slogan, expropriate the expropriators. Proudhon’s phrase, Property is Theft (a maxim that contains the essence of graffiti as the anarchist weapon of choice) had been absorbed into the anarchist community. The “right to theft”, which had, they claimed, been the property of the upper class, was to become the property of those bold enough among the workers to claim it. Thievery on a mass scale — capitalism — was to be met with thievery on an individual scale — anarchy. The target they chose was, to say the least, peculiar: a two story town house in which a fashionable painter, Madame Lemaire, lived and worked. On October 6, 1886, at 31 Rue Monceau, a fire broke out — a fire set by robbers. Let me quote Maitron, the indispensable site for radical history:
In Duval’s memoir, translated into English by Michael Shreve, Duval describes the circumstances that led to him being tried for attempted murder:
“You are accused of the attempted murder of Sergeant Rossignol. When this officer was investigating Didier with the chief of detectives, Didier’s wife pointed you out as Duval to the officer. He asked you to follow him to talk to the chief of detectives. You answered that you had no business with him and he wasn’t one of your friends. Seeing this, the officer identified himself as a sergeant of the police and arrested you in the name of the law. You answered him: ‘Ah! Scum, in the name of freedom I’ll strike you down!’ And you stabbed him eight times with a handmade dagger, intending to kill him.”
“I only struck Sergeant Rossignol twice and not eight times. If I’d stabbed him eight times, being all worked up by the surprise at being arrested as I was, he would probably not be here to testify. It was a scratch, a scrape that he got when we fell off the sidewalk. Unfortunately, he dragged me down with him in his fall, otherwise neither he nor Officer Pelletier, who was with him, would have arrested me.”
“So, you would have killed them both?”
“No, I would have defended my freedom. But I couldn’t. Officer Pelletier right away took advantage of my fall by grabbing me by my throat and my private parts; and Rossignol was able to get hold of my right thumb and bite it.”
4.
A certain air of farce. Officer Rossignol. Officer Nightingale. The grabbing of the private parts, the biting of the thumb.
5.
Albert Bataille, in his early thirties at the time, covered the trial for the Figaro. Bataille was trained as a lawyer. Among his colleagues, he was known for his energy and persistence: “Leaning his head over his pad of paper, pen in hand, he would report on what he was seeing for five or six hours at a time. … He grasped on the fly sudden incidences that would cause a shock, he’d extract from interrogatories everything that was pertinent, susceptible to enlighten the reader…” In France, Bataille was known for a report maintaining that journalists should be trained as such, at the higher education level. He died in 1899 from a heart attack: “ A little tired the last two or three days”, read the report in the Figaro, “he had happily passed the evening at home, with his family. At one in the morning the first symptoms of the sickness declared themselves. His entourage, and he himself, at first believed that it was only a not very serious feeling of discomfort, and soon, after taking some care, his good humor returned. It was only around seven in the morning that a new crisis occurred. He got up suddenly, then, regaining his bed, at the insistence of his poor frightened wife, he told her simply, I am lost, and died in her arms.”
Bataille described Duval like this, on January 14, 1887: “Duval is a bad boy around thirty years old, hairy, with an evil squint, a bushy moustache, a line in bibulous talk, a sinister clown who posed himself before the jury without seeing that he was playing for his head.”
Posed. A threatrical term. One used by Duval himself — he spoke, once, about being “posed” — playing the role of — the accused. The dramaturgy leaks through the legal ritual.
Yet, Bataille’s account of Duval’s street eloquence is not without a certain hint of admiration. Duval was not a buffoon, a sinister clown, however much his working class manners insulted the dignity of a courtroom that was, in its etiquette, a redoubt of esoteric and feudal gestures. His speech to the jury after they found him guilty is both moving and, for the readers of Figaro, where it appeared in Bataille’s reporting, a threat.
“I have to tell you that I am not a thief, but a rebel. I have to tell you why I am an anarchist. My lawyer has posed me here before you as the accused. But I pose myself as the accuser. If you want the head of an anarchist, here it is, take mine. But I have the right to turn to bourgeois society and ask it to account for itself. Theft, on our part, is restitution. In pillaging, as you put it, the town house of Madame Madeleine Lemaire, I committed an act of anarchy.
I’ve given the people a lesson in the deed…. I do not recognize your law. I am not a defendant — I am an avenger!”
6.
Yet was this locksmith an avenger?
Or a dupe?
