The Posthumous Autobiographer

Throughout his long and varied literary career, Michel Leiris’s experiments in autobiography made him a central figure in midcentury French intellectual life. Yet his contributions are conspicuously missing from the current conversations about memoir, autobiography, autofiction, and other writing of the self. An unfocused student, Leiris fell in with the Surrealists and agreed, on a lark, to serve as the secretary-archivist on a two-year government-financed ethnographic expedition to Africa. His subsequent working life was split into two distinct parts that influenced each other obliquely. By day he was an ethnographer in his basement office at the Musée de l’Homme; after work he was an art critic and a literary figure renowned on the Paris scene. You could say that by looking at his own world with the same curious eye that he devoted to the peoples he studied, he undertook a lifelong ethnography of the self.

Frail Riffs (Frêle Bruit), the fourth volume of his grand autobiographical project, La Règle du jeu (known in English as The Rules of the Game, though the French title also sounds like la règle du je—“the rules of the self”), appeared in 1976 when Leiris was seventy-four, an age when most people are worrying about memory and decline—a worry that hovers in the book’s background, along with the sense that he’s an old hand at the genre. Scratches (Biffures, 1948), the first volume of The Rules of the Game, was followed by Scraps (Fourbis, 1955) and Fibrils (Fibrilles, 1966)—all three translated by Lydia Davis. In Frail Riffs, translated with matching virtuosity by Richard Sieburth, Leiris is preoccupied not so much with finding the past as with tracing its long fade, with showing how his most beloved ideas have become outdated, like an old address book that you think you will always need but that you discover is full of useless phone numbers and the names of acquaintances who have died. Prone in all his books to metaphors of combat, bullfights, and duels, but also to confessions of impotence, Leiris evokes in Frail Riffs a phase of existence “when your witnesses have already died, leaving you there to duel on your own,” and “when life has become so lackluster that you really have to be a bonehead to complain that one day you’ll have to bid it adieu.” I like Sieburth’s choice of “bonehead” rather than “hardheaded” for the French buté. It’s the kind of insult you might hear in a frat house.

Simone de Beauvoir credited Leiris’s first autobiography, Manhood (L’Âge d’homme, 1939), with inspiring The Second Sex. Leiris sparked her desire to bring to the surface of consciousness the myths that constrain and structure women’s lives, just as he had tied his own troubled sexuality to Lucas Cranach the Elder’s paintings of Judith and Lucretia—Judith, who beheaded men; Lucretia, who aimed the knife at herself. Susan Sontag, reviewing Richard Howard’s translation of Manhood in these pages, found the book “brilliant and repulsive.”¹ In the coldness of Leiris’s gaze, his controlled masochism, his de-idealizing physical description, his insanely detailed prose, the combination of feelings held at arm’s length and bundled in theory, the lack of transition from one section to the next, and the total disregard for the so-called narrative arc that drives American writing, we would be hard-pressed to find traces of what passes for memoir today, if it weren’t for his fervor never to abandon the quest for understanding himself and his adamant refusal to make himself look good.

This was a habit that began early, with the diary he kept during the expedition to Africa—known as the Dakar–Djibouti mission—from 1931 to 1933 and later published as a book with a writerly title: Phantom Africa (L’Afrique fantôme, 1934).² Thanks to Brent Hayes Edwards’s 2017 translation, which includes excerpts from the letters Leiris sent to his wife, we have a rare account of the coercion with which the mission pursued its true purpose: to acquire some 3,700 art objects for Paris’s Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (the precursor to the Musée de l’Homme, established in 1937, and to the indigenous art collections currently in the Musée du Quai Branly). The French Parliament’s interest in the enterprise was clear:

At the moment when the Colonial Exposition at Vincennes is highlighting our colonial economic methods…it is highly opportune to prove to the scientific world and foreign powers the interest that the government is taking in the study of the civilizations of our overseas possessions.

Leiris’s own position wobbles: Did the means justify the ends—getting to know African societies—or was this unacceptable exploitation? Some two decades later he published strong criticism of intertwined ethnography and colonialism in Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine, Les Temps modernes.

In 2018 a report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron recommended that France return its ill-gotten artworks to their home countries in Africa. Since its publication, for a new generation of cultural critics Leiris has become exhibit A in a polemic against imperial thievery. Leiris’s descriptions in Phantom Africa of what happened on the Dakar–Djibouti mission, rich with on-the-spot detail of plunder and manipulation, stand in sharp contrast to the rhetoric coming from the museum’s 1931 activity report:

Buying ethnographic objects on the art market is a solution as expensive as it is unscientific…. How much more preferable, as long as there is still time, to proceed with a direct harvest on the ground, either by individuals on mission or by those on the spot who are familiar with our ethnographic methods.³

For critics today focused on decolonizing the museum and imagining possible forms of restitution, Phantom Africa can serve both as indictment and as evidence of a crime. 

