Free A Brief History of Portable Literature by Enrique Vila-Matas Page A

handwriting was very, very tiny, and he succeeded in fitting all these words onto the back of a photograph of Prague, thereby fulfilling that longstanding Shandean ambition of attaining microscopic script. But the most notable thing about the postcard is that HYDRE INTIME —the portable society’s secret name—appeared for the first time in writing. This greatly alarmed Picabia who immediately suspected that if there really were a traitor, it was by no means Céline, but rather Crowley himself.

ALL DAY ON THE DECK CHAIRS
     
    Francis Picabia shouldn’t have been so alarmed by Crowley’s postcard. In fact the traitor’s text wasn’t as dangerous as it might have seemed. Properly considered, it at most betrayed something that was not overly worrying. Many of the Shandies had, at the International Sanatorium, already realized that the portable ensemble would have to disappear sooner or later; this was a fact of life and, in fact, something very much to be desired, as the conspiracy would become the stunning celebration of something appearing and disappearing with the arrogant velocity of the lightning bolt of insolence.
    Duchamp, receiving a letter from Picabia at the Sanatorium informing him of the traitor’s existence, tried to make him see as much. He wrote back saying that Crowley’s postcard was a rousing document, a capricious text, no less, a living, breathing embodiment of Shandyism.
    Indeed, the postcard displayed a sublime concern for maintaining an industrious attitude among the Shandies, and this was profoundly portable: aside from the odd period of extraordinary laziness, the portables were always keeping busy, always trying to put in more work that speculated frequently on their lives as tireless artists. A large number of the texts they produced ended up featuring curious sections with recipes for how to work: the ideal conditions, the timing, the utensils. The massive correspondence they kept up among themselves—both oral and written—was always
partly animated by a desire to chronicle the work’s existence: to inform, to confirm it.
    Additionally, the Shandies’ instincts as collectors served them well. They learned partly by collecting, as with the quotations and extracts from their daily reading, which they accumulated in notebooks they carried with them everywhere, and which they often read in their conspiratorial café meetings. Thinking was also a way of collecting for them, at least in the early days. They would meticulously note down their extravagant ideas; they’d advance mini-essays in letters to friends; rewrite plans for future projects; write down dreams; and they would carry numbered lists of all the portable books they read.
    But how was it that the joyful, voluble, and zany Shandies willed themselves to become heroes? My view is that it was because of the way work can become a drug, a compulsion: “thinking is eminently narcotic,” as Walter Benjamin wrote.
    A need for solitude—along with bitterness about that solitude—was very common among the Shandies, joyful, voluble workers that they were. To move their work forward, they had to be solitary, or at least not form any permanent bonds. Their negative feelings toward matrimony were clearly outlined in numerous pieces of writing. Their heroes—Baudelaire, Kafka, Roussel—never married. Some of the Shandies who functioned as bachelor machines were married, but ended up thinking their marriages “fatal” to them. The world of nature, of natural relations, did not appeal to them as bachelor machines. Generally, they all hated children. Walter de la Mare actually threw his son out the window and later wrote that, for him, what is natural (when bound up by the family) ushers in the falsely subjective, the sentimental. “It was,” wrote Walter de la Mare, “a bloodletting of the will, of independence, of freedom, in order to focus on the work.”
    The Shandy way of working meant immersion, focusing on the job. “One is