Merrrrdrrrre!: Alfred Jarry and Père Ubu
Alastair Brotchie
ALFRED JARRY
A pataphysical life
424pp. MIT Press. £24.95 (US $37.95).
978 0 262 01619 3
Published: 17 April 2013
Detail from front cover of Ubu Roi, 1896 © Mary Evans Picture Library
It all began with the “classroom martyrdom” of one Félix-Frédéric Hébert (1832–1917), a physics teacher at the lycée in Rennes. Possessed of a large stomach, short legs and an air of bluff pomposity, Hébert was ragged mercilessly by his pupils. “What made him unique and inspired a plethora of ingenious inventions aimed at stirring him up”, recalled one, “was that we could look forward to beautiful tears, noble sobs and ceremonious supplications.” Two brothers, Charles and Henri Morin, began writing and illustrating a series of satirical sketches recounting the exploits of the ridiculous Père Hébert, and these stories were added to by other boys. The “Hébert cycle” consists of long poems, plays, mock newspapers and fantasy adventures, many exhibiting a protosurreal wit:
“Appearance of P. H. – He was born complete with bowler hat, woollen cloak and check trousers. On top of his head is a single, extendible ear, usually covered by his hat; both his arms are on the same side (likewise his eyes) and, unlike humans, whose feet are situated next to each other, he has one behind the other, so that when he falls over he is unable to pick himself up without assistance and remains prostrated, shouting until someone helps him up.”
When the fifteen-year-old Alfred Jarry arrived at the lycée in 1888 he was swiftly initiated into the cult of Père Hébert. He converted a skit by the Morins called Les Polonais – in which Père Ebé (as he now was) is the king of an imaginary Poland – into a play for marionettes. They performed it at their homes in their special “Théâtre des Phynances”, named in honour of Père Hébert’s lust for “phynance” or money, and it was an early version of Ubu Roi.
After Jarry’s death, Charles Chassé, the critic and author of Les Sources d’Ubu Roi (1921), objected that Ubu began as “a worthless skit written by schoolchildren”. Jarry had never pretended otherwise, but as Brotchie argues, Père Ubu is shocking and monstrous, and cut through the theatrical conventions of the time precisely because he was the invention of an army of schoolboy satirists.
In Hébert’s physics lessons, Jarry would “put insidious and bizarre questions to Père Heb”, who crumbled under pressure. The other boys regarded Jarry as a hero, although some felt disquiet at the ferocity of his sarcasm. He seemed incapable of reining in his anger, almost possessed, and it was felt that he always went a bit “too far”. No real explanation is forthcoming as to why Jarry should have been such a supercharged child. His parents separated when he was six, his doting mother leaving her travelling-salesman husband and taking the children, but Jarry seems to have been untroubled by this turn of events. As Brotchie reads it, Hébert personified a dangerous type that Jarry wholly rejected: the bourgeois nationalist, submissive to and unquestioning of authority. Jarry’s later refinement of the character of Père Ubu was a highly charged political statement. More than just a warning against petit-bourgeois conformity, Père Ubu came to embody for Jarry “everything in the world that is grotesque”.
In 1891 Jarry and his family left Rennes for Paris, where he went to the Lycée Henri IV and had his first serious homosexual relationship with his fellow pupil Léon-Paul Fargue. Jarry’s sexuality, like so much about the man, defies categorization. He shocked his schoolfriends with tales of frequenting brothels, but Oscar Wilde, for one, had no doubt that Jarry was homosexual (or “Uranian” in the parlance of the time). “He is a most extraordinary young man”, said Wilde, “very corrupt, and his writings have sometimes the obscenity of Rabelais, sometimes the wit of Molière, and always something curious of his own . . . . In person he is most attractive. He looks just like a very nice renter [London slang for a homosexual prostitute].” The art critic Sander Pierron observed that he resembled a transvestite and so androgynous was Jarry that when his portrait (sadly lost) by Henri Rousseau was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1895 the catalogue gave it the title “Portrait of Madame A.J.”. Jarry was an early champion of Rousseau, directing Apollinaire and Picasso towards the self-taught artist. In fact, one of Picasso’s prized possessions was Jarry’s revolver, and Brotchie hints at the possibility they were lovers. However, Jarry evinced distaste for the physical expression of homosexuality and a chapter called “The Discovery of Woman” in his novel Le Surmâle (The Supermale) contains a rare, tender, lyrical evocation of sexual passion for a mistress.
At the Lycée Henri IV, Jarry attended Henri Bergson’s classes, a possible influence on his developing notion of a new science: Pataphysics. The word “Pataphysique” came from the mythology surrounding Père Hébert – probably based on his stumbling pronunciation of “physique” (physics) – but Jarry later defined it as “the science of imaginary solutions”. Literature, says Brotchie, is “the imaginary solution par excellence”, because it allows the imagination as much reality as the actual, and, indeed, Jarry soon settled on a writing career.
