review of
Philippe Soupault's Last Nights of Paris
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 25, 2017

The last review I wrote, finished today, was one of Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather wch I began by writing: "I keep picking on Cyberpunk writing in much the same way I pick on Surrealist writing. At the same time that I like it in theory I'm annoyed by it in praxis." ( https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/604975-heavy-whether ) The point is that most Surrealist writing that I read doesn't strike me as Surrealist enough - but, then, I don't read much Surrealist writing anymore so I'm usually dependent of my memory of it.

This might be the 1st Surrealist novel I've read since Lisa Goldstein's The Dream Years read in April of this yr & that doesn't really qualify. Before that, the 1st bk I finished reading in 2009 might fit the bill: Giorgio de Chirico's Hebdomeros: With Monsieur Dudron's Adventure and Other Metaphysical Writings.. or maybe not. Even this novel doesn't fit into the category if one takes Soupault's expulsion from the Surrealists before its writing seriously.

William Carlos Williams, the poet, translated it & I think he did an excellent job. However, he refers to it as a "Dadaist novel" & I think that's even further off the mark than its being a Surrealist one is. The "Publisher's Note" has this to say:

"Co-author with André Breton of the first self-proclaimed book of automatic writing, Les Champs Magnétiques (1919), and co-editor with Breton and Louis Aragon of the avant-garde journal Lttérature (1919—1923), Philippe Soupault was one of the founders of the Surrealist movement. A poet, novelist, and journalist, with a much less political and less theoretical approach to writing than his colleagues Breton and Aragon, Soupault was expelled from the movement in 1926—along with Antonin Artaud—for "their isolated pursuit of the stupid literary adventure." Les Dernièrs Nuits de Paris was his third prose work, published in 1928." - p v

"Indeed, Last Nights of Paris seems to share much with both the Surrealist novels (Nadja, Paris Peasant) and the American expatriate novels (The Great Gatsby, The Day of the Locust) of its day." - p vi

"both the Surrealist novels"? Does that mean that it's commonly thought that there were only two? I've read them both & didn't find either very Surreal. As I've probably overstated by now I find Raymond Roussel's novels far more Surreal than anything the Surrealists ever wrote. As for "the American expatriate novels"?

Ok, The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925 while the Fitzgeralds were traveling in Europe a few weeks before they settled in Paris but he began planning it in 1923 when he was still in New York. The Day of the Locust (1939) was written when Nathanael West was living in the US long after a brief 3 month trip to Paris in the early 1920s. Calling him an "expatriate" is stretching things a bit & calling either of those novels "expatriate" is also stretching it given that both are set in the US. Interestingly, West died the day after Fitzgerald did.

When I praise Williams' 'poetic' translation I mean passages like the following:

"The virtuosity of words in this historic quarter is amazing. Those that escape from the houses have a quicksilver sheen, those that hide in their cracks are phosphorescent." - p 4

In other words, the descriptions use images not usually associated w/ what's described, things like: words w/ a "quicksilver sheen" or words "that hide in" [..] "cracks". I enjoy this so the bk got off to a good start for me. It also has a fairly linear plot but one that's revealed in an intriguing enuf way:

"Georgette, the sailor, the dog and I myself had no answer ready and this we sought wandering at random, driven here rather than there by an invincible fatigue.

"Thinking it over as we were walking with soft steps under the trees of the Champs-Elysées, I seemed to catch a purpose, that of all the night prowlers of Paris: we were in search of a corpse." - p 20

Given that there've probably been many novels written about the criminal underworld, as this one partially is, I wonder how many criminals so depicted ever read such things?

"I read that they were on the assassin's track, a sailor from Chacal who had killed and cut to pieces one of his friends." - p 22

W/ friends like that, who need enemies?

The poetic descriptive language continues to please me: "Paris swelled out with boredom, then slept as if to digest it." (p 36) I hate to break it to you, Paris, but you might be pregnant & time has been known to eat his children. "I took pains to notice the time at each clock we passed on the trip, and on passing the seventeenth, and despite the distance run, pointed to eleven thirty-five. Had time stopped?" (pp 37-38) No, but when Paris is digesting, time slows down drastically.

