Henri Michaux

Henri Michaux (1899–1984) was a Belgian-born French poet, prose writer, and painter whose work refuses every genre convention. Born in Namur, Belgium, he moved to Paris in 1924 and spent his life largely in France, though extended voyages to South America and Asia produced some of his most distinctive writing. He declined the Grand Prix national des Lettres in 1965, as he did other institutional recognitions throughout his career.

His earliest major collections — Qui je fus (1927), Ecuador (1929, a travel journal), Un Barbare en Asie (1933) — established a voice that is observational, comic, hallucinatory, and savage by turns, generating interior mythologies from the encounter with the world and the self. His invention of the fictional character Plume, an absurd anti-hero subject to every form of misfortune and misunderstanding, gave this sensibility a comic vehicle that became famous. L'Espace du dedans (1944) gathered his key early work. From the late 1950s, Michaux began a sustained series of experiments with mescaline, producing texts (Miserable Miracle, 1956; L'Infini turbulent, 1957) and visual works — gestural ink drawings and paintings — that attempted to record the states of consciousness produced by the drug with the same precision as his other writing. He was also a prolific visual artist, known for small-format drawings in ink. His collected poems and prose have been published by Gallimard.