The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  They had no sooner returned to Paris than Drieu betrayed her with the forty-year-old wife of the famous actor-director Charles Dullin. It was his first passionate affair, he wrote—as passionate as his marriage was not, and the more so for Marcelle Dullin resembling his mother. However, the affair provided insufficient shelter from marriage, and in November 1917 he applied for service at the front, despite his feeble arm. The army assigned him to an American division in the Vosges Mountains as an interpreter. There he wrote poems about the strength and vitality of “soldiers from beyond the sea” while complaining to Colette about the difficulty of putting words on paper. “I am appalled by my past slothfulness, by all that I must learn. I don’t know how to write. At the moment I am locked in a bitter struggle with my sentences. But the difficulty is passionately absorbing.” He asked her to send him books by Socialist and monarchist writers.

  Pierre Drieu La Rochelle before World War I, arms folded, with André Jéramec, his school friend, and André’s sister, Colette, the uppermost figure, whom Drieu married in 1917.

  In 1918 the American division moved to Verdun, where Drieu spent the last months of the war. He was discharged in March 1919.

  The ornate apartment Colette and Drieu occupied after the war had enough rooms in it for two people hiding from each other, and it was, indeed, more often a scene of mutual evasion than of relentless matrimonial conflict. But it was also hospitable to the larger world. Far from shunning that world in Drieu’s absence, Colette had enrolled in medical school, almost completed work for the degree, and struck up friendships with fellow students, one of whom, Louis Aragon, another beau parleur, became Drieu’s boon companion. She held receptions for well-known poets, high-ranking diplomats, and publishers (Gaston Gallimard and Bernard Grasset, who shared the honor of recognizing Proust’s genius), during which Drieu, the presumed beneficiary of her social exertions, was said to behave like an uninvited guest, gazing abstractedly out the window. He felt at home nowhere but felt less marooned in the salon of Edmée de La Rochefoucauld, a young woman of letters and future suffragette as well as the bearer of an ancient title, or at Adrienne Monnier’s bookstore on the Rue de l’Odéon, La Maison des Amis des Livres, chatting with Aragon, Breton, and Soupault.17 There were serious conversations with a Communist friend from Sciences Po, Raymond Lefebvre, who never had time to convert him: on his way back from the Soviet Union in 1920, returning via Murmansk to elude the White Russian blockade, his boat disappeared.

  In 1919, Drieu’s fellow poets could think about little else but a review they were launching with help from Adrienne Monnier. They gave it an ambiguous title, Littérature, intending to echo the antiphrasis in Paul Verlaine’s poem “Art Poétique,” where “literature” signifies everything that true poetry is not (“et tout le reste est littérature”) or to trick subscribers in much the same way that the Dada movement lured the credulous public to its events with punning advertisements or false news.

  Their kindred spirits were Arthur Rimbaud and Isidore Ducasse (Lautréamont) rather than Verlaine. Several years earlier, Breton had cocked a snook at aesthetic propriety in language reminiscent of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer. “We are drawn to ageless, undreamt of, unimaginable little objects,” he wrote, “the museum of a child raised in the wild, curios from insane asylums, … broken mechanical toys, steam organs.” They loved what soon came to be known as “found objects”—objects valued for having no value, or for being prized by children and madmen, for being innocent of the culture that butchered millions while patenting the useful and insuring the beautiful. Poetry and art were to be found in trash cans and in the flea market rather than museums. “In old shop signs, in idiotic paintings, in the backdrops of circus performers,” Rimbaud would have added.

  But the ambiguity of “littérature” served a purpose. The journal’s creators dared not dress in flaming red lest the well-bred modernists they needed to vouch for the seriousness of their enterprise take fright. Thus, André Gide, Léon-Paul Fargue, and Paul Valéry mingled with Aragon, Breton, and Drieu in the inaugural issue, conferring upon Littérature the imprimatur of a fin-de-siècle literary vanguard. Marcel Proust, who had just won the Goncourt Prize for À l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs and never abbreviated his opinions, wrote a twelve-page compliment. They were seen as heirs. Before them loomed the specter of careers.

