CW: Cannibalism.
For such an infamous book, the original edition Dévorer is decidedly ordinary. It is a small, clothbound book, written in French. It is one hundred and forty-seven pages long. It was privately printed by its author, Edgar Addison, in the final years of his life. After his death, Dévorer was lost to various estate sales and storage units as war and its aftermath unfolded around it. It was republished by the small press Beurre Fragile in 1967. It did not take long for Addison’s haunting collection of essays and confessionals about cannibalism to quickly became an underground cult sensation.
Only one photo of Edgar Addison has survived history. It was taken in 1923, possibly at Addison’s sixty-first birthday party, possibly not. The photographer is unknown. In the black and white photo, Addison is revealed to be a large, pale, bearded man. He sits in a café with an intricate hookah set around him. It is clear by the debris on the table, by the glasses and trays, that another person has been sitting with him, but he poses by himself for the photo. He wears expensive boots, well-made pants, a dark shirt, and an old, well-loved and well-travelled fur-edged coat that has been patched and mended in numerous places. He has a leather eye patch over his left eye. His left hand is missing. A closer inspection reveals that the small finger on his right hand is also absent. Addison looks tired and worn. His wife, Madeleine, has died recently. He has spent the last two years caring for her in their Paris apartment, their home for the previous twenty years. Addison will continue to live there until his death in 1933.
Edgar Addison was born in Nottingham in 1862. His father was Lord William Addison. His mother was Lady June Addison. Thirty years separated his two parents. Edgar was the youngest of William’s nine children and the oldest of June’s three. He spent his childhood on a large, lush estate, and wanted for nothing. His father died when he was young. The death was a suspicious one, but the young Addison did not search for answers or retribution when he came of age. By then, he knew why no one mourned his father. He knew the family title had been purchased in 1713 through a series of bribes and near treasonous promises and he knew that his father lived off the taxes from the surrounding land like a parasite. He knew, also, that his father had been a violent man who beat his previous wives and murdered two of the servants he’d had affairs with. The bodies of the young women were rumoured to be buried in unmarked graves on the family estate, down by the lake where William Addison fell from his horse unnoticed and was found, later, with a broken neck.
Addison was a quiet boy. In this way, he took after his mother. He was a good student, but unremarkable. At the age of ten, he loved nothing more than adventure stories. Alexandre Dumas and Jules Verne were his favourites. He wanted to be a novelist when he was older. He wrote his own stories, short stories that he bound together with woollen yarn his mother gave him. A few have survived. The stories are about boys who are drawn into mysteries and adventure by their proximity to a crime and a certain lack of parental oversight. Most are unremarkable, but one of the early writings, “The Winter Brothers and The Grave Robbers,” is of note. It is the story of a group of body snatchers who rob graveyards and later sell the dead as mummies. The fake mummies are then used in paints or sold as a curative called mumia. The ruse is revealed when a rich lord eats the mumia and tells his servants that he tastes not an Egyptian on his tongue, but an Irishman.
Addison’s first real experience with the cannibalism that came to define his life took place when he was fourteen. One of his tutors taught him about the failed Hungarian revolutionary, György Dózsa. Addison retells the story in Dévorer. He writes how, after Dózsa was captured, he was forced to sit naked on a throne of smouldering iron, where he was fitted with a burning crown. While he burned, nine of his loyal soldiers were led out in chains and forced to watch. Dózsa’s flesh was then torn from his body and given to them. The soldiers were told to eat what they were given or be executed. Some refused and were killed. Others ate. Those soldiers were set free after they finished. They were returned to their homes and forced to live with the shame of what they had done. It was a public shame. Addison’s own shame, he writes in Dévorer, began that night. He dreamed he was Dózsa. He dreamed that his flesh was torn from his body and given to his soldiers to eat. In the dream, he was still alive while this took place. He watched the soldiers eat and the pleasure of watching them woke him.
