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Translation of La minéralisation de Dudley Craving Mac Adam by Juliette Roche, 1924

 Juliette Roche and The Mineralization of Dudley Craving Mac Adam

A Cautionary Satire for Male Dadaists

While spending two extended periods in New York (1915 to 1916, and then 1917 to 1919) among now famous members of notorious avant-garde groups, a newlywed young French painter and poet observed the city around her and, in 1918, composed a satire that is part fantasy, part horror story. The main character, a lethargic creature of habit who finds inertia more enticing than making the smallest effort to decide to take a taxi, undergoes a mental, spiritual, and finally physical metamorphosis during the course of the novella. Unlike Kafka’s Gregor Samsa who suddenly awakens transformed, the protagonist of Juliette Roche’s Mineralization of Dudley Craving Mac Adam endures a long and agonizing deterioration by stages. Mac Adam begins to exhibit symptoms of encephalitis lethargica as he wanders the streets of a gasoline-stenched, 99ºF Manhattan. In his imagination he travels across space and time, then fills himself with alcohol and lies down to suck on a female-named phallic beam of metal.

The title The Mineralization of Dudley Craving Mac Adam foreshadows the title character’s end: Dudley’s fate relies on a fictionalized exaggerated chemical process, one through which the human body (an organic substance) becomes impregnated by or turned into a mineral (inorganic substance). In his case, the copper of the beam, named “the Archduchess Ottilie,” is supposedly oxidized by the ethanol in the protagonist’s liquor, and by consuming both together Dudley causes his body to become a receptacle for ionized copper, thus undergoing a “mineralization.” During this evolution, through which he remains acutely conscious though disoriented, his tissues gradually stiffen and harden, resulting in his paralysis, asphyxia, and death.

But there is more to the story. Underlying the plot of a character threading his way through Manhattan to his accidental suicide, Roche has managed to compose a satire that depicts the uncertainty of the World War I era (“annihilation announced in several holy texts is getting ready to come to pass”), the collapse of the city (“water, air, and earth have disappeared; stone and soot are the new elements”), and the decadence of those who inhabit it (“I am now a deserter from France, England, the United States, and Canada, swindler, forger, and multiple bigamist”).

Her French novella, La Minéralisation de Dudley Craving Mac Adam, labeled a roman à clé, was first published in Paris in 1922 and serves as a prime example of the daring poetic style that Roche developed in New York during her time among avant-garde artists and writers who, escaping the destruction of a European war, proclaimed their affiliation with the Dadaists. The piece challenges readers with ambiguous characters, unidentified dialogue, stream-of-consciousness monologues, and allusions to contemporary and historical cultural figures. Syntax and meaning gradually degenerate (alongside the disintegration of the protagonist) from scenic description and logical discourse to an abstract and hallucinatory expression of entirely sensory-based perceptions somewhere “between the past of tomorrow and the future of an hour ago.”

The experimental prose of the novella, mirrored by Roche’s typographically innovative poems of the same period, captures the geography and atmosphere of early twentieth-century New York, while it subtly scrutinizes and critiques her contemporaries. The novella is, in fact, an indirect indictment of certain illicit behaviors Roche found annoying and dangerous. In her unpublished memoirs, the author alludes to the unhealthy bohemian lifestyle surrounding Francis Picabia and his all-male crowd. In her fiction, she synthesizes her fellow expatriates’ personalities and physical traits to create the decadent Mac Adam and the men he encounters on the day of his demise. Roche’s tale moves beyond conventional storytelling to allow readers into the minds of her characters through rich interior monologues, revealing in each case her estimation of the particular model’s idiosyncrasies.

Through his wanderings from the Battery to Central Park West, Dudley Craving Mac Adam (a.k.a. D.C.M.A.), interacts with an array of characters who amusingly resemble certain members of the New York Dada group. With creativity and humor, Roche revenges herself on the teasing and bothersome Picabia of French-Cuban ancestry who lived downstairs from Roche and her Cubist husband, Albert Gleizes, in 1917; she depicts him as “a fat philosopher, a bit Guatemalan, his fingers stiffened with rings,” who spouts syntactically disorganized phrases as confusing as his paintings of mechanical objects. Picabia’s irreverent portrait entitled Juliette Roche au manomètre from just before this time depicted Roche as a collection of wheels, pulleys, and pistons. Even worse, he refused to explain the meaning of his manomètre to her. Her frustration took two forms: her own “mechanical” painting Nature morte au hachoir [Still Life with Meat Grinder] and her novella. After reciting a nonsensical formula for sound transmission, the fat philosopher concludes, “Am I really the psychic medium of the world or am I only a reporter?”

Roche’s fictional Lloyd Willow brings to mind poet Arthur Cravan due to his uncommon height (“his interminable length folded several times on itself like a telescope”), his legal family name (Lloyd), and his notorious bragging (“…I could have [I was ‘so talented in all the arts!’] written some audacious music, painted the portrait of people with whom I would dine, ‘synthetic’ nudes or still-lifes full of feeling”). The character is a self-confessed army deserter, “swindler, forger, and multiple bigamist,” who has played the roles of “press correspondent, boxing champion, man of business, founder of a religion, coal-trimmer, stevedore, barman, and film actor.” Cravan, the model for the chameleon-like Willow, was indeed a self-promoting eccentric and anarchist, ready to enter a duel with poet Guillaume Apollinaire or insult a public audience at New York’s Grand Central Gallery with vulgar epithets. Of all the characters who evoke New York Dadaists, Cravan’s look-alike is the most fleshed-out with the narrative alluding to his schooling in England, his marriages, and his 1918 disappearance near Mexico.

The author even includes herself in the novella à clé, as the character Juliette Granite, with a word play on her name “Roche” meaning “rock,” “covered in threadbare batiks and Mandarin necklaces bought in Chinatown bazars,” who, instead of writing the “war stories” requested by her literary agent, finds herself daydreaming about a gloomy Paris peopled with specters. Granite calls upon the sights and sounds of a seemingly joyful and healthy North America to “wash away [her] melancholy mood accumulated from spending too much time between the Palais-Royal and the Père Lachaise, the Palais-Bourbon and the Conservatory, Montmartre and the Institute!” In real life, Roche was from a wealthy and politically-connected Parisian family, who was more likely to wear dresses by Poiret than Chinatown batiks. However, like Granite, she did serve (in name, at least) as a foreign correspondent for Le Gaulois, a French daily taken over in 1929 by Le Figaro. Juliette Granite appears in sharp contrast to the dissatisfied and boasting Lloyd Willow and the unmotivated and antisocial D.C.M.A.

Among the novella’s otherwise all-male cast are two unconventionally drawn female characters through whom Roche delivers her most memorable depiction of the privileged, spoiled, and madly disillusioned Mac Adam. The first character is an unassuming woman walking down the street with an “elongated step.” By the time Dudley reaches the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, he begins hallucinating multiple versions of his own body: “He can no longer take a step without being assailed by an enlarged or a diminutive version of himself.” One face appears and reappears, made up of various microscopic organisms, and in this face Mac Adam recognizes the signs of sleepy sickness (encephalitis lethargica) that was spreading worldwide after the Spanish flu pandemic.

In his surreal imaginings, the movie screen from the Strand Theater on Broadway at W. 47th Street, where he must have seen a newsreel showing victims of the sleeping epidemic, transforms itself into a silk scarf enveloping the shoulders of the young woman he follows. Ironically, while she is the supposed carrier of the sleepy sickness, Mac Adam, through the act of doggedly trailing her, comes to exhibit the symptoms of the disease.

Stripping her of all sexual or human attributes, Dudley ignores the exposed nape of her neck and the suggestive bumping of her knee beneath her skirt as she walks. Instead, in a case of reverse personification, “[h]ypnotized, he follows the Film of Sleepy Sickness” into a drug store in a shopping passage under Grand Central Station. There, a sense of calm takes over, and “in his subconscious something disintegrates and falls from him like a fakir bird who falls from a tree, killed by an echo.”

