[In the following essay, Cutshall examines the critical and commercial failure of Alfred Jarry's novels, providing an overview of the works themselves and their historical context, and suggests that a radical reappraisal of Jarry's work as a novelist is long overdue.]

How, and why, did Alfred Jarry come to write his seven novels? To some, this question, which I will endeavour in this article to go some way towards answering, will no doubt appear banal. To others, in the light of these works' scant success and the fact that, as a corpus, they are little read even by scholars, it will probably just seem a matter of no great importance. It would be easy to claim that attitudes such as these which might reasonably, eighty years after Jarry's death, be described as the judgement of history, are based on ignorance. In many cases they undoubtedly are. Be this as it may, the failure of Jarry's novels is a phenomenon with fascinating implications.

Jarry began publishing novels in 1897 and had six completed by the end of 1901. A seventh, La Dragonne, remained unfinished at his death in 1907. Although Jarry was never solely a novelist, this genre was certainly his major form of expression during the second half of his career. Right from the start, however, his novels failed to sell, and as time went on, publishers became increasingly difficult to come by. Yet Jarry persevered. What is instructive in this fact is the light it sheds upon what were always the two overriding and contradictory imperatives of Jarry's career in literature: on one hand, the need to live by his writing, which is to say, the need to sell his works, and on the other, the need to preserve his view of himself, the writer, as the man who “s'amuse à l'image de son Créateur” (891).

Below, I will set out what is known of how Jarry went about the pursuit which (with one very brief interlude) constituted the whole of his working life insofar as it pertains to his novels and the author's willingness to make compromises in them. Needless to say, I would personally defend Jarry's novel-writing on the grounds of literary quality, while perhaps a majority of others would not. Such questions are, however, beside the point in a study whose subject is history rather than art. For the literary historian, as indeed for the literary critic, Jarry presents unique problems. Working manuscripts of Jarry novels are virtually unheard of. In most cases, it is impossible to be sure of even what year a particular Jarry novel was written in. What is known nonetheless provides invaluable background material for the critic's work and explodes several of the more popular critical misconceptions concerning Jarry's status as an author.

On December 10th 1896, the “générale” of Ubu Roi was held at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre. Jarry, apparently petrified, prefaced his play with a speech of which the audience, according to Firmin Gémier, who took the role of Père Ubu, heard not a single word. The near-riot that took place shortly afterwards among a public composed in roughly equal proportion of Symbolism's admirers and detractors, has passed into theatrical history, and since its events are recounted in virtually every book ever written on Jarry, there is no need to restate them here. What is sometimes overlooked, however, is that this momentous evening had both long- and short-term consequences for Jarry himself. Certainly Ubu Roi assured his notoriety, as indeed it continues to today. Although the play ran for only two performances and was not revived until the year after Jarry's death, such was its celebrity that, on hearing that he was to perform Jarry's post-mortem, Dr. Stéphen-Chauvet immediately went out and bought a copy. He was indeed able to. Ubu Roi went through three editions in Jarry's lifetime, which is to say, two more than any of his other works. Famous, or tolerably so, Jarry may have been, but Ubu Roi did not make his fortune. In fact, on a personal level, it proved to be something of a catastrophe.

For several months in 1896, Jarry had worked as Aurélien Lugné-Poe's “secrétaire-régisseur” at the Œuvre, in the process taking the role of the Old Man of Dovrë in, and helping to produce, the first French version of Ibsen's Peer Gynt. This association ended abruptly when Ubu Roi was performed. In Le Symbolisme au Théâtre, Jacques Robichez was later to claim that Jarry had been profligate with the Œuvre's money in preparing the production, although it is only fair to add that he had also exhausted his own meagre inheritance to the same end. Worse than this, Ubu Roi had caused the biggest scandal in the press that even an avant-garde theatre like the Œuvre had ever seen. Whatever the case, Lugné-Poe was driven to break not only with Jarry but also with the Symbolists as a group. Up until this point, the Œuvre had been the main outlet for Symbolist drama in France, and reaction was predictably heated. In 1897, a group of Symbolist journalists including Jarry published a statement denouncing Lugné-Poe's defection. Eventually Lugné, tired of having his artistic integrity challenged in this way, went so far as to fight a duel with Catulle Mendès, whose performance with a pistol was described by Laurent Tailhade as “brave et maladroit comme pas un”.¹

Although Ubu Roi had these repercussions, as well as gaining for Jarry membership of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques and causing him to write his “manifesto”, Questions de Théâtre, there was one further and even more significant consequence. In Ubu Enchaîné (1899), Père Ubu refuses to utter “le mot” (i.e. “Merdre!”) because “il m'a valu trop de désagréments” (429). At least one of these was the fact that, having succeeded in publishing and staging Ubu Roi after several years of trying, at the beginning of 1897 Jarry was rather at a loose end. He was, moreover, in debt to a certain M. Trochon for his famous Clément Luxe '96 bicycle, collected the previous year and not paid for. Indeed, after Ubu Roi Jarry had little means of paying for anything. True, he was regularly printed in magazines like the Mecure de France, La Plume and the Revue Blanche, but his adventure as a dramatist-cum-actor-co-director had been abortive. Apart from puppet productions of Ubu Roi by some of his friends in 1898 and of Ubu sur la Butte by the Guignol des 4'z-Arts in 1900, Jarry's involvement with the practical theatre would henceforth be limited to his occasional work as Claude Terrasse's librettist. By and large, Jarry was less than pleased with such collaborations as he had to undertake towards the end of his life with Terrasse, “Karl Rosenval”, Demolder and perhaps even Jean Saltas. On June 8th 1906, having just been so ill that his life was despaired of, he wrote in a letter: “J'ai été épuisé depuis un an. Les collaborations ne me reússissent pas.”²

