Gardening with Guy Debord
Avant-gardes of the past are so curious. Especially their leaders. Ego-maniacs, endearing visionaries, troubled souls, the tortured artiste. Claire Carroll and I met in Aberystwyth and discussed these matters in a wider group, at the Glengower pub in June 2023. When Prototype published their fifth anthology the following month, I was really tickled to find Claire’s hilarious story about André Breton, A Sun is Only a Shipwreck Insofar as a Woman’s Body Resembles It, on such matters there. It’s a tale that imagines André Breton, the Surrealists’ main man, visiting in the summer-time and seeking assistance to dye his hair. It describes subtle and unnerving interrelations between this large difficult character and a polite and obliging, yet extremely wily, female protagonist, his temporary hostess. It begins, uncomfortably, thus (please purchase PROTOTYPE 5 to hear the further events that ensue):
André Breton is staying over at the beach house. It's unbearably hot. I wake up from a nap, with the heat pressing in, and he's standing over me with a box of hair dye he has found in the bathroom cabinet.
Let's do this, he says.
Researching big intellectual figures can fancify an odd feeling of fictional intimacy; how would it be to actually have to be close to these complex personas? Claire looks a lot at Surrealism, and I’m looking a lot at the Situationist International who saw themselves as its superior successors. The relationship Claire develops, wryly, between André Breton and her anonymous narrator felt eerily familiar. Immediately, I wished to conjecture a similar experience with Guy Debord, main man of the usurping Situationists, in response.
In his 1967 book of theory The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord famously said that ‘Dadaism sought to abolish art without realising it’, ‘Surrealism sought to realise art without abolishing it’, and that the ‘critical position since elaborated by the Situationists has shown that the abolition and realisation of art are inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art’. Crazy. Gardening with Guy Debord recounts a hypothesised guest-stay with Guy Debord at his rural central-France abode in the autumn, witnessing and becoming embroiled in his attempts to achieve this confusing ambition.
Whether you’ve ever speculatively or actually endured occasions such as the following, I hope you enjoy the account. And Claire’s new collection of short stories, The Unreliable Nature Writer, will be published later this year, June 2024, by Scratch Books.
Gardening with Guy Debord
After Claire Carroll’s A Sun is Only a Shipwreck Insofar as a Woman’s Body Resembles It in PROTOTYPE 5
Guy Debord is out in the garden with a large steel fork. In mid-November, the leaves must be caught. Guy Debord likes his garden immaculate, but its whimsy intact. A leaf here, a leaf there, Guy Debord’s garden is extremely spacious, with many leaf-shedding trees. He has invited me over to lend him a hand. It is bitterly cold. Virginia Creeper cascades the château at his home in Haute-Loire. I edge forward in gloves.
‘Glove girl,’ he says, as I slowly approach. ‘Why don’t you join me and pick up a fork.’
The lapels of Guy Debord’s thick wool manteau are flopsy. Its pockets are massive and full of Gauloises. From an oval flower-bed in the upper lawn’s centre, a big curling finger beckons me over. I cross the stone patio, then the verdurous grass, long and wet under-boot. Guy Debord passes me a fork. It is heavy and awkward.
Tucking my hair behind my ear, Guy Debord holds out a fag. Sun glimmers into our faces.
‘A golden time, a golden time to be alive,’ Guy Debord says. He lights us both up – flunk. I nod, politely smiling. Since arriving at Guy Debord’s house I have not said a word. I have so far sensed Guy Debord likes it this way.
Puff puff. Guy Debord points with his large steel fork. ‘This bed is full of frittilaires,’ he says, toking deeply. ‘Which I lurve.’
I make my move.
‘Oui, frittilaires,’ I say. ‘Chess-boards on petals. Delicate, sinister. How is it you have them?’
Guy Debord looks at me with amusément. He scrapes at the oval frittilaire-flower bed’s border, prettily scalloped in black plastic wire, pawing ochre puce peach orange leaves. Some of them rip.
‘A gift from a once-dear friend in Auvergne,’ he exhales. Guy Debord covets a grin melancholic.
Silence. Puff puff. I keep my gaze down and continue to gather small mounds of leaves, the task at hand. It is bitterly cold. Autumn air nips the nape of my neck, and then Guy Debord’s rough blobby digits are there.
‘Where is your scarf?’ he probes. Guy Debord does not want a reply; I do not give him one.
Guy Debord and I have cleared the perimeter of the oval frittilaire-flower bed. We exit stage left to find a table and two chairs before a balustrade and stone steps, which descend to a lower lawn that is exceedingly ample.
The top of the table’s a chess-board.
‘Don’t you fancy a game?’ asks Guy Debord. I sense that the only acceptable answer is yes. ‘The only acceptable answer is yes,’ says Guy Debord. ‘Yes,’ I say. Guy Debord lurves to play chess, and is terribly pleased. We prop up our forks at a nearby trunk, and sit down to compete. It is bitterly cold. Guy Debord distributes further Gauloises and begins to direct King Queen Bishops Knights Castles, and Pawns. Hoards of leaves hang above us. Of course, everyone knows what comes next. ‘CHECK MATE!’ yells Guy Debord in seconds, and leaps to his feet. Guy Debord lurves to win. He runs past the balustrade and down the stone steps, throwing off his manteau, and himself to the ground. He lies on the floor, giggling, intoxicated.
