It is a few years after the end of the Second World War. Europe is in ruins. Out in its colonies, the will and the means come together to start throwing off the yoke. The Russians and the Americans brandish bombs at each other. Meanwhile in Paris, the City of Light, curfews and rationing slowly come to an end. The lights are lit again. The black market fades to gray. It’s a time to shoot movies rather than collaborators. Formerly banned pleasures still have a special quality: American jazz, gangster movies and crime novels seem to promise unknown thrills, a sort of cultural correlate of the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction. There is a world to build out of books and mortar.
Existentialism is all the rage. All the papers say so, even if they don’t approve. A doctrine that puts such a premium on freedom seems somehow both frightening and delicious. The philosophers credited with creating it—Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty—refuse the label while selectively exploiting the attention. Self-styled existentialists turn up in their Paris neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. They hang out in the famous cafés, hoping to rub shoulders with intellectual celebrities. After the cafés shut, it’s on to the cellar clubs. The wire-service journalists started this fad. Working odd hours, in need of a drink when all else closes, they end up in the cellars, and so the cellars end up in the news.
The most famous was Le Tabou. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote: “People drank and danced and also brawled a great deal, both inside and out front. The neighborhood declared war … at night, people threw buckets of water on the customers and even on people just passing by.”1 De Beauvoir claimed never to have been there. She did not like the way its front people, Anne-Marie Cazalis and Juliette Gréco, traded on the existentialist fashion. But she was friends with Boris Vian (1920–59), who played the trumpet in the band. Vian was a man of parts. Besides his passion for jazz, he wrote a fake American crime novel to cash in on that craze, and he wrote the Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (1949).2
The Manual is a mock ethnography of the quarter. Saint-Germain has its natives, those who ply respectable trades, pouring cold water on the bohemian effusions they consider beneath them. It has its incursionists, new-money people who doubtless got rich off the black market and came looking for ways to spend it. It has permanent invaders, American and Scandinavian and the occasional English.3 And it has its troglodytes, the nocturnal residents of the cellar clubs. Boris Vian regarded himself and his friends as none of the above. The real Saint-Germain was to him a small coterie of creative individuals.
Here are some of them, with their dates, since time is key to this story: the poet Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), the composer Georges Auric (1899–1983), the writer Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), the writer Jacques Prévert (1900–77), the artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–66), the writer Raymond Queneau (1903–76), the writer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), the writer Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), the writer Jean Genet (1910–86), the saxophonist Don Byas (1912–72), the actress Simone Signoret (1921–85), and the singer Juliette Gréco (b. 1927). None will feature much in our story—with one exception: the poet Gabriel Pomerand (1925–72).
In her memoir, Simone Signoret describes her initiation into Saint-Germain in 1941. She quit her job on a collaborationist paper and came to hang out at the Café de Flore, hoping to get into the film business. Of the people she met there—“some of them Jewish, many of them Communists or Trotskyites, Italian anti-fascists, Spanish Republicans, bums, jokers, penniless poets, sharers of food ration tickets, ambulatory guitarists, genial jacks of all trades, temporary no-goods”—some would not survive the war.4 Of those who did, a few would become celebrated figures of a new postwar culture, with Saint-Germain as their symbolic home. Saint-Germain was where the forces for the postwar restoration of the spectacle gathered.
American pop mixed with youthful irreverence was not to everyone’s taste. In his Manual, Vian takes great exception to the portrayal of Saint-Germain in both the conservative and communist press. Gullible cellar-dwelling troglodytes, he suspects, can be cajoled into saying pretty much anything for the price of a drink. They give the place a bad name. The legend the press starts is that Sartre is the Magus and jazz the Pied Piper of an evil cult. Worse, Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex (1949) ruins the morals of impressionable girls. Vian quotes some choice bits of journalese: “Beginning of the legend: an amateur existentialism of destruction. The whole story: blood, sensuality, death.” Poor troglodyte existentialists, mere teenagers, living in cheap hotels they can’t afford. They are “unwholesome” and “violent,” “intoxicated” by American crime novels (or perhaps by Vian’s copies of them). In the clubs they can be found “screaming like banshees.” The press has fabulated a folk devil here, about which to whip up a moral panic.5
“These zealots recognize each other through thousands of little items of clothing: cowboy shirts flapping in the breeze, red, yellow and green, plaid shirts that hang open down to the belly button.” The troglodyte existentialist belongs to a subculture.6 “The women of the tribe are fond of smocks that come in maybe two or three colors: their hairstyles give them the look of a drowning victim … they are none too fond of soap or hairbrushes, but they dance one hell of a boogie-woogie.” The press can’t decide if they have too much sex or not enough, but either way their desire is out of line, a threat to bourgeois enjoyment.7 They gather in Saint-Germain, in the shadows cast by its luminaries, to reinvent themselves, by means both fair and shady. Bohemia’s other face is delinquency.
