Francis Vielé-Griffin, Franco-American Symbolist writer & publisher. Letter / Micro-Essay, probably to collaborator Paul Adam. Handwritten on folded quarto paper, headed with "16, Quai de Passy," Vielé-Griffin's address as of 1904.
Francis Vielé-Griffin was born in Virginia, the son of a politician who had served as a Federal general in the American Civil War, and though he spent his early childhood in the U.S., he lived for most of his life in France and never wrote in English. One of the most formally experimental poets of his generation, he was a leading member of the Symbolist community in Paris, one of Mallarmé's closest disciples and a close friend of Alfred Jarry. Intensely interested in the relationships between consciousness, rhythm, phonetics and radical politics, he experimented with synthetic languages in the 1880s and '90s, laying the groundwork for the transrational experiments of Zoum, and wrote in the 1890s of the potential of recording technology–then in its infancy–to revolutionize voiced poetry. With Paul Adam, he co-edited the influential Symbolist-Socialist journal Entretiens, which gave equal space to avant-garde culture (including Vièle-Griffin's own Volapük poems mentioned above, and a great many of his theoretical essays) and to Socialist news articles, essays and polemics, with heavy anarchist leanings.
The precise date and context for his intriguing handwritten note (essentially a micro-essay of a few sentences) to his collaborator Adam are not known. It seems to be part of an ongoing discourse about mass psychological manipulation by the ruling class. If the tenuous reading of the first word as "parce que" ("because") is correct, the implication may be that it was an answer to a note from Adam, part of an ongoing discussion carried on intermittently throughout the day, in a kind of precursor to 21st century facebook discussion threads. Parisian intellectual life for most of the 19th Century was supported by a vast network of postal couriers continually criss-crossing the city bearing letters, most of them only a few sentences, and it was not uncommon for writers, editors, politicians, scholars, and others to write and send off and receive more than a hundred such notes a day, providing a real-time, simultaneous web of communication not entirely dissimilar to that facilitated today by email and social media. This may have been part of their planning process for an article dealing with current events referred to (cryptically) in it, or may simply have been a side conversation carried out between them in the midst of their other work. Depending on the date, Vielé-Griffin may or may not still have been editing the journal, which he stepped away from after several years to free up more time to write.
The note is not yet entirely deciphered; a tenuous reconstruction follows (I welcome advice):
The precise date and context for his intriguing handwritten note (essentially a micro-essay of a few sentences) to his collaborator Adam are not known. It seems to be part of an ongoing discourse about mass psychological manipulation by the ruling class. If the tenuous reading of the first word as "parce que" ("because") is correct, the implication may be that it was an answer to a note from Adam, part of an ongoing discussion carried on intermittently throughout the day, in a kind of precursor to 21st century facebook discussion threads. Parisian intellectual life for most of the 19th Century was supported by a vast network of postal couriers continually criss-crossing the city bearing letters, most of them only a few sentences, and it was not uncommon for writers, editors, politicians, scholars, and others to write and send off and receive more than a hundred such notes a day, providing a real-time, simultaneous web of communication not entirely dissimilar to that facilitated today by email and social media. This may have been part of their planning process for an article dealing with current events referred to (cryptically) in it, or may simply have been a side conversation carried out between them in the midst of their other work. Depending on the date, Vielé-Griffin may or may not still have been editing the journal, which he stepped away from after several years to free up more time to write.
The note is not yet entirely deciphered; a tenuous reconstruction follows (I welcome advice):
Mon [lure] preferé
Le Trust
[parceque] [si] je ne m abuse,
c est ce premier [line/lure] d'inter-
psychologie [où] on [puisse]
[voir] quatre populations yankée
Cubaine, egyptienne et française
travserées [par] une [mei??] idee,
modifiée par elle, et la
modifiant- a leur [tou??], selon
les [caractères] de leur elites et de
leurs foules [en] pleine [ire].
Lequel a eu le plus de succès
Le Trust
or, in English:
My favourite [lure]
Trust
[Because] [if] I do not deceive myself,
it is this first [line/lure] of inter-
psychology [in which] one [could]
[see] four populations yankee
Cuban, egyptian and french
spanned by one [????] idea,
altered by it, and
altering it- [???ed] them, depending
the [integrity] of their elites and of
their masses [in] full [anger].
The one who has most success
Trust
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