A Brief History of Portable Literature Read Online Free PDF

rooms, but he made no effort to control them. “The soldiers perhaps accounted for another obsession of his—his colors. They were blue, yellow, and white, and so were his cufflinks and his ties. His colors flew from the roof of his country house whenever he was in it (which was not often, since he preferred to be in Paris or traveling about).”
    Larbaud was also a traveler of words: “I fixate on winding clocks to make sure they tell the right time, putting things where they belong, polishing those things that have gotten tarnished, bringing to light things relegated to the shadows, mending and cleaning old toys from forgotten civilizations in people’s lofts . . .” It was in one such loft that Larbaud decided on the phrase that came to be used to swear in new members to the secret society, a definition from
Tristram Shandy
: “Gravity: a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind.”
    And if we add to all this his passion for discovering unexplored, portablist literary territories (Savinio, Littbarski, Gómez de la Serna, Stephan Zenith, and a very youthful Borges were among those he invited to join the secret society), we get a rough picture of this writer whose figure (although outshone in this century’s cultural panorama) is fundamental to understanding how portable literature consolidated itself. It was Larbaud, in fact, who organized the Shandy party in Vienna, in March, 1925.
    A month before, Larbaud went to scout out the city as a possible location for a party; having to be top secret, it called for certain special conditions. For the illustrious traveler arriving in Vienna at that time, the most important—and the gravest—man then living there was Karl Kraus. Nobody had the slightest doubt about that. Here was a writer who went on the offensive against everything substandard, everything rotten. He edited a review to which he, and he alone, contributed. Everything submitted by other people struck him as inopportune. For the review, he never accepted invitations to collaborate on projects, and he didn’t answer letters. Every word, every syllable published in
Die Fackel
was written by him. Every claim he made was rigorously correct. Never since has there been such scrupulousness in literature. He concerned himself—scrupulously—with each and every comma. Anyone who wanted to uncover any kind of erratum in
Die Fackel
could spend entire weeks torturing himself in search of just one. Best simply not to try.
    But it so happened that a little before Larbaud’s arrival in Vienna, an injudicious young writer named Werner Littbarski set out to find that elusive erratum, and with the help of his black Brazilian servant Virgil, after several sleepless days and nights, he found it. Littbarski had a champagne celebration, just him and Virgil, but he imagined a multitude of friends visiting, whose voices and cries he imitated, making a considerable din, once again upsetting the neighbors, who for a long time had known this to be Littbarski’s great specialty: throwing make-believe mass parties in his apartment.
    In the days following the triumphant discovery of the erratum, Littbarski, usings his father’s old printing press to publish an anti-Krausian review entitled
Ich Vermute
, went some way to reinforcing his neighbors’ image of him as a madman. ‡ The review’s one and only edition contained twenty-four pages written entirely by Littbarski, except for one opinion piece by Virgil, which opened as follows: “Today I have ceased to hold any kind of opinion about anything.” Littbarski’s review featured insults against Kraus, jokes of questionable taste, ads for strong liquor, Indian postcards, mysterious “safe-conduct passes,” pornographic tales, drawings of elephant tusks, comic vignettes with Kraus’s grandmother as the main character. In short, it was an obscene display of boundless aggression.
    All Vienna took pity on Littbarski; if it had been said before that he was