René Crevel, Putting My Foot in it, Trans. by
Thomas Buckley, Dalkey
Archive Press, 1992.
[1933.]
Imagine, if you can,
Freud and Proust sitting down for a chat with Zippy the Pinhead and
the marquis de Sade. Then, just when things are starting to get a bit
silly, in walks Karl Marx with a dead serious face to deliver a
vitriolic diatribe. After he has finished his speech, Jacques Lacan
enters and slips a couch under the narrator, who begins
psychoanalyzing himself and his text. Zippy soon prevails, however,
and the narrative has turned into a political allegory with
characters out of Felix the Cat: a surrealist, graphic
(historiographic, geographic, pornographic) version of The Romance of
the Rose. Rene Crevel's 1933 novel Putting My Foot in It (Les Pieds
dans le plat) has long been considered a classic of the surrealist
period, but has never been translated into English until now. Loosely
structured around a luncheon attended by thirteen guests, the novel
is a surrealistic critique of the intellectual corruption of
post-World War I France, especially the capitalist bourgeoisie and
its supporter, the Catholic Church. The novel begins with an account
of the family of the major character, known as the "Prince of
Journalists." This bizarre family - the grandparents a soldier
and a sodomized woman, the parents an orphaned epileptic and a
hunchback - is matched by Crevel's bizarre syntax and vocabulary:
nouns that initially appear legitimate, intact, and respectable, soon
decompose into obscene epithets, making other nouns, both common and
proper, suspect. The story continues in this way to deconstruct
itself on many levels - literary, semantic, psychological,
ideological - until the final chapter, when the luncheon degenerates
in a way reminiscent of a Bunuel film and all of the
novel'scharacters appear in a dirty movie entitled The Geography
Lesson, a final metaphor for the corruption of European society
between the world wars. This edition also reprints Ezra Pound's
well-known essay on Crevel as a foreword, and includes an
introduction by Edouard Roditi, who
‘Rene Crevel’s
1933 novel Putting My Foot in It (Les Pieds dans le plat) has long
been considered a classic of the surrealist period. Loosely
structured around a luncheon attended by thirteen guests, the novel
is a surrealistic critique of the intellectual corruption of
post-World War I France, especially the capitalist bourgeoisie and
its supporter, the Catholic Church. The novel begins with an account
of the family of the major character, known as the “Prince of
Journalists.” This bizarre family—the grandparents a soldier and
a sodomized woman, the parents an orphaned epileptic and a
hunchback—is matched by Crevel’s bizarre syntax and vocabulary:
nouns that initially appear legitimate, intact, and respectable, soon
decompose into obscene epithets, making other nouns, both common and
proper, suspect.’ — DA
“Crevel was born
rebellious the way others are born with blue eyes.”—Philippe
Soupault
“Crevel actually
wrote only a single sentence: the long sentence of a feverish
monologue from the pen of a Proust who dipped his biscuit laced with
LSD into his tea, instead of the unctuous madeleine.”—Angelo
Rinaldi, L’Express
“He will be read
more and more as the wind carries away the ashes of the ‘great
names’ that preceded him. “—Ezra Pound
Felix the Cat: a surrealist, graphic (historiographic, geographic,
pornographic) version of The Romance of the Rose.
This is,
wonderfully, an apt description of the work as a whole. As noted
above, and to tie in the publisher quote, Crevel spends much of the
middle portion of the novel channeling entirely too much Proust and
Freud – and it’s here that the novel labors – and foregoes
Zippy alomost entirely. However, it’s in the opening sections –
where Zippy is prominent – that Crevel shines as a novelist.
All that said, the
really crowning achievement of the work – and it’s high level
five star stuff – is in the final two chapters (“[…]in walks
Karl Marx with a dead serious face to deliver a vitriolic diatribe.
After he has finished his speech, Jacques Lacan enters and slips a
couch under the narrator, who begins psychoanalyzing himself and his
text.”).
let hatred, for its
part, take over and not give an inch of ground
The second to last
chapter (The Fourteenth Guest) is one long bitter, angry (man, I love
bitter and angry writing) rant against hypocrisy in it’s many
forms, and fascism in general. And that might sound like a drag, but
it is enlightening, intelligent, enjoyable, and overall darkly funny
(mostly all at the same time) that it is a true joy to read. The
final (Lacan-esque) chapter is mostly more of the same with more
explicit ties to what (in 1933, when this was published) would have
been very, very current events: the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, and
a continued condemnation of fascism. Crevel was a bit ahead of his
time in loudly ringing the alarm bells over Hitler’s rise to power
– but, seeing as his best friend at the time was Klaus Mann (the
Mann’s, of course, being early and outspoken critics of the rising
Nazi tide) it does make sense.
