SOURCE: A review in The Times Literary Supplement, Issue 4453, August, 1988, p. 855.

In the following excerpt, Sheringham considers Crevel's novels as monologues that reflect the hardship of his life.

René Crevel acted in Tzara's play, Le Cœur à barbe, on the memorable night in 1923 when a ritual punch-up marked a watershed in Dada's evolution into Surrealism. From then until his suicide in 1935 Crevel participated in all the reviews, signed all the tracts, attended all the meetings in cafés (health permitting). Yet when one reads him it is not always easy to see how this can have been. An active homosexual with misogynistic tendencies, Crevel must have found Breton's fulminations against gays, and his cult of the feminine, somewhat trying. Nor did he really share the Surrealists' beliefs concerning chance, or the modern marvellous, or even language (he dodged the automatic writing sessions). Moreover, his main literary output consisted...