These comments may provide us with an explanation of why Jarry suddenly—it would appear—adopted the novel-form with such enthusiasm that he produced four finished novels within the next two years. Jarry had certainly begun to make a reputation for himself in the theatre, but he had at the same time made it extremely unlikely that any of his plays, like Ubu Cocu, which he had already been reworking for some time, would be produced in the foreseeable future. Of course Jarry contributed regularly throughout his career to some of the most prestigious reviews of his day. Léon-Paul Fargue remembers:

J'étais alors frais émoulu du Lycée Henri-IV, comme mon camarade Alfred Jarry. Nous venions de prendre part au concours littéraire de l'Écho de Paris qui était le seul quotidien littéraire de l'époque, et nous cherchions, naturellement, à écrire dans les revues, ce qui constituait de ce temps une aubaine et un honneur, car on n'y ouvrait pas tout grands les bras aux illettrés, faux inventeurs, mercenaires, drogmen ou larbins qui sortent avec l'habit de leur maître.³

By 1897, some four years on from such beginnings, however, Jarry, though still only twenty-three, was seeking to establish himself as a major literary figure, like his close friend Rachilde or his former mentor Remy de Gourmont, both of whom were essentially novelists. With the theatre temporarily closed to him, his poetry, probably his first love, having had indifferent success on those occasions when it had been published and, as we shall see, the year 1897 proving financially torturous, the novel was the next obvious medium for Jarry to try. He might conceivably extend his reputation and make enough money to pay off his creditors at the same time.

It is important to remark upon the conflicting exigencies of these two factors. Jarry did not suddenly think: “I must dash off a novel to make some money.” On the contrary, we will see that his first four novels were all conceived before Ubu Roi was produced, and that he seems to have merely dusted off projects that had been temporarily overridden by his work at the Œuvre. He was, however, well aware that his novels had to succeed. With the second of them, L'Amour en Visites, in particular, he made great compromises although, as it became obvious that publishers were not attracted by his work, he was to become more intransigent. In any case, from the end of 1897 to the end of 1903, his financial situation, though not exactly easy, was by no means as perilous as it had been in the months following Ubu Roi's premiere.

Jarry's first novel was Les Jours et les Nuits, finished by April 1897 although certainly started much earlier. Here we run into our first real problem. We do not know when or in what circumstances Les Jours et les Nuits was written. Because the novel is loosely based on Jarry's own experiences of life in the army, it may be assumed that the project stemmed from his brief and inglorious spell of military service in 1895. This view is supported by one of his officers, Gaston Roig, who states that Jarry was forever writing while in uniform:

Il écrivait beaucoup. Assez mystérieusement du reste car il fut toujours impossible de lui faire définir avec précision la nature de ces travaux: —Nous-con-si-gnons-des-no-tes, disait-il, sur-un-mé-tier-ce-lui-de-soldat-que-nous-com-men-çons-a-bien-con-naître.⁴

It is therefore probable that Jarry at least took notes while he was still a soldier and perhaps wrote them up in the form we know during the first months of 1897. Beyond this, it is impossible to be specific. Whatever the case, Les Jours et les Nuits was duly submitted to Jarry's old friends Alfred Valette and Rachilde at the Mercure de France and published there in May 1897.

Although it is in a sense the Jarry novel most in tune with its time and the tastes of a publisher like the Mercure, which had previously issued Gourmont's Le Joujou Patriotisme, Les Jours et les Nuits met with little success. At Jarry's death in 1907, Alfred Vallette, chosen as executor of the author's will, wrote to Jarry's sister Caroline (“Charlotte”) in order to establish the extent of Jarry's debts. He informed her that “Jarry n'a ici qu'un livre établi au compte à demi: Les Jours et les Nuits, et qui ne se vend pas du tout”.⁵

Still, as a first novel, Les Jours et les Nuits must have been the source of some encouragement insofar as it was published at all. This is likely since, in spite of personal difficulties (beside his difficulties with M. Trochon, Jarry had been evicted for non-payment of rent and was staying temporarily with Henri [“le Douanier”] Rousseau) a second novel followed immediately afterwards.

