From The Banquet Years: The Arts in France, 1885-1918 Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, Guillaume Apollinaire. Contributors: Roger Shattuck - author. Publisher: Harcourt Brace. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1958.

Alfred Jarry, 1873-1907

SEVEN • Suicide by Hallucination

After us the Savage God.
W. B. Yeats

In respectful mockery, Alfred-Henri Jarry always boasted of his birth exactly on the feast of the Nativity of the Holy Virgin, September 8, 1873. He contrived to die with equal precision on All Saints' Day, 1907. His parents lived, like Rousseau's, in Laval, close enough to the ancient lands of Brittany for Jarry to call himself a Breton. The picturesque and stifling town was known best for the dogged devoutness of its population and for a high incidence of alcoholism. After his own fashion, Jarry was a true son of Laval in both respects.

The father, Anselm Jarry, born of a long line of masons and carpenters in Laval, had worked up to be traveling salesman for a wool factory and then manager. His business acumen was not great, however, and severe reverses obliged him to go on the road again. Neither his person nor his fortunes satisfied his wife, Caroline Ouernest, daughter of a judge in Brittany and boasting noble ancestors. Both her mother and her brother were confined part of their lives for insanity. Caroline herself had been well educated and was convinced of her own artistic gifts. She indulged her stifled ambitions by wearing eccentric clothes, interfering in her husband's business, treating her first child, Charlotte, like a domestic servant, and spoiling Alfred. This parental combination of hard-working artisan father and unstable romantic mother produced an offspring endowed with both strains. Jarry was always something of a sensible maniac.

He made his own pronouncement on his parents some years later when he had adopted the regal speech of Père Ubu. and full of whimsey, of whom we had to approve before we had a voice in the matter.

Our father was a worthless joker--what you call a nice old fellow. He no doubt made our older sister, a girl of the 1830 period who liked to put ribbons in her hair, but he cannot have played much of a role in the confection of our precious person. Our mother was a lady of Coutouly ancestry, short and sturdy, willful and full of whimsy, of whom we had to approve before we had a voice in the matter.

From the beginning, Jarry scorned his father and showed a deep affection for his mother. Virtually deserting her husband, Madame Jarry took the two children away with her to Saint-Brieuc on the Brittany coast, where her father had retired. The boy took to roaming the open country. His earliest writings date from this period--poems and skits in the style of Victor Hugo and Florian. For a boy of twelve they show unusual precociousness and a merciless observation of the local residents and his schoolmates. In Brittany the young Jarry was already showing a characteristic blend of wickedness, charm, and savagery. He spent three years in the town where, forty years earlier, Tristan Corbière had spent the youth he grievously recalled in the poems of Les amours jaunes, and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam had learned the keen irony of Contes cruels.

In the fall of 1888, while Paris excitedly cheered General Boulanger, Madame Jarry and her children moved to the ancient town of Rennes. It is forty miles from Laval, where the father remained, trying to rescue his failing fortunes in the wool business. Jarry entered the lycée, and one of his schoolmates, Henri Hertz, describes how he immediately made his presence felt.

In the lycée and in the town he had a reputation which, in family circles and among professors, provoked sudden silences and obvious embarrassment. He was a brilliant student with all the marks of the worst kind of troublemaker. He excelled in his studies but without trying. At any mention of his irregularities, his escapades, and to tell the whole truth his vices, parents lowered their voices and children their eyes. . . . He delighted in attacks on our modesty. He loved to see our cheeks redden with shame and envy. Since he was already way ahead of the rest of us in his impatient maturity, we knew that everything which he had in common with us took on another meaning for him.

Madame Jarry had brought to Rennes a mixture of vice and virtue, half brat, half prodigy--a potache. (This familiar French word for schoolboy connotes mild toleration for the frenzied play acting of adolescence.) His companions admired him, haltingly followed his lead, and hated him a little for being able to flaunt an unpunished arrogance. His conduct, which alternated between virtuosity and effrontery, revealed a terrible wrenching of personality in which an aggressive imagination struggled with an almost invincible timidity. The other potache of French literature, Rimbaud, could not sustain the role. He abandoned his career as poet at the age of nineteen to become an ill-starred adventurer; Jarry, completing his best work between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, refused ever to come to terms with the world. His life and his work united in a single threat to the equilibrium of human nature. He died at thirty-four in a gradual suicide by poverty, drink, and violated identity.

At Rennes the pupil Jarry was far from handsome. His stature was close to that of a midget. He had a scrunched-up little face which was further twisted by a racking cough, as if violent excesses had very early undermined his health. "With his steep brow, keen eyes, and grating voice," writes another schoolmate, "he hewed his own path through the wilderness, running any risk, rebuffing people fearlessly, his squat torso planted firmly on bandy legs." It is reported, too, that he had surprisingly soft eyes. Despite his abrupt manner, he had a charm which always disarmed his enemies. Casual friendship did not come easily to him, but he formed bonds of extreme intimacy with a few schoolmates--principally with one, Henri Morin, and his brother Charles.

In the provincial lycée Jarry's encounter with the physics teacher was destined to make literary history. Professor Hébert was a well-meaning, obese, helplessly incompetent teacher such as boys immediately recognize as their prey. In 1888 the man was already an established institution, baited almost to death by the students, who brought frogs and grasshoppers into the ancient classroom (in a converted monastery), talked openly, and threw things at the blackboard while he was writing on it. His demonstrations in "my science of physics" always met with disaster; his classes were pandemonium for the whole hour--a circumstance which the lycée authorities seem to have blinked at. The name Hébert became legendary and underwent transformations into Heb and Hébé. The pupils of the school stole time from their lessons to compose extravagant plays and narratives of the adventures of Père Heb. In his own catastrophic versions he relived Ruy Blas and Don Quixote. For years Monsieur Hébert suffered before his charges, trying not to hear their taunts, dropping capillary tubes and thermometers from trembling hands.

Jarry carried the attack to a new level. Before the expectant class, this brazen new student asked questions so cunning and paradoxical that Heb was reduced to confusion. And Jarry began to collaborate with the Morin brothers on the various cycles of Heb epics and plays. In a well documented work on this period of Jarry's career, Charles Chassé summarizes the plots of some of these literary incunabula." Père Heb's behavior consists of two movements: translation and rotation about a vertical axis. When he moves in a straight line, each of his extremes describes a cycloid." In the fifteenth century Père Heb turned into a fish in order to enjoy the warmth of the Gulf Stream. He swam up the Seine, was pulled out on the end of a line, and resumed his human form. Shortly afterward, Père Heb came up for his oral exams before several terrified professors. His sole baggage of learning was composed of two or three Cuneiform letters which he tried his haphazard best to reproduce.

The principal characteristics of Père Heb were physical: a gidouille, or belly, of immense proportions; three teeth, one of stone, one of iron, one of wood; a single, retractable ear; and a body so misshapen that he could not pick himself up if he fell down--as he often did. And so it went, according to the vagaries of the schoolboy mind. Everything the boys read and recited was burlesqued. No author existed who would not yield a new chapter of tribulations for Père Heb to survive.

All this savage scholarship was Jarry's meat, and, within a few months of his arrival, he took the initiative of staging some of the plays. Charlotte Jarry, the two Morin brothers, and several other students produced Les Polonais in the Morin attic with Jarry as impresario, scene painter, and star. This was the ur-text of Ubu Roi, the play that shocked Paris eight years later. In the Jarry attic marionettes were the specialty, a medium for which Jarry never lost his passion. His theatrical experience, however, was not confined to attics. He and Henri Morin dressed up and impersonated monks in the streets of Rennes; they became brave courtiers and attacked people in the market place with sabers; they raised havoc indoors and out with fearless chemical experiments; they canoed and boxed and fenced; they were tireless enthusiasts of the newest means of transportation, the bicycle, and the thirty-mile trip to Mont-Saint-Michel scarcely taxed their endurance. Yet in the early morning hours Jarry was studying and writing, surrounded by his dictionaries, stuffed animals, and collection of musical instruments. Before he left the lycée he had accumulated a prodigious knowledge--not all of it from books however. Occasionally he came late to school looking disheveled and exhausted, as if he had been up all night. To those who asked him where he had been, he answered unchallengeably, "In-the-bro-thels."

