The fictions of Arthur Cravan: Poetry, boxing and revolution 9781526133243

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D A F Y D D

Dafydd W. Jones lectured in fine art and art history at Cardiff School of Art (1995–2012), and is currently the Editor of the University of Wales Press. He is the author of Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance and editor of the research volume Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde.

Cover image: Robert Miradique (Arthur Cravan), untitled (c.1913), watercolour. Private collection. Courtesy of Sotheby’s France, Paris

ISBN 978-1-5261-3323-6

9 781526 133236 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

DA F Y D D W. J O N E S

The remaining Cravan is a vibrant and unceasing dispersal of names and fictions, whose disappearance in 1918 constitutes a multiple death that can now only be expressed in the infinitive.

THE FICTIONS OF

Ranging subjectivity, metaphor, representation and multiplicity, The fictions of Arthur Cravan assembles a presentation of new readings from previously undocumented correspondence and literary forays. Cravan’s first published prose is now revised as a manifesto of simulation; the final contributors to his Paris review Maintenant are revealed as satirical impostures for the Delaunays; the scandalous specimen in New York is positioned as author by proxy of the iconic mustachioed Mona Lisa, and reconfigured as a Duchampian readymade; a full elegiac reading is given for the first time of Picabia’s experimental film Entr’acte, and the book concludes with the appropriated poet-boxer’s casting off into what would become the Surrealist legacy. 

ARTHUR CRAVAN

The legendary poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, a fleeting figure on the periphery of early twentieth-century avant-gardism, is frequently invoked as proto-Dada and Surrealist exemplar. Yet he remains an insubstantial phenomenon lost through historical interstices, clouded in perpetuated errors and drifting untruths. So much of what we ‘know’ compromises the attempt to register significance for this freeloader and risks his dismissal from the canon; in response, the present study proposes a practical recovery processing philosophical positions, together designed to yield sense from apparent nonsense. 

W.

J O N E S

THE FICTIONS OF

ARTHUR CRAVAN poetry, boxing and revolution



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The fictions of Arthur Cravan



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The fictions of Arthur Cravan Poetry, boxing and revolution Dafydd W. Jones

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Dafydd W. Jones 2019 The right of Dafydd W. Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 3323 6 hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10.5/12.5 pt ITC Century Std by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

i Mam yma, yn nheyrnas diniweidrwydd



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Contents

List of illustrations viii Preface x List of abbreviations xvii Introduction 1 1 On the genealogy of Arthur Cravan 18 2 Enter Colossus 44 3 To be an American in Paris 70 4 ‘All words are lies’: Maintenant, April 1912–July 1913 107 5 ‘Life has no solution’: Maintenant, November 1913–April 1915 143 6 The vision of struggling movement: Barcelona 1916 198 7 ‘Pure affect’: New York 1917 222 8 Being as being, and nothing more 257 Conclusion 278 Index303

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Illustrations

  1 Captain Haddock at Geneva airport, in Hergé, Anturiaethau Tintin: Cawl Erfyn Efflwfia (Tresaith: Dalen (Llyfrau) Cyf., 2011), p. 42. © Hergé/Moulinsart 2019.   2 Eduardo Arroyo, ‘Arthur Cravan avant et après le combat avec Jack Johnson’, lead pencil on paper, 43 × 33.8 cm. © Eduardo Arroyo, 1993. © ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London 2018.   3 Sir Otho Holland (Sir Oties Hollonde), ‘Pictorial Book of Arms of the Order of the Garter’. © The British Library Board (MS Stowe 594, folio 13).   4 Manifest of alien passengers for SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse arriving at Port of New York, 23 January 1907 (detail): passenger no. 1, Mr Richard Jourdan; passenger no. 7, Mr Fabian Lloyd. Courtesy of Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island Foundation www.libertyellisfoundation.org.   5 Fabian Lloyd, c.1908. Collection Marcel and David Fleiss. Courtesy of Galerie 1900–2000, Paris.   6 ‘Les champions de boxe anglais de 1910’, La vie au grand air, 26 March 1910, p. 208. Private collection, by permission.   7 Ernest La Jeunesse (self), in Roy Lear, Talentiers (1899), facing title page. Private collection, by permission.  8 Maintenant no. 4, March–April 1914, cover. Copy in the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries.   9 Eugène Atget, Cabaret les Noctambules, ancien hôtel d’Harcourt, 5 et 7 rue Champollion, 5ème arrondissement, Paris. Collection Musée Carnavalet, Paris. © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet. 10 Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait of a Poet (1914–15). Thaw Collection. The Morgan Library and Museum.2017.176.

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54 63 82 148 153

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List of illustrations ix

Photographic credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. 178 11 Robert Miradique (Arthur Cravan), untitled (c.1913), watercolour. Private collection. Courtesy of Sotheby’s France, Paris. 182 12 Jack Johnson vs Arthur Cravan at the Monumental, Barcelona, 23 April 1916; photograph by Josep Maria Co i de Triola. © Arxiu Fotogràfic Centre Excursionista de Catalunya; Creative Commons. 208 13 Manifest of alien passengers for SS Montserrat arriving at Port of New York, 14 January 1917 (detail): passenger no. 15, Lloyd, Avenarius F. Courtesy of Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island Foundation www.libertyellisfoundation.org. 217 14 ‘Arthur Cravan vs Jack Johnson’, The Soil, 4 (April 1917), 161 and facing verso. Private collection, by permission. 226 15 Beatrice Wood, Béatrice et ses douzes enfants! (c.1917), watercolour, gouache, ink and crayon on wove paper. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of the artist, 1978–98-4 © Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts / Happy Valley Foundation. 238 16 Manifest of passengers for SS Florizel arriving at Port of New York, 11 October 1917 (detail): passenger no. 13, Lloyd, Fabian; passenger no. 14: Frost, Arthur Jnr. Courtesy of Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island Foundation www. libertyellisfoundation.org. 244 17 Arthur Cravan, passport photograph, 1917–18. Collection Marcel and David Fleiss. Courtesy of Galerie 1900–2000, Paris. 258 18 Littérature, new series, 11 and 12 (15 October 1923), 24–5. Copy in the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. 287

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Preface

Preface

When we mobilise fictions to validate the present, an inevitable compromise emerges from perpetually drifting truths, half-truths and untruths. They are as recognisable in the macro-founding of histories and empires and world orders as they are in the micro-founding of booklifters and jewel thieves and blagueurs. In this regard, Arthur Cravan has been casually – and is too easily – distorted and presented as what he patently was not, and the historical recovery in the study that follows is first designed to temper the distortions that, by the currency they achieve, prove intoxicating in the discourses of Dada anarchy and Surrealist suicide. Responding soberly is not always easy, and might not infrequently demand the rigour of critical discipline beyond the immediate – laterally, for instance, from Deleuze to Nietzsche and into philosophical contexts that allow for potentially infinite ­potentialities – in working towards a present-day currency for Cravan. If cultural and art-historical studies will hold that the poet-boxer applies with any relevance to contemporary concern, then what will be processed in this book intends to demonstrate precisely why Cravan might thus be held; his cultural platforms consistently revise familiar mappings and scenes so frequently unobserved precisely because they are familiar. The schoolboy visit I remember (amarcord) to Tossa de Mar in 1983, for instance, has accrued a radically transformed significance today against the destination that long ago lured exiles in Barcelona to its medieval turrets and blue water; the rude and indiscriminate tone I adopted as directeur of the low-grade illustrated review Y Sgriw Rataf during its 1986–87 season makes a little more sense for me today when catalogued against Maintenant during la belle époque; the simultanist dazzle beaches and bacalhau of Vila do Conde in my frustrated summer of 1994 are now resolvedly calm; and leafing through an autumn pall across Upholland many years later, in 2015, I recognised names carved on



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the heavy stones. Today, on eternal returns to New York, Barcelona and Paris, streets are recognisably familiar but their hues render and reconfigure: downtown from the Chelsea Hotel’s half-term bridal suite in 1999, the disorienting circuit of the Woolworth meant I was unable to tell if I was walking around it or if it was walking around me; when I was ejected from the Monumental in 2000, as bulls echoed through cooling colonnades behind the noucentista exterior and giant Mudéjar eggs, I jostled with the ghosts of five thousand equally cheated barcelonés; and through the grieving summer of 2001 in Montparnasse, of stricken pathos at the Fontaine de l’Observatoire, I was revived at La Closerie des Lilas, where Cravan once poetically beat up the whole place. This book recovers one Arthur Cravan. There are certainly other Cravans to recover, but the book is tasked with one descriptive recovery. The writing of the main text between London (October 2013) and Amsterdam (October 2014) reanimates the Cravan that I first encountered in July 1993 as the original nihilist hero in the market town of Lampeter, Ceredigion. That version was subsequently soundtracked with John Cale singing ‘Myfanwy’, the nonconformist piano of my father Arwyn on velvet Sunday mornings and then two decades of beards and long hair by the Super Furry Animals. The arrest of 1993 was in the company of legendistas Sofia Areias and Salete Macieira, precipitating the start of a scholarly search for Cravan the following year at the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa. There, in the snowbound Midwest, I took far more than I could return from remarkable and stimulating exchanges with Curt Germundson, Stephen C. Foster, Timothy Shipe, Ruedi Kuenzli and Stephen E. Perkins; the country was young and had God on its side. Those exchanges continued in the immediately subsequent years, and still continue now, to inform my thoughts on art and anti-art, on avant-gardism and Dada, on performativity and Cravan, and all of their interstitial linkages. The postgraduate study that followed at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University during the later 1990s aligned to continental philosophy, actively to structure aspects of what I then considered to be among the most challenging manifestations of art in the twentieth century. Through babbling brooks with my Cardiff peers Alex Dalgleish, Jai-Jin Choi, Britta Schuessler, Adam Woodruff and Struan Sinclair – everything breathed – and of the dazzling faculty members Catherine Belsey, Laurent Milesi, Christopher Norris, Diane Elam and Duncan Large, I found means to assemble proto-structures for my scattered Cravan ephemera. And what finally worked its way from ephemera into the thesis titled ‘Poetry, Boxing and Revolution’

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owed sans pareil to joyous exchange with the greats, Martin Ignatius Gaughan and Jean-Jacques Lecercle. The present work bears little if any similarity to the dissertation that closed a studied twentieth century. In its immediate wake, my consolidated positions on Cravan were presented as conference papers that sought (unsuccessfully, I now think) to process the poet-boxer theoretically, and to apply what might emerge from such processing to a broader and more contemporary discussion on performativity and actionism. Papers were presented to conferences in Paris at the Mona Bismark Foundation (‘Americans in Paris, Paris in Americans’, July 2001), and at Sheffield University (‘Sporting Cultures: Hispanic and European Perspectives’, January 2002), for example, both occasions allowing me deliberately to address the art-historical instance of Cravan directly, ahead of publishing the chapter ‘Nonbattles and Counterthoughts: Arthur Cravan takes Manhattan’ for the volume Dada New York: New World for Old (2003) in the series ‘Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada’ (1996–2005). That chapter exercised all the flaws of juvenilia, sadly without the excuse of youth. The more coherent and complete text on Cravan, however, developed through the Eastern Mediterranean University literature and humanities conference in Famagusta, Cyprus (‘Inscriptions in the Sand’, June 2003), finally to be published as the chapter ‘To Be or Not To Be … Arthur Cravan: Subject, Surface and Difference’ in the volume Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (2006). After this, however, Cravan receded, yielding in the hiatus to a revived theoretical engagement with Dada via international conference papers and key meetings at Cardiff University (notably ‘Ethics and Politics: The Work of Alain Badiou’ in May 2002 and ‘Schizoanalysis and Visual Culture’ in June 2010), already accounted for in the monograph Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance (2014). Still, Cravan’s recession was not a disappearance, as he populated a smoky popular ether – from the musical underlay of Pascale Comelade (‘Arthur Cravan was a Flor Fina’) to the visual overlays of Renaud Perrin’s meticulous dessins-gravures; from the cushioned comfort of Judit Canela’s ‘Arthur Cravan vs The World’ to New York’s Maintenant journal of contemporary Dada works; from the midicouture of the Arthur Cravan Boxing Club to the nouvelle figuration of Eduardo Arroyo; from the Canadian presses of L’Oie de Cravan to die unheimliche Rückkehr in Berlin; from Kat Georges’s one of three somebodies to Jack Manini’s BD Histoire complète – and Cravan came very close to home on more than one occasion. I reviewed an exhibition of experimental filmwork titled ‘After Cravan’ by the artist



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Ian Giles in Newtown, Powys, for instance, in 2009; the review article, titled ‘Yr Anvarwol Arthur Cravan’, mediated the artist’s auto-destruction as he boated out to sea. I was minded by my fellow conference speaker Willard Bohn, at Queen Mary University of London (‘Back to the Futurists: Avant-Gardes 1909–2009’ (July 2009)), to chase butterflies with the poet-boxer. Publication of the poetry of the great medieval troubadour Dafydd ap Gwilym in the beautiful volume Cerddi Dafydd ap Gwilym (2010) reproduced on its cover a detail from a painting dated 1992 but attributed to the enigmatic name Édouard Archinard. And when Captain Haddock marched blindly into a lamp post at Geneva airport in 2011, among the items in his possession that fluttered to the floor was a copy of Maintenant. It was not until January 2013, however, that Cravan properly re-entered my thoughts when Martin Williams of Lliswerry made contact for a BBC Radio 4 programme about the poet-boxer. In response, prompted into giving Cravan serious consideration again, I was reacquainted with material that had lain dormant during a period of rising philosophical stakes, and set about revising my coordinates in an article that would eventually become the introductory chapter to this book. It was an article with which I intended to outline the complications of any approach to Cravan that must first work its way through the sparseness of evidence and the obfuscation of legend – only for its object again to be set aside and overtaken by the prioritising of other Dada projects. Then, in October 2013, publication of volume 53 of La règle du jeu was a revelation. Having long since resigned myself to the likelihood that what little I believed was contained in the Cravan archive had been exhaustively worked, reworked and overworked, I had not countenanced the possibility that there might exist material yet to be drawn into public contention. I was looking in completely the wrong direction when Bertrand Lacarelle (in the issue of La nouvelle revue française entitled ‘Salut à Arthur Cravan’, 2008, and Arthur Cravan, précipité, 2010) and Bastiaan van der Velden (in Kicker, Schüler, Sängerknabe: Arthur Cravan 1900 bis 1902 in St Gallen, 2011) made truly impressive strides. And realising that Cravan was far from exhausted, I commenced the enthused writing year of 2013–14. What eventually assembled of new textual and visual matter for the present schizo-biography found itself coursing multiplicities. The accessibility of dense francophone, anglophone and otherphone journalistic sources introduced essential dispassionate primary commentaries with which to assemble more complete readings. In acknowledgement of these sources, I have retained in the transcriptions for this book their not infrequent and unchecked vagaries, with the exception of

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1  Captain Haddock at Geneva airport, 2011.

the most common anglophone inconsistency, the misspelling (due to ­mispronunciation) of Cravan as ‘Craven’ (there was actually a contemporary ‘Arthur Craven’ in circulation: ‘Arthur Scott Craven’, stage name of the early twentieth-century actor and writer Arthur Keedwell Harvey-James). I have revised ‘Craven’ consistently throughout to ‘Cravan’ (with the single exception, naturally, of Beatrice Wood’s watercolour). Other vagaries are retained – from the ugly corruption ‘Gruhan’ to the erroneous forename ‘Frank’ (widely bandied among boxers at the start of the twentieth century, whose proper forenames were frequently lost or deemed unpronounceable), to the confusion of such composites as ‘Lloyd Napier’ – all of which are woven into the fabric of fictions. Except where otherwise acknowledged, translations into English are my own; I have retained the important vagary of ‘grandson to the Chancellor of the Queen of England’ as part of the Cravan myth, allowing for discussion of its origin in mistranslation creditable directly to Cravan himself. And the specific and deliberate intervention made with regard to the primary commentaries, I should note, has been chronological realignment and, where necessary, resequencing in the



Preface xv

light of newly researched sources presenting consistently reliable revisions (specifically around the years 1904–7). For kind assistance in image research and permissions for the volume, I am most grateful to Cécile Camberlin, iconography department at Moulinsart, Brussels; to Sandra Powlette at the British Library; to Drew Helstosky at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Foundation; to my brother Alun Ceri Jones for his assistance in the Paris corres­ pondence; to Camille Courbis at Musée Carnavalet; Paris, to Karine Bunout at Roger-Viollet, Paris; to Sylvie Delaume Garcia at Sotheby’s France; yet again, to Timothy Shipe, Curator of the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa; to Kaitlyn Krieg and Marilyn Palmeri, imaging and rights at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York; to Miriam Cady and Conna Clark at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; to Kevin Wallace at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, Happy Valley; to Fabienne Di Rocco and Eduardo Arroyo for allowing me access to Arroyo’s remarkable drawings and sculpture of Cravan; and especially to Rodica Sibleyras, Archivist to the Marcel and David Fleiss Collection at Galerie 1900–2000, Paris, for always patient and generous responses and for making the plough through picture research so easy; any failure properly to acknowledge the assistance and permissions granted is entirely mine. Once more, I am grateful to Amy English, licensing executive at DACS, who has always correctly reserved my rights. At the university presses, the engaged, enlightened and illuminating counsel of Charlotte Grievson at Yale, Emma Brennan at Manchester and Sarah Lewis at Wales has proved invaluable, and the book’s production is wholly indebted to Danielle Shepherd and to Paul Clarke at Manchester. The final text of the present volume now stands as read with thanks and gratitude to the anonymous readers and Matthew Frost at Manchester University Press, whose responses through drafts and revisions buoyed the work to publication; and the exchanges with Fiona Little throughout July 2018 made me think hard, and think again, about the way I write – thank you, Fiona. And so to close, the extension of thought proposes that Cravan comes into being by the process of observing. My contention is and will be that Cravan ‘occurs’ in discrete quantities (I concede this undeclared allusion to the Kopenhagener Geist); through headwinds, tailwinds and crosswinds beyond Merthyr Mawr towards Traeth yr Afon, swathes for thought emerge admitting discontinuity and probability before causality. I now yield to the discontinuities and probabilities from which I perpetually gain in the poetry, prose, painting and provocation of Henry Maas, Gareth Rees, Elza Adamowicz, Siân Chapman, Robert John Gwilliam, Martin Ignatius Gaughan, Meirion Pennar, Michael Crowther

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and Alun Ceri Jones, each of whom has, I think, been blissfully unaware (even in absentia) of their part in The fictions of Arthur Cravan. Finally, there is nothing that remains without the permanent revolution and the always changing presences out of which we make memory. So, in continued nonthought within thought, mae’r diolch mwyaf i bedair iâr fach fy haf: my mother Margaret, to whom I dedicate this book; my daughters Lleucu and Gwen, whose logic of sense destroys my philosophy of nonsense; and, devotedly, Denise, ym mreuder cain ei chalon fach. Dafydd W. Jones, October 2018



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Abbreviations

Arthur Cravan et al., 4 Dada Suicides: Selected Texts of Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma & Jacques Vaché (London: Atlas Press, 1995) ACM Emmanuel Guigon (ed.), Arthur Cravan: maintenant?, exhibition catalogue in French (with English texts, trans. Paul Edson), Museu Picasso, Barcelona (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2017) ACSS Maria Lluïsa Borràs, Arthur Cravan: une stratégie du scandale (Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1996) DPP Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981) LLB Mina Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (Highlands: Jargon Society, 1982) ŒPAL Arthur Cravan, Œuvres: poèmes, articles, lettres, ed. JeanPierre Begot (Paris: Éditions Ivrea, 1992) 4DS



Introduction 1

Introduction

The poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, a fleeting figure on the periphery of early twentieth-century European avant-gardism, frequently invoked as a proto-Dadaist, is an insubstantial phenomenon. His recurrent invocation in early twentieth-century art history is founded on diffuse documentation, evidence and testimonies, compounded by distant speculation, which conjure the strident cultural antagonist assuming heroic proportion in fabled modernity. His presence advances as an exemplar for later twentieth-century actionism and performative intervention, achieving status as legend in the absence of body, and as cult in the absence of intellect. And there are many versions of Cravan which serve many ends, the most widely recognised and popularly held summed up in the veteran Dadaist Hans Richter’s chronicling of that movement, that, ‘as an artist and as a human being … [Cravan illustrated] one tendency in Dada taken to its extreme: final nothingness, suicide’.1 What this book proposes to recover are the many versions of Cravan that can be documented in working towards a consistent reading of the historical singularity, confluent with a creative reading that tests history even in the nihilist extreme. Moderated by philosophical delineation of an idea of Cravan, this will be an exercise to lean and loaf against the recovery, and what follows will first orient itself towards Richter’s version of the protagonist and its many derivatives. Any move towards the apotheosis of nihilism, for instance, will require recovery of Cravan in a manner that participates in the construction and affirmation of the narrative of ‘final n ­ othingness’ – to read through multiply contingent becoming-fictions of the life from what little remains, in attempting some knowledge of it – and to proceed on the assumption that, ultimately, we may find that there is some sense and continuing relevance for us today in the change and revolutionary transformations encountered in the legend of Arthur Cravan.

2  Eduardo Arroyo, ‘Arthur Cravan avant et après le combat avec Jack Johnson’, 1993.



Introduction 3

What do we invest when legend is casually invoked? If what is s­ uggested is that Cravan is the hero of legend, then the use of the word ‘legend’ requires some address. I take ‘legend’ to mean that which history has not verified, but which is now presented as ­historical – fiction presented as truth – which means that Cravan immediately complicates the formulation, because any ‘truth’ given to us in the shape of his singularity is itself not true. Arthur Cravan was a construct: his real name was Fabian Lloyd, and ‘Arthur Cravan’ his own invention. In a very precise sense, his presence art-historically is a fiction but, crucially, presented as historically verifiable. There is a metaphorical existence to be invoked early on in the fact of the fiction, and we might rightly say that what is named ‘Cravan’ has by now most certainly become the subject of legend, or has been ‘legendised’ through the romanticising prism of ‘poet and boxer’ and under such eulogising headlines declaring his self-immolation. But as the syuzhet of legendising proceeds, the verifiable fabula of life recede in cultural visibility, compressed in a secondary function, and legend advances. So I declare Richter’s account at the outset, as a ‘control’ fiction for all that follows: Anti-art took on a new complexion with the emergence of the writer and amateur boxer Arthur Cravan. In 1912, he published in Paris the periodical Maintenant in which, with great aplomb, he dragged through the mire everything that was good, pure and of good report, especially his friend Robert Delaunay. Cravan was greatly admired, because he succeeded in tearing bourgeois existence apart at the seams. He carried out to the letter all the deeds of anarchy he promised in his writings. He claimed to have committed a perfect burglary in a Swiss jeweller’s shop. At the height of the war he travelled on forged passports across the length and breadth of Europe, the USA, Canada and Mexico. … He attacked everybody and everything. He handed out the deadliest insults as calmly as someone else might pass round chocolates. As he did this with the utmost elegance, he became the darling of Paris overnight; the darling, that is of all those who would have liked to settle their own personal accounts as elegantly, directly and coolly as he settled his. He challenged the world heavyweight champion, the boxer Jack Johnson, to a fight in Madrid on the 23rd April 1916 (he was knocked out in the first round). Lecturing to an invited audience of society ladies, he took off nearly all his clothes before he could be handcuffed and taken away by the police. The insults he hurled, mostly when drunk, at press and public, strangers as well as friends, were immoderate but brilliantly phrased.

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The fictions of Arthur Cravan In the end he left the Mexican coast in a little boat to sail across the shark-infested Caribbean. He never reappeared. His wife, the poetess and painter Mina Loy, who had just borne him a daughter, waited in vain for him to rejoin her in Buenos Aires. When he did not come, she looked for him in all the mouldering prisons of Central America. No trace of him was ever found. … An athlete himself, he was totally without fear, and always on the offensive with no thought of the consequences. Because he lived wholly according to his nature, wholly without constraint, and paid the full price, which is death, he became a nihilist hero in an age already long beset by nihilism.2

This is arresting. As an account, it captures the dramatically fleeting image of the proto-Dadaist, setting the bar of nihilism in the age of heroic modernity. It contains confusions, errors, exaggerations and untruths, most certainly (the residue of which persists even in the documenting of Cravan a hundred years on), but Richter’s presentation to a wider Dada audience condenses what we would broadly term ‘biography’ into its few brief paragraphs. Richter’s version, first roundly presented in Dada-Kunst und Antikunst (1964), is a somewhat speculative expansion (repeating the original errors) of Roger Shattuck’s earlier outline of Cravan in The Banquet Years (1955), which itself uncritically validated the error-strewn assertions that gained currency out of André Breton’s appropriation of Cravan for the Paris Dada legacy and into Surrealism some decades earlier.3 Breton had written in 1932, for instance: During the war, [Cravan] gave several riotous ‘lectures’ in New York, in the course of which, for example, he undressed on stage until the hall was completely evacuated by the police … At around the same time, in Spain, he challenged the black boxer Ben Johnson [sic], the world champion … he was a curious man whose legend may well last. He disappeared a few years ago, trying to cross the Gulf of Mexico single-handed, on a stormy day, in a very frail boat.4

An error practically on every point; now, in the decades since Richter, it is only in the most recent period that any non-speculative advance on Cravan has been made in presentation of material that amounts to more than the repetition of closed accounts (which would at once repeat and vary (within limits) the unaddressed vagaries of the primary sources). Recent research and scholarly thought have inched the subject in the right direction, but the ether which so much of what we ‘know’ occupies makes any progress contingent, and inevitably complicates whatever attempt we might make at establishing significance for the conduct,



Introduction 5

activities and creative output of an individual who, in any other context, might more happily be called a bullshitter and a freeloader. Whatever the proffered epithet, there is a critical sense in which fictions are routinely mobilised to validate the present, giving rise to an inevitable compromise out of perpetually drifting truths, half-truths and untruths. In such terms, Cravan has been casually distorted and presented as what he patently was not, which problematises any use to which Cravan might now be put in pursuit of what is more broadly termed ‘cultural criticism’. If cultural and art-historical studies hold that Cravan has any continuing relevance, then the positions given currency in this book intend to demonstrate precisely why he might be held thus. His cultural platforms, for example, consistently revise familiar mappings and scenes frequently unobserved precisely because they are familiar; and familiarity itself belies the possibility that, from the little remaining evidence, there is the possibility of a conceptual engagement with Cravan that far exceeds the  physical persona. The elements of historical recovery constituting the book’s syuzhet, that is the fabula consistently organised into the narrative of the nihilist hero, will primarily be designed to temper the often irresistible tendency to conjure Cravan as an anarchic model for Dada or as an exemplary suicide for Surrealism. Just as we do not know what a body can do, similarly I suggest the poet-boxer. We do not even know what Cravan can do, and, in responding to theoretically lateral routes from schizoanalysis through Deleuze to Nietzsche, for instance, a conceptual context manifests that will propose how Cravan might properly be read via his actions to pose remarkable and indeed infinite potentialities. It is in the excess of such potentialities that the permanence of and any current sense for Cravan – his relevance today in debating Existenz Kunst, actionism or performativity – are to be located. The performative dimension of Cravan’s activities establishes a direct connection to more contemporary aspects of art practice in embrace of the challenge to boundaries set by traditional art criticism – with the resulting reassessment of how sense and meaning are constructed in and out of the production and interpretation of art. In the process, this book’s descriptive recovery will pose the object (Cravan) to test cultural formations, and to observe what might be glimpsed beyond their perceived limits. So Cravan will jockey as a cultural agent who employed performance in its dynamic expedience, potentially to advance new models for the interpretation of art in its wake. As such, the metaphorical constitution and construction of Cravan – then as now – is to be presented in embodiment of the process of critical engagement through continuation of the open performativity of avant-gardism and, importantly, its intricate circuitry of signification. Any connections

6

The fictions of Arthur Cravan

we make from what can be ascertained, in the meantime, are inevitably ­contingent: we might be drawn, for instance, to such an obscure fact as that at the moment Cravan was born to Nellie Lloyd in the west of Switzerland, the stateless and independent Friedrich Nietzsche was writing in the east of that uniquely neutral country, in Sils-Maria, where he concluded in preliminary thoughts on the genealogy of morals how ‘[t]he will to truth requires a critique – let us thus define our own task – the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question’.5 Well, it is no more than good fortune that this physical proximity between colic freeloader and catatonic philosopher can be established – I will have recourse to the obvious point that Cravan was no philosopher, though arguably on more than one occasion he constituted philosophical positions – in order further to expand on the becoming-legend of Cravan, presaged in the legendising that famously and necessarily occurred in the early reception of Nietzsche as philosopher. Let us briefly consider the case of Nietzsche (and its points of connection, for example, with Schopenhauer or Wagner). Instructive observation is to be made for the purpose of the present exercise regarding Cravan when we admit that failure objectively to reconstruct the facts of the thinker’s life meant that he became a legend in the process of his soaring logic being mythologically reconstructed. It is correct to say that Nietzsche’s works give us that which is ‘concrete’ in his life but, through mythological reconstruction, the works are mediated into the legend of the philosopher. Among the early studies of Nietzsche is Ernst Bertram’s Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie (1918), in which Bertram anticipates the body’s evasion of historical containment and rational correspondence: Legend is in truth what a word expresses in its baldest sense: it is not something written but rather something to be read anew time and again, which only comes into being through being read differently over and over again.6

Without the single overarching reading that excludes all others, the thinker becomes a symbol, exemplary as the striving and impassioned, proud and lonely truth-finder, and it is the legend of the body that comes to educate before the corpus of the works. Nietzsche, as we know, had made the corresponding move to legendise another thinker in his own early essay ‘Schopenhauer als Erzieher’ (1874), a text that barely engages the great depressive’s philosophy but which fully commits to Schopenhauer’s demonstration through action that a ‘love of truth is something fearsome and mighty’.7 And it is this legend that educates in its deference to an uncompromising pursuit of truth. The legendising of



Introduction 7

Arthur Cravan charts a recognisably similar passage, to judge by the few contemporary or near-contemporary commentaries on the poet-boxer delivered from the early twentieth century. Prized among these are the more intimate passages written by the poet Mina Loy, who would marry Cravan in 1918 and whose writing touches her husband’s emotional life in a way that no other writing does. While the majority of accounts by others respond only to the public behaviour, a psychological dimension is glimpsed in Loy’s writings (inevitably processed by the writer herself) posing a parallel to the legendising of Nietzsche that is provocative to say the least. As the Nietzsche legend became defined, the instrumental role of his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in its consolidation after his mental collapse and death in 1900 is properly recognised – she who promoted herself as uniquely blessed of insight to understand and interpret her brother (and Förster-Nietzsche appears to have followed suit in the preservation of Richard Wagner’s heritage at Bayreuth by Cosima Wagner, after the great composer’s death in 1883). If we choose to draw the parallel, however, the differences in comparison may be little more than cosmetic. Quite emphatically, whatever her devotion, Förster-Nietzsche ‘seems to have had no notion of what Nietzsche stood for, or of what philosophy is, or of what is meant by intellectual integrity’.8 Mina Loy too was a receptive and devoted respondent to Arthur Cravan, though she did not overtly advance herself as her lost husband’s living representative after 1918. Yet she configured his persona into her thoughts on psycho-democracy, for instance, conceiving of ‘compound existence’ and ‘collective personality’,9 and likewise did carry the Cravan cult for the almost fifty years that she outlived his disappearance. It is fair to say that in the present context of legendising, Loy’s broader deliberation on the belief that ‘Cravan’s truth was his œuvre’10 has eventually played no less a part in consolidating Cravan’s legend than did Förster-Nietzsche’s in the case of Nietzsche’s. Already, in these opening passages, repeated invocations of ‘truth’ conflict as easily as they resolve on the matter – both in the will to truth and in its critique – along now with the suggestion of a third rendering of truth in form that is itself not true. For Loy, the real memory of Cravan would elide from myth to legend. She retrospectively code-named him ‘Colossus’ in her prose and poetry – ‘I had magnified his being into such proportions that all comparisons vanished’11 – for his physical if not mythical imposition, as a figure who strode an imagined remotely distant past. Then myth becomes legend as this literary ‘Colossus’ is the body we now read in the form of the fiction ‘Cravan’, striding into the present: ‘His appearance alone created a kind of awe. This Cravan … was over six feet tall; his extremely heavy body, that was admirably

8

The fictions of Arthur Cravan

proportioned, according to its own exceptional measures, bore an olympian head of striking regularity.’12 Now, in the broadest cultural sweep, we are familiar enough with the blight of transference of public interest from the works to the persons who produce the works – van Gogh’s ear notoriously dominates retrospection of his art, as we all know, just as Picasso’s women or Pollock’s drinking have been invoked to dominate theirs – but the confusion for this study may ultimately posit Cravan not as the producer of any works, but rather as being himself the work (or even himself the readymade), by which convolution the centrality of the work is restored. The point is to be made, in the meantime, that the prior transference of interest is rarely, if ever, to the real (and whatever the ‘real’ is assumes its own contingency), but rather consistently to the representation of the person who has produced the work. There are varied instructive examples to turn to in this regard. Schopenhauer’s case is one, for instance, where the bulk of the graft in presenting his ‘teacher’ to the world fell to Julius Frauenstädt, who, typically, confined his interest to those facts that could be put to use in advancing his particular case.13 Hollingdale’s assessment of Frauenstädt’s contribution is concise and pointed: ‘What he was writing was not biography … what he was writing was legend.’14 The idea of truth, in terms of the ‘real’ person, is then dispersed in legend, receding from view as well as from practical descriptive recovery just as, in the legendising of Frauenstädt, ‘the real Schopenhauer so quickly vanished behind the legend of the solitary knight errant of truth’.15 The critical complication is that the legend can and will easily persist in the absence of any ‘truth’ – in the absence of the philosophy (in Schopenhauer’s case) or in the absence of Cravan (in Cravan’s case) – and we are again minded of the absent philosophy in Nietzsche’s essay on Schopenhauer as educator.16 Through first doubt and then denial of the philosophy in the latter instance, the philosophy finally became expedient for Nietzsche precisely because he had come to consider that the greater value of Schopenhauer was to be found in his exemplarity as a type of vital and vigorous philosopher contra the harmless and sterile rather than virile academic philosophers of the day. ‘Niemandem war er untertan!’, wrote Nietzsche: he, Schopenhauer, was subject to no one.17 Thus similarly the encounter with Cravan in the form of his resistance; it is my proposition that any descriptive recovery for present interest be applied as a practical recovery. What was (or was not) achieved by the poet-boxer in print, in the boxing ring or on the boulevard is by now largely expedited in engaging the nihilist hero; and it continues to be the case that swathes in the documenting of Cravan, both before and certainly after 1918, have given up the writing of biography to make way for legend.



Introduction 9

On truth and lie Our first encounter of Cravan, then, is with the legend. And, however they may be constituted, types emerge in the encounter as being central to the processing and functioning of legend. Types, we can suggest, pose perspectives; the body provides a locus for perspectives, which can in subsequent analysis prove to be in competition or even conflict with one another, yet hence the insistence that Nietzsche, for one, places on the body.18 We will find that the body of Arthur Cravan, legendised as it has been, offers a plurality of types (logger, card sharper, painter, critic, poet, forger, dandy, chauffeur, orange picker, conférencier, thief, sailor, profesor, boxer …) as well as a plurality of named perspectives (Lloyd, Rubidini, Cooper, Lowitska, Lénod, Cravan, Holland, Miradique, Napier, Bombardier Wells, Hope, Archinard, Hayes …), and its overwhelming plurality makes it at once as vaporous as a body can be. We might look to Cravan as the moderator of pluralities, for example, directeur Cravan as he billed himself in the literary review Maintenant (1912–15), and look to him also as truth in the sense that we would conventionally invoke to refer to a stable, single perspective upon the world. But Cravan also constitutes himself somehow as metaphor, by virtue of the way in which he conspires to present us with new ways of perceiving the literal terms or subjects that he introduces. That is to say, Cravan gives us the image of Cravan in order to represent the truth of what is literal in our experience, and does so through the creation of a perspective on the world (‘Cravan’) that has no literal existence in the world, and the structure of which can ultimately only consistently be read in terms of its being a multiplicity. My suggestion is an idea of Cravan as both truth and metaphor – and metaphor, as emerges from a study of Nietzsche, is what ‘truth’ is. I make this suggestion deliberately in order to pursue and develop a critique of the constitution of whatever ‘truth’ might here apply via Nietzsche’s redefining of the relation between it and metaphor. Foundational for the philosopher’s thought – notwithstanding his occasional processing of the concealment of the true world of forms (which, in Plato’s idealist metaphysics, is reality) behind representation – is the Nietzschean thesis that the very construction of the world in all its reality happens through representation. There is no practical distinction to be drawn separating reality and representation (or appearance) for Nietzsche, as each is an aspect mutually defining the other. Though Nietzsche’s primary interest may well have been in the type of philosopher embodied in the Schopenhauer example, there are clearly aspects of the latter’s philosophical discipline feeding into Nietzsche’s own: specifically, the

10

The fictions of Arthur Cravan

way in which the perceptual activity of the body was understood by Schopenhauer already to be part of what we want to know of the world, rendering intimacy and immediacy in perceptual connection and situating the body thus as ‘the starting-point of the subject’s knowledge’.19 This is to remove through the notion of ‘will’ any distinction between subjective experience and objective reality.20 The body’s perception of that which it encounters is at the same time apprehension of the thingin-itself,21 an equation of mind and reality – in Schopenhauer’s words, ‘[t]he action of the body is nothing but the act of will objectified, i.e., translated into perception’.22 Now, though the body of Cravan has never been found, what we will respond to in its fragmentary recovery is what the body might be – in all its plurality – to pose theoretical fictions against the declared fiction of biography. For what follows in this book, theoretical expansions will take place against the recovered fragments. There may be a suggested resolution for the former separateness of mind and reality, for instance, but there will remain the complexity of accounting for the binarism encountered in our experiences: the binaries of one and other, of subject and object, of identity and difference. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche each address this variously in their philosophical writings as force, dynamism and tension, accommodating the emergence of two states from one. Perhaps the most resonant theoretical model is to be found in Nietzsche’s sustained interplay of the two principles of order and chaos represented by the restraint and intoxication of the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus;23 this is a binary given as a stationary polarity,24 where one state functions as generative and constitutive of the other in a contest immanent to the self, governed by the Apollonian principle and condensed in the image of the rearing, birthing centaur of Greek mythology (Cravan, in considered reflection, once actually described himself as a ‘centaur’). A given perspective achieves definition and functions through another, which suggests a state fundamentally different from one of coexistence. It suggests rather a state of continual bringing forth; and striking resonance is observed for the plurality of Cravan in the description of Nietzsche himself as he who ‘did not practise the one discipline alongside the other, but practised the one by practising the other’.25 The boxer brings forth the poet, I will suggest, in exemplifying the ‘centauric’ birthing proposed as the release of ‘an infinitely consequential artistic and philosophical double-natured eloquence’;26 and, as Cravan brings forth his many others, a remarkable if not radical tetra-linguistic eloquence is released upon his unsuspecting audience. It is a self-assured eloquence performed in Cravan’s notorious ‘undressing’ (not quite the ‘wild striptease’ still described in some



Introduction 11

current scholarship)27 at the Grand Central Palace in 1917, for example, resisting the demands of expectation in the very action of the body that ‘has long since left his imagined audience behind … [and is] no longer concerned with whether his actual audience will understand him’.28 The irrational man Thus begins our reading of the nihilism that distinguishes so much of Nietzsche’s thought and work, properly defining nihilism as the denial and rejection of received orthodoxies that would rest on ultimate and absolute truths. Desiring the virility of an intoxicating chaos above the sterility of rational restraint and order, Nietzsche’s appeal is markedly not to a hedonistic letting-go of all control, but to a responsive and responsible interplay between the polarities of order and chaos. From the latter emerge new coordinates to understand truth and order according to terms that we set out ourselves. New coordinates are regenerative, subject always to attentive revision. They are not, therefore, degenerative to the extent that general concepts delude themselves with belief in a recoverable original state: ‘A word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases – which means, purely and simply, cases that are never equal and thus altogether unequal.’29 And a word (constitutent of language), in becoming a concept, is thrice removed from reality as we remind ourselves that ‘concepts are only metaphors of metaphors’.30 The claim is to the difference and distinction of the individual, ‘an X which remains inaccessible and indefinable for us’,31 which is what we encounter and transform through sensory perception (thus generating metaphor) in our experiences. The rejection, precisely, is of our self-delusion in stable essences, in impenetrable truths and in unified selves. Nietzsche’s claim reaches back to a pre-Socratic state in order to project forwards, beyond the benign belief that rational knowledge is the fundament that explains and allows us to understand the phenomenal world. The pre-Socratic, Nietzsche suggests, is prototypical of the expression of ‘an exalted happiness … a playing with seriousness’ in his beautifying of the world,32 manifesting for the philosopher the type that he will oppose to the rational man: so the irrational man, described by Sarah Kofman in her study Nietzsche et la métaphore (1972): the joyous hero, freed from neediness since he considers only a life disguised as appearance and beauty to be real. This human type, thanks to art, is happy, lives more than the other in the acceptance of joy and suffering, through love of life.33

12

The fictions of Arthur Cravan

What is signalled is encounter of the inaccessible and indefinable X through joyous experience – forestalling the formulaic happiness that goes with virtue (the latter relegated by Nietzsche in terms of its being no greater than some idiosyncratic nobility of soul) – and describes a type exemplified as equally unimpeded by causal motive as by the idea of a goal.34 And, crucially, attached to this type is a principle of innocence read by Kofman as the irrational man’s ‘suffering’ arising from the lack of ‘memory’ of he who ‘does not learn any lessons from experience’;35 or by Nietzsche in his Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen (1873), as an innocence of ‘play as artists and children engage in it … coming-to-be and passing away, structuring and destroying, without any moral additive’.36 To the qualities of Kofman’s irrational man, then, accrues Nietzsche’s extra-morality. At a critical level, I here signal the intention to position Cravan in deliberate proximity to this sense deduced from Kofman’s irrational man or Nietzsche’s innocent player. The Cravan fiction is charted from early years and elides into subject categories that are frequently described for us elsewhere. Consider Cravan’s often cited intellectual recoil from moral conformity, mirroring the physical recoil that led him ‘to arrive sooner or later in some forbidden spot – so intuitively did he separate himself from the accepted places’.37 We read such discarding of morality as a discarding of interpretations of the world that might be imposed by others, interpretations that are the very foundations for the metaphors that pervade, and efficient precisely because we so easily allow ourselves to forget that they are metaphors in the first instance: ‘only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject … does man live with any repose, security, and consistency’.38 This, for Nietzsche, is the security of repose deep inside the herd, in among those ‘most reasonable people’ routinely at the receiving end of political appeals to the ‘common good’ (more Machiavelli’s concordia discors (‘asocial sociability’) than Cicero’s concordia ordinum, it should be said; and, as Thomas Aquinas long ago recognised, what is good for the politician is only bonum secundum quid, or ‘good with reservations’); the potential gain is that which would strike fear in the heart of those much lauded ‘reasonable’ people, that if ‘but for an instant he [the weak man] could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his “self consciousness” would be immediately destroyed’.39 What metaphors pose, however, is doubly complex in the proposition that their ‘untruth’ assumes a greater ‘truth’ than what is ordinarily given as truth: ‘there is … no real knowing apart from metaphor’.40 The point that Nietzsche makes here is well rehearsed, and has arguably found currency for as long as poetry has found breath. Metaphors offer



Introduction 13

possibilities of release from the constraint (and, so, from the desired security of the herd) pertaining within these walls of self-consciousness and the unique perspective of this consciousness, and crucially offer the possibility of means beyond ‘[t]he most accustomed metaphors, the usual ones, [which] now pass for truths and as standards for measuring the rare ones’.41 Metaphors are the means by which metaphors can overcome themselves, and among the ‘rare ones’ are those metaphors, or metaphorical worlds, that exceed and escape all confines: the world of dreams, lies, etc. … [that struggle with] the ordinary usual view of things … the rule struggles against the exception, the regular against the unaccustomed: hence the higher esteem for everyday reality than for the dream world.42

The preservation of order in the interest of its own perpetuation is locked into this struggle with the rare and unaccustomed precisely because it is metaphor passing for truth that allows us to look away from the dream (the lie) and its consequences, and indeed to assume to banish what is rare and to preserve the ordinary. But now, says Nietzsche, ‘what is rare and unaccustomed is more attractive: the lie is felt as a stimulus. Poetry.’43 What then of poetry, and of poets, those deliberate conjurors of metaphors? We are always, I think, mindful of Plato’s urging the expulsion of poets from the city-state for what he believed was their crime of yielding dissimulating, deleterious and ultimately degenerating effects. Greater than the harmless copies produced by visual artists, who are able to reproduce everything because they never penetrate ‘beneath the superficial appearance of anything’,44 the dramatic poets contract a suspension of disbelief in the copies that they produce, the very malaise of which is the resulting disregard for any distinction between harmless and what (for Plato) become ‘dangerous’ copies. Kofman breaks down Plato’s issue quite concisely, describing how ‘the liar who uses designations suited to make the unreal seem real’ is excluded by society because of the threat he poses in deliberate misuse and abuse of strict conventions, and ‘he becomes dangerous because man wants truth only in order to escape the regrettable consequences of lying’.45 ‘Truth’ is here understood as that which Nietzsche observed is arrived at only through blissful unconsciousness and forgetfulness of the original lie. The desired expulsion of poets from the beautiful and utopic city of Kallipolis, meanwhile, finds an elegant parallel under modernity with the very real ejection of Arthur Cravan from the capital of the German Empire, Berlin, by the city police in 1907 (ostensibly for the bizarre crime of wearing a loud shirt in a built-up area: ‘Sie sind zu

14

The fictions of Arthur Cravan

auffallend’)46 – Cravan who, during the formative period of 1905–7, had started soberly to write poetry,47 ‘dangerous’ precisely in his flight from ‘the regrettable consequences of lying’. What proved so problematic for Plato is what Nietzsche, by the reversal of Plato, eventually embraced as the task of a future philosophy that would move beyond itself, nullifying any sense of origin or foundation of being, and thereby acknowledging the immanence of becoming. If Nietzsche’s reading found that Plato’s fundament of life had been cleansed of the political, then he subsequently found the antidote to Plato in Thucydides’ determined and unconditional will to resist self-delusion, for individuals ‘not to fool themselves and to see reason in reality – not in “reason”, still less in “morality” ’.48 In his own thought, Nietzsche locates ‘reality’ in the city-state, and the experiencing of reality becomes prerequisite to the possibility of the experiencing of politics; instead of problems being resolved philosophically (in thought), it is in reality and in life that the solution is to be found; as previously with metaphor, so now with philosophy, which becomes the means by which the discipline overcomes itself. The specific reading that Nietzsche applies renders the ‘reality’ of Plato and the ancient Greeks as ‘myth’ abstracted from reality, and abstractions function as the potential carriers of any and every meaning (and so literally they mean nothing). The myth of Nietzsche as an abstraction means nothing, then, as he recognised himself that ‘[w]hoever thought he had understood something of me, had made up something out of me after his own image’49 (and, predictably, attempts at appropriating Nietzsche continue to this day; I am resignedly guilty of the same as I write). My opening premise, then, is that we are likely to find ourselves always making up something out of Cravan after our image of the cultural subversive; when our illusions are discerned, however, and if we reject our reliance on restraint to the exclusion of intoxication, then the experiencing and bearing of reality – even through the writing of panegyric – re-enters in our taking of chaos upon ourselves. Notes  1 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 86.  2 From Hans Richter, ‘The Self-Immolation of Arthur Cravan’, in Dada: Art and Anti-Art, pp. 85–6.  3 Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (London: Jonathan Cape, rev. edn 1969), pp. 353–4. Errors are perpetuated by the frequency of repetition: the ambig-



Introduction 15

uous wording that seems to misplace Cravan’s 1916 fight with Jack Johnson in Madrid (the fight took place in Barcelona, though the fight contract was signed in Madrid), for instance, occurs in Motherwell’s opus on Dada, first published in 1951; DPP, p. xxii.  4 André Breton to René Gaffé, 3 November 1932; trans. in ACM, pp. 275–6.  5 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), third essay, section 24, p. 154.  6 Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie (1918), ed. H. Buchner (Bonn: Bouvier, 1965), p. 6; cited in Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction, trans. Nicholas Martin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 174.  7 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 194.  8 R. J. Hollingdale, ‘The Hero as Outsider’, in Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 86.  9 Mina Loy, ‘International Psycho-Democracy’, The Little Review: A Quarterly Journal of Art and Letters (Autumn 1921), 14–19; reprinted in LLB, pp. 276–82, at pp. 276–7. 10 Mina Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, in LLB, p. 322. 11 Mina Loy, ‘Colossus’, extracts reproduced in Roger Conover, ‘Mina Loy’s “Colossus”: Arthur Cravan Undressed’, in Rudolf E. Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986), p. 112. 12 Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’ (1938), in DPP, p. 14. 13 Frauenstädt’s version of the Schopenhauer legend existed in nuce in his early essay ‘Stimmen über Arthur Schopenhauer’ (1849). 14 Hollingdale, ‘The Hero as Outsider’, p. 76. 15 Hollingdale, ‘The Hero as Outsider’, p. 77. 16 This proliferating absence ultimately prepares the ground for simulation and the simulacrum. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983). 17 From Nietzsche’s quatrain on Schopenhauer; cited in Hollingdale, ‘The Hero as Outsider’, p. 78. 18 See Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, trans. Sean Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 19 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), p. 19. 20 Nietzsche observes how ‘even Schopenhauer’s “will” … has been turned into a metaphor when it is asserted that all things in nature possess will; finally, so that it can be pressed into the service of all kinds of mystical mischief it has been misemployed towards a false reification’. Friedrich

16

The fictions of Arthur Cravan

Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), vol. 2, part 1, 5, p. 216. 21 Cf. Kant’s problem of the noumenon, and how reason provides us with knowledge of things as they are in themselves; see Immanuel Kant, ‘On the Principle of the Form of the Intelligible World’, in ‘Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation of 1770’, §IV, trans. William J. Eckoff (New York: Columbia College, May 1894), pp. 69–74. 22 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, p. 100. 23 The principles were introduced by Nietzsche in his first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872), reaching back to a pre-Socratism in order to recover the moral significance of tragic drama, as ‘[t]he essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically; we need a new world of symbols; and the entire symbolism of the body is called into play’ (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 40) – thus to render disintegration of the subject’s belief in its own sovereignty with the mounting case that the self is only a substitute or, to be precise, a ‘necessary illusion’, for the ‘true’ self. 24 For instance in Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), marked not by the clash of violent and irreconcilable forces but by the ‘clandestine doubling of the Apollonian’ (p. 25). 25 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, p. 6. 26 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, p. 10. The prescient invocation of the image of the centaur occurs in the Cravan narrative in correspondence by him dated to late 1910. 27 At the 2017–18 Barcelona exhibition, for instance, it was casually observed in the catalogue texts how ‘in New York … [Cravan] lurched drunkenly onto the stage and launched into a wild striptease’; ACM, p. 259. 28 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, p. 10. 29 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, trans. Daniel Breazeale, in Clive Cazeaux (ed.), The Continental Aesthetics Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 55. 30 Sarah Kofman, ‘Metaphor, Symbol, Metamorphosis’, in David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 201. 31 Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, p. 56. 32 Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, p. 61. The reduced Socratic formulae contend that virtue is knowledge, and that the virtuous man is the happy man. 33 Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 79–80. 34 Cf. Alexander Nehamas, ‘Nietzsche, Modernity, Aestheticism’, in Magnus and Higgins (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, p. 232: ‘ “Goallessness as such” (or better “goallessness in itself”, “die Ziellosigkeit



Introduction 17

an sich”) does not imply that goals do not exist any more than the fact that there is no “thing in itself” implies that there are no things or the fact that there is no “real world” implies that there is no world. What it does imply is that goals exist only insofar as they are established by individuals and, perhaps, by cultures … But goals, like values and processes, are not already there in the world to be discovered – they are not “in themselves”: they are to be made.’ See also, within the broader context of Dada and ‘revolution without a goal but with effect’, Dafydd W. Jones, Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), pp. 100, 207. 35 Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, p. 80. 36 Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1987), p. 62. 37 Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, p. 319. 38 Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, p. 57. 39 Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, pp. 57–8. 40 Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press; Hassocks: Harvester, 1979), p. 149. 41 Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, p. 149. 42 Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, p. 149. 43 Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, p. 149. 44 Plato, The Republic, trans. H. D. P. Lee (Middlesex and Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 374. 45 Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, p. 57. 46 Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, p. 318. 47 Fabian to Nellie, 10 October 1905, in ŒPAL, p. 142. 48 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 77. 49 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. xii.

18

The fictions of Arthur Cravan

1

j On the genealogy of Arthur Cravan

The legend of Arthur Cravan is a projection of the infinite onto the finite. There is a more than pragmatic motive to resist allowing reduction of the myth of Cravan into an abstraction if we are descriptively to recover, reclaim and recondition the poet-boxer from the myth and now the legend that appears so effortlessly to persist. Despite the apparent conformity of the legend to the model (the striding, breathing poet-boxer of 1911–18), it is by Cravan’s condition within the omnipotent realm of simulacra that he now appears almost (but not entirely) exclusively to unfold outside the relation between original and copy.1 Yet we might moderate the reading of simulation as pertaining to nothing more than what we apprehend at the surface; there is, rather, an immanent structure at work in which depth and surface interplay in complex, creative processes of productive combination, as ‘each sense combines information of the depth with information of the surface’.2 The legend is a consequence of our projection of the infinite onto the finite, delivering in the process the ‘double illusion’ that Deleuze has described in a chimera of infinite agony and ecstasy: ‘simulacra produce the mirage of a false infinite in the images which they form’.3 And though we may never be able fully to actualise what is recoverable from the legend, it will remain always and perhaps only thinkable for us, rendering a present memory of Cravan as something that we have made (idea, assemblage, metaphor, plurality, conceptual persona, even legend), a fiction among fictions, achieving the capacity for future joy in all its transformative potential. Where to begin, then, with the ‘false infinite’ of Arthur Cravan? Always, we might suggest, here and now, in whichever ‘present’ we point at, in the centre of a relentlessly ballooning universe. Evidently, as the art-historical proto-Dada instance, Cravan continues today and exists within broad contexts of deliberation upon protoavant-garde strategies in the early twentieth century. Cravan gains value

3  Sir Otho Holland (Sir Oties Hollonde), ‘Pictorial Book of Arms of the Order of the Garter’.

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The fictions of Arthur Cravan

in the ongoing revision of such strategic engagement through neo-avantgardism, post-postmodernity and the incomplete project of capitalist realism. We know in documentary terms, for instance, that Arthur Cravan was briefly active for no more than seven years. He appeared in Paris in 1911, and disappeared in the Gulf of Tehuantepec in 1918. Before 1911, he was someone else – Fabian Avénarius Lloyd, the name that he never fully discarded – delivered of genealogy that ranges the manor lords of Upholland, Lancashire, in the twelfth century, to the King’s Prothonotary within the counties of Chester and Flint in the early nineteenth. His great-grandfather on the Lloyd side was a close acquaintance of the utilitarian philosopher of liberty and advocate of experiments of living John Stuart Mill; and, importantly for that sober nation, among the progeny of this same ancestor was the chair of the Royal Commission into Welsh Sunday Closing.4 What Cravan knew of this genealogy may have been negligible and was certainly selective (what he knew assumed significance for him in mature manifestations and in the fiction that would eventually dominate), and indeed, in all practical terms, effects have no need to resemble their causes. But the method of genealogical analysis put to work so irrefutably by Nietzsche (in Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) specifically)5 carries the potential at least to show something other than the outward appearances of the effect. Any analysis of origin will demonstrate the blunt absence of essence in all things, or that what we might choose to view as purity in ‘essence’ is more correctly an impurity that admits ‘bastard and mixed blood … [as] the true names of race’.6 As Michel Foucault reasoned, following Nietzsche, genealogical analysis yields identification of ‘the accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely, the complete ­reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations which gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us’.7 The turn to genealogy, then, far from resolving all questions concerning the nature of a thing (as Gilles Deleuze indicated in the first days of postructuralism with his Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962), and as the insistent point in Nietzsche’s critical philosophy), in all practical terms resolves nothing, and is yet a necessary part of the process: Critical philosophy has two inseparable moments: the referring back of all things and any kind of origin to values, but also the referring back of these values to something which is, as it were, their origin and determines their value.8

There are no judgements to be made; it is rather the potentialities and the possibilities of what emerge through genealogy that gain in the ascendant (the primary genealogical concern for Nietzsche, of course,



On the genealogy of Arthur Cravan 21

being moral prejudice (in concepts and in practice) rather than strict ancestry). But the method of analysis prompts equal interest, whether the turn is to the genealogy of morals, or of types of human beings, or of ourselves as ‘men of knowledge’.9 By penetrating the pretentions of universal essentialisms and the vested claims of spirituality, genealogy far exceeds historical documentation and is properly understood to demonstrate the way in which what is delivered is never the inevitable outcome of its genealogical parts, but rather the contingent development of disparate and discontinuous historical forces. What is described in the following passages of the years 1882–87 renders Cravan’s immediate genealogical context in terms of ancestry, but it proposes little that figures in Nietzsche’s properly genealogical account, which signals the philosopher’s break with the accepted practices of historiography in the final decades of the nineteenth century – specifically, Nietzsche’s break with the given practice among ‘moral genealogists’ of confusing origins with purposes. The parents of Arthur Cravan The weight and gravitas of Cravan’s paternal lineage are beautifully offset by the obscurity of the maternal line. Cravan’s mother was herself the consequence of the seduction and abandonment of a young instructress in the employ of mid-nineteenth-century English aristocracy, and consequently was raised as daughter to the named Frenchman André L’Arnette and to her mother, identified only as Mme Whitehood.10 Cravan’s mother, then, this daughter of obscure origin, was Hélène Clara St Clair Hutchinson, possessing rare beauty and ‘[d]e grands yeux, un nez d’une pureté extraordinaire, une bouche un peu trop grande formant un visage terriblement spirituel’.11 She was affectionately Nellie, and married Otho Holland Lloyd (Cravan’s natural father) in Lausanne, Switzerland. Lloyd had first become acquainted with Nellie when she was instructress to the children of one of the families in the Swiss town’s large English colony,12 and had paid for her term at finishing school in Lausanne in the summer of 1882.13 The family by whom she was employed allowed her to adopt their name of Hutchinson as goddaughter to the head of the house, and thus Nellie assumed a modicum of respectability for eventual marriage into the family of the Hollands of Clifton and Rhodes,14 upon whom husband and wife would be economically dependent for the immediate future. Following their marriage in July 1884, Lloyd, who had qualified but never practised as a barrister,15 was able to research something of Nellie’s background with the assistance of her mother’s surviving sister, and claimed to have identified

22

The fictions of Arthur Cravan

a prominent English judge as her natural father.16 For the eighteen months that followed, the marriage proved to be a delicate though generally blissful arrangement between Lausanne and London – ‘I don’t think that, in marrying my father, she felt any love for him; her choice was dictated solely by the question of money’17 – and it was in London, on 6 July 1885, that a first child was born to the Lloyds, named Otho St Clair Lloyd, elder sibling to the future Arthur Cravan. One month before Otho’s birth, his cousin Cyril was born on 5 June 1885, also in London, a first son from the marriage of Constance Mary Lloyd and Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. The latter, yes, Oscar Wilde, was occasionally acquainted with Otho Holland Lloyd, Constance’s brother and senior of three years (both Otho and Oscar had read Classics at Oxford in the mid- to late 1870s; Lloyd went to Oriel College in 1876, Wilde had already gone to Magdalen College in 1874; they reportedly first met each other in Dublin in 1877 or, in Lloyd’s recollection, at Magdalen in 1878).18 Cravan’s later imagined Wildean verdict on his father and Wilde’s brother-in-law Lloyd was not the most complimentary: ‘He is the most insipid [plat] man I have ever met.’19 Wilde had first been introduced to Constance in 1881, and Lloyd warmly greeted his sister’s betrothal, welcoming Wilde ‘as a new brother ... if Constance makes as good a wife as she has been a good sister to me your happiness is certain; she is staunch and true’.20 Constance and Wilde were married in London in May 1884; Constance had lived at the imposing Lloyd family home at 100 Lancaster Gate since 1878, and it was there that she and her new husband briefly stayed before settling as newly-weds into the recently built and (for the Wildes) fashionably renovated number 16 Tite Street, Chelsea.21 Their second son was born on 3 November 1886 and proudly named Vyvyan Oscar Beresford Wilde. Thus, to sum up, Oscar Wilde was uncle to the future Arthur Cravan. For the Lloyds of Lausanne, in the meantime, the ardour of 1884–85 had been waning somewhat as Otho Holland Lloyd’s attentions became increasingly overtly directed at Mary Edna Winter, Nellie’s friend and the daughter of the principal at her finishing school. And though Nellie’s pregnancy into 1887 delivered the Lloyds a second son, the birth came at a time of upheaval in domestic commitment; in the period that followed, Lloyd left his wife and two children in Lausanne, heading south to Florence in Italy ‘pour une escapade romantique’22 with Mary – an act that would have inevitable repercussions and ultimately irrecoverable consequences. Constance wrote to her brother Otho: [W]hat a burden you have thrown on poor little Nellie. She writes so very sweetly and kindly but she is such a child quite unfit to take charge of two



On the genealogy of Arthur Cravan 23 children, two boys, entirely by herself with no father’s care. I imagined that you had such an intensely strong feeling of the duties of parents that you would not have so deserted the little ones. Is it forever, or is there no chance that you will some day return to her?23

There would be no return. The second of the Lloyd boys, born innocent and unaware on 22 May 1887, was named Fabian Avénarius Lloyd: ‘in an Alpine / summer resort the male fruit / of a Celtic couple / is baptized / Colossus’.24 This Fabian, much later code-named Colossus by Mina Loy, was the future Arthur Cravan. Holland Cravan’s historical ancestry unfolds in a remarkable pedigree from Upholland in Lancashire.25 Otho Holland Lloyd, his father, possessed an impressive document charting the family name back to the mideleventh century, as the nephew Vyvyan Holland (Wilde) recalled: My uncle, who took a great interest in ancestry of all kinds, possessed a family tree of the Hollands of Lancashire, going back to Sir Stephen Holland, Lord of Skevington [sic] in the time of Edward the Confessor. This family tree is an imposing document on parchment, measuring about five foot by two; it was prepared at the beginning of the nineteenth century and contains many interesting names, including that of Sir Otho Holland, one of the original Knights of the Garter.26

The manor of Upholland is listed as ‘Hoiland’ in the great land survey of the Domesday Book commissioned by William the Bastard and completed in 1086. The manor remained in the possession of the Holland (recorded as ‘Holand’ or ‘Holande’) family until 1534, Upholland being numbered among the market, castle and priory towns of Lancashire.27 Sir Ucke, Lord Knight of Holland, begat his son Siward de Longworth de Holland, born in the township in 1157 and latterly known for posterity as Siward the Warrior; in 1170 Ucke died (and was buried) in Picardy. Siward’s son was Matthew de Holland (recorded as Mattheum de Holande), born in 1175 and named in deed records of 1202 at Lancaster Assizes upon the granting of arable land to his modest possession totalling 210 acres, the possession of which saw the family settle in the township; deed records subsequently indicate that two years later, upon his death, Matthew was succeeded by his son Robert de Holland, born in 1197 and the first of the line recorded as having both entered and exited the world in Upholland. In 1219, Robert married Cecily de Columbers, and their first son and heir Thurstan de Holland was born in 1222. When Thurstan was not yet twenty years of age, it is recorded that

24

The fictions of Arthur Cravan

in 1241 he and his father were together in prison, charged with setting fire to an occupied property belonging to the Rector of Wigan. Having been released on bail, they claimed trial by jury putting themselves ‘for good or evil upon the country, to wit, upon twelve knights above suspicion and four vills of the neighborhood of Wigan’;28 the absence of any further record suggests they were cleared of the charge. The acquisition of land, wealth and progeny by the Holland family gained considerable pace during the lifetime of Thurstan de Holland, specifically through his three marriages: the first in 1254 to Margaret, daughter of Adam de Kellet, by which Thurstan inherited the manors of Lonsdale, Furness and Cartmel in north Lancashire; the second in 1262 to Juliana Gellebrond, who bore him four of his eleven children; and the third in 1266 to the daughter of Henry de Hale, whose father on his deathbed, ‘come il launguist a la mort’,29 yielded his family seal to Thurstan, who is reputed to have improperly used it in issuing to himself the manor of Hale. As legal witness of a charter to the Cistercian Abbey of Stanlow in 1272, according to the record he was knighted in the reign of Edward I as Sir Thurstan de Holland, signing the charter with a cross and closing it with his seal showing three bulls’ heads. Thurstan begat William de Holland, born in 1258 and the second of his children by Margaret,30 subsequently titled Sir William de Holland, lord of the Sharples estate; William begat his own son, also named William, born in 1275 and subsequently titled Sir William de Holland Knight of Sharples. To secure a male heir and to found his family, this second William formed a non-legal union with Margaret Shoresworth, and to them a son, Thurstan, was born in 1297. As had been the case with the first Thurstan three generations earlier, further land acquisition followed through the endowment of estates by Margaret’s uncle (who was without son and heir) to Thurstan, who was himself knighted before 1355 in the reign of Edward III and so titled Sir Thurstan de Holland Knight, and who founded the Holland branch of Clifton. The twentiethcentury chronicler of this early genealogy, notwithstanding his own vested interest, observes: [t]here has existed no family in Lancashire … whose career has been so remarkable as that of the Hollands. Playing an active part in the most picturesque and chivalrous period of English history, they figured among the founders of the Order of the Garter, allied themselves with the royal family, and attained the highest rank in the peerage.31

The distinguished line that eventually leads to Arthur Cravan, half a millennium hence, carried the name Holland through generations of male heirs, concluding at the twenty-second from Sir Ucke de Longworth



On the genealogy of Arthur Cravan 25

de Holland with Judith Holland of Rhodes, whose marriage to James Watson in the mid-eighteenth century delivered a son, named Holland Watson, in 1751. Lloyd The second line coursing prominently through the ancestry of Arthur Cravan is Lloyd, which we can reliably resume in the late eighteenth century. The name Lloyd itself will take us back well beyond its first recording in the fourteenth century, into medieval monastic Wales in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries with the grey friars, or brodyr llwydion; the adjectival llwyd in Welsh (literally ‘grey’, connoting ‘holy’) was subsequently transcribed as the fixed epithet ‘Lloyd’.32 It is with the Stockport solicitor John Lloyd that we resume the genealogy of Arthur Cravan: John Lloyd, the determined law enforcer in the face of Luddite insurrection during the years 1811–13 in the Cheshire town south of Manchester, bordering Lancashire, that had been witness to the dramatic expansion of industrial means of production threatening the very survival of a rural working class. After the first wave of Luddite action in 1811, the Manchester Gazette reported how the following year began ‘with a gloom altogether so frigid and cheerless that hope itself is almost lost and frozen in the prospect’.33 On 9 March 1812, the man by whose name the insurrectionists would eventually reputedly be identified, Ned Ludd, Clerk to the General Army of Redressers, issued notice of destructive action that would be taken by the Luddite armies and that ‘[w]e will never lay down our Arms … [until] the House of Commons passes an Act to put down all Machinery hurtful to Commonality’.34 Government agency commissioned many in response, among whom was the solicitor John Lloyd, installed as Attorney to the Crown and answerable to the Home Office. In the month following Ned Ludd’s notice, Lloyd was recorded by his own hand, reporting to the Crown, as having apprehended a man displaying pro-Luddite slogans in Stockport. The months that followed, into late 1812, demonstrated an escalation in Lloyd’s enthusiastic activities to counter Luddite sedition. He was active monitoring, arresting and interrogating suspects; abducting witnesses and acting himself as witness for the prosecution; leaking information to the press; or recruiting informants and spies – indeed all of the above, to the point at which Lloyd, this ‘Tory of the old school, intensely loyal to Church and King’,35 became himself the object of scrutiny among his superiors lest he should further aggravate what were by that point already exacerbated and incendiary social tensions. Over an intense six-month period in 1812, Lloyd was so suitably

26

The fictions of Arthur Cravan

active and prominent in Luddite suppression as to have consolidated a reputation of some distinction among loyalists. On 6 October 1812, as an unequivocal expression of their appreciation, Stockport dignitaries wrote to the Home Secretary the following endorsement in appeal of wise and just ‘recompense’ for Lloyd: John Lloyd Gentleman a Solicitor in this town did evince unwearied zeal activity and resolution in discovering and bringing to justice many of the Ringleaders … [by] his constant and unparalleled endeavours to suppress the same riotous spirit which now prevails in some of the neighbouring Counties …36

In his efforts to apprehend and bring to justice the murderers of a mill-owner, for instance, who had been ambushed and shot on 28 April 1812, Lloyd’s ‘unwearied zeal’ employed methods to be remarked upon. Lloyd wrote to the Home Office on 20 October, detailing somewhat circuitously his informant and abduction policy in relation to this particular case. In summation, ‘I have run away with one of the Witnesses to prevent her being tampered with and have placed her in my own House where she will more fully and freely give her Examination …’37 Lloyd’s original informant in the case was spared from having to give evidence thanks to Lloyd’s stated abduction and elicited ‘examination’ of the suspect’s mother, by which means he was able to secure the suspect’s confession to having been an accomplice rather than felon, and so to spare himself the gallows. In putting together (or concocting) the Crown case, Lloyd was instrumental, and was himself subsequently to be noted as prime suspect in leaking to the press details of the arrests of the three men finally convicted of murder. Presenting the plea for the original suspect’s pardon, an anonymous letter was published in the Leeds Mercury, concluding with its author’s sincere wish that government intervention would ‘ultimately restore the West-Riding to its former tranquillity’.38 The letter contains details that were not subsequently raised at trial, and which might well conflict with what was established as evidence;39 but whatever the irregularities in methods and means, Luddite suppression cemented a reputation for John Lloyd in his home town, where he ‘was hated by the lower class of the people of Stockport’.40 Typical was the conclusion of proceedings in a trial for burglary in September 1813; the accused, having been found guilty, ‘holding up his fist in a threatening position, said, ‘ “[Damn] thee [Lloyd], I may thank thee for this” ’.41 Remuneration for Lloyd’s devotion to the government cause came in 1822, as reported in The Salopian Journal of August that year: ‘The King has been pleased to appoint John Lloyd, Gentleman, to be



On the genealogy of Arthur Cravan 27

Prothonotary and Clerk to the Crown, within the Counties of Chester and Flint.’42 At his right hand in the years prior to his appointment to this ancient office had been Lloyd’s eldest son from his marriage in 1794 to Molly (Mary) Watson, ‘whose mother was a Holland’ – thus the first point of confluence between Lloyds and Hollands; Molly was the ninth child to James Watson and Judith Holland, and eighth sibling therefore to Holland Watson).43 The son, John Horatio Lloyd, born in Stockport in 1798, the year of England’s decisive victory over France at the Battle of the Nile during the Revolutionary Wars (and named Horatio in patriotic gesture to the popular hero of the day, the first Viscount Nelson), grew up during the years in which his father was locked in Luddite combat. As a youth, he ‘assisted his father in his efforts to restore order … [in] those stirring times’,44 before embarking in 1818 on academic study of some distinction at Queen’s College, Oxford, which culminated in 1824 as reported, once more, in The Salopian Journal in November of that year: ‘[T]he degree of Master of Arts was conferred on Mr John Horatio Lloyd, Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, and son of John Lloyd, Esq. the King’s Prothonotary in the Chester Circuit.’45 Having subsequently read for the Bar and practice as Barrister at Law, Lincoln’s Inn, Lloyd achieved recognition for his legal abilities and political interests, and was a prominent member of the Union Debating Society in London, where he associated closely with John Stuart Mill, his junior by several years. In May 1826, Mill prepared a peroration on the question proposed by Lloyd: ‘That the practical Constitution of Great Britain is adequate to all the Purposes of good Government’. Referring to Lloyd as proposer in his address to the Society, Mill described how his associate intended to defend the practice of the Constitution, and not its theory, and though he admitted that the Constitution is not what it pretends to be, he maintained … that it is better than it pretends to be. For my part, I care as little about the theory of the Constitution as he does. I care not by what machinery my pocket is picked: picked or not picked is the essential point, all the rest is of small moment.46

Mill’s mature philosophy on liberty would develop ultimately as a sustained reflection on the negotiation between the individual and society in contest with authority. Though it may falter at instances into objectionable positions regarding the nation-state,47 Mill advocates the authority of government to act in the protection of society from possible harm resulting from the action of any individual, and we note the conclusion that ‘[o]ver himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign’.48 In September 1826, Lloyd married his cousin Caroline Holland

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Watson in Liverpool; she was the daughter born in 1802 to Harriet Watson (née Powell) and Holland Watson, the latter being a Holland of the twenty-third generation from Sir Ucke de Longworth de Holland, and brother to Lloyd’s mother, Molly Watson. Lloyd stood for and was elected Member of Parliament for Stockport in the session commen­cing in 1832, following that year’s Reform Act, sitting as a Radical and as a reformer in the advanced Liberal interest, calling for wider suffrage. That parliamentary session took its toll, however, evidently exhausting Lloyd both physically and mentally, specifically during the progress through parliament of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which would abolish the death penalty for certain crimes. His tireless work put him in line for appointment to the role of Solicitor General, but the late nights running into the small hours spent reworking and redrafting were demanding indeed, as his obituary much later observed: His health gave way under the double strain of a long practice, and the keen contests of Parliamentary life, and at the ensuing election he did not again offer himself as a candidate. He retired for a short time from the exercise of his position, but when his health was re-established he returned to the Bar.49

The unreported account later documented Lloyd’s presumed breakdown and ‘moment of madness’ under the strain of long hours and high demands: Lloyd ‘exposed himself in the Temple Gardens … he ran naked in the sight of some nurse maids’.50 And so he abandoned his aspiration to become Solicitor General, stepping down from politics and temporarily from legal practice; his diversification over the next four years took him abroad, and he became a director of the Athens agency of the Ionian Bank (the Athens agency opened in 1845, eventually to become the bank’s head office). When he returned to legal practice, Lloyd’s chambers prospered enormously as authorities in matters on the rapid expansion of the railway system during the industrialising of Britain after the mid-nineteenth century, and with the introduction of the so-named Lloyd’s Bonds as securities that made possible the construction of large parts of that railway system. From this time onwards, then, Lloyd’s professional life secured substantial means for his now large family, which came to reside in the new-build at 100 Lancaster Gate in Bayswater, London, directly opposite the Royal Albert Hall on the other side of Kensington Gardens;51 a family in which the tributaries that are of greatest comment in the genealogy of Arthur Cravan had now become confluent. Together, Caroline Holland Watson and John Horatio Lloyd had eight children, the second of whom was Horace Lloyd, born in August 1828.



On the genealogy of Arthur Cravan 29

Horace, in adulthood ‘[k]nown as a whist and chess player’,52 graduated from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before being called to the Bar in the Middle Temple in 1852. Three years later, Horace married his eighteen-year-old second cousin Ada, Adelaide Atkinson of Dublin,53 and to them two children were born, Otho in November 1856 and Constance in January 1859, constituting thus the family that would first reside at 3 Harewood Square, south of Regent’s Park. Horace was skilled, able and successful in his profession, becoming Queen’s Counsel in 1868, by which time the family had moved to live at Sussex Gardens (first at number 9, and then at the significantly more impressive villa at number 42), a short walk from John Horatio Lloyd’s residence at Lancaster Gate. Horace’s distractions were of equal note to his chosen profession, however, as he busied himself in the ranks of Freemasonry and within the social circle around the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII – and, in gentlemen’s clubs, he carried a reputation as one who could have ‘taken on any expert in one of the three games, chess and billiards and whist, and beaten him in two out of three’.54 For his son’s education, in the meantime, Horace sent Otho to board at the recently founded Clifton College in Bristol (‘ “Play up! play up! and play the game!” ’),55 where curricular emphasis on science rather than Classics failed to deter the young Otho in his later academic pursuits.56 What appears to have been absent in the family home is the semblance of emotional stability; indeed, it is surmised that, with the distractions of gaming interests, Horace had fathered an illegitimate half-brother to Otho and Constance (fragmentary reminiscences are documented of rows taking place at Lancaster Gate when this halfbrother was presented, and subsequently of Otho’s suspicion that he had encountered the same youth in Oxford in 1878).57 There was some ignominy, too, during Otho’s school years, reported under the headline ‘A Queen’s Counsel Fined for Assault’ following an incident between Horace and a Cookham solicitor.58 Horace’s early death one year later, resulting from pulmonary complications at the age of forty-six, was variously observed among ‘deaths of note’;59 and, in its column for the Freemasons, The Era reported the demise of one who ‘had long been a distinguished Freemason and taken a prominent part in the affairs of the Craft’, who ‘breathed his last on the 30th [March 1874]’.60 There is, then, a painful inconstancy to these childhood and early maturing years of Cravan’s father, Otho Holland Lloyd. Following Horace’s death and until Oxford, Lancaster Gate sought to provide a surrogate domestic stability in the absence of any such at Sussex Gardens and at 1 Devonshire Terrace, Hyde Park (the home the family moved to after Horace’s death). As well as his father’s vagaries, Otho’s mother Ada

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is documented maternally as having been emotionally cold, meting out particularly unkind treatment to her daughter Constance in ‘perpetual snubbing in private and public sarcasm, rudeness and savage scoldings’, accompanied by the sometimes menacing threat of physical hurt.61 When Ada Lloyd remarried in late 1878 at the age of forty, with Otho by then a student at Oxford, the final settlement was that Constance should move to live at 100 Lancaster Gate ‘with [grandfather] John Horatio and Auntie Emily in loco parentis’.62 It may be too easy retrospectively to analyse and identify in Otho’s own subsequent conduct a repetition of domestic indiscretion during the 1880s, but his personal reflection on the strife of the 1870s concedes as much in his admission that Constance could not herself have endured what she had gone through ‘without some mark on the character being left’.63 Similarly Otho, we surmise; the domestic turbulence that followed the birth in 1887 of his second son Fabian (Cravan) may not mirror the two decades or so previously, but it does resound in events that achieved some resolution with Otho’s divorce from Nellie (Cravan’s mother) and his marriage to Mary Winter in September 1889. As for Nellie, abandoned following Fabian’s birth to raise two sons in Lausanne, she became the object of patient and attentive care at the hands of a cultured Swiss medical doctor, Henri Grandjean. Docteur Grandjean was, by accounts, prone to romantic flights and found himself quickly enamoured of a woman he believed to be of noble descent, and expressed his gentle affection in tender letters written to her. Coincidentally on Fabian’s first birthday, in 1888, Nellie made her first acceptance of Grandjean’s advance and made it known that she would consider favourably an invitation to share a boat ride with him out from Lausanne and onto Lake Geneva.64 In the weeks and months that followed, discreet and strict propriety was observed between Nellie and Grandjean, largely through restrained correspondence during summer months in each other’s absence. In early June 1888, Nellie travelled to London, staying at 9 Porchester Place, Hyde Park, where the recklessness of Otho’s conduct the previous year obligated support for her from the Lloyd family; and, in mid-July, Nellie set out the conditions of her divorce from Otho.65 She returned to Lausanne in August, and it was from that period onwards that Grandjean was presented socially as her future husband and beau-père to her sons Otho St Clair and Fabian Avénarius; Nellie and Grandjean were married at the beginning of May 1890, remaining contentedly thus throughout years which Nellie much later described as those of ‘un heureux mariage’.66 For the family, domestic stability followed; if Otho was always to be his mother Nellie’s favourite at the expense of the younger sibling Fabian, then Grandjean might provide



On the genealogy of Arthur Cravan 31

some corrective. His letters to Nellie during their summer separation reveal refined interests:67 he counted the painter Félix Vallotton among his own childhood friends in Lausanne. Combined with his embrace of the great outdoors and a love for sport, Grandjean would be the cultured model that Fabian could aspire to emulate in his own pursuits, and it was to this beau-père that Fabian would consistently turn in confidence during the maturing youth that would eventually yield Cravan’s own manifesto of continuous contradiction: I have lived in so many different milieus, all of which have shaped me, that I have ended up possessing all the flaws, vices, qualities and virtues, all the feelings, that are generally shared by several men and several animals: my heroism, my cowardice, my laziness, my diligence, my love of departures, my love of home … have brought me both new misfortunes and new joys, so many dual feelings that for some years I have regarded myself as the most sensibly human of all the men who ever lived.68

Genealogical critique And thus, the dominant genealogy. If we are curious now as to the purpose of the future assemblage ‘Cravan’, then Nietzsche reasons that no purpose (or ‘eventual utility’) will be revealed if we account, let’s say, for Cravan’s origin by the presentation of some narrative for his historical emergence. There is no such narrative. Yet though Nietzsche presents genealogy as nothing more than description, he writes in such a way as to indicate precisely the opposite. The priority for a critical philosophy takes form rather in the systematic revision of ‘meaning’, the continual reinterpretation of ‘purpose’, the letting-go of any sense of ‘eventual utility’ in the object, ‘through which any previous “meaning” and “purpose” are necessarily obscured or even obliterated’.69 Fundamental here is Nietzsche’s revised application of the philosophy of values, which by the late nineteenth century had arrived at an instrumental state capable of giving rise only to new ‘conformism’ and new forms of ‘submission’, but which the philosopher deliberately set to reconfigure into ‘the true realisation of critique and the only way in which a total critique may be realised’.70 It is not by working to the chicken-and-egg tautology of values-and-evaluations that effective critique will be deployed, according to Nietzsche, but rather by redirecting attention to the way in which values are arrived at. Deleuze clarifies: ‘The problem of critique is that of the value of values, of the evaluation from which their value arises, thus the problem of their creation.’71 The historiography of ancestry starts to be useful when directed at the methodology of genealogy (corresponding to the move from

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the ‘why’ of psychoanalytic to the ‘how’ of schizoanalytic enquiry) in consideration of Cravan’s own ancestry and of any morality or ethically defined position that we might attach to him. Our understanding of the way in which Nietzsche draws distinctions regarding values is inadvertently prompted by the different social and class backgrounds represented by Cravan’s mother and father in the 1880s, not to mention the cultural and emotional contrasts of character scored by Cravan in his much later ‘autobiographies’. The first task in hand is to identify what are and what are not values as Nietzsche would deliberate – not always the easiest thing to do (or undo) in the face of received beliefs and assumptions, but necessary if we are to move towards a realisation of critique. Deleuze’s reading stresses the crux for Nietzsche: ‘high and low, noble and base, are not values but represent the differential element from which the value of values themselves derives’.72 The differential element is important, because it indicates a space in which values are created and named, a space in which Nietzsche locates the ‘pathos of distance’,73 a space that is immanent and thus signals the practical impossibility of removing values from criticism (be it even in ‘inventories of existing values’ or in such values as are presumed to derive from ‘objective facts’).74 It is in this sense that the philosopher becomes a genealogist, and steps away from his (sic) prior role as ‘tribunal judge or … utilitarian mechanic’: Genealogy means both the value of origin and the origin of values. Genealogy is as opposed to absolute values as it is to relative or utilitarian ones. Genealogy signifies the differential element of values from which their value itself derives. Genealogy thus means origin or birth, but also difference or distance in the origin. Genealogy means nobility and baseness, nobility and vulgarity, nobility and decadence in the origin. The noble and the vulgar, the high and the low – this is the truly genealogical and critical element.75

And the ‘difference or distance in the origin’, it must be said, is nothing if not pronounced in the genealogy through Cravan’s mother and father, and between the vulgar obscurity in origin of Nellie St Clair on the one hand and, on the other, the noble lineage from Sir Ucke de Longworth de Holland (Baron, Lord Knight of Holland, Lord of Longworth, Longworth Hall and Manors of Bolton) in the early twelfth century, through long and noble descent to Otho Holland Lloyd – a differential that Cravan would himself reconstitute into his maturing idea of the voyou and voyoucratie (which I discuss in Chapter 4). Genealogy, of course, is not genealogical critique; genealogical ­critique, as developed by Nietzsche, rejects any sense of essences or



On the genealogy of Arthur Cravan 33

of innate, natural human capacities (whatever temptation to invoke the progressive opportunism of named progenitors), in order to focus on such material forces that generate or produce any subsequent states. Whereas the critique as method was deliberately developed by the philosopher in his enquiry into the production of moral concepts and values, it is equally correct to say that social privileges and exclusions in the documenting of ancestry are also themselves contingent states, possessing no immanent essential properties, and similarly subject to material forces. Documenting ancestry in these terms, then, in ascents and descents from high to low, from noble to base, is a register of the differential from which the value of values derives. Once more reading the chronicler, despite a promising start, the account is quickly reduced to such invocation of innate capacities that so frequently blights traditional history in its assumption to identify origins and purposes: The vicissitudes of [the Hollands’] fortunes were great. If they rose to the heights they also tasted of the depths. Most of the chiefs of the race, from the time of Edward II to that of Edward IV [1307–1470], came to violent ends as befitted an ambitious fighting family in stormy English times, when politics was a game played with lives for stakes.76

Well, we might now modify Nietzsche’s challenge by applying his method to account for social privileges, which are themselves materially generated out of successive reinterpretations of the conditions of existence as they take form through dominant historical forces and interests – and each reinterpretation itself involves the expression of a defined quantity of will to power.77 What objectivity, indeed, can be possible in a conception of history that would describe itself as ‘idealistic’, and when it is the victory of strong over weaker forces that routinely produces historical interpretations? The whole point for Nietzsche and his method is precisely to separate high and low, noble and base, in the creation of what is conceded as only one among any number of versions of the past, but which allows us to develop the coursing forces of the present. If, as Deleuze is able to distil from Nietzsche, the differential is the truly genealogical and critical element, then we have posed critique at its most positive and productive through a method that provides means of analysing the value of values and that also identifies ‘the positive element of a creation’.78 Thus critique, for Nietzsche, is always ‘active’ rather than ‘reactive’, ‘the active expression of an active mode of existence; attack and not revenge, the natural aggression of a way of being’.79 In the hands of the philosopher, the differential is wielded in active mode; Nietzsche describes his ‘attempt to philosophize with a hammer’,80 putting it to work as would a critic and creator.81 In Ecce

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homo (1888), a work that carries the less frequently cited sub-title How To Become What You Are (Wie man wird, was man ist), Nietzsche’s thoughts take the genealogical turn in extracting the differential: The fortunate thing about my existence, perhaps its unique feature, is its fatefulness: to put it in the form of a riddle, as my father I have already died, as in my mother I am still alive and growing old. This twofold provenance, as it were from the top and bottom rungs on the ladder of life, both décadent and beginning – this, if anything, explains the neutrality, the freedom from bias in relation to the overall problem of life, that perhaps distinguishes me.82

Now, these words carry undeniable resonances within the reliquaries of Arthur Cravan, to which this study will have repeated recourse; for the moment, however, they isolate what Nietzsche calls his ‘dual ascent’ in accommodation of the differential – that is to say, the differential is immanent in the ascent. As an idea, such dual ascent has featured in critical engagement of Nietzsche since the closing decades of the twentieth century. Of particular note is Peter Sloterdijk’s description of the ‘centauric’ birthing that oscillates between noble and base, not in a dialectical but in a relation of open hostility towards one as the other; and though the centaurs may ‘consistently take the wrong step … [they] thereby proceed upward!’83 Between the virtues of nobility (or the ‘strong’ or the ‘dominant’) and the values of baseness (or the ‘weak’ or the ‘dominated’) – Cravan himself would write of how ‘[d]istinction is bounded on one side by the toughocracy [voyoucracy], and on the other by the nobility’84 – residence therein of the differential aligns Nietzsche’s critical philosophy with the philosophies of immanence, and genealogy configures as a set of forces immanent in the phenomenon expressing those forces. The genealogical phenomenon in this instance, specific to what I shall develop in this study, is the body of Arthur Cravan; the body that will never be found and that is submitted as an insubstantial phenomenon. Constituted as the arbitrary relation of force with force, Nietzsche describes the body in Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886) as a social structure (‘social’ understood in psychological terms as the nexus of forces in competition with one another).85 It is subsequently Deleuze who stresses the point, reading Nietzsche, that the body is not defined as a field of forces but rather as the relation between dominant and dominated forces: Every relationship of forces constitutes a body – whether it is chemical, biological, social or political. Any two forces, being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter into a relationship. This is why the body is



On the genealogy of Arthur Cravan 35 always the fruit of chance, in the Nietzschean sense, and appears as the most ‘astonishing’ thing …86

We are still at the genealogy and ancestry of Cravan but, in working out and in applying Nietzsche’s greater genealogical method, it will also become instructive as we take account of the competing forces (Cravan’s ‘others’) in the mature ‘life’ that can be documented between 1911 and 1918. The closer our approach to Cravan (as ‘event’ or ‘singularity’), in the meantime, the more immediate become the relationships and differentials between forces immanent to the body – which obtain quality as well as quantity (the former corresponding to the difference in the latter).87 There is here no hierarchical rigidity; that is to say, Nietzsche reasons how inferior forces can prevail over superior,88 and thus describes a distinction of quality. Deleuze’s reading then outlines the functioning of ‘hierarchy’ for Nietzsche, which, in addition to signalling the superiority of active over the inferiority of reactive forces, also designates the triumph of reactive forces, the contagion of reactive forces and the complex organisation which results – where the weak have conquered, where the strong are contaminated, where the slave who has not stopped being a slave prevails over the master who has stopped being one: the reign of law and of virtue.89

The relations between forces then bear continuously upon genealogy, and the genealogist enters into ongoing negotiation and consequently evaluation of prevailing forces as either being inferior or superior, active or reactive. Is there anything in Cravan’s ancestry, therefore, that provides explanation for what its multiple and contingent forces delivered between 1911 and 1918? Retrospective rationalisation can arise only from whatever concepts are applied in the present, and if the genealogy of the future Cravan could be said to reside anywhere, then, rather than in commonality, it will emerge in a process of individuation. In his own Parisian reflection, Cravan would one day write,     let yourself love all that you take delight in Accept yourself whole, accept the heritage That shaped you and is passed on from age to age Down to your entity. Remain mysterious; Rather than be pure, accept yourself as numerous.     The wave of heredity will not be denied …90

Reasserting the claim of ‘bastard and mixed blood … [as] the true names of race’,91 Cravan’s doggerel here signals a process of individuation that would eventually occur for the poet-boxer in proliferant differences,

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influences and interactions – the latter as contingent through chance configurations as they would be actual and specific. The experimental use to which Cravan applied his ‘past’ would itself prove the creative element, concisely to ‘remember the future [and] imagine the past’,92 making of himself an effect of ‘the emergence of a plurality of times and their organization as valid presences’.93 In the creative determination of the values of the future, we are given the aspect that combines with the critical in constituting the evaluative aspect of Nietzsche’s genealogical method: his positive critique. If the philosophy of sense and values is to manifest in critique, then, as Deleuze interjects, it becomes ‘the true realisation of critique and the only way in which a total critique may be realised, the only way to “philosophise with a hammer” ’.94 Notes  1 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy’, in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 312.  2 Deleuze, ‘The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy’, p. 310.  3 Deleuze, ‘The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy’, pp. 313–14.  4 The commission chair was Sir Horatio Lloyd of Chester (1829–1920), son of Edward Watson Lloyd (1802–50, son of John Lloyd and Mary Watson, and brother of John Horatio Lloyd, Cravan’s great-grandfather) and Alice Pennington. With the Sunday Closing (Wales) Act of 1881, it has been pointedly observed that, ‘[f]or the first time in history, the Imperial Parliament [of Great Britain] had sanctioned separate legislative treatment for Wales’; Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics 1868–1922 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1963, 3rd edn 1980), p. 43.  5 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967).  6 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), p. 379.  7 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (New York and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 81.  8 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 2.  9 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 17. 10 ‘Repères biographiques’, in ŒPAL, p. 265. 11 Arthur Cravan, ‘Autobiographies’, La nouvelle revue française, 587, ‘Salut à Arthur Cravan’ (October 2008), 254. 12 The English colony in Lausanne was recalled as even having ‘an English club, full of retired Service men who found Switzerland cheaper than



On the genealogy of Arthur Cravan 37

England. There was a Lausanne football club … and there were at least two tea-shops patronised exclusively by English and American residents and visitors.’ Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 171. 13 See Franny Moyle, Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde (London: John Murray, 2011), p. 73. Otho Holland Lloyd alighted in Lausanne during his continental tours as a young man; he had already toured closer to home, spending time in Wales in 1879, for instance, along with his sister Constance and grandfather John Horatio Lloyd. 14 See ACSS, p. 22. 15 See Bastiaan van der Velden, ‘Chronologie’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 62. Otho Lloyd’s professional absence from the Bar is glossed by what proved to be an embarrassing visit as a young man to the Court of Justice, not in a professional capacity but as a witness in the prosecution for fraud of a young lady and her accomplice who had duped Lloyd (along with several other ‘charitable’ individuals) into handing over money. The case was reported in The Evening News (Portsmouth), 24 March 1879. 16 Cravan, ‘Autobiographies’, 249. Many years later, Nellie wrote in laconic expression of relief that this presumed father appeared to be a man of considerable distinction and repute rather than a mere cobbler. Nellie to Otho St Clair, 25 September 1923; cited in ACSS, p. 28. 17 Cravan, ‘Autobiographies’, 254; trans. in ACM, p. 265. 18 Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde, p. 75, however, states that Otho Holland Lloyd ‘had been at Oxford at the same time as my father [Wilde], though they never met there’. 19 Arthur Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, trans. adapted from The Soil, 4 (April 1917), in 4DS, p. 59. 20 Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (eds), The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 222, n. 1. 21 What was number 16 is today 34 Tite Street. The interior of the Wildes’ home was described by W. B. Yeats in his memoir: ‘[They] lived in a little house at Chelsea that the architect Godwin had decorated with an elegance that owed something to Whistler … I remember vaguely a white drawing room with Whistler etchings, “let in” to white panels, and a dining room all white, chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of red cloth in the middle of the table under a terra-cotta statuette … It was perhaps too perfect in its unity.’ W. B. Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil (London: T. Werner Laurie Ltd, 1922), p. 24. Otho Holland Lloyd also provided his son, Fabian, with a detailed description and drawings of the house’s interior; this text was subsequently published in 1917, headed ‘Wilde’s House’, in The Soil, 4 (April 1917), 149–56, and mined as a source for much of Cravan’s own later writing on Wilde. As for Constance, an unfortunate pall is drawn across accounts of her domestic life with Wilde: ‘It is said that Mrs Wilde was rather cruelly made to pose for Lady Henry

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Wotton in Dorian Gray, that “curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest … She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy ... looking like a bird of paradise that had been out all night in the rain …”. She was sentimental, pretty, well-meaning and inefficient. She would have been very happy as the wife of an ornamental minor poet, and it is possible that in marrying Wilde she mistook his for such a character.’ Arthur Ransome, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (London: Martin Secker, 1912), p. 80. 22 ACSS, p. 20. 23 Moyle, Constance, p. 123. 24 Mina Loy, ‘Enter Colossus’, from the long poem Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose: 1923–1925, in LLB, p. 150; thus the mythical birth of the Colossus of Clifton and Rhodes. 25 The Holland ancestry was chronicled at the start of the twentieth century by Bernard Holland CB, The Lancashire Hollands (London: John Murray, 1917), pp. 1–4. Upholland is mapped variously as Up Holland and Up-Holland, the market town that, as Margaret Denton (née Ashcroft) recalled for the author (30 October 2015), could by the middle of the twentieth century provide all of its residents with anything ‘from a pin to a piano’. 26 Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde, pp. 76–7; Skevington is Shevington. The image of this Sir Otho Holland is rendered in the work commissioned c.1430–40 by William Bruges, the ‘Pictorial Book of Arms of the Order of the Garter’; the British Library MS Stowe 594, folio 13, depicts ‘Sir Oties Hollonde’ (c.1316–59), with his elder brother ‘Sir Tomas Hollond’, first Earl of Kent (c.1314–60), depicted on folio 17; they were sons from the union between Robert de Holland, first Baron Holand, founder in 1307 of the college for priests on the site of the present parish church of St Thomas the Martyr in Upholland, and Maud la Zouche. 27 Among the older eighteenth-century burial markers laid at the entrance to the parish church in Upholland, ‘Here underneath thou dost approach man the body …’, the name of Longworth (1776) is visible still. The castle is now long gone, but the chancel of the priory founded in 1319 remains in the nave of the church of St Thomas the Martyr. 28 Holland, The Lancashire Hollands, p. 2. 29 Holland, The Lancashire Hollands, p. 3. 30 The first-born to Thurstan and Margaret de Holland was Robert de Holland (c.1253–1311), father of Robert de Holland, first Baron Holand (c.1280–1328). 31 Holland, The Lancashire Hollands, p. 1. 32 See T. J. Morgan, Welsh Surnames (Cardiff: Qualitex Printing Limited, 1985), pp. 5–8, 151–4. It is presumably this origin that Conover indirectly invokes in his text on the ‘secret’ names of Cravan and pointers to Cravan’s Welsh ancestry; see Roger Lloyd Conover, ‘The Secret Names of Arthur Cravan’, in Arthur Cravan: poète et boxeur, exhibition catalogue, Galerie 1900–2000, 7 April–5 May 1992 (Paris: Terrain Vague, 1992), p. 32.



