André Pieyre de Mandiargues

Mandiargues, André Pieyre de (1909-91). A tangential figure in post-war Paris Surrealism, Mandiargues specialized in elegant fictions about disturbing erotic experiences, minutely tabulated and often involving scenes of sacrifice and exacting ritual reminiscent of Sade or Bataille. The early fantasias of Le Musée noir (1946) exploit a thematics of perverse encounters and bloody struggles in the dark. The less sombre Le Lis de mer (1956) celebrates the almost metaphysical aura of anonymous sex, as the heroine alluded to in the title arranges for her own deflowering on a nocturnal shore in Sardinia. The interaction of desire and external setting dominates Mandiargues's imaginings, as in the novel La Marge (1967), set in the feverish alleys of Barcelona's red-light district, or the story ‘La Marée’ (1971), whose hero times his climax to coincide precisely with high tide. A connoisseur of the outré, Mandiargues devoted essays (Le Belvédère, 1958; with further vols. in 1962 and 1971) to the Gothic novelist Charles Maturin and the Surrealist artist André Masson, as well as to such personal discoveries as the monstrous Baroque sculptures at Bomarzo in Italy or the modern graffiti he copied down in the park at Versailles. His salute to Histoire d'O. (1954), a pornographic classic signed by the pseudonymous Pauline de Réage (Dominique Aury), may be tongue-in-cheek, given that he is widely suspected of complicity in its composition.

— Roger Cardinal