Jarry stayed three years in Rennes, distrusted by his teachers and untouched by the discipline of the school. He became a bachelier with an excellent record in Greek, Latin, German, and drawing. He very nearly chose to attempt the engineering training of the Ecole Polytechnique, but he finally decided to go to Paris and prepare at the Lycée Henri IV for the Ecole Normale. In 1891, at the age of seventeen, Jarry arrived in the capital--doubtless by bicycle.

Paris did not intimidate Jarry--at least not on the surface. He remained the potache, astonishing his companions in the vast halls of the Henri IV with his buffooneries. When the classics professor congratulated Jarry on his style in Latin and asked him what author he had used as a model, Jarry replied, "Aristophanes." The class guffawed, thinking he had confused the classical languages, and Jarry explained haughtily that he meant the footnoted translations into discreet Latin of the many obscene passages in the original Greek.

During initiation rites at the recess hour, new students were required to improvise a speech on the most unlikely topic that could be dreamed up. Jarry's performance became celebrated; the subject assigned him was Turkistan. Again a schoolmate, C. G. Gens-d'Armes, has recalled the incident.

"Turkistan--just the subject I know best. The Orient my friends, the unfathomable Orient . . ." In a minute he was talking about the Turks, Istanbul, Pierre Loti, Aziade. He was recalled to the subject. "The subject!" he said. "What else am I talking about? Since when is a digression out of order? Cicero himself in Pro Milone. . ." The audience was submerged. The bell rang and Jarry concluded, "My friends, we have treated as best we could the first part of this vast subject. We shall take it up again tomorrow at the point where this idiot bell is forcing us to stop."

He did not take it up again. But from that day on Jarry's mental mechanism disturbed me. When he opened the valve of his wit, he seemed to follow after the stream of his words without any control over them. It was no longer a person speaking but a machine driven by some demon. His jerky voice, metallic and nasal, his abrupt puppet-like gestures, his fixed expression, his torrential and incoherent flow of language, his grotesque or brilliant images, this synchronism which today we should compare to the movies or the phonograph--all this astonished me, amused me, irritated me, and ended by upsetting me.

He was informed, intelligent, and discriminating; he was good, even sweet-tempered, and perhaps timid beneath it all. But he lacked that something which prevents people from putting the cart always before the horse and from ruining their lives. His originality was too much like some mental anomaly.

It was not long before this originality almost eclipsed the engaging young man who sought protection behind it.

These were fervid times for the young men studying at the Henri IV. From Professor Bourdon they heard the revolutionary doctrines of Nietzsche before his works were translated into French; Professor Henri Bergson soberly developed his theories of comedy and laughter in the same classrooms; the Russian novel, anarchism, occultism, and symbolism were in the air; and Jarry had his own special interests in Rabelais, Shakespeare, Poe, De Ouincey, Coleridge, Greek and Latin texts, heraldry, and the cabala. "That was the period," Jarry wrote years later, "when a revelation took place; even a verse from the Apocalypse is not too grandiloquent: 'The sky opened and rolled back like a scroll.'" Gradually he abandoned his schooling and the hopes of Ecole Normale for the tempting career of an homme de lettres.

Jarry's closest friend at this time was Léon-Paul Fargue, who was also writing verses and looking for a place in the literary world. According to Fargue, Jarry "created a sensation with his hooded provincial cape and his stovepipe hat which was taller than he was and glistened like burnished metal." In 1893 they made friends with an auctioneer and horse dealer by the name of Louis Lormel, who published a small literary review, L'Art Littéraire, and with Marcel Schwob, author of La croisade des enfants and editor of the literary supplement of L'Echo de Paris. ^* Schwob quickly recognized Jarry's talent, as did the writers Octave Mirbeau and Catulle Mendès, who worked on the same paper, and Félix Fénéon, one of the most perceptive defenders of symbolism and impressionism. Jarry attended several of Mallarmé's last Tuesday soirees in the Rue de Rome and often finished the evening alone with the poet of silence and the sonnet form. And now Jarry met Alfred Vallette, editor of the Mercure de France, and his handsome spirited wife, Madame Rachilde, a prolific novelist. These two became his lifelong friends, publishing his work, receiving him in their home, and caring for him in his last poverty-stricken years. The Mercure held regular Tuesday receptions whose habitués included the entire general staff of symbolism: the critic-novelist Remy de Gourmont, the poets Henri de Régnier, Albert Samain, Pierre Louys, Gustave Kahn, Charles-Henri Hirsh, Franc-Nohain, and many others. Among them moved a few unknowns like Paul Valéry, André Gide, Maurice Ravel, and Alfred Jarry. None caused such a sensation in the circle as Jarry. Madame Rachilde describes how he first appeared at the Mercure receptions with a strikingly pale face, straight black hair, bright red lips, a vague mustache, and dark phosphorescent eyes "like those of a night bird." He made his literary debut "like a wild animal entering the ring."

Despite his fearsome behavior, and because of it, Jarry was well received at the Mercure and on the café terraces. He was soon on friendly terms with Régnier and Gourmont, Valéry and--with wariness on both sides --Gide. On April 23, 1893, Marcel Schwob L'Echo de Paris supplement published a brief text by Jarry which won a prize for the best prose work by a young author. These fragmentary dialogues, entitled Guignol, present publicly for the first time Père Ubu (changed from Hébé), his Conscience, and his science of "'Pataphysicks." A month later Jarry won the poetry prize in the same paper with three prose poems. Along with Mallarmé, Gide, Remy de Gourmont, and Fargue, Jarry became a contributor to Lormel L'Art Littéraire, where he published two articles, two perceptive art chroné icles which mention Gauguin and Rousseau, and the drama César-Antéchrist. The Mercure de France then brought out his first book, Les minutes de sable mémorial

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^*

In 1896 Jarry dedicated Ubu Roi to Schwob and inscribed a copy to him thus: "Just as the book is dedicated to him, this copy is offered to Marcel Schwob because his writings are among those I have admired the longest." The same year, Paul Valéry dedicated Monsieur Teste to Schwob, evidence of the range of the older author's fascination over the young. He is today a singularly neglected figure.

The foreword, entitled "Linteau," prepares one for the dense, highly aural writing.

In all likelihood many people will not perceive that what follows is beautiful (without superlative: to start); and even if we assume that one or two things interest them, they may never believe those things were intended. For they will half see a few half-disclosed ideas, not embroidered with the usual trim. . . .

As with diamonds, one must weight one's words, polyhedron of ideas, by scruples in the ear's scale, without asking why this and that. For one has only to look: it's written right on them.

Published when he was barely twenty, this selection of poetry and prose (illustrated with his own woodcuts) is probably the most important single volume of his work. It reveals the influence of symbolism, the durability of Heb-Ubu, and Jarry's first attempts to integrate the two contrasting strains.

During these years Jarry lived off the Boulevard de Port-Royal, at the foot of a dead-end alley so narrow two people could not walk abreast. Handprints in blood decorated the walls of the spiral stairway, and in the tiny room he hung censers and crucifixes and kept owls, which he admired for the absurd shape of their beaks and their nocturnal habits, resembling his own. His mother visited him frequently in this cell, which he called his "Dead Man's Calvary," the first of his legendary lodgings. For a time Rousseau was a neighbor, a coincidence which probably led to the meeting of these two sons of Laval. In March, 1893, began a series of events scantily recorded in his sister's terse words. "Paris . . . He takes long walks, falls ill, summons his mother and sister. His mother cares for him through forty wintry days, brings him through, then dies herself nine days later." The same influenza epidemic carried off his father within a week--"exactly on schedule," Jarry observed.

Jarry inherited a little money and the house in Laval with its imaginary tower, which he described as rotating very deliberately on its axis "once every century." He moved from Dead Man's Calvary to an apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where he installed a little marionette theater to entertain his guests, and invented the sport of bouncing chickpeas off the stovepipe hats of gentlemen on the boulevard below. Straightway he began spending his tiny fortune. With Remy de Gourmont as coeditor, he founded in October, 1894, a superbly presented review, L'Ymagier, devoted to popular and religious prints, Dürer engravings, Jarry's and Gourmont's woodcuts, and their comments on this material. The second number contained Rousseau's only known lithograph, entitled La guerre. After the fifth number Jarry broke with Gourmont, and in 1896 started another magazine entirely his own, Perhinderion, named from a Breton word meaning pil-

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^*	The title defeats translation because of the triple meaning of "sable": sand, sable (the animal), and sable (the color in heraldry).

grimage. He set about to print "the complete engraved work of Dürer plate by plate"; a special hand-set type face was cast for the text; he commissioned the original Pellerin firm in Epinal to do separate printings for him of old woodcuts by Géorgin; and in all this he was far ahead of his time, as was Gourmont, in recognizing the qualities of popular and primitive art. Small wonder that Perhinderion exhausted his fortune after only two issues.

