Haunted House

by Pierre Reverdy

Fiction. Translated from the French by John Ashbery. Pierre Reverdy's short story HAUNTED HOUSE, originally published in 1930 in a collection of prose tales called Risques et Perils, is very different than his typically oblique, allusive and dreamlike poetry. Rife with mock rhetorical grandeur and ironic asides, HAUNTED HOUSE was lauded and included in Andre Breton's list of ten books he would take to a desert island. John Ashbery is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and has translated the works of Stephane Mallarme, Giorgio de Chirico, Raymond Roussel, Max Jacob and Alfred Jarry. Since 1990 he has been the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

Genres: Poetry, France, Horror

70 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Pierre Reverdy (September 13, 1889 – June 17, 1960) was a French poet whose works were inspired by and subsequently proceeded to influence the provocative art movements of the day, Surrealism, Dadaism and Cubism. The loneliness and spiritual apprehension that ran through his poetry appealed to the Surrealist credo. He, though, remained independent of the prevailing “isms,” searching for something beyond their definitions. His writing matured into a mystical mission seeking, as he wrote: “the sublime simplicity of reality."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_R...

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surrealist prose poetry of the generally better sort, image and dream-continuity-wise, albeit absolutely plotless. It's just about the forms, words, and landscapes that rise up out the void only to disappear back into it again. I read this to our frenetic new kitten Tampopo until he fell asleep.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henceforth no heroic thought will ever come to lean at the ship’s rail.

I picked this book up used a few months ago. For some reason, at the time, I thought it was a late 19th century French gothic haunted house tale. I’m not actually sure why I thought that – or at least why I had come up with “late 19th century” – as I didn’t actually read any of the description on the back of the book at the time. I liked the cover, it was in my favorite used bookstore’s Literature section (as opposed to its post-WWII “fiction” section), and it was fairly cheap, so I bought it mostly sight-unseen. I sat down to read it a month or so after I bought it, and the opening lines -

Under the rampart of fire, the reassuing details of the bedroom come slowly into focus.
Down below is the rather sinister street, mysterious, with or without passerby, very dark in places, and dimly lit at the corner by strips of light filtering through shutters

- did not really do much to change my expectations.

Of course, the book turns experimental and surreal fairly quickly, and, as I was reading at a pace appropriate for lighter fare, I found myself lost in the text fairly quickly. Some video games that I wanted came out and this book just kind of got put to the side and forgotten. And I do literally mean “put to the side” as the book has been sitting on my bedside table for months now, and every night I put my water next to it and my cell phone on top of it and never really notice its presence.

Anyways, I finally recognized that I needed to just read the thing, so I sat down to give it the attention it deserves. First, the back cover makes it kind of clear what to expect, noting that Reverdy, in his mid-teens, “edited Nord-Sud, a review which published the early works of Breton, Aragon and other Surrealist writers” and that Breton himself once included Haunted House “in a list of ten books he would take to a desert island”. So, with all that in mind, my reading and enjoyment of this book progressed much better the second time around.

And my enjoyment of it was immense. It’s one of those surrealistic texts that is simply a pleasure to read, to allow the cadence and structure of the sentences to dance through your mind in their alluring, yet jarring rhythms.

One cannot, beneath the ashes of boredom and the slabs of stupidity, abolish the flaming vision of love. For behold, in the liquidation of the past, the stimulus of envy, the uneven parquet of dismal fields sown with grain, the dark swollen sea of passions, salt, the salt of evaporated air, moldy bread, snow hardened in the grooves of winter, time carefully folded and stored in crates, on the docks, next to the new lights, songs permitted and forbidden, the joy of living, unpunished crimes, hearts laden with boredom, distress subdued, peace and prosperity forever compromised, knot-free boards of silence, gaping abysses of fear, delicate zigzags of madness, staccato tenterhooks of murder, icy feet of terror, cold hands of justice, exhausted limbs, head empty of confessions, lassitude that oxidizes reason, alcohol that perorates the flesh and the earth which is only the rattling bead in an immense silver sleigh-bell, across which, still counting the scales of the roof and the gleaming slates of fish, the convict has slipped back to his penal colony through the crafty slit of the guillotine between the severity and the honesty of the judges where not even a hair could pass through. It’s not a question of entering the other world, it’s a question of getting out of it.

