A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical. W. E. Gutman
a small plaster bust of Hector Berlioz, a tortoise shell cigarette case, a gold-tipped fountain-pen, an illustrated first edition of Jules Verne’s Voyage to the Center of the Earth.
I’d objected politely but they’d insisted. “It’ll be that much less to dust,” they’d quipped, winking at each other. “You’re doing us a favor, my boy.” It was a hint that held, in its subtlety, the promise of some impending finality I did not have the maturity to decipher. I continued to do errands for them on rainy days or when the pain in their joints flared up. They never spoke about the Great War. I never asked. All wars, I surmised, possess a prosaic commonality, a tragic redundancy that makes explication quite useless. It is the mark of great soldiers never to reminisce. Bernard and Bertrand committed suicide, I later learned, when life, irrelevant and joyless, ceased to be worth living. They were found in bed, their medals and ribbons lying at the bottom of chamber pots in which they had dutifully -- and with studied scorn for the military establishment, La République and posterity -- taken their last shit. It was a scene straight out of Louis-Ferdinand Céline: blasphemy exalted by contempt.
Above the din and the scents, tucked away at the top of a narrow wooden corkscrew staircase, was home at last. It was in the nurturing silence of this sparsely furnished mansard that I withdrew after work and school. Delivered from the world below, I’d hasten to the dormer, part the chintz curtains and gape at my city the way a boy covets a woman. Under me were the streets. I could read in their cadence like from an open diary and I reveled in their pantomimes. In the distance, Paris spread like a tapestry of gilded domes, verdant parks, esplanades, and ancient spires, and I’d marvel at the loveliness, the grace, long after twilight had draped the city in a star-studded mantle of lilac and periwinkle blue.
I’d then turn to my books. In their pages, I explored the unrevealed nature of things, unearthing strange and wondrous emotions, toying with enticing abstractions. I wanted to conquer everything that is known and, if possible, to understand all that is unknowable. Such quest, I would discover, was as self-defeating as it was all-consuming. Alluring as they were, the voices behind the words (or was it the echo of my own ruminations?) invariably raised more questions than they answered. Curiosity is a long hallway filled with an infinite number of doors. Most never swing open, even at the loudest rap. I would settle on the notion that to seek knowledge is to know. In prospecting the unknown, I would also later concede, I was not so much interested in acquiring new insights (I was even less impressed with their utility or application) as in how they played on my imagination, how they kindled certain longings. Once digested, essential knowledge and fresh perspectives opened up a world into which I withdrew the better to savor the transcendent realms they evoked. I was intent at all cost, and with each newly apprehended truth, to let my subconscious roam free. Knowledge was in vain unless it had the capacity to stir, touch, shock or stupefy.
“The totality of all action culminates in knowledge…”
-- The Bhagavad-Gita
Surrealism, still in vogue in post-war Paris, played a pivotal role in this frenetic self-scrutiny. The eccentric cultural movement of the 1920s might have eluded me altogether had I not heard it panned as “intellectual snobbery” and “spiritual degeneracy,” or dismissed as “a hoax perpetrated by petty artists bent on scandalizing the purist mainstream.” Condemnation of an idea, much more than praise, tended to arouse my curiosity and, in some cases, earn my support.
Fierce criticism strengthens a cause more than high praise.
To have talent, imagination, or technique is not enough to be Arp, Dali, Duchamps, Ernst, Klee, Magritte, Miró, Picabia, Picasso or Tanguy. One must also have a grain of madness, daring and irreverence.
One embraces a cause to challenge the status quo; one discards it to challenges oneself.
Distracting society from its utilitarian yoke and reconciling irrationality with the rigors of conscious thought, a fundamental aim of Surrealism, found immediate favor with the wayward, nonconformist-in-training that I was becoming. The works I read, the avant-garde paintings, sculptures and musical compositions I discovered along the way, produced an immediate and lasting euphoria, and I eagerly surrendered to their spell. They still enchant me to this day.
