Caresse Crosby made being Caresse Crosby look like more fun than just about anything that wasn’t being Caresse Crosby. By the time she checked out on this day in 1970 she had several lifetimes behind her, and of the numerous figures to disprove F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous maxim about second acts in American lives – specifically, absence of same – few did so as magnificently as she.

Yes, there was that spot of bother with the boring, alcoholic first husband. And the drug-addicted second husband who committed suicide (that would be Harry Crosby), and the third alcoholic husband. OK, so she had some man trouble, but she never let it get her down.

Following her unlikely invention of the modern bra, Caresse Crosby spent the 1920s and ’30s as a publisher, poet, patron and – for a moment – performer. Pioneering experimental filmmaker Emlen Etting asked Crosby to appear in two of his films in 1933. Ever game, she agreed. The first of their collaborations was Oramunde, loosely based on the figure of Mélisande (of Pelléas et Mélisande fame).

A few things come to mind watching this. Firstly, the interplay of elemental forces and dancing figures is uncannily similar to later work by Maya Deren (this is 1933 mind, putting it right at the vanguard of artistic film experimentation). On a less exalted plane, the “help I’m trapped in a valance” style of dancing brought to mind Mr G, while the monochrome figures (Caresse is the one in black at the end) recalled Anton Corbijn’s very silly video for Joy Division’s “Atmosphere”, voted “song which least needs a video”. By me.

The other filmic product of this fruitful year was the longer work Poem 8, with more al fresco dancing (in which the valance briefly claims another victim), some amazing period shots of Manhattan, and Caresse treating a lawn like her dressing room and parlour. I suspect the inside-out motif is as much to do with the difficulty and expense of lighting interiors as a desire to make the whole thing a bit more surreal. That lawn, incidentally, belonged to Caresse’s in-laws, i.e. Harry Crosby’s parents.

I came across more footage of Caresse recently. It’s a newsreel clip by British Pathé which shows her during what must have been…what, her fourth, fifth act? It came towards the end of her life when she leased and subsequently bought the castle of Rocca Sinibalda, north of Rome. With idealistic fervour she saw it as a centre for creative cross-pollination which would enlighten the fractious peoples of the world. The clip shows Caresse being grandly carried about in a sedan chair (this is possibly the sedan chair designed for her by Buckminster Fuller). Set down, she expounds in Italian on her vision for the castle, which she wanted to become the “world capital of peace”, commissioning her artistic and literary friends to help spread her “call for serenity and love for all peoples”. A villager praises “Principessa Crosby”, repeating Caresse’s hope that it become the capital of peace, while his eyes are adding “…as long as I don’t have to haul the bitch around”.

I couldn’t embed the clip but that’s all for the good if it inspires you to check out some more slices of Pathé while you’re there. This phenomenal online resource contains some 90,000 archived clips drawn from newsreels spanning much of the 20th century. There’s the odd war and coronation, naturally, but also an incredible range of hidden treasures. I can’t be held responsible for any loss of productivity resulting from watching such delights, say, as ballet director Serge Lifar (remember him?) chewing Jean Cocteau’s ear off, Greenwich Village in its bohemian apogee, Josephine Baker singing “J’ai deux amours” in a boxing ring, mid-’50s hairstyles, some very early drag and – just because puppies are literally the best thing in the world – puppies. See? Your grandparents weren’t just sitting around waiting for YouTube to be invented.

While over there, take time to explore the village of Portmeirion, known of course from cult TV series The Prisoner. Its creator Clough Williams-Ellis turns up (and that finally clears up how you pronounce “Clough”…it rhymes with “muff”). As someone who took some architectural cast-offs and built a whole Italianate village around them (in Wales, no less), he was definitely a man after Caresse’s heart.

Here are some more images from the exhibition Locus Solus: Impresiones de Raymond Roussel, as discussed yesterday:

It’s almost eight decades since Raymond Roussel dissolved in a solution of barbiturates and despondency, but only now has the French writer received the acknowledgment of a major exhibition: Locus Solus. Impresiones de Raymond Roussel, which runs until 27 February in Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia. It covers the writer’s formative influences, the erratic course of his privileged, eccentric existence and his comparably yet separately bizarre works, including La Doublure, Impressions d’Afrique, Locus Solus and L’étoile au front. It also embraces the output of writers, filmmakers and visual artists who have plunged their buckets into the deep, pungent well of Roussel’s imagination. But his bequest still remains largely unknown to the wider world, such that the sight of Raymond Roussel’s name draped over a big-time, grown-up institution like the Reina Sofia feels thrillingly subversive; improbable, at the very least.

