Mayer André Marcel Schwob

Born: 23 August 1867 in Chaville, Hauts-de-Seine, France.

Died: 26 February 1905.

Mayer André Marcel Schwob, known as Marcel Schwob was a French symbolist writer best known for his short stories and his literary influence on authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño. He has been called a "precursor of Surrealism". In addition to over a hundred short stories, he wrote journalistic articles, essays, biographies, literary reviews and analysis, translations and plays. He was extremely well known and respected during his life and notably befriended a great numbers of intellectuals and artists of the time.

Early life (1867–89):

He was born in Chaville, Hauts-de-Seine on 23 August 1867 into a cultivated Jewish family. His father, George Schwob, was a friend of Théodore de Banville and Théophile Gautier. His mother, Mathilde Cahun, came from a family of intellectuals from Alsace. He was the brother of Maurice Schwob and uncle of Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob).

His family had just returned from Egypt, where his father had headed the cabinet of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for ten years. When the French Third Republic began, the Schwob family lived in Tours, where George became the director of the newspaper Le Républicain d'Indre-et-Loire. In 1876, he moved to Nantes to direct the Republican daily Le Phare de la Loire; after he died in 1892, his eldest son Maurice, born in 1859, took his place.

At age 11 he discovered the work of Edgar Allan Poe translated by Charles Baudelaire. He then read the original versions of his tales in English and they proved to be a lifelong influence in his writing. In 1878-1879, he studied at the Lycée of Nantes where he won the 1st Prize for Excellence. In 1881, he was sent to Paris to live with his maternal uncle Leon Cahun, Chief Librarian of the Mazarine Library, and continue his studies at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he became friends with Léon Daudet and Paul Claudel. He developed a gift for languages and quickly became multilingual. In 1884, he discovered Robert Louis Stevenson, who was to become one of his friends and role models. He studied philology and Sanscrit under Ferdinand de Saussure at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1883-4. He then completed his military service in Vannes, joining the artillery.

He failed his entrance exams for the École Normal Supérieure, but he earned Bachelor of Arts in 1888. He became a professional journalist, collaborating in the Phare de la Loire, the Evénement and the Echo de Paris.

Early work (1890–1897):

He had a passion for French slang, and in particular for the language of the Coquillards used by Villon in his Ballads in Jargon: unlike the widespread opinion at the time (developed by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables), Schwob considered that slang is not a language that is created spontaneously, but that it is actually an artificial language in code.

For eight years he wrote short stories that were collected in six books: Cœur double (Double Heart, 1891), Le Roi au masque d'or (The King in the Golden Mask, 1892), Mimes (1893), Le Livre de Monelle (The Book of Monelle, 1894), La croisade des enfants (The Children's Crusade, 1896) and Vies imaginaires (Imaginary Lives, 1896). His last short story, L'etoile de bois, is the longest one he wrote and was published in 1897. Two large reprint collections of his stories were published during his lifetime: La Porte des rêves (The Gate of Dreams, 1899), illustrated by Georges de Feure, and La lampe de Psyché (Psyche's Lamp, 1903).

Along with Stuart Merrill, Adolphe Retté and Pierre Louÿs, Marcel Schwob worked on Oscar Wilde's play Salome, which was written in French to avoid a British law forbidding the depiction of Bible characters on stage. Wilde struggled with his French, and the play was proofread and corrected by Marcel Schwob for its first performance in Paris in 1896.

Late work (1898–1905):

In the last eight years of his life Schwob was often too sick to work, but he managed to complete a number of projects, although with the exception of the play Jane Shore, and "Dialogues d'Utopie" (written in 1905), he never wrote any more original fiction. He did write articles, introductions and essays, adapted and translated several plays, and planned or began numerous projects that remained unfinished when he died.

Travels:

     Ting Tse-Ying was a young Chinese scholar from the Island of Saint-Louis, fluent in English, that Schwob had met at the Chinese pavilion at the closing of Paris's Exposition Universelle and hired as a domestic servant, personal assistant and traveling companion. Ting later worked for explorer Paul Pelliot, whom he accompanied to Turkestan.

In 1901, assisted by Ting, he travelled first to Jersey, where he stayed for several weeks, and then to Uriage, trying to improve his health. He then began the biggest voyage of his life, traveling to Samoa, like his hero Stevenson, in search of his tomb. Leaving from Marseilles, he stopped in Port Said, Djibouti, Aden, toured Sri Lanka, Sydney and finally Vailima, where Stevenson had lived. There, he met people that had known Stevenson. He stayed for a little less than a month. He became very sick in the island, lost a lot of weight and was forced to return to Paris in a hurry without having visited the tomb. Because of regional racism, Ting was arrested on several occasions and prevented from accompanying Schwob in some parts of the trip. Schwob complained about this in his letters to Moreno.