She loved to dance: Vali Myers (1930–2003) left home at fourteen and moved to seamy St Kilda, a waterside neighborhood in Melbourne, Australia. She worked in a hair salon for a while, and as an artist’s model, but preferred factory jobs. What money she made went towards study with the Melbourne Modern Ballet. In 1950 she left Australia, aged nineteen, determined to dance in Paris. She found a ruined city, cold in winter; poor all the year round. The war had shattered one way of life, and another had not yet risen from the ashes. Myers dropped ballet and went dancing in the cellars where African drummers played. Tourists threw money at her feet. She learned very little French, but picked up the argot of the streets. This is what she wrote about those times:
The kids who survived after the war years in our quarter, Saint-Germain des Prés, can be counted on one hand. It was … a world without illusions, without dreams. It had a dark stark beauty like a short Russian story of Gorky that one doesn’t forget. They were uprooted kids, old for their years, from all over Europe. Many had no home or parents, no papers (stateless), no money … We lived in the streets and cafés, like a pack of “bastard dogs” and with the strict hierarchy of such a tribe. Students and workers were “outsiders.” The few tourists on the lookout for “existentialists” were “game” (for a meal or a drink), but no one sold himself. There was always cheap booze and Algerian hashish to get by on. What we had we shared, even the butt end of a cigarette.8
Sometimes she slept in cafés or movie houses; sometimes she slept rough. For a while she had a tiny room at the Hôtel d’Alsace-Lorraine, where the concierge was reputed to have worked for Marcel Proust in his last years. She slept by day, and danced through the night as if consumed by fire. Her whole delinquent “tribe” was nocturnal.9 There was Kaki, the beauty of the quarter, a former Dior model, the daughter of collaborators who killed themselves after the war. Kaki joined her parents at age nineteen. There was Fred, the big blond Corsican, in and out of prison, who later became a success: as an artist, husband, and father. There was Robert the Mexican, said to have killed a man. There was Eliane, who had run away from both home and the reformatory. There was Ralph Rumney, dodging military service in Britain. Vali Myers lived on and off with Pierre Feuillette, who was known as the Chief. Unpredictable, with a walk like a cat, he was not the sort of character it pays to romanticize. He cut her once, in a fight. When she danced, it was he who collected the money the tourists threw. These were the scenes and characters from what she called her “opium years”—which lasted until 1958.
Gabriel Pomerand introduced Myers to opium. He was one of several men of the quarter who made her into a bohemian muse. Pomerand wrote that “she disobeys every last law of conventional beauty,” and compared encountering Myers to meeting a “cheetah on a leash.” The Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken gave her the leading role in his book Love on the Left Bank. “She danced like a Negress,” he said. George Plimpton, the expatriate American, wrote in Paris Review: “Her dancing is remarkable—a sinuous shuffling, bent-kneed, her shoulders and hands moving at trembling speed to the drumbeats.” Plimpton quotes another admirer: “You saw in her the personalization of something torn and loose and deep-down primitive in all of us.” Even the great gay Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo idolized the “solemn, hieratic girl, systematically dressed in black, with her face painted like a mask,” who declared that she lived in a “damp cave with mice and called on the most daring to try her one night in a cemetery.”10
Myers said that for her Saint-Germain was “like a little battlefield.” Tired of parrying the glances of so many attentive men, she left Paris for a secluded valley in Italy. She would henceforth prefer the company of animals. The remarkable thing is that she survived her marginal Paris life. One of the press stories Vian disparages contains at least a kernel of truth: “Existentialism has ripened so quickly that it is already divided by class warfare. In fact it is necessary these days to distinguish the rich existentialists from the poor ones.” Bohemia is fine for those who enter it voluntarily, and its legend is sustained by those who succeeded through it. For those who aren’t rich, aren’t men, aren’t white, aren’t straight, for those from the provinces, for those without a home to go back to, it is no picnic. People like Myers’s tribe were doubly dispossessed, too young and too marginal. There was nothing for it but to stick together. As Ralph Rumney put it: “Our social exclusion made us a closed group.”11
