Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [90]
It was this more technical meaning of the term fourth dimension that most interested writers such as Apollinaire, who sought to find literary forms to express it. He began to abandon the traditional method of printing poems on the page in horizontal lines — instead creating arrangements of words that were intended to express as much as the words themselves. One of these so-called calligrammes was about time, and the words formed the shape of a pocket watch. Another formed the shape of the Eiffel Tower, which had a radio antenna at the top to transmit messages.
In some of Apollinaire’s prose works, he invented characters who moved across time and space simultaneously (a concept later termed simultanism). Apollinaire advised others to read the Fantômas novels as rapidly as possible, to heighten the impression of simultanism. In Apollinaire’s story “Le roi-lune” (“The Moon-King”), the hero wears a belt that enables him to make love to all the women of all times. A story in another work, L’hérésiarque et Cie., has as its central character the Baron d’Ormesan, whose toucher à distance enables him to appear simultaneously in many places around the world. 20 Not by coincidence, the baron was a movie director, for Apollinaire, like Picasso, was a great admirer of this new art form. (Apollinaire once wrote that typography itself was “brilliantly finishing its career, at the dawn of an age of new modes of reproduction, which are the cinema and the phonograph.” 21 ) French filmmakers had already discovered special effects, and Paris audiences had seen time speeded up and people disappear from one place only to reappear in another an instant later, exactly as Apollinaire’s characters did. One reason Apollinaire admired the Fantômas detective novels was that the antihero was able to create endless new identities for himself, changing with his surroundings.
Playing the role of “ringmaster of the arts,” Apollinaire introduced Picasso to Alfred Jarry, the playwright who had shocked and enraged Paris in 1896 with his play Ubu roi — not so much for its scatalogical dialogue as for its ferocious ridicule of bourgeois life and values. Jarry was known for his personal eccentricities — even in Montmartre, a milieu where eccentricity was commonplace. He would sometimes sit in a café and in a monotone utter endless strings of nonsensical phrases. He liked to carry two pistols, displaying them openly and occasionally firing them into the air. People enjoyed recalling the occasion when a stranger asked Jarry for a light, and he fired his pistol at the end of the man’s cigarette.
Jarry’s personal style as well as his artistic vision was rooted in his passionate anarchism. He saw society as corrupt and took every opportunity to mock it. Picasso too had been associated with anarchists in both Spain and France, and in fact the French police kept an eye on him, probably for this reason. (The police dossier on him is sealed until the year 2033.) The poet André Salmon, another member of what people called La Bande à Picasso (“the Picasso Gang”), traveled in anarchist circles and had even met Jules Bonnot, who was to achieve fame as the head of a gang that carried out spectacular crimes in the name of anarchy. When Picasso and Salmon first met, Picasso had recommended a book of anarchist poetry, which included calls to violence such as
But our mission is big.
If we kill, if we die,
It’s for the wealthy pig
Asleep in his money-sty!22
Apollinaire embraced anarchy too, but his was