The Last Days of New Paris (18 page)

In our timeline, the designs were published in the Surrealist journal
VVV
in 1943, in New York, some reworked a little. Mostly this was just a matter of tidying up the images, but there were more substantial changes.
The Ace of Revolutions, for example, became a wheel seemingly balanced on a spatter-pattern of blood, rather than, as in Lamba's original design, a waterwheel
churning
blood. The radical-melancholy and foreboding sense of blood as a
motor
for change was thus, uncha­racte­risti­cally for the movement, bowdlerized away.

In the reality of New Paris, the cards were never published, though they did, obviously, appear within the city, in card form no less, as immensely powerful manif items, capable of invoking their geniuses, their sirens and magi. Thibaut claimed to me that it is not just the face cards but the aces and number cards that were present in Paris. What
they
manifest, and how, he did not know.

“A lobster. With wires…”
:
It would be surprising if Salvador Dalí's absurdly iconic Lobster Telephone of 1936 did not appear in Thibaut's reconfigured world.

scratch-figures etched with keys
:
In the 1930s, Brassaï famously photographed the images scrawled on and scratched crudely into Paris walls. In New Paris, the faces (as they mostly were) he obsessively captured in black and white are live, and full of motion. If, Thibaut said, you put your ears close to the walls, they move their scratch mouths, and whisper to you in a cementy language no human understands.

a great shark mouth…smiling like a stupid angel
:
This manif is from a text by Alice Rahon, from 1942, in which she describes, at the horizon of the city, “a great shark mouth appear[ing] with the smile of a stupid angel.”

It is a sandbumptious
:
The sandbumptious is a freakish beast manifest from the work
March 7 1937—4 (Sandbumptious)
by the extraordinary Grace Pailthorpe. Pailthorpe, now an obscure figure, was described in 1936 by Breton as “the best and most truly Surrealist” of the British Surrealists (which could be read, admittedly, as damning with faint praise). She had been a surgeon in France during the First World War, and went on to be a pioneer in British psychoanalysis. Born in 1883, she turned to painting late, at the age of fifty-two, when she met the artist Reuben Mednikoff, who was to become her partner (in another overlap between the worlds of the occult and Surrealism they met at a party hosted by Victor Neuberg, a Satanist and one of Crowley's lovers). Pailthorpe and Mednikoff were expelled from the London Surrealist Group in 1940 in a bout of toxic infighting (Conroy Maddox called Pailthorpe an “Ogre”) but the spirit of her work clearly remained allied enough in spirit to be made manifest in New Paris after the S-Blast.

the Lion of Belfort
:
The Lion of Belfort is one of the Parisian sites irrationally embellished in 1933, but none of the suggestions from the article exactly concord with Thibaut's description here. The stone figures through which Thibaut walked seem, rather, perhaps to be refugees from the “Lion of Belfort” section of Max Ernst's collage novel
Une semaine de bonté.

the Statue of Liberty
:
The semi-living replacement of the—real—statue in the Jardin du Luxembourg is manifest from a grotesque 1934 collage of the Statue of Liberty by Czech Surrealist Jindřich Štyrsky.

where the Palace of Justice once was…sawdust swirls from the windows and doors of Sainte-Chapelle
:
The form taken by the Palace of Justice in New Paris is a
combination of the “irrational embellishments” suggested by Benjamin Péret, who proposed that it be replaced by a swimming pool, and by André Breton, who wanted it replaced by a huge graffito visible from planes above. It was Tristan Tzara who proposed that the Sainte-Chapelle be filled with sawdust.

the squat square towers to either side of its sunburst central window
:
The two towers of New Paris's Notre-Dame have been irrationally embellished somewhat as per Breton's suggestion: he suggested they be replaced by glass containers full of blood and sperm. Why the blood appears to be a blood-vinegar mix, and why the towers are silos, rather than the giant bottles of his suggestion, Thibaut did not claim to know.

Arno Breker's looming, kitsch, retrograde marble figures
:
Josef Thorak and Arno Breker, the Austrian-German and German “official” Nazi artists, were sculptors specializing in grandiose sinister “Aryana,” held to be the antipode of “degenerate,” especially “Jewish” art.

