Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography
Laurence Vail, novelist, poet, painter, and sculptor, was born in Paris on 28 January 1891 and died in Cannes on 16 April 1968. Known variously as the King of Montparnasse or the King of Bohemia, he is important for his Surrealist prose and his avantgarde art. He was described by Peggy Guggenheim as "always bursting with ideas," and he exerted a catalytic force on his many friends, among them Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.
His family had been connected with France for many generations: his great-grandfather had been a friend of Lafayette; his paternal grandfather, Adam Vail of New York, knew Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps and married a girl from Brittany; Vail's father, the commercially successful painter Eugene Lawrence Vail, was born in Paris and brought his son up to live like a Frenchman but think like an American. The most significant parts of Vail's education did not occur during his often-interrupted formal schooling in Paris, in Connecticut, or at Oxford, but in the summers spent with his father in Venice or in the French Alps.
Laurence Vail served during 1918 in the American army as an officer assigned to the Corps of Interpreters. He met heiress Peggy Guggenheim in Manhattan in 1921 and married her the next year in Paris. They had two children, quarreled, gave marathon parties, and separated in 1929. In December 1928, Vail had met Kay Boyle at the Coupole, and soon a relationship developed which lasted until 1941. This marriage produced three children and the short story collection 365 Days , coedited and coauthored by Kay Boyle, Vail, and Nina Conarain. Boyle credits Vail with being one of the most important influences on her development as a writer: he encouraged her in the cross-country skiing and mountain climbing which were to figure in several of her novels, and he introduced her to many American and French writers. During the war years in Connecticut and New York, Vail was heartsick for Europe; he crossed the Atlantic again after the war, to spend the rest of his life mainly in France.
Vail's creative life was extremely varied. Perhaps he best characterized his own course in "Grey Crust," a poem published in Poetry in 1921: "I would be fused into anyone going new ways." Tristan Tzara considered him one of the fathers of Dada, and he was an early practitioner of Surrealism in art and literature. He experimented with form, diction, and style. He was one of the signers, along with Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Harry Crosby, Eugene Jolas, and others, of the "Proclamation" which announced the "Revolution of the Word" in transition (June 1929) and stated that the undersigned were "tired of the spectacle of short stories, poems and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism."
Piri and I (1923), Vail's first novel, is a fantasy based in part on his life from age eleven onward and treats his very close relationship with his sister, Clotilde, as the romance of two people, Piri Riminieff and Michael Lafosse, the narrator. Piri and I defies simplistic categorizing, since the fictional modes change to suit the author's purpose. At first it is quite frankly a sensitive story of childhood and adolescence, then it becomes a novel of manners, and finally it turns self-consciously philosophical. Vail's narrator looks back nostalgically upon his early loves: "Where is she now--the marvellous Lili, once the pride and terror of nurses, the tyrant of the child-speckled avenue"" Occasionally Vail, trying to see the world through a child's eyes, becomes trapped in an overwrought simile: "Slatternly words fall from her heavy lips like frogs from the lips of the princess in the fairy tale." He reveals himself as a word painter who, at his best, can achieve images which move with the authority his friend Marcel Duchamp produced on canvas. As Piri and Michael climb, "The mist falls away from them, tumbling gently like the skirts of a ballet dancer."
The novel of manners section begins with the descriptions of spas and ski resorts, of balls and tennis tournaments. Some of the characters recall eighteenth-century English stage figures: "Now it is a buxom blonde, striving to demonstrate by a simpering laugh and coy little steps that her heart is as young as the night." Vail's narrator describes himself in terms that clearly fit Vail himself; he is "a blond lad with large and uncertain blue eyes, an acquiline nose, and a slightly irregular mouth." Soon the narrator's philosophy emerges; in a false society, the clever person assumes the mask of the pierrot to safeguard his integrity: "He is the amateur actor let loose in the world.... The real artist is essentially the amateur. This young man's poses are both intuitive and intellectual." This passage could describe the outward show put on by Laurence Vail and his friends Harry Crosby and Robert McAlmon.
Piri and I is fairly traditional in form and gives little hint of the various styles, from Victorian sentimental realism to Surrealism, to appear in Murder! Murder! (1931), and of the interior monologue mode which dominates the later novel. Murder! Murder! contains portraits and events for which the originals are easily recognizable: Polly is Peggy Guggenheim; Martin Asp, the protagonist and narrator, is Vail himself; Nell, the "queen of Montparnasse," owes a lot to Florence Martin, Gerald Burns to Harold Stearns, and Miriam Oon probably to Mina Loy. Vail also exploits the banalities of his tourist countrymen: two young women are defined by their assertion that "We might do both Louvres before lunch."
The book begins with a section entitled "Advertisement" which gives excerpts from confessions of murder, ranging from the Victorianchaste admission of a fratricide complete with "deathly pallor," feminine sympathy, and invocations of the Maker, to the blunt "Killed her? I should say I did."
