Isidore Read online

  Lautréamont as literary outlaw delights even in liquidating his characters, metaphorically sten-gunning them out of action. One could argue that he is as assiduous in eliminating his characters, as he was in destroying all biographical evidence of his own existence. The photograph, the ten or twelve letters that have survived, the few fragmented recollections of him by contemporaries — do they add up to a life or a fiction? Was death certificate (no. 2028) issued to a young foreigner called Isidore Ducasse, who had died from the then prevalent outbreak of small-pox in Paris? — and does Maldoror owe its authorship to a different provenance? And why did Ducasse go for the artificially sounding Comte de Lautréamont, as a pseudonym, the self-conferment of a title seeming to be at odds with the book's flagrantly iconoclastic credo? Or was the invention of the name simply a product of the author's paranoid schizophrenia, a desire for grandiosity that placed him in the line of his heroes like the Marquis de Sade and Lord Byron? Certainly it was Lautréamont who would carry the author's credits for posterity. Isidore Ducasse had in the meantime dematerialised, killed off by the book's eponymous identification with Lautréamont, the name blocked on the spine, cover and title-page of The Songs of Maldoror.

  Already in the first canto of Maldoror Ducasse had raised the issue of the possible circumstances of his death. ‘You will not see me’, he wrote, ‘surrounded by priests in my final hour (I write this on my deathbed). I wish to die, rocked by the waves of a tempestuous sea, or standing on a mountain... eyes looking up – no: I know that my annihilation will be complete. Besides, I have no hope of grace. Who is opening the door of my funeral chamber? I said no one was to enter. Whoever you are, leave me alone. But, if you believe you see some mark of sorrow or fear on my hyena’s face (I use this comparison although the hyena is more handsome than I and more pleasant to look upon), do not be deceived: you may approach. It is a winter night and the elements are crashing against each other on all sides. Man is afraid, and a youth contemplates a crime against one of his friends, if he is like I was in my youth.'

  I quote this passage in full as it illustrates the central issues of my thesis: Lautréamont's preoccupation with death and the homoerotics of murder. My extension goes further, in that I believe the author's obsession with both attracted the nemesis that was somehow to be his retribution on the night of 24 November 1870.

  In Chant I Lautréamont catalogues, with the scrupulous attention to detail often symptomatic of psychopathology, the emotional link he establishes between love, murder and redemption. He makes it quite clear in the way of a programme that his ideal is to be bonded in death to the youth he has assaulted. The scene is disquieting enough to scare up feelings that it has been thought out with cold precision. 'Blindfold him' Maldoror instructs, 'as you tear at his trembling flesh. After having heard for many hours his sublime cries… you then rush into the next room, where you pretend to help him.' After wounding the youth in an act motivated by a cocktail of perverse emotions, Maldoror binds up the cuts, and dreams of establishing an erotic union with his victim. 'Forgive me’ he begs. ‘Once we have left this momentary life, I want us to be entwined throughout eternity; to form a single soul, my mouth pressed to your mouth.'

  The need to hurt in order to feel love and to bond with the victim as a pact stemming from the sadistic nature of the crime, may well be a pointer to Lautréamont's own aberrant sexuality, and his desire to dissolve all clues relating to his personal life. It's not that there hasn't been judicious research into the case of Isidore Ducasse, and that diligent attempts haven't been made to assemble a biographic profile that sticks, it's more that the subject continues to elude the nature of enquiry. Autopsies keep on being performed on an imaginary body. In fact none of the Ducasses were in the business of leaving memoirs. Francois Ducasse died in the Hotel des Pyramides, Montevideo, in 1899, choosing the same impersonal surroundings in which to die, as his son. His wealth assured him burial in the Central Cemetery; but with him probably died Isidore's secret, if indeed he ever knew the true nature of his son's death. If Isidore had died at a less politically disruptive time, then his death would have been reported. Instead, he chose the right moment, and his father may well have been glad of it. It's a question left open to the weird aleatory spin of chance. New evidence may still come to light concerning the youth who was designed for posterity as death certificate (no. 2028).

  Lautréamont has been missing for over 130 years, and yet we still appeal to the one photograph, the consortium of existing biographic facts, and to the addresses at which he lived, almost as a way of fixing him in time. We could believe he's still there, and that nothing has changed. We tend to visualise the dead as they were and not as they are. It's our way of keeping them alive. And of course so much has happened, inclusive and exclusive of Isidore Ducasse in that period of time. Both The Songs of Maldoror's reputation and the legend surrounding its author have grown in proportion to the momentum the work has acquired. But the two items long ago separated like metal splitting off from a rocket after blast-off, and crashing down over the Urals.

  Who is Isidore Ducasse now in the possible cyclic chain of reincarnation? And if he was reborn and remembered his previous life as the author of Maldoror, would anyone believe him? Imagine a young man tripping over himself in the street, with that sort of recall. To live to be 24 may seem like old age at 17, but get beyond that and it doesn't appear like there's even been time to get started. I suppose everything he knew from life, as well as all the accessible information in his genes, ended up compounded in Maldoror. There can't have been very much overlap, and even if some of the information on animals in Maldoror is lifted almost word by word from Dr. Chenu's Encyclopaedia of Natural History, it's the fusing of it to Lautréamont's own purpose that counts. Like all writers he shoplifted from his sources, and re-tagged his findings. It's not important. What counts is the main thrust of the work's unmitigating originality, and the way it is sequenced always to meet with a future that hasn't yet arrived. I'm not claiming that this was intentional on the author's part, rather that it just happened that way, and goes on happening; and that Maldoror continues to influence people without their even having read it.

