Putting My Foot in It

by René Crevel, Thomas Buckley (Translator)

Imagine, if you can, Freud and Proust sitting down for a chat with Zippy the Pinhead and the Marquis de Sade. Then, just when things are starting to get a bit silly, in walks Karl Marx with a dead serious face to deliver a vitriolic diatribe. After he has finished his speech, Jacques Lacan enters ands slips a couch under the narrator, who begins psychoanalyzing himself and his text. Zippy soon prevails, however, and the narrative has turned into a political allegory with characters out of Felix the a surrealist, graphic (historiographic, geographic, pornographic) version of The Romance of the Rose. Rene Crevel’s 1933 novel Putting My Foot in It (Les Pieds dans le plat) has long been considered a classic of the surrealist period, but has never been translated into English until now. Loosely structured around a luncheon attended by thirteen guests, the novel is a surrealistic critique of the intellectual corruption of post-World War I France, especially the capitalist bourgeoisie and its supporter, the Catholic Church. The novel begins with an account of the family of the major character, known as the “Prince of Journalists.” This bizarre family―the grandparents a soldier and a sodomized woman, the parents an orphaned epileptic and a hunchback―is matched by Crevel’s bizarre syntax and nouns that initially appear legitimate, intact, and respectable, soon decompose into obscene epithets, making other nouns, both common and proper, suspect. The story continues in this way to deconstruct itself on many levels―literary, semantic, psychological, ideological―until the final chapter, when the luncheon degenerates in a way reminiscent of a Bunuel film and all of the novel’s characters appear in a dirty movie entitled “The Geography Lesson,” a final metaphor for the corruption of European society between the world wars. This edition also reprints Ezra Pound’s well-known essay on Crevel as a foreword, and includes an introduction by Edouard Roditi, who knew Crevel in the 1930s. (Mr. Roditi died in May of 1992 while this book was in production.)

Genres: France, Fiction, French Literature, Literature, Surreal

173 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Crevel was born in Paris to a family of Parisian bourgeoisie. He had a traumatic religious upbringing. At the age of fourteen, during a difficult stage of his life, his father committed suicide by hanging himself.

Crevel studied English at the University of Paris. He met André Breton and joined the surrealist movement in 1921, from which he would be excluded in October 1923 due to Crevel's homosexuality and Breton's belief that the movement had been corrupted. During this period, Crevel wrote novels such as Mon corps et moi ("My Body and Me").

In 1926, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis which made him start using morphine. The 1929 exile of Léon Trotsky persuaded him to rejoin the surrealists. Remaining faithful to André Breton, he struggled to bring communists and surrealists closer together. Much of Crevel's work deals with his inner turmoil at being bisexual. Crevel killed himself by turning on the gas on his kitchen stove the night of 18 June 1935, several weeks before his 35th birthday.
-from wikipedia.org

Reviews

[Ronald Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The French Surrealists tended, at least in theory, to be suspicious of the novel both as a literary genre and as a legitimate form of literary expression. The writing of a novel, they argued, required too much previous planning, so that the final product, like that of most painting and sculpture too, lacked the spontaneity of automatic writing.

- from the Introduction, by Edouard Roditi

Or, as Paul Valéry famoustly once told André Breton, that he could not be a novelist because he refused to write, “The Marquise went out at five o’clock.” (stolen from here)

My main problem with this novel – and to me it’s the difference between it being a four star and five star book – is that there is a long portion where René Crevel spends entirely too much time writing “The Marquise went out at five o’clock.” But, before we get too much more into that, allow me an aside to touch briefly on just who René Crevel was, as he is mostly forgotten. Most of this is taken from Wikipedia/GR, with a small (noted) portion coiming from Edouard Roditi’s introduction of this book:

Crevel was born in Paris to a family of Parisian bourgeoisie. He had a traumatic religious upbringing. At the age of fourteen, during a difficult stage of his life, his father committed suicide by hanging himself.