For his tussle with a policeman, his stealing of silver and jewellery, and for setting a fire that burned “a portrait of Lemaire by Chaplin, a piano, and an umbrella painted by a young miss,” Duval was given the death penalty. However, because this sentence caused a stir — it is a little much to guillotine a man for scratching a plainclothes policeman and taking some thousands of dollars in jewellery that was quickly recovered — it was changed to life in the prison colony of Guyana, another sort of death sentence. Duval’s speeches had been too well reported in the papers to allow him to serve five years in some prison in France. Duval himself published, or had someone publish, a little pamphlet containing his defence. In his memoir, he claimed that 50,000 of these pamphlets were sold. So: better to bury him in the French overseas concentration camp system. Like the much more famous Henri Charrière — Papillon — he managed in the end, after 18 years, to escape his prison in Guyana. Papillon became a movie, written by Dalton Trumbo, the ex communist. In Marianne Enckell’s introduction to Duval’s memoirs, Duval is called an anti-Papillon — Papillon was, after all, a cop stooge who bowed down to the authorities, snitched, and snubbed his fellow prisoners. Duval, that hirsute locksmith, was far more guilty in the eyes of bourgeois society: he threatened it with the bomb. His Hollywood category is plainly villain.
7.
“… and Clement Duval, who made his name in 1886 by knifing a police officer.” Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: the story of America in its first age of Terror.
:… A burglar named Clement Duval, who stole from a wealthy Paris residence, was transformed into Comrade Duval.” John Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror.
“… Clement Duval, a notorious robber who justified his profession as a redress of social oppression.” Louis Patsouras, Crucible of Socialism.
And to say back: those who are pointing out the terrorism are justifying the oppression. Flip the coin: on both sides, there’s faces.
8.
There are so many perspectives, infinite perspectives, in which a person can be seen, and the sum of these is a difficulty for novelist, policeman, anarchist, artist and the angels of God. Even those celestial recorders with their data. What does it profit an angel if they mark down a theft and lose their own souls?. Was Duval the anti-Papillon, the avenger even in chains? Paul Mimande, a journalist, went to Guyane in 1894 and wrote a reportage: Among the anarchist felons. As a senior convict, Duval was a mentor to many of those sent to the prison camps as the French Republic cracked down on political dissent. Mimande went and interviewed certain names that had once seemed threats to the bourgeois order. Duval was living, then, on one of the island camps, in a hut. He’d returned to his old job as locksmith. When Mimande asked his police guide about Duval, he was told that he no longer had the “hand” of a good locksmith, but: “… he is full of good will, no transferee is as submissive, as gentle, as well behaved.”
Mimande found that Duval had not lost his convictions. Which bored the journalist-tourist. So he asked about his wife, the family from which he had been parted, and got a satisfactory breakdown, tears, some ragged regrets about his wife. Mimande was satisfied.
Mimande’s account is of a different Duval than the one who penned the memoirs. Far from being submissive, Duval made 18 attempts to escape and he aided in a failed rebellion. He finally did escape in 1901. His memoirs, which recount his life in Guyana among the political prisoners, don’t give the details of that escape. Duval did not think of himself as an adventurer. He was an avenger.
In the Affaire Duval, there is a mysterious gap, from the beginning. Duval, when he was caught, spoke of one Turquais. Or Turquet. “I met him boulevard de la Chapelle. I initiated him into anarchism. I showed him our newspapers, which are made by workers and not journalists. And then he indicated to me a good job. (with the voice of a villain in a melodrama) The day came at last to break open the strong boxes of the rich! (general hilarity).”
Another version: “I was out of work last September. My boss, to whom I had been denounced as a member of the anarchist group, the Panther of Batignolles, threw me out on the pavement. One day, in the square of Villette, I came upon Turquet sitting on a bench, not less desperate than me. We spoke of social injustice, and I showed him that it was time for anarchists to act against the propertied class. I told him that I had fabricated a jimmy for stealing, hoping by this example to give courage to the workers, who will not be free until they have blown open the safes of their bosses. It is Turquet who proposed that we rob Madame Lemaire.”
Duval did not disclaim the idea behind his crime; but his forging of a “pince” a burglar’s tool for forcing open locked drawers was as far as he had gotten. He was a talker, Duval. He wanted to “teach” the working man. Hypothesis: this is the very type of gull that the agent provocateur preys on.
