Since I’m about to turn 37, I wanted to pay respects to a member of the Forever 36 Club - René Daumal, Pataphysician, Gurdjieffian, poet, essayist, author of Mount Analogue.
The all-time prize for the most fitting, most honorable death of a writer will forever be held by Daumal’s contemporary Boris Vian, who had a heart attack, age 39, while publicly denouncing the movie adaptation of his own book, but Daumal’s is in the same league. He continued to work on Mount Analogue until the very day of his death - the manuscript we have ends, literally, mid-sentence. And there is a suggestion that a distant cause of his death were the experiments Daumal made on himself as a teenager, dosing himself with carbon tetrachloride in an attempt to replicate the experience of death and to “register everything that might take place.”
That experience - as recounted in his essay ‘A Fundamental Experiment’ - really was the seminal event of Daumal’s life. He was born in the Ardennes, went to the lycée in Reims. At age 15, as he recalled, “I began to have doubts, to question the basis of everything. I began to perform all kinds of experiments ‘in order to see.’” That phase culminated in the experiment with carbon tetrachloride, which, Daumal wrote, “burst the limits of the possible and projected me brutally into another world.” Daumal’s experience sounds a great deal like that of DMT trippers or of descriptions of the Bardo or of a variety of near-death experiences - the sense of coming across some other realm that was intact and that had its own very distinct, and very different, reality. Daumal wrote:
With these wretched words I can put together only approximate statements, whereas my certainty is for me the archetype of precision. In my ordinary state of mind, all that remains thinkable and formulable of this experiment reduces to one affirmation on which I would stake my life: I feel the certainty of the existence of something else, a beyond, another world, or another form of knowledge.
Daumal seems to have been one of these people who was really and truly loved by everybody he encountered - absolutely dedicated to transcendence and hard internal work but at the same time deeply whimsical. At his lycée he fell in with a group of ‘mental voyagers’ - Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Roger Vailland, Robert Meyrat - who would remain virtually welded to one another well into adulthood. As ‘Les Phrères Simplistes’ (The Simple Brothers), they published Le Grand Jeu, experimented with consciousnesses employing a variety of methods (among the most charming was their attempt to meet in ‘planned dreams’), rejected the Surrealists for being too conventional, and were the epitome of a certain kind of French bohemianism, described as a “many-headed Rimbaud.”
From the beginning, Daumal had a pronounced interest in the East. While still at the lycée in Reims he had taught himself Sanskrit. The Orientalist Jacques Masui would write of Daumal, “I can only say that I have never seen a Westerner live Indian culture to such a point, so completely that its archetypes must have been there from the beginning.” Attempting to explain what Masui meant, Roger Shattuck, Daumal’s principal English-language champion, wrote, “The Westerner tends by tradition to think of grasping the meaning of life through certain crucial experiences - death, grief, danger, passionate love, sudden success, catastrophe….Having cast his mind deep into Indian philosophy, Daumal senses that the reality and meaning of the world can come to us at every moment without our having to rely wholly on extreme situations to wrench us into awareness.”
In 1930, Daumal had the critical encounter of his life. He and his friends “began to notice a tall, solitary man who had begun to frequent their haunt, the Café Fignon,” as Daumal’s biographer Kathleen Rosenblatt described it, “who would always sit in a corner of the terrace drinking many glasses of calvados and endlessly drawing curious Arab and Chinese characters.” After several weeks, Daumal’s painter friend Josef Šima suddenly realized that he knew the solitary man, invited him to their table, and the man - Alexandre de Salzmann - promptly asked his new friends to hold their arms out to their side for as long as they could. Minutes later, with Daumal the last one of the group holding the posture, de Salzmann declared to him, “You interest me.” De Salzmann, Tbilisi-born, was a painter, lighting designer, member of the Jungendstil, friend of Kandinsky, pupil of George Gurdjieff. Daumal described him as “a former dervish, former Benedictine, former professor of jiu-jitsu, healer, stage designer, not a tooth left in his head, an incredible man.” De Salzmann had had a falling-out with Gurdjieff (whom I’m sure I’ll write more about some other time) but introduced Daumal to Gurdjieffian thought, and, as Masui wrote, “Daumal was not content merely to accept the Gurdjieffian teaching, he gave himself over to it.”
