The author has received the kind permission to include the reproduced text and images that are currently held by Jersey Heritage (https://www.jerseyheritage .org), a charity that holds collections of artefacts, works of art, documents, specimens and information relating to Jersey’s history, culture and environment. Jersey Heritage has in turn received permission from the Cahun estate, which posthumously manages and preserves the works of surrealist artist Claude Cahun (born Lucie Schwob) and their partner Marcel Moore, to license these materials.
- 1 For more on the “Soldat Ohne Namen” resistance movement and subsequent interrogation, trial, and im (...)
1It is impossible to discuss the life of Suzanne Malherbe (1892–1972) without also discussing the life of Lucy Schwob (1894–1954) — and vice versa. Born within months of each other, these stepsisters-turned-artistic-collaboratorsturned-lifelong-companions became inseparable from the moment they met in 1909 as teenagers. Known more commonly under their pseudonyms, Marcel Moore (Malherbe) and Claude Cahun (Schwob), the duo soon became romantically involved and moved to Paris in 1920. Over the next decade-anda-half, the pair found themselves at the centre of the French Surrealist movement, hosting salons in their apartment. Regular attendees included the artists Henri Michaux and André Breton and literary entrepreneur Sylvia Beach; their address book from that time includes, among others, the names Jacques Lacan, Havelock Ellis, Tristen Tzara, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst. In 1937, with a Nazi invasion on the horizon, the two fled Paris due to Schwob’s Jewish heritage and settled in Jersey, an island in the English Channel where Malherbe and Schwob used to holiday with their parents. Here, they conducted an antiNazi resistance campaign during the Occupation of the Channel Islands under the guise of the “Soldat Ohne Namen” persona, creating anti-propaganda to confuse the soldiers into disloyalty. Schwob later described their efforts as a “militant Surrealist activity” which brought to fruition their previous products of the Surrealist anti-propagandist Contre Attaque movement from their time in Paris (qtd. in Thynne 2010, 2). Following their arrest by German military authorities in July 1944, their sham trial and consequent imprisonment, the pair were finally liberated with the rest of the Channel Islands in May 1945.1 Schwob died in 1954 from poor health caused by her time in imprisonment while Malherbe lived for two more decades in Jersey until she committed suicide in 1972.
2When the time came to write a memoir after the war and their consequent liberation, the duo encountered significant difficulty. Since that first lightning-strike meeting, Schwob and Malherbe had synchronised their lives, their careers, and even their suicide attempts in Nazi imprisonment. They perceived themselves as a single, intersubjective identity. Schwob referred to Malherbe in a 1921 issue of French periodical La Gerbe, writing “I am in her, she is in me” (qtd. in Pustarfi 2018, 29). For Malherbe, Schwob was also “the other me” (Knafo 2001, 46). This dyadic lifestyle and unique hyper-intersubjectivity complicated the memoir form’s narratological simplicity which demands a singular perspective, adding pains to an autobiographical work’s completion — and spurred a need to renovate the form into something that worked for their unique, interconnected lives.
- 2 In-text references to Peter and Madonna refer either to the manuscript in the Jersey Archive (JHT/1 (...)
3In this article, I shall argue that Peter and Madonna is a product of this frustration.2 Noting the chronological concurrence of the text with Malherbe’s torturous composition of the “memoir notes” in the post-war and post-Schwob years, I propose that it constitutes not merely an extended ludic interlude from memoir drafting, but an autofictional text which experiments with alternative ways to translate a life — or two intertwined lives — into textual form. The series of sketches recounts the life and escapades of a married couple, Peter (Malherbe) and Mary/Madonna (Schwob).
4While this article posits that Peter and Madonna and the memoir notes form two separate documents and two separate texts, despite their previous categorisations as a homogenous “memoir notes”, their fundamental interrelation is nonetheless the investigation of this essay. I consider how an inexact cataloguing and the roughness of a little-known and little-examined archive can shed new light on texts which seem trivial — how the all-important occasion in which Malherbe composed these documents allows them to become challenging works of autofiction that feed off the failed attempts of autobiography which sit with them in the archive. Malherbe’s initial sketches for Peter and Madonna even appear on identical envelopes to those used for memoir-drafting — for example, containing imported “Zeitungen” (newspapers) from Basel (Fig. 1). Their interrelation has been until now coincidental, random, for ease of cataloguing. I ask whether these overlapping documents instead gesture toward their intimacy in Malherbe’s creative consciousness at one time, uncovering the conversation between them.
5For this assessment of Peter and Madonna, I require Dirk Van Hulle’s theory of creative concurrence, which applies D. F. McKenzie’s conception of the concurrency of production in publishing houses to a genetic context. It aims to reconstruct the logic of a text’s genesis by “reconstructing the everyday reality of how a work, in all its draft versions, interacted with the other works that populated the author’s writing desk at any given moment” (Van Hulle 2021, 51). Van Hulle’s suggestion enables Peter and Madonna to emerge from a “writing desk” and “textual ecology” (47) tainted by the struggles with life-writing and encourages a reconstruction of the text’s genesis from the perspective of genre. Particular problems Malherbe encounters in the memoir form find their creative solutions in Peter and Madonna.
