Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 14 Read online

  The rain of teeth seems to be slowing now, though a few continue to trickle down, pooling on the floor of the old house like New York snow. I can walk, crunching, over the enamel drifts, Scott searching for the South Pole, or the prescient Titus Oates losing himself in the snow. Had I a telescoping aluminum probe, I could search the drifts for evidence of an earlier era of carefree childhood that my grandfather knew only in the womb.

  I remember him mostly as a girth, reeking of tobacco and astringent, a great flannel zeppelin motoring slowly through my young life with a fierce iron love only a degree removed from cruelty, all in the name of peace and quiet and a little rest for my ailing grandmother. He would put his fingers in my mouth, great as Polish sausages, slightly salty, stained from his pipe, his huge wrinkled face rising over my field of view like a harvest moon, and ask me if I wanted him to pull that loose tooth. Afraid of pain, I would shake my head and mutter shy denials until a grin split his old face like a melon and he floated away over the horizon, untethered and bereft of any ground crew.

  Downstairs, I sit in the mottled light streaming through the stained glass windows of his great house. Grandmother's ghost whispers to me from the polished floor, salvaged a generation ago from a distant church, while within the walls the great pocket doors creak like sails in the wind of Granddaddy's passing. The teeth are fewer here, scattered carelessly, piled up in small drifts around the grandfather clock, stuck in the corners, aimless wanderers uprooted from their jaws.

  Then I find his uniform lying on the stairs next to me. He was in the army, and some fraternal order as well, but these epaulets speak of a different era—comic-opera kingdoms or Prussian marching bands. The uniform is white, with gold buttons and lace and a chestful of suspiciously fanciful medals, and even though I too am large and growing into an airship of my own in keeping with the family tradition, it would fit me like a mess tent.

  Daddy is in the kitchen with Uncle Lloyd, quiet voices discussing some estate problem. Mom is upstairs, gathering teeth with a snow shovel and an angry sigh. I am alone with his uniform, this great acreage of white linen and canvas that smells, like him, of old tobacco.

  It does not fit, I tell myself, slipping a leg over my jeans. I will never be so large. The cuffs flop down around my fingernails. A conspiracy of dentists could meet in here with me. I fasten the gold buttons, each gleaming as if fresh from the jeweler's clamp. Seized by some dim instinct, I walk outside. My Adidas track shoes seem to have grown to cavalry boots, polished bone-white to match the uniform, and I thump as I walk, eliciting queries from the kitchen.

  On the porch, painted blue for the wasps, I stare out at the sere grass, the dried-out fountain, the high sandstone curb with its hitching post seventy years out of date, like the old man himself. Then the breeze catches at my arm. It plucks me, playing with my hair, finding wrinkles on my face though I am only fourteen, lifting me by the elbows as if to toss me like a young boy in his grandfather's arms.

  Then I am airborne, a white zeppelin majestic as any great-bellied storm cloud, my pockets ballasted with bright nickels and dimes and quarters, already searching for some house with a loose tooth and an eager child. “I may be some time,” I shout to Daddy and Uncle Lloyd emerging onto the porch, as a grin splits my face. Then I steer into the wind, ready to spend a lifetime creating an enamel rain of my own like Granddaddy before me.

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  Felix Soutre, Puppeteer:

  an abandoned article

  Matthew Latkiewicz

  I slowly climb the seven flights of stairs leading to puppeteer-in-hiding Felix Soutre's studio. My steps are hesitant, not because of the steepness of the stair or shortness of my breath, but because I palpably feel the gravity of the moment increase as I rise. Like a person before the door to the unknown room, the door labeled ‘Future', I hesitate to finish my climb, not wanting to confront that inevitable moment which lies only two flights up. Felix Soutre agreed to meet me after I called him on the telephone. “I am, too, you see, an aspiring puppeteer . . ."