One can laugh.
Laughter has never
erased, has never corrected anything.
This book does plod
a bit it in the middle – and, were I less stubborn reader I might
have given it up at its lowest point – but it’s final chapters
are truly excellent, and make this well worth picking up; all the
more so as it is both in print (and cheap) and available used (even
more cheap). - Ronald Morton at goodreads
René Crevel,
Babylon, Illustr. by Max Ernst.
Trans. by Kay Boyle, Sun and Moon Press,
1996. [1927.]
Babylon is a landmark of Surrealist literature, an enduring
achievement of one of its leading figures, Rene Crevel. Crevel
explores the private worlds of children and their sexual imaginations
in this important novel, now republished in the prestigious Sun &
Moon Classics. A free-spirited young girl witnesses her father elope
with a beautiful English cousin, the chambermaid run off with and
then kill the gardener, her grandmother seduce her mother's new
fiance, and her mother finally accept an arranged marriage with the
bizarre Mac-Louf, darling of the Society for Protection by Rational
Experience.
Crevel, who might be
termed an auxiliary Surrealist and who committed suicide at age 35 in
1935, is lushly translated here by Kay Boyle (below), buttressed by
Max Ernst ""photogram"" illustrations, and
compared in the Afterword to Rimbaud and Lautremont. The very slender
frame of the ""novel,"" written in 1927, concerns
the family of a young girl whose father has run off with a female
cousin (the girl forever after will think of her father and cousin as
""Mr. Knife, Miss Fork""), whose abandoned mother
then is all set to marry a dashing magistrate, only to have her
mother (the girl's 60-ish grandmother, married to an eminent
psychiatrist) steal him right out from underneath her. Fugitive and
spirit-loosening alliances of the senses is the book's theme--and
while certainly there is an unbuttonedness of language, of imagery
cascade, here, comparing Crevel on the basis of this book to Rimbaud
and Lautremont seems ludicrous, If Crevel's French is well-served by
Boyle's translation, his prose runs from the laughably bad (""In
the cement pools, goldfish revolved in such formation that one no
longer recalled that others, humbly gray, live in waters unimprisoned
by pain-daubed grottoes, waters that flow care-free through meadows
where peaceful oxen graze"") to the quite lovely (""An
auto turning redder and redder is a dizzy stain of madness on the
ribbons and nets of tar that keep the countryside from flying
away""). On the whole: of historical interest--but awfully
hyperventilated stuff. - Kirkus Reviews
René Crevel, My Body and I, Trans. by Robert
Bononno, Archipelago
Books, 2005.
In My Body and I
(Mon Corps et Moi, 1925), René Crevel attempts to trace with words
the geography of a being. Exploring the tension between body and
spirit, Crevel’s meditation is a vivid personal journey through
illusion and disillusion, secret desire, memory, the possibility and
impossibility of life, sensuality and sexuality, poetry, truth, and
the wilderness of the imagination. The narrator’s Romantic mind
moves from evocative tales to frank confessions, making the reader a
confidant to this great soul trapped in an awkward-fitting body. A
Surrealist Proust.
“Without René
Crevel we would have lost one of the most beautiful pillars of
surrealism.”—André Breton
“The works that
Crevel left us indicate that he was one of the most original, gifted
French novelists of the century.”—San Francisco Bay Guardian
“Crevel remains
one of the most readable Surrealists…His liquid language tumbles
along, powered by his strong descriptions, by his love of Freudian
wordplay—rarely is a cigar just a cigar.”