And once inside, there is an electric charge in confronting the iconography of Roussel’s cult, such as the original prints of photos otherwise known only from grainy reproductions. They include the classic image of the writer at 18 – rich, handsome and confident – an image he insisted should accompany all his published works. There are first editions inscribed to famous friends as well as original manuscripts, effusively reworked. Roussel’s flamboyant RV is sadly nowhere to be seen but there are other souvenirs from his extensive travels. Though the writer himself never recorded the details, it appears Roussel, gay and wealthy as he was, was frequently in flight from blackmailers.

It is unlikely that the museum will be erecting crowd-control barriers at any point in the show’s run, but if renown were measured by the aggregated prestige rather than numerical total of one’s followers, Raymond Roussel would be a near-household name. André Breton named Roussel, along with Lautréamont, “the greatest magnetizer of modern times”, Marcel Duchamp called him “he who points the way”; for Dalí he was simply a “genius”. Other members of Roussel’s exalted claque of admirers included Robert de Montesquiou, André Gide and Jean Cocteau, who met Roussel in rehab. All of them recognized Roussel as a singular creative force without precedent or equal in French literature; “el loco solo” as one Spanish reviewer describes him.

The very first piece in the exhibition, Jacques Carelman’s large-scale 1975 installation Le Diamant, serves as a warning of the wonders to come. It is a rock-mounted prism enclosing a freakish assortment of figures and objects, moving by mechanical means. However it is not a product of the artist’s imagination, but of Roussel’s; Carelman is merely transcribing, rendering a descriptive passage in Roussel’s Locus Solus as literally as possible.

Roussel’s writings initially appeared as vanity publications which sold in miserably small quantities. The Surrealists were the first of several 20th century avant-garde movements which passed Roussel’s vividly obtuse books to each other like samizdat. While grateful for their interest, Roussel felt little kinship with Breton and his cohorts and kept his distance.

Locus Solus illustrates how surprisingly conventional Roussel’s tastes were. His holy trinity of literary heroes – Pierre Loti, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo – were names which wouldn’t have been out of place on any bourgeois bookshelf of the era. When Roussel wanted his works illustrated, he ignored the Surrealist artists who craved his patronage and turned instead to stolid academician Henri-Achille Zo (although in Roussel’s typically eccentric fashion he used a detective agency as an intermediary). Zo’s vigorously hatched Boy’s Own-style illustrations appear highly subversive when applied to Roussel’s delirious scenarios (a dissonance later exploited by Glen Baxter), but Roussel had no such sedition in mind.

Playbills and cast photos allude to one of the strangest byways of Roussel’s career. His unrequited yearning for the boulevard’s approval and wilful refusal to acknowledge his writings’ rarefied, niche appeal led him to stage his written works. A glance at the original novel of Impressions d’Afrique, as anti-theatrical as the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir, should have been sufficient to scare anyone off. It contains no dialogue and endless descriptive lunacy like the following passage: “Claude retained his human body but his head turned into a wild boar’s. Three objects of different weights, an egg, a glove and a wisp of straw, began jumping from his hands, which uncontrollably and continually tossed them in the air and caught them again. Like a juggler who, instead of commanding his knickknacks, was at their mercy, the wretched fellow ran in a straight line, prey to a kind of dizzying magnetic pull.”

With great wealth and no need to court the mainstream, Roussel nonetheless attempted to do just that. Audiences at the 1911 run of Impressions d’Afrique, expecting a tale of adventure and exoticism, were utterly bemused by what actually transpired – often loudly and demonstratively so. A later adaptation of Locus Solus was even heckled by Roussel’s own co-writer, and just as vociferously supported by Breton, Aragon, Michel Leiris and other partisans. But in contrast to the likes of Antonin Artaud or Alfred Jarry, provocation was not the aim of Roussel’s theatrical works.

So what was the aim of the demented busywork which constituted Roussel’s storylines? Were one to assess Roussel’s oeuvre, clipboard in hand, none of the conventional narrative motives would apply. The tick boxes against psychological investigation, philosophical enquiry, humorous diversion, momentary escapism, spiritual uplift, moral instruction, sentimental reflection – all of them would remain stubbornly unchecked. The Surrealists might have detected an unmediated transcription from an unfathomable and unfathomably disordered mind, but as those manuscripts show, Roussel was in fact a fastidious self-editor. His work is unquestionably bizarre, but it was not driven by the Surrealists’ desire to disrupt reason and foment revolution, nor was it a despairing Kafkaesque amplification of everyday absurdity.

