Henri Michaux

Biography

In 1964 Michaux was awarded France’s national prize for literature, and he refused to accept it. This was no exception: he shunned publicity all his life. Interviews, lectures, television, photographs and scholarly editions were all unwelcome to him. A hundred or so letters of refusal were published in 2016 as a separate book under the title “Donc c’est non” (“So, no”).

He was born on 24 May 1899 in Namur, but lived there only about a year. His childhood was spent in a well-off family in Brussels; then came a boarding school near Mechelen and the Jesuit Collège Saint-Michel in Brussels. He grew up a sickly, withdrawn adolescent, read a great deal and was drawn to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. After the German occupation of Belgium he tried to study medicine, soon gave it up, and in 1920–1921 worked as a sailor, sailing to Germany, Britain, and North and South America; the voyages ended when his ship was taken out of service.

Lautréamont, it seems, pushed him to write. His first book, “Cas de folie circulaire”, appeared in 1922, followed by “Les Rêves et la Jambe” (1923) and “Qui je fus” (“Who I Was”, 1927). From 1922 he published in the avant-garde magazine Le Disque vert, run by his friend Franz Hellens, and from 1923 he sat on its editorial board and edited the issue devoted to Freud. His early work he later hid and destroyed: of some texts he said that he did not recognise “this horror”.

In the mid-1920s he moved to Paris and lived there from 1924. In time he himself disowned any tie to Belgium, but he kept Paris and France as his own. He made friends with the poet Jules Supervielle, travelled with him in 1936 to Uruguay and then to Buenos Aires for the congress of PEN International. His publisher at the Nouvelle Revue Française was Jean Paulhan. Some of his smaller collections, at times with his drawings, came out in small print runs from small publishers.

Travel gave him books. “Ecuador” (1929) sits between a diary and poetry: the entry for 10 January opens with an address to the ocean, which one might walk upon. In 1930–1931 he visited Japan, China and India, and the result was “A Barbarian in Asia” (1933); Jorge Luis Borges translated it into Spanish in 1941. Asian calligraphy and Buddhist thought later found their way into both his poems and his drawings. There are also imaginary journeys: “Voyage en Grande Garabagne” (1936) and “Au pays de la magie” (“In the Land of Magic”, 1941). There live creatures with names such as the Burbumes and the Chérinots, and the narrator cautiously hedges with “a sort of monster”, like an honest observer. Alongside runs the story of Plume, the most unenterprising hero in French prose, “a peaceable man”.

He began to draw in 1925. To my mind it is curious that the push came from an exhibition of the Surrealists, while he argued with Breton himself: in a note for Le Disque vert he mocked automatic writing. He is often called a Surrealist, but he never belonged to the group. His first exhibition took place in 1937 at the gallery of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in Paris. He worked in watercolour, gouache, ink and pencil and made prints, and his later drawings often contain signs resembling writing without words. Critics link him with Tachisme of the 1940s and 1950s, although that describes only part of his work, such as the hallucinatory faces and heads.

In January 1955 he took mescaline for the first time, in the presence of Jean Paulhan and the Swiss poet Édith Boissonnas; the experiment was repeated, and Michaux added a fourth, alone. The sessions were conducted under a doctor’s supervision, with calculated doses, a written protocol and drawings made on the spot. The result was the book “Miserable Miracle” (1956), with forty-eight of his drawings; later came “Connaissance par les gouffres” (“Light Through Darkness”, 1961) and “The Major Ordeals of the Mind” (1966). In 1963, together with Éric Duvivier, he made for the Swiss firm Sandoz an educational film, “Images du monde visionnaire”, on the effects of mescaline and hashish.

From 1955 he was a French citizen. In 1960 he won a prize at the Venice Biennale, and in 1964 the first large retrospective of his paintings and drawings opened at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Galerie Motte in Geneva. Similar exhibitions later took place in Paris, Brussels, Vienna, Stockholm, Lisbon, New York, Montreal and Tokyo; in 1978 his work was shown by the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His complete works appeared in three volumes of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1998–2004, after his death.

In 1983 he appeared in public for one of the last times: at Borges’s lecture at the Collège de France.

Michaux died on 19 October 1984 in Paris, aged 85. The funeral was held privately at the Père-Lachaise crematorium, where he was cremated.