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At exactly 9.45 a.m. Max cracked
hisself out of da egg his mother had
left in an eagle’s nest & over which
the bird had brooded seven years. Dis
was in Dover, I mean in Bruhl, six miles
to the south of Kohn, ex-Roman
colony on der Rhine. Crikey dick
sonny jimbo , da alleygators dey
not what dey used to be. Wings flap
dere spans far off into da endless night.
And so our little Max grew up to be a
beautiful and studious child. But not dootiful.
Nappy daubs out of hand condemned by Momma
and Poppa. Not appreciated. Ghastly tedium
of endless hours encarcerated in the convent-
church, leastways that’s his version. But what
of the exquisite skulls and delicate bones of
eleven thousand virgins encrusting those walls,
reputed to have held him spellbound? Determin-
ed in any case closely to scrutinise the mystery
of telegraph wires (and to flee from his father’s
tyranny) story goes 5 year old Maxie then fled
the parental home. Worldly goods in sack on
stick. So that after a brief rule of thumb, the
thrown cardinals obliged with a whip around
the four quarters. At a pretty pass of power-
ful contradictory tendencies, for instance Roman
Catholicism, Western rationalism, negative roman-
ticism, blow and behold a blue-eyed, blond-curly
-haired, bourgeois child, dressed in meat red
nightshirt, brandishing a brioche in his left
hand, walked barefoot into the middle of
a pilgrims’ procession. Truth be told they’d
already been taken aback a ways back
and had slowly by various means abandon-
ing self to Self, been brought to their
feet by the shuddering power of the
word "Hemit!", and so forth along
that dusty old nineteenth century road.
However, enchaunted by this chawm-
ing child and swearing (some grave mother)
it to be the vision of an angel or even da
infant of da virgin, the pilgrims now
proclaimed: ‘Look, li’l Lord Jesus
Christ.’ And at night, dreams da tortoise,
or was that now taught us, telegraphy I
mean, and with each booby a few more
scales fell from the eyes of the learned
aegrotats, or acrobats of electricity
should that be? till they fair carpet-
ed the ground around them. After a mile or
so of this the ‘headlight child’ had
escaped from the pilgrimage, made
his way out of the dark forest pre-
cinct and into the sunlit station and
took a long and delightful trip on
de choochoo and the telegraphic
wires, which move when you look at
them from a running train and stand
still when you stand still and the words
like lightning go. Maxie claps hands.
And the bird of day looked thought-
fully down on what he had seen from
above the midnight. Sometime later Lord
Max he struck off a toot suite of drawings, and
an eddy shun of young woomun. It used to be said
zee good fish wore zee red shoes, not anymore!
Not in that bygone age. See Poppa, see Momma,
sister Mary, Emma and Louisa, and good
friend Fritz, pictured there. On my verbal
there 'll be no more bicycle ice for you my
boy, no more the ancient Calligulators. Now
it's quilt by the board or batting, and no two
ways, the days are sorely numbered. Three,
two, one, zoo. The very next day when the
Bobby brought him home he pacified his
Poppa swearing he was l’enfant phare
Fur sure! On another, historic day
(see 21.4.22) in the Tyrol, first Tristan
Tiara, Johnny Arp and then Pole Eluard
and Andre, the Breton, meet with Maxie Ernst
and together they dreamed up ‘DADA
au grand air.’ A year later (1922) they
returned to the Tyrol, with, Mark Joseph-
son and others in tow, for another moment-
ous meeting. YadaYadaYada. So it came to this:
his Dadda, who was as gullible as the next man,
painted a portrait of his son as the Christ-child.
Looked at him thunderstruck and as from a
moving train. Instead of a whip, he carried a
cross, dressed in reddest shirt material, blue eyed,
curly topped and toed among eggshells, red-
tipped shoes. Then lowered slowly so’s her chin touched
her soft eiderdowny bazoomery then
slowly it to where you yes you began, wrapped
in warm and tinder love. It was thought
portraits of women with bare necks cost
one-third more as they were from under
her wing. This painting maybe the ideological
source of Ernst's 'Souvenir de Dieu '(1923). He suspects
his Dadda — he of the menacing eye and the up-turned
moustaches — of a God-complex. Goodness sakes,
kissing Mary goodbye gave him his first intimation
of the modernist void ( although it was quite
possibly a void of some other determination)
he feels he never left the room that she left
when she died. If you try I don’t doubt you can
imagine these lines as written by the true
Max Ernst who was all of 45 at the
time. Whereas in 1897 : premonitions
of frottage via miserable childhood measles’
hallucinations, frightful visions of wallpaper
eyes, noses, and a red nightingale, ovoid
of face, blue eyed and pale haired his heart
was hardening already against candid realism.
Exposure to pollution was becoming for him a high
sign of the mass of urbanity. He underwent a series
of psychological crises. And the inevitable battery
of tests in edition. They left him thunderstruck
at midnight. He learnt of the demise of the
pink and most intellectual cockatoo,
of his Momma, of the convent wallpaper
nightingale so menacing and the cracking
birth of a sister at very the same time.
The psychoanalysts were at sixties and
seventies. Between 1926 and 1939 he
held exhibitions in Paris, Brussels,
London, Zurich, Madrid, Berlin,
New York, Los Angeles, etc. He
became mightily confused between birds
and humans, as is amply demonstrably/
strated in as many of his paintings as
drawings. Wings. Identity had been instantaneous
then convulsive or not at all. And subsequently
on the 14th of July 1941, he had flown
to the United States and built a
nest for himself and Peggy
Guggenheim on a cloud above
the East River.
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