In 1954, finally appeared in commercial publishing the first book of Francis Augean, The Old Man and the Child . This did not stop the wanderings of Augean, which returned in December 1954 as a student in a veterinary school breeding Tadmait, Algeria. From this experience, will release a "diary" of this new residence in Algeria. With the feverish story of his life in Agadir prostitute and a new evocation of her relationship with her uncle at Fort El Golea, a relationship that forms the frame of the Elderly and Child , he began writing a new book The Journey of the Dead . These two pictures represent the Augean Agadir and Tadmait, two of the most important chapters of the book.
As he had done for his first book he had printed in 1954 in Perigueux Fontas a pamphlet on colored paper, first draft text of the future . From Africa, he sends to everyone he imagines being able to love this text and make it known. They are famous writers or critics. In this pamphlet, he corrects his text, erasing (it replaces all "my father" with "Uncle"), blackening whole paragraphs, deleting the sentence, adding sheets or signatures. Also a few months later, he continues with a second pamphlet, to which he will then suffer the same fate. Thus by 1955, a person (who?) Received two brochures, all living in repentance of the author who built his text at the same time he received from the printer and that the sent. These brochures can be printed in 100 copies, are moving accounts of a writer who builds a work. These are brochures that I present today:
Some examples of pages crossed out these brochures.
It was not until 1959 that publishes editions of La Nave the first commercial edition of the book under the same pseudonym Abdullah Chaamba. As one of the brochures, it contains a photograph of the fort of El Goléa which a halo of light gives a mystery.
Describe Journey of the Dead is almost impossible. For me, it is first and foremost the story of something inside that feeds on his experiences in the Algerian desert, his life dangerous and extreme prostitute in Agadir. Traversed by a pervasive eroticism, where the love of boys to manhood triumphant fight with Arab prostitutes, it is mostly a meditation on man's place in the cosmos, its relationship to the elements, with the forces of life. A strength of this book is first the power of style, who knows how to build a fragile alloy between the description of its raw sensual experiences and mysticism that feeds on its relationship with the earth, sky and sea Above This story, which first appears less constructed than his later work as the apprentice sorcerer Domme or occupation or testing , even messy, lets do emerge, one who knows the show, a line of force that radiates throughout the book. When you follow this thread, hidden, you can live oneself a personal experience that feeds the Augean.
I chose these few passages for you to discover this book:
On color brochures
had put packages in the mail, to Gardaïa at Ouargla. My temperatures were more visible than the text: my hand trembled against the starry sky. Believing write, I shipped all over the tracks of my fears, my joy delirious, pages devastated by the ferocity of the desert haunted as the picture at the beginning of this Journey of the dead.
My books: I lived with them, went to see them in the bush where I hid for a year, two years before sending them at random. The Journey of the dead, in color, I really saw that the only words that I loved.
I opened the Travel the dead. What a joy to be alive, can obliterate even snatch a text which does not belong to him (words destroyed reminded me of nights when I was not dead), this book is only the book of account my fears and my freedom.
What I did print in Africa has always been on colored paper, I kneel on a roof, is a notebook on my lap and I see my writing moonlight printed on yellow paper often transparent like corn husks.If men who carved masks from Africa came back to earth, they would do what I do. In southern Europe who insists on painting, the great adventure of my books was small, less revenge, night, a child with a retired colonel that victory in the twentieth century e, d a writing haunted.From night to night, in an easement in Europeans, I found the colors of my soul.
I struggled a bit to get me out of my shyness, to see clearly. Long ago that painting is dead, an art abstract decorative beautiful, very moving is still possible, but the adventure is elsewhere, it is good to know, not that of painters who have wanted nothing, understood nothing, who had nothing to say that African books in my color seemed a rare audacity.
Suddenly, his heart beating, I saw The Old Man and the Child recognized capitals blue Editions de Minuit. [...] The typography was underneath everything, my little books in color, desert, shipped to Asia, to Europe had a different effect, another virulence. I expected better fromTravel dead.
My color books:crossed out by me, open all night, buried in the sand again! As humble fetishes! In a sense, a nice kick in the ass of modern art that has never been able to invent one.Strange books sometimes made of signs, signs. Africa calls the signs and not the story.