 Entranced in his semi-somnambulism he mechanically imitates those around him and orders an array of soda fountain treats (“a chocolate milkshake, a maple nut ice cream soda, a pineapple phosphate, and a marshmallow and peach sundae, one after the other”). His mind then conjures up an entire poetic narrative in prose and verse in which he is lost at sea until the treacherous ice floes inhabiting his daydreams bring him back to the banality of his vanilla ice cream.

Keeping the woman in his gaze, he continually refers to her as dressed in a film of sleepy sickness, then as an arabesque, a “perfect play of cogs under all circumstances.” He studies her nose as a marvel of mathematical, chemical, and biological models. Yet, despite his observations that “not a hair is displaced, not a nerve flinches, each tone stays pleasant and each reflex remains civilized,” he comes to believe that in certain muscles of the arm and jaw, there is “a sensitive bestiality, something eager and bloody that reminds one of the paw and the muzzle, of things that sniff, dig, scratch….” In trying to humanize his machine-like description of her as a collection of frozen parts, Dudley has merely managed to diminish her to a rooting animal. In his gradually disintegrating mind, she cannot simply be a woman who decides to stop at a soda fountain.

The sleepy sickness that the young woman seems to embody begins to signal Mac Adam’s encroaching illness that will come to feature increasing lethargy, rigidity, and eventual psychosis. All of these symptoms will reach a climax during D.C.M.A.’s interactions with the final female character of the tale, the Archduchess Ottilie, a copper beam that he keeps in his study alongside his misogynistic study on Dante, an assortment of souvenirs of his life, and “a broken pedestal that belonged successively to Sappho, William Penn, Abraham Lincoln, Lautréamont, and Sade.” The alcove of his study includes his most recent preoccupation with “bolts, nuts, balls of wire, an oilcloth typewriter cover, fragments of a motor,” and Mac Adam’s latest poem, entitled the “Victory of the Marne,” in the form of “one of those flat keys used to open a jar of preserves… suspended from the ceiling by a long string.” The metallic poem calls to mind works such as Picabia’s Fille née sans mère [Girl Born Without a Mother], created in New York at the time Roche was writing The Mineralization.

After consuming three glasses of alcohol that dig “in a spiral to the back of his brain,” Dudley is irresistibly drawn to the luminous point of the final female character, the Archduchess Ottilie. After stroking the smooth oxidized phallic surface, he becomes aroused and brutally “grabs The Archduchess, drags her to the middle of the study and spreads out beside her on the Chinese carpet,” where he alternates glasses of whiskey with energetic sucking on the copper.

As the “metal makes its way to the back of his throat,” Mac Adam experiences a heightening of his senses in proportion to the disintegration of his body. The anesthetized disembodiment opens him up to observe “that he is everywhere at the same time,” wandering in a “No Man’s Land of the mind.” And, as Dudley’s hands “emit an odor of ozone,” “something cracks in his neck,” and “his thoughts adopt a whirling motion that descends in a spiral,” he mysteriously transforms into a type of mechanized portrait by Picabia, a ready-made of Duchamp, or Man Ray’s line drawing of perpetual motion. Entirely mineralized after deeply sucking on The Archduchess, D.C.M.A. enters a sleeping paralysis from which he never awakens.

Dudley’s downfall is precipitated by two female figures that his imagination manufactures. His mistake is that he underestimates their power: the first woman unknowingly infects him with a somnambulism that eventually leads him to attack and consume the deadly Archduchess. Through the tale of Dudley Craving Mac Adam’s mineralization, Roche stops just short of delivering an admonishing lesson about dissipation and perversion to Francis Picabia, Arthur Cravan, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Walter Arensberg, her male Dadaist compatriots in New York. In the process of delivering her reprimand, she manages to provide readers with a quirky fantasy story, embellished with European and American cultural allusions that recreate the decadence of the period.

The Mineralization of Dudley Craving Mac Adam

A novella by Juliette Roche

Translated from the French

I

Between the misshapen chessboards of the Produce Exchange Building and the Battery Place Aquarium, Dudley Craving Mac Adam comes and goes, making the short trip back and forth for over an hour.

The thermometer shows 99 degrees Fahrenheit. The air is a compact block of cotton impregnated with gasoline. Underfoot the asphalt is melting. A sucked down passerby takes a hold of his own leg and pulls.

Every Monday for a year with regularity, Dudley Craving Mac Adam comes downtown to the French Line to reserve his cabin on one of the next steamers leaving for France. He also renews the visas for his passport. He then returns home, where his Never Break Trunk and his cabin luggage await him in perfect readiness.

But today a unique inertia paralyzes him.

Nothing holds him in that light-tormented space between the reverberation of the bay and that of the buildings; nothing pulls him elsewhere.

He is incapable of making the effort to climb into a streetcar. He cannot even decide to look for a taxi. 

*

* * 

A light sea breeze from the northeast insinuating itself under his sleeves and running all the way up to his false collar brings him a feeling of agreeable freshness. But immediately his spirit, disciplined against welcoming any sensory perceptions, reacts.

He refuses to admit that a small, vulgar, and negligible wind, still fully impregnated with Coney Island’s sharp music and the smell of frying food, could have any such effect on him.

The irritation he feels abruptly turns him from his path. Without realizing it, he changes direction, edges toward the station of the elevated train, climbs the stairs, buys a ticket, goes out on the platform, enters a train. 

*

* * 

The train crosses catastrophic areas. Water, air, and earth have disappeared; stone and soot are the new elements.

The annihilation announced in several holy texts is getting ready to come to pass; a rush of panic drives the tramways, the streets, the landings struck by vertigo, the children hanging from the bars of the fire-escapes, a broken window blind, a yellow pot full of killed flowers posed on a window sill.

Against a thick violet backdrop, a gas meter rises, turns four times on itself and melts. 

*

* * 

The 8th Street station is poorly attached; at the least provocation it will dive, submarine, or rise, dirigible.

In the Italian streets behind Washington Square, crime continues. But the faces arrived from Naples or Sicily, the accordions, fruit, wreaths of tomatoes, the corn and peppers retain a certain freshness for him. 

*

*  * 

Behind a metal gate, a door breathes an odor of moisture.

Several steps lead to the basement. At the end of a corridor, a long low smoke-filled room. Lemon yellow walls, furniture of Prussian blue, a black carpet. Uniforms, tuxedos, Palm-Beach suits, shirt sleeves, Greenwich-Village smocks, Parisian dresses, shaved necks, pearl necklaces.

*

* * 

From the confusion of details known faces emerge.

A group snaps up D.C.M.A. in the passage. He sits down in front of twelve pink cherrystone clams, hard and chilled. 

​ *

* *  

To his right a Belgian impresario bestirs himself. “Listen… my last translation of Kipling… a Burmese woman… on the road to Mandalay….”

On his left, a very young marine lieutenant, filigreed and blond, tells in a toneless voice of a torpedo in the Mediterranean.

“Transport sank in five minutes… miscommunicated orders, … only several boats at sea… six hundred mullets escaped from the hold also wanting to hoist themselves up… we defended ourselves with oar strikes… the jaws of the mullets tore at an arm… a cheek….”
At the other end of the table, the author of Anonymous Capitals, Tristan Biped, answers the journalist Betty Summer, who wet-eyed, tamed and satiated, very drunk, interviews him:

“The greatest poet of our time?... But Rimbaud, naturally! Not for what he wrote… that doesn't interest me at all anymore!... but because he stopped writing at the age of twenty to sell rifles to the blacks.”

“A nation? dear Madame, a nation, it's a conglomeration of individuals absolutely opposed to one another, who differ in race, interests, spirit, morals, tastes, culture, and language, but who are all pestered by the same government!”

He is suffocating. The words don’t come. Neither do the clever twists. He thinks of the Mercer that he just bought through the intermediary of a friend, of the furs ordered for Sybyl Spyder, the thin Ziegfeld dancer.

