Arthur Cravan: The Disappearing Dadaist

The last time anyone saw Arthur Cravan alive, he was sailing off, alone, into the Pacific Ocean on a leaky boat. The nephew of Oscar Wilde, he was a poet, a boxer, a fraudster, a draft-dodger – and, according to some, the inventor of performance art. He was also on the run. It was early November 1918. After arranging to meet his pregnant wife in Argentina, he had bought the only boat he could afford and set off from Puerto Angel in southern Mexico, intending to pick up some friends along the way. No one ever saw him again. No wreckage was ever found. No body was identified. It was as if he had vanished into thin air. What had happened to him? Had he drowned? Was he still alive, hiding out in Central America? Was it suicide? Even murder? Or, was it art? 

Everything is a lie

Almost nothing about Cravan was what it seemed. He was a man who delighted in confounding expectation, in spinning wild tales – the kind of person to give reality a punch on the nose. He once promised to give a lecture at which he would appear in nothing but a jockstrap, place his testicles on the table and commit suicide in public. When the night came, however, he appeared neatly dressed in his dinner jacket and berated the audience for being so callous. It was what some loved most about him. André Breton, the ‘father’ of Surrealism, thought him inspired, while the situationist philosopher Guy Debord declared Cravan one of the people he esteemed most in the whole world.

Even Cravan’s name wasn’t his own. He was born Fabian Lloyd, in Lausanne, in 1887. To friends and neighbours, his family seemed respectably bourgeois. The reality was quite different, though. ‘Almost as soon as I could speak’, he later recalled, ‘I knew that everything people told me was a lie.’ His father’s sister was Constance Lloyd, the wife of Oscar Wilde. After Wilde’s imprisonment, Constance had fled to Switzerland and changed her name to Holland. The imposture marked Cravan deeply. Throughout his life, he adopted many pseudonyms: Édouard Archinard, Marie Lowitska, Robert Miradique… It is said that he only settled on Cravan because one of his lovers came from the village of Cravans, on France’s Atlantic coast. But he is just as likely to have invented it himself.

There was wildness in his blood. After being expelled from a succession of boarding schools – once for flogging a teacher – he left for America. It was the age of Teddy Roosevelt, and the spirit of adventure suited him. He rode boxcars and slept in doss houses and travellers’ camps, befriending labourers and thieves and learning to love the bizarre.

When he returned to Paris at the age of 21 he was ready to make his mark. Standing almost six feet tall, he had blond hair, blue eyes and wore a look of fashionable disdain. With an inheritance of £25,000 (almost £4,000,000 today) he could do whatever he pleased. He rented an apartment in the heart of the Latin quarter, bought a gigantic fur coat, just like his uncle used to wear, and threw himself into the art scene. He began frequenting the Closerie des Lilas, on the Boulevard Montparnasse. There, he met the symbolist poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Fort and, amid the heady swirl of Futurism and Cubism, set out to find a voice of his own.

But it was boxing that he loved the most – or, at least, the spectacle of it. He joined a club run by the famous coach Fernand Cuny on the Faubourg du Temple and within a few months entered his first fight as a light-heavyweight. He was no mean fighter. He had a long reach and a weaving, light-footed style. What surprised everyone, however, was his habit of shouting ‘Arthur Cravan!’ at the top of his voice whenever the bell rang. It was unsettling. And it worked. In February 1910 he won an amateur championship in a knock-out. The following month, thanks to a series of withdrawals and forfeits, he became the light-heavyweight champion of France – without ever having to land a punch.

France’s worst critic

This combination of pugilism and showmanship, hard-hitting and evasiveness captivated him. After a series of ferocious rows with his family, he decided to apply it to the world of art. He set out to become a critic. But not just any critic. There were already more than enough of those. Rather, he wanted to be the most hated critic in France – to hit hard, to knock the stuffing out of the self-satisfied bien pensants, to brawl in the galleries of the mind. Since no one with any sense would publish him – even among Paris’ avant-garde – he founded his own review: Maintenant (‘Now’). He wrote most of the articles himself, albeit under noms de plume. He was its main distributor, too. As he proudly recalled, he would sell it from a wheelbarrow ‘outside the Gaumont cinema’ in Montmartre ‘and in all the streets of Paris’.

