Strelitzia in hand, the very spirit of humour walks on eggshells back up the current of years covering the ‘last’ war,1 body forward and face in profile. Anything but an abstentionist, he sports a uniform that is beautifully tailored and, moreover, divided in two – a synthetic uniform, as it were, which on one side is that of the ‘allied’ armies and on the other that of the ‘enemy’ forces. Their strictly superficial unification is accompanied by a great many outer pockets, pale shoulder belts, staff ID cards, and scarves about the waist in every colour of the horizon. His red hair, his ‘dead-flame’ eyes, and the glacial butterfly of his monocle perfect this constant, wilful dissonance and isolation. His refusal to participate is absolute, and takes the guise of a purely formal acceptance pushed to the limit: he maintains all the ‘outer signs of respect,’ of a somewhat automatic acquiescence to precisely what the mind deems most insane. With Jacques Vaché, not a cry, not even a whisper: man’s ‘duties,’ which were typified in the agitation of those times by ‘patriotic duty,’ are defied – up to and including conscientious objection, which in his view still showed far too much good will. In order to find the desire and the strength for opposition, one still needs to fall less short of the mark. Instead of outward desertion in time of war, which for him still retained a rather Palcontent aspect, Vaché opted for another kind of insubordination, which we might call desertion within oneself. This was not even the kind of defeatism practised by Rimbaud in 1870–71, but rather a stance of utter indifference, along with a will not to serve any purpose whatsoever, or more precisely to conscientiously disserve. An individualistic attitude if ever there was one. It strikes me as the product – the most evolved product to date – of the emotional ambivalence that posits that the death of others is accepted much more freely in wartime than in peacetime, and that a person’s life becomes more interesting as that of the collective stops being spared. There is in this a return to a primitive state usually expressed by the ‘heroic’ reaction (the overheated superego managing to obtain the ego’s withdrawal, its consent to loss) and, in exceptional cases, by the exacerbation of egoistic tendencies, for lack of having met the appropriate erotic ferment (the id reemerging as dominant, as in the case of Ubu or the Good Soldier Schweik). A superego of pure simulation, veritable pattern of its kind, was retained by Vaché only as an ornament; an extraordinary lucidity conferred an unusual, wilfully macabre, and extremely disquieting cast upon his relations with the id. It is from these relations that black humour surges in a continual flow – Umour (no h, following the inspired orthography he adopted) that will take on an initiatory and dogmatic character. From the outset the ego is sorely tried: ‘I almost bought it,’ says Vaché, ‘– in our last retreat. But I object to being killed in wartime.’ He killed himself shortly after the Armistice. ‘I was just finishing this article,’ writes Marc-Adophe Guégan in La Ligne du coeur (January 1927), ‘when a trustworthy source sent me a horrifying revelation. Apparently Jacques Vaché said a few hours before the tragedy: “I will die when I want to die … But then I’ll die with someone else. Dying alone is too boring … Preferably one of my very best friends …” Such statements,’ adds M. Guégan, ‘cast doubts on the hypothesis of an accident, especially if we recall that Jacques Vaché did not die alone. One of his friends fell victim to the same poison, on the same evening. They seemed to be sleeping side by side, until it was discovered that they were no longer alive. But to admit that this double death was the consequence of a sinister plan is to make someone’s memory horribly responsible.’ To provoke the denunciation of that ‘horrible responsibility’ was, without a doubt, the supreme ambition of Jacques Vaché.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lettres de guerre, 1920.
BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: Letters from the Front.
x, 11 octo. 16
Dear Friend,
I am writing from a bed to which a bothersome fever and pure whimsy have confined me all day.
I received your letter yesterday – The Obvious Fact is that I have forgotten nothing of our friendship, which I hope shall last, so rare are Sars and Mimes!2 – and even though you have but an approximate notion of Umour.
I am interpreter to the English – and, bringing to said function the sheer indifference leavened with peaceable fraud that I bring to all things official, from ruins to villages I parade my crystal monocle and my theory of disturbing paintings – I have successively been a writer laureate, a well-known pornographic cartoonist, and a scandalous Cubist painter – These days I stay at home and leave others the task of explaining and discussing my personality on the basis of those indicated – The results are unimportant.
I am going on leave toward the end of the month, and will spend some time in Paris – I must pay a visit to my very best friend, with whom I have completely lost touch.
… Other than that – which isn’t much – Nothing. The British Army, preferable though it might be to the French variety, does not have much Umour – I have several times warned a colonel attached to me that I will perforate his nearoles with a little wooden pick3 – I doubt he entirely seized my meaning = for one thing he doesn’t know French.
My current dream is to wear a red blouse, a red scarf, and high boots – and to be a member of a secret and pointless Chinese society in Australia.
Are your Illuminati allowed to write? I’ll gladly exchange letters with a paranoiac, or some ‘catatonic’ or other.
* * *
x. 4/29/17
Dear Friend,
… I am writing from an ex-village, in a very narrow pigsty covered with blankets – I am with the British soldiers – they have much advanced into enemy territory in these parts – It’s very noisy – That’s all.