  Pierre Drieu La Rochelle recovering from wounds suffered at Verdun. Dressed in black is Colette Jéramec.

  Poetry and art were also to be found at the cinema, where the threesome of Breton, Aragon, and Soupault, with Drieu tagging along, found refuge from the thraldom of high culture in the exploits of a wildly popular villain named Fantômas. Exalted as “Master of Fright,” “The Torturer,” and “The Emperor of Crime,” Fantômas, whose diabolical disguises match his ruthlessness, assumed the mantle of Balzac’s Vautrin, of Maturin’s Melmoth, of Byron’s Manfred, of Ponson du Terrail’s Rocambole, and, above all, of Lautréamont’s Maldoror. At war with bourgeois mores, the future Surrealists fancied themselves denizens of the underworld before renaming it the unconscious. Crime prefigured nature. One act of terror would blow away the flimsy fortifications of a rational order.18

  They also found refuge from high culture in the company of their cinematic heroines. “An entire generation’s idea of the world was formed in the cinema and one film especially summed it up, a serial,” Aragon wrote. “The young fell head over heels in love with Musidora, in The Vampires”—a hypnotized vamp who kills at the bidding of her lover. Musidora had a serious rival for their affections in Pearl White, the mindless, death-defying heroine of The Perils of Pauline.

  That Surrealism belonged to the larger family of Romantic offspring was evident in its prenatal stage. The Romantic sensibility flourished after the bloodletting of World War I, as it had a hundred years earlier in the aftermath of the Revolution and the Napoleonic campaigns. With its penchant for the bizarre and the surprising, its contempt for bourgeois morality, its black humor, its glorification of evil genius, its language of rebirth, its messianism, its explorations of the erotic at the margin of death, the postwar literary generation envisaged a new human condition and succumbed to the ravages of a twentieth-century mal de siècle.19

  Breton and Aragon were chafing at their public sedateness when a small man named Tristan Tzara landed in their midst, like an imp from Pandemonium, and sparked the explosion of Dada in Paris. Born Samuel Rosenstock in Romania, Tzara had entered the University of Zurich during the war to study philosophy and found philosophy at a café among young habitués—mostly self-exiled Germans dodging military service or invalided out of the army—who spawned the Dada movement. Tzara made a name for himself beyond Zurich as the editor of reviews smuggled west across the battle line. “Dada means nothing,” he wrote in a manifesto declaring war on the warring nations.

  It was born of a need for independence, of distrust of the community. Those who belong to us retain their freedom. We acknowledge no theory. We have had enough of cubist and futurist academies, of laboratories of formal ideas.… We are spirits drunk on energy; we thrust pitchforks into flab.

  The only literature Dada recognized, he continued, was the “necessary” utterance of “supreme egoism” leaping off the page in mixed typeface, like the outrageous blagues of the great nineteenth-century actor Frédérick Lemaître, who inspired Daumier’s Robert Macaire drawings.

  I tell you: there is no beginning and we do not tremble, we aren’t sentimental. An angry wind, we shred the laundry of clouds and of prayers and prepare the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition. Let us prepare to suppress mourning and replace tears with sirens blaring from one continent to another.

  Reason and the belief that things can be explained rationally are the police force of authority. “Thought is a fine thing for philosophy,” Tzara continued, “but it is relative. Psychoanalysis is a dangerous malady; it puts to sleep the anti-real penchants of man and systematizes the bourgeoisie.… I am against systems
, the most acceptable system being that which has no principle.” Morality was another weapon the abolition of which belonged to the Dada agenda.

  Morality will wither like every poisonous weed planted by the intelligence.… Let every man shout: there is a great destructive, negative project to be accomplished. Sweep everything clean. The selfhood of the individual will affirm itself after a world left to the devices of bandits, who destroy one another and destroy the centuries, is in shambles. Without goal or design, without organization: untamable madness, decomposition.

  Dada, he concluded, encompasses a multitude of revulsions: for the family, for charity, for pity, for memory, for hierarchy and “social equation,” for logic, for prophets, for the future. Like movements as far to the right of it as the mind could reach, it celebrated raw energy.