The deal that he was counting on to pay for them falls through. His debts accumulate. For him the thousand daily stabs of a hazardous life add to the almost insurmountable disgust of the era.

Ten minutes of Swedish exercise every morning, breathing exercises. A cold bath.

Dancing. Swimming. Hunting. Driving. To enhance the health of the horse, the pulse of the engine.

For help he also calls upon his pride and his ambition, his love of order, every example of known energy, sayings by Nietzsche and Stendhal to be used as tonics.

 But the migraines alternate with bouts of insomnia and vision problems, with cardiac incidents.

He looks at his hands before him on the table. Dry hands with long pliant and sensitive fingers, the protruding veins, the slightly loosening nails. Arthritic hands just waiting for the nervous breakdown and arteriosclerosis….

“No! Waiter! No! It wasn’t me who ordered this whiskey. Give me some buttermilk!”

*

*  *

Covered in threadbare batiks and Mandarin necklaces bought in Chinatown bazars, Juliette Granite thinks of her literary agent who wants war stories, and, on the back of menus with a grey galalite fountain pen, she carefully writes:

—“This evening Paris fills my thoughts, Paris disquieting and viscous under the rain and under the veiled blue lighting from the gas burners.

  “The sky, where air raids are probably about to take place, lets out a Verlainian sob and, under the arches of the bridges, the Seine rolls out the stanzas of Samain and Baudelaire.

“Quai Bourbon. Quai d’Anjou. Quai de Béthune. Quai de Gesvres.

“Names cluttered with incidents involving sedan-chairs and Louis XIII duels.

“There are memories of riots and barricades in the narrow streets of the Left Bank. You breathe in the old microbes of the Cour des Miracles in the odors of the Faubourg du Temple and the Ile de la Cité.

“All along the grand boulevards, between the shabby boutiques full of decaying objects and the ailing trees with their feet in the gutters, silhouettes glide, trailing behind them, with a perfume of naphtaline, a sadness forgotten at Tortoni’s.

“Georges Sand passes by with Michel De Bourges, and Maurice de Guérin with Barbey d’Aurevilly…

“How to escape from these specters dressed in Venetian pants and cashmere vests?

“All escape is impossible. The exits are blocked.

“Everywhere we expect other distant memories…

“The old carriage bumping along will transform itself on the Rue Royale into a revolution-era cart.

“Napoleon’s horse will parade around the Place Vendôme.

“Wagner’s dog will get lost in a crowd near les Halles.

“Gérard de Nerval’s hedgehog will stroll alone around the Tuileries pond.

“Balzac still lives in his little house on the Rue Raynouard. Bothered more than ever by money problems, he tries to start a business and gives himself up to complicated calculations.

“In all the gothic mansions of the Plaine Monceau, the heroines of Bourget and Maupassant walk across poorly ventilated rooms, their matters of conscience unsolvable and their passions without end.

“A painter, who plays Chopin between poses, paints on a red background their bustle dresses and their waists so thin in their too tight corsets.

“A gaunt silhouette disappears into a creamery. It’s Mr. Folantin looking for a new diet.

“Here is the main floor of Mr. de Phocas’ house… the studio of Manette Salomon… the door of Des Esseintes….

“Here is a bad priest of Mirbeau…

*

*  *

“On the stage of a music hall, a fat singer who is almost blind puffs out her spangled skirt. She’s been there since 1914, a peaked cap on her head and winking at the soldiers on leave. She rehearses: ‘We will get them…when we want to…we will get them…when we want to…’ and ‘The little birdies go tweet, tweet, tweet…’

In the large amphitheater of the Sorbonne, Mr. Joshué Rheinvor gives a lecture before ten thousand. He exposes the danger of all the foreign influences and demands the return to the pure traditions of our Latin genius. Mrs. Samuel Kölnheim applauds.

“In the gloomy restaurants of Passy or behind the Opéra, the old unattached men about town and the elderly disaffected men of letters dine. They are saying disheartening things: ‘Saint-Saens, Carolus Duran, Exhibition of 89, Rose Croix, Miss Couësdon, the angel Gabriel, Lucy succeeded…. Pipette, she didn’t.’

“In the avant-garde salons (Chippendale, Coromandel, African sculptures, Matisse, and Picasso) very spiritual persons succeed, by virtue of goodwill and patience, in finding the Revue des Deux Mondes in Apollinaire and Déroulède in Stravinsky.

“In the opium dens decorated to perfection (orange and black, black and gold, tortoiseshell and violet)—staff officers and nurses dressed by Poiret…

“All of that drives me to despair.

“Blizzards of snow, sea baths and sun baths, tropical rain, wind from the Hudson that lightly carry along herds of pink and healthy girls and children on their roller skates, wash away my melancholy mood accumulated from spending too much time between the Palais-Royal and the Père Lachaise, the Palais-Bourbon and the Conservatory, Montmartre and the Institute!

“The deserts of Arizona, the hammocks of California, Indian summers in Long Island gardens, joyful Cuban funerals with your galloping hearses driven by coachmen dressed in red and followed by sprawling olive-skinned families fluttering fans and smoking enormous cigars, irresistible panic that seizes me between the ocean of sheet metal and zinc and the palaces-for-last-judgment of the Atlantic beaches, Thanksgiving day pumpkin pies, corn puddings molded by old black cooks, reassuring family teapots of New England, put yourselves between me and the sight of a continent that is finished…” 

*

*  *

Seated at an adjoining table, his interminable length folded several times on itself like a telescope, Lloyd Willow lifts his face above a civilian vest, American Army trousers, and gaiters from the Belgian supply corps. It’s an impressive Savonarole face gone cowboy and rinsed in oxygenated water.

He re-envisions his life in Sussex, the stormy park in June with waterfalls of crimson-ramblers falling from the cedars and the aviaries full of the cries of birds from Java.

He thinks of his success at college, of his professors from Eton and Cambridge who foretold a brilliant future for him.

“I could have become an admiral, chancellor of the exchequer, viceroy of the Indies, ambassador.

“I could have been sent here on an official mission. Voluptuously installed at the Sherry or at the Biltmore I would speculate on the fall in exchange rates and I would increase by 60% all the invoices of orders by the State.

“In a studio in Mayfair or Auteuil, I could have (I was ‘so talented in all the arts!’) written some audacious music, painted the portrait of people with whom I would dine, ‘synthetic’ nudes or still-lifes full of feeling.

“I could have been a dramatist, collector, philanthropist, or banker.

“But how to accept the implications of renouncing all success, for me who could truly never tolerate anything but perfection?

“I chose the unlimited existence of failures.

*

*  *

“Through a combination of circumstances that I am explaining badly and in which my individual will played only an insignificant role, I am now a deserter from France, England, the United States, and Canada, swindler, forger, and multiple bigamist. (My second wife has just drowned herself in Scotland, the third runs a dance school in Zurich, the fourth is waiting for me in Vera-Cruz).

“I’ve been, since the beginning of the war, one after the other, press correspondent, boxing champion, man of business, founder of a religion, coal-trimmer, stevedore, barman, and film actor.

“The police of various countries are looking for me.

“No one will ever suspect what internal liberation accompanies each of my failures.

*

*  * 

“Each time the indifference seemed to me like a veritable gift.

“But so many absurd people attached themselves to me, put themselves in my place, and prevented me from breathing.

“An ascetic dying of dyspepsia, an aesthete dying of simplicity, a deaconess dying of curiosity, a heretic dying of scruples…

“A spineless and disappointed race, born of my heredity, of my sicknesses, of my readings, of my reflections, of my hesitations.

“Now, I am annihilating myself.

  “With each new accident, I change myself.                                                                                                                            

“Rough hygiene, a treatment full of risks, but from which a renewed rejuvenation each day is the reward.

“Amusing to cause stress to prove one’s resistance.

