Exquisite corpse

It's not a coincidence that Blue Hotel's Blanca Nul shares her surname with Rebecca Nul, the protagonist of André Pieyre de Mandiargues' 1963 novel La Motorcyclette (The Girl on the Motorcycle). Blanca dresses the same as Rebecca and she looks the same; she doesn't ride a motorbike but both characters meet a similar end.

Rebecca Nul's husband in La Motorcyclette is named Raymond. Ray Moody's name doesn't come from there directly – the Ray kinda refers to Raymond Chandler, and was also a contrast to "Moody" (as in "ray of sunshine"). Somewhere in my unconscious the association may have trickled down. But the Rebecca / Blanca "Nul" reference is intentional.

I first read La Motorcyclette in 1991 and it hovers at the edge of my reading awareness in the same way as The Outsider and Story of the Eye do: just one of those things that keeps popping up. The main thing I appreciate about it is its impending mood. From the first page death is approaching and quickly. It's one thing to evoke a sense of doom and quite another to make it come up so fast.

Somehow I possess an English first edition 1966 Calder and Boyars paperback of La Motorcyclette (The Girl on the Motorcycle), translated by Alexander Trocchi, which features a still from movie as its cover. Marianne Faithful starred in the film, overshadowing Alain Delon. The British production tried to be French with predictable success. In Faithfull's words:

"It took three months to make. I was away a lot and Mick visited me on location in Zurich and Heidelberg and the South of France. Alain Delon was the star, and very early on in the film he tried to pull me in the same desultory way that Roy Orbison had. When I turned him down, he became very sullen and nasty and difficult. He was such a pompous ass, in any case, and every time he said that ludicrous line, 'Your body is like a beautiful violin in a velvet case,' while unzipping my leather suit, I would crack up. It was dozens of takes before I could do it with a straight face."

The Girl On the Motorcycle was released in the US as Naked Under Leather. N.U.L. = Nul? Maybe. Maybe not. For me the novel is the better version of the story. The symbolism works in prose: as visuals, it's at best merely erotic.

Mandiargues won the Prix Goncourt for his 1967 novel The Margin but it was La Motorcyclette that made him famous. He was friends with Henri Cartier-Bresson and translated Yukio Mishima. Edward Gauvin writes at Weird Fiction that Mandiargues was associated with the Surrealists and yes, the team is all there:

Mandiargues' personal divinities were André Breton, the founder of Surrealism; Jean Paulhan, the legendary Gallimard editor (of Mandiargues and many other fantasists); and Belgian Henri Michaux, poet, painter, and LSD dilettante. ... Octavio Paz called him "one of the truly original writers to have appeared in France since World War II." At a Caribbean-themed ball, Jean Genet introduced Mandiargues to Sartre, whose path he never crossed again.