Its five brief issues were explosive. Every page was a provocation, every sentence a challenge. His review of the Salon des Indépendants was excoriating. ‘I have nothing but disgust for the paintings of Chagall … who has become a man pouring petrol into the anus of a bitch.’ ‘M. [Robert] Delaunay … has the face of a swollen pig.’ ‘[Paul] Deltombe, what a moron.’ And so on. Lawsuits were threatened. Apollinaire was so appalled by Cravan’s remarks about his mistress that he challenged him to a duel. Not that Cravan cared in the least, of course.

But there were moments of brilliance, too. His poems – some in free verse, some in prose – were brusque, aggressive, intuitive. Evoking the contemporary disdain for representation and reality, they dealt in strange, dream-like allusions. They scorned logic; they had no regard for conventional, or even avant-garde, aesthetics; yet they had a strange, violent charm of their own. He had a gift for aphorisms. ‘Stupid people see beauty only in beautiful things’, he wrote. ‘Every great artist has the sense of provocation.’ No surprise that, before long, he had a legion of admirers. The anarchistic critic Félix Fénéon even hailed him as a ‘genius’.

Where all this would have led is anyone’s guess, but in 1914 the outbreak of the First World War upset everything. Cravan, despite all his bravery in the ring, was mortally afraid of battle. Rather than risk being called up to fight, he fled. Later, his admirers tried to romanticise this. The poet and painter Francis Picabia professed to admire his daring independence. But it was cowardice, pure and simple.

Dada!

In early 1916 Cravan finally turned up in Barcelona. Penniless and desperate, he turned to boxing to set himself right. He arranged a match with the American boxer Jack Johnson at the new outdoor bullring. The prize money was set at 50,000 francs. Cravan never stood a chance. Johnson was a titan of the ring. Known as the ‘Galveston Giant’, he had been the undisputed world champion for five years. According to his brother, Cravan was visibly trembling when the fight began. Johnson toyed with him for a while, before knocking him out cold in the sixth round. It had lasted less than 15 minutes. But the fight hardly mattered: for Cravan, what counted was the show. And the loser’s purse, of course.   

With the money, Cravan bought a ticket for New York, on board the same boat as Leon Trotsky. Arriving in the early hours of 13 January 1917 he immediately caused a sensation. It was all down to his old friends, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. Since they had last met in Paris, their whole artistic outlook had changed. Horrified by the madness of war, Duchamp and Picabia had embraced Dadaism. They rejected all reason – which they blamed for the slaughter – in favour of irrationality and the unconscious. They spurned traditional ideas of art. It seemed made for Cravan. Although he never officially joined their group, Duchamp and Picabia invited him to give a lecture at the opening of their exhibition at the Grand Central Gallery. Cravan did not disappoint. He arrived drunk. On reaching the lectern, he gave it an incredible thump, then proceeded to strip naked. The guests, all rich collectors, were appalled. Cravan was promptly carted off by the police. But Duchamp was delighted. This was something new. It was performance as art. It was pure Dada.

At around the same time, Cravan met the British poet Mina Loy. The two fell in love. In Cravan, Loy saw a singular being, with no regard for material things. He found her bohemianism irresistible. They became inseparable.

In November 1917, however, America’s entry into the war threw their romance into jeopardy. To avoid being drafted, Cravan persuaded Loy to flee to Mexico. There, they married. For a time they lived in contented, if abject, poverty. It was impossible to stay for long, though. The US government was on the lookout for draft dodgers abroad and Cravan was making no attempt to keep a low profile. When Loy fell pregnant they decided to head for Argentina. For reasons of economy they would travel separately. While Loy boarded a Japanese hospital ship at Salina Cruz, Cravan went to buy a sailing boat in Puerto Angel, intending to meet in Buenos Aires. They never saw each other again.   

Disappearing act

Loy never discovered what happened to Cravan. Nor has anyone else since. In a sense, it hardly matters. By that point, Cravan’s life had become a work of art in itself. That his disappearance provoked such questions was a sign that he had, quite literally, become Dada. Alive or dead, his defiance of reason, of certainty – of everything – was what it was all about. But at the same time, his disappearance was also a parable. For Dada, with its self-regarding unreason and love of spectacle, was left, like Cravan, adrift, floating aimlessly on a sea of its own choosing – without harbour, without end.

Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. His latest book is Machiavelli: His Life and Times (Picador).