  Let's go back for a last time to the night of 24 November 1870. We know from contemporary accounts that the winter was severe, so it would have been uncomfortably cold in the streets. It is more than likely that the siege of Paris had prevented Isidore's allowance from his father, which was paid in monthly instalments, getting through. From Isidore's one surviving letter to his bank, he doesn't seem to have enjoyed relations with them that would have extended to credit. Food was short, and the populace had resorted to eating rats, cats and dogs. People were desperate and crime on the increase. Isidore would have been waiting: waiting for money, waiting for food, waiting for someone? I'm tempted to write waiting for the man. When he got there, the concierge wasn't on duty, and there was no-one at the desk. He had, as we don't, Isidore's room number. The rest was easy. The second floor, third on the left, and anyhow he was expected. He'd done this before, and the self-loathing in the man was almost bigger than the desire for revenge. He was armed, but only as a precaution to being apprehended in his getaway. Isidore was weak from lack of food, and wouldn't be capable of putting up a fight. Suffocating him would do the trick. He'd done this before, and he'd do it again. It was easy. Ducasse was a foreigner anyway. Questions wouldn't be asked. People died in a time of siege. The hotel was quiet. A knock at the door. He could hear him get up from the bed to open it. He was sweating. He'd done this before and he'd do it again.

  *

  The End

  About Jeremy Reed:

  Jeremy Reed is a Jersey-born writer, poet and prose stylist. Reed has published over sixty major works in twenty-five years. He has written more than three dozen books of poetry, fourteen novels, two autobiographies, and several volumes of literary and music criticism. He has also published translations of Montale, Genet, Cocteau, Nasrallah, Adonis, Bogary and Hölderlin. His work has been
translated abroad in numerous editions and into more than a dozen languages.

  He has received awards from the National Poetry, Somerset Maugham, Eric Gregory, Ingram Merrill, and Royal Literary Funds. He has also won the Poetry Society's European Translation Prize.

  Reed began publishing poems in magazines and small publications in the 1970s.

  His influences include Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, J.G. Ballard, Stephen Barber, David Bowie and Iain Sinclair. Reed has a long history of publication with both Creation Books and Peter Owen.

  He has collaborated with the musician Itchy Ear. They perform live under the name Ginger Light.

  Jeremy Reed’s website is www.jeremyreed.com

  Works by Jeremy Reed:

  NOVELS:

  The Lipstick Boys

  Blue Rock

  Red Eclipse

  Inhabiting Shadows

  Isidore (a novel about Lautréamont)

  Red Hot Lipstick (erotic stories)

  When The Whip Comes Down (a novel about De Sade)

  The Pleasure Chateau (an erotic trilogy)

  Chasing Black Rainbows (a novel about Artaud)

  Diamond Nebula

  Dorian (a sequel to The Picture of Dorian Gray)

  Boy Caesar

  The Grid

  Here Comes the Nice

  POETRY:

  Target

  A Long Shot to Heaven

  The Isthmus of Samuel Greenberg

  Saints & Psychotics

  Bleecker Street

  A Man Afraid

  By the Fisheries

  Nero

  Selected Poems

  Engaging Form

  Nineties

  Brigitte’s Blue Heart

  Claudia Schiffer’s Red Shoes

  Turkish Delight

  Red Haired Android

  Kicks

  Sweet Sister Lyric

  Saint Billie

  Black Sugar

  Patron Saint of Eyeliner

  Dicing For Pearls

  Heartbreak Hotel

  Duck and Sally Inside

  Orange Sunshine

  This is How You Disappear

  Bona Drag

  West End Survival Kit

  Black Russian: Out-Takes 1978-9

  Piccadilly Bongo

  Bona Vada

  Whitehall Jackals (with Chris McCabe)

  Nothing But a Star

  The Glamour Poet Versus Francis Bacon

  TRANSLATIONS:

  The Coastguard’s House (Eugenio Montale)

  Tempest of Stars (Jean Cocteau)

  The Complete Poems (Jean Genet)

  Praries of Fever (Ibrahim Nasrallah)

  All That’s Left to You (Ghassan Kanafani)

  On Entering the Sea (Nizar Qabbani)

  The Sheltered Quarter (Hamza Bogary)

  Hymn to the Night (Novalis)

  NON-FICTION:

  Heart on my Sleeve

  Madness: The Price of Poetry

  Angels, Divas and Blacklisted Heroes

  Caligula – Divine Carnage (with Stephen Barber)

  Dead Brides (Edgar Allan Poe) – Introduction

  The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) - Introduction

  Through the Looking-Glass (Lewis Carroll) – Introduction

  The Songs of Maldoror (Lautréamont) – Postscript

  The Dilly – A History of Piccadilly Rent Boys

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY:

  Lipstick, Sex and Poetry (autobiography)

  Bitter Blue (autobiography)

  POETRY/PHOTOGRAPHY:

  Pop Stars (1995) – with Mick Rock

  Big Orange Day (2010) – with Lisa Wilkerson

  Exploding into Colour (2012) – with Lisa Wilkerson

  Above the Waves (2013) – with Lisa Wilkerson

  BIOGRAPHY:

  The Last Star (Marc Almond

  Another Tear Falls (Scott Walker)

  Waiting For the Man (Lou Reed)

  The Last Decadent (Brian Jones)

  Born to Lose (Jean Genet)

  Delirium (Arthur Rimbaud)

  A Stranger on Earth (Anna Kavan)

  The King of Carnaby Street (John Stephen)

  4 Poets & A Play (Ashbery, Gunn, Weiners, Francis Bacon)