The Last Days of New Paris

As everyone gathered watched the black virtue: The phrase “black virtue”—“La Vertu noire”—was my informant’s. Based on this, and on his description of the presence-filled darkness behind the glass, the chaos of colors in the house seems to have been a manif of Roberto Matta’s oil painting of the same name.

There are worse things than garden airplane traps: Around 1935, Max Ernst painted more than one Garden Airplane Trap,

landscapes in which vivid, feathery, fungal, anemone-like flowers overgrow broken planes.

Flocks of bat-winged businessmen and ladies: Winged figures are hardly culturally unprecedented, but the particular flying bourgeoisie described seem to me emergent from Ernst’s 1934 collage, Une semaine de bonté: from the Tuesday of that “week of kindness,” its figures cut from catalogues and chimera-ed with draconic wings.

mono- and bi- and triplane geometries: The horrifying colorless aerial shapes that predate like antimatter are from René Magritte’s 1937 painting, Le Drapeau noir.

It’s been claimed that the work was inspired by the bombing of Guernica: in the skies of New Paris its manifs seem like remorseless machinic iterations of some Thanatos.

Huge sunflowers root all over: Though he did not explicitly refer to it, there was something in the scale of the sunflowers Thibaut described and the unease with which he described them that makes me suspect the progenitor of these oversized specimens of what Dorothea Tanning called the “most aggressive of flowers” is manifest from her 1943 painting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, in which a colossal, balefully glowing specimen threatens two girls.

up-thrust snakes that are their stems: These snake-held, eye-and-heart-petaled plants, the Lovers’ Flower,

were drawn for André Breton (“quite clumsily,” he gracelessly reports) by “Nadja,” the woman we now know to be Léona Delacourt, and reproduced in his 1928 quasi-novel named for her.

human hands crawl under spiral shells: Dora Maar’s uncanny photo-collage Sans Titre (1934) is the source of the shelled hand manifs. In the war notebooks he showed me, Thibaut describes a fishing village of tents below the Quai d’Auteuil. “People dredge with wire, bring up spiral crustaceans that crawl the wet sand sluggishly on human fingers and thumbs. Painted nails. The locals boil them. They winkle steaming hand-meat from the shells and eat without cannibal shame.”

each shark is hollow-backed, with a canoe seat: In 1929, the Belgian journal Variétés

printed the results of several Surrealist games. In “If, When,” one player writes a conditional and another, without looking, a main clause, which are then combined into a new proposition. “If,” Elsie Houston mooted, “tigers could prove how grateful they are to us,” then, the photographer Suzanne Muzard concluded, “sharks would allow themselves to be used as canoes.” As in New Paris, it seems, sharks might sometimes do.

the stumps of its struts, forty storeys up: Just as the Eiffel Tower is the most iconic image of Paris in our own world, so its astoundingly truncated, floating pinnacle is in Thibaut’s. In his Paris and the Surrealists, George Melly remarks of the tower in passing that during one discussion about “embellishing” Paris, “it was proposed that ‘only the top half be left.’ ” I’ve been unable to find any other mention of this mysterious suggestion, which clearly cleaved with the dynamics of the S-Blast.

an impossible composite of tower and human…a pair of women’s high-heeled feet: The helmeted figure that investigated the young Thibaut appears to be manifest from a 1927 exquisite corpse created by André Breton, Man Ray, Max Morise, and Yves Tanguy.

enervation infecting house after house: I have not found a specific source in Céline’s work for the manif of enervation mentioned. The overall sense described, of course, permeates his work.

Enigmarelle, foppish robot staggered out of an exhibition guide: Enigmarelle was a freakish machine figure with ringletted hair and a vacuous wax smile. The Surrealists were fascinated by the “Man of Steel,” supposedly created by the American inventor Frederick Ireland in 1904, and popular in vaudeville. They promised it would attend their 1938 exhibition (it did not). What was without question a fake in our world appears to have become, in New Paris, real.