And so you are left with nothing but a succession of mind-curlingly complicated, nonsensical, self-referential events, a closed world adhering to its own internal logic where tortures, ecstasies, trifles and miracles are all served up in the same crisp, affectless prose. In the words of Cocteau, one of Roussel’s most insightful supporters: “He peoples emptiness”.

That there had been method in Roussel’s madness all along was revealed by the posthumously published essay, How I Wrote Certain of My Books. It detailed the writer’s use of wordplay, a kind of Chinese Whispers which relied on double meanings not to punningly elicit a moment’s wry amusement, but to open up new narrative potential. But often that process merely defined the starting point and the destination; the route from one to the other was still governed by the GPS of Roussel’s formidable imagination.

Locus Solus calls on a rich store of visual artists who drew directly or indirectly from Roussel. Each of them illuminates a different aspect of the writer’s carnival of exotic arcana: Joseph Cornell’s self-contained galaxies of private wonder, Max Ernst’s nightmarish conjunctions of banalities, Francis Picabia’s anti-logical machines, Giorgio de Chirico’s guilelessly-rendered dreamscapes.

Unsurprisingly, given the Reina Sofia’s important Dalí collection and the Spanish artist’s devotion to Roussel, he is well represented here. Dalí’s use of visual double meanings mirrors Roussel’s wordplay, his “paranoiac-critical” method a reflection of Roussel’s self-imposed process. As well as canvases and sculptures, Locus Solus offers a projection of the film Impressions de la Haute Mongolie (subtitled Hommage à Raymond Roussel), in which Dalí works through his unrestrained hero worship.

If anything, Roussel’s influence on Marcel Duchamp was even greater. Duchamp acknowledged the writer as a key trigger for the most famous of his non-readymade pieces, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (here represented by the Stockholm replica). Even Duchamp’s premature abandonment of art for chess was apparently inspired by witnessing Roussel playing the game in a Paris café.

Roussel continued to move through the underground after World War II, but his influence mutated. No longer was he regarded as a gatekeeper of dreams. Instead it was his emphasis on process and surface which spoke to conceptual artists, Structuralists and the nouveau romanciers. American poet John Ashbery and associates established a literary journal named Locus Solus in 1962 while Michel Foucault’s book-length study of Roussel the following year was pivotal  in animating scholarly discussion of a writer still regarded by many as a mere wealthy eccentric. Allen Ruppersberg’s 1979 set of drawings Raymond Roussel Falls to the Floor echoes Roussel’s fetishistic, almost autistic focus on objects.

In the tomb-like vaults of the Reina Sofia, the exhibition feels somehow elegiac, fixing Roussel in the 20th century rather than pulling him through to the 21st. There is a handful of post-millennial works, such as Cristina Iglesias’s Impressions d’Afrique II, a room-size thicket of forbidding verbiage in cast metal. But they appear as isolated phenomena, included to press a point and not truly indicative of Roussel’s enduring significance for contemporary artists. And so with his influence largely played out, all that’s left is Roussel’s body of work itself, isolated, magnificent, self-enclosed, unique.

The catalogue for Locus Solus is the best single-volume introduction to the life, work and influence of Raymond Roussel. Along with crisp reproductions of photos, letters and manuscripts, it features contemporary critical analysis as well as commentary by supporters such as Duchamp, Breton, Cocteau, Dalí and Foucault. It also offers several extracts from Roussel’s own writings.

The writer affects nonchalance

]]> http://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/locus-solus-impresiones-de-raymond-roussel/feed/ 4 James Roussel1 roussel0001 roussel5 Portrait of Pierre Loti defaced by Roussel Manuscript of Locus Solus Joseph Cornell O Cristina Iglesias Roussel101 http://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/metropolis-of-vice/ http://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/metropolis-of-vice/#comments Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:00:44 +0000 James Conway http://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/?p=8065 ]]>

I discovered this online recently and thought you really ought to see it. It’s from a 2005 Canadian documentary about the “legendary sin cities” of the 1920s and 1930s including, naturally, Berlin. Its depiction of Weimar licentiousness is familiar Strange Flowers terrain, but there’s some great footage and thoughtful talking heads.

Anita Berber is there, naturally. Berber biographer Mel Gordon, recently mentioned in these pages, talks about the woman who shocked even the blasé Berliners. Also analysing this unprecedented period of social experimentation is David Clay Large, author of Berlin: A Modern History.