‘Ha ha ha ha! Everything is too late! Fall, these crumbling walls! Dance, these tired leaves!’ Guy Debord does not verbalise that I should lay beside him, but that is what he wants and thus what I do. I bring my gardening fork, and Guy Debord’s. Micro-fibres degrade and itch in my gloves. Leaves are elegantly strewn hither and thither; Guy Debord blew them earlier this morning with his electric leaf-blower. There is not very much work to do.
We gaze into an icy-blue sky. Guy Debord’s cheeks are red, brightly blotched with capillary veins. He glances across his shoulder towards me. I continue to fix on the vaults above, fauxing the nonchalance Guy Debord favours.
‘What were your greatest hopes and dreams?’ Guy Debord asks me.
Ffs, I think, but concede. ‘When my sister and I were younger, our best best thing was to sing sing sing in the back of the car on car journeys – Maman in the passenger seat and Papi the driver – til our lungs burnt out. We wanted to be stars of the cabaret, our eye-lids powdered lavender, wearing crêpe crimson dresses. Each night, our song would cry a million tears for all of the world. Each night, we’d return to our apartment overlooking the Place Saint-Sulpice, toasting the moon before deliciously drifting to slumber. In the morning, we would buy pastries from Monoprix, to feed the birds.’
Guy Debord has fallen asleep. I sit up and relight my Gauloise. Guy Debord is roused immediately by its Arabic scents.
‘I want to show you something,’ he says. We fumble up, and walk to the far end of the lower lawn, where we exit stage right and enter a Hortus conclusus which Guy Debord calls his ‘Ode to Bacchus’.
Even more than frittilaires or winning at chess, Guy Debord lurves vin. Guy Debord lurves vin blanc, and Guy Debord lurves vin noir. But ne pas the vin in between.
Guy Debord does not believe in poetry on pages, but en fait that poetry becomes everyday life through architectural design and land management. Guy Debord is convinced that absolutely e v e r y t h i n g should be art, or nothing at all. ‘Ode to Bacchus’ is Baroque, Gothic, Rococo, Modernist, Renaissance, Classical, Medieval, &c. in style. Guy Debord is a voracious aesthetician. Clumps of stone grapes droop from a perfect square series of columns circling a statue of Bacchus, who stands at the middle of a fountain within a wider rotundal pond marked ‘N’ ‘E’ ‘S’, and ‘W’.
‘The leaves need to be fished out of here,’ says Guy Debord. ‘My most-cherished compass.’
Guy Debord and I remove the leaves from Bacchus clumsily with our forks. Guy Debord sees our reflections in the watery surface. ‘Look, there we are!’ he says, chortling. There is a feeling that nobody is around for miles and miles.
Then Guy Debord says, ‘You know, you haven’t asked me about my greatest hopes and dreams.’
I swallow.
‘When I was younger,’ says Guy Debord, ‘my friends and I – rascals! – endlessly traversed the streets of Paris, darling chérie, urgently passing bar vieux to bar vieux. Regarde her ruined beauty! Regarde the tragic milieu! We wore rags, and drank heartily. We had no interest in being stars of your cabaret spectacle – phoo! – colluding with Capital, but to change the course of history and achieve revolution for dear Daddy Marx. Damn the vain artists! So stupid, so superficielle! Traitors! Damn them! Out with them! I hate art! I love art! We are all artists! Art is life!’
Guy Debord is confused and exhausted. Having run out of Galouises, he wrenches a Lost Mary from his pocket and vapes rapidly. A sundial tells us it is exactly 1pm.
‘Aren’t you hungry?’ asks Guy Debord, chucking his Lost Mary into Bacchus’s waters. ‘Let’s go inside for something to fill up our bellies.’
We leave ‘Ode to Bacchus’ and retrace our tracks up the lower lawn and steps, past the balustrade and chess-board table plus chairs, onto the upper lawn and past the oval fritillaire-flower bed where Guy Debord kicks at our careful leaf bundles, over the stone patio, and through French doors into the kitchen. A tray of madeleines cools on the counter.
‘We can’t eat those – they’re to exorcise Proust,’ says Guy Debord.
We enter a dark drawing room and Guy Debord starts a plush fire in the grate, his eyes dewy. Amid photo-frames of bygone friends and nostalgic trinkets upon various wooden furnitures, copies of Gardeners’ World tower in piles. There are no books on the bookshelves. Instead there are countless vin blancs and vin noirs.
‘Let’s open a bottle,’ Guy Debord twists – purp! ‘I’m starving.’ He pours, then reclines.
Glug glug.
‘What were your greatest hopes and dreams?’ Guy Debord asks me.
I had nowhere else to go; it would be an unbearable winter.
Amy Grandvoinet is an AHRC-funded PhD researcher in literary psychogeographies, looking at the persisting influences of the b.1950s Lettrist and Situationist Internationals on contemporary art and writing Britain. Amy’s work has been published in Lumpen, Culture Matters, The Polyphony, Wales Arts Review, SPAMzine, and Question. She co-runs ‘campus dérives’ at Aberystwyth University with the Centre for Material Thinking, and you can find out more at amygrandvoi.net or on instagram.com/amy_k_grandvoinet.