6Some of these creative solutions involve Malherbe leaning into the Surrealist practices that she and Schwob used earlier in their lives and artistic careers. I thus also attend to “creative recurrence”, the “diachronic counterpart” of creative concurrence (Van Hulle 2021, 47). The only constant in Schwob and Malherbe’s oeuvre, Tirza True Latimer contends, “is the insistence […] to leave an autobiographical trace” (Latimer 2005, 102). I trace those efforts to leave that “autobiographical trace” by attending to the recurrent questions about self-portraiture in Peter and Madonna and their 1930 collaborative anti-autobiography of the Surrealist movement, Disavowals (Cahun 2007). Susan Laxton defines “surrealist play” as “a means (it has a role to play) without ends (it never reaches closure)” (Laxton 2019, 5), re-evaluating Walter Benjamin’s vision of Surrealism as “a meagre stream, fed on the damp boredom of postwar Europe” (Benjamin 1978, 47). As Surrealist play, Peter and Madonna therefore serves as a formative text where ideas can develop, through engagement with Surrealist processes, without the threat of completion — a creatively productive genetic fragment without the pressure of publication.
- 3 For further detail on the estate and archive, see Downie (2006).
- 4 For the rise of academic interest in “Claude Cahun”, especially in relation to gender and sexual fl (...)
7The fragmented and unpublished nature of Peter and Madonna has unfortunately left this text grossly overlooked and hidden in a scrambled transatlantic archive. When Malherbe died, the couple’s estate, their art and writing materials — as well as most of their story — went to auction, housed in tea chests and rummaged through by prospective buyers, before it was purchased in its entirety by John Wakeham for £21.3 Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, with the rediscovery and rise of the art and life of “Claude Cahun”, institutions have been on a mission to re-purchase their work.4 Jersey Archive and Yale University’s Beinecke Library are two such institutions — and Peter and Madonna can be found among the memoir notes of both Jersey Archive and the Beinecke.
8This article is the first, as far as I am aware, to unite two collections of Malherbe’s papers from across the Atlantic into one text and one edition. The very capable archivists at Jersey Archive until now believed that Schwob authored the document in 1945, labelling it as “Various rough notes regarding Claude Cahun’s diary […] and various stories concerning people called Peter and Madonna” (JHT/1995M/00045/3).5 This research is therefore the first, also, to consider these writings as Malherbe’s — and to consider them as a literary text worthy of genetic study. I have re-catalogued Peter and Madonna as Malherbe’s composition, written from 1957 to 1958. A third-person reference to “Lucy” (JHT/1995M/00045/3/6), the consistency of handwriting with Malherbe’s memoir notes in the Beinecke, and various codicological characteristics of the loose leaves and envelopes used in the manuscript’s composition — which are dated three years after Schwob’s death and addressed to “Carola” — allow such a conclusion. It was also rare for Schwob to write in English as her spelling was poor — “bangging” (JHT/1995M/00045/3/1). Malherbe, however, was a skilled English speaker and translator (Von Oehsen 2006, 20).
9This article will unfold as follows: first, it establishes the difficulties Malherbe encounters in the memoir notes, then examines the conversation between Peter and Madonna and the memoir notes concerning genre and outmoded narratological conventions. It considers the role these texts play in their respective geneses. The second section looks at the recurrent traces of Malherbe’s experimentation with the “autobiographical trace” and its demands on subjectivity, before proposing a new way to use Van Hulle’s theory by paying particular attention to the autographic aspects of this unique manuscript.
- 6 The texts, unpublished in Schwob and Malherbe’s lifetimes, can all be found in their incomplete, or (...)
- 7 Lalla King writes to Malherbe after Schwob’s death detailing that her husband “was in such a ‘menta (...)
10Malherbe and Schwob clearly struggled to condense their sprawling lives into a text. Their many attempts include Confidences au Miroir (1945-6), Le Muet dans la Mêlée (1948) and extended autobiographical letters addressed to Gaston Ferdière (1946), Paul Levy (1950), and a friend named “Faith” (1944). All rank at various compositional and prepublishing phases of Pierre-Marc de Biasi’s typology of genetic documentation (de Biasi 1996, 35). A typescript of Confidences au Miroir made it to an editor friend for correction in July 1950.6 But, before its rediscovery in the Beinecke and publication in François Leperlier’s Claude Cahun: Écrits (2002), the text never traversed bon á tirer — the pass-forpress moment — during their lifetime, perhaps due to Schwob’s declining mental health.7 It is a “delusion”, Schwob quips in the “Faith” letter, to believe their lives “had reached at last a maturity that could be translated into words” (1.12, 1). This “wild conceited affirmation” encountered further hindrance in their “objective doubt of the efficiency of words” to see their life “translated without distortion” (1.12, 3). Their crisis of faith in the ability of language and the memoir genre to translate their lives into textual form manifests itself in the inability of these stunted beginnings to translate across bon á tirer.
11After Schwob’s death, Malherbe continued their search for a vessel to contain the slow drip of memory, reworking a narrative of their wartime efforts in a rough holograph memoir manuscript until 1967. The manuscript consists of more than two hundred undated leaves divided among the Beinecke and Jersey Archive. Its approximate date of composition is nevertheless identifiable due to the writing surfaces on which it materialises: postmarked envelopes addressed to “Carola” (Malherbe’s residence from 1955 until her death; JHT/1995M/00045/3/6), recycled letters, advertisements, receipts, and even a loose leaf from a 1960 calendar (1.15, 16).
- 8 In-text references to Malherbe’s “memoir notes” refer to the manuscript in Yale University’s Beinec (...)
- 9 All translations from the French were translated by the author, unless otherwise indicated.
