An Exquisite Corpse Read online

  Also by Helen A. Harrison

  The Corpse Trilogy

  An Exquisite Corpse

  An Accidental Corpse

  An Artful Corpse

  Other Works

  Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach (with Constance Ayers Denne)

  Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock

  Larry Rivers

  Jackson Pollock

  The Jackson Pollock Box

  Copyright © 2016, 2018, 2020 by Helen A. Harrison

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  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks

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  Originally published as An Exquisite Corpse in 2016 in the United States by Mira Digital Publishing. This edition issued based on the paperback edition published in 2018 in the United States by Dunemere Books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-One

  Seventy-Two

  Seventy-Three

  Seventy-Four

  Seventy-Five

  Seventy-Six

  Seventy-Seven

  Seventy-Eight

  Seventy-Nine

  Eighty

  Eighty-One

  Eighty-Two

  Eighty-Three

  Eighty-Four

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  To Roy

  Always

  Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Max Morise, and André Breton, Exquisite Corpse, 1928. Pen and brown ink, graphite with smudging, and colored crayons on cream wove paper, 12¼ x 7¾ inches. The Art Institute of Chicago, Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection, 106.1991 © 2016 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

  In the Surrealist parlor game exquisite corpse, artists build a figure on an absurd assembly line. Typically a piece of paper is folded into sections and passed around; the challenge is that each artist must work on one particular segment without having seen the others. The results are often monstrous, or at least mismatched.

  —The New York Times, March 29, 2012

  One

  Saturday night, October 16, 1943

  André Breton did not need to examine the body to determine that his friend was dead. His work as a medic on the front lines during the Great War had taught him all he needed to know about corpses. There were no visible wounds or blood, but the skin had lost its coppery glow and had faded to a yellowish-gray. Although he realized there would be no pulse, he removed his glove, bent down, and touched his fingertips to the neck. The flesh was cool, but the muscle was pliant. No rigor.

  Breton was not squeamish—his experience in the trenches had taken care of that—yet the sight of Wifredo Lam sprawled on the floor of his studio both saddened and appalled him. As fellow Surrealists forced into exile from Hitler’s Europe, they had been on the run together, and as refugees in New York, they were outsiders marking time until the Nazis were driven out of Paris and they could return. Their bond had been strengthened by this shared peril and displacement, and Breton’s sorrow was deepened by the knowledge that Lam would not live to reclaim his honored place among the Parisian avant-garde.

  As if that were not enough, he also had to reckon with the condition of the body.

  Lam lay on his back. Over his handsome face, a grotesque African mask stared up from the floor. One outstretched arm was stuffed into the folds of an umbrella, and the other sported a galosh. A large rubber chicken claw covered his left foot. His right trouser leg was rolled up to the knee, leaving his lower leg and foot bare.

  Breton knew exactly what he was looking at.

  An exquisite corpse.

  Clearly the next step was to report it to the police, but he hesitated for two reasons. He spoke virtually no English, and he doubted that he would find a French-speaking person in a Greenwich Village police station. Even if he could make them understand that there was a dead body in an apartment on West Tenth Street, how would he explain the bizarre costume? He knew its meaning, but only a Surrealist would appreciate the significance. And no one but a Surrealist would have decorated the body that way, which strongly suggested that the killer was a member of his immediate circle.

  Breton wasn’t ready to face that possibility alone. With a gloved hand, he turned off the studio light. In the kitchen, Lam’s keys were hanging on a nail. He took them, locked the apartment door behind him, and went to find a translator.

  Two

  When Breton arrived at Roberto Matta’s building, in the quaint residential alley known as Patchin Place, the outside door had been left open, as was the door to Matta’s apartment, where
a party was in full swing. The living room rug had been rolled away, and two couples, William and Ethel Baziotes and Gerome and Marianna Kamrowski, were dancing to Glenn Miller and his orchestra, live on CBS Radio. Breton thought he might find his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, whose English was quite good, but she was not in evidence. Under the pretext of renewing the canapé tray, she and her young lover, David Hare, had retreated to the privacy of the kitchen, where they were renewing their acquaintance with each other’s bodies.