L'Amour en Visites is one of the best-documented of all Jarry's novels. Like Les Jours et les Nuits, it seems to have been in Jarry's mind for quite a long period prior to publication. An undated but obviously early plan of the work was discovered by Maurice Saillet and runs as follows:

• I. Chez Manette
• II. Chez Manon
• III. Chez Margot
• IV. Chez la [Voisine biffé] Cousine
• V. Chez la Vieille Dame
• VI. Chez la Grande Dame
• VII. Chez la Fiancée
• VIII. Chez le Médecin
• IX. Chez le Vieux de la Montagne
• X. Chez la Mort ou L'Autre Alceste
• XI. Chez la Muse
• XII. Chez [Ma biffé] Dame Jocaste ou l'Amour Absolu⁶

The history of L'Amour en Visites is marked by pronounced elements of tragicomedy. Like Jarry's previous novel, it was presented for publication to the Mercure de France in the late Summer of 1897. By this stage, it had already been considerably altered from what it would have looked like according to Saillet's plan. Crucially, two original chapters (III and XII) had disappeared and had been replaced by two already familiar texts: part of Ubu Cocu (“Chez Madame Ubu”) and “La Peur Chez L'Amour”, which had been published separately the previous year and which, in any case, Rachilde later claimed to have written in response to Jarry's wager that she could not pastiche his style⁷. L'Amour en Visites might have been Jarry's greatest novel, but ended up being his worst. The logical progression implicit in Saillet's plan, from the mundane description of earthly love in the opening chapters through the more poetic homo- (or auto-) sexual imagery of chapters VIII, IX and X to the impenetrable prose-poetry depiction of the love of God (a figure indistinguishable from the writer) for his creation in chapters XI and XII, is completely absent from the published text. This has all the appearances of a novel begun, abandoned half-way through and padded out with irrelevant, unconnected and already published material. The journey through, simultaneously, Jarry's experience of love and literary creation which would have made the inclusion of familiar texts like “L'Autre Alceste” and “Le Vieux de la Montagne” legitimate is to all appearances replaced by an unseemly rush to complete a volume and collect an advance on its publication.

If such was Jarry's design, and he was indeed in dire financial difficulty, it got off to an inauspicious start. In spite of the ties of friendship between Jarry, Rachilde and Vallette, the Mercure rejected L'Amour en Visites. In fact, the Mercure would never issue another Jarry novel, probably because of the lack of success of Les Jours et les Nuits, although the rejection of L'Amour en Visites may also be in part attributed to the fact that it was so obviously bad, and to the highly unflattering description it contains of Berthe de Courrière, nymphomaniac mistress of Remy de Gourmont, one of the Mercure's most favoured authors.

At this point, with Jarry's situation becoming ever more desperate, the ubiquitous Pierre Fort, purveyor of pornography to the Belle Époque, made his appearance. It seems that Rachilde, in an act of charity, undertook to find a publisher for Jarry's unwanted novel and somehow came up with Fort. The tenor of Fort's previous editions may be judged from one of which a copy is fortunately preserved in the British Library: the self-styled “roman historique et anti-clérical” of 1882 written by Jacques Souffrance (!) and entitled Le Couvent de Gomorrhe. Fort's grasp of literary style, on the other hand, may in part be ascertained from his reply to Rachilde's request:

Je viens de lire votre aimable lettre dans laquelle vous me dites qu'un de vos camarades désirerait traiter avec un editeur pour la production d'un ouvrage L'(Amour en visite). […] je prendrai connaissance du manuscrit si vous voulez bien me le faire parvenir par le poste et me le conflier quelques jours et vous donner ensuite une résponse ferme.

En attendant voeillez agrer, Madame Rachilde, mes plus respectueuses salutations.⁸

Such a choice of publisher was unlikely, to say the least. Jarry's previous works, as Rachilde was well aware, had been those of a serious adept of highcamp Mallarmean Symbolism, one of the “noisy, brainsick young people” whom Arthur Symons, who had met Jarry, describes sitting at the great poet's feet.⁹ All these the Mercure had shown no hesitation in printing. Indeed, much of the second half of L'Amour en Visites had already appeared in that review. So why should Rachilde have attempted to palm the novel off on Fort instead of a publisher more specialised in the Decadent authors?

There are a number of possible motives behind Fort's selection. Firstly, he may have been chosen purely by chance, as if Rachilde had, as Noël Arnaud puts it, “pointé son index au hasard sur la liste des éditeurs dans le Bottin”.¹⁰ Secondly, it may have been seen as a way of defusing Jarry's comments on the subject of Berthe de Courrière. Finally, Rachilde must have noted the similarities between the “Grande Dame” with whom the hero of the novel has an affair and herself, and considered publication by Fort as a way of preventing them being taken too seriously. It is indeed more than possible that Jarry did have an affair with Rachilde. In this respect the inscription in the copy of L'Amour en Visites he presented to her is somewhat provocative:

A Rachilde et à Jean de Chilra [Rachilde's nom de plume]
ces XI moments hétéro … doxes
de l'heure autosexuelle de
M. Ubu
Alfred Jarry [signature](11)

What is rather less comprehensible is why Fort should have risen to the bait and agreed to publish a work that was obviously doomed from the outset to be a commercial failure, if only on Jarry's past record. That he had misgivings is clear from the fact that he insisted on the deletion of one chapter (hence “XI moments”) in order to lower production costs. On April 25th 1898 he wrote to Jarry in even more inimitable prose than that with which Rachilde was graced:

Je viens de téléphoner à M. Lépice [a printer] qu'il m'a répondu qu'il avait tirer 4 feuilles et que les autres 2 qu'il vous les avait envoyer pour être corriger et il ma fait entendre qu'il y auraient peut être un peu trop de copie je voudrais que sa ne fasse plus de six feuilles je désirerais que vous me le portiez demain matin nous pourrions arranger cela ensemble.¹²