The break with Gourmont early in 1896 came as the result of a ludicrous but significant incident in Jarry's life. Gourmont had been one of his most sympathetic admirers, reviewed his first book favorably in the Mercure, and planned an article on him for "Le livre des masques". Gourmont's mistress was Madame Berthe de Courrière, who had lived previously with Huysmans (some say she also converted him and inspired the novel Là-bas), and now cared for Gourmont, who suffered from a disfiguring skin disease. An aging, lecherous, ambitious woman, who chased priests, the "old lady," as she was called, met Jarry at the Mercure receptions. The twenty-year-old poet had a fierce youthful spirit which in her eyes made up for his short stature and odd appearance. When one of the local wags, Jean de Tinan, told her that Jarry was burning with a secret passion for her, she swallowed the bait whole and made overtures to him in a lyrical and openly salacious letter--adding that he must need someone to "mend his socks." Possibly he tried her companionship for a short time; in any case he soon decided to live with his socks unmended and made no secret of the incident. It cost him Gourmont's friendship, and Jarry took Madame Rachilde to task for not having interfered in the hoax. The experience seems to have shaken him, for when he based a story on it some years later, he treats the matter savagely. "The old lady is old, as her name indicates," he begins. The story, which transcribes her correspondence verbatim, almost landed Jarry in prison. Beneath the bitterness of this section of L'amour en visites lies a note of real disillusionment, and the affair sheds light on his violently contracted private life.

One wonders, indeed, where it disappeared to. The only facts we have form a paltry debris. There is Jarry's schoolboy boast about visiting the brothels; there is one tale of his visiting card having been found by the police in the apartment of a fashionable Paris prostitute; Lugné-Poe states without comment that Jarry came to the theater several times in the company of Oscar Wilde and Lord Douglas; and there is further evidence of homosexual proclivities. His writings refer to every variety of sexual behavior; from the beginning he flaunts a violent misogyny and portrays women in the role of courtesans. In the various texts of Les minutes de sable mémorial, he wrote of homosexual love in a tone of dark meditation and distaste. There is some imbalance here, a wavering of emotional states which has its roots deep in the turmoil of Jarry's life. It is possible that he fell victim to psychological impotency in the presence of any woman he might have loved, and that he was at the same time drawn toward sexual inversion and solitary vice. This would partly illuminate the compulsive manner in which he exploited erotic themes in several of his books.

The nearest Jarry came to intimacy--one hesitates to say "romance" --was in his steady attachment to Madame Rachilde. To her he paid a rare compliment veiled in the bombastic style he came to affect: "Ma-da-me, your character is nothing to shout about, and like all of us you are a negligible assemblage of atoms. But we will grant you one quality: you don't cling." Possibly there was an affair between the two; it is more likely that they understood each other beneath their braggart exteriors and enjoyed one another's company. Jarry's most revealing correspondence is addressed to Madame Rachilde, and he writes to her with a compelling directness that implies the sympathy of friendship more than sentimental or physical attachment.

In November, 1894, a month after starting L'Ymagier, Jarry had been called up for military service; but nothing could interfere with his literary activity. There was to be no obedient submission of civilian to military. The first day in the Laval barracks, he was assigned to a half-human corporal by the name of Bouilly, who made a fetish of discipline and set out to break this stunted long-haired recruit to army life. Jarry was always polite and attentive, though he persisted in calling all his superiors "Monsieur." He seemed to be trying. But he was a born comic with a gun and in his inevitably outsized uniform. His presence in the company finally became so demoralizing to the other troops that he was excused from parades and from most drill and training. He struck up an acquaintance with the first drummer, apparently the only man who could match Jarry's already growing capacity for drink. He boasted of his privileges and soon found himself assigned all the worst details: policing the area, K.P., and latrine duty. His last defense consisted in pompous statements about his work. "It is no mere bow to rhetoric to designate with the word 'brush' these objects generally known in the civilian world as brooms. They are, in reality, exceptionally suited for sketching decorative designs on the ground and for roughing out the possible boundaries of a future sweeping project--one which remains highly improbable."

Jarry's rebellion was too well conducted for the army to quell; he even swallowed a strong dose of acid, which landed him in the hospital for some weeks. After only a few months Jarry was "reformed" out of the army for chronic lithiasis (gallstones). But the story gained credence, probably with Jarry's blessing, that his medical discharge records carried the classification "precocious imbecility." By now one can understand how apt the fictitious designation must have sounded. Just where was he going, this unregenerate misfit? What drove him? Is there any answer short of attributing his behavior to permanent psychosis? The questions are especially urgent in dealing with a career that skirts close to lunacy. The answers begin to emerge slowly from those first adult years around 1895.

Jarry's nonconformity, his resolute role of the potache, tends to obscure the human being he remained in spite of himself. In his twenties he had a proud but not unattractive face with heavy-lidded eyes and unsmiling lips. As time went on he let his hair grow down to his shoulders and assumed increasingly outlandish dress--hooded cape, crook-handled umbrella, and women's blouses instead of shirts because "men's linen is too confining." But the people who knew him never lost sight of him and testify without exception to his goodness and charm. His most faithful friend was Vallette, the busy levelheaded editor of the Mercure, with whom Jarry fished and canoed and bicycled. In an obituary note Vallette caught Jarry's flickering personality. "Extraordinarily comprehending, he was surprisingly ignorant of life; often sensitive, discreet, tactful under many circumstances, he liked to assume a cynical attitude. He was charming, unbearable, and sympathetic." Vallette is not alone in perceiving a fundamental innocence beneath Jarry's naughtiness. Dr. Saltas, who tried to restore Jarry's health in the final years, insists at length on his scrupulousness in paying debts when possible and calls him "noble." Paul Fort, the prolific author of Les ballades, sees him even more clearly. ". . . one of the most curious figures of the second generation of symbolists. He was popular with all of us, this sensitive witty young man, so pale and muscular. Popular? Not only himself but his manner of living among his owls and chameleons."

The longest tribute to Jarry's character comes in Madame Rachilde's romping biography, which reaches its climax in a scene of pure melodrama. One day Jarry was pulling her along country roads in a little trailer attached by ropes to his bicycle, and they started down a long hill with a hairpin turn under a viaduct at the bottom. The little team rapidly picked up speed, with the trailer overtaking the bicycle the minute Jarry attempted to apply his brakes. Madame Rachilde told Jarry not to go so fast. "Not so fast yourself, Ma-da-me," he retorted between his teeth. "You're pushing us now." The danger was suddenly upon them.

When it became apparent that they would not make the turn at the bottom and would smash into the stone viaduct, Jarry drew a knife and began to cut the ropes which prevented him from controlling the bicycle. Madame Rachilde closed her eyes in resignation. With a fiendish laugh he threw the knife away, lunged off his seat, and let himself be dragged with the bicycle until the trailer came to a stop. "Well, Ma-da-me," he muttered when he found himself only bruised and cut, "we believe we were a little frightened. . . . And never have we wanted so desperately to take leave of a woman." Madame Rachilde cites the incident as typical of his character-half criminal, half noble.

Jarry was in effect the extreme embodiment of his era. The fin-de-siècle world of Paris was topsy-turvy, rollicking on through corruption and optimism toward a still undefined New Spirit. Jaffy reveled in the waggishness and was not alone in his innocent zest. The time came, however, when he could no longer be merely the potache, the moment when most young Frenchmen return to their families or settle into a secure career. Jarry's circumstances were exceptional. No one had been so close to him as his mother, and her death removed the only stabilizing force in his already unruly life. ^* At that moment he was tasting his first literary success, protecting himself from Gourmont's mistress, and suffering from a break in his intimacy with Léon-Paul Fargue. Drafted into the army, he discovered that total eccentricity escaped even that ancient tradition of conformity. The events of 1893-1896 appear to have confirmed him in a slow and probably reasoned decision not to abandon his potachisme, but to carry it to a new level, to devote to it the effort of imagination which he applied to his writing. These years contain a true conversion which compounded into one rash and unflagging exploit both his art and his life.

