A Note on Lautréamont Although Les Chants de Maldoror has won acceptance as a classic of French literature—there have been at least three new editions with different Paris publishers since the War—little information has been unearthed by scholars about its author, Isidore Ducasse, who took the mellifluous pen-name of Comte de Lautreamont. The best summary of the verifiable facts is, I believe, in the introduction by Maurice Saillet to the Livre de Poche edition of the Oeuvres published in 1963. 1 have drawn heavily on Saillet in correcting the foreword to Mal­ doror which I wrote in 1943 when New Directions first published the Guv Wernham translation. Ducasse’s birth and death certificates have been found, and the texts of six short letters written between 1868 and 1870, the year of his death. Copies of the first printings of Maldoror (1868-9) and Poésies (1870) survive, but no manuscripts or other literary papers. There are some verbal accounts transmitted from schoolmates and others who knew him casually . . . but apart from these—almost nothing—we have the mystery [ V ] A oNte on of an unconventional young man who died early (at 24) and who was not, apparently, accounted of much importance while he lived. The name of Lautreamont begins to appear in French letters only toward the turn of the century; at that time a second edition of Maldoror, published by Genonceaux in 1890, caught the attention of such writers as Huys- mans, Léon Bloy, Maeterlinck. Jarry, Fargue, Larbaud, and Remy de Gourmont. Real fame came only much later when the Surrealists and Dadaists hailed Maldoror as a masterpiece and canonized Lautreamont as an an­ cestor of Surrealism. The Surrealists attempted to cre­ ate a personality and a biography for their hero, but it seems to be largely fictitious; the identification with a Ducasse who was a radical orator done away with by the secret police of Napoleon III has been disproved. Isidore Lucien Ducasse was born April 4, 1846, in Montevideo, Uruguay, where his father, Francois Du- casse, was first a clerk and later Chancellor in the French Consulate. Francois Ducasse had emigrated from a small town near Tarbes, just north of the Pyrenees, and mar­ ried a girl from the same region, Jacquette Celestine Davezac, who died, some think by suicide, eighteen months after the birth of Isidore. Nothing is known of the poet’s boyhood in Uruguay beyond the reference to its civil wars at the end of the first canto of Maldoror. Francois Ducasse may have had business outside the Consulate for he seems to have been well off in later life. In 1859 he returned to Tarbes on a visit, taking Isidore with him. He left the boy there, presumably in the care of relatives, who placed him from 1859 to 1862 at the lyceé of Tarbes, and then from 1863 to 1865 at the Lyceé Imperial in nearby Pau. Lautreamont Thanks to the research of Francois Alicot, who tracked down a surviving schoolmate, Paul Lespès, we do have a picture of Lautreamont in adolescence. Lespès remembers “a tall, thin young fellow, a bit round-shouldered, pale, with hair falling over his fore­ head and a sharp, high voice.’' His appearance was “not attractive" and he had a “distant manner" of “haughty gravity." Isidore’s health was frail; he was plagued with migraine headaches. “Most of the time he was rather sad and silent, as if turned in on himself." Lespès recalls that Ducasse was a fair student but hated Latin verse and showed little interest in mathe­ matics, although later, in Maldoror, he would write: O austere mathematics! 1 have not forgotten you since your learned teachings, sweeter than honey, distilled themselves through my heart like refreshing waves. “He liked Racine and Corneille and above all Sophocles' Oedipus Rex . . . particularly the scene in which Oedipus, knowing the truth at last and having torn out his eyes, cries in pain and curses his fate. He felt that Jocasta, to complete the tragic horror, should have killed herself on the stage." Lespès reports that the “ex­ cesses (outrances) of thought and style" in Ducasse’s compositions so dismayed the professor of rhetoric that on one occasion he punished the boy by keeping him in after school. Ducasse left the lycée at Pau in 1865. There is no trace of his raking entrance examinations or attending any university. In fact, the record is blank until 1868, when we know he was living in Paris. Saillet deduces that he may have returned to Montevideo, spending as much as two years there with his father. He may also vii ] A Note on have spent some time in Bordeaux and made literary contacts there, since later he was to enter the first canto of Maldoror in a poetry contest conducted by Evariste Carrance, a Bordelais editor. The publisher Genonceaux reported that Ducasse “came to Paris intending to study at the Polytechnique or the School of Mines,” but no enrollment records have been traced at cither institution. From the letters to his father's Paris banker, Darasse, it seems clear that the elder Ducasse provided a regular allowance, suffi­ cient to enable Isidore to live in comfortable lodgings (Saillet infers this from their street addresses), and, from time to time, extra amounts to finance the print­ ing of his work. The first canto of Maldoror was published in August, 1868, privately printed by Balitout, Questroy et Cie, and with no author's name on the title page. A few months later, Ducasse arranged with Albert Lacroix of the Librairie Internationale, Boulevard Montmartre, for the publication of the complete work, making a deposit of 400 francs. Lacroix has left us this description of the author: “He was a tall young man, dark-complexioned, clean-shaven, nervous, but orderly (rangé) and hard­ working. He wrote only at night, seated at his piano. He would declaim his sentences as he forged them, punctuating his harangues (prosopopées) with chords on the piano." It is in this edition that the pseudonym Lautreamont first appears, based, no doubt, on Eugene Sue’s historical novel, Latréaumont. Lacroix sent the manuscript to his partner, a printer in Brussels named Verbocckhoven, and in the summer of ’69 the author received twenty copies. Then some­ one got cold feet; none of the books were put on sale. [ viii ] a completely different conception. The dedication to Poésies speaks of further install­ ments to follow, but if more were written, they have never come to light. A death certificate tells us that Isidore Lucien Ducasse, “bachelor, no further informa­ tion, ” died in his lodgings at 7 rue du Faubourg-Mont­ martre early on the morning of November 24, 1870. His body was interred the next day in the cimetière du Nord; about twenty years later, the City of Paris con­ demned the site for housing and the remains of those buried there were deposited in the Pantin Ossuary. The critical literature on Lautréamont is now ex­ tensive; an excellent bibliography of it will be found in the revised edition of the Oeuvres published by José Corti, Paris, 1961. That edition also contains the valu­ able essays on Lautréamont by Genonceaux, Gourmont, Jaloux, Breton, Soupault, Gracq, Caillois, and Blanchot. Read in sequence, these essays are fascinating literary history, the record of how a reputation is made and changes. But the Corti edition should be supplemented with Maurice Saillet’s “Notes pour une vie d’Isidore Ducasse et de ses écrits" in the Livre de Poche paper­ back. Saillct, a thorough scholar, has researched every possible source of information, published and unpub­ lished, ou Lautréamont, including those in Uruguay, and I find his synthesis judicious and convincing. A copy of the superb Skira edition of Maldoror with illustrations by Salvador Dali may be seen in the library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. J. Laughlin June, 1965 [ * ] May it please Heaven that the reader, emboldened and become of a sudden momentarily ferocious like what he is reading, may trace in safety his pathway through the desolate morass of these gloomy and poisonous pages. For unless he is able to bring to his reading a rigorous logic and a spiritual tension equal at least to his distrust, the deadly emanations of this book will imbibe his soul as sugar absorbs water. It would not be well that all men should read the pages that are to follow; a few only may savor their bitter fruit without danger. So, timid soul, before penetrating further into such uncharted lands, set your feet the other way. Listen well to what I tell you: set your feet the other way like the eyes of a son who lowers his gaze respectfully before the august countenance of his mother; or rather, like a wedge of flying, cold-trembling cranes which in the winter time, with much medi­ tation, fly powerfully through the silence, full sail, [1]