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Henri Michaux (1899-1984) | |
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Belgian-born French painter, journalist, and poet, who explored the inner self and human suffering through dreams, fantasies, and drug-induced experiments. Henri Michaux's work show his interest in Surrealism, but he never joined the movement, and his writings avoid all classifications. Often Michaux narrated his suggestive prose poems in the first person and warned and advised the reader. However, Michaux leaves the question open, whether his images – steel prisons, labyrinths, slashing sounds, demons, dragons, snakes, camels and other animals – refer to the unconscious or outside world. Stretching his hands out beyond the bed, Plume was surprised at not meeting the wall. "Imagine that," he thought, "the ants have eaten it up..." and he went back to sleep. (in 'A Tractable Man,' Selected Writings: The Space Within, translated with an introduction by Richard Ellmann, New York: New Directions, 1968, p. 81) Henri Michaux was born in Namur, the son of a catholic lawyer. "Born into a middle-class family. / Father from the Ardennes. / Mother Walloon. / One of his grandparents, whom he never knew, of German origin. / A brother, three years older. / Distant Spanish ancestry." (from 'Some Information about Fifty-nine Years of Existence,' in Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984, selected, translated and presented by David Ball, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, p. xxiv) Michaux was educated at Putte-Grasheide and at a Jesuit school in Brussels. He intended to join the priesthood but was dissuaded from this by his father. After a religious crisis, during which he read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, the Lives of Saints, and many eccentric and extravagant authors, Michaux started his medical studies at Brussels University. Rebelling against his parents wishes, he dropped his studies and traveled in North and South America as a ship's stoker in the French Merchant Marines. Comte de Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror (1868-69) awakened in Michaux the long-forgotten need to write. In 1923 Michaux began to contribute to Franz Hellens's
magazine Le Disque Vert.
When his parents did not approve his
way of living, he moved to Paris, but returned regularly to Belgium,
with which he had an ambivalent relationship: he did not regard himself
as a Belgian poet. Michaux supported himself by working
as a teacher and secretary. He began to paint – especially
he was interested in the works of Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Giorgio
Chirico, and Salvador Dali. In 1927 Michaux traveled from Amsterdam to Ecuador and to the Amazon area. He was impressed by the Andes, and he took opium, which disappointed him: "This perfection without strain means nothing to me. better ether, which is more Christian. Blasts you away from yourself." (Ecuador: A Travel Journal by Henri Michaux, translated by Robin Magowan, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1970, p. 74) In 1929 he was back again in Paris. After the deaths of his parents, who died within ten days of each other, he started a new series of travels. This
time Michaux's journeys led him
to Africa, India and China – basically it was about rejecting the life
imposed on him and the quest of identity. "A terrible wind is blowing.
/ It's only a small hole in my chest, / But a hideous wind is blowing
in." (from 'I Was Born witha Hole,' in Ecuador: A Travel Journal, p. 69) Like his Surrealist friends, Michaux was preoccupied with the unconscious. Encouraged by Jean Paulhan and Jules Superville, he began to contribute reviews such as Commerce and Bifur. When his poems appeared in 1926 in the magazine Nouvelle Revue Françoise, one reader complained that they were not literature. Among Michaux's friends was the photographer Gilberte Brassaï,
with whom he had long discussions about literature. Brassaï was
impressed with Michaux's poetry, "the powerful and solemn voice of a
driven man, ill at ease with himself," as he said. Michaux did not like
being photographed, but Brassaï's portrait of him in 1945 shows him
relaxed, looking straight to the spectator. Michaux has a cigarrette in
his hand, but years later he told Brassaï that he is totally allergic
to tobacco. When his photo was published in 1959 in Arts,
covering the whole page, Michaux protested. Portraits, which Michaux
himself executed, were often faceless. Shy by nature, he valued privacy and avoided interviews. A trip to Asia produced Un barbare en Asie
(1932, A Barbarian in Asia). It was a poetic, self-analytical travelogue an
innocent mind that believed it could cope with all the impressions. In
Calcutta Michaux noted:
"Never, never will the Hindu realize to what a degree he exasperates
the European. The spectacle of a Hindu crowd, of a Hindu village, or
even crossing a street where the Hindus are in their doorways, is
irritating and odious." (A Barbarian in Asia, translated by Sylvia Beach, New York: New Directions, 1949, p. 6) This journey also inspired him to study Hindu
