A Note on Lautréamont

ALTHOUGH Les Chants de Maldoror has won acceptance as a classic of French literature—there have been at least three new editions with different Paris publishers since the War—little information has been unearthed by scholars about its author, Isidore Ducasse, who took the mellifluous pen-name of Comte de Lautréamont. The best summary of the verifiable facts is, I believe, in the introduction by Maurice Saillet to the Livre de Poche edition of the Oeuvres published in 1963. I have drawn heavily on Saillet in correcting the foreword to Maldoror which I wrote in 1943 when New Directions first published the Guy Wernham translation.

Ducasse’s birth and death certificates have been found, and the texts of six short letters written between 1868 and 1870, the year of his death. Copies of the first printings of Maldoror (1868-9) and Poésies (1870) survive, but no manuscripts or other literary papers. There are some verbal accounts transmitted from schoolmates and others who knew him casually . . . but apart from these—almost nothing—we have the mystery of an unconventional young man who died early (at 24) and who was not, apparently, accounted of much importance while he lived.

The name of Lautréamont begins to appear in French letters only toward the turn of the century; at that time a second edition of Maldoror, published by Genonceaux in 1890, caught the attention of such writers as Huysmans, Léon Bloy, Maeterlinck, Jarry, Fargue, Larbaud, and Remy de Gourmont. Real fame came only much later when the Surrealists and Dadaists hailed Maldoror as a masterpiece and canonized Lautréamont as an ancestor of Surrealism. The Surrealists attempted to create a personality and a biography for their hero, but it seems to be largely fictitious; the identification with a Ducasse who was a radical orator done away with by the secret police of Napoleon III has been disproved.

Isidore Lucien Ducasse was born April 4, 1846, in Montevideo, Uruguay, where his father, François Ducasse, was first a clerk and later Chancellor in the French Consulate. François Ducasse had emigrated from a small town near Tarbes, just north of the Pyrenees, and married a girl from the same region, Jacquette Célestine Davezac, who died, some think by suicide, eighteen months after the birth of Isidore. Nothing is known of the poet’s boyhood in Uruguay beyond the reference to its civil wars at the end of the first canto of Maldoror. François Ducasse may have had business outside the Consulate for he seems to have been well off in later life. In 1859 he returned to Tarbes on a visit, taking Isidore with him. He left the boy there, presumably in the care of relatives, who placed him from 1859 to 1862 at the lycée of Tarbes, and then from 1863 to 1865 at the Lycée Imperial in nearby Pau.

Thanks to the research of François Alicot, who tracked down a surviving schoolmate, Paul Lespès, we do have a picture of Lautréamont in adolescence. Lespès remembers “a tall, thin young fellow, a bit round-shouldered, pale, with hair falling over his forehead and a sharp, high voice.” His appearance was “not attractive” and he had a “distant manner” of “haughty gravity.” Isidore’s health was frail; he was plagued with migraine headaches. “Most of the time he was rather sad and silent, as if turned in on himself.”

Lespès recalls that Ducasse was a fair student but hated Latin verse and showed little interest in mathematics, although later, in Maldoror, he would write:

O austere mathematics! I have not forgotten you since your learned teachings, sweeter than honey, distilled themselves through my heart like refreshing waves.

“He liked Racine and Corneille and above all Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex . . . particularly the scene in which Oedipus, knowing the truth at last and having torn out his eyes, cries in pain and curses his fate. He felt that Jocasta, to complete the tragic horror, should have killed herself on the stage.” Lespès reports that the “excesses (outrances) of thought and style” in Ducasse’s compositions so dismayed the professor of rhetoric that on one occasion he punished the boy by keeping him in after school.

Ducasse left the lycée at Pau in 1865. There is no trace of his taking entrance examinations or attending any university. In fact, the record is blank until 1868, when we know he was living in Paris. Saillet deduces that he may have returned to Montevideo, spending as much as two years there with his father. He may also have spent some time in Bordeaux and made literary contacts there, since later he was to enter the first canto of Maldoror in a poetry contest conducted by Evariste Carrance, a Bordelais editor.

