The Banquet Years of Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, and Erik Satie

I cannot possibly write a review of Roger Shattuck's book "The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France 1885 to World War I without including the quote from Plato's Symposium (also sometimes translated as Banquet) found on the very first page.

. . . there remained awake only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were drinking out of a large goblet which they passed around, and Socrates was discoursing to them.  Aristodemus did not hear the beginning of the discourse, and he was only half awake, but the chief thing which he remembered was Socrates insisting to the other two that the genius of comedy was the same as that of tragedy, and that the writer of tragedy ought to be a writer of comedy also.

Roger Shattuck's book The Banquet Years is a book devoted to five subjects: Henri Rosseau, the self taught painter who would influence Picasso, Léger, Jean Hugo, Beckmann, and the Surrealists; Alfred Jarry, who is most famous for his play Ubu Roi (King Ubu) and its rather famous opening word "merde" that caused a quarter of an hour of pandemonium with the traditional theater attending public booing and jeering while the avant-garde countered with cheers and applause; Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki), who is accredited as the coiner of the term "Surrealism", Apollinaire was the impressario of the avant-garde, who met his end of the very last day of the first World War; and Erik Satie, the true progenitor of "Musak" with his 1920 manifesto advocating "musique d'ameublement" (furniture music), the brilliant composer that beat both Debussy and Ravel in the race to create modern music, and brought together in his own way the avant-garde, Surrealists, the Dadaists, and the old and the new.

Shattuck states in the Preface (to the Vintage Edition),

"Then came the idea - a kind of gambler's hunch that the trio Rousseau-Satie-Apollinaire represented several significant aspects of the period and could reveal them better than any single figure. . . Within a few weeks Jarry had forced his way into the group and established himself close to the center of things. He helped me clarify my underlying subject: how the fluid state known as bohemia, a cultural underground smacking of failure and fraud, crystallized for a few decades into a self-conscious avant-garde that carried the arts into a period of astonishingly varied renewal and accomplishment."

It all started with a funeral. On May 22, 1885 French literature was dealt a tremendous blow with the death of Victor Hugo (who received his letters addressed à Monsieur Hugo, sur son avenue - to Mr. Hugo on his avenue after they renamed the Avenue d'Elyau Avenue Victor Hugo in his honour). More than two million people joined in his funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon where he was laid to rest beside Alexandre Dumas, who was buried only fifteen years before. The endless procession included several brass brands, every political and literary figure of the day (like Zola who would also be buried in the same crypt as Hugo and Dumas), speeches, and numerous deaths in the crowd of the mourners. A church had been unconsecrated. No monarch ever had such a funeral.

Victor Hugo's funeral procession in a hearse of the "people" as he demanded in his will.

Paris had just had a lot "done". Baron Haussmann was the ultimate Svengali, preparing his ingenue for her ultimate role in la belle epoque. Every theater, avenue, cafe, and street corner would be her stage. Paris would become the Muse for art, literature, theater, fashion, and how to live the good life.

Unlike most celebrities, Paris is fairly open about having had work done.

Of all the stages set for her, the most demanding was that of the salon. The new Napoleonic aristocracy had replaced the old. The most elevated member of the new nobility, Princesse Mathilde Bonaparte, Napoleon's niece, did not mince her words: "The French revolution? Why, witout it I'd be selling oranges in the streets of Ajaccio." Princesse Mathilde cultivated" the great minds of Gautier, Flaubert, and Renan to her dangerously liberal salon. During the Third Republic she began receiving Alexandre Dumas (fils), Henri de Régnier, Maupassant, and Anatole France at her house on the rue de Berri. The same house would later be the Belgian embassy and it's next door neighbour would be fashion designer and rival of Madame Coco herself, Elsa Schiaparelli who was heavily influenced by the Surrealists, most notably by Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau.

Elsa Schiaparelli, lobster painted by Dali, made for Wallis Simpson.

Elsa Schiaparelli with details by Jean Cocteau.

Paris is nothing if not the cleverest of ladies. Knowing she could not conquer the salon, she used her new face lift to attract new admirers to the cafés. Here anyone could sit for the price of a drink. This singular idea would give birth to the café culture that still exists today. Here artists and writers could meet and exchange ideas. Impressionism came from The Café Guerbois on Avenue de Clichy thanks to Manet who was often joined by Zola, Bazille, Latour, Degas, Monet, Renoir, and Sisley with Cezanne and Pissaro visiting from time to time. Together the group was known as Les Batignolles, named for the area where the cafe was located. At the Nouvelle Athènes on Place Pigalle (torn down in 2004) one could find Matisse and Van Gogh. Degas painted L'Absinthe here. The Napolitain, the Weber (a favourite hang out of Henry Miller), the Vachette - all the cafés of Paris were full of people putting their glasses and minds together.

