"Guy Debord" by Andy Merrifield

 A surprisingly readable biography of political thinker and activist, writer and film-maker, Guy Debord who was influential in the 1968 Paris riots. 

I became interested in Debord when reading M John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again which is influenced by the idea of the dérive which this book defines as "drift" and originated as "a dreamy trek through varied Parisian passageways, forever on foot, wandering for hours, usually at night, identifying subtle moods and nuances of neighborhoods.” (Ch 2) Then I was impelled to read this biography after encountering Guy Debord in Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake: I think she bases her character of Bruno Lacombe on Debord. 

I was expecting the biography to be rather dry and not a little hard to understand. How wrong I was. Despite a penchant for lists, Merrifield is a fluent writer so his prose is easy to read, he never delves to deeply into the philosophy and what he does explain is reasonably comprehensible. Add in the fact that Debord had an interesting life, and that the fringe politics of the era was filled with swashbuckling (if brutal) factions such as the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Faction,  and that there is an actual real-life murder mystery in chapter four, and this academic text became a page turner. 

The young Debord was a student at the Sorbonne in the early 1950s but this seems more a rationale for living in Paris, drinking heavily, frequenting the cafes, talking philosophy and becoming involved with Leftist students. He never finished his degree. Instead, he became a leading member of the Lettrists before breaking away to found the Situationist International (which at its founding included a leading member of the London Psychogeographical Association). The Situationists used the technique of détournement to satirise the establishment. 

He began making films and writing books. Presumably somebody sponsored him because he never seems to have had any conventional employment: “Nobody knew how Debord got by. He had no job, didn't want a job, opting instead to reside in a rich and happy poverty.” (Ch 2). He came to prominence with "The Society of the Spectacle" which became a suces d'estime on its publication in 1967 and is thought to have been the catalyst for the 1968 student riots in Paris, in which Debord participated although he was nearly twice the age of many of the other leaders. 

By now he was a celebrity of the left-wing and he continued writing (and making films) while living mostly abroad. Later he returned to France spending summers in rural seclusion and winters in Paris. He died by suicide after suffering from alcohol-induced peripheral neuritis.

He was a fan of the proto-surrealist poems of Lautreamont and a friend of Alexander Trocchi who wrote Cain's Book and invited him to New York where he lived in a barge on the Hudson river. He identified with the romantic bad boy characters from French literature and history, such as the mediaeval poet Francois Villon, the novelists Louis-Ferdinand Celine (author of Journey to the End of Night) and Pierre Mac Orlan and Cardinal Gondi, the 17th century cardinal whose street protests against Louis XIV led to the rebellion called the Fronde. Cardinal Gondi was a colourful character. “The cardinal was an odd mix of Catholic holy man - who never actually believed - and libertine. He was a priest and a duellist,  a courtier and a conspirator. He womanized while he spread the gospel ... he simultaneously incited mob violence and earnestly preached peace. He was duplicitous and conniving, both worshipped and reviled, as he indulged in a life of intrigue and bewildering adventure.” (Ch 3) Debord liked to be called Gondi.

Has he a legacy? Merrifield clearly thinks that capitalism has triumphed since Debord's time and that this make Debord's critique even more important: “History has never seemed so open, so unstable ... wars and terrorism, financial meltdown, ethnic cleansing, religious conflicts, class exploitations, epidemic diseases, irresponsible American imperial might. More than 1 billion people now scramble to make ends meet on less than a dollar a day. Meanwhile, the net worth of the world's 358 richest individuals equals the combined income of the world's poorest 45 per cent - some 2.3 billion people.” (Ch 6)

Selected quotes:

