Vail's creative life was extremely varied. Perhaps he best characterized his own course in "Grey Crust," a poem published in Poetry in 1921: "I would be fused into anyone going new ways." Tristan Tzara considered him one of the fathers of Dada, and he was an early practitioner of Surrealism in art and literature. He experimented with form, diction, and style. He was one of the signers, along with Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Harry Crosby, Eugene Jolas, and others, of the "Proclamation" which announced the "Revolution of the Word" in transition (June 1929) and stated that the undersigned were "tired of the spectacle of short stories, poems and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism."
Piri and I (1923), Vail's first novel, is a fantasy based in part on his life from age eleven onward and treats his very close relationship with his sister, Clotilde, as the romance of two people, Piri Riminieff and Michael Lafosse, the narrator. Piri and I defies simplistic categorizing, since the fictional modes change to suit the author's purpose. At first it is quite frankly a sensitive story of childhood and adolescence, then it becomes a novel of manners, and finally it turns self-consciously philosophical.
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