DELICIOUSDEITY: November 2021

Largely forgotten now, René Crevel was an author in a movement that was, at least for me, considerably more visual than textual. He was a Surrealist, back in the day when publishing a manifesto meant something. These days it's just good looks and bling. Talent arrives a paltry third. Fraught by his sexuality, troubled in his youth, he was destined to live only 34 years. Maybe a few of the reasons he is mostly forgotten now is that he not only died young, but that his legacy was swept away by the Second World War and the rise of the corporate state. Political slap fests are common these days. 'Isms' have gone out of fashion.

Cultivated and charming, he came from the Parisian middle class establishment and was socially connected. Crevel's father put a rope around his neck in 1914, initiating a family trauma. Crevel apparently despised his mother. As a young boy he was haunted by a religious upbringing which left emotional scars, probably due to his hard-wired love for other men. During the middle 20s and ending in 1927, he had an affair with Eugene McCown, that flagrant, withering flame, who introduced Crevel to Jean Cocteau. With the introduction to Cocteau, he subsequently rubbed shoulders with the whole of the brilliant Parisian expat community between the wars. Stein, Thomson, Hemingway, Cunard, van Vechten, Gide, Fitzgerald, Tchelitchew, Flanner. He was George Platt Lynes occasional lover.

In 1923 he was expelled by the Surrealists. Although Crevel ardently followed Andre Breton, as the leader of the Surrealists he and his fellow members were a fairly homophobic tribe. Breton's single-minded need to sustain the status quo within the movement (ie, no queers) isolated Crevel. Regardless, Breton, to his credit, did later say that without Crevel they "would have lost one of the most beautiful pillars of Surrealism." By the next year Crevel found that he had contracted tuberculosis and would make frequent spa trips to Switzerland. Alcohol, opium, and cocaine would also make for palliative alternatives in his suffering. Even morphine is mentioned.

What had brought Crevel and Breton together was the written word, so after his dismissal Crevel plunged into a period of writing all through the 1920s. Détours, Mon Corps et moi, La Mort difficile, and Babylone are a handful of his titles from this period. A Difficult Death chronicles his affair with McCown, and his hated mother also makes an appearance, both guised with pseudonyms, of course. Much is made in his work of the struggles he had with his sexuality, and his preoccupation with politics, both clear on the page. Salvador Dali called him the "one true Communist" of the group he had been expelled from. He hated parliamentary democracy, Fascism, the Bourgeoisie, Capitalism, etc. It's a long list. He was also an arch satirist and polemicist.

By the early thirties he had made his way back into the group. The exile of Leon Trotsky to Mexico in 1929 prompted his reappearance. Having roots in Communist and Anarchist ideals, the Surrealists saw the aggressions of Stalin as the beginnings of a split. This split, between kowtowing to Moscow or giving vent to one's own artistic expression, would come to a head for Crevel and his group by the middle of the decade.

The Congress of Writers 'For the Defence of Culture' was an event held in Paris between June 21st and 25th, 1935. Organised to counter the rise of Fascism and a resurgent Germany, it was attended by over 3000 in afternoon and evening sessions. Loudspeakers were set up outside the Maison de la Mutualité for those who could not be accommodated inside. It was during this Congress that Crevel would make a last ditch effort to try to unite his broken brotherhood.

During the event Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg would accuse the Surrealists of being a band of pederasts (clearly a gibe pointed directly at Crevel). This thrown gauntlet was countered by Breton slapping Ehrenburg more than a few times in the face. Ehrenburg apparently gave back as well. The Surrealists were denied permission to speak, which essentially meant being expelled from the Congress. Crevel did his best to negotiate entry again by spending time into the late hours on diplomacy, without success.

Beaten down by illness and depression, exhausted by his attempts to reverse the edict of the Congress, he turned on the gas in the kitchen of his Paris flat and took his own life. He was weeks away from his 35th birthday. To be honest, he had often been haunted by the spectre of suicide. Aside from his father's death, he had strung a noose around his neck during an experiment in 'hypnotic sleep'. He vehemently exclaimed 'Yes!' after a piece written by Breton asked the question 'Suicide: is it a solution?' Crevel affirmed his view by saying it was "the most correct and ultimate solution." In his novel Détours, he actually outlines exactly the method of death-by-gas that he later employed. His short suicide note firmly acclaims, "Please cremate my body. Loathing."

In my research for this essay I did find some confusing information. The Congress was held between the 21st and 25th of June, 1935. His suicide is stated as June 18th. Was the drama between Ehrenburg and the Surrealists a precursor to the Congress? For all the literary ink spilled about the reasons he did in fact take his life, it doesn't fit. Another was the question of his sexuality. He is stated as homosexual here, bisexual there. He did apparently have an affair with Dorothea Sternheim in 1928 during a stay in Berlin, even going as far as a proposal. Not that it matters. Let's call him pan-sexual. He was ultimately a généraliste fatal.

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, in 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