Some Leaves
Dogging it lately, riding the mephitic vapours of mere self-
presence, yoohooing
up a routine commodity, ready-shuck’d
et faussement chaleureux.
It’s enough to put one off
the regular feed of rue-
skirting tenacity and humdrum bric-a-brac: that formulaic line
heedlessly recording the new constancy of upheaval’s only smell.
The kind of thing it “behooves” me to utter of a washy evening, the undeplored and regular sunset “occurring.” Periodic loss of temper (meaning “the particular degree of hardness and resiliency tender’d up into a steel blade”—though, recall, too, Cowper’s raffishly harden’d “heart’s temper in the forge / Of lust”—a line rather unrecumbently “feroce and belluine” up to the point where Cowper adds: “and on the anvil of despair.”) Usual cause: some plethora, or abundancy, the concomitant dawdle of excess. The way books fork algorithmick, each demanding a rash of others.
Pound, in 1956, to a BBC interviewer: “You cannot have literature without curiosity, and when a writer’s curiosity dies out he is finished—he can do all the tricks you like, but without curiosity you get no literature with any life in it.” (Pound’s next remark—mandatory reading for the insistently egregious purveyors of dopey labels: “Confusion is caused by package words. You call a man a Manichaean or a Bolshevik, or something or other, and never find out what he is driving at. The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing which is the truth.” Two lies like “School of Quietude” and “post-avant” . . .) So one rabbits along, nitpicking in the clutter, conning the plenitudes. Baudelaire: “Does one show to a now giddy, now indifferent public the working of one’s devices? Does one explain all those revisions and improvised variations, right down to the way one’s sincerest impulses are mixed in with tricks and with the charlatanism indispensable to the work’s amalgamation?” Now here’s a curious thing. I found that quotation in Enrique Vila-Matas’s lovely Bartleby & Co. (New Directions, 2004). He says it’s out of a “note for an unwritten preface for The Flowers of Evil”—a thing I’d like to see. So, dashing the word-package “charlatanism indispensable” up against the pie-eye’d goog of the machine, I find that Roger Shattuck’d quoted the Baudelaire in the 1999 Candor and Perversion, in a stretch about hoaxes, blagues, charlatanry, and the like. Thus:
But we have learned to respect the trickster, the Till Eulenspiegels of our civilized condition. In his notes for an unwritten preface for The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire advised the artist not to reveal his innermost secrets—and thus revealed his own.Vila-Matas:Does one show to a now giddy, now indifferent public the working of one’s devices? Does one explain all those revisions and improvised variations, right down to the way one’s sincerest impulses are mixed in with tricks and with the charlatanism indispensable to the work’s amalgamation?In such a passage, charlatanism comes very close to becoming a synonym of imagination. The two great novels of charlatanism that portray a confidence man, Melville’s 1857 work of that title and Thomas Mann’s unfinished Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1955), convey a latent admiration for the human being who can metamorphose himself into multiple identities. The stranger on Melville’s riverboat performs a wonderfully Duchampian prank on himself, on the other passengers, and on the reader by postinga placard nigh the captain’s office, offering a reward for the capture of a mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently arrived from the East; quite an original genius in his vocation, as would appear, though wherein his originality consisted was not clearly given.No one ever catches up with Melville’s strange impostor—or with Duchamp. . . .
We have learnt to respect tricksters. In his note for an unwritten preface for The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire advised the artist not to reveal his innermost secrets—and thus revealed his own: “Does one show to a now giddy, now indifferent public the working of one’s devices? Does one explain all those revisions and improvised variations, right down to the way one’s sincerest impulses are mixed in with tricks and with the charlatanism indispensable to the work’s amalgamation?”Shattuck’s piece (call’d “Confidence Man: Marcel Duchamp”) ends:
In such a passage, charlatanism comes very close to becoming a synonym of “imagination.” The best novel that has been written about charlatanism and that portrays a con man—The Confidence-Man, 1857—is by Herman Melville, the great inspiration, ever since he created Bartleby, behind the intricate labyrinth of the No.