Enjoy!

So after yesterday’s round-up of the last year’s stray books, a look ahead at some volumes of interest scheduled to appear in 2012.

Thanks to Philosophy, lit, etc. for highlighting the imminent release of Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, a collection of the great Austrian writer’s correspondence. Roth, whom we briefly stalked in Berlin, exhibited the qualities of openness, empathy, intellectual curiosity and transnational worldliness to the utmost and at a time when those qualities were least valued and most imperilled. His letters are translated and annotated by Michael Hofmann, who also translated the highly recommended 2004 anthology of Roth’s 1920s newspaper reports from Berlin, What I Saw.

Another translation from the German coming out early this year: The Side Real Press will be issuing Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy (Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase) by Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste. The 1923 book of poetry by two of the most notorious figures to writhe across the Weimar Berlin stage has been translated by Merrill Cole and features an essay by Mel Gordon. The Side Real Press blog has an entertaining encounter with Gordon, author of the only English-language biography of Berber (The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber, 2006) while there’s more on the translation here. Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy, as I’ve surely mentioned before, is the source of the name Strange Flowers (“strange flowers and greenhouse plants, painted people and listless sounding bells. so far. so. distant. merging. breathing.”…everybody now!)

April brings a new, thematic compendium of the work of Aleister Crowley (those themes in full: Qabalah and Magick, Yoga and Magick, Sex and Magick, Magick and Law, Magick and Lies). The pieces in Portable Darkness were selected and annotated by Scott Michaelsen with forewords by Robert Anton Wilson and (again!) Genesis P-Orridge. It promises to guide “novice and adept alike through the complexities of his notoriously impenetrable writings”.

Meanwhile the literary output of Isabelle Eberhardt – haphazardly translated and collated over the years as interest in this pioneering, cross-dressing traveller has waxed and waned – appears to be undergoing a respectful overhaul. Writings from the Sand, Volume 1, scheduled for May, is the first instalment of The Collected Writings of Isabelle Eberhardt, though there is no indication of when further volumes will appear.

The same month welcomes American Hipster, a biography of Herbert Huncke, to the best of my knowledge the first. Huncke’s 1990 autobiography Guilty of Everything was a raw and not overly-reflective look back at his own life. American Hipster‘s subtitle (“The Times Square Hustler Who Inspired the Beat Movement”) raises hopes that author Hilary Holladay will give due credit to Huncke’s enormous influence on the likes of Kerouac and Ginsberg and the counterculture beyond.

Considering the frequency with which writers are labelled “Firbankian” (usually shorthand for arch, camp and wordy), it is remarkably hard to get hold of the real thing. The novels, that is, of early 20th century English writer Ronald Firbank. Wry, effete sensibilities will thus rejoice at the news that Penguin Classics are reissuing his first novel, Vainglory, also in May. Like the New Directions collection 3 More Novels of Ronald Firbank, which included Vainglory, it features an Andy Warhol illustration. Look forward to discovering or revisiting such passages of swooning fabulosity as this dreamlike journey through London: “Sometimes, when the mood seized her, she would wander, for hours, through the slow, deep streets of the capital, in a stiff, shelving mantle, with long, unfashionable folds. At other times, too, she would meet George Calvally, swathed like an idol, and they would drive together in a taxi, full of twilight, holding each other’s hands. Oh, the mad amusement of Piccadilly…the charm, unspeakable, of the Strand…the intoxication of the Embankment towards St Paul’s.”

In July, M.P. Shiel’s tale “Xelucha” is paired with Arthur Machen’s “Great God Pan” for the Creation Oneiros imprint, which sets out its stall at the intersection of Decadence and horror, two qualities “Xelucha”, at least, exhibits in spades. This passage is another London odyssey but the nightmarish atmosphere could hardly be less Firbankian: “The habit is now confirmed in me of spending the greater part of the day in sleep, while by night I wander far and wide through the city under the sedative influence of a tincture which has become necessary to my life. Such an existence of shadow is not without charm; nor, I think, could many minds be steadily subjected to its conditions without elevation, deepened awe. To travel alone with the Primordial cannot but be solemn. The moon is of the hue of the glow-worm; and Night of the sepulchre. Nux bore not less Thanatos than Hupuos, and the bitter tears of Isis redundulate to a flood. At three, if a cab rolls by, the sound has the augustness of thunder. Once, at two, near a corner, I came upon a priest, seated, dead, leering, his legs bent. One arm, supported on a knee, pointed with rigid accusing forefinger obliquely upward. By exact observation, I found that he indicated Betelgeux, the star “a” which shoulders the wet sword of Orion. He was hideously swollen, having perished of dropsy. Thus in all Supremes is a grotesquerie; and one of the sons of Night is — Buffo.”

