Writers No One Reads

Herbert Pfostl at Blind Pony recently featured Fleur Jaeggy’s beautiful essay on Marcel Schwob. (Previous post on Schwob.) Don’t miss it.

Wakefield Press is bringing out some Schwob, starting with The Book of Monelle, hallelujah.

Probably coming soon to Writers No One Reads: Fleur Jaeggy herself.

Image found at Suspicious Patterns.

Both M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft spoke highly of the weird tales of Erckmann–Chatrian, James writing (in ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’) that ‘I should feel myself ungrateful if I did not pay a tribute to the supernatural tales of Erckmann–Chatrian. The blend of French with German in them, comparable to the French–Irish blend in Le Fanu, has produced some quite first-rate romances of this kind. [Some of their stories] have for years delighted and alarmed me. It is high time that they were made more accessible than they are.’

Emile Erckmann (1822–99) and Louis Alexandre Chatrian (1826–90) began their writing partnership in the 1840s, and continued working together—producing plays, novels, and short stories—until the year before Chatrian’s death. At the height of their powers they were known as ‘the twins’, and their works proved popular in England, where they began appearing (in translation) as early as 1865. After their deaths, however, they slipped into obscurity; and apart from the odd tale reprinted in anthologies, and the ill-fated collection of their weird tales published by Millington in 1981, their work has remained difficult to find.

In The Invisible Eye, Hugh Lamb has collected together the finest weird tales by Erckmann–Chatrian, adding several stories to those which he assembled for the Millington volume (the fate of which he discusses in the appendix to the present work). The world of which Erckmann–Chatrian wrote has long since vanished; a world of noblemen and peasants, enchanted castles and mysterious woods, haunted by witches, monsters, curses, and spells. It is a world brought to life by the vivid imaginations of the authors, and presented here for the enjoyment of modern readers who wish to be transported to the middle of the nineteenth century: a time when, it seems, anything could happen—and sometimes did.

—Publisher’s description for Hugh Lamb’s anthology The Invisible Eye, an expanded edition of the “ill-fated” Best Tales of Terror of Erckmann-Chatrian (pictured here).

Best Tales includes these 10 stories: The Crab Spider, The Murderer’s Violin, The Invisible Eye, The Child Stealer, My Inheritance, The Mysterious Sketch, The Owl’s Ear, The Three Souls, The Wild Huntsman, The Man Wolf. 

The Ash-Tree volume—I do not own one of the 500 copies printed—adds The White and the Black, The Burgomaster in Bottle, Lex Talionis, A Legend of Marseilles, Cousin Elof’s Dream, and The Citizen’s Watch.

No one reads Aloysius Bertrand (1807–1841). Bio courtesy of Gilbert Alter-Gilbert:

French writer generally acknowledged as the progenitor of the prose poem, as elaborated in his posthumously published volume Gaspard de la Nuit (Rat About Town or Fly-by-Night). Bertrand’s creative vision was shaped, to a great extent, by his admiration for painters, and he dedicated his ground-breaking Gaspard to the artists Rembrandt and Callot. Bertrand is noted for recreating medieval milieux and for vivid, highly-colored evocations of settings and scenes. A tubercular wretch, Bertrand reached the end of an existence made miserable by ill-health and impecuniousness at the age of thirty-four. His funeral expenses were borne by his friend, the sculptor David d’Angers. Bertrand was designated, in a famous essay by Paul Verlaine, as a charter member of the circle of “cursed poets,” and his influence has been emphatically acknowledged by such Symbolist poets as Charles Baudelaire, Tristan Corbiere, Jules Laforgue, and Stephane Mallarme, and by the Surrealist group as a whole.

Read Gilbert’s translations from Bertrand’s “Scarbo Suite”

Image: Jacques Callot, from the series Gobbi, circa 1621

Bio by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert:

Charles Nodier (1780–1844) was the literary “pilot of French Romanticism.” Director of the Arsenal Library and grand panjandrum of an epochal Parisian salon, he was a prominent cultural arbiter of the post-Napoleonic period. A multi-faceted author, Nodier is best remembered for his elaborate fantasies Luck of the Bean-Rows; Trilby; and Smarra, or The Demons of the Night. Nodier’s Infernaliana or Anecdotes, Histories, Tales and Accounts Concerning Revenants, Spectres, Vampires and Demons, a catalog of clichés of the supernatural, the spectral, and the chthonic which Nodier helped to make fashionable during Romanticism’s heyday, is the source from which The Bloody Nun [read it on 50 Watts] has been drawn, to be presented here for the first time in English translation.

In English:

—Smarra & Trilby from Dedalus
—History Of The Secret Societies Of The Army (I can’t vouch for the quality of this print-on-demand edition - the translation is likely ancient) 
—a biography in English

Repeated from my 50 Watts post on The Writing of Stones:

Roger Caillois (1913–78) is a fascinating literary figure, “neither an academic nor a journalist, neither a scientist nor a researcher, nor could he ever be termed an ‘intellectual,’” in the words of Denis Hollier, though he was elected to the Académie Française in 1971. After studying with Kojève and Mauss, in the ’30s Caillois played a role in early Bataille projects like Acéphale and the College of Sociology. His first book, The Necessity of Mind—written at twenty but published posthumously—deals with the praying mantis, but contains lines like “I wanted to cross the border of my skin, live on the other side of my sense” (making me wonder how he got on with Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte). He was responsible for salvaging from oblivion one of my favorite books, Jan Potocki’s Saragossa Manuscript (basis for the movie). A well-regarded anthologist and a protégé of Jean Paulhan, Caillois introduced Borges and Carpentier and many other Latin American writers to France (he lived in Argentina during the war). He also wrote a novel about Pontius Pilate and founded and edited Diogenes. You can sample his essays in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader and read a little more about him on wikipedia.