 “The instability satisfies my need for balance and solitude, my need for approval.

“New relationships are established. A secret scale of private worth.

“Keyboard of a thousand octaves. Seventh chord of audible notes. Imponderables are the only reality.

“Now I know what makes up illness and recovery, fatigue and movement, activity and repose.

“I know which rhythm controls the numbers.

“I know what to do to make the ball stop and the card to be played. But I despise the winning formula.

“Only witness worthy of me, fly’s eye, nomadic center, I simply record, I listen, I ask questions…

“An impartiality of Kodak…. A sort of guilty saintliness.

 “I am Job…

“And I am Simbad…. 

*

*  * 

“Nevertheless, often when returning home with this light and lucid delirium caused at certain times by hunger, I look not at the piles of foods offered by the quick-lunch stands and the delicatessens, but instead in the luxury store windows, polished objects tempting to touch, toiletries, perfume burners, atomizer bottles…

“By a phenomenon that is difficult to explain, as the dislocation increases around me and a certain taste of sabotage becomes clear to me, I attach myself more desperately to the never forgotten advice of my governess.

“I renounced everything altogether (absolutely everything), but the details take on exaggerated importance.

“Today I left my last dollar at the manicurist’s and I broke off with a person who wanted my well-being, just because his way of pronouncing certain words was unbearable.

*

*  * 

“Are my old enemies really dead?

“Or are they waiting to attack me with sneakier tricks?

*

*  *

“In his villa where nothing ever entered without him meditating on it and choosing it in advance, my Italian grandfather…

“He gave his horses the names of his favorite authors and matched the bindings of his books with the lining of his gloves…

“Curio collection, sofa corner amateurism, literature…

“What I call my wisdom, couldn’t it be after all only the drowsiness of a scoundrel… 

“With her overly heavy chin and her exceedingly blond lashes, Lorelei stuffed with pastries and with anchovy rolls, my Saxon grandmother…  An infallible lack of propriety characterized her. She caused her African greyhounds to die of pleurisy by forcing them to swim in the Thames in the winter and her Russian greyhounds of sunstroke by making them run behind her car in the streets of Florence in the summer.

“One doesn't know which practices or which crises held her for weeks, locked up in her room.

“She died from a fall from the roof where she was walking during a fit of sleepwalking…

“Could she be responsible for my excesses?

“My ancestors persecuted during the wars of religion, others later, Puritans, vegetarians, teetotalers, missionaries…

“In all that I like about myself, in my mania for perfection, my scruples, my refusals, my contempt, and my indulgence, am I to find their exasperating tenets, their Bible, and their boring herbivore kindness?...

*

*  * 

“This night, for the last time, when I ring at the door of my seedy pension, Major Murphy, Barnum’s performing chimpanzee will open the door.

“For the last time, I will hear between six and seven o’clock in the morning in the room over mine the record holder for jumping land and land again at regular intervals as he trains without pause to clear 112 chairs, and, a little later, the cries of my landlady, carried in tense arms through the hallways of the house by the athlete in training.

*

*  * 

“A man who looks like me stayed in a city in Central Europe, leaning at the top of a mountain street where soldiers pass…. Behind him, shivering and poor, beats a tulle curtain…

“In a Baltimore prison, another, closing his eyes, owns velvet grey elevators silently operated by supple Negroes, Sung and Ming objects, rare editions, perfected fans, and a little nickel appliance used for making toast.

“On the gangway of a freighter that leaves tomorrow for Mexico, another throws his old suitcase smelling of retreat, already taken back by the flavor of climates and temperatures, by the marvelous senility of the sun…

“And that’s all.

“No hyphen links up these disparate moments…

“The necessities of my self-defense projects me across space, recovered from my friends, my habits, and my books.

“Skinned bare by myself.

“I suppressed the will that became impoverished and the habits that stiffened.

“I will also suppress little by little the mania for questionnaires and the mania for classifications.

“That way, all my life, and up until extreme decrepitude, I will keep the heroic taste of the unstable and the feeling of beginning my life again each time that I climb into a train.

*

*  *

A fat philosopher, a bit Guatemalan, his fingers stiffened with rings, thinks:

“It’s past, the exoticism in time protractedly lasting cell in space.

“Durckheim Bergson organ elephant madness non-conformist for several centuries anti-alcoholic league subscription dues 3F50.

“Which mechanism arterial tension of a star claustrophobe in a concave curve and that astonishing violet?

“Contradiction rule without code and without tuning fork trap perpetually taut to the sixth sense danger of the wireless that is unwittingly intercepted and encourages confidences.

“Am I really the psychic medium of the world or am I only a reporter?

*

*  * 

As the soiree continues, the pressure outside gets louder. Under the disagreeably close ceiling, the odor of alcohol sours and smoke dilutes faces.

Now one can no longer forget the fear of the barren neighborhoods along the river where the summer lurks, illusively supple and furtive, like a young criminal.

Fear of the deserted docks with their night guards hidden behind boxes of explosives.

Fear of the camouflaged boats that run with covered portholes and all lights turned out.

Fear of the passengers on their deck chairs and in their asphyxiating cabins.

Fear of a Europe that is all made up, in costume, rasping and delusional like an enormous burlesque show.

*

*  *

A pale little bald man with very precise movements takes stock of the situation.

“The Russian Revolution? Something like the beginning of Christianity.” Several centuries of war. Famines. Typhus epidemics and suicide epidemics. The extinction of the white race.

A terror of the year 1000 possesses him.

A theosophist announces a new cycle.

A Cubist painter remakes geometry.

A Russian Jew distributes brochures in Esperanto.

A Hindu mime circulates among the tables. She offers cigarettes displayed on a tray and discretely, to the regular customers, opium and cocaine.

A German violinist carries around an innocence of fairy tales. Shaken by coughs and looking hungry, he sells melting chocolates: “Buy my Soul Candy. I make it myself from a magic recipe. On your way home, without even trying, you will compose a symphony or a quartet.”

Alone in a corner slumped in front of his fourteenth New Orleans fizz, the old revolutionary Hyppolyte Arkangel laments: “They refused to go to the lecture! They refused to go to the lecture!”

A Mexican is taken away in handcuffs after he tried to strip to prove General Villa’s cause just.

Under a table, cramped one against the other, in a cluster, a Japanese, a Swede, a Swiss and two Americans talk among themselves about their genius.

*

*  *

II

It is only ten o’clock. Dudley Craving Mac Adam decides to walk up to his club at 57th Street.

Washington Square still waits for the stagecoach missing from Indian Hill.

Beneath 5th Avenue, between the carved out roofs, a violet canal is embedded.

In the middle of a black and deserted 11th Street stands a woman in a YMCA uniform, immobile and at attention.

The Star Spangled Banner can be heard in the distance….

“In the absence of a truly impossible personal impulse, to be taken up in the movement of the crowd could be very amusing…

I hear people saying ‘the age of the masses… collectivity… universality… unity…  multitudes…’

Unfortunately, I don’t believe in serums… the warrior parades with their hysterical music makes me sick… and the odor of the large rooms where too many threadbare coats pile up depresses me a little….”

*

*  * 

FLAT IRON BUILDING. The intersection of 5th Avenue and Broadway. Several stores are still lit up.

“SHOW WINDOW FIXTURES”

A heap of disembodied heads, pleasant under their complicated hairdos, with chests squeezed by corsets, abdomens circled by rubber belts, hands with claw-like fingernails, limbs covered with orthopedic devices.

D.C.M.A. goes by rapidly. In the past these displays exercised a sort of fascination over him. He had even constructed a personal morgue with a few well-chosen pieces.

“Crimes committed in the old port of Naples or at Whitechapel, operating tables, torture gardens… and, around 1825, on the plantation La Carolina, after a slave revolt, murky blue madness of tortured black men…”

A little sadism, a little exoticism, the harassing rhythm of short phrases with, at the end, the falling off of a minor syllable…

Today these pleasures appear to him as childish and out-of-date.