Addison was understandably troubled by the dream. He was even more disturbed when it reoccurred, along with his pleasure, in the subsequent nights. He worried that he was sick. He stopped eating meat. He drank only water. He grew thin and pale in his attempt to exorcise his desire. His mother asked after his health, but he could not tell her what ailed him. He could not find the words to explain what he was feeling or what he desired. She called in doctors, uncles, older siblings, and old teachers. She called in all the people Addison admired so that he might confide in one or all of them, but he wouldn’t. He couldn’t rationalise the pleasure and need and revulsion that defined his nights even to himself, much less another.
He left home at the age of nineteen. The catalyst was not his feverish desires, but his mother’s new marriage. She married Addison’s oldest brother, Thomas. Addison didn’t object to the relationship, but he could not escape the strangeness of it, of the way his brother had suddenly become his father and his mother his sister. His mother was sympathetic. She tried to find him a marriage before he left, but Addison was cold to his prospective wives. He was cold in general. He had pushed the difficult questions of his desire deep within himself. In doing so he closed off that part of his world. He had few friends. He had no sexual appetite. He did not drink or gamble. He remained a vegetarian. Before he left, his mother talked to him about his father. She spoke about his temper and his violence. She was warning Addison, he knew. He told her he would never become such a man, but she took little relief from that. A son always promises to be different to his father.
Addison left home with a generous allowance. He didn’t need to work. He wanted to follow his childhood dream and become a writer, but it didn’t come naturally to him at the time. He took on low paying jobs in the belief that it would help his inspiration. He was a baker, a barman, a debt collector and, finally, a sailor. He travelled much of the world over the next decade, though he kept few detailed accounts of what he saw and what he did during this time. Only one account is recorded in Dévorer. It is of a storm that wrecks the ship Beloved. Many of the crew drown, but Addison and a handful of others wash up on the shoreline of a small island. While there, Addison’s suppressed desires return to torment him fiercely. He writes about how little interest he had in his own personal survival. He dreams of offering himself to those around him. He fantasises about them stripping the skin from his bones. He wants the members of his crew to eat his flesh raw and bloody. He wants them to feast on him so that they can be saved.
Addison and the others would be rescued two months later. He returned to London, then moved to Paris. He started to write again. This time, he had some small success. He published a handful of stories, a few poems, and a novel, Damnation. The latter is about a gambler who cannot win and is forced into a life of crime to pay off his debts. The book wasn’t very successful or, it must be said, good. Addison’s allowance stopped after his mother’s death in 1892. He was still rich, but he began to translate novels to ensure that his income remained comfortable. The most famous of his translations is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published privately in 1900, twenty years before Eve and Lucie Paul-Marguerite’s first official French translation in 1920. Addison felt a special bond with Dracula and often said it was the favourite of his work. His translations allowed him to live on the edge of French literary circles, neither fully embraced nor exiled. Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote about meeting Addison in 1893. In a letter, he describes Addison as shy and tall and a terrible writer. It was Huysmans who introduced Addison to his future wife, Madeleine Bloy.
Madeleine was ten years older than Addison, a widow, and the mother of an adult child. No photos of her have survived, but Huysmans describes her as a solid, red-haired woman. She had a reputation of being formidable, passionate, and a lover of absinthe. Her first marriage had been loveless. She refused to repeat that mistake. She told Addison she would only marry again if she was allowed to devour the man she was with, if he would submit to her love and allow her to consume him, to own him with all her desire. In response to this, Addison sent Madeleine a vial of his blood and declared his intentions to marry her. It was a surprising move for a man whose reputation was one of cold, asexual behaviour.
Madeleine did not drink Addison’s blood. She set the vial on her dressing table and watched it dry out. She told her daughter, who was scandalised. Still, Madeleine continued to see Addison. In a short amount of time, she became infatuated with him and professed her love to him well before the year was out. She was an adventurous lover and much more experienced than Addison. She was not shocked when Addison demanded she bite him until she tore his skin open. She enjoyed it, in fact. She was only too happy to dig her nails into him, to lick at his wounds. Addison’s bodily surrender excited Madeleine more than she thought possible. When he presented her with another vial of blood, she drank it before taking him to her bed. According to Addison, her blood-stained mouth left marks across him that he refused to clean off for days.