Now, Philippe, is this type of behavior becoming of you?:

"She was picked up, near the Pont-Neuf, by some sort of student in a béret who was taken by her to a hotel room. With decision, Jacques bribed the patron of the hotel and obtained the room next to that in which the student was undressing. We were misled by the banality of that interview. Georgette first demanded her pay, then, having complained about its smallness, declared that she was in a hurry because of a rendezvous with a Spaniard.

"Jacques and I made no secret of your joy. Georgette was no more than an ordinary prostitute; and by ourselves we had manufactured a mystery out of whole cloth."

[..]

"However when the characteristic noises and the succeeding silence indicated to us that all was over, we quitted the room and took up our watch at the door of the hotel. We wanted at least to make the acquaintance of the Spaniard." - p 45

Hence, the historic meeting between Soupault, Cousteau, Breton, & Buñuel did not take place in an aqualung sauna as usually reported. This explains Soupault's eventual marriage to a street: "The avenue de l'Opéra was no longer the stream that I had always followed, nor the highway that one usually pictures. It was a great shadow flashing like a glacier, which one must first conquer, and then embrace as one would a woman." (p 46) Awkward, eh? Maybe this explains the alligators in the sewers? But to each his own & que sera, sera. Ah.. but what about Georgette? Men are so fickle.

"I realized perfectly that in appearance she was just a common prostitute, the sister of all the prostitutes who overrun Paris and who, they say, are all more or less alike. But Georgette was seductive only because she was somehow different and because her appearance was obviously deceptive." - pp 48-49

"She loved only the dark which seemed each night to wed and her charm itself did not become real until she withdrew from the light to enter obscurity." - p 49

Maybe it was just to hide traces of disease.

Chapter Five begins w/ a quote from Roussel, Soupault can do no wrong:

"O, Treïul, remember that we are of the same race
and that I am entitled to your aid.

"—Raymond Roussel (La Poussière de Soleil)" - p 60

We are all the alligator children of Philippe Soupault & the avenue de lOpéra. As such, I make beginnings meet.

""You have come for some drawings, sir?" asked Georgette, and I couldn't tell whether she spoke in this way to deceive me or to deceive Octave. I was careful not to contradict and passed myself off as an art lover." - p 62

Well, I guess that makes sense: 1st he's embracing the avenue de lOpéra & now he's tossing off himself as an art lover. He's probably thinking of one of the sewer covers opened at a "^" intersection. Is it any wonder that Octave is a little odd? Thank goodness he's not a 9th, then he'd really be odd.

"He stopped talking suddenly and began to count the number of hairs in a paint brush.

"Then, in spite of my questions, he relapsed into silence like someone drowning.

"Wasted effort. Octave had departed, and for a realm to which I could not follow him. He seemed to push aside the horizon, drive back the walls of the room, wipe out the boundaries of day and dismiss the objects which surrounded us." - p 68

Then, all heck broke loose & metaphor was forsaken as simile piled on simile in a veritable cluster fuck tackle of the quarterback, halfback, fullback, & backhand. "One of them was torn and hung like a dead hand above the shining tracks of the railroad. Here and there the red point of an electric lamp, as sad as the dead body of a dog. The cars on the switches looked like pretentious tombs. / Octave took up his walk. It was like the refrain of a hackneyed ditty" (p 79)

"Chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella" - Comte de Lauréamont - NO WAY that was chance, Bub.

