Chapter 28 II Departure from Montparnasse to the Battle (1) King Yubu

Ubu, a character created by Alfred Jarry, is always vulgar, absurdly stupid, and triumphant all day long. God is the shortcut from zero to infinity.One might ask: in what sense? Alfred Jarry Until the beginning of the First World War, the painters of the "beehive" in Montparnasse and the artists of the "laundry boat" in Montmartre had not had any exchanges in artistic creation.A river - the Seine completely separates them into two worlds.The Picasso gang crossed the Seine to the left bank, mainly to meet friends in the literary circle represented by Guillaume Apollinaire, because the voices of poets came from Montparnasse from time to time.Those clumsy poets became kings in the local area, and some so-called painters who smeared and smeared followed them and parroted their tongues.Those artists in Montparnasse were unable to follow the luxury of the wealthy customers of the two high-end taverns, Dome and Rotonde, and could only follow the rhythm of the people in the Lilac Garden and live a poor life all day long.

Lilac Garden is one of the most well-known taverns in the Montparnasse district. In the past, it was just an inn on the road leading to Fontainebleau.It owes its honor and fame to the fact that it and the Ballroom de Brie are full of people all day long.Before the war, people used to dance among the lilac bushes at the Brier Ballroom on the Observatory Street opposite the Luxembourg Gardens. After the dance, everyone went to the Lilac Garden Bistro for some refreshing drinks.University students from Avenue Saint-Michel meet poets from Montparnasse.People exchanged glasses and chatted under the shade of the statue of Marshal Ney.

The Lilac Gardens had once been a Dreyfus camp and had also served as a rear base for the Claude de la Lune, where Charles Morass often called meetings of the newspaper dealers who sold the Royalist papers for him.Monet, Renoir, Verlaine, Gide and Gustave Larouge also came here.Finally, it is worth mentioning that the person who played a major role in promoting the integration of the art circles of Montmartre and Montparnasse: Paul Fort (1872-1960), French poet, died in 1912 , Known as the "French Poet Prince". . Most of his "French Ballads", with a few exceptions, are no longer sung.The famous line that is still often sung is:

The little pony struggles in bad weather, but he has a lot of courage! But he was still a prince, a prince among poets.After Verlaine, Mallarmé and Leon Dierx, after a referendum organized by the five newspapers "Franchi", "Gil Blas", "Comoedia", "News" and "Wolf", he Appointed as the heir of the recently deceased Dilks, Prince Poet. 350 literati voted for it, and Paul Faure was regarded as the best heir to the French literary tradition. Paul Fore was penniless.When people asked him what he lived on, he smiled and replied decisively: "With the pen in my hand!"

He copied his work repeatedly, and sold the copies to collectors of manuscripts and authentic works. Every Tuesday, he called his partners to a party at the Lilac Garden Tavern, which was owned by Papa Combe at that time.The people present happily drank, sang and danced, and recited poems. Paul Fore, an activist, spoke with eloquence and acted like a musketeer.Thin, with long hair and a loose beard, he wears a black tie and a jacket buttoned up to the collar. He laughs, clinks glasses with everyone, tells stories, and then leads them to dance.At 12 o'clock in the middle of the night, he often improvised a few talented poems in his harsh thin voice; sometimes, he stood on the table and sang until dawn with the accompaniment of the piano and others.

His friend Jean Baratimantoboulos (pen name Jean Moreas, who is extremely rich in cultural knowledge, often leads his readers to the great writers Chateaubriand, Vogelas, Valles, etc.) Or Mrs. Lafayette's house) listening, laughing, and composing poetry with him through the smoke and booze.He sat drunkenly at the table, his top hat lowered to his monocle, which drooped over his dyed beard, which bobbed up and down with the movement of his mouth, which was slanted to the right, spitting out as much as he could. He flattered Bales and Moras with all his might.His starting point for doing this was not to offend Paul Leoto, secretary of the editorial department of the "French Courier" magazine.This was Leoto's first visit to Luo Tongde Tavern, but he swore he would never come again.Two reasons: Jean Moreas's filth (a well-known and attested fact) was unbearable; Sold only 500 copies in five and a half years...

