{"id":19915,"date":"2020-07-20T16:48:54","date_gmt":"2020-07-20T15:48:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=19915"},"modified":"2025-09-20T18:56:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-20T17:56:09","slug":"satans-saint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2020\/07\/20\/satans-saint\/","title":{"rendered":"Satan’s Saint"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Digging in a box for an errant paperback turned up this volume which I’ve owned for years but never read. Having recently watched Jan \u0160vankmajer’s Lunacy<\/em>, which has a Sade-like character among its cast, I thought I should give it a proper look. Sade’s irreligious and libertine philosophies haunt the Surrealist world, hence \u0160vankmajer’s interest, Jean Beno\u00eet’s performance art<\/a> and so on. Surrealism didn’t have any saints but it did maintain a pantheon of precursors, with Sade accorded the status of “Genius of Wheels” (ie: revolution) in the Surrealist deck of playing cards<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Guy Endore (1900\u20131970) wasn’t a genius, a satanist or a saint but he was an interesting character, an American writer best known today for The Werewolf of Paris<\/em>, another novel I own and have yet to read. He was a vegetarian and a socialist at a time when both these pursuits were regarded with suspicion or outright hostility (his Communist sympathies later caused him to be placed on the Hollywood blacklist). He wrote a great deal of historical fiction\u2014in addition to Satan’s Saint<\/em> there are novels based on the lives of Casanova, Voltaire and Shakespeare. And his Hollywood credits include work on scripts for Tod Browning (Mark of the Vampire<\/em>, The Devil-Doll<\/em>), writing the source novel (Methinks the Lady<\/em>) that became Otto Preminger’s psychological film noir, Whirlpool<\/em>, and, with John Balderstone, adapting Maurice Renard’s The Hands of Orlac<\/em> into the screenplay that became Peter Lorre’s Hollywood debut, Mad Love<\/em>. The latter is a great film that I’d love to see again. Satan’s Saint<\/em> was first published in 1965. This Panther edition appeared in 1967. Now I just have to find the time to read it\u2026<\/p>\n

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Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade by Jean Beno\u00eet<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Marat\/Sade<\/a>
\n\u2022 Surrealist cartomancy<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Digging in a box for an errant paperback turned up this volume which I’ve owned for years but never read. Having recently watched Jan \u0160vankmajer’s Lunacy, which has a Sade-like character among its cast, I thought I should give it a proper look. Sade’s irreligious and libertine philosophies haunt the Surrealist world, hence \u0160vankmajer’s interest, … Continue reading “Satan’s Saint”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New blog post: Satan's Saint","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42,7,22,14,18],"tags":[10783,375,1688,10784,4840,10785,3082,8091,5552],"class_list":["post-19915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-film","category-horror","category-politics","category-surrealism","tag-guy-endore","tag-jan-svankmajer","tag-jean-benoit","tag-john-balderstone","tag-marquis-de-sade","tag-maurice-renard","tag-otto-preminger","tag-peter-lorre","tag-tod-browning"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-5bd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}