"Chance, said I to myself, is at least sincere in that it does not conceal its deceptions from us. On the contrary it exposes them in broad daylight, and trumpets them at night. It amuses itself, from time to time, by stupefying the world with the shock of a terrible surprise, as if to remind men of its great strength, thinking they might forget its flightiness, its mischief, its whimsicalities." - p 83

I discovered Restif de la Bretonne in recent yrs, in particular his "Anti-Justine". This is early 19th century French incest pornography of the most vivid sort. I just stumbled across the bk while browsing my favorite used bkstore & got it b/c of the reference to de Sade. I don't recall ever seeing any mention of de la Bretonne before when, Lo & Behold!:

"He described to us with many details the check room for small children, who were deposited under a number by nursery girls. This custom, he affirmed with a disarming certainty, is very ancient. And he cited cases of substitution of children infinitely more numerous than one would suppose. Now and then he underlined what he said with an observation borrowed from Restif de la Bretonne, who was plainly his model." - pp 106-107

The implication being here that the children were vulnerable to sexual use. As if that weren't enuf, we further get to learn of walking privies.

"["] Do you know," said he, smiling in his best manner, "that toward the end of the middle ages, bucket carriers circulated through the streets to give aid to people who were 'caught short'? They were armed with a great cloak forming a sort of temporary shelter from which emerged the face alone of the crouching client. After which the bucket was emptied into the nearest stream." - p 107

Chapter Nine begins w/ this quote:

"A something or other that has no name in any language.

—Tertullian"

Lately I've been preoccupied w/ the notion of concepts specific to particular languages. See, e.g., my review of Howard Rheingold's They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/598455-they-have-a-word-for-it . But an idea that I haven't come across yet is the one presented in the above Tertullian quote & an excellent idea it is. There are currently over 6,000 languages, what ideas don't have a word for them in any of them?! Discuss.

The novel's action meanders thru the activities of some criminals who're roughly clotted around a kingpin named Volpe:

"One day he sold pictures, the next day cotton and in all probability women. He possessed blocks of shares in a number of newspapers, whose policy he controlled and which served him at the same time as buffers against the world. What struck one about Volpe was his remarkable gift for using to the hilt everything that belonged to him. He had the taste for small enterprises whose yields were prompt and it could be said that he enriched himself through makeshifts. Like all those in his category, Volpe had a great number of vices. But he loved best of all to dominate." - p 126

The Publisher's Note declared Soupault a "poet, novelist, and journalist" & it's interesting to speculate how much of each was at play in the writing of this. The above description seems likely to me to be based on either a single individual known to the author or an amalgamation of character types - but is it? & what about the rest of it? I wonder if Soupault was ever interviewed in depth about just how fictional or non-fictional this is - but I don't wonder enuf to research it at the moment.

"One day, in a café—one of those cafés they love so much—I saw them listening with particular attention to a refrain spit out by a gramophone: it was the hackneyed of the hackneyed:

"Paris, c'est une blonde
Paris unique au monde.

"The imbecilic words spilled themselves before them and they listened with open mouths, ravished, convinced." - p 134

Ha ha! My French-Canadian friend Alan Lord wrote a bk called ATM SEX (you can read my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/563848-alan-lord ) in wch he writes about Paris thusly:

"You love Paris because you've never actually lived there. You just passed through with a temporary load of money, gawked at the usual tourist trappings, then said au revoir Les Mis-arabes. You didn't have to try dialing for operator assistance in a phone booth (it doesn't exist, and anyway your pocket change is useless—you need a phone card, which you can only buy in a Bar Tabac). And you didn't get kicked out of a supermarket for squeezing in through a checkout aisle instead of going all the way to the end of the interminable checkout aisles and going in through the proper "IN" gate like the rest of the obedient French sheep, who in fact are much more conservative and knee-jerk respectful of rules, tradition, and hierarchy than their former Nazi masters." - p 98, ATM SEX

In my review of that I recount my own story:

"In 1984 I went into the Paris underground, the former Roman mining tunnels, w/ some friends & a Parisian reporter who knew his way around somewhat. I picked an area that I then proclaimed the "PS.B.B.T.O.U.C." (the "Paris Suburban Branch of the BalTimOre Underground Club"). I explained that everywhere I went became a suburb of BalTimOre. Now BalTimOre's a hopeless shithole of the 1st order & I was parodying imperialism but the reporter failed to see the humor in it & seemed more than a little offended that I wd dare to reduce the-great-Paris to a mere suburb of an American industrial city in decline. I thought that was funny."

