René Crevel
The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides; Dead Letters by Gary Lachman (2007)
[....] That Crevel believed, “Suicide is a matter of conscious choice” must have enamoured him to Breton, and throughout their relationship, which was full of contradictions and crises, and which ended with Crevel’s own suicide at the age of thirty-five in 1935, Breton was something of a father figure for Crevel (who was only four years younger than Breton). That Crevel sought such figures and that the question of suicide was associated with them, is rooted in the gruesome circumstance of his own father’s suicide, when Crevel was fourteen. His father, a music-publisher, hanged himself, and René’s mother, an apparent sadist, intent on teaching the boy some lesson, forced him to look at the dangling body while she cursed it.25 Understandably, Crevel loathed his mother thereafter. The rest of his life was punctuated by episodes of a similar traumatic character. In answer to a similar questionnaire posed by another avant-garde journal, Le Disque vert (edited by Henri Michaux and Franz Hellens), Crevel had written, “Is not the fear of suicide the best remedy against suicide?” Perhaps Crevel didn’t fear it enough, or perhaps this is simply not true. Or perhaps Crevel was simply trying to bolster his own defences against something that he may have felt was inevitable, just as it is possible that his remark about suicides being free of the “quasi-universal cowardice” mistakenly associated with the taboo was a way of refuting the hysterical abuse his mother threw at the defenceless corpse of his father.
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."
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.”
P 99
The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides; Dead Letters by Gary Lachman (2007)