Forgotten for his autobiographies but remembered as an accessory to plunder: clearly writers do not control their legacies. In this light it’s especially interesting to return to Frail Riffs, Leiris’s self-portrait as he anticipates his demise and attempts, in his own oblique style, a life review.

Leiris’s autobiographical project as a whole belongs to a form almost unrecognizable today, the product of an era when literary memoirs were driven not by plot—the narrative arc—but by words, according to an idea no longer in vogue that, in as much as one can express it, life is really just a text. Books like Sartre’s The Words, Nathalie Sarraute’s Childhood, and Jacques Derrida’s The Monolingualism of the Other, or theoretical treatises like Jacques Lacan’s The Language of the Self, partake in this focus on language as the essence of self. “How did nickel, this common metal, make its way into the adjective nickelé?” Leiris writes. Sieburth doesn’t translate nickelé, maybe because its sound (nee-que-lay or nee-clay) is truer to the charm of the word than the flat “nickel-plated.” The sentiment would be futile if Leiris didn’t develop it so brilliantly. We learn that as a child he “adored this word for its glint, its neatness, its rarity” and that it conjures helmets and trumpets, “the acid sheen of jazz instruments”—the very qualities he wants to bring back to his tarnished prose.

Throughout Frail Riffs are nods like this one to the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who famously wondered how the word nuit (“night”) could sound so bright and the word jour (“day”) so somber. Leiris’s obsession with language bears little resemblance to the quests for survival we’ve come to expect from memoir—the recitations of trauma, feats of social mobility, accusations of sexual malfeasance, and embattled quests for recognition of ethnic, racial, and gender identities.

Yet reading Frail Riffs, appearing in English nearly fifty years after its initial French publication, I realize how much our attraction to autobiography owes to Leiris. In his existential manifesto “On Literature Considered as a Bullfight,” a preface to the 1946 edition of Manhood, he contemplates the bombed-out port of Le Havre and wonders what difference an intimate memoir could possibly make when the world is in ruins. To succeed, he argues, writing needs to show us at least the shadow of bulls’ horns—it needs to find words that put the author in danger.

It wasn’t clear to Leiris in 1946 where the bull’s horns would come from. Like so many intellectual men of his generation, he was subject throughout his life to moments of high drama and low depression, including a suicide attempt after a failed love affair and an erotic fascination with a local prostitute during his army service in Algeria. He harbored a series of aching dissatisfactions—with the shape of his body, with the limits of his prose, with his political misjudgments. His melancholy is offset by moments of levity—affection for his tailor, stories about walking his dog, Puck, to stay in shape. Not the least of his achievements is to have created stories and images of himself strangely devoid of narcissistic self-display.

If trauma and victimhood are missing in Frail Riffs, replaced by episodes of doubt and self-loathing, it’s in part because Leiris enjoyed a situation of extraordinary class privilege. He was a grand bourgeois by virtue of his marriage to Louise (known as Zette) Leiris, the stepdaughter of Picasso’s art dealer and greatest champion, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. When in 1941 Vichy’s second anti-Jewish statute threatened Kahnweiler’s right to own his gallery, Louise purchased the business, ensuring its survival. (The couple hid Kahnweiler in their apartment—a story Leiris never tells.) If Leiris had never published a line of memoir, he would be remembered through portraits of him created by the artists whose work he reviewed and championed: André Masson, his oldest friend in the art world; Francis Bacon, whose painting of Leiris appears on the cover of Frail Riffs; Man Ray, who photographed him; and Picasso, who made a set of ten drawings of Leiris’s face. Each artist shows a man with “a broad, rather bulging forehead” (Leiris’s own words in Manhood)—by extension a man who thinks too much and who is condemned to record his every thought. We recognize Leiris, too, in Brassaï’s well-known photograph taken ten days after D-Day of the gang of “existentialists” rehearsing Picasso’s nonsensical play Desire Caught by the Tail: there is Leiris with his big head and slender torso, sitting on the floor with Sartre, Camus, and Picasso’s Afghan hound Kazbek.

Instead of anecdotes about celebrated friends, Leiris gives us Frêle Bruit. Sieburth transforms bruit (“noise”) into “riffs”—a fitting choice, akin to the musical process by which Leiris circles from one subordinate clause to another in order to grasp an archaic verb tense, an architectural detail, or the contents of a display case that becomes an exhibit of his life. Writing as an old man, he is suspicious of the coin of the realm of memoir—feeling:

Autumn leaves: not just a scatter of reminiscence and regret but a scurry of moments of remorse involving dirty little dusty nothings, evasions and wishy-washy hesitations, words that remained on my lips instead of being said out loud, actions that I should have taken but from which I abstained, senses of relief when alibis or ways out were offered to me….