I don't actually have any feelings about Paris one way or another. I remember being treated rudely there b/c my French was so horrible, I can't blame them for that - although when I meet someone who doesn't speak the local Lingua Franca I try to help them not castigate them. But let's not dwell, s-hell we? Let's refresh ourselves w/ some more poetic description:

"Empty-handed, I set out upon the discovery of the flight of time and space. Words, like joyous companions, started before my eyes and spun about my ears in a carnival of forgetfulness." - p 135

Do all Parisians speak like this? Alaseth, I thinketh noteth. They're more like our pal Blin below:

"Blin, seizing his courage in both hands, got up and said: "There are various degrees of doubt just as there are progressive stages of insanity. You make me laugh. Let one of you throw the first stone, I'll fling it back. My position today permits me to face these obligations of which I myself have fixed the value. I demand, I DEMAND. . . ." The words—empty, useless, out-of-date—flowed until he was breathless." - p 170

Ok, maybe not. Here're excerpts from Soupault's afterword on translator poet Williams's time in Paris:

"I think it was the memory of these nocturnal wanderings that made him decide to accept translating my "testimony," incorrectly subtitled "novel," Last Nights of Paris. Which for me was a great joy. I was one of the few Europeans (or Americans) who knew that Williams was a great, a very great poet and an admirable writer of incomparable lucidity and even of incurable modesty." - p 178

Perhaps my question-mark-less question above, "I wonder if Soupault was ever interviewed in depth about just how fictional or non-fictional this is", is answered here by Soupault saying ""testimony," incorrectly subtitled "novel["]". I think Williams did a great job - esp considering that the original is just one symbol: "^".

"But, as he has written, he had retained pleasant memories of our walks in Paris, which he evoked in translating, with his mother, Last Nights of Paris.

"And after reading his translation I congratulated him, because he had done an admirable job of describing the atmosphere of the Parisian nights." - p 179 ( )

In the interests of ramping up the Parisian reading prior to the France trip, I picked up Philippe Soupault's 1928 Last Nights of Paris, as translated by American Modernist poet William Carlos Williams. I wanted to soak up a bit of surrealist love for the City of Light, and indeed, Soupault's work is a kind of proto-noir love letter to nocturnal Paris, in which various shady characters roam the banks of Seine between sundown and dawn, interacting in mysterious ways and becoming fascinated and disenchanted with one another. The city itself is the most vivid character here; the humans are merely atmospheric outgrowths of the Parisian streets, "types" of the romanticized thief or prostitute. One can trace the precise paths they take while roaming from the railings of the Louvre to the skeletal shadow of the Petit Palais, to to the unsavory ambiance of the Gare St. Lazare in the early hours, but beyond a stylish silhouette they hardly exist as people—or, if they have distinguishing characteristics, they come off more as accessories to the city itself, parts of a collective hive rather than individuals.

Soupault's atmospheric creation comes off well in its first half, which is intensely visual. One is constantly reminded that this work is part of the original Surrealist movement. Not only does the world of the novella qualify as "surreal" to modern sensibilities (featuring unexpected juxtapositions, jarring metaphors and non sequiturs), but even Soupault's specific images recall those of his influences and contemporaries. The opening chapter, for example, features a plethora of umbrellas, bringing to mind Lautréamont's "chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella" line. (Unsurprising, since Soupault apparently idolized Lautréamont, holding him up as a role model for the Surrealist movement as a whole.) Some of the umbrella images are quite good, and good examples of the classic surrealist vibe of Last Nights of Paris:

It is said that along one side of it is the meeting place of monastic bachelors. A modest and silent club. Here umbrellas take on the appearance of a flock.

And again:

Dragging an umbrella as one drags along an unhappy cur, a couple passed on the quay and stopped an instant to cast a look around. The woman let out little shrieks that recalled those of a screech owl. They checked their umbrella on the steps of the Pont des Arts.

