Marcel Schwob – författare

Human beings are by nature very social animals. Most of us love to connect, to talk and share experiences. It’s a big world with much to do. But curiosity and grief are two situations that make some people attempt to discover more.

We are all familiar with the Ouija Board and also the thrill, or perhaps worry, that nighttime can be full of spirits who offer harm and fear, rather than comfort and solace.

In this volume we run the gamut across clairvoyants as we explore seances and all manner of experiences that come from them or of our curiosity to find out more from the spirit world, ‘the other side’. Indeed, grief motivates some people to talk with their departed loved ones through their talents. Whether they be genuine or charlatans our authors stories reveal much about the human condition from the pens of Benson, Schwob, Purves, Hope, Cowles and Jerome as well as the talents of many others.

A Strange Story by Ivan Turgenev

The Man of Science by Jerome K Jerome

Eyes For the Blind by Frederick Cowles

In the Séance Room by Lettice Galbraith

Mrs Morrel''s Last Seance by Edgar Jepson

Spiritualism by Marcel Schwob

Behind the Curtain by Gertrude Barrows Bennett writing as Francis Stevens

The Spectral Hand by Jean Lorrain

The House of the Black Evil by Eric Purves

The Thing That Smelt by Christopher Blayre

A Successful Rehearsal by Anthony Hope

The Terror by Night by E F Benson

Mayer André Marcel Schwob was born in Chaville, Hauts-de-Seine, France on 23rd August 1867 into a cultivated Jewish family.

As a child he devoured the works of Poe and Stevenson in French and then again in English. His attachment to the bizarre and dark was already forming.

His education at the Lycée of Nantes earned him the 1st Prize for Excellence. In 1881, he was in Paris with his maternal uncle to study at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Schwob quickly developed his multilingual abilities and then studied philology and Sanscrit at the École pratique des hautes études before completing his military service in Vannes with the artillery.

After completing a Bachelor of Arts in 1888 he became a professional journalist and worked for the Phare de la Loire, the Événement and L''Écho de Paris.

The 1890’s marked his establishment as a brilliant writer with the publication of six short story collections.

He fell ill in 1896 with a chronic, incurable intestinal disorder. He also suffered recurring bouts of influenza and pneumonia. Intestinal surgery was given several times, at first with success but, by 1900, after two more surgeries, he was told that nothing more could be done for him. Schwob now existed on kefir and fermented milk.

By the turn of the century, despite failing health, and often too ill to write, he embarked on several long travels, including to Vailima in the South Pacific where his literary hero Stevenson had died.

Schwob was regarded as a symbolist writer and a ‘precursor of Surrealism’. He wrote over a hundred short stories, journalistic articles, essays, biographies, literary reviews and analysis, translations and plays.

Marcel Schwob died on 26th February 1905 of Pneumonia. He was 37.

“The art of the biographer consists specifically in choice. He is not meant to worry about speaking truth; he must create human characteristics amidst the chaos.”—Marcel Schwob

Imaginary Lives remains, over 120 years since its original publication in French, one of the secret keys to modern literature: under-recognized, yet a decisive influence on such writers as Apollinaire, Borges, Jarry and Artaud, and more contemporary authors such as Roberto Bolaño and Jean Echenoz. Drawing from historical influences such as Plutarch and Diogenes Laërtius, and authors more contemporary to him such as Thomas De Quincey and Walter Pater, Schwob established the genre of fictional biography with this collection: a form of narrative that championed the specificity of the individual over the generality of history, and the memorable detail of a vice over the forgettable banality of a virtue.

These 22 portraits present figures drawn from the margins of history, from Empedocles the “Supposed God” and Clodia the “Licentious Matron” to the pirate Captain Kidd and the Scottish murderers Messrs. Burke and Hare. In his quest for unique lives, Schwob also formulated an early conception of the anti-hero, and discarded historical figures in favor of their shadows. These “imaginary lives” thus acquaint us with the “Hateful Poet” Cecco Angiolieri instead of his lifelong rival, Dante Alighieri; the would-be romantic pirate Major Stede Bonnet instead of the infamous Blackbeard who would lead him to the gallows; the false confessor Nicolas Loyseleur rather than Joan of Arc whom he cruelly deceived; or the actor Gabriel Spenser in place of the better-remembered Ben Jonson who ran a sword through his lung.

Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a scholar of startling breadth and an incomparable storyteller. The secret influence on generations of writers, Schwob was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman (whom he translated into French).