In his first published work, in 1893, Jarry used a near pun which changes "magnificent gesture" into "manifest imposture." From then on the magnificent gesture of his temperamental oddity became something deliberate and systematic, the manifest imposture that monopolized his total being. Henceforth he was hard to recognize; his "act" became a literary version of originality imposed upon the externals of his life.

The division in Jarry's work between obscure, intensely personal poetry and the extroverted monstrosity of Ubu now began to disappear. The novel Les jours et les nuits (1897) relates the story of Sengle, a misfit recruit, whose days are military fiascoes and whose nights bring escape to writing and reverie. In solitude at night he writes "curiously and precisely balanced" works, the products of his mind during sleep. In his daily life he has learned that by abandoning himself to external circumstances he can learn the secret of controlling them. For example, Sengle discovers he is able to will the fall of the dice.

As a result of these reciprocal relations with Things, which he could direct with his thought (but all of us can, and it is not at all certain that there is a difference, even in time, between thought, will, and act: cf. the Holy Trinity), he did not in the least distinguish his thoughts from his acts or his dreaming from his waking; and perfecting the Leibnizean definition that perception is a true hallucination, he saw no reason against saying: hallucination is a false perception, or more precisely, a feeble one, or better yet, an anticipated perception (remembered sometimes, which is the same thing). And he thought above all that there were only hallucinations, or perceptions, and that there is neither day nor night (in spite of the title of this book, which is why it is chosen) and that life is continuous. . . .

The paragraph is crucial. The book reveals itself as a demonstration of how the barriers between sleeping and waking break down to render life "continuous." Jarry stands in the tradition of Jean-Paul Richter and Rimbaud and especially Gérard de Nerval, whose professed end was to "direct his dream." The opposition in his work between personal lyric and horrendous farce dissolves before this single view of life as sustained hallucination.

At this point then, Jarry's work intersects his possessed, hallucinatory life--the virtual incarnation of a dream. And at this point, also, he races past both the tranquil innocence of Rousseau in his child-man vision of the world, and the genuine sense of the absurd with which Satie prolonged his youth. Jarry's writing expressed an almost unthinkable code of conduct, which he did not shrink from applying to his own life. Dream must invade every waking moment to become the element in which we exist. The conscious and the unconscious fuse into a continuum which coincides with the fusion of thought and action, art and life, childhood and maturity.

Still human in spite of all, Jarry could not in every respect "live up to" these ambitious ideas. But they shed light on almost everything he did and reveal its purpose. He set about to upset the balance of waking (rational) logic and developed the elements of 'Pataphysicks, a kind of reasonable unreason similar to the workings of our dreaming minds. He held out to our conscious attention the hideous figure of Ubu instead of repressing it along with other childish images. He forced his life into a mold closer to literary fiction than biological survival. And as a symbol of this total abandonment to the hallucinatory world of dream, he advocated and practiced the use of alcohol.

It was in these years that, in addition to everything else, Jarry began drinking. This explains in part the rapid disappearance of his inheritance. An unbelievable consumption of absinthe (and ether at the end) helped him do violence to his identity until his own personality dropped away. Like Rabelais, he proclaimed his faith in alcohol, calling it "holy water," the "essence of life," and "my sacred herb." "Antialcoholics are unfortunates in the grip of water, that terrible poison, so solvent and corrosive that out of all substances it has been chosen for washings and scourings, and a drop of water, added to a clear liquid like absinthe, muddies it." And elsewhere he wrote: "We thought we had done once and for all with this question of alcoholism, and that all sensible people understood that the use, and even more the abuse, of fermented beverages is what distinguishes men from beasts." He drank defiantly and triumphantly. De Quincey had a comparable addiction and equal boldness in calling his vice a virtue. Verlaine drank in secret; Nerval did not have to induce his intervals of insanity. Baudelaire, describing Poe and how he raised memory to the power of a "periodic dream," wrote a profoundly significant passage on the subconscious functioning of the human mind.

But incontestably . . . there exist in drunkenness not only dream associations but patterns of reasoning which, in order to recur, require the circumstances which originally provoked them. . . . I believe that in many cases . . . Poe's drinking was a mnemonic method, a technique of work, a method both energetic and mortal, yet appropriate to his passionate nature. The poet had learned to drink the way an author takes pains over his notebooks.

Alcohol helped Jarry achieve his fierce antic and sent him early to his grave. He must have foreseen the results.

So it was that through drink and hallucination Jarry converted himself into a new person physically and mentally devoted to an artistic goal-a person in whom Jarry, the man, spent the rest of his days dying. The questions about the basic intentions of his life now begin to find their answers. He unlived his life. He abdicated his self in order to become another, and the culminating event of the process, which began with the loss of his mother, looks suspiciously like a perverse father identification. Jarry's public behavior began to crystallize around a single figure whose presence had haunted him since the lyée at Rennes, stayed with him in the army, and now usurped his speech and bearing. It was old Père Heb, rechristened with the infantile and immortal name of Ubu, in English, Ooboo. By 1896 he had published six different fragments of Ubu texts, all modeled on the original schoolboy farces at Rennes. His systematic promotion of the character was well under way. In the spring of 1896 Paul Fort virtually commandeered from Jarry a full-length play called Ubu Roi and published it in the review, Le Livre d' Art. At about the same time, Jarry read parts of the play to Gustave Kahn, the self-styled inventor of vers libre, and several of his friends. Their enthusiastic reaction fired his secret ambitions. Ubu obsessed and possessed him totally, swallowed him whole. Thereafter it was as if, like Jonah, he could communicate only from inside the whale. He had found his Other, the flesh of his hallucination.

The first edition of the play in book form, in June, 1896, was greeted by a number of impassioned reviews, mostly favorable. The subtitle gave an honest authentication: "Drama in five acts restored in its entirety as performed at the Théâtre des Phynances in 1888"--meaning the puppets in the attic at Rennes. Jarry fixed on the idea of a Paris production. When Lugné-Poe, the young director of the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, asked Jarry to become secrétaire-régisseur of the company, Jarry's hopes increased enormously. This group, which grew out of Paul Fort Théâtre de l'Art and thus inherited a reputation for both symbolist and anarchist leanings, was the most active and forward-looking in Paris. Jarry had followed it from the beginning and offered the support of his growing fame. He accepted the position and worked hard through the long summer while Lugné-Poe (who let it be supposed he was related to Edgar Allan Poe) vacationed in the country. Jarry forwarded manuscripts, made plans for the coming season, and carefully insinuated into the program his two pet projects: Ibsen Peer Gynt and Ubu Roi.

Since he ran the publicity and had a hand in everything, Jarry made certain that his play was not neglected. Posters, announcements, articles, and Jarry's own woodcuts appeared in a steady stream. Peer Gynt, partly adapted by Jarry, had only a minor success in the fall--despite Jane Avril, brought in to do Anitra's dance, Munch's work on the sets and program, and Jarry himself in the cast. The play was not the kind of Ibsen Paris expected. In November Lugné-Poe still hesitated over the prospect of Ubu. "I didn't know which way to take hold of the thing." A letter from the loyal Rachilde persuaded him to go ahead and stage the play as Jarry wished, "en guignol"--slapstick.

Jarry had expressed his ideas in a letter to Lugné-Poe, which was later printed as a preface to the play.

Dear Sir,. . . It would be curious, I believe, to produce this play (and at little expense really) in the following manner.

1. A mask for the principal role, Ubu, which I could do for you if necessary. But then I believe you have yourself been involved with this business of masks.

2. A horses's head of cardboard, which he could hang around his neck as in the old English theater, for the only two equestrian scences--both these suggestions being in the spirit of the play, since I intended to write a "Guignol."

3. Only one set, or better yet, one catchall backdrop, eliminating raising and lowering the curtain. A suitably costumed person would come in, as in puppet shows, to put up signs indicating the scene. (You see, I am sure that written signs are more "suggestive" than sets. No set or contrivance could portray the Polish army on the march in the Ukraine.)

