The World of Alphonse Allais Read online

  Which is not to say that every piece of Allais is a gem. Like most journalists, Allais never gave himself time to reach perfection (legend has it that he wrote his pieces in a café on the night of the deadline, handing each sheet as it was written to be rushed to the printer) and there are in this volume superb stories with moderate endings and marvellous episodes in routine routines. But Allais is not a man to laugh aloud at much of the time or to find in the Oxford Book of Funny French Quotations. You are more likely to sit with a permanent fascinated smile on your face when you read him. He works cumulatively, and the best way to approach him is to wander at leisure across his infinitely varied landscape, giving yourself time to get drunk on his peculiar flavour. I have been doing so for ten years, long before it ever occurred to me that I might translate him one day, and I can honestly say that he has given me more pleasure in that time than any other comic writer with the possible exception of Tom Stoppard. (With whom, come to think, he has many parallels.)

  All of which leaves one question unanswered. If Allais is even half as good as I suggest, how is it that he is totally obscure in the English-speaking world?

  There are several possible answers to this. One is that most humorists die with the magazines they wrote for. Another is that a humorous writer does not have the normal life-belt of literary histories or academic syllabuses or serious people’s conversations to cling on to. There is also the curious literary law whereby serious writers are thought to remain fresh for ever whereas comic writers date quickly.

  But in Allais’s case there is also, above all, the mischance whereby he happened to be born a Frenchman. (I am skating on thin ice here, so I shall skate quickly.) Because, it seems to me, the French have a far greater mistrust of humour than we do. They like wit, they like satire, they love a good coarse belly laugh and have given us the word ‘Rabelaisian’ to prove it, but they don’t know what to make of a man who simply sets out to amuse. They don’t even have a term for what he produces, so they have imported our word ‘humour’, as if it were some exotic, fascinating but ultimately incomprehensible activity. A French artist born with comic talent can only get by as long as he devotes that talent to some well-established form of art such as drama (Molière), the novel (Queneau), satire (Voltaire), even verse (Prévert) or song (Brassens). But to be a humorist is too frivolous, too uncommitted, even too unliterary. It isn’t, in a word, French.

  And Allais had the misfortune to exist and work in a freak period in French history: a time when humorous journalism was undergoing a huge boom. It hardly had before or has since. But in those few years there was an explosion of talent which – not just in humour, but also in songs, posters, cabarets, early films, conversation, boulevard farces, paintings and social life – has made the turn of the century inescapably French. The images of the time are all, with the scanty exceptions of Jack the Ripper and Oscar Wilde, Parisian through and through. When we think of that epoch, we think of France.

  Inevitably, it could not last and when the era burst like a bubble Allais was forgotten. For forty years he vanished. Utterly. He died in full harness in 1905, at the age of fifty-one. And until André Breton made brief mention of him in his Anthology of Black Humour in 1940 he might well never have existed. He simply did not fit into any French category of memorability.

  Even since then his memory has been kept alive only by fanatical adherents who have edited some dozen paperback collections of his work, and by a heroic figure named François Caradec, who has recently master-minded for Les Editions de la Table Ronde the collected works of Allais, mostly rescued from hard-to-find magazines of the time. Yet Allais is still not a household name in France.

  Even in his home town of Honfleur he is not quite as celebrated as you might expect, which is partly because Honfleur has an unusual crop of distinguished sons to celebrate such as the painter Boudin and Erik Satie the composer. There is a rue Alphonse Allais, it is true, and a plaque reading “Ici naquit Alphonse Allais, Ecrivain Humoriste’ on his father’s old pharmacy, but the pharmacy is now a restaurant named, ironically, after another famous Honfleur inhabitant, Champlain, the sailor who founded Quebec. When I visited Honfleur in late October 1975 to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of Allais’s death, I met no-one there who realised what an auspicious day the 28th was.

  Yet I was lucky enough to meet Henry Couespel who is not only at 94 the oldest living inhabitant but also almost certainly the last person alive to remember Allais personally. M. Couespel’s father was in the pharmaceutical supply trade and young Henry frequently made deliveries to Allais’s father’s shop.

  ‘Alphonse Allais often came back from Paris to stay with his parents,’ he told me, ‘but I don’t think I ever realised until after the First War that he was a well-known writer. All we knew was that he was M. Allais’s son and had gone to live in Paris where he wrote for some paper or other. When he came back, he could most often be seen wandering round the old port in a straw boater carrying an old Norman peasant’s stick, or sitting in a cafe. He always struck me as very introvert – très renfermé – and as having rather highly coloured cheeks. That was because he drank, you know, drank too much. Absinthe, of course. He once invited me into a café for a drink with him, which was a great honour for a young lad.

  ‘But he always had the reputation of being a joker. I remember once he was in the butcher’s shop overlooking the port and the butcher, who was a big simple man, said to him: “Look, M. Allais – that’s strange. They’ve opened one of the lock gates into the port fully, and kept the other closed. Why on earth have they done that?” “Easy,” said Allais. “They want to half-empty the port”. “Ah,” said the butcher.’