There was dissension in the circle surrounding Daumal over whether or not Gurdjieff via de Salzmann was good for him. Daumal’s early mentor, the esotericist René Guénon, complained that Gurdjieff was “not purely and simply a charlatan, but that this makes him the more dangerous. He exercises on those who go to him a kind of grip of psychic order which is quite astonishing and from which few have the strength to escape.” But Daumal felt that de Salzmann and Gurdjieff were exactly what he had been looking for - the “search of a true science, a science that includes being,” as the Gurdjieffian physicist Basarab Nicolescu put it. As Daumal wrote of his encounter with de Salzmann, “I have met a human being. I didn’t think it was possible. Just the same, I have had to sacrifice some very comfortable despairs. Hope is what is hard to bear.”
***
Daumal’s mature work, from the early 1930s onwards, seems often to be a dialogue between his various schools of influence - with each one, after his death, looking to claim him for themselves. The Surrealists had courted Les Phrères Simplistes on the basis of the early issues of Le Grand Jeu, but Daumal - in the sort of intellectual fracas that could only occur in Paris - vehemently denounced the Surrealists for “ideological poverty and a secret desire for a place in literary history,” which led in turn to the group being ‘excommunicated’ by André Breton. Daumal continued with more standard scholarly work - translating D.T. Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism into French, writing a Sanskrit dictionary, compiling Rasa, a volume of Sanskrit texts and essays on Indian aesthetics, that would result in his being called “the West’s first heroic student of yoga and the arts.” His core lycée group were fracturing by the 1930s, his ‘dark twin’ Gilbert-Lecomte succumbing to a morphine addiction, but much of their kazoo-blowing spirit can be found in Daumal’s column ‘Pataphysics This Month,’ which he wrote at various times for La Nouvelle Revue Française. Pataphysics is the ‘science of imaginary solutions,’ as developed by Alfred Jarry, the early hero of the Simplistes, and there’s something very charming about the attempt, as made by Thomas Vosteen in Pataphysical Essays, to try to reclaim Daumal from the intensity of Guénon, Gurdjieff, Surrealism, and to insist that Daumal’s schoolboyish Pataphysics was really the guiding thread in his intellectual career.
‘The Pataphysics This Month’ articles are a good starting-place for reading Daumal - with his whimsy leading the way. The essays are, above all, an attack on science as solemnly practiced in laboratories and universities. A more or less typical sentence might run, “It is inevitable that the idea of injecting astrological serum into a human being should arise in our pataphysician’s imagination.” And proposed scientific experiments might include a technique - this seems very influenced by Gurdjieff - attempting to work out what sort of ‘disguised animal’ one’s interlocutor at a given moment might actually be. To achieve this, Daumal suggests “nonchalantly, but in an intimate tone” introducing into conversation certain memories that might excite the listener - if one suspects, for instance, that one is speaking to a ‘disguised’ farm animal, one might “go on about a warm stable, the cows we’re going to milk, the steaming milk in the pails,” and then watch for a beatific expression to spread over the face of one’s conversation partner. Following Jarry’s definition of pataphysics as the study of the “the universe supplementary to this one….which can be and perhaps should be envisaged in place of the traditional one,” Daumal claimed that “poetry is to prose as pataphysics is to physics” and proposed a sister science ‘copulistics’ that would be to “ordinary logic what the voyage is to the map, what the meal is to the menu, what wine is to the label, what I am to my identity card.” This was, needless to say, very different from conventional science - Daumal seems to have been particularly annoyed by Sir Arthur Eddington - which was all just materials scooting around and was completely disconnected from being. “Everywhere, it’s booming, it’s bombing, it’s blasting,” he wrote. “A general catastrophic mood. The universe, according to Jeans and Eddington, continues to explode.”