4. The elimination of crowds, which are often bad on stage and have no intelligible effect. Thus, a single soldier in the review scene, and only one in the great scuffle when Ubu says: "What a hoard of people, what a flight, etc."

5. The adoption of an "accent" or better yet, a special "tone of voice" for the principal character.

6. Costumes with as little local color and historical accuracy as possible (it gives the best idea of something eternal); modern ones preferably, since satire is modern; and sordid costumes because they make the action more wretched and repugnant. . . .

In a subsequent article in the Mercure, Jarry came out bluntly for the elimination of sets ("décor is hybrid, neither entirely naturalistic nor entirely artificial") and of acting in the usual sense. He reasserted his belief in masks, which convey "a character's eternal quality" and which can be made to express variations in mood by a few basic movements using the full effects of lighting and shadow. Jarry carefully defined "universal gesture" as opposed to ordinary pantomime, which cries out for words. Lines are to be delivered in a conventionalized manner "as if the mask itself were speaking." He continued to advance ideas on the production of Ubu Roi, including the unheard-of suggestion in 1896 that the role of Bougrelas, aged fourteen, be played by a boy of that age. Again he cited the Elizabethan stage for support. It was neither the prevailing realism of the time nor the essentially antidramatic theories of symbolism that determined his theater. Its stylized comic earthiness stemmed from medieval theater, Rabelais, and the schoolboy experiments at Rennes.

Jarry finally had his way about the production, after carrying Ubu like a cancer inside him for eight years. Two excellent actors were found for the roles: Firmin Gémier, borrowed from the Comédie-Française, and Louise France. All literary Paris was primed for the event. Jarry's friends saw to it that every critic was present at the première, and the old Théâtre Nouveau in the Rue Blanche was filled to the last seat with partisans and enemies, with symbolists, decadents, naturists, independents, and the Mercure faithful, to hear the enormity Jarry had perpetrated. Loyal subscribers scarcely knew what they were in for. December 11, 1896, the opening night, is worth describing in detail. There had been nothing like it since the wild première of Victor Hugo Hernani in 1830, when Théophile Gautier and Gérard de Nerval carried the day for romanticism by highly organized demonstrations.

Before the curtain went up, a crude table was brought out, covered with a piece of old sacking, Jarry appeared, looking dead white, for he had made himself up like a streetwalker to face the footlights. Nervously sipping a glass of water, he spoke in his flattest, most clipped tones. For ten minutes, he sat in front of the explosive crowd, thanking the people who had helped in the production, referring briefly to the traditions of the Guignol theater, and mentioning the masks the actors would wear and the fact that the first three acts would be performed without intermission. He concluded in a more properly Ubuesque vein.

In any case we have a perfect décor, for just as one good way of setting a play in Eternity is to have revolvers shot off in the year 1000, you will see doors open on fields of snow under blue skies, fireplaces furnished with clocks and swinging wide to serve as doors, and palm trees growing at the foot of a bed so that little elephants standing on bookshelves can browse on them.

As to the orchestra, there is none. Only its volume and timbre will be missed, for various pianos and percussion will execute Ubu-esque themes from backstage. The action, which is about to begin, takes place in Poland, that is to say: Nowhere.

In these earnest nonsense lines Jarry was already insinuating that the play is more than it appears, that the true setting of farce is (like Poland, a country long condemned to the nonexistence of partition) an Eternity of Nowhere, and that contradiction is the mode of its logic. The speech did not exactly insure a sympathetic reception.

Jarry vanished with his table; the curtain went up on the set--the handiwork of Jarry himself, aided by Pierre Bonnard, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Sérusier. Like every other feature of this performance, the set has been described countless times. Arthur Symons, one of the few Englishmen present at this "symbolist farce," as he calls it, recalled every detail.

. . . the scenery was painted to represent, by a child's conventions, indoors and out of doors, and even the torrid, temperate, and arctic zones at once. Opposite you, at the back of the stage, you saw apple trees in bloom, under a blue sky, and against the sky a small closed window and a fireplace . . . through the very midst of which . . . trooped in and out the clamorous and sanguinary persons of the drama. On the left was painted a bed, and at the foot of the bed a bare tree and snow falling. On the right there were palm trees . . . a door opened against the sky, and beside the door a skeleton dangled. A venerable gentleman in evening dress . . . trotted across the stage on the points of his toes between every scene and hung the new placard on its nail. (Studies in Seven Arts)

Gémier, swollen and commanding in his pear-shaped costume (but without a mask, despite Jarry's campaign), stepped forward to speak the opening line--a single word. He had not known how to interpret the role until Lugné-Poe had suggested he imitate the author's own voice and jerky stylized gestures. The midget Jarry truly sired the monster Ubu. In a voice like a hammer, Gémier pronounced an obscenity which Jarry had appropriated to himself by adding one letter.

"Merdre," Gémier said. "Shite."

It was fifteen minutes before the house could be silenced. The mot de Cambronne ^* had done its work; the house was pandemonium. Those who had been lulled by Jarry's opening speech were shocked awake; several people walked out without hearing any more. The rest separated into two camps of desperately clapping enthusiasts and whistling scoffers. Fist fights started in the orchestra. The critics were on the spot, their reactions

One of Napoléon's officers at the Battle of Waterloo, General Cambronne, heard a report that one of his companies of guards was surrounded. His heroic response of "Merde" became the mot de Cambronne. Subsequently, the word achieved a paradoxical existence as an acceptable talisman of good luck said to a friend going on a journey. Still, public utterance of the word was, in 1896, unthinkable.

observed by both sides. Edmond Rostand smiled indulgently; Henry Fouquier and Sarcey, representing the old guard, almost jumped out of their seats. A few demonstrators simultaneously clapped and whistled in divided sentiments. Mallarmé sat quiet, waiting to see more of the "prodigious personage" to whose author he addressed a letter the following day. Jarry's supporters shouted, "You wouldn't understand Shakespeare either." Their opponents replied with variations on the mot of the evening. Fernand Hérold in the wings startled the audience into silence for a moment by turning up the house lights and catching people with their fists raised and standing on their seats. The actors waited patiently, beginning to believe that the roles had been reversed and they had come to watch a performance out front.

Finally, Gémier improvised a jig and sprawled out on the prompter's box. His diversion restored enough order to allow the action to proceed to the next "merdre," when the audience took over once more. The interruptions continued for the rest of the evening, while Père Ubu murdered his way to the throne of Poland, pillaged the country, was defeated by the king's son aided by the czar's army, and fled cravenly to France, where he promised to perpetrate further enormities on the population. The story of Ubu Roi is no more than this. ^* Père Ubu and Mère Ubu use language more scatological than erotic, and Rachilde maintains that the audience whistled because they "expected this Punch and Judy of an Ubu to function sexually" and were disappointed. The curtain rang down that night on the sole performance of Ubu Roi until it was revived by Gémier in 1908. For the Théâtre de l'Œuvre it was the catastrophe that made it famous.

Also present in the house was a young Irishman by the name of William Butler Yeats. Despite a very limited knowledge of the language, his description of the performance is worth repeating.

I go to the 1st performance of Jarry's Ubu Roi, at the Theatre de l'Oeuvre, with Rhymer who had been so attractive to the girl in the bicycling costume. The audience shake their fists at one another, and Rhymer whispers to me, "There are often duels after these performances," and explains to me what is happening on the stage. The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of king, carries for a sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say, After S. Mallarmé, after Verlaine, after G. Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God. (Autobiography)

One obvious and neglected source of the action is the libretto of Chabrier's comic opera Le roi malgré lui, which concerns a fictitious king of Poland, Laski, his grand palatin (out of which title Jarry & Co. forged the three palotins or "palatoons"), and a generally farcical sequence of events. The opera had its widely discussed première in 1887, just the year before Jarry entered the lycée in Rennes. The circumstances of the rout of Ubu may well have been lifted from Brillat-Savarin, one of whose "Examples of Obesity" in Physiologie du goût relates the scene perfectly. "In the case of the King of Poland, his obesity came close to causing his death, for having fallen among the Turkish cavalry before whom he had been obliged to flee, he was saved by his attendants."