*

*  *

24th Street and Broadway. The window of a milliner. Hats, cushions, bottles of perfume, bags of pearls, dolls…. All “Imported”…

Gold and pink, his red hair stuck to his mask like glove leather, all limp, fallen from a dome of net, crushed on the sand of the ring, a clown cadaver…

In black satin, a long too supple Pierrot. Heavy eyelids falling on an unsteady glance, his color a little cancerous… Moon solo…

A recognizable odor filters through the glass. A whole lethargic world jumps… 1913… Paris…

“Infantes Défuntes, Petrouchkas, Melisandes

Ballet Russes, S.M.I., watered down orchestras,

nerves ready to snap string quartets,

Magic City, tangos, incurable Steinways…”

D.C.M.A. gets a grip on himself.

“My friends who are more advanced than I am have explained to me that the little nervous shock brought about in our body by sounds is only a convention like any other; therefore, I no longer allow a seventh minor nor an augmented fifth to make the least impression on me.

*

*  *

LOEWS VAUDEVILLE. Variety program. Show bills. Four chairs lined up. Clacking of yellow spats.

Spirituals, invertebrate leaps. Soft springs suspended under the differing pressure of slow motion.

Little dance it’s surprising

a traced gesture

mine the same

On the screen.

An eagle grows a flat cactus

a seal bursts      big balloon

sister Anne my sister Anne

does someone know where we’re going?

All alone all blue my eye floats

impure overhead miracle

one must kill so many faces

to finally recognize one’s own.

D.C.M.A throws away the scrawled paper. He could cover several hundreds scrawled thus everyday.

*

*  *

A tourist agency. Advertisement for mountain resorts and health resorts.

Hot Springs. Lakewood. Adirondacks. Lake Placid.

New hotels. Camping sites. Fishermen in boats. Polo players. Golfers.

Dudley sees himself as an adolescent in white flannel in love with sports, with rocking chairs, and with banjos.

The image disgusts him.

Models of steamers. The schedule of organized cruises.

Bermuda, Cuba, The Antilles, Japan, The Philippines. Honolulu.

Dudley imagines the departure piers like all those he already knows.

He is already irritated by those cameos of ferocious white, mosquito bites, and the cries of donkey-drivers.

*

*  *

Two totem poles frame the door of the bar.

For an instant D.C.M.A. is tempted to go finish the summer in a pueblo.

Dances to conjure a drought and dances to make the corn grow.

Everything would become something else.

To discover one’s origins otherwise than by death.

Fish clan? Wolf clan? Cloud clan?

Trick, a force happy and tenacious as a stag. Mysterious power bear healer.

*

*  *

In front of a Cadillac dealership, a new concern assails D.C.M.A.

“Has something really changed because I replaced the tree with a balloon and the rhyming dictionary with popular manuals?”

It’s not at all funny to me anymore to demonstrate that it’s the straight line or the circle that represents infinity.

Nor to pronounce “iridium” or “hypothesis.”

Nor to make surfaces crawl on a sphere.

*

*  * 

On the corner of 29th Street, at the pet shop, in the false light of an aquarium, a creation recommences. Masses stick to the walls: sponges, octopi, jellyfish. Fat faces flabby, made-up, tattooed, drowned…

In his cage, pulled forward for centuries by his too heavy beak, the depressive toucan moves to another perch. Four streaks of black and three of blue tint his feathers. His fierce eye burns in the center of tattered rings.

*

* * 

White rats, Siamese cats, telescope-eyed goldfish with gossamer tails, a pink aura.

Old parakeet of my childhood that devoted your last years to trying to climb a too steep staircase, I’m like you.

Like you, clinging with my claws and my beak, I painfully raise myself. Like you, also at each stage I walk with a round eye, disappointed and a bit myopic on the path still to be taken and on the path already taken.

Where will I end up walking like this from freedom to freedom?

*

*  *

 30th Street, 6th Avenue, 7th Avenue and BROADWAY.

Saks, Gimbel’s and Macy’s are three terrible blocks of sleep.

The elevated train screams. A switch opens. The crowd flows.

*

* * 

In the sky, around a dark abyss, electric zigzags scrawl words.

A disk lights up and goes out. A hand points out the void.   

Mercury. Prism. Crystals. Water fountains. Signals. Shipwrecks.

A green cat unwinds a ball. A wheel turns, red and violet. Faster. A little too fast. It bursts.

The fragments are pulverized. They flee, they find themselves, join back up, explode. Battles of the stars.

Above the rooftops phantoms with a surprising skill, four yellow clowns keep going.

A sheet of white light overwhelms the brain.

*

**

Suddenly a revolving door throws Billy Torquay out onto the middle of the sidewalk. Billy is an old friend from Dudley’s schooldays. They lose contact for long periods, find each other again, and lose each other.

Billy, who is leaving again tomorrow for Tuxedo, invites Dudley to come spend the weekend at his home. Dudley accepts, completely resolved not to show up. He regularly misses his meetings with Billy, doesn’t respond to his letters, and affects an air of boredom when he runs into his friend.

That’s out of delicacy. Dudley belongs to the past. He was buried at Harvard with “Two years” and “Three years courses” twenty years ago.

Nothing justifies his perseverance to live.

Remorse being the only form of sympathy that his old friend can still inspire in him, Dudley is obliged, in order to avoid detesting him straight out, to behave rudely toward him.

When they part company, Dudley notices that Billy’s necktie dangles beneath his face gleaming with heat.

He has studied enough Psycho-Analysis not to know the real meaning of the tie, and the idea that the virtuous Billy, director of his parish and respected member of several temperance groups, can thus display the most guilty of inclinations in the middle of Broadway delights him enormously.

*

* * 

Irritated by this meeting, D.C.M.A. gives up his club.

Behind each folded newspaper, from the seat of each armchair, from the plants on the roof-garden, and from the water in the swimming pool grow other useless and well-shaved heads, just like Billy’s and other invitations for weekends.

In 37th Street there is a little Armenian café where the fans move around the liquored, exciting, and black air…

Dudley turns around and goes down Broadway.

*

* * 

At the corner of 42nd Street, newspaper vendors announce their evening editions.

An advance by the Allies, an assassination attempt on Lenin, a renewed submarine campaign.

D.C.M.A. remembers the charming poems in regular verse that he wrote three years ago to avenge the rape of Belgium and the death of children sunk in the Lusitania.

Since that period, his development has been so rapid that he has the continual feeling of being late for his own movement.

He pursues himself like a dog chases a locomotive, panting, his tongue hanging out, his eyes full of dust, without the hope of ever catching up.

*

* * 

 Thus, innumerable D.C.M.A.s deposit themselves across the city and wait for him to pass.

He can no longer take a step without being assailed by an enlarged or a diminutive version of himself.

Toward what will all these meetings lead him?

He seems to retake, in the opposite direction, a path already taken.

Every detail for the past several hours is added to others as proof.

A vague condensation is achieved.

D.C.M.A. now knows that he is located in a dark reality in a still to be materialized way.

*

* * 

Before him, in black and white, the same face repeatedly appears and reappears, a whirling of molecules, a swarming of atoms, an outbreak of infusoria.

D.C.M.A. recognizes the microbes of sleeping sickness that he saw last week at the Strand Theater.

But the size of the screen is gigantic. Frills, tunics, scarves.

Black and white, the thin silk sticks to the shoulders of a young woman who walks with an elongated step.

D.C.M.A. doesn’t look at the rough and silky nape of the neck, nor at the long agile line from the hip to the heel, nor at each step, confident and short, under the skirt, the bumping of the knee. Hypnotized, he follows the Film of Sleeping Sickness.

The Film crosses 5th Avenue, goes along 42nd Street, walks toward Grand Central Station.

The passage that leads to the underground station opens out in front of him, lined with illuminated boutiques.

The Film steps into a Drug Store.