  The place was thick with smoke, under which the smell of oil paint was detectable. Matta had left the studio door ajar, so his guests would be sure to see and admire his latest work. He was in there now, soliciting the thoughts of Mercedes Matter—a fellow artist as renowned for her beauty as she was respected for her Neo-Cubist paintings, her discerning eye, and her outspoken opinions—whom he was also trying hard to seduce. They both spoke fluent French, and in fact, they were flirting in that language, with Matta using the similarity of their names to suggest that a merger was appropriate. Breton was too discreet to interrupt.

  He scanned the room for other Francophones, hoping to see Robert Motherwell, the self-appointed American ambassador to the European expatriate community. With his innate distrust of authority, especially the police, Breton would have preferred a native English speaker, someone familiar with the local system, but apparently Motherwell had skipped the party. He noticed Djuna Barnes, the eccentric lesbian author who lived in the upstairs apartment. He was surprised to see her, as she was becoming more and more reclusive since her forced return to her native country. They had known each other in Paris, where she was a fixture of the vanguard literary scene in the 1920s, but with virtually no audience here for her work, she was being supported by the heiress Peggy Guggenheim, a collector of art and artists, who had also returned reluctantly from her bohemian expatriate life in Europe. It was evident that Barnes had had plenty to drink, so Breton ruled her out.

  Using the only armchair as a de facto throne, the writer Harold Rosenberg was holding court, his high-pitched voice cutting through the music and the chatter. His bad leg, the result of osteomyelitis, kept him off the dance floor, and he used it as an excuse to station himself where others would have to come to him. He was surrounded by a trio of muses—his wife, May Tabak, and the artists Lee Krasner and Elaine Fried—who were encouraging his philosophizing.

  While keeping up a lively banter with Harold, Lee had one eye on her lover, Jackson Pollock, sitting by himself in a corner, studying his shoes and nursing a glass of red wine. She was rationing him and wanted to be sure he wasn’t cheating. He had an important exhibition coming up in just a few weeks, and he couldn’t afford any time off for a bender.

  Lee was becoming a bit weary of Harold’s pontificating. She would have enjoyed dancing, but no partners were available. Dancing with Jackson was out of the question. Their one and only attempt had been a disaster. Of course, he had been stinko, cut in on her boyfriend, Igor, stepped all over her feet, and propositioned her. Not the most promising start to a romantic relationship—she hadn’t spoken to him again for five years—but when she saw his astounding paintings, all was forgiven. In fact, she fell in love with his art first, then with him.

  “The Europeans are completely justified in thinking that the term ‘American culture’ is an oxymoron,” Rosenberg asserted with customary assurance. “Whoever said America’s only contribution to civilization is indoor plumbing forgot that the Romans invented it two thousand years ago. Everything we have that’s worthwhile in art, science, literature, you name it, is imported from Europe.”

  Lee was not ready to accept such a dismissive attitude. “Come off it, Harold. If European culture is so superior, why is it destroying itself as we speak? Or rather, as you speak,” she added, “since no one else has been able to get in a word for the past half hour.”

  Rosenberg carried on, unfazed. “What’s happening now is anti-cultural,” he argued. “The Nazis and the fascists can’t tolerate anything but their own warped ideology. Their lust for power is inflamed by profiteers who buy political influence and by their lackeys in the military. What chance do the poets and painters have against such evil greed? That’s why the great minds of Europe are here in New York. They’re our most valuable imports.

  “Look at the Surrealists,” he continued. “They witnessed firsthand what the last war did to their society, and they rejected the values that fostered destruction instead of creation. They chose to be outcasts because they had nothing to lose.”

  “They didn’t invent iconoclasm,” countered Elaine. “Every culture has its innovators. And it’s only natural that they would look inside themselves for inspiration when what’s outside is such a mess. It’s terrific that so many Surrealists are here now, that they have a safe place to hide from Hitler, but they had already made their advances long before they got here.”

  Invoking her lover, the painter Willem de Kooning, she added, “Bill says they’re running out of creative juice because New York is more surreal than anything they could dream up.”

