Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams
Mark Ford
Faber £20, pp303
Buy it at BOL
Leafing through your Sunday paper in Paris in 1897, you would have come across 'Mon âme' , a poem by the 17-year-old Raymond Roussel which, so the byline ran, clearly signalled 'the sort of promise his precocious and fecund genius holds for the future'.
'Mon âme est une étrange usine,' Roussel begins: 'My soul is a strange factory - a huge mine - A multitude of workers grimace/As they extract from this fiery pit/Rhymes flying like masses of sparks.'
By day the poet is a captain of industry, worshipped by his workers and the flocking crowds of devotees although he cannot bear to look at them. By night, however, the tables turn nightmarishly: now at the furnace's mercy, Roussel is forced to conjure up discordant images and write interminable works which no one understands - 'Complaining that no one realises/The infinite is in my least verse'. Only in the final eight quatrains is order restored: by prodigious work, the poet reasserts control over his imagination, flames flare up as a fresh shift of workers produces verses and 'At this explosion deriving/From my universal genius/I see the world bow/ Before this name: Raymond Roussel.'
What is extraordinary about this poem is how uncannily it predicted Roussel's career and life, in all but one crucial respect. Two years after it was written, 'Mon âme' became a sober description of his mental state. For six months he was gripped by 'an extraordinarily intense sensation of universal glory' as, barely sleeping or eating, he wrote a 5,600-line poem. This period featured in a study of displaced forms of religious mania written by his psychologist, Pierre Janet. 'Whatever I wrote was surrounded by rays of light; I used to close the curtains, for I was afraid the shining rays emanating from my pen might escape into the outside world through even the smallest chink'. There could be no doubt that this poem would secure him the fame of his heroes Jules Verne, Victor Hugo and Pierre Loti.
Strikingly enough, 'La Doublure', the poem in question, is, as Mark Ford says, a story of mundane disappointment and obscurity which gives no sign of having been written with 'a thousand flaming pen nibs'. The understudy of the title fails on stage and in love, and two-thirds of the poem is given over to minutely detailed descriptions of the revellers at Nice Carnival. It received two reviews - 'more or less unintelligible', 'very boring'. Roussel collapsed.
His night of the soul lasted 10 years. He wrote interminable poems - the 20,000-line, unfinished 'Les Noces', for instance, page after page describing soap bubbles blown by a child on a café terrace - as he struggled to discover the compositional method, procédé, which would allow him to recover la gloire.
Essentially based on puns, the procédé is a way of playing with language to make it generate his increasingly fairytale works. He would break down a random sentence - 'Napoleon premier empereur', for instance - into assonantally related words. The result - nappe ollé ombre miettes (tablecloth, olé, shadow, crumbs) - would give him the image of castanet-clicking flamenco dancers on a heavily leaden table. With his love of illusion, he cast this as a tableau wrought by a sculptor capable of shaping water into momentary reliefs. Et voilà. A liquid drawing so detailed one can discern the shadows cast by the breadcrumbs on the tablecloth.
Or he would take two almost identical sentences, in which each word has two, unrelated meanings, and extract the beginning of a story - a cryptogram on a billiard table in a country house - and its end - a group of Europeans held hostage in an African kingdom. All that was left was to write it.
By 30, feeling he had achieved the required 'sensations of art', he embarked on the novel Impressions d'Afrique. This reveals an extraordinary world which he elaborated for the rest of his life, suspended, as Cocteau said, 'from elegance, fairyland and fear' and full of inventors, virtuosi and miraculous inventions. A worm, for instance, in a trough full of a strange water as heavy as mercury with a narrow slit in its base, suspended above a zither. Trained by a Hungarian musician, the worm arches its body to regulate the flow of drops on to the zither and thus plays wondrously complex rhapsodies and waltzes with 'a savagely dramatic range of expression'. Entering his flood of stories is, as André Gide said, like being swept up in a Gulf Stream of the imagination.
What 'Mon âme' failed to see, however, is to whom such an experience would appeal. Roussel couldn't stand psychology and since his works start and end with language, they have a uniquely strange, distant quality, like 'a complicated set of tools whose use cannot be discovered', as John Ashbery puts it. Yet still Roussel all but bankrupted himself publishing, advertising, serialising and staging his work. His books barely sold. Performances became pitched battles between Surrealists and their opponents who bombarded the stage with coins and baked apples. And he could never understand why.
Born in the same circumstances as Proust, Roussel lived an equally insulated life. He never wore clothes more than a certain number of times - collars once. He worked furiously, writing in a vacuum-sealed room in his vast villa or as he travelled endlessly round the world by ship without ever looking out of his cabin. It seems that, rather as Percy Grainger may be said to have been the inventor of the tracksuit, Roussel's impact on mass culture may have lain in tourism, rather than literature. When he became phobic to luggage, he devised a luxury caravan which became the talk of the motor shows. The total lack of consolations in his lonely life led him to commit suicide in 1933.
As he has reached near-canonical status in France, people have tended to dwell on the life more than the work. But in this wonderful, first full-length account in English, the poet Ford has struck an impeccable balance. Roussel emerges as a luminous, unique figure, 'outrageous in his innocence and logic'. Reading this book, one understands why Breton said that he, along with Lautréamont, is 'the greatest hypnotist of modern times.'
