Wout Hoeboer: Frommage à Picabia

Entering the so-called cultural world, we are still engaged in the same struggle when I read, from the pen of Jacques Lothaire, speaking of the French Academy and the Institute :

I say once and fo all get rid of the senile element that we bother ourselves with so pointlessly. We must be modern. And for that, don’t swoon before the most stupid pseudo-modern lucubrations; but only fools will make the mistake: Péguy and his blue eyes when they said: ‘We shall never know all the

cowardice that the fear of not appearing sufficiently modern has been responsible for.’ But, in spit of Péguy’s words, we must be modern. For that, we don’t need to deny or scorn the work of past centuries; only the Futurists fell into this trap. But the works of Victor Hugo in 43 volumes are for us less interesting than Apollinaire’s Calligrammes or a Dada book.

Woodcut by Guy Boscart aka Clément Pansaers, 1918

What dominated then, our senile structures, is said in a perpetual struggle of academism against discoveries. The same academic plague still exists, and it must force a certain number of young discoveries te become more conventional as they grow older – or else, by not seeing our century, so different from the Judaeo-Christian civilisation, a century that is gradually being constructed. This is the only century that has any hold on me personally as I have the advantage of surveying it from 1909 (Futurism) to 1973. This is what leads me towards a certain indulgence in noting that there was no flaw in the first seekers, whose over-all freedoms are finally the only values of the century. Which means that Charles Péguy, compared with them, is simply a good Catholic, in spite of the doubtful publicity he has been given, especially by certain retarded persons who have become Heads of State. If only Péguy knew how he was used! If only he knew how much Catholicism is giving way, catching the last boat! He would certainly feel ashamed.

In this fine production of Ça Ira!, I invite you to read the notes, where Pansaers, Nicolas Bauduin, Paul van Ostayen are toegether. And further on, as I turn the pages, I read quotations from the dangerous Paul Colin, who made such mistakes, used by Jacques Lothaire:

Since the armistice, skilful politicians have skilfully cultivated the people’s anger, which was thus turned against the Germans, instead of against war.

Yes it should have been, but not by keeping a certain trust in any ideology.

Unlike the latter, it is again Paul Neuhuys who remains lucid, in his series ‘Few Poets’. This time he talks of Jean Cocteau, and dada, through Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Philippe Soupailt, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Francis Picabia and Clément Pansaers. If Neuhuys was mistaken ‘in considering Jean Cocteau as peerless’, it doesn’t matter. Cocteau never understood the century, having produced too much modern stuff by using old, as in his films, his amazingly poor drawings of his superficial poems. But – in 1921 – it may have been possible to believe in him... a little.

Henri CHOPIN

Collection OU, 7, Ingatestone, Essex, 1977.

Clément Pansaers. Drawing by Jean-Jacques Gailliard

These reflexions come as a result of Ça Ira!, which in time followed Pierre Albert-Birot’s review SIC, already announced the death of Dada, and preceded Surrealism by four years. For this reason, Ça Ira! must be situated, especially as it was a great meeting-place. It was an international concert in which Neuhuys and his friends were participating, and with which they associated Clément Pansaers who, in his series of ‘Paradoxes Blennorrhagiques’ begins as follows:

Becomes senile, whoever traces his trajectory in a straight line. Reigns a a parvenu, motoring. Noise, noise – bangs and engines – and speed and speed – dynamism spirals down. Does there not exist a dynamism of slowness? Read ‘In Praise of Idleness’!

These are lines which remain, in opposition to invented economic crises and I take a sly pleasure in marking a whole passage by Mr Pansaers who simply writes in action:

Bass: arise, consumptive, the march of legs. Wash painting with liquid music. The heraldic lions draw themselves up. I, chaotic cacophony. – The bars tango. – finances spin on their head. Double the big drums. Beat! Beat! The march of indecision! Finale! Motorists, aviators, who wants these tape-worms! Kid, blow up your bear! Before the sewers the heraldic lions play at bulls. Ride on the decoy belts of 220 horse power engines. Racing cars of laughter burst out. Greed devours a lusthouse fillet. Slaughterhouse smells. A Chambertin at room temperature, waiter! With snapped strings, play the sound-box, double bass! Da capo, the finale! Croak, swear! Swoon, tarts! Perfumed sweat, rancid tastes! Oysters, Roquefort, lime, tar! How sweet the wine is! Breasts panting! Legs tautening! A neat whisky! Light a cigarette with poetry! Where in all that is painting, music, literature! Bitterness weeps for joy! Christ is thirty-three – redeem the stones! End! Finished! I chaotic cacophony!

Finale...

A...

The memory of a hundred years of shattered poetry comes back to me through Ça Ira! I realise that, after the Zutists, Nietzsche, René Ghil and Gustave Kahn, the arts have been radically transformed, just as life and society have. Everything goes hand in hand, but exorcism of societies of the future that had already been thought of at that time appear.

For example, ‘In Praise of Idleness’ whose mere title is the remedy for the present inflation in the world, and particulary in the Common Market. I cannot help thinking that this title alone could become a huge poster plastered everywhere, which in no time would become an exorcism of the sad, haggard faces of the robot-workers.

