[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid: December 7, 2007]
Carco himself called it the "last Bohemia" - the artistic and literary underground which flourished, first in Montmartre then in Montparnasse, before the first World War.
But while Bohemias go down in history, history shows no signs of having done with them.
It must have been glorious, though. Fresh memories of the fin-de-siècle, Lautrec, the Moulin Rouge, Bruant's Le Mirliton. The belle époque confronted by modernity, industrialism, speed, the war machine. A period occupied by Proust and Apollinaire, Cezanne and Picasso. The latter years of l'affaire Dreyfus which produced, among other things, the concept of a vanguard role for intellectual and cultural workers in the socio-political arena.
And it was still a time when an artist could actually afford to starve in a garret just a step or two from the Seine. In A First Map of Bohemia, two weeks ago, I sketched the particular vie-de-Bohème centered around the dilapidated bateau lavoir houses on the butte de Montparnasse and the tavern-cabaret known as the Lapin Agile, the latter painted by Picasso in 1905 . The old "laundry boat" building was housed, at one time or another during this period, Picasso and Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Utrillo and Modigliani, Bracque, Mac Orlan.
The writer Pierre Mac Orlan (born Pierre Dumarchey, he was known by this near-Scottish nom de guerre and loved to wear tam o'shanters) was a fixture at the tables of the Lapin Agile, where he entertained with his accordion and whimsical songs of women and seaports. Here he was joined by his young friend François Carcopino- soon known as Francis Carco - an aspiring lyric poet from the provinces, who was already working on his first verse collection, La Bohème et Mon Cœur.
In their early twenties - only a few years younger than Picasso and Apollinaire - Mac Orlan and Carco, near-destitute and as yet unknown, were among the junior members of this circle - but they were both in Bohemia for the long run.
Carco, in fact - and this is how I came across the name - became the unofficial historian of this circle, as well as the Bohemian milieu of the Latin Quarter. His numerous novels are for the most part set in the criminal underworld which surrounded, and often impinged on, his aesthetic enclave. His 1920s memoir, The Last Bohemia: From Montmartre To The Quartier Latin, offers detailed portraits of members of the circle, from Mac Orlan, Utrillo and Jacob to forgotten figures like the strange dandy-poet Claudien.
The tone of Carco's reminiscences is reflected in the writing of a more recent French Bohemian figure. In a recent biography, Andy Merrifield emphasized the enduring attraction of Mac Orlan's oeuvre for the political philosopher and activist Guy Debord; but nowhere have I seen any reference to the echoes of Carco in Debord's books and films.
"What a lot of water has run under the bridge since our youth! How many faded dawns, how many days, weeks, seasons...I stir only ashes with my recollections - very fragile ashes which are lifted on the night wind and shaped like disembodied spirits, ghosts.."
"We derived nothing better; it seems so simple to live, to have friends and to work...The amiable ladies who shared our destinies at that time were not hard to please."
Apart from the reference to work, this could be Debord recalling the nights of the Lettrists who haunted the Rue de Buci thirty or forty years after Carco. Of that street, Carco comments on its "exceptional atmosphere and setting." He was a pioneer of psychogeography.
I was surprised that I so easily turned up a copy of Madeleine Boyd's 1928 translation of the memoir. This, together with Carco's sole English language biography by Seymour Weiner, led me in search of the work which ultimately won the romancier des Apaches membership of the Académie Goncourt: his novels.
The few English translations are long out-of-print (with one exception - see below), but can be tracked down at sites like Abe Books. And one immediately discovers that they made their way into the English-language market, for the most part, heavily disguised as "saucy" French thrillers. A dame and a smoking gun on the cover, salacious notes ("the quarter of the violent, the lustful and the damned...), low prices and low page counts.
In France, where Carco won literary prizes and was known as a representative of a grand Bohemian circle, it would be fair to say that his novels are treated as literature. In the United States, he was presented as a Gallic Mickey Spillane.
His first - Weiner would say his best - novel, is particularly badly served by its English translation. Jesus-le-Caille (1914) - literally Jesus-the-Quail, but given that its hero is a young rent boy, Jesus-the-Chicken would be appropriate. To sell it, the publishers Berkeley put a sort of busty Audrey Hepburn with a well-past-1914 hairstyle on the cover, and called it...
Weiner offers a painstaking analysis of the original text in his book on Carco, and makes it clear that one lasting aspect of the work's interest is that the characters speak authentic street argot of the period. Carco knew his apaches. This is entirely abandoned in the English version. What remains is the concrete sense of place - this is a Paris meticulously described and grey with driving rain - and taut compression of action (the very short novel has always had literary status in France: Constant, Musset, Mauriac, Colette, Radiguet, Camus).
Another perennial theme, derived partly from a clear predecessor, Charles-Louis Philippe's Bubu of Montparnasse, is the powerful, adored and overwhelmingly attractive figure of the violent pimp. Later, in Genet, the authorial voice will worship the pimp; in Carco's novels, more conventionally, the pimp is loved by his whores. In Jesus-le-Caille, the superificially power of the police informer is overwhelmed by the greater strength of Fernande's Corsican pimp.
Jesus himself is an observer who provides brief respite as Fernande's highly improbably love interest. Carco always treats homosexuality and homosexual prostitution in a dispassionate, frankly factual manner. And this was 1914.
Only A Woman, an unobjectionable rendering of Rien Qu'une Femme, departs, as Carco occasionally did, from la bohème de Paris. It's the story of a youth's hopeless passion for a woman who is first a servant in the family home, and then makes her way stolidly through prostitution and a series of lovers to contented ownership of a café-bar. It reminded me of Patrick Hamilton's The Midnight Bell.
Back on home turf, and served by a translator who was at least his equal as a novelist, Carco seems best captured for the English reader in Perversity. Despite the cover, the juicy English text by Jean Rhys (Wide Sagasso Sea) at last gives some idea of how Carco's low-life characters speak in the original French. Rhys's English is often blunt, awkward, ungrammatical, but we finally hear Carco through the crackle and hum.
This is shockingly tense and violent book. The brutality inflicted by the pimp, Bébert on the retiring, cowardly figure of Emile is unexpected, unflinchingly described, and imaginative enough that it has an awful reality. The outcome is predictable, but the route by the author arrives is not. The psychological portrait of Emile is worthy of Julien Green.
Carco wrote avowedly and shamelessly from experience. Long passages of his Last Bohemia are given over to confessions of whoring and drinking. Weiner mentions that he was picked up by the police, hopelessly inebriated, celebrating his membership of the Academie Goncourt. In his youth, he descended nightly from the rudimentary but artistic surroundings of the Lapin Agile to the lowest of stews and grog shops. The reality seeps into his prose.
Carco is not a major novelist, but doesn't deserve to be a forgotten Bohemian. And he makes a welcome break from Jack Kerouac, to whom we must shortly return.
The Jean Rhys translation of Perversity was re-issed in 2005. It reproduces the cover of yet another daft, cheap paperback edition: Amazon page.
Merrifield's book, Guy Debord (2005) is partly en-Googled here.