In a similar frame of mind, he wrote his first novel, A Night of Serious Drinking. In spite of the great title, I find it to be a bit heavy-handed - a pastiche of Rabelais, Swift, and Dante, a tour of the various types besetting intellectual life (‘the Fidgeters,’ ‘the Clarificators’) and with drinking standing in for Gurdjieff’s ‘unconscious,’ dreamlike existence. A Night of Serious Drinking does, though, contain Daumal’s most lucid and vituperative attack on science - and, in the distinction between ‘scientist’ and ‘scienter’ puts into very clear form something that I’ve frequently been trying to address on this Substack in my criticisms of ‘scientific determinism’:
The scientist does useful work. Out of all his hypotheses, which has verified experimentally, he retains only those which may be of service to himself or others. The Scienter, on the contrary, seeks pure truth, as he says; that is, truth which does not have to be lived. It matters not to him if, when making a discovery, others apply it for making poisonous gases or curing disease or transmitting intellectual corruption or educating the young. That’s the first difference. Here’s another. The scientist believes only that which he has tested experimentally and asserts with confidence only what he can require others to test by experiment. But the Scienter applies the experimental method exclusively to material objects.
***
Over the 1930s he was becoming increasingly Gurdjieffian. His famous poem ‘Poem’ is a nice synthesis of Gurdjieff’s mode of seeking:
One cannot stay on the summit forever / One has to come down again. / So why bother in the first place? Just this. / What is above knows what is below - / But what is below does not know what is above. / There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up.
And his essay, ‘The Holy War’ - written in 1940 and having absolutely nothing to do with the war breaking out across Europe - is a beautifully Gurdjieffian call to arms: “There is only one ‘right’ - the right to be more.”
His mentor Alexandre de Salzmann had died of tuberculosis in 1934. Daumal worked with his widow Jeanne de Salzmann at a communal home she set up to explore Gurdjieffian movements and techniques and, in 1938, began working directly with Gurdjieff. By the time he started Mount Analogue, in 1944, Daumal was steeped in Gurdjieffian thought, and the book may well be the best fictional access point (the literary counterpart of P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous) to Gurdjieff and the ‘Fourth Way.’
Subtitled in Pataphysical fashion, ‘A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing,’ and an avowed attempt, as Daumal wrote, to “do for metaphysics what Jules Verne had done for physics,” Mount Analogue is the tale of a particularly surreal mountain-climbing expedition. The narrator had written - and then forgotten about - an article on Mt. Analogue, a sort of ur-mountain, that would represent the apex of the human spirit and that ‘must exist geographically,’ and then is startled to receive a letter from a mysterious Pierre Sogol proposing an immediate expedition to it. “It made me more than a little uneasy that someone should have taken seriously, almost tragically, a literary fantasy by which I had been carried away at the time,” the narrator remarks. But he does visit Sogol - following these Mary Poppins-ish directions for how to find him (no real coincidence, by the way, P.L. Travers was also a Gurdjieffian):
Pierre Sogol, Professor of Mountaineering. Lessons Thursday and Sunday, from 7 to 11 a.m. Means of access: go out of the window, take a left turn, scale a chimney onto the cornice, climb a crumbling schistslope, follow the ridge from north to south avoiding several gendarmes and enter by the skylight on the east slope.
The narrator successfully makes his way to Sogol, who explains:
The very fact that there are now two of us changes everything. The task doesn't become twice as easy: after having been impossible, it has become possible. It's as if you first gave me, in order to measure the distance from a star to our planet, one known point on the surface of the globe: you can't make the calculation. Give me a second point and it becomes possible, for then I can construct the triangle.
Sogol is usually described as being a fictional stand-in for Alexandre de Salzmann, which may be so. To me, he sounds almost exactly like Gurdjieff - the dedication of his early life to the investigation of ‘religious sects and mystic cults,’ the propensity towards working odd jobs and towards unexpected means of initiation, even the physical description of him as “having the tranquility of a caged panther biding his time.” (Then again, de Saltmann and Gurdjieff look more alike than not.)
