Edgar Du Perron and the Modernists

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Edgar Du Perron and the Modernists Herbert Van Uffelen Studies in buitenkant – Studies in Surroundings: Edgar Du Perron and the Modernists Edgar Du Perron (1899-1940) is regarded as one of the most important Dutch authors of the interwar period. He established himself as a renowned writer with his novel Het land van herkomst (1935) and as a contributor to the magazine Forum (1931-1935) which he founded together with Menno Ter Braak (1902-1940). Forum propagated the relevance of an authentic person- ality to literature and distanced itself from formal experiment and lyrical- sentimental effusion alike. What is less well-known is Du Perron’s avant- garde past, which originated in Paris in the 20s and is usually dismissed as a youthful peccadillo in view of Du Perron’s declaration that this period of his life was a mere “salutary sickness” (Snoek, E. du Perron 3701). Close inspec- tion, however, reveals this phase to be more than a bout of sickness, albeit a salutary one. Much rather, Du Perron discovered very early a poetics that was later labelled modernist and that was to allow him to express his personality authentically in his work.2 Edgar Du Perron was born in Gedong Menu, a former Dutch colony, and moved with his – then well-off – parents to Europe. They settled in Brussels, but the barely 21-year-old Edgar was soon drawn to Paris. At that time, Paris was “the magical centre of the universe” (Snoek, E. du Perron 265) for the young European Du Perron – but his knowledge of Paris was then basically limited to Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. A major change occurred when Eddy, as he was called by his friends, got to know his first muse Clairette Petrucci (1899-1994). She not only introduced Du Perron to her “favourite authors” (Snoek, E. du Perron 262) Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848- 1907) and Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), but he also found in her library the works of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), Max Jacob (1876-1944) and Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) (Veenstra 7). Through Clairette, Du Perron’s “romantic” (Bulhof 19) Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec was transformed into the capital of the avant-garde. 1 The author provided German translations of all Dutch quotes, which were in turn translated into English by Caterina Novák. 2 Du Perron himself always spoke about ‘modernism’ or about ‘the modernists’. To better distinguish between his early period and his later modernist one (Fokkema and Ibsch), the term ‘(anti)-avantgarde’ is here used consistently (except in direct quotes) to refer to the pe- riod before 1927, while the later period is labelled modernist, or modernism. 268 Herbert Van Uffelen Eddy Du Perron realized his dream at the beginning of March 1922. He moved to Paris for a while, staying in the famously infamous Montmartre district, leading the Bohemian life of a son of rich parents with all its ameni- ties: the father’s financial support, a room in a meagre hotel, a black hat and – if possible – a maîtresse (Du Perron, Voorbereiding 30; Veenstra 8).3 De- spite the fact that, at the beginning of 1922, the heyday of Montmartre was actually over, the centre of artistic life having in the meantime shifted to Montparnasse, Du Perron could nevertheless still meet some interesting per- sonalities: Oscar Duboux (1899-1950) and Pedro Creixams (1893-1965), who were later to illustrate some of his works; Max Jacob; and, last but not least, Pascal Pia (1902-1979). Pascal was not only his “mentor” (Bulhof 19; Pia 9), Du Perron also brought out some of his (erotic) works and in 1933, together with him, published the – unfortunately unsuccessful – Bouquet poétique des médecins. Coping with the new literary movement in Paris cost him quite an effort, since the young Du Perron was skeptical towards the so-called Modernists. In 1921 he had still written about Jean Cocteau’s poetry: “My admiration for Jean Cocteau has drowned completely after I immersed myself into the river of his verses. It was a fatal bath and I am afraid it would also result for you in admiration and suicide if you were to do the same. If not, I expect an expla- nation of what it is all about. Is this meant to be cubism in literature? Or just a mere farce?” (Snoek, E. du Perron 262) Consequently, it was not to be expected that this short stay in Paris and the often fleeting encounters with individual authors and artists would dispel his mistrust. On the contrary, Du Perron started with an “anti-modernist” project (Snoek, E. du Perron 273). In May 1922 he told Clairette that he had produced a long poem which was the first in a series of “verses without rhyme and reason […] without commas, full-stops, and so on, without talent, without expert knowledge and full of ideas which I myself cannot explain” (Snoek, E. du Perron 272). This long poem developed into the Manuscrit trouvé dans une poche (1923). 3 The fact that the newly-established Bohemian received financial support from his father was of course carefully concealed from his new-found Parisian friends (Snoek, E. du Perron 267). .