  Felix Soutre shook the puppetry world to its core when he emerged from this studio fourteen years ago, a young, ambitious artist. While no one knew him at the time, it would be one short year before all who cared about such things spoke his name with a whispering reverence. Though he had performed a number of small shows at the coffee-house near Covent Garden—the one with the intimate basement packed with uncomfortable chairs, Felix begging to perform at their weekly open mic. “But you don't even need a mic,” they would admonish him before finally giving in—it was his performance at the street theater festival held down in Greenwich that truly began his career. I often imagine Felix riding out to the three-day festival on the Docklands light rail, carrying his now-famous stringed figure in a suitcase, or maybe (for one can just see him doing this) holding the puppet on his lap, prostrate, attracting both the looks of the strangers and their distance.

  While I was not there, I know people who were, and the story of Felix's performance is near puppetry legend by now. The festival hosted its fair share of fantastic, shocking, head-turning acts, all competing for the attention of those strolling the streets, stepping carefully as befits a wander through such an artistic minefield. Running the main street of the festival, the one blocked off and throbbing with exhausted, panting performers, is like running the gauntlet of medieval days: one barely escapes with head intact.

  Amidst the tap-dancers, the break-dancers, the beat-boxers, the fire-breathers, the magicians, the musicians, the human statues, the jugglers, the fire-breathing, juggling statues, and the downright freaks, Felix stood out with his repose. While his puppet has donned many costumes and personas throughout Felix's career, it was markedly unadorned in Greenwich; a simple and small wooden figure, what God's model for Adam might have looked like. I like to imagine that no one even noticed Felix at first; that he began his performance as if alone in his studio. And I like to think that people collected around him not because they saw him, but because they felt him. Amidst the flurry of acts trying to steal your sight away from everyone and everything else, I think the crowd gathered around Felix precisely because they didn't see him; or he moved in a space just outside that of sight.

  The crowd grew to four, then five, then nine people deep. Eventually people knocked on street-side doors, asked if they might hang out the tenants’ second story window: “Come on up,” they were told. “We were just there.” The performance itself lasted an hour, though that figure is actually the average estimate based on witnesses’ memories of a duration anywhere from seven minutes to thirteen days. (Admittedly, that last figure came from a woman whose pupils were reportedly about to swallow her whole head; in the calculations, her contribution was tossed out.) Many accounts of this show have been elsewhere recorded; suffice it to say here that the style which would shoot him to notoriety was here already apparent.1 Unlike most puppeteers before him, Felix did not hide himself behind any actual or metaphorical screen. He established what Michel “Taz” Kwetwait calls in The Art of Felix Soutre a dialogue with his puppet, focusing the audience's attention not on the puppet alone, but on the puppet and puppeteer interaction. At first people collected around him in silence. Eventually, this turned to small murmurs of appreciation, becoming by the end all-out cheers.

  Felix brought this same innovation to each of his performances and garnered exponential admiration. In an interview given five years ago in Puppetry Magazine, Felix describes how he conceived his art during a decade-long sequestered stint in his studio.2 For ten years, he worked tirelessly with his puppets, while also studying philosophy, history, and theology. Through reading, writing and practice, he formulated his artistic ideas, until, as he says in the interview, “[o]ne day, I overflowed.” As Felix describes it, “My head became so full of ideas, that when I added one more that day, I began leaking out of my ears and nose. I had to hang my head over a bucket so as not to mess up my floor. I knew I had to leave my studio and enter the world where I
could work my ideas out of my head. This is why I began performing in public: to empty my head, draining my ideas down the strings of my puppets. I left my studio that day, locking the door behind me. I have not been back since."

