The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  Crevel came to Breton’s attention when it became known that he was an adept at the ‘sleeping fits’ that were for a time the centre of Surrealist attraction. With the poet Robert Desnos – with whom he vied for Breton’s attentions – Crevel developed a strange facility for passing into a trance and producing the kind of ‘stream of unconsciousness’ verbiage that fascinated Breton, and which was the subject of his and Philippe Soupault’s collaboration The Magnetic Fields. Crevel discovered his talent for producing the ‘psychic automatisms’ by which Breton later defined Surrealism while attending a séance. Sitting around the table holding hands, Crevel almost immediately nodded off and, as reported by the others, produced some remarkable statements, of which he later had no memory. When Crevel heard that Breton was exploring dreams and other altered states of consciousness, he told him of his experience. Breton was intrigued, and for a time Crevel and Desnos ran a sort of contest to see who could fall into trance quickest and produce the most fascinating material.

  But poetic ‘channelling’ wasn’t the only attraction Crevel had for Breton. Like Jacques Vaché, Crevel was handsome, a beautiful boy with an angelic face ringed with golden curls; Dali, with whom he also had a close relationship, described Crevel’s looks as “the sullen, deaf, Beethovenesque, bad-angel face of a fern shoot.”26 Also like Vaché, and perhaps less attractive, Crevel was a drug user, more or less an addict, and bouts of heavy opium and cocaine use would alternate with periods of detoxification, a routine that hardly helped the tuberculosis he suffered from and which, just prior to his suicide, was diagnosed as incurable. Another trait he may have shared with Vaché was his homosexuality, which Breton could not have been ignorant of, but which Crevel, because of his devotion to Breton, was forced to hide as a kind of open secret. Crevel may really have been bisexual, as he did have relationships with women, but it’s clear that, for the sake of his relationship with Breton, he pretended not to like men.

  Crevel’s sexual preference was enough to create inner conflict, given that his surrogate father abhorred it. But there were other contradictions. Crevel was a fervent Marxist and a believer in the proletarian revolution – as many middle-class people were – yet, like Jean Cocteau (another opium user), he was a darling of high society, and enjoyed rubbing elbows with the rich and famous. He was also the author of novels, a literary form that Breton in particular loathed. His political beliefs finally led him to reject the Surrealists, but his devotion to Breton, and his attempts to reconcile it with his commitment to the revolution, was in the end what killed him.

  Although Breton had embraced the revolution and, like other avant-garde poets – Mayakovsky, for example, about whom we will have more to say later on – he had seen his work as a means of effecting political change, he grew disenchanted with the communists and by the early Thirties, was an outspoken critic of Stalin and the show trials. Crevel had joined the French Communist Party in 1927, but, as with the rest of his life, his relations with it fluctuated. In 1933 he, along with Breton and the other Surrealists, was expelled from the party and from the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, a group that participated in agit-prop activities more or less sanctioned by the communists. For all their dedication to ‘the revolution’, most of the politicos exhibited rather bourgeois tastes and found Surrealism too strange and subversive for their liking. Crevel had also published a novel, Les Pieds dans le plat (“Putting My Foot In It”), in which he made blatant reference to his, and others, homosexuality, a candour unwelcome among the Stalinists, who were as bourgeois in their ideas about sex as they were in those about art. Breton remained adamantly beyond the pale, but Crevel managed to get readmitted to the party the next year.

  Although emotionally loyal to Breton, Crevel disagreed with him politically; he had also disagreed with the tribunal Breton subjected Dali to over his unseemly glorification of Hitler, whom, Dali insisted, should be considered surrealistically, and whom he referred to as the “edible-paranoid great man,” whose “soft eyes” and “curvaceous fanny” were “possessed of an irresistible poetic charm.”27 (Dali’s politics, at the best of times madcap, did turn toward fascism and he ended up a devout Francoist.) By this time Crevel had also realized that, given the increasing fascist threat, his most immediate loyalty must be to the communists, who seemed to form the only real opposition to Hitler, Dali’s appreciation of him notwithstanding. Yet although he withdrew from most Surrealist activities, he was loathe to let Breton go – if only to avoid suffering the fate of those who had gotten into the Black Pope’s bad books – and he lobbied hard for Breton to take part in the Congress of Writers in Defence of Culture organized by the party, to be held in Paris in June 1935. Crevel seemed to be making some headway, but, ironically, because of a chance event – something Breton prized highly – Crevel’s efforts in the end were practically useless.

