Miserable Miracle

Henri Michaux (1899 -1984) was born in Namur, Belgium, the son of a lawyer, and educated at a Jesuit school in Brussels. He contemplated entering the priesthood, turned to the study of medicine, then left school entirely, enlisting instead as a stoker in the French merchant marine. Michaux's travels, throughout the Americas, Asia, and Africa, were to inspire his first two books, the extraordinary travelogues Ecuador and A Barbarian in Asia (later translated into Spanish by Jorge Luis Borges). Settling in Paris, Michaux began to write and paint, and his work, especially his prose poems recounting the strange and very funny misadventures of the character he called Monsieur Plume, drew the attention and praise of other writers, among them André Gide. In 1948 Michaux's wife died after accidentally setting her nightgown on fire; devastated, Michaux devoted himself increasingly to his distinctive calligraphic drawings in ink. He also began to take mescaline at regular intervals, recording his deeply disorienting, often traumatic experiences in a series of unflinching texts beginning with Miserable Miracle. Celebrated in France and around the world for his accomplishments as a writer and artist, Michaux remained averse to publicity and public honors throughout his life, and in 1965 refused the French Grand Prix National des Lettres. For many years the only photograph of himself that he allowed to circulate showed his right hand holding a pen over a sheet of paper on a chaotic writing desk. »

Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was born in Mexico City, and his extraordinarily busy and fruitful life took him from civil-war Spain to surrealist Paris, from US universities to the Mexican embassy in New Delhi, where he served for six years as ambassador before resigning in protest after his government's suppression of student demonstrations at the 1968 Olympic Games. A great poet, Paz was also the author of many essays and a study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, as well as the founder and editor of two important journals, Plural and Vuelta. Octavio Paz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. »

By Henri Michaux
Translated from the French by Louise Varese
Introduction by Octavio Paz

"This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored." In Miserable Miracle, the great French poet and artist Henri Michaux, a confirmed teetotaler, tells of his life-transforming first encounters with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. At once lacerating and weirdly funny, challenging and Chaplinesque, his book is a breathtaking vision of interior space and a piece of stunning writing wrested from the grip of the unspeakable.

Includes forty pages of black-and-white drawings.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

Anhedonic as ever, Michaux began his hallucinogenic experiments in anything but the spirit of what we now call 'recreational.' He was searching for the foreign territory within himself. And though he stated that 'a hand two hundred times more agile than the human hand would not be up to the task of following the speeding course of the inexhaustible spectacle' he discovered, it looks to me like he not only found that vast and endlessly transforming landscape, but claimed it . . . They don't evoke apparitions, but rather their opposite: vision ground down to its molecules.
— Barry Schwabsky, Artforum

Michaux excels in making us feel the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things.
— André Gide

One of the most original and quintessentially French writers . . . Michaux is the poet laureate of our insomnia.
— Anatole Broyard, New York Times Book Review

These psychedelic texts are among Michaux's most carefully crafted writings. He emerges as one of the most extraordinary voices of our (post)modernity, a true technician of the sacred and perhaps the century's most genuine Surrealist.
— Richard Sieburth, The Times Literary Supplement

Also see:

Black Sun
By Geoffrey Wolff

Black Sun is master biographer Geoffrey Wolff's picture of a brilliant and self-destructive man who sought to make his life into a work of art.

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $13.95
Price: $10.46 (25% off)

Apr 30, 2002
200 pages
ISBN: 1590170016
9781590170014
Biography & Memoir
All Literature in Translation
NYRB Classics
Visual & Performing Arts
Literature in French

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