The Last Days of New Paris (16 page)

“It's the
Vélo
!”
:
The bicycle-woman is from Leonora Carrington's 1941 pen-and-ink work,
I am an Amateur of Velocipedes.
Though Thibaut was scandalized at the sight, in her drawing, Carrington also depicted a rider on her figureheaded machine.

As everyone gathered watched the black virtue
:
The phrase “black virtue”—
“La Vertu noire”
—was my informant's. Based on this, and on his description of the presence-filled darkness behind the glass, the chaos of colors in the house seems to have been a manif of Roberto Matta's oil painting of the same name.

There are worse things than garden airplane traps
:
Around 1935, Max Ernst painted more than one
Garden Airplane Trap,
landscapes in which vivid, feathery, fungal, anemone-like flowers overgrow broken planes.

Flocks of bat-winged businessmen and ladies
:
Winged figures are hardly culturally unprecedented, but the particular
flying bourgeoisie described seem to me emergent from Ernst's 1934 collage,
Une semaine de bonté:
from the Tuesday of that “week of kindness,” its figures cut from catalogues and chimera-ed with draconic wings.

mono- and bi- and triplane geometries
:
The horrifying colorless aerial shapes that predate like antimatter are from René Magritte's 1937 painting,
Le Drapeau noir.
It's been claimed that the work was inspired by the bombing of Guernica: in the skies of New Paris its manifs seem like remorseless machinic iterations of some Thanatos.

Huge sunflowers root all over
:
Though he did not explicitly refer to it, there was something in the scale of the sunflowers Thibaut described and the unease with which he described them that makes me suspect the progenitor of these oversized specimens of what Dorothea Tanning called the “most aggressive of flowers” is manifest from her 1943 painting
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,
in which a colossal, balefully glowing specimen threatens two girls.

up-thrust snakes that are their stems
:
These snake-held, eye-and-heart-petaled plants, the
Lovers' Flower,
were drawn for André Breton (“quite clumsily,” he gracelessly reports) by “Nadja,” the woman we now know to be Léona Delacourt, and reproduced in his 1928 quasi-novel named for her.

human hands crawl under spiral shells
:
Dora Maar's uncanny photo-collage
Sans Titre
(1934) is the source of the shelled hand manifs. In the war notebooks he showed me, Thibaut describes a fishing village of tents below the Quai d'Auteuil. “People dredge with wire, bring up spiral crustaceans that crawl the wet sand sluggishly
on human fingers and thumbs. Painted nails. The locals boil them. They winkle steaming hand-meat from the shells and eat without cannibal shame.”

each shark is hollow-backed, with a canoe seat
:
In 1929, the Belgian journal
Variétés
printed the results of several Surrealist games. In “If, When,” one player writes a conditional and another, without looking, a main clause, which are then combined into a new proposition. “If,” Elsie Houston mooted, “tigers could prove how grateful they are to us,” then, the photographer Suzanne Muzard concluded, “sharks would allow themselves to be used as canoes.” As in New Paris, it seems, sharks might sometimes do.

the stumps of its struts, forty storeys up
:
Just as the Eiffel Tower is the most iconic image of Paris in our own world, so its astoundingly truncated, floating pinnacle is in Thibaut's. In his
Paris and the Surrealists,
George Melly remarks of the tower in passing that during one discussion about “embellishing” Paris, “it was proposed that ‘only the top half be left.' ” I've been unable to find any other mention of this mysterious suggestion, which clearly cleaved with the dynamics of the S-Blast.

an impossible composite of tower and human…a pair of women's high-heeled feet
:
The helmeted figure that investigated the young Thibaut appears to be manifest from a 1927 exquisite corpse created by André Breton, Man Ray, Max Morise, and Yves Tanguy.

enervation infecting house after house
:
I have not found a specific source in Céline's work for the manif of enervation mentioned. The overall sense described, of course, permeates his work.