… And then you ask me for a definition of umour – just like that! –
‘IT IS IN THE ESSENCE OF SYMBOLS TO BE SYMBOLIC’ has long seemed to me worthy of being such a definition in that it is liable to contain a host of living things: EXAMPLE: You know the horrible life of the alarm clock – it’s a monster that has always appalled me because of the number of things its eyes project, and the way that good fellow stares at me when I enter a room – why, then, does it have so much umour, why then? But there you have it: it is so and not otherwise – There is also much that is UBU-ically tremendous in umour – as you shall see – But this is of course not – definitive and umour derives too much from sensation not to be very difficult to express – I believe it is a sensation – I almost said a SENSE – that too – of the theatrical (and joyless) pointlessness of everything.
When you know.
And that then is why the enthusiasms (first of all they’re noisy) of others are hateful – for – isn’t it so – we have genius – since we know UMOUR – And Everything – could you possibly doubt it? is permitted us. All this is quite boring, furthermore.
I’m enclosing a figure – and this could be titled OBSESSION – or else – yes – BATTLE OF THE SOMME AND THE REMAINDER4 – yes.
He’s been following me around for a long time, and has stared at me countless times in countless holes – I have great affection for him, among other things.
* * *
8/18/17
Dear Friend,
… Besides – ART doesn’t exist, no doubt – It is therefore pointless to sing of it – and yet: people make art – because that’s how it is and not otherwise – Well – what can you do?
So we like neither art nor artists (down with Apollinaire) and HOW RIGHT TOGRATH IS TO ASSASSINATE THE POET! Nevertheless since it is necessary to extract a little acid or old lyricism, may it be done with a lively jerk – for locomotives travel fast.
So modernity too – constant, and killed every night – We ignore MALLARMÉ, without rancour, but he is dead – We no longer recognize Apollinaire – BECAUSE – we suspect him of producing art too wittingly, of stitching up Romanticism with telephone wire and of not knowing dynamos. THE STARS still disconnected! – it’s boring – and then sometimes they don’t talk seriously! – A man who believes is a curiosity. BUT SINCE SOME PEOPLE ARE NATURAL-BORN SHOW-OFFS …
Well then – I see two ways of letting things take their course – Create one’s own sensations with the help of a flamboyant collision of rare words – not often, mind you – or else neatly draw the angles, the squares, the entire geometry of feelings – those of the moment, naturally – We shall leave logical Honesty – provided we contradict ourselves – like everyone else.
… Umour should produce nothing – but what can be done? I grant LAFCADIO a bit of umour, because he doesn’t read and his only products are amusing experiments – such as Murder – and without Satanic lyricism at that – my dear old, rotten Baudelaire! – We needed our air dry, a little; machinery – rotating in stinking oil – throb, throb – throb – Whistle! Reverdy – amusing as po-wet, tedium in prose; MAX Jacob, my old charlatan – PUPPETS – PUPPETS – PUPPETS would you like some beautiful puppets in coloured wood!? Two dead-flame-eyes and the crystal wafer of a monocle – with an octopus typewriter – I like that better …
* * *
11/14/18
Dearest friend,
Your letter found me in such a state of depression! – I’m devoid of ideas and almost totally muted, more than ever no doubt the unconscious recorder of many things, as a whole – what crystallization? … I’ll emerge from the war gently doddering, perhaps indeed like those splendid village idiots (and I hope so) … or else … or else … what a film I’ll star in! – With careening automobiles, don’t you know, and collapsing bridges, and enormous hands creeping over the screen toward some document – useless and priceless! – With such tragic conversations, in evening wear, behind the palm tree with a thousand ears! – And then Charlie [Chaplin], of course, who grimaces, eyes serene. The Policeman left behind in the trunk!!
Telephone, shirtsleeves, people in fast motion, with those strange jerky movements – William R. G. Eddie, who is sixteen years old, has thousands of liveried Negroes, such beautiful ash-white hair, and a horn-rimmed monocle. He will be married.
I’ll also be a trapper, or thief, or prospector, or hunter, or miner, or well driller. – Arizona Bar (whiskey – gin and mixed?), and fine, high-yielding forests, and you know those beautiful riding breeches with their machine pistols, the clean-shaven look, and such lovely hands for playing solitaire. It’ll all go up in smoke, I tell you, or I’ll end up in a saloon, having made my fortune. – Well.
However will I manage, my poor friend, to stand these final months in uniform? – (they’ve assured me the war is over) – I’m at wits’ end … and besides THEY don’t trust me … THEY suspect something – So long as THEY don’t debrain me while THEY still have me in their power? …
1. (The other one, that is.)
2. Terminology borrowed from Rosicrucianism (as is the reference to ‘Illuminati’ at the end of the letter) to designate individuals who have reached certain stages of enlightenment. [trans.]
3. A torture picked up from Alfred Jarry, one of the few writers to find favour in Vaché’s eyes. See Ubu Rex, Act III, Scene 8. [trans.]
4. The Somme, site of a major battle in the First World War, is also the French word for a mathematical sum. [trans.]