In Paris, his studies behind him, he became a star turn in the literary circles of the 1890s. “You could not invent such a character”, observed an amused André Gide. “He expressed himself without the least reticence, and with utter disdain for decency and decorum.” The group around the avant-garde Mercure de France played an important role in Jarry’s life and myth. The magazine’s editor Alfred Vallette and his wife the novelist Rachilde became trusted friends, and Rachilde’s memoir of Jarry (1928) is a major source for any biographer.
Ubu Roi appeared as a book in 1896 and in that same year Jarry began working as general factotum for Aurélien Lugné-Poe, the director of the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, who eventually agreed to stage the play. At a time when realistic melodramas and drawing-room farces were in vogue, Jarry insisted on masks for the actors, a plain backdrop and cardboard props. He wanted to achieve the atmosphere of a puppet play with human puppets. The celebrated actor-director Firmin Gémier (who went on to direct Raymond Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique) was persuaded to play Père Ubu, complete with papier-mâché strap-on belly; the actress Louise France was enlisted to portray Mère Ubu, Lady Macbeth to Ubu’s usurping king.
Père Ubu took to the stage at the public dress rehearsal on December 9, 1896, bellowing the famous first word of the play: “Merdre!”. “How is one to duplicate the majestic, tongue-rolling sonority of the word merdre, given only our bleak, unheroic ‘shit’ to work on?” mused the translator Simon Watson Taylor. Not quite “merde”, it has been translated as “Pschitt!” or “Shittrr!”. The audience took this in good humour, but very soon all hell broke loose. “Even though I have played other avant-garde parts that have been poorly received”, recalled Gémier, “I have never had such a feeling that the public had plainly just had enough.”
At the premiere the following evening, the uproar was immediate. One critic called it “five acts of shrieking and gesticulating by utterly grotesque puppets that created the impression of some kind of hallucinatory vision”; another described the musical accompaniment on piano, kettledrums and cymbals as “zing, zing, bada-zing, boom, boom”. The play ended with Père Ubu’s final “Merrrrrdrrrrre!”. There could be no doubting that, as one critic observed afterwards, “Père Ubu exists”.
The play offers no explanation, no solace, no solutions
“The chief personage”, observed a puzzled W. B. Yeats, who was in the audience, “who is some kind of King, carries for sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet.” Yeats joined those shouting in favour of the play, but back in his hotel room he had second thoughts and made his famous pronouncement “After us the Savage God”. As Brotchie wryly observes, “One of the undoubted achievements of Ubu Roi was that it upset almost everyone who saw it”. The play offers no explanation, no solace, no solutions. Jarry called it a comedy, but the humour is immensely sinister. We are invited to laugh, provided we realize the joke is on us.
In public, Jarry played along with expectations that he should be Ubuesque, until Père Ubu became a contradictory part of his psychological make-up. He would bellow “Merdre!” on cue, and his “Ubu-speak” became habitual. Was Ubu a monster that took over its creator, a mask he could not remove? One acquaintance went so far as to say that Jarry was “devoured by Ubu”. But if the public associated him with Ubu, he saw himself as Faustroll: half-Faust, half-troll (self-sufficient creatures in his private mythology). Jarry finished Les Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien (The Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician) in 1898, but never sought to publish this coded autobiography in which Faustroll visits miraculous imaginary lands.
The chief editor of the Atlas Press, which specializes in avant-garde prose writings, Brotchie offers informative readings of Jarry’s less well-known works, many of which he has published, including César- Antéchrist (1895), Les Jours et les Nuits (1897), the Gestes et Opinions, L’Amour absolu (1899), Messaline (1900), Le Surmâle (1902) and La Dragonne (1943), but his emphasis here is on the man himself. In fact, Brotchie so excels in his stated aim of making Jarry “a believable person” that I defy any reader to close this book without a sense of sadness that somebody so rare and unworldly came to such a sorry end.
Undeniably, Jarry could be an ass, smearing doorknobs with excrement and famously firing a revolver in a café, but by playing down the myth Brotchie presents us with a far more complex and vulnerable figure. There are many ways to fritter away an inheritance, but when Jarry’s father died in 1895, he blew his on an “extravagant and impractical art review”, Perhinderion, printed on expensive paper using specially cast, fifteenth-century type. After that, his own “phynances” never recovered. He turned his back on fame to hide away in the country. Some contemporaries believed he had squandered his early success, but as one friend observed, there was “nothing of the ambitious careerist about him”. Jarry made a meagre living from his pen, but never considered any other employment. Isolated by poverty and pride, he made his final home a mud-floor shack on a bank of the Seine without power, water or toilet, described by one visitor as “a pitiful and dilapidated hovel”. He befriended the crews on the barges, making notes on their slang and way of life for his last, unfinished, semi-autobiographical novel La Dragonne.