On the ocean at night giving me my color books in the history of men being printed, they can be multiplied to an infinite number of copies, gave them more likely to survive than to me.
On the love of boys
I get drunk tea, kiff near a girl, a gun in my ankle boot that plowed while I made love j loved her and be a man, so young and naive male.We slept in a notable who had a large wooden bed French, reads like a peasant. We had supper, dishes on the fender, and the flames lit up our faces, toilet ware, his son who served us. Outside it was raining in torrents, the red tide seemed likely to carry the village. We were treated well in a school farm. Hubert, all honor, shared the bed of our host, I stood by the fireplace with the boy of my age.I saw him in an alley, leaning against a door of a blacksmith, black charcoal dust. Seeing me out of a house where her father had forbidden to enter under threat of correction, he had an amused smile, he had to go ... or had he felt knowing that I slept with him? He was not sleeping, watching me from the other side of the fireplace, the room was in shadow, except we close the embers. Slowly he crawled towards the wall carrying his blankets. I understood. I walked away from the glow of embers. He was sleeping? My hand wandered to the ground, our fingers met; long he shook my hand with all his might. With a gentle, extreme tenderness, I entered the quilt that her father had given him for the night.was the breath of life I wanted. Boys do not seek the tongue lips closed we drank our breath. Our hands went up to our hips, fat, hard. Under the covers, eyes closed, I loved him with all my strength. We were both intoxicated by the winter, the night in the mountains with snow. I kissed her face. Our legs were hot. He had the scent of forests. The love of boys, their real wedding night, joy. Then sleep off with kisses and caresses to have cramps in the wrist. Moisture woke me at midnight.If I pulled the blanket to me, he had discovered the kidneys, I was cold on the floor. I made coffee in the embers, sat a shoulder against the mantel, watching my friend asleep.How many hours passed thus? I came back under the covers. In the darkness, the flames died, when life got in us it was hot, bright, and I saw eternal life which we felt in the heart of winter and night. What girl would have given me this: his gentleness, his life so simple. By disjoint bricks tiles, moisture penetrated into our blankets. We sensed the proximity of underground streams, the water in the earth, the sap, a thousand sources. I fell asleep and the sound of melting snow, outdoors, gradually decreased as the gel overnight stop and hold the streams.The glow of fading light extinguished by the fire woke us. We stood against us to keep the heat blankets. It was time to resume our places in the room. Naked, one near the other, in the softness of dawn, we were young, yet united by sleep, the same source. "I love you," I said under the quilt. "Me too," he said, kissing my lips.was my spring.The glow on the embers died was blue, a perfect blue.
I longed for after she met my snub-nosed. I thought he was handsome, noble, that boys love them desirable as they go with girls. Chance gave me the same young woman that the boy I loved.
I kissed her face with an extremely soft, clasping me in his arms, he gave me kisses and closed his eyes in the vast moonlight seized the high meadows silent.
Seven brothers or cousins were guarding the animals high on the hills near large red rocks. The eldest rode a mule, a stick on the neck. A ride in the sky, a spectacle for its own. He jumped quickly down, offered me to fight against him. He had a passion without violence, a terrible joy in the struggle. The moment we had too much force is losing the joy of hugging, he released his effort. When his face was near mine on the ground in spring sip water, pollen, close your eyes: yes, he says, one arm around my neck. Before all, I kissed his warm lips.- Go with him, "said his brothers.We went atop the small mountain. I1 there was, between blocks immaculate, a cement bunker where we entered. The brothers withdrew. In the room with obscene inscriptions, I drew myself to my new friend.One spring morning in the twentieth century e .Manners of war? Ways of soldier, shepherd? He rummaged in the little canvas bag that was in my belt and took out books, books. "I love you" "I said.On the prairie, the last time I kissed her shoulders, the hands of his brothers, went down to the plain, towards the evening shadows by the golden sands of a trail washed out by rain. In a grove of trees, I sat down between the logs into fragrant twigs. I saw the blue long fight against the night, the rising stars. That was my life. I heard the tramp of horses led to the trough to blue water and the cries of flocks of return of the steppe, one evening in Algeria.
