Teenager Isidore Ducasse (1846-1870), making up a name for himself – Comte de Lautréamont – that would rival and sound like the name Marquis de Sade, wrote
Maldoror, a prose poem, an epic cycle of songs that is the most evil book ever written by a dead gay European white boy.
Professors of French literature call him "a strange case" and then go on to other subjects. Albert Camus called him in print (1951) "a homosexual" (that's obvious), and labeled him a "banal genius" while appraising his fanciful writings as the work of a "choirboy." Dr. JeanPierre Soulier (1964) produced Lautréamont: genie ou maladie mentale, a whole book about him based on the few scraps that we know about his actual life, and proved that he was "a schizophrenic" (more obvious news).
Professor David Steel of Lancaster University writing (1995) in The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French calls him "the maudits of French literature," the cursed one, the wretched one. "His premature death (at 24) is a sign, however, that he was beloved at least by gods of the savage sort." Steel makes a cute inside joke and calls him the "midnight taggeur," as though he were a graffiti artist caught 'bombing' suburban walls. Steel cannot resist passing over the sex/murder scenes in his poem without reminding us good souls that for this strange author "male adolescents are the preferred prey, charmed, abducted, and destroyed in an atmosphere of psychopathic mayhem that smacks of the homosexual, but equally subverts any such inference." (How coy!)
In most gay histories and handbooks of literature, like Neil Miller's Out of the Past (1995), he is left out and not mentioned. The only mention you will find of him is in a queer context. Critics will say that he influenced contemporary authors such as William Burroughs and Dennis Cooper.
Because his life-span is coeval with Oscar Wilde, he dies when Oscar was 15 turning 16; and because Oscar often went to Paris, and our guy wanted to have a queer buddy, 15-years-old, I propose that we imagine our guy and Oscar as buddies at the beginning of our movement, each representing two different ways of being us: one gay, one queer.
Wilde was a bisexual family man, and gay only on the side. Our guy was too queer to be gay, and like his hero Maldoror, he abandoned his family for a nomadic life with strangers. He did not compose stage dramas of domestic love and tranquility. He wrote a blood-spilled poem of horror about birds of prey and sea monsters. For him, the "great universal family" was a sham. He took on his father, a Chancellor in the French Consulate, and God the father. In one wild scene he meets God out on a "Supreme Drunk," sees Him sitting on a rock "his arms adangle like a consumptive's testicles." Another time he finds God "caught in the sight of a throne fashioned of human excrement and gold upon which, with idiotic pride, body swathed in a shroud made of unwashed hospital sheets, sat he, who calls himself the Creator!"
He took on God and earned the wrath of his contemporaries, the embarrassment of his family, and the scorn of his teachers. His hero, at the beginning of his tales, "takes a penknife with a sharp edged blade and slits the flesh at points joining the lips. Looks in the mirror and wonders, if he made a mistake."
Like his hero, our author never did find "someone to love," a queer buddy. While his possible buddy Oscar was out creating the emergence of the modern gay movement, our guy had urges for queer punk raging in his head. And no one to hookup with. No Quimby's Queer Store, no, Homocore bands, no Joy Division, no 'zine scene. No wonder he zapped his brain and died at 24, with all those queer thoughts whirling in his head.
He doesn't even have a "proper name." His family and family name, weren't good enough for him. The name he chose to write under, Comte Lautréamont, is a rude pun in French mean something like "the bill goes to the other," or in his case, Daddy pays the bills.
His enemies said he was a homeless street beggar, living in a place like the Lake Hotel, eating rats and cats out of garbage cans. Not true. His Daddy paid the bills, even though he bit the hand that fed him.
He lived in a place more like the Belmont Hotel. He stayed up late at night in his room playing the piano and composing his poems of songs. He was the first rock 'n roll poet, he invented riffs that could fly like a flock of birds. But his neighbors complained about the noise. His readers and teachers threw down his self-published book as though bird shit had been dropped on them.
I have given him a temporary homocore punk name: Iszy, short for "Who is he?" I think queer culture starts with him. He invented the genre formally called The Cruelty of Words. Just as later Antonin Artaud would invent The Theater of Cruelty. And today Dead World, SPY, Throbbing Gristle have invented The Music of Cruelty. And Dennis Cooper writes the novels of Teen Cruelty.
Blood and fierceness mark their style. Gentleness their soul. "If you have a decided taste for carmel," our guy says, "no one will conceive of it as a crime; but those whose minds are more forceful and capable of greater things, prefer pepper and arsenic." In his queer mind you are no criminal, if, like Oscar Wilde, you are gay and like soft carmel-like things. He would never call you the names he was called: criminal, homo, queer, schizo. All he ever wanted was a buddy, a 15-year-old like Oscar to hang out with. In the fifth song of his Fifth book, he cries out: "0 incomprehensible pederasts, not for me to hurl insults at your great degradation; not for me to cast scorn on your infundibuliform anus." He would not condemn Oscar Wilde's "fudge tunnel," nor send him to jail.
Two years before he died (1868), he wrote a sweet letter to himself saying exactly how he felt in his queer heart:
I was young, had deep loves, and my heart would overflow with enthusiasm! And I mingled with the crowd, I mixed with my fellow men, speaking my thoughts out loud! And I withdrew from them and they said to me: Arrogant one! And from time to time in my solitude, my loves, my repressed enthusiasm broke out into ode; and my companions laughed and used to point me out as a madman. So, I suffered, doubted, cursed, and no one believed me sincere. It's as if this heart, once so full of strength and love were annihilated.
The gay movement started with the wish to talk to, to say the love that dare not speak its name. The queer movement began with Iszy's shattered heart that took on God, man and the family in cruel words of song. Postscript: Maldoror is out in a new edition in English by Exact Change, (Cambridge 1994). A translation with introduction and notes by Alexis Lykiard, including all of Iszy's other poems and letters and biographical outline. I did not give detail of Maldoror because I think previews often ruin a good movie; I will let you discover the breathtaking scenes and brilliant writing for yourself.
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Publisher’s Note(s): This originally appeared in Jon-Henri Damski’s column, JHD in Windy City Times on November 7, 1991. It was reprinted as Schizo-File No. 54, under the title “If I could build a time machine that worked this is who I’d get (back off man, he’s mine!)” in dead/queer/proud (Firetrap Press, 2002)--John Vore.]
