Michel Leiris 1901-1990
biography
Michel Leiris was born in 1901. He grew up in comfortable Parisian bourgeois surroundings. The earnest student of chemistry was soon seduced by the exciting world of cafes and cabarets, and particularly by the heady stimulus of Dadaism and Surrealism. Introduced to surrealist circles by his lifelong friend Andre Masson, Leiris by the late 1920's had become one of the earliest defectors from the movement. Subsequently, he co-founded, with George Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Klossowski and Roger Caillois the College de Sociologie. His continuing ethnographic fascination with the cultures of Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America, as well as his extensive fieldwork in Sudan and Ethiopia, have produced such literary fruits as his unique travel account L'Afrique Fantome (1933). He is also the author of a four volume autobiography, La Regle du Jeu, of which the first volume was published in English as Manhood. Leiris lived in Paris with his wife, owner of the Galerie Louise Leiris, a major art institution in the post-war period. Leiris has written extensively on major modern artists - among them Miro, Giacometti, Duchamp, Lam, and Bacon.
selected works in translation
Aurora translated by Anna Warby (Atlas, 1990)
Nights as Day, Days as Night translated by Richard Sieburth (Eridanos Press, 1987)
The Cardinal Point in The Automatic Muse translated by Terry Hale and Iain White (Atlas 1994)
writing
excerpts from -Nights as Day, Days as Night
May 7-8, 1925
Travels, railways. Before leaving Paris - or passing through Paris - I arranged to meet my mother in, for example, one of the forward cars of such and such a train at the Amsterdam Station. In my dream, I seem to be remembering an earlier dream that appears to provide a precedent for my current situation: having forgotten my suitcase on a train and having figured out the location of my compartment, I wait for the next train, convinced I will find my suitcase in the corresponding compartment; which is exactly what happens.
Undated
I observe the following bit of dialogue between Andre Breton and Robert Desnos, or I read it as if it were a fragment of a play with stage directions:
A.B.: (to Robert Desnos) The seimoteric tradition...
R.D. (turns into a stack of plates).
Undated
A tree with three branches (that are snakes) taps at my windowpane, dressed in a ready-to-wear suit and a broken detachable collar.
Somewhat later that night, a dog I imagine to be lying between my mattress and my bedspring turns into a long bronze reptile whose porcupine-like quills penetrate my body.
April 2-3, 1934
This woman I am in love with and I are following our story in an illustrated weekly for children. Each week we buy a new installment and both in the little blocks of print and in the accompanying illustrations, we discover descriptions of everything we will be doing.
return to the library
return to kicking giants