The action is frankly Surrealistic: a murder has been--may have been"--committed by the narrator. In an excerpt published in transition (June 1929), the murderer/narrator, M, is pursued around the world by a detective, D, who is the narrator's double and alter ego. Reality and dream, sobriety and drunkenness alternate. Vail experiments with relativity: the dream-events of several days' duration turn out to have lasted only a few hours. Then both D and M become drunk on Prohibition liquor in a Manhattan speakeasy, and time lags. A slow-motion chase ensues which takes six hours and thirty-eight minutes and covers eight blocks. Even the dialogue is expanded visually: "P---pp---er---er---haps-------if---I---t---t---tt-----ake-----a-----s-----s---sh---ort-----n---ap-----I---m---may---be---a---a---able-----to---cr---cr---awl---or---h---h---hob-------ble-------." Later the pace challenges time itself: "At the same time, to judge by rude chronometer, M is at Washington Square and at the Battery. He dives. A minute later D follows him into the puddle. And, indeed, for swimmers like M and D, the Atlantic is a puddle."
There is a Rabelaisian quality to much of Vail's humor and to his prose style. Lists expand simple statements into pages: "Outraged, as you say. Fondled, petted, taken liberties with, chucked under the chin, osculated, bitten, caressed in all sorts of places, cuddled, bussed, clasped, muzzled...." Beneath all his buffoonery and word-wizardry, Vail has a serious purpose in Murder! Murder!. He has shown man's despair at his loss of individuality. As Martin Asp laments, after an unsuccessful attempt to have himself arrested for his real or imagined murder, "No doubt of it: I am a null, a zero." He needs desperately to assert himself, and in this Kafkaesque attempt he is denied success by wife, friends, and officials. Asp approaches the stature of a modern Everyman in the last lines of the novel as, in a final attempt to become "something," he says, "I smash a tumbler. I smash a bottle. Filling my hands with broken glass, I rush out of the cafe...into the night ... across the street...."
Vail did not publish the many other novels he wrote. According to Kay Boyle, he destroyed seven or eight manuscripts. He may have been haunted by his own cry, "Why should we, living poems, fuss about with ink"" His other writings show considerable promise, but they are relatively few. An early play, What Do You Want", was produced by the Provincetown Players in 1919. A few poems and short stories appeared in Peter Neagoe's Americans Abroad, Bellman, Broom, Dial, the New Review, Bob Brown's Readies anthology, and the Smart Set. His verse tends to lapse into prosaic utterance, but there are occasional effective images:
Wine starts a glissade of wordsWe will meet again Maud TrevylyanWhen the gutter is choked with leaves.
His essay on "Mutation in Language" in transition (July 1935) reflects the diction of Finnegans Wake and looks forward to Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot:
Referring to glummarians and deams of Acaca old blanketters and aulde douchers roting the rechauffe with comas and semicomas, arsestericks & hystarisks & Nobel Prize periods--you know, the fool stop when the pintellect stoops to pickpocket slime from old Messachusetts
the word wormed He was not the lowest poochpooet who hardly sang.
Vail was also a versatile linguist who produced translations into English from French, German, and Italian. In his first important effort, Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire's The Life of Madame Roland (1930), he achieved a dignified and controlled prose suited to the original. His second translation from French, Charles-Louis Philippe's Bubu of Montparnasse (1932), was published by the Black Sun Press with a preface by T.S. Eliot. Eliot had complained privately about the language of Vail's translation, and indeed, though it reads well, the street-tough quality of the original is not consistently maintained. Robert Neumann's On the Make (1931), which Vail translated from German, is rendered in a racy, rather British English: "I've too much to do to waste my time twaddling fiddlesticks." Laurence Vail also had "too much to do" in too many creative fields for him to fulfill all the promise he showed, but he deserves to be remembered for his contributions to the life, art, and literature of his generation. Thus far, he has been largely neglected by critics and historians.
Works
WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:Books
Piri and I (New York: Lieber & Lewis, 1923).
Murder! Murder! (London: Peter Davies, 1931).
365 Days, by Vail, Kay Boyle, and Nina Conarain (London: Cape, 1936; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).
Two Poems (New York: Modern Editions, n.d.).
Other
Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire, The Life of Madame Roland, translated by Vail (London & New York: Longmans, Green, 1930).
"Always Gentleman - To God - Aria di Maria - Envoi - Pogrom?," in Readies for Bob Brown's Machine, ed. Bob Brown (Cagnes-sur-Mer: Roving Eye Press, 1931), pp. 9-15.
Robert Neumann, On the Make, translated by Vail (London: Peter Davies, 1931).
"Buster Bourbon, Private," in Americans Abroad An Anthology, ed. Peter Neagoe (The Hague: Servire, 1932), pp. 428-457.
Charles-Louis Philippe, Bubu of Montparnasse, translated by Vail (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1932).
Periodical Publications
"Americans," Dial, 70 (February 1921): 163.
"Grey Crust," Poetry, 19 (December 1921): 136-137.
"A Great One," transition, no. 14 (Fall 1928): 151-163.
"Revolution of the Word Proclamation," signed by Vail and others, transition, no. 16/17 (June 1929): 13.
"Murder, Murder," transition, no. 16/17 (June 1929): 108-119.
"Inquiry on the Malady of Language," by Vail and others, transition, no. 23 (July 1935): 168-171.
"Fragment from a Novel," transition, no. 27 (April/May 1938): 138-141.