12The manuscript’s autographic aspects — those depending “upon how or when or by whom that object or event was produced” (Goodman 1984, 149) — tell the story of Malherbe’s difficulty with standard autobiographical and literary practice. Extensive deletions (1.13, 42), fruitless variants of a single moment (“16th Nov”, the date of their trial, recurs on most pages), broken-off sentences, idiosyncratic orientation of text (1.15, 28), and overall disregard for legibility and coherence belies any impression that Malherbe was making progress.8 On an envelope which had contained her subscription from a Swiss book club, she even doodles around a postmark which appeals the recipient “Aidez les réfugies en Suisse” [help refugees in Switzerland].9 As a break from the page’s false starts and variants — “Something woke me —”, “Something had woken me”, “It had startled me awake” (1.15, 45) — Malherbe’s transformation of the postmark into a star depicts a ludic interlude in the struggle to write their life. The moment of flight aptly summarises her difficulty, like that of Europe’s to rehome refugees, to find a home for fugitive memories generated amidst the trauma of war.
13In the memoir notes, Malherbe reflects dourly on these seeming impossibilities amid broken flows of memory: “Wading through memories, fishing in a rockpool / — process of sedimentation —” (1.14, 56). However, in Peter and Madonna she writes: “she’s much too fluid […] It is like / running water leaving a sediment on the river bed: you can collect / and examine the sediment — but not the charm of the river” (JHT/1995M/00045/3/14). The repeated figurative choice of sedimentation alters in tone, with Malherbe acknowledging the possibility of a more accurate representation of character in its second iterance. This aspirational outlook aptly finds itself in the manuscript which provides that playful space for collecting “charm” as opposed to the stodgy “sediment” accumulated in the memoir’s “wading”. In the slight differences between these two passages, Malherbe challenges herself to invent a mode of life-writing which also collects the “charm” of individuals — Peter and Madonna.
- 10 Before then, French theorist Marie Darrieussecq labelled autofiction “unserious” (Darrieussecq 1996 (...)
14“Peter” and “Madonna” serve as merely the last in a long line of autofictional personae corresponding to Malherbe and Schwob throughout their life and artistic careers. That claim is potentially complicated due to the fact that autofiction evaded coinage until 1977 and serious critical consensus until recent years (Dix 2018, 2).10 Despite those complications, autofiction has nonetheless emerged as a common framework in which to consider their artistic output, and the recent rise of scholarly interest in Malherbe and Schwob has coincided with that of autofiction. Ryan Helterbrand comfortably assumes much of their oeuvre is “autofictional, implicated not in the revelation of a self but in its production and transformation”, citing Schwob’s autofictional double “Aurige” of Disavowals (Helterbrand 2016, 39). Even more recently, Ben Grant discusses Schwob’s texts in The Autofictional (2022) as sites where “the self is reimagined” and concludes that “elements of self-portraiture and autofiction are therefore co-present in Cahun’s work” (Grant 2022, 289). Let us also comfortably discuss their work with consideration of this genre.
15It was Serge Doubrovsky who coined the term in 1977, defining it as “fiction, of strictly real events and facts” (Gronemann 2019, 241). His works became ways of conveying “the real biographical (writing) experiences of an author named Doubrovsky, who is painfully aware that the self is largely inaccessible and who approached his own life through infinite ‘fils des mots’ [‘threads of words’]”, according to Claudia Gronemann (2019, 241; translation also quoted from the original). Hywel Dix provides an explanation of this genre as follows:
Autofiction raises the possibility of a non-referential, non-object-orientated form of autobiographical writing. As such, it may be considered as autobiographical fiction written in the subjunctive mood. That is to say, it is less concerned with faithfully reporting what its protagonist did, or even how that person thought and felt, and is more concerned with the speculative question of how that subject might respond to new and often imagined environments.
(Dix 2018, 6)
16The genre, coaxed into existence by French writers in the decades after Malherbe and Schwob, provides a way to read Peter and Madonna as our writer’s attempt to reconcile with the inaccessibility of the self in memoir-drafting. Malherbe outsources autobiographical episodes to an autofictional testing ground, shifting them from the drudgery of memoir to a compositional environment of “possibility” with a subject only tangentially related to the author. With de Biasi’s claim that the rough draft is a “text laboratory” where “everything was possible at any time” (de Biasi 1996, 40), the avant-texte of an autofictional work becomes one of the most liberating compositional spaces available to the struggling memoirist.
17We find an example of this outsourcing in the episodes concerning Lotte, Malherbe’s German governess. In the memoir notes, Malherbe tries — and fails — to write her response to a Nazi interrogator’s inquiry into whether Lotte illtreated her and whether that ill-treatment is the cause of her “hatred” toward Germans:
The question was so unexpected that I stared at him could not
XXX find a word. I thought of Lotte, who had taken
charge of me before when I was ten months old.
(1.13, 23)
18The rockpool of memory freezes, leading to excessive deletions which stall onward thought. The memoir’s “slavish recapitulation of known biographical facts” (Dix 2018, 3) takes precedence in Malherbe’s efforts to recount both her precise reaction to the question and her precise age. She battles with prepositions, substituting “before” for “when”. In the first sentence, she settles for defeat, opting for what she “could not” do as opposed to what she could, a lacklustre description through negation instead of affirmation. The paragraph breaks off with an ellipsis, leaving the account incomplete.
19Lotte reappears in Peter and Madonna. Malherbe, however, has disappeared — “transformed” into the autofictional persona of “Peter” who recollects a story remembered from childhood:
Lotte told it to me. — Lotte? […] I don’t believe it. It’s not her style
at all. […] It seems that your grandmother told it to you when you
were four years old, and that you were quite indignant. about it.
