Synopsis
We now have a unique opportunity to examine how novelist Charles Beadle portrayed the African sleeping sickness epidemic: first in a work of literature, A Whiteman's Burden, and then in a mass-market form of genre fiction, The Lost Cure. In both these works, the devastation of the pandemic that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives is etched with vivid, moving poignancy. The Lost Cure is featured in Adventure magazine's 30 January 1923 issue but has never before been published in book form. As always, Beadle's work resonates with a potent authenticity, because it's deeply grounded in actual experience. A courageous explorer and innovative writer, he spent a dozen years in Africa between 1898 and 1910, building a treasure trove of memories and existential observations that would later nourish his stories, essays, and novels.
About the Authors
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 Pèlerin ("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. Although the time and place of his death remained a mystery until 2025, we now know that Beadle spent his final years in Nice, where he died on 27 January 1957
ROB COUTEAU is a Brooklyn-born author and visual artist. His publications 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.
JOHN LOCKE has been fascinated by 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. Charles Beadle featured in two collections of Africa adventure fiction (The City of Baal, 2007; The Land of Ophir, 2012). In 2018, Locke 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.
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