It is perhaps significant that the chapter which had to go was “L'Autre Alceste”, one of Jarry's densest and most difficult pieces of prose. All in all it may simply be that Fort was initially impressed by Jarry's reputation for scandal after Ubu Roi and Rachilde's own not inconsiderable record as an author of erotica, and thereafter unable to withdraw. Partly thanks to this, by the Winter of 1897-98 Jarry's circumstances had become slightly easier. He had found an apartment in the Rue Cassette and, confident of his journalistic prospects and of an advance from Fort, was able to write to Maître Breux, Trochon's lawyer, on November 6th 1897: “Mes affaires se rarrangent un peu et je vais avoir de l'argent régulièrement tous les premiers mardis de chaque mois” (1062). And on December 8th: “Je dois toucher au jour de l'an chez un éditeur” (1063).

1898 was one of the busiest years of Jarry's life. Mishaps notwithstanding, L'Amour en Visites was duly issued by Fort in May, complete with illustrations. By this time Jarry had probably come to regard this work as the same sort of “besogne bâclée” as his later moneymaking enterprise, the volume of reminiscences Souvenirs sur Albert Samain (Paris: Victor Lemasle, 1907). In any case, before L'Amour en Visites was published, Jarry had completed a third novel, Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien, three chapters of which appeared in the Mercure de France in May 1898. Again, just how Faustroll came to be written is a mystery, although Henri Bordillon suggests that it was “Commencé sans doute dès la fin de 97, poursuivi à Corbeil et à Paris en 98”.¹³

The second half of Bordillon's statement is undoubtedly true, since a letter from Jarry to Vallette (undated, but certainly, given the address it quotes, written in early 1898) speaks of “notre Faustroll que nous venons de recopier” (1064). When the original version was written is anyone's guess, but the end of 1897 is perhaps the least likely date.

When the College de ‘Pataphysique published the catalogue of its “Expojarrysition” in 1953, two manuscripts of Faustroll were included: the so-called “Fasquelle” manuscript, which is to say the copy to which Jarry refers and from the first edition was prepared in 1911, and the possibly earlier “Lormel” manuscript. Both of these were, however, virtually perfect copies of the sort which Jarry made of many of his works. The papers on which Jarry's compositional work was done have either been destroyed or have as yet failed to come to light. The former explanation is the more plausible.¹⁴ We may, however, say this much with certainty. When Les Minutes de Sable Mémorial was published in 1894, the edition carried this announcement:

On prépare:
Eléments de Pataphysique

(170)

“Eléments de Pataphysique” is the title of Book II of Faustroll in its published form, which therefore makes it quite possible that Jarry had been working on his novel for up to four years prior to its completion.

Jarry once more ran into trouble with his publishers over this, his third novel. The Mercure, as I have said, printed excerpts from Faustroll but declined to issue the work as a volume. Another part was to appear in La Plume two years later. Before this recourse, Jarry had sent the manuscript to his other favoured outlet, the Revue Blanche. Its director, Thadée Natanson, wrote to Jarry in January 1899 inquiring: “S'agit-il de fragments à publier dans la revue? S'agit-il d'un volume à éditer?”¹⁵ However Jarry replied, the Revue Blanche never printed any of Faustroll. Even four years after his death, Jean Saltas and Gaston Danville had to exert considerable powers of persuasion in order to prevail upon Eugène Fasquelle to finally print it.

Faustroll apart, two other events of early 1898 are significant for our purposes. Firstly, Jarry acquired, in partnership with Rachilde, Vallette, Hérold, Quillard and Collière, a villa at Corbeil which became known as the “Phalanstère”. It was here that he virtually lived full-time until the partnership was dissolved in January 1899. The villa afforded him the opportunity to write and fish as much as he pleased, and this period was surely one of the most pleasant of his life. Hérold writes:

Dans la maison de Corbeil, nous avons passé des heures charmantes. Il avait été convenu que les uns ne gêneraient en rien les autres. Chacun avait sa clef, arrivait ou partait à son seul gré. Quillard, depuis longtemps, s'adonnait à la pêche, il y était fort habile. Jarry, que, entre nous, le plus souvent, nous appelions le Père Ubu, se fit son disciple ardent. Et Vallette, à l'exemple de Quillard et de Jarry, se mit à pêcher. Mais à la pêche il préféra bientôt un autre sport auquel Quillard aussi avait initié le Père Ubu: Vallette connut les joies du canotage.¹⁶

Rather less happily, Jarry now began to collaborate with Claude Terrasse on an “opéra-bouffe” based on Rabelais' Pantagruel. The libretto, seemingly impossible to complete satisfactorily, hung about his neck like a millstone until 1905, when Terrasse finally forced him to finish it.