On the genealogy of Arthur Cravan 39

33 Manchester Gazette; cited in Kirkpatrick Sale, ‘The Achievements of “General Ludd”: A Brief History of the Luddites’, The Ecologist, 29/5 (August–September 1999). 34 Ned Ludd to Mr Smith of Huddersfield, 9 March 1812; cited in Sale, ‘The Achievements of “General Ludd” ’. 35 ‘Obituary: John Horatio Lloyd, 1798–1884’, in Institution of Civil Engineers, Minutes of the Proceedings, 78/1884 (1 January 1884), 450. 36 Memorial to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Sidmouth, Secretary of State for the Home Department, 6 October 1812, http://ludditebicentenary. blogspot.co.uk/search/label/john%20lloyd (accessed 2 August 2015). 37 John Lloyd to the Home Office, 20 October 1812, http://ludditebicentenary. blogspot.co.uk/search/label/john%20lloyd (accessed 2 August 2015). 38 Anonymous, ‘To the Editor of the Courier’, 24 October 1812, http://lud​d​ itebicentenary.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/john%20lloyd (accessed 2 Aug­ust 2015). 39 Alan Brooke and Lesley Kipling, Liberty or Death: Radicals, Republicans and Luddites 1793–1823 (Huddersfield: Huddersfield Local History Society, 1993), p. 48. 40 ‘Obituary: John Horatio Lloyd, 1798–1884’, 450. 41 Proceeding at Chester Lammas Assizes were recorded in the Chester Chronicle; cited in http://ludditebicentenary.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/ john%20lloyd (accessed 2 August 2015). 42 Salopian Journal, 28 August 1822. 43 Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde, p. 77. 44 ‘Obituary: John Horatio Lloyd, 1798–1884’, 450. 45 Salopian Journal, 10 November 1824. 46 John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 26: Journals and Debating Speeches, Part I, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), p. 358. 47 Notoriously so, for instance, in Mill’s articulation of what would come to be the unchecked ideological foundation of a crude and passive racial prejudice that persists today: ‘Experience proves that it is possible for one nationality to merge and be absorbed in another; and when it was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human race, the absorption is greatly to its advantage. Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilized and cultivated people [the French] … than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit … The same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander as members of the British nation.’ John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861; New York: Prometheus Books, 1991), p. 314. 48 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Longman, Roberts & Green Co., 1859, 4th edn 1869), p. 6. 49 ‘Obituary: John Horatio Lloyd, 1798–1884’, 452.

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50 Otho Holland to A. J. Symons Clark, 22 May 1937; cited in Moyle, Constance, p. 17. 51 Through his travel for attendance at court, the census returns between 1841 and 1863, ahead of Lancaster Gate, give Lloyd’s residences permanent and temporary at 15 Park Place, Regent’s Park, London (1842); the Parade Castle Hotel, Neath, Wales (1851); 30 Dorset Square, Mary le Bone, Middlesex (1861); and 1 King’s Bench Walk, London (1863). 52 John Venn, Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College 1349– 1897, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898), p. 272. 53 The family relation between Horace Lloyd and Adelaide Atkinson was detailed by their son Otho in 1937: ‘John Lloyd … married “Molly” a sister of Holland Watson … John Lloyd’s son John Horatio married his first cousin Caroline 7th daughter of the above Holland Watson, and their son Horace … also took to wife a cousin … Adelaide Barbara Atkinson of Dublin; her paternal grandmother née Judith Watson was one of Holland Watson’s many sisters. Holland Watson’s and their mother had been a Miss Judith Holland, a descendant of the well known “Lancashire Hollands”.’ Otho Holland to A. Symons, 22 May 1937; cited in Moyle, Constance, p. 330. 54 Otho Holland to A. Symons, 22 May 1937, cited in Moyle, Constance, p. 330. 55 The Close of Clifton College is thus famously setting for the first stanza of Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’ (1892). 56 In later life, Otho (re-styled Lloyd Holland) translated and published the ancient Greek historical oratory of Herodotus and of Demosthenes: Demosthenes, The Olynthiacs and Philippics, trans. Otho Holland (London: Methuen and Co., 1901); Demosthenes, The Speech on the Crown, trans. O. L. Holland (Bournemouth: W. Mate & Sons Ltd, 1916). 57 Constance to Otho Holland, 31 October 1878; cited in Moyle, Constance, pp. 16–17. 58 ‘A Queen’s Counsel Fined for Assault’, Grantham Journal, 30 August 1873. The Cookham solicitor in question was named John Henry Champion Coles. 59 ‘Deaths of Note’, Bath Chronicle and Gazette, 2 April 1874. 60 The Era, 5 April 1874. 61 Moyle, Constance, p. 19. 62 Moyle, Constance, p. 28; Auntie Emily was Emily Francis Lloyd (1830–92), Horace Lloyd’s younger sibling and the eldest of his sisters. 63 Notebook of Otho, MS collection of John Holland; cited in Moyle, Constance, p. 19. 64 ACSS, pp. 12–13. 65 ACSS, pp. 13–17. 66 Nellie to Otho St Clair, May 1913; cited in ACSS, p. 18. 67 ACSS, p. 16; Grandjean wrote to Nellie of the seventeenth- to nineteenthcentury writers Sapho (Madeleine de Scudéry), Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Alfred de Musset and Alphonse Daudet.



On the genealogy of Arthur Cravan 41

68 This whole passage reads: ‘I have lived in so many different milieus, all of which have shaped me, that I have ended up possessing all the flaws, vices, qualities and virtues, all the feelings, that are generally shared by several men and several animals: my heroism, my cowardice, my laziness, my diligence, my love of departures, my love of home, my honesty, my dishonesty, my energy, my weakness, my love of money, my disinterestedness, my love and my hatred of books; my hypocrisy, my sincerity, my independence, my officialness, my immoderate love of nature, my passion for the big city, my taste for the natural, my penchant for the artificial, my misanthropy, my selflessness, my brutality, my angelic gentleness; my kindness, my nastiness, my ferocity; my pity, my cruelty; my indifference, my immense love; my dreams, my activity; my health, my decline; my inconstancy, my loyalty; everything, everything, everything; my modesty, my vanity, my delusions of grandeur; my politeness, my rudeness; my primitiveness, my civilisation, my seriousness, my recklessness; my belief, my lack of religion, have brought me both new misfortunes and new joys, so many dual feelings that for some years I have regarded myself as the most sensibly human of all the men who ever lived.’ Cravan, ‘Autobiographies’, 252; trans. in ACM, p. 263. 69 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 77. 70 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 1. 71 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 1. 72 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 2. Nietzsche’s aristocratism is brilliantly debated in the volume edited by the present author for Renato Cristi and Oscar Velásquez, Nietzsche: On Theognis of Megara (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015). 73 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 26. 74 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 2. 75 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 2. 76 Holland, The Lancashire Hollands, p. 1. 77 See Lee Spinks, Friedrich Nietzsche (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 6. 78 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 2. 79 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 3. 80 This image, sub-title to Nietzsche’s Götzendämmerung, is explained in the book’s foreword: ‘eternal idols that are here touched with a hammer as if with a tuning fork’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 3. 81 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 3. 82 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘1. Why I Am So Wise’, in Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 7. 83 Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 10. 84 Arthur Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’ (1914), trans. Ralph Manheim, in DPP, p. 8.

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85 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 86 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 40. 87 Deleuze Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 42–3. 88 In demonstrating this complication, Nietzsche revives the antique debate between Callicles and Socrates, where Callicles argues (despite not being understood by Socrates) how ‘[t]he slave does not stop being a slave by being triumphant; when the weak triumph it is not by forming a greater force but by separating force from what it can do’. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 59. This invocation resounds in the broader discussion around the 1910 ‘Fight of the Century’ between the heavyweight boxers Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries. 89 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 60–1. For Deleuze, in later collaboration with Félix Guattari writing Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (1975), this process, whereby the inferior decomposes and defeats the superior by making the latter reactive, is restated in the process of minorisation by which (in the Kafka instance) a major language is subjected to an alienation (or ‘deterritorialisation’) before it is reinvigorated (or ‘reterritorialised’) by a minor language, and the language of the vanquished finds itself in a paradoxical position of dominance over the language of the victor. This is yet further complicated for Deleuze, however, by the irresistible hegemonic drive of the superior in its ‘extraordinary capacity for being twisted and shattered and for secretly putting itself in the service of minorities who work it from the inside, involuntarily, unofficially, nibbling away at that hegemony as it extends itself: the reverse of power’; Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues with Claire Parnet, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1987), p. 58. 90 Arthur Cravan, ‘Des paroles’/‘Some Words’, in John Ashbery, Collected French Translations: Poetry, ed. Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2014), p. 105. 91 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 379. 92 Carlos Fuentes, ‘Remember the Future’, Salmagundi, 68–9 (Fall 1985– Winter 1986), 338. 93 Fuentes, ‘Remember the Future’, 351. 94 Deleuze, Nietzsche, p. 1. For the present study, Cravan’s first unfolding is thus through genealogy, and through the processes in which we participate as we register the unobservable relations of forces which are immanent to the phenomena interpreted by the genealogist.

from ‘Enter Colossus’ His gracious little lady-bird of a mamma dresses him in velvet suits of gentian blue determined she will do her best to keep him a little gentleman even if he does not live in London Her idea of rearing a son is showing him to every one in the drawing-room for them to praise him which idea is rather distorted by the little one throwing the tea-pot at Mme Fallilot because her top-knot displeases him so And who would care to call at any house on finding the young master in the hall pissing into our reverend pastor’s hat? He like so many of us has his own sense of fun and when his governess offers him a bun ‘Bring me a bifteck de femme – and under done!’ These women run in all directions when he appears – palpable evidence of his mother’s unfortunately having given birth to a criminal1

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2

j Enter Colossus

Subjectivity [S]ubjectivation, the relation to oneself, continues to create itself, but by transforming itself and changing its nature … Recuperated by powerrelations and relations of knowledge, the relation to oneself is continually reborn, elsewhere and otherwise.2

Subjectivity and subjectivation connect to issues of power and powerrelations. Specifically, invocation of the later Deleuze’s position on a distinctly modern subjectivity, which we read in his study of the work of Michel Foucault (1986),3 presents a position that is different from (but arguably reconcilable with) his own earlier descriptions of subject­ ivity.4 Among Deleuze’s earliest observations are those describing the subject as ‘defined by the movement through which it is developed’,5 and as something that is ‘organised’. The constitution of the subject is as a fiction, therefore, among a whole host of other fictions (by which Deleuze means such objects as we would assume to know but which can never be objects of knowledge; the prime example, of course, is God).6 By the time of Dialogues in the mid- to late 1970s, Deleuze reconfigures his notion of subjects into ‘dynamic individuations without subjects, which constitute collective assemblages’,7 rendering the sense of the multiplicity or of the open totality without the constraint of being called ‘subject’. Well, the ‘modern subject’ of which Deleuze speaks in Foucault is an idea moderated by the thinker’s preceding deliberations, inevitably, which are manifestly separate (rather than contradictory) responses to equally separate questions relating to subjectivity. By the time of Foucault, on the matter of subject-forming Deleuze states the words given as epigraph to this chapter; it is the same position that I will apply to propose the relation to himself (and in continuous negotiation of himself) that we can now start to read in the adolescent and youth Fabian Lloyd. It becomes something which in a very precise sense we



Enter Colossus 45

can at a later point observe being performed in the mature ‘fiction’ of Arthur Cravan. When Deleuze speaks of power-relations, they are the relations discerned in the impositions, constraints and figures of authority against which Fabian Lloyd increasingly postured from his late teens onwards. It is the contrary motion undercurrent to the brief period of his education at New College in West Worthing, for example, an institution designed to ground students for a sound career in commerce. Among the ‘awakenings’ that Mina Loy would one day describe in the early life of her lost husband Cravan, before he had even entered formal schooling, was defiance and resistance in the face of authority: From infancy he refused all possible lines of conduct presented to him as engagements with untruth. ‘At once I knew that everyone was lying to me – that Life was not like that.’ … A spontaneous defiance of any force challenging his own.8

The young Fabian was hardly unique in this regard, of course. If what I now invoke is a philosophy of power in speaking of power-relations, what Loy describes and what we can document from Fabian’s schooling is identifiable within the ‘political’ concept of power, whereby power is exercised by one body over another. But more than the political, the sense of power to which I appeal is the positive and creative one that draws critical distinction between Deleuze and Foucault – a distinction advancing Deleuze’s positive power to, manifesting (as it does for Deleuze and Guattari) as ‘desire’, a condition in which potentiality is read as both creative and expressive. The subject’s relation to itself, therefore, poses deliberations on ‘political’ power in order to begin to negotiate contemporary modes and ‘modern’ subjectivity. Deleuze, in Foucault, pointedly asks: ‘If it is true that power increasingly informs our daily lives, our interiority and our individuality; if it has become individualizing … [then] what remains for our subjectivity?’9 His response (or one of his responses) applies what is later mobilised in his elegant meditation on the work of Leibniz,10 to describe the subject as that which comes into view through a process of folding, of outsides becoming insides, endlessly varying and proliferating (and, as such, constituting a critique of a traditional sense of subjectivity that relies on the strict distinction of interiority and exteriority).11 Answering his own question, Deleuze says: There never ‘remains’ anything of the subject since he is to be created on each occasion, like a focal point of resistance, on the basis of the folds which subjectivize knowledge and bend each power. Perhaps modern

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subjectivity rediscovers the body and its pleasures, as opposed to a desire that has become too subjugated by Law?12

Crucially, in mounting the critique of interiority, thinking in these terms is to propose that the inside is an operation – or is a doubling up – of the outside which no longer provides a fixed limit. The outside moves, it varies, it is animated by the folds and folding that generate the inside; it is ‘not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside’.13 What we then negotiate in our relation to our own subjectivity, Deleuze proposes – and which we will note in observance of Cravan – is ‘the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis’.14 Significantly at stake in this subjectivity is the ‘image of thought’, the ultimate foundation that is the direct consequence of subscribing to the cogito in sweeping away all other external foundations. The cogito carries its own assumptions regarding the nature of experience – that is to say, experiences are given to the thinking subject – and, for example, in such assumptions occur every reading hitherto produced, from Mina Loy’s onwards, of the poet and boxer Arthur Cravan: readings that draw distinction between Cravan as foundational thinking subject on the one hand, and the world that he then strives to know on the other. These are readings rendering the figure presupposed by the concept in the form of the ‘conceptual persona’ entering into dialogue with the world; as the concept which then creates order in linking together affects; and, finally, as the concept which, through its drama, creates an outside to thinking that is nominally ‘transcendence’ or ‘truth’. But Deleuze presents a critical challenge to the interiority and exteriority of the cogito, a challenge in which thinking in terms of folds and folding comes alive, so to speak, where breakdown of the concept demonstrates how the cogito does not precede but is rather a response to the problem of knowing and, consequently, cannot be foundational. What concepts are, for Deleuze, is part of the active pure flow of life on what he terms a ‘plane of immanence’, upon which all possibilities are brought together and upon which all events occur, continuously making and dissolving connections.15 It is according to concepts that thought arranges the field of possibilities, and philosophy is precisely this organisation of new concepts from which are subsequently created new planes of immanence – continuously and simultaneously in Cravan’s love of departures and love of home, in Lausanne, Paris, Barcelona, New York, Mexico City and everywhere else in between. Any distinction between subject and object or inside and outside is drawn from the field of experience and, finally, it is from experience that the subject is formed.



Enter Colossus 47

So the subject is an effect. This is a critical premise for our r­ eading of Arthur Cravan. In this regard, Nietzsche comes in advance of Deleuze deliberating how consciousness is an effect and not a cause (specifically an effect of the body: ‘body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body’),16 and what Nietzsche once referred to as ‘the doer’ is now Deleuze’s perceiver (formed from perception), obtaining an image of itself as a subject relative to what it perceives as being outside – or what it perceives as being transcendent to – itself. Fabian Lloyd did not begin as a subject who then set out to know a world, but rather as what Deleuze would term a ‘larval subject’ forming an image of itself out of the experience of a multipli­ city of perceptions and contemplations, which then become organised into a distinct self and subject. From our vantage with a century of thought between us and Cravan, however, experience is no longer read as that which happens outside and to the closed structure of the subject, but rather as that which occupies the same plane of immanence from which the subject is formed; neither is experience any longer that which assumes a normative standard model (human experience, for example), and, as such, it has ceased to provide us with a secure foundation for knowledge. But with the breakdown and apparent impassage of structuralist closures, the opportunity that is now posed (and that we are challenged to respond to in order to get beyond) is precisely what I will argue Fabian Lloyd, as pre-poststructuralist exemplar, went on to do – creating, experimenting with and transforming (his) life. Elementary studies As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, from the Grandjean family home at 3 avenue du Théâtre in Lausanne, the young Fabian pursued an itinerant schooling at which his mother had not long since despaired: ‘I have never known such a stubborn, headstrong child; if I have explained the same thing a million times, he still has not learned anything.’17 Nellie Grandjean’s sympathies on the occasion of these words were squarely with the Pradervand sisters, Victoire and Eugénie, who provided primary instruction in reading, writing, drawing, music and dance for Fabian and his brother Otho at the sisters’ home on rue du Bourg, ahead of their pupils’ school entry aged nine or ten to the collège cantonal, which would take the children through to completion of their elementary studies. Sending season’s greetings to his natural father, Otho Holland Lloyd (‘Mon cher, cher père’) and his other family in December 1896, Fabian wrote of the instruction that he and his brother were receiving: ‘I am progressing well on the

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violin and can already play scales, and Otho can draw beautifully’, ending affectionately, ‘Adieu, a thousand and another thousand kisses from your dear Fabian to you and to your children.’18 Fabian registered at the collège cantonal (where the name of the pastor Charles Archinard as founding director was respectfully observed) in October 1897; he had written at Christmas 1896 in anticipation, ‘[w]ithin a year, I shall start at school’.19 Just two months later his name was absent from the school register – excluded, according to Otho’s later recollection, for poor conduct.20 Otho, Fabian’s senior by two years, faced no such exclusion and, when he completed his elementary course in readiness for high school, his mother (counselled no doubt by her children’s natural father, then living in new domesticity in Bevaix near Neuchâtel, north of Lausanne) decided that, rather than remain in Lausanne, he should continue his education in the country of his birth, where he would learn the language of his chivalrous ancestors. Otho, then, commenced studies at New College in West Worthing, Sussex, on the English south coast in the autumn of 1898.21 Otho impressed his mother among his taught subjects with a diligence at drawing. When it came to the choice of high school for Fabian two years later, however, rather than opting for Lausanne or Sussex, Nellie chose to send her younger son east to the Swiss town of St Gallen and the boarding fare at the Institut Schmidt on the town hill, where Fabian was then registered as a student from 1900 until 1902. During what was their first board for many of the school’s students, it was required that they write a letter home every week; two known letters by Fabian date from this time. In the first, written to his mother in June 1900, Fabian speaks tenderly and respectfully, in anticipation of his return at the end of the second semester, and expresses his desire to holiday in the cool and calming mountains away from the noise and heat of the town. He details his instruction at St Gallen and the frequency and sometimes severity of examinations, ending the letter with grand affection (‘[e]mbrasse tout le mond de ma part’).22 In the second letter, dated October of the same year and sent with birthday greetings to Grandjean (‘Mon cher papa’),23 Fabian apologises that, despite all good intentions, a present for beau-père has proved beyond his meagre schoolboy means on this occasion; he then notes that he will happily forgo his anticipated Christmas money, preferring instead that Grandjean should buy him the school’s colours jersey to represent the Institut Schmidt at football.24 The outdoor physical activity and the gymnastics classes in which he participated during this early schooling were sources of considerable enthusiasm on Fabian’s part, as perhaps also his broadening (or, as his mother complained, loosening)



Enter Colossus 49

v­ ocabulary into his mid-teens. By the time the sixteen-year-old followed his brother to New College in West Worthing, he was clearly beginning to flex intellectually. Boarding far from Lausanne, writing once again to greet Grandjean on his birthday in 1903, Fabian’s response at being sent to the land of his ancestors carries more than a hint of sarcasm but plenty of humour, in his complaint at the cold and his futile efforts to keep warm at night by piling his entire wardrobe on top of his bedclothes, and in his lament that the dance classes at New College were barely more than military drills. The saving grace in Worthing, it seems, was the physical education and the football. In the meantime, following the first documented suggestion for Fabian that there might be futures elsewhere, he hints at the lure of the city (Nietzsche’s locus of ‘reality’) in the smoke of London sixty miles away; despite being pleasant enough, Worthing offered little beyond its fair quota of churches and a vicar who barked like a pug. And even Fabian’s request that his father should give his mother a kiss from him is confounded by circumstance: ‘but not on the mouth, because I’ve just eaten onions’.25 Fabian returned home to Lausanne in 1904 – sent home, according to Mina Loy,26 who in her coded episodic prose of the ‘newsreel of my memory’ would recount Fabian as a truant school-boy sleeping a fortnight under the London bridge, cornering the fried chips market in the dormitories; and then taking the schoolmaster across his knee and caning him. His parents’ confusion over his being expelled, the schoolmaster’s farewell: ‘I am heartily glad to get rid of you, but I like you better than any boy I ever had in school.’27

He spent August of that year in sibling proximity to his cousin Vyvyan Holland, youngest son of Oscar Wilde,28 who had been sent by his guardians to spend part of the summer with his relatives in Switzerland (ostensibly to improve his French before entering university).29 From the French Rhône-Alpes summer resort of Chambéry in the company of Fabian and the Grandjeans, Vyvyan returned with the family to Lausanne in late September, and kept a diary throughout his stay. In the company of Fabian, it is improbable and unlikely that Vyvyan, the Jesuit Catholic student, would have recounted any ‘shameful deeds’ relating to his father Oscar Wilde’s fall from grace; the matter of fact is that Vyvyan’s guardians had, until his time in Lausanne, successfully managed to guard him from knowledge of the trials and events of ten years previously. But it was coincidentally around the time of the posthumous and excised publication of Wilde’s De Profundis (1905) and during his stay in Lausanne that Vyvyan was first told the truth about his father. All was revealed to him by none other than Nellie, his cousin

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The fictions of Arthur Cravan

Fabian’s mother: ‘[O]ne day in Lausanne I put the matter bluntly to my aunt, and she, being a simple woman, not gifted with overmuch tact, gave me an equally blunt answer.’ My entry in my diary for that day includes the following: ‘After tea Aunt Nellie came to my room and talked to me about my father. She was surprised to hear that I knew so little about him and she told me the truth.’ … [M]y aunt, who was, to say the least of it, broad-minded, regarded all this secrecy about my father as absurd and had told all her friends in Lausanne who I was. She told me herself once that she could not see what all the fuss was about.30

Nellie probably told her own son Fabian about Oscar Wilde too, and during that summer of 1904 Fabian became increasingly aware of the aesthete’s persona (securing in the process from both his natural ­parents – who were, of course, Oscar Wilde’s former sister- and brother-in-law – two unique documents that would in time be put to creative use)31 and of the ‘scandal’ surrounding Wilde in England. Wilde would henceforth feature prominently in the forming subjectivity of Fabian consciously as ‘nephew of Oscar Wilde’.32 Still at this ‘larval’ stage, Fabian enjoyed a series of postscripts to his education that are now woven into the legend and the fictions. He returned from summer in Lausanne and Chambéry to gloomy England, this time to embark on a planned (not by him) career in commerce in Birmingham, an academic year that he summed up in a letter sent to Nellie (‘Ma chère maman’) in October 1905.33 It airs Fabian’s complaint regarding one of the teachers who had apparently mocked his schoolboy interest in poetry and the Classics: he was now not only reading but, importantly, beginning to cultivate himself as an aesthete. In the letter, Fabian exaggerates the brilliant ideas conjured by his mind, his ‘masterpieces’ and ‘great literary works’ – and, immodestly, his modesty at not yet publicly revealing these works – before self-deprecating (conceding to over-confidence on his part, and admitting to his mother that writing the word sempiternellement actually caused physical pain). But there is also serious reflection upon his own creations, some of which he records for their poetic weaknesses, and he speaks of a desire to ‘create new images rather than to copy or adapt the great ideas of other writers; my preference is an earthy realism’.34 Nellie could not be insensitive to her son’s maudlin gloom in England, however, and gradually relented duly to allow him means in response to the growing desire to travel. And so the Wanderlust that overtook Fabian at this point was premised on his own experiencing of experiences, wholly centred on his ­youthful



Enter Colossus 51

self – to wit the Australian adventure of legend, chronologically sequencing into 1905–6, and the first occasion on which he found himself employed as a ‘chauffeur’: He ran away to sea, signing on as a ‘fireman’. He expected to wear a shining helmet – to drill on deck in swaggering readiness lest at any moment the ship should catch on fire! But a ‘fireman’ [chauffeur] turned out to be a stoker, and the life of a stoker was a physical shock so grim it tore [Fabian] apart. His habitual self of semi-destitute ease in its unsoiled skin refused to inhabit a laborious substitute dripping with sweat over an iron shovel. So [Fabian] deserted with a Frenchman when they reached Australia. He described their first night … creeping like snakes in a field of potatoes, digging with their nails and clinching their teeth in the raw flesh of the tubers as their eyes, from under the plants, followed the farmer searching for them with his gun.35

What he garnered on his travels would become raw material to feed a creative energy for the next decade. The prosopoème ‘Notes’, for instance, published many years after Cravan’s disappearance and coloured by his adventures, scrapes and escapades, revives the same potatoes and tubers in his gaze upon ‘the movement of mist on the theatre of the plains and valleys where the rectangular plantations of radishes and cabbages seemed to form vast tombs’.36 Episodes The Frenchman in whose company Fabian deserted as a merchant seaman was a Parisian, Richard Jourdan, the son of the restaurantowning family at La Maison Blanche on the rue des Bons-Enfants, which would eventually become a regular sponsor of the magazine Maintenant. Jourdan was the same age as Fabian, and the two evidently concurred that desertion in the Antipodes was a far preferable option to the forty-day return journey to Europe consigned to blood, sweat and grim toil in the steamship’s engine room. A return passage to Europe, however, would not be easy to obtain for two recent ship’s deserters, and they found themselves making their own way back home. Sequences are poorly defined around 1906–7 (severally reconstructed as they are from scant correspondence, third-party recollection and misdirection), but it is the likeliest proposition that Fabian travelled from Australia to Japan in 1906, to California and back across the United States. This was the long road home on which we might speculate that the developing youth became the illustrated man described by Cendrars in Paris around 1913 (although the ‘blood red tattoos’ that Cendrars described

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The fictions of Arthur Cravan

were actually painted on), before being shipped home from New York. One journalistic source notes: He worked his way as a fireman [stoker] to Japan, where he studied jiujitsu. In the same way he worked his way back to San Francisco, where he became a bartender. Afterward he got a job as a snake charmer, for which he disguised himself as an Indian. He worked in a lumber camp and became a section hand on a railroad at Los Angeles. He drifted to New York, where he borrowed $100 from a friend and went to Munich.37

Thus is intimated the first passage across North America routinely claimed in the accounts and chronologies of Arthur Cravan, ahead of what is more safely accounted for in 1907. On the road from San Francisco back to Europe, much of the employment that Fabian found (and which most probably elides into his varied employment in the United States in the first half of 1907) would eventually merge into the poet-boxer’s legendary list of credentials. This first and staggered long haul made potentially viable Fabian’s better-planned realisation of a formal passage to the United States on what would be his first ‘official’ visit. He restated for his mother the assurance that childhood acquaintances would welcome him in the big country,38 and Nellie gave in to allow her son due means. Cravan took passage with the same boyish excitement that never went away and that he would, eight years later, declaim in the prosopoème depicting his imagined life as a domesticated touring boxer (‘Houiaiaia! Je partais dans 32 heures pour l’Amérique’).39 The stopover hotel in Paris, La Palette on rue Val de Grâce, is documented for 15 January 1907,40 before Fabian boarded the fast and luxurious four-funnelled SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse (one-time Blue Riband holder for the Atlantic crossing, ‘Tandis que siffle le rapide héroïque qui arrive au Havre’)41 on 16 January as a second-cabin passenger in the company of Jourdan, on a bright Wednesday morning in Cherbourg: The defiant ship … Welcomed me aboard with breathless expectation, Well-content with the luxury, such as the electrical fittings Which flood the vibrant cabin with light, Of the beautiful turbine-driven ship. The cabin ablaze with copper columns, Upon which, by seconds, my drunken hands delight Suddenly to tremble in the cool metal, And quench my appetite in this vital plunge …42

The crossing to North America lasted seven days. Cravan swelled and braced himself on deck, and first imaged one beautiful line of poetry



Enter Colossus 53

that surely ranks among the most seductive openings of any of the twentieth century’s many revues littéraires: ‘Le rythme de l’océan berce les transatlantiques.’43 On the 23rd, the liner steamed in to New York, where the immigration office at Ellis Island recorded Fabian Lloyd: aged nineteen; male; six feet and five inches tall; fair complexion; blue eyes; he literally stood out among fellow passengers. Noting that he was not in possession of a ticket to reach his stated destination (Los Angeles), the manifest checks Fabian’s good state of health and documents his social status (emphatically ‘no’ when questioned as to whether he had ever been in prison, whether he was a polygamist, and whether he was an anarchist), and confirms his permanent residence in Lausanne.44 On that fair and cold Wednesday, after one week looking abroad each day and seeing nothing but the rhythmically rolling sea (‘Nous voguâmes sans accident jusqu’à sept fois vingt-quatre heures!’),45 Fabian disembarked in the city of dreams and height and modernity (‘New York! New York! Je voudrais t’habiter!’),46 marvelling at the splendour of rapid expansion rising before him. To inhabit the city he made himself intimate with it, from the chaotic Lower East Side with its bread lines and immigrants to ‘every perpendicular of skyscraper, every metallic suspension and every square millimeter of superficies of the city he roamed in his tenacious idleness’.47 The World Building and the Park Row Building – and the Singer Building under c­ onstruction – dominated a skyline which, by the time of Fabian’s next visit to the United States in 1917, would be transformed again in the grip of the early high-rise construction boom. In the rising progress he found a tranquil idyll: … I see the marriage of science And industry With bold modernity, And in the Palaces, Globes Which dazzle the retina With their ultra-violet rays; The American telephone And the tranquillity Of elevators …48

Rising high above and away from ground level, elevators shared calm seduction with automobiles: here, the tranquillity is stated in the poem ‘Sifflet’ (published in April 1912); the same is subsequently restated in the poem ‘Hie!’ (published in July 1913). New York’s perpendiculars had imposed themselves monumentally in barely more than a decade

4  Manifest of alien passengers for SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse arriving at Port of New York, 23 January 1907 (detail): passenger no. 1, Mr Richard Jourdan; passenger no. 7, Mr Fabian Lloyd.



Enter Colossus 55

since the world’s first skyscraper hauled itself into the clouds above Chicago (‘[t]he outlines of Chicago’s skyscrapers, thrust against the horizon, thrilled and frightened me’), the city another eight hundred miles west which became Fabian’s next stopover. This was Chicago before the mob, and which behind its civic dignity possessed an inevitable underworld of reportedly ‘busy, gaudy parlors of assignation houses … blood and thunder melodrama … [where the idler could watch] in a beer hall with fascination the rhythmic sensuous contortions of bedizened belly dancers’.49 In city churches, apolitical yet celebrated divines would reportedly start with nothing and end with nothing, and Fabian himself became part of the greater whole which in that year had so engaged the Chicago Daily Socialist reporter: I was fascinated by the complexity of polyglot America. Lured by the promised American freedoms, alien rebellions were streaming in upon the land, joining with our native dissents to vitalize and enrich our democracy … I found many of them more passionately loyal to the basic American premise than the average American I had known.50

Fabian was briefly housed at the Rogers Bros address at 4837–45 Broadway, home to his childhood acquaintance (‘son amie d’enfance’)51 Cora Rogers from Lausanne, now resident in Chicago with her family. An unfortunate suspicion based on little evidence suggests that Fabian’s reception of Cora’s charitable welcome was, well, less than reciprocally charitable, before his move on towards the declared destination of Los Angeles.52 He is soundly documented in Los Angeles between March and April; then south-east of Los Angeles in the city of Corona in southern California on 3 May (Corona the one-time ‘Lemon Capital of the World’ during the late nineteenth-century citrus boom, in Riverside County, next to Orange County, setting for the dreamy orange-picking of the Cravan legend); and then in northern California, in the Pacific Northwest lumber company town of Scotia, on 21 June (from where he indicated in a note that he would be back in Paris in a month’s time); by late August 1907 he was safely ensconced in Lausanne.53 The late summer of 1907 was spent with his family between Lausanne and the resort of Aix-les-Bains, north of Chambéry. Fabian’s mother at least noticed something different in her younger son; when asked if all was well, Fabian maintained that it was and that his mother really had no need to worry. Whether it was some perceived change in his health or behaviour, Nellie made her concern known to Grandjean.54 And it is to this period in Switzerland that one resonant event sequences into the chronology, so frequently referenced in the Cravan literature documenting the jewel thief of Lausanne:

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[Fabian] proclaimed his incapacity to live according to the social order and its accepted exigences and he boasted loudly that he had successfully accomplished ‘the perfect burglary’ – an exploit that had taken place in a Swiss jewelry store.55

Well, it would have been the perfect crime had he not told everyone about it, but the story reflected a popular image of the gentleman-thief that had gained some currency in francophone culture. Coincidentally, 1907 was the year of publication of Maurice Leblanc’s collected stories Arsène Lupin: gentleman-cambrioleur, previously serialised 1905–7 in the magazine Je sais tout, whose leading character may have been partly based on the fictional Arthur Lebeau, the gentleman-thief in Octave Mirbeau’s Les vingt et un jours d’un neurasthénique (1901). Then, in the months following his tour across the states and his return to Lausanne, Fabian enjoyed a brief stay in Berlin. Commentary has consistently placed this interlude in late 1904 running into 1905, still during Fabian’s student years, though on the basis of cobbled chronological assumption rather than positive documentation. The only existing docu­ mentation placing Fabian in Berlin dates from September–November 1907, when he wrote from Nonnendamm in the city’s western factory district. This date resequences the Berlin stay to the second half of the year of Fabian’s first roundly scheduled visit to North America. It may have been brief, but the Berlin sojourn accrued significance for the storyteller as much as it did for those who listened to and embellished the story (notably the poets Mina Loy and Blaise Cendrars) to consolidate the legend even when the chronology became frayed. Loy, writing of Fabian long after the event, places her object in the urban site of modernity to which he was now serially drawn and in relation to which the forming subject would acquire its meaning in the fullness of time: Arrived at a new town, he would give it a glance and assess its population – then tramp through every street … wherever one went with him one was sure to arrive sooner or later in some forbidden spot – so intuitively did he separate himself from the accepted places.56

Cendrars recounted those forbidden spots as the dives and the nightclubs set back from Berlin’s tree-lined Kurfürstendamm, dens frequented by drug addicts and the sexually adventurous,57 where spending the night with a prostitute was cheaper and probably easier than finding a hotel – the latter being precisely Fabian’s preferred option, but which on at least one occasion failed to provide him with the bed for the night that he needed: After half an hour, when he was turning over to go to sleep, she called in her bouncer, as big a brute as [Fabian] himself, who was … obliged



Enter Colossus 57 to make room for another caller. To revenge himself, he snatched up the girl’s handbag, took it to her ‘bosom friend’, and made her a present of it. ‘Imagine their meeting! It took them some time to make friends again, and when they did, they set the police on me. It appears that this offense has a name – Pompadour Diebstahl, and is considered very grave in Germany. I was in a tight corner.’ Still, he got out of it. The magistrate realized it was only a practical joke played by the son of respectable parents whose son had already brought them enough sorrow. ‘I thought there was something fishy about your bringing me a present,’ said the pretty little prostitute when he met her again.58

Formally opening his criminal record, had Fabian been required to mount his own defence he would have submitted such aggravating and mitigating factors as his dependency and motivation from desperation and need rather than profit – and, in any event, the stolen property was returned to its rightful owner. To help pay his way in Berlin, Fabian was taken on short-term at the still new Siemens-Schuckert electrical engineering factory, founded in 1903,59 where he was employed as a company driver (despite being legally exempt from qualification for a driver’s licence). By the time Fabian was in its employ, Siemens-Schuckert was building chassis for the automobile manufacturer Protos of Nonnendamm, and by the close of the decade the engineering had taken over the manufacturing company which would eventually publicly boast that the Kaiser’s son, Crown Prince Wilhelm II, ‘a sportsman and automobile expert, drives only Protos vehicles’.60 ‘Short-term’ barely covers the week for which Fabian was reportedly in the Siemens-Schuckert employ,61 but it certainly confirms his unqualified status to carry out the duties of company drivers: [He] was commissioned to drive back the Kaiser’s car which the Siemen Zuckertswerke [sic] had been overhauling. He impermissibly drove it up the Sieger’s Allee and had the royal guard out in salute … When he upset his sponsor and his car in a ditch, [Fabian] ambled off down the road, remarking over his shoulder, ‘you can pick it up yourself’.62

Inevitably, it seems, the Berlin episode would rouse to some kind of climactic event. It is again Mina Loy who recounts another of the stories of the mythical construct describing the scene on one of the city’s historic boulevards in the company of some local prostitutes, which led to the persistently expelled schoolboy now realising expulsion on a civic scale:

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parading down the Unter den Linden with four of these girls on his ­shoulders – tremendous muscles, exuberant with adolescence, his face singing out from among their laces, the sparkling sequins on their skirts playing hide-and-seek with flimsy shadows dancing off the trees, the crowds that followed him everywhere appended to him a tail lashing the city’s sensibility. So [Fabian] was once more expelled – from Berlin! ‘Am I permitted to ask,’ he enquired courteously, ‘the reason for my expulsion?’ ‘Berlin ist kein Cirkus – Berlin is not a circus’, replied the head of the police.63

In the eyes of the city authorities, Fabian had become one distraction too many, and the charge that brought about his downfall was precise, concise and to the point: ‘ “Sie sind zu auffallend” – you are too “noticeable”.’64 Fabian’s youthful release in Berlin presaged release from the city and his move south to Munich (this is probably the Munich detour variously noted),65 where his brother Otho had been for some months resident in the Bavarian capital’s Schwabing district, pursuing an artistic vocation in the proximity of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and the pool and billiard tables of the Schelling-Salon.66 Otho, since successfully completing his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Geneva, had been travelling Europe furnished with funds now released by the Lloyd estate (Fabian would have to wait another two years),67 furthering his own artistic training and visiting places far from Lausanne as Fabian now also sought to do. Nellie’s caution regarding what she would eventually come to view as Fabian’s bad influence on his brother was at this time appropriately reserved and, at her younger son’s return to Lausanne, she was waiting: ‘ “What need have you to travel?” his mother protested, eyeing him with outrage. “You want to write? Well, why don’t you sit down and write?” ’68 Representation The bristling youth exercised a constant movement and ‘mastication of space’69 between places and events, perhaps in abstract recognition that there could be no foundation for knowledge in the structured discipline that his mother would impose. Tied to this, however, is an intriguing proposition that Fabian’s movement over the next few years may have been practical demonstration that any firm foundation he desired in this period was not to be achieved through experience alone (or ‘pure’ experience). The assumption with regard to experience, as



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we know, is that by direct manifestation it is routinely imagined to render life simply in appearances, in visual and sensual phenomena. It does not follow, however, that knowledge derived from experience will centre on the subject.70 As we chart his movements, much of the world inhabited by Fabian emerges out of what he imagines; he carries images to varied destinations, and when he moves on he carries with him sometimes fantastical embellishments that become the construction materials for his own world – the world, Deleuze once observed, which ‘is an outright fiction of the imagination’.71 But more than the world is describable in these terms; the image of the subject similarly exercises itself as a product of the imagination, and it is specifically in our reading and application of Deleuze that Fabian Lloyd can be seen to manifest a creative tendency in life (this couples with Deleuze’s tendency creatively to interpret philosophy), forming self images, rational minds and ‘subjects’ as outright fictions. In challenging imposed authority, Fabian tested closed and non-­ compliant structures in pursuit of some excess, and in deliberate ­demonstration of the instability of structures. In turn, structures modify, mutate and become; and by the process of becoming, reliance on the concept of the cogito and the primacy of such presumed commonsense notions as being, identity and subjectivity are necessarily given over to the unceasing challenge to think differently (for Deleuze, it is momentarily to capture the chaos of life, before letting it go again), not to represent the world and the subjects in it, but to invent them. Giving Deleuze the lead into the later twentieth century, Nietzsche once specified that the error in which the Western tradition has become embroiled routinely defaults in conceding primacy to the reason of the thinking subject: [I]n so far as the prejudice called ‘reason’ compels us to establish unity, identity, duration, substance, cause, materiality, [b]eing … This is what sees doer and deed everywhere: it believes in the will as cause in general; it believes in the ‘I’, in the I as [b]eing, in the I as substance, and projects the belief in the I-substance onto all things … At the beginning stands the great disaster of an error that the will is something at work – that will is a capacity … Nowadays we know that it is just a word …72

Critically for Deleuze, this projection and positing of self-consciousness as the fundamental quality of being effectively limits the extent to which we are able to conceive of difference. What is understood as different, consequently, amounts to nothing more than a relative measure of sameness – a difference-from-the-same whereby things are ‘the same’ (or not ‘the same’) only to lesser or greater degrees. It is both Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s challenge to habitual thought to imagine or

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to conceive of the world in new ways and, in this respect, becoming attains its own critical dimension. When a world of re-presentation (‘presenting again’) is defined by the primacy of identity, then a world of presentation is defined anew by becoming. The subject’s self-creation and potentially self-engagement pose transformational potentialities for the subjective self, thereby introducing a critical dimension. It becomes possible to test and exploit habitual thought and subjectivity in the social field through a plurality of possible selves – not in sameness, therefore, but in difference. For his part, Nietzsche was quite clear and direct in his pronouncement that ‘there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything’.73 Similarly Deleuze, in positing difference ‘behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing’.74 For the philosopher of difference, ‘becoming’ means ‘becoming different’, and therein reside the two central principles of Deleuze’s intellectual work: ‘becoming’ and ‘difference’. ‘Becoming’ is read as the dynamic of change that has long since yielded any motive towards goal or end-state, and it is in the absence of a projected endstate for Fabian Lloyd that we can conceptually align the uniqueness of events as instances of production. What is shared by these instances is a continuity through becoming and becoming-different in the course of an ongoing productive cycle – an advance, therefore, on Nietzsche’s concept of ‘eternal return’: The eternal return is not the permanence of the same, the equilibrium state or the resting place of the identical. It is not the ‘same’ or the ‘one’ which comes back in the eternal return but return is itself the one which ought to belong to diversity and to that which differs.75

The subject moves through every event in its expanding universe, through states obtaining only temporary projections of outcome.76 The property of this becoming is the eternal return of difference. Difference will no more be thought of as a relative measure of sameness – in terms of the assumed pre-existing unity of ‘differences which resemble one another, which are analogous, opposed or identical’– but rather will be theorised as it is experienced, as ‘[e]ach difference passes through all the others; it must “will” itself or find itself through all the others’.77 Thus would Fabian embark on passage through cities, across continents and through the sometimes fantastical array that would accrue, vary, expand and contract over the decade to come. In the residue of his curricular list, it is Fabian-as-poet that becomes most distinct in the current biographical passage, posing a deliberate idea of himself cultivated both intellectually and in his social postures. From the early



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musings in and around 1905, the forming of the poet is provided with occasional commentary along the way; the red West Worthing notebook, for instance, which includes writings from 1903–4 and which Fabian kept with him for many years after his formal education had ceased, opens with standard-fare exercises in Latin before a draft poem, evidence of laboured juvenilia which at times conjures excessively florid imagery, followed by annotation of critical comment.78 The notebook also includes a heavily worked draft for a short story titled ‘La folie de Madame’, featuring two fictional friends (Paul and Eugène) possibly based on Fabian and his brother Otho; and a draft letter to the editor of a literary journal in submission of Fabian’s poetry and prose, declaring heartfelt joy should they be judged worthy of publication. His maturing tone – at least in self-reflection – is evident in the previously discussed letter to Nellie in 1905; and, it would seem, by 1906–7, notwithstanding the stacked odds against literary voices being able to rise above the clamour, Fabian had resolved to be a poet.79 A concerted and eventually protracted effort to progress the literary vocation is signalled by Fabian’s intermittent correspondence with the poet and writer Charles Brun from late 1906 into 1907. Brun, ‘homme de lettre et journaliste’ known pseudonymously as Raoul Toscan, founded and published the literary review Le coq, art et littérature in 1907. Fabian hoped to publish his own poetry in Le coq; a short letter dated 30 November 1906 indicates items in verse submitted by him for the first issue, and his assumption of the pseudonym ‘Philippe Or’.80 After a month’s consideration, Fabian aborted that first pseudonym and proposed another, ‘Jean Rubidini’, in its place;81 and in December he wrote again briefly to acknowledge some constructive criticism of his verse (perhaps the heavily critical notes preserved in the West Worthing notebook).82 Enthused by the prospect of Le coq, Fabian undertook to represent the journal on his travels through North America in the first half of 1907.83 He took receipt of the first issue (which did not include his poetry) in Los Angeles, writing thoroughly to compliment the publisher and signing himself ‘J. Rubidini’.84 Seemingly culturally dulled in early May from weeks in the citrus fields of Corona, California, where there appeared little motive beyond the next buck (‘[l]es oreilles sont tympanisées du mot Dollar’), Fabian urged Brun to write to him and announced that he had started work on a five-act play in verse (‘une grande machine qui doit pétrifier l’univers de la béatitude’), also offering prose items chronicling America.85 Within six weeks, Fabian had received his response from Brun and had written back from the logging town of Scotia, documenting for the first time, a whole seven years before it next appeared in print, a proto-version of what would

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one day be the legendary roll-call of Cravan.86 The blight that had by now overtaken him in California ill concealed his literary reinvigoration and excited anticipation of a return to Paris in July, and then Lausanne: ‘je suis de retour et suis heureux!’87 In August 1907, writing from Lausanne, Fabian submitted prose impressions of America in his best handwriting for Le coq, which he would title ‘Caricatures’. As well as the prose items, there was a thirteen-line rondel titled ‘La clochette’.88 Within the week, further offerings were mailed, including a poem titled ‘Sérénade’, which Fabian auto-critiqued for its repetition of the word ‘tout’ – the auto-critique of this doggerel verse could arguably have gone further: Serenade I will whisper to you: come with me into the woods Where the balmy wind blows through the tall trees / like a woodwind [Come] along the green paths where the wild rose blooms Let’s play together until evening, you will blush like a child. And when the rosy sunset blossoms When all things soften as night falls If you sigh: come, it’s better to rise and leave, In spite of your caprice and your adorable pout I will say stay and you won’t demur For I will murmur your secret name89

Correspondence continued between September and November, from Berlin, proffering rondels and triolets, ‘un conte badin’ and a madrigal, and the promise of sonnets and dizains. It is on the cold and privation experienced in Berlin, however, that Fabian rounds in his letters to Brun, with some reflection on his global travels for the seemingly sympathetic recipient (Brun had himself travelled Europe extensively in the tradition of artists of the nineteenth century). Fabian predicted that in the coming year he would move into theatre (‘[j]e risquerai de me lancer dans le théâtre en 1908’) as ‘Jean Rubidini’.90 The prescient event of 1908, however, occurred in the month of May, when Fabian first spoke of an idea to publish his own literary journal, a potential vehicle for his poetry ultimately, but which quickly ran into Nellie’s not always sympathetic pragmatism. In a note to Grandjean in May, Nellie’s overriding concern was clearly the financial implication of such a venture and the very real possibility that money held in trust until Fabian’s twenty-first birthday might be blown in its funding.91 Her concern also extended to being protective of Otho, at that time installed in Rome and

5  Fabian Lloyd, c.1908.

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progressing his own grand tour, in light of Fabian’s impending visit to stay with his brother in the eternal city. Nellie’s misgivings of the previous summer now fed her concern that the younger sibling would be a bad influence on the apparently more sober and studious elder, and she reasoned as best she could to impress her concern in correspondence with Otho – but had finally to concede and wash her hands of any eventual and unhappy consequence.92 Into the autumn months, the brothers travelled together to Florence, from where Fabian wrote to Brun after a break of almost a year, hinting at too troubled a narrative to account for the pause in correspondence, offering the Moonlight Sonata in eighteen-verses and proposing yet another pseudonym for himself, this time ‘Numa Persan’.93 From Florence in September 1908, Fabian sent that year’s birthday greetings to Grandjean, submitting a newly drafted poem for approval (‘Voilà ces fameux vers faits dans une nuit immémoriale!’).94 Fabian judged this offering to be free of any obvious flaw, but deferred to Grandjean’s better judgement on such matters in the hope that he would not consider the budding poet’s progress and development in literary technique to be too slow. The letter also airs Fabian’s chagrin at his mother’s lack of sensitivity towards his literary ambition, but he hints at the possibility that he might offer a short story to accompany her birthday greetings in November – a short story that he was busily drafting (possibly the same ‘La folie de Madame’), but which he admitted to struggling with in unwieldy prose.95 By December, Fabian was on his way back to Lausanne for the festive season; though The Sun in New York eventually would report that ‘[h]e inherited $20,000 when he was 21 years old and spent it all in Italy’,96 it is more reliably documented that Nellie’s maternal acumen intervened.97 Still, whatever the banking arrangements, Fabian now found himself with means, and he looked to the capital of France in the Third Republic as his next destination towards the chosen vocation: to be a poet in Paris, in what would prove to be the final years of la belle époque. Notes  1 Mina Loy, ‘Enter Colossus’, excerpt from Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose: 1923–1925, in LLB, pp. 150–1.  2 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (London: Athlone Press, 1988), p. 104.  3 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1986).  4 For early Deleuze on subjectivity, see Empirisme et subjectivité: essais sur la nature humaine selon Hume (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,



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1953) and Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977).  5 Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 85, 86.  6 For an excellent study on Hume and organised fiction, see J. C. A. Gaskin (ed.), Varieties of Unbelief (London: Macmillan, 1989).  7 Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues with Claire Parnet, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1987), p. 93.  8 Mina Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, in LLB, p. 321.  9 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 105. 10 Gilles Deleuze, Le pli: Leibniz et la baroque (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988). 11 See my expansion on conceptual folding and simultaneity in Dafydd W. Jones, Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), pp. 167–9. 12 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 105. 13 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 97. 14 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 106. 15 This is a plane, not the plane, because only temporary and virtual arrangements are achieved here. As Deleuze states (with Guattari), ‘We will say that THE plane of immanence is, at the same time, that which must be thought and that which cannot be thought. It is the nonthought within thought.’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p. 59. 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, part 1, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York and London: Penguin, 1976), p. 146. 17  ACSS, p. 51. 18 Fabian to Otho Holland, Christmas 1896, in ŒPAL, pp. 135–6. Otho Holland Lloyd’s second marriage to Mary Edna Winter in 1889 delivered three halfsiblings for Fabian: Eva Hester (b. 1889), Eugene Holland (b. 1890) and Horace Holland (b. 1889). 19 Fabian to Otho Holland, Christmas 1896, p. 135. 20 ACSS, pp. 51–2. 21 Bastiaan van der Velden suggests that the choice of Worthing for Otho, and later Fabian, may have been prompted by Oscar Wilde’s stays with his acquaintance George Alexander and his family in the town in 1893 and 1894; it was during his stay there in August 1894 that Wilde wrote his first draft of The Importance of Being Earnest. See Bastiaan van der Velden, ‘Chronologie’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 66. 22 Fabian to Nellie, June 1900, in ŒPAL, pp. 136–8. 23 Fabian to Grandjean, 1900, in ŒPAL, p. 139. 24 The Institut Schmidt’s school football team had its reputation to uphold

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after being crowned Swiss champion in 1895 but, in 1901, struggled to field a team; FC St Gallen, in the meantime, went from strength to strength and would be crowned Swiss champion in 1903–4. The Swiss Football League was founded in 1897. 25 Fabian to Grandjean, 10 October 1903, in ŒPAL, pp. 140–1. 26 Van der Velden, ‘Chronologie’, 66. 27 Mina Loy, ‘Colossus’ (extracts); cited in Roger Conover, ‘Mina Loy’s “Colossus”: Arthur Cravan Undressed’, in Rudolf E. Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada (New York; Willis Locker & Owens, 1986), p. 113. 28 The surname Holland was formally adopted by Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan Wilde in October 1895, following the events of April in that year which eventually led to Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment, and after which Constance was urged to change her sons’ surnames: ‘you owe it to them to start them in life with a clean record – and if they bear their father’s name this can never be’. Philip Burne-Jones to Constance, 11 April 1895; cited in Franny Moyle, Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde (London: John Murray, 2011), p. 272. 29 Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 168. 30 Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde, pp. 170–1. 31 The original texts which provided much that was recycled in Cravan’s own writings on Oscar Wilde between 1912 and 1914 were published in 1917, headed ‘Wilde’s Personal Appearance’, ‘Wilde’s House’ and two ‘Stray Recollections’, as supplements to the English translation of Cravan’s ‘Oscar Wilde is Alive!’, in The Soil, 4 (April 1917), 149–56. 32 Georges Sebbag draws a wonderful parallel between Oscar Wilde’s nephew and Rameau’s nephew; the latter is Diderot’s embodiment as ‘a composite of nobility and baseness, good sense and irrationality … endowed with a strong constitution, an exceptionally vivid imagination’. Georges Sebbag, ‘Arthur Cravan, neveu d’Oscar Wilde’, in ACM, pp. 21–61; trans. on pp. 260–73. 33 Fabian to Nellie, 10 October 1905, in ŒPAL, pp. 141–3. 34 Fabian to Nellie, 10 October 1905, p. 142. 35 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 117. 36 Arthur Cravan, ‘Notes’, trans. Terry Hale, in 4DS, p. 68. 37 The Sun (New York), 24 August 1913. 38 See Fabian to Grandjean, 10 October 1903, in ŒPAL, pp. 140–1. 39 Arthur Cravan, ‘Poète et boxeur’, Maintenant, 5 (March–April 1915), 1. 40 Fabian to Charles Brun, 15 January 1907, ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun (Raoul Toscan), directeur de la revue Le coq’, Guillaumot-Richard Maison de Vente aux Enchères, www.guillaumotrichard.com/html/fiche.jsp?id=4948883 (accessed 30 June 2018). The correspondence between Cravan and Charles Brun comprises a collection of six postcards and ten letters sent by the former to Brun, and sparingly documents the period December 1906–November 1908; it provides



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the basis for my resequencing of specific episodes in the received Cravan chronology. 41 Arthur Cravan, ‘Sifflet’, Maintenant, 1 (April 1912), 1. 42 Arthur Cravan, ‘Whistle’, trans. Paul Lenti, in 4DS, p. 37. 43 Cravan, ‘Sifflet’, 1. 44 ‘List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival’: SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse arriving at Port of New York, 23 January 1907, frame 217 (Fabian Lloyd passenger ID 101880040306); © 2015 The Statue of Liberty – Ellis Island Foundation, Inc., all rights reserved. 45 Cravan, ‘Sifflet’, 3. 46 Cravan, ‘Sifflet’, 1. 47 Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, p. 319. 48 Cravan, ‘Whistle’, p. 37. 49 Reuben W. Borough, ‘The Chicago I Remember, 1907’, Illinois State Historical Society Journal, 59/2 (Summer 1966), 122, 129. 50 Borough, ‘The Chicago I Remember, 1907’, 129–30. 51 ACSS, p. 63. 52 Nellie to Otho St Clair, late 1916; cited in ACSS, p. 64, n. 5. 53 Fabian to Charles Brun, 21 June 1907, ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun’. 54 ACSS, p. 68. 55 Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’ (1938), in DPP, p. 14. 56 Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, p. 320. 57 Blaise Cendrars, ‘Témoignages’, in ŒPAL, p. 221. 58 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 115. 59 It was the name Siemens-Schuckert, corrupted in Loy’s text to Siemen Zuckertswerke, that founded the untruth of Cravan’s employ in a sugar factory during his Berlin sojourn. See Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 113; ACSS, p. 65. 60 Thus as advertised by the Protos vehicle company in 1911; see www.motorbase.com/manufacturer/profile/protos/ (accessed 4 August 2015). 61 The Sun (New York), 24 August 1913. 62 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 113. 63 Loy, ‘Colossus’, pp. 115–17. 64 Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, p. 318. 65 Specifically in The Sun’s report of 24 August 1913. 66 It was in the Munich Schwabing district that Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov published his newspaper Iskra in 1900–1, during self-imposed exile from Russia, and first used his pseudonym ‘Lenin’; this was also where Cravan’s brother Otho first met Olga Sacharoff, his spouse in later life. 67 ‘Repères biographiques’, in ŒPAL, p. 266. 68 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 117. Later avant-garde cautionaries famously observe that ‘to sit in a chair for a single moment is to risk one’s life … [and one should rather] let oneself be thrown by things, to oppose all sedimentation’

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(Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Collective Dada Manifesto’ (1920), trans. Ralph Manheim, in DPP, p. 246); and we note how Cravan’s Paris poetry would apply the same metaphor, ‘You will always be having to get up from your chairs / To move on to other heartbreaks, to be caught in other snares’ (Arthur Cravan, ‘Des paroles’/‘Some Words’, in John Ashbery, Collected French Translations: Poetry, ed. Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2014), p. 103; Édouard Archinard, ‘Des paroles’, Maintenant, 2 (July 1913), 9 (‘Il vous faudra toujours vous lever de vos sièges / Gagner d’autres chagrins, vous prendre à d’autres pièges’)). 69 Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, p. 322. 70 Indeed, twentieth-century phenomenology, which referred to experience as a secure foundation for knowledge, fully rejected the idea that knowledge would be centred on ‘man’, and so phenomenologists would not make any presuppositions with regard to who (or what) was doing the experiencing. 71 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, p. 80. 72 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 18. 73 Nietzsche’s original reads, ‘[T]here is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 45. 74 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p. 57. 75 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 46. 76 Among the outcomes is Fabian’s idea of becoming a poet; one of Deleuze’s many critical sources was the French philosopher Henri Bergson (who would also become an oblique reference for Cravan in 1914), who proposed at the start of the twentieth century how ‘[o]ur intelligence … can place itself within … mobile reality, and adopt its ceaselessly changing direction’. See Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), trans. T. E. Hulme (London: Macmillan and Co., 1913), p. 59. 77 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 57. 78 Arthur Cravan, ‘Le cahier de West Worthing’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 223–32: ‘Must avoid repetition, awkward alliteration, drawn-out descriptions, over-familiar idiomatic forms, improper terms … The imagery lacks originality and precision. Avoid becoming too precious and polemical’ (p. 224). 79 See ACSS, p. 68. 80 Fabian to Charles Brun, 30 November 1906, ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun’. 81 Fabian to Charles Brun, December 1906 (A), ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun’.



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82 Fabian to Charles Brun, December 1906 (B), ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun’. 83 Fabian to Charles Brun, 15 January 1907, ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun’. 84 Fabian to Charles Brun, 1 March 1907, ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun’. 85 Fabian to Charles Brun, 3 May 1907, ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun’. 86 Fabian to Charles Brun, 21 June 1907, ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun’: ‘[E]ntre cent métiers, garçon de café, cueilleur d’oranges, laitier, poseur … bucheron, terrassier, valet de ferme et qu’à cette heure il charge de planches de wagons, s’étant sauvé d’un vaisseau anglais où il était chauffeur. Mais il est surtout chemineau, amoureux des étoiles, il a couché dans des lits, dans la paille, dans des trous et sur l’herbe.’ 87 Fabian to Charles Brun, 26 August 1907, ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun’. 88 Fabian to Charles Brun, 26 August 1907, ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun’. 89 Fabian Lloyd, ‘Sérénade’, trans. Elza Adamowicz for the present volume; in Fabian to Charles Brun, 31 August 1907, ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun’. 90 Fabian to Charles Brun, 25 November 1907, ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun’. 91 Nellie to Grandjean, 29 May 1908; cited in ACSS, p. 72. 92 Nellie to Grandjean, June 1908; cited in ACSS, p. 66. 93 Fabian to Charles Brun, 5 November 1908, ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun’. 94 Fabian to Grandjean, 10 September 1908, in ŒPAL, p. 143. 95 This much is stated in Fabian to Charles Brun, 31 August 1907, ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun’. 96 The Sun (New York), 24 August 1913. 97 Fabian’s inheritance was entrusted for security to the family friend and lawyer François Fiaux; see ACSS, p. 73.

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3

j To be an American in Paris

If poverty would one day be remembered as a luxury in Montparnasse, when Fabian arrived in Paris in early 1909, the district in the city’s 14th arrondissement was poised to become the centre to which the intellectual and artistic population would increasingly migrate in escaping the ‘fake artists, eccentric industrialists, and devil-may-care opium smokers’ of Montmartre.1 Montparnasse had been developed only since the second half of the nineteenth century and was, as a result, very different in look and feel from the city’s older artistic centre – not as picturesque, but distinctly more ‘modern’.2 For new arrivals who came from outside Paris – and more so for new arrivals who came from outside France – Montparnasse was attractive for a variety of reasons; the state had allowed its development ‘into a “free zone” with less police surveillance and greater acceptance of unconventional behaviour and life-styles than would have been allowed in other areas’.3 During his first exile in 1903, for instance, Trotsky was a resistant resident in the quarter and part of the city’s Russian student colony: I was entering the atmosphere of a world centre with an obstinate and antagonistic attitude. At first, I ‘denied’ Paris, and even tried to ignore it … I felt that in order to get close to Paris and understand it fully, I would have to spend a great deal of mental energy. But I had my own world of revolution, and this was very exacting and brooked no rival interests.4

Lenin was also briefly in Montparnasse at this time (as recounted by Trotsky for some merciless ‘twitting’ for the latter’s suffering the pains of a borrowed pair of too-small shoes),5 and both men would subsequently return for extended residencies in later exiles. When Fabian Lloyd made his entry in 1909, Lenin had recently returned to Montparnasse for the second time, renting an apartment for his family on rue Beaunier, recalled by Krupskaya as ‘a large airy flat, which even



To be an American in Paris 71

had mirrors over the fireplaces … This rather luxurious apartment, however, did not fit in with our way of living.’6 Fabian’s own revolutionary activity required an immersion in Paris that Trotsky’s ‘denial’ could not have accommodated, and it was on the other side of the Paris Catacombs of Montparnasse that Fabian alighted for his city installation at the Hôtel des Écoles on rue Delambre. Despite his arriving in Paris as the aspiring poet, what we retrospectively read of Fabian’s domestication in 1909–10 appears momentarily to set aside poetry, with the unfolding of a sequence of events only indirectly anticipated in the preceding years. Initially, a circumstantial event of note occurred in February 1909 when Parisians woke up to read Le Figaro with Filippo Marinetti’s seismic ‘Manifeste du futurism’ on its front page.7 Now, if nothing else, this publication of an artistic manifesto in the most widely circulated of French daily newspapers was to radically re-set the coordinates of cultural address that were reworked into artistic activity in Paris and elsewhere over the coming decade, and within the context of which the parameters of art would be transformed. It is out of such renewed coordinates that as potent an image as the poet-boxer emerges, for instance, whose revision was especially pronounced in the craze for boxing that spread through Parisian artistic and intellectual circles during la belle époque. The vital and popular enthusiasm for boxing at the time is remote for us today; it was shared by such an unlikely cultural crew in Paris as Maurice de Vlaminck, Guillaume Apollinaire, André Derain, Henri-Pierre Roché and Gertrude Stein, as well as Pablo Picasso,8 and, of particular note, Georges Braque, who enjoyed a presence and reputation for physical strength as an amateur boxer, sparring with fellow amateurs and occasionally his closest cultural acquaintances.9 Fernande Olivier recalled Braque as ‘tall, with big shoulders, and … an unusual impression of sheer physical power’, shorter and heavier [than his associates Derain and Vlaminck], with a powerful head which made him look like a white negro. He had the shoulders and the neck of a boxer, very brown skin, curly black hair and a clipped moustache.10

The writer and journalist Roché, as recalled in a diary entry in spring 1909, once stepped into the ring with the Hermetic Cubist: [F]acing Braque, squared up, fifteen pounds heavier than me, and I was afraid. I felt his science and his strength … With all my power I threw about fifteen punches which I thought were well-prepared, to the jaw, to the heart, to the back … except all of these punches landed on Braque’s gloves, or on his forearms which he used like a pigeon’s wings.11

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Then Roché made way for Derain: [Derain] threw massive punches, with all his great strength, and he weighed fully ten pounds more than Braque. But he soon had to appreciate that not one of his punches landed, that Braque intercepted them all, that Braque hit him when he wished, where he wished, without trying, and that he was playing with him … And Derain was, in his turn, worn out.12

Roché’s reflections came just a week after what proved to be the longest boxing match and arguably the ‘greatest’ fight of the twentieth century (documented for thirty-eight knockdowns in a contest that was not stopped until the forty-ninth round) took place at the Cirque de Paris between two American heavyweights: Joe Jeannette vs Sam McVea, ‘l’idole de Paris’, on 17 April 1909, two fighters brought together in that era of ‘boxing matches imported to Paris from America [which] carried with them a showmanship and a menacing low life of pimps’.13 In the weeks that followed, La presse described the culmination of this remarkable fight by invoking culture above all its antonyms, in which the science, speed and flexibility of Jeannette had triumphed over the brute force of McVea.14 Well, if Fabian had come to Paris to be a poet, the eleventh muse in Montparnasse was unexpected; the meeting of artistic and sporting culture could not be anything but irresistible for the imposingly proportioned athlete Fabian Lloyd. So it was that Cravan’s first (and, under the name Fabian Lloyd, last) public address came just six weeks later, in the 10 June 1909 edition of the Paris newspaper L’echo des sports. The lead column carried a short article comprising pointed observations – the response of one among many Parnassois to the environment in which Fabian now found himself and critically informed by what he had seen and experienced during the years leading up to 1909. The environment, culturally and socially, was the object of general analytic comment around this time; Apollinaire, for one, would observe how, in Montparnasse, you can now find the real artists, dressed in American-style clothes. You may find a few of them high on cocaine, but that doesn’t matter; the principles of most Parnassois (so called to distinguish them from the Parnassians) are opposed to the consumption of artificial paradises in any shape or form.15

In Fabian’s case, his published prose of 1909, titled ‘To Be or Not To Be … American’, is a practical exercise in thinking out loud as he resists deliberate conclusion. It might surprise us that this particular text is the aspiring poet’s first published work, addressing no highbrow literary intelligentsia but rather ‘everyone who is slightly sporty and



To be an American in Paris 73

c­ apable of being of interest to us’.16 After all, the platform was L’echo des sports – not Vers et prose or La revue blanche, or the newly founded La nouvelle revue française, or the yet-to-be-founded Les soirées de Paris (although the latter would eventually include articles on boxing). Ostensibly collected commentaries on cultural pose and posturing, this first text contains the original submissions to Le coq two years previously (see Chapter 2). What underlies ‘To Be or Not To Be’ specifically is praise of the black American boxers who were at that time making the Montparnasse scene: Joe Jeannette and Willie Lewis are named, the latter once credited as having ‘inculcated the meaning of the pugilistic art into [French] athletes’.17 Further, however, I would suggest that we are able to read ‘To Be or Not To Be’ as a rather unlikely protomanifesto of simulation in its address of appearances and surfaces. In such terms, it presents what the later Arthur Cravan would deliberately seek to exploit: ‘Today … everyone is American. It is essential to be American, or at least to look like you are one, which is exactly the same thing.’18 This article-manifesto renders appearance and the assumption of pose collectively as a strategic principle of cultural agency and engagement, which Fabian could confidently exercise by the following year and would continue to refine throughout a decade of movement through postures and impostures. ‘To Be or Not To Be’ breaks down those socio-cultural structures predicated upon the efficient execution of roles understood in terms of difference. Such terms initiate a philosophical affirmation of surfaces,19 supremely realised (for Fabian) in the simulation of ‘the American’: at a time when everyone needed to carry the label of a profession, barring outlaws, when one man is proud to be a joiner, another a Naturalist poet, others journalists, house-breakers, painters or long-distance runners, he, the American, is an American and nothing else.20

What Fabian would exploit (although not exclusively Fabian, we ought to remind ourselves; assuming pose ‘is the only way to be fashionable’, he says) was the perception of status and importance that came with being American;21 assuming pose, we then read, is a matter of degree, ‘more or less convincingly’ secured by the adoption of some basic traits and behaviours: Be a whisker taller than the norm. Be clean-shaven. Part your hair in the middle. Chew. Spit in the drawing-room. Wipe your nose with your fingers.

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Never speak. Dance the jig. Carry your money loose in your pocket, not in a wallet. Always keep your hat on your head. Greet people by raising your forefinger to the brim of your hat. Always look busy. Hang around bars drinking nothing but ‘American drinks’. Despise women.22

This, of course, is a very particular and culturally distorted perception of the American, propagated in popular forms, and Fabian had already documented this perceived construct before reaching his estimated conclusion in 1909 that ‘[i]t is not difficult to pass for an American’.23 Among the items he had hoped Charles Brun might publish in 1907, for instance, had been his caricature titled ‘Spitting American’ (‘Le cracheur américain’), and a comparison of this item with passages in ‘To Be or Not To Be’ is marked: Americans are long when they are not short; some are long and skinny, others are short and squat; some flabby, others scrawny. Some shoot up, others flop. You will notice some with moustaches, or beards, or cleanshaven. They all chew tobacco; and they all spit it out. Here is one particular case: He is travelling, sitting in a corner of a train compartment. He is chewing tobacco in total silence. His dark blue suit is too loose and makes him look fat. On his one-metre wide shoulders a large head swivels, at this moment he cocks it to one side. His neck rises freely from narrow collar. He crosses one leg over the other; his shoes gleam in the shadow. He is arrogant. Large diamonds glitter on him. His round clean-shaven red face is dotted with black spots; his challenging gaze from round brown eyes like a carnelian. Motionless he spits over you suddenly slipping his tongue between his lips. You are about to slap him, he sniffs. He sits on the edge of his seat, stares at his boots, then the floor; and then the space in front of him.24

This 1907 draft, declined for publication by Brun, resounds in Fabian’s later texts – ‘To Be or Not To Be’, obviously, but also in the train compartment setting of ‘Poète et boxeur’ (1915). In his 1909 summing-up, Fabian asserts a characteristic that we see deliberately applied in the years following (yet with glimpses that it is but one aspect of assumed behaviours and roles, only partly grounded in his documented youthful obstinacy): ‘above all else, crown yourself with arrogance. Cheek is



To be an American in Paris 75

everything.’ 25 We might consider Loy’s recounting of the young Fabian in Paris, for instance, crowning himself thus: the story goes that he was given work at librairie Brentano’s,26 conjuring the image of a suited and booted brawny youth who had lumbered into young adulthood only to have to struggle with the straits and delicacies of books. He exploded in frustration on his first day in the job – ‘[He] threw all the books in his first client’s face because, she said, “allons, allons!” when he fumbled with tying up the string’ – a reaction, according to Loy, all because Fabian ‘considered it outrageous that a mere little French actress should say allons, allons to Him, and he walked out’.27 Simulation More precise, perhaps, as we document the forming subject, is to admit the conflict and struggle in the face of expectations of conformity and organisation, with the at least theoretical consequences of resistance in such situations. In their second volume of Capitalisme et schizophrénie, the breathtaking Mille plateaux (1980), Deleuze and Guattari deliberate what oppositional resistance would entail: You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body – otherwise you’re just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpreted – otherwise you’re just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement – otherwise you’re just a tramp.28

Resisting this arrest through the forces and processes of subjectification renders the depraved and deviant tramp – not merely ‘an outsider’, but the entire, pure outsider (exclu) whose oppositionality functions as a heightened oppositionality, ultimately offering Fabian greater potential in exploitation than any diametric challenge he might otherwise pose. In ‘To Be or Not To Be’, the text I configure as a manifesto of simulation, we read the first critical moves that would eventually make of Fabian a pure outsider, but which here immediately signal what is corroborated by the chronology: ‘Americans are feared since they know how to box – or at least are supposed to.’29 Evidently, Fabian’s idea of ‘the American’ is a prompt for his pursuit of the pugilistic art and the assumption of the cultural role of the boxer – ‘[c]aps with outrageous peaks are tolerable only for boxers or those who wish to pass as such, which is exactly the same thing’30 – and we might easily revise the title of the 1909 article as ‘to be or not to be … a boxer, an elephant, anything’. Significant emphasis is placed on appearance – either of the American, in this instance, or of the boxer – a critical emphasis to step

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away from phenomena (and, for Deleuze, from phenomenology) as presenting appearances of worlds, possessing essences or foundations behind them, and towards simulation and Deleuze’s sense of simulacra as appearances in themselves. Appearances in themselves refer to nothing (no essence or foundation) but themselves: ‘the American, is an American and nothing else’. If the world and its fluctuating appearances achieved precedence for twentieth-century phenomenology, Deleuze’s radical critique of phenomenology by rethinking appearances, not as the appearances of some world but rather as appearances in themselves, now advances a logical structure by which to assemble Fabian Lloyd in 1909–10. There is no foundation of the experiencing mind or subject: ‘masks do not hide anything except other masks’.31 Thus raising the philosophical stakes, what Deleuze critiques is representation as an essentially moral and restricted view of the world (privileging identity, order and stable references), which functions in denial of difference (so to maintain and perpetuate existing orders). Deleuze does this to progress Nietzsche’s highly critical corpus on metaphor. The critique constitutes a challenge to representational models that draw distinctions between the original and the copy; and, in registering ‘the original’ understood as that which most resembles itself (let us say in the form of the exemplary self-identity of subjectivity), ‘the copy’ is inevitably always deficient or imperfect. To move beyond representation, however, the primacy of the original over the copy will be undermined by advancement of the copy for which there is no original – the simulacrum – and which, in the absence of any original, is in no sense deficient.32 For Deleuze, this confronts Plato’s model-copy system with a world of pure simulacra – not simulations of a world lost in precession, cut off from the theoretically recoverable referent or from appearances, but precisely a world wholly composed of simulacra: Everything has become simulacrum, for by simulacrum we should not understand a simple imitation but rather the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is challenged and overturned. The simu­ lacrum is the instance which includes a difference within itself, such as (at least) two divergent series on which it plays, all resemblance abolished so that one can no longer point to the existence of an original and a copy.33

In this, Deleuze recognises a positive force. The model-copy system will always require the referent (here, the ‘American’) in order that the copy (here, Fabian Lloyd) can mean anything, to the extent that the copy takes the place of something that is not present. But conversely, the simulacrum (here, Arthur Cravan) relies on no referent for its force,



To be an American in Paris 77

which is thus understood in positive terms (rather than in the negative of the flawed or degenerate copy),34 able to enter into concrete relations and produce identities from within a world in which differences within themselves ‘swarm’ in a groundless movement, ‘a formless ungrounded chaos’. From ‘identity’ as it resides in the history of philosophy, Deleuze reads its falsifying effect when, in philosophical thought, the necessity to represent obscures differences. Representation requires that objects, subjects, ideas and so on be identified, but ‘[d]ifference is not and cannot be thought in itself, so long as it is subject to the requirements of representation’. It is this capacity to falsify that Deleuze opposes, a power embedded in an image of thought that waives critical immanence and fails to register reality as a process of becoming in which unre­ presentable differences are continually at play: ‘[t]he fault of representation lies in not going beyond the form of identity, in relation to both the object seen and the seeing subject’.35 But, in going beyond, Deleuze postulates an ‘infinite representation’, whereby identity is opposed to an uncountable and non-reductive multiplicity. Deleuze reasons how all things, rather than possessing fixed and limiting identities, connect to the unidentifiable and multiple processes of becoming, concluding that those representations to which we habitually return in our unthinking daily activity have no correspondence, ultimately, to anything in reality. So deliberately engaging representations and identities had an emerging strategic function in the activities of Fabian Lloyd in Paris. Though the latter-day complexities of simulacra may at first appear extremely remote in our revisiting the Left Bank, what they propose are means by which we can apply consistent (if yet provisional) readings to make sensical the events and actions of the singularity Arthur Cravan, whose ‘life was unreal, or surreal, in that he never was the things he became. He never got nearer to a thing in so far as a poet requires – to take contact with it.’36 This is Mina Loy’s assessment, where evidently appearances aligned Fabian with his declared vocation in 1909–10 to be the poet who (at least according to Rimbaud’s nineteenth-century definition) attains ‘a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men: the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed’.37 But little of the poet is glimpsed in the evidence of this year, where poetry momentarily yields to rival interests. Renée Bouchet First installed in Paris at the Hôtel des Écoles, Fabian promptly set about finding more permanent accommodation. He moved north out

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of the 14th and into the 5th arrondissement, between the Seine and the Panthéon, to the apartment at 67 rue Saint-Jacques that would be his Paris address for the next three years (this proximity to the Sorbonne accounts for the misleading suggestion, made a few years later, that Fabian had studied at the Université de Paris).38 His brother Otho, working his way through marital vagaries in this period,39 soon followed the younger sibling, leaving behind the ancient and cultured brilliance of Rome for the delights of modernity that Paris now offered; from his first stop at the Hôtel des Facultés on rue de la Sorbonne, very close to Fabian on rue Saint-Jacques, Otho moved back into the 14th arrondissement to take up his own apartment at 45 rue de Sèvres, off boulevard Raspail, in Montparnasse. It would appear that both Fabian and Otho were most content with their new residences, Fabian writing to Grandjean in 1910 describing ‘my beautiful house adorned with beautiful paintings’,40 and Otho much at ease with the amenities and the amenable residents with whom he shared the fourth floor at rue de Sèvres.41 And so it was, during these first months in Paris, that Fabian met the woman who is rarely glimpsed and even less frequently directly addressed in either primary or secondary sources, but who became the de facto Madame Cravan and occasional collaborator during Fabian’s six-year sojourn in the city, and who must count among the most significant though slightly acknowledged forces in the forming, deforming and reforming subject Cravan. Latterly described as ‘une jolie jeune femme’,42 she was named Renée Bouchet. Born Alphonsine Bouchet in a small community in the south-west of France, between Royan and Angoulême in what is today the PoitouCharentes region,43 on 22 August 1880, Renée was by several years Fabian’s senior and had been resident in Paris for four years when they first met. She was at that time working as secretary to the journalist and art critic Gustave Coquiot, who had himself, as a younger man, worked in a secre­tarial capacity for Rodin. By the start of the twentieth century, Coquiot was known as ‘a writer of risqué feuilletons, chronicler of the social and theatrical worlds’.44 Most famous and impressive to note, perhaps, is the large portrait of Coquiot painted by Picasso at the time of the Spaniard’s second and decisive foray to Paris in 1901 – and, that is, before the so-called Blue and Rose periods – a painting described as stylistically hybrid, delivered in return for journalistic favour: ‘Picasso … applied van Gogh’s heavily loaded brush to a van Dongen-like image of Coquiot as an urbane Mephistopheles in white tie against a livid finde-siècle background’).45 Through her employment, Renée found herself acquainted with a varied selection of artists from that Parisian milieu. The Polish modernist Henri Hayden, for instance, was ­enamoured of her and



To be an American in Paris 79

painted her portrait in 1909. Fabian, too, became enamoured of Renée, and she of him, before they embarked together on the mutual domestic arrangement that lasted until the end of 1915 and according to which they lived together in common-law domesticity. Cravan’s life with Renée is the constant but muted background to the years in Paris. The French Heavyweight Boxing Champion By early 1910, Fabian and Otho were together enrolled at the Club Cuny boxing gymnasium,46 where they received instruction from Fernand Cuny himself. Cuny was trainer, manager, exponent of the science of boxing and ‘Ex-Professeur aux Grandes Écoles Militaires de Saint-Cyr et Saint-Maixent’. In 1910, he had published his boxing manual La boxe as an induction to the basics of technique, training, rules and history of the sport.47 He was described by one notable exponent in the field as ‘a great man … who had much to do with giving France a place among the boxing nations of the world … Shrewd, careful, a born disciplinarian’.48 In February, the Lloyd brothers registered for and entered their first boxing competition, the second annual French championship for novices and amateurs, in which a sequence of events commences that we can read as exercising certain of the principles as laid out in Fabian’s proto-manifesto of the previous year. Indeed, simulation and simulacra are central in what has elsewhere been described as the supremely proto-Dada occasion when Fabian assumed a role that would subsequently become foundational in the fictions:49 he became champion de Boxe amateur de la France without boxing, because all the challengers sat in a row and he was presented and they all resigned. Nobody would box him so he was champion.50

Once more, this is the distillation of events relayed by the protagonist (Cravan) and recounted for posterity by the writers of legend (here Loy). It is triumphal in its vision, but lacks critical detail; and it is emphatic in condensation of the poet who became, quite legitimately by meting out crushing defeats through his mere physical presence, a French national boxing champion by not boxing, by never being the thing that he became. The competition for novices and amateurs was organised by the French Federation of Boxing Clubs in Paris, and held at the Boisleux gymnasium.51 Otho weighed in first at 69.5 kg, a light middleweight in the amateur division; Fabian weighed in at 76.5 kg, comfortably in the amateur heavyweight division, and with a distinct height and reach advantage to carry into his fights; favourable draws in the preliminary

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sessions placed the brothers in the semi-final rounds. The semi-finals and the finals were then held on 20 February, and Otho won both his middleweight bouts with knockouts, impressing the sports review correspondent of L’auto, who remarked on his precise, hard-hitting and scientific technique.52 Fabian’s progress, however, took a slightly different, less athletic but ultimately more spectacular route than his brother’s. His scheduled opponent in the final was Eugène Gette; but Gette was forced to withdraw from the competition decider, thus handing glory to his opponent on a plate before the latter had even laced up his gloves. At the beginning of March, then, Le Figaro published the names of the Lloyd brothers as winners in their respective weight divisions;53 two days later, on 3 March, Grandjean relayed his congratulations in a postcard from Lausanne, but with a sober caution for Otho not to abandon his artistic studies.54 Buoyed by success, in the meantime, Fabian progressed through the eighth meeting of the Boxing Championship for Amateurs and Soldiers, staged at the suitably auspicious exhibition halls of the Salle Wagram, near the Arc de Triomphe. Otho had also entered this competition, but was eliminated from his division on 6 March. Fabian won his semi-final draw against the opponent Grosnier on the 9th.55 But, for the second time, it was a win by forfeit. At the final, however, at nine in the evening on Monday the 14th at the Salle Wagram, proceedings commenced for fights in nine separate weight divisions, to culminate with the amateur superheavyweight clash; the evening’s penultimate bout was scheduled in the heavyweight division, between the opponent Pecqueriaux of Club Bayle, who had weighed in at 74.3 kg, and the 77 kg F. Lloyd of Club Cuny.56 Great things beckoned for all divisional winners, who would qualify to represent the French Federation of Boxing Clubs – as French champions, therefore – at the English Amateur Boxing Association championships to be held at Alexandra Park, London, on the 16th. The next day, Le Figaro reported Fabian Lloyd as the winner of the heavyweight division – but winner by forfeit, again, for the third time, with Pecqueriaux’s withdrawal from the contest suffering from influenza.57 So there was no fight to report, a less than satisfactory state of affairs: Fabian Lloyd triumphed in the heavyweight division without boxing – which was doubly unfortunate and plainly uninspiring for him, and for us who would wish to make a considered assessment of his ability by actually seeing him box.58

Once, it has been said, is an accident; twice is a coincidence; three times is a conspiracy. Fabian was probably as surprised as anybody by



To be an American in Paris 81

his rapid rise, but more than content to ride his luck. The championship, moreover, had proved a success for Club Cuny with a total of four winners (in the flyweight, bantamweight, featherweight and heavy­ weight divisions). Yet on the day of the Amateur Boxing Association championships, it was reported that Fabian had not joined the other boxers in London to represent the French Federation59 – perhaps as a result of his status by forfeit – though the 26 March issue of the Paris illustrated sports weekly La vie au grand air showed Fabian in slightly gangly and very staged, if not awkward, boxing pose; photographed in front of a calming pastoral and captioned ‘Champion poids mi-lourd’, in the distinct absence of any opponent and with only his shadow to box.60 Fabian’s triumph, however, was complete: he was now, and would remain, the 1910 French Heavyweight Boxing Champion. During the months that followed, there took place some very modest touring (in truth, a handful of appearances) for Fabian as a boxer in the Paris vicinity and beyond – ‘reported’ three years later in the New York daily The Sun: ‘He came to France and made a tour of the boxing booths of the pleasure fairs’61 – and it is from this period that we can recover the few existing documentary testimonies of him in action in the ring (with the notable exceptions of the extensive Barcelona coverage in 1916, of course, and subsequently Mexico City in 1918). In April 1910 at the Cirque de Paris – which staged ‘gala affairs with an elaborately decorated, plush-lined ring with velvet draping’,62 close to the baroque splendour of the Hôtel des Invalides – Club Cuny and the Wonderland boxing club were beneficiaries of the evening’s fare, with both Fabian and Otho scheduled to appear in separate bouts. Just one week after Sam McVea’s appearance and win by technical knockout at the Cirque de Paris, Fabian entered the same ring and took on his opponent Ricaux on 23 April, in what turned out to be a most forgettable contest, prosaically reported in La boxe et les boxeurs: I have seen some ingenious puppetry that seeks to imitate life, and witnessing Ricaux and Lloyd in the ring is similarly suggestive of life in inanimate objects – when their movements seize for seeming eternities in confrontational and inelegant stances, they do nothing but slowly inhale and exhale, sniffing like two French white whales.63

Into May, Fabian briefly toured south-west France as French champion, but his title success in Paris seemed to evaporate out in the sobering fields. From Angoulême – Renée’s home turf – Fabian sent a postcard to Otho on 3 May, declaring that despite losing the day’s fight and money

6  ‘Les champions de boxe anglais de 1910’, La vie au grand air, 26 March 1910.



