by RYE DAG HOLMBOE
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Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou by Andrew Hussey (Reaktion, 328 pp., £20, September 2021)
In 1942, walking the streets of wartime Bucharest, 17-year-old Isidore Isou posed himself the same question then being asked of the founding of Israel: how to build a better world than the one around him? The answer came to him as an illumination – or perhaps as mania. ‘All must be revealed in letters.’ Words had, he thought, done great damage throughout history. By breaking them down and exposing them as a collection of arbitrary symbols, Isou hoped to make space for a new language to emerge. This was the inspiration for the movement known as lettrisme. Isou saw himself not only as the founder of the movement, but its messiah.
Like Futurism and Dada before it, lettrisme held that meaning was secondary to everything else that makes up a word: sound, appearance, texture, the way it is articulated or intoned. Take ‘Larmes de jeune fille’ (1947), which Isou wrote after his move to Paris:
M dngoun, m diahl ?1hna îou
hsn îoun înhlianhl M2pna iou
vgaîn set i ouf! saî iaf
fln plt i clouf! mglaî vaf
?3o là îhî cnn vîi
snoubidi î pnn mîi
A4gohà îhîhî gnn gî
The Greek characters here, footnoted below the poem, encode dramatically contorted modes of speech: the theta is explained as a ‘soupir’, or sigh; the mu as a ‘gémissement’, a moan or groan; the lambda as a ‘gargarisme’, a gargling; the alpha as an ‘aspiration’, a mere breath. Isou’s own background is registered in the much repeated letter ‘î’, pronounced in Romanian as more of a long ‘uh’ than a French or English ‘i’, sounded with the tongue close to the roof of the mouth.
It’s easy to see how different this is – with its tortuous mouthfuls of diphthongs, screeches and howls – from what we usually understand as sound poetry. Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb (1914), the extended sound poem which did much to establish the form, was sonorous and rhythmic when performed, and unlike many of Isou’s examples, which have no semantic content at all, it told a story – of the siege of Adrianople in the First Balkan War, which Marinetti had reported on as a journalist. Zang Tumb Tumb is a collage of actual Italian and English words, along with onomatopoeic and typographical representations of rat-a-tat gunfire, the boom of grenades, the rattle of a train on an iron bridge, the clicking of telegraph messages sent and received. For Isou, such comprehensibility was almost as outdated as the writings of Victor Hugo, the paintings of Delacroix or the music of Wagner: art should represent nothing other than the medium itself, radically deformed.
Ion-Isidor Goldstein was born in 1925 in the town of Boto?ani in north-east Romania. His father, Jindrich, was a successful businessman. His mother, Saly, ran the two family homes. She gave him the nickname Izu, which he went on to adopt as his nom de guerre. Isou’s first, ongoing fight was with his father, and he found an ally in his sister Fanny, whose loyalty he promised to reward with the proceeds of the Nobel Prize he was sure to win one day. The Goldsteins were part of Romania’s Jewish minority, a significant presence in Boto?ani. He was disdainful of his home town – too provincial for a messiah – but Boto?ani wasn’t a backwater. It was here, rather than in Paris, that he first encountered many formative influences. Beyond the yeshiva, where Isou studied religion, there was a theatre, several publishing houses and a well-stocked bookshop. It was in Boto?ani that he was first introduced to Dada.
Jews had no rights in Romania until after the First World War. From the early 1930s, they were increasingly excluded from economic and public life, prohibited from speaking Yiddish in the streets and subjected to attacks by nationalists and Orthodox Christians. In 1933, the Goldsteins moved to Bucharest, where they hoped to find safety in numbers. Isou, a precocious teenager, read Marx, Proust, Dostoevsky, Husserl and Bergson. He joined a gang, the so-called huliganii, many of whose members went on to join the Iron Guard (to which Isou almost fell victim). He got into fights, robbed, begged, womanised, visited brothels and fell in love with a girl he had tried to kill by persuading her to commit suicide. His hatred of Christians grew, as did his disturbing self-belief. In 1940, he tried to join the resistance but was turned down. It was more radical, he said, to walk down the street ‘taking a piss with your cock out, with no shame, as I have done’ than it was to follow orders.
Ion Antonescu, who took control of the Romanian state in September 1940, oversaw the deaths of more than 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma. The pogrom in Bucharest, led by the Iron Guard, saw Jews tortured and skinned alive, their bodies hung from butchers’ hooks in a twisted reference to shechita, the kosher slaughtering of animals for food. Isou was beaten nearly to death. He seems to have been saved only by his capacity to filter even the most horrific experiences through his messianic belief system. Surely the sacrifice of the Jews heralded his arrival: how else could it be made sense of? Most accounts of Isou’s work have been guided by the insouciant flair for self-promotion he displayed as a member of the Parisian avant-garde, but as Andrew Hussey makes clear in his critical biography, this is to overlook the extent to which lettrisme was driven by the experience of trauma. The fact that Isou rarely mentioned the Romanian Holocaust is only a measure of the impact it had.
London Review of Books for more