“He needs looking after,” I said.
Jacques nodded. “I’ll introduce you.”
There were many conversations and encounters with Breton, and it is hard to separate them out. I remember Claude sitting close to him in a café, discussing the increase in tension between politics and art. Like everybody else, she was saying, she had joined the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, the AEAR, since it was only the Communist Party that seemed prepared to oppose Hitler’s fascist and xenophobic program. She was beginning to have second thoughts, though. She wished Stalin had not stripped communism of all its romantic aspects. In turning his back on libertarian aesthetics, he had betrayed the legacy of Rimbaud and Lautréamont.
Breton looked pensive.
“What’s more, I’m worried by the party’s attitude to freedom of speech,” Claude went on. “They appear to think that everything we create should somehow reflect their ideology. I can’t—and won’t—accept those kinds of constraints.”
“Unlike Aragon,” Breton said.
Claude nodded. “A case in point.”
As Claude and I both knew, Breton had fallen out with Louis Aragon, once his most intimate associate, and a real force in the Surrealist movement. Also, Aragon had started publishing poems that regurgitated Communist Party dogma. They were awful.
“Art must be free of any shackles,” Claude said, “or it will die. I’m thinking of writing a defense of creativity.” She paused. “Which would amount to an attack on Aragon, and on the PCF.”
She was passionate that afternoon. She glowed like heated metal. Of the feelings of incompetence that had prevented her from writing for Soupault thirteen years before there was no sign. Had she finally overcome her shyness? Or was she inspired by Breton’s company?
“A defense of creativity?” There was a hint of a smile on the great man’s face. “I’d be interested to see that.”
At around that time, Claude came home weighed down by morning editions of all the daily newspapers. Her face was troubled, pale.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
There had been a double murder in Le Mans, she told me. Two housemaids, Christine and Léa Papin, had killed their employer, Madame Lancelin, and her daughter, Geneviève.
I asked her what had happened.
She gave me the background first. Christine and Léa came from a dirt-poor rural family, she said. Their father, a violent alcoholic, had raped their older sister, Emilia, when she was ten. Their mother blamed Emilia, and sent her to a brutal local orphanage. As a baby, Christine was sent to the same place. Léa, who was born six years later, was farmed out to a great-uncle. In time, Emilia became a nun. When Christine said she wanted to follow her sister into the church, her mother forbade it, insisting that both Christine and Léa go out to work in order to provide her with an income.
For seven years, the Lancelin family had no cause for complaint—Christine and Léa worked hard, and kept themselves to themselves—but on the night in question a power cut had plunged the house into near darkness, and something in the two young women must have snapped. When the police arrived at the house, they discovered the bodies of Madame Lancelin and her daughter on the landing, at right angles to each other, severe wounds inflicted to their heads and legs. There was an eye on the third step down from the landing. There was another eye in the hall. The carpet was drenched with blood, so much so that it gave underfoot, like moss. The youngest of the policemen was called Truth. Claude let out a laugh that was disbelieving, humorless. She had always paid great attention to names, and liked nothing better than to make them up, especially for me.
It was Truth who found the two sisters, she went on, in the attic, lying side by side in bed. Their hands and faces were scrubbed clean, as were the knife and hammer they had used as weapons. They put on matching blue kimonos, and he escorted the sisters down the stairs and out into the cold black February night, where they were photographed, their expressions shocked and masklike, their hair disheveled.
When Claude opened one of the papers and showed me the picture I was mesmerized, and it was a while before I worked out why.
“It’s just like you,” I said at last.
She looked startled. “What do you mean?”
The picture reminded me of Pierre Albert-Birot’s production of Barbe-Bleue, in which Claude had played the role of Bluebeard’s wife, Elle. She had worn a floor-length dress with black crosses all the way up the front of the bodice, as if she had been ripped open and then sewn back together. Her eyes were ringed in black, and her mouth was painted to look smaller than it was. A thick blond braid framed her face like a primitive hairband. Her presence onstage was chilling, since her movements were awkward, almost mechanical, and her face remained expressionless throughout. Even at the time, I had seen the performance as a portrait of repressed emotion. Elle could not react to—or even think about—the multiple rapes and murders her husband was committing. Her blankness became a screen on which the audience could project its own ideas about what she might be feeling.
I pointed at the photograph of the two sisters. “Christine and Léa are the same. You see?”
“Yes,” Claude said. “I do.”
For Surrealists like Breton, the case became a cause célèbre, since they saw the crimes as an attack on bourgeois complacency, but Claude and I were far more interested in the psychological aspects. We followed the case obsessively, discussing each development, no matter how inconsequential.
The trial took place in September of that year. Though both sisters were judged to be sane, experts subsequently claimed that Christine was almost certainly a paranoid schizophrenic. It emerged in court that Christine had been responsible for the murder of Madame Lancelin, and that Léa had copied her sister by killing the daughter. Léa didn’t speak except to say that she had used the knife to make “little carvings” on Geneviève’s thighs, which was the site of the secret of life itself. She was asked why she believed such a thing. Christine had told her so, she said. Christine was sentenced to the guillotine. Léa received a lighter sentence—ten years’ hard labor—since the jury felt she had a weak personality and had fallen under her sister’s spell.
