Correspondance: 1915-1928

by René Daumal

Le volume l de la Correspondance de René Daumal (1915-1928) couvre la première partie de sa vie. Les lettres, publiées dans l'ordre chronologique, croisées avec celles de ses correspondants, permettent de suivre l'auteur du Mont Analogue presque au jour le jour. Humoristiques ou sérieuses, elles éclairent les deux événements qui ont marqué sa jeunesse : le Simplisme et le Grand Jeu, le seul mouvement qui osa tenir tête à André Breton. De la communauté des adolescents de Reims au groupe des jeunes hommes unis et liés par la même recherche, elle nous fait vivre des moments drôles ou importants dans l'intimité de Roger Vailland ou de Gilbert-Lecomte ; elle nous fait connaître Maurice Henry et Artur Harfaux, Pierre Minet, Monny de Boully, Richard Weiner, Léon Pierre-Quint, Josef Sima et le climat de Montparnasse, des avant-gardes de l'époque - tout ce qui, à travers Daumal et Lecomte, fait que le Grand Jeu ne cesse de se jouer.

304 pages, Paperback

First published May 22, 1992

About the author

René Daumal was a French spiritual surrealist writer and poet. He was born in Boulzicourt, Ardennes, France.

In his late teens his avant-garde poetry was published in France's leading journals, and in his early twenties, although courted by André Breton co-founded, as a counter to Surrealism and Dada, a literary journal, Le Grand Jeu with three friends, collectively known as the Simplists, including poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. He is known best in the U.S. for two novels A Night of Serious Drinking and the allegorical novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing both based upon his friendship with Alexander de Salzmann, a pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff.

Daumal was self-taught in the Sanskrit language and translated some of the Tripitaka Buddhist canon into the French language, as well as translating the literature of the Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki into French.

He married Vera Milanova, the former wife of the poet Hendrik Kramer; after Daumal's death, she married the landscape architect Russell Page.

Daumal's sudden and premature death of tuberculosis on 21 May 1944 in Paris may have been hastened by youthful experiments with drugs and psychoactive chemicals, including carbon tetrachloride. He died leaving his novel Mount Analogue unfinished, having worked on it until the day of his death.

The motion picture The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky is based largely on Daumal's Mount Analogue.

William Walsh, an English poet, was a personal friend of Daumal and performed a radio presentation of Mount Analogue later in his life.