René Crevel
gigatos | June 9, 2022
Summary
René Crevel, born on August 10, 1900 in Paris 10th and died on June 18, 1935 in Paris, is a French writer and poet, dadaist then surrealist, and member of the Order of Toledo of Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca.
Born into a Parisian bourgeois family, René Crevel attended the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, where he met Jean-Michel Frank (who became a decorator) and Marc Allégret (who became a film director). After his baccalaureate, he studied literature and law at the Sorbonne, but abandoned the courses for reading and discussions with artists. He met Marcelle Sauvageot. He was only 14 years old when his father committed suicide.
During his military service, he met Roger Vitrac and Max Morise. He met André Breton in 1921 and joined the Surrealists. At the end of 1922, he led the group in the experiments of “forced sleep”, which Breton accepted with good will at first. Crevel impressed by the quality of his eloquence to the point that Breton regretted that the sessions could not be recorded: “We would have had an invaluable document, something like the “sensitive spectrum” of Crevel.
Excluded from the movement in October 1925, he joined Tristan Tzara and Dada. He participated as an actor in the production of Tzara”s play Cœur à gaz in a costume designed by Sonia Delaunay. For her, he wrote the article Les Robes de Sonia Delaunay, in which he praised the talent of the artist. In 1926, he was stricken with tuberculosis. In 1929, the exile of Leon Trotsky led him to renew his ties with the Surrealists. Faithful to André Breton, he exhausted himself trying to bring together surrealists and communists. Member of the French Communist Party since 1927, he was excluded in 1933.
He was very involved in the organization of the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, in 1935, where the Surrealist group was registered. Breton was appointed as spokesman. However, following a violent altercation with Ilya Ehrenbourg, who represented the Soviet delegation, the latter obtained a ban on Breton”s speech and his exclusion from the congress.
René Crevel, who could not imagine the absence of the Surrealists at this congress, left disillusioned and disgusted. Moreover, he had just learned on June 16 that he was suffering from kidney tuberculosis, although he thought he was cured. The following night, he committed suicide with gas in his apartment, after having scribbled on a paper “Please incinerate me. Disgust”.
Eugène Dabit notes in his diary: “…he was tubercular. Lost. But he hid his illness with such courage. I will never be able to forget his face. So much freshness, generosity, passion, in him; disgust for low things, violence against a bourgeois world … two weeks ago, we were next to each other, at a meeting of the congress … and here, Crevel died. Not in our memory … “
While Klaus Mann, a close friend summarizes in his book The Turning Point: “He committed suicide because he was afraid of insanity, he committed suicide because he thought the world was insane.
Crevel,” wrote André Breton in 1952 in his Entretiens, “with that beautiful adolescent look that some photographs keep for us, the seductions he exerts, the fears and bravado as quick to awaken in him… through all this it is anguish that dominates. He is, moreover, psychologically very complex, thwarted in a kind of frenzy that possesses him by his love of the eighteenth century and particularly of Diderot.”
In the 1920s, he was a frequent guest in Sainte-Maxime, where he visited his friend Victor Margueritte and stayed at the Hôtel du Commerce and the Hôtel des Palmiers. During the winter season, he was also a regular at the Château Saint-Bernard (now called Villa Noailles) in Hyères, where he was warmly received by his friends Marie-Laure de Noailles and Charles de Noailles.
“Born rebellious as others are born with blue eyes”, as Philippe Soupault wrote, he rests in the family vault in the cemetery of Montrouge.
René Crevel had a love affair with the American painter Eugene McCown, Arthur Bruggle”s model in La mort difficile, and with Mopsa Sternheim (de) from 1928. His last companion was the Argentinean countess “Tota” de Cuevas de Vera.
Also read, biographies – Guru Nanak
Posthumous publications
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