Arthur
Cravan (born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd[2] on
22 May 1887, Lausanne, Switzerland – disappeared 1918) was a Swiss writer,
poet, artist and boxer. He was the second son of Otho Holland Lloyd and Hélène
Clara St. Clair. His brother Otho Lloyd was a painter and photographer married
to the Russian émigré artist Olga Sacharoff.[3] His
father's sister, Constance Mary Lloyd, was married to Irish poet Oscar
Wilde.[4] He
changed his name to Cravan in 1912 in honour of his fiancée Renée Bouchet, who
was born in the small village of Cravans in the department of
Charente-Maritime in western France. Cravan was last seen at Salina
Cruz, Mexico in 1918[5] and
most likely drowned in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico in November
1918.[6]
Cravan was born and educated in Lausanne, Switzerland, then at an English
military academy; he was expelled under mysterious circumstances, but some
sources suggest that it was for spanking a teacher.[7] After
his schooling, during World War I, he travelled throughout Europe and America
using a variety of passports and documents, most of them forged.[8] He
declared no single nationality and claimed instead to be "a citizen of 20
countries".
Cravan set out to promote himself as an eccentric poet and art critic, but
his interest in art and literature was that of the provocateur which is
typified by his claim in Maintenant (March – April 1914) that art is "situated
more in the guts than in the brain" and that he wanted to "break the face" of
the modern art movement.[6] He
staged public spectacles with himself at the centre, once acting on the front
of a line of carts where he paraded his skills as a boxer and singer. His
proclivity for shock was what endeared him to the New York Dadaist movement,
who adopted him as a poster boy after his death despite the fact Cravan never
self-identified with the movement. From 1911 to 1915, Cravan published and
edited a critical literary magazine, Maintenant! ("Now!"), which appeared in
five issues and which he notoriously distributed around Paris with a
wheelbarrow.[6] It
was gathered together and reprinted by Eric Losfeld in 1971 as J'étais
Cigare in the Dadaist collection "Le Désordre".[9] The
magazine was designed to cause sensation; in a piece about the 1914 arts
salon, Cravan viciously criticised a self-portrait by Marie
Laurencin. His remarks drove Laurencin's lover and influential modernist
critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire into a fury that resulted in a bid for a
duel. It is not known whether the duel ever happened, though Apollinaire was
depicted more than once with a sling on his arm around that time. Cravan's
rough vibrant poetry and provocative, anarchistic lectures and public
appearances (often degenerating into drunken brawls) earned him the admiration
of Marcel Duchamp, Francis
Picabia, André Breton, and other young artists and intellectuals. Carolyn
Burke notes that Amelia von Ende, writing in The Dial in 1914, argued that
Cravan "had not only put the idea of pluralisme into poetic form but also
invented the term 'machinisme', which very appropriately characterises the
mechanical and industrial side of our life. [...] [von Ende] observed that
Cravan's 'machinisme' had not found favour because it was less euphonious than
'dynamism', the critical term in vogue."[6][10]
After the First World War began, Cravan left Paris to avoid being drafted into
military service.[9] On
a stopover in the Canary Islands a boxing match was arranged in Barcelona
between Cravan and the former world champion Jack Johnson to raise money for
Cravan's passage to the United States. Posters for the match touted Cravan as
"European champion". Johnson, who didn't know who the man was, knocked Cravan
out cold after six rounds. In his autobiography, My Life and Battles, Johnson
noted that Cravan must have been out of training. Cravan's pride in being the
nephew of Oscar Wilde produced hoax documents and poems which Cravan wrote and
then signed "Oscar Wilde". In 1913 he published an article ("Oscar Wilde is
Alive!") in Maintenant claiming that his uncle was still alive and had visited
him in Paris. The New York Times published the rumour, even though Cravan and
Wilde never met.[6] In
1915 Cravan held an exhibition of his paintings at the gallery Bernheim Jeune
in Paris under the pseudonym Èdouard Archinard.