—Publishers Weekly
For many of us, that is those of us who seriously think on things,
the greatest problem to overcome in life is the activity of our own
brains; not political corruption or poorly paid jobs or gas pains or
the daily bastards we encounter, but the sparkings of our own grey
matter. Our brains dictate the tenor of our lives. They can create
prisons and paradises and everything in between. They are the worlds
we each live in and are in continuous flux, but within this flux are
inherent tools to alter its course and solve problems encountered and
shape the very world we live within, though the flux remains and
there is no final solution. This life within this world created by
our brains is an unending ride in a vehicle with a variable
accelerator but no brake pedal, though there is an emergency brake
located somewhere deep in the debris between the seats - beneath the
condoms and coffee cups, the maps and unpaid tickets, bagel crumbs
and baby vomit, there is suicide. Rene Crevel ultimately yanked up
this emergency brake by cranking up the gas in his stove, but before
he did this he created a highly articulate road map toward his
destination. My Body and I was one of the first installments of this
map, and what made it so haunting and moving for me was that suicide
had not yet been decided upon as an option to overcome the problem of
his brain, considered, sure, but not intentionally and consciously
predestined. This book is an honest and detailed account of Monsieur
Crevel attempting to solve the problem of his own brain, and to read
it is to take a convoluted interior journey through his life thus
far; a swarm of memories drawing everything in its wake from his
father’s suicide to his love affairs with fat singers to his
self-prostitution to his tormenting dreams. He tries to solve his
problem by achieving total aloneness, but everywhere he turns he
encounters memories and dreams and objects that make this perfect
aloneness impossible. In the end he is alone, but it’s not a
perfect aloneness, not a transcendent aloneness, but rather an
aloneness still besieged by the problem of his own brain, and it
would be ten years before he pulled the brake; ten years of
Surrealism, black humor, politics, sexual torment, high society
cocktails, and ceaseless thinking and dreaming. - Eddie Watkins at
goodreads
Without René Crevel we would have lost one of the most beautiful
pillars of surrealism. — André Breton
Crevel actually
wrote only a single sentence: the long sentence of a feverish
monologue from the pen of a Proust who dipped his biscuit laced with
LSD into his tea, instead of the unctuous madeleine. — Angelo
Rinaldi, L’Express
He will be read more
and more as the wind carries away the ashes of the ‘great names’
that preceded him. — Ezra Pound
‘If you look at
the photograph of leading Surrealist artists and writers, taken in
1932 at Tristan Tzara’s, you will find René Crevel in the back
row, and that is where he long remained. The others, including Andre
Breton, Salvador Dali, and Paul Eluard, all seem to know what to do
with their hands, whereas René Crevel is leaning forward, one hand
placed for support on the shoulder of Max Ernst, the other on that of
Man Ray. Born in 1900, the golden boy of the Surrealist movement,
Crevel is perhaps remembered more for having killed himself than for
his writings, though even in death he is surpassed by other suicides,
by the revolver-brandishing Jacques Vaché, for instance, whose myth
was sedulously fostered by Andre Breton. Why, then, has David Rattray
chosen to publish now a translation of Crevel’s autobiographical
novel, La Mort difficile, sixty years after its first appearance in
1926? The answer to that question may well have as much to do with a
certain climate of opinion that has flourished since the Sixties as
with Crevel’s undoubted talent as a writer.
‘It was in 1947
that Jean-Paul Sartre accused the Surrealists, who deeply influenced
him, of being young men of good social position who were hostile to
daddy. Crevel senior, however, hanged himself in 1914, and his young
son was left under the domination of a mother he loathed and who is
caricatured as the odious and pretentious Mme. Dumont-Dufour in La
Mort difficile. Still, unlike many of the budding Surrealists in the
Twenties, Crevel was indeed well-to-do and well connected. He was a
great friend of the Vicomte Charles de Noailles and his wife
Marie-Laure, who financed the notorious film, L’Âge d’or, by
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali; and it was he who introduced the
inventor of limp watches to one of the earliest of that artist’s
princely patrons.
‘Crevel appears
indubitably handsome in the portrait photograph by Man Ray, and in
fine line drawings of the period. His looks were of a type that
should have given him a role in one of Cocteau’s later films, had
he survived and if Breton and Cocteau had not been at daggers drawn.
One of Crevel’s friends, the Surrealists’ ally, André Thirion,
remarked in his memoirs on the engaging personality and polished
charm of the author of La Mort difficile. André Breton’s portrait
of his associate is more somber: it stresses the disquiet and the
complexity of the young man’s character.