The metaphorical transformation of umbrellas into animate creatures—dogs, groups of birds—is very characteristic of Last Nights of Paris. The boundaries between animate and inanimate are unclear: Paris itself comes off as a living, breathing entity, and everything else, whether street or human, is something like an organ to its organic body. Likewise, the woman in the second quote reminds the narrator of a screech owl: human/animal boundaries are just as fuzzy as the borderline between animate and inanimate. Indeed, the narrator is more or less guided around the city during the first chapter by a stray dog, with mongrels appearing over and over throughout the novella. Soupault is not suggesting that these dogs have human-style intelligence, or some kind of mystic knowledge—only that conscious decisions are of less importance, in nocturnal Paris, than the vagaries of chance. The most fitting thing, given the spirit of the nocturnal city, is to abandon oneself to the random chance, investigating odd details that catch one's eye or simply drifting from encounter to encounter with no conscious goal. And even if one has a conscious goal, like the narrator's desire to know the explanation of the events he witnesses during the first chapter, one is most likely to find the answers through a kind of zen abandonment to accident, than through applied logic. As the narrator remarks in the latter half of the book (which is less visual, more conceptual, and I thought generally weaker):

The days when we follow the secret voice of diversion are those chosen by chance to show us its ways. [...] Boredom with the eternal pageant turned my thoughts to what you will. I fled voluptuously.

This preoccupation with chance and night time leads nicely into another of Soupault's trademark Surrealist touches. Scattered more widely throughout the novella as a whole are clocks: looming and ticking, often becoming loci of fascination for different characters, or malfunctioning in one way or another. The narrator notices, in one section, that his watch has developed an odd habit:

And meanwhile, as if in answer to the city's signal, the small clock I used to measure time and ennui stopped each evening at eleven thirty-five. There was no explanation for this disconcerting regularity.

I love the koan-style nonsensical-ness of this. For how long does the clock stop every evening; when does it start up again? Does the narrator reset it to make up for the time lost during the period when it was stopped, or does the ostensibly precise stopping time shift slightly every day as the clock's lost time interferes with its accuracy? Perhaps Soupault is suggesting that the measurement of time—and even more so, one might assume, the measurement of ennui—is a more subjective process than commonly believed, so that the lost time does not need to be taken into account, and whenever the watch displays 11:35pm, 11:35pm it will be as far as the narrator is concerned. This image of the elusive, adaptive clock anticipates Dalí's famous Persistence of Memory (1931), with its melting, traveling clock faces.

Elsewhere in Last Nights of Paris clocks are both reminders of the relativity of time (they are often unsynchronized, or malfunctioning), and simultaneously powerful creators of a moment in time. The character Octave is always staring at clocks, comparing them to his watch and to each other—presumably to check their agreement, reminding the reader of each timepiece's potential inaccuracy. In the opening chapter the "great clock of the Gare d'Orsay, the one on the left, pointed to three, strangest hour of all[, ...] three o'clock, the hour of indecision." Here the clock seems to embody and almost create the sense of this witching-hour in the narrator. The hands and face are less a neutral measurement device of an external quantity (time), but the co-creationist of a specific ambiance known as "three o clock." Could this 3am scene in the Gare d'Orsay achieve the same level of strangeness without the giant clock presiding over it? I think not. Elsewhere, the narrator himself becomes unreliable when he claims to know, without being told, that his friend Jacques "was obsessed with thoughts of a gigantic clock," and, finally, late in the book, chance itself is identified as "the hands of time."



I like Soupault's games here, but I'm not sure what to do with them. And in fact, after my delight at the visual oddity and atmospheric repetitions of the first half of this novella, I was taken aback to find myself slogging through the second half, which often reads like the journal of a stoned high school student or the more sophomoric passages of Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch. Still, at only 180 pages, 90 of which are delicious fun, and given the interesting geographical and historical context, Last Nights of Paris was definitely worth a read. And it will certainly flavor my impressions should I find myself in the neighborhood of the Louvre or Petit Palais after dark.