A Passionate Pilgrimage. Edited with an Introduction and Afterword by Rob Couteau
Published on 24. December 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
508 pages
978-1-963363-30-2 (ISBN)
Description
In 1915, Charles Beadle had the honor of creating a banned literary novel, A Passionate Pilgrimage, one of ten books blacklisted between 1914 and 1916 by Britain's Circulating Libraries Association. By today's standards, there's nothing lewd, graphic, or obscene in this largely autobiographical confession. But for the Britain of 1915, Beadle's carefree portrayal of casual sensual encounters between an unmarried protagonist ("Jim") and various members of the opposite sex was a literary taboo - especially since it doesn't lead to moral retribution. Instead of suffering a fateful nemesis, Jim is focused on how to express his natural instincts without being waylaid by hypocritical doublethink. He also holds unconventional views regarding marriage, religion, and the forging of a personal life philosophy. Bucking the collective morality, he even empathizes with the plight of sex workers, whom he regards as victims deprived of a better life simply because of a bad roll of the dice. The author's sympathetic portrayal of Jim's romantic relationship with a dark-skinned African native, whom he regards as a more worthwhile companion than her "proper" Victorian counterparts, must have been a difficult pill for the contemporary puritans to swallow. Such notions flew in the face of the "Genteel Tradition" of Anglo-Saxon literature: a convention of "cautious Victorianism" that was about to crumble under fledgling but mounting attacks by courageous authors such as Theodore Dreiser (another censored innovator, with whom Beadle was personally acquainted), who sought to explore the unspoken realities of contemporary life. The upcoming decade of the Twenties would mark a full-frontal assault by the literary giants of the avant-garde; thus, A Passionate Pilgrimage appears at the very cusp of this creative revolution. Drawing directly from personal experience, Beadle affords us a rare glimpse into the underbelly of Victorian society, breaking through the "mind-forg'd manacles" of what was then considered an "acceptable" or "tasteful" tale and exploring points of view that only an anti-Victorian story might dare encompass. With the Obelisk Press publication of his seventh novel, Dark Refuge (1938), he produced an even more provocative chronicle - and one that was also banned in the Anglo-Saxon world due to its brazen portrayal of the Parisian demimonde of the interwar years. Therefore, both of these censored books portray the shifting mores of the times and encompass a major trajectory in the author's life. Newly revised, with over 200 annotations.
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
728 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-963363-30-2 (9781963363302)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
The author of eight novels and dozens of short stories, CHARLES BEADLE was a world traveler who was born at sea in 1881. When he was eighteen years old he expatriated from England and spent a dozen years exploring South Africa, Rhodesia, Zambia, Uganda, the Congo, Mozambique, Borneo, and Morocco. In his mid-twenties he organized an expedition to Fez and traveled there disguised as a dancing girl to interview the sultan of Morocco. In the 1910s he lived in Montmartre, where he befriended his neighbor Beatrice Hastings, the mistress of Modigliani and translator of Max Jacob. Modigliani later portrayed Beadle in a drawing titled Le Pelerin ("The Pilgrim"), which may have been a reference to Beadle's first banned book, A Passionate Pilgrimage. During World War I he traveled to the United States, where he published his stories in Adventure and in the International, a cultural journal edited by Aleister Crowley. He returned to the City of Light in the fall of 1919, where he lived throughout most of the 1920s, eventually moving to the French Riviera. In 1938 Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press published Beadle's last novel, Dark Refuge: an unrecognized modern masterpiece that quickly fell into obscurity. It contains thinly disguised portraits of Modigliani, Max Jacob, Beatrice Hastings, Léopold Zborowski, and various other figures who haunted the Parisian demimonde of this period. Beadle's brazen portrayal of drug fueled pansexual orgies prevented the chronicle from being distributed in the Anglo-Saxon world despite its literary merit and lyrical beauty. In 1941 Faber and Faber published Artist Quarter, a nonfiction work pseudonymously coauthored by Beadle with Douglas Goldring, which is still considered to be the urtext of Modigliani biography.