  Shortly before the Congress, Breton, his second wife Jacqueline Lamba, Benjamin Péret and some members of the Czech Surrealist group were out one evening, when one of the Czechs saw the Soviet critic Ilya Ehrenburg leaving a café. Breton had never met Ehrenburg, although he was well known in Paris, but a year before Breton was enraged by a pamphlet Ehrenburg had written, denouncing Surrealism and the Surrealists as ‘pederasts’ and ‘dreamers’ among other things and singling out Breton in particular. The Czechs pointed Ehrenburg out, and Breton went up to him and introduced himself by announcing that he had a bone to pick with him. Ehrenburg feigned not to know the name ‘André Breton’, and, to refresh his memory, Breton slapped him in the face, each time repeating one of the epithets from his pamphlet: “André Breton the pederast” (slap) “André Breton the dreamer” (slap), and so on. Then it was Péret’s turn. Ehrenburg merely covered his face with his hands and said, “You’ll be sorry for that.” He then promptly reported the incident to his superiors and the idea of a Surrealist speaking at the Congress – which would include major players like Gide, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Malraux, E. M. Forster, Brecht, Aldous Huxley among others – became a non-issue.

  Crevel was not ready to give up and he spent the forty-eight hours before the Congress trying to get the party to change its mind, and trying to get Breton to make a conciliatory gesture. Neither injured party was ready to budge, and in a last chance effort, Crevel addressed a committee meeting. Ehrenburg merely remarked that Breton had “acted like a cop,” and that seemed enough: none of the Parisians wished to alienate the Russians, and were Breton allowed to speak, Ehrenburg assured them the Soviets would boycott the Congress, which was unthinkable.28 Crevel was humiliated. He then went home, swallowed a massive dose of sedatives, turned on the stove and gassed himself.

  In looking for a trigger for Crevel’s suicide, we have several candidates: his failure to dissuade the communists to relent or to persuade Breton to apologize; his inability to reconcile his love for the Black Pope with his rejection of his politics; his repeated drug addictions; his homosexuality; the fact that on the day he committed suicide he had discovered that his tuberculosis, which he believed had been cured, had in actuality gotten worse and was spreading; his recent pitiful performance lecturing to workers who he realized saw him as “just a rich kid with problems, slumming;”29 or, underlining all the rest, what must have been the gruesomely traumatic memory of his father’s death. Dali, who was a close friend, hearing about the Congress debacle, realized Crevel needed some support, and telephoned him, only to receive what must have seemed like a particularly surreal answer: an unfamiliar voice advised him to get a taxi and come at once, as Crevel was dying. When Dali arrived, he found a fire engine parked in front of Crevel’s building, and firemen in his flat. “With the gluttony of a nursing baby,” Dali wrote, “René was sucking oxygen. I never saw anyone cling so desperately to life.”30 His attachment to it, sadly, was brief; he died in hospital that evening. Crevel’s note, tied to his wrist, speaks of his self-hatred. It read, “René Crevel. Please cremate me. Disgust.”31

  Although Crevel had called suicide a m
atter of “conscious choice,” it isn’t difficult to see that his was the product of an inordinate number of personal crises, compounded by desperation and a sense of personal failure. Even Breton, who had been accused in print of practically murdering Crevel by one of René’s Catholic friends, understood this, and in his defence spelled out the probable reasons, listed above, for Crevel’s death. Six years earlier, however, another young Surrealist who had taken his own life seemed to meet the Vaché standard with greater accuracy. According to Tristan Tzara, Jacques Rigaut committed suicide “after having exhausted all the reasons for living a man can offer himself.”32 For Breton, Rigaut had “sentenced himself to death at about the age of twenty and waited impatiently for ten years, ticking off the hours, for exactly the right moment to put an end to his existence. It was, in any case, a fascinating human experience, to which he knew just how to give that peculiar tragic-comic twist which was unique to himself.”33 One doesn’t want to deny Breton his insight into his friends’ lives and deaths, but it is interesting how often they seem to coincide with his own personal mythology.

