A Brief History of Portable Literature Read Online Free PDF Page A

to receiving Typhon’s letters and giving them no more than a minute of his time, now that the portable conspiracy required his attention twenty-four hours a day. It was Antheil, for instance, who found the ideal place for the group’s first secret meetings: Shakespeare & Company, the bookshop situated at number 12, Rue de l’Odéon, and run by Sylvia Beach.
    George Antheil lived in the two-room apartment above the bookshop and often entered through the window. Shandily, he would scale the front of the building. Sylvia Beach, in her mediocre memoirs, says that the portables met in the bookshop every Friday, occasionally admitting some new member. Antheil was master of ceremonies. Apparently, he was also the inventor of the method for finding portable artists on the streets of Paris. For a year Antheil strolled the terraces of Montparnasse and Saint Germain, in perfect silence, making conspiratorial gestures, and distributing the alphabet manual for the deaf. Along with the alphabet, there were some instructions, incomprehensible at first sight: twelve phrases that only made sense when read vertically and the first letter of each phrase spelled out the following address: SEPT RUE OD ÉON .
    Apart from that, the first of the phrases, translated to Spanish (Si Hablas Alto Nunca Digas Yo), would have been of interest should anyone discover the word spelled out by its capital letters:
    That is: SHANDY .
    It’s important to bear in mind that more than referring to the book by Laurence Sterne, the word shandy invokes alcohol. Shandy is commonly drunk in London—a mixture of beer and either fizzy lemonade or ginger beer—and a pint of shandy with ice is thirst quenching in the summertime.
    So, the address of a house on Rue de l’Odéon, and the word shandy. If anyone worked this out they’d understand that, by mysterious means, they were being invited to a house to drink shandy. And that person would soon go and have a look around the vicinity of number 7, Rue de l’Odéon. There, Blaise Cendrars would ask him the simple question: “Are you deaf?” “Yes,” he’d generally answer. Blaise Cendrars would point him in the direction of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and, departing at an unmistakably conspiratorial (leisurely) pace, would say: “As you can see, it’s not number 7 but number 12. Friday, at eight o’clock, we’ll be expecting you.” †  
    Among the Shandies that Antheil and Cendrars brought in off the street Valery Larbaud stood out from the beginning as the heart and soul of the first world deaf conference held at Shakespeare and Company. Valery Larbaud was the portable artist par excellence. His sexuality was extreme, and he was vehemently opposed to any idea of suicide. Additionally, his fraught coexistence with doppelgängers was outstanding, as was his sympathy for negritude, his perfect functioning as a “bachelor machine,” his disinterest in grand statements, his cultivation of the art of insolence, and his passion for traveling with a small suitcase containing almost weightless versions of his work.
    Clearly, an out-and-out Shandy. He was your typical learned and worldly gentleman, who didn’t turn up his nose at friendships, aspired to an international culture, a world of broad horizons and lofty origins: a splendid ideal marking the period between the wars. He apparently showed a precocious vocation for travel: he loved the smell of leather in trains and the successive landscape, which appeared motionless, yet would still pass by. He was only five years old when he crossed a border for the first time—the one between France and Switzerland—and he was surprised not to see that red and lilac line one sees on maps (which he had scrutinized so attentively, his first game).
    He was, like any good portable, also enthusiastic about miniature things. In her memoirs, Sylvia Beach tells us Larbaud had an enormous army of toy soldiers and complained that they were beginning to crowd him out of his