• “As they shifted in and out of public spaces, they were intent on accumulating rich qualitative data, grist to their ‘psychogeographical’ mill, documenting odors and tonalities of the cityscape, its unconscious rhythms and conscious melodies: ruined facades, foggy vistas of narrow, sepia-soaked streets, nettle-ridden paving stones, empty alleyways at 3am, menace and mayhem, separation and continuity.” (Ch 1)
• “If the Sacre-Coeur trampled over the legacy of the Communards, Pompidou [centre built in 1969] did likewise over the soixante-huitards.” (Ch 2)
• "The unitary city would be disruptive and playful ... it would emphasize forgotten and beleaguered nooks and crannies, mysterious corners, quiet squares, teaming neighborhoods, pavements brimming with strollers and old timers with berets sitting on park benches.” (Ch 2)
• “Humans are protean beings, desiring differentiated practice, needing meaningful and fulfilling activity.” (Ch 2)
• “Society has always rewarded mediocrity, always rewarded those who kowtow to its unfortunate laws.” (Ch 2)
• “In leisure time, workers became consumers ... private life became the domain of the advertisement ... of movie and pop stars and glamorous soap operas, of dreaming for what you already know is available, at a cost.” (Ch 3)
• “Mass consumption and commodities fill the frame and pollute the mind ... The diffuse spectacle thrives off the gadget, the gimmick, the fad. ... in accumulation for accumulation’s sake.” (Ch 3)
• “Dramatic weather patterns aren't too dissimilar to storms that break out across the economic and political landscape. Each, after all, takes place when the temperature is hottest, when the pressure dial approaches danger level. Often nobody pays attention to the inclement forecast. In such heat, wealth accumulates, business booms and stock prices grow, until, suddenly, the bubble bursts and the heavens open.” (Ch 4)
• “Truth ... becomes like storytelling; each tale is difficult to adjudicate, because everything has relative plausibility.” (Ch 5)

In the Cafe of Lost Youth, a novel by Patrick Modiano, takes its title from a line in Debord's masterpiece film ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’ (We Wander in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire)April 2025; 153 pages

A beautifully readable book about a surprisingly romantic philosophe.

Published in 2005 as part of their series of Critical Lives by Reaktion Books.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway

The classic manual on how to be a writer living in Paris.

In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway moved to Paris with his first wife, Hadley, and baby son, gave up journalism and tried to eke out a living writing short stories. This memoir, based on notebooks he had stored in the basement of the Ritz hotel in trunks made for him by Louis Vuitton, describes his life surrounded by other writers and how he learned to write. 

If, like me, you want to be a writer, this is fascinating stuff. But it's also a roll-call of literary celebrities from James Joyce (author of Dubliners, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake) to F Scott Fitzgerald (author of The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon), Ford Madox Ford (author of The Good Soldier and the Parade's End tetralogy), Ezra Pound (a major influence on The Waste Land by T S Eliot) and Gertrude Stein among others. 

It is particularly funny about FMF: not only did Hemingway think him smelly and dishevelled: “I always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room.” (Ford Madox Ford and The Devil's Disciple). FMF also made inaccurate statements, sometimes lying, sometimes contradicting himself, but always insisted that what he was saying was correct. An example is when he misidentifies Aleister Crowley as Hilaire Belloc.

FSF is more tragicomic: he is ridiculous but doomed to die young having failed to fulfil his immense promise: “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he only remembered when it had been effortless.” (Scott Fitzgerald)

Through it all, Hemingway is learning to write:

• “I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
• “But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made ... and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know’.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
• “I was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
• “She had also discovered many truths about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition that were valid and valuable.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
• “You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen your story and make people feel something more than they understood.” (Hunger Was Good Discipline)
• He regards Ezra Pound as “the man who believed in the mot juste- the one and only correct word to use - the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives.” (Evan Shipman at the Lilas)
• Re Dostoevsky: “How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?” (Evan Shipman at the Lilas)
• “I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all my facility and try to make instead of describe.” (Scott Fitzgerald)

He's obviously serious about his writing. At one stage he talks about terza riruce. I had to look this up. It is a rhyme scheme derived from terza rima, the form Dante used in his Divine Comedy, which uses triplets and rhymes aba bcb cdc ded ... etc. Terza riruce was originally just terza rima used for comedic or scatological purposes but it evolved into a distinct form: aba dab ado, ‘o’; being an anti-rhyme using vowels and consonants unconnected with others in the sequence. Hemingway obviously knows all this but wears his learning so lightly that he merely mentions the word.