  In January 1920, Breton, Aragon, and Soupault met Tzara at the apartment of the Franco-Spanish painter Francis Picabia, whose magazine 391 (published during the war in Barcelona, where French refugees found asylum) allied itself loosely with Tzara’s six-page journal, Dadaphone.20 Old hands at nihilistic buffoonery, Tzara and Picabia prepared Dada’s debut in Paris. Breton and Aragon rented a hall called the Palais des Fêtes and engaged several actor friends to read Dada texts. Picabia and Tzara organized the program.

  Opening of the Max Ernst exhibition at the Au Sans Pareil bookstore in May 1921. On top of the ladder is Philippe Soupault, holding an inverted Jacques Rigaut, who later served as the model for the drug-addicted, suicidal hero of Drieu’s novel Le Feu Follet. Breton is on the right.

  The Palais des Fêtes, on Rue Saint-Denis, was far removed from Left Bank literary circles. Flanked by two cinemas where Breton and Aragon had watched Fantômas, Les Vampires, and Chaplin films, the hall had been chosen for prankish and sentimental reasons. Located in a commercial neighborhood, it attracted merchants, who came hoping to learn more about France’s financial crisis, for the event had been advertised in newspapers as a symposium entitled “La Crise du Change.” “Change” could be understood to mean either “currency” or cultural and social change. The program opened with a lecture on Apollinaire. Puzzled jewelers and wigmakers who sat it out left soon afterward, as the evening descended from serious poetry to antics of the kind that had led to Tzara’s arrest in Zurich. Drieu was present. He and Jean Cocteau read poems by Max Jacob and Pierre Reverdy before Breton came onstage with a canvas of Picabia’s scrawls conspicuously entitled L.H.O.O.Q. The letters form, by their sounds, the sentence “Elle a chaud au cul.”21 Once it caught on, the audience—as much of it as remained—erupted, booing and stamping until a small orchestra calmed it down with the music of Satie.

  The second act continued where the first had left off, but with no alloy of serious poetry and music. Preceded by a fanfare of rattles, Tzara announced that he would read his “latest work,” which turned out to be a speech Léon Daudet had recently delivered to the National Assembly. Aragon and Breton drowned him out with bells, and members of the audience shouted, “Back to Zurich! To the gallows with him!” Juan Gris protested that he had been enlisted as a participant under false pretenses. He was not alone.

  Other capers followed in quick succession. The May 1920 issue of Littérature carried thirty-two Dada manifestos, notifying subscribers and literary eminences who had originally sponsored it that it no longer operated within their understanding of literary modernism. On May 26, the Dada Festival was held in Paris’s principal concert hall, the Salle Gaveau.

  By then, the thirty-two manifestos notwithstanding, Tzara’s French collaborators had already begun to distance themselves from him. “Every time a demonstration was foreseen—naturally by Tzara, who never tired of them—Picabia would assemble us in his salon,” wrote Breton, “[and] ask us, each in turn, to suggest ideas. The harvest became increasingly sparse.” Dada continued fitfully. Tzara left Paris in July 1920 for the Balkans and returned in December, after a Dada Congress in Italy, to sabotage a lecture by Emilio Marinetti on tactilism. A concert of bruitist music met the same fate. Vacationing together in the Tyrol, Hans Arp, Max Ernst, and Tzara conceived a show called “Open-Air Dada.” In May 1921, Tzara reluctantly participated in Maurice Barrès’s mock trial. Six months later, Picabia briefly distracted Paris from the very real trial of a serial killer with his painting L’Oeil Cacodylate at the Salon d’Automne (the oeil cacodylate being an eye surrounded by the comments and signatures of friends—like graffiti around a peephole inside a urinal, wrote one critic). Tzara broke with Picabia, or Picabia with Tzara, and, sooner or later, everybody with everybody else.

  A Dada tract, January 12, 1921, signed by Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, Breton, Aragon, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Paul Éluard, and Marcel Duchamp, among others. The title translates to “Dada moots everything. Dada knows everything. Dada spits everything out.”

  Drieu observed, as a supernumerary, the drama of large egos jostling for space at center stage of a Parisian sideshow. He followed where Aragon led, out of friendship or loneliness rather than conviction, and remained the fellow traveler when Littérature, having renounced Dada, found its true path in the practice of automatic writing.