*

* * 

Among jars crowned with ribbon bows, pyramids of rose soaps, pots of cold cream, bottles of rice powder and note paper, an inexplicable calmness takes over.

A well-being filled with convalescence replaces an illness amassed for hours.

On the surface of D.C.M.A.’s consciousness large sheets spread out, reflecting the surrounding objects. In his subconscious something disintegrates and falls from him like a fakir bird who falls from a tree, killed by an echo.

*

* * 

Someone in the passageway is trying some gramophone records.

Nasal quarrels. A false scale that rises, a strike of the gong.

A cruel Chinese adventure full of subplots, schemes, torturers, and executions.

Dudley wants to sleep on the mats, find the tumult of yellow cities around him, their odor of sandalwood, opium, and dried fish.

Travelers, carrying suitcases or followed by porters, hurry toward the trains to the suburbs and toward the express for Buffalo and Canada.

Each passerby branches off to a city of factories and fires, to a northern lake, to a bungalow in Westchester, to an avenue of pink bricks, to a round lawn with three sweaters in the center.

Ballasts

parallels

meetings nowhere

I think of continents full of isthmuses

where your two metals die.

From two sides of the boulevard

the palaces of stucco have an accent

the banana and cotton goods vendors;

there are also neutral elements in me,

orthodox churches, seminaries

and old synagogue enchantments;

probably the earth is not worth

so many eulogies.

*

* *

 Around Dudley people are acting. Imitating them, he orders a chocolate milkshake, a maple nut ice cream soda, a pineapple phosphate, and a marshmallow and peach sundae, one after the other.

*

* *

SODA-FOUNTAIN

            In a sea                                               sweet                          and cunning

                 a straw                                            goes into                     the maelstroms.

We have left far behind us the regions of illustrated tales, where carapace creatures find the skeletons of lost hunters in the swamps.

 Soon taken up by opposing currents, the ship no longer advanced. The compass turned on its own and the barometer did not tell us a thing.

 For entire weeks, each night, rolled in our travel blankets on the bridge, we listened to the sea lions of Cape Horn moan.

 Each day, with our ship’s binoculars, we probed the open sea where the equinox that was supposed to rescue us slyly hid itself.

 Bursting out suddenly, the sharp sounds of a hornpipe dance or the whistling of maneuvers made the dead calm moments and leaden suns more intolerable.

            Ancient Mariner, sharks, jellyfish,

            seahorse, crab, a murdered albatross,

            dazed waves, white lead seagulls,

            and the sea serpent so poorly formed.

 Suffering from scurvy, one by one, the crewmen died.

We lined up the harpooned porpoises.

I suckled the dying porpoise.

Then                a sign               appeared                   in the southeast.

In the abysses of the vanilla ice cream

                        The ice floes                cracked

*

* * 

Dressed in the Film-of-Sleeping-Sickness, the young woman drinks her soda in little sips.

Around her, men and women are poorly cut and poorly sewn sacks, made for holding organs.

She is an arabesque. In the abstract of the term, the purity of an arabesque.

Her shape expresses everything that her spirit probably does not suspect.

She makes one believe in the importance of things obtained slowly and with difficulty.

Little short line of her cheerful nose, beveled corners designed like a silver mine, precious cartilages.

To produce them lots of formalities and reticence were necessary, chemistry, mathematics, the laws of attraction, gravity, and the sacrifice of thirty species of animals.

Model of perfection. Massaged. Polished. Sanded. Brushed.

Patient training assures the suppleness of reactions and the perfect play of cogs under all circumstances. In the middle of a fire, an earthquake, a shipwreck, not a hair is displaced, not a nerve flinches, each tone stays pleasant and each reflex remains civilized.

Nevertheless, in certain curves of the upper arm, in the bulging of muscles around the jaw, a sensitive bestiality, something eager and bloody that reminds one of the paw and the muzzle, of things that sniff, dig, scratch…

*

*  *

All of a sudden, Dudley sees himself in the mirror, gaunt, features drawn, hat knocked at an angle, perched on a too high stool, and separated from himself by a countertop sticky with sugar.

*

* *

III 

At Central Park West, between 86th and 87th streets, in a large new building, D.C.M.A. lives in an apartment on the twelfth floor.

An enormous studio, covered with sheets of reinforced concrete, serves as his study.

Each successive phase of his evolution is represented there. Therefore, he lives in a perpetual projection of himself that seems to confirm his reality up to a certain point.

From his evangelical and bourgeois origins he still has the comfortable mahogany family furniture in the style of Adams.

From his school days, a pair of oars and boxing gloves.

From his travels to Europe, Louis XIV damasks, velvets from Genoa, a Spanish tapestry, a fake Holbein, a Venetian mirror, a Swiss cuckoo clock.

From his Far East period, paintings on scrolls, jade shrubs, and a Chinese silk carpet of lemon yellow trimmed in blue with zodiac signs.

From his scientific and materialist period, the brain of one of his friends, preserved in a jar.

From his occult period, a broken pedestal that belonged successively to Sapho, William Penn, Abraham Lincoln, Lautréamont, and Sade.

At the end of the study in a sort of alcove, objects that match his most recent evolution: bolts, nuts, balls of wire, an oilcloth typewriter cover, fragments of a motor.

On the floor, a sort of copper girder cut on four unequal planes and coming to a point. Without having any apparent reason, D.C.M.A. has named it The Archduchess Ottilie.

Suspended from the ceiling by a long string, hangs one of those flat keys used to open a jar of preserves. This “church key” is the last poem of Mac Adam. Entitled the “Victory of the Marne,” it sums up the metallic aspect of the battlefield, an association of ideas that is too complex to be communicated, as well as the key to operations.

A wide picture window opens onto Central Park. But hanging on the outside, a network of high tension electric wires prevents the temptation to put one’s nose to the window.

D.C.M.A. sits down at this desk before his current project. It’s a study in several volumes on The Divine Comedy. By a special method of induction and deduction, by etymology, and especially by the psycho-analytical method of professor Freud, it proves that Dante never liked women.

The name of Beatrix is merely a pseudonym, chosen by some interior censorship in order to disguise the true personality of a great uncle of Dante on his mother’s side (Beatrix-Matrix).

*

* * 

Usually, the mere vision of pages covered with his handwriting suffices to bring D.C.M.A. to a state of intellectual excitement favorable to production.

But, this evening, his spirit remains lifeless and reactionless. The malaise that has been building up for hours increases further.

Outside, blasts of hot muggy air rise from the sidewalks.

A cloud of gasoline engulfs the city.

The avenue swells and deflates the continual wailing of trolleys and roaring of open exhaust pipes.

One can feel the massifs and suffocated lawns dying in Central Park. 

*

* * 

D.C.M.A. mixes in a tall glass the contents of several decanters that he keeps always prepared on this desk.

The first dose does nothing. He takes a second, then a third.

Now an anthill settles under his scalp. Too stretched, the skin on his forehead is going to split. A burning sensation burrows into his eyes and goes on digging in a spiral to the back of his brain.

*

* * 

He sees again, at the corner of 5th Avenue and 117th Street, the peanut roaster’s dog that was dying under the stand. Plagued by a skin disease, its big head, already decaying, was shaking.

There was also a day in the subway, seated next to Mac Adam, an old repugnant black woman. Under her absurd crooked hat, patches of pink alopecia stuck to her skin between gray strands of hair, pulled thin.

Dudley runs his hand through his hair almost anticipating a gummy mass under his fingers. But he doesn’t notice anything abnormal, only at the top of his skull a sort of indentation that he had never noticed before.

Remembering the soft surface in that same location that persists for some time on the heads of babies, he considers that, as a matter of fact, everyone is born perforated.

*

* * 

In the neighboring house an Italian sings Puccini, the sickening voice of a fat tenor.

Dudley imagines a glossy person with heavy gestures, with dishonest hands. He recognizes a dull odor of roses of Jericho that once followed him a whole season at the Lido.

