A very short, peculiar-looking man wearing cycling clothes, a porkpie hat, and a cape was standing in the yard firing a gun against the side of his neighbor’s house. He was practicing his aim. While he reloaded, the mother who lived in the targeted house dared to open a window and pleaded with him to stop.
“I’m not asking for myself, Monsieur, but consider the
children!”
“Madam,” said Alfred Jarry, looking up. He spoke, as Andre
Gide would later say, the way a nutcracker would, if a nutcracker could speak.
“Should I accidently kill one of your brood, I’ll be happy to make some more
with you.”
He was born in Laval, France on September 8th 1873. And he
would live for only thirty-four years. But they were thirty-four prime years.
Early in his life, he decided not to follow the rules of
society. It struck him as absurd that anyone did. Who made these rules anyway? Why
did people feel compelled to obey them, instead of following their own inner
nature? People looked at him as if he were demented, but it seemed clear to him
that they were the demented ones.
“Blind and unwavering lack of discipline at all times,” he
would later say, “constitutes the real strength of all free men.”
It’s not hard to imagine that he was a disciplinary problem
everywhere he went. In school, he instigated his friends in their ridicule of
their slow-witted, if well-meaning, physics teacher. They made up a play
surrounding the farcical imaginary exploits of this poor fellow. The other boys
probably forgot all about it when they grew up. But Jarry never did. Maybe it was a function him never quite
growing up. He would develop the character of the otherwise long-forgotten
schoolmaster into one of the great comic monsters of world theater: Ubu.
The French Army tried to make a soldier out of him, but he
was one of those hopeless cases the army doesn’t like to acknowledge. His
anarchic nature was so elemental it threatened to break down the general
discipline of the corps before its drill instructors could break him. Some
people are simply ungovernable. Alfred was one of these rare people. They discharged him quietly and quickly in order to keep the Great Secret: if there were more like him war would be impossible.
From there he was off and running. Or rather off and
cycling. He rode his Clement Luxe 96 racing bicycle all over France.
He was openly homosexual. He met Oscar Wilde.
He stepped out with Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.
Did he have sex with both of them? Did they have a ménage a
troi?
Women found him attractive but he didn’t think much of them.
He considered a woman’s most
valuable asset to be her natural submissiveness. Still, his first great patron
was a woman, Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, the controversial author of Monsieur
Venus and La Marquise de Sade. Once,
by way of a compliment, Jarry said to her: “Madam. You are an insignificant
bundle of atoms clinging together. But we grant you one quality. You do not
cling to us!”
He drank and drank and drank. On a typical day he would
start with two liters of white wine after waking and then three absinthes
between 10a.m. and noon. He’d have wine with lunch and more absinthe. Coffee and
brandy throughout the afternoon. At dinner: aperitifs and more wine, two more
bottles typically.
Towards the end of his life he was imbibing pure ether.
While living in a state of almost constant inebriation, he
produced plays and novels unlike anything ever seen before. He invented
pataphysics. As best as anyone can define it, pataphysics is the study of laws
that govern exceptions. The pataphysician accepts every event that happens in
the universe as an extraordinary event.
“What about art?” someone asked him.
“The work of art,” he said, “is a stuffed crocodile.”
He lived for a while with Henri Rousseau. Later, he moved to
an apartment that a greedy landlord had divided in half horizontally by the
addition of an extra floor. The ceiling clearance was so low that only the five
foot three inch Jarry could walk through the place without stooping. That didn’t
stop people from visiting him, however. He was worth the stoop. Guillaume
Apollinaire, Andre Salmon, and Max Jacob were among his cramped guests. The
smallness of the place did nothing to deter his enthusiasm for indoor shooting.
“It is one of the great joys of home ownership,” he insisted, “to fire a pistol
in one’s own bedroom.”
He kept owls. He once went to the opera wearing a paper
shirt with a tie painted on it. At
Stephen Mallarme’s funeral, he came dressed in yellow high heels and filthy
bicycle racing shorts. After his death, Picasso inherited his revolver.
He died on November 1, 1907 of tuberculosis.
When, on his deathbed, he was asked if he wanted anything.
He said, “Yes, a toothpick.”
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