Bayamus & Cardinal Pölätüo

Fiction. Two riotous novels by the Polish-born British writer Stefan Themerson (1910-1988), who with his wife Franciszka ran the Gaberbocchus Press in London. Gaberbocchus published both Kurt Schwitters and Bertrand Russsell—and these extremes unite in Themerson’s highly individual brand of philosophical Dadaism. BAYAMUS recounts the adventures of a self-proclaimed mutant with three legs (one is attached to a roller skate) and his efforts to propagate a new species; it includes an instructive visit to the “Theatre of Semantic Poetry,” where old rhymes mutate into new truths. CARDINAL POLATUO is the biography of Guillaume Apollinaire’s anonymous father, who turns out to be an ecclesiastic with a murderous interest in modernist poetry, a faith based on science, and a dreamlife so frankly obscene that only a dictionary of Freudian symbols can explain its innocence.