Marcel Béalu

Marcel Béalu (30 October 1908 – 19 June 1993) was a writer and bookseller born in Selles-sur-Cher in the Loire Valley. He died in Paris in 1993.

Life Béalu was raised in impoverished circumstances in the town of Saumur, not far from his birthplace. Largely self-taught, he read the classics of French literature on his own initiative while working as a haberdasher in Montargis, a town on the canal that links the Loire and the Seine. 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, Béalu met the poet Max Jacob, who gave him critical encouragement and advice.

In 1951, Béalu set himself up in business as a Parisian bookseller. He named his store Le Pont Traversé ("The Crossed Bridge"), after a comment on his work by Jean Paulhan. 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 in Paris. 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 predilection 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 Réalités 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.

Marcel Béalu's work has appeared in la Nouvelle Revue Francaise, l’Herne, Poésie 44, La Tour de Feu, Les Lettres, Fiction, La Tour Saint-Jacques, Botteghe Oscure, Dire, Marginales, Les Cahiers du Sud, Betelgeuse.

His writing was admired by Jean Paulhan and Antonin Artaud, but as yet his literary reputation has not fully developed.