A Brief History of Portable Literature Read Online Free Page B

suicide, one which made you retrace your steps, not to the side of death, but
to the other side of existence
. This is the only suicide that would have value for me. I have no appetite for death, but I have an appetite for not existing, for never having fallen into this interlude of imbecilities, abdications, renunciations, and obtuse encounters . . .”
    Although initially, as we’ve seen, each Shandy with his drama was to understand that he’d come down on the side of death, soon it would become clear that suicide was not a solution, but nor was it nothing. It could only be realized in the same space as writing: whether, as we’ll see, by repeating the most radical silence, or indeed by transforming oneself into a literary character, or by betraying language itself, or by drinking liquor strong as molten metal, or by steering off into trompe l’œil or optical illusions, or certain kinds of smoke and mirrors. These were portable solutions to suit all tastes, to put aside this language of death that, two years before, wandering around Montmartre, carrying a trunk and some sort of bundle, Rigaut had discovered. He had done so deep in impressions of Africa (those of Port Actif), where, it seems, the whole thing began.
    * The exact name is
Grand Hotel et des Palmes
. Following Rigaut’s suicide, it became a pilgrimage site for anyone in possession of the portable secret. It can be visited nowadays and is well worth the trip—it has other points of historical interest such as being a clear reflection of Sicily’s splendor and misery during its transition from the House of Savoy to the Republic. I ought finally to sound a note of caution: the hotel is run by a group of academic elephants, who only show visitors the room where Wagner once spent the night, making out that Rigaut was never there.

THE PARTY IN VIENNA
     
    “I had actually been invited.”
    —F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby
     
    At the beginning of 1925, the musician George Antheil appeared on the Shandy scene brimming with energy. With his announcement of Nicotechnica—a science invented by Antheil himself consisting of a fount of knowledge that categorically disproved the existence of the thriving secret society—he sowed seeds of uncertainty, as well as a certain despondency, among the portables. After that, amidst the confusion he had generated, Antheil published a curious tract that had the effect of revitalizing the Shandies, propelling them into a kind of highly creative secret euphoria with some extraordinary results, including a first-rate essay by the ill-fated Anthony Typhon in which he praised Despondency as an inexhaustible source of new and stimulating sensations. *
    It’s worth noting that Typhon’s own despondency was so great, he even eliminated the
h
’s from his first and last names. At the same time, he proposed George Antheil be given a medal, which led to Typhon’s immediate expulsion from the group, since if there was anything the Shandies to a man found appalling, it was insignia, medals, or honors of any kind.
    Typhon fled to Martinique; there, he set up a stationery shop in a village where they spoke a strange local variant of Creole and no French and barely wrote at all. The little paper they did use, they bought from a dealer in the nearby municipality of Saint-Joseph, in the middle of the island. He soon bankrupted the business buying his own merchandise. He’d occasionally write letters to Antheil begging forgiveness in an extraordinarily sincere tone that was nevertheless always belied by his unswerving inclusion at the end of the missive, each and every time, of the same postscript: “I’ve recently been working on perfecting the game of Love, availing myself of coal tar,” and then he’d cynically turn his signature (Typ(h)on) into a drawing of an insignia or medal.
    George Antheil—who years later would go on to compose the controversial
Ballet Mécanique
(a Shandy musical par excellence)—became accustomed