Laurence Vail, novelist, poet, painter, and sculptor, was born in Paris on 28 January 1891 and died in Cannes on 16 April 1968. Known variously as the King of Montparnasse or the King of Bohemia, he is important for his Surrealist prose and his avantgarde art. He was described by Peggy Guggenheim as "always bursting with ideas," and he exerted a catalytic force on his many friends, among them Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.
His family had been connected with France for many generations: his great-grandfather had been a friend of Lafayette; his paternal grandfather, Adam Vail of New York, knew Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps and married a girl from Brittany; Vail's father, the commercially successful painter Eugene Lawrence Vail, was born in Paris and brought his son up to live like a Frenchman but think like an American. The most significant parts of Vail's education did not occur during his often-interrupted formal schooling in Paris, in Connecticut, or at Oxford, but in the summers spent with his father in Venice or in the French Alps.
Laurence Vail served during 1918 in the American army as an officer assigned to the Corps of Interpreters. He met heiress Peggy Guggenheim in Manhattan in 1921 and married her the next year in Paris. They had two children, quarreled, gave marathon parties, and separated in 1929. In December 1928, Vail had met Kay Boyle at the Coupole, and soon a relationship developed which lasted until 1941. This marriage produced three children and the short story collection 365 Days , coedited and coauthored by Kay Boyle, Vail, and Nina Conarain. Boyle credits Vail with being one of the most important influences on her development as a writer: he encouraged her in the cross-country skiing and mountain climbing which were to figure in several of her novels, and he introduced her to many American and French writers. During the war years in Connecticut and New York, Vail was heartsick for Europe; he crossed the Atlantic again after the war, to spend the rest of his life mainly in France.
Vail's creative life was extremely varied. Perhaps he best characterized his own course in "Grey Crust," a poem published in Poetry in 1921: "I would be fused into anyone going new ways." Tristan Tzara considered him one of the fathers of Dada, and he was an early practitioner of Surrealism in art and literature. He experimented with form, diction, and style. He was one of the signers, along with Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Harry Crosby, Eugene Jolas, and others, of the "Proclamation" which announced the "Revolution of the Word" in transition (June 1929) and stated that the undersigned were "tired of the spectacle of short stories, poems and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism."
Piri and I (1923), Vail's first novel, is a fantasy based in part on his life from age eleven onward and treats his very close relationship with his sister, Clotilde, as the romance of two people, Piri Riminieff and Michael Lafosse, the narrator. Piri and I defies simplistic categorizing, since the fictional modes change to suit the author's purpose. At first it is quite frankly a sensitive story of childhood and adolescence, then it becomes a novel of manners, and finally it turns self-consciously philosophical. Vail's narrator looks back nostalgically upon his early loves: "Where is she now--the marvellous Lili, once the pride and terror of nurses, the tyrant of the child-speckled avenue"" Occasionally Vail, trying to see the world through a child's eyes, becomes trapped in an overwrought simile: "Slatternly words fall from her heavy lips like frogs from the lips of the princess in the fairy tale." He reveals himself as a word painter who, at his best, can achieve images which move with the authority his friend Marcel Duchamp produced on canvas. As Piri and Michael climb, "The mist falls away from them, tumbling gently like the skirts of a ballet dancer."
The novel of manners section begins with the descriptions of spas and ski resorts, of balls and tennis tournaments. Some of the characters recall eighteenth-century English stage figures: "Now it is a buxom blonde, striving to demonstrate by a simpering laugh and coy little steps that her heart is as young as the night." Vail's narrator describes himself in terms that clearly fit Vail himself; he is "a blond lad with large and uncertain blue eyes, an acquiline nose, and a slightly irregular mouth." Soon the narrator's philosophy emerges; in a false society, the clever person assumes the mask of the pierrot to safeguard his integrity: "He is the amateur actor let loose in the world.... The real artist is essentially the amateur. This young man's poses are both intuitive and intellectual." This passage could describe the outward show put on by Laurence Vail and his friends Harry Crosby and Robert McAlmon.
Piri and I is fairly traditional in form and gives little hint of the various styles, from Victorian sentimental realism to Surrealism, to appear in Murder! Murder! (1931), and of the interior monologue mode which dominates the later novel. Murder! Murder! contains portraits and events for which the originals are easily recognizable: Polly is Peggy Guggenheim; Martin Asp, the protagonist and narrator, is Vail himself; Nell, the "queen of Montparnasse," owes a lot to Florence Martin, Gerald Burns to Harold Stearns, and Miriam Oon probably to Mina Loy. Vail also exploits the banalities of his tourist countrymen: two young women are defined by their assertion that "We might do both Louvres before lunch."
The book begins with a section entitled "Advertisement" which gives excerpts from confessions of murder, ranging from the Victorianchaste admission of a fratricide complete with "deathly pallor," feminine sympathy, and invocations of the Maker, to the blunt "Killed her? I should say I did."
