Lipstick Traces (30 page)

You can sense Siurlai reaching; you can feel him fall back, finally, into the canary cliché, as if to block his own reach: yes, it was just a show. In the late 1970s dozens of new Siurlais would try to describe attempts to create the same sensations (in San Francisco, the singer for Nōh Mercy comes on stage pregnant, squats, emits a torrent of fake blood, and gives birth to a cow bone; in Los Angeles, a woman strides naked onto the bandstand as Vox Pop plays, collapses into the bass drum, rises, pulls a Tampax from her vagina, and hurls it into the crowd—“grown men, skinheads, turned white and ran away”—that was punk, after the Sex Pistols broke up, after Johnny Rotten had taken the show as far as a show can go). Writers would try to make sense of new versions of Hennings’ apparition and fall short even of Siurlai’s compromise—which perhaps means that something happened in 1912 that did not happen in punk, or that the dread to which Siurlai gave voice required an innocence that could no longer be felt. In 1912 the war
was two years away; along with everyone else in Europe, Siurlai had yet to learn the meaning of a phrase like “hops over corpses,” or for that matter the meaning of the word “corpse.” Still, like Louis Veuillot faced with Thérésa, Siurlai was reaching for a prophecy—and the moral disorder he saw in Hennings would soon find its analogue all over the West. Ball may have found it in 1914, in a visit to the Belgian front, which changed him from an enlistee into a draft dodger; he surely found it in July 1915, when Marinetti sent him the futurists’ latest “Parole in libertà” (Free Speech).

“The image of the human form is gradually disappearing from the painting of these times and all objects appear only in fragments,” Ball wrote the next year, with the cabaret in full swing. “This is one more proof of how ugly and worn the human countenance has become, and of how all the objects of our environment have become repulsive to us. The next step is for poetry to decide to do away with language for similar reasons. These are things that have probably never happened before.” But Marinetti had provided the clue: in 1915 the words and letters of his manifesto leaped over the page like illiterate diagrams of a song, like proof of a critic’s inability to keep up with a new music. “They are just letters of the alphabet on a page,” Ball said in amazement; “you can roll up such a poem like a map. The syntax has come apart. The letters are scattered and assembled again in a rough-and-ready way. There is no language anymore . . . it has to be invented all over again. Disintegration right in the innermost process of creation.”

It was a perfect theory for Hennings’ practice, a perfect summation in advance of the strongest moments of the cabaret that would follow six months later—especially if one reverses the first and last words of Ball’s final sentence. The cabaret was named for the author of the greatest of all ironies—“All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,” said Voltaire. “Our sort of
Candide
against the times,” Ball said of the Meierei—but for those who knew how to listen, there was no irony at all. Disintegration right in the innermost process of creation, creation right in the innermost process of disintegration—no one, the dadaists least of all, has ever been able to figure out if dada was absolute affirmation or absolute negation, only that the absolute was present, as present as Ball’s sentence was reversible. But even though in
Police Academy 2
Zed’s gang kidnaps a police captain and sends him back to the stationhouse with his face and clothes painted with lines and curls that are preliterate, almost precognitive signs reaching for letters, the cop returning to the fold as a manifesto-against-his-will in favor of syntax coming apart, calling for language to be invented all over again, or never again, the Zedists rolling him up like a map of their disgust, that wasn’t quite it either. All dada histories quote Ball’s 1915 line about disintegration and creation; like so much of his diary, it was written to be quoted. But no one quotes the line he wrote next, which does not seem to anticipate dada at all: “It is imperative to write invulnerable sentences.”

According to legend the invulnerable sentence was the antithesis of dada; dada denied there was any such thing. But dada was part of its time, and Ball’s politely unquoted line is part of dada. It brings dada all too close to futurism, which in the 1920s would happily make the leap from avant-garde aesthetics into the new world of fascism. It was a small leap, from either direction: Mussolini had himself been a poet, a futurist hanger-on, though perhaps one less attracted to Marinetti’s experiments with language than to his celebration of war as the highest form of modern art.