To be an American in Paris 83

in Marmande, he was hopeful of better in Angoulême.64 A week later, on the 10th, he entered the ring for ten scheduled three-minute rounds against the opponent, Cussot Brien. The fight was brief, being reported as follows: Round one: Cussot Brien attacks, connecting Lloyd directly and flooring him. Lloyd is quickly back on his feet, but his arms are spent. Round two: Lloyd is unable to continue, and his seconds throw in the towel.65

By the end of the month, Fabian was listed as a professional heavyweight, and the last documented activity from this first boxing episode was participation in the open championship held at the Casino des Lilas in Bordeaux on 24 May.66 In the space of weeks literally, and with even fewer rounds under his belt, Fabian’s exuberant detour into this sporting life had gone full circle. It was over without him having physically won a single competitive round, yet he had somehow technically managed to secure the impressive title that he would spectacularly exploit throughout the coming years, before eventually cashing it in. The immediate effects and legacy of February–May 1910 would manifest for Fabian both the science and the oldest tradition of boxing: the science ‘when later his intellectual faculties came into play [and] the instinct of “knock out” dominated his critique’,67 and the oldest tradition as he cultivated and refined his mouth-fighting in a verbal barrage, eventually with incisive precision to taunt and insult his Parisian constituency and to undermine it psychologically.68 Cravans The 1910 summer retreat took Fabian and Renée for a brief stay in Brittany, before they made their way south and to the place of Fabian’s penultimate competitive bout as an amateur boxer, Angoulême. A short distance west of Angoulême was the historic town of Saintes, where they spent the end of the summer. Before returning to Paris, the two would visit Renée’s family in her birthplace, the village of Cravans in the Poitou-Charentes region, to celebrate the christening of her sister Simone’s young son at the family church. This occasion was recounted many years later by Renée, reflecting back over forty years, when she walked with Fabian to the church and he eyed the bell tower, confessing to her that for as long as he could remember he had dreamt of the campanile and of ringing the church bells. Without further prompt, he strode into the tower and rang the bell with all his might and without interruption until he had entirely exhausted the intoxicating moment – a symbolic occasion, as Maria Lluïsa Borràs

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has poetically interpreted it, marking his own baptism in Cravans.69 The subsequent long journey home to Paris became a prelude to rupture and its inevitable consequences between Fabian and his mother Nellie, who had informed her son that she would briefly be visiting the French capital in the company of old family friends, the Kœchlins, and she had invited Fabian to dine with them at the Gare de Lyon at eight in the evening. Earlier in the summer, before leaving Brittany, Fabian had sent Nellie sound assurance by telegram that he would be there and on time, formally but gently intending to introduce Renée to this immediate family circle. Returning to Paris from Poitou-Charentes, however, became a rushed affair with the train delayed; Renée was anxious at being late to meet Fabian’s mother, and he went on ahead in the vain hope of saving grace. Nellie would later describe her version of events: Fabian eventually appeared alone, almost two hours late, without any explanation or hint of an apology. He quietly told me that Mlle Renée was with him, but it was of course impossible for me to respond to this in the presence of M Kœchlin – you know how reserved and proper Kœchlin is. Then after five minutes, Fabian said he had to leave because he had things to do, and that was that!70

Fabian took his mother’s failure to acknowledge Renée as an intolerable slight; Nellie’s defence was the awkwardness of the situation in which she found herself, further exacerbated at being left unresolved at Fabian’s sudden departure. His following letter to his mother to express deepest dismay was, in no uncertain terms, dramatic and ruptive: Your behaviour was scandalous. Would you have ignored Mlle Renée even if I had introduced her to you at the station? Any decent person would have at least made some cordial acknowledgement of her … Don’t expect anything more of me, as I won’t expect anything more of you. I find your partiality towards me repulsive … we are too different from one another. The only reason I said nothing in front of Kœchlin was out of respect for you. Please don’t write to me again, I have no time for your hypocrisy. I shall live my life without you … If you find that I lack respect in writing this much, then consider why – I account impartially for everyone. Write to me no more with your grand pronouncements, I shall only find them risible.71

In much later reflection, ‘ “My mother and I,” I said drolly, “were not born to understand each other”.’72 The situation in the autumn of 1910, meanwhile, demanded some diplomacy to defuse and, reliable as ever, Grandjean intervened in appealing to Fabian’s better reason. In his response to Grandjean, in a letter written at the start of October, it was



To be an American in Paris 85

clear that for Fabian the storm had abated (‘[l]a rancœur ne m’habite plus’).73 The October letter to Grandjean is a provocative glimpse into Fabian’s social self at this juncture. A palpable sense of ease and comfort is to be read out of his description of the nurturing community he found in Paris, along with satisfaction at his own daily creative development and faith in his growing talent (‘[m]on talent est en disproportion avec mon corps très riche, mais il grandira’).74 The image conjured certainly corresponds to the romantic image of the Parisian artistic scene during la belle époque, of badinage and brouhaha in late-night bars, and of the warm glow radiating from the heroic artist, the creature of myth towering above peers: I am supported by a small circle of friends – painters, poets and musicians – who all hail me as though I am a god: next to me, they are diminutive, and my presence among them really is as a god or a centaur. And I am in rude health.75

The organic growth and proliferation of talent, and the hint at multiplicity in the dual image of the centaur, are tempting and strongly resonant images for my reading of the desiring poet who became Arthur Cravan. The position outlined by Peter Sloterdijk in Der Denker auf der Bühne: Nietzsches Materialismus (1986), for instance, productively sets an idea of the residence of multiple forms within one body, in order to pursue something greater than merely their coexistence. Specifically is posed the functioning of one form or role through another; the declared object of Sloterdijk’s enquiry is Nietzsche, who, he proposes, ‘did not practise the one discipline alongside the other, but practised the one by practising the other’. As forms and roles struggle in contest for a semblance of liberation, though they may ‘consistently take the wrong step … [they] thereby proceed upward’, which makes obsolete the exhausted concept of progressive dialectic. It suggests precisely the ambivalent image of the centaur and the centauric body, which is able to capitalise on the conflict within the contest in order to negotiate an ‘intellectual dismemberment’ that is antagonistic to a sense of unity and completion. And with ‘effortlessly effective double-natured observations’, says Sloterdijk, Nietzsche ‘found himself caught in the position of representing an unclassifiable curiosity … at home nowhere because it could belong anywhere’.76 To qualify this alignment of the dual image with Fabian in late 1910, I shall proceed to describe theoretical coordinates for the radical reconstitution of the subject that we witness entering into 1911, prompted by his own invocation of himself as centaur. This subject held regard for many Arthurs – poets

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(Rimbaud) or boxers (Jack Johnson) or gentleman-thieves (Lebeau) – ringing out from the village of Cravans. This defining metaphor, the Arthur of Cravans, was now poised to become ‘the darling of Paris overnight’.77 Metaphor In 1873, Nietzsche made the critical observation that, in the striving towards some correspondence between knowledge and reality, which we will eventually call ‘truth’, all that we are ever able to possess are metaphors for things.78 That this is not a negative observation, I think, is understood, because in their description of one thing as something else metaphors will pose new ways of perceiving literal terms and subjects. In the acknowledged relation that metaphor and metaphorical language have to objective descriptions of experience, what are generated are perspectives on the world that have no existence in the world. The second critical observation on metaphor is that the implied relation between the literal, objective thing and its metaphorical, subjective description is not a relation between a stronger over a weaker form of truth, precisely because truth is itself a metaphor and is its own con­sequence of perspectives, which dominate and find themselves privileged above others. Our projection of metaphors onto the world in order to give it structure and to make it thinkable (and Nietzsche reads the concepts space, time, causality and number as precisely such metaphors) functions in no small measure to distance the metaphors we use from their origin, to the point that we forget that they are metaphors and that they eventually become what we refer to as our ‘truths’. As perspectives that we have created, therefore, to allow us to represent the world, Nietzsche’s challenge for us is to rethink the function and the purpose of our ‘truths’ by the interrogation and examination of their histories and values (their genealogies). My cursory comments around metaphor in the introduction to this book have already posed an idea of Arthur Cravan as metaphor. This is a deliberately provocative idea in order to approach what was rendered in Paris in 1911 as a context within which perspectives were generated and became ‘live’ – though they had no existence in the world. The generation of the person and persona of Cravan from the residue of 1909–10 sustains for us a fundamentally vital understanding that certain individuals (specifically Mina Loy) had in Cravan’s immediate wake. His quite bizarre elevation (as Fabian Lloyd) to French Heavyweight Boxing Champion, for example, is the emphatic instance of one thing (Cravan) being described as something else, the creation



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of a perspective that in the popular or cult image has so distanced itself from the literals that we have long since lost sight of the untruth of that particular ‘truth’. What I propose in pursuit of the chronologies and biographies, speculative and projective as they are, is that ‘Arthur Cravan’ is a far more elaborate (and potentially an elaborately and strategically deployed) assemblage than what we have in the singular example of the 1910 boxing champion; and that it, the Cravan assemblage, intentionally exploited its structural envelopment and containment (and in the process exposed the contingencies and transience of those structures). Adopting the name with which his cultural stance unfolded, then, ‘Arthur Cravan’ became what metaphor is: a means to represent the world. It was in early 1911 that Cravan walked the short distance from his Paris residence to Lucain’s stationery suppliers (Articles de Bureaux & d’Écoliers Fantaisies), around the corner on boulevard Saint-Germain, and bought a small notebook of indexed, graphed folios inside a black cover. He modified this notebook with carefully cut-out black letters on a green background, ordered alphabetically and pasted onto each folio, transforming what was initially an unremarkable object into his codex, the Paris Address Book of Arthur Cravan, a remarkable object indeed. Inside it, he listed the varied names and addresses of members of the Parisian and European literary avant-garde (including Apollinaire, Cendrars, Cocteau, Dermée, Fort, Gide, Jammes, Marinetti, Pound, Yeats); the artistic avant-garde (including Delaunay, van Dongen, de la Fresnay, Laurencin, Rivera, Severini); art galleries, dealers, critics and experts (including Coquiot, Duret, Rosenberg); composers (including Debussy, Ravel); politicians and political writers (including Clemenceau, Descaves, Tailhade (Taillade)); acquaintances and associates of Oscar Wilde in Paris; and, perhaps most illuminating, the names of journals and journalistic contacts in Paris, New York, London and Berlin. More than a personal document, this address book signals a conscious mapping by Cravan of, first, the public arena that he would purposefully enter and, second, its means of casual exploitation, as would be revealed over the next few years: I was feverishly dreaming, after a long spell of the most dreadful idleness, of growing suddenly very rich … I was reflecting on my unfulfilled projects, and getting increasingly worked up at the thought of dishonestly, and wholly unexpectedly, rising to affluence by means of poetry – I have always tried to consider art as a means and not as an end …79

Revealingly, his consistent method would be the exploitation of circumstances. In among the names and addresses of the culturally high, low

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and middling brows are a number of les immortels, recently elected members of the Académie Française (the likes of Donnay, de Régnier, Rostand), Cravan declared his intention to ‘conquer’ them en bloc – much to Nellie’s distraction in far-away Lausanne: ‘I received a highly amusing letter from Fabian saying that he had been to pay his respects to the thirty-nine academicians. How we laughed!’80 It may well have amused his mother, but Cravan now set deliberately and systematically to proceed through les immortels in order to work towards his own immortality, in the Paris of arts and letters he had mapped in the address book. Félix Fénéon Among the names in the address book that feature in Wilde’s orbit, some are to be commented upon by their recurrence in Cravan’s accounts. Most prominent is Félix Fénéon, the dandy-anarchist of Paris who famously occupies the foreground of Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1895 painting of Goulue dancing at the Foire du Trone, complete with distinctive goatee (the goatee dazzlingly rendered in Paul Signac’s 1890 Portrait of Félix Fénéon), standing next to Wilde, ahead of the aesthete’s conviction for ‘gross indecency’ in May of that year.81 By the time Cravan arrived in Paris, Fénéon (his senior by more than twenty-five years) was an established, provocative and widely respected art critic.82 Fénéon’s acquaintance with Cravan into the early 1910s emerged through the social circle of painters, poets and musicians that the latter was edging into. Despite being a firmly established if not ‘brilliant’ figure, Fénéon was by no means above the creative cultural ferment; on the contrary, he obtained a seniority within the most progressive circles. He was also actively pursued by Cravan for the continuity his acquaintance would allow for the absent moderation of Wilde in the life that Cravan was assembling. Strategically, also, Fénéon exemplified cultural stances that Cravan not only registered for critical potential but also emulated and would, in due course, confidently adopt with vim and vigorously modify to his own ends. Of specific note projecting into the Maintenant years (1912–15) is a review of the Paris salon that Fénéon published in the anarchist weekly Le père peinard, in April 1893 – and that would certainly have been made known to Cravan during their acquaintance. A series of laws introduced under the Third Republic in 1893, the lois scélérates or ‘rogue laws’, were implemented in prohibition of anarchist propaganda, responding to a wave of criminal anarchist activity in France in the preceding few years, and Le père peinard was targeted under



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the new legislation. In two instalments, however, on 9 April and 16 April 1893, before the rogue laws had forced Le père peinard to move along (to London in 1894, before its return to Paris in 1896), Fénéon’s review titled ‘Balade chez les artisses indépendants’ was published, constituting an unprecedented aggressively satirical article that gave no quarter in its assault on the salon jury and exhibiting artists. It was unrestrained in its ribald and scatological excesses as it progressed through the five exhibition rooms, indicting the salon’s high arbiters of taste as shitting invalids squatting over their chamber pots (‘[e]t ceux qui aiment la discussion se foutent à raisonner comme un pot de chambre sous le cul d’un malade’).83 Cravan admired the tone, which was precisely what, along with Fénéon’s style, he would revive in his own eighteen-page review ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’ in the spring of 1914, where he methodically pilloried the exhibition’s veneration of kerosene poured ‘into a cow’s ass-hole’84 (his comment, presumably, on the painting within a painting in Marc Chagall’s Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers of 1912–13),85 and bluntly aired his thoughts on his misfortunately named targets (‘an ass is an ass and to have temperament is to imitate oneself’).86 Indeed, there is unbridled scatological joy to be found in the link to Fénéon; back in the mid-1890s, for instance, he was caught up in the wake of the rogue laws in the mass trial of alleged anarchists. The trial, in the summer of 1894, infamously climaxed with a package that had been sent to the government attorney being ill-advisedly opened during proceedings, revealing its content to the stunned courtroom – not a smoking gun, but a steaming turd. At the call to recess, to permit the attorney to wash his hands (after coming into contact with la matière fécale), it was Fénéon who rose to the occasion above all others, denouncing the magistrate as a latterday province prefect: ‘Never since Pontius Pilate has a magistrate washed his hands with such ostentation.’87 By his position and status within the Parisian cultural and gallery scene, then, Fénéon would become a vital and highly regarded ally for Cravan in the poet-boxer’s strategic positioning and as he tested the limits of metaphor to become yet something or someone else that he was not. For Cravan, Fénéon would be a trusted, sage counsel and background figure for the Paris years and beyond. André Gide André Gide, founder in 1908 of La nouvelle revue française, was another established literary figure listed in the address book and offering Cravan significant continuity with Oscar Wilde. Gide had become

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closely acquainted with Wilde at the time of the latter’s visit to Paris late in 1891, their mutual self-absorption opening the way to what has been described as the ‘spiritual seduction’ of Gide by Wilde,88 and the latter’s dramatic impact on his youthful friend: ‘I do not like your lips,’ Wilde had told Gide at their first meeting, ‘they are quite straight, like the lips of a man who has never told a lie. I want you to learn to lie so that your lips may become beautiful and curved like the lips of an antique mask.’89 Within a matter of days, however, the moral-intellectual struggles that were foundational to Gide’s personal and creative life saw him quickly (but far from irreconcilably) recant on Wilde and record how their meeting had done him, Gide, ‘nothing but harm’.90 There is much in Gide’s own reflections upon and progress towards revised aesthetic and ethical systems and his privileging of sensation that holds rich and productive potential with regard to a study of Cravan – ‘[e]ach thing is made up only of its emptiness’,91 Gide once wrote to Paul Valéry in discussion of Wilde, and he wrote publicly on how Wilde determined in his plays ‘to make of falsehood a work of art’92 – but the object that Gide became for Cravan in Paris was one of disaffection and, eventually, derision. Cravan made initial contact with Gide in 1911, having been introduced by the writer Georges de Porto-Riche to the dramatist Jacques Copeau at the beginning of July.93 Copeau was a close friend of Gide and co-founder of NRF, and he provided Cravan with the direct line he required to write at the end of October, by virtue of his connection to Wilde, expressing a wish to meet and interview the distinguished literary figure who had been so intimately acquainted with his uncle: ‘I ought to pay a call on André Gide. He’s a millionaire. What a lark – I shall take the old littérateur for a ride!’ … I dropped Gide a line, mentioning my kinship with Oscar Wilde. Gide agreed to see me.94

‘The tone of the letter amused me,’ Gide recalled in November 1922, ‘and I was in a state of high anticipation when I journeyed one beautiful morning to the small apartment that Cravan occupied near the rue des Écoles.’95 Gide’s memory served him well – the rue des Écoles intersects rue Saint-Jacques just to the south of Cravan’s apartment at number 67 – and the meeting that took place was cordial, with Renée in dutiful attendance as Madame Cravan (though she appears certainly not to have been presented as such; Gide recalled the somewhat distracting presence of ‘une femme’ on that occasion). In the portrait that would eventually be published in 1913, Cravan described what he believed was his homosexual advantage in eventual exploitation of their frisson encounter:



To be an American in Paris 91 I was like a dream to him given my size, my shoulders, my beauty, my eccentricities, my words. Gide was infatuated, he would do anything for me. We were already on our way to Algeria … Gide paid for the private compartments, the thoroughbred mounts, the palaces, and for our ­partners … Gide paid, paid and paid again; and I even dared to hope that he would not sue me for damages when I admitted to him that following the unhealthy profligacy of my leaping imagination he had sold everything barring his trusty Normandy farm in order to satisfy all my modern child’s caprices.96

For his part, Gide knowingly observed Cravan, remembering him as handsome, tall, strong and well proportioned, but with the critical proviso that Cravan was all too aware of his own physical impress (‘un peu trop conscient de ses avantages’).97 With both parties no doubt eyeing some potential gain from what Cravan more candidly described as his ‘little projects of exploitation’, that day’s first meeting concluded with an invitation to visit Gide subsequently at his Paris home, the impressive Villa Montmorency built and completed to the littérateur’s own design in 1906, at 18 avenue des Sycomores in Auteuil. Gide thanked the nephew of Oscar Wilde for his hospitality and departed, with Cravan watching him as he walked away: There was only a short distance to the corner of the street where he would disappear from sight and I saw him halt in front of the window of a bookshop, even though there was a shop selling surgical instruments and a confectioner’s nearby …98

From the domestic modesty of rue Saint-Jacques, the approach to and entry into Villa Montmorency was a dramatic shift. The villa, funded by the sale of Gide’s inherited estate in Normandy, housed a kaleidoscopic library, realisation of his immersive ‘fantasy of a masculine mother imago’,99 that could not but arrest the visitor. Cravan’s plan to make an impression on his host, on the other hand, got off to a bad start for the lack of a suit; true to his proto-manifesto of simulation of the previous year, Cravan recalled how at the time ‘I did not possess a suit, something that I regret to this day as it would have made it easy for me to have dazzled him’.100 Cravan, naively underestimating his object, would have to find other means of impressing Gide: As I approached his house, I repeated to myself the brilliant remarks that I would try to slip into the course of our conversation. A moment later I rang the bell … I was shown to the first floor and I was asked to wait in a sort of tiny cell created by a right angle in the corridor. As we proceeded, I glanced with curiosity into all the different rooms … Then, I was sitting in my own little corner. The leaded glass windows … allowed the daylight

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to fall across a writing-desk on which sheets freshly dampened with ink lay scattered.101

The literary project with which Gide was most obviously occupied during this period dated back as far as the early 1890s; he would work intensely in 1912 to complete it in mid-1913 (the annus mirabilis of French literature, as Shattuck describes it),102 and publish it a year later as Les caves du Vatican (1914). Little did Cravan imagine, as he could not help himself from scanning the loose papers on Gide’s writing desk, what part he might have in bringing this protracted project to a close over the coming eighteen months. The story of Les caves du Vatican – which Gide stressed to call a sotie,103 rather than a novel – originated in the circulation in 1892 of reports into the alleged imprisonment of Pope Leo XIII and the installation of a false pope, and the consequent accounts of financial swindles and extortions among pious Catholics in order to restore the true pope to the bishopric of Rome. The irreverent quality of Gide’s sotie structured around this hoax allowed for a composition that indirectly invoked the carnivalesque by the inversion of order to mock piety and materialism in equal amount.104 The inversion of cultural logic does not change anything, of course; the logic remains intact, processing through what Deleuze describes as decodification and recodification.105 The logic of code remains, and the outcome can only be further ‘struggles and new prohibitions’,106 exercised by Gide in the convolution of the actes gratuits and individual freedom that become, ultimately, the central contentions in Les caves du Vatican as played out in the character of Lafcadio. As an imaginary character, Lafcadio had been developed by Gide over several years. Towards the end of 1909, he wrote of the emerging story of this character in his journal, noting how there was little to distinguish between the honest man and the churl or knave (gredin), and that the terrible truth was that the honest man was easily capable of becoming a churl (‘[i]l n’y a pas de différence essentiel entre l’honnête home et le gredin – et que l’honnête home puisse devenir un gredin, voilà le terrible et le vrai’).107 The ease with which such slippage could occur and the complex moral position engendered by it is explored in Les caves du Vatican, and exercised in Lafcadio. Lafcadio’s shadow is the indoctrinating Protos, the well-educated leader of the criminal organisation les Mille-Pattes, the society of subtils, ‘a genus who … [does] not present to all persons and in all places the same appearance’;108 Protos, who disguises himself as a priest to extort money from devout Catholics. The scene, however, by which Les caves du Vatican resonates is the train journey from Rome to Naples during



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which Lafcadio finds ­himself by chance sharing a compartment with the character Fleurissoire (whom he does not know) and carries out the extreme acte gratuit, which is an act dictated by chance; if he can count to twelve before a light appears in the darkened landscape, Lafcadio will kill Fleurissoire.109 Thus does Fleurissoire meet his demise. With minimal premeditation, the killing of Fleurissoire is an act presented to the reader as self-sufficient, disinterested, without motivation, entirely gratuitous, demonstrating a ‘complete anaesthesia’110 and obtaining no past or future – Gide’s positing of a morally defined struggle between human freedom and determinism. And yet, as we read the acte gratuit, it slowly unravels to reveal an inner coherence that is masked only by the appearance of absurdity. Following the train scene, in conversation with Lafcadio, the character Julius (brother-in-law to Fleurissoire) airs the idea of an imaginary criminal, innocently and unwittingly outlining both the criminal and the crime that has just taken place: We will take him as a mere youth, I mean him to show the elegance of his nature by this – that he acts almost entirely in play, and as a matter of course prefers his pleasure to his interest … Then, we must add that he takes pleasure in self-control … We’ll endow him, then, with the love of risk.111

The element of chance that is central to the developing story, of course, functions within the anti-logic of Gide’s disponibilité which he reasoned to protect individualism – ‘[t]here is no reason that a man who commits a crime without reason should be considered a criminal’112 – but, as for the acte gratuit, Gide himself found it hard if not impossible to imagine an act without some semblance of motivation. The idea of the acte gratuit rather indicated apparent disinterestedness and absence of motivation on the part of the perpetrator (a position familiar to us in the later twentieth-century cultural category of the readymade and its attendant ‘reaction of indifference’);113 it is an indication, therefore, of motive and interest potentially to reveal the ‘true’ nature of the act and the actor. Much later, in the November 1951 ‘Hommage à André Gide’ memorial issue of NRF published after Gide’s death earlier in the year, the brief contribution by Jean Cocteau revealed publicly for the first time that Gide’s model for the fictional Lafcadio had been Cravan, no less: ‘Arthur Cravan, qui fut à l’origine de Lafcadio …’.114 Gide had himself privately acknowledged that Lafcadio’s character owed something in part to Cravan,115 and it is striking that the background details of these ‘fictional’ characters – Lafcadio and Cravan both – correspond so closely. We can practically seamlessly substitute Cravan for the fictional Lafcadio (and for Lafcadio’s mother, Nellie; and for the Count of Baraglioul, Otho Holland Lloyd):

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From his mother, Lafcadio inherited his fine looks and his lack of scruples, his total lack of inhibitions. From his father, the old Count of Baraglioul, he inherited his elegance of manners and speech and dress. He had the charm and seductiveness of an adventurer who is only nineteen. He speaks several languages, has lived in many places and is rootless. Lafcadio explains himself by saying that he is without logic: je suis un être d’inconséquence. His vigour is matched by his sensuality. And yet he has also the self control of a young aristocrat who is detached from the usual systems of living. Whenever he does something in contradiction to his nature, an act which might endanger his freedom of choice, he stabs his thigh with a knife. The familiar Gidian pattern of alternating moods: of wild impulse … and of self-control … is in Lafcadio.116

Cravan’s eager pursuit of self-knowledge was, like the fictional Lafcadio’s, in deliberate and occasionally reckless affirmation of his freedom of action, routinely disengaged from consequences and proliferant in his own regeneration whenever he sensed approaching constraint. As the audience with Gide at Villa Montmorency reached its conclusion, then, Cravan took leave: ‘I rose to my feet, affectionately shook the artist’s hand and left carrying in my head a portrait of one of our most notorious contemporaries.’117 In that portrait, later to be published in Maintenant, Cravan markedly omitted any mention of the day’s attempt at his own exploitative deed, which had been to inveigle Gide by proffering articles of poetry that he claimed were written by a deceased friend named Albert (or Hubert) Lénod.118 With literary endorsement of the articles from Gide, Cravan might ‘posthumously’ promote Lénod and profit financially. The incident has the distinct air of an attempted hoax. As for the poetry in question, Gide found in it little to inspire, and it was his disappointment above all else that he would later remember at reading verse which was neither particularly good nor particularly bad, but which distinctly lacked any outstanding quality (‘[s]es vers n’étaient ni particulièrement bons, ni particulièrement mauvais; ils étaient (et c’est ce que je leur reprochais précisément, lui dis-je) trés peu particuliers’).119 Most perceptively, however, Gide judged the episode to have been one that his invented Lafcadio might equally casually have perpetrated. The encounter was over: ‘Since then, M. Gide has written to me once and I have never seen him again.’120 Kees van Dongen Towards the southern end of rue Saint-Jacques, as it runs from the Sorbonne down to Montparnasse, the road today parallels rue Henri



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Barbusse. In March 1912, when the latter was called rue DenfertRochereau, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen rented a large second studio at number 33. Van Dongen was a successful and fashionable painter at that time, a recognised figure within the Parisian avant-garde who featured prominently in the artistic community within which a still extremely youthful Cravan (ten years van Dongen’s junior) now circulated.121 During van Dongen’s first visit from his native Rotterdam in 1897–98, he had established anarchist contacts in Paris’s émigré community, including Fénéon: ‘I had met a curious gentleman named Félix Fénéon. I had met him because he was an anarchist. We were all anarchists without throwing bombs, we had those kinds of ideas.’122 It was during his second Paris residency from 1899 onwards that van Dongen established himself as an artist. His first solo exhibition was put on by Vollard at the end of 1904; Fénéon provided the catalogue preface aligning the traditionally anarchist subject matter of much of the exhibited work with its violent visual treatment and colouring.123 Subsequent shows for Druet, Kahnweiler and Bernheim-Jeune were confirmation of van Dongen’s success,124 facilitating his eventual move to the large and amenable Montparnasse studio in 1912. This spacious studio, decorated with the artist’s paintings and not much else, quickly became a rendezvous for the Parisian avant-garde, and it is where van Dongen held the first of his many and highly popular parties during the années folles of his period as a socialite, vividly described by Fernande Olivier in a recollection of early 1914: Lights shone; the walls, the gallery, everything was transformed by shimmering drapery. The effect was of brilliant colours, movement, chattering, a rather contrived gaiety and a certain mystery, provided by the darkened and shadowy corners, in which one seemed to make out human forms buried deep in piles of cushions. … People danced and sang and gathered in groups in the corners of the room. Sometimes a hysterical laugh could be heard from a stray couple who had got lost in the huge closet which had been turned into a room. There were magnesium flashes and photographers … there was a babble of noise, a few lovers’ quarrels and several solitary figures stifling yawns. An observer might have seen examples of every deviation from normal human behaviour.125

Chronicles of the period document a variety of those present at one of these fancy-dress parties held on 21 March 1914, including Cravan dressed as a Chinese executioner;126 and in among the party-goers Cravan stood as a promontory, a frequent reveller with Renée, who sits on his shoulders in one of those magnesium-flash-lit photographs.127

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By day, in expansion of Paris’s vogue for boxing, van Dongen set up a sparring ring in his studio, which he availed to professional and amateur boxers. The painter had himself taken up fairground wrestling as a means of earning some money during his financially difficult years of 1900–3 and, in 1912, was suitably enthusiastic about this pugilistic turn, recalling Cravan’s physical presence and sporting prowess at the organised sparring (‘[Cravan] était très sportif … et nous avons souvent organisé dans mon atelier des “Boxing Exhibitions” ’).128 Van Dongen documented this studio sparring in his painting titled Boxing exhibition avec Charley (1912), which depicts Cravan sparring Charley MacAvoy as some kind of gentleman-boxer in accentuated pose,129 with the obvious height and reach advantage that was without question his greatest asset in the ring. Occasional first-hand accounts set the scene: I saw [Cravan] … often sparring with Negro boxers at van Dongen’s studio on Thursday afternoons. Van Dongen lived near the Boulevard St Michel, and all the critics came and drank liqueurs on Thursdays. In one corner boxing went on.130

Paris had a pugilistic backdrop of some distinction by this time. In the summer of 1913, the World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Jack Johnson arrived in the midst of the French capital’s boxing vogue,131 which featured Cravan with some low-level prominence if not faux distinction in exploiting the publicity potential of his patrilineage. On the evenings of 18–19 August 1913 at the Folies-Bergère, for instance, Cravan was the opponent for Battling Jim Johnson, the American heavyweight boxer, in preparation for the latter’s title challenge against Jack Johnson later in the year; Cravan was lined up for a three-round contest, his billing on that occasion listing ‘Sir Arthur Cravan, nephew of Oscar Wilde and grandson to the Chancellor of Her Majesty Queen Victoria’.132 With this noteworthy run of appearances under Cravan’s belt,133 The Sun in New York printed the headline ‘ “Baronet” on Paris Stage’, beneath which the report included a woefully duped potted biography that revealed the ‘real’ name of ‘Baronet Sir Arthur Cravan’ to be Lloyd Napier;134 but, beyond obfuscation, this short report does give us some indication of the erratic income potential at that time: ‘[Cravan] is now earning $4 a night and hopes to appear in vaudeville in America.’135 At the subsequent main event of Jim Johnson’s challenge fight, meanwhile, held under the Premierland billing staged in December 1913 at the Élysée Montmartre,136 in order to maintain a professional livelihood Jack Johnson received his challenger in what proved to be the first heavyweight title contest between two black boxers. Historic it was



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for this reason, but bizarre also in the holder’s (successful) defence of his title with a reputedly broken arm from the third round onwards, after which there was much holding and clutching, very little boxing and loud protest from the spectators: ‘The general opinion is that [Jack Johnson’s] arm was injured in a wrestling match early in the week, and that a blow tonight caused the fracture of the bone.’137 There came a degree of redemption six months after this disappointing show, this time at the Vélodrome d’Hiver in June 1914,138 when Jack Johnson saw off his next challenger, Frank Moran, on points in a bout that scored no knockdowns. By this time, Johnson was arguably already moving into the semi-retirement that would eventually reap the relative rewards of celebrity as World Heavyweight Boxing Champion: When not training for an upcoming fight (in gyms and training camps to which the admiring public was invited) he embarked upon theatrical tours … He shadow-boxed, he sparred, he performed in vaudeville and burlesque routines. Here was the very archetype of the ‘sport’ … in anklelength fur coats, expensive racing cars painted bright colors, tailor-made suits, with rubies, emeralds, diamonds displayed on his elegant person, and the dazzling gold-capped smile for which he was known.139

Van Dongen painted a remarkable full-length portrait of Johnson that stripped away to accentuate the accretion of celebrity – remarkable in light of a range of interests that would be developed in subsequent twentieth-century art discourse, rendered in fauvist-derived technique with German-expressionist primitive otherness and, compositionally, resonant of Le Douanier Rousseau’s imagined tableaux from the turn of the century. Titled La promenade du matin, van Dongen’s portrait shows the figure of Johnson emerging from lush tropical vegetation with the dawn sky behind, silhouetted naked save for the walking cane and top hat that he holds, the modern one and the primitive other combined, holding the viewer in the gaze of two eyes peering from the dark140 – expressive of the complications and contradictions arising from a pugilistic arena ‘in which the myth of black savagery could be confirmed and even supported’.141 As far as the active agents are concerned, there is no verifiable record of Cravan having made any substantive acquaintance with Jack Johnson in Paris; all that we have are the briefest glimpses in observations made by Cravan himself. In Maintenant in 1913, he recalled Johnson’s risus purus, ‘ “Ah! let me laugh, laugh, but truly laugh, like Jack Johnson!” ’;142 it is said that at the close of 1913, the two met for the first time at the Bal Bullier;143 a few years later, in 1917, presumably desiring to capture some of Johnson’s reflected glory, Cravan commented that ‘I had known him slightly in

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Paris …’;144 and there are some remote references made in passing that the two had participated in private boxing exhibitions.145 Summing up van Dongen, meanwhile, Cravan described how he ‘has painting in his skin. When I talk to him and look at him, I always imagine that his cells are full of colour, that his very beard and hair carry green, yellow, red or blue down along their canals.’146 Notes 1 Guillaume Apollinaire; cited in Leroy C. Breunig, ‘Max Jacob et Picasso’, Mercure de France, 1132 (1 December 1957), 409; trans. in John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 2: 1907–17: The Painter of Modern Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), p. 259. 2 In contrast to Montmartre in this period, Roland Penrose describes ‘the more banal surroundings of Montparnasse … a quarter newly discovered by artists from all parts of the world. Intellectuals of all sorts were to be found at the Closerie des Lilas, as well as at the two famous cafés, La Rotonde and Le Dôme, where political exiles … joined in passionate discussion with poets and painters.’ Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work (London: Victor Gollancz, 1958), p. 174. 3 Billy Klüver and Julie Martin, KiKi’s Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900–1930 (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1989), p. 11. 4 Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1975), p. 152. 5 Trotsky, My Life, p. 153. 6 Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (1933), trans. Bernard Isaacs (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), part 3: ‘Paris, 1909–1910’. 7 Le Figaro, 22 February 1909. 8 See Laurence Madeline, ‘Picasso boxeur’, in ACM, pp. 205–25. 9 ‘[B]oxing is a great sport in Paris now. Everybody is falling for it and the shrewd Yankee scrappers who got in on the ground floor made plenty of money and some of them are still reaping the golden harvest. The Paris promoters are right on the heels of their American rivals in the advertising line. They bill the dead walls and scatter handbills broadcast.’ San Francisco Call, 107/103 (13 March 1910). 10 Fernande Olivier, Picasso and his Friends, trans. Jane Miller (New York: Appleton-Century, 1965), p. 103. 11 Henri-Pierre Roché, diary entry, 25 April 1909; cited in Alex Danchev, Georges Braque: A Life (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 104. 12 Roché, diary entry, 25 April 1909; cited in Danchev, Georges Braque: A Life, p. 104. 13 Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000), p. 46.



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14 Reported in La presse, 24 April 1909. 15 Guillaume Apollinaire; cited in Breunig, ‘Max Jacob et Picasso’, 409. The Parnassians were poets belonging to a positivist tendency in French literature from the mid-1850s onwards, which figured as a literary style chronologically between Romanticism and Symbolism. The writer Théophile Gautier and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer were among the influences on Parnassianism; Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine were included in its anthologies. 16 Arthur Cravan, ‘To Be or Not To Be … American’, trans. Terry Hale, in 4DS, p. 33. 17 Georges Carpentier; cited in Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 2, p. 267. 18 Cravan, ‘To Be or Not To Be … American’, p. 33. 19 See Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990), p. 133: Deleuze deliberates how surface phenomena cease to function as secondary to what resides elsewhere, and how indeed the philosopher functions ‘on a level with the surface’. 20 Cravan, ‘To Be or Not To Be … American’, p. 34. 21 Cravan, ‘To Be or Not To Be … American’, pp. 33, 34: ‘To be an American, therefore, is to have status.’ 22 Cravan, ‘To Be or Not To Be … American’, pp. 35–6. 23 Cravan, ‘To Be or Not To Be … American’, p. 35. 24 Fabian Lloyd, ‘Spitting American’, trans. Elza Adamowicz for the present volume; in Fabian to Charles Brun (31 August 1907), ‘Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan adressée à Charles Brun (Raoul Toscan), directeur de la review Le coq’, Guillaumot-Richard Maison de Vente aux Enchères, www. guillaumot-richard.com/html/fiche.jsp?id=4948883 (accessed 30 June 2018). 25 Cravan, ‘To Be or Not To Be … American’, p. 36. 26 Brentano’s bookstore was located at 37 avenue de l’Opéra in the 2nd arrondissement. 27 Mina Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, in LLB, p. 317. 28 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), p. 159. 29 Cravan, ‘To Be or Not To Be … American’, p. 34. 30 Cravan, ‘To Be or Not To Be … American’, p. 36. Fabian is seen sporting a cap with a fairly outrageous peak in a photograph taken of him with his mother, captioned to Lausanne in 1915; reproduced in Maria Lluïsa Borràs, Arthur Cravan: una biografia (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, SA, 1993), image 10 in unpaginated picture section. 31 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p. 17. 32 ‘Overturning Platonism … means denying the primacy of original over copy, of model over image; glorifying the reign of simulacra and reflections.’ Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 66.

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33 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 69. The now standard reading for the precession of simulacra is, of course, Jean Baudrillard’s in Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983). 34 More accurately on this point, Deleuze’s stress is that by Plato’s morally biased account the distinction is drawn between ‘true’ and ‘false’ copies (rather than ‘good’ and ‘bad’). 35 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 69, 262, 68: ‘The fault of representation lies in not going beyond the form of identity, in relation to both the object seen and the seeing subject. Identity is no less conserved in each component representation than in the whole of infinite representation as such. Infinite representation may well multiply points of view and organise these in series; these series are no less subject to the condition of converging upon the same object, upon the same world’ (p. 68). 36 Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, p. 317. 37 Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell: The Illuminations, trans. Enid Rhodes Peschel (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 7. 38 The Sun (New York), 24 August 1913. 39 Otho ‘disastrously’ married Mathilde in Lausanne in late 1908; in 1909, he lived with the artists’ model Raymonde in Paris; he divorced Mathilde and ended his relationship with Raymonde in 1912, and his spouse for the remainder would be the painter Olga Sacharoff from Tbilisi, Georgia. 40 Fabian to Grandjean, September 1910, in Arthur Cravan, ‘Lettres inédits’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 234. 41 ACSS, p. 74. 42 Philippe Sollers, ‘Portrait d’un rebelle’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 46. 43 Renée’s misidentification as a native of Burgundy arises in Blaise Cendrars’s writings, where he refers to her as ‘la bourguignonne’, ‘his wife in Paris … the Burgundian girl’ (Blaise Cendrars, Sky: Memoirs, trans. Nina Rootes (New York: Paragon House, 1992), p. 205) – a native Cendrars believed of the village of Cravant (medieval Cravan), which was the main fourteenth-century port on the Yonne river in north-central France, south-east of Auxerre (this much allows the confusion of the Cravant commune’s medieval church and belfry with the Cravans episode recounted by Renée, discussed in this chapter). See ACSS, pp. 169–70; and Mercure de France, 1185, Blaise Cendrars memorial issue (May 1962). Four years before Renée was born, the avant-garde poet and publisher of Sic (1916–19) in Paris, Pierre Albert-Birot, was born in Angoulême in 1876. 44 Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 2, pp. 195–8. 45 Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 1: 1881–1906 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), p. 198. 46 The Cuny gymnasium was located at 99 Faubourg du Temple, in the 10th arrondissement. 47 Fernand Cuny, La boxe (Paris: Éditions Nilsson, 1910).



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48 Georges Carpentier, My Fighting Life (London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne: Cassell and Company Ltd, 1920), pp. 39–40. 49 See Dafydd Jones, ‘To Be or Not To Be … Arthur Cravan: Subject, Surface and Difference’, in Dafydd Jones (ed.), Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), p. 207. 50 Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, p. 317. 51 The Boisleux gymnasium was located at 11 rue de Malte, a short distance from the Cirque d’Hiver on rue Amelot in the 3rd arrondissement. 52 L’auto, 23 February 1910. 53 Frantz-Reichel, ‘Boxe’, Le Figaro, 1 March 1910. 54 See ACSS, p. 80. 55 See reports in Le matin, 9 and 10 March 1910. 56 Le temps, 15 March 1910. 57 Le Figaro, 15 March 1910. 58 ‘Les championnats amateurs 1900’, La boxe et les boxeurs (1910), 379. 59 Le temps, 16 March 1910. 60 La vie au grand air, 26 March 1910. 61 The Sun (New York), 24 August 1913. 62 The Cirque de Paris is thus described in Jose Corpas, New York City’s Greatest Boxers (Arcadia Publishing, 2006), p. 67; the venue was located at 18 avenue de la Motte-Picquet in the 7th arrondissement. 63 ‘Au Cirque de Paris’, La boxe et les boxeurs (1910), 457. 64 Fabian to Otho St Clair, 3 May 1910, in ŒPAL, p. 144. 65 ‘À Angoulême’, La boxe et les boxeurs (1910), 522. 66 Bastiaan Van der Velden, ‘Chronologie’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 76. 67 Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, p. 317. 68 See Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), p. 235. 69 ACSS, p. 170. 70 Nellie to Otho St Clair, n.d.; cited in ACSS, p. 85. 71 Fabian to Nellie, n.d.; cited in ACSS, p. 86. 72 Arthur Cravan, ‘André Gide’, trans. Terry Hale, in 4DS, p. 43. 73 Fabian to Grandjean, October 1910; cited in ACSS, p. 86. 74 Fabian to Grandjean, October 1910; cited in ACSS, p. 86. 75 Fabian to Grandjean, October 1910; cited in ACSS, pp. 86–7. 76 Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 10, 12. 77 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1965), pp. 85–6. 78 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, trans. Daniel Breazeale, in Clive Cazeaux (ed.), The Continental Aesthetics Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 55–9. 79 Cravan, ‘André Gide’, p. 40. Cravan’s words here (1913) are provocatively

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prescient of Andre Gide’s own gradation of writers in 1919: ‘There will be those for whom literature is above all an end, and those for whom it is principally a means.’ See Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (London: Jonathan Cape, rev. edn 1969), p. 356. 80 Nellie to Otho St Clair, 16 June 1911; cited in ACSS, p. 95. 81 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Panneaux pour la baraque de la Goulue, à la Foire du Trône à Paris (1895), Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Paul Signac, Portrait de Félix Fénéon (1890), Museum of Modern Art, New York. 82 Fénéon had written perceptively on the work of the Impressionists since the mid-1880s, advancing the sense of a new, post-Impressionist tendency in his review of the eighth (and officially last) Impressionist exhibition in May–June 1886 (Félix Fénéon, ‘The Impressionists of 1886’, pamphlet, October 1886; trans. Belinda Thomson for the Open University A315 ‘Modern Art & Modernism’ Supplementary Documents (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1982), pp. 17–19). He had published in the tantalisingly named (for the present study) La Cravanche reviewing the billed ‘Impressionist’ exhibition at the Café Volpini in July 1889, specifying the exhibiting artists’ apartness from their objects of representation whereby ‘reality is but a pretext for distant creations’, and critically described for an interested public the post-Impressionist overcoming of the mid-1880s Impressionist loss of faith in the ‘tachiste’ means once considered ‘so appropriate for representing visions disparaissantes’ (Félix Fénéon, ‘Another Impressionist Group’, La Cravanche, 6 July 1889; trans. Belinda Thomson for the Open University, A315 ‘Modern Art & Modernism’ Supplementary Documents (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1982), pp. 19–20). 83 Félix Fénéon, ‘Balade chez les artisses indépendants’, Le père peinard, 9 April and 16 April 1893; in Félix Fénéon, Œuvres plus que completes, ed. Joan U. Halperin (Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1970), pp. 222–8. 84 Arthur Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’ (1914), trans. Ralph Manheim, in DPP, p. 7. 85 Marc Chagall, L’autoportrait aux sept doigts (1912), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. 86 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, p. 12. 87 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, p. 21. 88 Richard Ellmann, ‘Corydon and Ménalque’, in Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 81–100. 89 André Gide, Oscar Wilde: A Study, trans. Stuart Mason (Oxford: Holywell Press, 1905), p. 30. 90 André Gide, journal entry, 1 January 1892, in Journals, 4 vols (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947–51). 91 André Gide to Paul Valéry, 4 December 1891, in Self-Portraits: The Gide/ Valéry Letters, trans. J. Guicharnaud (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 90–2. 92 André Gide, journal entry, 1 October 1927, in Journals.



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93 Porto-Riche features among those listed by Cravan in receipt of review copies of Maintenant; see ACM, pp. 46–7. 94 Cravan, ‘André Gide’, p. 40. 95 André Gide, ‘Arthur Cravan’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 201. 96 Cravan, ‘André Gide’, p. 40. 97 Gide, ‘Arthur Cravan’, 202. 98 Cravan, ‘André Gide’, pp. 41, 44. 99 Victoria Reid, Andre Gide and Curiosity (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi), p. 268. 100 Cravan, ‘André Gide’, p. 41. 101 Cravan, ‘André Gide’, p. 41. 102 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, p. 28. 103 ‘Sotie’ refers to medieval parodies and satirical plays staged by Parisian law students and frequently themed around a Pope of Fools. 104 On the carnivalesque in the context of early twentieth-century avantgardism, see Debbie Lewer, ‘Dada, Carnival and Revolution’, in Sacha Bru et al. (eds), Regarding the Popular: Modernism, Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), pp. 99–114. 105 There is no transmission of anything that is uncodifiable; see Gilles Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, in David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 142–3. 106 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 90. 107 André Gide; cited in Garry Geddes, Drink the Bitter Root: A Writer’s Search for Justice and Redemption in Africa (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011), pp. 124–5. 108 André Gide, The Vatican Cellars, trans. Dorothy Bussy (London: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 216. 109 Another parallel drawn by Sebbag regarding the acte gratuit is between Gide’s Lafcadio and Jacques the Fatalist in Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime. Georges Sebbag, ‘Arthur Cravan, neveu d’Oscar Wilde’, in ACM, pp. 270–1. 110 Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), p. 141. 111 Gide, The Vatican Cellars, p. 195. 112 Gide, The Vatican Cellars, p. 196. There is a tempting discussion to lead on to at this point regarding Cravan’s legendised ‘perfect crime’ as a jewel thief in Lausanne; or, by the same logic, in the disinterested context of the Duchampian readymade, it might be suggested that there is then no reason that a man who produces a work of art without reason should be considered an artist. 113 Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, p. 141. 114 Jean Cocteau, ‘On ne peut se permettre …’, in La nouvelle revue française, ‘Hommage à André Gide’ (November 1951), 90. 115 See André Gide, Journal 1889–1939 (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), p. 337.

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116 Wallace Fowlie, André Gide: His Life and Art (New York: Macmillan Company, 1965), pp. 68–75. 117 Cravan, ‘André Gide’, p. 43. 118 Gide’s recollection does indeed pose yet another pseudonym for Cravan as Albert (or Hubert) Lénod, potentialy a thin veil drawn across Avénarius (or Holland) Lloyd; the initials A.L. further cross-reference the jewel thief sources of Arthur Lebeau and his fictional Arsène Lupin. 119 Gide, ‘Arthur Cravan’, 202. 120 Cravan, ‘André Gide’, p. 44. 121 Van Dongen had exhibited with les fauves, alongside Matisse, at the February 1904 Salon des Indepéndants and the December 1905 Salon d’Automne; he was a veteran of the Bateau-Lavoir in the period in which Picasso painted Les demoiselles d’Avignon there in 1907, and an invitee to exhibit with the Die Brücke group in Dresden in 1909 and alongside Kandinsky with the Neue Künstlervereinigung in Munich in 1910. 122 Kees van Dongen; cited in Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts, Western Europe: A Cultural History from the French Revolution to 1968 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p. 254. 123 Félix Fénéon, ‘Van Dongen’, in Kees van Dongen: Galerie Vollard, exposition du 15 au 25 novembre 1904 (Paris: Galerie Vollard, 1904), n.p. 124 Fénéon was gallery adviser for Berheim-Jeune, at which exhibition van Dongen wrote his own foreword titled ‘Avant-propos capricieux’, summing up what ‘anarchism’ meant for many in that milieu by his sentiment that ‘the absence of respect for many respectable things’ is truly a virtue. See Kees van Dongen, ‘Avant-propos capricieux’, foreword in exhibition catalogue, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, December 1911; cited in Donald Kuspit, ‘Kees van Dongen: Unequivocal Colour and Equivocal Sexuality’, in Kees van Dongen, exhibition catalogue, Museum Boymansvan Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1989–90 (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1990), p. 52. 125 Fernande Olivier, Picasso and his Friends, trans. Jane Miller (New York: Appleton Century, 1965), pp. 161–3. 126 Sebastiaan van der Velden notes the following two sources: André Warnod, Fils de Montmartre: souvenirs (Paris: Fayard, 1955), p. 246; Anita Hopmans, De grote ogen van Kees van Dongen (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, 2010), pp. 100–1. The photograph of Cravan dressed as a Chinese executioner is reproduced in ACSS, p. 77; it was first reproduced in Losfeld’s 1957 edition of Maintenant. 127 In the same photograph, van Dongen himself surveys his estate from the far back row; the popularly dour Henri Matisse squats at the front of the party group, together with his close artistic associate Albert Marquet standing behind him, both sporting false beards and wearing fairground strongman outfits; and in the middle of the group stands the Paris couturier Paul Poiret (Poiret was famed for his own flamboyant fashion parties and innovator with the jupe-culotte and hobble skirt; the latter drew con-



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demnation from the Vatican in 1911, which is why, I think, you’ll never see the pope wearing a hobble skirt). This image can be viewed at http:// www.parisenimages.fr/en/collections-gallery/1297–5-van-dongen-bal-ruedenfert-rochereau-paris-1912–1-henri-matisse-2-albert-marquet-3-georgebesson-4-jacqueline-marval-5-paul-poiret-6-van-dongen-7-charles-camoin8-mrs-abel-desjardins-9-mrs-van-dongen (accessed 25 November 2015), where the source dates the photograph to 1912 (rather than March 1914; see note 126 above). 128 José Pierre, ‘Portrait-puzzle d’Arthur Cravan (préface-coupure)’, in Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut and Jacques Vaché, Trois suicides de la société (Paris: 10/18, 1974), p. 12. Willard Bohn suggests that the contests at van Dongen’s may well have provided some financial relief as a potential source of income ‘[j]udging from the precarious state of Cravan’s finances’; Willard Bohn, ‘Chasing Butterflies with Arthur Cravan’, in Rudolf E. Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986), p. 121. 129 Van Dongen’s Boxing exhibition avec Charley (1912) is reproduced in ŒPAL, between pp. 192 and 193; it repeats the classic Cravan boxing pose, as photographed in sparring with Otho on the beach at (?) Tossa, reproduced in ACSS, p. 145. 130 Nina Hamnett, Laughing Torso (London: Constable, 1932), pp. 51–2. 131 In 1913, Johnson was retrospectively tried and convicted in the United States for contravening the Mann Act, which prompted his violation of bail conditions in a flight to France. He spent the next seven years in European and South American exile. Johnson was finally pardoned in a meaningless gesture by an Executive Act of Clemency on 24 May 2018. 132 Le gaulois, 18 August 1913; ‘Echos’, Comœdia, 17 August 1913. 133 See Le temps, 21 August 1913. 134 In documenting Fabian Lloyd/Arthur Cravan, the name Napier was appropriated from his aunt Louisa Mary Napier née Lloyd (1834–1908), sister to his grandfather Horace Lloyd, who had been among the Lloyd family guardians of her niece Constance Wilde’s children after 1895. A secondary though far less likely (indeed unlikely) source for the name is the Polish dancer Stacia Napierkowska, a provocative and seductive performer, whom Francis Picabia had encountered in 1913. 135 The Sun (New York), 24 August 1913. 136 The Élysée Montmartre was located at 72 boulevard de Rochechouart. 137 ‘Jack Johnson Fights a Draw’, Saskatoon Phoenix, 20 December 1913. 138 The Vélodrome d’Hiver was located on rue Nélaton. 139 Oates, On Boxing, p. 243. 140 Kees van Dongen, La promenade du matin (1914), Collection Palais Princier de Monaco. The date of the painting is undetermined; at its most recent exhibition (2017–18), for instance, it was given a later date, but confusingly in separate references in the same catalogue assigned to both 1918 and 1919. 141 Archer-Shaw, Negrophilia, p. 46.

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142 Arthur Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, trans. adapted from The Soil, 4 (April 1917), in 4DS, p. 51. 143 The meeting is documented as having taken place on 15 December 1913; see ‘Repères biographiques’, in ŒPAL, p. 270. 144 ‘Arthur Cravan vs. Jack Johnson’, The Soil, 4 (April 1917), 162. 145 Publishers Weekly (8 November 1913), 1523; The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record, 99 (1913), 669. 146 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, p. 10.



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4

j ‘All words are lies’: Maintenant, April 1912–July 1913

La Closerie des Lilas Cravan’s mapping of Paris was oriented not only to individuals, but to the sites of their encounters. Within a short distance of van Dongen’s on rue Denfert-Rochereau, on the north side of the junction at 171 boulevard du Montparnasse and avenue de l’Observatoire, the café La Closerie des Lilas was prominent among such sites, a gathering place for artists and intellectuals in Montparnasse. Frequent conventions took place for ‘les mardis de la Closerie’ at which the experimental poet Paul Fort, inheritor in 1912 of the honorific title ‘Prince des poètes’, held court.1 Fort had frequented the café since 1903 and went to no other according to his appointed secretary at the mardis, André Salmon,2 making ‘of the Closerie the centre of the vast “Internationale” of the mind, poets and artists of all the world unite!’3 The mardis, by all accounts, were something to behold – ‘What life, what uproar, what madness! What interminable discussions, only brought to halt when the host threw us out into the street.’4 And on occasion, their host had good reason to throw them out. La Closerie des Lilas was where, the story goes, Alfred Jarry once walked in and discharged a loaded revolver, shattering a large mirror behind a seated young lady and following up memorably with the words, ‘Now that the ice is broken, let’s talk’ (‘Maintenant que la glace est rompue, causons’).5 La Closerie was opened by François Bullier in the mid-nineteenth century, from which time it became established in Montparnasse as a meeting place for vigorous and creative intellectual exchange. Just a few steps away from the lilac croft, Monsieur Bullier opened his ballroom, a glittering chandeliered lilac garden given over to dancing ‘[a]nd other physical foolishness’, to quote Cravan;6 this was the Bal Bullier, at 31 avenue de l’Observatoire. By the early years of the twentieth century, the Bullier was a lively place indeed, its clientele slightly less exclusive than in prior decades, during a period coinciding with Cravan’s maturing into the

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seasoned reveller. Thursdays at the Bullier were regular nights for the Delaunays, artists Robert and Sonia, for instance, who not infrequently made entries in their simultanist outfits and reportedly caused quite a stir as they danced the tango: ‘The Bullier is a must on Thursdays and Sundays, where the painters Mr and Mme Robert Delaunay are revolutionising ballroom attire with their wonderful simultaneous [sic] Orphist creations,’ wrote Apollinaire.7 The poet and writer Blaise Cendrars recounted one occasion when he had set off, detouring with Cravan, to the Bullier: getting dressed at [Delaunay’s studio on] Rue des Grands Augustins for an evening at the Bal Bullier … [We] slipped on three or four pairs of mismatched violet and green socks so [we] could tango without shoes … and, when Arthur stood still, [Delaunay] painted scarlet tattoos on his friend’s starched shirt front.8

What follows is an image of Cravan making the scene in simultanist shirt-tails having symbolically brushed his arse in synchronic movement against the wet paint of Delaunay’s L’équipe de Cardiff series. And, ‘to give his posterior a dash of “simultaneity”, Arthur sat down on Robert’s palette. For five minutes the painter was furious. Did Cravan know what lapis lazuli cost?’ Robed in ‘an immense black nightshirt cut in formal tails’,9 and with black shorts, with the dickey-slit right open to reveal his bleeding tattoos and the obscene inscriptions on his skin, his coattails flying free and daubed with fresh paint … We dressed up like Orphic harelquins to create a scandal, but also to outdo Marinetti’s futurists, whose permanent delegate in Paris, Gino Severini, telegraphed the details of our bizarre get-ups to Milan every evening, and the news was noised abroad …10

The three together – Cendrars, Robert Delaunay and Cravan – made up a merry band, we are told, dancing the tango in gaudy socks and silk pyjamas. As a visual record, Sonia Delaunay’s expansive tableau Le Bal Bullier, at almost four metres in length, painted in 1913, strikingly renders the untroubled ‘pure aesthetic pleasure’11 of the Bullier in the technique that Apollinaire named Orphism – the simultanist dimension of which the Italian Futurists would themselves eventually go on to incorporate into their own works. For his part, Cravan appears to have become a popular fixture, assuming a physical prominence in the scene revolving in and around Montparnasse. There is an air of inevitability that the long walk from the Sorbonne end of rue Saint-Jacques to the centre of gravity in Montparnasse would yield to the domestic move that Cravan and Renée made together in the autumn of 1913, to live within staggering



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proximity to La Closerie and the Bullier, renting their new apartment from mid-October onwards at 29 avenue de l’Observatoire, immediately next-door to the Bullier at number 31. For the pugilist, there is also an air of predictability to some of the consequences: ‘[h]e once went to the Closerie des Lilas … and remarking what stupid faces everybody had, expressed his emotion by challenging, then beating up the whole place.’12 Cravan’s pugilistic inclination typifies much of the combative social posturing of his early to mid-twenties, whether the alwaysrecoverable falling-out between siblings – ‘Pity be upon us!’, wrote Nellie to her elder son Otho in October 1913, ‘You have lost a brother, I have lost a son – he hates us!’, following some serious fighting between the two brothers in a restaurant13 – or the less discriminate out-of-hand confrontations and testosterone-fuelled fights on the streets of Paris, the consequences of which were far less predictable. He found himself on that Parisian illegalist milieu’s radar, for instance, embodying in part the anarchist belief in ‘propaganda by the deed’14 and reputedly ready to jump to the defence of la Bande à Bonnot, the criminal anarchist group and innovators in their use of the getaway car, active in Paris during 1911–12. He would step in to defend their honour in the face of ‘anybody who dared to attack the Anarchochauffeurs’;15 Cravan’s mother indirectly confirmed as much in her own distressed reflection: ‘I feel disgusted and ashamed to be the mother of such a rogue – his conduct is no better than if he were a member of that loathsome Bonnot tribe.’16 Whether Cravan’s regard for the Bonnot gang was properly digested or, as is more likely, it was a romantically motivated attachment to ‘anarchist’ sympathies, his name was linked to the Anarchochauffeurs in observations made by the Austro-Hungarian writer Emil Szittya in his Das Kuriositäten-Kabinett (1923), in recollection of a Paris sojourn, when he had been introduced to Cravan by Cendrars. Szittya, in 1912, founded with Cendrars and Marius Hanot the anarchist review Les hommes nouveaux,17 the content of which was primarily if not entirely written by Cendrars and attributed either in his own name or to some deliberately misdirecting pseudonyms (Diogenes, Jack Lee). Cendrars’s emergence in Paris shares much in common with Cravan’s. The two were the same age, and both had grown up in Switzerland and had absented themselves from boarding school during their youth (in 1913, Cravan’s movement from one school to the next was described as his having ‘attended many schools, at each of which he soon expressed a wish to continue his education elsewhere’).18 Both Cravan and Cendrars were committed to the poet’s vocation, and each had found creative stimulus in the geophysical drama of New York: at the time of publication of Les hommes nouveaux, Cendrars was newly returned to Paris

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from Manhattan. Described subsequently as ‘one of the greatest liars of all time’,19 Cendrars would publish this fleeting anarchist review from his apartment at 4 rue de Savoie (as noted in Cravan’s Paris Address Book). Les hommes nouveaux was by no means a unique model for Cravan in 1912 – Paul Fort had his Vers et prose (1905–14), Apollinaire had his Les soirées de Paris (1912–14) – but of particular note in Cendrars’s publication is his deliberate editorial dissimulation by the use of invented ‘others’ ostensibly as contributors. Among varied targets that both Cravan and Cendrars set themselves, in different contexts, was that frequenter of La Closerie des Lilas, the poet, writer, critic and prime suspect in the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa, Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire’s name is the first and second to appear in Cravan’s Paris Address Book: the first address given at 10 rue la Fontaine in Auteuil, a few doors away from the house at number 32 where Marie Laurencin lived with her mother, is crossed out to make way for the second, at 202 boulevard Saint-Germain. Apollinaire was, of course, an established figure in Paris’s most progressive artistic circles, a seasoned member of la Bande à Picasso, a man ‘of paradoxical qualities, who could be, almost simultaneously, theatrical, emphatic, simple and naïve’,20 whose poetry captures the immediacy of a fractured Paris air, mixing ‘high and low diction, of latinate and slang, of abstracted concretes and concretized abstractions’21 in a manner that is not easily translatable from the original French.22 Once again, there is some retrospective inevitability that Apollinaire’s ‘prominence and vulnerable position’23 within the same social circles as those in which Cravan moved would mark him out for attention that was not always the most flattering; and neither would Apollinaire’s anointed ones, the likes of the painters Delaunay or Laurencin, be immune to derisive assault. Laurencin, so-called muse to Apollinaire during these years, was by some accounts not an individual who inspired the greatest devotion even within her chosen social group, her affectations causing palpable irritation and her presence evidently more tolerated than welcomed.24 But Apollinaire, it appears, was amused by and protective towards her, and in his company she gained entry into the very masculine avant-garde world of Paris. When Les soirées de Paris was launched in February 1912, the natural editorial bias allowed room for Apollinaire’s own poetry and art criticism; in the November 1913 issue, advance notice was given of illustration of ‘the most interesting pictures from the Salon d’Automne’25 – which had been summed up as a generally weak show that year – and ‘the most interesting pictures’ were revealed in the following month’s issue to be paintings by Matisse and, yes, Laurencin, along with a handful of second-tier Section d’Or Cubists. Les soirées de



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Paris, as recalled by one of its founders, was born to some extent ‘of the desire of Guillaume’s closest friends to erect a bastion to protect him’ in the aftermath of his very real scrape with the law over the Mona Lisa affair,26 and Apollinaire assumed co-editorship along with four of those close friends: André Billy, René Dupuy, André Salmon and André Tudesq. And over the course of the review’s first series, the evolution of Apollinaire’s own poetry is evident as his growing experimentation with overheard speech and chance phrases produced equivalents to the new collage and simultaneous techniques exercised in the visual arts, creating poetry out of ordinary language: ‘Flyers catalogs hoardings sing aloud / Here’s poetry this morning and for prose you’re reading the tabloids.’27 Taken together, the three series of Les soirées de Paris, published between 1912 and 1914, cover Apollinaire’s most productive phase as critic and advocate of the emerging Modernism of the twentieth century. The development of chance in his poetry, of course, gave rise to the technique of surprise, which he would invoke as a means to escape reason, to generate ‘new and uncontrollable values’,28 a means by which ‘the new spirit distinguishes itself from preceding literary and artistic movements, and in this respect it (surprise) belongs exclusively to our time’.29 With the review’s second series (starting in November 1913), Apollinaire assumed the greater editorial control and effectively free rein to advance his views on art without the moderating intervention of his previous co-editors, and it was in the third series (starting in January 1914) that the rightly famous typographical experimentation of the calligrammes made their earliest appearance (in June 1914), a development of the poet’s interest in Marinetti’s and the Italian Futurists’ parole in libertà, those Italians he claimed as ‘Nos amis futuristes’.30 For his part, Marinetti had famously set out the disintegration of typography in his ‘Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista’ (1912), taking heed of what the aeroplane propeller had to tell him above ‘the mighty Milanese smokestacks’ – to ‘free words, releasing them from the prison of the Latin period’31 – and grafted the rousing rhetoric of transcendence ‘onto the technology of flight’.32 His random placement of nouns, infinitives substituting for indicatives, his the abolition of adjectives, of adverbs and (most triumphantly) of punctuation found a particular reconfiguration in Apollinaire’s calligrammes and the undoing of the ‘abstract code’ of syntax. When detailing the foregoing experimentation in the Paris poetry of these years, it is to be remarked upon that comparable formalist dimensions are barely glanced in Cravan’s own literary interests despite his social proximity to these key modernist figures; still, neither Apollinaire nor Marinetti is excluded from the

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Paris Address Book. Marinetti’s name heads the addresses listed under ‘M’, at 61 Corso Venezia in Milan, along with which Cravan carefully saved an English-language newspaper clipping on Futurism.33 Cravan clearly conceded import to the modernists, whose observance is of mildly prescient note with regard to the woman Cravan would marry in 1918: Mina Loy had achieved early and modest artistic prominence in Paris in 1903–6 (meeting Apollinaire in 1905) before moving to Florence in Italy (which later featured in Cravan’s tour itinerary with his brother Otho in 1908), where she became heavily artistically involved with the Futurists from 1913 onwards, exhibiting with them in Rome in 1914. Loy was by this time pursuing divorce from her first husband, and fell into a brief and unproductive relationship with Marinetti that ‘weathered two months of war fever’, declaring later that the experience had added twenty years to her life ‘from mere contact with his exuberant personality’: [T]he vitality I learnt from Marinetti has not abated … although I think I am the only female who has reacted to it – exactly the way I have noticed men do – Of course being the most female thing extant – I’m somewhat masculine …34

As for Les soirées de Paris, back in the French capital, publication came to an end with the July–August 1914 issue, coinciding with the declaration of war on 3 August, and Apollinaire’s military call-up. He became one of the vast and unquantifiable casualties of war, and received trepanning as a medical procedure in subsequent treatment; though he continued to write for other publications, there was no resumption for Les soirées de Paris after 1914. Among Apollinaire’s war-wounded comrades and veterans of La Closerie des Lilas who returned with him to Paris from the front was Cendrars, another pre-war innovator in poetry, who had lost his right arm in front-line action and who made no allowances for any fellow returnees bearing either physical or mental scars. Indeed, Cendrars became a prominent one among many disaffected by Apollinaire’s absurdist play Les mamelles de Tirésias (completed in 1916 and first performed in June 1917), for instance, writing in personal correspondence, ‘I’m appalled by Apollinaire’s assumption of absurdity … He’s like a cracked bidet [referring to Apollinaire’s head wound]. His scar has nothing glorious about it, it emits the fresh farts of his Victory. Don’t attribute too much importance to Apollinaire’s wind.’35 These, then, count among the many names from Cravan’s Paris Address Book who wafted through La Closerie des Lilas.



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The authority of the text Rendered in the Paris Address Book is a transiently mapped and assembled territory upon which each assembly member moved – Fénéon, Gide, van Dongen, Cendrars, Apollinaire, Marinetti and all the others listed in alphabetical order – each a singular perspective, all metaphors upon territory here possessed of the moderating metaphor ‘Cravan’. If there is to be some alignment between this mapping and the observation of art as Nietzsche would have it in the perspective of life, then it will occur through the placement of ‘knowledge’ in proximity to ‘reality’, and with Cravan’s striving towards correspondences between the two. The philosopher’s lucidity, writing of how the ‘drive towards the foundation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive’,36 is given in an essay that accounts for ‘knowledge’ in varied demonstrations within ‘the perspective of life’, where metaphors are themselves recognised both as and as a consequence of created perspectives that become our means to represent the world. What this intimates is the philosophically experimental enquiry from varied perspectives into the forms that populate the territory – Nietzsche’s desire ‘to want to see differently’.37 Out of such enquiry, in relating those forms to the greater contexts and environments occupied, there are consequences which will expose contingencies and the transience of, among others, social and linguistic structures. So Nietzsche, famously in Zur Genealogie der Moral: ‘the more affects we allow to speak about one thing … the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity”, be’.38 If the map of the Paris Address Book presents a source of diverse models and metaphors, the array of perspectives named between its covers will allow for different ways of thinking to be played in the ‘creative pleasure of throwing metaphors into confusion’,39 now streaming into Cravan’s pursuit of the truth of language. From all that can be recovered and reconstructed of Arthur Cravan, there is one deliberate bequest. The literary review Maintenant, which ran to five issues between April 1912 and April 1915, was Cravan’s distillation of lyricism, sarcasm and literary invention, targeting a declared constituency through strategic deployment of means. Not least was his wilful use and abuse of the authority of the text premised on the truth of language: ‘the first time / he communes with himself / he decides / “All words are lies” ’.40 Only a month before publication of the first issue of Maintenant, Cravan wrote in correspondence that its launch was in hand, at a cost of 100 francs,41 designed as a provocative expansion of the poet-boxer’s armoury in conquering the Paris of arts and letters and providing him with a platform to contest the likes of Apollinaire

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and Fort; a supplementary document to the Paris Address Book is Cravan’s wide-ranging list of those in receipt of review copies of Maintenant.42 Cravan set to write his way into a culturally creative and combative zone, whereby the potentialities of language and text were exercised exploitatively; the activity of writing itself was submitted as his primary creative gesture; and his role as author was deliberately thrown into question not only by its undermining but, in practice, by its abandoning of any sense of a unified authorial identity.43 If, by the late twentieth century, we are today able to read how Deleuze had philosophically affirmed that ‘[t]o write is also to become something other than a writer’,44 then in 1912–15 Cravan took publicly to flexing that which would become, in the fullness of time, the post-poststructuralist contention. So on 2 April 1912, the citizens of Paris received public notice with the following announcement in Gil Blas – a pale description, it must be said, giving away little and bearing only the most rudimentary resemblance to what was shortly to follow: Now we have a new review, not bulky at eight pages in length, to be published monthly. It is called Maintenant, and has as its sole editor M. Arthur Cravan (pseudonym of the writer and nephew of Oscar Wilde). Maintenant promises to bring us previously unpublished documents.45

With a mastery of understatement, this self-styled revue littéraire founded the authority of its text on the common illusion – as popularly unquestioned in 1912 as it is today – that behind language there resides some truth, which certain ways of speaking or writing can reveal to us (that is to say, which will allow us to move beyond metaphor and which will reveal to us the ‘true’ world). My proposition for the present account of Maintenant, however, is that what Cravan gives us in his mature Paris phase is an object that escapes any succinct definition as revue littéraire, and that rather presents us with an object (Maintenant) that creates (without wishing to overstate) a whole new path for thinking. As literary text, Maintenant carries subtle prose and occasional glimmers of poetic distillations, the qualities of which emerge distinctly from their epoch. To account for Maintenant as literary text, however, and to pursue any quality it may possess as such, would be to follow a false path, and might well demand of us a reading that concedes to its literary existence but simultaneously resists its reading as literary text. If we allow for the publication’s possibilities in enacting or in creating literariness, for example, then it gains in capacity to be open and expansive, and our understanding of it will accordingly take shape through the new connections that it makes. It



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would certainly test the reader’s tolerance to describe Maintenant as a philosophical text but, I submit, there is an important philosophical dimension to be admitted in considering how a set of interrelated positions or concepts can be mobilised to challenge the received belief that a text or a thought, an idea or a concept, presents us with a picture or representation of the world. It was indeed Nietzsche who argued that the activity of thought and the formulation of concepts is a process of making manageable small units of the flux of reality – ‘[d]o you think this work must be fragmentary because I give it to you (and have to give it to you) in fragments?’46 – though it does not necessarily follow that in being made manageable they are either consistent or consistently even. For Nietzsche, as he so memorably describes, all thinking is a type of metaphor which substitutes fixed images for flux and fluid reality.47 This includes the fixed image of the author. If we consider how it is routinely imagined that we are able to identify the ‘author’ as a literal and concrete concept in language, it is Nietzsche’s insistence that the same concept is one that language creates. The philosopher’s premise is that language in all its manifestations, and not only in its literary form, is metaphorical; the inherent property of language, by its very being language, then, is that it is creative. When we delude ourselves that certain ways of speaking or writing are able to reveal ‘truths’, Nietzsche’s sobering reminder is that there is no ‘truth’ behind language or behind appearances, only further appearances. He famously reasoned that there is no being behind doing, and the twentieth-century philosophical advance posits difference behind doing and, indeed, behind everything; ‘but behind difference there is nothing’.48 For Deleuze, the affirmation of surfaces emerged from a philosophy of difference, whereby surface phenomena would cease to function as secondary to what might reside elsewhere (‘truth’), and the protagonist – the philosopher, the author, the poet or the boxer – functions always ‘on a level with the surface’.49 Thus does Maintenant render a ‘surface’ on which the Arthur Cravan of Paris functions; additionally, it renders this same Cravan himself – or itself – a ‘surface’, an outside and nothing more, body entirely and nothing else. Though the way in which Cravan unfolds during the course of Maintenant may prove disorienting for the reader at times, it is a deliberate disorienting that exercises Nietzsche’s thoughts on how the body is not a single thing but, rather, an insubstantial phenomenon expressing the relationships between forces. In its fluid state, the body evaluates reigning values and engenders new values. This Nietzschean body is constituted as the arbitrary relation of force with force, and is here the reading that allows us to approach the description of the

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body in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, for instance, as a ‘social structure’, psychologically the nexus of forces in competition with one another. The body, then, manifests as a locus for perspectives (similarly in competition with one another), and, as Eric Blondel has further observed in commentary on Nietzsche, ‘to interpret is to have a body, and to be a perspective’.50 It is then possible to propose for Maintenant (text) and Cravan (body) that they be considered analogous, which signals what Nietzsche long ago pre-empted in his emphasis on the interpretative process, and in his reading of the body as ‘a thousandfold process’.51 Both text and body, Nietzsche reasoned, are interpreted. And Blondel has attended closely on this philosophical point: ‘Asking what the body is … means asking what interpretation is … [and] the ultimate principle is not the body, but interpretation, the “body” being merely the metaphor of interpretation, the human means of interpreting it.’52 So this body as metaphor will be described as the site of contestation, the locus of the multiply defined subject ‘who dreams of being able to possess himself as one’,53 though its impermanence will resist the emergence of one meaning that dominates all others: ‘life is the instability of power-relations, there is no domination, only a struggle for domination’.54 And what the struggle renders is manifold, the text that brings forth the pluralities of Cravan in the process of wills to power,55 that is, the new revue littéraire. ‘The first number of an eccentric review called “Maintenant,” appeared to-day. Its editor and manager is Arthur Cravan, who is described as a nephew of Oscar Wilde’, announced The Washington Herald, news that had travelled the four thousand miles from Paris on the back of the exploited Wilde connection, and the short report of early April fanned idle speculation in the promotion of which Cravan’s interest was plainly vested: ‘It is said by some that Cravan is one of Wilde’s two sons, who, at the instance [sic] of their mother, changed their names when the poet was condemned to prison.’56 Whether the hint that Cravan was a son of Oscar Wilde was deliberate or something wilfully lost in translation, there would be plenty of mileage in exploiting the link to the uncle of whom he endlessly dreamt. Blagueur Cravan’s revue littéraire loses something in translation as ‘literary review’. There is a whole literary background to register, and if we look first to the performance genre in France that takes us into Second Empire music halls, a revival of the revue can be charted into the Third Republic and unprecedented popularity during the first decade



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of the twentieth century. Its structure involved sequences of satirical scenes drawn from the events of the day, overlaid by commentary, and the popularity of such performances rose to crescendo as any given year drew to a close and the twelve months preceding fell under the satirical eye of the revue de fin d’année. Into the work of the revuistes, popular advertising found its way as publicité and réclame; and the more casual and ironic the tone of satire, the greater its comic potential as self-assured blague or cynical rosserie.57 In its performative context, the use of verbal allusion assumed central importance, being described by Robert Dreyfus in 1909 as that which ‘we call the à peu près and the pun … [and] the more rudimentary the pun, the better it permits us to isolate the stark naked allusion, the drained and, as perhaps Kant would have said, pure allusion’.58 The revue did not aspire to the heights of Molière’s political comedy of manners, but rather satisfied itself in the use of allusion in contemporary and communal satire as ‘l’essentiel et le tout’.59 Perhaps inevitably, the popularity of the genre carried its potential to a cultural life outside and beyond the music hall, to be taken up by newspapers and journals; examples from 1912 include a satire on the Balkan wars and a send-up of the extraordinary advertising claims made for popular miracle cures (next to endorsements for those same cures), both published in Le charivari in the autumn and winter months.60 The critical evolution of the genre can be read in the false-dispatch blague, a word described in 1902 as being ‘not yet French: [but] it deserves to be. Meanwhile, it is Parisian, and it’s one of the most successful finds of boulevard language.’ This description by Jules Wogue is given in his ‘La philosophie de la “blague” ’, an engaging article that resists defining the word because ‘to define is to limit, and the field of blague is infinite’61 – this grasps the critical dimension and the philosophical notion of excess and infinity in the form of a thought that exceeds itself, a thought that contains more than can be thought – and which submits the blagueur as the individual who recognises the naivety and self-delusion of our deference to ‘all species of faith, conviction and dogmatism’.62 And the blagueur’s style of delivery is of particular note, possessing a cool detachment which becomes its most critically potent feature.63 The direction and practical application of blague was variously observed, for instance, by the late-nineteenthcentury journalist and critic Francisque Sarcey: Blague is a certain taste which is peculiar to Parisians … to disparage, to mock, to render ludicrous everything that hommes, and above all prud’hommes, are in the habit of respecting and caring for; but this raillery is characterized by the fact that he who takes it up does so more

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in play, for a love of paradox, than in conviction: he mocks himself with his own banter, il blague.64

Though blague might easily be reduced to mannered affectation, we are reminded that affectation possesses itself a certain hypocrisy, the potential of which Cravan would undoubtedly seek to cultivate in his pronouncements against conventionality and the pleasure derived from ‘puncturing inflated balloons, of feeling oneself superior by proving that one is not a dupe’.65 Maintenant no. 1 The first issue of Maintenant, written and edited by Cravan, composited and printed by Paul Birault at 4 rue Tardieu,66 was published in Paris in April 1912. It was, as Gil Blas had properly noted, a slim issue at just eight pages,67 comprising one poem and one article, plus an extremely brief news-in-brief section. As the Washington Herald notice relayed, ‘Cravan publishes a well-written French poem in which he takes the unique attitude of drawing his inspiration from commerce.’68 The poem was ‘Sifflet’ (‘Whistle’), in the narrative line of Cravan’s journey to North America in January 1907. In the gleaming rush of modernity, the poet imagines his all-conquering commercial stride beyond the wild frontier, as though an upstart Commodore Vanderbilt, with the steam from the towering funnels of the SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse transposed to the stack of Commodore Cravan’s own thundering express train: Flying flags embroidered with my initials And stamping my commercial power upon the waves, I also own my first locomotive: Puffing out steam like snorting horses, Yet bending its will under expert hands, It rushes by madly, rigid upon its eight wheels. It pulls the long convoy on its adventurous trek, Into green Canada, through virgin forests … It whistles penetratingly through valleys, Dreaming of the oasis: the station in the heaven of glass, Amidst the thicket of rails it crosses by thousands, Where, trailing its long white cloud, it rolls its thunder!69

In the five years past, Cravan had presumably been whittling away at the poems that he would now publish in Maintenant, but the revue littéraire would be put to yet more productive and provocative use as vehicle for the ongoing project to exploit literary Paris. Cravan applied



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the dissembling technique in discriminate use that saw the fiction grow and eventually become the many and proliferant fictions. The single article in this first issue of Maintenant is a three-page prose passage, the journal’s first instalment of the ‘Documents inédits sur Oscar Wilde’. It is signed at the bottom with the promise of more to come, and attributed to ‘W. Cooper’. The attribution is obscure – the name may have been chosen as a first printed alias for an already established alias (‘Cravan’) owing to its decidedly unremarkable quality, drawn from literary noise as an ordinary gloss on a publication that would be biased towards the extraordinary.70 As far as the article itself is concerned, its interest arises immediately from the object of claimed literary visitations; after his death in 1900, Oscar Wilde was said to have appeared to a varied host over several years,71 including individuals who had never met the aesthete during his lifetime, claims that implicitly invoked a living presence.72 Many were facilitated in their detail not only by Wilde’s own posthumous admissions and revelations in published sources, notably De profundis (1905), but importantly also by the informative studies of Wilde written by Robert Sherard (1902 and 1906) and by Arthur Ransome (1912).73 There continued a popular interest in material relating to Wilde, and, as it would transpire, Cravan published Wilde-related texts for the complete run of Maintenant. In the space of a few reported lines, the Washington Herald even managed to convince itself that Cravan was one of Wilde’s two sons, stating that ‘[a] detailed article on Wilde appears in the magazine. It contains intrinsic evidence that it was written by his son.’74 Well, the article does read as first-hand testimony, describing in detail the physical appearance of Wilde himself in a manner suggesting authenticity. Background references reveal more familial dimensions. In its descriptions of the tone and timbre of Wilde’s distinct, studied speaking voice, for instance, the subtle emphasis on the double letters of such words as ‘adding’ and ‘yellow’, lazily enamoured of mellifluous vowels, delighting in their pure sonority and verbality as much as in what they might conjure in the imagination, is documented.75 These references are directly sourced from the texts that Cravan’s own parents, Nellie and Otho, had written for him circa 1904; certain passages are almost verbatim in description of Wilde’s enunciation (Nellie herself had written of how Wilde’s voice was ‘very distinct and studied; he gave full value to the double letter … in such words as adding, yellow, etc., and lingered caressingly on the vowels’).76 The Cooper instalment of 1912, then, concludes with a description of the charm and articulation of Wilde’s expressive body in swan-like elegant gesture, drawn in comparison with the aristocratic immersion of one of Wilde’s many memorable fictional creations, Lord Henry Wotton.