From that, a fairly familiar tale rises. In the face of a savage crime, the narrator (travelling with Despair) sets out on a journey. They are caught in a storm and take refuge in a foreboding manor. But the story quickly submerges into the morass of text again. Perspectives shift – different “I”’s take over, second person directions show up and mixed, disconcerting, third person narratives mingle as well and fourth-walls are shattered. Settings change at whim as well – the house, a crossroads, a ship, rooms of money changers and usurers – yet the narrative continues to circle back to these places. It is difficult to find one’s footing in the text, and many pages will go by, full of fascinating words but a barely graspable substance.

If you like this sort of stuff you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, this likely isn’t the book to change your mind. It is a pleasure to read, but it keeps its secrets close, and buries them so deep some times that one is left to wonder if there is anything left beneath the surface of it all.

Where we are going, eyes shut, there is certainly no one who would joyfully consent to follow us.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me it's the perfect book to bring with you in the bathtub. If you read it slowly, and wait till the water reaches your chin, it is sort of the ideal situation with regards to this book. "Haunted House" may be the first prose piece or fiction published in English by this great poet Pierre Reverdy. The poet John Ashbery translated Reverdy's prose into English, which can't be the easiest thing in the world. Nevertheless this is very much a classic Surrealist text - where the images flow dream-like against the other image.

In the back of the book the publisher/editor compares this work to Lautréamont's "Chants de Maldoror" which is a fair comparison. Both books bring up a dread that can't really be described, it is more of a mood piece than anything else. As a reader you just follow the pathway and let the writing take you to another place. For those who have a collection of Surrealist text, "Haunted House" is an important part of that textural world. It is a fave of Andre Breton, so he knows!

[Sparrow .]

I did read Haunted House; at first, I read each line over and over, until I completely understood it, lines like:

The sensitive and white man consigned to all the offshore winds, to all the caprices of fortune; he who lacks the motor of shame, the perches of friendship, the breeze from the magnetic crowds.

(Did you notice that sentence is lacking a VERB?) But after a few pages, I began to feel that I was misunderstanding the book, by understanding it. Perhaps the book is meant to be painted onto your soul, like a Boy Scout painting a model of a Piper Cub, not thought over like an economics essay in Fortune magazine. And maybe the book would eventually have a plot! Perhaps one involving a haunted house, like the captivating lithograph on the cover, executed by Rodolphe Bresdin in 1871.

But the plot, if it did appear, happened in a corner of the book's persona, perhaps at the very end.

They have placed a medal on a hole in the dead man's chest.

That's a line from the penultimate page of this book, the 69th. Perhaps "Haunted House," written in 1930, was opposed to war? I realize I know nearly nothing about Pierre Reverdy, except for the paragraph on the back cover, entitled "About the Author." And maybe I should not learn about Pierre, maybe I should read more of his books -- in French -- because English seems to shortchange his thinking, to LEGALIZE it. For example:

Deep within him, he who speaks now has also discovered all the treachery of these dangerous regions wherein anyone so imprudent as to venture is engulfed without reprieve.

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this little book sentence by sentence. I didn't want it to end. The back copy says it was one of Andre Breton's ten desert island books, and now in John Ashbery's stunning translation, it's one of mine too.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found it "quite impossible to apply the brakes to the impetuous momentum of this sentence." Except, you know, for like a whole book.

[Bowdoin]

Sean Campos–I got really into John Ashbery this summer, and stumbled across this translation he did of Pierre Reverdy's Haunted House. After reading the brief seventy pages, I came across one truth: Pierre Reverdy is out of his mind. The book has very little to do with a haunted house in any physical way, and the prose-poem twists and turns about busy French street corners, homes of power-hungry bureaucrats, and the sad-eyes of the less-than-well-off -- all in one sentence. Around the fiftieth page, he changes gears completely, and draws this connection between a haunted house and the interior of anybody brave (or crazy) enough to live, day-to-day, alongside modernity. He writes, "There are better ways, certainly, to know men and to learn what is happening in their souls -- we have only not to look at them." He doesn't really seem to give a damn about what an author is, or what one ought to be, and never makes the distinction between inventive word-play or conscious self-criticism. It is an immensely fun read, if you don't mind having a dictionary in one hand and a bottle of caffeine pills in the other. Of course, I only really guessed as to what it is all about. Andre Breton said this is one of ten books he would take with him on a desert island, but he also said that 'the man that cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot'. Do with that what you will.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

pick it up

[Julia D · Rating 5 out of 5]

my favorite

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Words, words, words....placed in beautiful order.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I missed something, but I found this rather hard to follow.