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Jacques Vaché went through literature with his hands in his pockets. In fact, he was not even a writer but rather an ingenious guy, someone who was enrolled in the payroll without asking permission. What others were searching hard he had without looking for it.

Jacques Vaché (1895-1919) did not have time for almost anything, almost not even to grow that mustache that, I now interview, it seems that someone had drawn. But Jacques Vaché was lucky that he was wounded in the Great War, that catastrophe that woke the world from the lethargy of the nineteenth century, and that in the hospital of Nantes he knew, at the beginning of 1916, a nurse named André, was called Breton and, second, Surrealism (or something similar). And to Breton, who was going around with psychoanalysis, the sheaf of letters that the patient sent him from the front months later came as a ring to his finger. He found without looking for a pure diamond . If not, how can this fragment of the second epistle be understood: "But in spite of everything, in spite of everything, what a life! I have (naturally) no one to talk to, no books to read, no time to paint-In tremendously isolated sum - I say, Mr. the Interpreter- Will you ... Excuse me, which way does it lead to? Have a cigar, sir? - Supply train, inhabitants, mayor and lodging sheet-A howitzer and rain , rain, rain- rain-rain-rain-200 trucks in a row, in a row - in a row. "

The Harold Bloom of literature consider that Jacques Viché's 14 war letters were sufficient to proclaim that surrealism was born. I went, if I had had ambition or less laziness I could have said le surrealisme c'est moi . But what was missing, his friend Breton, who had already reserved a ticket for History, was left over. Breton was a sun in the absence of satellites. " Breton needed Vaché (a certain Vaché, his Vaché); he surrounded him, isolated him, distilled him (...) What Vaché did not have, Breton himself invented." This is what Miguel Ángel Frontán and Carlos Cámara maintain in the prologue to Letters of War (Ediciones de la Mirándola) and also their translators.

Jacques Vaché disdained almost everything, he conducted himself as if life were not with him , as if the war was an inconvenience: "It is a heat full of flies and smells of ajar cans." He brought careless art with capital letters. And to contradict himself: "I am definitely far from an infinite number of writers - even from Rimbaud, I fear dear friend - ART IS A TONTERY - Almost nothing is nonsense and a bit annoying - that's all - Max Jacob - very rare time-it could be U-MO-RE. "

Vaché, of course, is a very villa-matiano character, one of those who had not existed would have invented them . An artist without work. That's what it's called, Artists without works. I world prefer not to (Cliff), the book in which Jean-Yves Jouannais groups, according to the Barcelona writer, "an extensive list of dandis or elegant creators who had opted for non-creation (...) There they were, of entry, Vaché and Duchamp leading a wide succession of lazy artists, with little or no work. " The book was read to him by Vila-Matas, he told himself at a conference at the National Library in 2012, in one night at the "horrible Hôtel de la Opera" in Paris in March 1998.

The icing on the Vaché case came with death : did he commit suicide? It is true that his body appeared on January 6, 1919 in a bed of the Hôtel de France, in Nantes, very old in opium. He lay next to his friend Paul Bonnet.

What and how this young man was bullied for the nonsense of an atypical daring is difficult to know, but he wrote down these aeroliths :

-Currently I dream of wearing a red T-shirt, a red scarf around the neck and high boots - and being a member of a Chinese society with no objective and secret in Australia.

-The brains starter works with great noise, and I have not far from me a stable for TANKS-animal very ubiquitous, but devoid of joy.

-I would need some good suits of green water burlap, and a white vest of bartender-and those solvent women smell of dirty and perfumed underwear.

The insolence, the provocation, the game for the game, that inheritance that he received from Alfred Jarry, that inventing words, that laughter in the dark, came from the disbelief , of having traveled and seen too much and too soon. This gives faith in the book Stop the war or I shot myself (El Nadir), which compiles three teenage texts that he wrote for the magazine Le Canard Sauvage .

What can you expect, where can you get when this has been written: "Then, in the afternoon, a tank in excellent health has come to have tea with us and turned around with all kinds of infernal noises and clattering , calmly crushing the barbed wire and climbing the slopes with ease. I could not give credit to my eyes, I had seen tanks go, but never loose in their natural environment. "

He was 23 years old. Maybe he had already said it all .

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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