From the forward to Putting My Foot in It (from MAJORLY BURIED author Edouard Roditi):

The origins of Crevel's peculiar preoccupations with both suicide and homosexuality can probably be attributed to a profound emotional shock experienced in his adolescence, when his father, a music publisher, appears to have been compromised in some homosexual scandal and suddenly hung himself in their family home. […] Crevel was then fourteen years old and his mother, an apparently sadistic moralist, insisted on displaying to her children their father’s corpse in order to impress on their minds the full extent of the “shame” that the poor man’s “sin” and death had brought upon his widow and offspring.

YIKES. Back to the bio:

Crevel studied English at the University of Paris. He met André Breton and joined the surrealist movement in 1921, from which he would be excluded in October 1923 due to Crevel's homosexuality and Breton's belief that the movement had been corrupted. During this period, Crevel wrote novels such as Mon corps et moi ("My Body and Me"). In 1926, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis which made him start using morphine. The 1929 exile of Léon Trotsky persuaded him to rejoin the surrealists. Remaining faithful to André Breton, he struggled to bring communists and surrealists closer together. Much of Crevel's work deals with his inner turmoil at being bisexual. Crevel killed himself by turning on the gas on his kitchen stove the night of 18 June 1935, several weeks before his 35th birthday.

I’ll note here that, unlike his contemporaries, Crevel primarily wrote novels, and as such, is a bit of an outlier of the Surrealist movement of the time. And this particular work appears to be a great example of why the Surrealists were so wary of the novel-as-form. When this book is at full torrential flow, when it hops and skips through language – making unexpected connections, whimsical wordplay (much of which remains untranslatable into English, but the translator here as made one hell of a go at it and manages to – many times through interjected explanations – illuminate the more opaque and murky jokes) and generally absurd shifts of narrative and scene – it really excels; however, it also is unmistakably “crafted”, and at times it labors under the stricture of its craft, bogging down in (regrettably necessary for the story as a whole) plodding minutiae and exposition. Let me touch briefly on the publisher’s copy, as way of example and explanation, before I wrap this up:

Imagine, if you can, Freud and Proust sitting down for a chat with Zippy the Pinhead and the marquis de Sade. Then, just when things are starting to get a bit silly, in walks Karl Marx with a dead serious face to deliver a vitriolic diatribe. After he has finished his speech, Jacques Lacan enters and slips a couch under the narrator, who begins psychoanalyzing himself and his text. Zippy soon prevails, however, and the narrative has turned into a political allegory with characters out of Felix the Cat: a surrealist, graphic (historiographic, geographic, pornographic) version of The Romance of the Rose.

This is, wonderfully, an apt description of the work as a whole. As noted above, and to tie in the publisher quote, Crevel spends much of the middle portion of the novel channeling entirely too much Proust and Freud – and it’s here that the novel labors – and foregoes Zippy alomost entirely. However, it’s in the opening sections – where Zippy is prominent – that Crevel shines as a novelist.

All that said, the really crowning achievement of the work – and it’s high level five star stuff – is in the final two chapters (“[…]in walks Karl Marx with a dead serious face to deliver a vitriolic diatribe. After he has finished his speech, Jacques Lacan enters and slips a couch under the narrator, who begins psychoanalyzing himself and his text.”).

let hatred, for its part, take over and not give an inch of ground

The second to last chapter (The Fourteenth Guest) is one long bitter, angry (man, I love bitter and angry writing) rant against hypocrisy in it’s many forms, and fascism in general. And that might sound like a drag, but it is enlightening, intelligent, enjoyable, and overall darkly funny (mostly all at the same time) that it is a true joy to read. The final (Lacan-esque) chapter is mostly more of the same with more explicit ties to what (in 1933, when this was published) would have been very, very current events: the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, and a continued condemnation of fascism. Crevel was a bit ahead of his time in loudly ringing the alarm bells over Hitler’s rise to power – but, seeing as his best friend at the time was Klaus Mann (the Mann’s, of course, being early and outspoken critics of the rising Nazi tide) it does make sense.

One can laugh.
Laughter has never erased, has never corrected anything.

This book does plod a bit it in the middle – and, were I less stubborn reader I might have given it up at its lowest point – but it’s final chapters are truly excellent, and make this well worth picking up; all the more so as it is both in print (and cheap) and available used (even more cheap).