It was with Moreas and Salmon that Paul Faure co-founded the famous magazine Poetry and Prose in 1905.Three friends borrowed 200 francs, bought a batch of stamps, and sent 2,000 letters to the first pre-estimated subscribers. "Poetry and Prose" has been an immortal masterpiece of French literature before the war.Its first readers are: Maeterlinck, Stuart Merrill, Balles, Gide, Moras, Jules Renard, Apollinaire... The magazine is located in its founder's Home on Rue Boissonnade.The title of the magazine was the idea of ​​Pierre-Louis.The purpose of the magazine was "to advocate a reform of the content and form of French literature and to unite the poets and writers of prose who had long inspired an interest in high literature and lyric poetry".

The symbolist troubadour appeals to the power of the image, but that is a mysterious power beyond analysis. The magazine Poetry and Prose unites the various genres of "Young Literature".Although Symbolism had reached its zenith several years earlier, Paul Fore was still a pioneer of this artistic genre. The great apologists of this school were Henri de Regnier, Saint-Paul Roux, and Jean Moreas, who changed his position three times a day.They fought against Zola in realism, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Lamartine in romanticism, Bonville, Legonte de Risler, Baudelaire, and Gaubet in the Parnassians.Symbolism condemned them for focusing only on analysis and criticism in poetry, rather than appealing to young people.They attacked not only the above-mentioned men, but also Flaubert and Cartier Mendes, who regarded Verlaine as a very bad poet.

Symbolism has only a short period of ten years in the history of literature, which can only be regarded as a transitional stage. The fighting task of symbolism and post-symbolism is only a matter of poetic rhythm. It was necessary to get rid of the traditional rules and regulations, liberate Alexandrian verse from its twelve-meter meter, and strive to make a rapid progress towards free verse. The magazine Poetry and Prose discussed the issue extensively and deeply, and even Mallarmé replied to it by saying that he regretted the "excessive use of the national rhythm in the Alexandrian verse, which, like the national flag, can only be It should only be used in very special circumstances."

The first issue of the magazine had 400 subscribers.Before long, subscribers were coming from all over the world.Magazines gave books as gifts to subscribers, and advertised in publishers, bookstores, bookcase manufacturers, banks, and financial institutions. The "Poetry and Prose" Publishing House was founded in 1910, and organized many large-scale receptions for nearly 500 poets who are loved by the people.On Tuesday, there were fewer people attending the celebration in Lilac Garden, but the scene was equally lively.The congratulatory crowd was not only from Montparnasse, many people walked across the Seine River from Montmartre to the celebration scene.When they pushed open the door of the Lilac Garden Tavern for Paul Four's Tuesday, the painters of The Laundry Boat saw not an unfamiliar scene: in addition to the excitement and frenzy they were all too familiar with, Coupled with the poetry reciting and crossword activities of the poets in the Lilac Garden, as well as the lively and noisy atmosphere, it is really enviable.