  And M. Couespel chuckled at the eighty-year-old memory of it.

  ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘a lot of those incidents he describes in his stories did really happen. You remember the piece called Zèbres, about how he and a friend painted the horses of some locals with black and white stripes? All true. I remember it well. Mark you, I really knew his parents better…’

  Allais’s lack of fame in France may simply be because he is not as good as I think. Perhaps. It could also be because he has not yet encountered his true audience, an English-speaking one, a theory of which this book is the first tentative test. (His friends always felt that Allais was a little too English for his own good.) After all, it is hard for the English to be alerted to Alphonse Allais if the French never have been, or if they never deserved to be. There have been English authors who have always done better in France than they have here; perhaps Allais is an example of a writer whose true but as yet unfound home is in England.

  Allais would have been tickled by the idea. On the one hand, as a true Norman, he cared little for the English. On the other hand he loved a good paradox. He rarely had a good word to say for Britain yet was fascinated by the place, which in those days had the all-powerful aura that America has today and was consequently equally resented. Now that we have relinquished our role of global bully I think he would have allowed us to enjoy his writing at leisure.

  One of the few principles I hold dear in life is never to try to analyse humour, which I fear I have betrayed in this introduction. So let me make amends by stressing finally that Allais’s place in the history of literature is quite immaterial. It doesn’t matter a damn if he never influenced another writer or if he is not significant or if he isn’t mentioned in a history of nineteenth-century literature. All that matters is whether he still has the power to amuse the reader. If you find what follows unamusing, please blame it on the translator, learn French and read Allais in the original.

  A Note on the Translation

  The main problem that a translator of Allais has to face is that he is untranslatable. It is almost impossible to transfer humour from one language to another. The rhythms of French are very different from those of English. Allais was a stylist who did tricks with French that cannot be done with English, any more than a genuine French loaf can be cooked from English f
lour.

  So the best that can be done is to provide a version that suggests Allais’s Frenchness, retains a period flavour and changes gear when the original does, while at the same time remaining fluent, not wooden. I have done this as best I could. I am not a professional translator; I am a professional humorous journalist with a degree in French and a big dictionary. Ideally, one should take as long to develop an English style for Allais as he himself did in French, but the publishers indicated to me they were not prepared to wait twenty years.

  A few points.

  Allais, like most Frenchmen, loved a good pun and rather liked a bad pun. Many of them occur in his made-up names (his American friend called Harry Covayre, for example) and all these I have left as he wrote them, for the reader to pick up for himself. His other puns I have either provided English substitutes for or, doubtless, failed to notice.

  I have sometimes been deliberately anachronistic and used English slang terms which did not exist in his day. This is because many of the French slang terms he uses still exist, whereas the Victorian English equivalents have died. It seems better to recreate the original effect rather than create the original substance.

  Occasionally he makes up words; sometimes prophetically. In one piece I use the word ‘ecological’. This did exist in English at the time, but the world Allais used in French was his own invention ‘géophile’, which means friend of the earth.

  From time to time I felt it was absolutely necessary to omit small passages, run paragraphs together, drop forgotten references and condense long-winded denouements. Not very often, though.

  My only yardstick in selecting the pieces was to make them varied – to cover as many subjects as possible, while illustrating the different ways in which he used his cool, curiously modern style. I included ‘The Doctor’ as an example of the kind of cabaret sketch used at Le Chat Noir (it is dedicated to the actor who performed it). And ‘Commercial Interlude’ I thought worth using, as it reads like a good modern radio sketch. I find it impressive that they were writing good radio sketches in the 1890s.

  Finally, an oddity. I mentioned that Allais knew Verlaine from the Chat Noir days. There exists one letter written to Allais from Verlaine, included in Caradec’s complete edition of the works, and, as befits a letter from a great poet to a great humorist or indeed from any writer to any other writer, it is all about money. Here it is.

  Tuesday 8 May 1894

  My dear Allais,

  I hear that a little book has come out called ‘Les Gatés du Chat Noir’ with a trifle of mine in it – ‘J’crach’ pas sur Paris etc’. I’d be grateful if you could possibly send me a copy of the anthology and let me know if any cash will be coming my way, because we could all do with a bit of hard cash now and then, eh? especially

  your old colleague P. Verlaine

  I’m laid up with my leg (not for long, I hope) in the Hôpital St Louis, Gabrielle Ward, Room 2. Visiting hours every afternoon between 1 and 4. It’s the wing for the well-off, of whom I am supposedly a member … I have a room to myself. Come and see me if possible. Don’t tell anyone else where I am, not even Cazals. Understand?

  If any cash to come, let it come quick! P.V.

  MILES KINGTON

  HOW I BECAME A JOURNALIST

  I hadn’t been very long at my Jesuit college before I became totally disgusted by the vile, decadent goings-on there and decided to have nothing more to do with the ecclesiastical career my parents had planned for me. But after I had finally succeeded in escaping from the establishment, I was faced with another agonising problem. How to earn my living. A scientific examination of my pockets revealed the presence of a small deposit of copper and a few traces of silver. There was no sign of either gold or paper. Things looked grim.