On 13 January 1916 Cravan arrived in New York on the same ship as Leon
Trotsky, Carolyn Burke notes, "just a few weeks before the Kaiser announced
the resumption of attacks on steamships".[6] On
the journey Trotsky and Cravan actually became acquainted and, although Cravan
reportedly liked Trotsky, he felt that "It was useless telling him the result
of his revolution would be the founding of a red army to protect the red
liberty".[6] While
Cravan's practices may have aligned with certain anarchist and socialist
principles, he was staunchly unaffiliated, mocked all notions of progress and
subscribed to no single ideology or movement. In 1917, Cravan met the poet Mina
Loy at a war benefit ball where the dress code was modern art movements.
That night Cravan had to deliver an address on "The Independent Artists of
France and America" but he was pranked by Picabia and Duchamp who got him so
drunk that he ended up swaying and slurring his speech on the platform,
shouting obscenities and removing his coat, vest, collar and suspenders.[6] This
led to his arrest by four private detectives at the event but, after being
taken to the local police station, Cravan was soon bailed out by friend Walter
Conrad Arensberg who took him back to his home at West Sixty-Seventh Street.[6]
Loy was to describe him, for the rest of her life, as the love of her life.
Cravan left New York for Mexico on 1 September with a friend called Frost.
Around this time in his letters to Loy, who remained in New York, he wrote
that "I am only at my best when travelling" and that "[w]hen I have to stay
too long in the same place, I become almost imbecilic."[6] Together
Cravan and Frost hitchhiked north through Connecticut, Massachusetts, and
Maine to Canada. After many failed attempts to sail from Nova Scotia to
Newfoundland due to the Canadian authorities refusing their lack of papers,
Frost became ill and Cravan boarded a schooner bound for Mexico alone.[6]
By December, Cravan had reached Mexico City and sent Loy a multitude of
letters pleading with her to join him, insisting that his life depended upon
it. In one such letter he begged for a lock of her hair and begged, "Better
yet, come with all of your hair." He finished this letter with: "La vie est
atroce."[6] Soon
after this Loy purchased a one-way ticket to Mexico City involving a 5-day
train journey.[6]
Loy, in one of the extracts from her autobiography Colossus (the title taking
after her name for Cravan), recalls their time in Mexico City: "Our life
together consisted entirely in wandering arm in arm through the streets. It
never made any difference what we were doing – making love or respectfully
eyeing canned foods in groceries, eating our tamales at street corners or
walking among weeds. Somehow we had tapped the source of enchantment." Not too
long after Loy's arrival the pair decided to get married and, as they were
unable to afford a luxurious wedding in a Mexican chapel, the pair eventually
got married on 25 January 1918 at the major's office with two passersby as
witnesses.[6]
The couple lived on very humble means and Cravan eventually got seriously ill
with amoebic dysentery, fever, stomach issues.[6] During
this time there was increasing pressure for the couple to leave Mexico city as
Cravan, being a draft-dodger, was being pursued by American secret police.
After Loy nursed him back to health, the couple decided to leave Mexico City
separately – Loy leaving first, in order to research escape routes to
Argentina, and Cravan remaining in order to raise some money. In his
desperation Cravan took up a fight against Jim Smith in which he was
humiliatingly beaten.[6]
After reuniting it was clear that Loy was pregnant. With very little money,
and Cravan's passport documents still not in order, it was agreed that Loy
would travel on a passenger ship to protect her health and Cravan, as well as
his friends Winchester, Cattell, and their Swedish friend (none of whom had
the necessary papers) would sail to Chile. After purchasing and repairing an
old, small, craft cheaply in Salina Cruz, Cravan sailed alone to Puerto Angel,
a few days up the coast, with the intention of selling or trading it for a
larger vessel which he would then return to Salina Cruz in so as to
accommodate all his friends in their journey to Chile.[6][11]
Cravan never arrived or returned and it is presumed that he capsized and
drowned in a storm raging at sea in the following days.[9]
Loy gave birth to Fabienne Cravan Lloyd, named after her father, on 5 April
1919 in London.[6]
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