Henry Bemis Books: "You're looking exceptionally ugly tonight, Madam, is it because we have company?" Alfred Jarry's astonishing plays, in their first American edition

Jarry, Alfred, King Turd (Boar’s Head Press, 1st Am. ed., 1953). Hardcover, octavo, 189 pp., unclipped dust jacket.

Jarry (1873-1907) was a prodigy and a parody all at once. At fifteen he wrote and performed the first iteration of King Turd (Ubu Roi, in French- often the preferred title in English, as nobody knows what it means) as a vicious parody of a hated schoolmaster.

At 20, Jarry’s parents died. They left him a small inheritance, which he blew through on alcohol and absinthe. Drafted at 21, his appearance in an oversized uniform (he was five feet tall and the Army had none that small) provoked such merriment and indiscipline he was barred from all drills and parades. He was drummed out for medical reasons and made his way to Paris, where he fell in with the bohemian class, who knew an original when they saw one.

Jarry became a whirlwind of ink and drink, cranking out articles, novels and plays. Dusting off his schoolboy play, he recast it as a loose parody of Macbeth- with odd bit of Lear and Hamlet shoehorned in- in five acts, and called it King Turd. The story of a man who becomes king of Poland on the strength of his limitless vileness, it seemed sure never to see a stage.

This, of course, meant one became available almost immediately. Auralien-Marie Lugne-Poe took on the production. Paul Walsh of Yale’s Drama School explains:

“Something remarkable happened on December 10, 1896. Something that changed theater forever. On that day a diminutive young man of 23 named Alfred Jarry stood before the gathered audience at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris and introduced his new play. The expectant audience was mixed of friends and foes, enthusiastic supporters and suspicious critics. They had come to see a new play by a writer of promise. What they got instead was a riotous parody, a malicious mockery, a scabrous affront, a puerile attack on literature, on drama, on theater and on themselves. As the first word of the play was pronounced from the stage, the theater erupted in pandemonium: a riot perhaps, or perhaps a demonstration that testified to the belligerent daring of Jarry’s Ubu Roi. Friends celebrated, foes fumed, and the bad-boy avant-garde was born. It took nearly fifteen minutes before the play could continue. People stormed the exits, fist fights broke out, and Jarry’s supporters shouted: “You wouldn’t understand Shakespeare either!” (always a useful retort during any kind of brawl).

One can, perhaps, expect such reactions when the first word spoken in a play is a bellowed, “Shit!” In any event, the dress rehearsal riot and the opening night were the only performances in Jarry’s lifetime, and the scandal pretty much ensured the two following Ubu plays, Ubu Cuckolded and Ubu In Chains, waited many years indeed for productions.

Famous overnight, Jarry doubled down on his drinking, and got new digs the likes of which were not to be seen again until the office in Being John Malkovich:

Jarry moved into a flat which the landlord had created through the unusual expedient of subdividing a larger flat by means of a horizontal rather than a vertical partition. The diminutive Jarry could just manage to stand up in the place, but guests had to bend or crouch.

Already a pioneer of surrealism, dadaism, postmodernism, absurdist theater and futurism, Jarry concocted a philosophy all his own, called “pataphysics”, which anticipated Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's Maximum Improbability Drive by 75 years, and died of drink, drugs and TB at 34.

The trouble with a succes de scandale- think the premiere of Stravinsky’s Firebird in 1913, or any concert tour of Madonna’s in the last century- is that it’s hard to top, or even fully appreciate after the event. In this edition of all three Ubu plays, translator G. Legman complained that the trouble with most translations was they tried to cram in as much scatology and general vulgarism as possible to try and recreate the sense of shock Jerry caused that December night in 1896. It was hard to do in 1953, and even harder 60 years later, but Ubu is still a play with which to be reckoned, and is performed around the world to this day.

Our first American edition is in good condition. The dust jacket has a few nicks and chips. The jacket seems to have been designed to shock- as one bookseller on Abe.com described it, “the title unscathed and boldly visible from even a far-away shelf. It'd make a pointed gift, if one were so inclined.”

Let King Turd stand out on yours. HBB price: $75.