Robert Meyrat

Meyrat's most clearly documented participation included attempts with Daumal to arrange meetings in deliberately induced dreams and an episode in which he pulled the trigger of a revolver held to Daumal's head; the weapon did not fire. These experiments later formed part of the experiential background from which Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte developed the Grand Jeu's idea of “experimental metaphysics”. Meyrat withdrew from the circle before the Parisian review was established. He did not contribute to the three published issues of Le Grand Jeu and did not pursue a literary career. He remained in Reims, trained as a physician and lived there until his death. According to a later account by Vailland, Meyrat continued to visit Gilbert-Lecomte's grave each week.

• Name — Robert Meyrat • Birth Name — Robert Georges François Meyrat • Born — 1 February 1907 • Birthplace — Reims, France • Died — 22 January 1997 • Place of death — Reims, France • Other Names — La Stryge; Ellen Dyan • Occupation — Physician • Known for — Founding member of the Phrères Simplistes Robert Georges François Meyrat (1 February 1907 – 22 January 1997) was a French physician and one of the four founding members of the Phrères Simplistes, the group of secondary-school students in Reims whose ideas and experiments preceded the avant-garde magazine and collective Le Grand Jeu. Before René Daumal joined their circle, Meyrat, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and Roger Vailland had helped produce the handwritten school review Apollo. With Daumal, the four developed Simplism into a private intellectual and initiatory community. They adopted pseudonyms and invented rites, read Arthur Rimbaud, Gérard de Nerval and Alfred Jarry, and experimented with dreams, extrasensory perception, intoxicants, trance, depersonalisation and other altered states. Meyrat's most clearly documented participation included attempts with Daumal to arrange meetings in deliberately induced dreams and an episode in which he pulled the trigger of a revolver held to Daumal's head; the weapon did not fire. These experiments later formed part of the experiential background from which Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte developed the Grand Jeu's idea of “experimental metaphysics”. Meyrat withdrew from the circle before the Parisian review was established. He did not contribute to the three published issues of Le Grand Jeu and did not pursue a literary career. He remained in Reims, trained as a physician and lived there until his death. According to a later account by Vailland, Meyrat continued to visit Gilbert-Lecomte's grave each week.

Meyrat was born in Reims on 1 February 1907. He attended the Bon-Enfants secondary school, where he became friends with Gilbert-Lecomte and Vailland. Before Daumal's arrival in 1922, the three produced a handwritten review entitled Apollo. It ran to six issues in two series and contained poems, prose and drawings. Gilbert-Lecomte acted as its principal editor, assisted by Vailland and Meyrat. Daumal arrived at the school after the academic year had begun. He was already widely read in poetry, esotericism and Asian religious literature and shared the interests that had begun to develop around Apollo. Meyrat later recalled that Daumal's arrival had “completely changed everything”: the three friends, previously united chiefly by humour and literary games, acquired a more coherent intellectual purpose. The four met at Gilbert-Lecomte's home or at the home of Meyrat's grandparents. They drank, smoked, read aloud from Baudelaire, Nerval and Rimbaud, and criticised one another's poems. Daumal introduced the others to Jarry and pataphysics. Their reading gradually expanded from poetry into philosophy, psychology, mysticism and accounts of alternative forms of perception. Reims was still being reconstructed after the First World War. Its damaged buildings and partially ruined districts provided the adolescents with settings for wandering, pranks and nocturnal experiments outside the authority of their school and families.

By 1923–24, Meyrat, Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte and Vailland were calling themselves the Phrères Simplistes, sometimes translated as the “Simplist Phraternity”. The deliberately altered spelling of frères combined schoolboy wordplay with the suggestion of a spiritual or initiatory brotherhood. “Simplism” did not designate a preference for simple literary style. The group sought to preserve what it regarded as the imaginative freedom of childhood against the adult world of logic, social utility and fixed identity. Its members hoped to recover a condition preceding familiar divisions between dream and waking, visible and invisible reality, and individual and collective consciousness. The Simplists created an elaborate private mythology. Their patron was “Saint Pliste”, while “Bubu”, a grotesque infant partly derived from Jarry's Père Ubu, served as a talisman and private deity. They produced two issues of another handwritten publication, Bubu-Magazine, in 1925. Each member received one or more names intended to express different aspects of his place within the group. Daumal was “Nathaniel”, Gilbert-Lecomte “Rog Jarl” or “Coco de Colchide”, and Vailland “Dada” or “François”. Meyrat was called “La Stryge”, after a vampiric nocturnal creature, and also “Ellen Dyan”. Their private system also reorganised ordinary relationships of kinship. Gilbert-Lecomte was sometimes treated as Daumal's spiritual father, while Vailland and Meyrat were his siblings. Meyrat was assigned the role of “sister” within one version of the group's mock family. The four also described themselves as a single Simplist archangel distributed among four bodies. These identities were partly jokes, but they also expressed the group's attack on the idea of a stable, self-contained personality. The Simplists treated names, social roles and individual character as forms that could be displaced, multiplied or collectively reorganised.