(JHT/1995M/00045/3/23)
20Under the guise of a married couple, resurrecting Schwob in this “reimagined” pillow-talk with Mary/Madonna, Malherbe reworks traumatic childhood memories (later in this passage, Mary/Madonna concludes that Lotte “must have marked you for life”; JHT/1995M/00045/3/23). This time, her revision substitutes “quite” and “about it” for the adjective alone, a stronger phrasing which conveys more concisely her unwholesome relationship with Lotte — perhaps more tainted after the war due to Lotte’s German nationality. The revision indicates progress, and not the painful slowness of “wading”. In fact, such revisions could be considered microcosmic representations of the autofictional process as a whole, which liberates writers from “slavish recapitulation” of fact to allow a more cogent portrait of a life through reworking and elision.
21Moreover, the moment yearns to pastiche life-writing. Verbs in the memoir passage find their looser, tentative alternatives — “was” becomes “seems” — and a fact relies on Peter to “believe it” to become true. The two personae discuss biographical fact into being, couching representations of the past in provisional language. Peter and Madonna projects a more casual approach to biography, teasing out memories through positing and assaying facts — it is anything but “slavish”.
22By transposing memories of Lotte into an unencumbered, dialogic autofiction, Malherbe achieves a more precise and organic account in its very carelessness. She returned to Peter and Madonna’s Lotte episode, making these slight revisions in a different ink and carrying the moment to conclusion (JHT/1995M/00045/3/23). This action implies that she saw potential in this autofictional rendering. In contrast, she leaves the memoir’s Lotte fragment incomplete, a lost cause. Although the memoir envelope’s postmark reads 1962, creative concurrence still functions in retrograde as Malherbe’s writing desk remained cluttered with the problems of traditional memoir during Peter and Madonna’s composition. Attuning ourselves to the microgenesis of certain childhood memories in concurrent projects allows us to see that the autofictional moment responds to the memoir’s constraints and allows a smoother transition of Malherbe’s life to paper.
23While particular dead-ends of the memoir notes find their reworkings in Peter and Madonna, Malherbe also directs to this text grander “speculative question[s]” concerning formal and narratological issues arising from the memoir genre. Namely, how to record the life of “two artists acting as one” (Latimer 2002, 71) — “une lutte individuelle à deux” [an individual battle for two] (Cahun 2002, 580). Malherbe visualised this hyper-intersubjective identity in relation to their artistic collaboration in Duogram Drawing (1919), where the initials L. S. and S. M. overlap into one composite being. The “S” serves as “a revolving door” between two subjectivities (Latimer 2006, 199) and “a selfcomplementing element that turns the singular into the plural” (Pustarfi 2018, 52). Their witty section from Disavowals entitled “Singular Plural” therefore lampoons the declarations of courtly love traditions and their linguistic separation of “us” into “I” and “you” (Cahun 2007, 102). Peter and Madonna’s assertion that “it is as if I didn’t exist any more as a person, but only as something inside you” surely rephrases these testaments of intersubjectivity (JHT/1995M/00045/3/10).
- 11 James Stevenson saw Malherbe as an assistant who simply “operated the camera” (Stevenson 2006, 53). (...)
24Furthermore, recent scholarly investigation has recovered the extent of “inter-artistic collaboration” in the production of their oeuvre (Oberhuber 2007, 42). This is despite the previous elision of Malherbe’s contribution due to “overvaluation of the individual artist by Western cultural institutions” which celebrates only “Claude Cahun” (Latimer 2006, 198).11 In Vues et Visions (1914), “Cahun-Moore” created a “new scriptural practice that marries writing and drawing” (Helterbrand 2016, 45). Erin Pustarfi argues that without their complementation “the entire publication would feel disjointed” (Pustarfi 2018, 28). Their lives and works were inherently dyadic — and without both subjectivities and the combination of Schwob’s writing and Malherbe’s drawing, their works cease to work. In Schwob’s dedication to Malherbe at the start of Vues et Visions, she hopes “tes dessins nous fassent pardoner mon texte” [your designs may thereby pardon us my text] (Cahun 2002, 22). This collaborative dynamic is also idealised in Disavowals: “(ah! How our hair would meld together indistinguishably). Portrait of one or the other, our two narcissisms drowning there, it was the impossible realized in a magic mirror” (Cahun 2007, 12). The awkward and untranslatable “our two narcissisms” references that “doubt of the efficiency of words” to convey their unique private-professional companionship to readers. In Malherbe’s retort to a Nazi guard in the memoir notes, she even voices and prescribes this formal difficulty she encounters:
When two people have known each other
from childhood, and made a habit of
discussing everything together, it becomes
impossible to trace back the origin
of a particular idea to one of them rather
than to the other.
(1.15, 75)
25While “traditional portraiture has served to valorise the notion of singularity” (Latimer 2006, 199), in their unique case, a “portrait of one or the other” would not work.
26This extended career of hyper-intersubjectivity ensures Malherbe’s indecisiveness in the memoir notes when choosing a suitable mode of focalisation; she struggles to translate “LSM” into a narrative perspective. Unlike the “remarkable facility” of Franz Kafka’s transposition from first to third person in manuscripts of The Castle (1926), as masterfully analysed by Dorrit Cohn (1968, 30), Malherbe’s struggle more resembles Christa Wolf’s difficulty avoiding das Ich in her autofictional work Kindheitsmuster (1976; Lejeune 1991, 5). Many writers battle with memoir’s narratology, and Malherbe see-saws between first-person singular and first-person plural.
