Babylon by Rene Crevel

First Edition

North Point Press, 1985

Illustrated by Max Ernst. Translated and with an Afterword by Kay Boyle.

“The first of Rene Crevel's six novels to appear in English, is a fabulous beast: it has a novel head, a prose-poem body, and wings simultaneously rickety and strong, which send it skittering about like a kite, bouncing here and there, then catching an inspired gust to heave itself at the sky.”—NYT

Babylon is a landmark of Surrealist literature, an enduring achievement of one of its leading figures, Rene Crevel. Crevel explores the private worlds of children and their sexual imaginations in this important novel.

Crevel was born in Paris to a family of Parisian bourgeoisie. He had a traumatic religious upbringing. At the age of fourteen, during a difficult stage of his life, his father committed suicide by hanging himself. Crevel studied English at the University of Paris. He met André Breton and joined the surrealist movement in 1921, from which he would be excluded in October 1923 due to Crevel's homosexuality and Breton's belief that the movement had been corrupted. During this period, Crevel wrote novels such as Mon corps et moi ("My Body and Me").

In 1926, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis which made him start using morphine. The 1929 exile of Léon Trotsky persuaded him to rejoin the surrealists. Remaining faithful to André Breton, he struggled to bring communists and surrealists closer together. Much of Crevel's work deals with his inner turmoil at being bisexual. Crevel killed himself by turning on the gas on his kitchen stove the night of 18 June 1935, several weeks before his 35th birthday.