Between April 1912 and April 1915 appeared and disappeared the five issues – now impossible to find – of the little magazine Maintenant, edited by Arthur Cravan. This magazine displayed an entirely new conception of literature and art, somewhat akin to the fairground wrestler or lion tamer vis-à-vis refined entertainments. Out of hatred for stifling bookstores in which everything is jumbled together and begins crumbling to dust even when new, Cravan hawked his copies of Maintenant from a greengrocer’s cart: twenty-five centimes apiece! This very short, very limited enterprise seems, in retrospect, to have possessed decongestive properties of the first order. It is impossible not to see in it the harbinger of Dada, although it sought its solution to the intellectual malaise from an entirely different angle. Cravan proposed to rehabilitate temperament, in almost the physical sense of the word (regression not toward individual childhood, but toward that of the world, toward prehistory, the love of the uncle – in this case, Oscar Wilde, presented in his old age as a pachyderm: ‘I adored him because he resembled a huge beast’; and the poet adopts these lyrical accents to describe himself: ‘I had folded my six-foot frame into the car, where my knees jutted forward like two polished globes, and I noticed how the cobblestones reflected rainbows of garnet-red gristle criss-crossed with green beefsteaks’). Proclaiming that ‘every great artist has the sense of provocation,’ he chose sarcastic confessions and insults as his favourite weapons. Whereas Rimbaud objects in tears: ‘I do not understand your laws. I have no moral sense. I am a brute … I am a beast, a Negro savage,’ Cravan moves it onto the level of an apologia, of total demand: ‘Anyone can understand that I’d take a big, stupid Saint Bernard over Miss Froufrou, who can dance all the steps of the gavotte, and, in any case, a yellow man over a white man, a Negro over a yellow man, and a Negro boxer over a Negro student.’ Without seeking to rectify the erroneous judgments to which his predilection for boxers, swimmers, and other specialists of physical culture had led him in artistic matters, Cravan, in the fourth issue of Maintenant, penned a review of the Salon des Indépendants that remains a masterpiece of humour as applied to art criticism: ‘How far all this is from train wrecks!’ he exclaims. ‘Maurice Denis should paint in heaven, for he knows nothing about tuxedos or toe jam. Not that I find it especially daring to paint an acrobat or someone taking a shit, since, on the contrary, I believe that a rose painted with some imagination is much more demoniacal … If I were as famous as Paul Bourget I’d appear every night in some cabaret review wearing a G-string, and you can bet I’d fill the house.’
During the war, not content with having been a deserter from several countries, Cravan took pains to call upon his person the most tumultuous kinds of attention and disapproval. Invited to give a lecture on humour in New York, he climbed onstage completely drunk and began stripping off his clothes, until the room emptied and the police came to cart him off; in Spain, he challenged world champion boxer Jack Johnson and got himself knocked out in the first round. He is known to have been for a brief time, in 1919, a physical education instructor at the athletic academy in Mexico City; he was preparing a lecture on Egyptian art. We lose all trace of him shortly afterward in the Gulf of Mexico, where he cast off one night in the lightest of small craft.
BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: Selected texts, in 4 Dada Suicides.
One day after a long period of horrible indolence, as I was feverishly dreaming of getting very rich (my god! how often I dreamed of that!), I had reached the part where I made my eternal plans, and as I was gradually warming up by thinking of dishonest (and so unexpected) ways to make my fortune via poetry – I’ve always seen art as a means rather than an end – I cheerfully said to myself, ‘I should pay a call on Gide. He’s a millionaire. What a gas it would be to take that old scribbler for a ride!’
Right then – isn’t it the thought that counts? – I bestowed upon myself a phenomenal gift for success. I wrote Gide a note, giving my kinship with Oscar Wilde as a reference; Gide agreed to see me. He found me to be a marvel, with my size, my shoulders, my beauty, my eccentricities, my words. Gide couldn’t get enough of me; I thought he was okay. Already we were running away to Algeria; he made another trip to Biskra, and I fully intended to drag him all the way to the Somali Coast. – My head soon tanned to a golden brown, for I’ve always been rather ashamed of my whiteness. And Gide paid for the first class coupés, the noble steeds, the palaces, the lovers. I finally gave substance to several of my thousands of souls. Gide paid, and paid some more; and I dare hope that he won’t sue me for damages if I admit to him that in the unwholesome shamelessness of my galloping imagination, he went so far as to sell his solid Normandy farmhouse to satisfy my modern childish whims.
Ah! I can still see the way I depicted myself back then, legs stretched out on the seats of the Mediterranean express, spewing out the most preposterous fancies to amuse my patron.
People might say that I have the mores of an Androgyde. Might people say that?
In any case, I succeeded so poorly in my little plan of exploitation that I’m going to have to take some revenge. I will add, so as not to alarm our readers from the provinces unduly, that I especially took a dislike to M. Gide on the day when, as I explained above, I realized that I would never squeeze ten lousy centimes out of him, and when, moreover, that threadbare stuffed shirt permitted himself to rip apart – on the grounds of talent – the naked cherub they call Théophile Gautier.