The winter of 1898 saw further projects under weigh. The first Almanach du Pére Ubu was published in December. Par la Taille, a verse play forming part of Jarry's Théâtre Mirlitonesque was completed in a first version and a fourth novel, L'Amour Absolu, was worked upon. The final draft of L'Amour Absolu was finished on February 20th 1899. Although this manuscript carries some trivial corrections, it is once more suggestive of at least one earlier version, since lost. The novel must at least have been planned (in some detail, given the dominant Oedipus/Jocasta theme of the finished product) long in advance since it figures as chapter XII in Saillet's plan of L'Amour en Visites. The bulk of the composition may have been done at any time during the preceding few years, although Saillet himself opines:

[…] il y a place ici pour des hypothèses et bien des rêveries. Celles-ci ne sauraient toutefois effacer la date (“20 février 1899”) qui clôt le livre, et prouve que c'est largement six mois après la publication de l'Amour en Visites que Jarry acheva d'écrire l'Amour Absolu.¹⁷

There is strong evidence to suggest that this view is mistaken. That evidence comes in the form of the “Service de Presse” of L'Amour Absolu, which is to say, those people to whom Jarry wished copies to be sent. To have compiled this, Jarry must have had the novel at least in a state of near-completion. The fourteenth name on the list is that of Stéphane Mallarmé, to whom Jarry sent most of his published work. Now, Mallarmé died in September 1898, which means that the “Service de Presse” was compiled earlier than this and strongly suggests that the vast bulk of the work of the novel was done by the time Jarry embarked on his final copying-out in the Winter of 1898-99.

With the completion of L'Amour Absolu, we reach one of the crucial points—indeed, arguably the breaking-point—of Jarry's whole career.

In November 1898 Jarry and Vallette had quarrelled over a trivial matter concerning the Phalanstère. Jarry had employed a local locksmith, Gabaret, to break into the building for him, and some damage was done by the workman. For Vallette, this was obviously the last straw. On November 21st Jarry wrote to him, beginning “On m'apprend que vous fûtes furieux au sujet de mes exercices de serrurerie” and concluding “je démissionne du Phalanstère” (1071-72). This matter caused considerable bad feeling between the two men, especially as, having once resigned, Jarry then refused to leave for several weeks.

It was not therefore, in the most propitious of circumstances that Jarry presented his novel for publication, probably in March 1899, given that the Mercure announced in that month that L'Amour Absolu was to appear “chez divers éditeurs”. There exists a letter from Jarry to Vallette which might conceivably refer to L'Amour en Visites, but is perhaps more likely to concern the rejection of L'Amour Absolu:

J'ai oublié de vous dire hier au sujet de mon in-18 et ce matin je me suis levé beaucoup trop tard pour venir vous en informer, qu'il est bien entendu que même s'il paraît invendable au Mercure, je n'y change rien du tout dans l'ordre des chapitres ni en rien.

Si donc il était à prévoir qu'en cas d'acceptation du comité, le Mercure ne dût néanmoins point être disposé à une publication honorable et précipitée (j'entends en mai, par exemple), la formalité serait tout à fait superflue de confier ledit in-18 au comité, et je vous en demanderais le restitution quand j'irai au Mercure dimanche.

(1075)

It must have been galling in the extreme for Jarry to see a third novel in a row rejected by his friends at the Mercure, and the tone of his letter contrasts sharply with Hérold's description of his relations with Vallette a few months earlier. As I have said, Jarry must have been perfectly aware of the weaknesses of L'Amour en Visites, and this perhaps accounts for his uncharacteristic malleability where Fort was concerned. L'Amour Absolu was a different matter. Jarry therefore decided to have the work printed at his own expense in a facsimile edition of fifty copies. As what may be seen as a gesture of reconciliation on Vallette's part, these were sold through the Mercure's offices, and probably printed on its presses as well.

Again, however, Jarry had indulged in useless expense—a habit for which Vallette was to reproach him in his obituary. This may be judged from a letter Jarry wrote in October 1905, when once more short of cash, to a bookseller in the hope of disposing of the remaining copies of L'Amour Absolu. After cataloguing his previous publications (though, significantly, not L'Amour en Visites), and describing them as “livres qui eurent une vente assez considérable”, which was a barefaced lie, Jarry continued:

Or j'ai eu la fantaisie—en 1899 et par les soins du Mercure—de faire tirer un de mes livres à tres petit nombre et en fac-similé autographique. Ce livre s'appelle l'Amour Absolu. […] C'etait une fantaisie pour pouvoir donner le manuscrit autographié à quelques amis. Sur les 50 exemplaires il en reste, déposés au “Mercure” 32 ou 33. Voulez-vous acquérir cette totalité de l'édition à dix fr. l'exemplaire?¹⁸

The bookseller was not interested, and of the seventeen or eighteen copies disposed of in the six years since publication, we may assume that most were presented by Jarry to his friends.

Although relations with Vallette were patched up shortly after the débâcle over the Phalanstère and L'Amour Absolu, this affair had indeed proved a turning-point for Jarry. As has been shown, Jarry's first four novels had all been projects of long standing, with their roots firmly in the pre-Ubu Roi era. All, in different ways, exhibit the influence of Jarry's Symbolist mentors. By contrast, the novels of 1900 and 1901, Messaline and Le Surmâle, were apparently conceived and written virtually in one go. Further-more, those two works represent a new departure for Jarry inasmuch as they are, at least superficially, “genre” novels. Messaline is Jarry's variation on the historical novel, with one of the favourite fin-de-siècle chronotopes merged seamlessly with what is recognisably his own slant on literature. Le Surmâle is again a variation, but this time on the science-fiction novel in the style of H. G. Wells.

