Héliogabale ou l'Anarchiste couronné - Exemplaire de Carlo Rim

First edition, one of 100 numbered copies on alfa, the only grands papiers (deluxe copies) after 5 pur-fil paper.

Bound in half green morocco, paste paper boards, marbled paper endpapers, wrappers and spine preserved, top edge gilt, contemporary binding signed Lucie Weill.
Skilful and discreet repair to the top of a joint.
Illustrated with 6 vignettes by André Derain.

Handsome inscription signed by Antonin Artaud: “à Alice & à Carlo Rim que j'aime beaucoup parce que j'aime dans la vie tout ce qui est nature, franc et sans fard et la vie d'Héliogabale aussi est franche et sans fard et dans la ligne de la grande Nature. Antonin Artaud leur ami.” (“To Alice & Carlo Rim whom I love very much because I love in life all that is nature, frank and unvarnished and the life of Elagabalus is also frank and unvarnished and in line with the great Nature. Antonin Artaud their friend.”)

Carlo Rim, one of Antonin Artaud's oldest friends, was a companion of poetic beginnings and a brother of Marseille blood, the “French Chicago” that nourished their works and their imaginations.

Although we do not know exactly how the complicity between Antonin and Pagnol's young protégé, Jean Marius Richard, alias Carlo Rim, was born, we do know the melting pot in which their unbreakable friendship was formed: Marseille. Even more precisely, “between five avenues and the Vieux-Port”, in the heart of what was the city of Artaud's childhood and literary beginnings. It was in the magazine Fortunio, founded by two young baccalaureate graduates, Marcel Pagnol and Marcel Palnas, Antonin's cousin, that Artaud published some of his first poems alongside the very young cartoonist, Carlo Rim. Shortly afterwards he titled his own magazine – of which only two issues were published – after the bilboquet that presided in the Fortunio offices and which had, already, sealed Rim and Pagnol's friendship, during an epic baccalaureate review.

When published the same day and with the same publisher Denoël, Héliogabale and Carlo Rim's first work, Ma belle Marseille, the two accomplices went out to celebrate this simultaneous release together, with the “Literary Tout-Marseille”: Kisling, Lhote, Raimu, Dabit, Dyssord... In Le Grenier d'Arlequin, Carlo Rim will talk of this memorable evening “at Titin's”, during which “Artaud, overexcited by four mominettes [little glass of absinthe], enthuses to his neighbouring table, about the cult of the phallus and the Sperm Festival introduced by Elagabalus the Sodomite, the empaffed Caesar”.

It was probably during this evening that the two friends respectively offered each other one of the rare luxury copies of their latrine volumes in the literary pool.

The two works share more than their contingent publication. The Baudelairian ode to “debauchery without thirst and love without soul” of Ma belle Marseille agrees as a sister with “the background of our wild literature” which is, according to Le Clézio, Héliogabale.

Rim's work will have a considerable impact on Artaud who, in a famous letter to Jean Paulhan, will make it one of the three books to consecrate the legend of his double mystic, Saint-Artaud.
It is especially at the reading of this unvarnished portrait of the aristocracy and the Phocaean underworld, that Artaud will decide the future of Carlo Rim by persuading him to make his first film, Justin de Marseille, as the filmmaker will recount in his Mémoires d'une vieille vague:
“— I want to play a crackpot ["fada"] in your film, a crackpot who would be, like a real madman, a puzzle solver, a proxy of fate, an Elagabalus in a hat and sandals! Do you know Etienne, the crackpot of the Vieux-Port? He is my double, and I will show this resemblance again by imitating his voice and his gestures. And Antonin Artaud suddenly dismantled his skinny carcass with an ape-like waddle, his beautiful face in convulsive grimaces and he began to quaver like a used record:
She had a wooden leg
And so that it doesn't show...
At the last minute, Antonin Artaud fell ill and we had to replace him with Aimos in this role of the “crackpot” that had been written for him.”

Artaud satisfied his desire for acting the following year by opening, with the precious help of Alice Rim, alias Caro Canaille, his Théâtre de la Cruauté, and by playing the main role of his adaptation of Cenci.

Discreet but always present friends, Carlo and Alice Rim were for Artaud, what he writes in this sumptuous inscription, an intimate manifesto of a literature “frank and unvarnished and in line with their great nature.”