“Fabian Lloyd aka Arthur Cravan (1887-1918) put all his genius into his short life; he put only his talent (and a limited one at that) into his works. As David Lalé writes in the recently-published Last Stop Salina Cruz: ‘His was a life dedicated to wanton destruction, to the extent that he elevated scandal and humiliation into an art form’. Almost too bad to be true, he inspired Gide’s Lafcadio — the infamous character who kills a man for no other reason but to exercise his free will — and kick-started the Dada insurrection when he crossed paths with Picabia in Spain.
After being expelled from an English military academy for spanking a teacher, Lloyd relocated to bohemian Paris where he adopted his pseudonym, partied hard with the likes of Blaise Cendrars and managed to become France’s heavyweight champion without fighting a single match. Never one to shy away from self-promotion, Cravan ruthlessly exploited his reputation as a pugilist poet (although his boxing was on a par with his writing skills) and got a lot of mileage out of being Oscar Wilde’s nephew. His antics — including giving lectures during which he insulted, mooned and fired gunshots at the audience — led to rough justice at the hands of an angry mob of avant-garde painters as well as a duel challenge courtesy of poor old Apollinaire. Significantly enough, he printed his literary journal on wrapping paper from a butcher’s shop. The onset of the war marked the beginning of a convoluted vanishing act that led him — in various guises — from Paris to Mexico where he disappeared at sea on a drunken boat of his own making. His body was never found. Cravan, the eponymous colossus of Mina Loy’s novel, had always been larger than life; now, he had taken elusiveness to the point of illusiveness. For decades, he would continue to be spotted in different parts of the world. He is still at large.”
[Text: excerpt from the Guardian Books Blog. Video 1: the only footage we have of Cravan as a boxer. Video 2: René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924) featuring Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray, Erik Satie… Spot the references to Arthur Cravan.]
First posted: Wednesday, September 26th, 2007.
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