The artists of Montmartre's Lavignon Square had begun to come to the Lilac Garden as early as 1905 to socialize with Apollinaire's friend Alfred Jarry.It was Jarry who taught them their love of misusing guns.Andre Breton said when talking about him: "Who is Jarry? Is it the one who likes to play with pistols?" Surrealists respect him and share two of the same hobbies with him: writing Poetry and live ammunition. Guillaume Apollinaire was the first person to aim at Jari with a gun. He introduced Jari and said: Alfred Jarry seemed to me like a river, a young river (beardless and soaked in wet clothes) personified.The drooping mustache, the hem of the tuxedo swinging from side to side, the soft shirt, the cyclist's shoes, all of which make people feel soft and docile: the demigod is still wet, as if he just It wasn't long before he left the bed that made him sweat profusely. [Excerpt from Guillaume Apollinaire's "The Exciting Modern Writer", published in 1975] Jarry was the inventor of the pataphysique (fictional solution) of that era.Hubu and Forstrow are the proponents of this theory.What is a fictional solution? It's a skill we invented, and when it needs to be applied, it's generally felt. This skill is: not according to customs and conventions, but to observe the world from the special phenomenon, anomaly of things (Rene Dormer, Boris Vian and Raymond Canot later developed Jarry in the "fictional solution" research work). When Apollinaire met Jarry, the latter had published a large number of articles in "Literary Art" and "French Messenger", and the publishing house had also published several of his works, such as "The Enemy of Christ-Caesar" , "Days and Nights" and "Super Male".In particular, he was long regarded as the author of a play which aroused great public outrage among Parisian audiences. On December 9, 1896, the orthodox Parisians sat in the theater of "Famous Works" patiently waiting to see the play.But just after watching the first monologue: "Fuck it!" The whole theater exploded, and the entire audience was in an uproar. They stood up suddenly and protested in every possible way. Alfred Jarry lives in Rue Cassette, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, near the Luxembourg Gardens. In a house in the No. 7 courtyard.The house may not have been his image, but it suited him perfectly.The room was on the fourth and a half floors, and the small door was half covered by the stairs.Guillaume Apollinaire and Ambroise Volald often visited his house.They knocked lightly on the small door a few times, and the door leaf was pushed outward, just touching the chest of the visitor.A voice came from the room, asking the visitor to bend down so that the tenant could see who it was. If it is a friend, Jali invites him into the house.After entering the house, people found that the room was very small and the roof was very low, and they had to bend over to walk indoors.The landlord divided a house into two from the middle, and divided the upper and lower into two rooms, and rented it out to short tenants.In this way, the landlord can get double the rent.Volald, a tall man, narrated: Jarry could just stand upright indoors, and he lived with a lovely owl.The top of the big bird's head turned white because it often touched the plaster ceiling, and the writer Jerry's head sometimes touched the roof, leaving a few strands of white hair on the top of his head.Today, people don't know what the owl looked like, whether it was a living creature of flesh and blood, or a large ceramic bird.Because Andre Breton often complained about the stench of owls in Jarry's room. The bed that Jali sleeps on is very low, and he always lies on the bed when he writes.On the wall hangs a portrait of the writer, painted for him by his friend Rousseau.People saw that there seemed to be only a parrot or a chameleon accompanying Yali in this room.According to André Salmon, people especially noticed the modification of the painting by the model himself: Jarry cut a hole in the body of the portrait the same size as the ventilation hole in the wall.Jarry could not recognize himself from the portrait at all. When he wants to stretch his legs, he rides his bike to a park by the Seine.Jarry bought a 16-square-meter land near the real estate of Valette, the president of the "French Courier" magazine, and his wife, the novelist La Hilde (her real name is Mrs. Eymery).He used all the land to build a small wooden house: a triangular altar.In the hot summer, he lived there and ate the fish he caught. Yali usually has a small appetite, except when he eats and drinks for jokes.One day he and Salmon went to a bistro in the rue de Seine, sat down at a table, and called the proprietor: "A bottle of Cognac, please." "Anything else?" "No. I'd like a cup of coffee too." "But……" "A cup of coffee, a portion of Swiss Gruyère cheese, and a portion of candied fruit." "This is the dessert you ordered!" "Yes, and then, half a chicken." "and then?" "And then, a bowl of pasta." "Would you like steak?" "Blood." "All these at the same time?" "Serve in the order you ordered just now." The tavern owner smiled slyly and nodded in agreement. "After the meat, I'll have some radishes...and a soup," Alfred added. "anything else?" "Yes, a bottle of Pernaud... the highest alcohol." At this moment, the tavernkeeper put his hand on the shoulder of the customer, sighed, and said: "Please stop here! You are going to ruin your body!" "Get your paws off! Bring me a glass of red ink." "almost there." The ink has arrived.Yari put a sugar cube in the ink cup and drank all the ink in one gulp. That day was his specific recipe day.Usually most of the time, he eats only cold meat and pickles. But he drank a lot of wine every day, and his favorite drink was absinthe-he named it "Holy Grass Wine".According to his best friend Rahilde, from waking up to lunch, Jarry