The World of Alphonse Allais Read online

  The World of

  ALPHONSE ALLAIS

  Selected, translated and introduced by

  MILES KINGTON

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Introduction and a Note on the Translation

  How I became a journalist

  Mothers-in-law are the necessity of invention

  A Christmas story I

  The language of flowers

  Anything they can do …

  Ghost Story

  Lighthouses

  A careful criminal

  St. Peter and his concierge

  The poor bastard and the good fairy

  Animal power

  The failed fiancé

  My world record

  A petition

  The Henri II chest

  In which Captain Cap takes great exception to being made a fool of

  The boy and the eel

  Putting the record straight

  The Imprudential Assurance Company

  The dogs of war

  Romance in the ranks

  God

  A house of mystery

  Freaks

  The Templars

  D’Esparbès’s revenge

  Arfled

  Patriotism on the cheap

  Finis Britanniae

  Finis Britanniae (continued)

  Final thoughts on the floating of England

  Crisis time for England

  It’s love that makes you go round the world

  Keeping up appearances

  Virtue rewarded

  Companies, insurance, infernal cheek of

  The ends justify the means

  P S

  The doctor

  Lionisation

  The Corpse Car

  Captain Cap again

  A stroke of good luck

  A Christmas story II

  The search for the unknown woman

  Absinthe

  The cork

  Littorally

  The beautiful stranger

  M-E-R or The New American Moto-Elevated-Road

  A few ingenious ideas

  Some more ingenious ideas

  A third and final batch of ingenious ideas

  The prevention of cruelty to microbes

  The paper crisis

  Commercial interlude

  Family life

  Sensitivity

  The good painter

  Personal Column

  A tactical error

  Speed reading

  Post Office love

  Comfort

  An unlikely story

  A sad poem translated from the Belgian

  Widow and son

  The polymyth

  A most unusual way to die

  No hurry

  How far can the book publicity people go, always assuming, the way things are going at the moment, that they will ever stop?

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Alphonse Allais was born on October 20th 1854 and died on October 28th 1905. He was probably the finest humorous writer France has ever produced. I hope you enjoy this selection of his pieces.

  And that, in an ideal world, would be all the introduction that Alphonse Allais needed. But this is not an ideal world (if it were, we might not need humour) and seventy years after his death Allais is still an almost totally obscure figure in the English-speaking part of it. He has never been translated into English. You will not find him in the Encyclopaedia Britannica or indeed any other reference book in English that I have ever seen. Drop his name at any gathering of well-read people and it will sink to the bottom of an immediate silence. The only way you ever come across Allais is by sheer accident. Which leaves me with some introducing to do.

  Well, let me mention a few of his achievements. He was among other things the first man in history to paint an abstract picture. In the 1890s it was a common criticism of modern painters that they could not paint or draw; so Allais’s circle decided to hold an exhibition by people, mostly writers, who genuinely could not paint or draw. Allais’s contribution to this show, which they called the Salon des Incohérents, was a large, completely black rectangular canvas. It was entitled ‘Negroes Fighting in a Cave at Night’. Encouraged by the success of this trail-blazing work, he followed it with six others, among them a totally white rectangle called ‘Anaemic Young Girls Going to their First Communion through a Blizzard’ and a red composition entitled ‘Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes by the Red Sea.’

  He also invented a perfect method for being called early at a hotel without being rudely disturbed. It was to arrange an early morning call for the room on either side of you, and to be gently woken by the sound of your neighbours’ protests. (Once it almost misfired; one of his neighbours obediently rose and dressed, paid his bill and left. Having been roused by the dim sound of fury through the other wall, Allais found the first man on the station platform half an hour later, still muttering to himself in a puzzled sort of way: ‘I do wish I could remember why I had to make an early start.’)

  He has passed on to us the tragic story of a young writer who swore never to do any hack journalism till he had finished his first, great novel and who thus unsurprisingly ran out of money. One evening he came home to find no food in the house at all. Undeterred, he cut up an old leather suitcase, fried the slices and ate them. In the night he became very ill and died. The papers next day splashed the headline: ‘TRUNK FOUND IN DEAD MAN!’

  He also started an essay on his impression of Italy with the words: ‘The most striking thing about the city of Venice is the complete absence of the smell of horse dung’. And he once broke off from the flow of a story to say ‘(Do you mind if I open a bracket? It’s awfully stuffy in here.)’.

  Whenever post office workers appear in his stories, they are invariably bad-tempered. This, he once explained, was in accordance with the old Latin proverb Post Coitum Animal Triste or, Postal clerks are surly beasts.

  On a more serious level, he invented a good many things years before anyone else. Germ warfare and microfilmed newspapers, for example. He also invented some things which have not yet been tried out. The necromobile, for instance, a vehicle for cremating dead people actually en route to the funeral, which is powered by the energy derived from the conflagration. Or the frosted glass aquarium tank for shy fish. Or a method of collecting kidnap money by homing pigeon. Or the unique system for disposing of unwanted mothers-in-law found in ‘Mothers-in-law are the Necessity of Invention’ in this selection.

