Marcel Béalu, The Experience of the Night (Europe 1996)
, Trans. by Christine Donougher, Dedalus, 1997."Written in 1945, this Kafkaesque fantasy concerns a man who goes for an eye test and is presented with a box of black pills which he must take after "twelve hours of work". He therefore finds a job in a spooky factory, and things get progressively more weird. Episodic and irrational, the ideas are often better than Bealu's over-ripe prose, but no surrealist will want to be without this cult curiosity." - Ryan Mckay
"Marcel Béalu (1908-1993) was best known for the delicacy with which he explored dreams and the unreal in poetry, prose, and painting. A retiring figure, he ran the Parisian bookstore at 62, rue de Vaugirard named Le Pont Traversé after a novel by his friend, critic and editor Jean Paulhan. There he held readings for a small circle of surrealist and fantastical writers; it is said Lacan, among his first customers, purchased Shakespeare’s complete works and forgot to pay for them. Béalu also founded the revue of fantastic writing Réalités secrètes (1955-1971)."
"Largely self-taught, he read the classics of canonical French literature on his own initiative while working as a haberdasher in Montargis. His wife, Marguerite Kessel, encouraged him to read German literature as well. The grim and cerebral atmosphere of German Romantic literature would make itself felt in his style.
In 1937, Marcel Béalu met cubist poet Max Jacob, who gave him critical encouragement and advice.
In 1951, Marcel Béalu set himself up in business as a Parisian bookseller. He named his store, after a comment on his work by Jean Paulhan, Le Pont Traversé, or “the Crossed Bridge.” The store, which sold all manner of strange works in addition to the more familiar bookshop fare, moved several times, at one time into a former butcher’s shop at 62 rue de Vaugirard. One of his first customers was pre-eminent French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, who purchased a complete edition of Shakespeare - for which he never paid.
Marcel Béalu is most consistently associated with the literature of the fantastic, and in particular with the characteristically French strain of imaginative writing. He was intrigued by the equivocal relationship of fantasy or dream to reality, the uncertainty of reality as a distinct property or mode of being, and his fiction was widely hailed for its dreamlike qualities. While his work was fantastic, it did not reflect a reductive Freudian idea of fantasy as a mere substitute for the banal. His predeliction for cramped, seedy, confusing and confining spaces, and for irregularities and repetitions in time, prompted some readers to compare his work with Kafka’s.
In 1955, he and Rene Rougerie founded the journal Realités secrètes, which endured until 1963. Julien Gracq, Jean Paulhan, A. Pieyre de Mandiargues, Charles Nodier, J.M.A. Paroutaud, and Jacques Sternberg, were among the authors to appear in the first issue alone. Béalu did not publish a great deal of his own material in the magazine, in part because he chose to be a marginal, remote figure. And he painted, his visual work being another translation of the unreal as was his poetry and fiction.
His writing was admired by Jean Paulhan and Antonin Artaud, but as yet his literary reputation has not fully developed. Only one of his works, L’Expérience de la nuit, has been translated into English (by Christine Donougher, as The Experience of the Night)." - Wikipedia