Hélène Smith…glossolalic channeler of a strange imagined Mars
:
The Surrealists described the medium Hélène Smith (pseudonym for Catherine-Elise Muller), the manif of their dream of whom Thibaut's card summoned, as a “muse” of automatic writing. It was in a trancelike state that she would “channel” a deliberation-free scrawl she called Martian script. Thus she described the lives of extra-terrestrials—Martians and “Ultra-Martians,” extraordinary manif figures Thibaut also glimpsed on the Île de la Cité.

the Société de Gévaudan…in a Lozère sanatorium
:
I was eager to hear more from Thibaut about the Société
de Gévaudan, that he mentioned, but he knew little, and seemed not particularly interested. From our-world sources, I learned that this extraordinary collective was centered in the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital in the region of Lozère, in south-eastern France. Under the experimental leadership of Lucien Bonnafé and François Tosquelles, in the face of the vicious eugenic ideology of Vichy France, a resistance group was formed in the hospital comprising various of the medical practitioners, including avant-garde psychiatrists (later inspirations to what became known as the “antipsychiatry” movement), alongside philosophers (some of whom, such as Paul Éluard, had been close to Surrealism)—and the patients themselves. They seem to have run a clandestine publishing house, collaborated with other resistance groups, organized weapon drops, all while pursuing “institutional psychotherapy” and “geopsychiatry,” the therapeutic collaborative integration of patients into the local population. The facts are extraordinary enough in
our
timeline. But of all the untold stories of the world of New Paris, it is about the actions of the Société de Gévaudan that I would most like to know more.

A man in a coat watches eyelessly from a chessboard head
:
The man with the chessboard face seems to be a manif of a photo of Magritte taken by Paul Nougé, in 1937. Before its filmed murder, it had been rumored to walk New Paris in its bulky coat, invoking zugzwangs and gambits, turning situations into chesslike occurrences.

“the Soldier with No Name!”
:
The Soldier with No Name—
der Soldat ohne Namen
—was the persona of
an anti-Nazi German officer under which the incomparable Claude Cahun and her partner Suzanne Malherbe intervened in the war in Jersey. The two artists instigated an extraordinary campaign of propaganda among the Germans stationed there, distributing flyers and coins painted with anti-Hitler slogans into soldiers' pockets and through their car windows. The soldier, as manifest in New Paris, was said to flick such coins at all who saw him, bringing, or perhaps legitimating, a spirit of mutiny and anti-war resistance particularly among the German forces. It is no wonder it was one of the targets of the Nazis' investigations.

tiny exquisite corpses ripped into their components by machines
:
Judging by the descriptions of the exquisite corpses being experimented upon, the Nazis of Drancy had captured specimens manifest from specific collaborative works by Man Ray, Miró, Yves Tanguy, Max Morise, Picasso, Cécile and Paul Éluard, and others.

“It's a self-portrait.”…“Of Adolf Hitler.”
:
Of course we cannot see a work by even a twenty-one-year-old Adolf Hitler free of the shadow. We cannot and should not try. The sense of horror that infects the viewer of the future Führer's amateurish watercolor is ineluctable. “A Hitler,” we read in the bottom right corner of the image. “1910.” A Hitler indeed.

In our timeline, the painting from which this manif occurred was found by Company Sergeant Major Willie McKenna, traveling with comrades in Essen in 1945. According to Thibaut, it has remained unknown in the world of New Paris. It's not due to any particular fame that Sam and Thibaut were able to tell what the manif was, to recognize it.

I've come to think, rather, that they could do so because it is so very accurate a portrait.

A stone bridge straddles a stream. The waters are rendered in dilute red. Perhaps meant to be reflections of sunrise or sunset, it's quite impossible now not to see that river as a tributary of blood. Sitting at the furthest point from us on the bridge, ungainly in a child's pose, his legs dangling over the water, is a figure in brown clothes.

The artist has penciled a cross above it, and—anxiously, pathetically—written “A.H.” That is all. There is the sweep of that familiar side-parting, and below it, nothing. Bar hesitant lines for eyebrows, the face is faceless. Unmarked by any features.

The watercolor of young Hitler by young Hitler has no specificity. It is blank. Incompetence makes it a death-drive's dream of itself, in pale skin.