  It can be gathered from this short catalogue that Allais was not an entirely conventional person, but there was nothing in his background to suggest that he might turn out so. He was born in Honfleur, which is to this day a quiet fishing port of small tile-hung Norman houses, across the Seine estuary from the much larger sea-port of Le Havre. His father was the local pharmacist, and when Alphonse had finished school he was sent off as a young man to Paris to study all the things a young man must study before he becomes a pharmacist like his father. He never completed his studies, because in Paris he found a different way of life and one which proved more suited to his talents.

  For it was at the same time that he arrived in Paris that the first stirrings were to be seen of the social and cultural movements which were to culminate twenty years later in the glittering world of fin-de-siècle Paris. We tend to associate all the symbols of that Belle Epoque – Art Nouveau, Erik Satie, Bernhardt, the Eiffel Tower, cancan, Impressionism, absinthe, boulevard life – with the 1890s, but that decade was the culmination of much previous artistic and frivolous ferment. It was just when Allais arrived in the mid-70s, for instance, that the shift was beginning from the Left Bank to Montmartre
as a centre of entertainment and Bohemian life, and Allais became involved with the establishment of what was probably the first Montmartre cabaret, thus joining a long tradition of medical students who have abandoned medicine to go on to higher things.

  The cabaret was called Le Chat Noir. It was initiated and run by a man called Rodolphe Salis and as it developed it became more than just a place where you could go to drink, be entertained and stay late; it became a magnet for the young, talented and irresponsible of all ages. The piano accompaniment for the cabaret singers was provided by, among others, the young Erik Satie and Claude Debussy. At the other end of the age scale, contributions were made by the then declining Paul Verlaine. And Allais found himself usefully if not perhaps too gainfully employed devising entertainments, writing monologues for other performers and reciting his own material. He did not come into his own, though, until Salis decided to extend the operations of the Chat Noir by starting a weekly humorous paper of the same name.

  For it was as a journalist that Allais found his true metier (no disrespect to those French critics who, true to French tradition, have seen him as a frustrated poet or essayist) and he could not have found a better place to start than in the Chat Noir. Not only did he benefit from rubbing ideas with a group of like-minded fellows who called themselves Les Hydropathes (an ironic term, meaning roughly ‘The Friends of Water’) but the existence of the Chat Noir until 1890 gave him a platform on which he could outgrow the derivative, somewhat pun-laden humour of his first years to become the best and most original humorist of the era. (Some of his colleagues would bear further rediscovery – his friend Charles Cros, for instance, who was not only a quirky poet of some quality and an original humorist in his own right, but a talented inventor. He registered a fully workable gramophone some six months before Edison did.)

  When the Chat Noir foundered, Allais was ready for a wider audience. He found it as a weekly columnist for two popular papers of the time, Le Journal and Le Sourire, of which latter he also became chief editor. He wrote for other magazines as well, published ten collections of pieces in his lifetime (calling them his Anthumous Works), wrote a novel called L’Affaire Blaireau, dramatised some of his work, travelled in Britain, Italy and America, and is even said to have been syndicated in Canadian papers, though I have not found any concrete evidence of this. (To be honest, I have not tried to find any.) But there was plenty of material at home to satisfy any humorist – it was an age full of new inventions, European aspirations, American expansion, Universal Exhibitions, relaxed censorship and an effervescent social life. His system for writing humorous pieces did not change much over his last twenty years, mainly because he did not have a system. He wrote as the fancy took him. One day he might indulge in parody. The next he would write a shaggy dog story. The next would find him printing imaginary letters from readers, the day after he might be attacking dogs, spreading anti-English propaganda, revealing that the visit of the Czar to France was being made by a Russian officer who resembled him through fear of assassination, announcing new inventions, telling a macabre tale or merely reminiscing. If the piece turned out too short for the space available, he filled it out with an imaginary Personal Column.

  If I have made his life sound uneventful, it is because he led an uneventful life, so much so that French writers on him find it hard to know what to say about him outside his writings. But it is also because he himself made little attempt to separate his own life from his fantastic imagination. He knew the difference, but he never let the reader know. There is, for instance, a story about Allais in his collected works which comes from a short-lived magazine called the Anti-Concierge. It tells how Allais came home very late one foul rainy night and rang endlessly for the concierge to let him in. Eventually the man shouted from his room: ‘Sorry, can’t let anyone in after midnight!’

  ‘Oh, come on!’

  ‘Sorry, the landlord would give me hell if he knew I’d broken the rules.’

  Evenually Allais played his trump card. He dropped a 100 franc piece through the letter box. Like a flash the concierge was there to let him in. Allais entered, dripping wet and cross, but with the concierge now at his beck and call. So he asked the man to slip outside to fetch in some luggage he had left in the street, and promptly slammed the door shut on him.

  ‘Let me in!’ shouted the concierge. ‘Stop playing around!’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Allais calmly. ‘Can’t let anyone in after midnight.’

  ‘I’m freezing to death out here,’ begged the concierge. ‘I’ve only got my night clothes on.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ replied Allais. ‘But the landlord would give me hell if he knew I’d broken the rules.’

  ‘Then how am I going to get in?’ whined the concierge.

  ‘Same way I did, I expect,’ suggested Allais.

