If the contemporary reader knows Henri Michaux at all, and that hasn’t been a sure bet for some time, it probably is mainly through his character Plume, that lovable bumbler, his alleged alter-ego, a naif prone to getting into scrapes in a topsy-turvy world by which he is utterly flummoxed and overmatched. Perhaps the reader conjures a literary version of Inspector Clouseau or Charlie Chaplin. If so, there would be a nugget of truth in her assessment. But there is so much more.
So, we should be grateful for Richard Sieburth’s rehabilitative new translation, A Certain Plume, which presents the text as originally published in Paris by the small press Editions du Carrefour in 1930. Eight years later, it would be folded into Gallimard’s Plume précédé de lointain intérieur, which would make the author famous, albeit for his more recent poems, largely relegating those concerning Plume to its back pages.
A Certain Plume is divided into five sections. Part One contains the most widely known prose poems, and to my mind the least interesting. Like many of today’s specimens, they often begin with “hooks” that range from the mildly teasing to outright provocative:
All they wanted to do was pull him by the hair.
Plume had barely arrived in Berlin, he was about to enter the Terminus, when a woman accosted him and suggested that she spend the night with him.
And away we go. Usually on the heels of some error or misunderstanding, the ensuing narrative veers abruptly a droit et a gauche. The head beneath that hair is yanked off in the next sentence; the woman who propositions Plume has nine children and is accompanied by a mob of her friends, who rob and have their way with him one after another.
Honestly, I find these poems too tirelessly whimsical. Although not always — one of my favorites is The Night of the Bulgarians, which starts shockingly in medias res:
— So there we were on our way back. We took the wrong train. And finding ourselves with a bunch of Bulgarians who were babbling away and wouldn’t sit still, we decided to deal with the situation right there and then. We drew out our revolvers and shot them all.
Still, the tone is not unfamiliar. Any reader of Russell Edson or Cortazar or even Calvino, would recognize it. Obeying the Iron Law of Absurdity, the prose grows more disinterested, more matter-of-fact in proportion to the burgeoning chaos of the circumstances. Nevertheless, the sheer inventiveness of Michaux’s cruelty is a sordid delight. As the bodies of the murdered Bulgarians jostle about the compartment, it istheywho are at fault — they make a nuisance of themselves.
They … slouch over more and more … they can’t sit still for a moment … You have to get tough with them … slam them against their headrests … squash them down, but then their heads give you a butt.
Until finally, they are thrown off the train, in glorious slapstick, most black:
They carefully lower the main window of the compartment and proceed with the operation. They stick them out up to their waists and then toss them overboard. But they have to bend their knees, together so that they won’t get stuck – for while they are dangling there, their heads knock against the door, as if they wanted to return back inside.
In Part Two, narrative is dropped in favor of short, journal-like entries, from which the name Plume is altogether absent. Of a more explicitly autobiographical nature, they find the author considering his own early life, its emptiness and inextinguishable rootlessness, his salvational discovery of words and literature, and – the mystical. One might be reading simultaneously drafts of The Notebooks of Franz Kafka 1914-1923, Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation, and Manguel’s The Library at Night:
His attention span was short, and even when interested in something, he noticed little., as if only the outer layers were opening in him, but not his “self.” He just stood there, shifting his weight back and forth …
All objects offer a graspable cheek. Then they eat you up.
Things are a façade, a crust. Only God is. But there is something divine in books…A book is aa ball of light. Pure. Soulful. Divine. Self-abandoning … All in all, books were his experience.
Unlike many of the Plume adventures, as we might call the initial prose poems, those in Part Three, while resuming an air of surreality, view their subjects with the raw eye of a Celine, or Artaud, harking, it seems, to the disintegrations of personality brought on by personal tragedy and, one might suspect, the recent and ongoing abominations of modern warfare across Europe.
From “The Night of the Impediments” we read of:
Legless cripples in spun sugar (or even in blown glass)/ pose an obstacle to traffic…A sweet little cheek shattered by a kiss, hardly charming./Its rotted face, hardly seductive. You turn aside.
A few pages later, in “The Night of Disappearances,” we encounter savagery that is both timeless and as fresh as this morning’s reportage,complete with Trump-ian shivers.
A gang of knives rises up a tree trunk as along an elevator shaft, now darting out, now stabbing the countryside… Then the brush draws out long thread of light, broken threads, threads of life. The men thereby struck will no longer be men. Dogs will be dogs no more, nor willows willows. Small monuments scattered through the countryside, swept away bit by bit as the wind slithers in.
Here a king orders a breast cut off; a traveler “trumpets like an elephant, playing the alpha animal, throwing his weight around, stirring up entire neighborhoods for matters of no consequence.”
Part 4 represents something of a volte-face. With titles like “Death Song,” “Fate,” “Movements of Interior Being” and “Nature,” Michaux seems to find refreshment in consideration of the world and the self, and the battle that rages between them. Although arms and noses still go missing, and voices harangue him brutally, this section, my favorite, offers hope, and the astringent pleasures of mature introspection. There is narrative here, and parable, aperçu and insights worthy of Montaigne. To the bargain, it contains some of the writer’s most innovative, and beautiful, images.
When misfortune, taking up its crate and toolbox.. misfortune with its nimble hairdresser’s fingers …
When Fear, that atrocious crayfish …
Finally, in Part Five, we reach the more traditionally lineated poems. Of these there is little new to say, for one might have read them, astonished, only yesterday, inone of the more adventuresome literary journals. And, in reading, thought them “haunting,” vaguely reminiscent of X or Y from one’s youth, encountered, say, in Barnstone’s mid-sixties masterwork Modern European Poetry. For there is in them something of that time, ineffably continental, as I, at least, have come think of that term. Weary, but clear-eyed, death-obsessed and unabashedly joyful, stripped down and image-driven. Hard to put a finger on, one can only point – Paz, Seferis, Trakl, Montale, Grass, Voznesensky – Michaux. For example,
XXXII
She, the Love Reft from Me
Take away her corpse.
If you want to keep it, Keep it.
As for me, during the long years I knew her
I fashioned her into a small ball without her being aware.
I’ll keep her
I’ll raise her in my country fields
And perhaps she’ll live.
At the conclusion of A Certain Plume, there is an appendix that returns us to where we began, with four more Plume poems from a revised edition of Plume Preceded by the Faraway Within. A welcome bonus from the author who, Gide famously observed, “… excels in making us feel the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things.”
[Published by New York Review Books on May 22, 2018. 240 pages, $16.00 paperback.]