Also in English:

—Man, Play, and Games
—Man and the Sacred
—The Mask of Medusa

nyrbclassics:

Félix Fénéon’s marker at the columbarium in Père Lachaise cemetery.

Fénéon lived until 1944?! Somehow I can’t imagine Seurat’s first champion living straight through Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism, etc. (not to mention all the fighting). I wonder what kind of car he drove.

Thanks to Luc Sante and NYRB Classics, people are reading his “Novels in Three Lines” (don’t forget Joanna Neborsky’s illustrated version), but not much of his criticism made it into English. [Steven Heller on Three Lines: “In 1906, suspected terrorist, anarchist, and literary instigator Félix Fénéon wrote more than a thousand small bits for the Paris newspaper Le Matin. Each was a bizarre yet enigmatic, fragmentary, often scandalous, report.”]

The 1940s Gallimard collection of his work seems to be out-of-print. Ditto the 2-volume 1970 “more than complete” collection from Droz, all 1088 pages of it.

Sample Three Line: “The sinister prowler seen by the mechanic Gicquel near Herblay train station has been identified: Jules Menard, snail collector.” 

Bio by Michael Richardson: “The entry of Gisèle Prassinos (born 1920) into the Surrealist circle at the age of 14 has gained a legendary status. Born into what had been a wealthy and cultured Greek family which was forced to move to France to avoid persecution during hostilities between Greece and Turkey when Gisèle was only two (her father had to sell his library of 100,000 books to pay for the journey), she grew up in a difficult but stimulating environment that is reflected in her work. Aside from her novels, stories and poems, she also creates objects, particularly in fabric, and has translated Kazantzakis into French.”

Texts in English (at least the ones I could round up in my collection):

11 pages plus a 2-page bio by J. H. Matthews in his Custom House of Desire: A Half-Century of Surrealist Stories: “Blackday,” “The Three-branched Tree,” “The Maniac Fire,” “The Big Bank Check,” “The Wool Dress.”

The Dedalus Book of Surrealism: The Identity of Things, ed. Michael Richardson: “The King’s Ostlers” (2 pages) and “The Man” (7 pages) 

The Myth of the World: Surrealism 2, ed. Michael Richardson: “Sondue” (16 pages)

Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, ed. Penelope Rosemont: 3 very short texts: “Arrogant Hair,” “The Ghost of Chateuabriand,” “Peppermint Tower in Praise of Greedy Little Girls” (Homage to Hans Bellmer)

A footnote in Surrealist Women: “Prassinos is represented in the ‘Double Surrealist Number’ of the English journal Contemporary Prose and Poetry in 1936 and in Julien Levy’s Surrealism (New York, 1936).”

—brief wikipedia entry

No one reads Valery Larbaud (1881–1957).

From the back cover of The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth:

In 1908 a small volume of poetry was published in Paris by an unknown author named A. O. Barnabooth—who in fact did not exist. Only after the book received favorable reviews by major French writers and critics did its real author, Valery Larbaud, step forward to claim Barnabooth as his alter ego. The revised and expanded 1913 edition of the book, with Larbaud credited as its author, has become a classic, eventually being included in the esteemed Pleiade series of books devoted to great French writers and has remained in print in France for almost 100 years now. 

In English (Amazon US links):
The Diary of A. O. Barnabooth
The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth
Fermina Marquez
An Homage to Jerome: Patron Saint of Translators 

Image: Alexandra Grinevsky for Larbaud’s “Deux Artistes Lyriques” (1929), more here

No one reads Marcel Aymé, who Simenon called “the greatest French writer of the day.” Image by Bohumil Stepan for a Czech edition of The Green Mare.

Amazon links to books in English, though only one in print at the moment:

• Beautiful Image (in print)
• The Green Mare
• The Man Who Walked through Walls (forthcoming Feb. 2012)
• Walker-through-Walls (presumably an older trans. of the above)
• The Barkeep of Blemont
• The Secret Stream
• The Proverb & Other Stories
• Grand Seduction
• The Miraculous Barber
• The Hollow Field
• The Transient Hour
• The Second Face
• The Fable and the Flesh
• Fanfare in Blemont
• Across Paris & Other Stories
• The Conscience of Love
• The Proverb and Other Stories
• The House of Men
• Five Short Stories
• The Wonderful Farm (for kids, illus. by Sendak)
• The Magic Pictures: More About the Wonderful Farm (illus. by Sendak)

No one reads Marcel Schwob. (Three old posts on 50 Watts.)

Solar Books put out an edition of Imaginary Lives in 2009, though it seems to already be hard to find in the US.

The King in the Golden Mask is long out-of-print, as is The Book of Monelle, last printed in 1929.