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Almost as an afterthought to this first issue comes the miscellany of varied notes, the news-in-brief section added to the foot of page 7. Titled ‘Différentes choses’, these items are in direct continuation of a specific variation on the nouvelles en trois lignes that emerged in 1906 when Félix Fénéon introduced the ton de blague to his reporting of minor daily news items. Into his bulletins for Le matin, Fénéon worked an excess of gravity simultaneously and deliberately undermined by a wit in the generation of absurdity. Assuming the guise of reportage that barely revealed any authorial voice or partiality, the brevity of the item was a condensation of Fénéon’s editorial skills: Monsieur Schied of Dunkerque, after shooting his wife three times and missing, killed his mother-in-law. There is no longer a God for Drunkards. Kersilie of Saint-Germain, mistaking the window for the door, was killed.77

The news being reported is authentic, but delivered with an existentially ironic tone. Before Cravan in 1912, there had been at least one other devotee of Fénéon’s style: André Salmon launched Nouvelles de la République des Lettres in 1910, and gave editorial space for blague in the form of reportage that masked its own fabrication and alleviated gravity, ably aided by the likes of Max Jacob and Fernand Divoire. But it was not until Cravan’s Maintenant that the avant-garde press had a single publication devoted, to all intents and purposes, to blague writ large, ‘flung in the faces of writers and artists, the young, those most convinced of their “independence” ’,78 and Cravan’s indirect homage to Fénéon remains an instance of the pupil emulating his master: Other News in Brief We are pleased to hear report of the death of the painter Jules Lefebvre. At the Cirque de Paris on the 3rd of April, the black boxer Gunther will embrace in elegant combat with Georges Carpentier. Marinetti makes much noise for our amusement, for glory is a scandal.79

The first item commented on the death in the preceding week of the respected academician Jules Joseph Lefebvre, disrespectfully related with editorial content at his demise. Lefebvre, this painter of the idealised female form, had at one time counted among his students the young Félix Vallotton of Lausanne at Paris’s Académie Julian. The second item gives advance notice of what would be boxer Georges Carpentier’s successful defence of his world middleweight boxing title against the challenger, the Australian George Gunther. Carpentier was what the Dada chronicler Hans Richter much later suggested Cravan became – ‘the darling of Paris’ – and may have been what Cravan



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­ imself imagined emulating, ‘the pugilistic idol of France’ who was h blessed of a ‘fascinating personality … [a] well-proportioned frame and handsome features’ and who attracted ‘hundreds of ladies’ to his contests; he was, we read, ‘a brilliant conversationalist and a good allround sportsman’, who crowned his success as ‘a very wealthy man as a result of his many fistic combats’.80 And in the third news-in-brief item, we glimpse Cravan’s proto-sloganising for the posturings of the twentieth century; in this, appropriately enough the first year of gestation for what would eventually become Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb (1914), Cravan embraces the Futurist din and makes his emphatic declaration that ‘glory is a scandal’. Marinetti brought with him more than clatter, of course; he had just eighteen months previously delivered his impromptu ‘Futurist Speech to the English’ at London’s Lyceum Club for Women; a version of this was published in Paris in 1911, reproaching his host nation on several counts and specifically for its hypocrisy, illustrating the latter with the example of Oscar Wilde: You [English] lack consuming intellectual passions, a sharp and adventurous taste for ideas, an impulse toward the unknowns of the imagination, a passion for the future, a thirst for revolution … Do you remember the dismal, ridiculous condemnation of Oscar Wilde, which Europe has never forgiven you for? … As for your twenty-year-old young men, almost all of them are homosexuals for a time, which, after all, is absolutely respectable … before they turn thirty, [which is] the time for work and good order, when they show their heels to Sodom … [and they] hasten to condemn the born invert severely, the counterfeit man, the half-woman who fails to conform.81

This was a period during which Marinetti was touring the continent, and, with Futurist correspondents in all of the major European cities, Cravan was well aware of such declamations as the speech to the English. Meanwhile, we can speculate regarding Cravan’s position on the Parisian literary scene; at the end of April, for instance, with Maintenant the newest literary review on the block, Cravan was named in dispatch from a conference on French poetry of the preceding twenty-five years, held at Le Havre city hall, ‘les machinistes avec M. Arthur Cravan, etc., etc.’, in advance of the conference nod towards those poets who showed promise of producing great future works. By whatever means Cravan had managed to get his name onto this particular roster, he was evidently already considered by some to be realising significant poetic potential.82

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The Paris Futurists Parallel developments in Paris around the time of the publication of the first issue of Maintenant would, at various stages and to varying degrees, become confluent with Cravan’s broadly understood cultural activities. Against the Futurist backdrop, for instance, Cravan took his first steps into those performative occasions that he would eventually and outwardly confidently occupy as conférencier. His presence in attendance at a Futurist manifesto reading held at the Salle Gaveau concert venue in June 1912 is particularly intriguing.83 The main event was the French belle époque dancer, poet and artist Valentine de SaintPoint – g­ randdaughter to Victor Hugo, artist’s model to the delicately decorative Alfons Mucha, ‘inspiration in marble’ to Auguste Rodin, and niece to Alphonse de Lamartine – who had started hosting so-called ‘Apollonian’ parties in her studio in mid-February 1912.84 Some of the most prominent of the Italian Futurists were well and regularly represented, and it was in response to the misogynistic stance summed up in Marinetti’s glorification of ‘scorn for women’ in the 1909 ‘Manifeste du futurisme’ that Saint-Point made one of the most significant interventions in the greater Futurist project. She published her ‘Manifeste de la femme Futuriste’ on 25 March 1912: ‘women are neither superior nor inferior [to men] … They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn.’ 85 As the first woman to write a Futurist manifesto (and as that extremely rare thing, a woman Futurist), Saint-Point occupies a position of some distinction in early twentieth-century avant-gardism. Although she rejected being herself called a Futurist, Saint-Point was inevitably grouped together with the loudest and most polemical of the Italian declamators, even by such ambiguous Futurist and fascist intellectuals as Ardengo Soffici, who, in unforgiving and interrogative mode, once wrote of how ‘[Futurism’s] audacity consists of the rashness typical of the make-believe insane, [and] is the spiritual vulgarity of the emptyheaded, and Valentine de Saint-Point is Valentine de Saint-Point.’86 The public presentation of Saint-Point’s manifesto that took place on 27 June 1912 was in the presence of prominent Futurists and alongside some ‘imbeciles’ and ‘unfortunate creatures’, as Serge Jastrebzoff (later Serge Férat) recalled: I attended a conference by Valentine de Saint-Point, a unique spectacle, organized by the Futurists to promote their own grandeur. She talked about Futurism and about women, and especially about lust as a source of great strength. Fistfights broke out on the staircase. But alas! there were a few imbeciles who, together with the Futurists, took everything she said seriously, yet were at odds with each other, unfortunate creatures.87



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The Saint-Point conference was memorable for the Futurist painter Gino Severini for several reasons, not all of which had to do with incendiary declamations. Severini would much later recall the impressive public presence and persona of the main speaker, whom he described as being ‘capable of putting her manifesto to the test for a night of carnal play, and then spending an hour the following morning in fencing practice’.88 Wearing a plumed hat as wide as an umbrella, Saint-Point faced a baited audience that included at least one ‘plant’, an individual identified only as ‘Caplan’ who was an associate of SaintPoint’s spouse, the Italian poet and painter Ricciotto Canudo.89 With her manifesto declamations still ringing in the ears of her audience – ‘[I]ncite your men to surpass themselves. You are the ones who make them. You have all power over them. You owe humanity its heroes. Make them!’90 – the cue came for ‘Caplan’ as appointed agitator to climb up on stage. The simultaneous cue came also for the dissolution of formality. Severini describes what happened next: The audience raced onto the stage and our [Futurist] friends had to battle their way into the orchestra. Somehow I found myself in the first row of boxes, from which I would have dropped directly down into the orchestra by the shortest route possible, had it not been for the timely intervention of Cravan, a huge man and a boxer, a supposed nephew of Oscar Wilde.91

Severini gives no further detail regarding Cravan’s intervention, but it evidently earned the Italian painter’s devotion. Cravan was physically impressive and imposing, features doubly accentuated by his standing next to the diminutive Futurist Severini,92 whose descriptive emphasis understandably fell on the height and strength of the object that so dominated him: ‘Arthur Cravan was two meters tall and proportionately broad. Despite his gentle face, typical of large, strong people, he was actually not in the least gentle.’93 Severini not only confirms but adds to what can be established in relation to Cravan’s activities and ambition for Maintenant in 1912. He restates the monthly publication of the latter (though it was never realised) as announced in the Washington Herald: ‘[Cravan] published a more or less monthly “notebook” called Maintenant – Revue Littéraire which included enough insolence, irony, and bitter criticism for all tastes.’94 More engagingly, Severini makes some critcal analysis based on his own contact with the poet-boxer, establishing Cravan’s provocative idea of distinction as actually being the quality of mediocrity, reasoning that ‘the truly genealogical and critical element’95 (as differential of high and low, noble and base) functioned to condition ‘distinction’ ultimately never to rise above what was mediocre:

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[Cravan] invented the efficient word ‘voyoucratie’ with regard to ‘distinction’. He claimed that distinction, in art, was limited by ‘voyoucratie’ on the one hand, and by nobility on the other. Falling between these two, like all things middling, distinction was nothing but mediocrity. Therefore to call an artist ‘distinctive’ meant that he was only mediocre.96

The ‘voyou’ – the yob or thug, famously as Gide would name Lafcadio in Les caves du Vatican in 1914 – gave Cravan his ‘voyoucratie’ (loosely ‘mobocracy’ or, in Ralph Manheim’s Dada translations, ‘tough­ocracy’),97 the strength of the mobile vulgus, which not only provided Cravan with a regulating principle but also pointed at the single constituency to which he gravitated more than to any other. For Cravan, the attraction of the Futurists was undoubtedly their rowdy, riotous and voyoucratic serate, rather than the ideas they promoted in art. Cravan’s regard of the Futurists as individuals was markedly low and, as Severini’s vested observation noted in his autobiographical prose, he at least concluded that ‘[Cravan’s] friends were few and he did not care for the Futurists very much, although he did like me personally.’98 Judging by the evidence, Severini liked Cravan too. This bantam Futurist’s creative output from around 1912 (the year in which Braque and Picasso were developing their Synthetic Cubist works, incorporating collaged newspaper texts into still-life compositions) included a series of collaged portraits that numbered individuals held by the artist in the highest regard. One portrait is of the founder and impresario of Futurism, Marinetti, complete with collaged moustache; another is of Paris’s ‘Prince des poètes’ and Severini’s future father-inlaw, Paul Fort, collaged with leaves of Vers et prose; and a third is of the literary editor and publisher, former French Heavyweight Boxing Champion, Arthur Cravan, collaged with leaves of the first issue of Maintenant.99 Maintenant no. 2 Whatever the expectations and good intentions in April 1912, the promise of the monthly publication of Maintenant would never be realised. May and the months that followed came and went without the appearance of a second issue, and it was during this period approaching early 1913 that Cravan would claim a visitation by Oscar Wilde, a visitation of which he would not yet speak. Still, from the historic north–south axis of Paris where Cravan lived on rue Saint-Jacques, paralleled by the treelined boulevard Saint-Michel, Maintenant achieved prominence by its absence; that is to say, publicité and réclame proved highly efficient:



‘All words are lies’ 125 Who hasn’t heard of Maintenant? Walls the length and breadth of boulevard Saint-Michel are pasted with flyers, the papillons that sing its praises. A sandwich man parades up and down the streets of the 5th arrondissement, displaying his wonderful advertising placards. And who is behind all this publicité? … It is none less than the delightful Mme Arthur Cravan, in devoted and obedient regard of her husband. It is she who pastes the flyers to the walls, who remunerates the sandwich man, and who cares in equal measure for her adorable Siamese cats, companions in her husband’s absence.100

These notes were published at the same time as the long-anticipated second issue of Maintenant, and Renée was clearly central in its promotion and is most likely to have turned in unmodified ‘obedience’ to Cravan’s preferred homme-sandwich – Monsieur de Regnancourt, listed in the Paris Address Book as resident at 33 rue de Chabrol, and member and practitioner of the generic profession of the publicité ambulante – in promotion of the 1912–13 Maintenant via the human billboard. At this height of publicity, Maintenant made its second appearance in July 1913, a considerably lengthier proposition than the first issue at three times the pagination, and containing twice as many items of prose and poetry. Maintenant no. 2 opens with Cravan’s six-page item on André Gide, fabulously recounting the visit to Villa Montmorency in 1911–12 and rudely summing up its flaking, peeling object at the end: ‘He looks like an artist; and the only compliment … I shall pay him is that his tiny pluralism derives from the fact that he could easily be mistaken for a ham actor.’101 Mercantile interest is not lost: a closing footnote, to the words ‘Gide has written to me once’,102 offers the same missive autographed by Gide for any interested party prepared to pay 15 francs for the privilege. This item is then followed by a lengthy seven-page poem by Cravan titled ‘Des paroles’ (‘Some Words’), attributed to the obscure name ‘Édouard Archinard’. As though in reflection upon the vaporous Archinard as poet, or as reflected self-reflection upon Cravan, the poem opens with the lines ‘Life is not at all what you might think it to be / A simple tale where each thing has its history’, and indicates an interest in poetic form and Symbolist thought and expression: ‘Weary of seeking day you will relish the night.’103 The poem’s fatalism as it relays a worldweary meditation is present in the lines ‘In vain do we speak, provoke actions or think, / We are prisoners of the world’s demented sink’104 – impressing Cravan’s own social and cultural stake. ‘Des paroles’ carries the distinction of being the first complete poem by Cravan to have been translated into English, though with a significant time-lapse when it was first published in the form of a ‘compacted, somber, abstract

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lyric discourse’,105 by the American poet John Ashbery in 1969.106 This adaptation, the version here cited, ranks alongside Ashbery’s own original works as a ‘quotation’, a found poem belonging to Cravan, who in 1969 barely registered for anglophone readers. Ashbery’s stands in homage to a late French Symbolism, claiming alterity between itself and the original poem of 1913 in deliberately indulgent, sentimental and anodyne verse described by Ashbery for the ‘purposeful doggerel alexandrines’ of both original and translation, and the translation’s preservation of Cravan’s ‘limping rhymes’.107 ‘Des paroles’ is then followed by the second instalment of W. Cooper’s unpublished documents on Oscar Wilde, describing the tarnished lustre of the aesthete, ‘ineffably bored’ in his waning years, suffering delirium tremens, yet still possessing great presence, grand gestures and the golden voice of old.108 The notes on Wilde by ‘Cooper’ round with a tantalising hint of what might be glimpsed again of ‘the self-assured strength of [Wilde’s] charm at its most intense vibration – his irresistible seduction’.109 And then, finally, the fourth item is Cravan’s poem ‘Hie!’, which he self-assigns and continues in the free-verse style of ‘Sifflet’ from the previous Maintenant, reviving the poet’s dazzled awe in the machine and modernity, and resonant ultimately of Cravan’s ranging experiences on the road in 1906: The lazy ocean cradles the funnels, I see in the port, on the decks of steamships, Among the indiscriminate merchandise, Sailors mixing with stokers; Bodies polished like machines, A thousand things from China …110

The greater revelation in this poem, however, is Cravan’s self-realisation and celebratory declamation of his own arresting plurality, hinted at already in Archinard’s ‘Des paroles’ with the line ‘In you all things must live and procreate’ (‘Il faut que tout envous vive et se multiplie’). It is Cravan’s acceptance that now proliferates, from the opening to the closing lines of ‘Hie!’: What soul disputes my body? … I would like to be in Vienna and Calcutta, Catch every train and every boat, Lay every woman and gorge myself on every dish, Man of fashion, chemist, whore, drunk, musician, labourer, painter, acrobat, actor; Old man, child, crook, hooligan, angel and rake; millionaire, bourgeois, cactus, giraffe, or crow;



‘All words are lies’ 127 Coward, hero, Negro, monkey, Don Juan, pimp, lord, peasant, hunter, industrialist, Flora and fauna: I am all things, all men and all animals! What next? Assume a distinguished air, Manage to leave behind perhaps My fatal plurality! … And, as if in a kaleidoscope, My abstractions Elaborate variations On my body’s Harmonies, … If on this earth I heard The rumble of trains Let my souls revive themselves!111

Walt Whitman The diffuse intoxication of ‘Hie!’ embraces an exhilarating potentiality of the body that Cravan had become attuned to since his Paris initiation at ‘les mardis de la Closerie’. A favourite among the poets whose work was read aloud at La Closerie des Lilas was Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass had its first full translation and publication in French in 1909 (the first English-language edition of many subsequent revisions was originally in 1855, and Borràs suggests that Cravan had read Whitman in the original English).112 The pantheism and whole bodily participation in the world read out of the free-verse style became celebrated as a poetic philosophy, and an origin of Leaves of Grass is famously traced to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1842–44 essay ‘The Poet’, which draws distinction between those skilled in poetic industry and what Emerson advocates and names ‘the true poet’. In his essay, Emerson makes the striking assertion in relation to the materiality of the poet’s medium that ‘[w]ords are … actions, and actions are a kind of words’, leaving no doubt as to the non-exclusivity of the poetic element.113 The poetry in which Whitman then responded to Emerson’s essay and its call for a new poetic voice to articulate a new expression of America – ‘America is a poem in our eyes … and it will not wait long for meters’114 – makes an intentionally lowbrow address, with words greeted ‘as simple as grass’,115 a striking vision of the urban landscape and a poetic style released from standard verse patterns (the same

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is, in turn, a ­distinction to be drawn between Cravan as the poet of ‘Sifflet’ and ‘Hie!’, and Archinard as the alter poet of ‘Des paroles’). But Whitman’s sense of self becomes critical, streaming into Cravan and the expression of a voice that does not represent a single individual – most distinctly so in the epic and expansive ‘Song of Myself’, where the voice of the ordinary man (not any heroic figure) connects the individual to the universal: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, … My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs, … Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) … I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.116

It is not the historically bound poet, but the multitude that constitutes the poet, which narrates ‘Song of Myself’. The guide vocal enacts ‘the drama of identity’,117 recognised in 1912 as not presenting ‘a trust­worthy criticism of life, but rather the chaotic unevolved elements of life itself’,118 and now rises from Cravan’s immersion in ‘this illustrated review’.119 If every structure for Deleuze becomes ‘a multiplicity’,120 then the present reading revises both Whitman’s ‘poet’ and Cravan himself as structures. But the emerging multiplicity makes no reference to a prior unity; if the ideas of ‘poet’ or directeur potentially pose a sense of unity for multiple fragments, that same unity cedes to the multiplicity therein. In the structures of ‘poet’ and directeur, there is no essence to determine. I suggest an inevitability to the attraction that Whitman had for Deleuze as he did for Cravan, critically in the correspondence posed for a fragmentary style of writing. Such a spontaneous fragmentary style has been argued to characterise the American writer contra the European’s acquisition of the sense of the fragment.121 Robert Coady’s later explicit alignment of Cravan with Whitman in The Soil magazine in New York, for example, is to be remarked upon; and, in Deleuze’s essay ‘Whitman’ (1993), the fragmentary renders [t]he world as a collection of heterogenous parts: an infinite patchwork, or an endless wall of dry stones (a cemented wall, or the pieces of a puzzle, would reconstitute a totality). The world as a sampling: the samples (‘specimens’ [fragments]) are singularities, remarkable and nontotalizable parts extracted from a series of ordinary parts.122



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This ‘nontotalizable’ dimension resists any reductive (and unproductive) reading of Cravan himself as a unified, complete sum of parts. The singularity ‘Cravan’ is a multiplicity, an assemblage structured from always distinct fragments, a collection of arbitrarily gathered affects, whose ‘folding’ in the Deleuzian sense makes them coextensive. Directeur Cravan is the folds of names as the leaves of Maintenant are the folds of thought; we are presented with the world in the form of ‘an infinite patchwork’, correlate to the particular in the situation (any situation), composed of the multiplicities that make up the patchwork that conceptually and continually precludes totality. And the fragmentary residue around the Maintenant years continuously yields; we read following publication of Maintenant no. 2, for instance, of the August event at the Folies-Bergère and the first of Cravan’s three-round exhibition bouts with Battling Jim Johnson, with which Cravan declared simultaneously his ambition to appear in American vaudeville.123 And, two months after that, the editorial office of Maintenant made its move to the new Paris address for Cravan and Renée at 29 avenue de l’Observatoire – an apartment that coincidentally occupied the same block as the one belonging to the celebrated French academic Romain Rolland’s parents, who had since 1901 been sharing their home with their adult son (‘If you long for a people’s art, begin by creating a people!’).124 This new installation would be announced on the front page of the soon-to-be published Maintenant no. 3. Édouard Archinard The other names of Cravan, then, assembled in Maintenant, provide glimpses of other lives with the distinct sense of their appropriation from Cravan’s Parisian milieu. Now, the long poem ‘Des paroles’ (with its resonant sentiment, ‘accept yourself as numerous’),125 is the only published writing attributed to ‘Édouard Archinard’, a name that makes just one other appearance in Maintenant, in an obscure reference made by the first-person Cravan. In Maintenant no. 4, Cravan refers to a painter named Archinard as ‘un de mes amis’.126 Cravan’s authorship of ‘Des paroles’ under the Archinard alias is not disputed here, but pursuit of this alias yields much. There is, for instance, an Édouard Archinard documented as a Swiss compatriot to Cravan during the Maintenant years. Born in Geneva in 1862, this Archinard died in his home town in 1947 and, during his lifetime, produced albums containing handdrawn and painted heraldic designs.127 There are two other Archinards of especial note. Charles Archinard (1819–1905), instructor and former director at the collège cantonal in Lausanne, where Cravan enrolled in

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1897; and Louis Archinard (1850–1932), a French army general decorated through the five degrees of the Légion d’honneur between 1881 and 1914.128 Another more elusive Édouard Archinard is documented from this period, recorded as follows in Emmanuel Bénézit’s 1924 ­critical dictionary of artists: A painter born at the end of the nineteenth century, killed during the war of 1914–18. Very few details of his life as a painter are known. The declaration of war prevented the mounting of an exhibition of some 100 of his works.129

Well, just a few months before France’s entry to the war in early August 1914, one year after publication in Maintenant of Archinard’s ‘Des paroles’, an exhibition of paintings by this (again presumably) same Archinard was held in Paris at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune between 16 and 28 March 1914.130 It ran concurrently, therefore, with that year’s Salon des Indépendants. The exhibition comprised thirty works, not entirely consistent in style though not untypical of their epoch in figuration and, superficially, derivative of late Impressionism in compositional and chromatic quality. Against this background, André Salmon’s revision to the 1949 second edition of Bénézit’s dictionary added a telic note on style: Few details are known regarding the life of this painter … Although drawing on everyday themes, he distances himself equally from pure imagination and from literal translation. His highly personal use of colour seeks only harmony, with no concern for truth. His wholly unrestrained drawing is reminiscent, in its swift execution, of the fresco technique.131

Subsequent to this 1914 exhibition, three years later between 1 and 11 May 1917, the same gallery listed two works by Archinard exhibited alongside Matisse, Bonnard and others in the group exhibition ‘Exposition de peinture, série D’.132 This Archinard of the BernheimJeune exhibition then corresponds chronologically to the painter described in Bénézit’s dictionary. There is significant circumstantial information that draws the exhibiting painter Archinard into the fictions of Cravan. Despite the implausibility of any suggestion that Cravan had assumed a fully fledged imposture (to the extent that he produced and exhibited what appear to be suitably accomplished paintings, in addition to writing and publishing poetry, under the name Archinard),133 this particular case study is productive. By the time of the Archinard exhibition, the Bernheim-Jeune gallery was an established Paris art dealership: in the 1890s it was dealing in the work of leading Impressionist painters, and



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in 1901 it held a major van Gogh retrospective. In the decade leading up to the First World War, the gallery had made a conscious move to show and deal in the work of a younger generation of artists, notably with the appointment of Félix Fénéon as gallery director taking charge of the modern section in 1906.134 Now, the detail around Bernheim-Jeune at this juncture would be tantalising enough, even provocative, if only for the later established connection between Fénéon and Cravan, but it continues well beyond Fénéon. The Bernheim-Jeune brothers Josse and Gaston had succeeded their father Alexandre to run the gallery business, with Gaston himself painting and exhibiting his own work under the alias Gaston de Villers. In 1899, one of the three BernheimJeune sisters, the widowed Gertrude Rodrigues-Henriques, married the painter Félix Vallotton, that other son of Lausanne, childhood friend of Grandjean and former pupil of Jules Lefebvre. Further, Vallotton’s brother, Paul, had been introduced to the woman he would eventually marry by her childhood friend in Lausanne – none less than Nellie, Cravan’s mother. Paul Vallotton was a close acquaintance of Fénéon and, in Lausanne in 1913, had opened his Galeries du Commerce backed by Bernheim-Jeune. Cravan, in the meantime, was intimately connected to the current art world in Paris through Renée as well as through his artist brother Otho and his amour from 1912 onwards, the artist Olga Sacharoff (Olga painted Cravan’s portrait in 1913);135 and, as observed by Conover, ‘Cravan moved on the fringe of the Académie Matisse and was especially close to the atelier of Russian artists.’136 All of the foregoing gains momentum when we allow for the severally suggested possibility that, in the absence of any other positive testimony, the 1914 Archinard exhibition was some kind of hoax, the product of a conspiracy between at least two interested parties. If Archinard the poet functioned as one of Cravan’s many aliases in the pages of Maintenant, the viability of a greater imposture in the form of the painter Archinard would have demanded others in collaboration. Fénéon is entirely plausible as orchestrator, promoting and hosting the exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune, the gallery run by two brothers already predisposed to the use of artstic aliases. And, as the e­ stablished art critic, Fénéon would have been ideally placed to disseminate and perpetuate an Archinard imposture and to feed such detail as he wanted about this little-known French modern, for instance, during compilation of Bénézit’s 1924 critical dictionary.137 Indeed, the rapidly evolving and expanding Paris gallery system at the turn of the century is well documented, and it is known that Cravan assumed to play a part – we will remember the November 1910 letter to Grandjean, in which Cravan wrote of coming into possession of two works by

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Toulouse-Lautrec, authenticated by an expert who worked at the Louvre, and which Cravan believed would make him ‘une petite ­fortune’138 – and it is elsewhere though sparsely documented that Cravan pursued his own (imaginary) painterly projects (The World Champion at the Whorehouse, for example),139 and what were likely to have been infrequent dealer commissions from artists and collectors. With regard to the latter, the strongest testimony comes from the Paris dealer André Level, who famously amassed the collection of contemporary art that he named ‘La peau de l’ours’ (including works by Matisse and Picasso), the financially satisfying and successful sale of which took place in the same month as the Archinard exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune. In his recollections, published in 1959, Level reminisced of Cravan: [H]e barely scraped by at that period from the rare commissions on paintings that he obtained, and thus it was that I encountered him one day in Georges Aubry’s shop on the Blvd. de Clichy, near the corner of the rue des Martyrs, a favorite hunting ground of mine. His financial straits, coupled with his undeniable poetic gifts, moved me, and I was happy to give him several commissions.

When it came to the business end of this arrangement, Level is generous in his recollection: [Cravan] brought me a rather old Matisse together with a Picasso which I thought exceptional, dating from the beginning of Cubism he assured me, which he asked me not to show its creator because he had promised the seller not to reveal it – a transaction in which I let myself be caught because of my confidence in him which until then had been entirely justified. For, disregarding his violence, he possessed great taste and sensitivity as a critic of art.140

The Matisse painting was later authenticated for Level by the artist himself; it quickly transpired, however, that the Picasso painting was not the work of the Spaniard at all, but was by the Chilean artist Ortiz de Zárate (who was more than happy to sign it for Level). Cravan was evidently comfortable in manipulating the dealer-gallery system to his own ends. Further, we note in André Breton’s Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle, a special issue of La nouvelle équipe française (La nef) published in March 1950, the inclusion of a brief anthology of texts by Cravan (as well as Cravan’s image in the composite drawing by Maurice Henry on page 22), which contained a publicity notice for the dealership ‘Galerie Isaac Cravan’ and listed its represented artists Modigliani, Hayden, Diego Rivera and van Dongen.141 A few years later in 1959, Robert Lebel described Cravan’s practice during the years before the war of signing his commissioned transac-



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tions with the name ‘Galerie Isaac Cravan’.142 In the meantime, it is speculation to suggest that the paintings exhibited in Archinard’s name in March 1914 might have acquiesced (perhaps not so reluctantly) into the hands of Fénéon at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune from the studio of any number of potential candidates via ‘Galerie Isaac Cravan’. There are many such candidates, it must be said – affiliates of the Russian atelier, or even such individuals as another psuedonymous painter, Félix Tobeen – though there is no claim that can be substantiated.143 Among more widely known painters, works by Cravan’s confirmed acquaintance van Dongen around 1908 demonstrate strong stylistic and compositional resemblances to a small group of paintings attributed to Archinard and dated 1914 (two of which were exhibited at the 1917 ‘Exposition de peinture, série D’), depicting scenes in Nice, striking works painted with a divided touch of colour resonant of van Dongen’s tachiste method and divisionist investigations of about 1904–5 (which took him to Fauvism), and have a provenance from Fénéon’s private collection to the family estate of Maurice Janicot.144 The discussion about Archinard the painter may be almost entirely speculative, but we can concede that none of its parts are beyond the realms of possibility when we allow for two of the central players: the indoctrinaire Fénéon as art critic and dealer, a man ‘of considerable complexity and contradiction … [capable of] mischief and delicate imprudence’,145 and Cravan, of course, the emerging blagueur of Paris. Notes 1 Fort inherited the title that year following the death of the poet Léon Dierx in June. 2 Fernande Olivier, Picasso and his Friends, trans. Jane Miller (New York: Appleton-Century, 1965), p. 44. 3 Cited in Noel Riley Fitch, The Grand Literary Cafes of Europe (London: New Holland Publishers Ltd, 2006), pp. 34–5. The long list of patrons, before and after Cravan’s time in Paris, is most impressive. In the years around the turn of the century – not all at the same time, of course – the composers Satie and Toscanini; the painters Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Sisley, Whistler, Modigliani, Picasso, Léger, Metzinger, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Russell, Braque, Le Fauconnier, the Duchamp brothers; and the writers and poets Strindberg, Verlaine, Zola, Wilde, Valéry, Gide, Fénéon, Cendrars, Jarry, Salmon, Apollinaire, Raynal, Breton, Éluard, Pound and, some years before them, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Baudelaire, all made appearances at La Closerie. 4 Olivier, Picasso and his Friends, p. 44. 5 Cited in Fitch, The Grand Literary Cafes of Europe, pp. 34–5.

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6 Arthur Cravan, ‘Hie!’, trans. Paul Lenti, in 4DS, p. 45. 7 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Les réformateurs du costume’, Mercure de France, 1 January 1914. 8 Axel Madsen, Sonia Delaunay: Artist of the Lost Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1989), p. 121. 9 Madsen, Sonia Delaunay, pp. 121, 122. 10 Blaise Cendrars, Sky: Memoirs, trans. Nina Rootes (New York: Paragon House, 1992), p. 198. 11 Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters (Les peintres Cubistes: méditations esthétiques, 1913), trans. Peter Read (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), p. 26. 12 Mina Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, in LLB, p. 317. 13 Nellie to Otho St Clair, 9 October 1913; cited in Bastiann van der Velden, ‘Chronologie’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 85. 14 Richard Parry, The Bonnot Gang: The Story of the French Illegalists (London: Rebel Press, 1977), p. 10. 15 Emil Szittya, Das Kuriositäten-Kabinett: Begegnungen mit seltsamen Begebenheiten (Constance: See-Verlag, 1923), p. 174. 16 Nellie Grandjean; cited in Philippe Sollers, ‘Portrait d’un rebelle’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 47. 17 The ‘unique’ issue of Les hommes nouveaux published in October 1912 is moderated by its cover claim that it was running its third series; its second series Neue Menschen was published in Vienna and Munich in 1911. 18 The Sun (New York), 24 August 1913. 19 Descriptions of Cendrars’s youthful maturing are remarkably resonant of Cravan (at least as most popularly characterised): ‘He had behind him several adventurous failures … played the enfant terrible and was known as a whorehouse habitué who could hold his liquor and who never shied away from a street brawl. He grandly dissociated himself from all poetic “schools” and proclaimed that poetry demanded violence and energy, that it was a kind of fever … He knew how to tell stories, and his adventures, true or false, were mesmerizing. He made fun of art, considered it a mere by-product of life … .’ Madsen, Sonia Delaunay, pp. 112–13. 20 Olivier, Picasso and his Friends, p. 37. 21 Donald Revell, ‘The Alcools of Guillaume Apollinaire: Why and Why Now’, preface to Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools: Poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, trans. Donald Revell (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1995), p. xi. 22 Consider the lines midway through the poem ‘Zone’, for example, first published in Les soirées de Paris in December 1912, starting ‘Maintenant tu marches dans Paris tout seul parmi la foule’: ‘Your life is a painting in a dark museum / And sometimes you examine it too closely / You are walking in Paris the women are bloodsoaked / It was and I have no wish to remember it was the end of beauty.’ Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Zone’, in Apollinaire, Alcools, p. 7.



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23 Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (London: Jonathan Cape, rev. edn 1969), p. 286. 24 Starting with faint praise, Fernande Olivier’s description of Laurencin is damning: ‘She took a good deal of trouble to appear to be just as simply naïve as she actually was … She was incapable of being natural and she seemed affected to us, a bit silly, very contrived and self-conscious and chiefly interested in the effect she produced on other people … It was never possible to untangle the real personality and the real intelligence from this pretentious little person.’ Olivier, Picasso and his Friends, pp. 85–7. 25 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Le Salon d’Automne’, Les soirées de Paris, 18 (November 1913). 26 André Billy; cited in Dawn Ades, ‘Les soirées de Paris’, in Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), p. 9. 27 Apollinaire, ‘Zone’, p. 3. There is intellectual continuity to Apollinaire’s poetry at breakfast-time in the mid 1990s’ popular press scandal surrounding the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. In 1989, the Shakespeare scholar Terence Hawkes, along with Christopher Norris and Catherine Belsey, had founded the centre, which became instrumental in making Cardiff a powerhouse of English studies. When Hawkes wrote in The Mail on Sunday (5 March 1995) of the teaching practice that required students to analyse a package of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes as they would Shakespeare, both to be read as ‘texts’, uproar ensued. 28 Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, ‘Guillaume Apollinaire’, Aires abstraites (1957); cited in Ades, ‘Les soirées de Paris’, p. 13. 29 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘L’esprit nouveau et les poètes’ (1917); cited in Ades, ‘Les soirées de Paris’, p. 15. 30 Guillaume Apollinaire, Les soirées de Paris, 21 (15 February 1914). 31 F. T. Marinetti, ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (11 May 1912)’, in Selected Poems and Related Prose, trans. Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara R. Studholme (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 77. 32 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Propeller Talk’, Modernism/Modernity, 1/3 (Sep­t­ ember 1994), 169. 33 Cravan and Marinetti may have had uncorroborated contact, though nothing more than fleeting, at the Valentine de Saint-Point conference at the Salle Gaveau on 27 June 1912. 34 Roger L. Conover, Introduction to LLB, p. lxviii. 35 Blaise Cendrars to Hélène d’Oettingen; cited in Pierre-Marcel Adéma, Guillaume Apollinaire (Paris: La Table Rond, 1968), p. 302; cited in John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. 2: 1907–17: The Painter of Modern Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), p. 427. 36 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, trans.

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Daniel Breazeale, in Clive Cazeaux (ed.), The Continental Aesthetics Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 59. 37 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), third essay, section 12, p. 119. 38 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 119. 39 Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, p. 60. 40 Mina Loy, ‘Enter Colossus’ (stanza 3), from Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose: 1923–1925, in LLB, p. 150. 41 Fabian to Nellie, March 1912; cited in ACSS, pp. 95–6. 42 Reproduced in ACM, pp. 46–7. Among inclusions of intriguing note are the Comtesse de Noailes, Jeanne Catulle Mendès, Valentine de Saint-Point, Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats. 43 Interrogating authorial identity in this sense will take inevitable recourse to Roland Barthes and the impossibility of answering the question ‘Qui parle?’ For a discussion on Barthes and imaginary discourse, see Michael Moriarty, ‘Affirming the Imaginary’, in Roland Barthes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 169–85. 44 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Literature and Life’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 6. 45 Gil Blas, 2 April 1912. 46 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 243. 47 Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, pp. 53–62. 48 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p. 57. 49 Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990), p. 133. 50 Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, trans. Sean Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 242. See also Eric Blondel, ‘Nietzsche: Life as Metaphor’, in David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 150–75. 51 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, second essay, section 1, p. 57. 52 Blondel, Nietzsche, p. 219. 53 Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 31. 54 Blondel, Nietzsche, p. 213. 55 Friedrich Nietzsche, in Blondel, Nietzsche, p. 233. 56 Washington Herald, 4 April 1912. 57 See Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 14. 58 Robert Dreyfus, Petite histoire de la revue de fin d’année (Paris: Librairie



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Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1909), pp. xv–xvi; cited in Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, p. 14. 59 Dreyfus, Petite histoire de la revue de fin d’année, p. xx; cited in Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, p. 14. 60 Victor Hoerter and Max Eddy, ‘Revue charivarique’, Le charivari, 26 October 1912; Victor Hoerter, ‘Encore une revue d’actualité!’, Le charivari, 29 December 1912. 61 Jules Wogue, ‘La philosophie de la “blague” ’, La grande revue, 1 March 1902, pp. 537–8; cited in Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, p. 122. 62 Marcel Duchamp, ‘À l’infinitif’ (1966–67); cited in Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, p. 125. 63 For my expansion on the gravity of laughter, see Dafydd W. Jones, ‘The Rude Product of Luxury’, in Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), pp. 175–200. 64 Francisque Sarcey, cied in Victor DuBled, La société française du XVIe siècle au XXe siècle, séries IX: XVIII et XIX siècles: le premier salon du France; l’Académie française; l’argot (Paris, 1913), p. 258; cited in Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, p. 120. 65 Sarcey, cited in Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, p. 120. 66 In a discussion on Cravan, frequently oscillating between aliases and hoaxes, the writer and editor Paul Birault is an interesting individual. In 1913, Birault staged a memorable hoax in soliciting donations to fund a commemorative statue of Hégésippe Simon, the invented, imaginary figure he journalistically lauded as ‘précurseur de la démocratie’; see Guy Breton, ‘Hégésippe Simon, précurseur de la démocratie’, Historama, 47 (1913), 111–15. 67 The eight pages of this first issue included the cover and the back page, which was given over to advertisements. One of the two advertisers that provided modest sponsorship for this latest venture was the restaurantowning family Jourdan, who declared in the mock publicité that would feature throughout Maintenant’s three-year run, ‘Que faut-il au Poète? Un bonne nourriture’ (‘What makes a good poet? A hearty meal’). 68 Washington Herald, 4 April 1912. 69 Arthur Cravan, ‘Whistle’, trans. Paul Lenti, in 4DS, pp. 38–9. 70 The ordinariness of the name ‘W. Cooper’ is attested to in a variety of sources, not least among which is the adoption of the name ‘William Cooper’ by the novelist Harry Summerfield Hoff (1910–2002) as his pseudo­nym as a writer of fiction. Hoff, it is suggested, abandoned his real name perhaps because it sounded ‘more fictional than his sort of fiction could bear’. Norman Shrapnel, ‘William Cooper: Novelist who Depicted the Mysteriousness of Ordinary People through a Naturalistic Eye’, The Guardian, 7 September 2002. 71 Among the most famous appearances, of course, is that recounted in Lord Alfred Douglas’s 1901 poem ‘The Dead Poet’: ‘I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face.’ Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘The Dead Poet’ (1901), in Alfred B.

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Douglas, The Collected Poems of Lord Alfred Douglas (London: Martin Secker, 1919), p. 88. 72 There is a direct parallel in this regard to the Surrealist invocation of Cravan himself by individuals who had never met the poet-boxer (discussed further in the Conclusion to this volume). 73 Robert Sherard, Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship (London: Hermes Press, 1902); Robert Sherard, The Life of Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1906); Arthur Ransome, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (London: Martin Secker, 1912). 74 Washington Herald, 4 April 1912. 75 The same ‘as of old, in music measureless, / I heard his golden voice’ in the visitation of 1901; Douglas, ‘The Dead Poet’, p. 88. 76 The Soil, 4 (April 1917), 150. 77 Félix Fénéon; cited in Eileen M. Baldeshwiler, ‘Félix Fénéon and the Minimal Story’, Critique, 1 (1972), 73–4. 78 Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, p. 44. 79 Arthur Cravan, ‘Différentes choses’, Maintenant, 1 (April 1912), 7. 80 Port Pirie Recorder and North Western Mail (South Africa), 20 December 1913. As an aside, it was the precisioned profile of Carpentier that would eventually and famously substitute for the equally elegant line of Marcel Duchamp’s on the cover of issue 19 of Picabia’s 391 in October 1924; and 391, as discussed in Chapter 6 below, took its direct inspiration from Maintenant. 81 F. T. Marinetti, ‘Futurist Speech to the English’ (December 1910), reproduced in ‘Continental Interlude I: The Futurist Moment (1909–14)’, p. 7; www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/ Sample_chapter/0631204490/Rainey_sample%20chapter_Modernism.pdf (accessed 8 July 2015). 82 See Recueil des publications de la Société havraise d’études diverses, 79/1 (Le Havre: Micaux, 1912), 141. 83 The Salle Gaveau was located at 45 rue la Boétie in the 8th arrondissement. 84 Saint-Point’s studio was located at 19 rue de Tourville. 85 Valentine de Saint-Point, ‘Manifesto of Futurist Woman (Response to F. T. Marinetti)’ (1912), in Lawrence S. Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman (eds), Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 109–13. 86 Ardengo Soffici; cited in Gino Severini, The Life of a Painter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 98. 87 Serge Jastrebzoff; cited in Severini, The Life of a Painter, pp. 97–8. SaintPoint would publish her ‘manifesto of lust’ in 1913. 88 Severini, The Life of a Painter, p. 105. 89 In light of some other muffled identifications, such as ‘Gruhan’ (see Chapter 6), it would be tempting to speculate on the identity of this ‘Caplan’ as potentially Cravan – although Severini’s distinction in his autobiographical text assumes to suggest otherwise.



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90 Saint-Point, ‘Manifesto of Futurist Woman’, pp. 109–13. 91 Severini, The Life of a Painter, p. 106. 92 The artist’s daughter, Jeanne Severini, recalled her father’s ‘delicate constitution’, thus indirectly emphasising the difference in physical constitution between him and Cravan, in a letter to Marcel Fleiss dated 27 March 1991. See ACSS, p. 99. 93 Severini, The Life of a Painter, p. 106. 94 Severini, The Life of a Painter, p. 106. 95 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 2. 96 Severini, The Life of a Painter, p. 106. 97 Arthur Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’ (1914), trans. Ralph Manheim, in DPP, p. 8. 98 Severini, The Life of a Painter, p. 106. 99 Severini was a contributor to the early issues of Pierre Albert-Birot’s artistic review Sic (see Debra Kelly, ‘An Infinity of Living Forms, Representative of the Absolute?’, in Elza Adamowicz and Simona Storchi, Back to the Futurists: The Avant-Garde and its Legacy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 95–112). The close collaboration between them, however, had ended by the 1918 run of issues which departed the standard staid cover design to feature attributed drawings (among the contributors were Léopold Survage, Serge Férat and Chana Orloff). The one exception is an unattributed cover image for the March 1918 issue, a distinctively drawn head that bears remarkable and tantalising (because of Severini’s admiration for, and of Albert-Birot’s Paris activity as publisher of, an artstic review) similarity to photographs of Cravan c.1910. Severini’s Portrait d’Arthur Cravan (1912) is reproduced in ŒPAL, between pp. 256 and 257. 100 Georges Martin, ‘Courrier théâtral’, L’aéro, 15 July 1913. The cats are there in the famous photograph of Cravan that Mina Loy had first seen of him: ‘[a] couple of Siamese cats lay among his negligent hands’; Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 104. 101 Arthur Cravan, ‘André Gide’, trans. Terry Hale, in 4DS, pp. 43–4. 102 Cravan, ‘André Gide’, p. 44. 103 Arthur Cravan, ‘Des paroles’/‘Some Words’, in John Ashbery, Collected French Translations: Poetry, ed. Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2014), p. 101. 104 Cravan, ‘Des paroles’/‘Some Words’, p. 107. 105 William Watkin, In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (London: Associated University Presses, 2001), p. 100; see http://williamwatkin.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/john-ashbery-double-dreamof-spring.html (accessed 13 September 2015). 106 Cravan, ‘Des paroles’/‘Some Words’, pp. 100–7. Alongside ‘Some Words’ in the 2014 volume of collected translations is Ashbery’s translation of Cravan’s ‘Langueur d’éléphant’ (‘Elephant Languor’; original French

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­published in La nef, March 1950, reproduced in ŒPAL, p. 104), which Ashbery first published in Juillard, 9 (Spring 1972); John Ashbery, ‘Elephant Languor’, in Collected French Translations: Poetry, pp. 106–9. The only published translations of Cravan into English prior to Ashbery’s intervention were in The Soil in 1917, with an extract of ‘Sifflet’ and the article ‘Oscar Wilde is Alive!’ in its entirety. 107 For Ashbery, his adaptation eventually achieved ‘a very nice quality … a sort of combination of high-flown rhetoric and a very limping, bad, patchedtogether quality … [a] damaged would-be nobility of the language.’ ‘John Ashbery in Conversation with John Tranter, New York City, May 1988’, Jacket, 2, http://jacketmagazine.com/02/jaiv1985.html (accessed 3 July 2018). 108 Cf. The Soil, 4 (April 1917), 150. Reference to the ‘golden voice’ revives again Bosie’s description, in Douglas, ‘The Dead Poet’, p. 88. 109 W. Cooper, ‘Documents inédits sur Oscar Wilde II’, Maintenant, 2 (July 1913), 17. 110 Arthur Cravan, ‘Hie!’, trans. Paul Lenti, in 4DS, p. 45; ‘stokers’ here is from the French ‘chauffeurs’. 111 Cravan, ‘Hie!’, trans. Lenti, pp. 45–8. 112 ACSS, p. 110. Léon Bazalgette’s French translation of 1909 would be superseded when André Gide published his own translation a decade later, far surpassing Bazalgette and restoring the homoeroticism of the original that earlier hetero-bias had suppressed. Bazalgette (as well as Gide) is listed by Cravan among the names in receipt of review copies of Maintenant; see ACM, pp. 46–7. 113 ‘[W]herever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee …’. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poet’, in The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 227. 114 Emerson, ‘The Poet’, p. 227. 115 Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’ from Leaves of Grass, in Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 108 (line 983). 116 Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, pp. 63, 64, 123, 124 (lines 1, 23, 1324–6, 1339–40). 117 Betsy Erkkilä, Whitman the Political Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 95. 118 Louis I. Bredvold, ‘Walt Whitman’, The Dial, 53 (1 November 1912), 325. 119 Cravan, ‘Hie!’, trans. Lenti, p. 45. 120 Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 117. 121 See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Whitman’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans.



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Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 56. Nietzsche as philosopher acquired such a sense, achieving a fragmentary style of writing as one means of negotiating small units of the flux of reality. 122 Deleuze, ‘Whitman’, p. 57. 123 See The Sun (New York), 14 August 1913. 124 Romain Rolland, Le théâtre du peuple (1903); cited in David Whitton, ‘Whatever Happened to théâtre populaire? The Unfinished History of People’s Theatre in France’, in Edward Batley and David Bradby (eds), Morality and Justice: The Challenge of European Theatre (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001), p. 70. 125 Cravan, ‘Des paroles’/‘Some Words’, p. 105. 126 Arthur Cravan, ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’, Maintenant, 4 (March– April 1914), 6. 127 Fifteen albums of these heraldic designs, produced by Archinard of Geneva after 1895, are today held in the private inventories of the Geneva city archives. 128 See Jean-Paul Morel, ‘Archinard, une mystification?’, in ACM, pp. 75–101, which includes colour reproductions of the 1914 Archinard paintings, together with an undated handwritten letter from Archinard to Fénéon; trans. in ACM, pp. 277–9. See further, ‘Bulletin’ no. 4 and catalogue of paintings by Édouard Archinard (Paris: MM Bernheim-Jeune & Cie, 1914); later exhibited works by Archinard are reproduced in Arthur Cravan: poète et boxeur, exhibition catalogue, Galerie 1900–2000, 7 April–5 May 1992 (Paris: Terrain Vague, 1992), pp. 71–2. 129 Emanuel Bénézit, Dictionnaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs & graveurs (Paris: Ernest Gründ, 1924); trans. cited in Roger Lloyd Conover, ‘The Secret Names of Arthur Cravan’, in Arthur Cravan: poète et boxeur, p. 35. 130 Galerie Bernheim-Jeune was located at 15 rue Richepanse, in the 1st and 8th arrondissements. 131 ACM, p. 277. 132 The reproduced 1917 catalogue lists the two Archinard works as ‘La voiture d’enfant’ and ‘Les palmiers du rivage’, presumably referring to the colour reproductions ‘La voiture d’enfant et les militaires’ and (?) ‘La silhouette bleue’, both dated 1914; Arthur Cravan: poète et boxeur, pp. 73 and 75. 133 The child-like watercolour signed ‘Robert Miradique’, reproduced as cover to the present volume, is probably as fine an example as we could wish for to demonstrate the limitations of any artistic skills possessed by Cravan. 134 In the years before the Archinard exhibition, Fénéon gave shows to the Nabis artists Bonnard and Jean-Édouard Vuillard (in 1906), to Georges Seurat and Kees van Dongen (in 1908), to Henri Matisse (in 1910) and artists associated with the Fauves, to the Futurists (in 1912) and to the Synchromists (in 1913, a group that included the North American paint-

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ers Morgan Russell and Patrick Henry Bruce, the company that perhaps earned Fénéon the epithet ‘le faux Yankee de la rue Richepanse’ given him by Apollinaire; Willard Bohn, ‘Chasing Butterflies with Arthur Cravan’, in Rudolf E. Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986), p. 122). 135 Olga Sacharoff, Portrait d’Arthur Cravan (1913); reproduced in ACM, p. 18. 136 Roger L. Conover, Introduction to LLB, p. l. 137 The dictionary, published in three volumes, is described as having been compiled by Bénézit ‘and a team of international specialists with assistance from his son and daughter’ as a repository of bibliographical information for use by art museums, auction houses, historians and dealers. See www.rookebooks.com/product?prod_id=39516 (accessed 26 August 2015). 138 Fabian to Grandjean, November 1910; cited in ACSS, p. 91. 139 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, pp. 5, 8. 140 André Level; cited in Bohn, ‘Chasing Butterflies with Arthur Cravan’, p. 121. 141 See ‘Exercice poètique’, in ŒPAL, p. 101; Breton’s complete Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle can be viewed online at https://archive.org/details/ almanachsurreali00bret (accessed 9 December 2015). The identification of ‘Galerie Isaac Cravan’ can be documented to the gallery opened in 1913 at 15 rue Montaigne (today rue Jean Mermoz) in Paris by the collector and critic Charles Malpel. Cravan frequented the gallery and apparently acted as intermediary for Malpel in negotiating purchases and sales of artworks; four artists had exclusive contracts with Malpel – Hayden, Modigliani, de la Fresnaye and van Dongen – and in the summer of 1914, Malpel held an exhibition dubbed a ‘salon for child artists’ at the gallery ‘hardly a stone’s throw distant from the Grand Salon of the Artistes Français in the Champs Elysées ... [with a jury] under the Presidency of Félix Fénion [sic], expert head of the Bernheim gallery, to judge the entrants and award medals.’ ‘Paris has Salon for Child Artists’, New York Times, 14 June 1914. See also ACSS, pp. 91–2. 142 Cited in Conover, ‘The Secret Names of Arthur Cravan’, p. 36. 143 The work of Tobeen (Félix Elie Bonnet) c.1912 might superficially be argued to share some formal and compositional qualities with the exhibited Archinard paintings, but there is no convincing comparison to be made; Tobeen moved in the circles of Picasso, Braque and van Dongen, and exhibited at the 1912 Salon de la Section d’Or and the 1913 Armory Show, with his work descending through the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. Cravan quickly glosses over Tobeen in his notorious review ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’ (‘I don’t know you but that doesn’t matter’). Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, p. 7. 144 Four of these paintings are reproduced in colour in Arthur Cravan: poète et boxeur, pp. 73–6. 145 Conover, ‘The Secret Names of Arthur Cravan’, p. 35.



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5

j ‘Life has no solution’: Maintenant, November 1913–April 1915

Actual and virtual The extent to which viable continuities manifest themselves in the process of descriptively recovering Cravan is striking as the discussion is drawn into the complexities and complications of contemporary theory. When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in the mid-nineteenth century that words are actions and that actions are words, the alignment with a philosophical monism as exercised by Deleuze at the end of the twentieth century was markedly more than fortuitous. For Deleuze, there is no categorical difference between concepts and percepts (that is to say, between words and actions); they are rather an affirmation of intensities, variations and transformations which enact patterns of becoming through creative processes. It is precisely this creativity that affirms the structure of difference read positively and, specifying the activity of Cravan writing Maintenant chronologically mid-way between Emerson and Deleuze, there is engaged a process whereby the self is emptied and freed from rational control in order to open it up to the potentialities of onrushing affective outsides, making it receptive to otherwise unremarkable perceptions. Writing moves beyond the stakes that we would routinely associate with it – beyond the manipulation of linguistic conventions; beyond the cognitive penetration of objects; beyond the appropriation of a theme – and, theoretically for Deleuze at least, writing comes to be a particular ethical orientation that concerns itself with testing limits in pursuit of what might lie beyond their capacities and observable boundaries. Cravan, in 1913, was multiply occupied with the writing of Maintenant. It was his creative activity deliberately undermining perceived structures that privileged mind above matter, original above copy – indeed actual above virtual, and the assumed locus of potential in the actual (to the exclusion of the virtual). Untheorised for Cravan, however, is what Deleuze subsequently argued against the equivocity

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The fictions of Arthur Cravan

of hierarchies, which is to say a non-privileging univocity to contest any claim that a single phenomenon might be more real than any other. Rather than hierarchical differences reduced from an ideal origin (where differences amount to relative measures of sameness), following Deleuze we can now read each difference and each being as fully real; difference, therefore, as difference-in-itself and immanent to the one substance. Critically, this one being, this one plane of becoming, does not preclude events or futures that will form as radically new. What univocity does preclude for Deleuze is any end point, completion or unity. And for present interest, therefore, univocity makes possible a reading of Cravan in continual process, actualising in words and actions, in creating and events, the virtual power and potential for difference and variation of this immanent world and this immanent life. Deleuze’s essay ‘L’actuel et le virtuel’ (1995) reasons at its outset that ‘[p]urely actual objects do not exist’ on the premise that the actual is ‘the object of actualisation, which has nothing but the virtual as its subject’. In such actualisation, the actual is at the same time surrounded by ‘a cloud of virtual images’, positing the virtual as both text and context.1 This is complicated. For Deleuze, what it means to be virtual follows inversely from what it means to be actual; the qualities of the virtual will not be objective, therefore, and they will never be visible or ‘seen’ in the normal sense. Now, what we ‘see’ when we look at Cravan is not easily negoti­ able. The radical philosophical position of univocity will reason that there are no separate types of being outside or transcendent to our own. To stake the latter would be to posit more than one substance and more than one ‘voice’ of being (it would posit equivocity) and, accordingly, we encounter Cravan as highly indulgent in exploitation of our habitual assumptions of dualisms (routinely the dualism of an intelligible mind above sensible nature) as he assembles his fictions for Maintenant. The assemblage, the multiplicity, makes no appeal to any essence of being (what substance is there, after all, beyond the leaves and ephemera, to the fiction named Cravan?), and there can be no privileged being if there is only one being. Accepting this, we read Cravan’s pluralism in his reflective and revelatory opening passage to the single text in Maintenant no. 3 (the ‘special issue’ published for October–November 1913), attributed to Cravan himself and revealing the complexities encountered by the writer in observation of, or in the act of seeing, himself: I wish … to show the strangeness of my character, seat of my inconsistencies; my detestable nature … for it makes me sometimes honest,



‘Life has no solution’ 145 sometimes deceitful, and vain and modest, coarse or distinguished. I want to make you guess them, that you may not detest me …2

Cravan recounts his struggle with an always conflicting constitution, hopelessly seeking to ground himself yet conceding to let go as soon as the seat of his inconsistencies appears within reach. He reflects upon his position in Paris, communing with the city in which he had by the age of twenty-six been resident for four years, affirming in the process his material circumstance and his continued yet conflicting aspirations: ‘Ah, Paris, what hatred I bear you! What are you doing in this city? Ah! that’s right! No doubt you think you’ll succeed! Why twenty years are necessary for that, my poor man … I shall never understand how Victor Hugo could, for forty years, pursue his labours’ … I aspire to success, for I feel I should know what humorous uses to make of it, and would find it amusing to be famous; but how [to] manage to take myself seriously? … But – another perplexity – I also wish to lead the marvellous life of the raté … I thought too: I am spending my capital. Great! I can guess what my troubles will be when, towards forty, I shall see myself, from every point of view, ruined.3

We read disclosure of Cravan’s self-reckoning as poet, his pursuit of inspiration that seems continually to evade, and his projection of the prosopoème as the innovative poetic form with which he would, eventually, overcome the present frustration: Seeking some amusement, I tried to rhyme, but inspiration, ever ready to tease the will at a thousand turns, completely failed me … Incapable of originality, and not renouncing my efforts to create, I sought to add lustre to ancient poems, forgetting that verse is an incorrigible child! … At last – ultimate extravagance – I imagined the prosopoème, a thing of the future, the execution of which, moreover, I put off to the happy … days of inspiration. The idea in view was a piece begun in prose which, through insensible iterations – rhyme – at first remote then closing in more and more, should give birth to pure poetry.4

These passages are the most autobiographical yet written by Cravan. In their sober self-reflection, they reveal far more than we might read anywhere else with regard to the subjective-economic-creative complex possessed of the writer relapsing ‘into my sad thoughts’. His escape from Paris is an imagined escape to a city populated by giraffes, mammoths and elephants, and the multiplicity is emphatic: I am here, because life has no solution. I can make merry in Montmartre and a thousand eccentricities, since I need them … I, who dream of myself even amid catastrophes, I say that man is only so unfortunate because a thousand souls inhabit a single body.5

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The fictions of Arthur Cravan

The idea of essence, of which ‘soul’ has become emblematic, is dissolved as Cravan dreams of himself in ‘a cloud of virtual images’: Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘schizo dream’,6 the expression of being released from reference to any grounding being, or to a separate ordering principle. With this redundancy for entrenched dualisms, Deleuze would argue that we move beyond morality (specifically in the absence of any opposition between good and evil) and towards our own creation of the potential­ ities of what we might become, in the expansion of life beyond already established limits precisely as ethics. Cravan’s own immersion in these opening passages of the article ‘Oscar Wilde est vivant!’ has consistently been overlooked for the wider response that was generated to the article’s nominal object. But before accounting for that, we might consider the boxer’s inching of prose towards poetry, intimated in the preceding passages but not properly realised in published form for another eighteen months. In this context, I quote finally at length from Maintenant no. 3: I had, that evening, the soul of a man deceived, for nobody, I am certain – since I have never formed a friend – nobody has loved as much as I: each flower transforms me into a butterfly; more than a ewe, to trample on the grass ravishes me; the air, oh, the air! for entire afternoons have I not occupied myself in breathing? On nearing the sea, does not my heart dance like a buoy? and from the moment I cleave the waves my organism is that of a fish. Amid nature, I feel myself leafy; my hair is green and my blood is green; often, I adore a pebble; the angelus is dear to me; and I love to listen to memory when it whistles plaintively.7

The resonance of Whitman is unmistakable. There is, moreover, an affirmation of the univocity of being in continuation of ‘I am all things, all men and all animals’, whereby no thing, man or animal is more real than any other. Cravan’s menagerie (giraffes, mammoths, elephants, butterflies, ewes) multiplies as his writing progresses. He is fully part of the flora and fauna that are sometimes named, the green man of Paris, while being at once removed and apart from it. There is no explanation that Cravan will propose for experience, because to do so would necessitate a privileged position – ‘I am here, because life has no solution’, he said – and it is precisely to allow for the flow of experience (instead of any single being) that Deleuze encourages us in shaping and ordering existence. In the forms that culture takes (consider writing, for instance, or literature more broadly), there is a testing and stressing to exceed established limits, a multiplication of affects and intensities, and a production of further and new possibilities. In the multiplicity we name ‘Cravan’, affects and percepts flow across the alter identities



‘Life has no solution’ 147

as narrative wanders across names and across the position of each name. ‘Cravan’, I should restate, is not the privileged centre (or authorial voice) of what I here contend, but rather a nexus for viewpoints that are themselves the very flows of experience. The names Cravan, Cooper and Archinard (and the future names Miradique and Lowitska) deployed in Maintenant were not names – or characters – that experienced through perception, but rather what Deleuze might have one day designated ‘blocks of becoming’. These ‘blocks of becoming’ in each proper name, then, functioned as conduits for their perceptions, and thus each was (and is) its own singular becoming, an assemblage and nothing more than its own encountered images.8 Maintenant no. 3 The third issue of Maintenant was dated October–November 1913 and published at the start of November. It comprised the prose ‘Oscar Wilde est vivant!’, in which Cravan described in studied detail the visit­ ation that he claimed had taken place one late winter’s evening. The implicit claim of the text was made explicit in the article title, which was accompanied by two previously unpublished portrait drawings of Wilde attributed to ‘E. Lajeunesse’. Now, Maintenant is routinely described in the literature as being the sole and unadulterated creation of Cravan (variously under invented or appropriated guises that occasionally include ‘Lajeunesse’),9 but here we are presented publicly with the only other person apart from Cravan to have contributed to Maintenant. Ernest La Jeunesse (1874–1917) was a writer, critic and occasional caricaturist (contributing to La revue blanche, Le cri de Paris and L’intransigeant) who lived and worked in Paris at the turn of the century. Peculiarly porcine in appearance, he was described in 1905 as being ‘one of the most witty of the younger Parisians. Much of his work has been on the impudent and amusing plane … [and he has not held back from criticising], chiefly by way of parody, all the biggest toads in the puddle of French letters.’10 La Jeunesse had been familiarly acquainted with Oscar Wilde during the latter’s final Paris years, frequenting the same cafés (the Calisaya Bar, for instance, on the boulevard des Italiens, or the more central Napolitain with Catulle Mendès, as Fernande Olivier recalled),11 and Wilde had once remarked on La Jeunesse’s falsetto voice, which was so pronounced as to be not infrequently mistaken for a woman’s.12 The two drawings of Wilde accompanying Cravan’s prose in Maintenant are patently not of the figure approaching sixty years of age that Cravan imagined, emerging from the gloom into his candle-lit apartment, the ‘old man with white

7  Ernest La Jeunesse (self), in Roy Lear, Talentiers (1899).



‘Life has no solution’ 149

beard and hair … [his head] furrowed with profound wrinkles and nearly bald’;13 they are original drawings by La Jeunesse, depicting the Wilde he had known at the close of the nineteenth century. The style and signature are recognisable from La Jeunesse’s caricatures of cultural and political figures of the day – Stéphane Mallarmé, Maurice Barrès, Paul Fort, Catulle Mendès, Anatole France, for example – in Talentiers, a collection of ballades libres by Roy Lear (André Ibels) published in 1899, including La Jeunesse’s self-caricature on the facingtitle page.14 So Cravan, we correctly surmise, had secured La Jeunesse’s drawings (the first of which carries the presumably copied, perhaps genuine, signature of Wilde) for publication alongside ‘Oscar Wilde est vivant!’, and in the process added weight to the truth of his prose. The late evening visitation begins properly with the opening of the door of the apartment onto gloomy rue Saint-Jacques, where there stood a barely discernible but ‘immense’ figure, ushered by Cravan into his dimly lit apartment, ‘Then, after some moments, he whom I thought a stranger said: “I am Sebastian Melmoth”.’15 ‘Melmoth’ was Wilde’s assumed name when he left England for France in June 1897 after his release from prison the previous month (a name assumed from Wilde’s great-uncle Charles Maturin’s 1920 Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer). Gide had written in 1902: ‘At Berneval, a quiet little village near Dieppe, a certain “Sebastian Melmoth” took up his abode. It was he [Wilde].’16 Cravan’s item on Wilde is a productive continuation of Gide’s ‘Hommage à Oscar Wilde’, the latter recounting personal observations by Gide upon his three ages with the aesthete, though it concludes ultimately in denunciation of its object. The style of Cravan’s prose comes strikingly close in imitation to Gide’s, setting a scene that may even have been directly prompted by Gide (whose 1902 oration is referred to by Cravan in ‘Oscar Wilde est vivant!’); consider the following by Gide: Presently we sat down near the lamp, Wilde drinking his grog in little sips. I noticed, now that the light was better, that the skin of his face had become red and common looking, and his hands even more so, though they still bore the same rings – one to which he was especially attached had in a reversible bezel an Egyptian scarabæus in lapis lazuli. His teeth were dreadfully decayed … his hat was not so glossy; his collar was of the same shape, but it was not so clean, and the sleeves of his coat were slightly frayed at the edges.17

And the following by Cravan: His bloated visage was diseased; the thick, bloodless lips would at times uncover teeth that were rotten and scrofulous, repaired with gold; a great

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The fictions of Arthur Cravan

white and brown beard … almost always masked his chin … [H]is dress interested me; I noticed that he wore a black suit, passably old, and I sensed his indifference to his toilette … A radiant solitaire, that I could not refrain from coveting, gleamed on his left ear …18

What Cravan could only imagine in Far Eastern fauna, blessed of the carriage, ‘cadenced and dreamy dignity of pachyderms’, lost ‘amid the music of flies, creating mountains of excrement’, now sat in his humble abode, with each actor’s emotions heightened. The visitor spoke of life in Italy, in futile pursuit of anonymity and solitude, since his assumed death in 1900; in his own prose, Cravan pointedly returns Gide’s favour of 1902 and the recounting of several of Wilde’s parables from their first meeting in 1891.19 And of especial note, in view of claims that Cravan subsequently made outside Maintenant, the imagined Wilde speaks of his continued literary activity in memoirs, verse and plays (as Gide had described Wilde’s never-completed literary works in his final years), before Cravan declares his hand, seizing upon this latest exploitative opportunity, to Wilde’s amused distraction: I publish a little literary review, where I have already exploited you – it’s beautiful, a literary review! – and I shall ask you for one of your books, which I will publish as a posthumous work; but, if you prefer, I become your impresario …20

Now touting as Wilde’s impresario, Cravan’s strategy of literary exploitation relays with complete and casual candour. ‘Oscar Wilde est vivant!’ is important within Cravan’s literary output for illuminating a variety of imagined sequences with which the present recovery is concerned. Far from being the least of these is the familial intimacy established upon Wilde’s entry to the apartment: ‘ “Dear Fabian.” To hear myself named thus familiarly and tenderly touched me to the point of tears.’21 The same intimacy is present throughout the insinuations of the Maintenant years,22 and their origin can be traced back to the recollections of Wilde written by Cravan’s parents, and to the summer of 1904 and Cravan’s speculation during the years that followed concerning his own paternity; Cravan, as documented by one observer, ‘was said to be a nephew of Oscar Wilde and … when in his cups, claimed an even closer relationship’.23 Now, with his imagined prime paternal suspect sitting directly opposite, the response to Wilde’s asking after Nellie, Cravan’s mother, is shared with the reader only in explicitly casting doubt upon the remote (natural) father that Otho Holland Lloyd (long-since re-styled Lloyd Holland) had become: ‘[H]ad they not half informed me of my mysterious birth, several times very vaguely intimating that Oscar Wilde might be my father? … I spoke to



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him [Wilde] of M. Lloyd – my father?’24 Cravan, it is claimed, did once confront his mother Nellie to accuse her ‘of conducting an adulterous affair with Wilde, of which he imagined himself the offspring and openly declared that he was Wilde’s son’.25 He assumed occasional affectation, deliberately clouding paternity, and even declared his sibling Otho to be only a half-brother.26 First-hand testimony is recovered in casual instances as the passing comment by the Washington Herald in 1912, for example;27 and more than forty years after the events, sober assessments were made that ‘[i]t was he who, as Arthur Cravan, traded on pretending he was the son of Oscar Wilde’.28 The intimation, of course, was to be profited from and exploited. With Wilde firmly established as Maintenant’s stock-in-trade, ‘Oscar Wilde est vivant!’ closes with a description of Cravan’s late-night boozy descent into coarse insults: ‘Oh no, really, I’m not your father … Hey! Piss off! You street-corner whore, good-for-nothing, plug-ugly shit-shovel scrapings, cottager, imbecile, old queen, whacking great cow …’;29 Wilde’s emphatic and repeated ‘You are a terrible boy’ and charge to Cravan not to disclose anything of their meeting until six months have elapsed; the affectionate final parting, and Cravan’s desperate, remorseful pursuit of the now disappeared Wilde through the empty streets before, ‘[w]andering … I returned slowly, and my eyes never left the moon, companionable as a curse’ (less crude in translation than Cravan’s original French ‘secourable comme un con’).30 It was at this point that Arthur Cravan went viral. Reaction to ‘Oscar Wilde est vivant!’ was instant, and on Sunday, 2 November 1913, the Washington Herald headed its front page with ‘Oscar Wilde Alive and in Paris, Claims Nephew’. The report cited ‘A. Fabian Lloyd’ as having been visited by Wilde six months earlier, and set out the next phase of Cravan’s maximising of publicity: Lloyd has offered to bet 10,000 francs that Oscar Wilde is alive and that the coffin in Bagneux Cemetery … holds nothing but paving stones, cotton wool, and a large glass jar, which in turn holds a manuscript by Wilde.31

Retaining the mystery surrounding Wilde’s ‘death’, Cravan’s disclosure in the Washington Herald item was that Wilde had ‘secreted himself in the Petit Trianon Palace’ in November 1900 before escaping to India, ‘where he has been since then, with the exception of a winter spent in Italy’.32 The story was picked up in that same winter retreat, where the Turin-based newspaper La stampa covered ‘Oscar Wilde est vivant!’ on 4 November 1913, conceding fully to its veracity and describing ‘Arturo Cravan’ as ‘an English writer … a blond Marinetti of Albion, who claims that Oscar Wilde is not dead but has been living quietly and incognito

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The fictions of Arthur Cravan

in Florence, where he has been recognised only by certain individuals’.33 Simultaneously, the story appeared in North American newspapers, and within days there was journalistic flurry in response on both sides of the Atlantic as the story gathered momentum. On Sunday, 9 November 1913, the New York Times published an extended report headed ‘No One Found who Saw Wilde Dead’, in which the paper’s own correspondent undertook further to investigate Cravan’s story and to commission one of Wilde’s friends in Paris, Charles Sibleigh, to interview Cravan (the report was premised on the absence of any reliable witness to the deceased Wilde, although Sibleigh himself was named in Robbie Ross’s letter written just two weeks after those final events as having been among the ‘literary people’ who were allowed to see Wilde’s body in the immediate aftermath of his death at the Hôtel d’Alsace in Paris).34 In the New York Times report, Sibleigh indicates that he was witness only to Wilde’s coffin being moved from Paris to Bagneux – not witness to the body, therefore. After first dismissal, Sibleigh’s conversion is swift, and he is convinced by the claims made by Cravan in ‘Oscar Wilde est vivant!’ Sibleigh’s report then makes slight revision to the earlier accounts and claimed content of Wilde’s coffin (which, by now, is said to contain a manuscript comprising two literary works, ‘a tragedy and a comedy, the last that he produced before his disappearance’),35 and restates Cravan’s wager (now 5,000 dollars) to have the coffin disinterred. Through November and into December, bizarre though it now appears, the story was reported in the furthest reaches of the anglophone press – in Canada (the Montreal Gazette), in Mexico (the Mexican Herald), in South Africa (Port Pirie Recorder), in Australia (Barrier Miner) and in New Zealand (Press). The press reports detail a finally achieved consistency and name the manuscript inside Wilde’s coffin: ‘ “Amen”, with sub-titles “A Comedy”, and “A Tragedy” ’.36 Maintenant no. 4 From the new Maintenant editorial office on the avenue de l’Observatoire, Cravan could have been only remotely aware of the distance covered by the Wilde story, which came finally to rest as ‘[o]ne of the tallest yarns’ to emanate from Paris in recent times.37 As it was telegraphed around the globe, Cravan directed his energy at presenting Maintenant ‘live’ as conférencier. Blaise Cendrars gives us the public presentation of 13 November 1913, for instance, an occasion at which Cravan had announced to the assembled ‘snobs and aesthetes’,

8  Maintenant no. 4, March–April 1914, cover.

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The fictions of Arthur Cravan

with a great deal of ballyhoo that he was going to commit suicide in public, replace the usual carafe of water with a bottle of absinthe, and, in honour of the ladies, or perhaps some sister-soul, wear nothing but a G-string and put his balls on the table (in the end, he did none of these things, he was so embarrassed that he emptied the carafe of water without even realizing it, for he must have been thirsty, jabbering on and on, taking the mickey out of Victor Hugo, and not daring to brandish the revolver with its chamber empty – not even loaded with blanks!38

Cendrars drew decidedly sceptical conclusions about Cravan, suggesting how ‘the actions of this giant, this lazy man, had the fatal quality of the pricked balloon about them’,39 yet the audience beyond immediate acquaintances appeared enthralled. Towards the end of November, with his rising literary stock trading on the established credential as nephew of Wilde, Cravan was invited to speak to the literary Cercle de la Biche, which met regularly at 37 rue des Martyrs in Montmartre.40 Advance notice of the meeting was given in Gil Blas,41 and what the assembled la Biche audience eventually sat through that evening was a stream of Cravan’s pronouncements on art and literature that would struggle to amount to any coherent whole, ‘spouting so many platitudes’ as Cendrars recalled.42 Expressing his contempt for artists and demanding the audience’s silence before a fanfare for what he was about to say, Cravan lamented that death from cholera at the age of thirty (in order to forestall their own creative decline and dereliction) was not prerequisite of all great poets; he loudly denounced Marinetti’s annual investment in artistic pursuits (which, in order to emphasise the point, Cravan estimated to be in the region of 100,000 francs); and, in summation for Gil Blas, André Salmon provocatively posed Cravan as ranking alongside Alfred Jarry for the quality of his literary aggression, his absurdity and the impact of his maturing public address.43 Conférencier Cravan was evidently finding his stride and, for the months following 1 March 1914, the background to his public, publicised and published activity was the annual salon of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. The salon was held on the avenue de la Bourdonnais on the Champ de Mars, south of the Eiffel Tower, and housed in temporary structures: the sheds for this exposition have been built on a corner of the Champ de Mars, a site once covered by the Galerie des Maclunes, in which the old Barnum & Bailey circus gave its performances when it came to Paris.44

This would be the final salon after thirty years of annual exhibiting by the Indépendants, thus concluding only at the start of the First World War, and in the wake of the triumph of Cubism during the preceding



‘Life has no solution’ 155

years, the public sensation in 1914 was Orphism. This abstracting strain of Cubism was named Orphism and championed by Apollinaire, and its development had been led by Robert Delaunay since 1912, gaining salon prominence in the works exhibited by him and Sonia Delaunay. Robert exhibited his Hommage à Blériot and Sonia exhibited her Étude de lumière (prismes électriques), the latter taking as its subject the coloured halos of the night, the newly installed electric street globes on boulevard Saint-Michel; the painting was prominently emblazoned with Cendrars’s name across his and Sonia’s collaborative artists’ book La prose du transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France: Right at the entrance may be seen the works of the ‘simultanists’, Robert Delaunay, his wife, Sonia Delaunay, and P. H. Bruce, an American. ‘In this manner’, remarked an Independent, ‘the Salon at once marks its significance and one knows one is not at the Louvre.’45

The two lesser exhibiting Orphists, both Americans, were Patrick Henry Bruce, progressing into his engaging post-Cubist style,46 and Arthur Burdett Frost, Jr., whose works instance an early American colour abstraction; both Americans had developed their work closely in relation to the Delaunays in this period, and both had attended the Académie Matisse. In the meantime the private sensation at the salon for Apollinaire was the three exhibited canvases by Giorgio de Chirico, the qualities of which Apollinaire had made ‘marvellously prophetic and surely unpremeditated’ identification,47 to his enduring credit: ‘To depict the fatal character of modern things this painter uses that most modern source of energy – surprise.’48 And as a distraction on that blooming St David’s Day of Paris in the spring, at the opening of the 1914 Salon des Indépendants, Cravan ‘took a position at a café table near the Salon and read aloud excerpts from the magazine as the persons named passed’.49 The excerpts were from his devastating review in Maintenant no. 4, ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’, which comprised the entire content of the first edition of the March–April numéro spécial; and the persons named were that year’s exhibiting artists, singled out individually for rude and crude insult. The review ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’ exercises Cravan’s strategy and defines his philosophical proximity to the Parisian cultural milieu he was a part of. We should properly register ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’ as Cravan’s opportunity taken publicly less to write constructive art criticism than to pillory, insult and summarily dismiss his close as well as fringe Parisian acquaintances, to affirm in print a declared view on and his ‘profound disgust with painting that I shall carry away from the show, a sentiment which in most cases can not be

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The fictions of Arthur Cravan

developed enough’,50 and to continue in the tradition of Félix Fénéon’s ‘Balade chez les artisses indépendants’ of 1893.51 The self-interrogative style he adopts means that, as is true of the self-reflection in ‘Oscar Wilde est vivant!’ in the previous Maintenant, there is much for us to recover from the review as we address the Cravan assemblage. If he is disgusted by painting, why then devote eighteen pages to review an exhibition of paintings? It’s quite simple: if I write, it is to infuriate my colleagues; to get myself talked about and to make a name for myself. A name helps you succeed with women and in business. If I were as famous as [the critic and member of the Académie] Paul Bourget, I’d show myself in the Follies every night in a fig leaf and I assure you that I’d have a good box-office. Moreover, my pen may give me the advantage of passing for a connoisseur, which in the eyes of the crowd is something enviable, for it is almost certain that no more than two intelligent people will attend the Salon. With such intellectual readers as mine, I am obliged to give one more explanation and to say that I consider a man intelligent only when his intelligence has a temperament, since a really intelligent man resembles millions of really intelligent men. Therefore, as far as I am concerned, a man of subtlety or refinement is almost always nothing but an idiot.52

What Cravan presented was even less discriminate than it at first appeared; his polemic targeted the exhibiting artists, yes, but potentially also anyone who harboured some sense of their own refined culture, and his insulting invective was nothing if not inclusive. In very general terms, the popular account of Cravan’s critical assault is summed up in one of the documented glimpses of him in ‘bohemian’ Nina Hamnett’s reminiscences, Laughing Torso (1932), of the day she visited the 1914 salon: This was the year that Arthur Cravan – the nephew of Oscar Wilde’s wife – edited a paper called Maintenant, and wrote a criticism of the Indépendants. He stood outside and sold it himself for thirty centimes. He was at one time a champion boxer and it tickled the French, who wrote columns about the ‘ex-champion of France’ who sold art criticisms outside the ‘Exposition des Indépendants’. The criticism was very funny and a great deal of it very true. He criticized celebrated female artists’ figures and appearance rather than their talents. Of one lady he criticized her legs, which he did not approve of. Her lover, a distinguished critic, took exception to this and challenged him to a duel.53

Hamnett’s is a remote reference, barely touching the aleatory manifesting of Cravan’s review, and is blissfully removed from its immediate consequences. Indeed, even the retrospective accounts given by persons we might consider ‘insiders’ can strike us initially as failing to



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register anything greater than Cravan’s provocative blague. Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, who only became acquainted with Cravan and Renée two years later in Spain, subsequently wrote in retrospective and ­legendising prose: The article devoted to the Independent Exhibition in Paris in 1914 made him famous, and unleashed a tempest of protests. He attacked the most outstanding names. The women painters, no less than the men, were the object of his insolent commentaries, which were all the more irritating as they were characterized by an irresistible verve and drollery. And although everybody said it was outrageous, they could hardly control their chuckles.54

Cravan, who imagined the tented salon as more of a circus ‘set up by some Barnum’ than an art exhibition, waded his way through the artists, naming each in mercenary fashion (‘if I mention a number of names, it is solely for reasons of guile, as the only way of selling my magazine’), and submitting his verdicts, ranging from instant dismissals (‘Deltombe, what a prick!’) to frank admissions of ignorance (‘Szaman Mondszain, it seems that I once got drunk with this artist … this forgotten companion has asked my wife to speak of him … I couldn’t find his canvas: he’s lucky’), to more considered but no less crushing accounts.55 First in line was Henri Hayden, Renée’s long-time admirer, who had actually painted Cravan’s portrait about 1912,56 and whose exhibited work at the salon was his large-scale Les joueurs d’échecs. The ‘suffocating manufacture’ of Hayden’s painting proved its fundamental flaw, in the opoinion of Cravan the critic, the entire ‘muddy’ and ‘cerebral’ composition suffering as a consequence where Hayden ‘has not seen the globe, for he has at least ten paintings on his canvas’. These considered comments come in advance of Cravan’s more constructive criticism and ‘[a] bit of good advice: take a few pills and purge your spirit; do a lot of fucking or better still go into rigorous training’.57 The observations on the work of Félix Tobeen are decidedly and perhaps revealingly noncommittal: ‘Ah, ah! Hum … hum!! Poor old Tobeen! (I don’t know you but that doesn’t matter) … There is something in your painting (that’s nice) … Go and run in the fields, gallop across the plains like a horse.’ Cravan advocates a far more direct and physical encounter, wholly denouncing what he considers the stifling intellectualisation of art: [I]n my opinion the first requirement for an artist is to know how to swim. I also feel that art, in the mysterious state corresponding to form in a wrestler, is situated more in the guts than in the brain, and that is why it exasperates me when, in the presence of a painting, I evoke the man and all I see is the head. Where are the legs, the spleen and the liver? … [G]enius is but an extraordinary manifestation of the body.58

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This is not philosophy, but it makes a philosophical point. Nietzsche famously deliberated consciousness to be an effect of the body; we might now substitute the foundational sense of ‘genius’ for ‘soul’ in Zarathustra’s address on the ‘despisers’ of the body, and the assertion that ‘body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body’.59 Nouvelle edition augmentée Accompanying the critical dismissals in ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’ are some considered accounts, moderated by liberal insults for the most exposed targets as Cravan lines them up. Discussing the work of the Section d’Or painter Roger de la Fresnaye, for example, Apollinaire takes a glancing blow as art critic following his description of de la Fresnaye as a ‘disciple of Delaunay’;60 it has been suggested that ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’ constitutes an indirect but sustained attack on Apollinaire,61 the ‘distinguished critic’ to whom Hamnett referred. Apollinaire was notoriously sensitive at any slight,62 and took umbrage at Cravan’s casual reference to him in Maintenant as ‘the Jew [juif] Apollinaire’63 and in aligning him with the man of letters Catulle Mendès (who was of Jewish heritage and, incidentally, a famous denouncer of Oscar Wilde; Mendès died in Paris in 1909).64 Additionally, Apollinaire found himself compelled in response to Cravan’s review to defend the honour of his still recent amour Marie Laurencin, another of the exhibiting artists at the salon who had been singled out for crudely gendered insult: Now there’s one who needs to have her skirts lifted up and to get a sound [et qu’on lui mette une grosse] … some place, to teach her that art isn’t a little pose in front of the mirror. Oh! My dear! (keep your trap shut!) Painting is walking, running, drinking, eating and fulfilling your natural functions [et faire ses besoins]. You can say I’m disgusting, but that’s just what it is.65

Laurencin was one of several female artists subjected to wholly unmodified gendering by Cravan: Suzanne Valadon, ‘vieille salope!’; Hanna Koschinski, ‘très Kochonski’; Alice Bailly, ‘I was expecting something horrible, because … [she] has never been married’;66 and Sonia Delaunay, who was at the receiving end of the most coarse treatment, ‘I do not say that I shall not fornicate some day with Madame Delaunay, because … it would give me a cruel satisfaction to debauch a kindergarten teacher’ (Cravan’s implication was that her ward, of course, was the child-like Robert Delaunay).67 The admirable Parisian



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art dealer Berthe Weill responded specifically to Cravan’s woefully processed comments, receiving him at her gallery as l’insulteur des femmes and roundly scolding him for his profound lack of respect in the public pronouncements that he made.68 Meanwhile, it was not unknown for Apollinaire to declare challenges if he considered that his own (and sometimes others’) honour had been offended: Fernande Olivier recalls one such early incident at which ‘Apollinaire’s courage was entirely superficial, but he was all puffed up with a sense of his own importance, and this served to disguise his terror’, and how certain cost implications of duelling eventually ‘caused Guillaume to reflect on the financial risks involved if ever he were to embark on another duel. He never did’.69 Both Hamnett and Buffet-Picabia indicate that Apollinaire did challenge Cravan to a duel, directly in noble defence of Laurencin’s honour, though what is reliably documented for us as a consequence of the review is yet another French farce. During the first week of distribution of Maintenant no. 4, Apollinaire’s agitation arising from the juif affair was such that he commissioned two intermediaries to secure Cravan’s formal apology. Together as signatories, they duly published their correspondence dated 7 March 1914 in that same week’s Journal des débats politiques et littéraires. Having drawn Cravan’s attention to the fact that Apollinaire was not a Jew, the intermediaries Jérôme Tharaud and Claude Chéreau obtained the following statement: ‘I declare that, contrary to what I have asserted in my magazine Maintenant, Monsieur Guillaume Apollinaire is not a Jew, but in fact a Roman Catholic.’ The statement was signed by Cravan, and the minutes conclude: Our friend Guillaume Apollinaire has accepted this correction. We have acknowledged receipt of Monsieur Cravan’s letter, as agreed between us, and consign in this record to be published that the incident is now closed.70

