Enrique Vila-Matas - A Brief History of Portable Literature

As I said, Mdivani’s text is pure ravings. I don’t know if he was obsessed with enthralling his readers, or if he simply wanted to make something back on his investment. Either way the prince certainly invented enjoyable — though clearly unlikely — adventures, beginning in Zanzibar and ending at the bottom of the sea in a Never-never Land. Here is a brief example of the prince’s remarkable ravings: “Sailing for Balboa under a full moon one night, the clouds like mackerel bones, blurred Herculeses, mauve crepuscules, dreadful for the deranged travelers. The Panamanian coast looked like that of Wales.”

As for Paul Klee, I think we should be grateful for his attempt to offer an account and excuse the way he veered off at the end, which more than anything, was due to the fact that he had recently discovered poetry. Also, he was thoughtful enough to veer off later on in the book, so we get to find out almost everything we’d want to know about the Bahnhof Zoo . The pages in which he veers off are actually very lovely. I enjoy taking what’s expressed in them literally: the image of poor Death visiting the submarine, for example.

Klee begins his ship’s log explaining where the name Bahnhof Zoo came from. He tells us, in Berlin in those days, the city’s best known meeting point was Bahnhof Zoo. A mass of people could be seen at any time of day or night, awaiting lovers and friends beneath the clock that presided over that place. For Prince Mdivani, Bahnhof Zoo was the most appropriate name for his old submarine, seeing that in Berlin — beneath that clock (made in Zurich by a company called Crazy Ship) — he’d waited on a number of occasions to meet a femme fatale, who, in the end, left him feeling terribly wretched and pushed him toward the decision to hire a static submarine as consolation, where he and his portable friends could have lots of fun.

The word Zoo also evoked Noah’s Ark, so similar to the submarine, since never before had such a variety of wild portable beasts gathered together. The historical partygoers from Vienna were joined at the last minute by people as distinctive as Marianne Moore, Cyril Connolly, Carla Orengo, Ezra Pound, Josephine Baker, Jacobo Sureda, Erich von Stroheim, Rozanes the jeweler, and Osip Mandelstam, among others, as well as the eccentric captain of the ship who declared his name to be Missolonghi. (He was in fact none other than Robert Walser, who, after years skirting around the edges of madness, had finally plunged into its abyss.)

“This Missolonghi,” writes Paul Klee, “wore a fur-lined jacket with the collar up, a blue cap, and the look of a colossus with his curved form silhouetted against the ship’s hatch, he was constantly angry with those he believed to be the longshoremen, shouting a continuous stream of invective and orders at them in an incomprehensible language.”

The people he believed to be longshoremen were in fact a group of English poets, friends of Rozanes the jeweler and great admirers of Baudelaire; they gave themselves the task of overseeing the smooth running of the Macao Salon, a luxurious opium den done up like a ransacked Norwegian palace, and, along with the puppet theatre, one of the Bahnhof Zoo ’s main attractions.

The Macao Salon — presided over by a very large witch from China — was the setting for the incident between Rita Malú and Carla Orengo. Orengo, hearing Rita Malú was in love with Francis Picabia, waited for her to enter a deep opium dream and shaved off all her hair, leaving her completely bald. Quite the scandal, a dire incident — soon to be followed by another: Max Ernst, secretly in love with Orengo and briefly touched by madness, wrote to Alfonso XIII of Spain offering him Josephine Baker’s amatory services. At the same time, he proposed that he become a member of “a secret society of a portable area, a freed-up large beach of the imagination at the very center of language, needing no other key than playing along.” The letter was intercepted in time by Henri Michaux, who helped Ernst regain his sanity, reminding him that it was the madness of the Shandies to make this immobile voyage at the bottom of the sea.

Michaux was convinced that submerging oneself in the depth of the port of Dinard should be understood as a journey downward. For Michaux, this meant plunging into the abyss of what sustains us, plumbing the depths of our foundations. According to him, when we go down to what is truly below, we lose our points of reference, and those audacious enough to go downward in a radical way will see for themselves how that which is above closes over them, and at the same time how that which is open in a closed space (like the Bahnhof Zoo ) takes on a dark and distant indeterminacy.

But not all of the Shandies who submerged in search of the opium salon fully understood these perspectives that had opened up in the depths. For many of them, this was an exotic, but straightforward, trip down to a den at the bottom of the sea, until they realized it was an instinctive movement appropriate — in fact perfectly appropriate — for the portable sentiment. Furthermore — and paradoxically — the Shandy voyage could continue, immobilizing oneself in what lies beneath in order, to fully regain mobility in that which is above.

“Days of great excitement they were,” writes Paul Klee, “and an awful lot of smoke. All of the portables, following previously agreed upon instructions, remembered to bring a cane with them onto the Bahnhof Zoo ; César Vallejo’s was particularly noteworthy: it was made of mahogany and at some point swelled up, and a pair of breasts appeared. It was just a cane, but, right then, it became suddenly feminine. So entranced were we by Vallejo’s cane that, there beside the piano in the Macao Salon, we made it into the Shandy herald.”

Cane and piano also took lead roles in one of César Vallejo’s poems. Written on board the Bahnhof Zoo , the poem has until now been considered exceedingly hermetic when, in fact, it is a diaphanous approximation of the static voyage (downward and within) of portable opium.

“This cane is a piano that travels within, / travels by joyful leaps. / Then it meditates in iron repose, / nailed with ten horizons. // It advances. Drags itself under tunnels / beyond, under tunnels of pain, / under vertebrae naturally fugacious. // At times its tubes go, / slow yellow yearnings to live; / they go in eclipse, / and insectile nightmares delouse, / now dead to thunder, the heralds of geneses. // Dark piano, on whom do you spy / with your deafness that hears me, / with your muteness that deafens me. // Oh, mysterious pulse.”

Colette, Cocteau, Varèse, and Antheil always played the piano in strict rotation, sadly, in the Macao Salon, which was always very busy. But Antheil fell in love with Pola Negri and had to be replaced by Erik Satie. In his eagerness to win the femme fatale, Antheil began carrying out oceanographic studies, sounding the watery depths in a diving suit, cataloging unknown mollusks, etc. Any activity, as long as it won her attention.

Pola Negri, initially utterly indifferent to the vivacious musician, ended up taking pity on him when he fell ill, and, then, remembering she was a femme fatale, began to seduce him in his sickbed. For a few days, they shared the same divan in the Macao Salon, until the evening when he suddenly began to notice she was afflicted by some strange ailment. Indeed, she was unwell, for she didn’t know how to love. The water was killing her. The Shandies realized that they were afflicted, and so were the femmes fatales. The sun very much setting on the secret society at this point, its pangs well advanced, and the presence of this affliction, in turn, disclosed the presence of water, of nothingness, of death. George Antheil was visibly moved. “A dead woman is very weird,” he said.