Recommended publications
  • Page 355 H-France Review Vol. 9 (June 2009), No. 86 Peter Read, Picasso and Apollinaire
    H-France Review Volume 9 (2009) Page 355 H-France Review Vol. 9 (June 2009), No. 86 Peter Read, Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory (Ahmanson-Murphy Fine Arts Books). University of California Press: Berkeley, 2008. 334 pp. + illustrations. $49.95 (hb). ISBN 052-0243- 617. Review by John Finlay, Independent Scholar. Peter Read’s Picasso et Apollinaire: Métamorphoses de la memoire 1905/1973 was first published in France in 1995 and is now translated into English, revised, updated and developed incorporating the author’s most recent publications on both Picasso and Apollinaire. Picasso & Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory also uses indispensable material drawn from pioneering studies on Picasso’s sculptures, sketchbooks and recent publications by eminent scholars such as Elizabeth Cowling, Anne Baldassari, Michael Fitzgerald, Christina Lichtenstern, William Rubin, John Richardson and Werner Spies as well as a number of other seminal texts for both art historian and student.[1] Although much of Apollinaire’s poetic and literary work has now been published in French it remains largely untranslated, and Read’s scholarly deciphering using the original texts is astonishing, daring and enlightening to the Picasso scholar and reader of the French language.[2] Divided into three parts and progressing chronologically through Picasso’s art and friendship with Apollinaire, the first section astutely analyses the early years from first encounters, Picasso’s portraits of Apollinaire, shared literary and artistic interests, the birth of Cubism, the poet’s writings on the artist, sketches, poems and “primitive art,” World War I, through to the final months before Apollinaire’s death from influenza on 9 November 1918.
    [Show full text]
  • Anna De Noailles (1876-1933) Marie-Lise Allard
    Document generated on 09/28/2021 1 a.m. Nuit blanche, le magazine du livre Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) Marie-Lise Allard Réjean Ducharme Number 124, Fall 2011 URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/65130ac See table of contents Publisher(s) Nuit blanche, le magazine du livre ISSN 0823-2490 (print) 1923-3191 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this article Allard, M.-L. (2011). Anna de Noailles (1876-1933). Nuit blanche, le magazine du livre, (124), 72–76. Tous droits réservés © Nuit blanche, le magazine du livre, 2011 This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ NB_No124_P1_a_P80.qxd:*NB_103_P1 à P72_final_v2.1.qxd 25/09/11 23:41 Page 72 Anna de Noailles Par Marie-Lise Allard* La vie d’Anna de Noailles ressemble à un conte de fées qui commencerait Par Anna de Noailles « il était une fois… » est effectivement une princesse, merveilleux. Dès lors, Amphion a toujours symbolisé d’ascendance roumaine par son père et l’éden terrestre : « Oui, ce fut là le paradis2 ». Par turque par sa mère, qui vit le jour à conséquent, la nature devint l’un des thèmes de C’ Paris le 15 novembre 1876.