‘In his books
Crevel made no secret of his homosexuality or bisexuality. As for
Breton, he wrote paeans to heterosexual love, and like most of the
Surrealists he viewed homosexuality with disfavor, although the
colleagues tolerated what they regarded as an aberration in their
friend. It is plain from Crevel’s highly personal narrative, Mon
Corps et moi (“My Body and Me”), that the young author felt
deeply divided about his sexual proclivities. Moreover, he had long
suffered from ill health: tuberculosis took him at frequent intervals
to boredom in Swiss sanatoria, and his sickness was complicated by
alcohol and drugs (opium, cocaine). The theme of suicide haunted him.
In his very first book, Détours (1924), he imagined the scenario of
death by gas that he was to follow eleven years later in 1935. With
Man Corps et moi, he betrays his doubts about the reality of his own
existence.
‘The great event
of Crevel’s life was his meeting with André Breton in 1921: a
strong, aggressive character under whose aegis the Surrealist
enterprise often appears as a succession of insults, cuffs to
celebrated heads, and expulsions. Crevel made an important
contribution to the movement and yet he also figures as its victim.
Having been initiated into spiritualism by an aristocratic English
lady, he introduced Breton to “hypnotic sleep,” which played so
large a role in the development of Surrealism and its use of
automatic writing or image-making. In a deep sleep, Crevel declaimed,
sang, yet apparently he had no memory of what had passed. These
experiments led the young writer to try to hang himself, and Breton
put an end to them. In the famous “Inquiry into Suicide,”
conducted by La Révolution surréaliste, Crevel eloquently justified
suicide as a solution to his dissatisfaction with his life.
‘The risks
involved in Surrealist practices, such as the debate on suicide and
the rehabilitation and simulation of madness, are obvious. The
extravagant declarations of Breton—that “living and not-living
are imaginary solutions,” or that the distinction between true and
false, good and evil, is “absurd”—must have had a harmful
effect on one like Crevel, whose hold on life was so precarious. The
whole objective of Surrealism was to undermine reason and logic.
Crevel could write a book paradoxically entitled L’Esprit contre la
raison (“Mind against Reason”), but he valued highly his own
critical intelligence and, having worked on a thesis on Diderot while
at the Sorbonne, he never lost interest in the eighteenth century as
the age of enlightenment.
‘Meanwhile,
profoundly loyal to André Breton, he was among those who “gave
proof of ABSOLUTE SURREALISM,” as Breton’s first Manifesto has
it. Only too well known is Breton’s concept of absolute Surrealist
revolt: to go down into the street with a revolver and to fire
haphazardly into the crowd. Time and experience have not been kind to
such irresponsible language, and too much real blood has been shed in
the streets for Breton’s words to be regarded as mere ink. One
difference between words and paint is that words have meaning and,
however “poetic,” cannot be totally divorced from reason and
logic. Perhaps that is why some Surrealist art tends to make a
greater impact than a good deal of strictly Surrealist literature.
Certainly, the confusion in Crevel’s mind between unreason and
reason must have been acute.
‘A way out of the
impasse appeared to be at hand for intellectuals in revolt: adherence
to the Revolution and membership in the Communist Party. Crevel
discovered Marx and dialectical materialism, and he began to quote
chunks from Engels and Lenin in his writings. He was among those who
wrote for the periodical Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution,
doubtless believing with Breton that to propagate the idea of
revolution would hasten the advent of the great cataclysm. In 1927
the author of La Mort difficile joined the French Communist Party; he
was expelled in 1933 and readmitted in 1934. None worked harder than
he did to try to reconcile the mistrustful party hacks and the
would-be revolutionary Surrealists or, as it was then put more
grandly, “Communism and Culture.” His efforts to establish
harmony during the preparations for the Communist-inspired First
International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in 1935
were thwarted by the exchange of insults and slaps between Ilya
Ehrenburg and André Breton, which led to the author of the
Surrealist Manifestos being denied permission to speak. This Congress
proved to be one of the early successes of Stalinism in the
international cultural sphere. There was in fact no way of
reconciling such fundamentally opposing attitudes to free thought and
free expression.