Turquet knew of Madame Lemaire. How? This uncaught presence knew a place. Don’t they always? It was Turquet who shimmied over a wall, and let Duval in to the garden of the apartment. Turquet, when they got to Suzanne Lemaire’s room, the daughter of the painter, read her letters and scattered them on the carpet. They must have gone through the atelier. They must have recognized it as such. A place of work. Turquet set fire to the house, the latter over Duval’s objections. Not that Duval was against the arson for bourgeois reasons! Duval does not come out and say it, but he evidently thought arson would endanger the other people in the town house. The Judge and prosecutor laughed at Duval’s claims. Where was this Turquet? The police could not find him. Although Duval never expressed this, either at the trial or in his memoirs, there is something funny about Turquet, something that bothered Duval enough that, even though he took on himself the guilt, or the glory of the burglary, he compulsively told on Turquet. Even as he exculpated the two others who were on trial with him.
Was there really a Turquet? Was Turquet, the man conveniently on that bench, really… an agent provocateur?
Duval’s testimony, as it is reported in the different papers, makes for a slightly confused transcript, since different reporters hear different things. One collates, one gets a broad picture from the stories. But the overall tone of the courtroom is pretty clear, with the President of the court and the prosecutor either sneering or indignant, and Duval acting as he must have imagined he would act, if given a chance: as though he were turning his deed back into words, words that would penetrate the hard of hearing bourgeois world — as well as reaching the masses. He was there to testify, to tell a story, to make a courtroom procedure about a crime into a agit-prop drama about a person. The courtroom was where he could testify about his own existence; for him, the judge, the partial and stooge like “President”, was a kind of prop bourgeois in a scenario he and his anarchist group knew well.
Knew as a caricature. In the same way they were known by the judge, the reporters, the middle class readers, as caricatures. Caricature faces caricature. On both sides, there’s faces. He was proud of stealing, but never showed that he was an egotist about it, a disciple of Stirner. It was a deed clearly led to by the logic of anarchism, but it was a deed that was, primarily, for anarchism. He was clear that he was not stealing for his wife and family. In previous seasons of poverty, he had stolen a crust of bread, vegetables to feed himself and his wife, but these were not anarchist thefts. The robbery of 31 Rue Monceau was for money to fund the cause. It was for weapons, it was for printing presses. Which makes it all the more puzzling that he would try to hide his tracks through a fire, and all the more plausible that this really was not his idea.
Even at the time, even among sympathizers like the group that published Cry of the People, there were discussions of Duval’s individualist expropriation. Wasn’t theft itself always theft? If property was theft, that doesn’t mean one was therefore, justified in stealing property. Or was this to continue the chain of (socially evil) being. The mirror doesn’t destroy the room it reflects, it simply reflects it as another piece of furniture.
10.
Duval was asked if he knew Madam Lemaire. “No. But Mme. Lemaire is part of the collectivity of parasites which gnaw the worker and nourish themselves on their sweat, so I accepted to do the job. I must add that if I had known there was no money rue de Monceau, I would never have gone.”
Meanwhile, Madam Lemaire had settled back into her routine. Her work as an artist. Dumas fils, author of Lady of the Camillas, said Lemaire was, next to God, the greatest maker of roses. She provided illustrations for many books — including a thin, highly aesthetic book entitled Les Plaisirs et les jours. A book that caused an incident. Jean Lorrain, a self-consciously decadent writer, reviewed that book under the pseudonym Raitif de la Bretonne, and criticized not only the author, but the illustrator.
“Les Plaisirs et les Jours : serious melancholies, elegiac spinelessness… inane flirting with a precious and pretentious style, with, between the margins or at the head of the chapters, the flowers of Mme Lemaire as strewn symbols — and one of these chapters is called: the death of Baldassare de Silvande, le vicomte de Silvande. Illustration: two jugs. Another, Violante or the mondaine lifestyle. Illustration: two rose leaves (I’m not making this up). The ingeniousness of Mme Lemaire has never been so tightly adapted to the talent of the author… It is thus that a story entitled Amis: Octavian and Fabrice has for its commentary two cats playing the guitar …”
Jean Lorrain’s article goes on in this fashion, and even implied various things about the author’s supposed homosexual liaison with Lucien Daudet. If true, perhaps the rumor had travelled in the same gay circles as Lorrain, a very gay man. In any case, the author replied by challenging Lorrain to a duel.