    [Show full text]
  • Architecture's Ephemeral Practices
    ____________________ A PATAPHYSICAL READING OF THE MAISON DE VERRE ______183 A “PATAPHYSICAL” READING OF THE MAISON DE VERRE Mary Vaughan Johnson Virginia Tech The Maison de Verre (1928-32) is a glass-block the general…(It) is the science of imaginary house designed and built by Pierre Chareau solutions...”3 According to Roger Shattuck, in (1883-1950) in collaboration with the Dutch his introduction to Jarry’s Exploits & Opinions architect Bernard Bijvoët and craftsman Louis of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, “(i)f Dalbet for the Dalsace family at 31, rue St. mathematics is the dream of science, ubiquity Guillaume in Paris, France. A ‘pataphysical the dream of mortality, and poetry the dream reading of the Maison de Verre, undoubtedly of speech, ‘pataphysics fuses them into the one of the most powerful modern icons common sense of Dr. Faustroll, who lives all representing modernism’s alliance with dreams as one.” In the chapter dedicated to technology, is intended as an alternative C.V. Boys, Jarry, for instance, with empirical history that will yield new meanings of precision, describes Dr. Faustroll’s bed as modernity. Modernity in architecture is all too being 12 meters long, shaped like an often associated with the constitution of an elongated sieve that is in fact not a bed, but a epoch, a style developed around the turn of boat designed to float on water according to the 20th century in Europe albeit intimately tied Boys’ principles of physics.4 The image of a to its original meaning related to an attitude boat that is also a bed, at the same time, towards the passage of time.1 To be truly brings to mind the poem by Robert Louis modern is to be in the present.
    [Show full text]
  • Present Picasso): Portraiture and Self- Portraiture in Poetry and Art
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Modern Languages and Literatures, Department French Language and Literature Papers of July 1998 Future Mallarmé (Present Picasso): Portraiture and Self- portraiture in Poetry and Art Marshall C. Olds University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench Part of the Modern Languages Commons Olds, Marshall C., "Future Mallarmé (Present Picasso): Portraiture and Self-portraiture in Poetry and Art" (1998). French Language and Literature Papers. 45. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/45 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Modern Languages and Literatures, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in French Language and Literature Papers by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Future Mallarm6 (Present Picasso): Portraiture and Self-portraiture in Poetrv and Art Marshall C. Old( ' he centenary of Stkphane Mallarmk's death (1898-1998) not only provides the occasion for this article and for many other publications and colloquia, but is also an appropriate moment to reflect on the afterlife of a poet who was haunted by a spectral conception of the future and for whom the pristine survival of his work was an obsessive concern. In this, Mallarmi was like other writers in kind but not in degree. He pushed a preoccupation with the future to become one the major themes of his poetry: the future seen as a distinctly literary event, at once in the poem and yet beyond it, as though the completion of the poem, the "death of the poet, in effect marked the future.
    [Show full text]
  • Ubu Roi Short FINAL
    media contact: erica lewis-finein brightbutterfly[at]hotmail.com CUTTING BALL THEATER CONTINUES 15TH SEASON WITH “UBU ROI” January 24-February 23, 2014 In a new translation by Rob Melrose SAN FRANCISCO (December 16, 2013) – Cutting Ball Theater continues its 15th season with Alfred Jarry’s UBU ROI in a new translation by Rob Melrose. Russian director Yury Urnov (Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company) helms this irreverent take on world leaders. Featuring David Sinaiko, Ponder Goddard, Marilet Martinez, Bill Boynton, Nathaniel Justiniano, and Andrew Quick, UBU ROI plays January 24 through February 23 (Press opening: January 30) at the Cutting Ball Theater in residence at EXIT on Taylor (277 Taylor Street) in San Francisco. For tickets ($10-50) and more information, the public may visit cuttingball.com or call 415-525-1205. When Alfred Jarry’s UBU ROI premiered in Paris on December 10, 1896, the audience broke into a riot at the utterance