L'Absinthe on display at the Orsay Museum in Paris that was once booed off the easel and thus kept in storage for nearly 20 years.

With that much talking go on and amongst so many gifted minds, it is inevitable that a quarrel should occur but none more bizarre than the one between Count Montesquiou and Henri Regnier. After the new cinematographe of the Lumiére brothers caused a fire at the Bazar de la Charité in 1897 that led to the death of a few prominent French aristocrats a quarrel broke out between Count Robert de Montesquiou and the symbolist poet Henri de Regnier and all over a cane.


It was rumoured after the fire at the Bazar that some of the upper-crust youths used their canes to clear a path for themselves out of the fire, abandoning their lady companions. Upon meeting Count Montesquiou at the Baron de Rothchild's, Regnier's two sisters-in-law made a comment about the count's cane, even though he had not been present. Regnier himself added some comments about how dashing the count would look with a muff or a fan. Montesquiou demanded satisfaction, choosing pistols.

But Regnier claimed to have said, on the contrary. "There are two things I wish I could use - a fan in the summer and a muff in the winter". The offender became the offended and chose swords. The poet proved as mighty with a sword in his hands as with a pen and wounded the count. They both refused to be reconciled.

Dueling or demanding satisfaction were not uncommon during the age. The newspapers announced each day's affaires d'honneur, with interviews from the seconds as to what had and had not happened. Engagements were fought untl the first blood flowed only. Fatal duels were rare though sometimes death was only just avoided as in the case of Catulle Mendes who almost lost his life defending Sarah Bernhardt's right to play Hamlet.

But despite these fanciful things in 1885 Paris there was a need for fresh outlets of expression that was met in part by the new literary reviews, the Salon des Independants, and the private gatherings of artists such as Mallarmé's mardis (Tuesdays) and Edmond de Goncourt's grenier (attic). The pressure was building up - and the effects would go farther than just the limits of Paris.

The year was 1913. Cubism was now in London and DH Lawrence published Sons and Lovers. 1913 is the year that Joyce would send in Dubliners for publication. In New York, in Italy, in anywhere that mattered things were starting to happen, but in 1913 Paris everything was happening at once.

Apollinaire was writing about Cubism and sitting for portrats; Satie was composing music that would be later pumped into elevators; the pistol of Alfred Jarry the pataphysician was now being carried around by Picasso after Jarry died of tuberculosis after years of drinking and drugging in 1907; Rosseau would die three years later and be buried in the same cemetary as Jarry outside of Paris. Apollinaire would compose his epitaph that Brancusi would chisel on to his tombstone:

We salute you Gentle Rousseau you can hear us.
Delaunay, his wife, Monsieur Queval and myself.
Let our luggage pass duty free through the gates of heaven.
We will bring you brushes paints and canvas.
That you may spend your sacred leisure in the
light and Truth of Painting.
As you once did my portrait facing the stars, lion and the gypsy

The Dream, the last painting of Henri Rousseau painted just before his death.

Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry.

Apollinaire painted by Maurice Vlaminck. "Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine..." Our loves recall how then after each sorrow joy came back again".

Erik Satie's first published composition,  Gymnopédies No. 1.

With the exception of the Renaissance, the avant-garde was a time when writers, artists, and musicians lived and worked together and tried their hands at each other's arts in an atmosphere of constant collaboration. But the avant-garde years, The Banquet Years as Shattuck calls them were more than a period, more than just a movemement. It was, as Shattuck puts it in Chapter Two: "a way of life, both dedicated and frivolous.  The question is where to look, where to concentrate one's attention in order to distinguish its form and details." Shattuck mentions in his footnote that Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle and Marcel Raymond's De Baudelaire au surréalisme are worth a read, but one couldn't go wrong to read "The Banquet Years" (or at least purchase it for its footnotes and bibliography.

* I would like to comment here that while Satie's work in music did eventually lead to modern day Musak, his compositions are well worth a listen and can easily be listened to on Deezer. Please don't let your experienced with Neil Diamond "Musak" at grocery stores dissuade you.