I’m a bit of a pig, a lot, even - Alphonse Allais's I Am Sarcey

Every time I write about Doug Skinner’s translations of Alphonse Allais – the new one is I Am Sarcey (2017, contents 1886-97) – I say that the Allais’s humor columns and so on ought to be period pieces, historical ephemera, but are better than that, are good.  Still funny; still fun.  This is my only idea about Allais, apparently.  If anything this is even more the case with I Am Sarcey – more ephemeral yet not, but even more so.

Francisque Sarcey was for decades the most powerful theater critic in France, like Frank Rich in the distant old days in New York City.  A rebel in his youth, he became more plump and bourgeois as he aged.  To the young cabaret Bohemians and artists of Montmartre, he was made for mockery.

Alphonse Allais mocked him by writing a newspaper column under Sarcey’s name.  I don’t know much about the “real” Sarcey, but Allais’s Sarcey is a great comic creation.  Conventional, banal, inadvertently self-revealing, lecherous, pompous yet deeply ignorant.

Zola doesn’t commit obscenities in his life, but fills his books with them.

Me, in my articles, never a dirty word, but how I make up for it in private!

For – and this is no secret to anyone – I’m a bit of a pig, a lot, even.

Well then!  I’d rather be the way I am, than be like Zola.  (30, 1887)

Allais has no qualms about being vulgarly insulting, but the banality is the primary insult.  There follows a digression about where to buy chickens:

…  go see my cousin in Dourdan.  He’ll take care of you, and it won’t be expensive.

He also sells little baby chicks, and eggs to be hatched.

But I’m chattering, chattering, and I forgot what I was talking about.  (31)

Sarcey is as digressive as Tristram Shandy.  He has the habit of digressing into explanations of the most ordinary things – common card games, or how steam power works (“Few people, outside those in the profession, know what steam is,” 111).  He spends an entire column describing how he was out without an umbrella, and got “as soaked as soup.”

So what do I do now, after that adventure?

I’ll tell you.

Whether it’s a fine day or a bad one, I don’t go out without an umbrella.  (155, 1893)

That is the main source of humor, I suppose – that this powerful man is a friendly, talkative idiot.  What is funniest is the conversational, self-satisfied voice applied to trivia.

A terrific running joke involves Sarcey 1) bragging about how he no longer writes any of the other columns that bear his name, meaning those written by the “real” Sarcey, having handed them off to ghostwriters like a butcher from his neighborhood, and 2) complaining about people writing fraudulent columns, filled with the grossest stupidities, as if they are by him.  Sometimes Allais seems so stunned by the “real” Sarcey’s genuine idiocies that he has trouble inventing fake idiocies.

I suppose these pieces benefit from more notes than usual, more identification of newspaper and Bohemians and so on.  Skinner’s notes are themselves amusing and surprising, so this is hardly a problem.  But Allais’s Sarcey becomes plump and lifelike without much extra help.

Champagne or Chartreuse? - Alponse Allais reconciles the old values with a somewhat ruined life

He then seemed to hesitate between a glass of fine champagne and one of Chartreuse.  (p. 17)

I have had the great luck to read the latest volume of Doug Skinner’s translations of Alphonse Allais, humorist, prankster, man about Montmartre.  This time it is Allais’s only novel, The Blaireau Affair (1899), one of those books that sounds minor and weightless, like it should be a dead period piece, yet in practice – meaning, reading – is effervescent and flavorful, perfect in its way.

And in France, it is alive and well.  The most recent film version is from 2010!  The most recent non-pornographic version.  Despite having read Skinner introduce Allais four times now, his introductions remain eye-openers.  Or eyebrow-raisers.  I suppose my eyes were already open, given that I was reading.

The novel is about a woman who likes bad boys (mildly bad boys), the gymnastics instructor who must prove himself to be (mildly) bad, the poacher , Blaireau, who is mistakenly tossed in the klink as a result, and the complications that ensue from this miscarriage of justice.  A B-plot about a Paris courtesan and her boyfriends is at least as funny as the main plot.  Some theorizing about courtesans:  

“Their reputation may not be intact, but they’re dishonored under such charming conditions!  And besides, they lead lives of activity and surprise, whereas we…  The ideal, you see, Baron, would be to reconcile the old family values of the provinces, with a somewhat ruined life…  But it’s very difficult.”  (30, ellipses in original)

A footnote, though, reminds me what Allais thinks of his plot:

I probably shouldn’t  tell you this now, but, too bad, I just can’t help myself.  Know then that Arabella will get married near the end of the novel, and will be very happy.  (32)

Bookish controversies are eternal.