In a pine wood, a young nomad cows kept her face was beautiful and round. He spoke, breaking twigs low. The darkness became more intense. Our fingers united leaned to bark from which flowed from the resin. One and one défaillîmes us, we came upon the fragrant twigs on the hard ground frost.tattered clothing covering her chest. Was pure night troubled by barking dogs. There was a smell of grease and smoke, big eyes Shepherd, streaks of dirt darkened his face. In the arms of one another, near the trees, we were happy. A link rope clutched his waist linen trousers. He threw me on one side of his coat. Her hips were warm, soft. I kissed her lips. He had with me of how serious, a little moved, without a word under my caresses. Her lips tasted of salt and the purity and freshness of the night.
I liked the softness, the severity of the boy from the steppes naked under a coat of the Army too big for him and so close to me, showed me a friendship so true. We stood shoulder against shoulder, into the arms of one another, even moved from the blows we received. His throat was hot, black with dirt, his eyes calm and pure as the idea that I had of love. We were poor.
If God exists, I say to him is what was for me the ultimate happiness. I'm not afraid to face death for making love as well: the pleasure that you had put in our bodies, we have thrown at Thy stones near the stars.
First, the father is to call a man who was not my father - I never knew my own - and with whom I slept! Finally, he presented a most serious human obsessions. He was my father "wanted" as anything that is close to onanism. (I masturbated while he possessed me.)Relationship with God? His life, his morals claimed will enjoy facing the starry night. Only a boy could please him on a bed of iron. A moment of intense pleasure in human history.
We went into a career, he leaned on the stones. I kissed her lips. Incredible violence of joy made me see this career as a paradise, the stones, stars and night.finally I shook my shadow on my heart. He knelt down, asked me to do like him, and each one hand on the hip of another, the trembling lips of our United, one knew at that moment what the other felt.
On writing
Southern exasperated my taste colors, unknown spaces. Wherever in the world, what human act, which claimed the decisive focus control man, the nobility of man. My drama - or my luck in the twentieth century e - was not being an artist, have to find the real, to my peril, a lifestyle that takes against the splendor of the stars. Awareness of human history was haunting me, I met the wonderful madness of a man, a loner in Africa.
Every work of art is a dead Travel In this sense they are doing the discovery of her soul that has no chance to survive if it reaches the eternal soul of man. At the point where I was, artistic creation mattered more than anything. Frames, schemata unknown shook my pen.
The stars twinkled, some regions of the sky was pale, they were going to my heart and my desires; primary, I loved the world, kneeling on the stones of pure joy ... ridge, I sometimes longed my seed; joy to mix my young strength to strength of the stars and plants in months the sudden appearance of joy, in advance of fifty years of human history: a new agreement between man and heaven. The chances, the silences, the desert in the moonlight ... A trial copy. First in the field changes.
More than ever I wanted to write. Again, off to the bookstore, I wondered if I was not a wild full e XX century, occupied only make minds.
A terrible joy made my heart beat. Threatened in the night, coming from more distant past, already in the future, I was shaking with honor and pride of being a man.
Description
works
For two booklets:
Slnnd two brochures 12mo (188 x 115 mm) of 32 and 44 pages at irregular pagination
There a copy at public libraries in France (source CCFr). Another copy is up for auction in Paris, Drouot, April 4, 2006, the library of the philosopher Emmanuel Peillet Reims (1914-1973).
For the original edition of 1959: Abdullah
Chaamba [Augier (Francis)]
The journey of the dead
Paris, La Nef de Paris, Editions, [1959], in-8 (190 x 142 mm), 217 - [5] pp, a photograph in black and white plates.
Appeared in the series "Structure", No. 2.
There are only 5 copies in public libraries in France (source CCFr): 3 copies to the BNF and 2 at the National Institute of Educational Research, Lyon.
Our copy contains a mailing Augean:
This is probably Dulsou Rene, who was one of the great loves of Max Jacob between 1932 and 1935.
Since 1959, there were two editions:
Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1979
"The red books", Paris, Grasset, 2000 (still available) :
The text differs slightly from that of 1959, because pages 71 and 72 were deleted.
The Library of the Arsenal (manuscripts and archives - Don Jean Chalon) has the manuscript: The journey of the dead , nd, 1 notebook and handwritten notes: autograph manuscript and typescript corrected.
To conclude this lengthy message, I hope, will want to know and discover Augean Francois, this beautiful photograph:
