Michel Leiris (1901-90) was one of those intellectual adventurers who are the astonishment of French literature in the 20th century. Their achilles’ heel is that most were communists, in a few cases Nazis; and nothing kills the life of the mind more thoroughly than preaching. Their saving grace is that many were eccentric characters, and their autobiographical work can often be their most luminous legacy.
Among Leiris’s subjects are his dogs, his ideal hotel, his hatred of Wagner, his Anglophile snobbery and his tailor
Because they were anti-form, the ideal prose vehicles became ‘aphorism’ or ‘fleuve’. The most brilliant of the French aphorists, Emile Cioran (though he was Romanian), exclaimed in an interview ‘Expression – that’s the cure!’, meaning not society’s cure but the writer’s. Leiris usually chose the fleuve route; and since he was a psycho-mess and wanted lots of therapy, there’s plenty of outpour. He married a rich woman, and so there was plenty of time too. This exemplar of Tom Wolfe’s ‘radical chic’ divided his days between an apartment on the quai des Grands-Augustins and a country house not too far from the agonising toils of St Germain. Plus official visits to communist regimes and several forays into primitive society.
This, the fourth and final volume of his autobiography, was published in Paris in 1976 and is now translated by Richard Sieburth. I was put off by his rendering of Leiris’s sweet title Frêle Bruit as Frail Riffs. In the event, the translation reads well, often beautifully – no mean task, given that Leiris was a neurotic hair-splitter and auto-contrarian, tying up his pages in endless loops of subordinate clauses.
Here, as before, he is writing at length on the impossibility of achieving anything by writing, whether it be an intellectual goal or change in the external world. In the former case he is surely wrong, since literature is a triumph of our species. In the latter case, he was also wrong, though not in the sense he implied. Words have often wrought murderous destruction in the real world via literal addiction to scripture or to political formulae.
‘Whatever I do I only half do,’ he wails. He became a Surrealist, but soon fell out with André Breton. He became an ethnographer (sort of). He tried his hand at novels. Though a fleuviste, he wonders if instead he should ‘go for something far more incisive… little batches of phrases that say a great deal in a few words’. In many hands this has proven a highly successful idea, to replace the old-fashioned railway journey of a prose work with something like a small galaxy. He’d done it himself, in a much earlier autobiographical book on his sex life, L’âge d’homme. Many of the entries here, in contrast to the autobiography’s three previous volumes, are indeed short: poems (they are very clever), brief incidents. But it doesn’t satisfy him. He always needs to explain the explanation.
It is embarrassing when Leiris comes to the Revolution, because like all masochists he is a sentimentalist. He believes an earthly utopia should be striven for, ‘to get to that place where poetry and revolution might blend into each other’. He thinks you can legislate for ‘the marvellous’ and for ‘love’. Walter Pater’s hard, gemlike flame is ever before him: ‘… to live the marvellous at the highest and most accelerated intensity…’ Unsurprisingly, he was a lifelong insomniac. He never visited a gulag.
When all this gets too much even for Leiris, he writes about his dogs, his ideal hotel, the decadent night-owl in white tie and tails, his Anglophile snobbery, his hatred of Wagner, his love of the Mediterranean and tropical lands, the respective merits of town and country, the nobility of not having children, King Arthur and the Round Table, his tailor, ‘the fetishistic affection I feel for my clothes, which like my writings represent a feature of my person as it appears to others’.
This dossier of a book is as unique as its author’s fingerprints, something that all autobiographies should be and which few are. He is oddly genial throughout, even as the pages wither away in self-laceration and pirouettes of futility: ‘This idea keeps gnawing at me: deep down, I’m a total fraud.’ What dandiacal impudence! Maybe that is the secret of his improbable appeal. He says he is a hypocrite, that his writing is mere bricolage. He decides the only way forward is to conduct his private life with ‘graciousness and extreme modesty’. So is this the end of it? Not at all. Much more autobiographical work bodied forth well into his eighties. Meanwhile, he’d kept a secret journal from 1922 to just before his death. A thousand pages from it was published in Paris in 1992. What’s next – the letters?
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