27Both forms often co-exist on the same leaf, and sometimes in the same sentence: “If I said that we had never learnt to do it” (1.13, 43). Malherbe repeatedly continues her inconclusiveness beyond the initial decision, substituting third-person singular for first-person plural in “because Lucy we had never yet had the occasion” (1.14, 40). Only rarely does she refer to “Lucy” in the third person, and even then, the signifier is worthless and merely identifies herself (as the writer). Descriptions of their shared ideology often exhibit sustained passages of first-person plural, such as “we have taken interest in the extraordinary development of publicity within our lifetime” (1.13, 44) and “we had annoyed the Germans a good deal more than we had ever hoped” (1.13, 46). But despite these temporary fusions in the closest equivalent language can offer to the “Singular Plural” — first-person plural form — Malherbe reaches no consensus, and no authorial voice emerges. A particular memoir fragment flits between first and third person, resulting in a disjunct transmission of their trial:
I could not catch a
word […] our counsel sat still, wrapped in
despondancy (sic), and if I had not known for
certain that the Inspector and the nurse
were sitting behind us —
(JHT/1995M/00045/3/6)
28The account breaks off with a jagged dash. Unable to write from the united perspective of two subjectivities, Malherbe abandons the attempt, “drowning” in two narcissisms.
29When Latimer discusses Schwob’s dedication to Vues et Visions – “your designs may thereby pardon us my text” — she plays off this “interlacing of possessive articles” as idyllic. It creates “a grammar — not of repetition or mimetism but of hybridity, whose dissimilar elements combine in unfamiliar ways” (Latimer 2006, 205). Yet Latimer’s prefatory negations of “repetition” and “mimetism” to valorise this “hybridity”, followed by tonally ambiguous “dissimilar” and “unfamiliar”, undercuts the efficiency of this hybrid grammar. Her latent uncertainty finds its incarnation in the “interlacing” of singular and plural pronouns in Malherbe’s memoir notes where harmonious hybridity gives way to an entangled “mesh” of layered narrative perspectives. The task of representing simultaneously her thoughts, their ideology, her physical circumstances, and their physical circumstances ensures any pronoun leaves much to be desired and conveys neither their collaboration nor their intersubjectivity.
30In Peter and Madonna, Malherbe solves this narratological issue by eliminating standard narration altogether. Exporting their story into a dream space similar to those used in their earlier Surrealist work, where “speech is freed from its quotidian constraints” (Oberhuber 2007, 46), Malherbe removes the restrictions of an intruding narrative voice. The need to choose a pronoun and perspective melts away as she opts for two monologues (“our two narcissisms”) stitched together by em dashes:
… Once
upon a time… a long long time ago… — How long? — Oh… seven-eight
years ago… I had a cactus. — are you sure that you don’t mean
you were a cactus? — Quite sure. I had him given me. — Him? ..
(JHT/1995M/00045/3/17)
31Malherbe achieves a new version of “Singular Plural” in this plurality of two singular voices retaining individual identities yet remaining intertwined. Neither takes precedence over the other, and the two voices collaborate to give rise to the text; they work together to make meaning, like two hands cupping water. Instead of derailing Mary’s story, Peter’s interrogative interjections tell another story altogether — of lifelong partnership, two individuals intimately aware of each other, joking themselves into loving balance and union.
32In short, Peter and Madonna is a literary duogram. Their marriage translates the “Cahun-Moore” marriage of illustrative and poetic techniques into a narratological choice, telling the story of their life through form. Such fusion is helped along by punctuation, which also finds itself free from quotidian restraints. Ellipses and em dashes banish vacant spaces between the monologues, keeping them always interconnected. Malherbe empowers the em dash to function as the “S”, the “self-complementing” element in “LSM” which translates from one subjectivity to the other, passing narrative authority between the two voices. Using this “revolving door”, she lets the reader into each subjectivity in turn to give a coherent picture of the whole. Breaking the unified self into “a dialogue among its parts” to recuperate the memoir’s problem-ridden narratology (Knafo 2001, 46), Malherbe creates an authoritative narrative voice emerging from a composite third being: LSM. She literalises that “textual third place” from which Gertrude Stein attempts to write in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Brodzki and Schenck 1988, 11). Where Stein and Toklas combine into an authorial being through the extended use of a persona, Malherbe uses punctuation to spatialise the union of two identities.
33Sometimes the voices “meld together indistinguishably”, realising Malherbe’s reply to the interrogator in ingenious narratological fusion. It becomes “impossible to trace back the origin of a particular idea to one of them rather than to the other”:
Did I wake you up last night? — … No, you didn’t. — I seem
to remember that I spoke to you. — You must have been dreaming… Did
you have a bad night? — … No…
(JHT/1995M/00045/3/24; see Figure 2)
34Short, successive sentences ensure the voices overlap into a palimpsestic being of LSM. Malherbe’s erasure of narration results not in a decentred, unfocalised text but a stronger sense of voice with narrative streaming from two united sources. She thus breaks conventional life-writing practices (choice of a single narrative perspective) and the logical order of language, grammar, and punctuation (which she seriously doubted anyway) to write an autofictional text from the perspective of “Singular Plural” and collect the “charm” of not only one individual, but two.