It has become an impertinence to say we. The collective pronoun is to be distrusted. Only the voice of the self is authentic. This voice declares itself from endless status updates, with whole spiders’ nests of self-affirmation: ME! ME! ME! It’s a world of free agents vainly attempting to establish themselves on the slender résumé of their own qualities. The twenty-first century is the culmination of two forms of individualism. In the first, individuals are all the same; in the second, they are all different. The first is classically bourgeois, the second distinctively bohemian. But whether different or the same, in the twenty-first century it’s the same difference. Bourgeois individualism is now infused with bohemian flourishes. In the 1950s Vali Myers stood out even in Saint-Germain. In the 1970s, when she gave the singer Patti Smith her first tattoo, this might still have been a gesture with a point. Now you can get your tattoos at the mall. It’s romanticism for everybody, with a little blood and pain thrown in for the price. The collapse of bourgeois and bohemian individualism into the warm embrace of the commodity is the defining style of the middle-class sensibility of today’s disintegrating spectacle.12
There are also two kinds of collective belonging. In the first, we belong because we are the same; in the second, we belong because we are not.13 The most insistent form of collective belonging in Paris after the war was the Communist Party, which was definitely of the first kind, a collective belonging that obliged of its members a certain unity and identity as proletarians. Wrapping itself in the scarlet mantle of the Resistance, the Party exerted its gravity upon artists and intellectuals even if they were not members. While directing a withering criticism at the surrealist old guard, Sartre agonized over how to align himself with the Communists, who he still took to be the representatives of the working class.
Saint-Germain offered its own alternative to the collective belonging of communism—the collective belonging of the Letterist movement, led by the charismatic Romanian poet and film-maker Isidore Isou (1925–2007). The rogue surrealist Georges Bataille once described him as a genius who lacked nothing except talent. Sartre hated the Letterists almost as much as he hated Bataille: “Letterism is a substitute product, a flat and conscientious imitation of Dadaist exuberance. One’s heart is no longer in it, one feels the application and haste to succeed.”14 Yet not the least merit of the Letterists is that they were one of the few groups who managed to stay outside of both bourgeois postwar French culture and its Stalinist alternative. They managed to make something enduring, by seizing control over their own self-presentation. These were things for which Myers and her tribe lacked the wherewithal.
Romania gave the world Tristan Tzara, the poet of Dada, and it gave the world Isidore Isou, the prophet of Letterism, who first achieved fame in postwar Paris by publicly embarrassing poor old Tzara, even as he began his own avant-garde practice by appropriating the best Tzara had to offer. Notoriety led to the publication of two of Isou’s books by the venerable, if somewhat compromised, house of Gallimard. Saint-Germain was at the time the center of the French publishing world, so it made sense for a provincial gate-crasher like Isou to install himself the cafés there while finding a way to both scandalize and break into one of the quarter’s few industries. Its other racket was cinema, drawing the likes of Signoret. Isou would tackle that one too, in his extraordinary film Treatise on Spit and Eternity (1951).15
While most people approached the postwar years as a time of reconstruction, Isou wanted to push the destruction of culture still further. His trans-historical theory of culture took the will to create as its primary axiom. Not Marxist necessity, not Sartrean freedom, but creation was the highest form of human activity. Creation takes us from the spit of unconsciousness to the eternity of a consciously created history, for while the artist creates within history, the act of creation touches the eternal. All forms—aesthetic and social—move from a stage of amplification to one of decomposition. In the amplification stage, a form grows to incorporate whole aspects of existence. The amplified form shapes life and makes it meaningful. During the period of decomposition, forms turn on themselves and become self-referential. Forms fall from grace and from history. As the form decomposes, so does the life to which it once gave shape. Form becomes unreal, and language becomes tame: “Tarzan learns in his father’s book to call tigers cats.”16
Isou applied this theory to all forms, from art to cinema, but poetry had a central place, for he was interested in both the history of poetry and the poetics of history. In modern French poetry, Victor Hugo took the amplification stage as far as it could go. Its decomposition then advanced, phase by phase, through Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Tzara. Dada rendered all existing forms worthless. Dada was conscious decomposition. Isou’s self-appointed task was to complete the reduction of the word to the letter, through a deliberate chiseling of poetry down to its bare elements. By creating a new alphabet, a new language would be possible, which would reconstruct, amplify, and retell the story of the world. Isou’s mission was to gather disciples for an all-out attack on spent forms, and the creation in their place of a fresh language.