The action is frankly Surrealistic: a murder has been--may have been"--committed by the narrator. In an excerpt published in transition (June 1929), the murderer/narrator, M, is pursued around the world by a detective, D, who is the narrator's double and alter ego. Reality and dream, sobriety and drunkenness alternate. Vail experiments with relativity: the dream-events of several days' duration turn out to have lasted only a few hours. Then both D and M become drunk on Prohibition liquor in a Manhattan speakeasy, and time lags. A slow-motion chase ensues which takes six hours and thirty-eight minutes and covers eight blocks. Even the dialogue is expanded visually: "P---pp---er---er---haps-------if---I---t---t---tt-----ake-----a-----s-----s---sh---ort-----n---ap-----I---m---may---be---a---a---able-----to---cr---cr---awl---or---h---h---hob-------ble-------." Later the pace challenges time itself: "At the same time, to judge by rude chronometer, M is at Washington Square and at the Battery. He dives. A minute later D follows him into the puddle. And, indeed, for swimmers like M and D, the Atlantic is a puddle."
There is a Rabelaisian quality to much of Vail's humor and to his prose style. Lists expand simple statements into pages: "Outraged, as you say. Fondled, petted, taken liberties with, chucked under the chin, osculated, bitten, caressed in all sorts of places, cuddled, bussed, clasped, muzzled...." Beneath all his buffoonery and word-wizardry, Vail has a serious purpose in Murder! Murder!. He has shown man's despair at his loss of individuality. As Martin Asp laments, after an unsuccessful attempt to have himself arrested for his real or imagined murder, "No doubt of it: I am a null, a zero." He needs desperately to assert himself, and in this Kafkaesque attempt he is denied success by wife, friends, and officials. Asp approaches the stature of a modern Everyman in the last lines of the novel as, in a final attempt to become "something," he says, "I smash a tumbler. I smash a bottle. Filling my hands with broken glass, I rush out of the cafe...into the night ... across the street...."
Vail did not publish the many other novels he wrote. According to Kay Boyle, he destroyed seven or eight manuscripts. He may have been haunted by his own cry, "Why should we, living poems, fuss about with ink"" His other writings show considerable promise, but they are relatively few. An early play, What Do You Want", was produced by the Provincetown Players in 1919. A few poems and short stories appeared in Peter Neagoe's Americans Abroad, Bellman, Broom, Dial, the New Review, Bob Brown's Readies anthology, and the Smart Set. His verse tends to lapse into prosaic utterance, but there are occasional effective images:
Wine starts a glissade of wordsWe will meet again Maud TrevylyanWhen the gutter is choked with leaves.
His essay on "Mutation in Language" in transition (July 1935) reflects the diction of Finnegans Wake and looks forward to Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot:
Referring to glummarians and deams of Acaca old blanketters and aulde douchers roting the rechauffe with comas and semicomas, arsestericks & hystarisks & Nobel Prize periods--you know, the fool stop when the pintellect stoops to pickpocket slime from old Messachusetts
the word wormed He was not the lowest poochpooet who hardly sang.
Vail was also a versatile linguist who produced translations into English from French, German, and Italian. In his first important effort, Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire's The Life of Madame Roland (1930), he achieved a dignified and controlled prose suited to the original. His second translation from French, Charles-Louis Philippe's Bubu of Montparnasse (1932), was published by the Black Sun Press with a preface by T.S. Eliot. Eliot had complained privately about the language of Vail's translation, and indeed, though it reads well, the street-tough quality of the original is not consistently maintained. Robert Neumann's On the Make (1931), which Vail translated from German, is rendered in a racy, rather British English: "I've too much to do to waste my time twaddling fiddlesticks." Laurence Vail also had "too much to do" in too many creative fields for him to fulfill all the promise he showed, but he deserves to be remembered for his contributions to the life, art, and literature of his generation. Thus far, he has been largely neglected by critics and historians.
Works
WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:Books
Piri and I (New York: Lieber & Lewis, 1923).
Murder! Murder! (London: Peter Davies, 1931).
365 Days, by Vail, Kay Boyle, and Nina Conarain (London: Cape, 1936; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).
Two Poems (New York: Modern Editions, n.d.).
Other
Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire, The Life of Madame Roland, translated by Vail (London & New York: Longmans, Green, 1930).
"Always Gentleman - To God - Aria di Maria - Envoi - Pogrom?," in Readies for Bob Brown's Machine, ed. Bob Brown (Cagnes-sur-Mer: Roving Eye Press, 1931), pp. 9-15.
Robert Neumann, On the Make, translated by Vail (London: Peter Davies, 1931).
"Buster Bourbon, Private," in Americans Abroad An Anthology, ed. Peter Neagoe (The Hague: Servire, 1932), pp. 428-457.
Charles-Louis Philippe, Bubu of Montparnasse, translated by Vail (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1932).
Periodical Publications
"Americans," Dial, 70 (February 1921): 163.
"Grey Crust," Poetry, 19 (December 1921): 136-137.
"A Great One," transition, no. 14 (Fall 1928): 151-163.
"Revolution of the Word Proclamation," signed by Vail and others, transition, no. 16/17 (June 1929): 13.
"Murder, Murder," transition, no. 16/17 (June 1929): 108-119.
"Inquiry on the Malady of Language," by Vail and others, transition, no. 23 (July 1935): 168-171.
"Fragment from a Novel," transition, no. 27 (April/May 1938): 138-141.
Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography
Laurence Vail, novelist, poet, painter, and sculptor, was born in Paris on 28 January 1891 and died in Cannes on 16 April 1968. Known variously as the King of Montparnasse or the King of Bohemia, he is important for his Surrealist prose and his avantgarde art. He was described by Peggy Guggenheim as "always bursting with ideas," and he exerted a catalytic force on his many friends, among them Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.
His family had been connected with France for many generations: his great-grandfather had been a friend of Lafayette; his paternal grandfather, Adam Vail of New York, knew Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps and married a girl from Brittany; Vail's father, the commercially successful painter Eugene Lawrence Vail, was born in Paris and brought his son up to live like a Frenchman but think like an American. The most significant parts of Vail's education did not occur during his often-interrupted formal schooling in Paris, in Connecticut, or at Oxford, but in the summers spent with his father in Venice or in the French Alps.
Laurence Vail served during 1918 in the American army as an officer assigned to the Corps of Interpreters. He met heiress Peggy Guggenheim in Manhattan in 1921 and married her the next year in Paris. They had two children, quarreled, gave marathon parties, and separated in 1929. In December 1928, Vail had met Kay Boyle at the Coupole, and soon a relationship developed which lasted until 1941. This marriage produced three children and the short story collection 365 Days , coedited and coauthored by Kay Boyle, Vail, and Nina Conarain. Boyle credits Vail with being one of the most important influences on her development as a writer: he encouraged her in the cross-country skiing and mountain climbing which were to figure in several of her novels, and he introduced her to many American and French writers. During the war years in Connecticut and New York, Vail was heartsick for Europe; he crossed the Atlantic again after the war, to spend the rest of his life mainly in France.
Vail's creative life was extremely varied. Perhaps he best characterized his own course in "Grey Crust," a poem published in Poetry in 1921: "I would be fused into anyone going new ways." Tristan Tzara considered him one of the fathers of Dada, and he was an early practitioner of Surrealism in art and literature. He experimented with form, diction, and style. He was one of the signers, along with Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Harry Crosby, Eugene Jolas, and others, of the "Proclamation" which announced the "Revolution of the Word" in transition (June 1929) and stated that the undersigned were "tired of the spectacle of short stories, poems and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism."
Piri and I (1923), Vail's first novel, is a fantasy based in part on his life from age eleven onward and treats his very close relationship with his sister, Clotilde, as the romance of two people, Piri Riminieff and Michael Lafosse, the narrator. Piri and I defies simplistic categorizing, since the fictional modes change to suit the author's purpose. At first it is quite frankly a sensitive story of childhood and adolescence, then it becomes a novel of manners, and finally it turns self-consciously philosophical. Vail's narrator looks back nostalgically upon his early loves: "Where is she now--the marvellous Lili, once the pride and terror of nurses, the tyrant of the child-speckled avenue"" Occasionally Vail, trying to see the world through a child's eyes, becomes trapped in an overwrought simile: "Slatternly words fall from her heavy lips like frogs from the lips of the princess in the fairy tale." He reveals himself as a word painter who, at his best, can achieve images which move with the authority his friend Marcel Duchamp produced on canvas. As Piri and Michael climb, "The mist falls away from them, tumbling gently like the skirts of a ballet dancer."
The novel of manners section begins with the descriptions of spas and ski resorts, of balls and tennis tournaments. Some of the characters recall eighteenth-century English stage figures: "Now it is a buxom blonde, striving to demonstrate by a simpering laugh and coy little steps that her heart is as young as the night." Vail's narrator describes himself in terms that clearly fit Vail himself; he is "a blond lad with large and uncertain blue eyes, an acquiline nose, and a slightly irregular mouth." Soon the narrator's philosophy emerges; in a false society, the clever person assumes the mask of the pierrot to safeguard his integrity: "He is the amateur actor let loose in the world.... The real artist is essentially the amateur. This young man's poses are both intuitive and intellectual." This passage could describe the outward show put on by Laurence Vail and his friends Harry Crosby and Robert McAlmon.
Piri and I is fairly traditional in form and gives little hint of the various styles, from Victorian sentimental realism to Surrealism, to appear in Murder! Murder! (1931), and of the interior monologue mode which dominates the later novel. Murder! Murder! contains portraits and events for which the originals are easily recognizable: Polly is Peggy Guggenheim; Martin Asp, the protagonist and narrator, is Vail himself; Nell, the "queen of Montparnasse," owes a lot to Florence Martin, Gerald Burns to Harold Stearns, and Miriam Oon probably to Mina Loy. Vail also exploits the banalities of his tourist countrymen: two young women are defined by their assertion that "We might do both Louvres before lunch."
The book begins with a section entitled "Advertisement" which gives excerpts from confessions of murder, ranging from the Victorianchaste admission of a fratricide complete with "deathly pallor," feminine sympathy, and invocations of the Maker, to the blunt "Killed her? I should say I did."