‘Crevel’s
failure to secure agreement between Surrealists and Communists is
thought to be one contributing cause of his suicide. Shortly before
his death, the former Communist André Thirion had expounded
privately—much to Crevel’s surprise—his own conviction that
Stalin represented as much of a threat to culture as Hitler. When
Crevel stayed with Dali at his home at Port-Lligat, the painter could
not have been very helpful when employing his “paranoia-criticism”
to provoke “the maximum number of hopeless antagonisms in every
situation.” Meanwhile, Crevel was becoming more critical of Andre
Breton, and was losing faith in Surrealism, as his letters to Tristan
Tzara of 1934-35 reveal. An adverse medical report prompted the young
novelist to write: “Please have my body cremated. Disgust,” and
to take his own life.
‘There is a
certain irony in prefacing Difficult Death with Dali’s memoir of
1954, as David Rattray has done. Crevel would have hated Dali’s
support for General Franco: he himself was keenly opposed to fascism,
having helped to create a committee of anti-fascist writers at the
time when the French fascists almost overthrew the government in
February 1934. It is equally ironic to find Ezra Pound’s essay on
Crevel, with its laudatory reference to Mussolini and its refrain on
usury, being used to preface a reprint of Crevel’s satirical novel,
Les Pieds dans le plat (“Putting One’s Foot In It”). Crevel
forcefully expressed his hatred of anti-Semitism and Hitler in that
novel, and his detestation of Mussolini elsewhere.
‘With La Mort
difficile, written in the year of his mother’s demise, Crevel
probes the conflict within the mother-fixated Pierre. The protagonist
is torn between his ambivalent regard for the self-sacrificing Diane
and his passion for Arthur Bruggle, an equivocal American modeled on
the painter Eugene MacCown, to whom the author was devoted. Dreamlike
elements and a rather mannered insistence on repetition betray the
work’s Surrealist connection. Black humor merges with self-pity.
David Rattray’s translation is at times ingenious. However,
Pierre’s mother admires slim legs as a token of breeding (signe de
race), not of “race.” In her prejudiced vocabulary, “foreigner”
is too anodyne a word for the pejorative métèque. A reference to
the poet Lamartine, hero of the Second Republic, is eluded: Crevel
liked to satirize the liberal “Lamartinian current,” otherwise
graciously qualified as “the dustbins of liberalism.” To find an
equivalent for the American’s amusingly painful misuse of French
genders looks impossible. One realizes how skillful, witty, and
idiosyncratic Crevel’s use of language can be. He had no small
talent as a punster, satirist, and polemicist.
‘After the
événements of May 1968 there was a revival of Crevel’s work in
France in the Seventies, when several of his books were reprinted.
One admirer went so far as to declare: “The explosion of May [1968]
places the figure of Crevel, that dark archangel, in the forefront of
those who refuse to live divided against themselves.” A curious
observation, surely, since in Crevel’s case that refusal meant
self-immolation. The rebellious author of Babylone could serve as
model for a new generation of rebels. He, too, was opposed to
religion, family, country (in whose name so many had perished in the
1914-18 War), and all existing institutions.
‘High among his
pet hates were liberal parliamentary democracy, capitalism,
colonialism, and imperialism. His terminology sometimes recalls that
of fashionable theorists of the Sixties and after. When he excoriates
the privileged swine (salauds) or invokes “oceans of wrath” to
drown the bourgeoisie and all its works, he sounds like a precursor
of Sartre and his heirs. Crevel’s heady combination of revolt,
homosexuality, and drug-taking doubtless remains in vogue in certain
circles even today.’ — Renee Winegarten
René Crevel, Difficult Death, Trans. by David
Rattray, North Point
Press, 1986.
His own thoughts,
his own nerve-ends, were they the brightest corals of the spirit and
flesh, amounted to so little in relation to the whole. No more than a
peninsula, not even that, a mere antenna rates the name Pierre Dumont
and experiences the surprises of this singular ocean. But out of the
sea of adventures has come a fleet of guilty boats which even now his
blood is sweeping along in quest of he knows not what harbor. Mangled
thoughts, shapeless desires, garbled secrets- are all these heading
for some less-than-final shipwreck?
"All aboard
Ratapoilopolis!" Pierre's mother holds her unforgiving nature on
nurture over her young Pierre's head. Eighteen years in the womb is
enough for any animal. It's the same old fight in casa Dumont-Dufour.
You look like your father so you are his packed bags. What is left
upstairs of that man, anyway? Amputated appendages with a memory like
it was today, perhaps a sex sweaty mustache. It's never ever today or
tomorrow, only ever yesterday today. The parents share that, at
least. I can't get rid of an idea of a slaughter-house for the mad.