Each shot twice at the other in the Bois de Meudon. None of the four bullets struck flesh. They both stood there and, one supposes, looked at each other, critic to author, with the author feeling justified and masculinely restored.
On May 11, 1903, a certain Dominique, the pseudonym of the author of Les plaisirs et les jours, wrote a floral article, Le cours aux lilas et l’atelier aux roses, subtitled “The Salon of Madame Madeleine Lemaire” for the Figaro. Was Duval already in New York at this point? The robbery of 31 Rue de Monceau had long been overshadowed by other, more drastic, anarchist deeds. Dominique made no mention of it. Dominique — or, to use his real name, Marcel Proust — was a regular at Madam Lemaire’s soirees. Her name figures extensively in his correspondence, notably with another regular, Reynaldo Hahn. Proust once wrote Hahn that after his Mama, he loved Hahn best. Hahn was a well known pianist, song-writer, and musical impresario. Between Proust and Hahn, in their letters, Madam Lemaire was gently mocked. Later, not so gently mocked, she inspired, in part, Madam Verdurin, with her “mincing tyranny.” Her way of ruling the “little clan” on her Tuesdays. Where Odette met, in an encounter whose modulated shock resonates throughout Proust’s novel, M. Swann.
“Very few of these women painters achieved more than a mediocre standard and one of the more onerous duties of critics was to attend the annual “Salon des Femmes Peintres’ which had been inaugurated in 1881. ‘They would be better employed in devoting themselves to embroidery’, sighed one critic, but there is no use in telling them — they will do it.”
12.
Dominique’s account of Madame Lemaire begins with a pastiche of Balzac that one can’t imagine a society columnist getting away with today. We begin with the neighborhood, and come upon a certain disturbance in the street order:
“… a small townhouse which, contemptuous of all wayfare regulations, advances by a foot and a half on the sidewalk, which thus renders the street hardly wide enough to park cars on…”
The house, for Dominique, still writing under the guise of imitating Balzac, is a symbol for the painter and hostess who lives in it, for it “stops the passerby.” “One senses immediately that its proprietor must be one of those strangely powerful personages, before the caprices or habits of whom all powers must bend, for whom the ordonnances of the Prefecture of the Police and the decisions of the municipal council remain dead letters.”
The strange power that puts at naught the state, or its representatives. One wonders: is this what Duval saw? Did he and his friend Turquet “case” the joint?
Proust at this point was exploring the mysteries of different levels and forms of power — that of literature, that of the society hostess and that of her guest, that of the aristocracy and that of the bourgeois parvenu. As he wrote to Jacques Riviere, he constructed his novel on “many planes”. It is at one of Lemaire’s Tuesdays that Proust met Robert de Montesquieu, who became as important for Proust the novelist (the “model” for Baron de Charlus) as Oliver St. John Gogarty was for Joyce the novelist (the “model” of Buck Mulligan). Thus, from the atelier and salon of 31 Rue de Monceau sprang two of the great figures in A la recherche du temps perdus.
An address is an encounter. An event — which is the form taken by encounters, and which is, at the same time, irreducible to them.
Posing. As regards posing. There’s a passage about the Verdurin salon. Swann comes in looking for Odette. She isn’t there. He leaves. The little clan discusses Swann — that mover between spheres, that man who is, although the Verdurin don’t know it, a personal friend of the Prince of Wales. There is some discussion about if there is something “going on” between Swann and Odette. Monsieur Verdurin remarks that even if there was, the little clan wouldn’t know about it, because it would be a matter between the two people involved.
“She would have told me,” answered Mme Verdurin with pride. “I may say that she tells me everything. As she has no one else at present. I told her that she ought to sleep with him. She makes out that the can’t; she admits, she was immensely attracted to him at first; but he’s always shy with her, and that makes her shy with him. Besides, she doesn’t care for him in that way…”
“You’ll permit me not to be of your opinion,” said M. Verdurin, “he is only half on my good side, this gentleman, and I find him a poser.”
‘Mme Verdurin stiffened, put on an inert expression, as if she were becoming a statue, a fiction that permitted her to seem like she had not heard that insupportable word, poser, which had the air of implying that one could “pose” with them, thus that one was “more than them.””
To pose. To pose in a courtroom or a salon. A salon that, once infected with the suspicion of the poser, might well erode the mysterious power it held, might dissolve the little clan. A suspicion held off by posing — posing as a statue.