Enigmarelle, foppish robot staggered out of an exhibition
guide
:
Enigmarelle was a freakish machine figure with ringletted hair and a vacuous wax smile. The Surrealists were fascinated by the “Man of Steel,” supposedly created by the American inventor Frederick Ireland in 1904, and popular in vaudeville. They promised it would attend their 1938 exhibition (it did not). What was without question a fake in our world appears to have become, in New Paris, real.

The dreaming cat
:
The bipedal cat is manifest from
The Cat's Dream,
an image by Nadja. It's unclear whether the animal is dangerous, constrained as it is by a weight tied to its right leg, and with its tail tethered by rope to a metal ring that, according to Thibaut, floats constantly behind it and above its head like an unlikely balloon.

sagelands, smoothed alpine topographies like sagging drapes
:
It took me some time to realize from his description and the areas' odd name that the “sagelands” are places where geography has come to manifest certain paintings of Kay Sage, with their frozen, twisted, melancholy rippling coils and rock forms.

Under one lamppost, it is night
:
This isolated outpost of manif night, with its streetlight, seems certainly to be from Magritte's painting series
The Empire of Light
(1953–54).

Jacques Hérold set a black chain on fire
:
It was in May 1944, in our timeline, that the journal
Informations surréalistes
was published with a cover by Jacques Hérold: a simple, stark image of a flaming chain.

a dream mammal watches him with marmoset eyes
:
Thibaut made no mention of the source of the image of the clawed beast, and I did not think to try to track it
down. But during quite other researches I came across Valentine Hugo's drawing
The Dream of 21 December 1929,
of that year, and it was clear that it was from there that the animal was manifest. The image also includes a drowned woman: it's possible that the prey, as well as the predator that Thibaut disturbed, was manif.

Redon's leering ten-legged spider
:
The Smiling Spider,
with a gurning, almost chimpanzee-like face, dates from the 1880s, in its original charcoal and later lithograph form. Odilon Redon was one of the Surrealists' revered recent predecessors, and more than one of his
“noirs,”
his “black things,” have been sighted in New Paris: Thibaut described to me watching Redon's great sky-gazing eye-balloon rising sedately over the smoking ruins of a battle between Nazi soldiers and forces of the Groupe Manouchian.

such prim Delvaux bones…prone Mallo skeletons
:
Manifs from the work of Belgian artist Paul Delvaux seem to be relatively common in New Paris, in particular skeletons such as those described here, to which, if not as obsessively as he did his big-eyed nude women, he repeatedly returned. To quote the title of his 1941 image, the whole of New Paris could be considered
“la ville inquiète”
—the worried, apprehensive, anxious, unquiet city. The uneasy city. A city also inhabited by other, fitting, trembling bone figures, ripping themselves apart as they lie shaking, reconstructing themselves repeatedly. They are manifest from Maruja Mallo's 1930
Antro de fósiles—Den of Fossils.

The Musée de l'Armée is being emptied…by curious undergrowth
:
Paul Eluard's idea, from
Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution
number 6 in 1933, has clearly
manifested. The “irrational embellishment” he suggested for Les Invalides was that the area “be replaced by an aspen forest.”

“They're called wolf-tables…Manifest from an imagining by a man called Brauner.”
:
The most famous iteration of the
“loup-table,”
the “wolf-table,” of the Romanian artist Victor Brauner, was the physical object itself that he made, in our reality, in 1947. Whether or not he physically made it in that of Thibaut, too, I don't know, but he had imagined the furniture-beast at least twice before the S-Blast, in his 1939 paintings
Psychological Space
and
Fascination,
which Thibaut appeared to know. As Thibaut mentions, in both these earlier renderings, as in the later sculpture, the predator's snarling head—“screaming over its shoulder at death,” as Breton put it—and tail and ostentatious scrotum appear more vulpine than lupine. Breton considered Brauner's wolf-table to be a uniquely sensitive tapping of fear, of anticipation of the war to come.

a barnacled book
:
Initially I presumed that the “book that has rested underwater” was Prospero's grimoire, but in later conversation Thibaut corrected me: it is the manif of a 1936 object made by Leonor Fini.

a spoon covered with fur
:
The spoon that Thibaut half expected to find often accompanies a similarly furred cup, he said, and is of course manifest from Meret Oppenheim's famous assemblage, sometimes known as
Breakfast in Fur.
A reasonable minority of the spoons left in New Paris are, apparently, now furred.