The selected quotes show how the Hemingway style excels: 

Selected quotes:

• “She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin.” (A Good Cafe on the Place St-Michel)
• “The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.” (The False Spring)
• “All the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry.” (Hunger Was Good Discipline)
• “In those days many people went to the cafes ... to be seen publicly and in a way such places anticipated the columnists as the daily substitutes for immortality.” (Ford Madox Ford and The Devil's Disciple)
• “It was a very Corsican wine and you could dilute it by half with water and still receive its message.” (With Pascin At The Dome)
• “Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.” (Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit.)
• “The whores in Kansas City, who were marked for death and practically everything else, always wished to swallow semen as a sovereign remedy against the con[sumption].” (The Man Who Was Marked For Death)
• “For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.” (An Agent of Evil)
• “The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.” (Scott Fitzgerald)

Other Perspectives:

I recently read Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood which chronicles each of Ernest's four wives. The first, Hadley, is the one to whom he was married at the time of AMF. He left her following an adulterous affair with, and subsequent marriage to, Hadley's best friend Fife; Ernest regrets this betrayal towards the end of AMF, saying: “All things truly wicked start from an innocence.” (There Is Never Any End To Paris). There is no doubt that he was a selfish husband and probably an unpleasant man. There are a lot of writers in this blog who were seriously flawed human beings; I am of the opinion that their works should be judged in isolation from their lives. 

Hemingway won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature

December 2024; 182 pages

First published (posthumously) in 1964

My paperback edition published by Vintage in 2000

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Age of Light" by Whitney Scharer

 

A fictionalised biography of Lee Miller, a model, photographer, and journalist. It focuses on the three years she spent in Paris as the assistant, student, collaborator and lover of Man Ray but there are also glimpses of the many other aspects of her life.

She must have been a truly remarkable person. She was raped by an uncle, contracting gonorrhoea from the encounter, when she was seven. Her modelling career began with her father taking nude photographs of her when she was a teenager; it took off when, about to step into the road in New York, she was saved from being hit by a car by Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue; it ended when a shot of her was used in an advert for menstrual pads. She went to Paris at the end of the 1920s to become an artist and ended up working and living with Man Ray. This was the height of surrealism. She discovered the technique of solarization which became a feature of the photographs of Man Ray and her. (The book credits her with discovering the technique but it would be more correct to say that she rediscovered it, it had previously been described in print in 1859.) The book suggests that she left Man Ray after he claimed credit for some photographs of a girl's head in a Bell Jar (I wonder whether this photo suggested the title of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath?) which won a prize; she felt that he was trying to control her. Whilst in Paris she also acted in one of Jean Cocteau's films and modelled for the French Vogue.

Her subsequent career was with the English Vogue. She was first a fashion photographer and correspondent and then a photo-journalist, at first during the London Blitz and then joining the American troops after the D-Day landings. She took a picture in St Malo of the first US use of napalm. She took photographs in the newly liberated Dachau. She had her photograph taken in Hitler's bath on the day he committed suicide. After the war she reinvented herself as a cordon bleu chef and cookery correspondent, marrying the man who founded the Institute for Contemporary Arts.

The novel is written from Lee's perspective, in the third person and using the present tense. This gives us access to Lee's thoughts, while at the same time creating a distance between the reader and the narrator. The principal characters, Lee and Man Ray, are both given depth and nuanced complexity. For all his role as principal antagonist and de facto villain, he is shown to be deeply in love with Lee and he perhaps understands her (especially regarding her father's abusive behaviour) better than she understands herself. 

The final chapter suggests that the pair of them meet in 1974 "forty years since they last saw each other" which heightens the drama but is contradicted by other accounts.

The technique of focusing heavily on three years in a long life makes for an interesting novel but I wondered whether the flashbacks and flashforwards contributed much to the overall book.

Selected quotes:

• “She told him that until he puts a sidewalk on the downs and lines it with cafe bars, she's not going to be wasting her time tromping through the hillsides.” (Prologue)
• “She ... panicked, as if her life were a balloon and she had just let go of the string.” (Ch 1)
• “Her letters read like excerpts from an Anita Loos novel, full of non sequiturs and gossip.” (Ch 8)
• “The next day, Lee wakes up with a clear head, and it feels like a gift to have the energy for everyday tasks. Why doesn't she appreciate it more when she is healthy?” (Ch 9)
• “When I look at a picture of you, I want to feel exactly as good as I felt when I was taking the picture. Photography can capture reality, but how does it capture emotion? Isn't the emotion what makes reality real?” (Ch 14)
• “The Illuminated moths wings of her lungs inside her chest, shot through with cancer.” (Sussex England)

September 2024; 367 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Click here for an article in the Guardian about Lee's war work (and the war photography of other women).