  I am all too aware of this as I reach the door to Felix Soutre's studio. The door itself is unremarkable, yet I am nearly paralyzed simply because of what it means. This door remained locked for the fourteen years that Felix changed the world of puppetry, sat silent like the womb after birth. This was holy space, removed from social, cultural life, but yet also its very center. In here, alone, Felix slowly conceived of and then built the future, holding it back while it incubated, and while we outside of this door plugged naively along in the present world. If one thinks hard enough, one can imagine numerous spaces such as these where lonely individuals think up our various futures. Outside, in the buzzing and crowded culture, we unwittingly wait for them to fling open their doors; they do, and we live amidst the ripples. Felix waited ten years before he emerged from the future and pulled us all into it. It took an incredible twelve years before others began copying his work and moves; then suddenly we all lived in Felix's studio. That's when you knew that the present had finally become the future; or, as I am beginning to believe, the present, by loving it too much, had scared the future back into hiding again.

  Felix returned to and unlocked his studio (in front of which studio I am now standing, hands still at my sides) in a similar flight from the world around him. In the years just preceding this return, Felix's work opened up into culturally unfamiliar realms. While other puppeteers harped the moves and work Felix had been originating since that performance in Greenwich—hashing and re-hashing it, making it look new while it felt comfortably old—Felix himself began exploring new territory. As he said in the interview quoted above, “One inevitably finds new work hidden in the folds of the old."3 Yet, like a premature child, Felix's new work was not yet ready to survive in the world; its newness frightened people; it made them squeamish. Rather than incubating his work safely away from people, hatching it for them when all was safe, Felix carried culture through the painful experience of creation, an experience which turned many against him.

  The outcry broke in a criticism written by Harry Blume in Puppetry Magazine. Reviewing Felix's 1998 show at the Almeida, Blume exposed the general public to the course and idea of Felix's new work. He wrote:

  * * * *

  With fame and critical success, Soutre has also lost his artistic focus, and has even given in to an inflated sense of himself. He obviously sees himself as a god-like figure, taking the metaphor of the puppeteer to self-indulgent and uninteresting (some might even say creepy) places.

  Soutre's show at the Almeida last Saturday began wonderfully, but quickly entered bad territory. In a movement he called Ghosts of Things Unborn, Soutre ceremoniously cut the strings on his puppet and began manipulating it without any readily visible means. While much of the audience gasped and then giggled at the effect, it soon wore thin as all illusions do. Having drained all his ideas in puppetry, Soutre is trying to stay alive through cheap magic tricks, hoping we do not notice the strings, as it were.4

  * * * *

  This was Blume's criticism—that Felix had turned toward “kitschy black magic"—and many in the high art circles echoed his view that Soutre had become a “mere magician.” While these comments definitely affected Felix's position within the art world—they stopped swooning over his work—they did little to Felix himself. While Puppetry Magazine may have huffed over Felix, he continued doing his work. Over the course of that next year, however, another, more damaging criticism emerged, one which lined the streets outside Felix's performances and forced him back into his studio.

  This other criticism grew out of many peoples’ experiences during the performances when Felix began cutting his strings. While Blume decried this as simple illusion, smoke and mirrors gimmickry, others began accusing Felix of modern-day witchcraft. During his show at the Donmar Warehouse (ostensibly during the now infamous movement Ghosts of Things Unborn), a young man leapt onto the stage and began mirroring the puppet's movements. According to eyewitness accounts, Felix turned toward this man without pause and “pulled him like he himself was a puppet."5 The audience watched in amazement that turned to riotous horror as both the puppet and the man flailed in unison. The newspaper reports of this event—in which people charged the stage and devastated the theatre—opened the floodgates. Many others came forward with their own experiences at Soutre shows, in which they also felt a loss of control; some even claimed that the puppeteer himself had taken control. While some, mainly from the Blume camp, claimed the frenzy too was just part of the illusion, a scheme worked out by Felix,6 many others were not so sure, especially as the numbers of people grew who felt physically manipulated by the puppeteer. It seemed that his no-strings ‘trick’ was not so innocuous. Soutre shows came under watch by the Arts Council; parents’ groups urged the banning of his work; cultural critics advocated banishing that work back to the dark ages from whence, they argued, it came.