of its first word. Jarry’s parody of Shakespeare’s Macbeth defies theatrical tradition through its disregard for audience expectations, replacing Shakespeare’s tragic hero with a greedy, sadistic ogre who becomes the King of Poland by force and through the debasement of his people. Set in a modern luxury kitchen, this re-visioned UBU ROI features a wealthy American couple who play out their fantasies of wealth and power to excess as they take on the roles of Mother and Father Ubu. Cutting Ball’s version of UBU ROI may bring to mind the fall from grace of many a contemporary political leader corrupted by power, from Elliot Spitzer to Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
    [Show full text]
  • THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA the Hybrid Theater of Robert Pinget
    THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA DOI number 10.2478/tco-2020-0020 The Hybrid Theater of Robert Pinget Anca SIMILAR Abstract: The theatre of Robert Pinget was acclaimed at the Avignon Festival till the 1980s, until it became in spite of itself a representative of the theatrical avant-garde greeted by numerous critics and academic texts. It appears, however, that Pinget’s theatre was the victim of a real misinterpretation. Adventurous life, where romance and destiny mingle, lay the foundations of pingétienne irony, this search for personal tone subjects to uncertainties and other contradictions Robert Pinget's affiliation with Max Jacob's is an attempt to approach the avant-garde, but to turn away from it in a subtle way in the last moment. This waltz-hesitation of Pinget will be the basis of a tendency to put this work in the “new novel” or the theatrical avant-garde. The literature of Pinget can be considered as a form of the art of the escape the expression of an incessantly renewed amazement through an acousmatic voice. It is through the theory of the double and the quest for secrecy that we can now reposition Pinget's theater in the perspective of a classical theater on the very margins of the avant-garde and a striking example of an ontological incomprehension between adaptation and the message left by the author. Key words: Robert Pinget, Avignon, automatic writing, controlled contradiction, surveyed subconscious, acousmatic voice From a young Swiss novelist1 at the dawn of the 1950s, too quickly placed in the drawer of the New Roman in the 1960s, Pinget's work will then be embodied in the theater with increasing success between the 1970s and 1980s when he will be acclaimed at the Avignon Festival, meanwhile giving Lecturer PhD., Theater and Film Faculty, Babeș Bolyai University, Cluj Napoca 1 He becomes french citizen in 1966.
    [Show full text]
  • Page 300 H-France Review Vol. 5 (July 2005), No. 72 Guillaume
    H-France Review Volume 5 (2005) Page 300 H-France Review Vol. 5 (July 2005), No. 72 Guillaume Apollinare, The Cubist Painters, translated, with commentary by Peter Read. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. 234p. Bibliography. $29.95. ISBN 0-520-24354-4. Review by William Hauptman, Independent Scholar. When I was an undergraduate art history student decades ago, one of the first texts I purchased outside of the ones listed for required reading was Apollinaire’s The Cubist Painters. The edition, which constituted the first volume in “The Documents of Modern Art” series published in 1944 by George Wittenborn, comprised a translation by Lionel Abel and a noteworthy preface by Robert Motherwell. The slender volume was purchased new at $1.75 and still contains my initial notes in the margins on Apollinaire’s flamboyant maxims--“Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman”--and comments on modern aesthetics--“I hate artists who are not of their own time”--which struck me as particularly appropriate. After this edition was succeeded by a second expanded version by Bernard Karpel five years later, Apollinaire’s criticism appeared mostly in anthologies, but with no new English edition of his major text until this rendering by Peter Read, a distinguished specialist of Apollinaire who teaches at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Apollinaire is probably little taught in the United States now, although his cult as a professional avant- gardiste remains strong in France. His sometimes chaotic poetry, imaginative criticism, artful prose, and, above all, his notions of novelty and inventiveness, have never been out of the limelight.
