The BURIED Book Club discussion

Many thanks to Dalkey Archives for bringing this guy to my attention.

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.

From the forward to Putting My Foot in It (from MAJORLY BURIED author Edouard Roditi):

The origins of Crevel's peculiar preoccupations with both suicide and homosexuality can probably be attributed to a profound emotional shock experienced in his adolescence, when his father, a music publisher, appears to have been compromised in some homosexual scandal and suddenly hung himself in their family home. […] Crevel was then fourteen years old and his mother, an apparently sadistic moralist, insisted on displaying to her children their father’s corpse in order to impress on their minds the full extent of the “shame” that the poor man’s “sin” and death had brought upon his widow and offspring.

YIKES. Back to the bio:

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 18 June 1935, several weeks before his 35th birthday.

Also noted in the preface, he hung out with Kay Boyle (amongst other American expatriates back in the 1920’s.

He has had four of his works translated into English:

My Body and I (1925)
Difficult Death (1926)
Babylon (1927)
Putting My Foot in It (1933)

Most frustratingly, his book Êtes-vous fous ? is referenced in the forward (to, again, Putting My Foot in It) with the following:

which remains, in many ways untranslatable

this is followed by a foonote where the Dalkey editor states "David Rattray is translating this for eventual publication by Dalkey Archives Press as Are You Crazy?: 22 years later and this has still not occurred.

Ronald wrote: " From the forward to Putting My Foot in It (from MAJORLY BURIED author Edouard Roditi): "

Indeed. You know anything about him?

Nothing besides the forward. He name drops a metric-fuckton of names in the Forward, all people involved with the Surrealist scene back in the '20's and '30's, and I have to assume that there are some buried folk in there as well.

I'll dig in later and look around, and see what can be excavated. For now, work calls.

Ronald wrote: "the Surrealist scene back in the '20's and '30's"

I don't count myself as a surrealist fan ; but we've got a few floating around this region. And so I'm asking, Anyone know of a milieu-biography or history of the general movement/era? Specifically literary surrealism, distinct from lit-modernism and other surrealist arts. Just would be something good to know about. Nate D?

My review of Putting My Foot in It can be found here.

Not quite as good as I had hoped - and that the opening chapter would suggest - but it has an upper-level-caliber conclusion that is worth sticking around for.

Have to remind myself one day why we ADD'd this guy. c-n-p ::


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Tough call. Four of his things have been English'd, and fairly recently ; although as I get older I have to remind myself that the '90's is no longer recently. But I've already invested some Librarian time ; so I'd hate to just leave that all to amazon's profit.

194 ratings · 14 reviews · 9 distinct works .......... ; ... ? .... ---; ......................... --):

okay so but remember how The BURIED Book Club is all about MY selfish needs to find books, etc? Well, all I need to do in a difficult case like this is make up some (further) arbitrary criteria in order to justify my inclusion of this HIGHly rate'd BURIED book. So here goes. FOUR books in English from FOUR different backHOE pub'ers. ---most importantly, I see only TWO reviews from what I arbitrarily call MY CORN(er) of gr ; only two names I recognize reviewing this guy ; and only TWO reviews with any quantity of LIKES (whereby, LIKES = EYEballs, ie, people who may have seen the REview, but not read the book, and reading reviews about books is part of knowing about the book's existence and being that much closer to reading the book itSELF).

Have I thoroughly justified my breaking my own arbitrary criteria?

ADD Please. (bold'd for your convenience)

Also, on that Crevel page you'll find :: Atlas Anthology Three, which may contain further nuggets.
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

This guy sounds completely interesting, so thanks Ronald. But having been invoked above I'll give some context on the general span of surrealist scene at that time.

I think the 20s were probably their prime era of activity. Without any research or fact-checking here's my impression of how thatall went down:

-All the early surrealists cut there teeth on Paris Dada, from the late teens on
-First major automatic text The Magnetic Fields by Breton and Pierre Soupault hit in 1920
-Everyone (mostly Breton and Soupault plus Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Bejamin Peret, etc) did a lot of automatism for a while, but this was more an exploratory technique so as to move forward from the wreckage of Dada without moving backwards into the reactionary pre-war literary forms that had plowed us into global disaster
-the Surrealist Manifesto hit in 1924 outlining this new way forward
-by 1927 basically no one knew what to do anymore, automatism being problematic for variously cited reasons depending who you asked ("mental hygiene", not really being a worthwhile ends in itself) By then, Aragon and Soupault had both been kicked out essentially for having bourgeois literary goals (ie they wrote books that were actually better than those of most of their contemporaries)
-At that point, though surrealist activity continued strong at least until WWII, I think it was most popularly represented in other modalities, yielding the domination in the public eye by Ernst (who I love) and Dali (who I loathe) and others that continues today. It seems like no one knew exactly what to do with words until more directed young fantasists like Leonora Carrington and Gisele Prasinos took up the form in the late 30s.

Honestly, the best books by Surrealists were not automatic texts (Carrington, Nelly Kaplan, Ithell Colquhoun), and I think many of the best surrealist books are all too often by non-capital-S-surrealists (ie Cortazar is great surrealist writer, but never a Surrealist).

But that spurt of activity in the 20s, which Crevel seems to have emerged out of, laid all the groundwork and I really can't stop coming back to it. As such, I have hopes for this guy.

Difficult Death and Babylon are worth reading (especially if you are drawn to unrest from poetry or a painting you have to keep looking at). Buried author Kay Boyle translated Babylon into English.

I own but haven't read Putting my foot in it (the Dalkey edition with the Rikki Ducornet cover art) and My body & I.

I loved My Body and I and would highly recommend it. Unfortunately I didn't review it (and don't remember why), but there are a couple of quotes in my status updates that should give you a taste. Also here is another quote I pulled from my reading notes:

Only the bruise of dreams will flourish, the sadness of eyelids and eyes hope that the veil is never lifted whose softness guards against a scene replayed and a disorder without possibility, in which, throughout the day and many others to come, we must look for reasons to continue living.

From Ronald's review, Putting My Foot in It sounds like a very different sort of book than My Body and I. This one is not so much a novel, as it is a work of poetic psychological fiction. Eddie's review provides a good snapshot.

Thanks, Sean. I believe I will read My Body & I soon. I did a "am I in the mood for this?" test on Putting my foot in it and am waiting for the right mood. "poetic psychological" is a great way to describe him.