The art of the book is in the voice, even more than the characters or the jokes, Allais’s literary simulation of genial conversation:

So, here we are in Paris.

In the Étoile district.

In a cozy little apartment occupied by a young woman, one of those young women who… one of those young women of whom…

This person who is not a young girl, because she is a young woman, as I said, is also not the wife of some individual.

Widow?  Not in the least.

And besides, it would be inelegant to insist upon this inquiry, which is perfectly unnecessary anyway, and more suitable for some mercenary working for the census, because the lines that follow will establish  soon enough the regrettable civil status of the pretty little sinner. (81-2, ellipses in original)

The punchy little paragraphs are the signature of a newspaper man.  The hesitations, the indirection, the rhetorical shift in the last sentence, those are French, delightfully, irrepressibly French, champagne and Chartreuse.

Alphonse Allais, pale slave of the truth

Another collection of jokes, stories, and nonsense by French humorist Alphonse Allais, chronicler, in his way, of the Montmartre Bohemia of the 1890s, has been charmed into English by Doug Skinner.  It is comparable to the others, comparably good.

The Squadron’s Umbrella is a collection of newspaper pieces and such ephemera, cullings from Allais’s humor column, but it is, I want to note, also a genuine book published in 1893.  Inevitably many references have become obscure,  the jokes dim or overly familiar, and the humor more theoretical than actually funny.

The same is true of Mark Twain.  Such is the nature of humor writing.  Later this week I want to write about Mark Twain’s first two collections of his newspaper writing.  Exact same problem.  The American context is more familiar to me, which helps, and Twain was a greater genius than Allais, although in the specific form of the punchy two-page newspaper anecdote, Allais does a lot better in the comparison than I would have guessed.

Oddly, The Squadron’s Umbrella even includes a Twain story, “Poor Little Stephen Girard,” translated and modified by Allais which I read just recently in the Library of America Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1852-1890.  The oddest thing is that the story is not by Twain.  See p. 149 of Skinner’s book.  It’s a good imitation of Twain, and a good fit for Allais.

How Allais works.  See “Too Many Kangaroos”:

At the present time, Paris – if I count correctly – holds within its borders no fewer than three boxing kangaroos.

The number three, which would be insignificant were we enumerating stars in the firmament, or grains of sand in the desert, acquires a special importance when the census of kangaroos is the subject.

For a long time, Paris was bereft of boxing kangaroos.  We found ourselves no worse, and no better, for that matter.  (30)

Allais goes to the zoo to interview the non-boxing kangaroos on the subject.  The zoo kangaroos, it turns out, think the boxing kangaroos are kind of trashy.  I am employing my usual demotic rhetorical mode, but please note how little of Allais’s humor really comes from any jokes about kangaroos but from  his lightly elevated rhetoric – “if I count correctly,” or the comparison to the stars and the sands, or the detached wisdom of “and no better.”  That last is the Allais signature.   The style can be applied to anything, and make anything funny. 

We must have Baudelaire, of course, but we must not have too much.  (41)

So true.  Or:

I apologize to my female readers for the unpoetical vulgarity of this detail, but when one writes for posterity, as I do, one renounces forever the right to embroider or to change the facts.  See in me nothing but a pale slave of the truth (lividus servus veritatis).  (137)

Twain has his own version of this exact joke; I plan to supply numerous examples over the next few days, since it makes me laugh every time.

Skinner’s annotations and illustrations are, as usual, exemplary.  Tracking down the Oxnard Beet Sugar Company in Grand Island, Nebraska (pp. 61 and 143) – above and beyond, Doug.  Skinner has an even newer new book out just now, a 17th century French zombie novel which I will have to see to believe.

An amateur, a simple amateur is all that I am - the plays of Alphonse Allais made me laugh

I have in my hands the Selected Plays of Alphonse Allais, another collection of the French humorist’s columns, monologues, and whatnots, including even a couple of miniature plays, the sequel to last year’s enlightening Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks.  That last part of the title is enough to identify the earlier book as the superior one.  No drink recipes in Selected Plays.  Dates of publication run from 1879 to 1900.

Here we are in the theatrical realm not so far from today’s stand-up comedy and yesterday’s sketch comedy.  The monologist has a little story to tell, and although one hopes the end is good the jokes and asides along the way are just as important.

The narrator is ill and receiving house calls from his doctor:

One morning when I was feeling not at all well, my doctor, after auscultating me more carefully than usual, asked me:

“Are you content with this apartment?”

“Why yes, pretty much.”

“How much is your rent?”

“Three thousand and four.”

“Is the concierge acceptable?”