It was Baudelaire, my mother’s favorite poet -- and one of France’s most revered literary icons -- who initiated me to Surrealism. Aroused, I would acquire an enduring appreciation for the genre. The formidable bard lavished not only the perfect harmony of his verse on a young, hungry mind; read with quasi-liturgical fervor, Les Fleurs du Mal also seemed to legitimize and vindicate my most visceral inclinations. Trusting neither man nor God, Baudelaire takes refuge in primordial chaos, in the flesh, in orgiastic sin. His verses crawl with monsters and freaks and pitiable bas-monde creatures all too reminiscent of ourselves. To set us at ease, to ensnare and disarm us perhaps, he strips himself to the bone in a poignant display of self-deprecation. Like Saint Sebastian, he flaunts the crimson gashes that score his naked breast, to arouse not pity but indignation. He then agitates our own demons, the ghouls that doze or stir within us, those we can never disavow. Shunned and lonely, the poet finds redemption in the anonymity of crowds, among beggars, cripples, harlots, drunkards. In sad or worn faces, he discovers traces of fathomless drama, in ephemeral smiles a twinkling of hope deferred. His is the voice of all who love unrequitedly, suffer inconsolably, savor rare joys with moving intensity and endure the sorrows, the longings and broken dreams that clutter the deepest regions of our being. Unloved, perhaps unlovable, he craves tenderness and quietude, longing for a faceless maiden to shine upon his winter years the golden warmth of an early autumn sky. He drowns his wrath and his agony in alcohol and hashish, and he dies, still waiting for that which he knows never comes.
If Rimbaud and Poe -- Baudelaire’s contemporaries and partners-in-rhyme -- gave madness a lyrical hue, it was Cocteau, France’s alchemical man, who urged me up the winding stairway of Surrealism, who shepherded me across its portals, and eased me into its strange and wondrous inner sanctum. Cocteau’s fairy tales, opium-induced phantasms and hallucinatory incantations imparted unique life to ambiguity, purpose to paradox.
“I am a lie doomed to always tell the truth.”
I gamboled and drowsed with Cocteau in fragrant fields of poppy only to awaken, sprinting in place in a relay race with myself. Forever seeking to jolt men out of their torpor as he himself prowls at the edges of delirium and paranoia, Cocteau’s trails are strewn with mockery toward the zealot, scorn for the hypocrite and disdain for the uninspired, pity -- dark, raging, agonizing pity. I often set sail on the wings of his allegories, just to keep in shape. Every time I alit from these fantastic voyages I was reminded that rationality is no match for intuitiveness, that the imponderable can only be hinted at by appealing to the imagination, not common sense. No, Surrealists do not live in ivory towers, as their critics suggest. They take careful aim instead and, with mordant wit and disarming irreverence, topple them and scatter their sordid debris for all to see. With the dismal fragments of their own intolerance now strewn at their feet, victims of reality no longer recoil from it but acknowledge its ineffable absurdity. Once fathomed, Surrealism encourages its disciples to seek within themselves new dimensions, hidden planes of awareness. Surrealism is the language of free spirits, the idiom of free thought.
Disquieting as my enthusiasm for Surrealism might have seemed (I would exploit this perceived eccentricity to discomfit those who were vexed by it), and in spite of a growing interest in the abstruse, I was still very much a boy and, like all French boys, I read Alexandre Dumas. In the flip of a page I became D’Artagnan and Edmond Dantès and Cagliostro. I wooed fair maidens with chivalry and selfless devotion. I rode noble steeds in pursuit of miscreants. I fought desperate duels on the side of the just, against despots, scheming aristocrats, and perfidious clergy. I escaped from dungeons, eluded the gallows, exposed dastardly cabals, and restored the good and the worthy to their rightful stations.
Mark Twain's landscapes and perspectives evoked settings and locales of an America now long gone, of mores and prejudices that are not. Wanderlust and a craving for the hinterlands of exoticism would be further whetted by Joseph Conrad, James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, Pierre Loti,