usually drank two liters of white wine and three bottles of Pernaud wine; then wine, coffee with grounds as digestive wine, before dinner And a few glasses of aperitif; before going to bed, a portion of Pernaud, a portion of vinegar, and a drop of ink to pamper the stomach. He was never seen drunk.Only once did Valette's daughter play a trick: he replaced the wine in his glass with purified water, and he fell ill... Jali doesn't love women, and no one has ever seen him have any connection with a woman.Jarry is very proud of this. Alfred Jarry, regardless of time, regardless of occasion, as he likes, whenever he is happy, he shoots when he draws his pistol: he shoots when someone blocks his way, he shoots when a child displeases him, people in the tram Too many were unable to get into the car and he shot.Even if he did not carry a pistol on occasion, he would carry other weapons. When Jarry met Apollinaire for the first time, the two of them wandered around Paris all night.While strolling in the Rue Saint-Germain, a man came up to them and asked where there was a convenient place.Jarry pulled out a pistol from his pocket, aimed at the stranger, and ordered him to back five meters.He didn't tell him which way to go until the visitor retreated five meters away. Shooting six shots in a row is the specialty of Yu Bu, the protagonist in Yari's plays, and there are also countless stories about Yali playing with guns. One night, Jarry was having dinner at Maurice Renard's house, and Picasso's friend, the sculptor Manolu, came to his side, just wanting to get to know him and make friends.This made Jali angry, and he ordered the sculptor to leave there as soon as possible and let him be quiet for a while.The Spaniard remained where he was, Jarry drew his pistol and fired at the curtain. Another time, he was in a tavern, sitting next to a lady.For some mysterious reason, disgusted by a customer next to him, he stood up, drew his pistol, and fired into a mirror.The mirrors that suddenly became shattered were scattered all over the place. The people present panicked and were in a mess, but Yali was calm as if nothing had happened.He sat down again, turned to the woman next to him and said, "Okay, now the mirror is broken, let's continue talking." One day, he tried to open a wine bottle with a pistol and shot in the yard of his rental house, panicked The bewildered landlady shouted: "Sir, stop! You will kill my child!" "What does that matter, we'll give you another one!" He argued forcefully. One evening, he went to a concert.He was wearing a paper shirt with a black tie drawn in Chinese ink.At the ticket gate, his attire caused dissatisfaction among the staff, who sent him to the top balcony of the concert hall.He was silent and made no response at the time.However, when the audience was quiet and the conductor was ready to start the performance, he suddenly stood up and shouted: "This is really outrageous! How can you let those people in the first three rows who disturb the audience with their musical instruments enter?" field?" On May 28, 1906, after receiving the last sacrament and drafting his will, Jarry wrote a letter to his best friend Lahild, in which he wrote: Old Yubu, who should be rested, will try to sleep.He was convinced that the mind was still functioning after the man had disintegrated and decayed, and that his dream was heaven.Old man Yu Bu may be about to rest forever, and under certain conditions, he is very eager to return to the triangular altar. The next day, he added the following postscript to the original letter: I reopened the letter I wrote yesterday.The doctor came just now, and he firmly believed that I was saved. [Excerpt from Alfred Jarry by Jacques-Henri Levesque, published in 1987] He was indeed saved, and Jerry lived for another year and a half.When he visited the doctor's house every day, he always carried two pistols and a lead-covered club with him.His situation was more dire than ever: wearing clothes his friends had discarded, in debt and suffering from tuberculosis.He had reached the end of the road, but kept it from everyone.He is silently waiting for the end of his life. On October 29, 1907, when people went up to knock on the door on the fourth and a half floors, Jarry refused to open the door.Valette asked someone to pry open the door lock, and saw the writer lying on the bed, unable to move.They took him to the mission hospital.For two days, he kept repeating in a low voice: "I'm looking, I'm looking, I'm looking..." The doctor examined him, and the patient was surprisingly calm.Ya was bloodless, her liver was ruptured, her pulse was weak, but she didn't complain or groan. On November 1, 1907, he suffered from tuberculous meningitis, and the treatment was ineffective, so he passed away.He also suffered from chronic alcoholism, but this was not the cause of his death. Jari bequeathed the triangular altar he built to his sister as a legacy.It is said (first by Max Jacobs) that he left his pistol to Picasso.No one knows the whereabouts of his bicycle - a Clement 96 racing car bought from others for 86 francs, and he still failed to pay the money until his death. Jarry died young.Alfred Jarry, who was only 36 years old, did not have time to play the role that should belong to him in the literary world.His debauchery and a series of absurd things he did constitute a language that young people of his contemporaries can understand.The first person to understand Alfred Jarry and understand his language was Guillaume Apollinaire: Alfred Jarry is a rare genius in the literary world.There is infinite literary connotation in any of his actions, even in all his mischief. [Excerpt from Guillaume Apollinaire's "The Exciting Modern Writer", published in 1975] The second is André Breton: ... For a long time people have gone further than the art for art's sake, and have considered