No event marks more clearly than this the close of one era and the imminence of another. Yeats did not have to understand French to perceive the significance of Ubu, natural offspring of the turbulence of the nineties.

This single performance assured Jarry's celebrity far beyond literary circles. The following morning, and for weeks after, the papers discussed the play. Five critics wrote favorable reviews--the five whom Jarry mentioned in his introductory speech. Ten-odd conservative critics, led by the ponderous Sarcey of Le Temps, denounced it as the limit of folly. One of them started his article, "Despite the late hour, I have just taken a shower." A critics' battle royal soon developed between Henry Bauer, defending Jarry and wielding great power from his post on the Echo de Paris, and Henry Fouquier of Le Figaro, an elegant Marseillais with a loyal bourgeois following. After Ubu Roi he was determined to crush Bauer. Because he knew how to write better bombast than Bauer, Fouquier finally won and his rival lost his column in the Echo de Paris.

It is to Fouquier's credit that he came up with one fruitful idea.

It strikes me that his performance brought a kind of release, a literary Neuf Thermidor. At least it has begun to put an end to the Terror which has been reigning over our literature.

Considering the prewar and postwar years to come, his terminology was apt and his prediction wrong. Ubu, the Savage God, arrived on the scene to inaugurate the Reign of Terror in literature. He was born full-fledged-belly, obscenity, ridiculousness, and all. The schoolboy imagination had succeeded in throwing dung in the public eye. Some laughed and some were incensed, but no one could deny that it had been cunningly thrown and that one performance of the play was enough to assure its fame. Catulle Mendès in Le Journal the following day wrote in a kind of frenzy.

. . . in spite of the idiotic action and mediocre structure, a new type has emerged, created by an extravagant and brutal imagination, more a child's than a man's.

Père Ubu exists.

Compounded of Pulcinella and Polichinelle, of Punch and Judy . . . of Monsieur Thiers and the Catholic Torquemada and the Jew Deutz, of a Sureté policeman and the anarchist Vaillant, an enormous parody of Macbeth and Napoléon, a flunky become king, he nevertheless exists unforgettably. . . . He will become a popular legend of base instincts, rapacious and violent; and Monsieur Jarry, who I hope is destined for a more worthy celebrity, will have created an infamous mask.

Amid all the heated exchange of opinion, Jarry appeared indifferent. He had to be persuaded to write a polite note to Mendès acknowledging the article, and twenty-three is not an age at which to be sophisticated about public acclaim. But Jarry was already engaged in redoubling the extravagance of his behavior and in completing his identification with Ubu. This scandalous performance gave him the final impetus to attempt a resolutely fabricated personality.

There are virtually no standards by which to judge the role Jarry created and the décors with which he surrounded himself in order to sustain it. He left behind every standard, ethic, maxim, golden rule, and secret of success. In the end his role implies new, almost nonhuman standards, and its most immediately significant aspect is the completeness of the transformation he wrought. Everything in his universe had to yield to his power to change it. Nothing escaped, neither the conventions of eating, which he destroyed by the simple expedient of devouring meals backward from pastry to peasant soup, nor common sense itself, which he stalked with the brilliant antireason of ' Pataphysicks.

The transformation began with elemental personal considerations of dress and speech. His usual costume was that of a bicycle racer: tight sweater, short coat, and old trousers tucked into his socks. (As a symbol of great respect at Marcel Schwob's funeral, he pulled them out, something he neglected to do at Mallarmé's funeral, for which he borrowed a pair of Madame Rachilde's bright yellow shoes.) However, the variations were manifold. One night Jarry and his friend Demolder presented themselves at the box office of a light-opera company with a note from the composer entitling them to complimentary seats. Demolder wore a fur cap and carried a shepherd's crook; Jarry wore a dirty white canvas suit and a makeshift paper shirt with the tie painted on in India ink. ^* When the apprehensive house manager seated them in the balcony instead of the orchestra, Jarry took his revenge by complaining, just as the curtain was going up and in a rasping voice audible to the entire house: "I don't see why they allow the audience in the first three rows to come in carrying musical instruments."

Ever since the Lycée Henri IV, Jarry's inflexible staccato speech was even better remembered than his dress. André Gide has written the most vivid description of Jarry around 1895, when the repersonification was almost complete.

It was the best period of Jarry's life. He was an incredible figure whom I also met at Marcel Schwob's, and always with tremendous enjoyment, before he became a victim of frightful attacks of delirium tremens. This plaster-faced Kobald, gotten up like a circus clown and acting a fantastic, strenuously contrived role which showed no human characteristic, exercised a remarkable fascination at the Mercure. Almost everyone there attempted, some more successfully than others, to imitate him, to adopt his humor; and above all his bizarre implacable accent--no inflection or nuance and equal stress on every syllable, even the silent ones. A nutcracker, if it could talk, would do no differently. He asserted himself without the least reticence and in perfect disdain of good manners. Afterward the Surrealists invented nothing better, and they had good reason to recognize him as a forerunner.

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^* This is not the last time we hear of the painted cravat. Apollinaire inherited the fashion.

In conversation he adopted a periphrastic style, after Homer: the wind became "that which blows," and a bird "that which chirps." ^* The lofty role of King Ooboo required that he assume the royal we and a pompous ceremoniousness. The result was a new form of speech, which still flourishes in Parisian literary quarters, a coarse inverted preciousness called le parler Ubu.

What surrounded the person of Jarry, or Père Ubu, as his friends soon called him, underwent an equally thorough transformation. His lodgings after the Dead Man's Calvary have become legendary. In 1897 he exhausted his inheritance and left his apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain for temporary refuge in the studio of his fellow Lavalois, Henri Rousseau. (That year Rousseau hung the portrait of Jarry at the Salon des Indépendants.) Then he found a dingy room at 7 Rue Cassette, where he lived the rest of his life and which he dignified with the name of "Our Grand Chasublerie" because a manufacturer of ecclesiastical vestments occupied the second floor. Apollinaire's description is classic--though he places the room one floor too high by the French count.

" Monsieur Jarry?"

"On the third floor and a half," answered the concierge.

The answer astonished me. But I climbed up to where Jarry lived--actually on the third floor and a half. The ceilings of the building had appeared wastefully high to the owner and he had doubled the number of stories by cutting them in half horizontally. This building, which is still standing, had therefore about fifteen floors; but since it rose no higher than the other buildings in the quarter, it amounted to merely the reduction of a skyscraper.

It turned out that Jarry's place was filled with reductions. This half-floor room was the reduction of an apartment in which its occupant was quite comfortable standing up. But being taller than he, I had to stay in a stoop. The bed was the reduction of a bed; that is to say, a mere pallet. Jarry said that low beds were coming back into fashion. The writing table was the reduction of a table, for Jarry wrote flat on his stomach on the floor. The furniture was the reduction

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^* In the first Père Ubu Almanach of 1899. Jarry applied the device with untranstable refinements: "Valette, celui qui Mercure; Allais (Alphonse), celui qui ira; Debussy, celui qui Pelle (et as et Mélisande); Degas, celui qui bec; Becque, celui qui gaz. . . ." Twenty years later the Dadaists and surrealists reveled in the technique.

of furniture--there was only the bed. On the wall hung the reduction of a picture. It was a portrait [of Jarry by the Douanier Rousseau], most of which he had burned away, leaving only the head, which resembled a certain lithograph I know of Balzac. The library was the reduction of a library, and that is saying a lot for it. It was composed of a cheap edition of Rabelais and two or three volumes of the Bibliothèque rose. On the mantel stood a large stone phallus, a gift from Félicien Rops. Jarry kept this member, which was considerably larger than life size, always covered with a violet skullcap of velvet, ever since the day the exotic monolith had frightened a certain literary lady who was all out of breath from climbing three and a half floors and at a loss how to act in this unfurnished cell.

"Is that a cast?" the lady asked.

"No," said Jarry. "It's a reduction." (Il y a)

The ceiling of the room was so low that the top of even Jarry's head brushed against it as he walked about, and he collected the flaky plaster like a severe case of dandruff. It was said that the only food that could be eaten conveniently in the place was flounder.