Of course, Jarry drank too much, but it is difficult to reconcile his prodigious consumption of absinthe, wine and ether with his undoubted athletic prowess and vigorous, open-air existence. He loved fishing and was an excellent fencer and enthusiastic cyclist (still something of a novelty in the 1880s; he carried a riding crop to ward off dogs and irate pedestrians). By blowing up a photograph, Brotchie offers a detailed examination of the gearing of Jarry’s Clément Luxe racing bicycle and concludes that he must have been extremely strong to ride it.
Jarry died from tuberculosis, although for many years it was assumed he drank himself to death. Bedridden in his last days, he wrote letters all night, some outlining a novel to be called “Le Mousse de la Pirrouïte”, described by Brotchie as “part epic poem, part bargees’ drinking song”. Eventually paralysed, he was taken to hospital where he repeated the words “Je cherche” again and again. His final request was for a toothpick, which he held between two fingers with an expression of intense joy. For the post-mortem Jarry’s head was cut open from ear to ear, the skull exposed and the cranial cap removed in a single piece. “Merdre!”, one of the trainees exclaimed. “Père Ubu never expected this!”
Ian Pindar’s collections of poetry include Emporium, published in 2011, and Constellations, which appeared last year.
“The chief personage”, observed a puzzled W. B. Yeats, who was in the audience, “who is some kind of King, carries for sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet.” Yeats joined those shouting in favour of the play, but back in his hotel room he had second thoughts and made his famous pronouncement “After us the Savage God”. As Brotchie wryly observes, “One of the undoubted achievements of Ubu Roi was that it upset almost everyone who saw it”. The play offers no explanation, no solace, no solutions. Jarry called it a comedy, but the humour is immensely sinister. We are invited to laugh, provided we realize the joke is on us.
In public, Jarry played along with expectations that he should be Ubuesque, until Père Ubu became a contradictory part of his psychological make-up. He would bellow “Merdre!” on cue, and his “Ubu-speak” became habitual. Was Ubu a monster that took over its creator, a mask he could not remove? One acquaintance went so far as to say that Jarry was “devoured by Ubu”. But if the public associated him with Ubu, he saw himself as Faustroll: half-Faust, half-troll (self-sufficient creatures in his private mythology). Jarry finished Les Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien (The Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician) in 1898, but never sought to publish this coded autobiography in which Faustroll visits miraculous imaginary lands.
The chief editor of the Atlas Press, which specializes in avant-garde prose writings, Brotchie offers informative readings of Jarry’s less well-known works, many of which he has published, including César- Antéchrist (1895), Les Jours et les Nuits (1897), the Gestes et Opinions, L’Amour absolu (1899), Messaline (1900), Le Surmâle (1902) and La Dragonne (1943), but his emphasis here is on the man himself. In fact, Brotchie so excels in his stated aim of making Jarry “a believable person” that I defy any reader to close this book without a sense of sadness that somebody so rare and unworldly came to such a sorry end.
Undeniably, Jarry could be an ass, smearing doorknobs with excrement and famously firing a revolver in a café, but by playing down the myth Brotchie presents us with a far more complex and vulnerable figure. There are many ways to fritter away an inheritance, but when Jarry’s father died in 1895, he blew his on an “extravagant and impractical art review”, Perhinderion, printed on expensive paper using specially cast, fifteenth-century type. After that, his own “phynances” never recovered. He turned his back on fame to hide away in the country. Some contemporaries believed he had squandered his early success, but as one friend observed, there was “nothing of the ambitious careerist about him”. Jarry made a meagre living from his pen, but never considered any other employment. Isolated by poverty and pride, he made his final home a mud-floor shack on a bank of the Seine without power, water or toilet, described by one visitor as “a pitiful and dilapidated hovel”. He befriended the crews on the barges, making notes on their slang and way of life for his last, unfinished, semi-autobiographical novel La Dragonne.
Of course, Jarry drank too much, but it is difficult to reconcile his prodigious consumption of absinthe, wine and ether with his undoubted athletic prowess and vigorous, open-air existence. He loved fishing and was an excellent fencer and enthusiastic cyclist (still something of a novelty in the 1880s; he carried a riding crop to ward off dogs and irate pedestrians). By blowing up a photograph, Brotchie offers a detailed examination of the gearing of Jarry’s Clément Luxe racing bicycle and concludes that he must have been extremely strong to ride it.
Jarry died from tuberculosis, although for many years it was assumed he drank himself to death. Bedridden in his last days, he wrote letters all night, some outlining a novel to be called “Le Mousse de la Pirrouïte”, described by Brotchie as “part epic poem, part bargees’ drinking song”. Eventually paralysed, he was taken to hospital where he repeated the words “Je cherche” again and again. His final request was for a toothpick, which he held between two fingers with an expression of intense joy. For the post-mortem Jarry’s head was cut open from ear to ear, the skull exposed and the cranial cap removed in a single piece. “Merdre!”, one of the trainees exclaimed. “Père Ubu never expected this!”
Ian Pindar’s collections of poetry include Emporium, published in 2011, and Constellations, which appeared last year.
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