it necessary to strictly separate life from art.But starting with Jarry, this point of view was questioned, and finally disappeared completely in principle. [Excerpt from André Breton's "Anthology of Black Humor", published in 1966] Alfred Jarry imitates Hubo, a drama character he defines as a "perfect anarchist" in his daily life, and he always hopes that he can become a person like Yubo, so how to do it? What is the best memory of Yali? The tragedy of Jarry is that, in fact, his bad reputation comes from an impostor: he is not old Yubo, and he never was old Yubo. The dramatic work that sanctifies him was not actually written by him. "King Yu Bu" is actually a collective work, and it can be said that he did not participate in the creation of the play at all.Old Man Hub was done by some students of Rennes Middle School in the Brittany region of France.They created the play to mock their physics teacher, old man Hebert.The teacher had no authority, and students often took pleasure in booing in his classes.When Jarry came to the school at the age of 16, the play already existed.The title of the play at that time was "The Poles", and the signed author was the Moran brothers.Jarry only changed the name of the play and the name of the protagonist.The protagonist's name, Ubu, undoubtedly comes from Hebert, and students often call him Hebee or Eb, so Ubu obviously evolved from Hebee. The anti-militarist scene in the play may have been added by Jarry on the basis of the original work.But "Green Candle" and "Cornegidouille" are not from his hands.The notorious prologue "Fuck!" was not written by him.There is the testimony of Charles Moran as follows: We were all kids at the time.Our parents absolutely disapproved of us using the words in the play; so we came up with the idea of ​​inserting a lot of "r"s in the lines.That's all. [Excerpt from Charles Morin's article "From Hubes to Rousseau the Customs Clerk" in the New Review magazine, 1947] However, thanks to Yali, Yu Bu was able to travel around the world.It was Jarry who staged "Ubu-King", initially for the Lyceum Lyceum in Rennes, where the actors were students.Then, other places gradually began to stage this play, and some places even adapted the play into a puppet show. After "Ubu King" was staged in Paris, enthusiastic reviews began.People compare it with the works of Shakespeare and Rabelais. "Poetry and Prose" pays homage to "this comical enduring tragedy, a masterpiece of French genius".Long after Jarry's death, "French Action" still raved about this satire of Shakespeare, Lenin, and advancing Bolshevism... .The Moran brothers kept silent. They didn't speak or express their opinions, but deep down in their hearts, they must think that what happened before them was ridiculous.True, they had been a little bit aggrieved by Jarry's role in the matter, the self-proclaimed sole author of plays for the collective, but they had not exposed him.Their explanation for their attitude is: the creation of the play was just a joke, to satirize the people of that era, especially those elites in the literary world.Such jokes make them happy.Because they have always maintained close contact with their classmate Yali, and they also know that Yu Bu, a dramatic character, has helped him a lot at the beginning of his career, and they are also happy that this farce has brought him such a great reputation.In the end, they also agreed with Jarry to revise the title of the play and link the protagonist with Hébert and Wren High School.In the eyes of the play's two authors, Hu Bu remains a joke, a farce, and more precisely, a hoax. Even if he is the author of "Yub the Enslaved" or "Yub the Cuckold", even if the character Yu Bu did appear in Jarry's works, it does not mean that "King Yu Bu" belongs to Jarry.His friend Ambroise Vollard was well aware that during the war he had written a sequel to the Nordic saga: The Resurrection of Old Man Ub, illustrated by Rouault. This act of stealing other people's copyrights put a heavy pressure on Jarry's fate and his own psychology.He once poured out his heart when talking about the work "The Poles", but little is known about it: People used "King Yubu" to overwhelm me.It was supposed to be a prank by a middle school kid, and it wasn't my hand... what I did was something else.But all of them used cloth to block my way forward.I had to talk about him, imitate him, live his life.That's all people want! [Excerpt from Charles Morin's article "From Hubes to Rousseau the Customs Clerk" in the New Review magazine, 1947] Valette and Lahielde's daughter testified that Jari was always called "Hubo" and that he was never heard to be called by any other name: It seemed to be a mask, and in our house, being a family member, he could take it off sometimes.Sometimes, all of us talk and act like old man Yu Bu. [Excerpt from Charles Morin's article "From Hubes to Rousseau the Customs Clerk" in the New Review magazine, 1947] The role of Yu Bu violated Jarry's life and soul.But he still plays like that all the time, no matter what others call him, he will accept it.He was molded on the stage of life, as was Macbeth, the tragic figure in Shakespeare's plays-King of Ireland from 1040 to 1057. ——Annotation, also like Falstaff, Shakespeare's play character—1379-1459, British captain, during the war between Britain and France, served as the governor of Normandy, Mina and Anjou in France. , Gao Kangda Gargantua, a character in Rabelais' play, has a very big appetite.and Polichinelle, the hunchbacked, high-pitched clown figure in farce or puppetry. .Under the burden of life, he fought hard, straightened his waist and shouted "Merdre", and in the salons of the upper class, he created a sensation with provocations and rudeness.Such behavior is more a sign of weakness for ultra-liberal, anarchist militants.His whole life was like a one-act tragicomedy.