Just as a too radical emphasis on the pose one held as the accused might make it seem all too arbitrary whether one was the accused or the accuser, the judge or the avenger.
14.
« Princesse, I am not going to speak to you about the war. I have, alas! Assimilated it so completely that I cannot isolate it, I can no longer speak of the hopes and fears it inspires in me than one can speak of sentiments that one experiences so profoundly that they no longer can be distinguished from oneself. It is less for me an object (in the philosophical sense of the word) than a substance interposed between me and the objects. As one loves in God, I see in the war (you know those neuralgias that one does not cease to feel as one speaks of other things, and even while one sleeps).” Proust, letter to madame Dimitri Soutzo, April, 1918.
Proust was not alone to “see” in war — this became the twentieth century experience, but he was aware of this as few of his contemporaries were.
The world after the war was tough on the world of the Verdurins. New fashions, new morals, new people, new money. It was, as well, tough on the utopias that drove the anarchists. Instead of the stateless future, the future of the collapse of the capitalist class, the future of mutual aid, utopia gravitated to the Bolsheviks.
Paul Avrich interviewed an anarchist named Florence Rossi in Needham Massachusetts on February 14, 1988. The anarchist comrades in Needham were recruited, as in many Massachusetts communities, from the Italian immigrant community. Rossi, along with her partner, Raffaele Schiavina (aka “Bruno”) were editors of L’Adunta dei Refrattari, the “principle Italian anarchist paper in the United States from the 1920s through the 1960s”.
“Clemente Duval lived with us for a while before his death. He had been living with a shoemaker in Brooklyn named Olivieri, but his house was next to the subway and Nonno — that’s what we called Duval — couldn’t sleep. So we moved to Brooklyn from New Jersey and he moved in with us. He was small, old and disfigured from arthritis. But he exercised every morning and a French comrade, Dr. Guilhempe, used to come to examine him. The neighbors thought he was Bruno’s father. He lived with us for a few months. He felt he was going to die and didn’t want to cause use any trouble, so he returned to Olivieri, where he died two days later.”
From Duval’s pamphlet, quoted in his memoir:
“And do you think that a worker with unselfish, noble sentiments can see this picture of human life constantly unroll before his eyes without revolting against it? He who feels all its effects and who is constantly its victim, morally, physically, and materially; he whom they take at twenty years old to pay the blood tax, to use his flesh against bullets to defend the properties and privileges of his masters; and he comes back from this slaughter crippled by it or with a sickness that makes him half-disabled, that makes him roll from hospital to hospital, using his flesh for the experiments of the Gentlemen of Science. I know what I’m talking about: I came back from this carnage with two wounds and rheumatism, sicknesses that have already earned me four years in the hospital and that prevent me from working six months of the year.”
Life sentences, that is what we rebel against. And the sentence keeps winning.
“A sincere artist whose inspirations were without doubt limited, but with a perfect sensibility, Madeleine Lemaire suffered, and horribly, from the sort of disdain that had fallen on her painting. In these last years she received, to finish her off, two cruel blows to the heart. The first before the Nympheas of Claude Monet, which she could not understand, posing this tormenting question to her spirit: Aren’t my flowers as good as the flowers of Giverny? The second blow by an afternoon at the Salle Drouot [an auction house], They were selling a collection in which figured many Madeleine Lemaires. She wanted to know “how much that would bring in”.
The most beautiful, an immense aquarelle, sold for 150 francs. And the artist went out, her eyes humid, feeling that she was finished, that fate had shot its arrow and she was now obsolete…”
Or, as Duval might put it, once bourgeois society has no more use for you, they throw you away like a used rag.
Proust’s Madam Verdurin, in Time Rediscovered, marries twice after the death of her husband, each one bringing her higher into the social circles she so envied and derided in her own little clan. In Proust’s novel, Elstir — that representative of modern art, Monet and Manet in one — is far from being a stranger to the Verdurins. But he leaves that circle when Madam Verdurin interferes too much in his private life.
This is what Proust writes about the death of Monsieur Verdurin. “For every death is for others a simplification of existence, takes away the scruple of having to show one’s gratitude, the obligation to visit. It is in no other way that the death of M. Verdurin was received by Elstir.”
What Proust didn’t imagine was the evaporation of all these scruples before Madam Verdurin’s death, the cold hard marking down of her work in some auction hall, and her afterlife as merely the key to a certain character in a famous novel.
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