A Passionate Pilgrimage. Edited with an Introduction and Afterword by Rob Couteau

In 1915, Charles Beadle had the honor of creating a banned literary novel, A Passionate Pilgrimage, one of ten books blacklisted between 1914 and 1916 by Britain’s Circulating Libraries Association. By today’s standards, there’s nothing lewd, graphic, or obscene in this largely autobiographical confession. But for the Britain of 1915, Beadle’s carefree portrayal of casual sensual encounters between an unmarried protagonist ("Jim") and various members of the opposite sex was a literary taboo - especially since it doesn’t lead to moral retribution. Instead of suffering a fateful nemesis, Jim is focused on how to express his natural instincts without being waylaid by hypocritical doublethink. He also holds unconventional views regarding marriage, religion, and the forging of a personal life philosophy. Bucking the collective morality, he even empathizes with the plight of sex workers, whom he regards as victims deprived of a better life simply because of a bad roll of the dice. The author’s sympathetic portrayal of Jim’s romantic relationship with a dark-skinned African native, whom he regards as a more worthwhile companion than her "proper" Victorian counterparts, must have been a difficult pill for the contemporary puritans to swallow. Such notions flew in the face of the "Genteel Tradition" of Anglo-Saxon literature: a convention of "cautious Victorianism" that was about to crumble under fledgling but mounting attacks by courageous authors such as Theodore Dreiser (another censored innovator, with whom Beadle was personally acquainted), who sought to explore the unspoken realities of contemporary life. The upcoming decade of the Twenties would mark a full-frontal assault by the literary giants of the avant-garde; thus, A Passionate Pilgrimage appears at the very cusp of this creative revolution. Drawing directly from personal experience, Beadle affords us a rare glimpse into the underbelly of Victorian society, breaking through the "mind-forg’d manacles" of what was then considered an "acceptable" or "tasteful" tale and exploring points of view that only an anti-Victorian story might dare encompass. With the Obelisk Press publication of his seventh novel, Dark Refuge (1938), he produced an even more provocative chronicle - and one that was also banned in the Anglo-Saxon world due to its brazen portrayal of the Parisian demimonde of the interwar years. Therefore, both of these censored books portray the shifting mores of the times and encompass a major trajectory in the author’s life. Newly revised, with over 200 annotations.

The author of eight novels and dozens of short stories, CHARLES BEADLE was a world traveler who was born at sea in 1881. When he was eighteen years old he expatriated from England and spent a dozen years exploring South Africa, Rhodesia, Zambia, Uganda, the Congo, Mozambique, Borneo, and Morocco. In his mid-twenties 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 his neighbor Beatrice Hastings, the mistress of Modigliani and translator of Max Jacob. Modigliani later portrayed Beadle in a drawing titled Le Pelerin ("The Pilgrim"), which may have been a reference to Beadle's first banned book, A Passionate Pilgrimage. During World War I he traveled to the United States, where he published his stories in Adventure and in the International, a cultural journal edited by Aleister Crowley. He returned to the City of Light in the fall of 1919, where he lived throughout most of the 1920s, eventually moving to the French Riviera. In 1938 Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press published Beadle's last novel, Dark Refuge: an unrecognized modern masterpiece that quickly fell into obscurity. It contains thinly disguised portraits of Modigliani, Max Jacob, Beatrice Hastings, Léopold Zborowski, and various other figures who haunted the Parisian demimonde of this period. Beadle's brazen portrayal of drug fueled pansexual orgies prevented the chronicle from being distributed in the Anglo-Saxon world despite its literary merit and lyrical beauty. In 1941 Faber and Faber published Artist Quarter, a nonfiction work pseudonymously coauthored by Beadle with Douglas Goldring, which is still considered to be the urtext of Modigliani biography.

JOHN LOCKE has been interested in the pulp magazine era and its fiction, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, for many decades. In the 1990s he started collecting information on the era, which led to writing historical treatments about the publishers, editors, and most of all the authors. Many of his findings have been published in his Off-Trail Publications books. In 2018, he jumped up to book-length histories with The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales. He's currently completing a book about writers behaving badly in the 1920s.

ROB COUTEAU is a Brooklyn-born author and visual artist whose work has been cited in the New York Times and whose books have been praised in Evergreen Review, Publishers Weekly, New Art Examiner, Midwest Book Review, and Witty Partition. In 1985 he won the North American Essay Award, sponsored by the American Humanist Association. His work has been cited in books such as Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Tyrone Simpson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'Love in the Time of Cholera' by Thomas Fahy, Conversations with Ray Bradbury edited by Steven Aggelis, and David Cohen's Forgotten Millions, a book about the homeless. His interviews include conversations with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Justin Kaplan, Last Exit to Brooklyn novelist Hubert Selby, Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda, LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann, Picasso's model and muse Sylvette David, sci-fi author Ray Bradbury, film star and bibliophile Neil Pearson, and historian Philip Willan, author Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy. Couteau has appeared as a guest on Bob Barrett's The Best of Our Knowledge (WAMC), Len Osanic's Black Op Radio, and on Monocle 24 in Europe. Since 2020 he has devoted himself to republishing annotated texts of important but forgotten authors such as Stanley Marks, Charles Beadle, and Francis Carco. In 2023 he published Intimate Souvenirs, a memoir featuring an Introduction by Robert Roper, author of Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita and Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War.