So I went to see M. Gide. I recall that in those days I didn’t own a suit, and I still regret it, for it would have been so easy to dazzle him. As I neared his villa, I recited to myself the sensational phrases that I was determined to utter in the course of our conversation. A moment later I rang at the door. A maid came to open (M. Gide has no footmen). They had me go up one flight and asked me to wait in a kind of little cell, which one reached via a corridor that bent at a right angle. Passing by, I cast a curious eye into different rooms, trying to glean some advance information about the guest accommodation. Now I was sitting in my little corner. Picture windows, which I found rather chintzy, let the daylight fall onto a writing desk on which lay a few sheets freshly moistened with ink. Naturally, I did not fail to commit the little indiscretion that you can guess. And so I can report that M. Gide polishes his prose something awful and that he must not give the typographers anything before the fourth draft at least.
The maid came to bring me back downstairs. The moment I entered the salon, some high-strung little lapdogs squeaked out a few barks. Things could have been going better. But M. Gide would soon come – and still, I had plenty of time to look around. The spacious room contained modern and not very attractive furniture; no paintings, bare walls (simple intent or simplistic attempt), and especially something very Protestant and fussy about the room’s arrangement and cleanliness.
For an instant, I even broke out in a rather unpleasant sweat at the thought that I might have soiled the carpet. I would probably have satisfied my curiosity a bit further, or yielded to the exquisite temptation to slip some small trinket into my pocket, had I been able to rid myself of the very distinct feeling that M. Gide was spying on me through some secret little hole in the wallpaper. If I was mistaken, I beg M. Gide to kindly accept the immediate and public apologies that I owe his dignity.
Finally, the man appeared. (What struck me most from that minute on is that he offered me absolutely nothing, except perhaps a seat, whereas at about four in the afternoon a cup of tea, if one is fond of economy, or better still a few liquors from the Orient, are rightly considered, in European society, conducive to the mood that sometimes makes it intoxicating.)
‘Monsieur Gide,’ I began, ‘I have taken the liberty of coming to see you, and yet I feel I must tell you straight away that I’d take boxing, for instance, over literature any day.’
‘Literature is nonetheless the only ground on which we may meet,’ my interlocutor replied rather curtly.
I thought to myself: This fellow gets the most out of life!
So we spoke about literature, and as he was about to ask me the question that must have been particularly dear to him – ‘What books of mine have you read?’ – I uttered without batting an eyelid, my gaze as sincere as I could make it: ‘I am afraid to read you.’ I imagine M. Gide must have batted quite a few eyelids.
Little by little, then, I managed to place my famous phrases, which only shortly before I was still reciting to myself, thinking that the novelist, like the uncle, should be grateful to use the nephew. First I negligently tossed out: ‘The Bible is the world’s biggest bestseller.’ A moment later, as he was kind enough to ask about my parents: ‘My mother and I,’ I said rather humorously, ‘were not made to understand each other.’
The subject of literature coming back up, I took advantage to speak ill of at least two hundred living authors, Jewish writers and Charles-Henri Hirsch in particular, and to add: ‘Heine is the Christ of modern Jewish writers.’ From time to time, I cast discreet and impish glances toward my host, who rewarded me with stifled chuckles, but who, I’m forced to admit, remained far behind me, being content with taking notes, it seemed, as he probably hadn’t prepared any phrases of his own.
At a given moment, interrupting a philosophical conversation, striving to resemble a Buddha who would unseal his lips once in ten thousand years, I murmured: ‘The great Joke is the Absolute.’ On the point of taking my leave, in the oldest and most world-weary tone I could muster, I inquired: ‘Monsieur Gide, where do we stand in relation to Time?’ Learning that it was a quarter to six, I got up, warmly shook the artist’s hand, and left, carrying away in my head the portrait of one of our most renowned contemporaries, a portrait that I shall now sketch, if my dear readers would be so kind as to grant me one final instant of their attention.
M. Gide does not look like a love child, nor like an elephant, nor like several men: he looks like an artist; and I will pay him this one compliment, moreover unpleasant, that his little plurality derives from the fact that he could very easily be mistaken for a show-off. There is nothing remarkable about his bone structure; his hands are those of a do-nothing – very white, my word! Overall, he’s a real weakling. M. Gide must weigh around 120 pounds and measure about 5′ 5″. His gait bespeaks a prose writer who could never produce a single line of verse. Along with that, the artist has a sickly face, with little flaps of skin, a bit larger than flakes, falling off around the temples – a bothersome condition which the common folk explain by saying that someone is ‘peeling.’
And yet the artist hardly indulges in those noble and prodigious ravages that jeopardize his fortune and his health. No, a hundred times no: the artist seems to prove on the contrary that he cares meticulously for himself, that he is hygienic, and that he has no truck with the Verlaine sort, the type that wears its syphilis like languor; and barring his denial, I believe I am not going too far out on a limb by stating that he frequents neither women nor places of ill repute. Indeed, judging from these very same signs, we are glad to note, as we would often have occasion to do, that he is prudent.
I saw M. Gide in the street only once: he was leaving my place. He had a mere few steps to take before turning the corner and disappearing from my sight, when I saw him stop in front of a bookstore: and yet, there was also a confectioner’s and a shop selling surgical instruments.
Since then, M. Gide has written me once,1 and I have never seen him again.
I’ve described the man, and now I would gladly have described the work, if I could just have avoided repeating myself on even a single point.
– first published in Maintenant
1. M. Gide’s handwritten letter can be procured at our offices for the price of 0.15 francs. [Cravan’s note]