  And after a pause his 100 franc piece came rolling back through the letter box.

  Now, the point of this ingenious story (probably the first ever about a Jobsworth) is that knowing Allais one has no idea whether it ever happened, or indeed whether he wrote it or not. It may be in his collected works, but even the editor confesses himself ignorant as to its veracity or attribution. Allais always insisted that life was as amazing as it was in his stories. You will find several stories in this book about his friend Captain Cap, who was supposedly a Canadian sea captain and who is said to have been called Albert Capron. Allais wrote enough stories about him to fill a book, which he called Captain Cap: His Life, His Ideas and His Cocktail Recipes. He helped promote Cap’s candidacy in a local Montmartre election. Among his election pledges were a promise to convert the Place Pigalle into a seaport and a commitment to encourage licentiousness in the streets with a view to halting France’s population slide. But how many of the stories are true? Was there ever such a candidate? Did Captain Cap even exist? I would hate to have to answer any of those questions.

  The longest running joke he ever manufactured was a parody-in-instalments of Francisque Sarcey, a drama critic who was the Harold Hobson of his day. Allais often imitated his earnest, slightly simplistic reflections on life in the Chat Noir and always signed them with Sarcey’s name. Not infrequently young admirers turned up at the cabaret to meet Sarcey and were entertained by Allais in that role. On one occasion he invited a young man to have dinner with him the next night and gave Sarcey’s real address, warning the admirer however that he had a younger brother who was under the sad delusion that he was the real drama critic. If the brother happened to be there (and he usually was, being kept at home because of his unfortunate tendency to molest children) the guest should be sure to treat him sternly and tell him: ‘I know all about you and those young kids!’ Well, the young man duly turned up at Sarcey’s for dinner, and was received by Sarcey himself who was amazed to find himself being accussed of unmentionable crimes.

  ‘But I am Sarcey!’ insisted Sarcey.

  ‘Then you have changed a great deal since I met you yesterday.’

  ‘And where did you meet “me” yesterday?’

  ‘At the Chat Noir, of course.’

  At which point Sarcey detected Allais’s hand and genially made the young man stay to dinner, for he felt quite amiably towards Allais’s permanent leg-pulling, as if it did them both credit. Once, though, a Sarcey parody appeared in a Paris magazine which was not by Allais, and he wrote furiously to the editor to tell him to get rid of the impostor. ‘There are only two men in Paris entitled to sign themselves Francisque Sarcey. Firstly, me, and secondly, Francisque Sarcey.’

  The point being that when reading Allais’s pieces one never knows if he is telling the truth or not, and that one never cares to know. When I broadcast a short talk on Alphonse Allais on Radio 3 on Boxing Day 1973, I found afterwards that a large proportion of people who had heard it assumed I had made Alphonse Allais up, together with all his works. Allais would have liked that.

  What is important about his work is how little it has dated. This was partly because he wrote so little abo
ut the politics and personalities of his time. Even the Dreyfus affair, which straddled much of his working life, hardly appears in his writing at all. ‘I have very firm opinions on the matter,’ he wrote to one editor, ‘but I prefer to keep them to myself.’ His attitude can be summed up by the story he tells of staying for the weekend in a country house where they suddenly ran out of eggs. The maid went out to get replacements managed to borrow six from a local French Army Colonel and another six from a wealthy neighbour named Levy. When she returned, the eggs had spontaneously shattered in the basket.

  By some blessed instinct Allais steered clear of the kind of topical references which turn yellow and die within a week or the kind of instant comment which makes a six-month-old Private Eye seem incomprehensible. He latched on either to the contemporary phenomena which still seem fascinating (international prejudices, the threat of the car, the depletion of natural resources, bridging the Channel, the advantage of bicycling, even a reference to Indo-China as ‘that damned nuisance’) or to phenomena which will always seem contemporary: love, drinking, making money, ghosts, Christmas and trying to get children to go to bed.

  Above all, though, it is his methods which seem modern. There are things in this book which are as free-wheeling as Monty Python (he also had a thing about parrots, like Monty Python), as tasteless as Lenny Bruce for the right reason, as cool and deadpan as Mort Sahl, as subtly macabre as Roald Dahl. He used the footnote as a weapon, not as explanation (all the footnotes in this book are Allais’s own). He would turn aside from the narrative to talk to the reader, he would digress for the sake of sabotage, he would lull the reader into false security to lead him into a verbal minefield, he mixed ornate French with low slang, he put the punch-line at the beginning and then proceeded to justify it, he invented the shaggy dog story….

  (Well, perhaps he didn’t, but I have never come across an earlier claimant. Here is one example. A monkey and a parrot were arguing heatedly as to which of them was the more sophisticated animal in the chain of evolution. The monkey pointed out that it was clearly the animal which was nearer to man, which meant the monkey. ‘I can walk upright, I use a thumb, I live in an organised society – I can even use tools.’ The parrot was unimpressed by this line of argument. ‘Yes, but I have the greatest gift of all, the gift that separates man from the apes. I can talk!’ ‘Talk?’ said the monkey. ‘What the hell do you think I’ve been doing for the last ten minutes!’)