And on like that.  “Etc., etc.”  I know this joke in its later New York City version.  Now a comedian would have to modify it somehow to get rid of the house call.  Plus, who’s going to have the better apartment these days, the doctor or the comic?

You really have to imagine the performance.  In “The Umbrella,” the narrator comes up with an amazing invention to keep off the rain, a silk cloth attached to a cane by rings and rods.  “That’s all there is to it, but you do have to think of it.”  He even comes up with an elegant name at the end, “’little shade’ in Italian.”  There is barely any joke aside from the monologist describing the umbrella in utter seriousness, as if he had no idea it already existed.  I’ll bet the bit killed.

“A Malcontent” is about a grump who shouts “Hooray for Boulanger,” a political slogan, whenever anything goes wrong for him, which is often, like when the bus is late.  The odd thing is that I met this fellow on a train in Paris once, an ancient man wearing a number of Catholic medals, who when forcefully informed he was sitting in the wrong seat shouted “Vive la République!  Vive la privatization!”  A true story, pointless, but true.

I wonder if I am emphasizing the wrong thing.  Allais has some importance as a forerunner of the Surrealists, and this book and Captain Cap make it clear why.  But I found myself laughing at the mother-in-law jokes,  the publisher jokes, the door-to-door salesman jokes, many of which would not have been out of place on Your Show of Shows.  The sex jokes, probably not on American television, back in the 1950s, I mean.

Somebody else can do a post about Allais as a proto-Dadaist.  I’ll just admire a humor writer who at the distance of 130 years and another language remains funny.

The book is like Captain Cap a production of Doug Skinner, friend of Wuthering Expectations, who translated, annotated, and even illustrated it.  It is another gift to English readers.  Great job; many thanks; more, please.  Title quotation from “The English Accent.”

Alphonse Allais and his pal Captain Cap, touring the bars of Montmartre - with a bonus mint julep recipe, sort of

Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks is a 1902 collection of the French humorist Alphonse Allais.  I had assumed that the humor had lost its flavor and that the book was useful as a period piece.  I was right about the latter but wrong about the former.

Allais, like any good humorist, needed a shtick – he needed a bundle of them – and Captain Cap has a great one.  Most pieces are encounters on the streets and bars of Montmartre with Captain Cap himself, who always has a new scheme, a new gadget, a new lie, and a new drink.

Early on, for example, over mint juleps, Cap describes his discovery of a cold cut mine in Quebec:  Meat-Land.  An explanation is given for the creation of such a mine that is almost plausible to those familiar with the principles of French cooking.

The cold cut mine has to be the finest creation in the book, from the Surrealist point of view, but it has lots of rivals, from the Kangacycle to the scheme to fill the French Catacombs with Arctic foxes to the Grandiose Billiards Club:

It looked as if the rain had not decided not to fall, so I proposed to Captain Cap that we play a game of billiards, simply, I added, to kill time.

“Alas!” Cap replied, “it is not we who kill time, but time that kills us!”

“Just to make it pass, then.”

“Alas!” Cap repeated, “it is not we who make time pass, but time that makes us pass.”

We could have continued quite a while with this system, so I thought it best not to insist.  (165)

In a bit of scene-setting later on the same page, Allais says he “should inform the reader, of there is still time, that the scene took place in the little white café on Blue Street – far preferable, in my opinion, to the little blue café on White Street).”

Allais has more than one arrow-through-the-head in his shtick quiver, is what I am trying to demonstrate here.

I need to get to the drinks.  The translator has helpfully catalogued all of them in an appendix.  Some of the drinks have dated where the jokes have not, like the various flips – try to find a bartender to serve you a drink with a raw egg in it.  And other drinks were once more, hmm, flexible:

The mint julep is excellent, when you can get fresh mint: crush four sprigs of the plant with a teaspoon of sugar, add a glass of cognac, fill with crushed ice, add a jigger of yellow Chartreuse, top off with water, and stir well.  Soak a spring of mint in lemon juice, and put it in the center of the glass.  Add seasonal fruits, and pour over it, without stirring, a dash of rum.  Sprinkle with sugar.  Drink with a straw. (333)

Seasonal fruits?  Yellow Chartreuse, are you insane?  And this is if anything less bizarre to me than the cocktails involving port.  Captain Cap adds port to lemonade.  How tastes change, in literature, jokes, and booze.

So this is an educational book, is what I am saying.  A period piece in the best sense.

Doug Skinner, who fortunately comments at Wuthering Expectations on occasion, is the translator.  He has enhanced the original with his own illustrations.  “Nobody said translation was easy,” Skinner notes (p. 245).

Congratulations and many thanks, Mr. Skinner!  Captain Cap is a fine contribution to English letters and Franco-American drinking.