Ball’s sentence opens dada to the will to power. It sounds like something that should have been written by Hitler—or Lenin, who in 1916 was living just down the street from the Cabaret Voltaire: his house has a plaque too. He came often, arguing night after night with Janco over the fallacy of abstract art when what had to be created (Lenin pounded the table) were new
facts
—or he came never, not even on Russian folk-song night, having already decided that art in whatever form was a moral safety valve: “I can’t listen to music too often,” he once said of Beethoven’s
Appassionata.
“It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head—you might get your hand bitten off. You have to hit them on the head, without any mercy.” Invulnerable sentences are death sentences. “Six million exterminated” is an invulnerable sentence. You can’t argue with it. There is a way in which it is dada.

There was real fear in Siurlai’s review of Hennings’ performance. “Hysteria,” he wrote; “avalanche,” “morphine,” “bloody,” “flame,” “violent,” “ravaged,” “distortion,” “corpses,” “infinities.” He was right to be scared. Ball’s diaries are a dubious record because they make up a treatise on ethics; day by day, as dada unfolded, he sought justifications for the barbarisms of the night before. But inside the cabaret he and the others abandoned the need for justifications; then like lovers seeking a way out of an illicit affair they all of them contrived endless escapes the next morning, and surrendered again by sundown. They knew Nietzsche’s warning that “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster”; as they danced in a circle on the stage, making a fire out of all literature, culture, modern art, they remembered those words like junkies reading the warning on a bottle of narcotics. They knew they had created a monster, and they had as much affection for it as Mary Shelley had for hers: “My little child.” Huelsenbeck:

If you have had the miraculous good fortune to be present at the birth of such a “sensation,” you will want to know how it happens that an empty sound, first intended as a surname for a female singer, has developed amid grotesque adventures into a name for a rundown cabaret, then into abstract art, baby-talk and a party of babies at the breast and finally—well [Huelsenbeck said in 1920], I shall not anticipate. This is exactly the history of Dadaism. Dada came over the Dadaists without their knowing it; it was an immaculate conception, and thereby its profound meaning was revealed to me.

. . . In the hands of the gentlemen in Zurich, Dada grew into a creature which stood head and shoulders above all present; and soon its existence could no longer be arranged with the precision demanded by a businesslike conduct of the Dadaist movement in art. Despite the most impassioned efforts, no one had yet found out exactly what Dada was.

There is a figure who appears in this book again and again. His instincts are basically cruel; his manner is intransigent. He trades in hysteria but is immune to it. He is beyond temptation, because despite his utopian rhetoric
satisfaction is the last thing on his mind. He is unutterably seductive, yet he trails bitter comrades behind him like Hansel his breadcrumbs, his only way home through a thicket of apologies he will never make. He is a moralist and a rationalist, but he presents himself as a sociopath; he leaves behind documents not of edification but of paradox. No matter how violent his mark on history, he is doomed to obscurity, which he cultivates as a sign of profundity. Johnny Rotten/John Lydon is one version; Guy Debord is another. Saint-Just was an ancestor, but in my story Richard Huelsenbeck is the prototype. God only knows what he was like as a psychiatrist.

“I still have a clear memory of the evening on which I entered the Cabaret Voltaire,” he wrote in 1957.

Hugo was sitting at the piano, playing classical music, Brahms and Bach. Then he switched over to dance music. The drunken students pushed their chairs aside and began spinning around. There were almost no women in the cabaret. It was too wild, too smoky . . .

Hugo had written a poem against war and murderous insanity. Emmy recited it, Hugo accompanied her on the piano, and the audience chimed in, with a growl, murdering the poem.