The Ratapoilopolis (he may be crazy but that's no doubt true enough
of those places) he writes from keeps the flailing heads to dangle
for cheese. There's a spot for you with him in Ratapoilopolis,
Pierre, room for good for nothings. Papa's body will eventually catch
up to his mind in pieces, but for now he's writing the same haunting.
Leave her in ashes fires, forget her revenge. Does insanity choose
some people like in one of those haunted house movies? Open the
pandora's box and it's too late. You were seen.
Is suicide
contagious? Crevel and his father died by their own hands. (I don't
want to make that connection. There's another unspooling here,
exercising or exorcising I'm not sure which.) The seven suicides in
the Hemingway family. Maybe the idea became a carnivorous plant in
the mind, eating all of the light the other idea plants needed to
survive. Pierre's cool hand on his forehead is the daughter of a
suicide. Everyday when her daughter leaves for the world outside
their apartment Diane's mother memorizes the signs. Suicides appear
in families like blue eyes or red hair. The father's death-wish
shadow over her head, though not Diane's levitations. It made me sad
as the mother longs to sit a little closer to the young life, the
busy bustle she never had. I knew that Diane's heart is only in
Pierre. Art classes Pierre takes, his streets, his rotational pull.
Call it maternal love, a blanket to bundle in. Prayers of nothing
else can touch me. Their mummified love, layers of gauzy connections
from the hand he reaches for, slaps away. It makes me suspicious and
sick as much as Pierre is afraid of inheriting insanity. To be a
human and this is what you get. What if all any of this was is just
how someone feels about themselves when they are with you? What a
bunch of nothing that would be if it were true.... Pierre hates
Diane, despises her more for hating himself. I wonder if his buttons
push themselves as much as his mama ripped his organs that do stuff
and shoved them in his face. The wounded puppy and kittens whenever
he pulls away because he no longer wants to need her. Sure, blame it
all on Diane. I think it's all crap that it's between the thuggy
American Arthur Bruggle. He wants to fuck Arthur, because he's sex to
him, and why not, go somewhere, that limitless place where "I
will always love you" lives before it's born and where it goes
when it dies. And Diane is the old story of anyone who has ever been
settled for. I don't care if it is someone who can't fool themselves
they aren't homosexual. Any "just right now" placeholder,
backburner passion for the (oh I hate this so much) the dream lover
who makes the world worth living again. As if this is all there is.
You're doing it wrong if one person is responsible for everything.
Did you really wake up every day and go through the way days blur and
what you can't forget, won't forget and STILL choose to make it all
hang on one romantic partner? I call bullshit on this like any easy
answer on nature and nurture as a hurricane. If you didn't want to
get out of its way that's the story (I hope). Pierre had prowled the
streets, heart in lighted windows and a free soaring shadow. The
battle drums, homes that could go anywhere. Of course they don't. The
faces of strangers are the hunted and the prey. Oh Pierre, you had
had it. He knows what Arthur smells like when he has sex. The
shivering timbers of Diane's hand, the almosts. It's all fucked up
when you have to say it means everything. I say he knew what he
looked like when he sold himself too. Not just Arthur of the
next-next-next big thing, theatre world scenesters, rolling around in
patronage and give me smiles. Arthur wasn't too good for it for me
but he was for Pierre and that hurts me. Don't leave me just yet,
ever, don't look good on the arm of those whores. I don't care if
it's fair, nor the outcome, I'm looking for the relief. It gives me
this falling no escape (I can't resist seeing it again) when he gives
and takes away the halos. Why does anyone do this? The pieces look so
damned good to me. The veiny bloody bony part within what you call
it. No one is above it and why does it happen that some parts of
people's today dies and others cling on for dear life.