  The cries against Felix increased when Puppetry Magazine published an interview with the puppeteer later that year (5 Nov. 1998). In it, Felix discusses his new work: “The puppet merely reflects the people watching it,” he said; “they are, in a sense, watching how they themselves feel when watching the puppet. In this sense, the puppet is a mere trick, an illusion, a crutch. I hope to remove the puppet. Without it to get in the way, the audience itself might began to move.” Felix's critics exploded. “That proves it!” many in the art watchdog groups proclaimed. They argued that Felix maliciously sought to control and manipulate his audiences; they made parallels to fascist dictators and brainwashing cult leaders. They urged that the puppeteer be blacklisted and even exiled, putting a stop to his no doubt nefarious designs.

  While I must stress the deepness of the anger against the puppeteer, it is important to remember that such attacks were not unanimous. Even while people gathered outside his performances in protest and fear, others articulated their support for Felix. It is also important to note that both the support and hostility of Felix's work operated according to a belief in it. As the rallies of protest and support grew in tandem, Blume's views—that Felix's work was simple illusion—receded into near silence. More and more, people accepted that Felix moved his puppets without strings; the debate shifted from whether or not he was a puppeteer (rather than a ‘mere magician') to whether or not his work was moral. Some praised his artistic bravery; some argued that there were things humans simply shouldn't do, no matter if they were artists. Felix's last few performances before he returned to his seventh-floor studio once again resembled the battleground between the present and the future; though this time, the future had not yet fully formed, and the pain of the artist became the pain of culture at large.

  I think Felix felt this and knew he would have to isolate himself once again in order to work through his new ideas. Since he has disappeared, much of the argument has been swept under the rug. While no one can forget what they felt during or about his ‘string-less’ work, the public have ultimately chosen to ignore those feelings. Some puppeteers have ventured into the realm Felix previewed just before disappearing, but they remain underground, side-show entertainers easy enough to ignore. Mostly, puppeteers continue to mine his old work: the visible dialogue between puppet and puppeteer. Though they do this to mild success, the work feels false in a way, as if both audience and performer were backpedaling, trying to forget what they know by putting that knowledge back into the future; or, what is the same, erase what they know by separating themselves from their past; drawing a moat between themselves and their experiences.

  I spent some time working with those puppeteers in the underground sideshows. The best of these shows hinted at Felix's brilliance, but could not achieve its lustre. A community sprang up among those of us who felt we understood a puppetry without strings, and wanted to explore what that meant. We tried to recreate wh
at little Felix had shown to us before he disappeared into his studio and then go from there. This meant going back to his original work and putting it together sequentially, building it up until the string-less work stood out like the last open space in a jigsaw puzzle. As Felix never fully explained this last work, we had to assume that it came from his experience of his old work; and that if we put ourselves through that same experience—mentally at least, mapped out that experience—then we might join him.

  We began with the dialogue between puppet and puppeteer, that exciting idea of Felix's which highlighted his interaction with the puppet. There were times watching Felix that it seemed as if the puppet were controlling him rather than the other way around (and I am not completely convinced that this was not the case). By putting himself—the puppeteer—out in the open (on the line, as it were), Felix necessarily shifted his focus from the puppet to the strings tying him to the puppet. Performance after performance, Felix focused on the strings, learned their art and how they worked. Most puppeteers look through the strings to the puppet; try to elevate themselves into invisibility and give to the puppet's world the veneer of reality. Yet, like gods atop Mt. Olympus, the puppeteer (and by extension, the audience, caught between puppet and puppeteer) watch and manipulate this reality at one remove; the puppet becomes real only insofar as it exists separate from, and indeed below the puppeteer. In this way, the puppet's reality never invades that of the puppeteer, but at most merely imitates it according to the puppeteer's whim. Thus, while the puppet may become real for itself within its own world, it is also safely constrained by that world. The puppet's reality is an illusion only it believes. The audience, in a conscious suspension of disbelief, and conspiring with the puppeteer, gleefully half-believes it. The ideal in this type of work is God's relationship to Adam: a reality below that of the creator; or, what is the same, the creation of a whole (or, better, self-contained) reality.7