35The genesis of Peter and Madonna originates earlier in Schwob and Malherbe’s career with their previous attempts both to translate their life into memoir and transform this genre into something more suited to contain a life — using the language of Surrealism. We can trace these creative engagements with memoir along “the diachronical axis of recurrent preoccupations” (Van Hulle 2021, 58) through a single recurring element: the kiss. Here we can see Malherbe confronting, like Doubrovsky, the problem of standard autobiographical subjectivity.
36In 1927, the pair crafted the monochrome print and autofictional autoportrait entitled “I am in training don’t kiss me” (Fig. 3). This phrase recurs three years later in Disavowals, both in the prose of Chapter IX (Cahun 2002, 408) and in its preceding heliogravure photomontage (183). The pair were immersed at that time in avant-garde theatre, Schwob as an actor, Malherbe as a programme and set designer, leading them to portray the subject as a “hyper-false mannequin” (Welby-Everard 2006, 9) which alienates the viewer — don’t kiss me. Employing in these portraits the Verfremdungseffekt à la Brecht, Malherbe and Schwob thus distance themselves from the traditional subject of portraiture. With that, they defamiliarize the entire genre of auto-portraiture and “portraiture’s literary analogue”, autobiography (Latimer 2006, 210). Susan de Muth’s translation of the title as Cancelled Confessions reinforces its allusion to the genre’s patriarch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (de Muth 2007); and as Latimer explains: “Aveux references the entire historiography of a genre (autobiography), while non avenus cancels it out in the next breath” (Latimer 2006, 210). This phrase — “don’t kiss me” — thus carries in its wake a discussion, distancing, and deconstruction of autobiography and the autobiographical subject.
37Its recurrence, then, as a motif underpinning Peter and Madonna brings this snowballing conversation to Malherbe’s arena of possibility. The self-cancelling statement re-conjugates itself five times within the manuscript: “Are you willing to kiss me?” (JHT/1995M/00045/3/7), “… you must not kiss me when we are out in the garden…” (JHT/1995M/00045/3/10), “You didn’t even kiss me when you came home” (JHT/1995M/00045/3/12), “If you / don’t give me that kiss…” (JHT/1995M/00045/3/20), and finally, an imperative that serves as an antonym of the original, “Give me a kiss” (JHT/1995M/00045/3/29).
38It is important to note that their ambitious anti-autobiography was a failure. “En vain, dans Aveux non avenus, je m’efforçai” [In vain, in Disavowals, I tried], Schwob writes in 1950 of her intentions for the soon-forgotten text (Cahun 2002, 710). Adrienne Monnier refused to publish it, even after Schwob forewarned her in 1926 that she would not be able to write “cette confession […] sans tricherie d’aucune sorte” [this confession without deceit of any kind] (Cahun 1926). And despite its friendly intertextual exchange with Breton’s Nadja (1928) in the ludic reversal of his opening line, “Qui suis-je?” [Who am I?] (Breton [1928] 1999, 11), as “Que puis-je?” [What can I?] (Cahun 2002, 178), he too was agitated by it: “All these characters burdened with first names or initials, ruined one after another in the course of these ‘confessions’ ” (qtd. in Leperlier 2007, 213). The 1927 and 1930 recurrences of “don’t kiss me” serve as dour antecedents of Malherbe’s “wading” through the layers of memory to reach and represent an authentic self. “I collect memories as a ship’s hull collects barnacles”, Malherbe muses in the memoir notes (1.14, 59) — so their early efforts at portraiture result in extensive sedimentation with the accretion of masks that gesture no closer to the individual behind: “Sous ce masque un autre masque” [Under the mask, another mask] (Cahun 2002, 405). The layers of mask in the photomontage signal “her attempt both to portray and remove them”, delineating only “the possibility of self-presence” (Lasalle and Solomon-Godeau 1992, 13).
39As Peter and Madonna picked up the slack from the memoir notes, so it once again succeeds where Disavowals had tried. With the phrase’s multiplication throughout the texts, Malherbe moves away from the fallacy of a singular “self-presence” to embrace the variance of identity. She re-shuffles the syntax of the original standoffish declarative to create “textual variations” (Ferrer 2016, 59) — interrogatives, modal phrases, and imperatives — relishing the opportunity for multiplication. Daniel Ferrer insists that the variation “exemplifies, directly or contrastively, qualities that were latent in the original form” (62).
40Malherbe’s variations of “don’t kiss me” release its latent potential; like the phrase which exists in many forms, moods, and modes within one text, the self is also multifarious. In the autofictional space of possibility, she playfully celebrates that always-thwarted “possibility of self-presence”, leaning into the dispersal and proliferation of selves, the exciting “possibility” that it could exist in many shapes. While the early subjects naively aspire to a kernel of authenticity, in Peter and Madonna, Malherbe rules out the stable and authentic self as a fiction — and fiction, as we see in her revision of the Lotte moment, as closer to the truth. The wearing of masks in Peter and Madonna’s personae brings the author closer to that self, valourising the memoir’s inability to capture a definitive trace.
41In Peter and Madonna, Malherbe continues to defamiliarize and question that style of Rousseauian life-writing which privileges a single — and often male — subjectivity. Her unfinished text anticipates post-structuralist conceptions of selfhood initiated by Roland Barthes’s pronouncement that writing was “that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost” (Barthes 2010, 1332). Lee-Von Kim convincingly compares the “authors’ quest for autobiographical revisioning” in Disavowals to Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (Kim 2014, 107). Peter and Madonna intersects with Kim’s comparison as a self-cancelling narrative which dispels — as Barthes does — this fruitless search for an “authenticating trace” (109). Furthermore, Malherbe elides the phrase’s recurrent initial clause, “I am in training”. With this proto-Barthesian revelation in Peter and Madonna, her “training” in the school of life-writing is complete. Van Hulle’s “diachronical axis of recurrent preoccupations meets” — or kisses — “the synchronic axis of creative concurrence” (Van Hulle 2021, 58). The culmination of a lifelong conversation with the genre and its limitations on the subject, Peter and Madonna concludes that the secret to the “autobiographical trace” is the untraceable nature of the self.