"Underland" by Robert Macfarlane

A travel book in which the author explores a variety of subterranean landscapes including cave systems and glacier moulins as well as those that are manmade, such as the catacombs below Paris and mine-workings and underground storage facilies.

Much of the joy of this book lies in his descriptions. Here is one example, from the first page:

• “Late-summer heatwave, heavy air. Bees browsing drowsy over meadow grass. Gold of standing corn, green of fresh hay-rows, black of rooks on stubble fields. ... A swan flies high and south on creaking wings.” 

There is much of this throughout the book, combining detailed observation with precise vocabulary and perfect metaphor.

There’s a lot of science (from an experiment to detect dark matter, buried in an English mine, to geology to climate change), much of it viewed through a quasi-mystical lens. Most of the journeys that Macfarlane makes are, for him, deeply spiritual experiences, and he connects them with legends about the underworld, and more recent stories - perhaps legends in the making - such as the Victorian obsession with a hollow earth.

I found many of Macfarlane’s journeys horrific. He squeezes into impossibly narrow tunnels, descends gulping sinkholes, wades starless rivers and wanders underground labyrinths, sometimes describing his terror, and I really didn’t want to share his experiences. Even when he is above ground, climbing glaciers and mountain sides, often alone, sometimes in heavy fog, far from any prospect of help, I was terrified on his behalf.

My favourite part was his description of the underground urban explorers in the Paris catacombs: perhaps because I am fundamentally a townie I could understand the romance and excitement of this below-street counterculture (though I still wouldn’t go down there: too scary!).

He makes the point repeatedly that geology has a much longer time span than humans and that all our little lives and dreams will disappear into nothingness. But then he also talks about the ‘anthropocene’, the new geological era characterised by human activities, and implicitly suggests that we shouldn’t produce so much plastic waste, or consume so much oil, or mine so much, or bury long-half-life nuclear waste. “Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human morality looks absurd - crushed to irrelevance.” (Ch 1)

There is a great deal to enjoy in this book ... but there is a great deal. I thought it went on too long. It belaboured the environmental message and over-romanticised the ‘little people’ who lived simple lives in impossibly beautiful (and often dangerous) landscapes - and still burned oil and produced wastes. And, at the end, there were just too many tunnels to squeeze through, too many mountains the climb, and the last ones just sounded the same as the earlier ones.

But the descriptions were beautiful.

Selected quotes:

• “An aversion to the Underland is buried in language. In many of the metaphors we live by, height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be ‘uplifted’ is preferable to being ‘depressed’ or ‘pulled down’. ‘Catastrophe’ literally means a ‘downwards turn’, ‘cataclysm’ is ‘downwards violence’.” (Ch 1)
• “To perceive matter than casts no shadow, you must search not for its presence but for its consequence.” (Ch 3)
• “If we’re not exploring, we’re not doing anything. We’re just waiting.” (Ch 3)
• “All cities are additions to the landscape that require subtractions from elsewhere.” (Ch 5)
• “A densely stacked modern cityscape leads, inevitably, to a new geography of inequality ... Broadly speaking, wealth levitates and poverty sinks.” (Ch 5)
• “Urban exploration mandates itself as a radical act of disobedience and liberation: a protest against state constraints on freedom within the city.” (Ch 5)
• “The city was full of portals - service hatches, padlocked doorways, manhole covers - that lay unseen in plain sight.” (Ch 5)
• “The leather noise of their wings kept time for me.” (Ch 5): Bats emerging from a cave at night
• “That cenote was understood by the local indigenous people to be an access point to the Mayan underworld, to ‘xibalba’ ... ‘place of fear’ ... a brutal realm ... heavily staffed by demons ... Just to reach Xibalba, you had to cross a river filled with scorpions, a river filled with blood, and a river filled with pus. If you were lucky to make it that far, you were then tested in the six deadly Houses of Trial.” (Ch 5)
• “The sound of this starless river is like none I have ever heard before. It has volume. Its volume has hollowness. Each sound has its echo, and each echo its interior.” (Ch 6)
• “In the Celtic Christian tradition, ‘thin places’ are those sites in a landscape where the borders between world or epochs feel at their [page break] most fragile. Such locations were ... often to be found on westerly headlands, islands, canvas, coasts and other brinks.” (Ch 8)
• “It is so cold the ink in my pen freezes in under a minute.” (Ch 10)

Shortlisted for the 2019 Waterstones Book of the Year

April 2022; 425 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"In the Cafe of Lost Youth" by Patrick Modiano

 Reading this hard on the heels of Modiano's The Black Notebook was a disconcerting experience. Both books revolve around old people remembering when they were young. Both books focus on a young woman who has a number of aliases, about whom there is some mystery. Both books feature a detective, both have an author who narrates some if not all of the book. Both involve an iconic Parisian cafe, and students, and walking the Parisan streets and taking the metro. It is as if Modiano has reworked the material.

