Bayamus & Cardinal Pölätüo: Two Novels

Two classics of pataphysical fiction from Stefan Themerson, brilliant but neglected novelist and founder of the legendary Gaberbocchus press

This is the first US publication of two riotous novels by the Polish-born British writer Stefan Themerson (1910-88), who with his wife Franciszka ran the Gaberbocchus Press in London. Gaberbocchus published both Kurt Schwitters and Bertrand Russell–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 propogate a new species; it includes an instructive visit to the “Theatre of Semantic Poetry,” where old rhymes mutate into new truths. Cardinal Pölätüo is the biography of Apollinaire’s anonymous father, who turns out to be a ecclesiast with a murderous interest in poetry, a faith based on science, and a dreamlife so frankly obscene that only a dictionary of Freudian symbols can explain its innocence.