  This exchange would have infuriated Breton if he had been able to understand it. But his lack of English was the very reason he was absorbed in his search for a translator. He spotted Marcel Duchamp, engrossed in a chess game with de Kooning. Oblivious to the hubbub around them, both artists were capable of focusing their concentration to neutralize distractions. Duchamp was now Breton’s objective, and he made straight for him.

  “Mon cher Duchamp,” he interrupted, “un moment, je t’en prie.” It took a few seconds for Duchamp to refocus. Breton’s voice sounded anxious, and that got his attention.

  “What is it, my friend?” he replied. They conversed in French.

  “I have just come from Lam’s. There is a problem, and I need your help.”

  “What is wrong?” asked Duchamp. “You look distraught.”

  “Please come with me. I will explain on the way.”

  Duchamp rose from the table, politely excused himself to de Kooning, retrieved his coat and hat from the bedroom, and left with Breton.

  Taking the seat vacated by Duchamp, Elaine wondered aloud what Breton was up to. “Why the rush to leave? He wasn’t here five minutes. And why did Duchamp go with him? Didn’t he give you a clue?”

  De Kooning shrugged. “Not a visper.” After nearly two decades in the United States, he hadn’t lost his charming Dutch accent.

  Three

  As they made their way to Lam’s apartment, Breton explained that his job as a broadcaster for the Voice of America’s European service had kept him late at the radio studio on West Fifty-Seventh Street. In those days of military stalemate for the Allies on the Western front and the Nazis’ increasing stranglehold on occupied France, his famous voice helped reassure his countrymen that they had not been abandoned in favor of the liberation of North Africa and Italy.

  The work was simple—he didn’t have to write the morale-boosting propaganda he read—but he did have the option to revise and approve it and to contribute his own scripts if he wished. The whole process was emotionally exhausting. Even though his words were addressed to nameless, invisible listeners, they brought back memories from twenty-five years earlier, when war was not a distant abstraction but a minute-by-minute struggle for survival.

  At around ten o’clock, he told Duchamp, he left the VOA studio, took the subway to Christopher Street, and walked along Tenth Street toward Matta’s apartment. On the way, he passed Lam’s and noticed that the light was on, so he supposed the artist must still be at home. It was unlike the frugal Lam to leave a light burning when he was out. Perhaps he had forgotten about the party or was as involved in his work as Breton had been.

  He climbed the stoop, intending to ring Lam’s bell. Just then someone came out of the building and held the door for him, so he didn’t bother to ring. He walked up the three flights and knocked on Lam’s door. When he got no response he tried the
knob and found the door open. He called out, but there was no answer.

  The apartment, one of several in the five-story building, had its entrance door opening into the kitchen. To the right, the large front parlor with a north-facing window served as Lam’s studio. To the left, a door led to a small windowless bedroom. The toilet was outside on the landing. Hearing no movement in the studio, Breton had glanced into the bedroom, thinking that Lam might be asleep, but the room was empty. Then he entered the studio and found the artist dead on the floor.

  “My God!” exclaimed Duchamp, shaken out of his habitual detachment—like Breton, he seldom lost his composure. “What happened to him?”

  “I cannot say,” Breton confessed. “There is no evidence of violence, no bleeding or wounds that I could see. I did not examine the body.”

  “A heart attack, perhaps,” suggested Duchamp.

  “No, I am certain the cause of death was not natural.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You will see for yourself,” Breton told him.

  Four

  They entered the building without meeting anyone. As they climbed the stairs, Breton advised his companion what to expect.

  “You will be as shocked as I was,” he warned. “Someone killed him, and whoever it was made the body into a human parody of our Surrealist parlor game.”

  Duchamp absorbed this news in silence. He had seldom indulged in the game of cadavre exquis, a diversion invented by the Surrealists as a means of practicing their trademark creative strategy of “pure psychic automatism.” One person would begin a drawing, fold the paper so that the picture was not visible, and then pass it to the next person, who would draw another segment, fold the paper again, and pass it on, resulting in an image of mismatched parts that was both absurd and amusing.

  Duchamp was not partial to the group activities that the Surrealists used to elicit subconscious imagery for their poems and paintings. They seemed contrived to him, though he had to admit that collective exploits sometimes led to interesting projects, such as the provocative exhibitions he had helped organize in Paris and New York. Chess was his game.