This is what got to
me. Diane's father. There's no use lamenting that some have fathers
who love them and others don't (it's the wish for things to be fair
just this once. Supposed-to-bes don't get up every day, they only lie
their head down at night). What digs in more than that, for me, is
the Russian man's only desire to go home. His wife and child he won't
taste. To the Volga boatman, bleeding hands and faces carved from
starved stone. To breathe their air he would be home. Did he truly
stop living in exile, unreached by their brothers where that still
happens? You could always go home to other people this way. Didn't he
see that?! It IS contagious, in all you could touch. I know what
Pierre thought, in how it all went down (dammit why?!). It's all in
the sun named in vain. What will outlive. Crevel said that "poetry
is the high road of freedom". I have mourned clarity, feared the
precipice of insanity and the death option. I could be night crawling
the streets in search of Pierre (not just him. Diane's mother got to
me in her it's not fair and the wish is more alive than oughtabe),
attempting the outrun of.... Yeah, when the desire is more alive than
oughtabes. I don't care about fair, I WISH that it wasn't Diane eye
and Arthur eye and nothing else, or else. Crevel's freedom is a
relief I need way too much. I don't know how to get at anything any
other way than just feeling it out. This feels.
He was alone. He was
empty. The adventure had begun when those ruby-and-felt birds, his
lungs, had flown out of his petrified throat and soared up in the
middle of the sky, sweeter than angels, which however as everyone
knows are boneless creatures, and his chest, prouder than the hull of
a brand-new ship, had rejoiced as if at last rid of a rather stupid
virginity - Mariel at goodreads
Difficult death, difficult book. Written after the death of author
Rene Crevel's mother, he endlessly pounds into protagonist Pierre’s
mother all through the book. There are also numerous mentions about
suicide, which Crevel eventually committed at the age of thirty-five.
In other words, there's a black cloud that hangs over this novel.
Difficult Death,
written in 1934, takes place during the Twenties about a young
Parisian artist's love for both a female art student and an American
hustler. The American hustler isn’t really made flesh until the
last twenty pages, making him a sort of human climax. It’s too bad
he doesn’t turn up until the end because that’s when Difficult
Death really comes alive, and I think the novel would have benefited
if he had more presence through the rest of the book.
Difficult Death is
audacious for tackling issues like bisexuality during the Thirties
but unfortunately rumbles at a laggard pace, weighing every emotion
and sentiment with four pages of endless ruminations. I wouldn't mind
reading something else by Crevel as long as it was pitched a little
higher. - Andy at goodreads
‘René Crevel (1900-35) was French Surrealist who initiated
experiments with hypnotic sleep. His greatest contribution to the
movement, however, was to demonstrate that Surrealism and the novel
could be reconciled. Whether texts such as Détours (1924), La Mort
difficile (1926), Babylone (1927), Êtes-vous fous? (1929), and Les
Pieds dans le plat (1933) are called ‘romans’ or ‘fictions’,
the role of language itself in their elaboration is arguably the key
element. Mon corps et moi (1925) is a confessional monologue and
L’Esprit contre la raison (1927) is his Surrealist manifesto.
‘Crevel was born
in Paris to a family of Parisian bourgeoisie. He had a traumatic
religious upbringing. At the age of fourteen, during a difficult
stage of his life, his father committed suicide by hanging himself.
Crevel studied English at the University of Paris. He met André
Breton and joined the surrealist movement in 1921, from which he
would be excluded in October 1923 due to Crevel’s homosexuality and
Breton’s belief that the movement had been corrupted. During this
period, Crevel wrote novels such as Mon corps et moi (“My Body and
Me”). In 1926, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis which made him
start using morphine. The 1929 exile of Léon Trotsky persuaded him
to rejoin the surrealists. Remaining faithful to André Breton, he
struggled to bring communists and surrealists closer together. Much
of Crevel’s work deals with his inner turmoil at being bisexual.
‘Crevel killed
himself by turning on the gas on his kitchen stove the night of June
18, 1935, several weeks before his 35th birthday. There were at least
two direct reasons: (1) There was a conflict between Breton and Ilya
Ehrenburg during the first “International Congress of Writers for
the Defense of Culture” which opened in Paris in June 1935. Breton,
who like all fellow surrealists, had been insulted by Ehrenburg in a
pamphlet which said – among other things – that surrealists were
pederasts, slapped Ehrenburg several times on the street, which led
to surrealists being expelled from the Congress. Crevel, who
according to Salvador Dalí, was “the only serious communist among
surrealists” (and was facing more and more solitude as the real
face of Soviet socialism started to occur), spent a whole day trying
to persuade the other delegates to allow surrealists back, but he was
not successful and left the Congress at 11pm, totally exhausted. (2)
Crevel reportedly had learned that he suffered from renal
tuberculosis right upon leaving the Congress. He left a note which
read “Please cremate my body. Loathing.”‘ — Wikipedia