“ ‘Those who are asleep…are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe.' ”
:
Géographie nocturne
's
opening line, which Thibaut quoted, is from Herakleitos. It, along with
La Main à plume,
was printed in 1941.

“Ithell Colquhoun?”
:
Colquhoun, in our reality, was an unusual and minor artist who had been expelled from the London Surrealist Group in 1940. She retained a lifelong fascination for the occult, particularly Kabbala, and was a member of various magically inclined orders and groups over the years. She was later the author of the odd hermetic novel
Goose of Hermogenes.

“ ‘Confusedly…forests mingle with legendary creatures hidden in the thickets.' ”
:
Robert Desnos's description of the forest dates from 1926, from the piece “Sleep Spaces.”

those rushing futurist plane-presences
:
Launched with a manifesto in 1929,
“aeropittura”
—“aeropainting”—was a heavily fascist-influenced iteration of second-generation futurism in Italy. It was associated with Benedetta Cappa, Enrico Prampolini, “Tato” (Guglielmo Sansoni), Fortunato Depero, Fillia and Tullio Crali. It offered its quasi-abstraction in breathless service to imagined speed and bombastic propaganda, and to quasi-religious fascist iconography, such as Gerardo Dottori's 1933 portrait of Mussolini,
Il Duce.
It was the frenetic angular plane-presences of
aeropittura
that appear to have manifested occasionally in New Paris.

“Fauves?…The negligible old star?”
:
The fauvism of André Derain, referenced here, was tolerated and, to a degree, celebrated in the Vichy regime. New Paris is home to a few too-bright figures walked vaguely from his images. A short and elliptical six-line poem by Gertrude
Stein gives its name—and, in New Paris, its unpleasant manifest quiddity—to the manif known as the negligible old star.

A giant's pissoir
:
It was Paul Éluard, in 1933, in the collective discussion on the “irrational embellishment” of Paris, who suggested the trans­mogri­ficat­ion of the Arc de Triomphe into a urinal.

a great sickle-headed fish…a woman made up of outsized pebbles
:
The fish with its huge orange crescent head was one of many manifs emerged from the vivid monsters of Wilfredo Lam. The figure of the stone woman cropped up more than once in Thibaut's testimony. He sketched it for me, and it was from that that I was able eventually to identify the manif as Meret Oppenheim's 1938 painting
Stone Woman.
And there is, indeed, something particularly arresting about the simple image, even among so much strangeness. I'm not able to express exactly what it is. But I think it may lie in the fact that because we have heard, many times, in fairy tales, of people being turned to stone, and because we've seen statues, we know what we think something called a “stone woman” must look like. But Oppenheim's reclining, resting woman is composed instead, jarringly, of a handful of loosely coagulated
pebbles.
We sense their tactility, we know how they will fit in our hands. But the chop of the water at her ankles shows that the woman is appropriately tall, and that these carefully rendered smooth stones are wildly out of scale. That problematic of scale, as much as the fact that the woman is rock, is what is so jarring.

the Palais Garnier, its stairs dinosaur bones
:
Breton's suggestion for the “irrational embellishment” of Palais
Garnier, the opera house, was that it become a perfume fountain, and that its staircase be reconstructed “in the bones of prehistoric animals.”

Le Chabanais
:
The extraordinary and macabre fate of Le Chabanais is manifest from Tristan Tzara's proposed “embellishment” of 1933. Of the famous brothel, he demands, “[f]ill it with transparent lava and after solidification demolish the outside walls.” This, horrifyingly, is what has occurred in New Paris, setting around all those within. They are frozen, suspended, staring and unrotting in eternal surprise, like insects in amber.