Finally, via The Antoine Itineraries, comes the welcome news that autumn 2012 will bring yet more morbid, lurid, fetid, doom-laden Decadence in the form of the complete works of Anglo-Estonian writer Count Eric Stenbock. Apart from the occasional anthology, the count’s slim body of work has been out of reach to all but the best-heeled book collectors for over a century. Check here for updates.

Google Alerts, we need to talk. Day after day you stink out my inbox with links rarely even tangentially related to my search criteria, and yet you ignore something like this. “This” is Body Sweats, a collection of writings by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the Dada Baroness, and thus in the shadow world of Strange Flowers a capital B capital D Big Deal. Though it was published in November I’ve only recently found out about it.

It’s a Big Deal because the baroness is generally discussed more in the context of her provocative, performative public identity than her work (mea culpa). The silence which greeted her sculptures, poetry and prose when it first emerged exposed the chauvinism of the Dadaists, often as dismissive of women’s artistic contributions as the bourgeoisie they purported to disdain. This collection is edited by Irene Gammel, who wrote the excellent Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity – A Cultural Biography, and Suzanne Zelazo.

Here’s a look at the launch of the book and an exhibition dedicated to the life and works of Freytag-Loringhoven:

I hope to talk more about Body Sweats when I get my hands on it, but in the meantime I’ve leafed through 2011’s back pages to see what else I’ve missed (or in some cases, forgotten) of the year’s books.

Another MIT title, Alastair Brotchie’s Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life is the “the first full-length critical biography of Jarry in English”, according to the original publishers Atlas Press. The Atlas list has much to recommend it, trolleying fearlessly down the less-trafficked aisles of the cultural history hypermarket: pataphysics, Dadaism, Absurdism, Surrealism, proto-Surrealism. Titles include works by and about Jacques Rigaut, Hermann Nitsch and Erik Satie as well as the notorious poetic pisstake of Decadence, The Deliquescences of Adoré Floupette.

One book I really should have mentioned by now: the memoirs of fabulist Sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse. A little over a year ago I was lamenting the fact that Backhouse’s “memoirs” (actually a largely invented account of improbable sexual encounters with many of the great figures of the age, from Lord Alfred Douglas to the Dowager Empress) had not yet appeared in print. Not six months later, those self-same memoirs appeared. “If true,” pants the blurb, “Backhouse’s chronicle completely reshapes contemporary historians’ understanding of the era, and provides an account of the Empress Dowager and her inner circle that can only be described as intimate.” (Spoiler alert: it’s not true).

I’m grateful to form is void for opening my eyes to the fascinating Sam Steward, “professor, tattoo artist and sexual renegade”. Like Sir Edmund Backhouse, Steward claimed to have slept with Lord Alfred Douglas, the difference being that in his case it was true. And there were numerous other distinguished names in his meticulously documented list of clothes-optional encounters. Among the numerous virtues of Justin Spring’s book Secret Historian is that it answers the most obtuse question imaginable: what is the missing link between Gertrude Stein and Ed Hardy?

My psyche is still recovering from its first glimpse into the world of Maximillen de Lafayette. I stumbled across him as the author of the first English language biography of can-can star La Goulue. Have a look at the Amazon entry for the book: I urge you in the strongest possible terms to scroll down and read Monsieur Lafayette’s epigrams (e.g. “If the top of your head is made of butter, don’t walk in the sun.”) His website is quite something, the design apparently the result of an experiment whereby meth-addicted lab monkeys are taught rudimentary HTML. The dozens of titles on offer cover everything from hospitality to UFOs. Choose from How to Read Peoples’ Vibes and Know Who They Really Are Just by Looking at Them (See their Aura, Sense their Vibes, Feel their Energy), How Some Famous Ufologists, Ancient Aliens & Ancient Astronauts Theorists Fooled You. Are They So Ignorant Or Simply Dumb? and How to Make Lots of Money from your Restaurant and Don’t Let Employees and Customers Steal from You!! According to the website De Lafayette apparently “wrote more than 1,200 books, 11 Dictionaries, and 9 encyclopedias”, all without recognising the difference between the simple past and the present perfect. Edging out on a limb and assuming the urbanely cravatted figure pictured on the home page hasn’t actually, personally penned 1,200 books, we are left to speculate who or what is responsible for this geyser of published wisdom (Wikipedia-skimming content bot? Consortium of ill-paid freelancers? Aliens?).

