A Review of 4 Dada Suicides – An Editor of Do Not Submit
November 15, 2025
Part One: Arthur Cravan
Suicidal ideation is a broad term that can range in intensity, from fleeting notions to detailed plans. 4 Dada Suicides introduced me to the life of Arthur Cravan, who dreamed his “life with great care,” transforming the entire spectrum of suicidal ideation into spectacle, and self-destruction into an artistic crescendo. He dreamed an existence that felt scripted and expendable.
Poet, pugilist, perpetual fugitive, nephew to Wilde’s ghost, no one burned as brightly or vanished as completely. Cravan appeared to turn his self-erasure into a vanishing trick as his body was never recovered. The myth of Cravan’s suicide was the boldest hoax of all, a final fuck off to the world’s demand for closure.
Whether Arthur Cravan vanished into thin air, drowned in high seas or reinvented himself…we may never know. There was no witness, no corpse, no note…one of the cleanest getaways in all of literature…
Cravan was a Swiss-born writer (poet, critic, counterfeiter, editor, deserter, boxer, brawler, hoaxer, hotel thief, chauffeur, gold prospector, missing person, lecturer, enfant terrible, grandson of the Queen’s chancellor, André Gide’s secretary, associate of Leon Trotsky, and proud nephew of Oscar Wilde) who predated Dada’s formal emergency in Zürich in 1916. Not having any foreknowledge of the movement, nor self-identifying with Dada, Cravan was adopted as a posthumous icon for Dadaists by the New York Dadaist movement.
As André Breton put it, Cravan’s life is the single best barometer for measuring the impact of the avant-garde between 1912 and 1917. With no foreknowledge of Dada, Cravan was forefather of Dada…he established himself as the incontestable master of negative appeal; he paved the way for Tristan Tzara’s anti-art slogans well before the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire.
4 Dada Suicides worked to pin down a life that thrived on evasion. Born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd (May 22, 1887-disappeared 1918) in Lausanne, Switzerland, Cravan was shadowed from youth by scandal. His aunt Constance Lloyd had married Oscar Wilde, whose 1895 imprisonment cast a pall over the family. Cravan’s Anglo-Irish parents had relocated to Lausanne, Switzerland, to escape the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde.
Raised with a British passport, but fluent in French, Cravan was defiant and itinerant in nature, and was kicked out of boarding school for allegedly spanking a teacher. At 16 he changed his name to Arthur Cravan (the forename was a tribute to his hero, the vagabond poet Arthur Rimbaud) and left Switzerland in search of adventure.
Cravan was self-proclaimed “deserter of seventeen nations,” who explored his plurality of selves through forgery, aliases, and disguises. He relied on forged passports to blur his identity and facilitate his wanderings, turning his life into performance art. He used forged passports to evade World War I conscription, drifting through Europe and America as a shadow self, teaching boxing in Greenwich Village, then hoboed his way from New York City to California.
In defiance of war, he assumed the disguise of a soldier and hitchhiked his way to neutral ground.
As a gifted dissimulator, Cravan also enjoyed creating dramatic pseudonyms and elaborate backstories.
Crossing boarders, slicing sensibilities, murdering reputations…
Cravan’s performances and lectures were legendary. He lectured blackout drunk and boxed professionally. Mina Loy called his provocations pantomimic atrocities on the spectator’s habitual expectations.
His most renowned “lecture” was at the New York Independents Exhibition in 1917; on this occasion he threw his dirty laundry at the audience and began to undress before being manacled and hauled off to jail.
Cravan’s “lectures” turned the ultimate vulnerability into voyeuristic bait.
He once drew a full house on the Noctambules in Paris by advertising his sincere intention to end his life before a paying public…threatening to take his life, then chastising the audience for making a social event of death. This was a signature Cravan technique.
Cravan’s most infamous proto-Dada event was his April 23, 1916, boxing match against world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson in Barcelona’s Plaza de Torus. Less athlete than anarchist, the fight was pure theater. Cravan, a mediocre boxer at best, hyped himself as a European Champion and arrived with forged credentials. The bout, attended by 15,000 spectators, devolved into farce: Cravan taunted Johnson with insults, lasted only six rounds before a knockout.
Literature was Cravan’s other arena. His journal Maintenant (1912-1915), was filled with his own pseudonymous essays, poems, and stories. He distributed copies via wheelbarrow, using publication to troll contemporaries and forge scandals, lambasting the avant-garde as “idiots” and claiming Oscar Wilde was alive and visited him, a story that was picked up by the New York Times.
Maintenant was a violently polemical journal, with no regard for fair play. During its brief existence, Cravan used it as his personal loudspeaker to attack…to advertise his friends’ cafes, to bring down artists’ reputations, to vent his wrath on the public, to publish his poems and praise his unlikely heroes. Consisting entirely of Cravan’s own writing, presented under many pseudonyms, its purpose was not to identify talent, but to insult it.
Though his output was slim (mostly Maintenant and scattered poems), Cravan’s influence endures as a performance artist and troll.
Despite a mythologizing necrophilia that has attached itself to Cravan on the part of everyone from the Surrealists to the Pataphysicians to the Situationists to the Sex Pistols, the chrestomathy…the few literary traces he left…are byproducts of a combustible compound which did not completely succeed in eliminating all traces of itself. If Arthur Cravan had totally fulfilled his quest, he would have taken this residue with him, and only left the imprint of his gestures…
Cravan’s work is remnants of a life “lived to the limit and then cast aside with nonchalance and abandon.” Cravan’s legacy resides more in his mode of living than his artistic creations.
Canon is the cage he escaped. This is why he is still at large.
In 1918, Cravan married the poet Mina Loy in Mexico City, where they briefly ran an art school. Their daughter, Fabienne, was born shortly before his disappearance. That same year Cravan vanished at sea off the Yucatan coast. After arranging to meet Mina in Argentina, he had bought the only boat he could afford and set off from Puerto Ángel in southern Mexico, No one ever saw him again. No wreckage was ever found. No body was identified. It was as if he had vanished into thin air.
Knowing that there is no future that is possible or desirable, I experience the solace one feels on going back to sleep when the alarm clock has sounded.
Mina Loy eulogized that Cravan “worked to maintain his reality by presenting an unreality to the world- to occupy itself with – while he made his spiritual getaway.”