In 1904, at the invitation of Francis Marion Crawford and accompanied by Ting, he took a boat trip to Naples, stopping in Porto, Lisbon, Barcelona, Marseille and finally Naples. He stayed for two weeks in Crawford's villa in Sant'Agnello in Sorrento. Bored, he left for France, stopping in Aix-les-Bains where his wife joined him. He then went to the Canton of Vaud in Switzerland, the Plombières in Belgium and finally Carnac, where Moreno, once again, joined him. His health had further worsened and they returned to Paris.

Personal life:

Friendships:

Throughout his life, Schwob associated with or befriended a great number of notables from the worlds of art and literature. They include Léon Daudet, Paul Claudel, Anatole France, Edmond de Goncourt, Jean Lorrain, J.-H. Rosny aîné, Alphonse Daudet, Auguste Bréal, Paul Arene, Maurice Spronck, Jules Renard, Paul Margueritte, Paul Hervieu, Charles Maurras, Rachilde, Octave Mirbeau, Catulle Mendès, Jules Renard, Guillaume Apollinaire, Henri Barbusse, Georges Courteline, Paul Valéry, Colette, Oscar Wilde, Pierre Louÿs, George Meredith, Maurice Maeterlinck, Alfred Jarry, Aristide Bruant, Marcel Proust, Robert de Montesquiou, Édouard Manet, Auguste Rodin, Camille Claudel and Jehan Rictus.

In 1903 Schwob reflected on the passing of several of his closest friends, all cultural celebrities at the time. He wrote to Edmund Gosse: "I have been sadly tried in my friends since a few years. Stevenson and Verlaine, Mallarmé and now Henley and Whistler are gone". Aleister Crowley also considered Schwob a friend and asked him to translate two of his sonnets: "Rodin" and "Balzac". Schwob was also friends with Lucien Guitry and tried to help him reconcile with his son, Sacha Guitry. Decades later Sacha went on to make several films with Marguerite Moreno.

Relationships:

The two loves of his life were a young woman known as Louise and the celebrated actress Marguerite Moreno. Schwob met Louise, a working class girl who might have been a prostitute, in 1891, when he was 24 years and she was 23 years old. He kept the relationship hidden and exchanged letters with her that he later mostly destroyed. After two years she died of tuberculosis. He was devastated and confided in many of his friends. He dedicated Le livre de Monelle to her, basing the central character on Louise, but turning her into a child of indeterminate age. Many consider this his most personal work and it is the single book for which he became best known during his lifetime. The year after Louise's death, 1894, Schwob met Marguerite Moreno, who, at 23, had been named by Stéphane Mallarmé "the sacred muse of Symbolism", and was the lover of Catulle Mendès. She had posed for sculptor Jean Dampt, artists Edmond Aman-Jean, Joseph Granié and often for Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer. In January 1895 they were officially together and they were married in London five years later, in 1900. Charles Whibley, the English writer, was a witness at the wedding. Their relationship was unconventional. They spent much time apart, due to Moreno's career and Schwob's frequent travels.

Health and death:

He became sick in 1896 with a chronic incurable intestinal disorder. He also suffered from recurring conditions that were generally diagnosed as influenza or pneumonia and received intestinal surgery several times. After two surgeries by doctor Joaquin Albarrán, Robert de Montesquiou recommended the care of the well known doctor and surgeon Samuel Jean de Pozzi, who had been lovers with Sarah Bernhard and was later painted by John Singer Sargent. At first his treatments had some positive effects relieving Schwob from his constant pain. In appreciation, Schwob dedicated La Porte des rêves to him. But by 1900, after two more surgeries, Pozzi told him that he could not do anything else for him. In the following years he ate only kefir and fermented milk. In February 1905, after nine years of serious recurring episodes, he died of pneumonia while his wife was away on tour, performing in Aix-en-Provence. He was surrounded by Ting, his brother Maurice and his biographer Pierre Champion.

Teaching:

Starting in December 1904 he taught a course on Villon at the l'École des Hautes Etudes that was attended by, among others, Michel Bréal, Édouard and Pierre Champion, Paul Fort, Max Jacob, August Longnon, Pablo Picasso, Catherine Pozzi (daughter of one of his doctors), André Salmon and Louis Thomas.