On their wedding night, Addison tore out his left eye and gave it to his new wife. Madeleine was prepared. They had discussed the act for months beforehand. The mutilation and consumption was their true ceremony, the true act of their love and commitment to each other. Madeleine ate her new husband’s eye raw while she straddled him, still dressed in her wedding gown. For the first time in his life, Addison felt complete pleasure. It was spoiled when Madeleine threw up on him. She apologised profusely. Desperate to save the night, Madeleine dosed herself with laudanum and cleaned her vomit from him with her tongue and hands. Addison later wrote that he had never experienced such an act of devotion before.
Within a few years the consumption of flesh had become a mandatory part of the couple’s sex life. Addison would cut himself with care and present his flesh to Madeleine on expensive plates they’d purchased for this act. She would eat it raw. He insisted: The purity of what they had could not be tarnished by fire. In Dévorer, Addison drew diagrams to show where he cut himself. He left comments on each of his illustrations about which wounds healed most easily and which ones took the longest to recover from. He also wrote about Madeleine’s use of drugs. By the third year of their marriage, she was reliant on laudanum to please him, a fact that depressed Addison.
As the years went on, Addison withdrew from public life. He preferred to stay home, translate novels, and work on Dévorer. He took great care with the latter. He wrote and rewrote each section dozens of times, worked on the placement of each piece in the space of a book. He would spend days on a sentence, weeks on a paragraph. Madeleine’s friends reported that towards the end of 1919 she was decidedly unhappy. They speculated that Addison’s secluded lifestyle was the cause. They urged her to divorce her strange, one-eyed husband.
Madeleine’s unhappiness was not with Addison, but with her health. She was diagnosed with cancer early in 1921. Addison cared for her as best he could, but as Madeleine’s illness consumed her, his care became desperate and, finally, dipped into the madness that had long lurked inside him. He cut off the fingers on his left hand and fed each to her, piece by piece, until he severed what remained at the wrist. The wound nearly killed him. He admits as much towards the end of Dévorer. It took him months to recover from the wound. During that time, Madeleine’s decline continued. Addison writes that he believed his health would work its way into her, that his flesh would heal her. Some charitable scholars have said that he was lost in grief at this time, but a fairer reading of the situation is that Addison was using Madeleine’s illness to enable his most perverse fantasy, the sacrifice of himself to save another.
In the final days of Madeleine’s life, Addison severed the small finger on his right hand, but she could not eat. Worse, she would not. A week before her death she had desperately embraced Catholicism to save what she hoped was her immortal soul. She told Addison that she loved him, but regretted what they had done. In the final entry of Dévorer, Addison wrote that Madeleine’s refusal left him hollow. She abandons me, he writes, not just in life, but in death. She leaves me to carry my burden alone, as if I never shared it, or found comfort with her.
Edgar Addison would live for another decade, but after his death he left no notes, or diaries, or any correspondence behind. He stopped translating. The few friends he had lost contact with him. He was found by a housekeeper two or three days after his death. The exact date has never been known. There was a single notice published, not in a French paper, but in a British one. It was paid for by a niece who had never met him.
Addison was an intensely private man. He did not write Dévorer with the intention that it would become a public record of his desire, or a cult ritual for those who had just become adults. He would not have agreed to its publication. He would have been horrified by all the editions and translations that now exist. There are few things in life you can be sure of, but one of them is that Edgar Addison would not have relished any part of his modern recognition. Dévorer is, at its very core, an account of his struggles, and his failure to attend to them.
Bibliography
A Partially True History of Dévorer, by Gideon Mah, France, 1984.
Führer, Führer, Führer, by Marie Wolf, Munich, 1976.
Lost Lord Addison, by Elizabeth Stewart, London, 1993.
The Bookbinder’s Trade, by Clara Havet, Paris, 1982.
The Hidden Cannibal, by Emma Laws, New York, 2005.
The Psychology of Evil, by Alexander Devine, London, 1992.
Secret Agents of Despair, by Zeno Z, Barcelona, 2010.