mythology. Ailleurs (1948) collected his imaginary journeys and beings: Voyage en Grande Garabagne (1936), Au pays de la magie (1941), and Ici, Poddema (1946). There is no paradise, suffering is universal. Michaux used the pen to write and draw, and explored the boundaries of different forms of expression. With his prose poems Michaux continued the literary form developed by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Jacob, who had published his manifesto of the new idea of poetry in the preface of Le Cornet à dés (1917). In 1940s and after Michaux become known for automatic images; Surrealists had already experimented with automatic writing in the 1920s and André Masson had executed automatic drawings in 1924. When Michaux had an exhibition in New York in 1949 with Otto Wols and Georges Mathieu, a critic described him as "obsessed by the imprecise forms of his larval world". Michaux's most famous book, Un certain Plume (1930, A Certain Plume), contains fifteen sketches of his alter ego, Monsieur Plume. He a Chaplinesque figure, an antihero, who confronts the world in tragicomic adventures. Michaux has said the the character was born during his visit to Turkey and "died" when he had to return. In the title story the hero wakes up and falls asleep several times. Meanwhile his house is stolen, and he is brought into trial after his wife is found in eight pieces, but Plume himself has not noticed anything. Plume continues again his sleep. The ants that eat up the walls of his home were perhaps the same that emerged in Luis Buñuel's film An Andalusian Dog (1929). Plume appeared also in Plume précédé de Lointain intérieur (1938) and 'Tu vas être père (d'un certain Plume), which Michaux wrote in 1943. The word 'plume' means 'feather' but it refers also to a penman (un homme de plume). According to Michaux, Plume got his name from Edgar Allan Poe's short story 'The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather'. From 1937 to 1939 Michaux edited the mystical magazine Hermès. His first painting show Michaux held in 1937 at the gallery Pierre, Paris. As a writer he gained fame in the 1940s. His work interested among others Andre Gide and Lawrence Durrell, whose book on Michaux, Henri Michaux: The Poet of Supreme Solipsism, appeared in 1990. Michaux's other friends included the Mexican writer and diplomat Octavio Paz, whom he gave an anthology of poems by Kabir, when Paz was transferred to India. During World War II Michaux fled to southern France to
escape
the German occupation of the country. His wife contracted tuberculosis,
Michaux himself was weakened by the food shortages. His poems of
Resistance were on the side of mortal humans. In 'Lazarus, are you
sleeping?' (1943) Michaux looked from a universal point of view the
"murderous twentieth century": "War of nerves / of Earth / of rank / of
race / of ruins / of iron / of lackeys / of flags / of wind / of wind".
(quoted in 'Poetry of the Resistance, Resistance of the Poet' by Yasmine Getz, Studies in 20th Century Literature, Vol. 26, Iss. 1, 2002) Nous deux
encore (1948) told about Michaux's life with
Marie Louise Ferdiere, whom he married in 1943. After her death in a
fire in 1948, Michaux concentrated on painting and writing
accounts of his experiments with mescaline, a drug which alters the perception of
time and creates visual hallucinations. Michaux had for hours, especially in the beginning, the most vivid images. Misérable miracle: la Mescaline (1956) describes his encounters with mescaline, delights and terrors of the invisible, how he indentified himself with a torrent, and was shaken around violently. "The stairway had vanished like the bubbles of champagne, and I continued my navigation, struggling not to roll, struggling against suctions and pullings, against infinitely small jumping things, against streched webs, and arching claws." (Miserable Miracle, translated by Louise Varèse, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1963, p. 25; ) Other drug-induced works include L'Infini turbulent (1957) and Paix dans les brisements (1959). After taking accidentally an overdose, Michaux experienced the total destruction of his self, an experience which he did not particularly enjoy. In the 1960s Michaux also made a film about hashish and mescaline. When the film was shown in the Salle de Géographie, it was completely packed. Michaux's friend Brassaï watched it while lying on the floor. In 1960 Michaux received the Einaudi Prize at the Biennale in Venice, but five years he refused to accept the French Grand Prize for letters – he had become a French citizen ten years earlier. Michaux's autographical book, Les Grandes Épreuves de l'esprit et les innombrables petites (The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones), appeared in 1966. Henri Michaux died in Paris on October 17, 1984. For further reading: Henri Michaux by René Bertelé (1946); Michaux by Robert Bréchon (1959); Henri Michaux ou une mesure de l'être by Raymond Bellour (1966); Henri Michaux by Kurt Leonhard, translated from the German by Anthony Kitzinger (1967); Henri Michaux: A Study of His Literary Works by Malcolm Bowie (1973); The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones by Henri Michaux (1974); Henri Michaux, esclave et démiurge by M. Béguelin (1974); Henri Michaux by Peter Broome (1977); Creatures Within: Imaginary Beings in the Work of Henri Michaux by Frederick Joseph Shepler (1977); Henri Michaux: The Poet of Supreme Solipsism by Lawrence Durrell (1990); Henri Michaux, peinture et poésie by Henri-Alexis Baatsch (1993); Henri Michaux ou le corps halluciné by Anne Brun (1999); Henri Michaux: Poetry, Painting, and the Universal Sign by Margaret Rigaud-Drayton (2005); Lire Michaux by Raymond Bellou (2011); Henri Michaux: Fiction & Diction by Vincent Metzger; préface de Michel Sicard (2018); Sous le signe de la colère: Henri Michaux et Louis-Ferdinand Céline by Pauline Hachette (2022) Selected works:
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