Apollinaire’s Les soirées de Paris no. 22, published within the week on 15 March 1914 (and including Apollinaire’s own review ‘30ème Salon des Indépendants’), carried in its ‘Chronique’ section the letters exchanged between Cravan and the intermediaries, signalling that the juif affair was indeed resolved as far as he was concerned.71 In the interests of Maintenant, however, there was plenty more to exploit, and issue no. 4 was quickly reissued as the nouvelle edition augmentée, augmented thus by the addendum which was Cravan’s own account and parodic version of the letter first cited by Tharaud and Chéreau. Cravan reported:

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Following my article ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’, I am given to understand that several people have been offended, including le juif Apollinaire who was insulted by my reference to him as a Jew. He commissioned his seconds to visit me, and what follows is the formal outcome of their mediation. … ‘Though Apollinaire wields an impressive weapon, he does not fill me with fear yet, through the absence of any self-opining on my part, I will happily make any required concession to anyone who asks if it helps me get by; and I declare that, contrary to what I have asserted in my magazine Maintenant, Monsieur Guillaume Apollinaire is not a Jew, but in fact a Roman Catholic. In order to pre-empt any future misunderstanding, I should add that Monsieur Apollinaire has the girth more of a rhinoceros than of a giraffe, the head more of a tapir than of a lion and the beak more of a scavenging vulture than of a heron. ‘To clarify one other outstanding matter, I will take this opportunity to correct a potentially misleading comment in my review. Where I stated of Marie Laurencin, “Now there’s one who needs to have her skirts lifted up [qu’on lui relève les jupes] and to get a sound … some place”, I meant to say, “Now there’s a con who needs to have her skirts [con lui relève les jupes] lifted up and to get a sound astronomy in the Variety Theatre”.’ Le juif Guillaume Apollinaire has accepted this correction. We have acknowledged receipt of Monsieur Cravan’s letter, as agreed between us, and consign in this record to be published that the incident is now closed.72

The minutes are falsely undersigned by Chéreau (artist) and Tharaud (Homme de lettres, Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur), and by Cravan (industrialist, sailor in the Pacific, muleteer, orange-picker in California, snake charmer, hotel thief, nephew of Oscar Wilde, logger in the great forests, former French boxing champion, grandson to the Queen’s Chancellor, Berlin automobile chauffeur, Gentleman-Cambrioleur, etc. etc.)73 – rendering for the first time in print, therefore, what would become Cravan’s legendised roll-call. Delaunay vs Cravan Cravan’s reneging in his nouvelle edition augmentée deliberately exploited an incident that others considered resolved and, if anything, made it worse for his targets. It was an opportunity he took to restate the juif slight (most reprehensible to us in its reduction to crude stereotyping) and, to Cravan’s clear delight, an opportunity to s­ ubstitute con for qu’on (twice) in the case of Laurencin. There was much more left unresolved, inevitably, as far as the anger of named individuals in



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‘L’exposition des Indépendants’ was concerned, and none had greater cause for outrage than Robert Delaunay, for whom (along with, explicitly albeit indirectly, Sonia Delaunay) Cravan reserved the lion’s share of rude insult. By the time of the salon, relations between Cravan and the Delaunays were already strained, as the blagueur declared with his opening salvo: Robert Delaunay, I am obliged to take certain precautions before speaking of him. We have had a fight, and I don’t want either him or anyone else to think that my criticism has been influenced by this fact. I do not concern myself with personal hatreds or friendships. This is a great virtue which at the present time, when sincere criticism is pretty much non-existent, constitutes an excellent and perhaps quite profitable investment. If I speak a good deal of the man and certain details shock you, I assure you that this is all perfectly natural, because it is my way of looking at things.74

The events and circumstances of the sparsely documented ‘fight’ are recoverable from the run-up to the March salon. On the evening of Thursday, 19 February 1914, and into the small hours of the following day, having rolled in from La Closerie des Lilas to the Bal Bullier, the alcohol-fuelled Cravan, it was reported, upbraided Delaunay and announced he was going to beat him up, throwing himself with some calamity at the great Orphic Cubist. The order of assault is reversed in the account given in Sonia Delaunay’s biography, which describes a rapid descent: [T]he Delaunays were at their table with a bearded Italian painter named Ricciotto Canudo when, at the nearby bar, Cravan began to make snide remarks intended to be overheard by Robert. When Robert had had enough, he jumped up and shouted at Arthur. At one point, the 220-pound [Cravan] … landed a punch at Robert. He slumped down, Arthur on top of him.75

The uglier turn of events, however, came when Madame Delaunay stepped in to save her husband and, despite the efforts of those nearby to deflect Cravan’s flailing arm, she found herself at the rough end of the poet-boxer’s alleged ‘blow’: Sonia went to her husband’s rescue, valiantly hammering her fists at Arthur, who got up, insulting his female attacker. Canudo grabbed Sonia from behind and lifted her out of harm’s way.76

A retrospective report published one year after the incident adds to the drama: [T]he beautiful Mme Delaunay, who wears cubistic gowns designed by her husband, had no sooner been felled to the floor of the café by the

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‘blow’ – the word blow is disputed, the Delaunays insisting upon that term, while Cravan solemnly asserts that he put out his hand merely to push – than the cables were hot with the affair.77

In the aftermath, as sobriety set in and as Friday dawned, Cravan incriminated himself by scribbling a note of apology for hitting Madame Delaunay, an act that he described as ‘unintentional and regrettable’ – but a de facto admission, however, which would have consequences. Cravan’s opening cautionary in ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’ was basic proviso for what came next, a ‘review’ in name only by the boxer who enjoyed ‘the impunity which his six feet in height and his athletic shoulders conferred upon him’:78 M. Delaunay has a face like an inflamed pig or a high-class coachman: with a mug like that he might have aspired to paint like a brute … Probably I exaggerate when I say that there was something admirable about Delaunay’s extraordinary appearance. Physically he’s a flabby cheese: he runs with difficulty, and Robert has some trouble throwing a pebble thirty yards. In spite of everything … he had his phiz in his favour: that face of a vulgarity so provocative that it gives you the impression of a red fart.79

This undoubtedly works as far as prodding rudeness goes. But, in further raising the personal stakes, Cravan sets upon what he brands as Delaunay’s artistic impotence and pseudo-intellectuality, in simultan­ eously coarse chauvinistic derision and defamation of Madame Delaunay herself: Unfortunately for him … he married a Russian, yes, Virgin Mother! a Russian woman, but a Russian woman to whom he’s afraid to be unfaithful. For my part, I should rather practice indecency with a professor of philosophy at the Collège de France – Monsieur Bergson for instance – than to go to bed with most Russian women …80

Then, barely pausing, in systematic dismissal of the so-called objective science of non-objective painting in which Delaunay was so heavily invested: Before he met his wife, Robert was an ass; he had perhaps all the qualities of an ass: he brayed, he liked thistles, he liked to roll in the grass, and he looked with great stupefied eyes upon the world that is so beautiful, without giving any thought to whether it was modern or ancient … Since he has been with his Russian, he knows that the Eiffel Tower, the telephone, automobiles, airplanes are modern things. Well, it did this big fathead no end of harm to learn so much, not that knowledge can be injurious to an artist, but an ass is an ass and to have temperament is to



‘Life has no solution’ 163 imitate oneself. What I see in Delaunay is therefore a lack of temperament …81

Cravan is equally cordial to Sonia, who is an in-tel-lec-tu-al, although she knows even less than I do, which is saying a good deal, [she] has crammed his head full of principles which are not even extravagant but simply eccentric. Robert has taken a lesson in geometry, one in physics, and another in astronomy, and he has looked at the moon through a telescope; he has become a phony scholar. His futurism … has a great quality of effrontery – like his phiz – although his painting suffers from haste to be first at any cost.82

There is no question that Robert Delaunay came off worse than anyone else in ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’. The collective response by the Delaunays and everyone else is not recorded anywhere in detail save for third-hand accounts in newspaper reports of the aftermath. The Chicago Daily Tribune, for instance, reported that the offence taken at the ‘unadorned French’ of Cravan’s review brought it to the attention of the police; there were those, however, who would have taken action without waiting for legal opprobrium, and though Cravan’s physical advantage ‘prevented an attack singly … that night [on the opening day of the salon] committees were formed all over the quarter to decide on drastic action against him and the magazine’.83 Cravan had gone too far, as Buffet-Picabia recalled many years later, but considered that there was no greater virtue in his victims’ response: Those who were insulted, it must be said, did not cut a very brilliant figure … when they made a little group of ten or twelve – union makes strength – and waited for him before the Independent Gallery, where he had come to sell copies of his review, like a news-vender. The encounter ended at the police station, not to Cravan’s advantage. Apollinaire, who loved duels, could not let this opportunity go by to send his seconds to the brazen offender of Marie Laurencin. Cravan made obviously hypocritical excuses and everything was alright again.84

‘La Very Boxe’ It was in that first week of the Salon des Indépendants that Cravan was publicised to appear at the cabaret artistique Les Noctambules on rue Champollion, set back from boulevard Saint-Michel, in the Sorbonne district. Les Noctambules had been a variety venue since the end of the nineteenth century, its interior an intimate stage for a range of declamations and revue performances.85 So, scheduled for nine in the evening of 6 March 1914, the billing announced ticketed entry for presentation

9  Eugène Atget, Cabaret les Noctambules, ancien hôtel d’Harcourt, 5 et 7 rue Champollion, 5ème arrondissement, Paris.



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of the fourteenth Poets’ Friday, to feature the all-dancing, all-boxing conférencier Cravan. Cravan wrote the promotional copy that appeared in Gil Blas, assuming to make his entry as ‘the only authentic nephew of Oscar Wilde, prince of boxing and letters, directeur of Maintenant, the one and only Arthur Cravan’, hyped to box like Carlotta Zambelli (prima ballerina at the Paris Opera) and dance like the heavyweight boxer Joe Jeannette. Cravan described his own lecture as something to be delivered as a sensational punch in the face to his sympathetic public, before exploding into such laughter as had not been heard since the opening day of the salon,86 and the evening scheduled with Cravan’s old boxing instructor Fernand Cuny as honorary ‘referee’. The headline for the news item in the Chicago Daily Tribune later in the month, however, hints at what happened next: ‘Wilde’s Nephew Disappears’: Arthur Lloyd … who, under the name of Cravan, edits a magazine entitled Maintenant … has disappeared. Lloyd was a famous character in the Latin quarter, where he also fills the role as painter, musician, dancer and pugilist, the last skilfulness making him a sort of quarter terror especially as he stands six feet high and when in form weighs well over 200 pounds.87

The programme organiser at Les Noctambules, the chanteur Élias Cohen, filled the vacated billing for the evening with the crooner Henri Dickson as a last-minute stand-in.88 For Cuny, it was a no-contest; it is speculated that Cravan absented himself at least partly in order to douse the inflamed reaction to ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’, and took his own action in reflection.89 The Delaunay–Cravan dispute, meanwhile, ostensibly the consequence of the February brawl at the Bal Bullier but carrying all of the umbrage at the March–April salon review, came to a head in the Paris correctional court before witnesses and journalists, in late May. Following the brawl, the Delaunays had made capital of Cravan’s review, taking it ‘to the police station with a complaint and got themselves a lawyer … [and to] prove malice aforethought, they gave their lawyer clippings from Maintenant of Cravan’s printed jibes’.90 Cravan, perhaps underestimating the seriousness of legal proceedings, waived representation and chose to defend himself in court. The prosecution cited ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’ as admissible evidence, although in the court’s view its content did not amount to indecency despite it being ruled that, by the signature of Arthur Cravan and in typical style, the accused has published an article that, far from respecting and critically assessing the work of the individual salon exhibitors, has descended on every page into crude, obscene and cynical comment.91

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In addition to clippings from Maintenant, incriminating evidence was submitted in the form of Cravan’s scribbled note of apology to Madame Delaunay – claimed by him as an act of gallantry, but which defence the court dismissed because its author was the same who had then gone on to write hardly gallant comments in Maintenant. The court record, however, gives what is as accurate an account as we could wish for of the accused in the dock with the case mounted for his defence: Smiling, M. Cravan stated, ‘My journalistic style was, in fact, nothing more than Rabelaisian. Please understand that I am the grandson of the Queen’s Chancellor of England, and it would be beyond reproach for me to offend any woman’ …92

It was all to no avail, however. In New York, The Sun subsequently reported: In the first action brought by Delaunay, Cravan, who is a heavyweight gentleman boxer of renown, a nephew of Oscar Wilde, a poet and an art critic who prides himself upon his frank, direct methods – it was a bit of frank art criticism that started the initial row – acted as his own lawyer and lost his case. In the retrial … it was his intention to have a real lawyer.93

The court’s first summary judgment, having found the defendant guilty, was to issue a sentence of eight days in prison plus damages,94 thus prompting Cravan to appeal and contract ‘a real lawyer’. Legal professional by day, writer and bibliophile by night, Raymond Hesse was named as Cravan’s lawyer in Gil Blas in early June. A petition circulated, the ‘Liste de sympathie en faveur d’Arthur Cravan’,95 to rally the support of over seventy signatories of varying prominence in the Paris of letters. Of note among the signatories is Ricciotto Canudo, poet, writer, witness to the fight at the Bal Bullier in February and, additionally, avant-garde magazine publisher and film theoretician;96 notable also is the signature of the anarchist, opium addict, anticlerical polemicist and satirical poet Laurent Tailhade, who had himself once been imprisoned for his published comments.97 There was broad sympathy for Cravan’s predicament within artistic circles, and some irritation that the Delaunays had taken matters to an unnecessary extreme; Cendrars felt distinctly uncomfortable with Sonia Delaunay’s ‘tone of insolent triumph’ in recounting the day at the Paris correctional court,98 and Gil Blas hoisted its colours to declare: We sincerely wish that Monsieur Cravan will be acquitted on appeal. We are informed that artists and writers of all persuasions have lent their



‘Life has no solution’ 167 name in his support. Such solidarity comes as no surprise; it is customary in our country.99

The ‘Liste de sympathie’ is ground for Mina Loy’s much later retelling of the story and eventual acquittal of the main actor, that ‘[w]hen the police arrested him, the people he had beaten up insisted that the police set him at liberty, because, they said, “C’est Cravan et il est si sympathique.” ’100 There were inevitably financial consequences to any formal legal representation, and Cravan had to muster means in fund-raising ‘to defray the legal expenses of his appeal against his imprisonment sentence for libel’.101 By the end of the month, notices were posted for a bénéfice event to be held on the evening of Sunday, 5 July 1914, at the Salle des Sociétés Savantes at 8 rue Danton, between boulevard Saint-Germain and the Seine.102 To accompany Cravan’s publicised ‘critique brutal’ with the promise of ‘conférenciera, dansera, boxera’ and ‘modern fashionable dances’,103 Renée would be present (publicised as ‘Renée Cravan’ above billing of her demonstration of fighting skills) along with the less specific ‘further attractions’. One of the signatories of the ‘Liste de sympathie’, the future Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Duranty, distributed yellow flyers among revellers at the Bullier; ‘[t]he purpose of the benefit was avowed in handbills that were distributed about town. Arthur Cravan, “le critique brutal”, would “speak, box and dance” ’: A novelty was promised, a new boxing dance, ‘La Very Boxe’, to be danced by Mr Cravan with the assistance of the sculptor Mac Adams. ‘Negres’, which are more of a treat to Parisians than to us [Americans], were also promised. One could pay various sums according as one wished to be placed near the door or near the stage.104

So, lining up alongside Cravan and Renée as ‘further attractions’, ‘autres numéros excentriques’, were the New York sculptor Edgar MacAdams (‘Mac Adames’) and Edward May, cousin (by marriage) to the American president.105 MacAdams was another artist-pugilist, described as ‘the lightweight-middleweight champion of the Latin Quarter’,106 and similarly Edward May, a young Princeton graduate and cousin to Mrs Woodrow Wilson, who had ‘reached Paris, walking from the Duchy of Luxembourg, and is now resting. He is very popular in the Latin Quarter.’107 Edward May gravitated towards life in the ring and was reported as ‘existing in Paris in a state of penniless vagabondage … seeking an engagement to give pugilistic exhibitions in cabarets’.108 And so they all took their places on that evening in early July for what reporters dubbed ‘a futurist lecture’ in front of a large if ‘dingily

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­studentish’ audience,109 an occasion recorded in the anglophone press as follows: Mr Cravan, a clean-shaved, tall young man, appeared on the stage dressed in black trousers and dancing pumps, with a white flannel shirt, open at the throat. He was girded with a scarlet sash. He began his ‘lecture’ by firing a pistol several times, and continued by talking, dancing, and boxing with an imaginary opponent, apparently half in joke, half in earnest. The ‘lecture’ was one long eulogy of athletes, thieves, and madmen, interspersed with violent diatribes against society, hurled at the audience. One of those who were present says that the hearers were mostly English and Americans, and seemed to enjoy this style of ‘conference’, which mystified the few Frenchmen present altogether. In the middle of the ‘lecture’ Mr Cravan threw his portfolio at the heads of the people in the first row of the orchestra stalls – a proceeding which only aroused their hilarity. When Mr Cravan had finished a number of persons – presumably his friends – mounted the platform and began dancing and boxing and talking in turn. The performance was altogether a most extraordinary one.110

There is rather less formal reportage in an item written by the American art critic Henry McBride some months later. The review feature ‘What is Happening in the World of Art’ appeared in The Sun of New York in April 1915, and further embellishes the reports of July– August 1914: The ‘entertainment’ which began a trifle late, and only after demonstrations of impatience upon the part of the audience had occurred, instantly assumed the uncertain and nebulous character of the biographical details that Whistler gave to would-be writers of his life.111 It appeared that the programme was to be distinguished not for spirituality but for the quality that we Americans call ‘bluff’. There was a young art student from Idaho, USA, who did truly wonderful things with a rope, there was a pretence at boxing and a pretence at dancing – the young lady who danced slipped awkwardly at the climax of her effort and gave an explanatory scream to the audience to indicate that the faux pas had not been intended. But the chief ‘outrage to our intelligences’ … was the lecture by the hero of the evening, Mr Cravan. The poet and art critic actually appeared before us ‘in a state unbecoming to a — ’ I forget the exact phrase that was once applied to one of the most celebrated of American poets, but there could be no doubt that Mr Cravan in endeavouring to ward off the terrors of a public appearance had overdone the matter and had put the terrors frankly up to us. He carried a pistol and fired a few blank cartridges at the floor and into the wings and then endeavoured to read a long poem he had written. He seemed to be aware that he was not in a condition to be taken seriously, to loathe the condition he found himself in and at the same time to defy



‘Life has no solution’ 169 his public with it. He did not try to bring out the meaning of the verses and gave from time to time burlesqued gestures that were not amusing. The matter of the poem, a gentleman who had seen the manuscript assured me, was not bad, but that of course could not be judged by us. The author spoke with a French that was better than that used by most students, but yet not sufficiently articulated for the purposes of a lecture hall. The Frenchmen present who became more and more mystified as the reader proceeded cried ‘Louder’, ‘Louder’. The students present who seemed to be Cravan’s friends or enemies, it was not easy to decide which, made remarks, and the poet answered back.112

The detail here suggests a frayed and not particularly well-rehearsed evening, which was eclectic to the extent that it brought together generally disparate items, and which somehow managed to make it from start to finish through lively heckling without any significant casualties. The participation of (presumably) Renée in ‘La Very Boxe’ is of especial note, as is the public reading of (presumably) the long poem ‘Des paroles’, and the contribution to the evening by the ‘further attractions’ undoubtedly made this bénéfice an affair of some remark. Despite doubt in advance regarding a fight challenge by Edward May to MacAdams – ‘it is uncertain whether this fight can take place today, MacAdams being engaged in other turns’113 – by the end of the week May’s participation was noted: May gained recognition here [in Paris] a few days ago when he boxed three rounds with three of young Ahear’s [sic] students at their entertainment in the Latin quarter … He is now handicapped in his search for work by his appearance, his features being in a woefully battered condition as the result of his fistic encounters. … ‘I’m having the time of my life,’ he declared.114

Though McBride, writing in The Sun, understood well the nature of the evening’s extraordinary proceedings, and of the role played by blagueur Cravan in turning his audience members into victims, there could be no detracting from the closing verdict: The affair was in fact a complete ‘blague’, decidedly painful to those who are shocked by the ‘dark streak’ that sometimes permeates poets; but all the young Britons and Americans insisted that the evening had been stunning, épatante.115

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‘Language-action’ By the second half of 1914, the variously constituted texts of Arthur Cravan render today’s corpus of reference for his position in the current of avant-gardism. His writings and the process of their production give us the cognitive, affective and ethical orientations according to which we now proceed to construct Cravan in the present. As we construct, we set limits and interrogate processes of change, and the enacting of creative processes then becomes an exercise in creative transformations, ultimately in affirmation of the positive structure of difference. To the extent that Cravan’s writing is experimental, without predetermined results, it functions as the ‘map’ that Deleuze and Guattari describe in its orientation ‘toward an experimentation in contact with the real’.116 This is their concept of the ‘rhizome’ that names the open multiplicity and its movement through change, proceeding ‘from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing’.117 As experimental, then, Cravan’s writing moves in a contrary motion to any assumption that its raw material (language) is a constant and homogeneous system. In all its forms and formal imposture, Cravan’s language and writings are deliberately deployed as what Deleuze and Guattari would call ‘language-action’.118 It, Cravan’s language, is the ‘assemblage’ of its components, made up of discursive and non-discursive elements that function together, simultaneously retaining the open-endedness of a multiplicity and its capacity to change. As general pragmatics, Deleuze and Guattari describe the basic assemblages of language first as ‘a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another’; and, second, as ‘a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies’.119 The concept of the machine and of the machinic articulated by Deleuze specifically allows us to rethink ethics in the context of the process of ‘machinic’ becoming. Rather than thought being advanced and our reactive ethics being formed from a presupposed pre-given unity (man, for example, or ‘Arthur Cravan’, or God), an active ethics now becomes possible in the absence of any presupposed intent or identity residing in the interactive organism working towards a specific end. The machinic process is one of immanence; it is not the production of texts by Cravan, but production for its own continued process, referring to no fixed, complete or unified state. Without subjectivity or an organising centre, a machine is entirely the result of its connections and productions.120 One of the (many) important currents in Deleuze’s



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work, alone and with Guattari, is the idea of deterritorialisation that concerns itself actively with the release of the speaker and of language to course lines of flight beyond previously discerned limits. The machine that Deleuze deliberates is in a constant process of deteritorrialisation and of becoming other than itself; and the correlation is one that I will suggest for Cravan in that, like Cravan, the machine has no home or ground but is what it does. To clarify this much, the distinction will be drawn in Deleuze’s specific use of ‘machinic’ (machinique, machinisme) between the machine (the machinic) and the mechanism (the mechanical). The machine is not made by or for anything, but is entirely its connections; conversely, the mechanism is contained and has a specific function as a closed machine (or a closed identity).121 It is through connections with other machines that the first and all subsequent machines will work;122 moreover, Deleuze’s position is that every aspect of life is machinic, and that life is wholly to the extent that it connects with other machines. My suggestion, then, is that ‘Arthur Cravan’ is entirely his (its) connections, not made by or for anything, and the synchrony of langue contrasts with the diachrony of Cravan’s ‘voice’: [T]he machine of ‘voice’, the speech-machine … [T]he voice is linked to the expression of desire, to the corporeality of the body as machine. Human beings … are caught in the interlocking of machine and structure, as the voice ‘cuts through’ the structural order of langue and founds it – the machine, therefore, comes first. The speaker is the result of this interlocking as signifying sequences criss-cross through the individual, whom they both constitute and tear up …123

Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s explication on the point relates to the complexity of what we today read as ‘Cravan’ arising from machinic connections and production (that is, the process of becoming);124 of ‘Cravan’ as the temporal site of the events called ‘breaks’ as opposed to being characterised by its elements or parts; of ‘Cravan’ as machine and ‘not a piece embedded in a larger organism [the mechanism] … and it [the machine] does not produce subjects’ – Guattari’s point precisely being that in a machine ‘the subject is always elsewhere’.125 There now enters into the lexicon one of the central terms in Deleuze and Guattari’s contestation of the negative and unproductive external organisation of prohibition (which I have elided without comment in discussing the foregoing by Lecercle): desire, and the desiringmachine. Desire in Western metaphysics is often characterised as wanting something without needing it, but the positive definition of desiring-production to emerge with Deleuze and Guattari in L’anti

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Oedipe (1972) initiates critical redress to that limitative tradition of metaphysics, conceptually connecting to the Marxian reading of social production. The effect is affirmation of the production of what we desire, resulting not only from psychical energy (libido) but equally from corporeal energy (labour-power, ‘labido’).126 The unstated proposition that relates to this investment is that if society (or, by reduction, the body) wants something, then it must be good (desire ‘does not “want” revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right … by wanting what it wants’),127 and the resulting definition of desire is machined.128 So ‘desiring-machines’ in L’anti Oedipe (the term subsequently modified to the more neutral ‘assemblages’)129 is developed as a term that emphasises desire as experimental, while desiring-machines in themselves ‘represent nothing, signify nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what is made with them, what they make in themselves’.130 Crucially, the term is also developed as a social force in the relation it establishes to an outside,131 as a result of its formation of connections that enhance the power of bodies. It is in this aspect that political consequence resides, as the state-oppressive inhibiting of machine dynamics through the imposition of structure is interrupted when machines overcome structures: what Lecercle points to emphatically as a revolutionary situation.132 It is this ‘Cravan’, meaning nothing and becoming what we make of it (him), that occupies the ‘revolutionary’ situation. Machinisme Assuming theoretical prescience to the foregoing, my investment in discussion of the ‘machinic’ is prompted at least in part by Cravan’s designation by the Société Havraise d’Études Diverses as part of the literary group ‘les machinistes’ in 1912 (a group of potentially few in number; Cravan may well have been their sole representative on the French literary scene). In 1914, Ernest Florian-Parmentier (pseudonym of the writer Serge Gastein) published his imposing survey of the preceding thirty years in French literature, La littérature & l’époque: histoire de la littérature française de 1885 à nos jours, which credited none other than Cravan as the originator of the term machinisme. Admittedly, though, this is more happy coincidence than prescience in terms of what has been considered of the ‘machinic’ thus far, but assemblages and becoming will inform the present recovery of Cravan as machiniste now in explication of le machinisme. Florian-Parmentier cites Maintenant and quotes a section of Cravan’s poem ‘Hie!’ in his text (amusingly misprinted ‘Hic!’), and aligns machinisme as derivative of



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the more widely deliberated pluralisme in French poetry. It is the detail of La littérature & l’époque that provides a source for the brief survey (brief at three pages in length, compared with the approximately twenty pages summarised from Florian-Parmentier’s 682-page tome) entitled ‘New Tendencies in French Poetry’, written by the Polish-born writer Amelia von Ende and published in the North American semi-monthly literary journal The Dial in October 1914. For her anglophone audience, von Ende decries the ‘appalling procession of “isms”’ and the ‘bewildering abundance of ideas’ in the contemporary French literary scene, but concedes to the few that ‘merit more than passing mention because they are distinctly symptomatic of the general intellectual ferment of our time’.133 Ploughing through effrénéisme, bonisme, druidism, totalisme, patriartisme, philoprésentanéisme, plurisme, simultanéisme, synchronisme and democratisme, von Ende arrives at pluralisme and Arthur Cravan, who, she says, ‘sings the disturbing manifestations of his plural soul’.134 The alignment is with the philosophical pluralisme and its decentring of the subject as encountered in the work of the Belgian writer J.-H. Rosny aîné (pseudonym of R.-H. Boex),135 whose work is today described as striving ‘to remove humankind and human reason, except as localized phenomena, from the center of the evolutionary process’.136 Von Ende suggests that Cravan’s ‘invention’ of the term machinisme is one that has in wider literary discussion been relegated in constant deference to the more ‘euphonious’ term dynamisme. As such, we surmise that what Cravan’s machinisme infers, if it infers anything at all, is summed up in the broadest terms for its opposing dynamism against what was viewed in certain circles as the static ­quality of French poetry at the start of the twentieth century.137 The Balkan passage To configure Cravan’s machinisme of 1912–14 alongside Deleuze and Guattari around 1972 is not unproblematic; it will not simply be based on the coincidence of terms, the use of which in each instance is conceptually and temporally remote. But the alignment does qualify the present reading and placement of Cravan between speech marks: ‘Cravan’ as machine, entirely of its connections; ‘Cravan’ in whose language-action is what he does and, as machine, represents, signifies and means nothing;138 ‘Cravan’ whose texts connect with names and with social impostures in the process of making the machine assemblage visible. As the connections proliferated, during the late spring and summer months of 1914, Cravan advanced the priorities of his July bénéfice at the Salle des Sociétés Savantes in pursuit of further

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fund-raising enterprises, not wholly unrelated to the exploitative interests that were undercurrents throughout his Paris years. In 1914, the Paris assistant to Wythe Williams, New York Times bureau chief and correspondent (and signatory, as already noted, of the ‘Liste de sympathie en faveur d’Arthur Cravan’), was Walter Duranty. Alongside his professional activity, Duranty found time to distribute handbills for Cravan’s bénéfice, and was recalled in June of that year as being something of a ‘scatterbrained young ne’er-do’well … encountered on the terrasse of the Closerie des Lilas’, a ‘courteous but flighty and effervescent little English expatriate, with a faint air of skulduggery about him’. Duranty was a graduate of the University of Cambridge, gifted in language and languages, and enlightened to the extent that he conceded a healthy ‘impermanence’ to his journalistic career. During that summer, he had reportedly entered ‘into dubious cahoots with one Arthur Cravan, a Latin Quarter character’.139 Duranty’s name is in Cravan’s Paris Address Book,140 and his reported involvement with Cravan is central to the weeks leading into the opening salvos of the First World War, as we read in the following personal note by Duranty’s colleague Alexander Woollcott: The plan was to raise a little money by exploiting this pretty fellow [Cravan] as a boxer … With the receipts they would then proceed to Bucharest for a really profitable match. To ensure being profitable these big dreamers planned to introduce Cravan there as Bombardier Wells, and the idea was to leave town before the aggrieved Rumanians discovered their error. Skullduggery indeed.141

‘Bombardier Wells’ was a mercenary appropriation for purely commercial gain. It was the name of the English boxer Bombardier Billy Wells, whose career record of fifty-two fights took him outside the United Kingdom on just four occasions: to North America and to Belgium in 1912–13 (it was in Belgium that he fought, and lost by a knockout to, Georges Carpentier). Wells had recently, in January 1914, knocked out the French boxer Gaston Pigot in a British heavyweight bout held at Cardiff Arms Park, but he did not set foot on French soil until 1917, and then only in a military capacity. An exploitative imposture as ‘Bombardier Wells’ was ripe for Cravan in continental Europe in mid-1914, and the initial part of the plan outlined by Woollcott was the documented Salle des Sociétés Savantes bénéfice. Woollcott proceeded to record, however, that Germany’s declaration of hostilities against France at the start of August 1914 quickly ‘put an end to all that nonsense’.142 But by the outbreak of war, Woollcott had left Paris and was none the wiser regarding what then transpired, as Cravan and variously



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his ‘manager’ and ‘impresario’ Duranty journeyed by train from the French to the Romanian capital and on to the southern Balkans, where they were overtaken by events of history. Interviewed in 1918, Cravan placed himself in Budapest, second capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, towards the end of the July Crisis as the final prelude to the First World War. From Budapest he journeyed to the Serbian capital Belgrade, en route to the Balkans. War was declared by Austria-Hungary against Serbia on 28 July, and the next day saw commencement of the shelling of Belgrade by the Austro-Hungarian forces that eventually took the city late in November. Cravan, then, found himself caught up in events and unable to leave the besieged capital until a temporary ceasefire was called, later recalling how ‘I escaped during a four-hour agreed truce to allow foreign nationals to leave Belgrade.’ From there he journeyed east, ‘I travelled to Rumania, Russia, Odessa and returned south through the Black Sea to Constantinople’, and then south-west from the capital of the late Ottoman Empire (not renamed Istanbul until 1923) and into the cradle of Western civilisation, Athens. There, at the Olympia Theatre on the summer evening of 16 August 1914, the one confirmed boxing engagement of this episode took place. Posters went up to announce ‘for the first time in Athens’ a boxing match to be held between Cravan (billed as the ‘Canadian Boxing Champion’, a claim qualified by a non-­ competitive result in Paris against the Canadian light-heavyweight boxer Irish O’Mara) and the local representative Georges Calafatis (billed equally misleadingly as the ‘Greek Olympic Champion’). Calafatis was the Athens athlete, gymnast and former medical student Giorgos Kalafatis, one of the founders in 1908 of Panathinaikos FC, the football club subsequently coached between 1912 and 1914 by the University of Oxford athlete John Campbell, who introduced club members to fencing and boxing. Cravan would in turn claim that he beat Calafatis in three rounds. And so to conclude the Balkan tour, returning home to Paris along the same route would probably have been too hazardous if not impossible during those first weeks of war salvos, which makes plausible a major homeward detour suggested by Cravan in the 1918 interview. Making for Paris, the route taken went first via the southbound passage from Athens to Cairo, Egypt, and from there north to Brindisi, Italy.143 Assuming also that Cravan’s ‘manager’ was Duranty (speaker of German, one of several lingua francas in the Balkans), then both together arrived back in Paris to conclude an episode described as ‘worthy of Western movies’,144 which Mina Loy would later relay in the myth ‘Colossus’:

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[The war] had broken out when he was in the Balkans on the eve of a lecture tour under the auspices of a manager with whom he could only speak German. Haphazardly – for this manager, I am sure, was about as insolvent as [Cravan] – they got back to France where an excited soldier, hearing them speak the enemy language, was on the point of running [Cravan] through with his bayonette. His scream of ‘sale boche’ was arrested by so obscene a flow of Parisien argot that it assured him he had after all confronted a patriot.145

France was by now at war. The German siege of Longwy, the Iron Gate to Paris, would last throughout August; war had been declared on Austria-Hungary, the Battle of the Frontiers had commenced, and mass military mobilisation was afoot. Cravan dreamt, meanwhile, of his own mobilisation: Only been back … from Bucharest for two days before bumping into the man I was after: the one who would meet all the expenses of a six-month tour. No contract, of course! Not that I gave a damn about that. After all, it wasn’t as if I was about to dump my wife!!! Shit! And you’ll never guess what I had to do: put on exhibition fights under the pseudonym of The Mysterious Sir Arthur Cravan, the world’s shortesthaired poet, Grandson of the Chancellor to the Queen, of course, Oscar Wilde’s Nephew, likewise of course, and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Great Nephew, once again of course (I’m wising up now). The fights were to be something completely new: Tibetan rules, the most scientific known to man and even more terrible than jiu-jitsu – the slightest pressure on a single nerve or tendon, no matter which, and splat! your opponent (who was absolutely not bribed, well maybe a little bit) falls to the ground like a man struck by lightning! If that doesn’t crack you up, how about this: by my reckoning this will really bring the money rolling in and if everything goes according to plan I should make some 50,000 francs out of the deal, which isn’t to be sniffed at. In any event, it was much better than the spiritualism racket that I’d been working.146

This passage from the prosopoème ‘Poète et boxeur’ would not appear in print for several more months, but clearly signals Cravan’s enthused excitement on his return from the Balkan ‘lecture tour’ and at the possibilities of life as a touring boxer. Almost as soon as he had set foot back in Paris in late August, Cravan had to apply for residency approval to stay in France as a foreign national while war mobilisation gathered pace. That was on 28 August, a day of ‘[b]right, clear weather with northeasterly breezes. Temperature at five p.m. 20 degrees centigrade.’147 Charles Inman Barnard, former Paris correspondent for the New York Tribune, noted the meteorological detail in his Paris diary of the first weeks of the war and, on the day Cravan was issued with his



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residency permit, Barnard recorded his own witness to French servicemen of the Aéronautique Militaire mobilising in sapper uniforms at Buc aerodrome: [H]ere, driving a sporting-looking car, is [Georges] Carpentier, whose more familiar costume is a pair of white slips and a pair of four-ounce gloves. For Carpentier has been mobilized, too. Instead of making thousands of dollars this month by his fight with Young Ahearn, and possibly other matches with Bombardier Wells and Gunboat Smith, he, too, is on the pay list of the army at next to nothing a day.148

If Duranty’s plan and Cravan’s imposture as Bombardier Wells continued after their return to Paris, the exploitation was perhaps not yet over; Barnard’s speculation on Wells very probably relates to Cravan’s imposture. Indeed, Cravan’s ongoing multiple others were far from diminished during this period and the time he now spent in Poigny, away from the centre of Paris, as ‘proprietor’ of Galerie Isaac Cravan, for instance, in maintaining social acquaintance with his represented painters. It has been said that Amedeo Modigliani, in the remarkable portraiture that the Italian painter had developed by the mid-1910s, once took Cravan as his subject.149 We might speculate that on the return from Greece and the Balkans, Modigliani’s drawing today titled Tête greque (sic) captures Cravan: the profile, jaw-line and features strongly resemble the photograph on Cravan’s residency permit card of August that year.150 But there is no need to speculate over the inscription dedicating another drawing by Modigliani, titled Portrait of a Poet, to Cravan. The drawing is not of Cravan (this isn’t the fabled portrait, although Cravan may be said to embody much of what the drawing alludes to); the ‘Madame Hastings’ of the upper inscription is the writer Beatrice Hastings, who had first met Modigliani in July 1914; and the portrait itself may depict the painter Frank Burty Haviland, the ostensible ‘poet’ of the title, rendered as flouncy aesthete complete with flower in lapel, reading from the works of louche Byron.151 Maintenant no. 5 While Allied forces faced the Great Retreat from Mons, Cravan took his retreat as ‘un etranger’ to the peace of Poigny. He made good of his time to work on what would be published in the spring of 1915 as the fifth issue of Maintenant. The fifth would also prove to be the final issue. Cravan’s mother, Nellie, responded to the news that he intended to visit her in Lausanne by writing to her elder son Otho in February 1915, speculating that Cravan’s main motive might be financial and that

10  Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait of a Poet (1914–15).



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he was facing a cash shortage. She expressed some apprehension with regard to the unresolved strain on their relationship during Cravan’s Paris years, but any worries that she had quickly disappeared upon his arrival in Lausanne. She wrote: Fabian is full of life, possessing an exuberance of which few are blessed. During his time here he has frequently been the source of joyous amusement for us – he is both articulate and erudite, perceptive and analytical, and it is a pity that the war should happen now just as he is coming to bloom. He is full of ideas … and is most commendably impatient to seize every opportunity, clear in his ambition and dedicated to its pursuit.152

Nellie’s great relief is apparent after years of fretting that her younger son lacked direction and that he would struggle to make his way in the world; his visit was marred only by a severe cold, which meant he could not enjoy as much time in the open air as she hoped he would. Maintenant made eventually its fifth appearance shortly afterwards as the March–April 1915 issue,153 after pause of a year that had been subject to more attrition than usual. The realised promise was of the prosopoème, of which Cravan had spoken in late 1913, and houiaiaia! Maintenant now made its fifth appearance with the same exuberance that Nellie had observed in her son. The verve of the prosopoème ‘Poète et boxeur’ is arresting from the outset. Its opening passages invoke the poet and boxer’s impresario (loosely modelling Duranty),154 who ushers Cravan off on tour from London to Liverpool,155 and thence on a passage to America, with barely a parting glance at Madame Cravan and the bourgeois domestic bliss left behind. At nine pages in length, ‘Poète et boxeur’ ranges base corporeality and lyric air as Cravan surveys his fellow travellers in the train carriage setting recalled from the earliest writings;156 from homoerotic ‘Fuck-fuck! The beat / Of the breeches / In the final / Abdominal / Spasm!’ and heteroerotic ‘Fancy dragging yourself to the porcelain for a jerk off, you bitch! I’ll give you what you’re after, you old slut!’,157 to elevated flights in excess and boundless and sometimes surreal love: On bewitched ottomans With our palmed feet, We shall rest our heavy pectorals And purringly Savour Our tongues superior to oysters And silently fart satin into velvet. As with pasta, banal thoughts Will stuff us like geese,

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The fictions of Arthur Cravan As belly pressed to belly, Stronger than two shoes, Emanating a liverish warmth all the while, Will bathe in their intestinal auroras.158

The reader is introduced to ‘allophage’, Cravan’s neologism, reviving what Amelia von Ende had remarked upon in the poem ‘Hie!’ as she paraphrased Cravan to describe how the poet is ‘[c]onscious of being identical with all things, all human creatures and all animals, he also desires ubiquity and wishes that he could gobble (bâfrer) all the tempting dishes on the world’s menus … a monstrous capacity of imagination!’159 The intended meaning of ‘allophage’, Cravan tells his readers, is ‘someone who tastes and eats other people ideally’,160 through machinic connections the assemblage that is ultimately ‘all things, all men and all animals’.161 Two brief items conclude Maintenant no. 5, both attributed to new ‘contributors’ who make their first and only appearances. The first is the dismissive ‘Critique’ in resignation of the fact that no submissions have been received at the Maintenant editorial office for the purposes of review and, therefore, deferring reviews to the never-tobe-published sixth issue. There is nothing especially remarkable in this, save potentially and provocatively its authorial attribution to ‘Robert Miradique’. The name was already given in the previous Maintenant in the broad wake of the February 1914 altercation between Cravan and the Delaunays at the Bal Bullier – and it would resurface with the modified spelling Miradecque a few years hence.162 According to the manner of appropriating names from his milieu, I will suggest that ‘Robert Miradique’ is a barely muted raspberry blown towards Robert Delaunay himself, intended less to invoke mirifique (‘fabulous’) than to radiate merdique (‘shitesque’);163 the paltry quality that we might anticipate of Miradique’s unrealised critique is directly hinted at in the final two issues of Maintenant. In the 1914 review ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’, Cravan described Sonia Delaunay most disparagingly as ‘an in-tel-lec-tu-al’, having already made summary dismissal of her husband as ‘an ass; he had perhaps all the qualities of an ass: he brayed’.164 What Ralph Manheim’s received English translation cannot easily retain, however, is the rude hee-haw and double entendre of the original French, which renders Madame Delaunay ‘une cé-ré-brâââle’ and Monsieur Delaunay ‘un âne’. Now, in the 1915 ‘Critique’, the readers of Maintenant are exposed to an appalling immaturity in the reaction to ‘les femmes de lettres’. With Delaunay braying like a donkey, ‘bêêêh, bêêêh!’, the sum effect is roundly to deride what Delaunay himself



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presumably considered to be his own sophisticated opinions and views on art. The paratext to confirm Miradique as an appropriation is his ranking as a painter, the producer of a small watercolour in which a rudimentary wagon trundles through verdant countryside, above which crane the long necks of herbivores. This watercolour (reproduced on p. 182) is a child-like rendering that airs no pretention to sophistication, bearing the artist Miradique’s signature in Cravan’s recognisable script. As a document, the watercolour is accompanied with verification by Blaise Cendrars dated 1917, stating that the work ‘is by Robert Miradique, one of the many pseudonyms of Arthur Cravan, whose real name is Gerald Llyod [sic]. I [Cendrars] paid 50 centimes in cash for the work in January 1914.’165 The quality of Robert’s painting, evidently and by intimation, was as poor as his critique.166 The second of the brief items rounding off this issue of Maintenant has a title prescient in retrospect only: ‘Pff’ consists of three aphoristic observations, attributed to the last named contributor to Maintenant, ‘Marie Lowitska’: Pff There is more to commend uncovering mystery in the light than in the dark. Every great artist has the sense of provocation. Idiots fail to see good in beautiful things.167

The aphoristic text, of course, functions in a very direct manner – and we might comment here on the quality of the aphorism that stylistically obtains a critical distinction in the immediacy of its lines of flight but which, in itself, ‘means nothing, signifies nothing, and is no more a signifier than a signified’.168 From that pulsional style and fragmented state (in which Nietzsche comes close to poetry), in his essay ‘Pensée nomade’ (1972) discussing Nietzsche’s use of aphorisms,169 Deleuze reads the means to negotiate resistance to so-called bad conscience in ‘the evolution of spirit’ when confronted with what is felt as ‘nauseating, ignoble, wretched’. The response is laughter in a line of flight that intensifies the nausea and wretchedness, ‘a bit more effort, it’s not disgusting enough; or, on the other hand: it’s astounding because it is disgusting’, and ‘finally, “man begins to become interesting”. This is how Nietzsche considers – how he deals with – what he calls bad conscience.’170 The aphorisms of Marie Lowitska, though they can claim only to relate distantly to what elsewhere we read in soaring Nietzschean flight, are yet immediate and gain proportionately from their points of departure; their attribution to ‘Lowitska’, in the meantime, remains open. The name suggests the painter and illustrator Sonia Lewitska, an active participant in

11  Robert Miradique (Arthur Cravan), untitled (c.1913).



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the School of Paris, Ukrainian by origin (compatriot to Sonia Delaunay, therefore) and a graduate of the atelier of Russian artists on the fringes of which Cravan is said to have moved.171 With her husband, the painter Jean Marchand, Lewitska was an exhibitor at the Salon d’Automne, the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon de la Section d’Or in Paris during the 1910s; the style of her work might actually pose a more convincing candidature than the previously suggested Tobeen for the Archinard imposture in 1914. But, allowing for provocation and a crude gesture of inclusivity, I will speculate that the name ‘Marie Lowitska’ (via Sonia Lewitska), coupled with ‘Miradique’, constitutes a thinly veiled swipe at the holy mother Sonia Delaunay. ‘Marie’, for instance, may be residual to the exclamatory ‘Vierge Marie!’ of ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’,172 while ‘Lowitska’ is homophonetically French slang ‘le vit’ (‘penis’) ahead of the Slavic suffix – and Sonia herself was known as the gallery owner Wilhelm Uhde’s beard before her relationship with ‘effete’ Robert Delaunay.173 And so, I propose we might easily read the last of Lowitska’s aphorisms as verbatim summary dismissal by Sonia Delaunay of Cravan and, whether by approximate accident or design, Robert ‘The Shit’ and Sonia ‘The Penis’ Delaunay together gain distinction by proxy in closing the proceedings of Maintenant.174 Leaving Paris In the wake of publication of the final Maintenant, the Cravan literature, especially in its most concise versions, has repeatedly rendered the adoption of a defiant stance vis-à-vis the war. His posture is characterised as challenging the assumptions of culture and nation, evading impositions and state controls as borders are crossed with apparent impunity and continents devoured seemingly at will. One among several notable dissenters to this bias in the myth is, however, significant. Cravan’s biographer Maria Lluïsa Borràs documents the period 1915–16 and candidly observes that from the outset in Paris, Cravan desperately sought to run away from the encroaching war and its effects. His was not so much the pugilistic defiance of legend or even strident pacifism as the overwhelming sense of anxiety and fear at the prospect of being mobilised.175 In the midst of the rhetoric of war and of his inconstant national identities, Borràs describes Cravan as being plunged into a state of absolute perplexity which became his unrelenting obsessive condition for the next three years.176 Reading second- and third-hand accounts of his movements from the summer into autumn 1915 may not directly document such anxiety, but the anxious apprehensions of others are there for us to read. An extended return to Lausanne and

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the Grandjean family home while the war continued had, it seems, been suggested to his mother either by Cravan (during his May visit to Lausanne) or by Félix Fénéon at the time of the latter’s visit to stay with the Vallottons, close family acquaintances of the Grandjeans, in the Suisse Romande.177 But such an arrangement would hardly be of Nellie’s choosing. Writing to her elder son Otho, Nellie put it bluntly: To have a young man of Fabian’s character and temperament here for an indefinite period is more than I can manage. The thought of accommodating a healthy young man whose only immediate interest is to look to kill time is horribly depressing, and it is therefore impossible to offer unlimited hospitality for idleness … Beyond that, I cannot tolerate listening to his nonsense indefinitely – it is, I should say, tolerable in small doses only … it is always fun to be in his company, but I wouldn’t want to live with him.178

The sightings of Cravan entering into the latter part of 1915, the period of his extended stays in Poigny, are few. At the end of September, the Symbolist poet Rémy de Gourmont died in Paris;179 four days later on 1 October, he was buried at Père Lachaise cemetery following the funeral service at the church of Saint-Thomas d’Aquin.180 In the record of funeral speeches published in the Mercure de France at the start of November, and despite many mourners being prevented from attending because of the war, we are told of a large gathering that took place around the coffin. And almost at the very end of a long list of mourners, there appears the name ‘Arthur Cravan’; thus the poet-boxer’s final public appearance in Paris, at Père Lachaise.181 It is reasonable to suppose that on this occasion Cravan paused before departing the cemetery at Jacob Epstein’s tomb for Oscar Wilde, newly unveiled (by Aleister Crowley) with testicles intact two months earlier. On 25 November, in a letter to Otho, Nellie wrote intriguingly in the third person to note that ‘[y]our friend Avénarius has written to me expressing his decision to go to America’. Perhaps accepting the practical difficulties of life in wartime, Nellie’s resistance in her letter of the previous May had slightly relented by the end of November (still short, however, of issuing an open invitation to stay), and she suggested that both her sons might be better off moving to Switzerland, where ‘[l]ife is no more expensive than in Paris and the impossibility of earning a living in the French capital, and Switzerland is far from the privations of living in a country at war’.182 For his part, Otho had overstayed his summer vacation with Olga well into the autumn at Pollença, Majorca. He did not return to Paris until early November, and he found resources public and personal to be running short there.183 Faced with the untenability of the city’s hard-



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ships, he and Olga chose to quit Paris for the southern French town of Céret, the so-called Mecca of Cubism, which had since 1910–11 drawn the Cubist innovators of Paris and in their wake a broader community of artists. Céret in the cold of autumn and winter, however, was inhospitable and a very different place from the summer retreat that Picasso had famously discovered in 1911. Otho considered his few options, preferring Lausanne; but Olga successfully argued for Barcelona as their next destination. With his brother having crossed the border into Spain, Cravan saw his opportunity too, and Otho made the arrangements that would allow Renée and Cravan to join him in the same apartment block behind the gate at carrer dels Albigesos 10, on the ascent of Carmel hill towards the completed but not yet publicly opened Parc Güell. On 6 December 1915, Cravan was chauffered from France into Spain by his brother, crossing at the border commune of Le Perthus and Els Límits. Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Actual and Virtual’ (1996), in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Eliot Ross Albert (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 148, 149. I pursue the creative potential arising from a Deleuzian theoretical engagement in Dafydd W. Jones, ‘Hans Arp: Resistance and the Philosophy of Virtual Creation’, in Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), pp. 120–51. 2 Arthur Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, trans. adapted from The Soil, 4 (April 1917), in 4DS, p. 49. 3 Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, pp. 49–50. 4 Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, pp. 50–1. 5 Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, p. 51. 6 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), p. 29. 7 Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, pp. 51–2. 8 Deleuze and Guattari’s demonstration of ‘blocks of becoming’ is given in the example of Virginia Woolf, as they discuss in A Thousand Plateaus, she ‘who made all of her life and work a passage, a becoming, all kinds of becomings between ages, sexes, elements, and kingdoms … [In her proso­ poème ‘The Waves’ (1913), Woolf] intermingles seven characters … But each of these characters, with his or her name, its individuality, designates a multiplicity … Each is simultaneously in this multiplicity and at its edge, and crosses over into the others … Each advances like a wave, but on the plane of consistency they are a single abstract Wave whose vibration propagates following a line of flight or deterritorialization traversing the entire plane …’ (p. 252); ‘The plane of consistency contains only haeccities, along intersecting lines … A haecceity has neither beginning nor end,

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origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome’ (p. 263). 9 See e.g. Roger Lloyd Conover, ‘Arthur Cravan: Stances of the Century’, in David Chandler et al. (eds), Boxer: An Anthology of Writings on Boxing and Visual Culture (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996), p. 102. 10 Percival Pollard, Introduction to In Memoriam Oscar Wilde (Greenwich, CT: Literary Collector Press, 1905), pp. 24–5. La Jeunesse was himself frequently rendered in caricature (see http://gallica.bnf.fr/blog/02052017/ presse-et-profils-perdus-ernest-la-jeunesse, accessed 18 March 2018), and was even depicted in a small pen and ink drawing by Picasso. 11 Fernande Olivier, Picasso and his Friends, trans. Jane Miller (New York: Appleton-Century, 1965), p. 110. La Jeunesse had only made Wilde’s acquaintance in his final years as ‘the enfeebled and crushed being’ following incarceration, and this was ground for Gide’s mildly barbed compliment to La Jeunesse as author of ‘the best or rather the only passable article on the great reprobate [Wilde] which any one has had the talent or the courage to write’; André Gide, Oscar Wilde: A Study, trans. Stuart Mason (Oxford: Holywell Press, 1905), p. 21. Sebbag also documents Apollinaire’s 1907 episode revolving around the rebus ‘R n’est là, genèse’; Georges Sebbag, ‘Arthur Cravan, neveu d’Oscar Wilde’, in ACM, pp. 268–9. 12 ACSS, p. 109. Also of note is that La Jeunesse’s oration to Wilde was included to accompany Gide’s ‘Hommage à Oscar Wilde’ (André Gide, ‘Hommage à Oscar Wilde’, in L’ermitage, June 1902) in the small book format In Memoriam Oscar Wilde, published in English in 1905. In Memoriam Oscar Wilde, comprising three essays by André Gide, Ernest La Jeunesse and Franz Blei, was translated and published in English in 1905; Pollard, In Memoriam Oscar Wilde. The more widely disseminated translation by Stuart Mason of Gide’s 1902 tribute to Wilde is the version of Gide cited in the present study. 13 Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, pp. 53–4. 14 Roy Lear, Talentiers: ballades libres (Paris: Bibliothèque d’Art de la Critique, 1899). 15 Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, p. 53. 16 Gide, Oscar Wilde, p. 55. 17 Gide, Oscar Wilde, pp. 58, 84. 18 Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, pp. 55–6. Nellie wrote in Cravan’s source texts on Wilde: ‘Teeth, when revealed, were large, irregular and ugly.’ The Soil, 4 (April 1917), 149. I am minded at this point to invoke Nietzsche’s never-realised ‘Nux et Crux: A Philosophy for Good Teeth’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), third essay, section 11, p. 118, n. 1). 19 Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, pp. 54–5, 57: ‘ “Have you read the pamphlet that André Gide – what an ass – published about you? He has not u ­ nderstood



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that you were mocking him in the parable ending … ‘And this is called the disciple.’ Poor devil, he did not take it as meant for him!” ’ Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, p. 57. 20 Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, p. 58. 21 Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, p. 53. 22 Washington Herald, 4 April 1912. 23 Alexander Woollcott, ‘A Personal Note on Walter Duranty’, in Walter Duranty, Duranty Reports Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1934), p. vii. 24 Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, p. 58. 25 Conover, ‘Arthur Cravan: Stances of the Century’, p. 99. If nothing else, the possibility that Cravan was fathered by Wilde is logistically implausible, although Conover severally documents the restated suggestion in his late twentieth-century texts on Cravan; see Roger Lloyd Conover, Introduction to 4DS, p. 23. 26 ‘Repères biographiques’, in ŒPAL, p. 266. In my own passing comment, Cravan certainly has his mother’s eyes and looks like her, but from the photographic evidence there is no overwhelming similarity in appearance between Cravan and his brother Otho. 27 Washington Herald, 4 April 1912. 28 Dudley Edwards, ‘The Wilde Goose Chase’, American Book Collector, 7/5 (January 1957). 29 Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, p. 59. 30 Cravan, ‘Oscar Wilde Lives!’, pp. 60, 61. Translations vary in tone as well as quality; the coarser version that perhaps more closely tracks Cravan’s crude pitch is given in Arthur Cravan, Works of Arthur Cravan, trans. A. G. O’Meara (Marston Gate: Amazon, 2012), p. 15. Maintenant, 3 (October–November 1913), 27–9, closes with a flourish of advertisements: for Jourdan’s restaurant, where diners ‘can see van Dongen putting food inside his mouth, chewing, digesting and smoking’; for Cluny’s dairy produce on sale five doors down from the recently vacated apartment on rue Saint-Jacques; and for Charles Debray’s mid-October grand wrestling championship at the Nouveau Cirque on rue Saint-Honoré, featuring such exotic-sounding wrestlers as Wuong-Fan-Tzin, Zbysko, Cherpillod and Raoul de Rouen. 31 ‘Oscar Wilde Alive and in Paris, Claims Nephew’, Washington Herald, 2 November 1913. 32 Washington Herald, 2 November 1913. Reference to the Trianon is potentially another sourced from the Wilde texts written down for Cravan by his natural parents; Otho Holland Lloyd’s remarkably detailed recollections of the Wildes’ family home describe, standing against the wall of the front drawing room at 16 Tite Street, ‘a little Louis Seize side-table on which were placed some small “curios”, Japanese, etc., including a gold key said to have been Marie Antoinette’s and to have been the key of the Trianon’. Otho Holland Lloyd, ‘Wilde’s House’, The Soil, 4 (April 1917), 153. 33 La stampa, 4 November 1914.

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34 Robert Ross, letter, 14 December 1900; reproduced in Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, his Life and Confessions (Adelaide: eBooks@Adelaide, University of Adelaide, updated 25 August 2015). 35 ‘No One Found who Saw Wilde Dead’, New York Times, 9 November 1913. 36 ‘Oscar Wilde Alive’, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, New South Wales), 27 December 1913. 37 Windsor and Richmond Gazette, 15 May 1914. 38 Blaise Cendrars, Sky: Memoirs, trans. Nina Rootes (New York: Paragon House, 1992), pp. 198–9. 39 Cendrars, Sky, pp. 198–9. 40 See Ernest Florian-Parmentier, La littérature & l’époque: histoire de la littérature française de 1885 à nos jours, p. 362. 41 Gil Blas, 26 November 1913. 42 Cendrars, Sky, pp. 198–9. 43 André Salmon, ‘Les lettres’, Gil Blas, 30 November 1913. 44 The Sun (New York), 15 March 1914. 45 The Sun (New York), 15 March 1914. 46 Conover has severally referred to a lost portrait of Cravan by Patrick Henry Bruce rendered in geometric abstraction; see Conover, ‘Arthur Cravan: Stances of the Century’, p. 103. 47 Dawn Ades, ‘Les soirées de Paris’, in Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), p. 18. 48 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘30ème Salon des Indépendants’, Les soirées de Paris, 22 (15 March 1914); cited in Ades, ‘Les soirées de Paris’, p. 11. 49 Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 March 1914. 50 Arthur Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’ (1914), trans. Ralph Manheim, in DPP, p. 3. 51 This Fénéon tradition continued at least into 1917 with Robert Coady’s review ‘The Indeps’ in the final issue of The Soil, 5 (July 1917), 202–11. In the context of the poets who praised the painters – ‘I [Cendrars] was Robert Delaunay’s poet (before the war of 1914, each of today’s masters had his own poet: Picasso, Max Jacob; Braque, Pierre Reverdy; Juan Gris, Ricciotto Canudo; Léger, Chagall, Roger de la Fresnaye, Modigliani – excuse me, but it was Blaise Cendrars; and the entire School of Paris, cubists and orphists, Guillaume Apollinaire)’; Cendrars, Sky, p. 197 – we can read Cravan’s review of the 1914 salon as a deliberate exercise in antipraise of the host of fifty-four. 52 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, p. 3. 53 Nina Hamnett, Laughing Torso (London: Constable, 1932), p. 51. 54 Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’ (1938), in DPP, p. 14. 55 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, pp. 4, 10. 56 Henri Hayden, Portrait d’Arthur Cravan (c.1912), oil on canvas, 81.3 × 69.5 cm, collection of Roger Lloyd Conover; reproduced in Roger Lloyd



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Conover, ‘Les noms secrets d’Arthur Cravan’, in Arthur Cravan: poète et boxeur, exhibition catalogue, Galerie 1900–2000, 7 April–5 May 1992 (Paris: Terrain Vague, 1992), p. 9. The portrait is dated 1910 in ŒPAL, but dated 1914 by Borràs in ACSS. 57 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, p. 7. 58 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, p. 7. 59 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, part 1, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York and London: Penguin, 1976), p. 146. 60 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, p. 8. Apollinaire’s original comment on de la Fresnaye was in Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Salon d’Automne’, Les soirées de Paris, November 1913. 61 Bertrand Lacarelle, Arthur Cravan, précipité (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2010), p. 24. 62 Axel Madsen, Sonia Delaunay: Artist of the Lost Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1989), p. 132. 63 Arthur Cravan, ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’, Maintenant, 4 (March– April 1914), 11. Sebbag explicates on this particular contention, in Sebbag, ‘Arthur Cravan, neveu d’Oscar Wilde’, pp. 265–7. 64 The poet Jeanne Mette, last companion of Catulle Mendès, is listed by Cravan among the names in receipt of review copies of Maintenant; see ACM, pp. 46–7. 65 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, p. 12. 66 Cravan, ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’, 9, 10, 11; Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, p. 12. Alice Bailly’s name would reappear not least as a future contributor to Picabia’s Maintenant-inspired 391 published in Zurich; see 391, 8 (February 1919). 67 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, p. 12. 68 Galerie B. Weill was located on rue Taitbout in the 9th arrondissement. See Berthe Weill, Pan! Dans l’oeil! Ou trente ans dans les coulisses de la peinture contemporaine, 1900–1930 (Paris: Libraire Lipschutz, 1933). 69 Olivier, Picasso and his Friends, pp. 111, 112. The financial consideration was partly mitigated by Apollinaire subsequently taking fencing lessons; see Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (London: Jonathan Cape, rev. edn 1969), p. 286. 70 Jérôme Tharaud and Claude Chéreau, ‘Correspondance 7 Mars 1914’, Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, 10 March 1914. 71 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Chronique’, Les soirées de Paris, 22 (15 March 1914). 72 Maintenant, 4, nouvelle edition augmentée (March–April 1914), 19–20. 73 Maintenant, 4, nouvelle edition augmentée (March–April 1914), 19–20. Cravan’s grandfather Horace Lloyd was made Queen’s Counsel in 1868; the perpetuated myth that Cravan was grandson to the Chancellor of Queen

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Victoria can only have arisen from Cravan’s own original mistranslation into French of his grandfather’s position as ‘le chancelier [chancellor] de la reine’ rather than the correct ‘le conseiller [counsel] de la reine’. 74 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, p. 10. 75 Madsen, Sonia Delaunay, p. 132. 76 Madsen, Sonia Delaunay, p. 132. 77 ‘What is Happening in the World of Art’, The Sun (New York), 18 April 1915. 78 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, pp. 14–15. 79 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, pp. 10–12. Aragon affirmed this particular assessment of Delaunay, modified on the colour spectrum, in his hand-written dedication to Tristan Tzara’s copy of ‘Une œuvre, un portrait’ in La nouvelle revue française: ‘And one can clearly see from the portrait that Cravan was right and that this painter was an orange fart.’ Cited in Michel Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, trans. Sharmila Ganguly (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2009), p. 605, n. 62. 80 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, p. 11. 81 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, p. 12. 82 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, p. 12. 83 Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 March 1914. 84 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, pp. 14–15; the reference to Apollinaire’s seconds is, of course, an allusion to the intervention of Tharaud and Chéreau. 85 The interior is rendered distinctly in an early twentieth-century chalk drawing by Georges Leroux, for example, ‘Le chansonnier Legay au cabaret “Les Noctambules” ’ (1906); www.artnet.com/artists/georges-paul-leroux/ le-chansonnier-legay-au-cabaret-les-noctambules-WT8V9UrVlKE1mQh​ 66BGJ7A2 (accessed 14 September 2015). 86 Gil Blas, 6 March 1914. 87 Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 March 1914. 88 Journal de la rive gauche, 16 March 1914. 89 Charting instances of Cravan’s retiring from confrontation range from the local and social to the most elaborate in the case of his flight from the First World War; writing of Cravan’s ‘might’, Mina Loy described how ‘[u]ntil well into his twenties he prowled the earth looking for fights. If ever he retired into a cowardice, it was the cowardice of a poet who desires to conceal himself from action in reflection.’ Mina Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, in LLB, pp. 320–1. Further speculation on Cravan’s absence at Les Noctambules could point to other priorities, such as the opening of the upcoming Archinard exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in ten days’ time. 90 Madsen, Sonia Delaunay, p. 132. 91 Archives de la Ville de Paris, 9ème chambre du tribunal correctionnel de Paris, 20 May 1914; in Bastiaan van der Velden, ‘Chronologie’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 96.



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92 Archives de la Ville de Paris, 20 May 1914, 9ème chambre du tribunal correctionnel de Paris, 20 May 1914; in van der Velden, ‘Chronologie’, 96. 93 The Sun (New York), 18 April 1915. 94 See ‘Diffamation et violences’, Le petit Parisien, 21 May 1914; the court sentence is variously documented as one week in prison; see Madsen, Sonia Delaunay, p. 132. 95 ‘Liste de sympathie’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 263–7. 96 Canudo’s magazine Montjoie! on 18 March 1914 was devoted to André Salmon’s review of the Salon des Indépendants, given advance publicity by the report in The Sun (New York), 15 March 1914. 97 At the risk of aestheticising violence, in response to the anarchist Auguste Vaillaint’s bombing of the Chamber of Deputies in 1893, Tailhade is reported as having declared the words ‘Qu’importe la victim si le geste est beau?’; cited in Mirande Lucien, Eekhoud le rauque (Villeneuve d’Ascq (Nord): Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1999), p. 114. 98 Madsen, Sonia Delaunay, p. 133. 99 Gil Blas, 10 June 1914. 100 Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, p. 317. 101 New York Times, 5 July 1914. 102 The Salle des Sociétés Savantes was located at 8 rue Danton, between boulevard Saint-Germain and the Seine. 103 New York Times, 5 July 1914. 104 The Sun (New York), 18 April 1915. 105 Edgar MacAdams had, two months previously, following an incident at a party at van Dongen’s at the start of May, enlisted Cravan and the painter George Shepherd as his seconds in a duel with Waldemar Georges, art critic for the Paris Journal; rather than this being a fistic encounter (in which MacAdams would have had a clear advantage), the weapons of choice were to be revolvers at five yards (and evidently, then, Cravan had some qualification for his cavalier brandishing of a revolver at his own public lectures). Explanatory notes citing the New York Times (14 May 1914), in Wyndham Lewis’s 1918 novel Tarr, detail the incident: ‘Two artists almost duelled in Paris in 1914 when the New York sculptor Edgar MacAdams struck a blow at Waldemar Georges, Polish-French art critic and future contributor to the second issue of Lewis’s journal The Tyro (1922), knocking him unconscious. Georges’s seconds considered the blow to be too hard to fall under the rules of duelling rather than the purview of the law courts. Georges explained “had Mr MacAdams slapped me or called me names swords and pistols would hav been in order, but he gave me a knockout blow, which is a form of attack that they classify as a ‘coup d’apache’, too violent for gentlemen to settle among themselves.” ’ Wyndham Lewis, Tarr, ed. Scott W. Klein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 320. 106 New York Times, 5 July 1914; see also New York Times, 13 May 1914 and 14 May 1914, reporting the incident on 9 May and its consequences.

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MacAdams’s pugilistic prowess precluded any option that the duel might be a fistic encounter, and he had also previously been convicted of resisting a Paris police officer in 1910, following a dispute at a ball given by the Académie Julien, reported in the New York Times, 7 April 1910. 107 New York Times, 5 July 1914. 108 Washington Herald, 10 July 1914. 109 The Sun (New York), 18 April 1915. 110 ‘A Futurist Lecture’, Straits Times, 8 August 1914. See also Liverpool Echo, July 1914, and ‘Oscar Wilde’s Nephew in Paris’, Auckland Star, 22 August 1914. 111 Such biographical details as famously receded behind the painter James McNeill Whistler’s knowledge gained in the work of a lifetime; see Blu Tirohl, Law for Artists: Copyright, the Obscene and All the Things in Between (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), p. 102. 112 The Sun (New York), 18 April 1915. 113 New York Times, 5 July 1914. 114 Washington Herald, 10 July 1914. The ‘young Ahear’ referred to here is ‘The Brooklyn Dancing Master’, the boxer Young Ahearn, recorded as having fought five times in Paris between November 1913 and March 1914; the three ‘students’ of Ahearn’s that are referred to are Cravan, Renée and MacAdams. 115 The Sun (New York), 18 April 1915. 116 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 12. 117 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 25. See also Robert Hurley, Preface to Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. i. 118 See Ronald Bogue, ‘Deleuze and Literature’, in Daniel W. Smith and Henry Somers-Hall (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 295. 119 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 88. 120 It is in this context, mindful of the reader’s need to image the machinic connections that form the complex organism, that the diachrony of a Heath Robinson drawing is invoked, comprising ‘machines, flows and ruptures, a machine being the negation of its predecessor and being in turn negated by its successor’. Similarly isolated for demonstration, if less elaborately, is the ‘machine’ bicycle, ‘which obviously has no “end” or intention’, and which productively connects to the ‘machine’ human body, ‘[t]he human body becomes a cyclist in connecting with the machine; the cycle becomes a vehicle’. See Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deleuze and Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 181; Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 56. 121 So Brian Massumi, translator into English of Mille plateaux: ‘By “machinic” … [Deleuze and Guattari] mean functioning immanently and pragmatically, by contagion rather than by comparison, unsubordinated either to the laws of resemblance or utility.’ Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to



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Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1992), p. 160, n. 69, pp. 192–3, n. 45; Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, p. 56. Jean-Jacques Lecercle illumines with reference to a distinction arising from Guattari’s work in early collaboration with Deleuze, describing the synchronic (static) mechanism in terms of structure, as different from the diachronic (dynamic) machine, the distinction between diachronic machine and synchronic mechanism that re-emerges to characterise Deleuze and Guattari’s subsequent usage; Lecercle, Deleuze and Language, p. 181. 122 Cf. the phenomenon Dada: ‘a formation; more precisely a constellation, between whose objects (the subsequently named ‘Dadaists’) we observe the relations that make them and the greater object (that is, the constellation itself, ‘Dada’), visible. The observed relations, however, are not engendered by the Dadaists themselves – objects don’t engender relations – but the relations are in some sense a phenomenological effect or emission of the contingencies and emergencies of 1916, the “environment” of early twentieth-century avant-gardism.’ Jones, Dada 1916 in Theory, p. 2. 123 Lecercle, Deleuze and Language, p. 181. 124 This explication arising in commentary on the 1969 essay ‘Machine et structure’ acknowledges Guattari’s intellectual formation as a student of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Lacan ‘the thinker of the human psyche as a machine’, with the essay itself dating from the time of Guattari’s break with Lacan. Félix Guattari, ‘Machine et structure’ (1969), in Psychanalyse et transversitalité (Paris: Maspero, 1972). 125 Guattari, ‘Machine et structure’; cited in Lecercle, Deleuze and Language, p. 181. 126 ‘The truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions. We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that is the historically determined product of desire … There is only desire and the social, and nothing else.’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984), p. 29. 127 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 116. 128 Deleuze and Guattari elaborately describe desiring-machines as ‘chronogeneous machines engaged in their own assembly (montage) … machines in the strict sense, because they proceed by breaks and flows, associated waves and particles, associative flows and partial objects, inducing … polyvocal conjunctions …’. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 286–7. 129 The alternative ‘assemblages’ arose as a result of subjectivist misunderstandings of ‘desiring-machines’ – regrettably so for Deleuze, who referred to the latter as ‘Félix’s fine phrase’. Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues with Claire Parnet, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1987), p. 101.

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130 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 288. 131 Movement towards and the relation to an outside is central to my discussion of Dada language (specifically in the context of simultaneous poetry), e.g. ‘ “L’amiral cherche une maison à louer”: The Counterpoint and Counterpolitics of Language’, in Jones, Dada 1916 in Theory, pp. 152–74: ‘[T]hrough its potential to affect social relations … language rears politically: the introduction of discontinuities and misidentifications into language overthrows the ideological subjection of the monologic; the result is the production of new language orientations. What is now productive is the way in which language can “move toward its extremities or its limits” and demonstrate resistance to the exercise of power.’ (p. 169). 132 Lecercle, Deleuze and Language, p. 181. 133 Amelia von Ende, ‘New Tendencies in French Poetry’, The Dial: A SemiMonthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information, 57 (1 July–16 December 1914) (Chicago: Henry O. Shepard Co., 1914), p. 283. 134 Von Ende, ‘New Tendencies in French Poetry’, p. 284. 135 Rosny aîné is listed by Cravan among the names in receipt of review copies of Maintenant; see ACM, pp. 46–7. 136 George Slusser and Danièle Chatelain, Introduction to J.-H. Rosny aîné, Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind, trans. George Slusser and Danièle Chatelain (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), p. x. 137 Cited in von Ende, ‘New Tendencies in French Poetry’, p. 284. 138 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 288. 139 Woollcott, ‘A Personal Note on Walter Duranty’, pp. vi–viii. 140 Duranty lived at 32 rue Louis-le-Grand, in the 2nd arrondissement. 141 Woollcott, ‘A Personal Note on Walter Duranty’, pp. vi–viii. 142 Woollcott, ‘A Personal Note on Walter Duranty’, p. viii. 143 ACSS, p. 122. 144 Jean-Paul Crespelle, Montmartre vivant (Paris: Hachette, 1964); cited in ‘Repères biographiques’, in ŒPAL, pp. 271–2. 145 Mina Loy, ‘Colossus’, extracts reproduced in Roger Conover, ‘Mina Loy’s “Colossus”: Arthur Cravan Undressed’, in Rudolf E. Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986), p. 113. 146 Arthur Cravan, ‘Poet and Boxer’, trans. Paul Lenti, in 4DS, p. 62. Contextualising Tennyson’s induction here by fictive autobiography into Cravan’s roll-call accords this particular ‘family connection’ a purely publicity function. The projection to late 1918, however, assumes prescience in Tennyson’s blank verse of early 1835, which was eventually developed into the final section of his cycle of twelve narrative poems The Idylls of the King (1859–85), titled ‘The Parting of Arthur’, which it is my conceit to modify as ‘The Parting of Arthur Cravan’: ‘Revolving many memories, till the hull / Look’d one black dot against the verge of dawn, / And on the mere the wailing died away.’



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147 Charles Inman Barnard, Paris War Days: Diary of an American (London: Laurie, 1914), p. 127. 148 Barnard, Paris War Days, pp. 128–9. As a boxer, Carpentier represented the Aéronautique Militaire, being decorated with the Croix de Guerre and Médaille Militaire; Young Ahearn is ‘The Brooklyn Dancing Master’ referred to in the Washington Herald report on the Cravan bénéfice in July 1914. 149 Conover, ‘Arthur Cravan: Stances of the Century’, p. 104. Among Modi­ gliani’s portraiture to emerge from the mid-1910s is the famous 1917–18 portrait of Cendrars, itself counting among the sections devoted to ‘Creative Networks’ and ‘Kindred Spirits’ by the Tate Modern’s Modigliani exhibition, 23 November 2017–2 April 2018. 150 Amedeo Modigliani, Tête greque (1915), crayon and pencil on paper, www.artnet.com/artists/amedeo-modigliani/tete-greque-uyHc_i7Ydb​Xf​ o​vl_0NsjPg2 (accessed 15 December 2015). Within Modigliani’s œuvre, this drawing is very close, in reverse, to the study for and portrait of Frank Burty Haviland, both dated 1914, although the nose profile in Tête greque is distinctly different from Haviland’s; the drawing Les deux orphelines repeats the profile of Tête grecque, see www.modiglianifoundation.org/Les-Deux-Orphelines.html (accessed 15 December 2015). Cravan’s photograph on the residency card presumably dates from (?) two years previously, and is evidently the image on which Hayden’s portrait of Cravan appears to have been based; Henri Hayden, Portrait d’Arthur Cravan (c.1912); reproduced in Arthur Cravan: poète et boxeur, p. 9. 151 Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait of a Poet (1914–15), pencil on tracing paper, Thaw Collection, The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, www. themorgan.org/drawings/item/247235 (accessed 2 September 2015). By happy convolution, this passing reference to Lord Byron refers back to Cravan’s great-grandfather John Lloyd, Stockport scourge of Luddites in 1811–13; Byron’s maiden speech in the House of Lords was an impassioned objection in ‘very violent sentences with a sort of modest impudence’ to the 1812 Frame Breaking Act that would increase the penalties on Luddite action: ‘You may call the people a mob, but do not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people.’ www.luddites200.org.uk/ LordByronspeech.html (accessed 28 March 2018). 152 Nellie to Otho St Clair, 20 February 1915; cited in ACSS, p. 123. 153 Maintenant no. 5 failed, however, to live up either to the schedule or to the promise given in Maintenant no. 4, twelve months previously, which had announced that the fifth issue would appear within a couple of months and include two items in prose (including one titled ‘L’appartement d’Oscar Wilde’ – recognising that there was still plenty left to milk from Cravan’s Wilde source scripts, specifically ‘Wilde’s House’) and a conte-en-vers bawdy narrative in elegant poetry, none of which ever saw the light of day alongside what was eventually published; and the undertaking by

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the directeur of Maintenant, suggesting the upping of a certain ante, to publish dire reviews by one Robert Miradique. 154 Cravan describes the impresario of ‘Poète et boxeur’ as possessing a ‘familiar vulgarity, his veal-stew cheeks which I’d already tasted before, his hair pullulating yellow and vermillion, his beetle-like brain, and, near the right temple, a mole of singular charm as well as the radiating pores of his golden clock … that beastly little bourgeois, the tenderest of arse-holes as ever lived’; Cravan, ‘Poet and Boxer’, pp. 63–5. A description directly of Duranty himself details the following: ‘He wore his hair cropped short in an abbreviated Roman style. His thick-lipped, sensual mouth seemed to have a slightly cynical twist around the corners. The nose was fine-­chiseled but a shade too large, that bit too flat. The only relief in this none-toohandsome face was a pair of clear, gray eyes, slightly hooded, twinkling … At full height, Duranty was no taller than five feet six inches; this as well as the look of youthful idealism he conveyed in his more serious moments made him look a good deal younger than he was. And his lively manner, his outrageous talk, added to the impression’; S. J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Man in Moscow (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 23. 155 Duranty was born in Liverpool, in 1884. 156 See the discussion around the early prose text ‘Spitting American’ in Chapter 3. 157 Cravan, ‘Poet and Boxer’, pp. 65, 66. 158 Cravan, ‘Poet and Boxer’, p. 67. 159 Von Ende, ‘New Tendencies in French Poetry’, p. 284. The original line from ‘Hie!’ in French is ‘Forniquer toutes les femmes et bâfrer tous les plats’; Arthur Cravan, ‘Hie!’, Maintenant, 2 (July 1913), 19. 160 4DS, p. 253, n. 25. 161 Arthur Cravan, ‘Hie!’, trans. Paul Lenti, in 4DS, p. 46. 162 With regard to the Johan Everaers letters; my reference here is to the letter dated 29 September 1917, written in Port Union, Newfoundland, http:// academie23.blogspot.co.uk/2006/08/sur-la-piste-darthur-cravan.html and http://academie23.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/sur-la-piste-darthur-cravan-2. html (both accessed 27 January 2015). 163 I am indebted to Elza Adamowicz for enlightened consideration of the name ‘Miradique’. 164 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, pp. 10–12. 165 Reproduced in Marcel Fleiss, ‘L’ange-gardien d’Arthur Cravan’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 29. The price of 50 centimes paid for the watercolour in January 1914 inflated dramatically in the intervening century; the work was auctioned by Sotheby’s–Paris/Me Binoche et Giquello in 2016 for 37,500 euros. 166 The legacy of Miradique continues in the fictional account of the life of Julien Torma, who, it is said, ‘had been implicated in the murder of a dyspeptic obituarist named Robert Miradique’; Neil Fraser



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Addison, Way Down Below (Laguna Beach, CA: Go Figure Press, 2014). 167 Marie Lowitska, ‘Pff’, Maintenant, 5 (March–April 1915), 12. 168 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, in David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1985), p. 145. 169 Deleuze describes as close a correlation as we could wish for the description of desiring-machines in L’anti-Oedipe: desiring-machines, state Deleuze and Guattari, ‘represent nothing, signify nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what is made with them, what they make in themselves’. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 288. 170 Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, p. 147. 171 Roger L. Conover, Introduction to LLB, p. l. 172 Arthur Cravan, ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’, Maintenant, 4 (March– April 1914), 17. This ‘Marie’ may also obliquely reference Marie Laurencin. 173 Cravan, ‘Exhibition at the Independents’, pp. 10–12. 174 I am indebted again to Elza Adamowicz for expanding my vocaubulary with regard to ‘Lewitska’/‘Lowitska’. 175 ACSS, pp. 124–5. Willard Bohn also notes how Cravan was ‘anxious to escape hostilities’; Willard Bohn, ‘Chasing Butterflies with Arthur Cravan’, in Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada, p. 121. Further on the problematic invocation of pacifism in relation to Cravan, see Conclusion, n. 54, below. 176 ACSS, p. 125. 177 On this occasion, Fénéon had sought to give the Grandjeans some reassurances regarding their youngest son’s literary ventures and adventures, and of his standing within the Paris of arts and letters. 178 Nellie to Otho St Clair, 30 May 1915; cited in ACSS, p. 124. 179 Rémy de Gourmont had been among those listed by Cravan in receipt of review copies of Maintenant; see ACM, pp. 46–7. 180 Cendrars makes illuminating reference to Remy de Gourmont’s Le latin mystique as a work that ‘turned my whole consciousness upside down and baptized me, or, at the very least, converted me to Poetry, catechized me and initiated me into the Word’. Cendrars, Sky, p. 237. 181 Van der Velden, ‘Chronologie’, 103. 182 Nellie to Otho St Clair, 25 November 1915; cited in ACSS, p. 135. 183 See ACSS, p. 127.