I haven’t yet read Nigel Kelly’s recent biography of Quentin Crisp, The Profession of Being, but heartily applaud any serious study of the great unacknowledged philosopher of the 20th century and — much as I imagine the ever-gracious Mr Crisp himself would have done —  I pass politely over the cover without comment. Meanwhile, the last collection of unpublished Crisp writings, Dusty Answers, remains…unpublished.

There is but one degree of separation between the late Mr Crisp and the German illustrator, writer and ambulant performance piece Alastair. The missing link is the Marchesa Casati, who once served as Alastair’s muse and patron and later – well into her decline – encountered Crisp in London. Thanks to feuilleton for pointing out a new monograph featuring Alastair’s rarefied, demonic, rococo graphic work. It seems to largely duplicate the efforts of Victor Arwas’ out-of-print Alastair: Illustrator of Decadence, but until Alastair’s extraordinary life and work get the full-scale chi-chi coffee table treatment they so richly deserve, any new compendium is welcome. Oh, and if you want to know how much it would cost to find Alastair’s illustrations in their natural habitat, check out some eye-watering prices at Bookride.

More sulphurous imagery from Daemons of Pleasure, a collection of theoretical writings by Austin Osman Spare, better known as an artist, with an introduction from the brilliant Genesis P-Orridge. It appears to be in purely digital form at present. For German readers, a new translation Austin Osman Spare: Kunst und Magie was also published recently.

The Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon by William Cross is the first biography of the wife of the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, of busting-open-Tutankhamun’s-tomb-and-dying fame. Almina, most probably an illegitimate Rothschild, was clearly a fascinating woman in her own right. “Here opening up before us the physical and emotional idiosyncrasies of our Victorian and Edwardian ‘betters’,” aver the publishers, “the philanthropists, the litigants, the loveless unions, the skeletons half in and half out of the closet, the gamblers, the rakes and adulterers, all written with an authentic eye on the facts as far as they can be established glimpsed through the ever closing ranks of the British aristocracy.”

Finally, a catalogue of artworks related to our old friend Raymond Roussel. Locus Solus takes its name from a novel written by Roussel in 1914, about a wealthy eccentric who surrounds himself with bizarre marvels (which, incidentally, is a servicable description of the writer’s own career). The name “Locus Solus” is here applied to a Madrid exhibition exploring the French writer in the context of visual art, which I hope to report on next week.

Please leave a comment if you think I’ve left out any unsung 2011 titles with Strange Flowers appeal!

Meanwhile, for a zesty, satisfying serving of books that everyone has more or less ignored over the years, I invite you to discover my new favourite blog, the auto-explanatory Writers No One Reads. The unappreciated talents and singular personalities profiled include Stefan Grabinski, “the Polish Poe”; Aloysius Bertrand, most maudit of poètes; and Romanian Surrealist suicide, Ghérasim Luca. The excerpts and author descriptions make you want to instantly render the blog’s name untrue.

The story of film actress Fearless Nadia becomes no less astonishing with retelling. Briefly: FN, born Mary Ann Evans in Perth, Australia on this day in 1908, grew up in India and performed in circuses before becoming a star of early Indian films, proving a huge Bollywood box office draw. Even more remarkable, her characters were of a type for which there were virtually no precedents in either Indian or Western films of the time – a kick-ass action heroine avenging wrongdoing in violent hand-to-hand combat which fully justified her pseudonym.

A documentary before Nadia’s death in 1996 and a book some years after have sustained ongoing interest in this unlikely pioneer. In her (and my) homeland a 2008 musical was followed by an unusual tribute last year, when she became the posthumous figurehead for a series of papers commenting on relations between India and Australia.

Thankfully more of Fearless Nadia’s film work is now available online. The three videos below range from 1936 to 1943, though the first is largely devoted to a haunting ghazal. These postings are clearly the work of a fan so I’m sure we can forgive his excessive watermarking which obscure the already compromised sound and vision of these precious fragments.

Even without understanding the dialogue it is clear that Fearless Nadia was unafraid to speak truth to power (or thump seven shades of shit out of power and send it crying to its mama). Nadia’s armoury variously includes a wheelbarrow, wagon wheel, her signature whip as well as the more conventional sword and gun.

Enjoy!

At this reform-minded time of year, we take a look at the utilitarian slash messianic wardrobe reforms of German artist Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach.