That particular litany of regret goes on for another twelve lines, ending in

a mounting heap of fears, given my approaching winter years, as well as a certain disgust with those fears whose weight alone would be enough to bend my back, as if the sky might at any moment fall on my head.

These are salutary hesitations in a current literary climate so easily satisfied with triumph and tears. In a crucial moment of confession, he writes about himself in the third person:

Far from merely humiliating him, this admission of his decline will snowball into a hastening of his senescence, given that he has so arranged his life that the only thing still keeping him in shape are the walks he takes, sometimes under clear skies, sometimes under a screen of branches, every time he is presented with the occasion on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays, as he overcomes his laziness, eager not to disappoint his dog’s quivering and ever more frisky expectations.

Leiris often chooses the third person—a way of trying out his future as “posthumous.” He acknowledges more than once his growing frailty. Yet there is nothing frail in Frail Riffs where syntax is concerned. A quiet virtuoso of French prose, Leiris identifies with Mallarmé, “who proved that one can simultaneously be both a soaring poet and a minor English teacher who ruffles no feathers.” If we consult his note card on Mallarmé, one among a collection of preparatory note cards gathered by Denis Hollier in his remarkable edition of Leiris’s complete works, we find a variant of that sentiment: “Mallarmé, who was neither a bad boy, nor a madman, nor an alcoholic, nor even a holy terror [monstre sacré], but an honest English prof—and who was nonetheless a great poet.”⁴

But Leiris’s debt to Mallarmé doesn’t quite capture his literary posture. Always a political writer, he was a critic of the Algerian War, a supporter of the May 1968 student revolution, and an admirer of Cuba and China who, like so many in his generation, later castigated himself for having “whitewashed the horrors of the revolution in the name of the justice of its aims.” In one fragment, he describes the animals in his country house engaging in wholesale murder—a cat killing rabbits, a dog killing a kitten, the guinea hens killing a pheasant—and concludes that it’s the norm for every species “to try to dominate everybody else, not excluding the murder or the manducation of one’s enemies.” But for Leiris the intellectual temptation is never to dominate; it’s to ferret out his own bad faith:

To take sides with the oppressed even though I belong to the class of the oppressors, to write in order to set myself free even though I am a slave to my writing and would never want to give it up, to be afraid of getting my hands bloody but to accept that my comfortable existence is built on the sweat or indeed the blood of others, to decide that life is not worth living even though I made only the feeblest attempt to end it, to go on and on about love and poetry while living the life of a bourgeois, to dream of decisive action when I know I’m a dyed-in-the-wool intellectual, to refuse to believe in the supernatural while being plagued by superstitions (for example, that to predict the good is to invite evil), and, as if some invisible tribunal might require me to justify myself, to save myself as much as possible from the commission of the ultimate, unforgivable crime.

To which he might have added: to live well thanks to his wife’s fortune.

As a writer, he excelled at self-accusation, though he was often evasive about the most basic information. Given what we know about his milieu, his ties to Picasso, Miró, Giacometti, and Bacon, and his wife’s art gallery, it’s astonishing to consider what he doesn’t talk about. There are no gallery shows in Frail Riffs, no mentions of money or acquisitions, no name-dropping. Leiris stays true to an inner world of perception and obsession.

With so little penchant to dominate, much less murder, anyone, Leiris admits he can’t even get his dog to obey his commands. I’d like to think, in the autumn of 2024, that one writer’s hesitations, his rehearsal of his every failure, might serve as an antidote to the kind of triumphant thinking that can end in murder. In this genre, Leiris is unsurpassed. As he absorbs his daily antidepressant gelcap, he worries that his own greatest sorrows may have fallen under pharmaceutical control. And so he finds a new threat: the possibility that after all these years, he may have lost his ability truly to be miserable.

In 1984 Louise and Michel Leiris donated their collection of modernist masterpieces to the Museé National d’Art Moderne in Paris. A second donation, of Leiris’s ethnographic art and documents, went to the Musée de l’Homme before it was transferred to the Musée du Quai Branly, home of the artworks now under dispute. That Leiris would one day be posthumous—the idea obsessed him—not because of his unique sentences, his oblique vision, his unflinching self-critique, or even those donations, but rather because of his complicity in the illicit plunder of African art on the Dakar–Djibouti mission strikes me as wildly unfair, yet perfectly in tune with his own capacity for self-blame.