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6

j The vision of struggling movement: Barcelona 1916

Un entre-temps The lasting quality of Cravan’s years of flight between 1916 and 1918, the years of the ‘unrelenting obsessive condition’ of his perplexed state as Borràs described it,1 is the impermanence of everything; in the most exemplary Dada fashion, their permanence is their impermanence. What has hitherto been read progressively now enters an intense flux at the French–Spanish border commune in manifestation of Cravan’s perpetual reconstitution and redefinition. For the orientation of the present reading, it is a significant relay point, as a consequence of which is prised a structurally inherent (or ‘immanent’) critical space to the ideological. It is referred to as the in-between or the ‘meanwhile’ or, in Deleuze’s precise usage, un entre-temps, ‘the event that is a meanwhile [un entre-temps] … it belongs to becoming’. Distinctions are suspended between the event and the space in which it occurs: ‘Cravan’ is both event and space; we apprehend ‘Cravan’ both in and as the mean, still time of the event where ‘nothing happens, but everything becomes, so that the event has the privilege of beginning again when time is past. Nothing happens, and yet everything changes … .’2 The sense of fixed goals dissolves and things change in the testing and exceeding of limits, in the unconditional reconfiguration of the ‘body’ that submits to theoretical reflection a practical stability – not fixity, but continuous, permanent, uninterrupted revision and variation within limits. In their collaborative works, Deleuze and Guattari subject this condition of change to the rigour of what Deleuze first named ‘nomad thought’ and its negotiation of un entre-temps that ‘enjoys both an autonomy and direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo.’3 And in the period most repeatedly invoked in the literature, Cravan’s physical movement ceases as condition for the evental changes that follow: of the monumentally farcical Jack Johnson fight; of passage to America in the company of Trotsky; of the scandalous New York ‘lecture’; of love



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in the arms of Mina Loy; of permanently deferred closure in Mexico; and of the legacy of speculation which, for Borràs as biographer at least, was (and now continues to be) the period of Cravan’s greatest confusion. The aspect that we have of the singular event of Johnson vs Cravan as un entre-temps exercises a staging and a centrality that is accorded to the body and all its parts. Upon this, Cravan the poet (lest we forget, after all, that to be a poet was the declared ambition at the outset) would insist; that is to say, from the pugilistic exploits of 1910 through to Maintenant and subsequently, no longer is distinction discerned between thoughts and actions, mind and body (subject and object, inside and outside). Once the body becomes central, just as the deed is everything (including being), so too is being everything (including the deed). In Deleuze’s varied philosophical readings, the body as a model is established in abandonment of dualisms: ‘what is an action in the mind is necessarily an action in the body as well, and what is a passion in the body is necessarily a passion in the mind’.4 Exceeding our knowledge of it, and as consciousness exceeds what can be thought, famously, the body instigates the dictum drawn from Spinoza and consistently invoked by Deleuze: ‘we do not even know what a body can do’.5 As will be discussed in the following, the fight at Barcelona’s Monumental bull-ring on 23 April 1916 is an occasion that distils a set of positions directly addressing the constitution and status of the body; without primacy of consciousness over thought, what emerges from Spinoza’s discovery is an unconscious of thought that is as profound and potentially powerful as the unknown of the body.6 Spinoza, for instance, describes an intellectual framework that his discovery leads on to, his ‘ethics’ constructing a framework for a mode of living that sustains experimentation and necessarily allows knowledge (specifically in the body’s capacity for being affected by other bodies) to be fundamentally contingent.7 The body rendered is not defined according to its occupying of space as a material organic structure, not by its form or its functions, but rather according to the relations of its parts in their actions and reactions, and its potential effects. If this body is defined, then it attains definition through its ‘[a]ffective capacity, with a maximum threshold and a minimum threshold’ for being affected by other bodies.8 And though it is possible to anticipate a principle of affective capacity, it is impossible to anticipate which other bodies will enter into experimental relations with this body. The body, then, here Cravan’s in all its affective capacity, is exposed in the spring of 1916 to ‘the dramaturgy of force’. Its descriptive recovery for present concern configures it out of the Nietzschean s­ ubjectless

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drives named the Dionysian and Apollonian as ‘the result of the interplay of energies that are both raging and resistant, intoxicating and precise’.9 It is my suggestion that upon entry into the creative relations encountered, the one that engaged the other signals what I have previously described as the supremely proto-Dada event of Johnson vs Cravan (understanding ‘Dada’ as referring to a particularly complex cultural configuration of experimental relations), with the bull-ring standing in for that ‘elusive interspace between the tendencies toward self-preservation and self-annihilation’.10 And yet entry into the staged conflict poses a binary that Nietzsche, at least, seems consistently prepared to preserve as an eternal polarity rather than attempt to resolve: comparable to a sculpture carved in stone of two superhuman wrestlers whose potential for violence is immediately apparent to anyone without their ever having to move. Both deities seem to have been frozen in a vision of struggling movement.11

By the symmetry of opposing forces, this binary establishes a principle of equilibrium; formerly turbulent oppositionalities dissipate, with one body increasingly read as constitutive of the other. And for as much as the body affects and is affected one part at a time, part by part, so too does it process body by body whereby one or both may be altered by the other. Further, the antagonistic relation between bodies may be preserved, and the two bodies will form parts of a whole as a ‘collective person’. It is, finally, as this collective person that I propose we may eventually most productively and profitably conceive of the intensive reality that renders ‘Arthur Cravan’, free of the hierarchical structure and organisation that constitutes the organism. There is philosophical profundity and prescience to what would be Mina Loy’s distant thoughts on the man whom she long ago married and whose child she bore: this ‘[u]nique phenomenon, a biological mystic, he traced his poetic sensibility to his power to “think” with any part of his body’.12 Barcelona Chauffeured beyond Els Límits on 6 December 1915, ‘driven across the border by an irresponsible millionheir’ it was said,13 Cravan was apparently enabled in his flight by the final transaction with André Level in Paris, who ‘unwittingly furnished him with the means to reach Barcelona’.14 Within a fortnight, Nellie wrote to Otho from Lausanne expressing her relief that he and Fabian were no longer resident in a belligerent country: ‘I am relieved for you all [referring also to Olga and Renée; Renée would join Cravan in Barcelona in January]. You



The vision of struggling movement 201

must let me know what you plan next – teaching, lecturing, or perhaps sports instruction and boxing? I sent Fabian a letter before he left Paris, containing two postage stamps – I do not know if he received the letter – stamps are likely to become very scarce, although they are still in supply here.’15 It does appear that Cravan intended to pursue his boxing interests in Barcelona, despite a bout of presumed influenza,16 which he could not shake off well into the New Year. ‘I fell ill here, and I am still not completely recovered,’ he wrote in January, ‘[w]hich means that although I have come to Barcelona to box, I must wait awhile.’17 In his letter to Level in Paris, there is evident disaffection with the artistic scene left behind in Montparnasse, where art only exists by theft, by deception, and by intrigue, where ardor is calculated, where tenderness is replaced by syntax and the heart by reason and where not a single noble artist breathes and where a hundred people make a living by manipulating novelty.18

Cravan had eulogised to the Americas, we know, expressing both poetically and physically his desire to inhabit them, and just two months before his installation in Barcelona he again expressed to his mother the desire to cross the Atlantic.19 Now, in his letter to Level, he projected beyond what would transpire in the coming twelve months, declaring through his inquietude that he would not be staying for long in Barcelona, and that his next destination would be America and Brazil. As an antidote to the emotionally creative bankruptcy of Paris, the lyric is restored: What will I do there [in Brazil]? I can only reply that I will be going to see the butterflies. Perhaps it is absurd, ridiculous, impractical, but it is stronger than I, and if I have perhaps some worth as a poet, it is precisely because I have irrational passions, excessive needs; I would like to see spring in Peru, to make friends with a giraffe, and when I read in the Petit Larousse that the Amazon is 6,420 kilometers long and has the largest volume in the world, it has such an effect on me that I cannot even express it in prose.20

In the expanding menagerie (including perhaps the craning herbivores of the Miradique watercolour), the poet evidently was not abandoned in fleeing from France; the poet-boxer, however, would pause for longer than anticipated at the relay point that Barcelona was destined to be. It was Cravan’s timely good fortune that a fashionable vogue for boxing was now emerging in Barcelona. His creative cultural activity could recede as an immediate concern, and his sporting interests become means of getting by, at least for part of 1916. With his always impressive

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credential as former French Heavyweight Boxing Champion, his physical impress and his familiarity with Queensberry rules,21 Cravan could enter sporting circles with relative ease. In the weekly El Poble Català, his name was listed in February as the referee in a contest between two lightheavyweight boxers, Frank Hoché (El Lobo) and Frank Cutchet, at the Iris Park venue.22 The fight report recorded the referee’s part in proceedings: ‘Midway through the second round, the match referee Señor Cravan exercised authority in officiating, stepping in to stop the fight and award Hoché a win by a technical knockout.’23 Cravan sparred at the Bricall gymnasium,24 and was casually employed as instructor to the gymnasium of Señor Solé (Solé was publisher of the sports review Los Deportes).25 And, within a matter of weeks, the daily newspaper La Vanguardia carried the following announcement: ‘Clases de boxeo bajo la dirección del profesor Arthur Cravan en el Real Club Marítimo de Barcelona.’26 Cravan was taken on as ‘profesor’ (‘instructor’, better than the lazy translation ‘professor’) to run boxing classes at the city’s exclusive yacht club, though his earnings there would not come close to meeting the required funds for his eventually desired passage to America. Meanwhile, three hundred miles west, the travelling entourage of the former World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Jack Johnson, comprising Johnson’s wife Lucille, his nephew Gus Rhodes, his manager Jack Morris and his masseur Kid Johnson, checked in at the Palace Hotel in Madrid, ‘where pleasant and profitable circumstances occasioned our stay for several months’. Always on the look-out for career diversification during his American exile, Johnson played to his own showmanship: ‘[t]he ring and theater continued to appeal to me and I returned to the stage, repeating some of the performances which had won success elsewhere across the Atlantic’.27 In his role as Johnson’s shrewd and ever-alert manager, Morris made clear that the boxer was also ready to take on challengers in fee-paying exhibition bouts. Residency in neutral Spain at this time might easily have lulled the traveller into a false sense of security as far as the ongoing war was concerned. Frequently, daily papers ‘carried no information about the war, just as if it did not exist … After all, the fighting was going on somewhere beyond the Pyrenees.’28 Still, during Cravan’s first months in Barcelona, intermittent press releases announced: Any British subject now residing in Spain, who is thoroughly conversant with the English language, and who is willing to serve in any capacity in His Majesty’s Forces, if called upon, should report himself to the nearest British consulate office.29

Famously, Cravan’s Paris residency permit (as well as his varied passenger manifest registrations) declared inaccurate information, as a



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result of which he found himself liable to be subject to the British consulate. Anxiety beneath looming clouds of war inevitably grew as the nations in conflict trawled to mobilise their own nationals, and Cravan was ill at ease at the prospect of not quickly being able to earn enough money to move on from Spain before the draft caught up with him. With few options, the idea of Cravan challenging the great Jack Johnson in a prize fight was mooted – the local promoter Juan Elías had been looking for a heavyweight boxer in condition for that precise match, and it was reportedly the suggestion of Frank Hoché and the boxing event organiser Eusebio Hernández that Cravan, as former French Heavyweight Boxing Champion, would be the ideal candidate to challenge Johnson. In Madrid on 23 March, El Correo Español published a letter by Cravan detailing his challenge to Johnson (qualified on the grounds that the two of them had previously scored drawn bouts against a common opponent, Jim Johnson), and Jack Johnson’s acceptance ‘on the formal condition that fifty thousand pesetas be placed in a bank as security’: This request for security is, one must assume, a pretext; for Johnson was convinced that I would not find any organiser in Spain willing to put up such a sum. He is thus resorting to a trick much used by boxers who have achieved fame and now only want to fight against false pretenders, in order not to jeopardise their titles or their reputations.

Then Cravan’s counter: I have found a millionaire sportsman willing to put up the exact sum of fifty thousand pesetas, and I have taken the first train to Madrid in order to meet Jack Johnson at the Palace Hotel; he has shied away, and wishes to hear nothing of the match … I hope that all sportsmen will be the judges of this attitude, or rather this … farce.30

In this public letter, Cravan was willing Johnson into the desired response, and left the readers of El Correo Español in no doubt that he considered himself to be a most credible challenger: Jack Johnson loathes the idea of fighting someone less illustrious than himself, someone younger and in better training than him, as heavy and tall as he is, and who, without air of presumption, hopes to beat him if given the chance.31

On the day this letter was published, Cravan travelled to Madrid and watched a ten-round bout between Jack Johnson and the Madrid-based Jamaican boxer Frank Crozier, held at the Gran Teatro de Madrid. The bout proved a disappointment for those present, who wanted more than an exhibition with sparring and training exercises; they wanted to

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see Johnson in a competitive prize contest, and that same day’s issue of La Tribuna hinted at more to come: It is said that Johnson does not intend to return to competitive fighting … but there is already talk of a prize fight to be held in Barcelona. La Tribuna can confirm that the fight will indeed take place, and that Jack Johnson’s challenger will be A. Cravan. The fight will be held next April – and it will be a competitive fight, not an exhibition – at the largest available venue, most likely an arena.32

Two days later, the sports review Stadium concluded: Boxing fans are excited at the prospect of the upcoming match between Jack Johnson and Arthur Cravan; the terms of the fighthave been agreed, to take place at a Barcelona arena in mid-April. Johnson may not be at the peak of his boxing career, but the people of Barcelona will be given opportunity to witness the grace and elegance of this former world champion in the ring.33

Johnson was certainly past his best, for he was out of condition and in his late thirties, but Cravan knew well the American’s enormous superiority over any boxing prowess he could claim for himself. Cravan had arguably never been in condition as a boxer, his status never likely to rise above that of a journeyman. Even in what was for him ‘peak’ condition, Cravan was not remotely close to matching the seasoned Johnson; he was, however, in dire need of the financial return from a well-publicised fight, and for that reason happily undertook to be Johnson’s challenger in Barcelona.34 The fight contract was signed on 25 March, and Cravan returned to Barcelona to prepare. Johnson vs Cravan The now contracted fight would take place one month hence; it was scheduled for twenty rounds (each round to last three minutes),35 starting mid-afternoon. Señor Hernández secured the arena that offered a crowd capacity of comfortably more than twenty thousand, Barcelona’s newly expanded and (in 1916) renamed ‘Monumental’ bull-ring. Cravan went into training, and maximised the publicity coverage: Cravan is in training at the Bricall gymnasium with his sparring partners Hoché, Pomés and Jaks; the regular classes [at the Real Club Marítimo] have for now been cancelled while Cravan conditions for the big fight. The training sessions, held on consecutive days, are open to the public.36

Existing film footage of these sessions shows Cravan standing tall over his sparring partner to take a pummelling, barely flinching,37



The vision of struggling movement 205 throwing and receiving punches … hours and hours rehearsing each blow and evading their opponent’s caresses … these athletes practise on substitute opponents, men hired for the occasion, who are little more than the satellites of brute force.38

Photographers were on hand to document the gym and the running sessions staged on Tibidabo (in photographs used as pre-fight publicity in Stadium magazine, Renée is present in the seated area at Bricall and joins in the expedition to picnic in the background on Tibidabo); and Otho applied his artistic skills to design what has today become the iconic image of this memorable event as the widely reproduced fight poster. On 4 April, Johnson and his entourage alighted in Barcelona, with Cravan in the delegation to meet the train, and public relations were quickly into their stride. Johnson made his first promotional appearance at a press conference on the 6th and, subsequently, a ring appearance alongside his challenger at Iris Park. Cravan was hyped and introduced to the crowd by Hernández, who exaggerated the announced twenty-five-year-old (actually almost twenty-nine-year-old) poet-boxer’s competitive bouts (boasting the former world champion Tommy Burns, the South African champion George Rodel and the world champion contender Jim Johnson). In El Mundo Deportivo it was reported that: Cravan has high hopes of beating Jack Johnson, who, he claims, has been living the high life and is no longer in the prime condition of recent years … Later in the evening, Johnson viewed the fight between Jaks and Hoché, refereed by Cravan, with some interest, before donning his hat to leave.39

Hernández invited the press to lunch with the big fighters on 8 April at the Excelsior dining hall, where the famous crowded photograph of the occasion (including Cravan’s scratch entourage of Hoché and Fred Jaks standing behind him) was taken: Johnson sat at the head of the table alongside Lady Johnson, speaking in English to declare his delight at having arrived in Barcelona, a city whose enthusiasm might even tempt him to settle permanently. A few words from Cravan also, to speak of his hope that he might be a worthy challenger to Johnson and meet the weight of expectation now upon him.40

Whatever the truth of any previous encounters in Paris, this was certainly the first time Johnson had reason to register Cravan. And it was surely the closest that Cravan ever came to the legendised account of ‘indulging in riotous living at Johnson’s expense, swigging champagne … [and] smoking fat cigars in the gay and decadent company of a

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crowd of drug addicts and homosexuals’41 (however frequently this image of pugilistic brouhaha is invoked in versions of Cravan from the Paris years). To further promote the fight, a ‘Gran Soirée de Boxe’ was held just over a week later at Iris Park, featuring five bouts between local fighters and headline appearances by Johnson and Cravan as referees. Borràs notes some unwarranted booing at the end of the ten-round Jaks vs Sum fight, refereed by Cravan.42 Johnson’s part was to officiate the fifteen-round Allack vs Hoché fight, and Stadium magazine reported: Cravan is modest and amiable, with an angelic personality yet Herculean strength … In his youth at twenty-five years of age, he is eager to win an international reputation by at least earning a draw in his match with Johnson – who is in good shape despite athletic decline as he nears the age of forty – as the latter’s established reputation gives way to the new.43

Press coverage in the week leading up to the main event was biased naturally towards Johnson, but the little-known Cravan promoted and maintained his profile as a credible challenger. Some reports candidly observed, however, that his prime motive in challenging a far superior opponent was the 50,000 peseta prize.44 A first hint at malcontent makes itself known in narrative detail that Cendrars notes in his memoirs, and which Cravan’s brother Otho much later confirmed for Borràs: [B]oth contestants had a guaranteed purse. The victor’s, obviously, was larger. On the eve of the fight, Cravan had persuaded his managers to pay him an advance … He did not breathe a word about this to his comrade [Johnson], but as he was in no shape to survive more than three rounds, he begged the black man not to knock him out and not to hit him too hard!45

In March, Cravan had already requested of Hernández an increased percentage for the loser; for his part, Johnson had allegedly agreed financial terms for the filming of the fight, excluding Cravan from any later profit. There were inevitable ructions on the eve of the event when one pugilist became aware of the other’s manoeuvring: [C]ertain differences of opinion had arisen … giving rise to a heated argument at an establishment in La Rambla, which ended in blows. Afterwards, Arthur Cravan apparently refused to take part in the match, and disappeared. If he cannot be prevailed upon, the match scheduled for today at the Monumental bull-ring will no doubt have to be suspended.46

It seems that Johnson was intent on meting out severe punishment in the ring; dread at this precise eventuality would account for the



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repeated descriptions of a pale and visibly shaking Cravan entering the bull-ring on that Sunday in 1916. Seconds out The day of the big fight between the billed ‘el capeón del mundo’ and ‘el capeón europeo’ dawned under a cloud. Johnson was disappointed at the match organiser’s failure to sell out (though there was a respectable crowd of some five thousand, the empty rows in the twenty-thousandcapacity arena made five thousand look like an embarrassingly small turn-out), and Johnson and Cravan were called together by the Chilean referee Tony Berton. The Spanish film-maker Ricard de Baños, who would one year later give Johnson a starring role in his feature Fuerza y nobleza (‘Strength and Nobility’), had placed six routiers around the arena to film the fight, all of whom were relying on favourable light registers for footage of any worth. A series of stereoscopic photographs also provides a unique document of the event. The supporting contest between Gus Rhodes and Kid Johnson was already under way, with another two fights scheduled before the big one, when the camera operators realised that the cloud cover might cancel all their efforts if proceedings went on too late into the afternoon. The fiesta schedule was hastily revised. Kid Johnson was told to feign injury and allow his match with Rhodes to conclude in the fourth round; the remaining ­support fights were deferred, and the big one for which the crowd was now in high anticipation was brought forward. Cravan was nervous; the next day’s edition of El Mundo Deportivo indicates that Johnson was intent on bringing him to book,47 and the legend recounts how, ‘in anticipation of the inevitable result, he [Cravan] had arrived in the ring reeling drunk’.48 Having sat ringside throughout the fight, however, Otho Lloyd confirmed many years later that, despite being visibly anxious at the prospect, his brother had not touched a drop of alcohol before proceedings commenced.49 In the little sober light of day that remained for filming, each camp primed its fighter and crowded the ring. For what happened next, accounts range from sobriety to sublimity to farce. Most reliable is the newspaper coverage, which documents thus: First round – Jack Johnson is clearly the better fighter, dominating his opponent with a few straight jabs. Second round – Johnson drops his guard to let Cravan have a go. The odd light hook shows that, if he wanted to, Johnson could knock the Frenchman out. Third round – Cravan seems to be there out of obligation, and Johnson does what he wants with

12  Jack Johnson vs Arthur Cravan at the Monumental, Barcelona, 23 April 1916.



The vision of struggling movement 209 him. Fourth round – Cravan is still totally bemused. Fifth round – The Frenchman’s performance in the ring is deplorable. If Johnson wanted, he could pulverise him. Sixth round – The joke has gone on too long, so Johnson decides to put an end to it. A right uppercut and a left cross to the chin are enough to ensure a knockout.50

But from sober accounts, the subsequent versions take off. The first that I cite is the version that belongs to Blaise Cendrars, and it elides most efficiently into the Cravan legend: In the ring, once the presentations and the announcements were over, and the referee had shouted ‘Fight!’ the handsome Arthur stood on guard, holding his gloved fists up to his face, lowering his head, pulling in his stomach, pressing his elbows tightly together and leaning forward so as to cover his heart and await the fatal blow; with his neck pulled right down into his shoulders and his back humped, he made not the slightest sketch of a gesture, not even a feint, a sham to make it look as if he was at least playing the part, but contented himself with marking time, dancing on the spot, trembling visibly while the big negro circled around the vain white boy like a large black rat around a Dutch cheese. Three times Johnson was called to order, because three times Big Jack kicked the poet-boxer in the ass to try and unfreeze the nephew of Oscar Wilde, then the black man pummeled his ribs, punched him, laughed at him, egged him on, insulted him, and, losing his temper all of a sudden, laid him out flat with a formidable slap on his left ear, a blow worthy of a slaughterer in the abattoir or of a cut-throat, for he was really pissed off! Cravan did not stir. The referee counted out the seconds. The bell rang to end the contest. And Jack Johnson was proclaimed the victor by a knockout. The whole thing had lasted less than one minute.51

Cendrars’s version, by its author’s admission, relied on remote accounts and was written several decades after the event; it occurs within a poetic and particularly insightful characterisation of Cravan by a fellow rowdy. Inevitably, Cravan’s romanticised recollection, which I cite next, recorded in the year following the fight, assumes a very different emphasis and obvious discrepancies: It was on a spring afternoon of 1916 that I fought Jack Johnson … The match took place in the bull-ring of Barcelona, Spain, and went seven rounds … He’s a great fellow … he has every quality of the fighter except the punch. I know it is generally believed … that he has a terrific punch, but I have fought him and I see that this is not quite so; he has every physical quality, he’s quick as lightning, his knowledge is immense and he’s terribly clever; a flyweight couldn’t be better … in short, he’s a marvel, but he has not a clean punch, he doesn’t hit like a Sam Langford. A skinny fellow will hit sharp, with edges, but about Johnson there is something

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too rounded and enveloped, and when he hits you’d think his glove was several ounces heavier than it really is … In my fight with him I found it almost impossible to get through his left, and he has wonderful strength holding. Once, aiming at my stomach, he missed me by a fraction of a second – I caught his tremendous punch on my elbow; he laughed and I’m sure I laughed back … I knew I was to be beaten, though I ought to say that for two years I had no gloves on practically … His left droops a bit, and that is the hand he uses mostly, leaning on his right leg. He’s a defensive fighter … We neither of us were in good training for our match in the ring; I soon lost my wind. The chief difficulty I encountered was his left – he kept me away with it.52

For the main attraction, Johnson, recollection was sketchy by the time he wrote his memoirs a decade later – the detail had indeed become unreliable almost as soon as the fight was over, with the name ‘Arthur Cravan’ muffled into ‘Gravan’ in match reports and into ‘Arthur Gruhan’ by the end of May (this ‘Gruhan’ then makes phantom appearances as an opponent for Johnson during his time in Spain, erroneously named in subsequent records and biographical texts)53 – and, by Johnson’s brief and unremarkable account, Cravan was dispatched within the first three minutes: I … arranged a ring contest with Arthur Cravan who was an English heavyweight and had fled to Spain because of the war. A large crowd was attracted by the contest which lasted but a short time, for I knocked him out in the first round.54

Johnson’s account is brief and to the point. The least biased account, of course (neither Cendrars, Cravan, nor Johnson is free of bias), derives inevitably from the first version of history recorded in local press coverage, which was reliably consistent in its reporting of match facts. I cite two further press sources: the fight, we are informed, lasted six rounds (neither Johnson’s one, nor Cravan’s seven) and was a farcical travesty from beginning to end: After a shameless and unworthy propaganda campaign, the fight which was billed as the great Johnson–Cravan fight, but which should have been dubbed the Great Swindle, took place. Those who were aware of the shady events of Johnson’s life or of his manager’s lack of scruples refused to attend this event which from the start stank of pesetas. Those who knew that the duel with the Nobody, Cravan, was all a farce were not surprised at Sunday’s let-down.55 The much vaunted fight was a disaster. It only lasted for as long as it did because Johnson was clearly under instructions – for it quickly became apparent that his opponent was a quite harmless individual, more terri-



The vision of struggling movement 211 fied than terrifying. Johnson toyed with Cravan for six rounds … and, had it not been for any prior arrangement, he would without doubt have had the grace to KO Cravan in the first round, which would have spared him his regrettable complicity. After being knocked down in the fifth round, Cravan was knocked out in the sixth.56

The crowd had long since realised it was witnessing a farce, and that Cravan was shuffling around the ring for the sake of expediency. There was a movie being shot, and de Baños needed more than three minutes’ footage to get on with: ‘to satisfy the contract’, according to yet one more estimate of the fight duration, ‘Johnson waited three rounds, whereupon Cravan virtually lay down all by himself’.57 According to Cravan’s version, ‘[Johnson] hit me on the jaw and the thing ended by the whole crowd jumping in’.58 Reports tell us how, in their attempt to stay the growing dissatisfaction, Johnson, Gus Rhodes and Kid Johnson took to giving exhibitions. In Cendrars’s dramatisation: [Johnson] started insulting the Catalan audience, who were protesting vehemently, invading the ring, demanding their money back, wrecking the arena, setting fire to the barriers. The police came to the rescue and evacuated the place, and, the riot having spread to the streets outside, they had to call in the carabineros to take the world champion to the central police station, while the managers had to give in and reimburse the spectators!59

The collapse of the Gran Fiesta de Boxeo is complete as Cravan makes his graceless exit, and the raging Johnson spends a night in the cooler.60 Meanwhile, the more reliable El Mundo Deportivo version arrives at a very different conclusion in its assessment of the skilled exhibition by members of the Johnson camp following the fight to an appreciative audience. Elegantly summing up, it states, the crowd had looked forward to cake but had to settle for bread (‘a falta de tortas, bueno es el pan’).61 If that Sunday was a day of shame in the history of boxing, the fact appears incongruously to have been ignored on the cover of Stadium magazine devoted to a wreathed photograph of Johnson vs Cravan the following week.62 Beyond the testimony of the barcelonés who had witnessed the shameful spectacle, six rounds in the ring with the former World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Jack Johnson (documented thus in official boxing records, irrespective of the dire performance) are not unimpressive; and, together with his credential as former French Heavyweight Boxing Champion, there is no disputing that for Cravan the official record was a coup. It was blague writ large, and Cravan was easily able to continue boxing in Barcelona in the months that followed. His was not unconditional joy, however, and there were undoubtedly

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contractual points to be resolved in the wake of the fight; there is a hint at the start of June, for instance, in a letter to an unidentified r­ ecipient (possibly the Countess Berthe Félicie de Rose, mother of Robert Delaunay), that Cravan was seeking to resolve a legal dispute in which instance the letter’s recipient apparently acted as benefactor: ‘Should you choose to forward a banker’s draft, to save any embarrassment please allow me to remind you that my real name is Fabian Lloyd.’63 In the same document, Cravan states that he has signed for another fight and is negotiating terms. Several respectable heavyweight bouts were held in Barcelona in the months around and following Johnson vs Cravan, with Frank Hoché prominent, as well as Gus Rhodes and Kid Johnson from the Galveston Giant’s entourage (Hoché fought Kid Johnson twice during May). The upcoming fight that Cravan refers to in his letter at the start of June was eventually held at the end of the month at the Gran Gala de Boxeo, at the impressive Frontón Condal venue.64 Within two months of Johnson vs Cravan, then, the headline bout was now Cravan vs Hoché. On the evening of Monday, 26 June 1916, the billed ‘extraordinario y sensacional combate entre los notables pugilistas’ took place. April’s sparring partners now took on each other, with the referee Berton again officiating. After a slow start followed by what Cravan declared in separate letters written to André Level and to Félix Fénéon to be his plainly technical superiority and points advantage,65 Berton declared the fight a draw. Leaving Barcelona For the duration of the war, there were émigré communities in Barcelona, as elsewhere in retreat from belligerence. Writing of August and the months that followed in 1916, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia recalled how Cravan ‘became one of our little nostalgic, uprooted group. Every day we met at the Café on the Rambla, we dined at each other’s lodgings and, for distraction, went in for Spanish cooking.’66 The company was an eclectic mix (even comprising former Parisian adversaries now reconciled in exile) that regrouped to the north in the coastal town of Tossa de Mar in the summer and early autumn. Among them were the Picabias, Francis and Gabrielle Buffet; Marie Laurencin and her husband, the painter Otto van Wätjen (Laurencin’s ‘Fritz’, ‘son Fritz’ as Cravan referred to him);67 Valentine de Saint-Point and Ricciotto Canudo; Nicole Groult, sister of the couturier Paul Poiret and intimate acquaintance of Henri Hayden; the poet Juliet Roche and her husband, the painter and ‘moral defender’ of Cubism, Albert Gleizes; and the sculptor Chana Orloff. Cravan and Renée (‘ma femme’, as he described



The vision of struggling movement 213

her in June),68 along with Otho and Olga (‘mon crétin de frère avec sa Caucasienne’),69 are clearly part of this happy gathering in the photographs that show them at Es Codolar cove and on the rocks beneath the fourteenth-century battlements of the Vila Vella enceinte (where Otho painted a series of delicate studies of views across rooftops, formally evocative of Picasso’s early Cubist views at Horta).70 From Tossa, Cravan wrote to Félix Fénéon in Paris, describing his diligent study of language and literature (which meant that he had not been able to devote time to his own writing, as he had promised Fénéon he would do) alongside Barcelona’s then thriving boxing scene, and his entertainment of the exiled Montparnasse colony. During these exiles’ varied conventions, Francis Picabia poses a penetratingly theoretical equivalent to Cravan as cultural agent who (in addition to his welldocumented and general dislike of Robert Delaunay) strategically embodied ‘a dread of repetition far stronger than any desire to create a school of whatever kind … [and] a complete lack of respect for anyone or anything’.71 For Picabia, Cravan relayed his activities in Paris with his own revue littéraire; and it is of prescient note that just a few months later Picabia embarked upon publication of 391 (in Barcelona), the journal that remained under his sole editorship for its duration, and for the first issue of which Maintenant has been cited as forerunner. In time, 391 would become the longest-running Dada magazine.72 In continued avoidance of the request to report to the British consul­ ate office, however, Cravan absented himself from Barcelona during the later months of 1916. After he had eased back into the company of Marie Laurencin at Tossa de Mar, an even more surprising reconciliation is suggested circumstantially towards the end of 1916. In the interview Cravan gave in Mexico in 1918, recounting his travels through different countries, Portugal is named among them; there is one other source to corroborate a Portuguese detour. The low resolution of much of Cendrars’s commentary in Le lotissement du ciel (1943–49) throws Cravan back in the ring with the ‘flabby cheese’ from Paris, Robert Delaunay. The Delaunays’ movements in Spain and Portugal between 1914 and 1916 took them first in the summer of 1914 (not long after the proceedings of May at the Paris correctional court in the wake of Cravan’s ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’) to the Basque town of Hondarribia (Castilian Fuenterrabia); they went from there to Madrid in September before eventually moving on to Portugal and Lisbon in mid-1915. After episodes in the northern Portuguese centres of Porto and Vila do Conde, and in Vigo in Spain, the Delaunays were resident in the town of Valença on the Portuguese side of the border with Spain in late 1916. There they were joined by Robert’s mother, the imposing

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Countess Berthe Félicie de Rose; the move to Barcelona would not happen until some time later in 1917. In Cendrars’s compression of time and blurred resequencing of events, Le lotissement du ciel describes Cravan swimming from belligerent France to neutral Spain, from the beach at Hendaye across the shallow sandy waters of the Bidasoa river to Hondarribia, where he jumped aboard the Delaunay wagon en route to the Portuguese capital: Arthur unhesitatingly joined the Delaunay caravan, but he did not feel at ease in Lisbon because he was a British citizen and Portugal was Britain’s ally. And so, when Portugal … became a belligerent, Arthur crossed illegally into Spain and lived for some time in Madrid, where Robert was not long in joining him … Sponging off these two women [Sonia Delaunay and Berthe Félicie de Rose] did not worry Cravan unduly … he had managed to ingratiate himself with Mother-in-law Delaunay (a sharptongued Parisienne), wheedling her into lending him the money for the desperate appeals and the telegrams he sent off in all directions, but now, having let her down, abused her generosity, cheated and empapaouted her, he had finally put her back up.73

By the year’s close, there was a distinct impatience to Cravan’s desire to move on to North America. In December 1916, the first issue of Robert J. Coady’s magazine The Soil was published in New York and included one citation of Cravan in addition to four contributions by him.74 The second issue, published the following month, carried Coady’s article-manifesto ‘American Art’ with its call for ‘the aesthetic product of the human beings living on and producing from the soil of these United States’: We are developing a new culture here. Its elements are gathering from all over the earth … Traditions are being merged, blood is being mixed. Something new, something big is happening here.75

Cravan journeyed from the west to the south of Spain. On the eve of embarking to cross the Atlantic on 31 December, he sent a postcard from Seville to Renée in Barcelona: My beauty, A quick note following my arrival at the station, after a thirty-hour train journey which wasn’t too exhausting. (Just another three hours to go.) I regret now that you didn’t travel with me to Valença. It’s sublime after life in Barcelona, especially by the light of the moon. On the night that I arrived, I took a walk that I won’t forget for the rest of my life. At one o’clock tomorrow morning I’ll be in Cadiz, where I’ll telegraph you! Haven’t had a look around Seville yet, but will be standing outside the Alcázar royal palace in five minutes.



The vision of struggling movement 215 Don’t be sad at my leaving – you will join me in two months. You know how I dislike pretentious gatherings, and I’ll be relieved when you’re with me again. The Montserrat is apparently the best of the Company’s steamships for the ocean crossing. I could write you reams of what I have seen in southern Spain; but here I am, writing a postcard in this enormous café … To you I send a million kisses. Write me at the Washington Square Gallery in New York. Ever your loving Faby.76

Though Cravan anticipated Renée joining him in just a few months’ time, and though he maintained correspondence with her through every strait until mid-1918, he would not see her again. Rather than return to Barcelona, where the SS Montserrat would start its journey to New York on Christmas Day, Cravan embarked at the steamship’s second port of call in Cadiz on the last day of 1916, with his forwarding address the New York gallery that Coady had opened with Michael Brenner in 1914. Another passenger registered on the ship’s manifest had already travelled in the opposite direction – from Cadiz to embark in Barcelona. He was Leon Trotsky, detained in Cadiz ahead of deportation by the Spanish authorities, leaving the southern port to travel to and embark with his wife Natalia Sedova, and their sons Lev and Sergei, in the Catalan capital. The Montserrat, aboard which Cravan now steamed towards New York, was far removed from the dazzling SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse aboard which he had passaged to New York in 1907. If it was supposedly the best vessel run by the Compañía Trasatlántica Española for the crossing, as Cravan had written to Renée, then the description by his fellow passenger Trotsky of the same vessel is sobering as it is depressing: [The Montserrat] delivered its live and dead cargo at New York after seventeen days … [T]he sea was very rough at this time of the year, and our boat did everything to remind us of the frailty of human life. The Monserrat [sic] was an old tub little suited for ocean voyages. But during the war the neutral Spanish flag lessened the chances of being sunk. The Spanish company charged high fares, and provided bad accommodation and even worse food.77

And it was aboard this old tub that the fabled encounter between Cravan and the revolutionary theorist took place. Trotsky wrote: The population of the steamer is multi-coloured, and not very attractive in its variety. There are quite a few deserters from different countries, for the most part men of fairly high standing … A boxer, who is also a novelist and a cousin of Oscar Wilde, confesses openly that he prefers crashing

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Yankee jaws in a noble sport to letting some German stab him in the midriff … The others are of much the same sort: deserters, adventurers, speculators, or simply ‘undesirables’ thrown out of Europe. Who would ever dream of crossing the Atlantic at this time of year on a wretched little Spanish boat from choice?78

Trotsky’s assessment of Cravan, his fellow passenger at sea for those first weeks in the year of the February Revolution and subsequently of Red October, is free of the bias of any other context into which we might ordinarily place the poet-boxer. It signals an ambiguity to which Coady would give some prominence in The Soil; that is to say, between the world-weariness of the boxer in his flight from and evasion of the war, and the Wildean sophistication of the aesthete.79 Though the estimate of Cravan in among the not very attractive collective of deserters, speculators and undesirables suggests a poor impression made on Trotsky, it would elicit a reciprocal gesture that could not but register in the affirmative. Musing on Trotsky in political expediency, Cravan’s thoughts are here processed for posterity: Out of the whole political bunch … there is only one who is sincere – Trotsky – poor lunatic! He really loves humanity. He really does desire to make others happy, and he actually imagines war is to be done away with. He is laughable and I respect him. But even he is trying to put something over – on himself. It was useless my telling him that his revolution will result in the founding of a red army to protect the red liberty, or that he, because he is sincere, will be turned upon by his followers. The only right the masses will accept from the idealist is the right to destroy. But he no more believed me than I believe him.80

The image of the Montserrat mid-Atlantic achieves temporary completion for the present study, I think, in the allegory of the stultifera navis, the ship of fools, carrying its ‘comic and pathetic cargo of souls’ variously finding ‘pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off’.81 Cravan was indeed in flight and steaming towards what Trotsky later described as the ‘city of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automatism’:82 where it was that the poetboxer would dissolve into the interstices of capitalism, the in-betweens where the Marxist revolutionary theorist locates the real processes of a permanent revolution. In the small hours of 13 January 1917, then, New Yorkers ‘could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors’:83 Sunday, 13 January: We are nearing New York. At three o’clock in the morning, everybody wakes up. We have stopped. It is dark. Cold. Wind. Rain. On land, a wet mountain of buildings. The New World!84

13  Manifest of alien passengers for SS Montserrat arriving at Port of New York, 14 January 1917 (detail): passenger no. 15, Lloyd, Avenarius F.

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Notes  1 ACSS, p. 125.  2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p. 158.  3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), p. 380. Negotiation of the in-between is concerned less with extending itself to an exteriority than with occupying an exterior position on the inside: we are reminded of the exuberant Fabian in Berlin in late 1907, the outsider inside the city walls before his civic ejection. In the philosophical writing, we read, the nomad is ‘he who does not move’ and who ‘does not depart, does not want to depart’, who is infinitely patient: ‘a movement may be very fast, but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still speed. Movement is extensive, speed is intensive … [speed] constitutes the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex, with the possibility of springing up at any point.’ Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 381.  4 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. 18.  5 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, pp. 17–18.  6 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 19.  7 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 40.  8 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, pp. 123–4.  9 Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 15. 10 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, p. 16. 11 Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage, p. 25. 12 Mina Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, in LLB, p. 317. 13 Mina Loy, ‘Colossus’ (extracts); cited in Roger Conover, ‘Mina Loy’s “Colossus”: Arthur Cravan Undressed’, in Rudolf E. Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986), p. 113. The date of the crossing from France into Spain is inscribed with the authorisation stamp on the reverse of Cravan’s Paris residency permit. 14 Willard Bohn, ‘Chasing Butterflies with Arthur Cravan’, in Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada, p. 121. 15 Nellie to Otho St Clair, 16 December 1915; cited in ACSS, pp. 137–8. 16 See ACSS, p. 145. 17 Cravan to Level, January 1916; cited in Bohn, ‘Chasing Butterflies with Arthur Cravan’, p. 121. 18 Cravan to Level, January 1916; cited in Bohn, ‘Chasing Butterflies with Arthur Cravan’, pp. 121–2. 19 See ACSS, p. 135.



The vision of struggling movement 219

20 Cravan to Level, January 1916; cited in Bohn, ‘Chasing Butterflies with Arthur Cravan’, p. 121. 21 The aleatory connection here from Queensberry rules to Cravan is via the rules’ endorser, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry, father of Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Bosie’ to Oscar Wilde. 22 The Iris Park venue was located at carrer Valencia 19. 23 El Poble Català, 6 February 1916 (report on 3 February fight). 24 The Bricall gymnasium was located at carrer Canuda 26. 25 Solé’s gymnasium was located at carrer Montjuïc del Carme 5. 26 La Vanguardia, 23 February 1916. 27 Jack Johnson, In the Ring and Out (1927; New York: Citadel Press, 1992), p. 104. 28 ‘Even I began to forget the war’, concluded Trotsky; Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1975), p. 276. 29 Cited in ACSS, p. 146. 30 Whatever the possible identity of Cravan’s ‘sportsman millionaire’, there came enthusiastic publicity backing for Johnson vs Cravan from the direction of the magazine Stadium: Revista Ilustrada de Sports, both in its coverage of the build-up and in its support for staging of the fight at the Monumental. 31 El Correo Español, 23 April 1916; trans. in ACM, p. 285. 32 La Tribuna, 23 March 1916. 33 Stadium: Revista Ilustrada de Sports, 25 March 1916. 34 See Roger L. Conover, Introduction to LLB, p. lv. 35 Reported in El Diluvio, 9 April 1916. 36 El Poble Català, 1 April 1916. 37 Sections of this sparring footage are included in the documentary film Cravan vs Cravan, dir. Isaki Lacuesta (Mallerich Films Paco Poch, Benecé Produccions, 2002). 38 Xarau (Santiago Rusiñol), ‘Glosari. Entrenadors’, L’Escuella de la Torratxa (21 April 1916), 279; trans. in ACM, pp. 286–7. 39 El Mundo Deportivo, 3 April 1916. 40 Stadium: Revista Ilustrada de Sports, 1 April 1916. Johnson restates his thoughts of having considered permanently settling in Barcelona in his autobiography; Johnson, In the Ring and Out, p. 104. 41 Blaise Cendrars, Sky: Memoirs, trans. Nina Rootes (New York: Paragon House, 1992), p. 200. 42 ACSS, p. 154. 43 Stadium: Revista Ilustrada de Sports, 8 April 1916. 44 La Il·lustració Catalana, 19 April 1916. 45 Cendrars, Sky, pp. 200–1. 46 El Diluvio, 23 April 1916; trans. in ACM, p. 287. 47 El Mundo Deportivo, 24 April 1916. 48 Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’ (1938), in DPP, p. 15.

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49 ACSS, p. 156. 50 Newspaper report in El Diluvio, 24 April 1916; cited in ACM, p. 288. 51 Cendrars, Sky, pp. 201–2. Cendrars’s account appears to be the basis for the brief note on the fight provided in Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), p. 150, n. 1; it is the version that lends itself most fully to later Dada and Surrealist appropriation. 52 ‘Arthur Cravan vs. Jack Johnson’, The Soil, 4 (April 1917), 161–2. 53 New York Times, 1 June 1916 (report dated 31 May 1916); cf. Tony van den Bergh, The Jack Johnson Story (London: Panther Books, 1956), p. 137. 54 Johnson, In the Ring and Out, p. 105. 55 Newspaper report in La Vanguardia, 24 April 1916; cited in ACSS, p. 158. 56 Newspaper report in El Poble Català, 25 April 1916; cited in Conover, Introduction to LLB, p. lv. 57 Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (London: Jonathan Cape, rev. edn 1969), p. 354. 58 ‘Arthur Cravan vs. Jack Johnson’, 162. 59 Cendrars, Sky, p. 202. 60 Cendrars, Sky, p. 202. 61 El Mundo Deportivo, 24 April 1916. 62 Stadium: Revista Ilustrada de Sports, 29 April 1917. 63 Cravan, 3 June 1916, in ŒPAL, pp. 149–50. 64 The Frontón Condal venue, home to Real Sociedad de Sport Vasco sporting club, was located at carrer Rosselló 223. 65 ACSS, p. 159; Cravan to Fénéon, 27 September 1916, in ŒPAL, p. 151–2. 66 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, p. 15. 67 Cravan to Fénéon, 27 September 1916, in ŒPAL, p. 152. 68 Cravan, 3 June 1916, in ŒPAL, p. 150. 69 Cravan to Fénéon, 27 September 1916, in ŒPAL, p. 152. 70 Photographs of the beach gatherings in Tossa have been widely reproduced in the Cravan literature; see ACSS, pp. 140–1. 71 Dawn Ades, ‘391, Cannibale’, in Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), p. 137. 72 See Ades, ‘391, Cannibale’, p. 137; it had been suggested to Picabia in 1916 by the Barcelona gallery owner José Dalmau that he should found a review. 73 Cendrars, Sky, pp. 199–200. 74 Arthur Cravan’s contributions to the first issue of Coady’s magazine are: ‘Come Now’, The Soil, 1 (December 1916), 4; ‘Take a Few Pills’, The Soil, 1 (December 1916), 25; ‘What’s Most Remarkable at the Salon’, The Soil, 1 (December 1916), 25; and ‘The Rhythm of the Ocean Cradles the  Transatlantics’, The Soil, 1 (December 1916), 36. See also Jay Bochner, ‘The Marriage of Rogue and The Soil’, in Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible (eds), Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), p. 61.



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75 R. J. Coady, ‘American Art’, The Soil, 2 (January 1917), 54. 76 Cravan to Renée, 30 December 1916, in ŒPAL, p. 155. 77 Trotsky, My Life, pp. 276–7. 78 Trotsky, My Life, p. 277. 79 See Bochner, ‘The Marriage of Rogue and The Soil’, p. 61. 80 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 112. 81 José Barchilon, Introduction to Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988) p. vii. 82 Trotsky, My Life, p. 279. 83 Barchilon, Introduction to Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. vii. 84 Trotsky, My Life, p. 278.

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7

j ‘Pure affect’: New York 1917

Deterritorialisation The present study is premised on a processing of philosophical positions into the descriptive recovery of Cravan, in an attempt to yield sense from what frequently appear to be nonsensical cultural positions that the idea of Cravan occupies. His perpetual escape from ‘an original territory’ through extensive movement renders for us the becoming of Arthur Cravan. The process of movement that is productive of change is described in Deleuze and Guattari’s last collaborative work: description is given in prior works, of course (and named ‘deterritorialisation’), as the conjunction in which ‘a system of referrals or perpetual relays’ occurs, outlined in their first published collaboration as a ‘coming undone’ and the destabilisation of processes that produce meaning.1 This already signals future reterritorialisations, ‘where the person who escapes causes other escapes, and marks out the land while deterritorializing himself’.2 For Deleuze and Guattari, the process subsequently constituted the most advanced dimension of an assemblage, indicating the creative potential of the same assemblage in its ‘cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away’.3 Connecting deterritorialisation to reterritorialisation is instructive; the terms of engagement pose a binary that would conflict with the overcoming of dualistic frameworks (although the overcoming need not reject such frameworks, as the present study resists rejecting chronology), but the process itself is not one of travel between polar opposites. Rather than reduce to a negatively read binary in the departure from a prior territory to re-establish elsewhere, the concept of deterritorialisation is one of immanence.4 The actual, ‘relative’ deterritorialising of Cravan in passage towards the fixity of New York in early 1917 is thus coincident with the virtual, ‘absolute’ deterritorialising on the plane of immanence around which art, philosophy and politics can theoretically be contextualised. This idea relates to the machine in Deleuze and Guattari,



‘Pure affect’ 223

which, in its s­ubjectless and groundless state, processes constantly through deterritorialisation in becoming other than itself;5 it relates also to the production of an image, which Deleuze develops specifically as the ‘pure affect’ that does not refer away from itself to somewhere or something else, but which is stationary and extensive. Now, in pursuit of the becoming-Cravan of Cravan, we might transpose Deleuze’s discussion of the colour-image, for instance, onto the Cravan-image, describing what ‘does not refer to a particular object, but absorbs all that it can: it is the power which seizes all that happens within its range, or the quality common to completely different objects’.6 What Deleuze maintains for colour I will here apply in our perception of Cravan, that ‘it’ (‘he’) is ‘the affect itself, the virtual conjunction of all the objects which it [he] picks up’.7 And in exposure to new organisations and configurations, the effect of deterritorialisation is to shatter the subject, opening lines of flight, coming into contact with outsides, deterritorialising oneself by renouncing and by going elsewhere.8 In that cold and wet January of 1917, then, the first issue of Picabia’s 391 published in Barcelona announced Cravan’s renunciation of Europe and his ‘going elsewhere’: Arthur Cravan has … boarded the transatlantic liner [from Spain bound for New York]. He will be giving a series of lectures. Will he be dressed as a man of the world or as a cowboy? On his departure he plumped for the latter outfit and made an impressive entrance: on horseback, blasting three gunshots into the air.9

Cravan’s flight, of course, was from war – whether from heroic defiance, conscientious objection (which he rebuffed and denounced, ‘But I don’t object! They may all allow themselves to be murdered for aught I care, only they need not expect me to follow suit’),10 or from fear – and, on 14 January 1917, the passenger ‘Avenarius F. Lloyd’ disembarked in the port of New York. He declared his age to be twenty-eight ­(inaccurate), his profession as a journalist, ‘Me. Nelly Grandjean’ as his ‘nearest r­ elative … in country whence alien came’, and his being in possession of 60 dollars, with his address on arrival as the Washington Square Gallery – all detailed in the list of alien passengers for the United States immigration officer.11 Cravan had cause for optimism that this latest among his perpetual relay points would similarly resist entry into war when, just a week after his arrival (yet after interception of the Zimmermann telegram on the 16th), President Woodrow Wilson (cousin by marriage to Edward May, the penniless vagabond and pugilist who had joined in with Cravan’s ‘further attractions’ in Paris in July 1914) declared that America had ‘no concern with the “causes

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or objects” of the war’ in his ‘Peace Without Victory’ address to the Washington Senate.12 The political intricacy of Wilson’s address, however, is unlikely to have registered for Cravan at the time, and he would have been ill prepared for the apparent presidential shift from neutrality to belligerence within the space of three months. Still, his documented flight was variously interpreted by observers, some of whom viewed it from cultural-­political positions that obtained their own intricacies, while others held it in thoroughly low regard. The most widely repeated version of Cravan’s flight is as the defiant rejection of any participation in the war, be it the heroic defiance in Mina Loy’s (which feeds into legend) or the more nuanced and productive rejection and desertion resonant of European Dada that we find in such a version as Cendrars’s. In Loy’s prose ‘Colossus’, Cravan transcends the base corruption and carnage of war: ‘For him, humanity drew its essential breath from an all-pervasive element superseding the air, the ether. Illimitable imbecility, spontaneous, irreducible, he foresaw in it the everlasting victor of our illusory intellection.’ When Cravan spoke to Loy in his defiance, he sounded preposterous, ‘[a]n uncultured heretic shooting the farcical arrows of his predictions into the glorious holocaust of heroism’.13 In the abandonment of a cause, his flight would elsewhere have been branded treacherous – technically ‘desertion’ rather than renunciation – and yet in the front-line soldier Cendrars’s version we read the apotheosis of the deserter: I greatly preferred a deserter to a behind-the-lines shirker, for the deserter who goes overseas is, in his own way, a hero, a man who has had the courage to say No! which is manly and shows character, it is the action of a generous soul; all this, of course, based on the given premise that the poilu, the rank-and-file soldier was the most ridiculous Frenchman of all, because he knew perfectly well that he was just a jerk! My paradox made my comrades laugh, for the joke was on them, and they were pissed off about it.14

It is here that the Dada din rattles above the shelling of war, when Cendrars intimates the lumpen idiocy of the rank-and-file blind to its own supplication, and by his applied logic elevates Cravan to courageous deserter numbered among those ‘who went to endless lengths to save their skins’.15 During this period of flight, if saving his skin was a priority, there are occasional deviations (sometimes bizarre and speculative in the extreme) to the narrative. The suggestion has been made, for instance, that Cravan was employed in a vaguely defined c­ apacity as an intelligence monitor on his fellow passenger Leon Trotsky aboard the steamer Montserrat during the passage from Barcelona and Cadiz



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to New York.16 The ethereally dissolved biography – ­specifically during the sketchy months at the end of 1916 and the start of 1917 – i­nevitably accommodates theories of conspiracy (there is even a ‘Sergeant Grandjean’ named in Lausanne reportedly in active correspondence with intelligence agents during March 1917).17 Shortly following his arrival, meanwhile, Cravan declared with joy how much at home he felt in New York, like a fish in water,18 but there is little of any substance reliably to recover in the narrative from February and March 1917. Writing in March, he proudly stated that he had been contracted to a manager for work in vaudeville or cinema on a starting weekly wage of 1,500 francs.19 In March also, Picabia returned to New York from Barcelona, with four issues of 391 already published since the January announcement of Cravan’s arrival in New York, cocked and ready for his North American offensive in the next three issues. Then came the famous interview boasting Cravan’s boxing record, published in The Soil ‘magazine of art’ in April, followed by a report in the New York Tribune in which the boxing matchmaker and promoter James J. Johnston (later promoter at the original Madison Square Garden) declared he would be willing to put Cravan on contract as a heavyweight to promote him under the title ‘Sir Arthur Cravan’.20 But the social and political background importantly impacts for Cravan on the coming months, into the middle of 1917. The shift from President Wilson’s neutralist stand in his January address, for example – with hindsight regarding the Zimmermann telegram, but faced with the February declaration by Germany of indiscriminate attacks on shipping in European waters and subsequently the German U-boat sinking of American merchant ships in mid-March – to the entry of the United States into the war in the first week of April meant a collapse of the social-political neutrality that Cravan believed he might find in America. The Soil Robert J. Coady, publisher of The Soil, was predisposed to an affinity with the marginal cultural forms that Cravan himself appeared instinctively drawn towards; Coady, it is said, preferred ‘the serials and slapstick comedies of the smelly little East Side movie theatres to the pretentious musical and feature programs of the amusement places of Broadway’.21 Cravan’s first appearance in The Soil had been in 1916, in citation from ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’, set as epigraph to Coady’s ‘American Art’ manifesto statement, clearly and deliberately granting Cravan status of some import in Coady’s cultural project. No less significant was Cravan’s proximity to Walt Whitman when The

14  ‘Arthur Cravan vs. Jack Johnson’, The Soil, 4 (April 1917).



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Soil paired the English translation of the opening passage of Cravan’s original ‘Sifflet’ with lines from Whitman’s poem ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ in proclamation of the commonality and shared experience of life.22 The greater context for Whitman as epic founder and hero of New York is familiar in a frequently breathtaking vision of the city as ‘an extension of his body, its thronging traffic and burgeoning commerce an overflow from his clamorous, multitude-containing egotism’.23 This is an image that resounds strongly in the present reading of Cravan,24 and his pairing with Whitman is striking, it must be said, arising at least in part from the poetic invocation of the stuff of the New World, the objects and places of modernity that became the deserving material ‘of the most serious study’: ‘the art of Charles Chaplin, Bert Williams [the African-American vaudeville entertainer] and the window dressers along Broadway’.25 And, in the April issue of The Soil, the interview article ‘Arthur Cravan vs. Jack Johnson’ cemented Cravan’s pugilistic ranking as former French Heavyweight Boxing Champion alongside the former World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Johnson. Johnson’s photograph in boxing pose had already appeared in the January issue, as Coady promoted his own belief in a new American culture that was to be discovered ‘in the products of American industry and in popular sports and entertainment … [illustrated by] publication of photographs of machines, railroads, boxers, and storefront windows’.26 To precede ‘Arthur Cravan vs. Jack Johnson’, Coady published a fullpage portrait photograph of Cravan (reposing inside his and Renée’s Paris apartment on avenue de l’Observatoire, c.1914). This formally presented the fine specimen Cravan to the New York avant-garde community. The interview describing his fight with Johnson was read, and his portrait was studied, with interest and intrigue. The most significant response undoubtedly belongs to the New York Sun’s prototype ‘Modern Woman’, the poet Mina Loy:27 I had first seen his portrait in an art review in which a certain sleekness of feature gave him the air of a homosexual, and this, for the time, stripped him of all mystery for me … ‘This is a mind which would snub mine,’ I surmised, as I studied the portrait: ‘It deals in values of luxury.’ His clothes, his surroundings, looked expensive. A couple of Siamese cats lay among his negligent hands.28

The ‘sleekness’ of the image and the expensive-looking surroundings belie the lack of any gainful employment for Cravan in this period. Picabia was by now back in New York, initially installed at the Hotel Brevoort on Fifth Avenue,29 just one block north of Coady’s Washington Square Gallery at 47 Washington Square South, before residence on

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82nd Street. He provided some welcome relief for the approaching destitute Cravan, as Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia later recalled: We met him [Cravan] again in New York in the beginning of 1917. He was in very bad straits, without money, and was trailing along after more fortunate friends ... He seemed worried and restless, for America had also entered the war. He came to see us often in the little apartment in 82nd street … where the assaults and calumnies of ‘391’ were planned …30

Cravan blagued his way into the welcoming accommodation of hosts and hostesses: ‘Won’t you take me home with you? – No? … I only asked as I presumed it was expected of me; I have been so very well brought up.’ … Do let me come home with you … the mere idea of sleeping in my own place makes me neurasthenic – Do.’ ‘I have no extra bed.’ ‘But a table, surely? I will sleep on the table and swear I will not address a single word to you.’31

It is most unlikely that Cravan had his ‘own place’, beyond the rent-free public (and sometimes private) spaces accessible on Manhattan: His pleasures, stupendous yet costless – the greatest of all was the open air – he found in such places as the Museum of Natural History, the Aquarium, Central Park, the Hudson River, a railroad siding … He often spoke of his bungalow, and although one supposed he must somewhere keep a furnished room, he spent many nights sleeping in Central Park. It was only after he left New York that someone discovered his quarters – an exhibit structure on the roof of the Pennsylvania Railway Station.32

Whatever his accommodation, it is in April that we reliably resume Cravan’s descriptive recovery on the occasion of the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, opening at the Grand Central Palace on 10 April 1917.33 The readymade Cravan Critical commentaries on the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition are dominated art-historically by Duchamp’s Fountain, which marks an early maturing of the concept of the readymade. The readymade as concept – in Amelia Jones’s words, ‘the quintessential “aesthetic” tool of institutional critique’, famously in the wake of Bürger’s Theorie der Avantgarde (1974), but which has since become the anchor ‘for a certain kind of now reified mode of avant-garde “critique” ’34 – registers for us in departure from what Duchamp called ‘the retinal’.



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Conceptually, however, it fails unless we proceed beyond a version of the artist’s or author’s choice of an object approached neutrally, ‘with indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste.’35 Notwithstanding Nietzsche’s own dismissal as ‘a nonsensical absurdity’ the idea of ‘contemplation without interest’,36 accounting for the concept demands that we take it beyond the idea of presumed ‘visual indifference’ and, as Thierry de Duve has done, recognise the readymade as a kind of rendezvous: It is born of the encounter of an object and an author. Object and author are nothing but the conditions of their encounter … It is necessary and sufficient for them to exist to be able to meet. The object is a given; it exists somewhere, no matter where, available mentally. It doesn’t even have to be in the artist’s reach, since, once decided on, the readymade can later be looked for (with all kind of delays).37

This idea of the readymade as rendezvous, then, redirects us to the meeting places in New York – the Picabias’ apartment, for instance, where ‘chess reigned night and day … [and] the eccentricities of Marcel Duchamp were admiringly discussed’38 – and, with more than a thought to capitalise on the scandalous reputation established in Paris with ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’, Picabia and Duchamp (backed by the always enthusiastic Walter Conrad Arensberg) proposed Cravan to deliver a public lecture at the Grand Central Palace in inauguration of the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. This was to be no dour lecture on art – the whole occasion was, apparently, ‘the unforeseen outcome of a luncheon at which he [Cravan] had a few too many drinks’39 – and, on the appointed Thursday, 19 April 1917, the most pressing concern for the organisers before an enthralled audience reportedly comprising the most beautiful Fifth Avenue hostesses, present to attend initiation ‘into the new formulae of “futurist” art’,40 was the impending arrival of the speaker at an event wholly intended by Picabia and Duchamp to be a follow-up to the scandalous salon review in Maintenant. When Cravan eventually arrived at the Grand Central Palace, the story goes that he made his late appearance looking like ‘a hunted lion, dishevelled, red in the face, his collar wilting, self-assured and drunk’.41 Winding his way in the general direction of the lecture platform, he managed to collapse into the speaker’s chair, from where he gauged his proximity, ‘tasted a glass of water, made a wry face, and began with a few haughty phrases’.42 He stood up and promptly fell down, hitting his head on the speaker’s table ‘with an independence of

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expression plainly heard on Lexington Avenue’, and then, gesticulating wildly, announced ‘in a small altered voice … that the heat was intolerable and, this being so, he would have to give his lecture stark naked’.43 To the horror of those seated in the front rows, Cravan began to loosen his attire, deliberately putting himself at ‘great pains to achieve coarseness, while others exerted the same effort to overcome it’.44 Suddenly, it seemed that in his intoxicated state Cravan might damage some of the valuable canvases on display; or worse, as he began to undo his trousers, that he might relieve himself before a beautiful depiction of Eve hanging nearby.45 This was the signal for house detectives to descend just as the speaker was in the throes of ‘hurling one of the most insulting epithets in the English language at his audience’,46 and, emitting ‘a whoop which drowned out the rattle and roar of the New York Central’s trains’,47 Cravan was forcibly ejected from the premises via the 46th Street exit. The suggestion that he subsequently spent a week in Sing-Sing is misdirection (the statement of incarceration at New York’s maximum security correctional facility first surfaced in July 1917, three months after the lecture, in Picabia’s fifth issue of 391). The poet-boxer was reportedly partying the very next evening; it was Arensberg, as Buffet-Picabia recalled, ‘who put up the bail for Cravan and delivered him from the hands of the law after Cravan had taken it into his head to disrobe in public on the platform from which he was to initiate the ladies of Park Avenue into the mysteries of abstract painting’.48 Transported back to Arensberg’s apartment, Cravan recovered quietly, closed his eyes and slept the whole thing off. The organisers, in the meantime, were by accounts pleased: ‘What a wonderful lecture’, declared Duchamp.49 My suggestion here is that we can read the ‘wonderful lecture’ as an elaborate and performative Duchampian readymade. Duchamp functions as inscribing author, with Picabia and Arensberg – but importantly not Cravan – in supporting collaborative roles.50 In 1915, Duchamp had already extended the idea that would mature into the readymades to include words and language,51 and, as critical to the readymade, the inscription is locatable within his reflections on this category of cultural production: ‘One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the “readymade”.’52 In a note-to-self dated January 1916, for instance, Duchamp wrote, ‘find inscription for Woolworth Bldg. as readymade’. 53 Duchamp’s reflections prompt de Duve’s critical observation that the readymade may indeed remain perpetually inaccessible to any appropriation, and for Duchamp as author there is no truth to declare in the process of inscribing,



‘Pure affect’ 231 only a speech delivered on no matter what occasion but at such and such an hour. He or she [the author] is without any intention other than that of inscribing a readymade, of being on time for the meeting. Given an object and an author, it is thus sufficient that they have a rendezvous for a readymade to be able to be inscribed, in other words, for an ordin­ ary object to be able to be written into the register of those things onto which the statement ‘This is art’ is affixed.54

Thus the proposition of Duchamp as inscribing author; Cravan as ordinary object; the Grand Central Palace as rendezvous; and the inscription, ‘What a wonderful lecture.’ The event, ‘which the Surrealist chronicles report[ed] as a decisive Dada act’, subsequently earned prominence in the Cravan legend ‘due to the enthusiastic commentaries of his friends Duchamp and Picabia … [which is how] the lecture became famous … [and how Cravan] acquired the halo of a Dada luminary’.55 This proposition of the Independents’ lecture as readymade has precedent, for instance, in Amelia Jones’s essay ‘New York Dada: Beyond the Readymade’ (2005), where means are suggested by which the body (here, the body of Arthur Cravan) insists upon its centrality in the whole discourse and functioning within avant-garde processing and disturbances ‘through interpretations informed by bodily investments that can never be fully rationalized’.56 Waking up the next morning in Arensberg’s apartment at 2FE 33 West 67th Street (beneath Duchamp’s studio at 3FW), the hungover Cravan (suitably sensational to be cited by Arensberg, three years later, in attempting to lure Picabia and other Paris Dada activists back to New York with the words, ‘I am sure that your adventures with the New York police would make the history of Cravan at the Independents a very pale affair’)57 obliged his most agreeable host with a follow-up appearance at that evening’s ‘Quarter Latin costume ball’: Poet-Pugilist at Artists’ Ball A Quarter Latin costume ball, Frank Cravan and the breath of about two hundred persons were held simultaneously throughout most of last night in the Grand Central Palace – all in connection with the huge exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. Frank Cravan was there because of the ball, and the breath was not there because of Frank Cravan. … Mr Cravan, who is a poet, amateur boxing champion of France, art critic, and editor too, appeared at the ball last night, evincing no desire to avoid trouble. He stalked in behind Miss Nora Bayes and ahead of the party of girls from ‘The Century Girl’ who were escorted by Mr and Mrs Rockwell Kent. His six foot frame was draped in a beadspread and his head wrapped in a towel.

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After a contemptuous glance at the swirling dancers in their multicoloured costumes the one-time adversary of Jack Johnson proceeded to brighten up the corner where he was by removing the spread and practically everything else above the waistline. Early this morning the ball was still being held, and Mr Cravan was being held within reasonable limits by his friends, and the breath of two hundred persons was being held in anticipation of further temperamental extravagances on the part of the poet-pugilist.58

In contrast and significantly less spectacularly, Mina Loy recalled her first meeting with Cravan in April–May as a decidedly sober and awkwardly muted encounter: I first saw him standing, stubbornly it seemed, beside Arensberg, he looked dull and square in merely respectable tweeds; not at all homosexual, but not handsome – more like a farmer, a husband. I felt no premonition of the psychological infinity he would later offer my indiscreet curiosity as to the mechanism of man.59

This is an appearance remarkable for the tweedy, earthy image conjured of the scandal in repose, of the poet-boxer more descriptively recovered from this New York phase in fragmentary glimpses, in between idle soirées, homeless dissipation, sleeping nights in Central Park or on the roof of the Pennsylvania Railway Station, and the persistence of the distinctly unformed sense of Cravan. Sophie Treadwell The backdrop in the wake of the Independents’ lecture takes the form of soirées that blur into indulgent and over-indulgent evenings at the apartment of Walter and Louise Arensberg. Some of the male host’s Harvard peers, for instance, viewed with dismay their old friend Walter’s absorption in what they considered to be the deleterious effects of the artistic avant-garde, commenting on some of his poems published in Picabia’s 391 that they were ‘the natural result of having no hold on life and of life having no hold on him’ and, additionally, the consequence of a ‘financial, domestic, and social situation where “life” means nothing. The whole thing is aberrational, a case of virtuosity carried so far that it has lost all meaning and validity.’60 The soirées, in the meantime and as has been broadly documented in the literature, provided conditions conducive to much of what was most progressive in the broad and loosely applied name of New York Dada. And, in the immediate aftermath of the Independents’ lecture, Cravan first met the person who completes ‘les trois femmes de Cravan’,61 Sophie Treadwell. Treadwell



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was a San Francisco journalist in the years during which she produced a quite remarkable body of work for the early twentieth century,62 joining the staff at the New York Tribune in the latter part of 1915, and she became an occasional frequenter of the Arensberg soirées, where it was that she and Cravan met. An independent-minded writer and playwright, Treadwell was married to the New York journalist William O. McGeechan, was in a protracted romantic relationship with the painter Maynard Dixon and, when she met Cravan, was about to embark on a road trip that took her for the entire month of May from New York to Los Angeles.63 As it would transpire, from their first meeting practically until the poet-boxer’s disappearance at the end of 1918, Treadwell and Cravan maintained correspondence; ‘love letters’ it has been said, during spring–summer 1917,64 written exchanges in French, granting occasional glimpses of Cravan’s entreaties and vying for affection.65 If the readymade object With Hidden Noise was Treadwell’s ‘child’ with Duchamp (Treadwell had actually provided Duchamp with the inscription for this work), then, Cravan lamented in September 1917, ‘No longer anything – is it finished? you don’t even have a readymade from me.’66 Mina Loy To coincide with the New York Independents’ exhibition in April, the first issue of the magazine the Blind Man (the ‘Independents’ Number’) appeared, edited and published by Henri-Pierre Roché, Beatrice Wood and Duchamp. It included a short item by Mina Loy, titled ‘In … Formation’, musing on the distinction between ordinary members of the public and the artist, who both ‘like the same drinks, can fight in the same trenches, pretend to the same women; but never see the same thing ONCE’.67 The second and final issue of the Blind Man appeared in May, the month of Sophie Treadwell’s New York leave, and again included contributions by Loy, and advance publicity and ‘axioms du bal’ for the Blind Man’s Ball, ‘a new-fashioned hop, skip, and jump’: The dance will not end till the dawn. The Blind Man must see the sun … Romantic rags are requested. There is a difference between a tuxedo and a Turk and guests not in costume must sit in bought-and-paid-for boxes.68

The most consistent commentaries on Cravan in New York are recovered from such ‘avant-garde’ gatherings, though they are in significant part generated from the priming for which the likes of Picabia had been advance party and are subsequently veiled in legend. In the available sources, dominated by Loy’s writings, an image is formed:

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Even before [Cravan] arrived in America, the legends surrounding him were so extravagant that the very idea of encountering him frightened me. From all accounts … he would assault a building if it stood in his way. I would have preferred to forego the almost imperative ritual of meeting him, but ‘haven’t you met the prizefighter who writes poetry?’ assailed me on all sides. In a certain circle, it was becoming ‘the thing’ to make his acquaintance, and my dislike of knowing less of what is going on than my friends spurred my ambition.69

This much hints at a proto-celebrity for Cravan despite himself within the Arensberg circle, an exotic Parisian specimen imported via the European capitals. It is with Loy, of course, that the Cravan record assumes mythical dimension as well as an intimacy absent (save for the briefest exceptions) in all others, a dimension given expression in poetry as well as in Loy’s unpublished prose writings that include reminiscences of Cravan.70 Loy renamed Cravan ‘Colossus’, a name that perhaps tells us far more than any other description does of his imposing physical presence, and wrote him into prose populated by identifiable figures from the New York scene. If the first brief, tweedy encounter had disappointed, the difference between it and the second meeting, which took place on the evening of the Blind Man’s Ball, on 25 May 1917, could not be more striking – from farmer in tweed to towering sculpture in animated stone – yet retains Loy’s attraction ‘upon a fount of physical repulsion’: It was on my second meeting with him that I perceived him as beautiful. But his huge bulk, his empty stare, only called up a comparison with that still more unwieldy beauty of Grecian feature, il gigante Ugo, the light of whose eyes had also fallen petrified upon his reason and who, like a towering statue of animated stone, had swayed lethargically above the spectators in the side-show of a circus in Italy. This second encounter took place at a party in Walter’s apartment preceding the Blind Man’s Ball. Colossus, after various telephone calls of inducement, turned up alone among the elegant couples gathered there. He was wrapped in a sheet evidently ripped at the last minute from his bed, his head swathed in a towel. This white encasement gave the perfect construction of his face the significance of sculpture. … Colossus, with whom I still had not spoken, slunk down beside me in his best (by this time he had taken off his sheet and towel) and draped his great bare arm around my décoltée shoulders. Slouched in his chair, the sneering muscles of his mouth and chin sunk into his chest, his gaze fixed on his monstrous boots, he looked as if at any moment he might vomit disgust in the faces of his twittering companions.



‘Pure affect’ 235 The putrefaction of unspoken obscenities issuing from this tomb of flesh, devoid of any magnetism, chilled my powdered skin. It was, to say the least, a negative initiation, this leaning flesh to flesh, as it were, upon a fount of physical repulsion. I had never been encircled by a stranger or by anyone who revolted me before. It was only satisfying to rise and leave him.71

The departure was choreographed into the brief and unspeaking courtships of the fashionable ‘instantaneous affairs’ that Loy described in the closing months of 1917.72 Cravan, as various sources either implicitly or explicitly indicate, spoke little at these social gatherings: ‘His manners were extremely reserved and courteous, when he was not drunk … [b]ut alcohol liberated alarmingly terrifying properties in him.’73 Loy recalled: When I passed by him, he took a paper from his pocket and pressed it upon me. ‘Read it,’ he urged, his face stolid. It was a letter from a woman of whom I had never heard, throwing a jealous fit on account of my relationship to this creature Colossus with whom I had not yet exchanged a word. … Toward the end of the Ball I came upon him again; by this time he was completely drunk, lurching among the mob, demanding women for their telephone numbers. ‘You may give me yours,’ he instructed me, ‘I will ring you up if I find the time. So many other women desire me.’74

For the greater Cravan narrative, then, there is this fleeting constellation in New York for the women of import. Renée (the original Madame Cravan, of course) had stayed in Spain at the end of 1916, with the apparent intention of following Cravan to New York.75 From 1917 onwards, however, Renée recedes in the narrative (erupting as, presumably, she who threw the ‘jealous fit’ over Cravan’s acquaintance with Loy), eventually returning to live her life in Paris. Though their correspondence continued (arguably out of Cravan’s continuing dependence on her), Renée was never to see Cravan again.76 If Renée was ‘Madame Cravan’ for the period 1909–16, then the title is conferred on Mina Loy for the years 1917–18; Treadwell, in the meantime, never pursued this particular epithet. Unlimited existence In addition to hamming it at balls and soirées, and whether or not he made any vaudeville or cinematic appearances into 1917 as he had suggested in March that he would do, Cravan was able to find only meagre income as the year progressed. Those few in New York who had known

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him before he left Europe at the end of 1916 – Buffet-Picabia most memorably – looked to help in finding ways of making his existence in the United States easier through casual employment: I had the luck to find a position for him as a translator in the very correct, puritan family of an old professor of philosophy, who wanted to supervise in person the translation of his works. It meant spending several weeks in the country. I hesitated to speak to Cravan about this situation, which would assure him a comfortable existence in exchange for easy work, but which demanded a certain type of conduct I did not dare guarantee. Finally I tackled the problem frankly. ‘Cravan,’ I said, ‘if you will swear to me that you will not carry off the silverware, that you will behave properly with the ladies, that you will not get drunk, etc. etc.’ He promised everything I asked of him, in such touching, serious terms that I no longer doubted his sincerity, and he was happy as a child at the idea of running around in the wood and living, for a time, far from scandals and alcohol. He kept his promise, perhaps because the test did not last long …77

As spring turned to summer the old unease as a declared British national resurfaced in the war climate, with press attention falling on draft shirkers. Already in New York, a good-natured push for voluntary enlisting had been under way: The recruiting bureaus for volunteers, which looked like French fairbooths, were stationed in the busiest parts of the city, and did not seem to be very popular, despite the fact that the pretty, alluring girls, flanked by a few non-commissioned officers in brand new uniforms, were used as decoys … but the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the passers-by made it obvious that more efficacious measures would soon be necessary.78

Those measures were introduced in June, when the Conscription Act was passed by the Senate, and Cravan was himself caught up in the City Draft Machine for registration on the 5th. The registration card for Fabian Lloyd provides several items of information confirming his status at the time.79 His given address at 6 East 14th Street, New York, is of particular note; it is the address at which the painter Arthur Burdett Frost, Jr., took a studio upon his return from Paris to North America in 1915, and, as Buffet-Picabia recalled of early 1917, Frost was the ‘more fortunate friend’ after whom she had seen Cravan trail in New York.80 In broader comment, ‘often in the company of the avant-garde poet and critic Arthur Cravan, [Frost is said to have] led a life of dissipation’,81 and he was by the middle of 1917 providing Cravan with space in his studio as temporary living accommodation. The two had been acquainted in Paris, Frost being one of the many summarily dismissed in ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’.82 So, meanwhile, draft registration



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was enough for Cravan to write to his mother in August hinting at mobilisation and that he was now anticipating the prospect of killing ‘un tas des boches’ in armed combat.83 The incongruity of the political situation by mid-1917 when set against the distractions of the Arensberg soirées is, it must be said, disorienting – certainly when we read of seemingly disconnected selfabsorption revolving around Duchamp teaching ‘love, that game of chess’84 – and Cravan was to some extent cushioned by these soirées against the reality of his flight from belligerence, though it now pressed once more in New York: [T]he poet with the shortest hair in the world had let it grow so as not to look like a man who was eligible for mobilization, in fact nothing about his person must suggest such a thing, and now the heavy, thick-set, but still seductive nephew of the dandy Oscar Wilde … [kept company] with the lily-livered funks of all kinds whom the European winds of war had blown away to New York …85

Among the Europeans of exiled decadence, Loy’s recollections include such vivid descriptions as the late soirée at the Arensbergs’, where Cravan and Duchamp ‘lolled about a divan in Walter’s parlor’ and took part in an almost ritualistic ‘privileged male sport’ for the evening, ‘which consisted of drawing their forefingers along the green stockings of the blond [sic] Countess [Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven] stretched among the cushions’ and, in knowing silence, ‘[e]very now and then a man would rise, giving his place to another’.86 The broader sweep of these soirées draws in the supporting cast of New York Dada, among whom ranks the wonderful Beatrice Wood, who lived into her 106th year and could recall for a still recent generation of scholars her days as the Mama of Dada. Her drawings documenting exits and entrances in 1917 include the watercolour Béatrice et ses douzes enfants! (reproduced on p. 238), where Cravan appears in sailor’s dress among the twelve children (grouped with the artist Joseph Stella and the writer Henri-Pierre Roché; the latter is depicted four times in total, including as the baby cradled in Wood’s arms).87 Paul B. Franklin has provocatively suggested that there rests in this image a complex gender ambiguity; Roché, for instance, as Franklin describes the picture, ‘is positioned next to Cravan as his [Cravan’s] “girlfriend”, their queer (in every sense of the word) coupling echoed in their matching his-and-hers sailor suits’.88 Perhaps the most perceptive, certainly critical, first-hand commentary on these related Arensberg gatherings is the one given in the intellectually astute poetic writings of Juliette Roche, whose 1916 interlude between two periods in New York with her h ­ usband Albert

15  Beatrice Wood, Béatrice et ses douzes enfants! (c.1917).



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Gleizes in 1915 and 1917–19 was spent in Barcelona and Tossa de Mar. Her first acquaintance with Cravan may well have taken place at the Catalan coastal town in 1916 – both Cravan and Roche are present in photographs of the beach gatherings of Montparnasse exiles in Tossa – although she had also occasionally frequented the earlier poetic gatherings at La Closerie des Lilas in Paris, and supported Ricciotto Canudo’s journal Montjoie! in and around 1913 and the run-up to Cravan’s troubles with the Delaunays, during which time she would undoubtedly have been at least familiar with the pugilist’s name as aspiring poet and publisher of Maintenant. By the time of the renewed acquaintance in New York, the creative optimism of the city’s initial gravitational pull on Roche in 1915 had weakened.89 In 1917, her own growing disaffection with New York’s artistic avant-garde was heavily influenced by Picabia’s role within that formation and by her ambivalence in relation to his admirable iconoclasm on the one hand and objectionable misogyny on the other. The Picabias on 82nd Street lived near Roche and Gleizes at West 88th Street, and Roche was the dismayed witness to ‘the worst cases washed up in New York … [who] attached themselves to [Picabia] like mussels to a rock’ – and, in among these ‘wrecks’, she observed Arthur Cravan.90 In Roche’s poetry of 1917–19, subsequently published in her 1920 volume Demi Cercle,91 the unnamed Cravan appears in the poem ‘West 88’ as the inconstant ‘compass-boxer, oriented simultaneously to the north, south, east and west’.92 Cravan has other walk-on parts: marking 1916, Roche’s poem ‘L’année’ refers to ‘the black boxer and the English deserter’,93 while the ‘confesseur athlète’ of an untitled visual poem, or the dull repeated ‘Vive l’anarchie!’ of the poem ‘Brevoort’, are other suggested allusions.94 But the more directly critical rendering of Cravan is to be found in Roche’s novella à clef, the extended three-section narrative poem titled ‘La minéralisation de Dudley Craving Mac’Adam’.95 This work, described as ‘Roche’s most detached consideration of the New York Dada circle and her engagement with it’, reflected what Roche considered to be the woefully high stakes of a certain notion of the modern that took form in the Arensberg circle; Carolyn Burke’s commentary on this work sums up ‘the spiritual disintegration of a wealthy Dante scholar, poet, and artist … a parodic Inferno set in Manhattan’. The eponymous central composite figure is most wholly based on Arensberg as self-styled scholar of Dante cryptography, with recognisable vestiges of Duchamp, and the invented middle name ‘Craving’ alludes to the Americans’ pronunciation of ‘Cravan’ configured with ‘the diffuse yearning seen as typical of Americans’. The final demise of Dudley Craving Mac’Adam comes eventually as ‘a victim of

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his own penchant for the cold allure of the intellect’.96 The direct parody of Cravan in Roche’s work, however, is to be found in the ­character named Lloyd Willow, denizen of the depressing basement setting in the first part of the extended poem (evocative of the Brevoort) where Mac’Adam encounters the fashionable avant-gardist pronouncement of banalities (including those made by the Picabia parody, referred to only as the ‘fat philosopher’); ‘Lloyd’, of course, is Fabian Lloyd, and ‘Willow’ invokes Cravan’s physical stature, the ‘interminable height’ (Roche) and ‘his gigantic shoulders with their gentle droop’ (Loy).97 Roche’s sympathy for her characters’ displacement, however, cedes to Lloyd Willow’s odiousness when he speaks of all the successes that he could have been but which he proclaims wittingly to have yielded to ‘the unlimited existence of the failure’.98 Cravan’s ‘unlimited existence’ may give us no corresponding account from the New York period to the intimacy we read in Loy’s writing about the middle part of 1917, the latter of which illumines the seduction of their relationship in those weeks of intimate courtship: [B]y virtue of being the most dislocated members of that set … [we drifted] into a kind of spontaneous partnership. At evening parties we would bury ourselves in the same deep armchair, sharing an inverted book. When other couples strolled past us we would break our habitual silence, concluding enigmatic remarks which, in our unwatched moments, we had not troubled to begin. All of this must have come about naturally, as if our predestined friendship had to pass laboriously through silence before creation. I remember feeling as if I were lounging on the flanks of an indolent mountain whose summit was lost in heavy clouds – so convinced was I that this partner of mine had received too many blows to the brain. … [H]is body still as granite, he held himself aloof from his words as he spoke of his loneliness, his love. ‘All your irony is assumed,’ he whispered to me, ‘You have really the heart of the romantic. Why will you not let me show you what life can be in the embrace of my boundless love? My one desire,’ he continued, parting the ethereal green grapes that hung from my hat and burying his lips in my hair, ‘my one desire is to be so very tender to you that you will smile without irony.’99

The eventual outcome of their intimacy would prove to be the last events and defining narrative episode of 1918. For the moment, however, Loy had yet seriously to debate, let alone resolve, the question that she posed for herself – whether or not she should take a lover100 – and Cravan, while he wrote the autobiography of his early years



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and the posthumously published ‘Notes’ (his jottings of an ‘histoire ­fantastique’),101 sensed pressing urgency for moving on under the increasingly leaden skies of the draft. The passage of Canada The prosopoème only retrospectively titled ‘Notes’ – not published until 1942, with brief introductory comments by André Breton (including factual errors) describing it as a work of raw genius (‘du génie à l’etat brut’)102 in the experimental Surrealist magazine VVV – is a remarkable text of epic scope and local reference. The extent to which it can be considered finished is only circumstantial – Cravan had been drafting notes for a poetic composition since the first half of 1917, and they remained in Mina Loy’s possession after 1918 – yet the published ‘Notes’ suggests a proto-structure revolving around allusions to the Eiffel Tower, Cravan’s fluctuating weight as a boxer, the moon and the poet-boxer’s by-now sprawling menagerie, projecting into the remaining eighteen months or so that are recoverable in the narrative and rendering some memorable aphoristic passages in the process: … the blue water of the rain, the downpour – the dusty ladybirds of museums – its snows on empty benches – the greatest monuments create the most dust – all these fruits are promised to the autumn – all that glitters in the spring is promised to winter – the silver of winter – Canada, I know that you are green – and take a stroll in the woods! – the dust of Caesars is raised by the wind – what am I, where are … and my books of love? the universal vessel – freshen the roses – (à propos the war) I would be ashamed to let myself be carried away by Europe – let her die, I don’t have the time – far from my brothers and far from the balloons – I love her, her manner of today is filled with genius, while I find her manner of yesterday visionary, and as for that of the day before yesterday … – what I like about myself … I have twenty countries in my memory and I drag the colours of a hundred cities in my soul –103

This is streaming consciousness away from belligerence and through plurality to physical movement, to drift away from the draft. Dated correspondence places Cravan in Toms River on 20 July, in Atlantic City on 19 August and in Washington a week later;104 he left New York in September to exit the United States and cross the border into that green land of Canada. There is a remote echo of the youthful adventures of 1906 in the company of Jourdan; this time, his travelling companion is the painter Frost, and, ‘given a lift by passing motorists, who took him for a soldier on furlough … [Cravan] reached the Far North’.105 A note to Loy in September and border entry records place Cravan

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and Frost in North Sydney, on the eastern tip of Nova Scotia, on the 16th and 17th.106 From Nova Scotia they went north-east to Corner Brook on the western side of the Rock, Newfoundland island,107 where Cendrars describes elaborately the first part of this most outlandish episode (I cite faithfully): When the United States entered the war, our poet, who did not want to have his pretty faced spoiled, was in such a blue funk at the thought of being caught and flung into the maelstrom that, without further reflection, he slipped over into Canada, since that happened to be the nearest frontier and he could reach it in a single night. It was only after he had made it over the border that Arthur Cravan realized his head was in the lion’s jaws, for Canada was a British Dominion, and therefore at war, and Arthur … was also a British subject … who wanted nothing whatever to do with this imperialist war, for God’s sake! … Quos vult perdere Jupiter, dementat prius. … The hare-brained idiot took refuge in a farm, and there he remained quietly for some time, not knowing what to do nor how to get himself out of there. What gave this great strapping fellow the idea of dressing up as a woman I do not know, but probably he was thinking of the homosexuals he had seen dancing together in the night clubs on the Kurfürstendam and at La Petite Chaumière in Montmartre … for these are the things that come back to you when you are all alone and keep hashing over your past while you whistle a popular tune to keep your spirits up. I do not know how he got hold of female clothing in that remote farm in the woods, but the Canadians are not very quick on the uptake and probably the farmers saw no harm in this big joker who knew how to make himself agreeable and who must surely have given them a hand here and there during the day and entertained them and made them laugh in the evenings. The Canadian winter is long, there are not many amusements in the country, and the passing stranger who has an interesting tale to tell, and can make jokes, such as an out-of-season travelling salesman, is welcome … But perhaps, quite simply, Arthur managed to seduce the daughter of some farmer, or a maidservant who gave him shelter, for he was a handsome hunk of man, a liar, and an arrant flatterer. I do not know how he managed to get to Montreal without arousing suspicion, and on to Quebec without getting arrested, nor how he embarked on board ship and landed up, high and dry, in Newfoundland, still dressed as a woman, but what I do know is that he disembarked without a cent and immediately (just in time to change his costume behind a fence somewhere) had to look for a job, which proves that his flight in travesty must have cost him dearly, for Arthur had left New York with his pockets full. He had passed the hat around among all his friends and acquaintances …108



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No further commentary offers itself in relation to this episode, with the exception of Johan Everaers’s recovery in the early 2000s of items of Cravan’s correspondence, locating the Canadian farm in Curling, Newfoundland, the fishing community which is today part of the town of Corner Brook.109 Cendrars’s account eventually falls into Cravan apocrypha charting the route across the Rock, where Cravan (and probably not Frost) took brief toil on the island’s eastern fleets at Bonavista, sailing the rich fishing grounds of the Grand Banks. What is reliably documented belongs to the end of this adventure in the Far North, in conclusion to Cendrars’s prose which recalls the Cravan that he knew: [H]e found work at once, as a sailor, in Bonavista, Newfoundland, on board a Danish boat that was setting off to fish for cod on ‘the Banks’, and Arthur must have sweated his guts out, that’s for sure! Oh, that blessed Cravan! This cod-fishing expedition was the hardest period of Cravan’s life. A fisherman’s lot is no joke and, in Newfoundland, it is sheer misery. Arthur had a rough time of it. For the first time in his life, Oscar Wilde’s nephew had to soil his hands with work, and the poet-boxer did not like to spoil his beautiful hands any more than he liked to spoil his pretty face … [L]ife cannot have been a bed of roses ‘on the Banks’ … [and] Cravan must have been sick to death of it.110

Cendrars’s cynical retrospection over thirty years is what it is. Still, September and October posed some hard physical challenges for Cravan,111 and, less than a month after leaving New York, the two made their return journey on board the SS Florizel, which sailed from St John’s, south of Bonavista on the eastern side of the Rock, to dock in New York on 11 October.112 Leaving New York The return to New York was probably scheduled for Frost, who exhibited a painting titled Mannequins in a group show held between 17 October and 9 November at the Penguin Club on East 15th Street.113 Cravan, meanwhile, staggered back to the fringes of the avant-garde bohemia with the approaching winter, during which, according to Mina Loy, ‘one heard little else than exhortations to love’. He seemed out of time in the company of the New York ‘moderns’ who ‘accused him of admiring Hugo! What was he doing in this crowd, anyway? “Well, he has a title,” the Americans reminded one another.’114 The little remaining time for the titled Sir Arthur Cravan in the United States, then, is coloured by one tragic event and, first, the now heightened intimacy of his relationship with Loy, who finally, by her admission, deigned to take him as her lover:

16  Manifest of passengers for SS Florizel arriving at Port of New York, 11 October 1917 (detail): passenger no. 13, Lloyd, Fabian; passenger no. 14: Frost, Arthur Jnr.