For a year or two around the turn of the century Père Ubu held court in an equally lowly summer residence--an old stable for barge mules at the Coudray locks south of Paris. In these drafty dirt-floored premises he decided to repay his social obligations by throwing a banquet of his own. The guests consisted of artists and writers from Paris, the literate subprefect from Corbeil (at whose house one rainy day Jarry had arrived barefoot for dinner), and the local café keeper and tradesmen. Jarry had caught a fish for every plate, and had laid in on credit enough wine and absinthe for a regiment. Madame Rachilde, despairing of the Ubuesque preparations, labored long to contribute an immense chocolate mousse molded in a salad bowl. The banquet ran its intemperate course from general conversation to demonstrations of how mightily the guests could make the river resound with shouted commands of "forward march." When the dessert arrived, the host rose for a royal speech.

"This," he said in solemn machine-gun accents, pointing first to the mousse and then to the wife of the café keeper, "this represents the left breast of the giant Negress of the carnival in the Place du Throne. Ma-dame-Ra-chil-de copied it from life in chocolate and vanilla, using Mother Fontaine's milk, who, as the whole countryside knows, sleeps with her goat. . . ."

The rest of his speech was lost in applause. Policemen broke the party up; they had come to the locks to fish out a body that had drifted in, and half the guests fled, thinking that Père Ubu's gala had exceeded the bounds of decorum. The rest went to see the body.

Toward the end of his life the penniless Ubu attempted to have a "medieval dungeon" built on a shabby piece of property near the old stable.

The resulting shack, which rose on four supports, he dubbed by ineluctable logic his "Tripod," and the architecture of this reduction of a castle deceived a few observers into calling it an abandoned freight car. The place was flooded regularly twice a year, and he had to hang his bicycle from the ceiling to save the tires from the rats.

In addition to being royally robed and lodged, Père Ubu had to be suitably accoutered. The bicycle, of course, became the royal vehicle, "that which rolls." He called it an "external skeleton" which permits mankind to outstrip biological evolution in developing new modes of locomotion. Then there were his weapons. In those days of anarchist assassinations Jarry made free with firearms, and often sallied forth at night in Paris with a carbine over his shoulder and two pistols in his belt. Beneath the bravado lay the knowledge that "there is no prohibition on arms openly displayed." A pedestrian who asked him one night for a light (du feu) suddenly saw a gun belch red flame in front of his nose while Jarry murmured politely "Voilà." His marksmanship with a stubby boule dogue or revolver, was excellent, and he made a specialty of hunting spiders, frogs, and grasshoppers. The closest he came to injuring anyone was at the "Phalanstery," a summer house in Corbeil, rented co-operatively by the Vallettes, Jarry, and several friends. One day Jarry began shooting off the tops of champagne bottles lined up against the wall that protected the landlady's neighboring garden and that was scarcely designed to stop bullets. The landlady came knocking in great perturbation to see Madame Rachilde and complain that the shots endangered her children, who played in the garden. Père Ubu, overhearing, replied in full pomp. "If that should ever happen, Ma-da-me, we should ourselves be delighted to get some new ones with you." The following year the residents of the Phalanstery had to found their community elsewhere. No such incidents were provoked by the most functional item of Jarry's equipment, his fishing line, on which he relied heavily for nourishment. He caught fish where no one else had any luck and lived in a miraculous world of true fish stories. A design by the sculptor Zadkine for a monument to Jarry shows him simultaneously riding a bicycle, pointing a gun, writing in a notebook on the handlebars, and looking off into the sky-the whole thing lit from within. He met the world fully equipped.

That part of his surroundings which Jarry could not physically transform into Ubu's kingdom did not, therefore, escape intact. So high a mental metabolism as his can alter things by merely seeing them afresh. In a combination of profound erudition and farce, he destroys our conventional vision and sets things as systematically askew as his dress and his lodgings. His magazine pieces called "Spéculations" invent the voice of another civilization commenting on ours.

It is a human superstition that, when one wishes to communicate with dear ones temporarily at a distance, one should toss into the appropriate orifices which might easily be sewer holes) the written expression of one's feelings, after having encouraged the postmaster with a small pittance and received in return some little pictures, no doubt blessed, which one devoutly kisses on the back. This is not the place to criticize the incoherence of these maneuvers; it is beyond argument that they make possible communication across great distances.

He can sustain it for several pages, and he wrote with the same wry logic about microbes and buses and squaring the circle. Everything in the world became a toy to him, as much as his bicycle and his pistols. The moment never comes in either his writing or his life when he had to clear his throat and say, "But seriously . . ." He was always serious and always discovering a humor that is closer to metaphysics than to silliness. We can laugh with him and at him, but it is not easy to laugh him off. He rejected no part of himself or of his environment and methodically transformed it all into an artificial world, the inverted dignity of Père Ubu.

Such a transformation presupposes one absolute principle: the totality of human freedom. I can choose the color of my coat; I can choose not to wear a coat; I can choose (yet few men venture so far) not to be I. But: for such absolute freedom there is retribution. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, Jarry was overwhelmed by his own power. Ubu acknowledges no affections, no damnation; for him nothing is sacred, not even, as in Faust, the clutch of his own mind. A distorted image of Faust, Ubu-Jarry is engaged in the only act logically left for him to perform: self-destruction. Elevation by alcohol became his form of protracted suicide; yet while he was dying he was at liberty. No worldly restraint could touch him.

One clue to Jarry's intentions in sustaining this role finally offers the possibility of interpreting an otherwise incomprehensible life. After his most outrageous escapades, he frequently commented, "N'est-ce pas beau comme la littérature?" ("Isn't it lovely as literature?") At certain moments, he implies, he effected a mutation of life into a work of art, something already in the realm of literature. His droll and occasionally abject "act" contained his highest ambitions: the sacrifice of his life to a literary ideal. "We maintain," writes the surrealist André Breton, "that beginning with Jarry, much more than with Wilde, the differentiation long considered necessary between art and life has been challenged, to wind up annihilated as a principle." It means that Jarry, if we glimpse him cursorily and with no willingness to measure his intentions, seems to live in foolish competition with his own work. Why run so wildly after Ubu once the personage had been created and staged? Why try to practice the preposterous theories of 'Pataphysicks? It is enough that the books exist. On the other hand, the total career of Jarry, the accumulation of accurate and distorted and fabricated stories about him, creates a perspective in which Jarry becomes consubstantial with his work. Montaigne, who represents the complementary tendency, molded his essays so closely to his person as to consider them his own flesh; Jarry molded himself so closely to the lineaments of his literary creation that none of his own flesh remained. One gives the "truth" of confession; the other, the "truth" of hallucination.

Of course something of Jarry was left, unless one goes so far as to say that it was Père Ubu who wrote his books after 1896. He continued to eat and sleep and see his friends, and to be a welcome participant in the literary life of Paris. But his public personage was established. After a typical escapade in a café (he broke a mirror shooting at a customer's pipe), the account in L'Illustration the next day referred to "le Père Ubu en personne." Since neither vanity nor true arrogance, but deliberate artifice caused the inflatedness of his behavior, most acquaintances tried to act as if it were all in the order of things. Something of the awkwardly personable, generous young man from Brittany still peeked through the chinks of the façade, but in Jarry's terms such revelations of the inner man meant weakness or failure. Soon even the chinks were filled. He was not the only eccentric in Paris, but he was by far the most rigorous.

This public form of privacy began by stimulating his work, and the years before 1900 were his most productive. After the best of his novels, Les jours et les nuits ( 1897), he finished the Rabelaisan Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll in 1898. It was followed by L'amour en visites ( 1898), the semimystical L'amour absolu ( 1899), and two successive numbers of an Almanach du Père Ubu, the second illustrated by Jarry and Pierre Bonnard, with whom Jarry collaborated for several months on a puppet theater. Only Faustroll had to wait for publication until after Jarry's death. But despite a favorable reception, these volumes scarcely supported him. Then in 1900 Jarry's frequent periodical writings and reviews bore fruit in an arrangement that he contribute a regular humorous chronicle, "Gestes," to the wealthy Natanson brothers' Revue Blanche. For three years Jarry lived on this income, and wrote two uneven novels, Messaline, "Novel of Ancient Rome," and Le surmâle, "A Modern Novel." After the Revue Blanche ceased publication in 1903, Jarry spent the winter in the Dauphine with his loyal friend Demolder collaborating on a libretto of Pantagruel.

