Dark Refuge

A lost modern masterpiece, Dark Refuge is now available for the first time since 1938. No other Anglo-Saxon author from this period describes the Parisian demimonde so accurately, because to do so would risk being thrown into jail. With thinly disguised portraits of Modigliani, Max Jacob, Beatrice Hastings, Natalie Clifford Barney, Leopold Zborowski, and other legendary modernists who haunt the underworld of the 1910s and '20s, its brazen account of drug-fueled pansexual orgies prevented the censorable chronicle from being distributed outside of France, despite its literary merit and lyrical beauty. The author of seven other novels, Charles Beadle was a world traveler who was born at sea in 1881. When he was 18 years old he spent a dozen years exploring Africa. In his mid-20s he organized an expedition to Fez and traveled there disguised as a dancing girl, to interview the sultan of Morocco. In the 1910s he lived in Montmartre, where he befriended Beatrice Hastings, the mistress of Modigliani and translator of Max Jacob. Modigliani later portrayed Beadle in a drawing. During WWI he journeyed across America and published genre fiction in Adventure magazine. After the war he returned to Paris, later moving to the Riviera. In 1941 Faber and Faber published Artist Quarter, a nonfiction work co-authored by Beadle and Douglas Goldring and considered to be the urtext of all Modigliani biography. Published for the first time since 1938, this edition of Dark Refuge features over 200 annotated notes that include previously unknown details about the author's life and that create a multileveled context for the novel. This is followed by an Afterword, "The Dark Refuge of Charles Beadle," in which Rob Couteau traces Beadle's biography from his earliest years to his disappearance in the 1940s. It includes previously unpublished letters, documents, and photos as well an artfully rendered summary and analysis of Beadle's greatest work. In a brief Postscript, author Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno concludes that Beadle has created "a tremendous modernist novel that should rank among other classics such as Tropic of Cancer, Nightwood, Nadja, Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, and, of course, Naked Lunch." This is the Third, Revised Edition.