‘Pure affect’ 245 Having nothing of the modern spirit, he was at a disadvantage, and men at a social disadvantage are likelier to fall back upon ‘love’. Therefore, I confided to myself, he might make a passable lover … My image of the half-imbecile savage had likewise slipped from my mind, and in its place I had merely a commonplace man to reckon with – one who happened to be tremendous and handsome, but who had no arts for winning a woman. Suppose I took him for my lover. This granite lump – although he held no magnetism – might perhaps prove affectionate.115

Loy, finally divorced from her first husband during this same October, tells of her eventual yield and promise to Cravan that she would take him home with her; his pronouncements on art and life and ‘the depravity of the herd’; his belief that if ever he should love a woman, he would ‘never “know her” carnally’; and the dawning realisation for Loy, as she watched him leaving the studio she had lit ‘with an orange light – to make it habitable for “love” ’ – creeping home ‘along the street entirely occupied with keeping an eye on my window without turning his head’, that indeed she now had a lover: ‘Darling, do you realize this great thing that has happened to you? You have a lover!’ ‘I had not noticed it.’ ‘Little angel,’ he inquired hopefully, ‘do you regret it?’ ‘I never regret wasted time.’116

Out of the intensity of Loy’s prose is released a Whitmanic image of the poet-boxer, whose devouring stride reduced New York to some kind of landfill ‘on which the works of man were regenerated in the poetry of his appreciation’: He could push his entire consciousness into a wisp of grass, plunge his whole being through a dish of frost in a wheel rut – for when he halted to observe he seemed to leave his immeasurable carcass on the threshold of his interest. And when he had engulfed in his regard every pebble, every wish, every perpendicular of skyscraper, every metallic suspension and every square millimeter of the city he roamed in tenacious idleness – a sort of inquietude would invade his motor centers. He was always looking for something of his own among all this – that something the poet always seems to have mislaid. He was occupied with identifying himself with every degree of height and depth – in that indes­ cribable interchange he interrogated the earth in order to bear it away as his seed. The secrets of the earth ‘re-minded’ his creative will. He would hang for hours over splinters of quartz with their distinct diamantine resemblances until his eyes would glitter and reillumine their object. This I know – that Cravan meant by the ‘eternal quality’ the poet’s obligation to augment through his own knowledge the value of the universal essentials,

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of which he knew himself to be one exponent and which his entire life was constructed to preserve.117

The Cravan that Loy met in New York was the mature specimen who had marked his thirtieth birthday just a few days before the Blind Man’s Ball, and whose gaze now seemed increasingly fixed on the middle distance in continued pursuit of neutral soil. In his ‘Notes’, we read the words: ‘my God! when I think that I’m thirty years old, it drives me wild.’ And though he bade ‘good-bye the passions of a twenty year old’, his image of himself remained that of the athletic boxer: ‘I have dedicated myself to life, I am in good shape – rippling muscles.’118 Cendrars offers a very different summing up of Cravan moving on in age, no doubt jaundiced by years of retrospection: Arthur, being a champion athlete, a boxer … like many semi-professional sportsmen who exhaust themselves with intensive training, being slaves to their beautiful bodies, victims of their torsos and the muscles they love to show off, flexing their biceps to seduce women and earn themselves honours, prize money, comfort, luxury, and, ultimately, the flabbiness that overtakes them before they are thirty years old!119

Cravan responds to his own reflection in ‘Notes’ on the athlete’s maintaining of physical condition as recurring frequencies within this proso­ poème – ‘Remember that my weight has often been my despair’; ‘my weight is subject to tremendous fluctuation, my friends will tell you as much, my fleshy face becoming drawn in a matter of hours’; ‘I distrust him: he weighs the same as ten years ago’; ‘I watched with a smile the man whose weight had not changed a kilo in ten years’120 – and, though he was heavy-set, Loy’s description of him standing in her bathrobe ‘flung open, displaying the frontal plane of his so solid, snow-white torso … like something escaped from the British Museum’,121 suggests that Cravan was a long way from succumbing to Cendrars’s flabbiness. December 1917 and January 1918 saw the coldest New York winter on record, and would prove decisive for the remaining twelve months of the present narrative. When he was not in the company of Loy, a good deal of Cravan’s time idled with Frost, much to the barely concealed consternation of Frost’s father, the successful illustrator Arthur Burdett Frost (senior). The latter had not approved his son’s travelling to the Far North with Cravan in the first instance, and his chagrin similarly at his son’s artistic pursuits dated from the belle époque avant-garde influence of Matisse’s classes in Paris and then of the so-called pure painting of Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s Orphism: ‘He has reached the bottom, he can’t degrade his talent any further. His studies are silly and affected and utterly worthless.’122 Cravan’s not dissimilar response to



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Frost’s painting was born more of fraternal provocation than of paternal despair, however – Cravan reflected in 1917 on Orphic tendencies that ‘the painter who only uses primary colours is like the writer who is forever shouting shit’123 – and their camaraderie was close as the year approached its end. Then suddenly, on the 7th of that cold December, we read that Frost ‘died tragically of a tubercular haemorrhage during a night of orgy and alcohol, in [Cravan’s] presence’.124 A slow demise as the inevitable consequence of dissipation might have been less painful for those who remained, but the blunt abruptness of Frost’s death (despite his evidently ailing condition since September) resounded in the brevity of the following day’s newspaper death notice.125 Frost’s father, in the meantime, was inconsolable: Senseless wrong and cruel, hard and cruel, he loved life and had everything to live for and it is cruel. I can’t believe that he is gone. I can’t realize it, it seems to me he must come back to me.126

The circumstances of Frost’s death posed particular discomfort for Cravan, who found himself culpable in the eyes of his deceased friend’s father when the latter, it is said, accused him of homicide.127 This was undoubtedly a signal prompt in Cravan’s decision to leave New York: ‘There is no longer room for me.’128 After looking in evasion of military service first to Mexico, where he could comfortably pose as an alemán rather than as an American in Carranza’s republic, he deterritorialised, renounced and went elsewhere in mid-December. Cravan’s ‘Notes’, then, conclude the Manhattan transfer: [A]dieu New York, I have only been passing through – The bone-structure of countries forms the topography of bones – in boredom I am both herbivorous and carnivorous – on what should I base my system of the world: a blade of grass or the boxer’s thighs? – New York … millions of madmen … Don’t forget to telephone – When the rays of the machinery have influenced my head as much as those of the sun – I am ashamed to be white: a white is not even a Negro’s corpse – I am going to Buenos Aires to be unhappy –129

Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p. 70. 2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984), p. 322.

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3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 68, 88. 4 Deterritorialisation is the transformative possibility of the ‘territory’ in which it inheres, its extensive movement obtaining no speed (neither fast nor slow). As Deleuze and Guattari write of the nomad, ‘[m]ovement is extensive, speed is intensive’. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 381. 5 Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 55–6. 6 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 118. 7 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 118. 8 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 353. 9 Pharamousse [Francis Picabia], ‘Whispers from Abroad’, 391, 1 (January 1917); trans. Michelle Owoo, in Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), p. 111. 10 Mina Loy, ‘Colossus’, extracts reproduced in Roger Conover, ‘Mina Loy’s “Colossus”: Arthur Cravan Undressed’, in Rudolf E. Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986), p. 112. 11 ‘List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival’: SS Montserrat arriving at Port of New York, 14 January 1917, frames 118 and 119 (Fabian Lloyd passenger ID 610187020015); © 2015 The Statue of Liberty – Ellis Island Foundation, Inc., all rights reserved. 12 See Uthara Srinivasan, ‘Woodrow Wilson’s “Peace Without Victory” Address, January 22, 1917: A Continuity of Thought’, Concord Review (1991), 129–43 (129). 13 Loy, ‘Colossus’, pp. 112, 113. 14 Blaise Cendrars, Sky: Memoirs, trans. Nina Rootes (New York: Paragon House, 1992), pp. 197–8. 15 Cendrars, Sky, p. 198. 16 Describing Cravan in far too broad strokes as ‘a founding member of the Dadaist fraternity and all-round cultural subversive’, Richard B. Spence continues provocatively, rounding up what little circumstantial and speculative evidence there is to reach his decidedly inconclusive conclusion: ‘Cravan had a habit of assuming identities, a contempt for convention and a taste for adventure. These factors would have made him an excellent spy, but if so, whose? He had been hanging out in Barcelona with a gaggle of “pacifist” artists among whom were one or more suspected German agents. If Cravan was doing any spying, he likely was doing it for the British, the same people who were reading Trotsky’s mail. For months Cravan had talked of going to America but had never mustered the will or money to do so. A little encouragement and cash from the



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local British consulate would have been enough to get him on his way. By design or accident, the French-speaking Cravan chatted up Trotsky. It was Cravan who reportedly recalled that Trotsky confessed that he was heading to the States in search of money [presumably among Russian émigré cosmopolitan revolutionaries for the purpose of anti-Tsarist agitation at home]. In New York, Cravan could have reported this and any other useful tidbits to [the head of the British intelligence mission in the United States] William Wiseman.’ Richard B. Spence, ‘Hidden Agendas: Spies, Lies and Intrigue Surrounding Trotsky’s American Visit of January–April 1917’, Revolutionary Russia, 21/1 (June 2008), 37. 17 See Nigel West, MI5 in the Great War (London: Biteback Publishing, 2014). More generally, there is scant though tantalising material to recover in relation to the speculative linking of Cravan to intelligence agencies in the period 1916–17. Mina Loy spoke of her suspicions, in the aftermath of his disappearance in 1918, that her husband may have found himself in prison as a ‘haul-in by the US government as a spy’; the suspicion is repeated by Carl Van Vechten in correspondence. Roger Conover suggests FBI monitoring: ‘It is known … that he was under surveillance by the FBI in New York and the US Secret Service in Mexico. It is time that these facts entered the file, for they may point to a less than artistic ending to Cravan’s life’ (Conover, ‘Mina Loy’s “Colossus” ’, p. 102). As for any speculated link to the occultist Aleister Crowley, this particular thread in the Cravan legend weaves from the unveiling by Crowley of Wilde’s tomb at Père Lachaise Cemetery in 1915, and then through Walter Duranty, who is said to have participated fully in Crowley’s Satanic orgies (see S. J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Man in Moscow (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)). Any subsequent though unlikely link between Cravan and Crowley rests on their convergence in 1917 in New York, where they frequented vaguely similar places at similar times and met similar people (see Spence, ‘Hidden Agendas’, 46), and Crowley was a secret employee of the British government. 18 Cravan to Humbert, 14 January 1917, in Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan avec Eugène Humbert (1916–1918), ed. B. D. van der Velden and W. van der Star (Amsterdam: La Société Protectrice des Enfants Martyrs, 2002), n.p. 19 Cravan to Humbert, 17 March 1917, in Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan avec Eugène Humbert, ed. van der Velden and van der Star, n.p. 20 New York Tribune, 16 April 1917. 21 Robert Alden Sanborn, writing in Broom magazine, 1921; cited in Jay Bochner, ‘The Marriage of Rogue and The Soil’, in Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible (eds), Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), p. 61. 22 See Walt Whitman, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, in Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 190 (esp. lines 13–19). The Soil issues 1–5 (December 1916–July 1917)

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can be viewed online in .pdf at https://www.jstor.org/journal/thesoil (accessed 13 July 2018). 23 Peter Conrad, The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 5. 24 Conrad, in The Art of the City, discusses at length ‘Whitman’s epic anchoring of New York in earth, and … a generation of artists who don’t need to consider it rooted and are happy to see it and everything it contains as a concatenation of idle chances’ (Preface). With the city itself as ‘a fabrication of myth’ (p. 4), Whitman derives New York ‘from his body. He generates the crowd, potentiates the city, incorporates its masses into himself. The athletic, ecstatic body inside which he thrives is a body politic. His fellow citizens on Broadway or Brooklyn ferry are members, literally physical components, of Whitman, partaking of his transcendentally capitalized, polymorphous and prolific egotism’ (p. 8). The poetic Romanticism of Whitman is an American strain that contrasts directly with English Romanticism as typified in Wordsworth, for instance: ‘American romanticism isn’t an individual retrenchment from the indifferent many but the individual’s dilation to beget or contain the many … The child is not merely father of the man … He germinates all men, replenishing the city with a million likenesses of himself. For Whitman the poetic faculty is a means of self-reproduction’ (p. 9). The heroic epic rendered in the poetry is physical, and the poet’s ‘urban enjoyments involve not the self’s extinction … but its expansive merger with a collective life’ (p. 12), and ‘energetically inspired or electrically vivified, New York’s ambition – like that of the epic hero in training for feats of arms – must be the attainment of bodily wholeness’ (p. 13). 25 American Art News, 19/14 (15 January 1921), 4. 26 Judith Zilczer, ‘Robert J. Coady, Man of The Soil’, in Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada, p. 37. 27 See also Clara Tice, ‘Who’s Who in Manhattan’, Cartoons Magazine (August 1917). 28 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 104. 29 The Hotel Brevoort on Fifth Avenue was located between 8th and 9th Streets. 30 Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’ (1938), in DPP, p. 15. 31 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 107. 32 Loy, ‘Colossus’, pp. 111–12. 33 The occasion is today primarily remembered for its rejection of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade Fountain, which was itself interestingly preempted some months earlier by Coady, no less, in his interrogation of a gesture by ‘a big artist’ in the name of expression: ‘how does it differ from the absolute expression of a little artist, how does it differ from the absolute expression of a – plumber?’ Robert J. Coady, ‘Letter to Jean Crotti’, The Soil, 1 (December 1916), 32. See also Menno Hubregtse, ‘Robert J. Coady’s



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The Soil and Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Taste, Nationalism, and New York Dada’, in RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review, 2 (2009), 28–42. The Grand Central Palace was located at Lexington Avenue between 46th and 47th Streets. 34 Amelia Jones, ‘New York Dada: Beyond the Readymade’, in Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkowsky (eds), The Dada Seminars (Washington, DC: National Gallery, 2005), p. 165. 35 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), p. 48. 36 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), third essay, section 12, p. 119. 37 Thierry de Duve, ‘Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism’, trans. Rosalind Krauss, in Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (eds), The Duchamp Effect (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1996), p. 103. 38 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, p. 15. 39 Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, ‘Some Memories of Pre-Dada; Picabia and Duchamp’ (1949), trans. Ralph Manheim, in DPP, p. 263. 40 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, p. 16. 41 Henri-Pierre Roché (1957); cited in Marc Dachy, The Dada Movement 1915–1923 (Geneva: Éditions d’Art Albert Skira S.A., 1990), p. 81. 42 Roché (1957); cited in Dachy, The Dada Movement, p. 81. 43 ‘Independents get Unexpected Thrill’, New York Sun, 20 April 1917. 44 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 108. 45 I choose to imagine that this depiction of Eve was the ‘neglected genius’ Louis Eilshemius’s painting Supplication (Rose-Marie Calling), the work declared by Duchamp to be the great painting of the 1917 exhibition and on whose author Mina Loy subsequently wrote her article ‘Pas de commentaires!’ for the second issue of the Blind Man, reflecting Duchamp’s verdict of the artist’s ‘elimination of sophistication’: ‘Eilshemius has not evolved, he has just grown to scatter seeds haphazard but at will to blossom in the amazing variations of his pictures, which, outside every academic or unacademic school, untouched by theory or “ism”, survive as the unique art form that has never been exploited by a dealer, never been in fashion!’ Mina Loy, ‘Pas de commentaires!’, in LLB, pp. 303–4. 46 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, p. 16. 47 As reported by the New York Sun correspondent; cited in Nathaniel Adams, ‘Hit the Rogue Jack’, The Chap (2 December 2017), http://thechap. co.uk/2017/12/02/hit-the-rogue-jack/ (accessed 7 March 2018). 48 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Some Memories of Pre-Dada’, p. 260. 49 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, p. 16. 50 See Molly Nesbit and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, ‘Concept of Nothing: New Notes by Marcel Duchamp and Walter Arensberg’, in Buskirk and Nixon (eds), The Duchamp Effect, pp. 163–5. 51 See T. J. Demos, ‘The Language of “Expatriation”  ’, in Dafydd Jones

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(ed.), Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 91–116. 52 Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), p. 141. 53 Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, p. 75. See further Adcock’s penetrating discussion in this context of how Duchamp ‘often conjoined the topical, even the trivial, with concepts that had far greater importance’; Craig Adcock, ‘Marcel Duchamp’s Approach to New York: “Find an Inscription for the Woolworth Building as a Ready-Made” ’, in Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada, p. 55. This was the same building that so impressed Cravan, who wrote in his own ‘Notes’ (not published until 1942) that it was a building ‘so large that one is unable to tell when walking around lower Broadway if one is walking around it or if it is walking around us.’ Arthur Cravan, ‘Notes’, trans. Hale, p. 75. The creative impress of and contrast between New York and other European centres in concisely expressed in reflections by Albert Gleizes in 1915: ‘New York inspires me tremendously … Walking through the streets of this great city, I have, not infrequently, a feeling of being hemmed in and even crushed. This is perhaps partly due to the height of the buildings, but also to the movement of humanity … In Paris there is a maze of little streets. Life goes with starts and stops … But New York is a very thrilling place. It stimulates me, and the glamour increases as I become more and more accustomed to the trend of things.’ Anon., ‘French Artists Spur on an American Art’, New York Tribune, 24 October 1915; reproduced in Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada, pp. 128–35. 54 De Duve, ‘Echoes of the Readymade’, p. 103. 55 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, pp. 263, 264. What I propose as Duchamp’s ‘closing inscription’ to the ‘readymade’ Arthur Cravan, delivered to the New York County public notary Max M. Levite on 2 March 1946, reads as follows: ‘I, the undersigned, Henri Robert Marcel Duchamp, Artist, thereby affirm that I knew about Fabian Lloyd whose disappearance, in 1918, caused a flutter in the Art World. We expected a great deal of his poems the manuscript of which was lost with him. I knew him well and only death could be the cause of his disappearance.’ Reproduced in ŒPAL, facing p. 257. 56 Jones, ‘New York Dada: Beyond the Readymade’, p. 165. Jones states that ‘[w]hile the body has not often been evoked in discussion of the work of New York Dada (the readymade, so central to these, tends to lure our gaze in a more rational, abstract direction), I want to insist … that the body is the means through which we can rethink what New York Dada may mean for us today.’ Jones’s emphasis is on avant-gardist activity ‘informed by bodily investment that can never be fully rationalized’ (p. 167). 57 Arensberg to Picabia, spring 1920, Dossiers Picabia, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris. 58 ‘Poet-Pugilist at Artists’ Ball’, New York Herald, 21 April 1917. 59 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 104.



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60 William Ivins to Paul Sachs, 23 October 1917, Paul Sachs, Oral History Program, Butler Library, Columbia University, pp. 294–5. 61 See Bertrand Lacarelle, ‘Trois femmes de Cravan’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 237–40. 62 Treadwell’s serialised reports ‘An Outcast at the Christian Door’ (1914, for the San Francisco Bulletin), in which she had posed as a prostitute in order to expose the appalling treatment of sex workers by self-styled ‘charitable’ organisations, are of significant note and exemplify her journalistic work. As a further example, as a female foreign war correspondent Treadwell had volunteered to be a nurse in order to gain access as close to the front line as possible, and to write of the domestic impact of war casualties and fatalities in her article ‘Women in Black’ (1915, for Harper’s Weekly). 63 For a contemporary report on Treadwell’s road trip with her childhood friend Esther Barney, see San Francisco Chronicle, 13 June 1917. Secondary writings on Treadwell include Ishbel Ros, Ladies of the Press: The Story of Women in Journalism by an Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1936); Nancy Edith Wynn, ‘Sophie Treadwell: The Career of a Twentieth-Century American Feminist Playwright’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 1982). 64 Nesbit and Sawelson-Gorse, ‘Concept of Nothing’, p. 165. 65 See Arthur Cravan, Pas maintenant: trente-cinq lettres inédites à Sophie Treadwell, ed. Bertrand Lacarelle (Paris: Cent Pages, 2014). 66 ‘Plus rien – est-ce fini? tu n’as même pas un “readymade” de moi’; Cravan to Treadwell, September 1917; cited in Nesbit and Sawelson-Gorse, ‘Concept of Nothing’, p. 165. 67 Mina Loy, ‘In … Formation’, Blind Man, 1 (April 1917), 7. 68 Blind Man, 2 (May 1917), 2. 69 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 104. 70 Extracts from Loy’s ‘Colossus’ are reproduced in Roger Conover, ‘Mina Loy’s “Colossus”: Arthur Cravan Undressed’, in Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada, pp. 104–19; and a full translation into French by Michel Pétris of passages relating to Cravan is published in ŒPAL, pp. 233–60. 71 Loy, ‘Colossus’, pp. 104–6. Loy’s description of Cravan’s appearance on 25 May 1917, ‘wrapped in a sheet’, corresponds to his reported appearance in the New York Herald, 21 April 1917. 72 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 105. 73 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, in DPP, p. 15. 74 Loy, ‘Colossus’, pp. 105–6. We must presume that the woman who had thrown the ‘jealous fit’ was Renée. 75 Cravan to Renée, 30 December 1916, in ŒPAL, p. 155. 76 Borràs reports Cendrars’s call on Renée in her Paris apartment many years later, along with her reminiscences of Cravan on that occasion; ACSS, pp. 168–71. 77 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, p. 16.

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78 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, pp. 16–17. 79 The detail includes Cravan’s home address as 6 East 14th Street, New York; occupation, self-employed author; marital status, single; exemption claim from draft, ‘moral reasons’; height, 6 feet and 4 inches; colour of eyes, grey. See also Bastiaan van der Velden, ‘Chronologie’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 109–10. Cravan also confirms the 14th Street address in his May–June correspondence; letter in ŒPAL, pp. 154–5, www.bino​ cheetgiquello.com/html/fiche.jsp?id=5880583&np=8&lng=fr&npp=20&ord re=3&aff=5&r= (accessed 30 March 2018). 80 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, p. 15. 81 Gail Levin, ‘Patrick Henry Bruce and Arthur Burdett Frost, Jr.: From the Henri Class to the Avant-Garde’, Arts Magazine, 53/8 (April 1979), 106. 82 ‘Frost, rien’, was the crushing dismissal; Arthur Cravan, ‘L’exposition des Indépendants’, Maintenant, 4 (March–April 1914), 9. 83 Cravan to Nellie, 6 August 1917; cited in van der Velden, ‘Chronologie’, 110. 84 Cendrars, Sky, pp. 202–3. 85 Cendrars, Sky, p. 201. The long hair is rendered in Wood’s watercolour. 86 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 107. 87 Beatrice Wood, Béatrice et ses douzes enfants!, c.1917, watercolour, ink and pencil on paper, 8¾ × 10¾ inches, Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of the artist. 88 Paul B. Franklin, ‘Beatrice Wood, her Dada … and her Mama’, in Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (ed.), Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 125. 89 We can, I think, align Roche’s impressions of New York in 1915 with Gleizes’s previously cited comments in n. 53, above, published in the New York Tribune in October 1915. 90 Carolyn Burke, ‘Recollecting Dada: Juliette Roche’, in Sawelson-Gorse (ed.), Women in Dada, p. 557. 91 Juliette Roche, Demi cercle (Paris: Éditions d’Art ‘La cible’, 1920). 92 Burke, ‘Recollecting Dada: Juliette Roche’, p. 561. 93 Juliette Roche, ‘L’année’, trans. in ACM, p. 284. 94 Willard Bohn, Modern Visual Poetry (Cranbury, London and Mississauga: Associated University Presses, 2001), p. 145. 95 Juliette Roche, ‘La mineralisation de Dudley Craving Mac’Adam’, La vie des lettres et des arts, Paris, new series, 8 (1922), 22–271; reprinted in booklet form as La mineralisation de Dudley Craving Mac’Adam (Paris: Croutzet, 1924). 96 Burke, ‘Recollecting Dada: Juliette Roche’, pp. 564, 567, 569. ‘Dudley’ was ‘the first name of a customs officer … [that Roche and Gleizes] had to deal with upon their arrival in New York’ (Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada 1915–23 (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1994), p. 98). The surname ‘Mac’Adam’ is a probable reference to the American sculptorboxer Edgar MacAdams, who had participated in Cravan’s Paris soirées (as ‘Mac Adames’).



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97 Juliette Roche; cited in Burke, ‘Recollecting Dada: Juliette Roche’, p. 567; and Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 112. The ‘gentle droop’ that Loy describes was the legacy of a curved spine about which Cravan’s mother had always been concerned, expressing relief on her son’s visit to Lausanne in 1915 that ‘[p]hysical exercise has made him more handsome … It’s a good thing, because his curved back spoiled his physique.’ Cited in Aitor Quiney, ‘The Poetic Image of the Boxer Arthur Cravan: A Straight Fight’, in ACM, p. 280. 98 Burke, ‘Recollecting Dada: Juliette Roche’, pp. 567–8. 99 Loy, ‘Colossus’, pp. 107–8. 100 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 108. 101 Cravan to Humbert, 17 March 1917, in Correspondance d’Arthur Cravan avec Eugène Humbert, ed. van der Velden and van der Star, n.p. The autobiographical texts, draft versions of Cravan’s early years, were published in 2008, in Arthur Cravan, ‘Autobiographies’, La nouvelle revue française, 587, ‘Salut à Arthur Cravan’ (October 2008), 249–83. 102 André Breton, cited for the alternative English translation, ‘Arthur Cravan: Notes’, in Dada/Surrealism, 3 (1973), 75. 103 Arthur Cravan, ‘Notes’, trans. Hale, pp. 68–9. 104 In correspondence, we can follow the route on through New Haven (1 September), New London (2 September), Boston (4 September), Portland (5 September), Bangor (7 September) and Meductic (9 and 11 September); see ŒPAL, pp. 156–63. 105 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, p. 17. 106 See ŒPAL, p. 163; van der Velden, ‘Chronologie’, 111. 107 ŒPAL, pp. 163–5. Cravan’s movement as documented in correspondence takes in Port-Aux-Basques (22 September), Curling (26 September) and Port Union (29 September and 4 October). 108 Cendrars, Sky, pp. 204–5. 109 Johan Everaers came upon a small number of letters written by Cravan to Renée in Paris (probably the letters sold by Cendrars to Jacques Matarasso in 1936 in his financial desperation, and upon which we must presume Cendrars based his account of Cravan in Canada; see Cendrars, Sky, p. 292, n. 15, and Roger Lloyd Conover, ‘The Secret Names of Arthur Cravan’, in Arthur Cravan: poète et boxeur, exhibition catalogue, Galerie 1900–2000, 7 April–5 May 1992 (Paris: Terrain Vague, 1992), p. 30) at a flea market in the village of Audresselles in northern France; the letters comment on Frost’s infirmity, and Cravan makes use of two of his Maintenant pseudonyms. See http://academie23.blogspot.co.uk/2006/08/sur-la-piste-darthur-cravan. html and http://academie23.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/sur-la-piste-darthurcravan-2.html (accessed 27 January 2015). 110 Cendrars, Sky, p. 205. 111 The challenges were even harder for Frost, who was not as physically robust as his companion. Cravan comments in letters to Renée in Paris on Frost’s extremely poor state of health, his constant coughing (16

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September 1917), his hospitalisation in Corner Brook and Cravan’s fearing the worst (25 September 1917). 112 ‘List of United States Citizens (for the Immigration Authority): SS Florizel arriving at Port of New York’, 11 October 1917, frames 118 and 119 (Fabian Lloyd passenger ID 610187020015); © 2015 The Statue of Liberty – Ellis Island Foundation, Inc., all rights reserved. 113 The Penguin Club was located on East 15th Street. See Levin, ‘Patrick Henry Bruce and Arthur Burdett Frost, Jr.’, 106. 114 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 108. 115 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 108. 116 Loy, ‘Colossus’, pp. 108–10. 117 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 111. Loy here, in describing Cravan’s engulfing of vast perpendicular heights and suspensions to intimate square millimetres, resoundingly echoes Nietzsche’s epic range ‘from the telescopic heights to the microscopic depths’; Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, trans. Daniel Breazeale, in Clive Cazeaux (ed.), The Continental Aesthetics Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 58. 118 Cravan, ‘Notes’, trans. Hale, pp. 71, 69, 70. 119 Cendrars, Sky, p. 198. 120 Cravan, ‘Notes’, trans. Hale, pp. 76, 78, 80. 121 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 110. 122 Frost (senior); cited in Levin, ‘Patrick Henry Bruce and Arthur Burdett Frost, Jr.’, 103–4. 123 Cravan, ‘Notes’, trans. Hale, p. 79. 124 Buffet-Picabia, ‘Arthur Cravan and American Dada’, p. 17. 125 New York Times, 8 December 1917. 126 Frost (senior) to Pach, 5 January 1918, in Bennard B. Perlman (ed.), American Artists, Authors, and Collectors: The Walter Pach Letters 1906–1958 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 170. 127 Roger Lloyd Conover, ‘Arthur Cravan: Stances of the Century’, in David Chandler et al. (eds), Boxer: An Anthology of Writings on Boxing and Visual Culture (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996), p. 110. Frost (senior), in grief at his son’s death, was less discriminate than the suggested accusation against Cravan would suggest, seemingly blaming himself more than anyone else in correspondence (see Perlman (ed.), American Artists, Authors and Collectors, p. 169). 128 Mina Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, in LLB, p. 320. 129 Cravan, ‘Notes’, trans. Hale, p. 79.



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8

j Being as being, and nothing more

Unceasing death Death, it is said, is many things. Death contributed to Arthur Cravan’s decision to leave New York at the end of 1917, with Frost’s death in the infinitive proving an impersonal event affecting Cravan ‘from the outside’. ‘Pauvre Frost!’, he wrote three weeks later.1 How death has contributed, and still contributes, to the relation between parts is, however, a far less direct proposition than ‘death’ in the infinitive; it will be the undercurrent to this closing passage of the life that we can recover. For us to reprise the earlier account of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage, for instance, is instructive in considering how the assemblage is structured from distinct and arbitrarily gathered fragments that are coextensive in experimental alliances and rhizomatic structures. Our approach to death can be read through the conditions of life when it escapes the organic sphere, via the seemingly contradictory convolution of anorganic (nonorganic, inorganic) life. The concept as we encounter it in Mille plateaux describes the organism as ‘that which life sets against itself in order to limit itself’. The description is followed by the claim that ‘there is a life all the more intense, all the more powerful for being anorganic’. What is intimated is the articulation of ‘inorganic, germinal, and intensive’ life in all things, ‘not because everything is organic or organized but … because the organism is a diversion of life’ and the inorganic life in question is ‘a powerful life without organs, a Body that is all the more alive for having no organs’.2 It is with this reimagining of life that I propose to document the closing narrative sequence of Arthur Cravan. What the body becomes at death is initiated in our understanding (after Nietzsche) of what the body is in life: an insubstantial phenomenon that expresses relations between forces. ‘Any two forces, being unequal,’ Nietzsche declares, ‘constitute a body’,3 always fortuitous and, as a result of the nature of the relationship between forces, always astonishing. A body is said to exist as an

17  Arthur Cravan, passport photograph, 1917–18.



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expression of its singular force of existence when its parts enter into a relation with one another; the same body ceases to exist when its parts enter into a relation that proves to be incompatible with its continued existence. This second relation is one brought about by external causes;4 it is of course the case that, when outside causes inevitably establish those incompatible relations and then proceed to ‘decompose’ the existing vitality in the relations of a body’s parts, death will be understood as coming always from the outside, as being a necessity arising from the chance encounters between bodies and as determined by cause and effect.5 In the decomposition of relations, the parts of a body will enter into new relations that are in turn characteristic of other bodies. This transformation of relations, then, sequences into the last known passage of Cravan, who disembarked the SS Santissima Madre de Dio which had carried him south from New York. He progressed to enter la Puerta a México, along today’s drug corridor, at the border town of Nuevo Laredo across the Rio Grande from old Laredo in Texas, before the eventual travel south again to Mexico City as 1917 came to a close. The intensity of Cravan’s correspondence with Mina Loy during this month of separation is loud. He writes in unrestrained adoration and, in the absence of any surviving notes from her to him, the profundity of his declarations at last present a corresponding account to Loy’s intimate recollections mid-1917. Having reached the border with Mexico just a week into the wake of the painter Frost’s death, Cravan writes in agonised distress at being apart from Loy: ‘C’est horrible, c’est horrible!’ The first brief letter, scribbled in haste, instructs Loy to address her correspondence to ‘Arturo Cravan’ care of General Delivery, Mexico City. Though brief, this note is another fleeting glimpse of Cravan’s selfevaluative capacity to describe, in the most concise terms, his own constitution in its extremes (‘Je suis l’homme des extrêmes et de suicide’;6 later in the month again, he describes his suffering and ‘martyrdom’ at being separated from Loy).7 This first letter, mailed on 17 December, ends with Cravan’s emphatic devotion.8 By the next day, Cravan was struggling to contain stifling passion, his only respite in knowing that Loy had promised to join him in Mexico (‘Mon Dieu, pourvu que tu gardes ton serment!’): It will destroy my faith in humanity and for all eternity if you do not keep your promise – and, though my devotion to you means I shall never question your honour, I am tortured by madness while you are not here.9

Cravan implores her to write words that will comfort; his fear, he says, would not be the fear of life, but the fear of life without her.

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He writes again that evening to say he will leave Nuevo Laredo for Mexico City in the morning. With this note Cravan included his passport photograph, commenting on his changed appearance and on how his clothes were in a sorry state – ‘his collar was of the same shape, but it was not so clean, and the sleeves of his coat were slightly frayed at the edges’10 – and pointedly remarking on the torn collar (apparently the result of a brawl that he claimed to have won, between himself and an individual identified only as Cornell;11 ‘je te jure que c’est moi qui ai gagné’). This second note of 18 December closes with Cravan’s projection as he looks abroad and away, declaring Buenos Aires as his destination and optimistically hailing the tripartite defence of the neutrality of Argentina, Chile and Mexico during war.12 Following the long journey south to Mexico City on the 19th, after he had passed through Monterrey, our resumption reading Cravan’s correspondence is with an incomplete letter dated 20 December. The fragmentary lines of self-reflection reveal the most from the assemblage, this time in assumption of apocalyptic sentiment: ‘I am the prophet of a new life and I am alone’, declares Cravan, urging Loy to hasten and join him.13 Perhaps tellingly, Cravan suggests that during their time spent together in New York, and despite its detailed intimacy, he had always maintained his guard – which indirectly affirms Loy’s own and much later reflection on how ‘to most of those early encounters he had come as an entirely different persona, and … [I wondered] how it was that I had been able to recognize any identity behind his frequent transformations’.14 The emotional stakes remain overwhelmingly high. Cravan watches as his own tears stain a photograph of Loy: ‘I adore you as no man has ever adored a woman … Until tomorrow, my love sublime.’15 The intensity reaches an agonising pitch two days later, feelings of utter despair, desperation and desolation at their being apart offering little prospect of joy left in life, with the pale glow of comfort should he drown in this engulfed state (‘Je suis fou de rage impuissante … Ah! Si l’on pouvait mourir en pleurant comme quand on s’ouvre les veines. Quelle douce mort!’). For Loy reading Cravan’s strained, poetic, almost Shakespearean notes – ‘I am mad with impotent rage … How sweet death!’ – yielding to her pleading Colossus surely had no greater condition than the formal processing of travel documents. For the colossal Cravan impressing upon Loy, we glimpse the swell in his emotional state and the spend that would destroy his sanity; of the futility of life for him in Loy’s absence; the letter sealed at the end with his weeping signature, ‘Et maintenant je pleure – Ton Arthur.’16



Being as being, and nothing more 261

Letters from Mexico City In Mexico City, between troughs of emotional despair, Cravan took orientation from the so-called American ‘slackers’ community of anarchists, conscientious objectors and draft dodgers,17 and busied himself to organise life. A hurried postcard on Christmas Eve signals his hope to make a mark among the city’s pugilists, specifically Enrique Ugartechea, founder and director of the school of physical culture at calle de Tacuba 15.18 Cravan asks Loy to mail a copy of The Soil containing the article of his fight with Jack Johnson; he needed employment, and the article would be his testimonial. He restates this request in a longer letter written later in the day, and again in that week’s subsequent correspondence. Additionally, on 26 and 27 December, he tells of his attempt to lure Jack Johnson to Mexico City and join in the fashionable vogue for boxing with the possibility of another prize fight.19 Cravan’s given address at this point is the Hotel Juarez,20 probably the truth-based but fictionalised ‘Slackers Hotel’ described in prose in 1932 as ‘an ancient hidalgo mansion, grand, crazy and creaky with ghostly staircases’,21 with Ugartechea’s escuela as a second address. Loy, however, had further considerations in departing New York around this time; she had left her children by her first marriage to the English photographer and painter Stephen Haweis – Joella and Giles – in their nurse’s care in Florence when she passaged to New York in 1916, and her thoughts were now intent on returning to collect them in Europe. So there is a diplomatic delicacy to Cravan’s love-stricken pleas (‘ne va pas croire que je cherche à t’attendrir’),22 mindful as they were of Loy’s eventual wish to proceed to Argentina and then passage from Buenos Aires to Europe. It is in the letter written on Christmas Eve that Cravan first submits a vow of chastity, which is emphatically restated in the days that follow. He also airs thoughts of his and Loy’s matrimony (‘Ah! si tu pouvais être ma femme!’), pleading his reformed character after the dissipate days in New York, if only Loy will accept to be at his side: I swear to you, Mina, what you saw was not me – you have seen my bad side [des moments hideux], but I have assured you that I will change. Forgive me, Mina – you saw [the mortality and fallibility of] a man, but I promise you that I am an angel.23

He cautions her against too rapidly returning to Europe with the prospect of the expansion of war (‘Ne va pas à Buenos Aires, je crois que l’Argentine va entrer en guerre’),24 and makes the first of severally repeated claims for his earning-potential as a prize fighter and pugilist:

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‘I can provide for all your needs here, I will be the happiest man in the world if you let me …’. The devotion that Cravan would now invest is of betrothal. He writes of tender love for her when her hair turns white and her face becomes wrinkled (‘J’oubliais de te dire que je t’aimais autant par la raison que par le coeur, ce qui fait que je pourrai t’aimer en cheveux blancs, ridée’)25 and of their blissful matrimony (‘Dis-moi que tu viendras bientôt et que nous serons ensemble le reste de notre vie’),26 begging her to find it in herself to love him and to consider her happiness in old age held in his embrace (‘Oh, Mina, Mina, les mots sont si vieux! Tâche de m’aimer. Songe à ta vieillesse. Le bonheur est tout près de toi.’).27 And he describes at length his sincere remorse for past conduct, denouncing his own frequent indiscretions and outrageous behaviour (‘j’ai agi comme un monstre à New York’),28 of which he now repents on bended knee (‘J’ai commis des indélicatesses, j’ai été mille fois coupable, mais je m’en repends à genoux’),29 with the promise that he is a changed man. In her absence, he begs to own something of her: a lock of hair or, better, all of her hair still attached (‘Envoie une boucle de tes cheveux ou plutôt viens avec tous tes cheveux’): You have given me your word that you will come – I will be utterly stricken if you write to tell me that you have changed your mind. I fear that such news would be enough to risk this life entirely. Now, I believe that I could marry you … Please, do not mock me. I am a fool for your love, and every thought is of my tenderest affection for you.30

Cravan’s plaint is his congenital sensitivity (‘Je suis né trop tendre’); his ailing emotional condition, first mentioned in his note of the 26th, now stifles his actions, even the little comfort that he might glean from writing to Loy (‘Je ne vais pas mieux. J’ai failli ne pas t’écrire aujourd’hui. Je suis comme l’homme qui va se noyer.’). With the year coming to its close, Cravan bares all in the first of two extended letters written on the 30th (separated by a shorter note written the same day), submitting his life to any response from Loy in return for his tears, what little he has left to give (‘Je t’adore, ange de mon cœur. Je t’envoie tous mes sanglots.’).31 In the second extended letter of the 30th, Cravan interrogates what foundation there might be for their relationship. He airs palpable unease at the cordiality if not formality that he senses in Loy’s responses to his pleas, impressing upon her the need to yield on matters of the heart: If you were true to yourself, you would admit the sweetest moments of your life – I could be so good without the slightest effort, were it not for the need to remain guarded in my actions. I know that you are as an angel – I have known it since our first meeting. Come to me in Mexico – I



Being as being, and nothing more 263 will do whatever you ask and go wherever you want, and we will attend to matters regarding your children.32

He proclaims elevated thoughts (‘je songe à devenir très saint’) and his desperate need for reciprocation lest he should lose his senses and recoil entirely from the world (‘Si la consolation ne me vient pas de toi, je vais disparaître du monde sensible ou en tout cas intelligent. Je ne peux plus regarder une étoile ou lire un livre sans que l’horreur m’envahisse.’). Without Loy, Christmas is accursed, a death sentence at the approaching New Year (‘J’ai eu un Noël de damné. Je vais avoir un Nouvel An de condamné à mort.’). He feels abandoned by God, wholly denouncing his dissembling past of untruths (‘Oublie le passé. J’étais plein de mensonges, et je ne veux plus vivre que pour la vérité.’),33 and the howl at the close of this letter invokes directly the penitential Psalm 129.34 In the palpable regret of the last note written in 1917, past impropriety is not explicitly stated, but a particular though otherwise undeclared incident is evidently admitted: ‘Were we not in love? All was dashed on a misunderstanding. Oh, if I had only been blessed of foresight I would have acted differently.’ The note makes a final acknowledgement of the painter Frost, now enviously dead and free of torment (‘Frost n’aura pas souffert, mais moi.’), and the poet-boxer, though he has attained the wings of an angel, fears his own destruction in a fall from the heavens (‘J’ai déjà mes alles et tout ça sera perdu.’).35 The personal turmoil at this juncture was far removed from public face. In the El Nacional newspaper in Mexico City, a short column was printed announcing the opening of a new boxing academy, with the headline ‘Una escuela de box, Arturo Cravan’, detailing the academy’s founder, Cravan, as victor over the Canadian boxing champion Irish O’Mara in a contest staged in Paris.36 Cravan’s academy fell under the broader activities of Ugartechea’s escuela, and, into the New Year, the press in Mexico City reported the following challenge to local hopefuls: BOXING SENSATION CRAVAN IS IN MEXICO Señor Enrique Ugartechea, director of the Escuela de Cultura Fisica that bears his name, has announced that he has hired the Swiss-national boxer Arthur Cravan from New York. Cravan once went several rounds against the great heavyweight champion Jack Johnson at the Monumental bullring in Barcelona … and may well be a contender for Mexican honours against Corbet II in Merida, Yucatán, following the latter’s wins against Smith and Martinez. Weighing in at 175 pounds, Cravan invites challengers to test their strength at Ugartechea’s Escuela de Cultura Fisica.37

Return to the pugilistic vocation, however, paled into barely perceptible significance for Cravan when, in the same month, Loy left New York to

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travel five days and two thousand miles by train south to Mexico City, through a ‘volcanic & feathery & altogether magnificent’ land.38 Finally, they were together again, and their month apart having become an entity in itself was now, in Loy’s description, drowned beneath waves of crashing emotion: After straining our hearts so long across so many miles, when that distance got telescoped by locomotive power, Our Separation, finding its two correlatives, had become an entity. It laid its embodiment of our late solitude between our bodies of flesh – thrust its aborted mouth of nostalgia between our lips. Longing had aroused our emotions to such a crescendo it crashed the senses. Our fingers fell numb in their caresses. No nerves are strung to that pitch our affections had reached during the dissonant interval. When all that is left of being alive is a ferocious longing to unlock the center of oneself with the center of someone else … exquisite flood.39

Bleak winter now turned to the vigour of a regenerative spring (‘Less of you than of a pruned rosebush will remain / That spring lies in wait for, to clothe once again’, Cravan had long ago written).40 The poet-boxer dutifully attended in those first months of 1918 to ‘the angel of his heart’, his heroic failure to provide little more than meagre means for sustenance touchingly offset by his devotion to Loy and the ideal to be realised in their ‘marriage of love’ (‘you will never know / Henceforth the peace a pious heart bestows / To the soul’).41 In far-away Lausanne, Cravan’s parents wondered at the silence when no Christmas greeting came at the end of 1917; it would be four months before Nellie received a battered postcard mailed in the middle of April, telling her that her younger son was now married.42 Marriage The card that Nellie received on 30 April 1918 gave Cravan’s address at 3a, calle de Soto 47, in the same Cuauhtémoc district of Mexico City as calle Tacuba, on the other side of the wooded Alameda Central public park. She immediately broadcast the news to her elder son, Otho, that his sibling had married an English writer and divorcee five years his senior, a mother of two from a previous marriage, ‘Le nom de la femme de Fabian: Mrs Haweis, nom de plume Mina ou Nina Loy.’43 The events of the wedding day and run-up to it are rehearsed: ‘But what do the Mexicans do?’ I beseeched. The formal dream of my life, a marriage of love, turning out to be true, was about to fade away because the ‘wedding shop’ [the Val de Graz emporium] was shut.



Being as being, and nothing more 265 ‘Du courage ma mignonne,’ Colossus counselled me as he accosted a policeman. ‘How does one get married in this city?’ ‘Who wants to get married?’ asked the policeman. ‘I do,’ answered Colossus, whereupon the policeman informed us we were facing the very municipal building we required.44

There were formalities to process in advance of a marriage ceremony, not the least among which involved health checks that neither pending bride nor groom had anticipated, but which gave Cravan opportunity to assert his prime athletic manhood. Loy resumes: The mayor, or whoever the marrier was, informed us that we had to visit a doctor. It appeared that … [a law only tentatively proposed elsewhere] had actually been passed. All candidates for matrimony were required to produce a medical certificate certifying that they didn’t have venereal disease. ‘You’d better go together,’ advised the mayor. ‘It’s cheaper.’ That, in our circumstances, made sense. But for a chaste fiancée? Even the most virtuous of fiancées could have passed through the ordeal without shock, however. … [Negligently, the doctor asked], ‘Do you happen to have any ailments?’ ‘Do I look like it?’ roared Colossus. ‘No,’ said the doctor. ‘I presume the senorita is English,’ he added, as he made out our certificates. ‘But he didn’t ask me anything,’ I exclaimed when we got out. ‘Must every law end in a mockery? No wonder Europe has not sanctioned venereal regulations – they are useless.’ ‘Why all the fuss about veneral disease, anyhow?’ asked Colossus. ‘It does one good. In Paris we felt we had not attained our manhood unless we had “done” that part of it,’ he boasted. ‘You’d commit suicide,’ I retorted, ‘you with your alabaster flesh – if you got syphilis. But men like you never get syphilis. You could sleep with a whole venereal ward without becoming infected.’45

With their accounts cleared, Arthur Cravan and Mina Loy were now free to be married in a civil ceremony held at the municipal offices and presided over by the mayor. What the prose renders of the marriage that took place in the spring of 1918 is, finally, the peace for which Cravan had so desperately wept at the end of 1917: We both wanted to ‘really’ marry in a rosy Mexican cathedral, spill our excessive delight in receptive aisles splashed with the wine and gold of stained-glass windows. Of course the money ran short of this fantasy and the mayor had to find two witnesses. I was so convinced of the mere formality of Mexican ceremonies that after the vows Colossus had to

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nudge me. ‘If you don’t make any response,’ he whispered severely, ‘he’ll refuse to marry us.’ ‘I will,’ I hurriedly exclaimed. ‘Now I have caught you. I am at ease.’46

An image of domesticity does not rest easily in any narrative surrounding Cravan, but what little is recoverable from the spring months and early summer 1918 suggests investment in the dutiful role of husband and provider. The period falls within the years of itinerancy in the Loy biography when, striding away ‘like conquering giants’ from the marriage ceremony in the municipal offices,47 they attended devotedly to one another: wandering arm in arm through the streets … [i]t never made any difference what we were doing – making love or respectfully eyeing canned foods in groceries, eating our tamales at street corners or walking among weeds. Somehow we had tapped the source of enchantment.48

Still, their financial straits were in need of supplement which, in turn, relied on the maintenance of Cravan’s own health and physical condition. But he fell ill during May, apparently suffering a combination of amoebic dysentery, fever and stomach trouble, so severe that Loy wrote to Cravan’s mother on his behalf. Nellie took cautious receipt of this letter written by ‘un ami de Fabian’; the letter told her that her younger son was dying.49 To the relief of all, however, Cravan was able to return to training in the ring during June–July, promoted by a former fringe acquaintance from New York known to all and sundry as ‘Red’ Winchester (‘the enterprising Wobbly’),50 who ‘walked beside [Cravan] like a keeper beside his elephant; he was only half his height but his face seemed twice as beaming-wide’.51 The return to the ring would be for a boxing contest pencilled in at the Teatro Principal on 9 August 1918. As Loy writes of the ‘ferocious longing’ between her and Cravan now quenched in matrimony, their stifling material and social constraints are evident: The effect – Cravan while I knew him was beset by the cardinal enemies – the enemy of hunger within – & hounding from without. By the rule of all possibility he was bound and gagged – without money – & hemmed in by the arbitrary condemnation to offer himself up to be murdered [in the war]. The war spirit that he denied denied him – all means of earning a livelihood – all modes of expression – & permits for transportation. This was Cravan’s freedom – for one blank-faced corporal to have attained to command to tell him to right left turn – Cravan would have burst his heart under the insufferable strain of such bondage – but



Being as being, and nothing more 267 c­ onfronting a hydra-headed menace of death – he remained playful as Ariel. Technically – he was immobilized – actually – he elected to travel over the world.52

So, at the Teatro Principal, he took on his opponent for the August fight, an undocumented heavyweight boxer named Honorato Castro. Despite losing on points at the end of a ten-round contest, Cravan profited from the occasion at least in preparation for potentially greater material rewards in the Mexican Republic boxing championship scheduled for mid-September. Cravan vs Smith By late summer 1918, Cravan readied himself in Mexico City for his twenty-round fight at El Toreo bull-ring, on 15 September. His opponent would be the middleweight boxer Black Diamond Jim Smith, and spoils to the victor would be the lion’s share of the purse, plus the gold medal awarded to the new champion. As had been the case in Barcelona two years previously, Cravan did what he could to ensure the available press attention fell on him and the fight. The Mexican sports review Arte y Deportes had reported the Honorato Castro fight in August and now, just one month later, enthusiastically covered the build-up to the ‘sensacional asalto de box’ of Cravan vs Smith. Cravan was announced as the boxer who had gone seventeen rounds (that’s right, seventeen) with Jack Johnson in Barcelona.53 Two days before the fight, Arte y Deportes published a feature on Cravan as top billing in the fight promotion, in an interview with the journalist signing himself ‘Chaplin’: I was surprised to find that the entrance to calle Nuevo Méjico 30 opened into a vestibule where I could barely stand. Stairs led up from this small entrance hall to a dining room where they were making chocolate … I asked a little nervously for Señor Cravan, the boxer who will fight Jim Smith at the Plaza de Toros next Sunday. A fair-haired and stocky man [Winchester] replied in Spanish with an English accent, and in his room I met the strong and muscular fighter, who gripped my hand as if we were old friends, invited me to take a seat, and said: ‘I am a native of Switzerland, my name is Arthur Cravan, 27 years old, married, I have been boxing for seven years in all parts of the world.’54

With formalities and general untruths completed, the interview proceeds to specifics: [Cravan] is being prepared for the big fight by champion Rosendo Arnáiz, and devotes three or four hours a day to training: ‘I begin at five in the afternoon and finish at eight or nine. Much of the day I spend walking in

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Chapultepec. Most nights I am asleep by half past eight. My agent is Señor Winchester, here present: he accepts all kinds of bets on me.’55

Ending with the concession to commercial enterprise, the interview signals more than it states. The fight that took place on Sunday afternoon at El Toreo was, by all available accounts, a suitably farcical occasion consistent with Cravan’s entire boxing career, an appropriate culmination to his documented life in the ring. Cravan had always relied heavily on his height and reach advantage, it being effectively the only superior gain in a vainglorious boxing career (despite persistent investiture beneath the laurel wreaths of nations – France, Canada, Mexico). Now, in Mexico City, Cravan’s second-round collapse versus Jim Smith demonstrated ultimately that holding off an opponent is not what boxing is. In the week after the fight, the headline ‘Smith retuvo el título de Campeón de la República Mejicana’ declared the Black Diamond as Mexican champion. It appeared in Arte y Deportes, above the brief fight report of Cravan being counted out in the second round – knocked out – following the valiant Smith’s assault.56 The full fight report by ‘Julius’ published a week later renders detail in which there is little to commend the lost minutes of the entire fight’s duration, rounding with an extremely poor verdict on the dereliction of the allegedly twenty-seven-year-old but actually thirty-one-yearold Cravan: Sunday’s comic turn at El Toreo was innovative, to say the least, but eventually proved to be something of a swindle … Cravan’s first mistake of note was that, in softening up his opponent, he used his hand instead of his fist for stop-shots – a clear indication that Cravan had also tired from soaking up the first-round assaults and from exercising his own purely defensive postures. With little more to report, the first round finished after the regulation duration of three minutes to Cravan’s slight advantage. After a minute’s interval … the pugilists stepped forward for round two. Smith made a positive start, taking the offensive and gaining tactical advantage. In sum, Smith caught his opponent with an upper cut and Cravan swayed. Rather than counter-attacking, perhaps too confident in his ability, Cravan continued to try and hold his opponent – an unforgivable error for a boxer of his strength fighting at this level … Smith quickly took advantage of Cravan’s error, catching him with a right to the upper torso followed by a series of straight lefts to the thorax; Cravan went down from this assault, and was counted out by the referee. Smith, then, eased to victory in the second round … of a fight that lasted exactly five minutes – an expensive five minutes’ entertainment for the paying public, however, which rose in uproar demanding reimbursement for a spectacle that fell well below the standards even of the support events … With his obvious height and reach superiority, Cravan’s decision to continue



Being as being, and nothing more 269 adopting a defensive posture in the second round handed Smith the initiative, and from that point the outcome was inevitable. For its elementary tactical naivety, Sunday’s fight could not be described as anything but a joke.57

Cravan was at least in receipt of a percentage from the fight, reportedly 2,000 pesos, which Loy states he then proceeded to share between those who had helped him in the weeks leading up to the contest (presumably Arnáiz and the Browns – and Winchester, who did not profit separately as Cravan’s agent, having declined his percentage because of poor takings).58 With little further to gain from remaining in Mexico City (the dire quality of the fight with Smith would have seriously undermined Cravan’s reputation as a boxing instructor), he and Loy now prepared to process the long road back to Europe. The passage of Mexico For Loy, these months had illumined Cravan in a new light: ‘When he was thirty-one Tenderness awakened in him; and tenderness in a strong man is always a deluge, because it is a luxury which the weak can not afford.’59 Having sought ‘the ultimate refuge … in the shadow of the body of love’,60 they conceived their child around July, which undoubtedly made the decision for Loy to hasten her own return to her children in warring Europe. Cravan’s status regarding a return, however, was compromised by the disarray of his official papers, s­ullied through multiple inaccuracies and forgeries accrued in his flights from bel­ ligerence.61 Together, Cravan and Loy agreed that they would begin by journeying south through Mexico and from there on via Chile to Buenos Aires in Argentina, a vast but necessary distance to cover in order to assure passage to Europe.62 The sense of desperate chaos in this period, when Cravan even proposed to Loy that they end it all in each other’s arms,63 revives the prescient notice in the Paris poetry: At the moment when your life becomes a total shambles You will have to resume your hopeless rambles You have left everything behind and you still are eligible And all alone, as the gulf becomes unbridgeable You will have to earn your daily bread Although you feel you’d be better off dead.64

Then on towards the Pacific coast, where they would prospect for a passage to Argentina. A similar route was planned by others. In Mexico City, the American slackers had come to be viewed with some disaffection by the established middle-class American community, who

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judged them to be undermining any respectable presence in the city. This precipitated the slackers’ dispersal away and to ‘the latest mecca for cosmopolitan draft dodgers’,65 the port city of Heroica Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico with its potential routes out of the country. Among the slackers closest to Cravan and Loy in Mexico had been Rose Johnston and her husband, the writer, poet and publisher Robert (Bob) Carlton Brown.66 It was the Browns who had put on a celebration for Cravan and Loy after their marriage, and who also diagnosed Cravan’s illness in May; indeed, Bob Brown’s 1932 novel You Gotta Live garbs this Mexican episode from the Cravan narrative in the guise of fiction, consequently rendering the poet-boxer and Loy (given the names ‘Rex Johns’ and ‘Rita’ in this roman à clef) most vividly for present interest.67 The route that we can today trace into mid-October passes several signposts. With her official documents in good order, Loy went ahead first from Mexico City, following the Browns east to Veracruz. Cravan made his way separately and in different company south through the free and sovereign state of Oaxaca with its rugged terrain and varying elevations towards this last destination, travelling with his boxing agent Winchester and a twenty-year-old student named Owen Cattell, in flight from the United States draft. Cattell is particularly interesting, a student at Columbia University when he was fined $500 in July 1917 and sentenced to a day in prison and the loss of his citizenship as a result, ‘for conspiring to violate the draft law’.68 A fourth individual is severally reported to have joined this company, an unnamed Swedish national who probably figured among the many labourers and mariners who passed through Salina Cruz and its harbour’s increased traffic in the 1910s.69 If, as is likely, it was during this phase that Cravan prospected the silver mines in Oaxaca (Cendrars recounts this passage, on the basis of the letters sent by Cravan in Mexico to Renée in Paris), where the preferred mining method was a labour-intensive hand cobbing, then his company from Mexico City would surely also have joined in this prospecting venture, which Cendrars fleetingly described in prose: [Cravan’s] stay in Mexico, his travels in the south, the prospecting for silver, might well have been the ‘road to Damascus’ for him … He had found his true climate. But this regeneration, this catalysis of his genius on coming into contact with Indian life and the great savage nature of the country did not endure.70

The sequential compression in Cendrars’s narrative confuses logical progression, but it allows us indirectly to observe an approach to Cravan’s conversion on the road to what could only ever be an infinitely deferred Damascus. Alighting from the airy Valles Centrales



Being as being, and nothing more 271

towards the Sierra Madre del Sur and to sea level at Salina Cruz on the Gulf of Tehuantepec, he and Loy were reunited. Loy had followed the Browns via a more easterly route from Veracruz crossing the isthmus of Tehuantepec, travelling three hundred miles on the trans-isthmus railroad in her still early pregnancy with just six hard-boiled eggs as sustenance,71 and finally watching the train pull away from Salina Cruz ‘into the jazz band sunset’.72 The final period during which Cravan and Loy were together in Mexico in September and October 1918, then, when the Oaxaca rainy season comes to an end, yields several indistinct and anecdotal threads to recover. The last known notes written by Cravan date from September,73 and positively to place him anywhere during October relies almost wholly on speculation. Bob Brown’s roman à clef recounts some lowkey and inevitably low-grade boxing ties (including wins) in Oaxaca for the Cravan-based character Rex – there are multiply layered fictions to negotiate at this point – and Loy writes of little roadside theatrical shows that she and Cravan put on as they passed through villages, all of which would at best have raised just a few meagre pesos.74 Loy’s later poetry evokes the arid terrain of that year in Mexico – ‘pinnacles of ferocious isolation / under the alien hot heaven / … / hunchback palm trees / belabour the cinders of twilight’75 – and there are signs that Cravan was ill with fever in October and was nursed by Loy through his infirmity (the fever, evidently, stirred his wartime paranoia, and it is said that in his mithering state he turned on Loy for her devoted tolerance of him and his desperate desire to escape ‘all these savages, draft dodgers, everybody’).76 Cravan’s Paris poetry rises again: ‘Whether you pass through fields, towns or across the sea / You will always retain your melancholy.’77 In Mexico City in mid-October, Arte y Deportes reported the possibility of a rematch between Cravan and Jim Smith, stating that Cravan was at that point in Veracruz – he wasn’t and hadn’t been – and a fortnight later at the beginning of November the same was reported with scant additional detail (if anyone had relayed information of a rematch, it would have been Winchester).78 However, both Arte y Deportes and its readers were blissfully unaware that, by the beginning of November, Arthur Cravan was missing. Leaving Salina Cruz What persists of the final events in advance of a now long and continued absence is the legend that has woven itself around devoted and diligent preparation of the boat, in which Cravan is so frequently but inaccurately said to have set sail in existentialist embrace, never to

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return, across ‘the shark-infested Caribbean’.79 Looking abroad from Salina Cruz, Cravan was closer to the Gulf of Mexico two hundred miles away than he was to the Caribbean Sea; the sea across which he imagined exit from Mexico was the Pacific. In contrast to her husband, for Loy, in safe possession of proper documents for crossing borders, exit was a relatively untroubled concern. Loy would travel south and then east to Buenos Aires in secure passage, while Cravan found alternative means to reach the same destination. The Browns would journey to the southern continent through Central America and meet up with Loy in Valparaíso, Chile, before traversing east across the Andes and into Argentina. In the meantime, the plan for Cravan’s company comprising his travelling companions from Mexico City – Winchester, Catell and the unnamed Swede – proved as motley as the crew. From that point in October, then, when Loy boards the Japanese hospital ship to start her journey to South America, we are left with little to document beyond remote witness testimonies and the ultimate fiction of Brown’s roman à clef. By every account, Cravan’s companions mustered few resources to buy a small and damaged boat in Salina Cruz, which he would repair and make seaworthy, and eventually trade for a larger vessel in which four people could sail the Pacific. In Brown’s version, it is the Cravanbased Rex who ‘found a stout sailing vessel that suited. Because of a hole stove in its hull he bought it cheap … He had the boat towed to a small private pier a mile from town, where he worked at refitting it.’80 With little prospect of being able to trade the repaired boat for something bigger and better in Salina Cruz, Cravan’s company would have to look elsewhere; four days due west by boat was Puerto Angel, a coastal town and port that had dwindled in importance as Salina Cruz prospered in the pre-war years, but where the prospect of trading boats might improve slightly. This, then, became the plan. Crossing the Gulf of Tehuantepec through the final blast of the most active season for tropical storms, sailing west from Salina Cruz to Puerto Angel, would have posed serious hazards for Cravan. He had no sailing experience to speak of, and no local knowledge of the tehuantepecaños, the winds that can come to the gulf through the isthmus with a violent and unexpected force: ‘no clouds, just clear air, then the wind comes up out of nowhere, hurricane force, strong enough to pick up stones, strong enough to knock you flat and sink your boat’.81 Cravan, it seems, designed quietly to sail alone to Puerto Angel – the size of the boat prescribed a solo journey – where he would trade as he could and return to Salina Cruz with something closer to a thirty-foot vessel big enough for him and his companions to sail south, presumably then to follow the same overland route as Loy and the Browns from



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Valparaíso to Buenos Aires. The last available description is recorded by Loy and based on the testimony of Owen Cattell, given in a letter written to Cravan’s mother in March 1921: They all pooled their money and gave it to Fabian so he could buy a boat. They waited for him at the hotel in Salina Cruz, so that they did not have to pay for the journey to Puerto Angel, as they had very little money left … There is not the slightest possibility of him disappearing on purpose. He left all his belongings with his friends who were waiting for him, despite them urging him to take them with him in case something happened. But he did not want to. He took Cattell’s clothes (who was half his height) because his pack was easier to stow in the boat which he took to Puerto Angel: he wanted everything shipshape so he could slip away at night in the boat with as little luggage as possible.82

This last suggestion hints at desperate measures – upon his arrival in Puerto Angel, Cravan may even have planned under cover of night to ‘acquire’ the bigger boat needed to sail south to Chile – but what happened after he sailed out one evening to see how his little boat fared on the water, fully intending to tack back after a short while, is now subject only to speculation. In November, Loy was safely esconced in Buenos Aires awaiting news of her husband; on the 3rd of the month, she wrote a letter to Cravan’s mother in Lausanne asking if any news had been heard of Fabian, but to no avail. The events of history, meanwhile, stirred in the eaves, and just one week later, in far-away Europe, the Armistice of Compiègne was agreed. Out to sea from Salina Cruz, Cravan’s poetry still ripples, ‘a discourse without end / The curtain rises on the afternoon wind.’83 Notes  1 Cravan to Loy, 28 December 1917, in ŒPAL, p. 178.  2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 503, 499.  3 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 40.  4 The same is elsewhere glimpsed in Walter Benjamin’s observation, for instance, of the messianic body torn and rent from organic closure and achieving apocalyptic revelation in death, and in the corporeal fragments of which is to be found the ‘authenticity’ that Benjamin sought in art. ‘The product of the corpse is life. It is not only in the loss of limbs … but in all the processes of elimination and purification that everything corpse-like falls away.’ Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1977), p. 218.

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 5 Further on cause and effect, and its suspension, see Dafydd W. Jones, ‘Becoming the Dada Body: Masks, Dance and Mime’, in Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), pp. 54, 66.  6 Cravan to Loy, 16 December 1917, in ŒPAL, p. 165.  7 Cravan to Loy, 25 December 1917, in ŒPAL, pp. 172–4.  8 ‘Je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime.’ Cravan to Loy, 16 December 1917, in ŒPAL, p. 165.  9 Cravan to Loy, 18 December 1917, in ŒPAL, p. 166. 10 André Gide, Oscar Wilde: A Study, trans. Stuart Mason (Oxford: Holywell Press, 1905), p. 84. 11 The only verifiable Cornell in the Cravan documentation is distinctly remote from this late 1917 episode, but is yet of interest. Among Mina Loy’s few close friends in New York during the 1930s and 1940s was the artist Joseph Cornell; the Christmas card made and sent by Fabienne, daughter of Cravan and Loy, to Cornell in the 1950s can be viewed online at www.aaa. si.edu/collections/items/detail/fabienne-lloyd-christmas-card-to-joseph-cor​ nell-13216 (accessed 18 September 2015). 12 Cravan to Loy, 18 December 1917, in ŒPAL, pp. 166–7. 13 Cravan to Loy, 20 December 1917, in ŒPAL, pp. 168–9. We also observe the same ‘biblical’, messianic glow elsewhere; in Loy’s ‘Colossus’, boarding the New York subway train in Cravan’s company was narrated with his words to her: ‘Fear not … you have the Christ with you.’ See Mina Loy, ‘Colossus’, extracts reproduced in Roger Conover, ‘Mina Loy’s “Colossus”: Arthur Cravan Undressed’, in Rudolf E. Kuenzli (ed.), New York Dada (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986), p. 111. 14 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 108. 15 Cravan to Loy, 20 December 1917, in ŒPAL, pp. 168–9. 16 Cravan to Loy, 22 December 1917, in ŒPAL, pp. 169–70. 17 See Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), p. 254. 18 Ugartechea was a wrestler and all-round strongman of some repute in Mexico, who had founded his Escuela de Cultura Fisica at the Palacio del Mármol c.1906, and is remembered more today for his part in developing and popularising Mexico’s pro-wrestling phenomenon Lucha Libre at the start of the twentieth century than for his casual employment of Cravan in Mexico City. 19 Cravan to Loy, 26 December 1917, in ŒPAL, p. 174. The prompt to wire Johnson, who proposed conditions beyond anything Cravan could promise, had apparently come from Ugartechea; see Burke, Becoming Modern, p. 259. 20 The Hotel Juarez was located at calle de Tacuba 81. 21 Bob Brown, from You Gotta Live; cited in Charles Nicholl, Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations (London: Penguin Books, 2012), p. 232. 22 Cravan to Loy, 22 December 1917, in ŒPAL, pp. 169–70.



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23 Cravan to Loy, 24 December 1917, in ŒPAL, p. 171. 24 Cravan to Loy, 24 December 1917, in ŒPAL, pp. 171–2. 25 Cravan to Loy, 25 December 1917, in ŒPAL, pp. 172–4. 26 Cravan to Loy, 27 December 1917, in ŒPAL, pp. 175–6. 27 Cravan to Loy, 30 December 1917 (A), in ŒPAL, pp. 179–80. 28 Cravan to Loy, 27 December 1917, in ŒPAL, pp. 175–6. 29 Cravan to Loy, 25 December 1917, in ŒPAL, pp. 172–4. 30 Cravan to Loy, 29 December 1917, in ŒPAL, pp. 177–8. 31 Cravan to Loy, 30 December 1917 (A), in ŒPAL, pp. 179–80. 32 Cravan to Loy, 30 December 1917 (B), in ŒPAL, p. 182. 33 Cravan to Loy, 30 December 1917 (B), in ŒPAL, pp. 181–3. 34 The indirect invocation is of (i) Cravan’s uncle Oscar Wilde’s letter from incarceration, (ii) his claimed ‘great uncle’ Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s blank verse poem and (iii) the poet of modernité Charles Baudelaire’s wailing from the depths in his poem ‘De profundis clamavi’. The first verse of the Vulgate Psalm 129 (130) reads: ‘De profundis clamavi ad te Domine’ (‘Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord’); Wilde’s letter to Bosie, written in Reading gaol in 1897, De profundis, first published and thus titled by Robbie Ross in a heavily excised issue in 1905, was not published in its entirety until 1962; Tennyson’s poem ‘De profundis’ was first published in 1880, rendering the poet’s affirmation of the spiritual truth in the mere existence of life; Baudelaire’s ‘De profundis clamavi’, severally translated into English since 1909, was first published in Les fleurs du mal (1857). 35 Cravan to Loy, 31 December 1917, in ŒPAL, p. 183. 36 ‘Una escuela de box, Arturo Cravan’, El Nacional, 31 December 1917. 37 Newspaper clipping dated January 1918, reproduced in ACSS, p. 218. 38 Loy to Mabel Dodge, n.d.; cited in Burke, Becoming Modern, p. 253. 39 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 117. 40 Arthur Cravan, ‘Des paroles’/‘Some Words’, in John Ashbery, Collected French Translations: Poetry, ed. Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2014), p. 103. 41 Cravan, ‘Des paroles’/‘Some Words’, p. 105. 42 Nellie to Otho St Clair, April 1917; cited in ACSS, p. 211. 43 Nellie to Otho St Clair, April 1917; cited in ACSS, p. 212. 44 Loy, ‘Colossus’, pp. 117–18. 45 Loy, ‘Colossus’, pp. 118–19. 46 Loy, ‘Colossus’, p. 119. 47 See Nicholl, Traces Remain, p. 233. 48 Mina Loy; cited in Burke, Becoming Modern, p. 255. 49 Nellie to Otho St Clair, June 1917; cited in Burke, Becoming Modern, p. 258, and Bastiaan van der Velden, ‘Chronologie’, La règle du jeu, 53 (October 2013), 113. 50 Burke, Becoming Modern, p. 254. 51 Bob Brown, from You Gotta Live; cited in Nicholl, Traces Remain, p. 233. 52 Mina Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, in LLB, p. 319.

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53 Arte y Deportes, 6 September 1918. 54 ‘Chaplin’, interview with Cravan in Arte y Deportes, 13 September 1918; cited in Nicholl, Traces Remain, pp. 233–4. This is the 1918 interview cited throughout the present study. 55 ‘Chaplin’, interview with Cravan; cited in Nicholl, Traces Remain, pp. 233–4. 56 Arte y Deportes, 20 September 1918. 57 Arte y Deportes, 27 September 1918. 58 See Nicholl, Traces Remain, p. 234; Burke, Becoming Modern, p. 261. 59 Mina Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, p. 321. 60 Loy; cited in Burke, Becoming Modern, p. 256. 61 In writing to Nellie at the time of Cravan’s illness in May, for instance, Loy had asked her to forward copies of Cravan’s birth certificate and of Nellie’s marriage certificate to Cravan’s natural father, Otho Holland Lloyd, in the hope that new documents for Cravan would be issued by the British consulate in Mexico City; suspicious of the request, Nellie never dispatched the documents from Lausanne. See Loy to Nellie, May 1918; cited in ACSS, p. 212. 62 Nellie wrote to her son Otho in the second part of August to tell of news that Cravan intended to head for Buenos Aires within the month. Nellie to Otho St Clair, 21 August 1918; cited in van der Velden, ‘Chronologie’, 113. 63 Burke, Becoming Modern, p. 259; the published account in French translation of this passage from Loy’s ‘Colossus’ is in ŒPAL, p. 257. 64 Cravan, ‘Des paroles’/‘Some Words’, p. 103. 65 Burke, Becoming Modern, p. 260. 66 Bob Brown was the conceptual pioneer of e-readers with his ‘reading machine’ of the early 1930s. Further on Brown, see Craig Saper, The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016): ‘From the invention of serialized movies, to avant-garde poetry, to the invention of a reading machine, to writing populist cookbooks, Brown created and celebrated twentieth-century culture of all kinds’ (cover blurb). 67 Bob Brown, You Gotta Live (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932). 68 Owen Cattell was the son of James McKeen Cattell, who was dismissed as professor of psychology at Columbia in October 1917 ‘for comments upon governmental policies in relation to the war’. New York Times, 21 May 1919. See War-Time Prosecutions and Mob Violence Involving the Rights of Free Speech, Free Press and Peaceful Assemblage (from April 1, 1917 to March 1, 1919) (New York: National Civil Liberties Bureau, 1919), pp. 26, 44. Cattell’s objection to the war was conscientious, and he was reportedly undeterred by his prosecution the previous year from proceeding in April 1918 to organise the Young Democracy party, ‘a new political organization … to sound the death knell of universal military training’. The Sun (New York), 11 April 1918. Cattell travelled to Mexico in May 1918, a move that would eventually see him arrested in New Orleans on his return to the United States on 20 May 1919, charged with draft evasion. 69 The Swedish name von Düben is connected to Salina Cruz (Baron Edward



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von Düben was once vice consul for Sweden in Salina Cruz, living in the seaport until his death in 1930; the nineteenth-century photographer Cesar von Düben was active in Mexico, and the early twentieth-century photog­ rapher Eden von Düben was based in Salina Cruz and documented the development and expansion of the harbour there); we might easily speculate on this particular circumstantial coincidence. 70 Blaise Cendrars, Sky: Memoirs, trans. Nina Rootes (New York: Paragon House, 1992), pp. 205, 206. 71 Mina Loy; cited in Burke, Becoming Modern, p. 262. 72 Mina Loy, ‘Mexican Desert’, in LLB, p. 17. 73 See van der Velden, ‘Chronologie’, 115. 74 See Nicholl, Traces Remain, p. 235. 75 Loy, ‘Mexican Desert’, p. 17. 76 Bob Brown, You Gotta Live; cited in Burke, Becoming Modern, p. 264. 77 Cravan, ‘Des paroles’/‘Some Words’, p. 103. 78 Arte y Deportes, 18 October 1918 and 1 November 1918. 79 From Hans Richter, ‘The Self-Immolation of Arthur Cravan’, in Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1965), pp. 85–6. 80 Bob Brown, You Gotta Live; cited in Nicholl, Traces Remain, p. 237. 81 Nicholl, Traces Remain, p. 240. The cyclogenesis of the strongest hurricane on record, Hurricane Patricia, with sustained wind speeds of 200 mph, occurred in the Gulf of Tehuantepec in October 2015. 82 Loy to Nellie, March 1921; cited in Nicholl, Traces Remain, p. 238. 83 Cravan, ‘Des paroles’/‘Some Words’, p. 107.

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Conclusion

The posthumous life What remains in the present absence signals the ‘double death’ (or yet the multiple death) of Arthur Cravan. First, the realisable and personal death of the central self that obtained a proper name (let it be ‘Fabian Lloyd’), the poet-boxer eventually lost at sea; but also the unrealisable and impersonal death of other identities whose names disperse (let them be ‘Cravan’ and the other names of ‘Arthur Cravan’), death as dying, expressed in the infinitive, whereby one never finishes dying: ‘Death has an extreme and definite relation to me and my body and is grounded in me, but it also has no relation to me at all – it is incorporeal and infinitive, impersonal, grounded only in itself.’1 This is Deleuze’s philosophical reading of Maurice Blanchot’s L’espace littéraire (1955), where the sense of the ambiguity of death thus expressed is developed, demonstrating by the most sustained concentration in Deleuze’s Logique du sens (1969) the resistance of impersonal death to a return to any zero intensity from which existence emerges. This unceasing death is the ‘nothing’ always present behind everything, the ‘nothing’ that is preferred to ‘something’, ‘not a will to nothingness, but a growth of a nothingness of the will … Being as being, and nothing more.’2 The absence of Arthur Cravan with which we are now faced is a vibrant and unceasing dispersal of names and fictions. There is no final death to recover, no single narrative, far less meaning, to emerge from a life of perpetually unstable power-relations and the relentless struggle for domination; there is no power, only the process of a will to power and (for the multiply other names of Arthur Cravan) there is no will to power, only wills to power.3 When casting off in late 1918, away from all solid foundations, Cravan’s last known act was a Nietzschean movement of infinite negation wherein ‘the horizon seems open once more … every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; and the sea, our sea, again lies open before us’.4 If anywhere in the chosen narrative of this



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schizo-biography, then, it is here that the nihilist impulse resonates the loudest and it is here that Cravan, ‘free for death, maintains this pure essence of will in willing nothingness’.5 My reading, however, insists that it be checked to the degree that speaking of ‘negation’ or ‘nothingness’ will always risk collapse into the statement that non-being is – that is to say, it risks always attributing being to non-being, whereby ‘ “non” in the expression “non-being” expresses something other than the negative’6 – when the more profound investment might be to reject the traditional Western philosophical accounts, and in their place to renew our reading and vitalise non-being as the positive power of life. Rejecting non-being in its traditional sense is contingent within the context of Cravan’s privileging by the cultural avant-garde in the years that immediately followed his disappearance. What fed through the post-Cravan phenomena 391, Paris Dada and Littérature eventually into Surrealism (and, therefore, the revolution that he was ushered into by Francis Picabia and elevated within as exemplar by André Breton) cultivated and maintained a non-being in the form of the unconscious at the heart of being, to orient in the direction of that which is either yet to be revealed (as always further experiences) or yet to be made present (in order for us to be able to experience it as something), or that which is other to (or beyond) our being. Succinctly in secondary commentary, this is described as ‘that inarticulable desired fullness, jouissance or plenitude that is not a being, not a thing, nothing’.7 Cravan’s subsequently scattered sightings in proto and proper Surrealist ephemera and his eulogised invocation by, most notably, Breton then ensured his continued cultural presence for the successive generation in Paris and in North America. Those who came after Cravan could no more than ever know of him, though during the interwar years they would document, chronicle and curate the same presence into the histories that became the textual bedrock of Modernism – the residual legacy of which is the legend that we encounter today. Now, it is the negativity of non-being in its traditional sense that complicates every reading that follows; and the affirmative impulse of Deleuze’s writings, for instance, described in Différence et répétition (1968) and current throughout the present study, cannot but reject the negativity of non-being in developing a philosophy of the fullness of life. In its process, Deleuze’s philosophy is able to demonstrate how ‘lack’ and any such similar effects of non-being are produced from – that is, are productions of – the fullness of life: ‘[b]eing is also non-being, but non-being is not the being of the negative; rather, it is the being of the problematic, the being of problem and question’.8 And the production of such effects derives precisely from our constrained and limited sense of being (in which we assume

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that what cannot be named is non-being), and from the non-being that we imagine to reside at the heart of being. Deleuze’s expediency is to revise terms as he resists the reduction of being to what is, in order to be able consistently to understand life as the unlimited and proliferant potential for creation, which can always exceed itself and exceed what we know: [N]on-being should rather be written (non)-being or, better still, ?-being. In this sense, it turns out that the infinitive … designates less a proposition than the interrogation to which the proposition is supposed to respond. This (non)-being is the differential element in which affirmation, as multiple affirmation, finds the principle of its genesis.9

Thus, precisely, what is rejected is the negativity of non-being traditionally embedded in Western metaphysics, the premise to the attribution of lack of presence or the negation of values. In rejecting non-being, Deleuze’s affirmation is of the positive non-being that he invokes as ?-being; that is, ?-being as the positive power of life to set out problems and to resist, indeed to reject, what are assumed to be universally shared commonsensical and self-evident ‘truths’. We recognise this rejection in the critical position against phenomenology and the traditional metaphysics that feeds into Deleuze’s double assault against the already constituted (and yet to be revealed) forms (that is, clichés), and against the unformed (and yet to be made present; that is, chaos). The consequent philosophy to emerge is then distinctly not a science of discovery but, rather, philosophy as concept creation; concisely on this point, ‘the purpose of concept creation lies in the fight against clichés, while the purpose of the laying out of a plane of immanence lies in the fight against chaos’.10 In processing this philosophy, Deleuze (with Guattari in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? of 1991) indicates in passage between concept and the preconceptual plane of immanence the occasional mysterious appearance and ‘hazy existence’ of conceptual personae (the first given example is of the Idiot), vital and necessary for the entire project: the history of philosophy must go through these personae, through their changes according to planes and through their variety according to concepts. Philosophy constantly brings conceptual personae to life; it gives life to them.11

Conceptual personae are figures presupposed by concepts: Deleuze and Guattari pose Descartes, for instance, as conceptual persona of the concept ‘cogito’ (not its author, therefore). To the extent that the present study has pursued Cravan in terms of subjectivity, representation,



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metaphor and multiplicity, it is in-between and in constant passage that the poet-boxer is here, finally, posed as conceptual persona. Now, concentration on the singularity Cravan ultimately demonstrates itself to be a concentration on the concepts generated out of the historical instance and a present reading of it. Indeed, if we are to insist on a named concept in the Cravan narrative, and at the risk of naming that process itself ‘philosophy’ (as concept creation), then perhaps ‘voyoucratie’ is the name that contains in all its connections what today remains as Hans Richter’s factually flawed description of the ‘nihilist hero’.12 It is the concepts that demand our investment, more than the conceptual personae, the very concepts that once allowed Deleuze sometimes to ‘dream of a history of philosophy … that would list only the new concepts created by a great philosopher – his most essential and creative contribution’.13 I shall restate what hardly needs restating, that Cravan was a cultural agent, not a philosopher, but I deliberately and provocatively choose to align him with this pursuit of the question of philosophy in order to test what possible continuity there may be for him in ongoing discourses on avant-gardism, neo-avant-gardism, performativity, actionism, cultural agency and extremism. In progressing this much, however, is not ‘voyoucratie’ very quickly superseded by the concept that we will name ‘Cravan’, delineating in all its contradictions that ‘adventurer prepared for every illegality’?14 And, in rendering the concept that relegates its author (Lloyd?) from prominence, is not ‘Cravan’ severed infinitely from any ground that it (he) can ever hope to return to? For Deleuze and Guattari, the dispersal through names (of concepts or of authors) is understood: It is possible that the conceptual persona only rarely or allusively appears for himself. Nevertheless, he is there, and however nameless and subterranean, he must always be reconstituted by the reader. Sometimes he appears with a proper name … [to] carry out the movements that describe the author’s plane of immanence … [and to] play a part in the very creation of the author’s concepts.15

The definition of philosophy, then, at which Deleuze and Guattari arrive in their final collaboration,16 now elides seemingly without effort into describing the proposition of Arthur Cravan: ‘philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’.17 The conceptual personae in the named perspectives – Lloyd, Rubidini, Cooper, Lowitska, Lénod, Cravan, Holland, Miradique or Miradecque, Napier, Bombardier Wells, Hope, Archinard, Hayes and on – wherein each renders a surface, belong to the created concept ‘Cravan’.18 And each surface is, in turn, fragile, cast off from security and into the chaos

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of life’s endless struggle with death. It is the vision of this struggle in its perpetual incompletion that proves beyond the grasp of the protagonist;19 in Logique du sens (1969), Deleuze mobilises Maurice Blanchot’s L’espace littéraire (1955) to demonstrate: Death as event, inseparable from the past and future into which it is divided, never present, an impersonal death, the ‘ungraspable, that which I cannot grasp’ … And the personal death, which occurs and is actualized in the most harsh present whose ‘extreme horizon (is) the freedom to die and to be able to risk oneself mortally.’20

This is the permanent deferral, the performance cancelled, relâche, of the completion of death out of which the posthumous ‘life’ of Cravan now continues into and beyond the present: [S]uddenly the rumour began to spread through Montparnasse, without anyone’s knowing where it had come from or being able to verify the truth of it, that Arthur Cravan had been murdered in a dance hall by a dagger-thrust to the heart … The stuff of cinema!21

More correctly, the recoverable narrative peters out (rather than rousing to Blaise Cendrars’s cinematic climax) in the years that immediately followed Cravan’s disappearance. It was the start of three years of agonised desperation disintegrating into despair for Mina Loy, from the long weeks in October 1918 spent travelling alone aboard ship from Mexico to Chile, imagining as she did so her future with Cravan; then traversing east into Argentina, hearing without wanting to the idle speculation that Cravan might have tacked south-west to Tahiti;22 and then the not-knowing as she waited in mid-term pregnancy for her husband at the British consulate in Buenos Aires; before embarking on the futile and exhausting search that Marcel Duchamp would many years later recollect: She looked for him in all the Mexican prisons, and since he was a boxer, a very big fellow, she thought that he wouldn’t be able to lose himself in a crowd, he would have been recognized right away.23

This tortured search finds more direct testimony in correspondences from the time. The writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, for instance, evidencing the currency of speculative accounts riddled with casual inaccuracies relating Cravan’s disappearance, wrote in June 1920 that Loy was seeking her husband in all the jails – as a possible haul-in by the US government as a spy or an embusqué [for draft evasion] or something. He went across a lake in a boat & was supposed to have been drowned but



Conclusion 283 perhaps not … [thinks Mina]. Others – some others – prefer to believe that marriage appalled him & that he has disappeared.24

And eyeing her daughter-in-law with remote suspicion, Cravan’s mother Nellie declined to respond from Lausanne to the appeals, in letters written from Buenos Aires in November and December 1918, for either news about her son (of which she had none) or the practical assistance of forwarding documentation in preparation for the approaching birth of her grandchild. There would be only a slight thaw in Nellie’s stance in the years that followed, and her suspicions of Loy would never leave her.25 In the stricken state in which Loy now found herself, her eventual recourse was to her own mother at Burnside House in Limpsfield, in Surrey, England. To this suburban village midway between London and the Worthing briefly of Cravan’s youth, Loy returned in the spring, and there, on 5 April 1919, the daughter named Jemima Fabienne Cravan Lloyd was born. Cravan’s conceptual dispersal in late Dada and early Surrealist texts, meanwhile, maintained a presence for him that was eventually written into the histories of twentieth-century avant-gardism. Though the ambition that first took him to Paris had been to become a poet, what he became for Picabia was the embodiment of Dada, and what he became for Breton was the executor of the Surrealist tenet that ‘you kill yourself in the same way as you dream’.26 Breton’s conclusions in relation to Cravan – and, specifically, what he wanted Cravan to be 27 – are highly problematic to the extent that it is a significant leap to reconfigure disappearance as ‘suicide’ (though Cravan was certainly ‘suicided’ by Breton).28 The close parallel in this regard is Breton’s relationship with the ‘dandy of the trenches’,29 the writer Jacques Vaché, who died at a very young age – whether accidentally or intentionally – from an opium overdose. Breton had first met his contemporary Vaché in 1916, three years before Vaché’s death, when the latter was being treated for shrapnel injury in Nantes. Breton, as medical intern on the neurology ward, recommended Maintenant to the patient, and later relayed that Vaché had found it ‘most entertaining’.30 We will conclude that Cravan carried some resonance for Vaché – indirectly in Vaché’s own drawings of Lafcadio from Gide’s Les caves du Vatican, or occasionally directly as in Vaché’s doodled drawing of Cravan in one of his 1917 war letters to Jeanne Derrien31 – though the extent to which we can ascribe centrality to any sense of self-erasure is questionable (Vaché died only a few months after Cravan’s disappearance in 1918, long before either of the two was ‘suicided’ by Breton). But if we will look to corresponding cultural postures, however, Picabia I think presents us with a corpus

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far more closely aligned than any other to what is now, in concluding this study, the concept ‘Cravan’. Picabia’s poetry, prose, aphorisms (‘happiness is to command no one and to not be commanded’)32 and provocations strongly evoke continuities for Cravan (391, for instance, presented itself as a viable and productive option emerging from the discussions between both actors during 1916 concerning Maintenant;33 furthermore, the blague of Picabia texts such as ‘Carnet du cuculin’ in Cannibale seems to be a logical continuation of the nouvelles en trois lignes that Cravan had previously adapted from Félix Fénéon in writing ‘Différentes choses’),34 documenting and sloganising a stance in such a manner as Cravan would have been unlikely to do in print, but which he did fully enact in his cultural presences. It is always with closely guarded caution that we imagine one persona in the writings of another, but when I read Picabia musing in Lausanne just weeks before the birth of Cravan’s daughter, his words cannot but conjure the object of this study: I have visited Paris New York London Berlin … I will live in these cities but I’ll never return to them … the November moon bows respectfully at the end of a ball honest for life about me … what intoxicates me like algebra like a musical vibration like opium moving its tail is a black shirt spotted with white miner of town bands retaining a memory of the soccer game in Wales harmonious as the rugby … there’s a countess



Conclusion 285 much in love I’m sure of it … the allies’ interests the underwater results can only be a pavilion on the wasteland fenced off by democratic ideas like the telephone which does away with material distance35