Sogol comes across like Gurdjieff as distilled through Pataphysics - or through the East wind that blew Mary Poppins to London. Sogol’s description of the kinds of ‘reputedly impossible inventions’ that he has been working on for his day job sound exactly like the halfway point between In Search of the Miraculous and ‘Pataphysics This Month.’ He describes his endeavors to the sympathetic narrator:
I immediately invented some appalling devices: a pen for facile writers which spattered or blotted every five or ten minutes; a tiny portable phonograph, equipped with an earpiece like those on hearing aids, and which would cry out at the most unexpected moments: Who do you think you are?’; a pneumatic cushion that I called ‘the soft pillow of doubt,’ and which deflated unexpectedly under the sleeper's head
But Sogol’s abiding interest - like Gurdjieff’s, like de Salzmann’s, like Daumal’s - is the obsessive thought of:
A superior type of man, possessing the keys to everything which is a mystery to us. This idea of a higher and unknown strain within the human race was not something I could take simply as an allegory. Somewhere on our Earth this superior form of humanity must exist, and not utterly out of our reach. In that case shouldn't all my efforts be directed toward discovering it? Even if, in spite of my certainty, I were the victim of a monstrous illusion, I should lose nothing in the attempt. For, apart from this hope, all life lacked meaning for me.
After that introduction, the rest of the novel has a somewhat foreordained feel to it. “Now that I have started, I shall have to tell the rest,” says the narrator in an appealingly succinct plot synopsis, “how it was proved that a hitherto unknown continent really existed, with mountains much higher than the Himalayas; how it happened that no one had detected it before; how we reached it; what creatures we met there; how another expedition, pursuing quite different goals, barely missed destruction; how we have begun little by little to put down roots, so to speak, in this new world; and how, nevertheless, the journey has barely begun.”
But very soon after Sogol’s party put ashore on this unknown continent - it proves to be exactly where Sogol, after some very fanciful calculations, had predicted it would be found - and begins its hike towards towering Mt. Analogue, Daumal succumbed to his tuberculosis. He was writing the sentence “Without the wasps, a large number of plants which play an important part in holding the terrain in place - ” when a friend knocked on the door and, knowing he was dying, asked him to describe the rest of the plot, which Daumal did, and provided, with it, this summation:
But we learned later that if we were able to approach Mount Analogue, it was because the invisible doors of that invisible country had been opened for us by those who guard them…..Those who see us even though we cannot see them opened the door for us, answering our puerile calculations, our unsteady desires, and our awkward efforts with a generous welcome.
Gary Lachman claims that Daumal continued his experiments with carbon tetrachloride hundreds of times - well into adulthood - and that it is “almost certain” that the carbon tetrachloride led to the fatal weakening of his lungs. By the early 1930s he was losing teeth and in terrible health. The tuberculosis diagnosis came in 1938 - with Daumal refusing all treatment. The war years reduced Daumal and his wife Vera to excruciating poverty - Lachman writes that Daumal and Vera at one stage had nothing available but hot water to stave off hunger pangs. Notwithstanding how young he was, his death in 1944 was far from unexpected.
In a touching tribute, Roger Shattuck riffs off the ‘peradam’ - the transparent and easily missable stone that is recognized as currency by the guides of Mt. Analogue - in his description of Daumal’s art:
I cannot help seeing Mount Analogue as itself a peradam in the stony fields of literature. The peradam possesses such perfect transparence that it escapes the notice of all except those who are inwardly prepared and outwardly situated to catch sight of its glint. Mount Analogue, the novel, has the force of a curving and uncurving lens for our minds. Through it, we can glimpse that 'other world' of which Nerval spoke, and Spinoza and Socrates. And yet it is hard to look through it, for so limpid a substance almost escapes one's attention even when it is right under one's eyes. One could conceivably read every word of the book without 'seeing' a thing.’
On this one, Sam, not having read Daumal, I'll say this: Happy Birthday, I assume this month perhaps? xo ~ Mary