In East Village Blues, Chantal Thomas, back in New York in 2017, remarks: “I had several youths.” One of which today, we say to ourselves, reading her new book and meeting her in Geneva, laughter ready to burst forth, keen eyes, precise attention. At the History and City Festival, she came to discuss her relationship with the sea, her Memories of the low tide (Threshold, 2017). A story that is in line with Cafes and memory (Threshold, 2008) and East Village Blues.
This autobiographical vein is one of the registers of a work that includes novels – Farewell to the queen, The testament of Olympus, The exchange of princesses – the theater of essays on Sade, Casanova, Thomas Bernhard, Roland Barthes, on freedom and suffering, on childhood. What is the thread that connects the fragments of this archipelago? “The quest for freedom in all its facets. The pleasure of writing and, in general, my relationship to pleasure. The idea of self-invention, the way you build your life like a masterpiece, including failure, if necessary, like Thomas Bernhard. The relationship to places: I really see them as characters – cafes, beaches, the streets of New York, Versailles… And also travel: it’s commonplace to say it, but moving creates a more intense relationship with the world. “
The era of “cool”
East Village Blues is a two-part walk through places where Chantal Thomas has lived on several occasions. A vibrant tale of images, characters, things seen, stories, which comes and goes between 1976 and 2017. Forty years ago, the Lower East Side was “a dangerous neighborhood, a neighborhood of robberies and violence , naked exposure of misery, but coexisting with something old-fashioned, moments of sweetness, pauses in breathing from ancient times and from a distant era, ”she writes.
Read also: The sea and the mother, always starting over
For the Parisian academic, the New York of those years is still a celebration where a great confused freedom reigns which enchants him. East Village is an area of immigrants, mostly from the East, mixed with artists and tramps. “You could hear Yiddish, Polish, Italian, everything that America is built on. Today the Bowery is becoming ultra-chic, rents there are some of the most expensive, but the old one is still somewhat visible under the polish. This is captured in the flamboyant photos of my friend, the American writer Allen S. Weiss: scraps of graffiti, tears, concrete traces of a world that no longer exists, full of humor, derision and tragic, a call before destruction. ”
Because these vestiges are being erased; second-hand bookstores, grocery stores, diners are replaced by boutiques – cupcakes, scented candles, gadgets – which follow one another at the rapid pace of bankruptcies. It is the reign of the pretty, of the “cool”, of full complacency. The misery, the tramps are relegated further. As farewell to the Queen indicated the other side of the splendor of the Ancien Régime, East Village Blues seizes a moment of change, in the United States, “when a corrupt president embodies without any mask the pure power of money, independently of any ideology”.
The energy of the beat generation
When Chantal Thomas arrived in New York in 1976, she had just defended a thesis on Sade, under the supervision of Roland Barthes. It was steeped in structuralism for years. She read all of Blanchot, which confirmed her in the sacralization of Scripture for herself. In a burst of laughter, she recognizes that the quotes “bristling with prohibitions” slipped into her story are there “to avenge a friend who has been paralyzed forever” and that she could have found many others just as beautiful. contradictory and sterilizing. She freed herself from this diktat by writing a book on Bécassine, an unpublished anti-Blanchot, alas.
Read also: Chantal Thomas, on an air of freedom
The meeting with the authors of the beat generation was beneficial. “With them, I started to breathe. They wanted to change the way they exist, ready to innovate at any cost and to take action. They took Rimbaud at face value. Patti Smith, this magnificent writer, will visit the poet’s birthplace: his approach is naive, magical, shamanic. Writers read their texts in public. Already in 1955, Ginsberg was screaming Howl in St. Mark’s Church. With Barthes, we reflected for a long time on the voice but we never sang! In New York, poets flourished everywhere, in the streets, in cafes, without any inhibition. I couldn’t believe it. That said, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs worked a lot on their lyrics. They were crazy about literature and writing. Barthes and them: two opposing registers of the same passion! ” And she marvels with a smile that two of the great books of Western literature were written on a scroll, even if it was for quite other reasons: On the road and The 120 days of Sodom.
Macho writers
These 1970s were also marked by struggles. The anarcho-syndicalist and lesbian friend who hosts him, more politicized, is angry with the boss and owner. She reproaches the Frenchwoman for her fascination with these macho writers, she who lives in a universe of women among themselves. “She was right; for them, women did not exist, they mistreated them. Homosexual or not, they only loved and esteem each other. But on rereading them, I was again impressed by the energy and the beauty of their writings. “
Numerous quotes, in English and in translation, show the strength and generosity which freed the young academic and which allowed her to write her scholarly books with this playful freedom, as the wonderful boxes of the artist Joseph Cornell, between surrealism and art brut, another gift from America.
Story
Chantal Thomas
East Village Blues
Photos d’Allen S. Weiss
Threshold, coll. Fiction & Cie, 208 p.
Citations
These poets, you see, are not from here below: let them live their strange lives; let them be cold and hungry, let them run, love and sing …
Arthur Rimbaud
“Charles of Orleans to Louis XI”
Highlighted
The enemy is the dollar. The greenback decides everything. He is the sole master of this country. The rest, morality, religion: decorative elements to make the prison bearable.
p. 97
Words reported by a companion of a night of wandering and partying
Those who talked endlessly for seventy hours from the park to the room at the bar to the asylum to the museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of dialogue maniacs platonics leaping down the slopes down the fire escape stairs, down the ledges of windows at the bottom of the Empire State Building out of the moon.
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” cited p. 103
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