At thirty Jarry had completed his best years, enjoyed a unique notoriety in the literary world of Paris, and was already looked up to by a new generation. Most important among them were several young writers just beginning to publish: Guillaume Apollinaire, André Salmon, and Max Jacob. They sought out Jarry in his Grand Chasublerie, drew him into their revelries and discussions, and saw much of him at a time when the New Spirit was finally beginning to take the shape of frank modernism in opposition to the classical-eclectic tendency which led to the foundation of the Nouvelle Revue Française five years later. Jarry was a frequent visitor in Montmartre during the earliest years of the bateau lavoir and exercised a special fascination over Picasso. The painter adopted his eccen- tric, pistol-carrying habits and later acquired a valuable collection of Jarry's manuscripts. Among these youthful champions of the twentieth century, in the cubist doctrine they devised, and in the other isms that followed, Jarry found his progeny.

From this time on, Jarry's health suffered, above all from the ether which was the only intoxicant he could afford. He started work on a series of marionette plays and attempted a few magazine pieces. After surviving the winter of 1904-1905, he did not eat regularly the following year, and went without heat. Dr. Saltas, a friend who helped Jarry and at the same time exploited his talents, began collaborating with him on a translation of a Greek novel by Emmanuel Rhoïdes. But Jarry collapsed and had to return to Laval, where his sister could care for him. At this grim moment Jarry began a long-projected novel, La dragonne. It kept him working through periods of fever and exhaustion, and certain scenes of the unfinished work indicate that his powers were undiminished. But he discovered that his health was too severely impaired to be regained more than temporarily. When he reached the point of total physical enfeeblement and extreme unction (for Père Ubu was apparently willing to die a Christian), he still wrote frequently to Dr. Saltas predicting recovery and explaining at length how he had been brought so low. "We must rectify the legend--for Père Ubu, as I am called, is dying not of having done too much drinking, but of not having always had enough to eat."

In what seemed his last moments, he addressed to Madame Rachilde a letter in which the façade begins to crack. The maudlin pomposity of Père Ubu struggles openly with Jarry's own dwindling voice: he does not know whether to refer to himself as he or I or we.

Laval, May 28, 1906

Dear Madame R.

This time Père Ubu does not write with a fever. (This is beginning like a last will and testament, but that is taken care of.) I think you understand by now that he is not dying (excuse me! the word slipped out) because of drink and other orgies.

He didn't have that Passion, and he has been so immodest as to have himself examined all over by merdcins [doctors]. He is without blemish, either in the liver or in the heart or in the kidneys. He is simply run down (a curious end for the man who wrote Le surmâle; his furnace is not going to blow up but simply go out). He will quietly stop running, like a tired motor. . . . And no cure known to man, no matter how closely he follows it (while laughing at it inside) will do any good. His fever comes perhaps from his heart trying to save him by sending his pulse up to 150. No human being has held on that long. For two days he has been of the Lord's Anointed, and as such feels like Kipling's trunkless elephant, "full of an insatiable curiosity." He will fall back a little further in the darkness of time. Just as he used to carry his revolver in his back

pocket, he has put a gold chain around his neck, solely because that metal does not oxidize and will last as long as his bones, with medals in which he believes, just in case he should meet any devils. It's all as much fun as going fishing. . . .

[ Jarry asks that his debts be paid--above all, to Vallette--with the revenue on his books.]

Père Ubu is shaved and has laid out a mauve shirt just by accident. He will disappear in the color scheme of the Mercure. . . and he will start out, still consumed with curiosity. He has a feeling that it will be tonight at five. . . . If he is wrong he will be ridiculous and that's that. Ghosts were always ridiculous.

With this Père Ubu, who has earned his rest, is going to sleep. He believes that the brain, during decomposition, continues to function after death, and that its dreams are our Paradise.

Père Ubu conditionally (he would so like to return to his Tripod) is perhaps going to sleep forever.

Alfred Jarry

P.S. I open this letter to say the doctor has just come by and thinks he can save me. A.J.

Jarry dragged himself through another miserable year, interrupted by increasingly serious relapses which made him return to Laval. His friends on the Mercure raised money with a subscribed edition of a mediocre operetta, Le moutardier du pape. Back in Paris in April, 1907, he wrote to an old friend, Victor Gastilleur.

Please come by today. I've had some money orders from Laval and I don't have the strength to go cash them; they must be cashed or I'm done for. I've been in bed five days without being able to go out and get anything. You'll save my life if you come.

The willfulness with which he kept himself saturated with ether was no longer a form of drinking or alcoholism; he was simply killing himself. In writing the letter a year before to Rachilde, he had almost flinched before his chosen end; this time nothing shook his purpose. One of his last writings, a chapter called "Descendit ad infernos" intended for La dragonne, contains this visionary description of the hero's approaching death: "But soon he could drink no more, for there was no more darkness for him and, no doubt like Adam before the fall . . . he could see in the dark."

In the fall of 1907 Jarry dropped out of sight almost completely, making a last written appeal in October to Thadée Natanson for a louis d'or. Dr. Saltas and Vallette became so disturbed over his prolonged absence from normal haunts that they paid a visit to the Grand Chasublerie. They knocked for a long time before they heard Jarry feebly reply that he was coming. He never came. Knocking again and again to rouse him, they asked if they should send for a locksmith. From inside Jarry answered at last in barely audible tones that "it might not be such a bad idea after all." They found him in a state of complete paralysis from the waist down, lying helpless in his reduction of a room. At the hospital (he worried immediately about who would pay expenses) no hope was offered for his life. He revived enough to receive visits from a few friends. But Jarry's memory and his lucidity declined rapidly. One friend was so distressed to see his frightful condition that he had to turn away from the bed to hide his emotion. For the last time, Père Ubu rose with august dignity out of the ashes of Jarry and said gruffly: "Well, Polti, aren't you feeling well today?" Paul Léautaud relates that he spent several of his last days in a semicoma muttering over and over the never-completed phrase, "Je cherche . . .je cherche . . . j'ch . . . j'ch . . ." He became lucid for a brief time at the end and asked for--a toothpick. Dr. Saltas hurried out to buy a box. When Jarry finally had one in his fingers, Saltas writes, "It seems as if he were suddenly filled with a great joy as on the days he went off fishing or on a canoe or bicycle trip. I barely stepped aside to speak to the nurse when she signaled me to turn around. He was drawing his last breath."

As he had predicted to one of his ward neighbors, Jarry died on November 1, 1907. An autopsy revealed that he had suffered from acute meningeal tuberculosis, a condition his drinking had severely aggravated but not caused. A cortege of fifty accompanied the body to the Bagneux cemetery. Apollinaire relates that just as Père Ubu would have wished, there was more eating and drinking after the burial than weeping during it. His friends subscribed for a monument for his grave, among them Octave Mirbeau, Alexander Natanson, Alfred Vallette, Félix Fénéon, Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Mère Ubu (i.e., Louise France, who had taken the role at the first performance), Gémier, Léon-Paul Fargue, Eugène Fasquelle (a publisher), Odilon Redon, Paul Léautaud, Stuart Merrill, Paul Valéry.

In the unstable compound of fable and fact that must pass as his life, the "real" Jarry is as much a pretense as a personality. Because of the violent fusion he attempted of life and literature, we shall find him equally present in his writings. A biography of Jarry ends by being about someone else, the inside-out person he created. In an almost frightening seizure, he became his pose. Jarry offers one of the extreme cases in history of literary mimesis--of an author becoming one of his own characters. Early in life he compensated for his small stature and crippling timidity by a profession of eccentricity. Within a few years he found himself defying the prosperous smugness of the fin-de-siècle with a resounding merdre. To live up to this beginning he resorted to extreme measures which amount to a modern form of self-scarification. His dedication to an artistic end exceeded Rousseau's and Satie's in savagery and exclusiveness. Through a prolonged suicide, Jarry clung to the moment of total freedom that precedes death. The wonder is that he could graft upon his diminutive figure the huge blundering monstrosity of Ubu, whose name has entered the language.

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^*	A few years later he devoted one of his most passionately moving books, L'amour absolu, to the theme of maternal love multiplied and transformed into an allencompassing religious experience.