In short, there Ça Ira!, like many reviews at the beginning of the century, goes in every direction, far from time and duration, dancing ‘on the headland of the centuries’ (especially those to come) as Marinetti had noted earlier in 1909.

But the programme of the head of the Italian Futurists always arouses my suspicions, because of his political choice.

Henri CHOPIN

Collection OU, 7, Ingatestone, Essex, 1977.

ça ira, 11, February 1921, woodcut by Jan Cockx

Of course, I am glossing over a great deal, as my aim is simply to talk – briefly – of this review with its many strokes of brilliance, as, for instance, in Number 10 in January 1921, from which I extract these lines by Neuhuys on an Introduction to some Poets:

Revolutionary currents have distant origins. One is occasionally tempted to go far back to discover fore-runners. Dada may descend from Pythagorus. It seems paradoxical; yet don’t golden lines like: Don’t piss against the sun, make you think of the esoteric notations of our most inveterate Dadas?

Or else:

One day a friend of mine who likes joking had, under the influence of a few beers, parodied some famous lines:

Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus faux

Et j’en sais d’immortels qui sont de purs bateaux.

And if, in other lines ‘Stendhal and the restification of enthusiasm’ by Léon Chenoy says nothing to me, it is because today Action in poetry had dominated reflection, even if the latter can seize our time in a premonitory way.

So it is action  that prevails from Number 11 of Ça Ira! In February 1921 and later. There is the arrival of Clément Pansaers, with his Paradoxes Blennorrhagiques de Lamprido from which I quote a short extract:

Didn’t you tell me that you cost a lot of money little lady? What becomes of the values of your lines and volumes if the buyer finds the factor that reduces both costly and cheap to nought? But no, certainly not Socialism! And how you tumble down old-fashioned! Your socialism hides cretinism! If O is to good as A is to bad, so is socialism tot bourgeoisie!

I repeat to you that words are vain. Don’t insist. Already the paradox of your metaphor yells blasphemy. Words are purges, why not, at the most harmless. What? Yes. A little music would liven up the session.

Henri CHOPIN

Collection OU, 7, Ingatestone, Essex, 1977.

Of course, I am glossing over a great deal, as my aim is simply to talk – briefly – of this review with its many strokes of brilliance, as, for instance, in Number 10 in January 1921, from which I extract these lines by Neuhuys on an Introduction to some Poets:

Revolutionary currents have distant origins. One is occasionally tempted to go far back to discover fore-runners. Dada may descend from Pythagorus. It seems paradoxical; yet don’t golden lines like: Don’t piss against the sun, make you think of the esoteric notations of our most inveterate Dadas?

Or else:

One day a friend of mine who likes joking had, under the influence of a few beers, parodied some famous lines:

Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus faux

Et j’en sais d’immortels qui sont de purs bateaux.

And if, in other lines ‘Stendhal and the restification of enthusiasm’ by Léon Chenoy says nothing to me, it is because today Action in poetry had dominated reflection, even if the latter can seize our time in a premonitory way.

So it is action  that prevails from Number 11 of Ça Ira! In February 1921 and later. There is the arrival of Clément Pansaers, with his Paradoxes Blennorrhagiques de Lamprido from which I quote a short extract:

Didn’t you tell me that you cost a lot of money little lady? What becomes of the values of your lines and volumes if the buyer finds the factor that reduces both costly and cheap to nought? But no, certainly not Socialism! And how you tumble down old-fashioned! Your socialism hides cretinism! If O is to good as A is to bad, so is socialism tot bourgeoisie!

I repeat to you that words are vain. Don’t insist. Already the paradox of your metaphor yells blasphemy. Words are purges, why not, at the most harmless. What? Yes. A little music would liven up the session.

Henri CHOPIN

Collection OU, 7, Ingatestone, Essex, 1977.

Jumping from page to page of these contrasts, liking contradiction anyway, I find premonitory notes which deserved te be better know when they were written. If somebody smiles at them today, it will be with the superiority of the Invader justifiyng his conquests.

In this way, the re-birth of Poland or the creation of Czechoslovakia are events but not reality.

It is easy for us to remember History today, after the war followed by Yalta, which shared out Europe; nobody can tell me that de Gaulle condemned Yalta since in fact he accepted the invasion of Czechoslovakia, when he was extremely powerful in late 1968. However that may be, it is now 1973 and I am in Poland and this mixture of 1973 and Ça Ira! Comes quite naturally to me in the place where I am writing. Sentences like the one above and the following strike me enormously:

A few million Czechs, a few hundred thousand Slovaks and a majority of Germans, Little Russians, Poles and Hungarians form a vast circle of rivalries and hatreds through which Europe will contract many crises and suffer many disappointments.