Diefenbach was shaping up to be just an averagely bohemian scenester in 1880s Munich when he reached an epiphany about the course and form of his life. In 1882 he retreated, Moses-like, to the mountain of Hohenpeißenberg and descended, in similarly Mosaic fashion, with a new creed.

He was soon pronouncing the virtues of free love and the vice of cigarettes, preaching temperance and vegetarianism to a city sodden with beer and swollen with wurst. But it was Diefenbach’s approach to dress which most alarmed Wilhelmine Germany. All about him good Bavarian burghers attended to their business in frock coats and the kind of women’s dresses which would have satisfied most definitions of torture had they been imposed by an invading force rather than convention. Diefenbach, meanwhile, trod the cobbles in sandals with long hair, bushy beard and capacious robes all flowing freely in the breeze.

With other free spirits such as Franziska zu Reventlow, he made the progressive district of Schwabing his stage. But the rigour of his vision intimidated even his fellow bohemians and the voluminously cowled Diefenbach was subject to derision in avant-garde periodicals, distinguished from the invective of the average Münchner on the strasse only by the pretentiousness of its prose.

Diefenbach wasn’t alone in his fundamental rethink of the modern wardrobe – the British Reform Dress movement was gaining ground around the same time. But Diefenbach went much further, bemoaning the “plague of clothing” which imprisoned bodies yearning for sunlight. He accepted no binding of the body, striding provocatively hatless, brazenly commando under his billowing cloak (this, mind, in Germany’s coldest city).  He used his art to parody the clothing of his age, showing apes dressed in typical bourgeois fashions. Meanwhile his most ambitious work, the monumental frieze Per aspera ad astra, was crowded with the cherubic forms of his own children whom he allowed to run naked. For the logical end point of his trajectory of thought was, naturally enough, naturism.

Predictably, Diefenbach had numerous run-ins with authority. He was rejected from the venerable Pinakothek museum in 1884 because his duds apparently represented an “irreconcilable contradiction” to the institution’s standards. The following year his public appearances, at which he preached his radical lifestyle reforms, were banned by the police.

Schwabing may have been more socially advanced than the rest of the Bavarian capital, but it offered scarcely more protection for one so exotic than the more bourgeois parts of the city. Diefenbach, suffused with messianic fervour, led his followers to a new promised land (which, by a stroke of luck, was located in nearby Austria). Along with his herd of naked children were disciples like Gusto Gräser and Hugo Höppener, named “Fidus” for his loyalty. Diefenbach would preach the word of Christ (minus the tenets of Christianity) before a giant crucifix, his freestyle spirituality and progressive lifestyle a prophetic forerunner of the 1960s. But his conception of himself as a benevolent patriarch looked even further ahead to the bastard children of Aquarius, the lost souls who drifted into cults. Diefenbach’s fanatical ordering of his followers’ lives had a smack of Jim Jones and like Rajneesh, he didn’t deny himself worldly pleasures while urging the ascetic self-denial of desert saints on his followers.

Diefenbach’s utopia eventually succumbed to drear reality, as utopias always do. But we’re fortunate that his life stages and forward-thinking outfits were richly documented. Here is a selection of images from the exhibition “Besser sterben, als meine Ideale verleugnen!” (“Better to die than deny my ideals!”):

Strange Flowers is taking a break until the New Year, so in the meantime Arthur “Chuckles” Cravan and I wish you a very safe and happy holiday season and all good things for 2012.

Thank you for your interest, comments and support throughout the year. We’ll see you on the other side!

I am determined to live my life, to drain its cup to the very dregs, to live each day, each hour, feverishly perhaps just now – I am absolutely ravenous for Life: what I do matters not so very much, as long as I live!

- Peter Warlock

British composer Peter Warlock was born, magnificently, in London’s Savoy Hotel under the fractionally less magnificent birth name Philip Heseltine, in 1894. His father was an affluent solicitor who died when Philip was only two years old and the boy had a close, at times claustrophobic relationship with his mother.

Young Philip evinced an early and intense interest for music. While still at Eton he conceived something close to a mania for the music of Frederick Delius, and through his mother met the composer. Although his passion for Delius would cool, partly replaced by another for Dutch composer Bernard van Dieren, they remained long-term friends – an impressive achievement given the burn rate of Warlock’s associates.

Warlock’s enthusiasms were as tempestuous as his disdain, and the flip side of that antsy vitality of the opening quote was the crippling despair to which he would periodically succumb. He conducted vituperative public feuds, writing obscene limericks about his enemies which he at one stage anthologised on a toilet roll.