  Luckily, I bumped into an old friend who told me:

  ‘It so happens I know a printer who is very keen to start a small local paper. As he is almost totally unable to spell, he is looking for an editor who is on speaking terms with the finer points of punctuation and allied cultural matters. Think you could do it?’

  ‘I have a strange, overpowering feeling,’ I told him, ‘that I am the right man for the job.’

  ‘Right, come on, I’ll introduce you.’

  The man in question turned out to be a big, fat, jolly printer with a fine moustache, going slightly grey. He greeted me quite disarmingly.

  ‘Can you write good local news items?’ he said.

  Mentally, I shrugged my shoulders.

  The telepathic printer would not take this for an answer.

  ‘No, no, I don’t mean the kind of boring local news you get in the usual provincial rag. What I want in my newspaper is local news with a difference!’

  ‘Why not try me?’

  ‘All right. Come and sit at my desk over here, and write me a news item for this headline: Pipe-Smoker’s Extreme Carelessness.’

  Not five minutes later I handed him the following story.

  PIPE-SMOKER’S EXTREME CARELESSNESS

  The parish of Montsalaud was the scene last night of a tragic accident caused by a pipe-smoker’s carelessness.

  A local clog-maker was returning home about ten, smoking a pipe which gave off a constant shower of sparks.

  He chose to come back through the small pine wood belonging to the Marquise of Chaudpertuis, not realising that the slightest spark might ignite the dry twigs and fir cones lying in profusion all around him.

  While thus walking along smoking his pipe, he suddenly stopped with a cry. For there beside the path lay two poor children asleep, entwined in each other’s arms and shivering with cold.

  Being a kind-hearted fellow, the clog-maker woke the children up and helped them build a big bonfire in the middle of the wood to get them warm again, then went on his way.

  Unfortunately, the fire had been badly lit and soon went out. The bodies of the two children were found this morning. They had died of cold.

  *

  ‘Marvellous!’ cried my new boss. ‘That’s what I call local news with a difference! Shake on it, young man!’

  MOTHERS-IN-LAW ARE THE NECESSITY OF INVENTION

  Recently I received a letter from one of the most eminent scientists in France, bearing information which I think should be available to all my readers and indeed to all humanity. Here it is in full.

  My dear Alphonse,

  I enjoyed reading your fascinating case history of the mother-in-law who was frightened to death by a stuffed lion specially fitted out with flashing eyes and mechanically recorded roars.

  As you know, it is no longer possible to be prosecuted for crimes committed over twenty years ago, so I now feel free to write and tell you how I brought about my mother-in-law’s death, the twentieth anniversary of which I recently celebrated. The method I used was quite foolproof and needs only a little scientific knowledge, so if you care to offer the hospitality of your column to an account of my experience, I am sure many of your readers will be able to profit from it.

  Although I had only been married a few months, I had already conceived a loathing for my mother-in-law which was enough to turn the mildest of men (I refer to myself) into a monster of ravening revenge. The question I kept asking myself was not ‘Can I bring myself to do away with her?’ (the answer to that was, Yes, and the sooner the better) but ‘How shall I do away with her?’

  You see, I have never lost a lingering respect for our police force and, given the choice, I always prefer to avoid a direct confrontation with their crack troops.

  And the trouble with killing anyone, even a mother-in-law, is that however discreetly it is done it tends to lead to a social call from a police sergeant, even an inspector or two.

  So my method would have to be so completely waterproof as to baffle the finest sleuths in the whole of France, as they say in the sort of books where they say that sort of thing.

  Well, I am a chemist by training, and it was to chemistry I eventually turned in my darkest hour.

  I should tell you
, by the way, that during the summer months my mother-in-law never wore anything but cotton.

  She went around swathed from head to foot in cotton.

  She was mad about cotton.

  ‘Cotton,’ she used to say at every opportunity, ‘is the only really healthy material there is.’

  And it was this that gave me my idea.

  One fine day I crept up to her room as stealthily as an Apache burglar and spirited away an entire set of her clothes. Stockings, pants, skirt, blouse, everything. Clutching them tightly I stole off to my little private laboratory where I spent the rest of the day transforming them, by a fairly simple and common process, into guncotton.

  The next step was to wait for a really hot sunny day and then so to arrange it that my dear mother-in-law found herself wearing that same set of chemically treated, highly dangerous garments.

  And so it came to pass, in due course.

  It was a sizzling hot day.

  She went out into the garden and sat on a bench to read a trashy novel.

  I crept up behind her armed with an extremely powerful lens and ruthlessly focussed the sun’s rays on her.

  It didn’t take long – there was a scream, a searing flash like lightning, then…. nothing.

  At the inquest, the forensic scientist could find only one theory to fit the known facts. My mother-in-law must have been a secret alcoholic and subject to some strange, unknown form of spontaneous combustion.

  I hardly thought it was my place to contradict an expert.

  yours etc

  X