42There remains a more dynamic application of Van Hulle’s “creative recurrence” to Malherbe’s Peter and Madonna manuscript. I want to end by suggesting that we find “creative recurrence” not only in recurrent textual examples, but in the recurrent use of literary practices, methods, and choices that a writer makes. In other words, noticing not only recurrent textual components, but the way in which a writer composes a text — the process behind it, who moves the pen and how she moves it. Surrealism prioritises “process-oriented art practices” (Lusty 2021, 2), and I want to look closely at the manuscript’s autographic aspects to put the “process” back in Malherbe’s “process of sedimentation”.
43In Peter and Madonna, Malherbe makes the same methodological choices as previously in her life and Surrealist artistic career. She adapts these processes and activates their potential in a new scene of genesis, as she does in the variations of “don’t kiss me”. Her displacement of standard narration for a timeless, placeless narrative space already brings to Peter and Madonna that literary style set out in Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) which takes into consideration “only the time of pure dreaming” (Breton 1972a, 11). However, it is Malherbe’s use of Breton’s “automatic writing” leaves its trace writ largest on the manuscript.
44Outlined in Breton’s Manifesto as a process of transcribing “psychic automatism in its pure state” (Breton 1972a, 26), automatic writing offered the opportunity for a “dizzying descent into ourselves” (Breton 1972c, 137). Breton and Phillipe Soupault had tried and failed to write this unencumbered monologue of “spoken thought” (Breton 1972a, 23) in The Magnetic Fields (1920). The other tenets of Breton’s “written Surrealist composition / or / first and last draft” include limited revision, because “thought is strong, and incapable of catching itself in error” (24–29).
- 12 There are numerous dream dictations in Jersey Archive, the latest from 1953 entitled “Description o (...)
45In the Jersey Archive, there are several documents containing dreamtranscriptions which demonstrate Malherbe and Schwob’s continued flirtations with Breton’s process. These include a particular “réve dicté” [dream dictation] composed at “4 heures du matin” on Christmas Eve, 1944 which collects the unconscious in its twilight state (00045/74).12 The document further contains infrequent errata and is the sole witness — a “first and last draft”. Finn Fordham proposes the utility of a technique where “writing emerges from somewhere unknown — perhaps deep within” to construct a self through process (Fordham 2010, 11). It creates a “connection” with the writer’s “true existence without any intermediation”, opening “a new unlimited belief in words” (Blanchot 1995, 86) — something Malherbe was severely lacking. What happens, then, if we consider that Malherbe instrumentalises the Surrealist process of automatic writing in the context of life-writing, bringing such a failure-prone tool to the autofictional Peter and Madonna? A recurrent choice of process in this liberating compositional space allows her to revise an outmoded genre suffering from shallowness and “intermediation” and — in the process — write the scattered unconscious onto paper.
- 13 In the memoir notes, on the other hand, Malherbe re-writes a passage which begins “I think colonial (...)
46A sensitivity to Peter and Madonna’s genesis reveals the recurrence of automatic writing from the dream dictations. The manuscript consists not of a teleological development through successive versions or witnesses to a complete draft (unless these have been lost), nor of obsessive variants of the same episode, but of loosely related “variations” — alternative sketches within the same, single witness which, like the variations of “don’t kiss me”, move Malherbe closer to a representation of the self.13 “The first sentence will come spontaneously” (Breton 1972a, 30), and sections accordingly begin with the incantatory and refrain-like “Madonna… — My love?” (JHT/1995M/00045/3/24), “Madonna… Come here…” (JHT/1995M/00045/3/17), “Peter? — … Mm?” (JHT/1995M/00045/3/24). Malherbe beckons to the unconscious with a performative utterance, surrendering herself to the following flow of “spoken thought” which tumbles out in Peter and Madonna’s monologues — the unmediated narrative of LSM. This process ensures no variation gains authority but simply illustrates another angle of the shifting, untraceable, multifaceted unconscious — a rhizomatic approach to drafting.
47Passages without corrections further recall Breton’s praise of Soupault’s hesitancy to “retouch” (Breton 1972a, 24). Malherbe puts her “trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur”, resulting in “ebullutions” (“bubblings”) (30). We witness this process in the progression from “Come here… now tell me a story” (JHT/1995M/00045/3/19), where the stream of narration takes on the character of the story’s cactus which bizarrely and relentlessly births rackets (Fig. 4). Clauses and strands of story multiply as Malherbe succumbs to the “murmur” of the unconscious, arriving at absurdist images: “That maddening smell must have been a call for help addressed to some exotic insect” (JHT/1995M/00045/3/19). The waters of memory are no stagnant “rockpool”, nor a “meagre stream”, but “pour themselves out in sleep” (Cahun 2007, 20). She unlocks a newfound mimetic capability in automatic writing, thereby renovating life-writing: as life keeps the individual on a need-to-know basis, so automatic writing moves the writer unpredictably through the drafting process.
