The Last Days of New Paris

a feathered sphere the size of a fist: The feathered lookers that feed on the sight of Thibaut and Sam are manifs of the 1937 painting Object-Phantom by the astonishing Czech artist known as Toyen, after rejecting the name Marie Čermínová, (and, in Czech grammar, the feminine gender). Toyen’s work seems to have had a strong influence on the topography and inhabitants of New Paris, after the S-Blast.

a winged monkey with owl’s eyes: The monkey on the windowsill is instantly recognizable as a manif of the beast crouching at the feet of the semi-nude woman in a doorway in Dorothea Tanning’s 1942 painting The Birthday.

It stands like a person under a great weight…hedgerow chic: They did not invent the game of “Consequences,” but at 54 rue du Château in the late teens or early 1920s, the Surrealists certainly developed it, giving it the name by which we now know it—“Exquisite Corpse.” They raised it to a, perhaps the, central place in all their methodologies. Simone Kahn describes the technique and its importance: “On one of those idle, weary nights which were quite numerous in the early days of Surrealism…the Exquisite Corpse was invented…The technique of transmission was readily found: the sheet would be folded after the first player’s drawing, three or four of its lines passing beyond the fold. The next player would start by prolonging these lines and giving them shape, without having seen the first. From then on, it was delirium.” “[W]e had at our command an infallible way of holding the critical intellect in abeyance, and of fully liberating the mind’s metaphorical activity,” Breton said.

There are countless beautiful examples in the archives. Some are simple lines of black ink on paper; some are carefully colored; some are much more complex and time-consuming cut-and-paste works. Grotesque, playful, sinister, combining the iconography of politics, the components of a bestiary, industrial machinery, and dream grammar. The collaborations include the work of Oscar Dominguez, Yves Tanguy, Pierre Naville, Jeannette Tanguy, Gerardo Lizárraga, Greta Knutson, Valentine Hugo, Breton, Max Morise, André Masson, Nusch Éluard, Picasso, Man Ray, Duchamp, and many others.

The exquisite corpse of which Thibaut and Sam became unlikely companions — which can be seen as the frontispiece of this book — is manif of a 1938 composite collage of stuck-together engraved images by André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Jacqueline Lamba. It stands, a tottering pile of parts, and looks out from below its caterpillar hat with a vatic melancholy.

everyone…feels as if they are on the mezzanine of a snake-flecked staircase: Thibaut was very specific about this anxiousness he felt in the moment described, putting me in mind of Pierre Roy’s 1927 or 1928 oil painting, Danger on the Stairs, of a large snake descending and crawling, toward the viewer.

They are in rubble full of birdcages…a baby’s face the size of a room: The shooting ranges are manifs from Toyen’s various drawings of that title, dating from 1939 to 1940, variations of the flat, troubling, and troubled landscapes. All the components and inhabitants of these stretches Thibaut described to me are from these images: the giant baby’s head, for example, is depicted in Tir IV / The Shooting Gallery.

a storm of birds: Birds recur throughout Surrealist iconography, and this collective bird mentioned, the dancing figure Thibaut saw in the sky, may be Loplop, Max Ernst’s “Bird Superior.”

Chabrun, Léo Malet and Tita: The role of these and other stalwarts of La Main à plume, the clandestine Surrealist group, is, of course, more dramatic in New Paris (not that it was uninteresting or without incident in ours).

Thibaut had fought the Carlingue once, alongside Laurence Iché: I tried repeatedly to persuade Thibaut to speak more of his Main à plume comrades but he was resistant, burdened, it seemed to me, with a respect and mourning that muted him for reasons he could not articulate: their death clearly weighed very heavily on him. Particularly Iché’s. In our timeline, Iché survived the war and lived until 2007. For reasons I can’t explain, including to myself, I did not tell him this.

The manifs he described fighting alongside, that Iché was able to bring forth and direct, come from her poem “I Prefer Your Uneasiness Like a Dark Lantern,” published — in our reality — in Au fil du vent in 1942. There she writes of “[t]he eagle-headed caterpillar,” “the wind-haired eagle,” and “the bath of shredded mirrors.”