Shortly before Christine was executed, the newspapers printed something she was supposed to have said. Sometimes I think that in former lives I was my sister’s husband. This statement echoed some of Claude’s preoccupations. First of all, Christine was questioning the boundaries of her gender. In defining herself as male, she had taken on a role that was proprietorial and dominant. Secondly, she had rejected the genetic link in favor of a union that was a choice. She had chosen Léa. The two young women were bound together by emotion, not by blood. Since Christine and Léa were sisters, and also, it was rumored, lovers, I wondered if Claude saw them as dark parallels, nightmare versions of ourselves. The thought was disconcerting, and I kept it to myself.
In time, the case disappeared from the newspapers, but Claude’s interest in mental disturbance and states of alienation did not fade. We met the poet and psychiatric doctor Gaston Ferdière, and would often attend his lectures at the Sainte-Anne hospital, with either Michaux, Breton, or René Crevel. I could never rid myself of the feeling that Claude was attracted by the very thing that had frightened or confused her as a child. After all, hospitals like these had been her mother’s refuges, worlds from which she—Claude—had always been excluded. They were also places in which she might herself have ended up. What had she written once? Madness looks at me with fixed eyes. In visiting Sainte-Anne, I thought, she was somehow visiting herself.
Though we grew close to René, we didn’t see as much of him as we would have liked, since he suffered from tuberculosis—his “dirty lungs,” as he called them—and he would disappear to a sanatorium in Davos for weeks on end. In his many letters to us, he referred to it as “being imprisoned.” If he wasn’t undergoing treatment in Switzerland, he was usually
traveling the world, but he would come and visit us the moment he returned to Paris. He would often bring Mops Sternheim-Ripper with him. She was a German-Jewish divorcee, with gleaming black hair and a slim figure. She worked in the theater, as a designer.
One night in 1934, after a month or two of silence, the couple appeared at our door while we were cooking for Henri Michaux.
“Am I interrupting?” René said.
“Of course not,” Claude said. “Come in, come in.”
Everyone said hello.
Claude spoke to René. “You look so well. Were you in Switzerland again?”
“I was with Dalí,” he said. “In Port Lligat.”
“I love Dalí,” Claude said.
René’s eyes opened wide. “You sound just like him.”
He had spent three weeks in Catalunya, he told us, at the fisherman’s cottage that was now Dalí’s home. I remembered Dalí describing the place. You must visit. I insist. Later, he had written me a letter in which he told me he had bought the property from the “witch” of Cadaqués, a paranoid woman by the name of Lídia Noguer. He admired her madness, he had said. It was so individual, and so inventive. Even after the sale had gone through, he would call on her, just for the pleasure of hearing her talk.
At first, René said, he had been alone with Dalí and Gala, who was ten years older. Some people found Gala high-handed or secretive—she had what Dalí called a “wall-penetrating gaze”—but he was devoted to her, and deferred to her at every opportunity. She walked around bare-breasted, even in public, wearing nothing but a flimsy little skirt. She turned heads everywhere she went. She was a nymphomaniac. Halfway through his stay, René went on, Mops had taken the train down from Berlin. They spent the days swimming in the lagoon or lying naked among the rocks behind the house. They dined on sea urchins and champagne and sardines caught when the moon was new. Some nights they slept on the flat roof, beneath the stars.
“Dalí used to try and watch us,” Mops said. “Making love.”
René nodded enthusiastically. “I caught him once, peering into our bedroom. He had a special peephole.”
“Dirty so-and-so,” I said.
But I didn’t mean it. I didn’t hold Dalí’s voyeurism against him. Somehow I could never hold anything against Dalí.
“Did you hear about the swans?” René asked.
We shook our heads.
Dalí owned three swans, he told us. When dusk fell, small cages would be fastened to their heads, each cage containing a lighted candle. Dalí liked to be able to watch the swans gliding across the bay while he was eating dinner.
The more René talked, the more fantastical his stories became, but he swore that every word was true.
“Usually I embellish,” he said. “With Dalí, though, there is no need!”
Towards midnight, Michaux rose from the table, visibly exhausted after hours of listening.
“I’ll see you out,” I told him.
When we were by the front door, he leaned close to me and spoke in a low voice. “He likes to talk, doesn’t he?”
I nodded. “It can be hard to get a word in edgeways.”
“Hard?” Michaux said. “Impossible.” He paused. “Do you remember what he said when he first walked in?”
“No, what?”
“ ‘Am I interrupting?’ ”
About a year later, on a midsummer morning, we were in a café with two Marxist friends, Néoclès Coutouzis and Lilette Richter, when we learned that René had killed himself. He had been found in his kitchen, with the oven on. He was younger than we were, only thirty-four.
Claude’s face drained of blood. “Does no one recall that line in his first novel?”
We all looked at her.
