How I Wrote Certain of My Books.

Raymond Roussel kept his distance from the Surrealists as he found their work "un peu obscur." They, on the other hand, were enthusiastic enough about Roussel to incite a riot during a production of one of his dramas, ostensibly to protest the audience's ignorance and inattention. Other, almost equally devoted Roussel admirers have included Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, Julio Cortazar, Maurice Blanchot, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Salvador Dali and Alberto Giacometti were influenced by Roussel's descriptions of machines and landscapes, and Marcel Duchamp named him as a source for the Large Glass. Michel Foucault devoted a book-length study to him, and the Oulipo group--Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, and Jacques Roubaud, among others--owes much of its inspiration to Roussel's rigorously calculated games-manship. It's a formidable intellectual legacy, but one that probably wouldn't have mattered much to a writer who preferred detective novels to "psychological" drama. What kept Roussel at arm's length from the Surrealists was their lack of a discernible method, and what he might have seen as their consequent lack of interest in an audience outside themselves. Roussel paved a thoroughfare for his readers to follow: for him, writing was not a product of the dream, as it was for the Surrealists, but instead created the space in which the dream occurs. It stands to reason that Roussel, in spite of his esoteric methods, expected popular acclaim. You dream for yourself, but write that others might dream.

His master was Jules Verne, whose name Roussel would allow pronounced only "on bended knee," and it was fame equal at least to Verne's, if not to Victor Hugo's--or Napoleon's--that he sought. Roussel, alas, has not yet achieved that status, in either French or English. In the latter case the problems are less a function of depth or intention than of the French language itself. Generally, when a work is said to be un-translatable it means that certain words or phrases carry nuances that cannot be imported without losing the compactness of the original, or its connotative force. Roussel, however, unpacks the nuances himself and flattens out the literary surface by already exploiting a possible range of meanings. His narrative machinery is bulk on puns, metagrams, and homophones, all essentially rhymes, and none of which facilitates translation.

Included in this collection are illustrations for Nouvelles Impressions that Roussel commissioned from the hack artist Zo. Paired with the brief instructions Roussel sent him, these are unexpectedly transformed into darkly epiphanic images. There is also an essay by John Ashbery, and translations by him, Harry Mathews, and Kenneth Koch. Though the translations are all first-rate, the French unfortunately is not included, so the best way to get a sense of Roussel's linguistic density is through the title essay, translated by Trevor Winkfield, and through Winkfield's excellent notes.

In 1969 Winkfield moved to New York from London, where, he writes in a biographical note, he was "self-taught as a painter" at the Royal College of Art. His work has been shown much too infrequently to suit his fans--his last one-man show was in 1989--but his paintings and prints have graced the covers of innumerable poetry books and magazines these last five years.

As a painter, Winkfield is apparently even more indebted to Roussel's researches than as a writer. He understands painting as a series of problems, given partly by himself and partly by the medium, which he sets out to resolve. For his acrylic-on-can-vas collages, he first makes a study by cutting out construction-paper backgrounds the same size as the final work and painting them; he then traces the figures onto the canvas and repeats the painting process--thus recreating in visual terms the way Roussel will write the same phrase twice but differently. As Roussel explained the origin of one of his stories, "I chose two almost identical words. . . . To these I added similar words capable of two different meanings, thus obtaining two almost identical phrases. . . . The two phrases found, it was a case of writing a story which could begin with the first and end with the second."

Ashbery has remarked in an essay on Winkfield's paintings that they were "literary" and has noted "the extreme attention he obviously pays to titles." Perhaps it isn't surprising, then, that Winkfield's writings are "pictorial," as this from "Leeds: an Autobiography": "But here his phrases petered out inconclusively, as he felt himself reduced to a St. Sebastian of dirty looks."

In the Scissors' Courtyard (which includes the brief "Autobiography") is a selection of Winkfield's writings from 1967-75, a small volume that will make devotees wish his prose were exhibited more often as well, though the less adventurous may find his literary efforts un peu obscur. This is from a poem called "Blud!":

She opens her parasol, an airborne jelly. Will the sun dapple her? She consults her sundial. Yes, it does.

It is a poem the latter Sir John Betjeman might have written had he been holed up in Kurt Schwitters' Merzbarn for a few rainy English weeks. Also included are a character named Digby, an unsolvable crossword puzzle, a detailed drawing of the "mucoid pellets (snot balls) found in Robinson Crusoe's bedroom," a photo of Timmy the Mouse, and all of it "'umbly dedicated to His Majesty Charles IV, last King of Hungary (a.k.a. Ernest the Policeman)." Though nothing else quite resembles this extraordinarily daft and delirious excerpt of the sublime, Winkfield, like his master, raises the comedic and sentimental elements of popular art to a level of formal reverie.

Lee Smith is a writer who lives in New York.