*

* * 

What does this indentation on Mac Adam’s skull mean?

Is it a sign of a beginning decay?

*

* *

Mac Adam leans over his Venetian mirror in terror of discovering himself wrinkled and bald, his teeth knocked out, his muscles disintegrated.

One of his eyes is drunk; the other stares coldly back at him with perfect calm.

So as not to meet this so lucid eye, D.C.M.A. turns off the switch and remains in the darkness.

*

* * 

At the far end of the study, in the corner farthest from the alcove, an angle of The Archduchess Ottilie catches the reflections of the avenue.

While his drunk eye continues to wander, the lucid eye of D.C.M.A. fastens on that luminous point.

The point dances, stretches, grows, and changes shape.    

Dudley gets up and walks toward the alcove, irresistibly drawn.

With an indefinable pleasure, seated on the pedestal, he feels the pure, cold, smooth, matte, silky, oxidized material.

Like a sufficient response to all questioning, he repeats: “Lead, Platinum, Pewter, Aluminum…”

Dense syllables that merge all subterranean forces.

He recalls that during episodes of anemia during his childhood he was given iron.

He brutally grabs The Archduchess, drags her to the middle of the study and spreads out beside her on the Chinese carpet.

*

* *

Glasses of whiskey alternate with deep sucking on the metal. Changes take place.

Just like when the liquid that they sell at the Ten-Cent-Store makes an old worn carpet regain its vigor, the spirit of D.C.M.A. is fortified.

At the same time, an insurmountable drowsiness devastates him.

It seems to him that he is lying on the rails of an iron train track and sees a train approaching from a far distance. Maybe he should do something to avoid it?

But the large rhythmic and continuous waves, just like those emanating from the center of The Archduchess, anesthetize him.

Filtering in through all the pores of his skin at once, a subtler and more multiple substance substitutes itself for his substance.

The train approaches.

But the large waves break ever larger.

He needs to let himself be covered. 

*

* * 

A hoarse cry awakens him. It’s a sailor being assassinated in a shady bar in Hong Kong. In the same instant, Dudley hears a foxtrot played aboard a cruising yacht along the coast of Norway. He also sees a man dressed in a light-colored overcoat and wearing a bowler hat stealing hosts from a church in the suburbs of Lyon for a black mass.

D.C.M.A. observes that he is everywhere at the same time.

Liquefied and volatilized, freed of spatial illusion and the laws of gravity, he can easily move through the walls of his house.

Guided by an intuition infallible as a sorcerer’s wand, he leaves New York and goes to roam around the countryside on the Blue Point coast. The waves lead him farther. He dives to the the bottom of the Sound and descends all the way to the Ocean. Under the water, he joins up with the starfish and the water flea, the cypris barnacle, the anatife barnacle, the coral, the pheronema, and the spongilla. 

*

*  *

Yet, what he needs to discover eludes him.

Neither at the top. Nor at the bottom. On the side. Motionless and deadly vibration of the mating of insects.

*

* * 

Outside a car horn blows. Dudley senses in passing:  UT 4. – 1,004 vibrations.

                        and suddenly

TONOMETER

            Under a sheet a glass, forty levels of music. All the prisms of sound.

            First an ultraviolet zone. On overly large tuning forks the bow glides uselessly. Silence of geneses.

            A confused buzzing. A growling populated by diplodocus and plesiosauruses.

            To the ears of men, hunched around the fire in caves, the knocking of primitive seas.

            The orchestra agrees. All the possibilities. A blind world populated with rattling and resonance.

            In a submarine, when it sinks, the creaking of the hull and sheets of armor-plating. A bell suddenly muffled…

   M         M         M         M         M         M         M         M         M         M         M         M        M        M      M      M  !

 and all the names beginning with M.

            Moses, Manfred, Merlin, Mowgli.

            A graph climbs all the way to the normal tuning fork, the 3. – 870 vibrations, then it descends again.

            Someone explains: “in order to obtain the number of the secret code, one must add everything up and then divide proportionally the intervals.”

            A note so transparent that one would like to listen to it without ever moving or breathing again, calm for life.

            Smaller and smaller tuning forks.

            UT – 9. – 32768 vibrations.

No sound. Only everything against the eardrum a break. Then nothing more. The bow remains without response.

Beyond all noticeable perception, the ultra-ultra silence.

*

* * 

How long does D.C.M.A. wander in that No Man’s Land of the mind?

His life spreads out behind him. In retrospect, it appeared as a surprising unity.

An inflexible interior order was directing it. A deep natural willpower linked the disparate appearances in it. Each fragment was indispensable to the whole and was justified by the whole.

It was made like a triptych, like a fugue, like a sonata.

*

* *

Little by little the metal makes its way to the back of his throat. Asphyxia begins.

Doubled up, parasite of himself, Dudley witnesses his own body’s disintegration.

His identity eludes him.

People long forgotten reappear, impose themselves upon him, become him… 

*

* * 

Is that the old English woman smelling of ether who used to go each September to leave her visiting card on the tomb of Juliette at Mercato de Cavallo in Verona?

The missionary who died of cancer during a sea crossing who played improper jokes and word games through the last minutes of his death throes?

The Brazilian general, grain-fed and obsessed with this fear of germs, who traveled the world with a thermometer under his arm to tell his temperature?

The Christian-Scientist who earned a significant fortune reselling fake Louis-Philippe fashion engravings bought in Paris in a back shop on the Left Bank to stock breeders in Ohio and miners in Oklahoma?

The hemiplegic who took with him only a collection of rare insects and a Stradivarius on his trip from Bombay to Christiania?

*

* * 

A taxi stops at the door and lets out its light load of rustling fabrics and voices.

It thunders softly two or three times over New Jersey.

Mac Adam’s meditation continues a bit affected by these interruptions and is carried to a new level.

*

* * 

“The never-ending coming and going between these two wearisome poles: the void and human thought.

 “Problems made of silt and certain animals whose blood resembles rosin; it is said that their glands secrete a poison that anaesthetizes all who lay eyes on it.

“Handsome adventurers of intelligence, history remains the meeting place of their weaknesses but it’s the planets that invented their expedients.

“More and more, my only kingdom.

“(A bit annoying obsession of little hands that persist after lunch in concealing the terrain of the double.)

“There is no cure. The eye, ceaselessly inverted, attentively follows the game of likelihoods, but the mind stays inert because nothing so plausible would ever take place.

“Yet a peninsula exists where regrets suffocate, a hard and dry climate gorged with salt. The free-roaming herds grazed on grasses soaked in gasoline and suffer from the stricken land.

“But one must not forget that for the past twenty-five years the facades of our national monuments are marked ‘suicide prohibited’.

“Cremation is merely a more convenient passport. How can one reconcile a bitter mental season and this sun on an embankment?”

*

* * 

Systems all around him, arranged like hats in a cloakroom, each with its serial number.

He recognizes popular manuals and dictionaries, the German philosophers, Sanskrit texts, Lao-Tse, Paracelsus, Max Stirner, Oscar Wilde, and Saint Augustine, Ruskin and Marinetti, the Archeometer and the Cabala.

He came close, in passing, to a little security, but a vigorous swerve threw him in full gravity. The danger faced, he gained full possession of himself.

To reassure himself he repeats: “Thirty-eighth convolution of the second lobe of the left hemisphere… thirty-eighth convolution of the second lobe of the left hemisphere…”

That’s where it has taken refuge, what he needs to find, at the very top of the brain, hiding in a ball and mocking.

At that moment, the door of the elevator closing with a crash heralds in the era of definitive revelations.

Dudley grasps that which is irrevocable and total between the past of tomorrow and the future of an hour ago.

As one declines a noun with difficulty always with a marked stop on the accusative (the accusative, movement toward)…

D.C.M.A. achieves the degree of absolute adaptation where the being ceases to be viable.