The Simplists regarded poetry as one instrument within a broader investigation of consciousness. Their collective activities included dream observation, sleep deprivation, trance, somnambulism, movement through the streets with closed eyes, mirrors, intoxication, induced asphyxia and attempts to produce states of depersonalisation or “doubling”. Their philosophy teacher René Maublanc encouraged experiments in “paroptic” or eyeless vision. Maublanc had studied with Jules Romains, whose theories of extra-retinal perception and Unanimism proposed that individual consciousness could be surpassed through collective and simultaneous forms of perception and behaviour. The group's interests were not confined to occult literature. Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte read Henri Bergson, the psychologists Théodule Ribot and Pierre Janet, the psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers, and works dealing with somnambulism, dissociation, false memory and multiple personality. These materials gave the adolescents a psychological and philosophical vocabulary for experiences they were attempting to induce by practical means.

Meyrat played a particularly important part in Daumal's experiments with directed dreams. Daumal later described these practices in “Nerval le Nyctalope”, published in the third issue of Le Grand Jeu in 1930 and dedicated to Meyrat. According to Daumal's account, he and Meyrat attempted to arrange nocturnal meetings in a state independent of their ordinary bodies. The procedure involved relaxing the body, controlling the breath and imagining each movement with enough precision that the imagined action occupied the same amount of time as its physical equivalent. Daumal insisted that the resulting encounters belonged to a real field of experience rather than to arbitrary fantasy. Later descriptions called the imagined form in which the two met a “mental double” or “second body”. The surviving testimony is Daumal's retrospective account, not independent evidence that the experiences occurred as the participants interpreted them. It nevertheless shows that Meyrat was central to one of the experiments later used to illustrate the Grand Jeu's idea of knowledge tested through experience.

The Simplists' preoccupation with death culminated in a Russian-roulette episode. Daumal acquired a revolver and, in the presence of the group, instructed Meyrat to hold it to his head and pull the trigger. The firing mechanism clicked without discharging the weapon, and Daumal fainted. Duncan treats the episode as one of the origins of the expression “great game”: life and death had ceased to be literary subjects alone and had become elements in an experiment carried out by the participants themselves. Meyrat's involvement demonstrates the extent to which he shared the early group's practical extremism, even though he did not participate in its later Parisian development.

In the summer of 1925, Daumal and Vailland left Reims for Paris to continue their studies. Gilbert-Lecomte initially remained in Reims under pressure from his father to study medicine. Soon after Daumal's and Vailland's departure, Meyrat abruptly stopped communicating with the other Simplists. Duncan writes that the break caused disappointment and confusion among his former companions, who received no explanation for it. Some shorter biographical accounts date Meyrat's departure to 1927, but the correspondence and chronology reconstructed by Duncan place the break substantially earlier. By 1927, when Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte and Vailland were planning a Parisian review provisionally entitled La Voie, Meyrat was no longer part of their activity. The Paris circle expanded to include the poet and essayist André Rolland de Renéville, the Czech painter Josef Šíma, Maurice Henry, Artür Harfaux and others. Its review appeared in 1928 under the title Le Grand Jeu. Meyrat neither edited nor contributed to its three published issues. He is nevertheless frequently included in lists of people associated with Le Grand Jeu because the review's mythology, experimental methods and collective language developed from the earlier Simplist group. His position is more precisely described as that of a founding Simplist and formative precursor of Le Grand Jeu rather than a member of the published Parisian review. The mature Grand Jeu's engagement with Hindu non-dualism, René Guénon, revolutionary politics and “experimental metaphysics” was developed principally after Meyrat's withdrawal, especially by Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte. Those later positions therefore cannot automatically be treated as Meyrat's own, although his participation in the Reims experiments formed part of their history.

Meyrat remained in Reims and trained as a physician. The published accounts of Le Grand Jeu provide little information about the details of his medical work, and no independent literary career followed his withdrawal from the Simplists. Gilbert-Lecomte died in Paris in 1943 and was buried in the Cimetière de l'Est in Reims. Vailland later reported that Meyrat visited his former companion's grave each week. Duncan presents the visits as evidence that, despite Meyrat's unexplained departure from the circle, his attachment to the friendships of his adolescence continued long afterwards. Meyrat died in Reims on 22 January 1997, ten days before his ninetieth birthday.

Meyrat's historical importance rests on his role in the formative Reims period rather than on a published body of work. Havard describes him as decisive in the adolescent activities of the future Grand Jeu, while noting that he did not continue beyond Reims and had no literary career. He helped create Apollo, participated in the Simplist mythology and took part in experiments that later became central to Daumal's account of the group's origins. Daumal's dedication of “Nerval le Nyctalope” to Meyrat preserved his connection with the attempt to enter a shared dream or double state even after he had severed contact with the group. Meyrat also supplied later testimony about the circle's beginnings. His recollection of Daumal's arrival at the Bon-Enfants school is one of the few surviving retrospective statements by him and is regularly cited in histories of the Grand Jeu. The surviving juvenile publications are collective rather than an independent Meyrat bibliography: • Apollo, first and second series, six handwritten issues produced at the Bon-Enfants school, approximately 1920–1922; • Bubu-Magazine, nos. 1–2, handwritten sheets produced in Reims in 1925. Facsimiles of both publications were reproduced in Henriette-Josèphe Maxwell's study of Gilbert-Lecomte.