The publisher Genonceaux reported that Ducasse “came to Paris intending to study at the Polytechnique or the School of Mines,” but no enrollment records have been traced at either institution. From the letters to his father’s Paris banker, Darasse, it seems clear that the elder Ducasse provided a regular allowance, sufficient to enable Isidore to live in comfortable lodgings (Saillet infers this from their street addresses), and, from time to time, extra amounts to finance the printing of his work.

The first canto of Maldoror was published in August, 1868, privately printed by Balitout, Questroy et Cie, and with no author’s name on the title page. A few months later, Ducasse arranged with Albert Lacroix of the Librairie Internationale, Boulevard Montmartre, for the publication of the complete work, making a deposit of 400 francs. Lacroix has left us this description of the author: “He was a tall young man, dark-complexioned, clean-shaven, nervous, but orderly (rangé) and hardworking. He wrote only at night, seated at his piano. He would declaim his sentences as he forged them, punctuating his harangues (prosopopées) with chords on the piano.” It is in this edition that the pseudonym Lautréamont first appears, based, no doubt, on Eugène Sue’s historical novel, Latréaumont.

Lacroix sent the manuscript to his partner, a printer in Brussels named Verboeckhoven, and in the summer of ’69 the author received twenty copies. Then someone got cold feet; none of the books were put on sale. “When it was printed,” Ducasse wrote Darasse, “he refused to bring it out because life is painted in colors too bitter and he is afraid of the attorney general.” Despite the author’s remonstrances, the sheets lay in the printer’s shop (at least he did not destroy them!) until 1879 when the business changed hands and the new owner finally released the book. There was no immediate critical response, but it must have had enough circulation to induce Genonceaux to reissue it in Paris in 1890. And not long thereafter Remy de Gourmont began the chorus of praise which was to follow when he wrote that Maldoror was “a magnificent, almost inexplicable stroke of genius, which will remain unique.”

Was it only his discouragement with publishers which led Lautréamont to try, rather ineffectually, to change the direction of his work? In February of 1870 he tells Lacroix that he will soon be sending him a new manuscript, a group of poems in entirely different vein, and in March he writes to Darasse: “I have now completely changed my method . . . from now on I will sing only of HOPE, FAITH, CALM, HAPPINESS, and DUTY.” These are not, however, precisely the sentiments which figure in the little book of Poésies that appeared in April, not with Lacroix but from the Librairie Gabrie, Passage Verdeau.

This final volume, which is not verse at all but aphoristic prose (Lautréamont called it “prosaïques morceaux” in the dedication), is sometimes labeled the preface for a collection of poems that were never written. Saillet, however, believes that this is not the case; he thinks that Ducasse abandoned the project he had sketched to Lacroix of poems which would “correct” the spirit of Lamartine, Hugo, Musset, etc., in favor of a completely different conception.

The dedication to Poésies speaks of further installments to follow, but if more were written, they have never come to light. A death certificate tells us that Isidore Lucien Ducasse, “bachelor, no further information,” died in his lodgings at 7 rue du Faubourg-Montmartre early on the morning of November 24, 1870. His body was interred the next day in the cimetière du Nord; about twenty years later, the City of Paris condemned the site for housing and the remains of those buried there were deposited in the Pantin Ossuary.

The critical literature on Lautréamont is now extensive; an excellent bibliography of it will be found in the revised edition of the Oeuvres published by José Corti, Paris, 1961. That edition also contains the valuable essays on Lautréamont by Genonceaux, Gourmont, Jaloux, Breton, Soupault, Gracq, Caillois, and Blanchot. Read in sequence, these essays are fascinating literary history, the record of how a reputation is made and changes. But the Corti edition should be supplemented with Maurice Saillet’s “Notes pour une vie d’Isidore Ducasse et de ses écrits” in the Livre de Poche paperback. Saillet, a thorough scholar, has researched every possible source of information, published and unpublished, on Lautréamont, including those in Uruguay, and I find his synthesis judicious and convincing. A copy of the superb Skira edition of Maldoror with illustrations by Salvador Dali may be seen in the library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

J. LAUGHLIN

June, 1965