Treatise on Spit and Eternity is almost the masterpiece Isou so confidently proclaimed.17 It has three movements. In the first, Isou wanders the streets of the quarter in his plaid jacket. “The neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés is an invention of the author, and represents nothing but the author’s calvary.” The voice-over recounts his (or rather his fictive double Daniel’s) attempt to expound his vision of a new cinema to a hostile audience at a film club who shout him down, usually with stock leftist jibes. Cinema has become obese, he declares. Its images have become too banal, too artistic. Cinema is merely “an industry organized in defense of current production.” The cinema of classic unities has to be rent asunder. He proposes a discrepant cinema, where image and sound are severed from each other. It is time to spit out the old masterpieces. Cinema should aspire to a gangrenous beauty worthy of the Marquis de Sade. “The more the subject matter is spoiled and perverted, the more beautiful it is … The novelty of creation alone interests the creator. That is why the ugliness of our era preoccupies him: it is new and therefore beautiful.”
After wandering about Saint-Germain in the first act, Isou meets up in the second with Eve, a Norwegian beauty. Now he attempts to enact the “Manifesto of Discrepant Cinema” just expounded. Isou thwarts the spectators’ expectations: “The author knows that people go to the movies to swallow their weekly Saturday night dose of tenderness. And though they don’t give a damn about the story, they retell it in the hope of a deserved success. The author does not care for this type of legend, because these are questions of personal taste. Only systems where form goes beyond story are of interest to him.” What he ends up with is a charmless account of his alter-ego Daniel’s misogyny.
Still, the second act achieves two insights. Daniel recounts how expulsion from the Communist Party felt like a kind of annihilation: “How astonishing to find oneself alive the next day.” The other is an observation voiced by another girlfriend, Denise: “How many corpses in the maze of the dictionary? … Our vocabulary is full of real corpses, a cemetery of men who died for words.” Given the brutality of the history Isou survived as a Romanian Jew, the statement carries a certain gravity. It is no accident either that across stock footage of a church service, Isou has scratched the Star of David and that stock footage of the colonial officer class routinely has the faces and bodies scratched out. For Isou, “the evolution of art has nothing to do with the revolution in society.” It is a refuge from it.
All one could say in favor of the film’s second act is that it manifests the latent male aggression towards women that is an undercurrent of bohemian sexual practices. “I installed myself in her,” he says of Eve, before discarding her. The third act can then devote itself to Letterist poetry, with two great performances by François Dufrêne (1930–82), perhaps the most accomplished of Isou’s followers where poetry was concerned. In the third act Isou promotes Letterism against all rival avant-gardes. He dismisses jazz, for instance, as “white-collar primitivism.” Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is just the “King Kong of the revolution.” Cinema in particular has failed as an art. “The God of cinema is dead,” like the God of legend who died while making the universe, leaving it unfinished. Isou sets himself the task of completion. “Actually what interests you is creation, invention, discovery. That’s what creation is. An unceasing destruction of surfaces to reach a subterranean pool.” The film ends with Daniel’s voice-over account of his abandoned girlfriend Eve, wandering Saint-Germain and succumbing to madness, until the police round her up and deport her. An indifferent Daniel, who witnesses her downfall, decides to play pinball with a friend, who wins a free game.
The unnamed friend in the film’s last act could well have been Gabriel Pomerand. Like Isou a Romanian Jew, his mother was deported to Auschwitz. He spent the war in Marseilles, in the Resistance, but still found time to read the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. He came to Paris after the war, meeting Isou in a soup kitchen for Romanian refugees. Pomerand quickly enlisted in the Letterists’ shallow ranks. In the early postwar years he was a perpetual scandal in motion. He was a mainstay of the Letterist poetry readings at Le Tabou, and produced the first sustained work of metagraphic poetry, which synthesized image and word in a visual language. In it he presents a less flattering portrait of Saint-Germain than that drawn by Vian or even Isou. Pomerand’s Saint Ghetto of the Loans (1950) is a grimoire of the quarter, a book for evoking its damned spirits.18
Saint-Germain is a ghetto, he says: its denizens all wear a yellow star. It is a “drowned drunk peacefully floating from one bridge to another.” It is where American anarchist millionaires cross paths with swells whose wealth lies in castles built beneath the bridges. There is no Saint-Germain. “There are only spirits who survey the streets, from terrace to terrace, awaiting the occurrence of unique events,” or for someone to pick up their tab. It is an “open-air temple,” a “bullet-holed beauty spoiling in the sun.” It is where language is pounded beyond recognition. “How sweet to subsist in a world that is falling apart.” Saint-Germain is a Letterist ground zero.
