A Brief History of Portable Literature Read Online Free Page A

suicidal indigestion, of Heinrich von Kleist beside the green bay of the Wannsee.”
    Out of the blue, one of the New York suicides had a profound effect on Rigaut. His best friend in the city, a concierge at the Ritz, hanged himself in the hotel lobby. Downcast and ashamed, Rigaut took his briefcase and hurried back to Paris, where he became hefty and his shadow (errant and voluminous) wandered the streets of Montmartre; he tried desperately to delay a suicide that seemed to him increasingly inevitable. He moved from one hotel to the next, accompanied by a beautiful black woman, Carla Orengo, and dragging a heavy trunk that was, actually, a writing bureau with two shelves for huge tomes, three drawers for documents, a compartment for the typewriter, and a folding table. Man Ray thinks that the weight of this trunk, which Rigaut realized wasn’t portable, could have been one of the reasons why he made up his mind, finally, to commit suicide, choosing the Grand Hotel in the city of Palermo as the place to do it. *  
    It was at the end of 1926 that Rigaut installed himself in this hotel, having taken measures to ensure he’d never return to Paris. In the trunk’s drawers were all manner of barbiturates, which he constantly ingested, trying to kill himself, plunging into a great orgy of pills as though he’d now taken a liking to death, which previously he’d so feared.
    The morning he was supposed to leave his hotel to go to Kreuzlingen for a detoxification cure, he was found dead. In spite of his extreme weakness, he’d dragged himself and his mattress to the door adjoining Carla Orengo’s room. This door had always been open, but was found locked with a key. (One final gesture on a mattress, as grotesque as it was indecipherable.)
    Man Ray says that when the news arrived in Paris the Shandies thought that thereafter, in the bosom of the secret society, they ought to avoid other capricious suicides and disseminated an array of texts about the perfection of Rigaut’s suicide. They thought that if they said this one was impossible to improve upon, future portables would discard the idea of trying to better Rigaut. Blaise Cendrars, for example, wrote: “In the hotel in Palermo, the key, the bolt, and that closed door formed—in that moment and indubitably forever—an enigmatic triangle: both offering and denying us Rigaut’s deed. In any case, an insuperable suicide. My friends, I recommend not attempting to better it, for that would be an impossible task, and there would be nothing worse than killing yourself and making a fool of yourself, and, to top it all off, not even knowing you’d done that.”
    In the opinion of Maurice Blanchot—in
Faux Pas
, he
briefly but lucidly analyzed the portable phenomenon—the proliferation of texts that sought to eradicate suicide weren’t attempts to convince others, but rather the authors themselves. Blanchot was very likely correct in a number of cases. For example, in the poem Prince Mdivani wrote in a stationary submarine, “And the Mattress?,” his quill must have trembled, or he was going insane, or, simply, he was in a deep panic at feeling tempted by suicide. Whatever it was, he wrote these inept verses dedicated to Rigaut’s barbiturates: “Phanodorme, Variane, Rutonai. Hipalène, Acetile, Somnothai. Neurinase, Veronin, Goodbye.” Paul Morand, never less than witty, construed this poem as “something truly brilliant, as it has revealed to me the possibility of realizing suicide in the process of writing.”
    To realize suicide in the process of writing. What came into the world as an ironic comment ended up becoming a principle agreed upon by all members of the secret society. It was very clear, from then on, that suicide could only be realizable on paper. Antonin Artaud, for example, responded in this way to a surrealist inquiry, where those interrogated had to give their opinion on the subject of taking one’s life: “But what would you say to an anterior