In 1915, Warlock contrived to meet D.H. Lawrence, only to break with him the following year. The ensuing rift brought out each man’s scatological qualities. “Heseltine ought to be flushed down a sewer,” said Lawrence, “for he is a simple shit”. Warlock, meanwhile, used an original Lawrence manuscript as toilet paper. He sued Lawrence over his thinly-veiled appearance as Halliday in Women in Love, winning an out-of-court settlement.

Philip Heseltine first used his most famous pseudonym in an article about Eugene Goossens in 1916 (another of his many handles was Roger A. Ramsbottom; his humour remained arrested in adolescence). The name Peter Warlock was evidently chosen more or less at random, although it offered a premonition of his later interest in the occult. It was also a useful identity for the Bohemian existence he was by now pursuing (contemporaries used the pseudonym and birth name interchangeably; I refer to him here, as posterity generally does, as Warlock).

Bohemian chatter has Warlock stripping off in Piccadilly Circus, tearing naked through quiet village lanes on his motorbike, or conducting what British tabloids inevitably refer to as “three-in-a-bed romps”. He shared a “queer barn-like studio” in Battersea with writer and composer Cecil Gray and frequented the Café Royal, inevitably coming under the influence of Augustus John. There he met ‘Puma’ – Minnie Lucy Channing, a beautiful artist’s model – whom he would later marry. Virginia Nicholson claims in Among the Bohemians that his table “was always a magnet to those who found his ribaldry and invective entertaining.” Typically, Warlock turned on his onetime local, later describing the Royal as “the very vortex of the cesspool of corruption”.

Warlock’s early career was erratic. Nancy Cunard’s mother got him a job as a music critic at the Daily Mail in 1915, where he worked for only four months. Oppressed by London and fearing that his previous exemption from the draft would be reviewed, Warlock left for Ireland with Puma in 1917. By that time the two had had a son, Nigel, but gave him away.

Poverty forced Warlock to retreat to his family’s house in Wales, a humiliation which nonetheless found him composing prolifically. He was also deepening his interest in the occult which had emerged in Ireland. Augustus John reports that on a visit to a Norfolk church, Warlock had light-heartedly suggested sacrificing his mistress Barbara Peache, whereupon the building was struck by lightning. Warlock was influenced by Aleister Crowley and maintained a friendship with Victor Neuberg, Crowley’s hapless, traumatised disciple.

Warlock returned to London to edit a music journal, The Sackbut, an exercise which ended predictably in rancour and recriminations. He spent much of the second half of the 1920s in a cottage in Eynsford, Kent with a regular stream of visitors including Nina Hamnett, Constant Lambert and Lord Berners. A regular Sunday ritual saw guests conducting a program of sea shanties and other off-colour musical offerings directed at the nearby church, followed by Olympian drinking bouts. Their excesses even bested Nina Hamnett, a woman who – God knows – could hold her drink. On one such occasion she simply face planted and passed out. For Warlock, wild exultation alternated with crippling depressions, and his workflow followed a similar pattern of total absorption or utter inertia.

It was the latter which won out in the end. On this day in 1930, Warlock died in Chelsea’s Tite Street, just two doors down from Oscar Wilde’s London home, succumbing to a gas leak. He was only 36 years old. The subsequent inquest returned an open verdict, but various clues point to suicide: Warlock had already spoken of taking his own life, revised his will shortly before his death, took care to put the cat out before retiring on the night in question.

Warlock left more than his music behind. Seven months after his death one of his mistresses, Jessica Goldblatt, gave birth to a son. That boy grew up to be one of Britain’s most high-profile art critics, Brian Sewell. Over 12 years ago he was dropping clues to his father’s identity which would have been unmistakable to anyone familiar with Warlock’s story. But it was only with the recent publication of his autobiography, Outsider, that he revealed his father’s name (along with accounts of queer sexual abandon to rival Edmund White’s City Boy).

Sewell’s extraordinary voice, a kind of exasperated, beyond-posh bray apparently instilled by his mother, is a long-running meme in Britain. But the similarities with his father – critical incivility, sexual incontinence and manic depression – are even stronger.

Of course it’s unfair to reduce any artist to the sum of his eccentricities. I can claim no detailed knowledge of Warlock’s oeuvre but would humbly suggest two pieces as a starting point if you would like to explore further. The first is The Curlew, an intensely melancholic setting of four Yeats poems. And to bring you back from the brink, a far more uplifting and seasonally appropriate work.