only authentic heir to Hassan-i-Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain? Certainly that. Through his painting I caught glimpses of the Garden that the Old Man showed to his Assassins. The Garden cannot be faked. And Brion was incapable of fakery. He was Master of the Djoun forces, the Little People, who will never serve a faker or a coward.
Brion was suffering from emphysema and lung cancer. He knew he had only a few weeks to live. I was preparing to go to Paris when Brion died. I have this last glimpse through a letter, in her own English, from my friend Rosine Buhler:
“Brion asked to wear his Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et de Lettres medallion in a very elegant way and we started dinner with a wonderful Chinese soup. Brion finds the wine slightly ‘rapeux’ to tease François de Palaminy, who has spent and concentrated to find a non-alterated wine which is not so easy even in Paris. After occurs a dreamlike talk about to have a large house by the sea in August, the shadowed room where all is burning hot outside. Brion said he knew he would sleep well and was really happy of that good day. He wanted no help to lift himself up from his green armchair, and went to his room. I was watching his tall straight way to walk, his secure path … only kings and wild people have this way.”
More than a decade after his passing, Gysin has continued to gain new admirers. There have been more gallery and museum shows of his work as a visual artist, including the major retrospective at the Edmonton Art Gallery in the summer of 1998, with a comprehensive book published by Thames & Hudson. However, his work as a writer has become almost entirely unavailable. This anthology, I hope, will correct that imbalance and, for old friends and new adventurers alike, will restore some measure of the worldly vision that was Gysin’s trademark.
“That Secret Look” (1941) first appeared in the journal View, edited by Charles Henri Ford. Like Gysin’s early work as a visual artist, his writing here shows the general influence of surrealism. More important, as a skeptical portrayal of New York, city of technological advances and endless gimmicks, this piece reflects his perspective as an outsider—one whose experience was formed both by the “wilds” of western Canada, in childhood, and the “civilized” refinements of his English public school education, in adolescence, as well as by the vanguard aesthetics of 1930s Paris.
When the city grew beyond Washington Square it seems to have stopped, drawn breath and then stretched out ahead a scaffolding of streets and avenues, a blueprint laid over the face of the island to the Harlem River. These streets today are the erosions on the hard-baked shell of the Aristotelian turtle that bore the world. Anchored deep in his crusty back-armor are the towers and honeycombed brick and mortar cliffs from whose ledges the city at night glitters like a mirror drowned in a deep well. And lo! the poor refugee, the Marco Polo in reverse, preferring his little Venice to Xanadu, wouldn’t buy the island with his trinkets and bright beads even if someone loaned him the $24 to conclude the deal. Traveling backward with the speed of an angry queen bee expelled from the hive, he cannot master the trick of putting on his clothes back to front as the natives do in order to give the impression of a more logical type of locomotion.
“The Natives are Friendly,” his compatriots wig-wagged back to Europe several years ago, but added when they came home, “But you never know what they are thinking—they all look alike to me.” A mysterious people that stands up to sleep clinging to straps in underground subways; a people that does not shake hands all around a room full of thirty; a people that walks around as it eats out of machines; a people that smiles and smiles and continues to extend its hospitality as you kick them around and that continues to copy your way of dressing its women, painting its pictures and furnishing its homes when these things represent a way of living and thinking that they have spilt blood to abolish.
“A town that greets you standing up,” says a writer, and sure enough between the skyscrapers hang festoons of popcorn and ropes of candy beads. Chased by the searchlights of a World Première, or is it a “Spectacle in the Sky”—a mock air raid, are the rainbows that breathe up from the miasmic Times Square; the exhalation of a million desires that carpets the sky from the seventeenth floor on up.
The Rainbow Level—an attitude as much as an altitude—a game of parchesi with ladders or chutes depending on the number you throw.
The streets below are like the stream of “The Old Mill” or “The Tunnel of Love” at Luna Park or Coney Island, through whose fog of carbon monoxide you are swept clutching your neighbor, past bright tableaux; the desert island, the cemetery by moonlight, the axe murderer in the kitchen or famous scenes from fiction. But here the tableaux are the windows and three balls for a dime do not give you the privilege of throwing anything less than a bathtub through them—and that from the inside. If the bleached cornflake snow of a fan-propelled winter blizzard blows through the windows of I. J. Fox—a man who can sign his name with a cloud, his moneyed finger tracing it in the sky as ephemerally as it would on the sand before an incoming tide, the further you travel north the more subtle the approach.
Past this window and that, past the architectural pride of a family that fears God as they once feared Congressional investigation on earth; past the windows of a beauty Princess who looks like the grandmother of the glamour girls, those strange, cross-pollinated flowers a generation removed from an old stalk. And step up, Ladies and Gentlemen, too! Here is the window where you can win a coconut. Let the little lady hold your hand; give you the aim; her little phantom hand guiding yours, and—Wham!
But what is it today? Not the bathroom but the corridor of that same hotel de passe. And you call it?—That Secret Look. Pass on we say, this man is telling you like the America Firster across the street, that a fifth column will uphold your house when the other four are torn away. You don’t understand—then look again. This is to be the pattern for your women: this is the way they must dress; the way they must smell; but what are they doing? They are backing out of hotel rooms; this pretty doll has a blueprint clutched in her black-gloved hand; that one has dropped a dagger to the floor, neatly pinning a paper acknowledging whose black dress this is, whose black hat, whose black stockings, shoes and gloves give her That Secret Look.—That baby’s got a gat! Look, she’s stuffing the plans of the washing-machine wringer into her corsage. Last winter I knitted sea-boot socks until I was blind and let the maid finish them. I wore pins and insignia until it hurt. I was worn to a skeleton reading papers and I never wore a pin five minutes longer than it took to read the Extra that told me it wasn’t fashionable. This winter I won’t wrap another fumble. This winter I am going to be destructive.
God, it smells like Paris! The air is like champagne today.
“Recollections of a Lost Seascape” and “Time and Brother Griphen” (1942) were published in Town and Country, in July and November 1947, respectively. These stories became part of a novel that was subsequently lost, “Memoirs of a Mythomaniac,” which Gysin later described as a détourné autobiography; another chapter was published as the story “Ariadne of Naxos”—in the volume of early fiction, Stories (1984)—based on travels in Greece in the late 1930s, which he recycled long after in a section of his novel The Last Museum (1986), as seen later in this anthology. “Recollections of a Lost Seascape” draws upon his vacation at the elaborate home of an aristocratic friend from school, on the island of Guernsey; “Time and Brother Griphen” reflects the setting of the English public school he attended in the early 1930s, Downside.
Recollections of a Lost Seascape
The island of Herm lies like an enormous, half-submerged whale in the tides and currents of the English Channel. This island was bought by my grandfather toward the beginning of the century, and he lived there in self-imposed exile, a widower with five daughters. Herm does not belong to England but is considered by a curious legal anomaly to be a fief of the Duke of Normandy, who is only incidentally the King of England. The owner of the