The author of these lines, Paul Colin, holds theories which are rigorously wrong and shows that he understands absolutely nothing of Central Europe since he advances theories saying that Czechoslovakia does not exist, when this country has resisted Hungarians, Austrians, Russians and Germans for a thousand years:

Czechoslovakia does not exist – really, realistically. But in the illusion of creating it and the hope of achieving their present aims, some States with no real governments or rather some governments with no lucidity, no programme, have adopted the Czechoslovakia event and let themselves be madly guided by it.

It is true that this country was only one year old as an autonomous state, but how dangerous the thought of a programme remains since its only way out is by force.

This means that Ça Ira!, with its oppositions and its differences of opinion, is the perfect bystander. I have reached Number 6 of September 1920 (apart from the note on Picabia) and the review has not yet sprung into its real life. The confusion resulting from the 14-18 war and the suffering of Belgium means that people who were active at that time in 1920 Antwerp conceived a passion for the revolution in Russia, and some admired its ‘programme’, which more and more has proved to be only a ‘Big Brother’ of the world. And yet again I must quote te one who was to become pro-Nazi, Paul Colin, in this very place:

Having a programme is being reasonable. Being inspired by events puts oneself under the control of the passions that engender them, it is being sentimental (or opportunist). It demands a theory of inchoherence or abdication, and completely despises the supreme necessities of political, social and economic life, of the progress of States and of the State.

Henri CHOPIN

Collection OU, 7, Ingatestone, Essex, 1977.

This particular reflection seems obvious to me when I read:

The only thing that interested me fot a moment about the Russians was the Revolution, but it only lasted a faw weeks and now they have the same “bourgeois family” way of thinking as we do here. The Revolution destroyed Tsarist inanities only to replace them with other absurdities which seem to us to have the same opportunist exaggerations as those conceived by the autocratic capitalism of the imperial government.

Moral and physical happiness (extract)

Francis Picabia, July 2^nd 1921, 10 a.m.

Why didn’t they see it at the time! With Ça Ira! I find a review that still corresponds with myself in the field of the arts and through politics, and I have great pleasure in noting what Willy Koninckx could publish in 1920 in the Number 1:

The epithets: romantic, impressionist, futurist, cubist, simplist, etc. are laughable; there is no romanticism, there is no impressionism, there is a man. There are not a few men, there are millions of men and every one of these men has a heart, a life.

Does this still have to be repeated, especially as these collective labels, these so-called groups are a camouflage for reality?

Of course, after fifty years of experience loaded with horror, certain aspects of Ça Ira! seem naive, and yet the questions are put, and well put, even in the article by Nico Bunt: ‘The Lightening Horizon’:

Yet, I remember rightly, bourgeoisie, too, has had its revolution: countless heads chopped off during the Terror prove this (which does not mean, however, that the Revolution was not an admirable achievement). But this Tiers Etat, that used to be oppressed, has today become the oppressor: it remembers 1792 and fears the ‘sovereign people’ will mete out the same treatment as was formerly inflicted on the ‘            aristocrats’.

And for the author’s conclusions, after half a century they seem the result of a feeling of protest rather than of constructed thought.

And yet, I can’t help laughing – with no great merit – with hindsight at sentences such as the ones I read in 1973 about the book Poets against the War, when Wily Koninckx says:

They (Flanders and Wallonie) have just escaped from the frightful trap laid for them by world imperialism...

or else

The dead live. They fell, glorious in their sacrifice.

It was frightful, of course. The ‘glorious’ only helped the blacklegs.

This review of which we can give only a glimpse, always contains sentences and lines that now seem aggressive to us in their strenght bound up in the soil:

I hear there in the offices

The cold-skinned old men

Multiply and grow

For the armies of the future.

Couldn’t I have understood that as the inspiration of Michel Debré – cold-skinned! – asking for a hundred million Frenchmen! Come, come, don’t be nasty, now! In fact these lines come from René Arcos in his poem ‘1916’ – another of his poems published in Ça Ira! was ‘banned by the Censor in 1917’. It was called ‘January 22, 1917, Message from President Wilson’.

Ça Ira! had no scruples in publishing, hardly two years after a great massacre for which only the politicians, whatever their party, were to blame, ‘A Kid’s Dream’, also by Willy Koninckx, from which I quote an extract characteristic of the whole:

The final result of the battle was sad. The manufacturers of coffins did not stop production and the schoolmasters, pedantic and finical, declaimed to their pupils the glorious sacrifices and the heroic deaths of obscure soliders.

Burning with questions of the moment, this review piles up clichés, much the same as those used by Georges Pompidou making an election speech to the French people. I quote what Georges Marlier wrote about France:

The most widespread of these ready-made formulae is the one that affirms dogmatically that France is the country of ‘the well-lined stocking’ and that ‘property is much divided there’.

An exasperating review for anyone who hides his ‘lust for power’ behind a cloak of conventional morality. Ça Ira! states and denounces, spreads its registers, as Paul Neuhuys says in 1973 for the complete republication of the review:

Ça Ira! had no other claim than to let some air into our house, to cross frontiers, to know the world.

And the review can do it, in its choices and its articles, its research.

Henri CHOPIN

Collection OU, 7, Ingatestone, Essex, 1977.