“I open the gas tap,” she said, “and forget to light a match.”
Someone gasped. “He wrote that?”
“It was in Détours,” Claude said, “published eleven years ago.”
There was a silence, then she pushed her chair back and left the table. In normal circumstances, I might have followed her, but I was thinking of my dream about the wet nurse with one breast, and how I too had appeared to be predicting my own future.
Later that day, as we walked in the Luxembourg Gardens, the weather cool and gray for June, Claude talked about René’s death. She was shocked and saddened—he had been a close friend and a pure spirit—but her overriding feeling, she said, was one of envy. She was jealous of his success.
“Success?” I was momentarily bewildered. As a writer, René had been a marginal figure, at best.
“He has accomplished something I have failed to accomplish,” she said. “He has shown me up for the fraud that I am.”
At last I understood. “Because you haven’t managed to end your life,” I said.
“What else?”
“But René was never very stable—”
“And I am?”
“He didn’t really have anyone.”
“No one has anyone.”
A dog bounded past us with a stick between its jaws. Its simple joy seemed outlandish, unachievable.
“Does our love count for nothing?” I said.
“Of course it does. But you can’t weigh love against death. There are no scales for what we’re talking about.”
“Maybe not. But you seem to be saying that death is heavier.”
“They belong to two completely different categories,” she said. “They can’t be compared.”
She asked if I remembered the lines that had appeared in her last book. Before being born, I was condemned. Executed in my absence.
I nodded.
“I was referring to my father,” she said.
One morning, when she returned from the dentist—she had been twelve at the time—her father had sat her down and asked her to forgive him for having brought her into the world. He saw her life as a mistake, a piece of carelessness. An abrogation of responsibility on his part. At some deep level, in a place where words could not be formed, she said, he had wished her dead. Or if not dead, unborn. Unthought of. Why? Because he didn’t want her to suffer, like her mother. Because he loved her. There were tears in his eyes as he spoke. Poor father, she said, taking his big hand. Don’t cry. She had been wished out of existence, and he was the one who had needed comforting! If she had been a boy, it would have been different. She didn’t think he had ever lost a moment’s sleep over her brother, Georges. His anxiety had been exhausting to live with. She had never been so tired as she was when she was young.
“That’s why I say that nonexistence is my natural state.” She looked ahead, down the long straight path. “It takes an enormous effort, sometimes, to go against all that.”
I remembered the photographs in which she appeared as her father. In merging her identity with his, perhaps she had been trying to remove herself from the equation. Wipe herself out.
“Oh, Claude,” I said.
The wind picked up. The leaves on a nearby plane tree shifted, and I felt something I had never felt before, the urge to do something sudden and destructive. To harm myself.
Maybe Claude sensed what I was feeling because she took my arm.
“This park is too depressing,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
I think it was in 1936 that Claude first suggested we should move away from Paris. After spending most of the twenties on the sidelines, we had been admitted into Breton’s inner circle. As paid-up members of AEAR, we were signatories to a number of high-profile protests and petitions, specifically against French imperialist policies and the rise of fascism. In 1934 Claude had published Les paris sont ouverts, the polemic she had promised Breton on one of their first meetings, and it had met with his enthusiastic endorsement. When Breton fell out with Georges Bataille—he was always falling out with somebody, it seemed—we helped him to form a new spli
nter group called Contre-Attaque. It didn’t last. Nothing lasted. The movements came and went more quickly than the seasons, and the rifts between people we knew were perennial and vitriolic. Some years later, in a letter, Breton would refer to Claude as “one of the most inquiring minds of our time”—he had thought highly of Disavowals, the book she had given him—and he went on to regret that she seemed to “find pleasure in remaining silent,” but he never realized the extent of her weariness and disillusion. If she still wrote, it was in secret, with no thought of being published. Though Paris was believed to be the center of the world, particularly for artists, and people were always congratulating themselves for being in the right place and pitying those who had the misfortune to live elsewhere, Claude was beginning to feel that something had been extinguished. This wasn’t clairvoyance on her part. Rene’s suicide was like a light going out, she told me. At the same time, she had noted the rise of right-wing factions like Croix de Feu, and the way in which anti-Semitic attitudes were once again in evidence throughout Europe. Newspapers ran articles that complained about the “swarming” Jews who were taking over the Parisian art scene, and Montparnasse was regularly demonized as an alien or “Jewish” area. Claude had already faced prejudice during her childhood, and she had no desire to face it again. What’s more, her health, which had always been delicate, had been worn down by her family’s endless bitter wrangling over money. She had been further weakened by surgical intervention, and by long years of starving herself, or eating poorly. Her eyesight was failing, and she was frightened that she might go blind, like her grandmother. The city drained what little energy she had. In her novel Nightwood, Djuna Barnes described Paris as having “the fame of a too-beautiful woman.” This was a compliment, of course, but only on the surface. The word “too-beautiful” said it all. One could be overwhelmed by Paris. One could become sated. And it was hard for a city to retain that kind of allure. There was the implication that it would fade. There was that inevitability.
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