Champion of Words

John Sturrock

• Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel by Michel Foucault, translated by Charles Ruas
  Athlone, 186 pp, £29.50, April 1987, ISBN 0 04 851136 6
• Raymond Roussel: Life, Death and Works. Essays and stories by various hands
  Atlas, 157 pp, £5.50, September 1987, ISBN 0 947757 14 7

Michel Foucault, for once and for now, may stand aside: who is the Raymond Roussel about whom he wrote this, his one real essay into literature? Roussel was a writer, of sorts, of the early 20th century; a man both glamorously rich and mentally odd. His money he spent to the hilt in the furtherance of his oddness, for Roussel laboured to write the most uncommercial works and then paid to have them published. He set new standards indeed for vanity publishing, because he paid not only to get his poetry and his fiction into book-form, but also to have his plays put on in Paris. The theatre does not come cheap for those who must be their own angels, but to see his uniquely inauspicious plays performed in public was a deep need and Roussel did not stint on the satisfaction of it. By the end of his life his huge inheritance was exhausted.