In February 1919, the month Picabia signed off this Poésie ron-ron and just four months after Cravan had last been seen, the eighth issue of 391 was published, reporting news from the various Dada centres; the news from New York ‘reported’ that Cravan, fitness instructor at the Mexico City athletics club, would soon be lecturing on Egyptian art.36 Within another year, Tristan Tzara, the impresario of international Dada who had by this time been collaborating with Picabia for eighteen months, assembled his extensive list of ‘some presidents and presidentettes’ of Dada for the Paris publication of Bulletin Dada (March 1920, the sixth issue of Dada magazine). The list included Cravan (as well as ‘Mina Lloyd’), and additionally brief texts in the style of ‘Différentes choses’ attributed to the poet-boxer in absentia;37 Cravan’s name was also present in the list of adherents of Dada publicised in the papillon broadside ‘La seule expression de l’homme moderne: lire Dada’, designed for general distribution that same year under the auspices of Paris Dada (attributed to Tzara and Paul Éluard). The strengthening current through Paris Dada then carried into first-series Littérature – Cravan’s presence is strongly sensed, for instance, in Picabia’s ‘philosophical dada’ text: DADA has blue eyes, a pale face and curly hair; has the English look of young men who are keen on sport. … DADA dreams of Byron and Greece. … DADA dreams of Nietzsche and Jesus-Christ.38

The following month’s epitaph by Philippe Soupault in Littérature – insensitive as it was to Loy’s ongoing distress (though she may by the beginning of 1921 have given up hope of finding Cravan, she was far from reconciled to the possibility that he was dead),39 and written by someone who (like Breton, Tzara or Éluard) could claim vain

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The fictions of Arthur Cravan

acquaintance only through degrees of separation and was therefore in a position to construct no more than an image of the poet-boxer40 – more concretely made evident concession to Cravan’s demise: The pushcart vendors have emigrated to Mexico Good old boxer, you died down there You don’t even know why You yelled louder than all of us in the palaces of America and all the cafes of Paris You didn’t want to gaze into a mirror You turned instead to the hospital What will you get up to in heaven, old friend? I have nothing to hide from you The Seine still flows outside my window Your friends have become very rich I feel the overwhelming urge to inhale41

In the spring of 1921, Cravan achieved equally middling and modest scores from Breton and Tzara in the ‘referendum’ results on suicide published for the March 1921 Littérature, but significantly higher scores from Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia (she awarded him the maximum, 20), Éluard and, importantly in view of the subsequently evolving Surrealist discourse on suicide, Jacques Rigaut. Into new-series Littérature, the December 1922 issue ran Robert Desnos’s puns (claimed to have been transmitted by Rrose Sélavy – that is, the pseudonymous Duchamp, who would finally in 1966 admit in relation to Cravan that ‘[h]e was a funny type. I didn’t like him very much, nor he me.’),42 which included the line ‘Cravan se hâte sur la rive et sa cravat joue dans le vent’ (smoothly translated as ‘Cravan wends on the wave and his cravat waves in the wind’).43 At the same trance session during which Desnos had written this line,44 he also marked the writing paper with some indexical and directional symbols, a part-complete Chi-Rho christogram and stellar forms, which he captioned ‘La mort de Cravan’.45 By the time Louis Aragon proposed his project for a history of contemporary literature in 1922, Cravan was securely installed alongside Guillaume Apollinaire as together the most significant literary figures to emerge from the period closing la belle époque and entering into the war; and, alongside Duchamp, Man Ray and Walter Arensberg, Cravan prominently headed the cultural radicalism which had radiated from the United States during the war years.46 The die was cast on the the canon of Surrealist precursors, which included Cravan, with new-series Littérature’s twopage spread in October 1923.47

18  Littérature, new series, 11 and 12 (15 October 1923).

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The fictions of Arthur Cravan

Picabia’s role in the legendising of Cravan after 1918 cannot be overstated; though Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia made the explicit declaration of Cravan’s status in the 1921 suicide referendum, along with the implicit declaration in her later retrospective writings, it was Francis who perhaps made the more profound accommodation for a continuity of Cravan in his creative output during the early 1920s. Out of Picabia’s indirect invocations emerge the transient allusions of René Clair’s short film Entr’acte (1924), scripted by Picabia on Chez Maxim restaurant stationery,48 in response to Erik Satie’s request to collaborate.49 For Picabia, the film became a work deliberately designed to ‘make the public head for the exits’,50 and today stands unique in Clair’s filmic œuvre for the final cut, which is both technically and inventively remarkable in its ‘joyous freehand anticipation of all the nightmare farces the surrealists would later produce’.51 The time-image: Entr’acte The initial sequences of Entr’acte visually range Paris rooftops; target dummies in a shooting gallery with inflating and deflating balloon heads; a ballerina (Inge Frïss) immodestly viewed through a glass floor;52 a rushing landscape; igniting matches superimposed on the head of a man (Man Ray?); the colonnaded façade of a building, intercut with the chequerboard hosting a game of chess between Duchamp and Man Ray on rooftops overlooking the Grand Palais, then intercut with a view of the Place de la Concorde before the chequerboard is drenched in water. It is a film which, despite possessing a narrative most frequently described as incoherent, even as ‘visual babbling’ by its director,53 now draws inevitable speculation in relation to Cravan from its early sequence (three minutes into the film) in which the sparring movements of white boxing gloves are superimposed over Paris night lights and the Palais Garnier on the boulevard des Capucines.54 In the context of the Parisian avant-garde, of course, Cravan does not hold exclusive rights on boxing credentials,55 but there remains an elegiac reading that offers itself from the film’s outset. The opening sequence features a stop-motion animated war cannon on the flat roof of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées, overlooking the Seine, around which Picabia and Satie bounce sublimely in slow motion with Les Invalides in the distant background; they load the cannon and bounce away in reversed sublimity before the shelling begins, a loud echo of the war that put Cravan to flight, closing this déclenché to the overturette of the projectionette. Entr’acte in its entirety (save for the opening déclenché passage) was shown in the interval between the two acts (entr’acte means



Conclusion 289

‘­intermission’) of the ballet Relâche (which means ‘relax’ or, additionally, ‘performance cancelled’), and its potential alluding to Cravan – always conceding to the risk of reading in – gathers pace in the ‘funereal grotesque’ of the film’s second half.56 The falling water sequence that ends the rooftop game of chess commences a passage panning the Paris rooftops as though an ocean, onto which is superimposed a flimsy paper boat, a ‘drunken paper ship’, tilting, riding and tossed, then intercut with the dancing ballerina and her abstractly foaming tutu, whose rousing movement eventually dissolves beneath becalmed water in submission to the sea. Picabia’s next provocation comes in revelation of the pirouetting, bespectacled and bearded ballerina’s face, revisiting the bearded Mona Lisa attributed to Duchamp but in exploitation of which Picabia held no reservation,57 and, moreover, in the invention of which Blaise Cendrars credited Picabia with deference to Cravan (to the marked relegation of the ‘malicious Parisian’ Duchamp): [I]n New York, Picabia saw Cravan every day and, inspired by his example, had the great moral courage to provide Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, who was too surprised to protest, with a pair of mustaches just like Kaiser Wilhelm II’s …58

The eyes that gaze out from the calm water of Entr’acte, in the meantime, revive the glare preceding the rooftop chess sequence, and are a striking inversion of the eyes in Picabia’s undated imaginary portrait of a beautified Cravan.59 The inverted gaze and submerging heads (in downward orientation, sinking and drowning) then lead into the fairground shooting gallery with clay pipes for prizes. In front of the range, an ostrich egg bobbing in mid-air on a jet of water becomes the target upon which the gun barrel of a plumed Tyrolean huntsman (played by the choreographer Jean Börlin, principal dancer with the Ballets Suédois), standing on the Paris rooftops, is trained. The one egg becomes many eggs in front of the huntsman’s eyes, disorienting, confusing and frustrating him, before restoring the singularity at which he shoots. Out of the exploding egg, the bird (that metaphor of the soul since ­antiquity) – actually a pigeon – is freed and released to the sky, only finally returning to settle on the now cheered huntsman’s hat. Then from the flat rooftop of the opening sequence, the menace of war steps forward again; Picabia takes his own aim at the bird and shoots. Intercut with a rifle range target (directly referencing Picabia’s own Optophone or La nuit espagnole, both of 1922, the latter including targets at which the artist had actually fired gunshot)60 and a hearse for a funeral cortège assembling far below, the huntsman falls to the street, cut down in his joy as Picabia’s gunshot misses the bird. The imagery of an inverted

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heart, a dimming and then reillumined sun, the now reverted heart with Picabia’s and Satie’s monograms on each chamber, then comes in advance of the assembling cortège behind a camel-drawn hearse. The camel’s presence conjures the nomadic caravan,61 and the hearse leading the caravan is adorned with bread rings (at which the cortège pecks) and joints that look more like boxing gloves than country hams. Thus commences the funeral procession assembled next to the wooden frame of the fairground rollercoaster ‘le Chatouilleur’ at Luna Park in Porte Maillot, with the camel leading. This is the sequence for which Entr’acte is probably best known as the ‘hilarious film whose funeral hearse chase scene ranks among the great comic scenes of silent cinema’.62 Intercutting the ballerina and Paris street scenes, the slowmotion prancing mourners of the caravan set off ‘with such pompes funèbres as the French strangely call their mortuaries transformed truly into pomp and celebration, a fun-house parade’.63 They enter a show ring, circling and gathering momentum around a miniature Eiffel Tower, before the hearse breaks free of the camel and careers away down a tree-lined avenue. The cortège steps up its pace to follow, eventually running at break-neck speed, mourning having literally broken; in among the mourners are a long-distance runner and a crippled war veteran pushing himself in his trolley (out of which he eventually leaps, both legs intact, in order to keep up). All means of transport – bicycles, motorcars, bateaux mouches and aircraft – join in the by-now frenzied chase through the Paris suburbs, the film edited in appropriation of some mainstream cinema aesthetics in the process, intercutting a dizzying ride on ‘le Chatouilleur’ and swelling to an onrushing crescendo as the coffin is jettisoned from the hearse, rolling into a field. The front-running mourners (led by possibly coincidental lookalikes for the Paris Dada regulars Jean Crotti and the former ‘Proconsul Dada’ Paul Dermée) arrive at the scene and gather around the coffin. There, pondering the place in which it has finally come to rest, the lid moves from inside the casket and the coffin opens. In front of the mourners, stunned and agape at what they are witnessing, up pops and out jumps the Tyrolean huntsman of the first half now formally dressed and decorated with the regalia of the Légion d’honneur, transformed into prestidigitateur waving his magic wand. Beginning with the voided coffin before progressing one by one through the astonished mourners, he points his wand at each one, who instantly disappears. Finally, standing alone in the field, the dazzling conjuror turns his wand on himself and dissolves, leaving an empty field. The same cast member (Börlin, now as himself) finally tears through the closing ‘Fin’, before being booted back in reverse motion to restore the torn paper screen. These are the



Conclusion 291

elements of Entr’acte which, in the absence of any statement anywhere to such effect (or to the contrary), present themselves for the rarely mooted possibility that the film is a constructed allusion to the presences and absence of Arthur Cravan (the most public statement to this effect is made in Isaki Lacuesta’s documentary film Cravan vs Cravan of 2002, where passages from Entr’acte ghost in and out of the narrative before its brief discussion towards the end of the documentary)64 – a suggestion ultimately offset by Picabia’s own provocation that the film is, in fact, a work which ‘respects nothing except the right to roar with laughter’.65 How we should read Entr’acte (just as how we should read ‘Cravan’) is a complicated proposition; the degree to which the film that Picabia ‘scripted’ can be said to represent anything involves an explicitly interpretive intervention on our part.66 The possibility is there, of course and if we choose it, to read a warring backdrop to Cravan’s plurality, his becoming a target within the Parisian avant-garde circuit, the boxing gloves of the ‘great white hope’, his fateful boat trip out to sea from Salina Cruz and the mourning of his passing confounded by dissolution. But all we can say with certainty is that what Entr’acte presents its audience with are relayed images in a ‘succession of erratic shots, the speed of its editing … its innovative special effects … [and] its cascade of burlesque and unexpected situations’,67 all deliberately assembled in such a manner as to resist an interpretive process. Indeed, it is Deleuze’s argument precisely that because cinematic images are not representations, we should not look for meaning in them. The point is that, rather than presenting us with representations of an existing world, what cinema does is create new worlds; it offers us recognition of the potential to move beyond limited forms of life and to embrace the process of becoming and the transformative possibilities in all life.68 The concept that Deleuze develops in expression of cinema’s potential is the time-image, articulated in Cinéma 2: l’image-temps (1985),69 describing such images as are qualified in Bergson’s popular philosophy of the early twentieth century as sites of duration, the time component that functions as neither successive nor chronological.70 By this designation of images, the time-image renders time itself apart from spatialisation or any derivation from m ­ ovement – relieved, therefore, from the chronological sequencing that I have exploited to structure the present study’s narrative, for example (though I would suggest it is more of a lateral, or rhizomatic, than linear narrative). It operates as ‘the perception of perception’ in prompting us not to interpret but rather to think through what we can look at in the process of articulating narrative matter.71 Deleuze, indeed, makes

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The fictions of Arthur Cravan

direct reference to Entr’acte in Cinéma 2;72 his description of some of the film’s sequences may have been judged inaccurate, but there is a processing through the imagery that lets go of structured narration and its use of montage (that is, the movement-image’s representation of time, described in Cinéma 1: l’image-mouvement in 1983). The time-image, in contrast, initiates a perpetual duration and the eliding of temporal distinction; emphatically for Deleuze, ‘it is in the present that we make memory, in order to make use of it in the future when the present will be past’.73 Rastaquouère Considering Entr’acte thus within a more comprehensive accounting of Cravan underscores the greater philosophical current structuring this study. Cinema, like the concept ‘Cravan’, should be seen less for what it is than for what it might do – as correspondingly, through readings as intuition, what philosophy is, and what art is, is what they might do (though it does not follow that their potential is always realised). Historically, Entr’acte falls into the broad period in the first half of the twentieth century that Deleuze identifies with the classical movementimage, which gives stability to narration and therefore representation in the image. Philosophically, Entr’acte belongs to Deleuze’s second, post-1945 period, in which the unity of movement and its interval enter crisis as the sensory–motor link is decoupled, giving rise to a new situation prioritising the optical and sound, ‘invested by the senses’:74 a situation that is no longer drawn out into action, but one in which ‘the image is given not solely to be seen … [i]t is as much legible as it is visible’,75 and brings the senses into an immediate proximity with time and thought. What Cravan is, accordingly, and what Cravan can only be (the present study, for instance, has ranged legend, assemblage, metaphor, plurality and concept in approaching Cravan), is a potentiality that we negotiate now. Our reading of Cravan and the forming of a memory happen in the present, and the potentiality of what Cravan might do is whatever transformative possibilities we apply Cravan to in the future. In the line of film-makers ‘who think by writing with images’ – those post-1945 auteurs – the reading that we apply in any study of Cravan after Deleuze is one in which ‘we produce and lose ourselves creatively’, as Tom Conley has most recently and sympathetically described it,76 alongside Deleuze’s own words: It may be that when we read a book, look at a spectacle or a painting, and even more strongly when we are ourselves [its] author … we constitute



Conclusion 293 a sheet of transformation that invents a kind of transversal continuity or connection among several sheets, and weaves among them an array of relations that cannot be located.77

If the process is one in which we lose ourselves, we may yet again find ourselves embedded in the transformative sites of our own writing; Deleuze’s point precisely is that it is the great auteurs, like the great artists or musicians, who tell us the most about their work. The ‘work’ of Cravan, then, is what is recovered in text and spectacle, its representations contingent, legible as they are visible. Mina Loy, even in Mexico before Cravan’s disappearance, began drafting her own didactic projection of thoughts for the future that she had imagined with Cravan, in what eventually became a fourteen-point programme promoting an intellectual heroism committed to ‘government by creative imagination’. The draft text, titled ‘International Psycho-Democracy’ and dated to Buenos Aires in 1918, was first printed privately by Loy in Florence in 1920, before its publication in a more widely disseminated form in New York the following year, declaring: Put yourself at your own disposal. Live life at first hand. Make the world your Salon.78

In the process, Loy exhorted the artist’s genius not to be at odds with but to lead social evolution. In its psycho-democrats, the ideal selves of Loy and Cravan can be discerned (though ultimately perhaps consigned as the product of Loy’s ‘creative imagination’). Through the aftermath of 1918, different projections of Cravan proving to be more resistant to rationalisation emanated from Picabia in particular, signalling a complex absent if not posthumous relation between the two, including Picabia’s imaginary portraits – the one of Cravan in timeless beauty, the other of the middle-aged poet-boxer complete with comb-over (or, in continually deferred completion, always forth-combing) – where arguably an ideal other to Picabia can be discerned in the latter’s correspondence to Man Ray’s well-known 1922 photograph of Picabia as naked (or Juliette Roche’s ‘fat’) philosopher.79 We will note how writings by other intimate acquaintances of Cravan fall by their own accord into an eventual alignment with some of Picabia’s most direct observations (few as they are) on Cravan. Where Cendrars makes his sober and distant reflections on the poilu in praise of the deserter, or where Loy makes perceptive assessment of Cravan’s unreal or surreal life ‘in that he never was the things he became’,80 Picabia had long since condensed these thoughts in the ‘treatise on failure’81 that he titled Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère and was published still during Cravan’s ‘lifetime’ in 1920:

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To dupe = Guillaume Apollinaire. I much prefer Arthur Cravan who toured the world during the war, perpetually obliged to change nationality in order to escape from human stupidity. Arthur Cravan disguised himself as a soldier in order not to be a soldier; he did as all our friends do who disguise themselves as honest men in order not to be honest men.82

Picabia concedes, implicitly and unconditionally then, to the embodiment of his sense of Dada in Cravan, admitting never to elegiac adoration, nor to the privileged elevation of an ideal. My affirmed contention is that Picabia’s own cultural posturings and provocations yield the most vivid continuity for Cravan after 1918, as the posturings and provocations of lateral cultural oppositionalities that followed in the twentieth century yield the poet-boxer’s most fully rendered critical legacy. Five years before he committed suicide, Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International, published the first volume of his autobiographical text Panegyric (1989). In it, he wrote of his manifesting disaffection with social mores during his adolescent years in the 1940s, the decade in which Cravan’s ‘Notes’ were first published in France with a short preface by André Breton (1942), which noted Cravan’s cultivating ‘an atmosphere of absolute irreverence, provocation and scandal’ in Paris and elsewhere that pre-empted Dada, and describing the now published ‘Notes’ as a lasting source of inspiration for poets.83 A decade after the publication of ‘Notes’, it was stated in La nouvelle revue française for the first time publicly that Cravan had provided a model for André Gide’s Lafcadio (1951);84 and, in the year of founding of the Situationist International (1957), Bernard Delvaille presented the entire run of Maintenant to an interested public in Érik Losfeld’s edition, the first time Maintenant had been available to a new readership in over forty years.85 In Panegyric, then, Debord, conceding to the laziness of his adolescence, signalled a model to which he at least aspired: I moved slowly but inevitably towards a life of adventure, eyes open – if indeed it can be said that my eyes were open on this question as well as on most others … The people I respected more than anyone in the world were Arthur Cravan and Lautréamont, and I knew perfectly well that all their friends, if I had consented to pursue university studies, would have despised me as much as if I had resigned myself to exercising an artistic activity … I firmly kept myself apart from all semblance of participation in the circles that then passed for intellectual or artistic.86



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Now, quite clearly, we will not take these observations uncritically, but retrospection allowed Debord to locate the cultural position that he came to associate with Cravan as central to his own mature Marxist position relative to categories of bourgeois cultural production, and his own activity as theorist and in film. What is instanced here, I suggest to close, is a critical legacy that has long since abandoned binary setpieces for lateral oppositionalities and asymetric means of engagement, precisely the means that allowed Cravan in the first instance to enter into and participate in those intellectual and artistic circles which he would ultimately critique. Though ‘panegyric’ implies the praise mode of eulogy, its choice as title for Debord’s autobiography comes from the latter’s deference to the enhanced definition given in Émile Littré’s dictionary (and which Debord set as epigraph to his own text), wherein eulogy ‘does not exclude a certain criticism, a certain blame … [but] Panegyric involves neither blame nor criticism’.87 It is easy to eulogise Cravan, as so many observers (including the present one) might consistently do with slight evidence, and eulogising can similarly and as casually drift into legendising. A panegyric to Cravan is not so easy, however, but is yet imperative if we are to align the poetboxer with any contemporary cultural oppositionalities and respond to the charge once issued by Michel Sanouillet – urgent today as it was at the time of writing half a century ago in preamble to Sanouillet’s great work Dada à Paris (1965) – which was ‘to bring the now mythical character of Arthur Cravan into proper proportion’.88 Well, if a descriptive recovery of Cravan can be exercised with neither blame nor criticism, we will find that what is grasped is an actualising made possible through sequences of particular historical circumstances – which, in his book on Nietzsche, is how Deleuze reads history itself. The historical circumstances that we recover from any point along the trajectory from Lausanne through Europe, to the Americas and out to sea, are circumstances that render the exceeding of limits in the process of creation, whereby ‘the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history’.89 Out of the fleeting productive intensity of the 1910s, the Deleuzian ‘event’ actualised in Cravan can only be in the infinitive, and can only retain the transformative dynamic of ‘becoming’ in the absence of fixed, stable temporality and structure. Through all of the fictions and metaphors of this poet, boxer, bullshitter and freeloader – this handsome hunk of a man, this liar and arrant flatterer,90 awkwardly wedged in somewhere between Wilde and Debord – and in each instance as postulate and proposition, there is no completion and no closure for Arthur Cravan Rastaquouère.

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Notes  1 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 172.  2 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 71. Elsewhere, Deleuze states, ‘Better a nothingness of the will than a will of nothingness!’; Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boymen (New York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 82.  3 See Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, trans. Sean Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 213, 233. Further, Maurice Blanchot discusses how, ‘according to Nietzsche’s clear statement, “The will loves even more to will nothingness than not to will.” The Overman is the one in whom nothingness makes itself be willed and who, free for death, maintains this pure essence of will in willing nothingness. That would be Nihilism itself.’ Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Limits of Experience; Nihilism’, in David B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1985), p. 124.  4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1887 addition), section 343, in The Nietzsche Reader, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 209–10.  5 Blanchot, ‘The Limits of Experience’, p. 124.  6 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p. 63.  7 Claire Colebrook, ‘Nonbeing’, in Adrian Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 187.  8 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 64.  9 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 64. 10 Leonard Lawlor, ‘Phenomenology and Metaphysics, and Chaos: On the Fragility of the Event in Deleuze’, in Daniel W. Smith and Henry Somers-Hall (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 120. On the plane of immanence, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p. 59. 11 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 61–2. 12 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 86. 13 Daniel W. Smith, ‘Deleuze and the History of Philosophy’, in Smith and Somers-Hall (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, p. 23. 14 Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, ‘Some Memories of Pre-Dada; Picabia and Duchamp’ (1949), trans. Ralph Manheim, in DPP, p. 263. 15 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 63. 16 This definition had been current, for Deleuze at least, since the writing



Conclusion 297

in the 1950s of Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (1968). See Smith, ‘Deleuze and the History of Philosophy’, p. 23. 17 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 2. 18 ‘Hope’ and ‘Hayes’ are two invocations that Conover has routinely cited as possible aliases assumed by Cravan after his disappearance in 1918: ‘If we say that Cravan was the most provocative critical presence of the twentieth century and is the most engaging missing person case still on file, we do not concede his death in 1918. No body was ever found, and there is persuasive – if not conclusive – evidence to suggest that he resurfaced as the vagrant poet James M. Hayes / Dorian Hope in the United States in 1919, and as Dorian Hope / Sebastian Hope … in Europe in 1921: names given by the elusive forger of fake Oscar Wilde manuscripts …’; see Roger Lloyd Conover, ‘The Secret Names of Arthur Cravan’, in Arthur Cravan: poète et boxeur, exhibition catalogue, Galerie 1900–2000, 7 April–5 May 1992 (Paris: Terrain Vague, 1992), p. 25. 19 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 156. See also Lawlor, ‘Phenomenology and metaphysics, and chaos’, p. 119. 20 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 178. Further, Deleuze describes how ‘death turns against death … dying is the negation of death, and the impersonality of dying no longer indicates only the moment when I disappear outside of myself, but rather the moment when death loses itself in itself’ (pp. 173–4). 21 Blaise Cendrars, Sky: Memoirs, trans. Nina Rootes (New York: Paragon House, 1992), p. 206. 22 Picabia had, some six months ahead of Cravan’s disappearance, published a remote line of poetry, ‘The priest flees to Tahiti’. Francis Picabia, ‘Oxygenated’, from Poems and Drawings of the Daughter Born without a Mother (Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère, Lausanne: Imprimeries Réunies, April 1918), in Francis Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation, trans. Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2007), p. 95. 23 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), p. 53. 24 Carl Van Vechten to Mabel Dodge, 18 June 1920; cited in Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), p. 285. Van Vechten would in due course photograph the child and young woman Fabienne Lloyd, daughter of Cravan and Mina Loy. 25 We recall Cravan’s brief words that perhaps condense his never easy relationship with his mother, in Arthur Cravan, ‘André Gide’, trans. Terry Hale, in 4DS, p. 43. Of intriguing note, towards the end of Nellie’s life, the first stage adaptation of Gide’s Les caves du Vatican staging the Cravaninspired Lafcadio was performed in Lausanne in 1933; Nellie died in early 1934. 26 The inquest announcement in the first issue of La révolution surréaliste (December 1924) reads as follows: ‘You live, you die. What has free will got to do with it? It seems you kill yourself in the same way as you dream. This

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is no moral problem we are posing. IS SUICIDE A SOLUTION?’; cited in Terry Hale, Preface to 4DS, p. 7. 27 Sanouillet notes how Breton ‘brought out’ Cravan (along with Vaché, Picabia and Duchamp) to counter and trump the astonishingly innovative Dada impresario Tzara, newly arrived in Paris in 1920, Cravan thus as exemplar of the admirable type ‘who placed life above art … [and facilitated the shift in behaviour of Paris Dada] towards pure action for a while’. Michel Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, trans. Sharmila Ganguly (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2009), p. 103. Breton further elevated Cravan (again among others) as embodying an undefined but ‘quite mysterious strength’ in his 1922 oration ‘Characteristics of the Modern Evolution and What It Consists Of’; see Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, pp. 271–2. 28 This is deliberately to invoke part of Antonin Artaud’s response to the question (which included his own question) posed in the first issue of La révolution surréaliste, ‘Is suicide a solution?’ Artaud wrote: ‘almost certainly I died long ago, my suicide has already occurred. That is to say, I have already been suicided. But what would you think of an anterior state of suicide, a suicide which makes us retrace our steps, but on the other side of existence and not on the side of death?’; cited in Hale, Preface to 4DS, p. 9. See also Leonid Livak, ‘The Place of Suicide in the French Avant-Garde of the Inter-War Period’, Romantic Review, 91/3 (May 2000). 29 Bertrand Lacarelle’s description of Vaché is cited in Geert Buelens, ‘Reciting Shells: Dada and, Dada in & Dadaists on the First World War’, Arcadia: International Journal for Literary Studies, 41/2 (2006), 275–95. 30 ACM, p. 274. 31 Jacques Vaché to Jeanne Derrien, 22 July 1917; illustrated in ACM, p. 65. 32 Francis Picabia, aphorism, 391, 6 (July 1917); in Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster, p. 30. Similarly, ‘One dies as a hero, or as an idiot, which is the same thing’, from ‘Manifest cannibale Dada’, Dadaphone, 7 (March 1921); in Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster, p. 204. Picabia here absently echoes Cravan’s repeated ‘which is exactly the same thing’ in ‘To Be or Not To Be … American’ (see Chapter 3). 33 See Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, p. 85. 34 Francis Picabia, ‘Carnet du cuculin’, Cannibale, 1 (April 1920), 13; trans. as ‘A Silly-Willy’s Notebook’, in Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster, p. 212. Similarly, Cannibale, 1 (April 1920), in Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster, pp. 209–10. 35 Francis Picabia, from Poésie ron-ron (completed in Lausanne, 24 February 1919); trans. as Purring Poetry, in Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster, pp. 127–35. It is to my immense personal joy that Picabia, among all Dadaists, here invokes not only my country of birth in his writings, but also and elsewhere my home town: ‘One thing I’m sure of is that it is impossible to stop movement; money itself has a value – or has none; paper would perhaps be worth more than gold if it was given to me to discover goldbearing mines as sizeable as the coalmines of Cardiff!’ Francis Picabia,



Conclusion 299

‘M. Picabia Separates from the Dadas’, in I am a Beautiful Monster, pp. 262–3. 36 Francis Picabia, 391, 8 (February 1919), back cover. 37 ‘Quelques prèsidents et prèsidentes’, Dada, 6 (February 1920). See also Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, p. 107. 38 Littérature (May 1920), 5; Francis Picabia, ‘Philosophical Dada’ (12 February 1920), trans. Ian Monk, in Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), pp. 183–4. 39 Loy’s poem ‘The Widow’s Jazz’, in which she speaks of Cravan, was first read publicly at Natalie Barney’s Friday salon in Paris c.1927, and published in 1931:‘Cravan / colossal absentee / the substitute dark / rolls to the incandescent memory / … / Husband / how secretly you cuckold me with death / … / as my desire / receded / to the distance of the dead / searches / the opaque silence / of unpeopled space.’ From Mina Loy, ‘The Widow’s Jazz’, in LLB, pp. 200–2. 40 We count four degrees of separation in Soupault’s instance, documented in his introduction to the circle of poets around Apollinaire in 1917, through which he first became acquainted with Breton, who knew Cendrars, ‘who had put him [Breton] onto Arthur Cravan’. See Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, p. 64. 41 Philippe Soupault, ‘Épitaphes’, Littérature, 14 (June 1920), 9. (The present translation has in part incorporated lines cited in Burke, Becoming Modern, p. 286.) 42 Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p. 53. 43 Robert Desnos, ‘Rrose Sélavy’, Littérature, new series, 7 (December 1922), 20; trans. Timothy Ades, in Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader, p. 216. 44 The trance session was held in October 1922. 45 Robert Desnos, ‘La mort de Cravan’; illustrated in ACM, p. 69. 46 Louis Aragon, Project for a History of Contemporary Literature (facsimile), reproduced in DPP, p. 230. 47 Littérature, new series, 11–12 (15 October 1923), 24–5. 48 The scenario for Entr’acte, first published in 1968, is reproduced in Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster, pp. 314–15. 49 Satie’s request came after his commissioning by Rolf de Maré to write music for Relâche, the final production to be staged by the Ballets suédois. Picabia’s collaboration with the company followed the departure from Paris in 1923–24 of his predecessor as balletic collaborator, Blaise Cendrars no less, when the project was in its infancy. The title Relâche, it seems, belonged to Cendrars. See George Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2007), p. 293. 50 Dawn Ades, ‘Camera Creation’, in Jennifer Mundy (ed.), Duchamp Man Ray Picabia (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), p. 114. 51 Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, rev. edn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), p. 170.

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52 The case for the ballerina in Entr’acte as a ‘mechanical expression’ of Picabia’s memory from a decade previously with the dancer Stacia Napierkowska is made in Jennifer Wilde, ‘Francis Picabia, Stacia Napierkowska, and the Cinema: The Circuits of Perception’, in Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson (eds), Dada and Beyond, vol. 2: Dada and its Legacies (New York and Amserdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 57–76. 53 See Steven Higgins, Still Moving: The Film and Media Collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006), p. 104. 54 One speculative suggestion is made by Christopher Townsend, that the white gloves represent the ‘pacifist-boxer’ Cravan – although Cravan never preached pacifism, despite Cendrars’s description of him as the ‘pacifist boxer’ – to contrast with Georges Carpentier, for instance. Townsend also poses the more considered observation that Cravan may have constituted for Picabia ‘an alternative model of physical prowess and a different kind of courage [to Carpentier’s] – the courage to refuse the annihilating demands of the state’ (cf. Cendrars on the military deserter as ‘a man who has had the courage to say No!’, Cendrars, Sky, pp. 197–8), but we should caution always against equating refusal with pacifism. See Christopher Townsend, ‘ “The art I love is the art of cowards”: Francis Picabia and René Clair’s Entr’acte and the Politics of Death and Remembrance in France after World War One’, Science as Culture, 18/3, ‘Technology, Death and the Cultural Imagination’ (September 2009), n.p. Cf. Malcolm Turvey, The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2011), p. 81. In gauging Cravan’s position vis-à-vis pacifism, we might refer to Mina Loy’s ‘International Psycho-Democracy’ (through which her later writings on Cravan are inevitably processed): ‘Pacifism has not yet offered a creative substitute for the military ideal, but a negative conception which leaves a void in social psychological construction, without providing any adequate suggestions as to how this void should be filled.’ Mina Loy, ‘International Psycho-Democracy’, The Little Review: A Quarterly Journal of Art and Letters (Autumn 1921), 14–19; reprinted in LLB, pp. 276–82, at p. 281. 55 Consider the clean-cut Georges Carpentier, for instance, appropriated into Entr’acte, Townsend suggests, within Picabia’s exploitation of an ‘inflated heroism’; Townsend, ‘ “The art I love is the art of cowards” ’, n.p. 56 See, for instance, Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 198. 57 Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail, pp. 308, 307; Picabia’s rationalisation was that ‘if the work of another translates my dream … then his work is mine’. 58 Cendrars, Sky, p. 202. Counting among the iconic Dada works, LHOOQ is routinely credited to Duchamp in 1919, followed by Picabia’s ‘theft’ of it in the version published in 391, 12 (March 1920); the first 1919 version of LHOOQ has further been linked to Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les mamelles de Tirésias (1916–17), in which, as she metamorphoses into Tirésias, Thérèse grows a moustache and a beard (see David Hopkins, ‘Questioning Dada’s



Conclusion 301

Potency: Picabia’s “La Sainte Vierge” and the Dialogue with Duchamp’, Art History, 15/3 (September 1992), 323. To advance Cravan’s legacy into the critical interventions around Duchamp, the poet’s words ‘the greatest monuments create the most dust’ (Arthur Cravan, ‘Notes’, trans. Terry Hale, in 4DS, pp. 68–9) inevitably breeze on the surface of Man Ray’s 1920 photograph of the dust-encrusted surface of Duchamp’s Large Glass, titled ‘Dust Breeding’, which Duchamp subsequently proceeded permanently to fix. 59 Picabia’s undated imaginary portrait of Cravan in idealised, if not beatified, beauty is reproduced in ŒPAL, between pp. 256 and 257. 60 Picabia’s La nuit espagnole potentially references his and Cravan’s convergence in Spain in 1916. 61 ‘Caravan’ is, of course, an anagram of ‘A. Cravan’, as Conover usefully points out. Conover, ‘The Secret Names of Arthur Cravan’, in Arthur Cravan: poète et boxeur, p. 30. 62 Ades, ‘Camera Creation’, p. 114. 63 Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail, p. 311. 64 Cravan vs Cravan, dir. Isaki Lacuesta (Mallerich Films Paco Poch, Benecé Produccions, 2002). 65 See Steven Higgins, Still Moving: The Film and Media Collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006), p. 104. 66 Cf. Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail, p. 302. 67 Arnauld Pierre, ‘The “Confrontation of Modern Values”: A Moral History of Dada in Paris’, in Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds), The Dada Seminars (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005), p. 260. 68 Cf. Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail, p. 318. 69 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Caleta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 70 Tom Conley, ‘Time-Image’, in Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary, p. 280. An organic emergence of artistic form, moreover, manifests the sense of the creating and the created, the shaping and the shaped, the constituting and the constituted, according to the reading given by Deleuze of Bergson; see Dafydd W. Jones, ‘Hans Arp: Resistance and the Philosophy of Virtual Creation’, in Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), pp. 120–51. 71 Conley, ‘Time-Image’, p. 280. 72 Cf. Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail, p. 323. 73 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 52. 74 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 4. 75 Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1: l’image-mouvement (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983), p. 24; author’s own translation in Tom Conley, ‘Deleuze and the Filmic Diagram’, Deleuze Studies, 5/2, ‘Schizoanalysis and Visual Culture’ (2011), 164.

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Conley, ‘Deleuze and the Filmic Diagram’, 173. Conley, ‘Deleuze and the Filmic Diagram’, 173. Loy, ‘International Psycho-Democracy’, in LLB, p. 276. See n. 54 above. Picabia’s imaginary portrait of a balding Cravan in middle age, dated 1924, is reproduced in ŒPAL, between pp. 192 and 193. 80 Mina Loy, ‘Arthur Cravan is Alive!’, in LLB, p. 317. 81 Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail, p. 345. 82 Francis Picabia, Jesus Christ Rastaquouère (1920), trans. Raphael Rubinstein, in Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster, p. 241. 83 André Breton, short preface to Arthur Cravan, ‘Notes’, VVV, 1 (June 1942). Cravan’s manuscripts for ‘Notes’ were given to Breton by Mina Loy; in the preface, Breton states that Cravan was murdered in Mexico. 84 La nouvelle revue française, ‘Hommage à André Gide’ (November 1951). 85 In his introduction to the Losfeld edition of Maintenant, Delvaille grouped Cravan with the likes of Novalis and Rimbaud, each as manifesting poetry in life as in words. 86 Guy Debord, Panegyric, vol. 1, trans. James Brook, and vol. 2, trans. John McHale (London and New York: Verso, 2004), p. 12. 87 Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française; cited in Debord, Panegyric, vol. 1, p. ix. 88 Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, p. 5. 89 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 170. 90 Cendrars, Sky, pp. 204–5.

Index

391 see Picabia, Francis Académie Julian 121 Académie Matisse 131, 155 acte gratuit 92–3, 103n109 actionism xii, 1, 5, 281 active and reactive 33, 35, 42n89, 170 actual and virtual 65n15, 143–7, 185n1, 222–3, 301n70 Adamowicz, Elza 69n89, 99n24, 196n163, 197n174 Adcock, Craig 252n53 Aix-les-Bains, Chambéry 55 Albert-Birot, Pierre 100n43, 139n99 Alexandra Park, London 80 ‘allophage’ 180 Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle 132, 142n141 America, North (passage) 52–5, 56, 61–2, 118, 127–8, 201, 202, 214, 216, 222–47, 248n16, 295 see also New York Anarchochauffeurs see la Bande à Bonnot Angoulême 78, 81, 83, 100n43 aphorism 181, 183, 241, 284, 298n32 Apollinaire, Guillaume 71, 72, 87, 108, 110–12, 113, 114, 133n3, 135n27, 142n134, 155, 158–60, 163, 186n11, 188n51, 286, 294, 299n40, 300n58 appearance, appearances in themselves 9, 11, 13, 59, 73, 75–7, 115 see also simulacrum Aragon, Louis 190n79, 286 Archinard, Charles 48, 129

Archinard, Édouard (? artist) xiii, 129–33, 141n128, 141n132, 142n143, 183, 190n89 Archinard, Édouard (of Geneva) 129, 141n127 Archinard, Louis 130 Arensberg circle and soirées 233, 234, 237, 239 Arensberg, Louise 232 Arensberg, Walter Conrad 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 239, 286 Argentina 260, 261, 269, 272, 282 Arnáiz, Rosendo 267, 269 Arroyo, Eduardo xii, 2 Arsène Lupin: gentleman-cambrioleur see Leblanc, Maurice Artaud, Antonin 298n28 Arte y Deportes 267, 268, 271 Arthur Cravan (Fabian Avénarius Lloyd) automobile chauffeur 57, 160 boxing contemporaries and opponents Charley MacAvoy 96 Corbet II 263 Cussot Brien 83 Eugène Gette 80 Felix Pomés 204 Frank Cutchet 202 Frank Hoché (El Lobo) 202, 203, 204–6, 212 Frank Moran 97 Gaston Pigot 174 George Gunther 120 George Rodel 205 Georges Calafatis (Giorgos Kalafatis) 175

304

Index

Arthur Cravan (cont.) Grosnier 80 Gunboat Smith 177 Gus Rhodes 202, 207, 211, 212 Harry Allack 206 Honorato Castro 267 Irish O’Mara 175, 263 Jaks (?) 204, 205 Jim Smith (‘Black Diamond’) 267, 268–9 Martinez (?) 263 Pecqueriaux (?) 80 Ricaux (alias Ricoux) 81 Sam Langford 209 Sum (?) 206 Tommy Burns 205 Willie Lewis 73 see also Carpentier, Georges; Johnson, Jack; Johnson, Jim; Kid Johnson; McVea, Sam ‘compass-boxer’ 239 curved back 240, 255n97 death 258–9, 271–3, 278–82 handbag thief 57 immediate family Henri Grandjean, beau-père 30–1, 40n67, 48, 49, 55, 62, 64, 78, 80, 84, 85, 131 Jemima Fabienne Cravan Lloyd, daughter 274n11, 283, 297n24 Mina Loy, wife 4, 7, 23, 45, 49, 56, 57, 77, 86, 112, 139n100, 167, 175, 190n89, 199, 200, 201, 224, 227, 232, 233–5, 241, 243, 249n17, 251n45, 259, 260–7, 269–71, 272–3, 274n11, 282, 293, 300n54 Nellie Grandjean (Hélène Clara St Clair Hutchinson), mother 6, 21–2, 30–2, 37n16, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 55, 58, 62, 64, 84, 88, 93, 109, 119, 131, 150, 151, 177, 179, 184, 186n18, 200, 201, 223, 264, 266, 276n61, 283, 297n25 Otho Holland Lloyd, natural father 21–3, 29–30, 32, 37n13, 37n15, 37n18, 37n21, 40n53, 40n56, 47, 65n18, 93, 119, 150, 187n32 Otho St Clair Lloyd, brother 22, 30, 47–8, 58, 61, 62, 64, 67n66, 78, 79–81, 100n39, 105n129, 109, 112, 131, 151, 177, 184, 185, 200, 205, 206, 207, 212, 213, 264

Renée (Alphonsine) Bouchet, common-law wife 77–9, 83, 84, 90, 100n43, 108, 125, 129, 131, 157, 167, 169, 185, 192n114, 200, 205, 212, 214–15, 235, 253n76, 255n111, 270 jewel thief 3, 55–6, 103n112, 104n118 ‘Liste de sympathie en faveur d’Arthur Cravan’ 166–7, 174 menagerie 146, 201, 241 other names and impostures Arthur Gruhan (corruption) 210 Arthur Lloyd 165 ‘Baronet Sir Arthur Cravan’ 96 ‘Bombardier Wells’ 9, 174, 177, 281 ‘Canadian Boxing Champion’ 175 conférencier 9, 122, 152, 154, 165, 167 directeur 9 Dorian/Sebastian Hope (speculated) 297n18 ‘Édouard Archinard’ 9, 68n68, 125, 126, 127, 129–33, 147, 281 French Heavyweight Boxing Champion 79–83, 86, 124, 202, 203, 211, 227 Galerie Isaac Cravan 132–3, 142n141, 177 Gravan (corruption) 210 James M. Hayes (speculated) 297n18 ‘Jean Rubidini’ 9, 61, 62, 281 ‘Lloyd Napier’ 9, 96, 106n134, 281 ‘Lloyd Willow’ 240 ‘Marie Lowitska’ 9, 147, 181–3, 281 ‘Numa Persan’ 64 ‘Philippe Or’ 61 ‘Robert Miradique’ 9, 141n133, 147, 180–3, 196n153, 196n166, 201, 281 ‘W. Cooper’ 9, 126, 137n70, 147, 281 poetry and prose ‘Autobiographies’ 32, 41n68, 255n101 ‘Caricatures’ 62 ‘Come Now’ 220n74 ‘Des paroles’ (‘Some Words’) 35, 68n59, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 169, 269 ‘Différentes Choses’ 120, 284, 285 ‘Documents inédits sur Oscar Wilde I’ 119



Index 305 ‘Documents inédits sur Oscar Wilde II’ 126 ‘Hie!’ 53, 126–7, 172, 180, 196n159 ‘La clochette’ 62 ‘La folie de Madame’ 61, 64 ‘La Very Boxe’ 163–9 ‘Langueur d’Éléphant’ (‘Elephant Languor’) 139n106 ‘Le cahier de West Worthing’ 61, 68n78 ‘Le cracheur américain’ (‘Spitting American’) 74 ‘L’Exposition des Indépendants’ 89, 142n143, 155–63, 165, 180, 183, 213 225, 229, 236 Maintenant 3, 9, 51, 88, 94, 97, 113–16, 118–21, 122, 123, 124–7, 129–30, 131, 137n67, 140n112, 143–4, 146, 147–60, 165, 166, 172, 177–83, 187n30, 195n153, 199, 213, 229, 239, 283, 284, 294 ‘Notes’ 51, 240, 241, 246, 247, 252n53, 294, 301n58, 302n82 ‘Oscar Wilde est vivant!’ 144–52 ‘Oscar Wilde is Alive!’ 66n31, 140n106 ‘Poète et Boxeur’ 74, 176, 179, 196n154 ‘Sérénade’ 62 ‘Sifflet’ (‘Whistle’) 53, 118, 126, 128, 140n106, 227 ‘Take a few pills’ 157, 220n74 ‘To Be or Not To Be … American’ 72–4, 75, 298n32 ‘The Rhythm of the Ocean Cradles the Transatlantics’ 220n74 portraits by Amedeo Modigliani 177 Francis Picabia 289, 293, 301n59, 302n79 Gino Severini 124 Henri Hayden 157, 188n56, 195n150 Kees van Dongen 96, 105n129 Maurice Henry 132 Olga Sacharoff 131, 142n135 Patrick Henry Bruce 188n46 surveillance (by FBI) 249n17 ‘The Self-Immolation of Arthur Cravan’ 3–4 The World Champion at the Whorehouse (imaginary painting) 132

transvestiture 242 weight fluctuation 241, 246 Ashbery, John 125–6, 139n106, 140n107 assemblage 18, 31, 45, 87, 129, 144, 147, 156, 170, 172, 173, 178, 193n128, 193n129, 222–3, 257, 260, 292 Atget, Eugène 164 Athens 28, 175 Atlantic (passage) 52–6, 214–16, 223 Atlantic City 241 Aubry, Georges 132 Australia (passage) 51 Austria-Hungary 175–6 avant-garde, avant-gardism xi, 1, 5, 18, 67n68, 87, 95, 110, 120, 122, 170, 193n122, 227, 228, 231, 232, 239, 240, 246, 252n56, 279, 281, 283, 288, 291 see also neo-avant-garde Bailly, Alice 158, 189n66 Bakhtin, Mikhail 92, 103n104 Bal Bullier 97, 107–9, 161, 165, 166, 167, 180 Balkans (passage) 117, 173–7 Balzac, Honoré de 133n3 Bangor, Maine 255n104 Barcelona x, xi, 15n3, 46, 81, 185, 198–9, 200–6, 209, 211–15, 219n40, 220n72, 223, 224, 225, 239, 248n16, 263, 267 Gran Fiesta de Boxeo 207–12 ‘Great Swindle’ 210–11 Barnard, Charles Inman 176–7 Barnum & Bailey 154, 157 Barrès, Maurice 149 Barrier Miner 152 Barthes, Roland 136n43 Bateau-Lavoir 104n121 Baudelaire, Charles 133n3, 275n34 Baudrillard, Jean 15n16, 100n33 Bayes, Nora 231 Bazalgette, Léon 140n112 Belgium 174 Belgrade 175 Belsey, Catherine 135n27 Bénézit, Emmanuel 130, 131, 142n137 Benjamin, Walter 273n4 Bergson, Henri 68n76, 162, 291, 301n70 Berlin xii, 13, 56–8, 62, 67n59, 87, 160, 218n3, 284

306

Index

Bernheim-Jeune (estate and gallery) 95, 104n124, 130–3, 131, 141n128, 141n130, 142n141, 142n143, 190n89 Berton, Tony 207, 212 Bertram, Ernst 6 Bevaix, Neuchâtel 48 Bidasoa, river 214 Billy, André 111 biography (auto-, schizo-) xiii, 4, 8, 10, 32, 41n68, 87, passim Birault, Paul 118, 137n66 Birmingham 50 blague x, 116–18, 120, 133, 157, 161, 169, 211, 284 Blanchot, Maurice 278, 282, 296n3 Blei, Franz 186n12 Blind Man 233, 234, 251n45 Blind Man’s Ball 233, 234, 236 Blondel, Eric 116 body 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 16n23, 34–5, 45–7, 75, 85, 115–16, 126–7, 145, 158, 171–2, 192n120, 198, 199, 200, 201, 218n3, 227, 231, 250n24, 252n56, 257–9, 273n4, 278 Bohn, Willard 105n128, 197n175 Bombardier Billy Wells 174 see also Arthur Cravan Bonavista, Newfoundland 243 Bonnard, Pierre 130, 141n134 Bonnot gang see la Bande à Bonnot Börlin, Jean 289, 290 Borràs, Maria Lluïsa 83, 127, 183, 198, 199, 206, 253n76 Boston 255n104 Bouchet, Renée (Alphonsine) see Arthur Cravan boxing clubs, contests and venues 72, 79, 80, 81, 83, 96, 97, 100n46, 101n51, 101n62, 105n136, 120, 187, 202, 204, 205, 206, 210, 212, 219n22, 219n24, 219n25, 220n64, 267, 268 Braque, Georges 71–2, 124, 133n3, 142n143, 188n51 Brazil 201–2 Brentano, bookstore 75, 99n26 Breton, André 4, 132, 133n3, 241, 279, 283, 285, 286, 294, 298n27, 299n40, 302n83 Brevoort, hotel, New York 227, 240, 250n29

Brindisi, Italy 175 Brittany 83–4 brodyr llwydion 25 Brown, Robert (Bob) Carlton 269, 270, 271, 272, 276n66 Bruce, Patrick Henry 141n134, 155, 188n46 Brun, Charles (Raoul Toscan) 61–2, 64, 66n40, 74 Bucharest 174, 176 Budapest 175 Buenos Aires 4, 247, 260, 261, 269, 272–3, 276n62, 282, 283, 293 Buffet-Picabia, Gabrielle 157, 159, 163, 212, 228, 230, 236, 286, 288 Bürger, Peter 228 Burke, Carolyn 239 Burnside House 283 Byron, Lord 177, 195n151, 285 Cadiz 214, 215, 224 Cairo 175 Cale, John xi California 51, 55, 61, 62, 160 Calisaya Bar 147 Callicles 42n88 Campbell, John 175 Canada (passage) 3, 118, 152, 241–3, 255n109, 268 Canudo, Ricciotto 123, 161, 166, 188, 191n96, 212, 239 Captain Haddock xiii, xvi Cardiff 135n27, 174, 298n35 Caribbean 4, 272 carnivalesque see Bakhtin, Mikhail Carpentier, Georges 120, 138n80, 174, 177, 195n148, 300n54, 300n55 Cattell, James McKeen 276n68 Cattell, Owen 270, 273, 276n68 Cendrars, Blaise 51, 56, 87, 100n43, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 133n3, 134n19, 152, 154, 155, 166, 181, 188n51, 195n149, 197n180, 206, 209, 210, 213–14, 220n51, 224, 242–3, 246, 253n76, 255n109, 270, 282, 289, 293, 299n40, 299n49, 300n54 centaur (centauric body) 10, 16n26, 34, 85 see also body; philosophy Cercle de la Biche 154 Céret 185 Chagall, Marc 89, 188n51



Index 307

Chambéry 49, 50 Chelsea Hotel, New York xi Cherbourg 52, 54 Chéreau, Claude 159–60, 190n84 Chicago 55 Chicago Daily Tribune 163, 165 Chile 260, 269, 272, 273, 282 Clair, René 288 see also Entr’acte Closerie des Lilas, La xi, 98n2, 107–12, 127, 133n3, 161, 174, 239 Coady, Robert J. 128, 188n51, 214, 215, 216, 220n74, 225, 227, 250n33 Cocteau, Jean 87, 93 cogito 46, 59, 280 Cohen, Élias 165 collective assemblage 44, 170 colour-image 223 Comtesse de Noailes 136n42 concept (concept creation, conceptual persona) 5, 11, 18, 33, 35, 46, 59, 60, 85, 86, 113, 115, 143, 170, 222, 228–9, 257, 280–1, 284, 291, 292 Conley, Tom 292 Conover, Roger 38n32, 131, 187n25, 188n46, 249, 297n18, 301n61 conscientious objection 223, 242, 261, 276n68 Constantinople 175 Copeau, Jacques 90 copy see actual and virtual; simulacrum Coquiot, Gustave 78, 87 Cornell (unidentified) 260 Cornell, Joseph 274n11 Corner Brook, Newfoundland 242, 243, 255n111 Corona, California 55, 61 Cravan vs Cravan 219n37, 291 Cravans 83–6, 100n43 Cravant 100n43 Craven, Arthur Scott xiv creation (creativity, self-creation) 9, 12, 18, 31, 33, 36, 45, 47, 59, 60, 85, 86, 113, 114, 115, 129, 143, 144, 145, 146, 170, 200, 222–3, 280–1, 292, 295, 301n70 Crotti, Jean 290 Crowley, Aleister 184, 249n17 Crozier, Frank 203 Cubism 71, 124, 132, 154–5, 162, 185, 188n51, 212, 213

cultural subversion 14, 248n16 Cuny, Fernand 79, 165 Curling, Newfoundland 243, 255n107 Dada x, xi, xii, xiii, 1, 4, 5, 17n34, 193n122, 194n131, 198, 200, 213, 220n51, 224, 231, 237, 248n16, 283, 285, 294, 298n27, 300n58 Bulletin Dada 285 ‘Collective Dada Manifesto’ 67n68 Dadaphone 298n32 European Dada 224 international Dada 285 ‘La seule expression de l’homme modern: lire Dada’ 285 ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’ 194n131 New York Dada 231, 232, 237, 239, 252n56 Paris Dada 4, 231, 279, 285, 290, 295, 298n27 ‘Philosophical Dada’ 285 proto-Dada 1, 4, 18, 79, 200 ‘Quelques Prèsidents et Prèsidentes’ 285 Dafydd ap Gwilym xiii de Baños, Ricard 207, 211 de Chirico, Giorgio 155 de Duve, Thierry 229, 230 de Gourmont, Rémy 184, 197n179 de la Fresnay, Roger 87, 142n141, 158, 188n51, 189n60 de Lamartine, Alphonse 40n67, 122 de Maré, Rolf 299n49 de Porto-Riche, Georges 90, 103n93 ‘De profundis clamavi’ 275n34 de Regnancourt, M. 125 de Rose, Berthe Félicie 212, 213, 214 de Vlaminck, Maurice 71 de Zárate, Ortiz 132 death, unceasing death 257–60, 278–9 Debord, Guy 294–5 Debussy, Claude 87 Delaunay, Robert 3, 87, 108, 110, 133n3, 155, 158, 159, 160–3, 165, 166, 180, 183, 188n51, 190n79, 212, 213–14, 239, 246 Delaunay, Sonia 108, 133n3, 155, 158, 160–3, 165, 166, 180, 183, 213–14, 239, 246

308

Index

Deleuze, Gilles x, 5, 18, 20, 31, 32–6, 42n89, 44–7, 59, 60, 65n15, 68n76, 75, 76, 77, 92, 99n19, 100n34, 100n35, 103n105, 114, 115, 128, 143, 144, 146–7, 170–1, 173, 181, 185n8, 192n120, 192n121, 193n126, 193n128, 193n129, 197n169, 198, 199, 218n3, 222, 223, 248n4, 257, 278–82, 291–3, 295, 296n2, 296n10, 296n16, 297n20, 301n70 see also Guattari, Félix Deltombe, Paul 157 Delvaille, Bernard 294, 302n85 Derain, André 71–2 Dermée, Paul 87, 290 Derrien, Jeanne 283 Descartes, René 280 Descaves, Lucien 87 desire, desiring-machine see Deleuze, Gilles Desnos, Robert 286 deterritorialisation see Deleuze, Gilles Dickson, Henri 165 Diderot, Denis 66n32 Die Brücke 104n121 Dionysus, Dionysian 10, 200 see also Nietzsche, Friedrich Divoire, Fernand 120 Dixon, Maynard 233 Domesday Book 23 Donnay, Maurice 88 Douglas, Lord Alfred (‘Bosie’) 137n71 dream 13, 41n68, 116, 145, 146, 281, 283, 285, 297n26, 300n57 see also creation; metaphor; Surrealism; truth, and untruth Dreyfus, Robert 117 Dublin 22, 29, 40n53 Duchamp, Marcel 103n112, 133n3, 138n80, 228, 229, 230–1, 233, 237, 239, 250n33, 251n45, 252n53, 252n55, 282, 286, 288, 289, 298n27, 300n58, 301n58 see also Fountain; LHOOQ; With Hidden Noise duel, duelling 156, 159, 163, 191n105, 192n106 Dupuy, René 111 Duranty, Walter 167, 174–5, 177, 179, 196n154, 249n17

‘Édouard Archinard’ see Arthur Cravan Edward I, II and III see Plantagenet kings of England Edward IV 33 Edward VII 29 Edward the Confessor 23 Eiffel Tower 154, 162, 241, 290 Eilshemius, Louis 251n45 El Correo Español 203 El Mundo Deportivo 205, 207, 211 El Nacional 263 El Poble Català 202 Elías, Juan 165, 203 Ellis Island 53 Els Límits 185, 200 Éluard, Paul 133n3, 285, 286 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 127, 140n113, 143 Entr’acte 288–92 see also Clair, René; Picabia, Francis Epstein, Jacob 184 eternal return 60 see also Nietzsche, Friedrich ethics 32, 90, 143, 146, 170, 199 see also Deleuze, Gilles; Gide, André; Nietzsche, Friedrich Everaers, Johan 196n162, 243, 255n109 Existenz Kunst 5 experience 9, 10, 11, 12, 46, 47, 50, 58–9, 60, 68n70, 86, 146–7, 279 extra-moralism see Nietzsche, Friedrich Fauvism (les fauves) 97, 104n121, 133, 141n134 Fénéon, Félix 88–9, 95, 102n81, 102n82, 104n124, 113, 120, 131, 133, 141n134, 156, 184, 188n51, 197n177, 212, 213, 284 Férat, Serge see Jastrebzoff, Serge First World War 3, 4, 130, 154, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 183, 184, 188n51, 190n89, 203, 210, 212, 215, 216, 219n28, 224, 225, 228, 236, 239, 241, 242, 266, 269, 273, 276n68, 286, 288, 291, 293, 294, 300n54 Fleiss, Marcel xv, 139n92 Florence 22, 64, 112, 152, 261, 293 Florian-Parmentier, Ernest (Serge Gastein) 172–3 Folies-Bergère 96, 129 football 37n12, 48, 49, 65n24, 175 Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth 7



Index 309

Fort, Paul 108, 110, 124, 149 Foucault, Michel 20, 44–5 Fountain 228, 250n33 France, Anatole 149 Frauenstädt, Julius 8 Freemasonry 29 Frïss, Inge 288 Frost (senior), Arthur Burdett 246–7, 256n127 Frost, Jr., Arthur Burdett 155, 236, 241–2, 243, 244, 246–7, 254n82, 255n109, 255n111, 257, 259, 263 Futurism 71, 108, 111, 112, 121, 122–4, 141n134, 163, 168, 229 see also Marinetti, Filippo; SaintPoint, Valentine de; Severini, Jeanne Galerie des Maclunes 154 Galerie Isaac Cravan 132, 133, 142n141, 177 genealogy 6, 18–36, 42n94 Geneva xvi, 30, 58, 129, 141n127 Georges, Waldemar 191n105 Germany 56–8, 174, 225 Gide, André 87, 89–94, 102n79, 104n118, 113, 124, 125, 133n3, 140n112, 149, 150, 186n11, 186n12, 186n19, 283, 294, 297n25 Gil Blas 114, 118, 154, 165, 166 Gleizes, Albert 212, 237, 239, 252n53, 254n89 goal, goallessness 12, 16n34, 60, 198 Grand Central Palace, New York 11, 228–9, 231, 251n33 Grandjean, Henri see Arthur Cravan Grandjean, Nellie see Arthur Cravan grey friars see brodyr llwydion Gris, Juan 188n51 Groult, Nicole 212 Guattari, Félix 42n89, 45, 65n45, 75, 146, 170–1, 173, 185n8, 192n121, 193n124, 193n126, 193n128, 197n169, 198, 218n3, 222, 248n4, 257, 280, 281 see also Deleuze, Gilles Gulf of Mexico 4, 270, 272 Gulf of Tehuantepec 20, 271, 272, 277n81 Hamnett, Nina 156, 158, 159 Hanot, Marius 109

Hastings, Beatrice 177 Haviland, Frank Burty 177, 195n150 Hawkes, Terence 135n27 Hayden, Henri 78, 132, 142n141, 157, 188n56, 195n150, 212 Henry, Maurice 132 Hernández, Eusebio 203–6, 207 Hesse, Raymond 166 Hoff, Harry Summerfield (‘William Cooper’) 137 Holland (Hoiland, Holand, Holande, Hollond, Hollonde), lineage 23–5, 33 Caroline Holland Watson 27–8, 40n53 Cecily de Columbers 23 Harriet Watson (née Powell) 28 Henry de Hale 24 Holland Watson 25, 28, 40n53 James Watson 27 Judith Holland 40n53 Judith Watson 40n53 Juliana Gellebrond 24 Margaret, daughter of Adam de Kellet 24 Margaret Shoresworth 24 Mary (Molly) Watson 27, 28, 40n53 Matthew de Holland (Mattheum de Holande) 23 Maud la Zouche 38n26 Sir Otho Holland (Sir Oties Hollonde) 19, 23, 38n26 Robert de Holland (1) 23 Robert de Holland (2) 38n30 Robert de Holland (3) 38n30 Siward de Longworth de Holland 23 Sir Stephen Holland 23 Sir Thurstan de Holland (1) 23, 24 Sir Thurstan de Holland (2) 24, 38n30 Sir Tomas Hollond 38n26 Sir Ucke de Longworth de Holland 23, 24, 28, 32 Sir William de Holland (1) 24 Sir William de Holland (2) 24 Holland, Bernard, CB 38n25 Holland, Cyril (Wilde) 22, 66n28 Holland, Vyvyan Oscar Beresford (Wilde) 22, 37n12, 49, 66n28 Hollingdale, R. J. 8 homme-sandwich see de Regnancourt, M. Hondarribia (Fuenterrabia) 213–14 Hopkins, David 300n58

310

Index

Horta 213 Hôtel d’Alsace, Paris 152 Hôtel des Écoles, Paris 71, 77 Hôtel des Facultés, Paris 78 Hotel Juarez, Mexico City (‘Slackers Hotel’) 261, 274n20 Huelsenbeck, Richard 67n68 Hugo, Victor 122, 145, 154, 243 Hurricane Patricia (2015) 277n81 Hutchinson, Hélène Clara St Clair see Arthur Cravan, immediate family, Nellie Grandjean idealist metaphysics 9 identity 10, 59, 60, 76–7, 100n35, 114, 128, 136n43, 170–1, 260 immanence (critical, plane of) 14, 34, 46–7, 65n15, 77, 170, 222, 280, 281, 296n10 Impressionism, post-Impressionism 102n82, 130 innocence 12 Institut Schmidt, St Gallen 48, 65n24 Italy 22, 64, 112, 150, 151, 175, 234 Jacob, Max 120, 188n51 Janicot, Maurice 133 Japan (passage) 51, 52 Jarry, Alfred 107, 133n3, 154 Jastrebzoff, Serge (Serge Férat) 122, 139n99 Jeannette, Joe 72, 73, 165 Johnson, Lucille 202, 205 Johnson, Jack 2, 3, 4, 15n3, 42n88, 86, 96–7, 105n131, 198, 199, 200, 202–12, 219n30, 219n40, 226, 227, 232, 261, 263, 267, 274n19 see also Barcelona Johnson (Battling) Jim Johnson 96, 129, 203, 205 Johnston, James J. 225 Johnston, Rose 270 see also Brown, Robert Carlton Jones, Amelia 228, 231 Jourdan, Richard (and Jourdan family) 51, 52, 54, 137n67, 187n30, 241 Journal des débats politiques et littéraires 159 Kafka, Franz 42n89 Kahnweiler, Daniel Henri 95 Kandinsky, Wassily 104n121

Kant, Immanuel 16n21, 117 Kellogg’s Corn Flakes 135n27 Kensington Gardens 28 Kent, Rockwell 231 Kid Johnson 202, 207, 211, 212 knowledge 1, 10, 11, 16n21, 16n32, 21, 44, 45, 47, 58–9, 68n70, 86, 94, 113, 199 Kœchlin, M. (Grandjean family acquaintance) 84 Kofman, Sarah 11, 12, 13 Koschinski, Hanna 158 Krupskaya, Nadezhda K. 70 Kuenzli, Rudolf E. xi Kurfürstendamm, Berlin 56 L’Arnette, André 21 see also Arthur Cravan, immediate family, Nellie Grandjean L’echo des sports 72, 73 L’intransigeant 147 la Bande à Bonnot 109 La boxe et les boxeurs 81 La Cravanche 102n82 La Jeunesse, Ernest 147, 148, 149, 186n10, 186n11, 186n12 see also Arthur Cravan La nouvelle équipe française (La Nef) 132, 139n106 La nouvelle revue française (NRF) xiii, 73, 89, 90, 93, 190n79, 255n101, 294 La Palette, hotel, Paris 52 La Petite Chaumière, Paris 242 La presse 72 La révolution surréaliste 297n26 La revue blanche 73, 147 La Rotonde 98n2 La stampa 151 La Tribuna 204 La Vanguardia 202 La vie au grand air 81, 83 Lacan, Jacques 193n124 Lacarelle, Bertrand xiii Lacuesta, Isaki see Cravan vs Cravan Lafcadio 92–4, 103n109, 124, 283, 294, 297n25 see also Gide, André Lampeter xi Lancaster Gate 22, 28, 29, 30, 40n51 language-action 170–2 Large, Duncan xi



Index 311

Laurencin, Marie 87, 110, 135n24, 158–1, 163, 197n172, 212, 213 Lausanne 21–2, 30–1, 36n12, 37n13, 46, 47–50, 53, 55–6, 58, 62, 64, 80, 88, 99n30, 100n39, 103n112, 120, 129, 131, 177, 179, 183–4, 185, 200, 201, 212, 213, 225, 255n97, 264, 273, 276n61, 283, 284, 295, 297n25, 298n35 Lautréamont 294 ‘le Chatouilleur’ 290 Le coq 61–2, 73 Le Cri de Paris 147 Le Douanier Rousseau 97 Le Fauconnier 133n3 Le Figaro 71, 80 Le Havre 52, 121 Le Père peinard 88–9 Le Perthus 185 Lear, Roy (André Ibels) 149 Lebeau, Arthur 56, 86, 104n118 Lebel, Robert 132 Leblanc, Maurice 56 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques xii, 171–2, 193 Leeds Mercury 96 Lefebvre, Jules Joseph 120, 131 legend, legendising 1–4, 6–8, 9, 15n13, 18, 50, 55, 56, 62, 79, 103n112, 157, 160, 183, 205, 207, 209, 224, 231, 233, 234, 249n17, 271, 279, 288, 292, 295 Léger, Fernand 133n3, 188n51 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 45 Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) 67n66, 70–1 Lénod, Albert (or Hubert) 9, 94, 104n118, 281 Leroux, Georges 190n85 Les Ballets suédois 299n49, 289 Les caves du Vatican 92, 124, 283, 297n25 see also Gide, André Les hommes nouveaux (Neue Menschen) 109–10, 134n17 see also Cendrars, Blaise les immortels 88 Les Invalides, Paris 288 Les Noctambules, Paris 163–5, 190n85, 190n89 Level, André 132, 200–1, 212 Levite, Max M. 252n55 Lewis, Wyndham 191n105

Lewitska, Sonia 181, 183 LHOOQ 289, 300n58 Limpsfield, Surrey 283 Lisbon 213–14 Littérature 279, 285 Littré, Émile 295 Liverpool 28, 179, 196n155 Lloyd, lineage 25–31 Adelaide (Ada) Atkinson 29, 40n53 Alice Pennington 36n4 Constance Mary Lloyd (Wilde) 22, 29, 30, 37n13, 37n21, 66n28, 105n134 Edward Watson Lloyd 36n4 Emily Francis Lloyd 30, 40n62 Horace Lloyd 28–9, 40n53, 105n134, 189n73 John Horatio Lloyd 27–30, 36n4 Sir Horatio Lloyd 36n4 Lloyd’s Bonds 28 lois scélérates (‘rogue laws’) 88 London xi, 22, 27–8, 30, 40n51, 43, 49, 80–1, 87, 89, 121, 179, 283, 284 Los Angeles 233 Los Deportes 202 Losfeld, Érik 104n126, 294, 302n85 Louvre, Palais du 132, 155 Loy, Mina 4, 7, 23, 43, 45, 46, 49, 56, 57, 77, 86, 112, 139n100, 167, 175, 190n89, 199, 200, 201, 224, 227, 232, 233–5, 241, 243, 249n17, 251n45, 259, 265, 274n11, 274n13, 282, 293, 297n24, 299n39, 300n54, 302n83 see also Arthur Cravan Luddites 25–7, 195n151 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich 58 Luna Park, Paris 290 Lupin, Arsène: gentlemancambrioleur see Leblanc, Maurice MacAdams, Edgar (‘Mac Adames’) 167, 169, 191n105, 192n106, 192n114, 254n96 McBride, Henry 168, 169 McGeechan, William O. 233 McVea, Sam 72, 81 Machiavelli 12 machinisme 121, 172–3 see also language-action Madrid 3, 15n3, 202, 203, 213, 214

312

Index

Maintenant see Arthur Cravan Mallarmé, Stéphane 99n15, 149 Malpel, Charles 142n141 Man Ray 286, 288, 293, 301n58 Manchester Gazette 25 Manheim, Ralph 124, 180 Marchand, Jean 183 see also Lewitska, Sonia Marie Antoinette 187n32 Marinetti, Filippo 71, 87, 108, 111, 112, 113, 120, 121, 122, 124, 135n33, 154 Marxism 172, 216, 295 masks 76 see also actual and virtual; simulacrum Matarasso, Jacques 255n109 Matisse, Henri 104n121, 104n127, 110, 130, 131, 132, 141n134, 146, 155 Maturin, Charles 149 May, Edward 167, 169, 223 Meductic 255n104 Melmoth the Wanderer see Maturin, Charles Mendès, Catulle 147, 149, 158 Mercure de France 184 metaphor 3, 5, 9, 11–14, 15n20, 76, 86–8, 89, 113–16, 281, 292, 295 Mette, Jeanne (Catulle Mendès) 136n42 Metzinger, Jean 133n3 Mexico (passage) 3, 199, 213, 247, 249n17, 259–73 Mexico City 46, 81, 259–60, 261–4, 266–8, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274n18, 276n61, 285 Milan 108, 111, 112 Mill, John Stuart 20, 27, 39n47 Miradique (Miradecque), Robert see Arthur Cravan Mirbeau, Octave 56 Modigliani, Amedeo 132, 133n3, 142n141, 177, 178, 188n51, 195n149, 195n150 Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin 117 Mona Lisa 110, 111, 289 see also LHOOQ Mondszain, Szaman (Simon) 157 Monet, Claude 133n3 Montjoie! see Canudo, Ricciotto Montmartre 70, 98n2, 145, 154, 242 Montparnasse xi, 70, 71, 72, 73, 78,

94–5, 98n2, 107, 108, 200, 204, 213, 239, 282 Monumental xi, 199, 204, 206, 208, 219n30, 263 morality 12, 14, 32, 146 Morris, Jack 202–3 Mucha, Alfons 122 multiplicity, multiplicities 9, 44, 47, 77, 85, 128–9, 144, 145, 146, 170, 185n8, 281 Munich 52, 58, 67n66, 104n121, 134 myth xiv, 6, 7, 10, 14, 18, 57, 85, 97, 175, 183, 189n73, 234, 250n24, 295 see also legend, legendising Nabis 141n134 Napier, Louisa Mary (née Lloyd) 105n134 Napierkowska, Stacia 105n134, 300n52 Nelson, Horatio 27 neo-avant-garde 20, 281 Neue Künstlervereinigung 104n121 New College, West Worthing 45, 48–9, 61, 65n21, 68n78, 283 New Haven 255n104 New London 255n104 New York xi, 4, 16n27, 46, 52, 53, 87, 109, 110, 198, 214, 215, 216, 222–41, 243–7, 249n16, 249n17, 250n24, 252n53, 252n55, 254n89, 257, 260, 261, 262, 274n11, 274n13, 284, 285, 289 see also Woolworth Building New York Dada see Dada New York Independents see Society of Independent Artists, New York New York Sun 227 New York Times 152, 174, 191n105, 191n106 New York Tribune 176, 225, 233, 252n53 Newfoundland 242–3 Nice 133 Nietzsche, Friedrich x, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9–14, 15n20, 16n23, 16n32, 16n34, 20–1, 31–6, 41n72, 41n80, 47, 49, 59, 60, 68n73, 76, 85, 86, 113, 115, 116, 140n121, 158, 181, 186n18, 199, 200, 229, 256n117, 257, 278, 285, 295, 296n3 nihilism xi, 1, 4, 5, 8, 11, 279, 281, 296n3



Index 313

nomad thought 103n105, 181, 198–9, 218n3, 248n4, 290 Nonnendamm see Berlin Norris, Christopher xi, 135n27 Nouvelles de la République des Lettres see Salmon, André nouvelles en trois lignes 120, 284 see also Fénéon, Félix Nova Scotia 241–2 Nuevo Laredo 259, 260 Oaxaca 270–1 Odessa 175 Olivier, Fernande 71, 95, 135n24, 147, 159 Orange County, California 55 Order of the Garter 19, 24, 38n26 original and copy 20 see also actual and virtual; simulacrum Orloff, Chana 139n99, 212 Orphism 108, 155, 161, 188n51, 246, 247 outsider (exclu) 75, 218n3 Oxford (university and colleges) 22, 27, 29, 30, 37n18, 175 Pacific (passage) 51–2 Panathinaikos FC 175 panegyric 295 Parc Güell, Barcelona 185 Paris xi, 3, 20, 35, 46, 51, 52, 55, 62, 64, 70–5, 77–98, 98n9, 100n39, 100n43, 103n103, 107–25, 127, 129–33, 134n22, 139n99, 142n141, 145–7, 151–69, 174–85, 188n51, 191n105, 192n114, 197n177, 200–2, 205, 206, 212, 213, 214, 223, 227, 235, 236, 239, 246, 252n53, 253n76, 263, 265, 269, 270, 271, 279, 283, 284, 285, 286, 288–91, 294, 298n27, 299n39 Paris Dada see Dada Paris Journal 191n105 Parnassianism 99n15 Penrose, Roland 98n2 perception 10, 11, 47, 147, 223, 291 Père Lachaise cemetery 184, 249n17 performativity xi, xii, 1, 5, 117, 122, 230, 281 permanent revolution xvi, 216 see also Trotsky, Leon

perspective(s) 9–11, 13, 86–8, 113, 116, 281 Petit Trianon Palace 151, 187n32 Pharamousse see Picabia, Francis philosophy x, 1, 6, 7, 8, 9–14, 16n23, 20–1, 31–6, 42n89, 44, 45–6, 59–60, 68n70, 68n73, 73, 76–7, 99n19, 113–16, 117, 123, 128–9, 144, 147, 158, 170–2, 181, 185n8, 193n122, 198–9, 200, 218n3, 222–3, 257, 278–81, 291, 292, 295, passim see also Deleuze, Gilles; immanence; Nietzsche, Friedrich Picabia, Francis 105n134, 138n80, 189n66, 212, 213, 220n72, 223, 225, 227, 229–31, 232, 233, 239, 240, 279, 283–5, 288–92, 293–4, 297n22, 298n27, 298n32, 298n35, 299n48, 299n49, 300n52, 300n54, 300n55, 300n57, 300n58, 301n59, 301n60, 302n79 see also Brevoort, hotel, New York; Buffet-Picabia, Gabrielle; Dada; Duchamp, Marcel; LHOOQ; Mona Lisa Picasso, Pablo 8, 71, 78, 104n121, 110, 124, 132, 133n3, 142n143, 185, 186, 188n51, 213 Plantagenet kings of England 24, 33 Plato 9, 13, 14, 76, 99n32, 100n34 see also actual and virtual; simulacrum plurality 9, 10, 18, 36, 60, 116, 126, 127, 173, 241, 281, 291, 292 poetry 7, 9–10, 12, 13–14, 35, 50, 52, 60–2, 64, 68n68, 68n76, 72, 77, 79, 85, 87, 94, 107, 109, 110–11, 112, 114, 115, 118, 121, 125–8, 130, 131, 132, 134n19, 135n27, 140n113, 145, 146, 169, 173, 179–80, 181, 190n89, 194n131, 195n153, 197n180, 199, 201, 227, 234, 237–8, 241, 245, 250n24, 260, 263–4, 269, 271, 273, 275n34, 281, 283–6, 294–5, 301n58, 302n85, passim see also metaphor; prosopoème; representation Poigny, Paris 177, 184 Poiret, Paul 104n127, 212 Poitou-Charentes 78, 83, 84

314

Index

Pollock, Jackson 8 ‘Pompadour Diebstahl’ 57 Pope Leo XIII 92 Port Pirie Recorder (South Africa) 152 Port Union 196n162, 255n107 Port-Aux-Basques 255n107 Portland 255n104 Porto 213 Portugal (passage) 213–14 Pound, Ezra 136n42 Pradervand, Victoire and Eugénie 47 Press (New Zealand) 152 prosopoème 51, 52, 145, 176, 179, 185, 241, 246 see also poetry Protos see Gide, André; Lafcadio Protos vehicles 45, 67n59 psychoanalysis 32, 193n124 psycho-democracy see Loy, Mina publicité ambulante see de Regnancourt, M. Puerto Angel 272–3 pun, punning 117–18, 286 see also blague

revue 114, 116–18, 163, 213 Richter, Hans 1, 3, 4, 120, 281 Rigaut, Jacques 286 Rimbaud, Arthur 77, 85–6, 302n85 Rivera, Diego 87, 132 Riverside County, California 55 Roché, Henri-Pierre 71–2, 233, 237 Roche, Juliette 212, 237, 239, 240, 254n89, 293 Rodin, Auguste 78, 122 Rogers, Cora 55 Rogers Bros, Chicago 55 Rolland, Romain 129 Romania 175 Rome 62, 78, 92, 112 Rosenberg, Paul 87 Rosny aîné, J.-H. (R.-H. Boex) 173, 194n135 Ross, Robbie (Robert) 152, 275n34 Rostand, Edmond 88 Royal Commission into Welsh Sunday Closing (Sunday Closing (Wales) Act of 1881) 20, 36n4 Rrose Sélavy see Duchamp, Marcel Russell, Morgan 133n3, 141n134

Quebec 242

Sacharoff, Olga 67n66, 100n39, 131, 200, 213 St Gallen 48, 66n24 St John’s, Bonavista 243 St Thomas the Martyr, church, Upholland 38n26, 38n27 Saint-Point, Valentine de 122–3, 135n33, 136n42, 138n84, 212 Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, church, Paris 184 Salina Cruz 270–3 Salle des Société Savantes 167, 173, 174, 191n102 Salle Gaveau 122, 135n33, 138n83 Salle Wagram 80 Salmon, André 107, 111, 120, 130, 133n3, 154, 191n96 Salon d’Automne 104n121, 110, 183 Salon des Indépendants 104n121, 163, 183 see also Arthur Cravan, ‘L’Exposition des Indépendants’ San Francisco 52 Sanouillet, Michel 295, 298n27 Sarcey, Francisque 117–18 Satie, Erik 133n3, 288, 290, 299n49

Ransome, Arthur 119 Rastaquouère see Picabia, Francis Ravel, Maurice 87 Raynal, Maurice 133n3 readymade see Duchamp, Marcel reality 9–10, 11, 13, 14, 49, 68n76, 77, 86, 102n82, 113, 115, 140n121, 201 see also actual and virtual; metaphor; simulacrum reason 14, 16n21, 59, 111, 173 see also philosophy ‘Red’ Winchester 266, 267–8, 269, 270, 271, 272 Relâche 286 Renoir, Auguste 133n3 representation (re-presentation) 8, 9, 58–64, 76, 77, 100n35, 102n82, 115, 280, 291–2, 293 see also actual and virtual; simulacrum revolutionary Russia 67, 70, 175, 149, 216 see also Lenin; permanent revolution; Trotsky, Leon



Index 315

Schelling-Salon, Munich 58 Schopenhauer, Arthur 6, 8, 9–10, 15n13, 15n20, 99n15 Scotia, California 55, 61 Sebbag, Georges 66n32, 103n109, 186n11 Section d’Or Cubists 110, 142n143, 158, 183 Sedova, Natalia 215 see also Trotsky, Leon self consciousness 12, 13, 59 Serbia 175 ‘Sergeant Grandjean’ 225 Seurat, Georges 141n134 Severini, Gino 87, 108, 123–4, 138n89, 139n92, 139n99 Severini, Jeanne 139n92 Seville 214 Shakespeare, William 135n27, 260 Shattuck, Roger 4, 92 Shepherd, George 191n105 Sherard, Robert 119 Shevington 23, 38n26 ship of fools, stultifera navis 216 Sibleigh, Charles 152 Sic see Albert-Birot, Pierre Sieger’s Allee, Berlin 57 Siemen Zuckertswerke 67n59 Siemens-Schuckert electrical engineering factory 57 Signac, Paul 88 Sils-Maria 6 simulacrum (simulacra) 15n16, 17, 76, 77, 79, 99n32, 100n33 see also actual and virtual Sisley, Alfred 133n3 Situationist International 294 see also Debord, Guy ‘slackers’ 261, 269, 270 Sloterdijk, Peter 16n24, 34, 85 social structures 34, 59, 73, 87, 113, 116, 144, 171–2 Société des Artistes Indépendants 154 Société Havraise d’Études Diverses 172 Society of Independent Artists, New York 231, 232, 233 see also Blind Man Socrates 42n88 Soffici, Ardengo 122 Solé, Sr 202

Sorbonne 78, 94, 108, 163 Soupault, Philippe 285–6, 299n40 Spain (passage) 185, 198–217 see also Barcelona; Portugal Spinoza, Baruch 199 SS Florizel 243–4 SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse 52, 54, 118, 215 SS Montserrat 215–17, 224 SS Santissima Madre de Dio 259 Stadium: Revista Ilustrada de Sports 204, 205, 206, 211, 219n30 Stanlow, Cistercian Abbey 24 Stein, Gertrude 71 Stella, Joseph 237 Stockport 25–6, 27, 28, 195n151 Strindberg, August 133n3 subjectivity 10, 12, 16n23, 44–7, 50, 56, 59–60, 75–7, 78, 85, 86, 100n35, 116, 145, 170–1, 173, 193n129, 199, 223, 280 suicide x, 1, 5, 154, 259, 265, 283, 286, 288, 294, 297n26, 298n28 see also Artaud, Antonin; Breton, André; Dada; nihilism Super Furry Animals xi Surrealism x, 4, 5, 132, 138n72, 220n51, 231, 241, 279, 283, 286, 288, 297n26 Survage, Léopold 139n99 Swedish national (unnamed) see von Düben Switzerland 3, 6, 21–2, 30–1, 36n12, 37n13, 46, 47–50, 55–6, 66n24, 109, 129, 184, 263, 267 Synchromists 141n134 Szittya, Emil 109 tachism 102n82, 133 Tahiti 282, 297n22 Tailhade (Taillade), Laurent 87, 166, 191n97 Tehuantepec 20, 271, 272, 277n81 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 176, 194n146, 275n34 text (authority of) 113–16 Tharaud, Jérôme 159, 160, 190n84 The Dial 173 The Era 29 The Mexican Herald 152 The Montreal Gazette 152 The Salopian Journal 26, 27

316

Index

The Soil see Coady, Robert J. thing-in-itself 10 see also philosophy Thomas Aquinas 12 Thucydides 14 Tite Street, Chelsea 22, 37n21, 187n32 Tobeen, Félix (Félix Elie Bonnet) 133, 142n143, 157, 183 Toms River 241 Torma, Julien 196n166 Toscanini, Arturo 133n3 Tossa de Mar x, 105n129, 212–13, 220n70, 239 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 88, 132 Treadwell, Sophie 232–3, 235, 253n62, 253n63, 253n66 Trotsky, Leon 70–1, 198, 215–16, 219n28, 224, 248n16 Trotsky, Lev and Sergei 215 truth, and untruth (lie) 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9–11, 12, 13, 45, 46, 86–7, 113, 114, 115 Tudesq, André 111 Tzara, Tristan 190n79, 285, 286, 298n27 Ugartechea, Enrique 261, 263, 274n18, 274n19 Uhde, Wilhelm 183 Ukraine 183 un entre-temps 198–201 Unter den Linden, Berlin 58 Upholland, Lancashire x, 20, 23, 38n25, 38n26, 38n27 Vaché, Jacques 283, 298n27 see also Breton, André; death; suicide Val de Graz 264 Valadon, Suzanne 158 Valença 213, 214 Valéry, Paul 90, 133n3 Vallotton, Félix 31, 120, 131, 184 Vallotton, Paul 131, 184 Valparaíso, Chile 272, 273 van der Velden, Bastiaan xiii, 65n21, 104n126 van Dongen, Kees 78, 87, 94–8, 104n121, 104n124, 104n127, 105n128, 105n129, 105n140, 108, 113, 132, 133, 141n134, 142n141, 142n143, 187n30, 191n105 van Gogh, Vincent 8, 78, 131

Van Vechten, Carl 249n17, 282, 297n24 van Wätjen, Otto 212 Veracruz 270, 271 Verlaine, Paul 99n15, 133n3 Vers et Prose 73, 110, 124 see also Fort, Paul Vigo 213 Vila do Conde x, 213 voice (speech-machine) 120, 128, 144, 147, 171 Vollard, Ambroise (gallery) 95 von Düben (? Swedish national) 270, 272, 276n69 von Ende, Amelia 173, 180 von Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness Elsa 237 ‘voyou’/‘voyoucratie’ 32, 34, 124, 281 Vuillard, Jean-Édouard 141n134 VVV 241, 302n83 Wagner, Cosima 7 Wagner, Richard 6, 7 Wales 25, 36n4, 37n13, 40n51, 284 see also Royal Commission into Welsh Sunday Closing Washington Herald 116, 118, 119, 123, 151 Washington Square Gallery 215, 223, 227 see also Coady, Robert J.; New York Weill, Berthe 159, 189n68 Wells, Bombardier see Bombardier Billy Wells Whistler, James McNeill 37n21, 133n3, 168, 192n111 Whitehood, Mme see Arthur Cravan, immediate family, Nellie Grandjean Whitman, Walt 127–9, 146, 225, 227, 245, 250n24 Wilde, Oscar 22, 37n21, 49–50, 65n21, 66n28, 66n31, 87, 88, 89–90, 116, 119, 121, 124, 126, 133n3, 146, 147, 149–52, 154, 156, 158, 160, 165, 166, 176, 184, 186n11, 186n12, 186n18, 186n19, 187n25, 187n32, 195n153, 209, 215, 216, 237, 243, 249n17, 275n34, 295, 297n18 Wilhelm, Crown Prince 57 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 57, 289



Index 317

William Bruges 38n26 William the Bastard 23 Williams, Wythe 174 Wilson, Ellen Axson (First Lady of the United States 1913–14) 167 Wilson, Thomas Woodrow (President of the United States 1913–21) 167, 223–4, 225 Winter, Mary Edna 22, 30, 65n18 With Hidden Noise 233, 253n66 Wogue, Jules 117 Wood, Beatrice 233, 237, 239 Woolf, Virginia 185n8 Woollcott, Alexander 174 Woolworth Building xi, 230, 252n53 see also Duchamp, Marcel

words, writing 6, 11, 111, 113, 127, 143, 144, 230 Wyndham Lewis, Percy 191n105 Y Sgriw Rataf x Yeats, W. B. 37n21, 87, 136n42 You Gotta Live see Brown, Robert Carlton Young Ahearn 169, 177, 192n114, 195n148 Zambelli, Carlotta 165 Zarathustra 158 see also Nietzsche, Friedrich Zimmermann telegram 223, 225 Zola, Émile 133n3