Huelsenbeck idolized Ball. They met in 1912, in Munich, where Huelsenbeck was studying literature and art and Ball was working in the theater. The next year Huelsenbeck contributed to Ball’s magazine
Revolution
as its in-house Paris correspondent (he had at least been to Paris, studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in late 1912; after dada he would become a real-life foreign correspondent for Berlin newspapers, traveling around the world, interviewing Chiang Kai-shek and turning up at the funeral of Sun Yat-sen). When Ball left Munich for Berlin in 1914, Huelsenbeck followed. In the first months of the war they organized readings to honor newly dead poets from both sides; in 1915 they put on an explicitly antiwar, anti-German “Expressionist Evening,” offering nonsense verse and “Negro poems” to counter the destruction of Europe. When Ball first abandoned dada in July 1916, Huelsenbeck had a nervous breakdown that lasted almost six months (“punishment for dada hubris,” he said). He was in Zurich only because of Ball—and his draft board. He arrived on February 8, 11, or 26, three, six, or twenty-one days after the cabaret opened.

Despite the noise and the crowd, he found it dead. He wanted a big beat, and he was ready to make it: with those “Negro poems,” Negergedichte, based on fragments of information about ragtime—based on nothing. Each poem ended with bones-in-the-nose: “umbah-umbah.” He read the poems out on stage.

Jan Ephriam took Huelsenbeck aside. He explained that the German medical student’s bourgeois primitivisms were hopeless fantasies, not even fakes: the old sailor had spent years with African “Negroes.”
Fine,
Huelsenbeck said (well, really he said
Fuck off,
but Ball turned him around)—
give me something authentic.
A few days later Ephriam returned with scribbles: “
TRABADYA LA MODJERE MAGAMORE MAGAGERE TRABADJA BONO
.”

It was, Ball would prove with his celebrated sound poems, the dada language. If words that cannot contain facts can dissolve facts, Ephriam’s sounds called up the invulnerable sentence. Huelsenbeck stood on the stage and recited the cabaret owner’s blank syllables, then made up his own, refusing in every instance to give up his stupid “umbah-umbah”; the crowd responded in a hundred different ways. He sat behind a big bass drum, pounded it, shouted the new words, then like Jerry Lee Lewis in “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” whispered them, then roared back. Reciting his poem “The End of the World,” he stalked the stage and slashed the air with a riding crop, spitting out his meaningless sounds as if they were apochrypha straight from the lost gnostic
Gospel of Truth:
“poème bruitist performed for the first time by Richard Huelsenbeck Dada,” he liked to say, “or, if you prefer, the other way around.” It was still a fraud but no one knew: “I secretly went to the University and started studying medicine,” he told the audience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1971. “I couldn’t say it to anybody because they would have thought I was a terrible liar and bourgeois. In the morning he goes to the University and at night he makes
umbah-umbah.”
But in Zurich in 1916 neither the dada six nor the crowd could have told “umbah-umbah” from “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” and so the dadaists made their rhythm as the crowd clapped off the beat, rushed the stage, grabbed at Huelsenbeck’s legs—it didn’t matter what language he was speaking, or if he was speaking any language at all. “All art begins with a critique,” he said, “with a critique of the self, the self always reflecting society. Our critique began, as all critique begins, with
doubt . . . 
Doubt became our life.
Doubt and outrage. Our doubt was so deep, finally, that we asked ourselves: Can language express a doubt so deep?”

On stage he kicked back. Fights broke out; he encouraged them. “You are invited to interrupt me any time you want to,” he said in London. “I would like you to be a little bit lively such as we were. Now I am approaching the last third of my life,” he said at seventy-nine, “and I’m not as lively as I was in 1916 in Zurich at the Spiegelgasse, then I was very lively—I could jump over tables and chairs, beat people up and was beaten up of course too, but there’s still a little bit of this spirit left in me . . . Ball in his famous book
Flight Out of Time
describes me there as a young, aggressive, disagreeable person who always attacks the public, who spits at it, and always as his third word says his
umbah-umbah.
It cannot go on this way, something will have to be done about it sooner or later if he does not discontinue that. So we went on.”