The action is frankly Surrealistic: a murder has been--may have been"--committed by the narrator. In an excerpt published in transition (June 1929), the murderer/narrator, M, is pursued around the world by a detective, D, who is the narrator's double and alter ego. Reality and dream, sobriety and drunkenness alternate. Vail experiments with relativity: the dream-events of several days' duration turn out to have lasted only a few hours. Then both D and M become drunk on Prohibition liquor in a Manhattan speakeasy, and time lags. A slow-motion chase ensues which takes six hours and thirty-eight minutes and covers eight blocks. Even the dialogue is expanded visually: "P---pp---er---er---haps-------if---I---t---t---tt-----ake-----a-----s-----s---sh---ort-----n---ap-----I---m---may---be---a---a---able-----to---cr---cr---awl---or---h---h---hob-------ble-------." Later the pace challenges time itself: "At the same time, to judge by rude chronometer, M is at Washington Square and at the Battery. He dives. A minute later D follows him into the puddle. And, indeed, for swimmers like M and D, the Atlantic is a puddle."
There is a Rabelaisian quality to much of Vail's humor and to his prose style. Lists expand simple statements into pages: "Outraged, as you say. Fondled, petted, taken liberties with, chucked under the chin, osculated, bitten, caressed in all sorts of places, cuddled, bussed, clasped, muzzled...." Beneath all his buffoonery and word-wizardry, Vail has a serious purpose in Murder! Murder!. He has shown man's despair at his loss of individuality. As Martin Asp laments, after an unsuccessful attempt to have himself arrested for his real or imagined murder, "No doubt of it: I am a null, a zero." He needs desperately to assert himself, and in this Kafkaesque attempt he is denied success by wife, friends, and officials. Asp approaches the stature of a modern Everyman in the last lines of the novel as, in a final attempt to become "something," he says, "I smash a tumbler. I smash a bottle. Filling my hands with broken glass, I rush out of the cafe...into the night ... across the street...."
Vail did not publish the many other novels he wrote. According to Kay Boyle, he destroyed seven or eight manuscripts. He may have been haunted by his own cry, "Why should we, living poems, fuss about with ink"" His other writings show considerable promise, but they are relatively few. An early play, What Do You Want", was produced by the Provincetown Players in 1919. A few poems and short stories appeared in Peter Neagoe's Americans Abroad, Bellman, Broom, Dial, the New Review, Bob Brown's Readies anthology, and the Smart Set. His verse tends to lapse into prosaic utterance, but there are occasional effective images:
Wine starts a glissade of wordsWe will meet again Maud TrevylyanWhen the gutter is choked with leaves.
His essay on "Mutation in Language" in transition (July 1935) reflects the diction of Finnegans Wake and looks forward to Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot:
Referring to glummarians and deams of Acaca old blanketters and aulde douchers roting the rechauffe with comas and semicomas, arsestericks & hystarisks & Nobel Prize periods--you know, the fool stop when the pintellect stoops to pickpocket slime from old Messachusetts
the word wormed He was not the lowest poochpooet who hardly sang.
Vail was also a versatile linguist who produced translations into English from French, German, and Italian. In his first important effort, Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire's The Life of Madame Roland (1930), he achieved a dignified and controlled prose suited to the original. His second translation from French, Charles-Louis Philippe's Bubu of Montparnasse (1932), was published by the Black Sun Press with a preface by T.S. Eliot. Eliot had complained privately about the language of Vail's translation, and indeed, though it reads well, the street-tough quality of the original is not consistently maintained. Robert Neumann's On the Make (1931), which Vail translated from German, is rendered in a racy, rather British English: "I've too much to do to waste my time twaddling fiddlesticks." Laurence Vail also had "too much to do" in too many creative fields for him to fulfill all the promise he showed, but he deserves to be remembered for his contributions to the life, art, and literature of his generation. Thus far, he has been largely neglected by critics and historians.
Works
WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:Books
Piri and I (New York: Lieber & Lewis, 1923).
Murder! Murder! (London: Peter Davies, 1931).
365 Days, by Vail, Kay Boyle, and Nina Conarain (London: Cape, 1936; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).
Two Poems (New York: Modern Editions, n.d.).
Other
Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire, The Life of Madame Roland, translated by Vail (London & New York: Longmans, Green, 1930).
"Always Gentleman - To God - Aria di Maria - Envoi - Pogrom?," in Readies for Bob Brown's Machine, ed. Bob Brown (Cagnes-sur-Mer: Roving Eye Press, 1931), pp. 9-15.
Robert Neumann, On the Make, translated by Vail (London: Peter Davies, 1931).
"Buster Bourbon, Private," in Americans Abroad An Anthology, ed. Peter Neagoe (The Hague: Servire, 1932), pp. 428-457.
Charles-Louis Philippe, Bubu of Montparnasse, translated by Vail (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1932).
Periodical Publications
"Americans," Dial, 70 (February 1921): 163.
"Grey Crust," Poetry, 19 (December 1921): 136-137.
"A Great One," transition, no. 14 (Fall 1928): 151-163.
"Revolution of the Word Proclamation," signed by Vail and others, transition, no. 16/17 (June 1929): 13.
"Murder, Murder," transition, no. 16/17 (June 1929): 108-119.
"Inquiry on the Malady of Language," by Vail and others, transition, no. 23 (July 1935): 168-171.
"Fragment from a Novel," transition, no. 27 (April/May 1938): 138-141.
