Nigey Lennon - Alfred Jarry: The Man with the Axe

Copyright 2011 by Nigey Lennon
Illustrations 2011 by Bill Griffith

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced in any form, except for brief excerpts which are part of a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Original layout design: Bill Griffith and
Nigey Lennon
Production and design coordination: Nigey Lennon

The Epilogue (Alfred Jarry First Sublime Humorist of the Apocalypse) originally appeared in somewhat different form in Arts and Architecture magazine.

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This book was originally funded in part by a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts, Literature Program, a federal agency.

In the process of researching, writing, and producing this book, I received assistance, support, and inspiration from a number of people. If some of them are still fed up with me for being a persistent and seemingly oblivious nuisance, perhaps the thrill of seeing their names in print will reduce their annoyance. If not, I promise Ill never do it againnot until next time, anyway.

First, my thanks to my chief collaborator, Bill Griffith (the Satie of the Speedball), for his uncanny ability to transform my subconscious gropings into concrete images, improving and clarifying them considerably in the process; and for remaining steadfastly good-natured about everything (even the severe shrinkage in his prized postcard collection due to our voluminous correspondence);

to my husband Lionel Rolfe (author of those classic volumes, Literary L.A. and The Menuhins: A Family Odyssey), for his support, insights, free advice, 6 A.M. runs for double chili-cheeseburgers, and computer-related angst;

to John Ahouse, head of Special Collections at California State University, Long Beach, for his astute editing of the manuscript as well as for his invaluable research assistance;

to Dianna Preston, computer typesetter and typographer, for her unflagging enthusiasm, saintlike patience, eagle editing eye, and immediate grasp of the essence of pataphysics, especially regarding type design and layout;

to Dennis Koran, the Grand Panjandrum (and winner of the Young Henri Rousseau Lookalike Contestprize: one vinyl Palmes Academiques medal), for moving his publishing empire from San Francisco to a location directly beneath the San Diego Freeway in Los Angeles, where he subsequently began publishing books on surrealism;

to Dr. Robert M. Rolfe and Messrs. Richard V. Wilson and Don Long, for all their time, sweat, and computer expertise during the agony of the data transfer process;

to Barbara Goldstein, publisher of Arts and Architecture magazine, for her belief in the project and for her generous sharing of resources; and to her husband John Pastier, for always laughing at my jokes;

to Ken Hensc (the Mad Synthesist of Mar Vista), for tapes of his music, which created the perfect ambience for writing a book called The Man with the Axenot to mention for being the inventor of the Pinhead Punch (Vandermint liqueur and tomato juice) imbibed by Jarry in The Pataphysician-,

to Benjamin L. Rolfe, my father-in-law, for legal advice and other support;

to Tyler Owlglass, Ph.D. and Maestro Alfredo Fettuccini, dishonorable Regents of the Los Angeles Institute of Quantum Pataphysics, for less than I have room to list;

and finally, to Urban Gwerder of Zurich, pataphysical cowboy and independent publisher par excellence, for championing Jarrys dubious cause in so many different languages.

Bill Griffith would like to extend his thanks to Joyce Zavarro for her help with the cover typesetting.

When I look back on the suburban angst of my high school years, one surreal scene especially stands out: the vision of myself slumping in the bleachers on the football field during a compulsory pep rally, blissfully perusing The Selected Works of Alfred Jarry while all around me countless numbers of my fellow adolescents were engaged in the quaint rite of sacrificing their larynxes to the mindless and bloodthirsty god of school spirit. Though the ambient noise level was hazardous to hearing, I remained oblivious, remote, contented, an unassailable atoll surrounded by stormy seas but only dimly aware of their furious roar. Let the uncivilized fools revel in their Stone Age amusements; I was content to wander in Jarrys rarified pataphysical universe. (Since I wasnt the rah-rah type by any stretch of the imagination, it amuses me no end when I realize that today I am, after a fashion, a Jarry cheerleader. Oh, wellthats pataphysics for you.)

I had stumbled across Jarrys Selected Works quite by accident, when I wandered into a local bookstore in the process of cutting class one afternoon. Bored, and probably in some chemically-altered condition or other, I went drifting aimlessly toward the literature section, vaguely hoping to get in a cursory perusal of Tropic of Cancer before I was apprehended and evicted by the eternally vigilant management. But I never got to the Ms, for, a couple of shelves below, there was The Selected Works with its bristling woodcut of Ubu (by no less an artist than Jarry himself). As fate would have it, the first thing to catch my eye when I opened the book was the poem Tatane, translated into English as Nookie. Being fifteen years old, I had a distinctly limited grasp of the vagaries of literature, but I definitely knew what I liked, and poems called Nookie were right at the head of that category. However, when I slouched defiantly up to the cash register and attempted to purchase the volume in question, I was informed by the clerk (whose twilight years were undoubtedly being grievously foreshortened by insolent truants like myself) that she couldnt sell it to me. Her logic was internally consistent, if otherwise somewhat open to question: Grove Press published dirty booksthey had published The Selected Worksergo, The Selected Works must be a dirty book, and of course she had no intention of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, harrumph, these kids today, tsk-tsk. Pretending to be chagrined, I returned the volume to its rack. But the moment the meddlesome clerks back was turned, I was out on the street in a flashfurtively hugging the hastily-resnatched tome close to my side, under my sweater. I was a teenage criminal...

I dont know what I was expecting when I first began reading Jarry, but it didnt take me very long to become the most enthusiastic (and only) pataphysician on my high school campus. I found something absurdly exhilarating about Jarrys staunch refusal to accept the parameters of reality, and in his equally stubborn insistence on living in his own personal universe. Born into stultifyingly mundane circumstances, Jarry had succeeded in transforming his existence into a veritable work of ironic art, and had done so with a dashing satirical bravado that had as much courage in it as humor. I was especially struck by the way he had refashioned his life, choosing to regard it as a grotesque puppet show with himself in center stagethe most bizarre marionette who ever bewildered a world irrevocably locked into the cut-and-dried and the predictable. Since no onenot even an Alfred Jarrycan flout the immutable laws of society and remain unscathed, there was only one possible punch line to the ridiculous joke of his life, and that was an early and ignominious death. Yet Jarry had remained in character right to the bitter endmarching fiercely off into eternity with an ironic sneer, accompanied by the asthmatic discord of an imaginary calliope and the tinny crash of cheap cymbals.