Lipstick Traces (53 page)

They didn’t, and this is why so many of the pictures of these people seem staged: they were, though not necessarily by the photographers. Vollmer’s famous picture of John Lennon, posing in a Hamburg doorway around 1960 (reproduced on the cover of Lennon’s 1975 lp
Rock
’
n
’
Roll),
almost exactly recapitulates a once-famous newspaper photo of Edwardian Colin Donellan. Lennon cannot have missed it; his pose is almost evidence that, as a schoolboy, he had Donellan’s picture pinned on his bedroom wall.

“Colin Donellan, at 22 a convicted thief and burglar, has, since the age of eight, been in the hands of the police,” reads the caption in London’s
Picture Post,
10 October 1953. “He has been to approved [reform] schools, Borstals [juvenile prisons] of varying degrees of severity, and an adult gaol”; he stands with his back against the window of a men’s wear shop, talking to a friend. Donellan is not looking at the camera; his clothes and hair are beautiful. He holds himself in menacing repose. In this carefully constructed moment, his eyes are empty; the scene is too perfect not to have been recorded. Donellan’s picture is that of someone waiting; he has taken his own picture by waiting for it to be taken.

Here one sees a set; in Moineau’s a setting. Before van der Elsken’s lens, the spirit is that of movement, interest, uncertainty. The girls and boys in Moineau’s seem oblivious of anybody but themselves; their peers seem to await a response, to offer themselves to a future they do not expect to make, to a history already judging them as deviants, anomalies, curios. Donellan and his pop-culture cousins seem to be auditioning for movies they’ve already seen; the people in Moineau’s seem to be having fun.

Colin Donellan, 1953

1953 began around a table and ended with the table in pieces. By August, the fast time caught in Wolman’s letter to Brau had yielded to the deadly pace of
I.L.
no. 3, a lifeless broadsheet. “Indifference in the face of the suffocating values of the present is not permitted us, not when those values are guaranteed by a society of prisons, and we live on their doorsteps,” Debord wrote dully in “To Be Done with the Comforts of Nihilism.” “We don’t want to participate at any price, or to accept our own silence, to accept . . . Red wine and negation in the cafes, the first truths of despair will not be the end of these lives, these lives so hard to defend against the traps of silence, against the hundred ways of
TAKING SIDES
.” Bossuet’s elegiac voice was already rising up, turning the echo of Saint-Just’s voice in Debord’s conclusion into a non sequitur: “We have to attest to a certain idea of happiness, even if we have known it to fail . . . We have to promote an insurrection that would matter to us.” Debord might as well have called for a revival of the Spanish Civil War—which, just a hairline rule to the left, he and the rest of the LI did. “The Middle Ages begin at the border,” they said in
I.L.
no. 3’s one dashing phrase, “and our silence seals it.” It was an admission that the LI’s own terrain had turned up empty.

The group blew apart. Some quit; others were kicked out. Those who remained continued the search for the hacienda, drifting from one odd bar to another, writing down incidents they tried to make strange. Not a word
appeared until June 1954, when Debord, Wolman, Dahou, and two or three others ran off the first fifty copies of the new
Potlatch
and began mailing them out to whoever they thought might most want to read it, or most not want to. The LI never published Chtcheglov’s “Formula for a New Urbanism,” which would not see the light of day until June 1958, in
I.S.
no. 1, and by then Chtcheglov was already crazy.

“He went mad,” Bernstein said in 1983. “But he was not mad. He had been excluded—he was convinced the Dalai Lama was controlling what was happening to us. And then, one day, he had a fight with his wife. He broke up a cafe, smashed everything. His wife—who was a
swine
—called the police. She called an ambulance. Because she was his wife, she was able to commit him. He was taken away to an institution, and given insulin shock. And electroshock. After that, he was mad. Guy and I went to visit him: he was eating with his hands, with saliva dripping from his mouth. He was mad—the way you know when someone is mad. The letters he wrote to us were babble. And he is still there, if he is not dead. He was very shortly sent to a halfway house, where he had freedom, where he could come and go. But he had developed the disease where he could not live outside of the asylum, where he could not stand to be anywhere else, where he did not want to be anywhere else.” Bernstein wrapped her arms around herself, making a straitjacket: “Whenever he came out, he became scared, and rushed back. So he took part in the asylum theater; he put on plays. And I think he is still there.”

Moineau’s, 1953, by Ed van der Elsken

It is not hard to imagine that Chtcheglov’s fall sealed the LI as a group. His destruction was an event, which gave the LI a tangible past, made the long year of doing nothing into a myth, into a story that could be told—made it real. The group had spent its time walking the streets, taking notes, then explaining its project to itself—that was all, from the attack on Chaplin to the first issue of
Potlatch.
“An art film on this generation,” Debord explained in
On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time,
his film on those months, “can only be a film about the absence of its real works.” But Chtcheglov’s absence was a real work: if the momentary seizure of Notre-Dame was the LI’s founding crime as legend (with Serge Berna, present in the cathedral, then within the LI, the group’s link to its imaginary past), Chtcheglov’s exclusion was the LI’s founding crime as act—a symbolic murder, since to the LI exclusion meant civil death. It was no help that in 1957, with the formation of the SI, Debord made Chtcheglov a “member from afar,” or that two decades later, in guilt and love, he made a film in which Chtcheglov was the hero; Chtcheglov’s exclusion had consequences, and they could not be undone. Even as violence and dementia, those consequences were a form of history, an unsettled debt charged to whatever future the LI might ennoble or fail. Unwanted
and unforeseen, those consequences were a proof that the LI could make history: events that could not be taken back. If, simply by pursuing its own philosophy of yes and no, explaining itself and acting on its conclusions, one day sitting down to vote on who should remain and who should not, the group could wreck a life, then it could wreck the world.