Especially since both books include the line: "We live at the mercy of certain silences." 

Whilst The Black Notebook was contextualised by revolutionary politics, this is contextualised by an interest in magic and the occult. It seems that Louki's favourite book is Lost Horizon, which is a potboiler that may or may not reference the earthly paradise known as Shambhala, or to modern ears Shangri La.

The title is a line taken from ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’ [We Wander in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire], a 1978  film by Guy Debord, the revolutionary and Situationist.

Selected quotes:

• "If everything was down in black and white, it meant that it was over, just like tombstones that have names and dates carved on them." (p 73)
• "Intermediary zones existed in Paris, no-man's-lands where you were on the fringes of everything, in transit, or even suspended. You enjoyed a degree of immunity there." (p 112)

September 2020; 153 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here

Other books by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Black Notebook" by Patrick Modiano

 M Modiano is a Nobel Laureate. This short novel is about a man trying to reconstruct, using his writer's notebook, events that happened twenty years ago, when he became involved with a woman called Dannie and the other people he met at the Unic Hotel in paris: Paul Chastagnier, Duwelc, Gerard Marciano, Aghamouri and Georges. For some reason the police interviewed him at the time. He tries to understand what was going on.

Not a lot, to be honest. The first half of the book is very unstructured, as you might expect from someone trying to remember, and he visits and revisits episodes, such as the occasions that he and Dannie went to an empty old house in the countryside, or when they let themselves into to Dannie's old flat and helped themselves to things. 

Half way through we learn that there was something sinister about the group, and that something terrible happened. 

But even as we learn more about what happened, we never see anything very clearly. And still the narrator wanders around Paris and oscillates between the present and the past, and between reality and his vivid dreams. 

There are some great moments:

• "Even though most of the buildings were still the same, they made you feel as if you were looking at a taxidermied dog." (p 7)
• "The present no longer  counted, with its indistinguishable days in their doleful light, which must be the light of old age, when you feel as if you're merely living on." (p 38)
• "We live at the mercy of certain silences." (p 134)

But in the end I thought it rambled and I was never sufficiently interested in what had happened to care about the main character. He just seemed a little lost and confused. And I couldn't understand why these events that had happened to him long ago should bother him now.

September 2020;157 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here:

Other books by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

 

"Rooftoppers" by Katherine Rundell

This children's book is a masterclass on how to say a lot with very few words.

Sophie is pulled from the wreck of the Queen Mary as a one year old baby by Charles, a scholar, who becomes her guardian. They live in Victorian London. When Sophie reaches twelve, the authorities believe that Charles, a single man, is unsuitable and so they plan to put Sophie into an orphanage; the pair escape to France because Sophie believes her mother may live there.

On the roof of their hotel in Paris, Sophie meets Matteo, a wild boy who lives on rooftops (and speaks remarkably good English). Matteo guides Sophie across the rooftops in her quest to find her mother. The  life of the rooftoppers is explained in unglamorous details: when Matteo explains that feet must be bare so toes can help to grip the roofs, Sophie asked whether his toes get cold and he answers: Yes.

This book is remarkable for its imagination but chiefly for the brilliance of its prose. Impossible, nearly magical things are written about with such simplicity that it reads like truth. And the descriptions are pared down to nearly nothingness but the few words left are exactly the right ones: when Sophie attends her first classical concert the pianist "made the sorts of faces that Sophie associated with being very itchy."

The book I was most reminded of as I read this was Jeanette Winterson's Lighthousekeeping whcih has the same sort of simple way of describing impossibilities. These are barefaced lies made convincing by the lack of artifice. It is the way the Bible is written: this happened and then that. And it helps when the prose is as lyrical as that of Wycliffe.