Around 1900 Jarry was once more in need of money. With the collapse of the Phalanstère venture he felt in need of somewhere to retreat from city life and bought himself a plot of land by the Seine at Coudray. Here he had built a curious shack known as the “Tripode”. The plot itself cost 525 francs—a large sum by Jarry's standards—and further expenditure was incurred with the building of the “Tripode”, the fencing of the property and the renting of an adjoining piece of land from a certain M. Troulet. Be this as it may, Jarry probably had high hopes, at last, of real literary success, reinforced by the choice for his next two novels of two popular genres liberally laced with sex. Messaline was probably begun in the summer of 1899, although beyond this little is known about the process of its composition. It is, however, the only one of Jarry's novels of which two substantially different versions survive, one the published text, and the other a manuscript presented by Jarry to the eventual publisher, Thadée Natanson. The leading present-day expert on Messaline, Brunella Eruli, opines that the Natanson manuscript is the earlier of the two, and has described the differences between them. Chapters are ordered differently and, more importantly:

Dans la deuxième version connue de son roman, Jarry a conçu les différents chapitres comme s'il s'agissait de tableaux inspirés par le texte qu'ils sont censés illustrer. […] Passant de la première rédaction à la rédaction définitive, Jarry apporte des changements de style (il s' inspire beaucoup plus du latin) mais il rajoute surtout des digressions historiques et érudites qui ont une valeur d'explication mais aussi de mystification.¹⁹

More interestingly for our purposes, the publication of Messaline displays a good deal of acumen of Jarry's part. Instead of asking for the work to be issued as a volume straight away, he reverted to a strategy which had worked with Ubu Roi in 1896. As he had done with Faustroll, he approached Thadée Natanson, but this time arranged for Messaline to be published in instalments in the Revue Blanche from July to September 1900. Once this much was accomplished, it must have been relatively easy to convince Natanson to issue the work in-volume the following year. It was as a mark of gratitude that Jarry gave Natanson the dedicated manuscript of his novel in July 1901.

Jarry clearly hoped that Messaline would sell. Indeed, he wrote his own advertisements for it which appeared in the Revue Blanche and Le Temps, and had the pleasure of seeing it favourably reviewed by figures as well-respected as Gustave Kahn and Francis Jammes. This was again all very reminiscent of Ubu Roi, of which Jarry had originally planned to send 130 complimentary copies to friends, reviewers (including Arthur Symons and Edmund Gosse) and magazine editors across Europe. By his own standards, Jarry's efforts met with success, three thousand copies of Messaline being sold.

One more thing about Messaline deserves mention, and we might call it the Czech connection. Perhaps the oddest thing about Jarry's whole unusual career is the fact that, while ignored the world over and even to a certain extent in France, he was regularly published in what is now Czechoslovakia. A magazine called Moderni Revue somehow discovered Jarry as early as 1895, publishing translations into Czech of some of his poems. There were periodic contacts between Jarry and Prague until 1904, when Moderni Revue began to publish a translation of Messaline in instalments, as it had first appeared in France. Like the Revue Blanche, Moderni Revue later saw to the issue of the work as a separate volume. The translator was an individual called Kamil Fiala.

In the Museum of National Literature in Prague, a letter survives written by Jarry to Arnost Prochazka, editor of the review. It is of interest firstly because Messaline was the only Jarry novel translated in the author's lifetime (it would also become the first of Jarry's works to be translated into English),²⁰ and secondly because Jarry obviously saw yet another opportunity to revive L'Amour Absolu. Parts of this letter were re-used almost verbatim in the letter on the same subject quoted above:

Étant en voyage dans le Dauphiné, je n'ai pas encore eu le plaisir de voir dans Moderni Revue le commencement de votre traduction de Messaline. Le numero a dû rester à mon domicile de Paris. J'espère avoir le plaisir de vous en écrire bientôt pour vous féliciter.

L'Amour Absolu est un tirage à petit nombre d'exemplaires autographiques (en fac-similé) au Mercure de France mais hors commerce. J'écris par ce courrier à Alfred Vallette pour qu'il vous en fasse parvenir au plus tôt un exemplaire quoique l'ouvrage doive être presque épuisé. Je vous signale mon “Surmâle” édité chez Fasquelle (anciennes éditions de la Revue blanche). Je rentre à Paris dans un mois et tâcherai de vous en avoir un.²¹

From this we of course note that Jarry is rather bending the truth, perhaps in the hope of further translations appearing. The edition of L'Amour Absolu was, as he himself later admitted, anything but exhausted, and the reference to the Mercure de France is misleading to say the least. His “domicile de Paris” was little more than a slum apartment, while Le Surmâle, though nominally under the auspices of Fasquelle, had been out of print for some time.

The final novel Jarry was to complete was Le Surmâle. Again we cannot be sure when it was written, although the surviving manuscript is dated December 8th 1901. Messaline had obviously proved enough of a success for Natanson to accept Le Surmâle without an initial “feuilleton” stage: the novel was published by the Éditions de la Revue Blanche in May 1902, and Natanson received another dedicated manuscript.