Laurence Vail, novelist, poet, painter, and sculptor, was born in Paris on 28 January 1891 and died in Cannes on 16 April 1968. Known variously as the King of Montparnasse or the King of Bohemia, he is important for his Surrealist prose and his avantgarde art. He was described by Peggy Guggenheim as "always bursting with ideas," and he exerted a catalytic force on his many friends, among them Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.
His family had been connected with France for many generations: his great-grandfather had been a friend of Lafayette; his paternal grandfather, Adam Vail of New York, knew Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps and married a girl from Brittany; Vail's father, the commercially successful painter Eugene Lawrence Vail, was born in Paris and brought his son up to live like a Frenchman but think like an American. The most significant parts of Vail's education did not occur during his often-interrupted formal schooling in Paris, in Connecticut, or at Oxford, but in the summers spent with his father in Venice or in the French Alps.
Laurence Vail served during 1918 in the American army as an officer assigned to the Corps of Interpreters. He met heiress Peggy Guggenheim in Manhattan in 1921 and married her the next year in Paris. They had two children, quarreled, gave marathon parties, and separated in 1929. In December 1928, Vail had met Kay Boyle at the Coupole, and soon a relationship developed which lasted until 1941. This marriage produced three children and the short story collection 365 Days , coedited and coauthored by Kay Boyle, Vail, and Nina Conarain. Boyle credits Vail with being one of the most important influences on her development as a writer: he encouraged her in the cross-country skiing and mountain climbing which were to figure in several of her novels, and he introduced her to many American and French writers. During the war years in Connecticut and New York, Vail was heartsick for Europe; he crossed the Atlantic again after the war, to spend the rest of his life mainly in France.
Vail's creative life was extremely varied. Perhaps he best characterized his own course in "Grey Crust," a poem published in Poetry in 1921: "I would be fused into anyone going new ways." Tristan Tzara considered him one of the fathers of Dada, and he was an early practitioner of Surrealism in art and literature. He experimented with form, diction, and style. He was one of the signers, along with Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Harry Crosby, Eugene Jolas, and others, of the "Proclamation" which announced the "Revolution of the Word" in transition (June 1929) and stated that the undersigned were "tired of the spectacle of short stories, poems and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism."
Piri and I (1923), Vail's first novel, is a fantasy based in part on his life from age eleven onward and treats his very close relationship with his sister, Clotilde, as the romance of two people, Piri Riminieff and Michael Lafosse, the narrator. Piri and I defies simplistic categorizing, since the fictional modes change to suit the author's purpose. At first it is quite frankly a sensitive story of childhood and adolescence, then it becomes a novel of manners, and finally it turns self-consciously philosophical. Vail's narrator looks back nostalgically upon his early loves: "Where is she now--the marvellous Lili, once the pride and terror of nurses, the tyrant of the child-speckled avenue"" Occasionally Vail, trying to see the world through a child's eyes, becomes trapped in an overwrought simile: "Slatternly words fall from her heavy lips like frogs from the lips of the princess in the fairy tale." He reveals himself as a word painter who, at his best, can achieve images which move with the authority his friend Marcel Duchamp produced on canvas. As Piri and Michael climb, "The mist falls away from them, tumbling gently like the skirts of a ballet dancer."
The novel of manners section begins with the descriptions of spas and ski resorts, of balls and tennis tournaments. Some of the characters recall eighteenth-century English stage figures: "Now it is a buxom blonde, striving to demonstrate by a simpering laugh and coy little steps that her heart is as young as the night." Vail's narrator describes himself in terms that clearly fit Vail himself; he is "a blond lad with large and uncertain blue eyes, an acquiline nose, and a slightly irregular mouth." Soon the narrator's philosophy emerges; in a false society, the clever person assumes the mask of the pierrot to safeguard his integrity: "He is the amateur actor let loose in the world.... The real artist is essentially the amateur. This young man's poses are both intuitive and intellectual." This passage could describe the outward show put on by Laurence Vail and his friends Harry Crosby and Robert McAlmon.
Piri and I is fairly traditional in form and gives little hint of the various styles, from Victorian sentimental realism to Surrealism, to appear in Murder! Murder! (1931), and of the interior monologue mode which dominates the later novel. Murder! Murder! contains portraits and events for which the originals are easily recognizable: Polly is Peggy Guggenheim; Martin Asp, the protagonist and narrator, is Vail himself; Nell, the "queen of Montparnasse," owes a lot to Florence Martin, Gerald Burns to Harold Stearns, and Miriam Oon probably to Mina Loy. Vail also exploits the banalities of his tourist countrymen: two young women are defined by their assertion that "We might do both Louvres before lunch."
The book begins with a section entitled "Advertisement" which gives excerpts from confessions of murder, ranging from the Victorianchaste admission of a fratricide complete with "deathly pallor," feminine sympathy, and invocations of the Maker, to the blunt "Killed her? I should say I did."
