As anyone who has ever tried to read him will know, the word "eccentric" scarcely begins to do justice to Raymond Roussel (1877-1933). A Parisian haut bourgeois, he was raised in luxury of which even the cosseted Proust could only dream, and began to write in his teens after falling into a trance-like state he termed la gloire. While in it, he composed the long poem La Doublure, believing his body was giving off rays of light visible as far away as China. He published the book at his own expense and was crushed by its utter failure to make an impression. He would have to try again and did, always with the same result. Mark Ford's Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams chronicles the books, the public disasters and the opaque personality behind them with consummate skill and devotion.
Roussel's many books would make even less sense than they do but for a short posthumous essay in which he explains the bizarre language games that were his inspiration. Taking a phrase such as les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard (the letters of the alphabet on the cushions of the old billiard table), Roussel would change one letter, in this case producing les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard (the correspondence of the white man about the hordes of the old plunderer), and devise a story that would lead from one to the other. Perhaps the best-known of Roussel's books is the 1910 novel Impressions of Africa, a country he had visited at length, though, true to form, scarcely ever leaving his hotel room. Among its catalogue of curiosities are a whalebone statue on rails constructed from calves' lungs, a harp whose strings are made from the wax tears of the wives of 15 brothers, a worm trained to play the zither, and a beetle that constructs a mosaic of human teeth. As for character or psychological interest there is, needless to say, none whatever.
Roussel the man is an enigma, or more accurately a cipher. His addiction to puns, cryptography and linguistic strait-jackets all bespeak the compulsive dissembler. But what exactly was he dissembling? He engaged a female companion to accompany him on his endless travels, to ward off accusations of homosexuality, but remained a frequent target for blackmailers. But the fact is that we will almost certainly never know what his secrets were, and don't need to: Roussel is the patron saint of literary privacy. His appeal to the Surrealists, the OULIPO writers and the New York school poets (in particular John Ashbery, who contributes a foreword to this book) has given Roussel a small but intensely loyal readership. He will always form an ideal pet taste for those in search of an underground classic, though in the last analysis perhaps it is the idea of Roussel that intrigues more than his actual books. But even those who throw aside Impressions of Africa or Locus Solus after a few pages will find Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams a richly enjoyable study.
David Wheatley's new collection of poetry, Misery Hill, has just beenpublished by Gallery Press