[Dylan Kiewel]

have been in and out of reading this in spurts and spots at work mostly where my brain is only fleetingly in evidence, presence and sensitivity to experience not being advantageous. even at home tho i could only soak this up properly so much, its wordy reverie to an almost onanistic degree, or else its so rooted in its time's squabbles and personages that i simply cannot relate. it is funny tho. it is tastey. crevel straddled the line between maybe the two movements of thought most important to insurrection in the 20th century, surrealism and communism, shucking the bad from each tho and remaining a right nasty individualist of true style and wit, chaos and enchantment, worthy of consideration by a healthy stretch a century on.

[Katrinka]

No idea how to rate this one. I really enjoyed the out-of-the-blue, straight-up social/political commentary-- but it was such a weirdly inserted block within a larger surrealist framework that I'm not sure what to make of the whole thing, in terms of effective delivery of Crevel's project.

[Gulliver's Bad Trip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pound's essay seems to mourn the missed opportunity to convert a ephebic epigone and finishes off with a rather vague diatribe but quite clearly aimed against, amongst others, Lewis Sinclar, author of It Can't Happen Here (that is, America) which is a dystopian novel about the european fascist epidemic taking over the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Ezra Pound, who was already well-established around Italy making pro-fascist propaganda up until his world-renowmed and humiliating capture after the italian invasion, pretended to be just talking about a back-then famous US banker, William Lewis Moody Jr. which was more of a all-american usurer than a another greedy jew but who cares now with Zionism on the rise, again, seemingly making everything it can to finally give reason to worldwide anti-semitism.

Anyway, Klaus Mann, half-jew and actual good friends with Crevel, is very illuminatting, complementing even, regarding many aspects of this author's novel and the living experience under the rise of fascism/nazism in general.

Here, in particular, Crevel gives us the specific characteristics of Clerical Fascism which had already, at that time, or would soon being in the way of taking over, since Italy, places like Spain, Portugal, Romania, Hungary and bits and pieces of other eastern european countries. While the not so famous son of Thomas Mann used the likeness of Gustaf Gründgens in his Mephisto to expose the cultural turn to fascism and its pleasantries to authority figures such as Goebbels and Goering, René Crevel used Leon Bailby (a french William Randolph Hearst) and vague veteran military figures such as Pétain who was placed as the head of state in the infamous Vichy Republic to do so. Personally, I think that the maternal figures don't need any further commentaries, on the other hand.

Roditi mentions the puzzling relation of the author with André Breton's Surrealist group and the homophobia dilemma which is more a trait of his times than anything else (that is, gay people supposedly should stay closeted even around intellectual and artistic circles that also were usely marginalized by philistines and puritans alike just for their effeminate beheaviour of expressing themselves passively) but what is most concerning for me was the unmistakable failure of surrealism to take proper precautions against both fascism and stalinism, finally barely being able to have delayed reactions and it wasn't up until the post-war that letterism and situationism that such concerns started to be seriously focused upon.

Historically, there are also some highlights of violent interwar period events in Eastern Europe which helped to consolidate the totalitarian climate of the region for the decades since, as well.

Cortazar, who explicitly mentions Crevel in his most famous novel and was around France when general de Gaulle had dealings, amongst other colonial affairs, in the fiasco of the algerian war, would be someone I would have preferred to have written instead the introduction for any of Crevel's novels, really.

René Crevel also was contemporaneous with Ödön von Horváth and Georges Bernanos, both very distinct writers who had extremely different reactions towards Fascism and the consequent european war preparations despite opposing it all in thought in the same way.

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange, unbalanced book. Crevel spends a long time painting a bunch of ridiculous, degenerate characters in sophisticated yet silly language. Then, around two-thirds of the way through, he suddenly breaks down into an anti-capitalist, anti-religious rant. Honestly, I was finding the plot dull and difficult to follow until this section, where the book's pages are positively burning with vitriol. Political rants in fiction often feel heavy handed or unnecessary, especially ones this long, but I enjoyed it, perhaps because I'm similarly enraged right now. Religion doesn't seem as relevant a target as anti-semitism or racism, though perhaps it was at the time, and Crevel is broadly progressive, decrying colonialism while mocking fascists. The novel (first published 1933) is prescient in predicting WWII, ending with the sentence "To be continued at the outbreak of the next war."