“Our tables aren’t often round,” the LI wrote in “36 rue des Morillons,” “but one day, we’re going to build our own ‘castles of adventure.’ ” The group emerged from the year of the continuous dérive with a sense of necessity, relaxing its ban on work and committing itself to a regular publication schedule. It stepped out again with a less abstract, more playful sense of reality, gleefully chronicling the best news of the week. The members of the LI remained planners of an imaginary city, but now they were also its critics—they saw that all cities were imaginary, complexes of desires turned into geography or suppressed by it, and they saw that all cities could be explored. Thus the LI toured Guatemala City in 1954, full of firing squads, setting up for vacationers, a cheap holiday in other people’s misery; it visited the Catharist town of Beziers in 1209, on the day it was exterminated by the pope’s armies in the Albigensian Crusade (“Kill them all,” the papal commander said when a lieutenant asked him how believers in the True Church might be distinguished from the heretics, “God will recognize his own”); it crisscrossed the East End of London in 1888, guided by Jack the Ripper, “the psychogeographer of love.” The imaginary city was Haussmann’s Paris, a fantasy of commodities and their troops—and it was the belief that if one could find the right street, one could escape from that city into Chtcheglov’s.

In the SI Debord called this instant route to total change the reversible
connecting factor; in the LI he named it the “Northwest Passage.” The metaphor wasn’t geographical, it was psychogeographical—it was psychogeography itself. It belonged to the history of the modern city and to the prehistory of the dérive; Debord found it in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater,
the memoir Thomas De Quincey published in 1821.

“I remember long, wonderful psychogeographical walks in London with Guy,” Alexander Trocchi said in 1983, a year before his death. “He took me to places in London I didn’t know, that he didn’t know, that he sensed, that I’d never have been to if I hadn’t been with him. He was a man who could discover a city.” The two met in 1955 in Paris, where Trocchi, born in 1925 in Glasgow, was serving one god as a pornographer for Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press, another as the editor of
Merlin,
a somber avant-garde quarterly. Joining the LI, Trocchi had to cut all ties, break with his friends and employers: “I stopped speaking to them. I was to enter into a closed society, a clandestine group, which was to be my whole world.” He was near sixty when we met, and he looked forty; he was built strong, all power, his eyes set deep but piercing and clear. A huge, intimidating nose came out of his face like a claw. It was impossible to believe he had been a heroin addict for almost thirty years.

Though Trocchi left Paris in 1956 for the United States, when the SI was formed Debord counted him a founding, active situationist. In 1960 Trocchi published
Cain’s Book,
an autobiographical novel in the form of a junkie’s journal: “Il vous faut construire les situations,” he wrote in the last pages. He was speaking of the fix: “systematic nihilism,” but also “a purposive spoon in the broth of experience.”

For a long time I have suspected there is no way out. I can do nothing I am not. I have been living destructively towards the writer in me for some time, guiltily conscious of doing so all along, cf. the critical justification in terms of the objective death of an historical tradition: a decadent at a tremendous turning point in history, constitutionally incapable of turning with it as a writer, I am living my personal Dada. In all of this there is a terrible emotional smear. The steel of the logic has daily to be strengthened to contain the volcanic element within. It grows daily more hard to contain. I am a kind of bomb.

This was the sort of person Debord wanted, but Trocchi never really returned.
Cain’s Book
made him famous in bohemian circles in Britain, and in 1962, in London, he began Project Sigma, an attempt to unite every sort of dissident and experimental cultural tendency into an international corps of “cosmonauts of inner space.” Debord published Trocchi’s Sigma manifesto in
I.S.
no. 8, January 1963, but there followed the ambiguous note that it was “no longer as a member of the SI” that Trocchi pursued his “technique du coup du monde,” his “invisible insurrection of a million minds”—to Debord, Trocchi’s association with people like occultist Colin Wilson and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, both of whom Debord had long since dismissed as “mystical cretins,” was a resignation absent la lettre. To Trocchi, Debord’s demurral was an exclusion, and he never got over it.

“Guy thought the world was going to collapse on its own, and we were going to take over,” Trocchi said in 1983. “I wanted to do that—to take over the world. But you can’t take over the world by excluding people from it! Guy wouldn’t even
mention
the names of the people I was involved with—Timothy Leary, Ronnie Laing. I remember the last letter he sent me: ‘Your name sticks in the minds of decent men.’ He was like Lenin; he was an absolutist, constantly kicking people out—until he was the only one left. And exclusions were total. It meant ostracism, cutting people. Ultimately, it leads to shooting people—that’s where it would have led, if Guy had ever ‘taken over.’ And I couldn’t shoot anyone.”