The action is frankly Surrealistic: a murder has been--may have been"--committed by the narrator. In an excerpt published in transition (June 1929), the murderer/narrator, M, is pursued around the world by a detective, D, who is the narrator's double and alter ego. Reality and dream, sobriety and drunkenness alternate. Vail experiments with relativity: the dream-events of several days' duration turn out to have lasted only a few hours. Then both D and M become drunk on Prohibition liquor in a Manhattan speakeasy, and time lags. A slow-motion chase ensues which takes six hours and thirty-eight minutes and covers eight blocks. Even the dialogue is expanded visually: "P---pp---er---er---haps-------if---I---t---t---tt-----ake-----a-----s-----s---sh---ort-----n---ap-----I---m---may---be---a---a---able-----to---cr---cr---awl---or---h---h---hob-------ble-------." Later the pace challenges time itself: "At the same time, to judge by rude chronometer, M is at Washington Square and at the Battery. He dives. A minute later D follows him into the puddle. And, indeed, for swimmers like M and D, the Atlantic is a puddle."
There is a Rabelaisian quality to much of Vail's humor and to his prose style. Lists expand simple statements into pages: "Outraged, as you say. Fondled, petted, taken liberties with, chucked under the chin, osculated, bitten, caressed in all sorts of places, cuddled, bussed, clasped, muzzled...." Beneath all his buffoonery and word-wizardry, Vail has a serious purpose in Murder! Murder!. He has shown man's despair at his loss of individuality. As Martin Asp laments, after an unsuccessful attempt to have himself arrested for his real or imagined murder, "No doubt of it: I am a null, a zero." He needs desperately to assert himself, and in this Kafkaesque attempt he is denied success by wife, friends, and officials. Asp approaches the stature of a modern Everyman in the last lines of the novel as, in a final attempt to become "something," he says, "I smash a tumbler. I smash a bottle. Filling my hands with broken glass, I rush out of the cafe...into the night ... across the street...."
Vail did not publish the many other novels he wrote. According to Kay Boyle, he destroyed seven or eight manuscripts. He may have been haunted by his own cry, "Why should we, living poems, fuss about with ink"" His other writings show considerable promise, but they are relatively few. An early play, What Do You Want", was produced by the Provincetown Players in 1919. A few poems and short stories appeared in Peter Neagoe's Americans Abroad, Bellman, Broom, Dial, the New Review, Bob Brown's Readies anthology, and the Smart Set. His verse tends to lapse into prosaic utterance, but there are occasional effective images:
Wine starts a glissade of wordsWe will meet again Maud TrevylyanWhen the gutter is choked with leaves.
His essay on "Mutation in Language" in transition (July 1935) reflects the diction of Finnegans Wake and looks forward to Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot:
Referring to glummarians and deams of Acaca old blanketters and aulde douchers roting the rechauffe with comas and semicomas, arsestericks & hystarisks & Nobel Prize periods--you know, the fool stop when the pintellect stoops to pickpocket slime from old Messachusetts
the word wormed He was not the lowest poochpooet who hardly sang.
Vail was also a versatile linguist who produced translations into English from French, German, and Italian. In his first important effort, Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire's The Life of Madame Roland (1930), he achieved a dignified and controlled prose suited to the original. His second translation from French, Charles-Louis Philippe's Bubu of Montparnasse (1932), was published by the Black Sun Press with a preface by T.S. Eliot. Eliot had complained privately about the language of Vail's translation, and indeed, though it reads well, the street-tough quality of the original is not consistently maintained. Robert Neumann's On the Make (1931), which Vail translated from German, is rendered in a racy, rather British English: "I've too much to do to waste my time twaddling fiddlesticks." Laurence Vail also had "too much to do" in too many creative fields for him to fulfill all the promise he showed, but he deserves to be remembered for his contributions to the life, art, and literature of his generation. Thus far, he has been largely neglected by critics and historians.
Works
WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:Books
Piri and I (New York: Lieber & Lewis, 1923).
Murder! Murder! (London: Peter Davies, 1931).
365 Days, by Vail, Kay Boyle, and Nina Conarain (London: Cape, 1936; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).
Two Poems (New York: Modern Editions, n.d.).
Other
Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire, The Life of Madame Roland, translated by Vail (London & New York: Longmans, Green, 1930).
"Always Gentleman - To God - Aria di Maria - Envoi - Pogrom?," in Readies for Bob Brown's Machine, ed. Bob Brown (Cagnes-sur-Mer: Roving Eye Press, 1931), pp. 9-15.
Robert Neumann, On the Make, translated by Vail (London: Peter Davies, 1931).
"Buster Bourbon, Private," in Americans Abroad An Anthology, ed. Peter Neagoe (The Hague: Servire, 1932), pp. 428-457.
Charles-Louis Philippe, Bubu of Montparnasse, translated by Vail (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1932).
Periodical Publications
"Americans," Dial, 70 (February 1921): 163.
"Grey Crust," Poetry, 19 (December 1921): 136-137.
"A Great One," transition, no. 14 (Fall 1928): 151-163.
"Revolution of the Word Proclamation," signed by Vail and others, transition, no. 16/17 (June 1929): 13.
"Murder, Murder," transition, no. 16/17 (June 1929): 108-119.
"Inquiry on the Malady of Language," by Vail and others, transition, no. 23 (July 1935): 168-171.
"Fragment from a Novel," transition, no. 27 (April/May 1938): 138-141.
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