In trying to come to terms with Jarry's bizarre behavior, it is important to remember that just beneath the surface of his ongoing one-man sideshow was a human being in a state of profound psychological, intellectual, and spiritual anguish. His chief interest was always in escaping from the mundane. In the process, he came exhilaratingly close to closing the gap between life and art, obsession and action, and "reality" and "unreality." He hoped that the sheer inappropriateness of his actions should reveal his fundamental disgust with the absurdity of life. 





        

        One night he and a friend went to hear a
        light opera. Jarry came attired in a grubby white canvas
        suit with a homemade paper shirt underneath; he had
        painted a smeary tie on the front of the shirt, using


        India ink. His friend wore a fur cap and brandished a
        shepherd's crook. For obvious reasons, the manager of the
        opera house exiled them to a back balcony. Nonplused,
        Jarry waited until the curtain was going up and then
        announced in a loud, abrasive monotone, audible to
        everybody in the theater: "I don't see why they
        allow the audience in the first three rows to come in

        carrying musical instruments." 

        


        
Jarry and Leon-Paul Fargue, his best friend, went to a
        cafe, where Jarry began a discourse for the benefit of
        the patrons on masturbation "from personal
        recollection," ending with the question: "What
        is art but intellectual masturbation?" 

        

        



Sometimes Jarry and his cohorts would dress up as
        swordsmen and stage fierce mock assaults on the vendors
        in the marketplace. At other times Jarry and his friend
        Henri Morin would put on monks' habits and stroll
        throulgh the town looking properly contemplative, but
        occasionally letting some extremely un-monk-like language
        pass their lips. 

        

        
Guillaume Apollinaire describes visiting one of
        Jarry's legendary lodgings: 

        

            
"Monsieur Jarry?"

            
"On the third floor and a half,"
            answered the concierge.

            
The answer astonished me. but I climbed up to
            where Jarry lived -- actually on the third floor and
            a half. The ceilings of the building had appeared
            wastefully high to the owner and he had doubled the
            number of stories by cutting them in half
            horizontally.

            
It turned out that Jarry's place was filled with
            reductions. This half-floor room was the reduction of
            an apartment in which its occupant was quite
            comfortable standing up. But being taller than he, I
            had to stay in a stoop. The bed was the reduction of
            a bed; Jarry said that low beds were coming back in
            fashion. The writing table was the reduction of a
            table, for Jarry wrote flat on his stomach on the
            floor. On the wall hung the reduction of a picture.
            On the mantel stood a large stone phallus, a gift
            from Felicien Rops. Jarry kept this member, which was
            considerably larger than lifesize, always covered
            with a violet skullcap of velvet, ever since the day
            the exotic monolith had frightened a certain literary
            lady who was all out of breath from climbing three
            and a half floors and at a loss how to act.


            "Is that a cast?" the lady asked. 
            

"No," said Jarry. "It's a
            reduction."


            

        

        
One day Jarry began shooting off the tops of champagne
        bottles lined up against a wall that was definitely not
        designed to stop bullets. The landlady of the building on
        the other side of the wall came running over to complain
        that the shots endangered her children, who played in the
        garden. Jarry replied, in the best Ubu voice and attitude
        he could muster, "If anything should ever happen to
        them, Madame, we should ourselves be delighted to get
        some new ones with you." 

        
            

        
        
Even in death, Jarry was a little, uh... off. The
        story goes that for several days before he died (from
        meningitis tuberculosis or from the effects of too much
        alcohol over too many years, depending on which legend
        you listen to), Jarry repeated over and over "Je
        cherche, Je cherche..." Finally, in his life's final
        throes, he said, "There is something that would be
        very nice ... a toothpick." A deathbed attendant ran
        out and got a whole box for him. A smile lit up Jarry's
        face, and he died.