In The Confidence-Man, Melville conveys a latent admiration for the human being who can metamorphose himself into multiple identities. The stranger on Melville’s riverboat performs a wonderfully Duchampian prank on himself (Duchamp was a prankster and loved pure verbal fantasy, among other reasons because he did not really believe very much in words, he was full of adoration for Jarry, the founder of pataphysics, and for the great Raymond Roussel), a prank on the other passengers, and on the reader by posting “a placard nigh the captain’s office, offering a reward for the capture of a mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently arrived from the East; quite an original genius in his vocation, as would appear, though wherein his originality consisted was not clearly given.”
No-one ever catches up with Melville’s strange impostor, just as nobody ever caught up with Duchamp, the man who did not trust in words: “As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.”
I can hear Duchamp still laughing among the celestial plumbing fixtures not only at our gullibility but also at inferior con men who seek their reward not in laughter but in money or sex or power—or in conventional fame. When Duchamp climbed up onstage at the end of his life to take his bows, he did not have to look down at the steps. From long and careful calculation, he knew exactly where they were. He had planned it all like a master.And Vila-Matas’s ending (of number’d footnote 21—Bartleby & Co. consists of 86 “footnotes commenting on a text that is invisible, which does not mean it does not exist, since this phantom text could very well end up held in suspension in the literature of the next millennuium”):
He laughed at all those inferior con men we’ve become so accustomed to recently, at all those small-time con men who seek their reward not in laughter and the game of the No, but in money, sex, power or conventional fame.(Vila-Matas’s ref to Nude Descending a Staircase undeniably apt, a replacement, one thinks, for Shattuck’s R. Mutt in heaven “laughing among the celestial plumbing fixtures.”) The translator, Jonathan Dunne, in a “Note”: “English quotations in the text have been restored to their original state (interesting here that the work of translation should have become the search for the original, which in many ways I think is what it is).” And: “The curious reader will find a wealth of reading material—and one or two titles missing from library catalogues, ‘held in suspension in the history of the art of the No.’” The epigraph is by Jean de La Bruyère: “The glory or the merit of certain men consists in writing well; that of others consists in not writing.” And Roger Shattuck himself in Bartleby & Co.:
This laughter accompanied Duchamp as he climbed up on stage at the end of his life to take his bow before an audience who admired his extraordinary ability to fool the art world with the minimum of effort. He climbed up on stage and the author of Nude Descending a Staircase did not even have to look down at the steps. From long and careful calculation, the great con man knew exactly where they were. He had planned it all, like the great master of the No he was.
I imagine you are perfectly aware who Duchamp was, but let me remind you of his activities as a writer; let me relate how Duchamp helped Katherine Dreier form her own personal museum of modern art called the Société Anonyme, Inc., advising her what art works to collect. When plans were made to donate the collection to Yale University in the forties, Duchamp wrote thirty-three one-page biographical and critical notices on artists from Archipenko to Jacques Villon.Plain sight. The initial paragraph of Shattuck’s Duchamp piece reads in part: “For fifty years after he had avowedly ceased painting, Marcel Duchamp spent much of his time advising friends what art works to collect. He helped Katherine Dreier form the one-woman museum of modern art called the Société Anonyme, Inc. When plans were made to donate the collection to Yale University in the forties, Duchamp wrote thirty-three one-page biographical and critical notices on artists from Archipenko to Jacques Villon.” Julien Gracq (Reading Writing): “The novel is an addendum to creation, an addendum that neither illuminates it nor reveals it in any way . . .” (See, too, certes, Williams: “poetry has to do with . . . the perfection of new forms as additions to nature.”)
Roger Shattuck has written in the New York Review of Books that had Marcel Duchamp decided, not uncharacteristically, to include a notice on himself as one of Dreier’s artists, he would probably have produced an astute blend of truth and fable, like the others he wrote. Roger Shattuck suggests that he might have written something along these lines:
“A tournament chess player and intermittent artist, Marcel Duchamp was born in France in 1887 and died a United States citizen in 1968. He was at home in both countries and divided his time between them. At the New York Armory Show of 1913, his Nude Descending a Staircase delighted and offended the press, provoked a scandal that made him famous in absentia at the age of twenty-six, and drew him to the United States in 1915. After four exciting years in New York City, he departed and devoted most of his time to chess until about 1954. A number of young artists and curators in several countries then rediscovered Duchamp and his work. He had returned to New York in 1942 and during his last decade there, between 1958 and 1968, he once again became famous and influential.”
