Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob

Mayer André Marcel Schwob, known as Marcel Schwob (23 August 1867 – 26 February 1905), was a Jewish French symbolist writer best known for his short stories and his literary influence on authors such as Jorge Luis Borges[1]:9 and Roberto Bolaño.[2] He has been called a "surrealist precursor".[3] In addition to over a hundred short stories, he wrote journalistic articles, essays, biographies, literary reviews and analysis, translations and plays. He was extremely well known and respected during his life and notably befriended a great numbers of intellectuals and artists of the time.

Early life (1867–89)

He was born in Chaville, Hauts-de-Seine on 23 August 1867 into a cultivated family. His father, George Schwob, was a friend of Théodore de Banville and Théophile Gautier,.[1]:2 His mother, Mathilde Cahun, came from a family of intellectuals from Alsace. He was the brother of Maurice Schwob and uncle of Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob).

His family had just returned from Egypt, where his father had headed the cabinet of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for ten years. When the French Third Republic began, the Schwob family lived in Tours, where George became the director of the newspaper Le Républicain d'Indre-et-Loire. In 1876, he moved to Nantes to direct the Republican daily Le Phare de la Loire; after he died in 1892, his eldest son Maurice, born in 1859, took his place.

At age 11 he discovered the work of Edgar Allan Poe translated by Charles Baudelaire. He then read the original versions of his tales in English and they proved to be a lifelong influence in his writing.[1]:3 In 1878-1879, he studied at the Lycée of Nantes where he won the 1st Prize for Excellence. In 1881, he was sent to Paris to live with his maternal uncle Leon Cahun, Chief Librarian of the Mazarine Library,[4]:33 and continue his studies at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he became friends with Léon Daudet and Paul Claudel.[1]:3 He developed a gift for languages and quickly became multilingual. In 1884, he discovered Robert Louis Stevenson, who was to become one of his friends and role models. He studied philology and Sanscrit under Ferdinand de Saussure at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1883-4.[5] He then completed his military service in Vannes, joining the artillery.

He failed his entrance exams for the École Normal Supérieure,[1]:3 but he earned Bachelor of Arts in 1888. He became a professional journalist, collaborating in the Phare de la Loire, the Evénement and the Echo de Paris.

Early work (1890–1897)

He had a passion for French slang, and in particular for the language of the Coquillards used by Villon in his Ballads in Jargon: unlike the widespread opinion at the time (developed by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables), Schwob considered that slang is not a language that is created spontaneously, but that it is actually an artificial language in code.

For eight years he wrote short stories that were collected in six books: Cœur double ("Double Heart", 1891), Le Roi au masque d'or ("The King in the Golden Mask", 1892), Mimes (1893), Le Livre de Monelle ("The Book of Monelle", 1894), La croisade des infants ("The Children's Crusade", 1896) and Vies imaginaires ("Imaginary Lives", 1896). His last short story, L'etoile de bois, is the longest one he wrote and was published in 1897. Two large reprint collections of his stories were published during his lifetime: La Porte des rêves (The Gate of Dreams, 1899), illustrated by Georges de Feure, and La lampe de Psyché (Psyche's Lamp, 1903).

Along with Stuart Merrill, Adolphe Retté and Pierre Louÿs, Marcel Schwob worked on Oscar Wilde's play Salome, which was written in French to avoid a British law forbidding the depiction of Bible characters on stage. Wilde struggled with his French, and the play was proofread and corrected by Marcel Schwob for its first performance in Paris in 1896.

Late work (1898–1905)

In the last eight years of his life Schwob was often too sick to work, but he managed to complete a number of projects, although with the exception of the play Jane Shore,[6] and "Dialogues d'Utopie" (written in 1905), he never wrote any more original fiction. He did write articles, introductions and essays, adapted and translated several plays, and planned or began numerous projects that remained unfinished when he died.

Interior cover of the comics anthology Lapin, issue 16 (July 1997), featuring a portrait of Schwob by Emmanuel Guibert.

Travels

Ting Tse-Ying was a young Chinese scholar from the Island of Saint-Louis, fluent in English, that Schwob had met at the Chinese pavilion at the closing of Paris's Exposition Universelle and hired as a domestic servant, personal assistant and traveling companion. Ting later worked for explorer Paul Pelliot, whom he accompanied to Turkestan.[7]:42

In 1901, assisted by Ting, he travelled first to Jersey, where he stayed for several weeks, and then to Uriage, trying to improve his health. He then began the biggest voyage of his life, traveling to Samoa, like his hero Stevenson, in search of his tomb. Leaving from Marseilles, he stopped in Port Said, Djibouti, Aden, toured Sri Lanka, Sydney and finally Vailima, where Stevenson had lived. There, he met people that had known Stevenson. He stayed for a little less than a month. He became very sick in the island, lost a lot of weight and was forced to return to Paris in a hurry without having visited the tomb. Because of regional racism, Ting was arrested in several occasions and prevented from accompanying Schwob in some parts of the trip. Schwob complained about this in his letters to Moreno.[4]:270–5