His arms stiffen. His hands, like a functioning electric typewriter, emit an odor of ozone. Something cracks in his neck.

His thoughts adopt a whirling motion that descends in a spiral, obedient to the attraction of centrifugal forces.

Centrifugal force, defector, fire-retardant, fumigations… 

A light bump. Landings… 

Somebody put a telescope at the end of each of his senses. 

*

*  *

He was found the next morning spread out on the Chinese carpet in the middle of the zodiac signs and fragments of the whiskey bottle, his jaws disproportionately distended and clenched on the incorruptible copper Archduchess.

Two doctors, three detectives, and one coroner called for the inquest, believed he had committed suicide.

Glossary

Elevated trains: The EL began running in 1878 and gave residents of Lower Manhattan access to the city via nine miles of track.

Produce Exchange Building: built between 1881 and 1884 at 2 Broadway, opposite Bowling Green, with a 224 feet high tower and grand hall lit by the designer’s hallmark skylight.

Battery Place Aquarium: first opened its doors December 10, 1902 in the Battery’s Castle Clinton in Lower Manhattan.

Mercer: American-made, high performance automobiles, 1909-1925.

Sybyl Spyder, the thin Ziegfeld dancer: possibly referring to Sybil Carmen, the female lead in multiple versions of Midnight Frolic, one of Flo Ziegfeld’s theatrical reviews or “Follies” between 1915 and 1918, when Roche was in New York.

Verlaine, Samain, Baudelaire: French Symbolist poets.

Quai Bourbon, etc.: riverbanks along the Seine.

Tortoni: 18th-century Italian café owner in Paris.

Georges Sand: pseudonym of Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, French novelist (1804-1876).

Michel De Bourges: French lawyer and politician (1797-1853).

Maurice de Guérin: French writer and poet (1810-1839).

Barbey d’Aurevilly: French writer of mystery tales (1808-1889).

Wagner: Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a German composer who reportedly loved dogs, especially his Newfoundland.

Gérard de Nerval: pseudonym of Gérard Labrunie (1808-1855), French Romantic poet whose works influenced Symbolists and Surrealists.

Tuilleries: Royal palace, then museum, and gardens on the Right Bank in Paris.

Balzac: Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), French journalist and author known for his multi-volume Comédie Humaine.

Gothic mansions of the Plaine Monceau: possibly the neo-gothic Hôtel Galliard or other similar mansions of 19th-century bourgeois architecture found in the 17th arrondissement of Paris.

Heroines of Bourget and Maupassant: novelist Paul Bourget (1852-1935) and short story writer Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) depicted suffering, tragic heroines.

Chopin: Polish pianist and composer (1810-1849); Georges Sand’s lover.

Mr. Folantin: from Joris-Karl Huysmans’ short novel A vau-l’eau, possibly a key to the antihero of Roche’s novella.

Mr. de Phocas: character in roman à clé of Jean Lorrain.

Manette Salomon: mistress and model of protagonist painter in Edmond and Jules de Goncourt’s novel of the same name.

Des Esseintes: reclusive protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A rebours.

Bad priest of Mirbeau: Octave Mirbeau wrote Sébastien Roch, about an abusive priest in his past.

“We will get them” (“On les aura”): popular French WWI song.

Joshué Rheinvor: fictional ironic name for a French nationalist speaker.

(Madame Samuel) Kölnheim: fictional ironic name for a French nationalist supporter.

Saint-Saëns: French composer of symphonic poems, operas, and symphonies.

Carolus Duran: French portrait artist who depicted members of Parisian high society in the 1870s. His death in 1917 would have been reported while Roche was in New York.

Exposition de 89: Exposition Universelle of 1889 or the World’s Fair, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the onset of the French Revolution.

Rose Croix: The mystic order of the Rose-Croix had its first annual exhibition in Paris in 1892, organized by Joséphin Péladan and showcasing mythical and mystical symbolist art.

Mademoiselle Couësdon and L’Ange Gabriel: In 1895, the periodical L’Estafette printed an article about Mlle Couësdon, a Parisian clairvoyant, who relied upon revelations of the Angel Gabriel.

Chippendale: furniture named after the English cabinetmaker (1718-1779), known for its craftsmanship and ornamental detail.

Coromandel: southeastern coast of India on the Indian Ocean where the French controlled Pondichéry and Karaikal until 1954. Since many Chinese exports came through this region’s ports, Oriental decorative items such as screens, boxes, and chests were referred to as “Coromandel.”

Matisse and Picasso: two painters whose works are regarded as seminal in the development of 20th- century visual art.

Revue des Deux Mondes: founded in 1829, the Revue is the first and oldest publication of literature and politics dedicated to freedom of thought.

Apollinaire: influential French poet and art critic (1880-1918).

Déroulède: French author and nationalist politician, leader of anti-Dreyfussards, died 1914.

Stravinsky: Russian-born composer whose operas, symphonies, and ballets were often performed in Paris during the first half of the 20th century.

Poiret: French couturier known in the U.S. as “The King of Fashion” for his uncorseted silhouettes that featured draping, sumptuous fabrics, and ornament. His “Orientalist” styles were known to be worn by Roche.

Savonarole: 15th-century Dominican friar who was responsible for the burning of Humanist writings and art. For the “Savonarole face,” see the portrait of Girolamo Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo (c.1498).

Durckheim and Bergson: Emile Durkheim and Henri Bergson, two of the most important thinkers of early 20th-century France.

General Villa: Controversial outlaw (1878-1923) who became general of the Mexican federal army during the Mexican Revolution. The American film, “The Life of General Villa” was released in 1914.

Infantes Défuntes: 1899 piano piece by Ravel, “Pavane pour une infant défunte” (Pavane for a Dead Princess).

Petrouchkas: Petrouchka is a ballet composed by Igor Stravinsky.

Melisandes: Pelléas and Mélisande is an opera by Claude Debussy.

Ballet Russes: a famous ballet company founded in 1907 by Serge de Diaghilev.

S.M.I.: Société musicale indépendante founded c.1910 by Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, and others in opposition to the strict rules of the National Society of Music. Other members included Bartók, De Falla, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky.

Magic City: Parisian amusement park located on the Quai d’Orsay from 1900-1934.

Loews Vaudeville: one of several theaters owned by Marcus Loews. The one mentioned on Dudley’s stroll is likely the Herald Square Theater at Broadway and 35th Street.

Tuxedo: town in Orange County, New York, known between 1915 and the Stock Market Crash of 1929 as a haven for the affluent.

Rape of Belgium: term used to describe the mistreatment of civilians during the German invasion and occupation of Belgium during WWI.

Lusitania: British ocean liner torpedoed in 1915 by a German submarine.

Sapho: Ancient Greek female poet.

William Penn: English Quaker, founder of the Province of Pennsylvania.

Lautréamont: pseudonym of Isidore-Lucien Ducasse (1846-1870), author of Les Chants de Maldoror.

Sade: French writer and philosopher (1740-1814), known for his satiric erotic works.

Puccini: Italian opera composer (1858-1924).

Lido: one of several Italian seaside towns known for their beaches.

UT: “ultrasonic thickness,” used to gauge the thickness of a solid element based on the time it takes for the ultrasound wave to return to the surface.

Lao-Tse: Chinese sage, contemporary of Confucius, considered the father of Taoism.

Paracelsus: German Renaissance physician, philosopher, and theologian.

Max Stirner: German philosopher (1806-1856) of the Young Hegelian group.

Oscar Wilde: Irish writer (1854-1900), author of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Saint Augustine: philosopher and Christian theologian (354-430), author of Confessions.

 Ruskin: British Romantic poet, painter and art critic (1819-1900).

Marinetti: Italian writer and founder of the Futurist movement in 1909.

Archeometer: an instrument developed by French nineteenth-century magician Marquis Saint-Yves d'Alveydre. It was to be used for forecasting events and organizing all human knowledge.

The Cabala: mystical interpretation of Hebrew scripture.