Le Surmâle had been described, notably by Thiéri Foulc,²² in terms which make it appear a sort of betrayal on Jarry's part, notwithstanding the fact that it is by common consent his best novel. True, Rachilde claimed in her Alfred Jarry ou le Surmâle des Lettres (1928) that it had been written in response to her plea for Jarry to “écrire comme tout le monde”. It is also true that Le Surmâle is the only one of Jarry's novels which might conceivably be read for distraction, and that, in terms of language alone, it is of far lesser difficulty than any of his previous works. Whatever the case, Le Surmâle was the apogee of Jarry's career as a novelist. It certainly attracted the best reviews he had ever had. Pierre Quillard enthused in the Revue Blanche, while in the Mercure Rachilde did her best to entice readers with promises of soft pornography: “… je ne sais pas du tout comment m'y prendre pour m'expliquer en présence de tant de lectrices.”²³ She concluded, however, in a tone which Jarry must have appreciated:

Les poètes, M. Jarry en est un, sont les grands explorateurs de l'impossible et ce qui étonnerait encore le plus de leur part ce serait probablement le possible. On n'y croirait jamais, le vrai n'étant que très rarement vraisemblable. Le Surmâle est donc un joli bibelot, un joujou de poète.²⁴

It seemed that Jarry, still aged only twenty-nine, might conceivably be on the verge of becoming a successful writer, especially with the publication of Le Surmâle which, although it probably aimed at cashing in on the vogue for science-fiction much in evidence at the turn of the century, gave the genre a social perspective that would not be approached again until the works of Zamyatin and, most of all, Olesha in the 1920s. As so often in his life, however, just when things seemed to be going well for Jarry, disaster struck.

From 1900 until 1903, much of Jarry's writing was done for the Revue Blanche, where, as we have seen, both his novels were published. At the end of 1903, the Revue Blanche folded, robbing the author of his main source of income—derived from his journalism—and the opportunity of seeing either of his most successful novels reprinted in the immediate future. Future journalistic collaborations were by and large less happy, while Eugène Fasquelle, who had absorbed the Éditions de la Revue Blanche, appears to have been rather more hard-headed when it came to Jarry's writings than was Thadée Natanson. Nonetheless, in the penultimate number of the Revue Blanche, in April 1903, Jarry did have the satisfaction of seeing a fragment of his seventh and final novel published, the chapter of La Dragonne entitled “La Bataille de Morsang”.

From this point onwards, Jarry's life took on increasingly tragic overtones which were largely due to his extreme poverty and frequent illness. He was furthermore embroiled in two seemingly endless projects. Pantagruel has already been mentioned, as has the fact that Jarry was unable to finish a satisfactory draft of this very minor work until 1905. The second was La Dragonne itself.

In the earlier period, whatever his individual novels' length of gestation, Jarry still managed to complete drafts of six novels in four years. The difference between this period and the last years of his life is exemplified by the fact that “La Bataille de Morsang” was the only part of La Dragonne that Jarry was ever to review and correct. The plan of the novel was heavily revised as time went on, which resulted in the failure of Jarry to write most of it. Some parts had to be dictated to his sister when he was too ill to write himself, others that he did write are so heavily corrected as to be practically unreadable. There have been attempts to publish La Dragonne, beginning with Dr. Jean Saltas's edition of 1943, but the exercise inevitably appears something of a forlorn hope, even in the wake of the discovery of new manuscript material in the files of the Mercure de France after the last war.

In the preface to his edition of La Dragonne, Saltas, a friend of Jarry's for the last ten years of his life, writes:

Alfred Jarry n'est pas un écrivain pour le grand public. Il faut une grande curiosité d'esprit, un grand sens de la fantaisie la plus poussée pour se plaire à ses écrits, et savoir en découvrir les beautés cachées sous leur obscurité, qui font de lui un des écrivains les plus singulièrement originaux de notre temps.²⁵

Jarry's career as a novelist would seem to prove Saltas's point, since he failed to find favour either with the “grand public” or even with publishers who happened also to be his friends.

It appears, however, that Jarry never quite gave up hope, even in the very last stages of the meningeal tuberculosis that eventually killed him. In spite of the disasters of later years—Pantagruel and the Souvenirs sur Albert Samain which, although immediately accepted for publication by Victor Lemasle, Jarry refused even to advise Rachilde to read, perhaps because he disliked Samain and had only written it for the money—he still apparently hoped that La Dragonne would turn his fortunes around. On October 26th 1907, one week before he died, Jarry wrote to Thadée Natanson about the manuscript which he intended to submit to Fasquelle:

Cher ami, me voici encore cloué à la chambre pour quelque temps, quoique ce soit beaucoup plus bénin que l'année dernière. Ce n'est d'ailleurs pas très pénible au milieu des livres et des paperasses. Pour les manuscrits Fasquelle […] je vous disais une semaine au plus.²⁶

As a piece of optimism this is impressive, as is Jarry's return to Paris from Laval a day or two later. He died on November 1st 1907, leaving debts of seven thousand francs and no means, especially not through the proceeds of his literature, or paying for them.

What, then, does all this tell us about the author, apart from how comparatively little is known about how he wrote his novels and how little success these works enjoyed in his lifetime? For one thing, it suggests that a radical reappraisal of Jarry's work as a novelist is long overdue. Since his death, Jarry's novels have continued to be handicapped both by the author's (in some respects) ill-deserved reputation for eccentricity verging on the insane, and by the very fame of the Ubu plays. The Collège de 'Pataphysique's elevation of Faustroll to a status approaching holy writ in the 1950s did little to overcome either of these problems, especially since Faustroll is one of Jarry's less readable novels.