    [Show full text]
  • Pablo Picasso Pablo Picasso (B
    Pablo Picasso Pablo Picasso (b. 1881, Málaga, Spain; d. 1973, Mougins, France), the son of an academic Biography painter, José Ruiz Blasco, began to draw and paint from an early age. Picasso studied first at the Fine Arts School in La Coruña and practised illustration and drawing caricatures at home. While studying at La Lonja Art Academy in Barcelona where his father had been appointed professor, he frequented the café Els Quatre Gats, the gathering place for a group of artists, musicians, and others who were crucial to his early artistic development. In summer 1901, Picasso held his first Paris exhibition at the Galeries Vollard. In 1904 he moved to Paris, settling in the Bateau-Lavoir studio in Montmartre. His circle of friends soon included Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Gertrude and Leo Stein, as well as two dealers, Ambroise Vollard and Berthe Weill. Picasso’s style developed from the Blue Period (1901–04) to the Rose Period (1905), leading him to the pivotal work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). The years 1906–07 marked his discovery of Iberian and African art. In the years from 1908 to World War I he experimented with Cubism, with the subsequent evolution from an Analytic phase (c. 1908–11) to a Synthetic phase (beginning in 1912–13). In 1910, Picasso designated Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler as his official art dealer. In February 1917, the artist traveled to Rome with Jean Cocteau to work on the ballet Parade. There, he met his future wife Olga Khokhlova. Soon after, his paintings and drawings came to be characterized by large, neoclassical compositions featuring nudes and figural representations.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Erik Satie's Musique D'ameublement and Max Jacob's
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Kingston University Research Repository 1 Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement and Max Jacob’s Ruffian toujours, truand jamais* Caroline Potter Musique d’ameublement Satie’s concept of musique d’ameublement (furniture music) ensures he is viewed as a precursor of minimalism, muzak, and many other 20th-century musical genres. The concept of music which is experienced as a backdrop to everyday activities rather than as the sole focus of a listener’s attention is something with which Satie was familiar in his role as a Montmartre café pianist in the late 19th and early 20th century: he had first-hand experience performing popular tunes of the day as a background to eating, drinking, and conversation. Music as mechanism, music as a backdrop to other activity reach an apogee in Satie’s furniture music. This article will explore the concept and context of Satie’s furniture music focusing on his collaboration with Max Jacob, Ruffian toujours, truand jamais (1920), a play which is examined here for the first time. The play, which received a single performance on 8 March 1920 and then disappeared from public view, featured furniture music entr’actes by Satie which link directly to the staging. Music is also central to the play, as two of the characters play instruments as part of the stage action. While Satie’s furniture music has been studied extensively by authors from Roger Shattuck to contemporaries including Steven * I wish to acknowledge British Academy funding of my research visit to Paris and Normandy which enabled this article to be written.
    [Show full text]
  • The Jean Cocteau Collection: How 'Astonishing'?
    Syracuse University SURFACE The Courier Libraries Spring 1988 The Jean Cocteau Collection: How 'Astonishing'? Paul J. Archambault Syracuse University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/libassoc Part of the French and Francophone Literature Commons, and the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons Recommended Citation Archambault, Paul J. "The Jean Cocteau Collection: How 'Astonishing'?" The Courier 23.1 (1988): 33-48. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Libraries at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Courier by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ASSOCIATES COURIER VOLUME XXIII, NUMBER 1, SPRING 1988 SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ASSOCIATES COURIER VOLUME XXIII NUMBER ONE SPRING 1988 The Forgotten Brother: Francis William Newman, Victorian Modernist By Kathleen Manwaring, Syracuse University Library 3 The Joseph Conrad Collection at Syracuse University By J. H. Stape, Visiting Associate Professor of English, 27 Universite de Limoges The Jean Cocteau Collection: How 'Astonishing'? By Paul J. Archambault, Professor of French, 33 Syracuse University A Book from the Library of Christoph Scheurl (1481-1542) By Gail P. Hueting, Librarian, University of Illinois at 49 Urbana~Champaign James Fenimore Cooper: Young Man to Author By Constantine Evans, Instructor in English, 57 Syracuse University News of the Syracuse University Library and the Library Associates 79 The Jean Cocteau Collection: How 'Astonishing'? BY PAUL J. ARCHAMBAULT Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) is reputed to have been the most 'as, tonishing' of French twentieth,century artists. In one of his many autobiographical works, La Difficulte d'etre, he tells how, one day in 1909, he was walking on the Place de la Concorde with Sergei Dia, ghilev, who had captivated Paris the previous year with his Ballets Russes, and Vaslav Nijinsky, his greatest dancer.
