‘I’m a hypocrite and a total fraud’ – the confessions of a French Surrealist poet

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.

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.

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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.