  The Dada group assembled at the Church of Saint-Julien le Pauvre, staging one in a series of Dada “visits and excursions” to “places that really have no reason to exist.”

  He and Colette divorced in 1921, not bitterly. They became friends. Colette continued to socialize with their Surrealist acquaintances and practiced medicine.

  1The supervising psychiatrist had him read La Psychanalyse des Névroses et des Psychoses by Drs. Régis and Hesnard, published in 1914. Freud’s works had not yet been translated into French.

  2The charge against Barrès implies that the Dada court was posing as a twentieth-century avatar of the Committee of General Security established during the First Republic to supervise the police and safeguard the Revolution. In 1793 it became a prime implement of the Terror.

  3Conservative papers were outraged. “Everyone with a French soul will naturally be repelled by such baseness and foul abuse.… Another performance of the show may provoke something more than simple boos and anodyne hisses,” wrote La Presse. A reviewer for La Justice suggested that hydrotherapy for Dadaists might be in order and that it was high time their identity papers be checked.

  4Bourdet had been appointed to the directorship during the left-wing coalition called the Front Populaire by Jean Zay, minister of education and fine arts, and Premier Léon Blum. Both were Jewish and detested for that reason, among others. Zay—founder of the Cannes film festival—was assassinated by Vichy militia in 1944. Blum was caught by the Germans and sent to Buchenwald.

  Giraudoux entered the foreign service before World War I and resumed his career afterward. He and Drieu could have met during the war, as both fought in the disastrous Dardanelles campaign.

  5Thiers rose very high indeed, first entering Paris as an obscure lawyer from Marseille, marrying into great wealth, playing a key role in the Revolution of 1830, attaining the premiership and, several decades later, the presidency of the Republic before exiting to occupy, offstage, the largest mausoleum in Père-Lachaise Cemetery.

  6In fact, Jacques came from a village near Coutances in Normandy, not from the Atlantic seaport of La Rochelle.

  7It will be recalled that Barrès’s grandfather Charles Luxer was also a rich pharmacist.

  8The neighborhood lycée was Condorcet, whose alumni included Henri Bergson, Stéphane Mallarmé, Thadée Natanson, Eugène Labiche, and Marcel Proust.

  9The Ministry of Foreign Affairs attracted children of the haute bourgeoisie and drew upon the École Libre des Sciences Politiques.

  10His prewar notebook contains a prophecy: “There are two beings I shall spend my life trying to comprehend: woman and the Jew.”

  11It caused him no apparent discomfort to identify his instinctual drive as French, to have Nietzsche as his vade mecum, and to wish that he could continue the war in the stylish uniform of a British officer.

 
; 12Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Gautier, Flaubert, and Rimbaud, among many others.

  13“And we shall make Peace as we made War. We shall wield our steel cranes. With reinforced concrete we shall raise the monument of our Strength.” Elsewhere he described “la force” as “mother of all things”—“mère des choses.”

  14After the death of André Jéramec in 1914, Drieu wrote to Colette: “Those who have endured the suffering of months on the battlefield have often longed for death and regretted that they hadn’t found it during the first engagement.… It helps to plunge into the swelling tide of one’s race. I want to think about nothing but my minuscule place in the immense sacrifice we must make at the altar of our homeland to fend off the threat of annihilation.”

  15Colette bore two children in the 1930s.

  16Some say 500,000 francs, or approximately $100,000 in 1917—the equivalent of almost $2 million in 2011; others say several hundred thousand dollars.

  17Her bookstore was an international gathering place for writers, as was the review she launched in 1924, Le Navire d’Argent. She befriended and mentored Sylvia Beach, the young American expatriate who opened Shakespeare & Co. down the block and published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no one else would. Drieu may have met Joyce’s translator, Valéry Larbaud, at one bookstore or the other.

  18Paris’s monuments were subjected to terroristic revision in a game the Surrealists recorded for posterity. They proposed, for example, to cut the Panthéon in two and pull the halves one inch apart.

  19In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls that “new” was used obsessively in daily conversation after the Revolution.