4 Dada Suicides: Selected Texts of Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma and Jacques Vache. - book reviews

By Roger Conover, Terry Hale and Pual Lenti, London, Atlas Press, 1995; 269 pages, paperback $17.99.

In the first issue of La Revolution surrialiste the editors asked, "Is Suicide a Solution?" Some of the responses were rhetorical bombast, and a few contributors later answered convincingly by taking their own lives. Viewed through a Dada lens, suicide embodied negation, disorganization and rebellion, all in absurd extremis. This book's perhaps too-neat title, 4 Dada Suicides, suggests that one might connect the four titular dots: Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma, Jacques Vache. But these dots don't connect. Not all of these figures were Dadaist, nor were they all, strictly speaking, suicides. Yet, in the wake of the First World War, their fates seemed to confirm Dada's violent rejection of the European status quo.

Cravan vanished under mysterious circumstances in Mexico in 1918. Vache's death the following year was due to an opium overdose, perhaps accidental. In the case of Torma, not only is his 1933 disappearance in the Tyrol unexplained but it has been suggested that his very existence was an elaborate hoax. Rigaut, whose darkly hilarious "The General Suicide Agency" is translated here for the first time, most painstakingly regarded suicide as a vocation. (When Rigaut ended his life in 1929, he used a ruler to ensure that he was shooting himself squarely through the heart.)

For each of the elusive quartet, the book's author/translators (Paul Leni, Roger Conover and Terry Hale) present texts by the subject, elegantly sandwiched between biographical sketches and contemporaneous accounts about them. This hybrid form provides a complex perspective for glimpsing men whose lives were more telling than the writing they left behind. Transforming sparse information into a virtue, these essays mix the personal voice of the subject, the precise information of the scholar and the close-up perspective of contemporaries. At their best, the original texts are provocative, aphoristic and eminently worthy of translation. The centerpieces of the book, they also benefit enormously from their accompanying commentary. The interest of Vache's World War I letters, for example, is enhanced when we learn that their recipient, Andre Breton, greatly romanticized Vache ("I will never belong to anyone else . . . " ) and was in part inspired to found Surrealism in his memory. This adolescent dandy and suicide became a talisman of the new movement.

Cravan benefits most fully from the condensed treatment. His fantastic life as boxer, poet, editor and provocateur lends itself to fairy-tale rendition--and he has found the ideal biographer in Roger Conover, who artfully speculates about the facts he has unearthed, such as the possibility that Cravan returned to Paris under an assumed identity ("Dorian Hope") and survived by forging Oscar Wilde manuscripts. (He was in fact Wilde's nephew.)

Poet Julien Torma is the least engaging of the four, and if his existence is indeed a ruse, one wishes it had been a more vivid creation. (Torma might have been replaced by the Surrealist writer Rene Crevel.) But this is a small complaint for a book that never outstays its welcome. 4 Dada Suicides offers a sharp and stylish look at the personas that can be created in the liberating space between life and death. "Try, if you can," wrote Jacques Rigaut, "to arrest a man who travels with suicide in his buttonhole."

Max Kozloff's latest book is Lone Visions/Crowded Frames/Essays on Photography (University of New Mexico Press, 1994). Steven Watson is the author of Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (Abbeville, 1991) and The Birth of the Beat Generation (forthcoming).

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