In 1904, at the invitation of Francis Marion Crawford and accompanied by Ting, he took a boat trip to Naples, stopping in Porto, Lisbon, Barcelona, Marseille and finally Naples. He stayed for two weeks in Crawford's villa in Sant'Agnello in Sorrento. Bored, he left for France, stopping in Aix-les-Bains where his wife joined him. He then went to the Canton of Vaud in Switzerland, the Plombières in Belgium and finally Carnac, where Moreno, once again, joined him. His health had further worsened and they returned to Paris.

Personal life

Friendships

Thought his life, Schwob associated with or befriended a great number of notables from the worlds of art and literature. They include Léon Daudet, Paul Claudel, Anatole France, Edmond de Goncourt, Jean Lorrain, J.-H. Rosny aîné, Alphonse Daudet, Auguste Bréal, Paul Arene, Maurice Spronck, Jules Renard, Paul Margueritte, Paul Hervieu, Charles Maurras, Rachilde, Octave Mirbeau, Catulle Mendès, Jules Renard, Guillaume Apollinaire, Henri Barbusse, Georges Courteline, Paul Valéry, Colette, Oscar Wilde, Pierre Louÿs, George Meredith, Maurice Maeterlinck, Alfred Jarry, Aristide Bruant, Marcel Proust, Robert de Montesquiou, Édouard Manet, Auguste Rodin, Camille Claudel and Jehan Rictus.

In 1903 Schwob reflected on the passing of several of his closest friends, all cultural celebrities at the time. He wrote to Edmund Gosse: "I have been sadly tried in my friends since a few years. Stevenson and Verlaine, Mallarmé and now Henley and Whistler are gone".[4]:296 Aleister Crowley also considered Schwob a friend and asked him to translate two of his sonnets: "Rodin" and "Balzac".[8] Schwob was also friends with Lucien Guitry and tried to help him reconcile with his son, Sacha Guitry. Decades later Sacha went on to make several films with Marguerite Moreno.

Relationships

The two loves of his life were a young woman known as Louise and the celebrated actress Marguerite Moreno. Schwob met Louise, a working class girl who might have been a prostitute, in 1891, when he was 24 years and she was 23 years old. He kept the relationship hidden and exchanged letters with her that he mostly destroyed. Two years later she died of tuberculosis.[7]:158 He was devastated and told many of his friends. He dedicated Le livre de Monelle to her, basing the central character in Louise, but turning her into a child of indeterminate age. Many consider this his most personal work and it is the single book for which he became best known during his lifetime. The year after Louise's death, 1894, Schwob met Marguerite Moreno, who, at 23, had been named by Stéphane Mallarmé "the sacred muse of Symbolism",[9] and was the lover of Catulle Mendès. She had posed for sculptor Jean Dampt, artists Edmond Aman-Jean, Joseph Granié and often for Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer. In January 1895 they were officially together and they were married in London five years later, in 1900. Charles Whibley, the English writer, was a witness at the wedding. Their relationship was unconventional. They spent much time apart, due to Moreno's career and Schwob's frequent travels.

Health and death

He became sick in 1894 with a chronic incurable intestinal disorder.[10] He also suffered from recurring conditions that were generally diagnosed as influenza or pneumonia and received intestinal surgery several times. In the last ten years of his life he seemed to have aged prematurely, since he lost a lot of weight.[11] In February 1905, after nine years of serious recurring episodes, he died of pneumonia while his wife was away on tour, performing in Aix-en-Provence. He was surrounded by Ting, his brother Maurice and his biographer Pierre Campion.[4]:328

Teaching

Starting in December 1904 he taught a course on Villon at the l'École des Hautes Etudes that was attended by, among others, Michel Bréal, Édouard and Pierre Champion, Paul Fort, Max Jacob, August Longnon, Pablo Picasso, Catherine Pozzi, André Salmon and Louis Thomas.

Dedications

Influence

Misinformation

An often repeated, yet baseless rumor, states that Schwob died from syphilis. It seems to have its origins in the book The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name by H. Montgomery Hyde, where he wrote that Schwob died from the "effects of a syphilitic tumor in the rectum, which he acquired as a result of anal intercourse with an infected youth".[12] This apocryphal theory contradicts everything that is known about Schwob's health and sexual activities.[4]:328

His birth name, Mayer André Marcel Schwob, is clearly indicated in both his birth certificate and marriage license, both in the possession of the Harold B. Lee Library of the Brigham Young University.[13] Despite this well-documented fact, several biographical texts erroneously continue to list his "real name" as "André Marcel Mayer" and "Marcel Schwob" as an alias.