48Using a tactic from earlier in her life, Malherbe hacks onto the river’s plane above mere sediment where the self’s “charm” resides. The material witness preserves the bubbling up of the unconscious in a “first and last draft” — psychic sedimentation shunning the “intermediation” of further revision. Where automatic writing risked succumbing to “an end in itself” with Breton and Soupault (Breton 1972b, 231), Malherbe implements this process in the autofictional arena, experimenting with ways to leave a trace of the untraceable self. It is a bold intervention which offers recuperation both to an outworn Surrealist gimmick and the memoir notes on her writing desk. Malherbe also provides a belated answer to the sporadic attempts at Surrealist and revisionist autobiography made by Breton, Stein, and even “Cahun-Moore”. Peter and Madonna, although unpublished and incomplete, stands as a testament that recurrent experimentation with the same processes can reap rewards.
49To return to Laxton’s definition of the transitive nature of Surrealist play as “a means (it has a role to play) without ends (it never reaches closure)”, Peter and Madonna “never reaches closure” in a printed text. We cannot identify its reciprocal “role” in the memoir manuscript’s genesis, and we cannot conclude that Peter and Madonna permanently unsettles Malherbe’s approach to memoir-writing. I offer the reader the following two conclusions from this case study of creative concurrence.
50First, that the document plays a genetic role in our approach to life-writing, rewriting the “set of norms that precede and exceed the subject” surrounding any “work on the self” (Butler 2005, 17). Finding herself challenged by the memoir notes, Malherbe challenges a reader’s pre-established orientation to life-writing and its subject as a coherent portrait of an individual, singular, and authentic self. “I always finish my stories,” Mary/Madonna retorts (JHT/1995M/00045/3/20), and Peter and Madonna finishes in the mind of a reader reading not for a single subjectivity, but accepting the fable of a single trace. Texts reach their realisation, Schwob declared, “through the indispensable collaboration of the reader” (qtd. in Lhermitte 2007, XXII), genetically informed or otherwise. Malherbe again turns to a process used earlier in her career to fix the synchronic problem on her desk: in their wartime “Soldat Ohne Namen” resistance campaign, the resistance duo adopted a “playful” strategy and “ludic voice” to rewrite the “hidden transcripts” of Nazi soldiers (Thynne 2010, 13), encouraging widespread dissent and re-evaluation. The choice undergoes another Barthesian twist — “a text’s unity lies not in its origin, but in its destination”, with the reader (Barthes 2010, 1325).
- 14 For Lejeune’s attempt to answer his question, see “The Genetic Study of Autobiographical Texts” ((L (...)
51The second conclusion regards the genetically informed reader and the usefulness of Van Hulle’s theory. Creative concurrence is intended to disrupt genetic criticism’s rigid “work-by-work approach” which “may have been conditioned by the print paradigm” (Van Hulle 2021, 58). With the preceding investigation, the discovered impact of Peter and Madonna on the reader’s approach to life-writing upsets a paradigmatic dismissal of the improperly catalogued, incomplete and playful avant-texte which fails to pass for press. The demonstrated significance of this text, which I have shown brings into alignment the sustained efforts of Malherbe’s oeuvre, also re-privileges fragmentary manuscripts as rich, formative sites to consider: “Is the pre-text of a work of fiction strictly comparable to that of an autobiographical text?” (Lejeune 1991, 2); what bearing does the text have on H. Porter Abbott’s “autography” which considers that “the end of an autobiography is everywhere present in the writing of it” (Abbott 1988, 598).14 Does Malherbe tell the story of her life simply in the way she tells it?
52These are provoking and ambitious questions I have resisted the instinct to discuss because they deserve broader treatment outside the confines of this essay. The mere instinct to ask those questions signals the importance of considering the document in the context of other works on her writing desk. That consideration has exposed the very seriousness of Malherbe’s play — and its serious consequences for a potential reader. Therefore, this research has resulted in a digital edition of Peter and Madonna to ensure that the text can reach the readers it means to affect.
53Cahun, Claude. “Various rough notes regarding Claude Cahun’s diary including the help given to a Moroccan French prisoner by a local man named Mr Le Cornu and various stories concerning people called ‘Peter’ and ‘Madonna’ ”, 1945, JHT/1995M/00045/3. Jersey Heritage Trust Collection, Jersey Archive, St Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands, https://catalogue.jerseyherita ge.org/collection-search/?si_elastic_detail=collect_103057. In-text references to page numbers in the manuscript (JHT/1995M/00045/3/page).
54Cahun, Claude. “Correspondence and other papers [2 of 2]”, 1943-1945, GEN MSS 721, Box 1, folder 12. Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe papers, 1913-1952, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/15730232. In-text references to the box, folder, and page e.g. (box. folder, page).
55King, Lalla. “Letter from Lalla [King] and Robin [King] of Apartamento E, Calvo Sotelo 18, Palma, Majorca, Spain to Suzanne Malherbe regarding moving from their house in Puerto Andraitx, illnesses suffered by Lalla and Robin and the apartment that they have moved into in Palma. Dated April 25 [no year-after 1954 when Claude Cahun died]”, 1954, (JHT/1995/00045/27). Jersey Heritage Trust Collection, Jersey Archive, St Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands, https://catalogue.jerseyheritage.org/collection-search/?si_elastic_detail =archive_110003081. In-text references to page numbers in the manuscript (JHT/1995M/00045/3/page).
56Malherbe, Suzanne. “Memoir notes by Malherbe” [n.d.], GEN MSS 721, Box 1, folders 13, 14 and 15. Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe papers, 19131952, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/17317512. In-text references to the box, folder, and page e.g. (box. folder, page).