  Jacques Rigaut resembles Vaché in another way: his literary remains are very slim, and what there are of them display an obsessive preoccupation with suicide. This was something that was more or less applauded by those of his friends who enjoyed a greater literary girth. For Paul Eluard, “The weapon aimed at life by the suicide is always right. No rubble nor ruins shall be left standing after the will which burns and destroys everything has passed by. But such an act leaves the strength of whoever has committed it intact. The regret at having been born and the need to die vanish with the world they have killed.” For Breton, “Jacques Rigaut … slips a revolver under his pillow every evening. Such is his way of expressing agreement with the generally held opinion that the night will give you council, and of hoping to dispose of the malefactors within, in other words all conventional means of adaptation.” Yet for the successful portrait painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, for whom Rigaut worked as a secretary, and who seemed to understand him better than his younger friends, “Theoretic suicide, which was already all the fashion, and which was to become one of the leitmotifs of Surrealism, had left its funeral mark on him, even to his affectation of ‘accepting’ a life of the most conventional and futile sort.”34 He was also for Blanche, “one of those wayward sons for whom a mother, a father, his sisters are everyday led to fear the worst.”35

  Like Vaché, Rigaut’s contribution to Dada, and later to Surrealism, was his “total world weariness and cynical humour,”36 a qualification that, however, could be applied to practically all of his compatriots. He once told Jacques-Émile Blanche that during the war he had “no feeling whatsoever as he saw his dearest comrade drop at his side,” displaying a predilection for ‘umour that no doubt would have met with Vaché’s approval. But to the more perceptive, Rigaut’s “haughty attitude,” which was “quite in fashion at the time in Dada circles,” was merely “the absurd braggadocio of a mild and timid being.”37 Yet this mild and timid being was obsessed with his own death.

  Although at times Rigaut’s take on suicide was equivocal – “There are no reasons for living, but there are also no reasons for dying either,” he wrote, “Life is not worth the trouble of departing from it”38 – these hesitations are perhaps the somewhat mandatory expressions of a truly total world-weariness, weary even of itself. But on the whole, suicide was something he identified with deeply. “As long as I cannot overcome my taste for pleasure, I well know that I shall be susceptible to the intoxication of suicide.”39 “Try, if you can, to arrest a man who travels with suicide in his buttonhole.”40 “Suicide should be a vocation.”41 In a sketch published many years after his death, “The General Suicide Agency,” Rigaut is “pleased to announce to its clients that it can now GUARANTEE THEM AN INSTANTANEOUS DEATH,” a claim that promises to be attractive to those who put off killing themselves “for fear of making a mess,”42 and an idea that Robert Louis Stevenson employed some years earlier (see “The Suicide Club” in A Suicidal Miscellany). In an untitled piece, Rigaut informs us that “The first time I killed myself it was to annoy my mistress.” The second time, he tells us, it was from laziness. And third time,

  I had just gone to bed after an evening on which my boredom had been no more overwhelming than any other night. I took the decision and, at the same time, I clearly remember that I articulated the sole reason. Then, drat! I got up to go and look for the only weapon in the house, a little revolver that one of my grandfathers had bought and which was loaded with bullets from the same epoch … Lying down naked on my bed, I was naked in the room. It was cold. [Shades of Vaché!] I hurriedly buried myself under the blankets. I cocked the hammer, I could feel the cold of the steel in my mouth. At that moment I could probably feel my heart beating, just as I could feel it beating as I listened to the whistle of a shell before it exploded, as if in the presence of something irrevocable but still unconsummated. I pressed the trigger, the hammer clicked, but the shot didn’t fire. I then laid the weapon on a small table … Ten minutes later I was asleep … It goes without saying that I did not for an instant consider firing a second shot.43