Pomerand compares Saint-Germain to the imaginary city of Donogoo Tonka, from the novel by Jules Romains (1885–1972).19 In this novel, a geographer faces professional embarrassment because a city he describes in the Brazilian jungle does not actually exist. So he enlists the help of an adventurer to create it. The adventurer finds some unscrupulous bankers, who provide the backing for the Donogoo Tonka company, which outfits an expedition to the jungle. The expedition thinks it is going to an already thriving city, when actually the men will have to build it themselves. When they arrive they find that others have already started work on building the city, drawn by the publicity campaign of the Donogoo Tonka company. In Saint-Germain as in Donogoo Tonka, the place makes a spectacle of itself. It is where the spectacle pulls itself up again by its own bootstraps.
Pomerand and Isou were younger than Vian’s notables, but half a decade older than Vali Myers. She ran with a younger crowd, some of whom were attracted to the Letterists, some of whom had their own ideas. There was Henry de Béarn (1931–1995), who lived in a loft with Ivan Chtcheglov (1933–1998) near the Eiffel Tower. The lights from the tower kept them awake at night, so they planned to blow it up. There was Jean-Michel Mension (1934–2006), fortunate not to be orphaned by the war. First they came for his father, a communist militant. Then they came for his mother, both a communist and a Jew. Like many who washed up in Saint-Germain, Mension was drifting away from family, school, the law. But unlike some he had read his Sartre and his Prévert. Like Pomerand before him, Mension found his way to the poetry of Rimbaud and Lautréamont. After that self-education there was nothing for it but drink and mischief.
Mension spent his eighteenth birthday on the street, drinking and talking to Guy Debord (1931–94). Unlike Mension, Myers, and the tribe, Debord had a student allowance, so it was probably he who bought the wine (red for Mension, white for himself). As Mension recalls it, “we would set the whole world to rights while polishing off a liter or perhaps two liters.”20 Though little interested in his university classes, Debord studied Mension and others like him closely. Debord was a sort of street ethnographer, although his method was more intoxicant peregrination than participant observation. “He had a particular fascination with young people like me,” Mension says. “He must have been searching in me for the kind of trigger that causes someone to snap one day and begin living without rules.” Debord was researching a people who were neither bourgeois nor proletarian nor bohemian—and decidedly not middle-class.
Cursing is the work of the drinking classes. A short text Mension wrote in the early 1950s called “General Strike” declares “nothingness, perpetually sought, is simply, our life.” Debord was in search, not of the organic intellectuals of the working class, but of what one might call the alcoholic intellectuals of the non-working classes. He had read his Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961), whose coruscating prose was capable of dispelling most illusions, not least about the nobility of labor: “We’re workers they say. Work, they call it! That’s the crummiest part of the whole business.”21 Mension’s strike was not against work but against life, and while it strikes the right note of negativity, it does not quite rise to the level of a critique of delinquency—and this was the least of what Debord had in mind. There are plenty of celebrations of bohemia.22 What is rare is to turn a critical theory of delinquency into a delinquent critique.
The first real statement of what would come to be a properly Situationist writing would come not from Mension but from Ivan Chtcheglov, in his celebrated “Formulary for a New Urbanism” (1953).23 This is the text that pointed the way to the exit from the twentieth century as we know it. It’s the key document of the Letterist International (1952–57), the group Debord cofounded and to which Chtcheglov belonged, forming a breakaway from the older Letterists such as Isou and Pomerand.24 It would contribute some key ideas and practices to the movement that did not yet bear the name Situationist.
The Letterist International was a young people’s affair. They discarded Isou’s self-referential theories and personality cult, but took with them a certain practice of intellectual seduction and the ambition to chisel modern art down to nothing, to clear the ground for something else. The Letterist International dreamed big. They foresaw the end of the workhouse of modernist form. They discovered a new city via a calculated drifting (dérive) through the old. Theirs would be a city of play, love, adventure, made for arousing new passions, a city that might finally justify the conceit that this is a civilization worthy of its predecessors: “Although their builders are gone, a few disturbing pyramids resist the efforts of travel agencies to render them banal.”25 They were the other side to the spectacle of bohemia, its delinquent side, its marginal side. They created out of this marginality a collective being, and rendered that collective being in a low theory specific to it, and as we shall see, in a distinctive kind of practice.