Works

Collections of short stories

Stories not collected during his lifetime

Other stories

Theatre

Non-fiction

Introductions

Translations and Adaptations

Unfinished Projects

Illustrated editions [16]

Adaptations

Music

Film

Comics

Theatre

Radio

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Schwob, Marcel (1982). The King in the Golden Mask and other writings. Translated by White, Iain. Mancester: Carcanet New Press Limited.
  2. ↑ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/a-constellation-of-isolated-flashes/
  3. ↑ Franklin Rosemont, "Jacques Vaché and the Roots of Surrealism: Including Vache's War Letters and other Writings", Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2007. p. 13
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Goudemare, Sylvain (2000). Marcel Schwob ou les vies imaginaires. Paris: Le Cherche midi éditeur. ISBN 9782862748191.
  5. ↑ Joseph, John E., 2012, Saussure, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 294.
  6. ↑ http://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/C0224/c007
  7. 1 2 Berg, Christian; Vadé, Champ (2002). Marcel Schwob, d'hier et d'aujourd'hui. Seyssel: Champ Vallon. ISBN 9782876733596.
  8. ↑ The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. New York, NY. Hill and Wang, 1969. Pages 342-343| The sonnets were published in Les Maîtres Artistes.
  9. ↑ http://www.cine-memento.fr/seguier/marguerite-moreno/9782840495697-p-18189.html
  10. ↑ http://www.marcel-schwob.org/Articles/116/chronologie
  11. ↑ http://www.sfsite.com/05b/rm128.htm
  12. ↑ Hyde, H. Montgomery. The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. p.9
  13. ↑ https://lib.byu.edu/digital/marcel_schwob/biography_eng.php
  14. ↑ De Meyer, Bernard. Marcel Schwob, conteur de l'imaginaire Bern: Peter Land, p. 127. 2004
  15. ↑ https://tidsskrift.dk/index.php/revue_romane/article/view/12148/23131/ Hillen, Sabine Madeleine "La main coupée.» ou la forme d'un récit bref chez Nerval, Maupassant et Schwob". Revue Romane, Bind 29 (1994)
  16. 1 2 Devaux, Alexandre. "Schwob, Goudemare et Maua". artnet. Artnet Worldwide Corporation. Retrieved 16 December 2015.
  17. ↑ http://www.octaveuzanne.com/2012/06/exemplaires-remarquables-feminies-huit.html
  18. ↑ http://www.marcel-schwob.org/?p=1512 Original manuscript of the French play, first edited by Société Marcel Schwob (France)in 2015
  19. ↑ http://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/C0224/c007 Original manuscript of the English adaptation by Vance Thompson to be produced by American impresario Charles Forthman. This was originally to be produced with Leslie Carter in the title role. It never happened and four years later, it was adapted further ("… turned the work into the American theatrical dialect") and performed as "The Lady Shore"
  20. ↑ Europe, n° 925, may 2006, p. 165-167. Transcription du manuscrit 3367, vol. I, Bibliothèque municipale de Nantes.
  21. ↑ Spicilège – Cahiers Marcel Schwob, n° 3, Paris, Société Marcel Schwob, 2010, p. 140-145. Reproduction and transcript of the manuscrit.
  22. ↑ William Grey, "Robert Louis Stevenson: A Literary Life", Houndsmill: Pallgrave Macmillan, 2004. p. 48
  23. 1 2 Fabre, Bruno (1 May 2015). "Bibliographie Chronologique sur Marcel Schwob" (PDF). marcel-schwob.org. Société Marcel Schwob. Retrieved 16 December 2015.
  24. ↑ Schwob, Marcel.Oeuvres. Paris; Les Belles Lettres, 2002. p. 1269
  25. ↑ Schwob, Marcel.Oeuvres. Paris; Les Belles Lettres, 2002. p. 1161-1264
  26. ↑ http://www.oldstilepress.com/books-pages/white.html
  27. ↑ http://thekankel.blogspot.com/2012/05/la-cruzada-de-los-ninos-de-marcel.html
  28. ↑ http://www.sfsite.com/05b/rm128.htm| Le roi au masque d'or, A review by Georges T. Dodds
  29. ↑ fr:Lapin (bande dessinée)
  30. ↑ http://www.tommyredolfi.net/UK/uk_BD/uk_Viktor/uk_bd_frameset_viktor.htm
  31. ↑ http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3053718-le-capitaine-carlate
  32. ↑ http://archive.kfda.be/projects/projects/2008/monelle
  33. ↑ http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-histoire-de-monelle-de-marcel-schwob-2007-01-06.html

Sources

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