    [Show full text]
  • André Salmon, Pablo Picasso and the History of Cubism
    André Salmon, Pablo Picasso and the History of Cubism André Salmon met Pablo Picasso at the very end of the Spanish artist’s Blue Period (late 1904-early 1905) through their mutual friend the Spanish sculptor Manuel Hugué (known as Manolo). The poet was led to the painter’s studio in a ramshackle building nicknamed the « Bateau Lavoir » at 13 rue Ravignan in Montmartre. The following afternoon Salmon met the poet Max Jacob as they both arrived to pay Picasso a visit. By then Salmon knew the poet Guillaume Apollinaire for almost two years. Apollinaire would meet Picasso shortly afterwards during the winter of 1905. These four men formed the symbiotic relationship known among their peers as « la bande à Picasso ». Salmon and Picasso The significant role these men played in each other lives cannot be overestimated, particularly the friendship between Salmon and Picasso ; for Salmon not only reviewed Picasso’s exhibitions but also inserted incidental references to Picasso’s current activities into his newspaper columns on art. These brief remarks now provide invaluable biographical information which has helped date several of Picasso’s Cubist works. Moreover, from his earliest descriptions of Picasso to his celebrated memoirs, Salmon helped to construct the artist’s reputation as he championed all Picasso’s avant-garde endeavors, regardless of their shockvalue. Most notably, Salmon was the first to praise Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) in his first book on art, La Jeune Peinture française (1912). Although Salmon’s first review of a Picasso exhibition at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in December 1910 introduces his Paris-Journal readership to the Malaguenian, his short paragraph about a visit to Picasso’s studio at 11 boulevard de Clichy, published on 21 September 1911 tells us more.
    [Show full text]
  • MAX JACOB ET LES ARTS DE LA SCÈNE Archives Municipales De Quimper Affiche Du118°RI Dequimper
    MAX JACOB ET LES ARTS DE LA SCÈNE Archives municipales de Quimper Affiche du118°RIdeQuimper. Affiche MAX JACOB ET LES ARTS DE LA SCÈNE par Patricia SUSTRAC* « Le Cornet à dés […] on dirait du Chagall en musique !1 » Quimper, la musique, la lecture, le théâtre tiennent une place importante dans Àla vie des Jacob. La famille est abonnée à des revues comme L’Illustration ou La Revue des Deux Mondes. Le piano trône dans le salon de la rue du Parc, les parents du poète sont mélomanes, la famille fréquente les salles de spectacle de la ville. Prudence Jacob, la mère de l’auteur, est « habile au piano » et « chante délicieusement divers airs d’opérette2. » Son père entonne volontiers des airs du Second Empire. Cette culture familiale est complétée par l’enseignement du piano3 pour lequel l’auteur montre « un goût remarquable, à l’inverse de [ses] trois frères4. » Musique savante ou populaire le font vivre dans un univers riche de sonorités quand, juché sur un tabouret, dans le magasin familial, Jacob copie les théories de Bergson « sur un cahier rose en écoutant les chants des ouvriers bretons de [son] père5. » Pour Pierre de Belay il se remémore « une jeunesse mélo- dieuse6 » et déclare à Michel Manoll : « J’ai été élevé… dans l’opérette7. » * Patricia Sustrac a publié des articles critiques et biographiques et édité plusieurs correspon- dances de Max Jacob. Elle est Présidente de l’Association des Amis de Max Jacob depuis 2005 et Directrice de publication des Cahiers consacrés à l’auteur. 12 Max Jacob et les arts de la scène En ville, les manifestations militaires au Champ de foire, les fêtes ou les parades rassemblent les quimpérois autour du répertoire des compagnies en tournées.
    [Show full text]