Scratches by Michel Leiris

Author:Michel Leiris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sunday

Sunday outing in the car, through the Ile-de-France. Crossed Chantilly, Senlis, Compiègne, Pierrefond, Nanteuil, Mortefontaine, Ermenonville. . . . Met Sylvie, in the form of a very pretty blond shepherdess about fifteen years old, tall, svelte, with beautiful blue eyes and hair cut in Joan of Arc style. She was dressed in a long black smock with white stripes and was leading a goat to pasture.

The light in the Ile-de-France reminds me of the light in Greece, especially Olympia. It is the same thin mist or diffused light. The trees are of all different sorts, which prevents the landscape—not very hilly, but undulating slightly—from being monotonous.

There is a dreadful crowd of people coming by car to gather lilies of the valley. This is the petty bourgeoisie in all its horror; the world of shopkeepers. It is impossible to find one sympathetic figure among all these figures. Written on a banner in a little town decorated for a festival are the words: “All honor to the authorities!”

To cross Saint-Denis is always a stirring experience. One sees majestic factories with towerlike chimneys of a different sort of menace from those of feudal castles. On the Seine, people canoeing or swimming don’t seem to care about that at all. It is as though the only decent people in Paris have stayed locked up in their houses or gone to demonstrate at the Mur des Fédérés.

Under the date May 26, 1929 (the day of the traditional demonstration in memory of the Communards shot down in Père-Lachaise), I find these lines in the square-ruled notebook with the blue cardboard cover where day by day—with intervals that can last for months, sometimes even years—I write this or that detail from my life to be set down for my own use, a dream from the night before, a reflection inspired by some external event, or by my state of mind at the moment. An album of memories, a keepsake, much more than a journal or collection of thoughts. An album almost in the same sense as an album of postcards or photographs. There are documents glued to many pages, in fact: separate leaves of paper scribbled on haphazardly and inserted just as they are, sometimes because of the fetishistic value I might have accorded these original documents (still quite steeped, in their very physical being, in the circumstances in which they were written), sometimes simply because I was too lazy to recopy them; pictures of women from the theater who embodied, at a given time, a type I felt to be particularly attractive or moving (such as Adelaide Hall, the black star of the 1929 revue, Black Birds, or Damia, the cabaret singer); publicity leaflets, like the announcement of Cervantès’s Numance, produced by Jean-Louis Barrault with sets and costumes by my friend André Masson (an announcement followed by a few lines by Robert Desnos) or like the publishers blurb from my book L’Afrique fantôme (which is really the private journal I kept when I was traveling in

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