As has been said already, there is no accounting for, or arguing with, taste in matters of literature. What such documentary evidence as has come to light in the eighty years since Jarry's death does allow us to do is dispel some of the many misconceptions surrounding his books. We may now see that Jarry, contrary to what is still widely believed, regarded literature with deadly earnest, often rewriting works many times before he was satisfied with then and, before misfortune overtook him, being one of the most productive authors of his age. The work Jarry put into his writings is apparent from our brief look at the history of his novels and particularly that of the first four—precisely those often accused of being mere exercises in “mystification”. Jarry was indeed aware what damage his reputation had done to his career. He wrote in a letter of June 8th 1906: “Le bruit a été répandu que le 'Père Ubu' buvait comme un templier. A vous je puis avouer […] que j'avais un peu perdu l'habitude de manger.”²⁷

The seriousness with which Jarry took his literature—to the point of quarrelling self-destructively with Vallette—was mitigated by one factor. Jarry's only source of income after 1896 was his writing, which basically meant his journalism combined with his published fiction. At times, the need for money overcame other considerations—such was the case with L'Amour en Visites and the Souvenirs sur Albert Samain. After 1899 Jarry seems to have radically reappraised his approach to novel-writing, possibly as a function of deteriorating personal circumstances, but no doubt also because the Symbolist influences that had marked his early career and his first four novels were, after the death of Mallarmé, fast becoming a spent force. From this point on he seems to have taken a much more pragmatic approach. On one hand, this had application to the process of publication and sale itself. On the other it may have had an effect on his very style of writing, insofar as from Messaline onwards Jarry's language becomes much more accessible.

Jarry was indeed not a novelist for the “grand public”, and there is no evidence that he strove to become one: certainly not on the basis of the gamut of esoteric references in Messaline and Le Surmâle. A study of his career, however, shows that one of the prime motivations behind his writing, especially as soon as he reached his mid-twenties, was the desire for commercial success of the sort enjoyed by the novelists with whom he associated. Although Jarry's name is now widely known whereas most of these are forgotten, as a novelist it is a success that he has yet to attain, although to his last breath he never quite gave up hope of doing so.

Notes

1. Quelques Fantômes de Jadis (Paris: L'Édition Française Illustrée, 1920), p. 213.

2. Facsimile reproduced in Jacques-Henry Levesque: Alfred Jarry (Paris: Seghers, 1951), n.p.

3. “Un Sage”, in Mercure de France 264, (1/12/35), 247.

4. Gaston Roig (“Géroy”): “Mon Ami Alfred Jarry (Souvenirs)”, in Mercure de France 300 (1/7/47), 497-98.

5. Quoted in Henri Bordillon: Gestes et Opinions d'Alfred Jarry, Écrivain (Laval: Editions Siloé, 1986), p. 201. This biography contains many newly-discovered and important documents, particularly those relating to the settlement of Jarry's estate.

6. Originally printed in Saillet's article “Relativement à l'Amour Absolu”, in Cahiers du Collège de 'Pataphysique, 8-9, p. 71. Reproduced in the Pléiade Œuvres Complètes d'Alfred Jarry, I, 1248-49.

7. There is no apparent reason why she should have lied about this since she was at this time still a far better-known author than Jarry.

8. Quoted in Noël Arnaud: Alfred Jarry: D'Ubu Roi au Docteur Faustroll (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1974), pp. 378-79.

9. “The Decadent Movement in Literature”, in Dramatis Personae (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1925), p. 96.

10. Arnaud: op. cit., p. 378.

11. Facsimile reproduced in Cahiers du Collège de 'Pataphysique, 10, p. 137.

12. Quoted in Arnaud: op. cit., p. 400.

13. Bordillon: op. cit., p. 68.

14. At Jarry's death, his papers were handed over to his sister, who preserved them until her death in 1925, when they disappeared without trace.

15. Reproduced in Cahiers du Collège de 'Pataphysique, 22-23, p. 50.

16. “Souvenirs”, in Mercure de France, 264, (1/12/35), p. 273.

17. Saillet: op. cit., p. 72.

18. Cahiers du Collège de 'Pataphysique, 11, p. 13.

19. “D'une Messaline à l'Autre”, in Europe (Jarry special number, March-April 1981), p. 114.

20. By Louis Colman under the title The Garden of Priapus (New York: Black Hawk Press, 1936).

21. Quoted in Albert Marencin: “Jarry et la Tchécoslovaquie”, in Europe (Jarry issue), p. 213.

22. Especially in the introduction to his excellent edition of the novel (Paris: Eric Losfeld [“Collection Merdre”], 1977).

23. “Revue du Mois (Romans)”, in Mercure de France 42, (1/6/02), 753.

24. Ibid. p. 755.

25. La Dragonne (Paris: Gallimard/N.R.F. 1943), p. 10.

26. Quoted in Bordillon: op. cit., p. 191.

27. See note 2.

Page-numbers in the text refer to Œuvres Complètes d'Alfred Jarry, I, ed. Michel Arrivé (Paris: Pléiade, 1972).