  Rigaut concludes by saying that, “The important thing was not whether I died or not but that I had taken the decision to die.” It was a decision the fulfilment of which came a decade later, although one wonders if at this point he had already begun the habit of making his decisions based on a throw of dice, a motif that would later be put to successful use by Luke Rhinehart, in his novel The Dice Man. In the meantime, Rigaut engaged in what was increasingly the surreal norm. After WWI, he worked, as mentioned, as a secretary for Jacques-Émile Blanche. Then in 1924 he met a rich American divorcee – like Crevel, he had an entrée into the world of money – and when she returned to New York, he followed her. They married, but it was not a success, and a year later they separated. Rigaut remained in New York where he lived in poverty and became addicted to alcohol and drugs, mostly heroin, again like Crevel. In 1928 he returned to France, where he admitted himself to several detoxification clinics, hoping to kick his habit, but with little luck. We don’t know whether he threw his dice or not, but on November 5, 1929, he finally came around to firing that second shot, that he put on hold ten years earlier. In a clinic at Châtenay-Malabry, “after paying minute attention to his toilette, and carrying out all the necessary external adjustments demanded of such a departure”44 (again the similarity to Vaché is striking), Rigaut placed a rubber sheet under his body, lined up the trajectory of the bullet with a ruler, and, using a pillow to muffle the sound, shot himself through the heart.

  Rigaut’s “affectation” of a “most conventional life,” which included doing his best not to leave a mess or to disturb his fellow patients, must rank as one of the most considerate suicides on record, perhaps topped only by the German-Jewish writer Egon Friedell who, facing arrest and deportation to a death camp, chose instead to throw himself out of a window, calling to the people below to “watch out.” Friedell belongs to the Political Suicides. They may or may not have been a polite bunch, but as we will see in the next section, he was sadly not alone.

  Notes

  1 Satie’s score, considered revolutionary at the time, owes much to an earlier and sadly little-known pioneer in the art of ‘noise composition’, the Symbolist and Futurist painter and ‘noisician’ Luigi Russolo. See my article “Ready to Rumble: Luigi Russolo and The Art of Noise” in the December 2003 issue of Wire.

  2 André Breton Manifestoes of Surrealism (University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1974) p. 125. Breton was, to be sure, not the only surrealist who indulged in visions of violence. Salvador Dali once remarked, apropos of an anarchist bomb planted in a first class carriage of a train, that planting it in a third class one would have made a greater scandal. He went on to declare that, aside from its political and surreal value, blowing up the poor was a form of sexual perversion for him, providing “erection, irresistible masturbatory desires, [and] splendid wet dre
ams.” Quoted in Ruth Brandon Surreal Live: The Surrealists (Macmillan: London, 1999) p. 395.

  3 André Breton Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism (Paragon House: New York, 1993) p. 19.

  4 Ibid. p. 17.

  5 Mark Polizzotti Revolution of The Mind: The Life of André Breton (Bloomsbury: London, 1995) p. 61; Ruth Braddon Surreal Lives: The Surrealists (Macmillan: London, 1999) p. 11.

  6 Mark Polizzotti, p. 38.

  7 Ruth Brandon, p. 28.

  8 The other literary figure that Vaché had something good to say about was, oddly enough, André Gide, whose Les Caves du Vatican was a favourite among the proto-surrealists. Gide’s hero, Lafcadio, is given to what Gide calls ‘gratuitous acts,’ such as murdering a stranger on a train for no apparent reason, what we today would call a ‘motiveless’ killing. Lafcadio’s ‘gratuitous acts’ share much with the behaviour of Dostoyevsky’s Stavrogin, whose penchant for performing ‘unnecessary’ acts of evil included rape and near murder. Although Gide maintained that Lafcadio was pure invention, Jean Cocteau claimed that the character was based on the boxing Dadaist Arthur Cravan. Vaché, Cravan and Stavrogin are, of course, all examples of the literary suicide. For an interesting treatment of the ‘gratuitous act’ and its relation to the ‘motiveless crime’, see “The Passive Fallacy” in Colin Wilson Order of Assassins (Panther: St. Albans, 1975).