The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  For the Soviet Union, anti-Fascism was a supremely effective propaganda tool. Just as Mussolini extorted tacit approval from foreign minister Pierre Laval for his invasion of Abyssinia by condemning Germany’s plan to annex Austria in the Anschluss, so Stalin, holding high the torch of anti-Fascism, blinded Western intellectuals to the evil that committed as many as 140,000 slave laborers to a cold grave digging the White Sea Canal and starved almost four million Ukranians in the so-called Holodomor. People who spread the word—who lived by words—were the special object of Soviet ardor. Russia’s overtures had begun well before January 1933, but when Hitler took office, promising in the name of race and nation to destroy “individualism and bourgeois culture,” the courtship came to include luminaries who qualified for a warm embrace as fellow travelers. Conspicuous among the latter was André Gide, France’s most celebrated writer. On March 21, 1933, at a rally of the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (a branch of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers created by Moscow in 1927), he declared, “Why and how I approve today what I reproved yesterday has everything to do with German terrorism, in which I see a reprise of the most deplorable, the most detestable past. In Soviet society I see the opposite—the promise of a bountiful future.” L’Humanité, characterizing Nazism as “one more atrocious episode in the international saga of class conflict,” reported that Gide’s vow “to stand with the proletariat” excited wild applause. The paper then advertised his solidarity by serializing Les Caves du Vatican (Lafcadio’s Adventures), an odd choice of fiction for apostles of realism. His old friend Roger Martin du Gard, disregarding the guilt born of inherited wealth and the horrors Gide had recently witnessed in the Belgian Congo, urged him to “expunge from your revolutionary vocabulary this ‘class struggle,’ which does not comport with anything else in your mind.” He couldn’t imagine Gide “waving the red rag.” Gide would come to the same conclusion, but not until he visited Moscow, three years later.

  André Gide speaking at the 1935 Congress of Writers, which he cochaired with Malraux.

  André Malraux, who rose from relative obscurity in 1933 with the publication of La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate), was a younger star courted by the Soviet Union. In June 1934, a year after receiving the Goncourt Prize, he traveled to Moscow with his wife and Ehrenburg for an international congress held under the auspices of the Union of Writers for the purpose of enshrining realism. They endured hours of lip service to that doctrine in a huge hall whose facade was emblazoned with Stalin’s lethal aphorism “Writers are engineers of the soul.” In an address verbose even by Soviet standards, Maxim Gorky observed, after meandering from Greek mythology to Cervantes and beyond, that Immanuel Kant would not have cudgeled his brains over the Ding an sich—the thing that exists independently of us, unfiltered by the forms of sense—if he had been a primitive man in animal skins. “Primitive man,” he concluded, “was a materialist.” Hours later, Karl Radek, a Bolshevik warhorse, laid down the line in a more coherent argument entitled “Bourgeois Literature and Proletarian Literature,” the burden of which was that the literature of late-stage capitalism displayed the symptoms of “intellectual degeneration.”2 It was effete, if not senile. It no longer produced the sturdy novels of Balzac’s Human Comedy but instead issued the sickly ruminations of Marcel Proust (whom he likened to a mangy dog incapable of action, lolling in the sun and compulsively licking its wounds) or the “dung heap” of Ulysses, populated by worms whose wriggling Joyce observed under a microscope with evident delight.

  What Malraux had to say about literature, after paying homage to the Soviet government for “saving saboteurs, assassins, and thieves” from their criminal lives by having them shovel out the White Sea Canal, did not ingratiate him with the prelates of realism.3 To declare that recent Soviet literature faithfully presented “the external facts” of the USSR without touching on its ethics and psychology was considered blasphemous. If writers are “engineers of the soul,” he asserted, the engineer’s highest aspiration must be to invent—to invent as Tolstoy invented when there was no Tolstoy to imitate. “Art is not a submission, it is a conquest,” he said. Marx’s lessons explained troubled economies; they did not necessarily promote “cultural progress.” Refuting Stalin’s dictum, he declared that “there is consciousness of the social and consciousness of the psychological; Marxism is one, culture the other.”

  For all his waywardness (he also raised a glass to the absent and vilified Trotsky), Malraux was not excommunicated by the Comintern.4 Nor did dialectical-materialist cant lead him, one year later, to regard a Communist-sponsored congress for the defense of culture as a lure and a derision. To be sure, anti-Fascism spoke much louder than intellectual stringency. It kept odd bedfellows in bed together. But so perhaps did the demon that tormented Malraux with the sense of being an actor, a third person to himself, condemned to ventriloquize and to dream—not unlike Drieu—of transcending his “otherness” in revolutionary action. “Virile brotherhood,” a phrase reminiscent of Barrès’s “spirit of the trenches,” was his ideal. One of the speeches he gave at the Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture signals a departure from his earlier pronouncement that art is a conquest rather than a submission. By 1935 he was apparently no longer inclined to champion conquest except as conquest over self, or to befriend individualism (which he associated with inner division) except as a collective “I.” Being a man, he noted emphatically, “requires each of us to stop playacting.” We have heard this before and shall hear it again: to be wholly human was to overcome the breach between self and other, between face and mask, between bourgeois writer and proletarian audience. If the revolution did what it should, men would cease to “live biographically,” he declared, implying the possibility of an impersonal rebirth.5

  Excluded from a congress that excluded a select few of the Comintern’s bêtes noires was André Breton, who had sought, since the late 1920s, when he became a passionate reader of Trotsky’s memoirs, to persuade skeptical French Communists that Surrealists were reliable henchmen in the struggle for revolutionary change. Ten years earlier, on November 8, 1925, L’Humanité had published an article reporting that a symposium hastily organized by “dissident anarchists” to discuss the idea of revolution had elicited a letter from the Surrealists pledging fealty to the French Communist Party (PCF). “The so-called ‘Surrealist group’ insists on protesting publicly against the misuse of its name,” it began. “Some have been led to believe that there is a Surrealist doctrine of revolution. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  Gide in the middle and Malraux to his left at the Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture.

  Surrealism is first and foremost a method of thought, conferring greater value on certain elements of the mind than on others; it is the violent critique of a certain hierarchy of mental faculties. It far surpasses the artistic and literary applications to which people have sought to reduce it.… Because of the morality and method in which Surrealists ground themselves, we have, in the very exercise of Surrealism, come increasingly to count on the fundamental idea of Revolution.

  Despite the title of their magazine, Surrealists never believed in a Surrealist revolution, he asserted. “We want the Revolution because we want the means of achieving it, and the key to that achievement lies with the Comintern and the PCF, not with individualistic theoreticians … who are necessarily counterrevolutionary.”

  Breton persisted in the illusion that the PCF (unlike Sigmund Freud, to whom he made a futile pilgrimage during the fall of 1921) would embrace a poet preaching revolution of the mind and seat him among its elite.6 When he applied for membership in 1927, the party thought that his talents could best be used, and his ideological fiber tested, by assigning him the task of writing a report about the coal industry in Fascist Italy. This humbling ordeal did not result in a report or in membership. Nor did it put an end to his vexed relationship with the party. Three years later, soon after publishing his second manifesto, he fou
nded a new review called Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, the first issue of which answered a question telegraphed by the International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature: “Please reply following question what your position if imperialism declares war on Soviets stop.” Breton replied, “Comrades if imperialism declares war on Soviets our position will conform to directives Third International position of members French Communist Party stop If you judge better use of our faculties in such case we are at your disposal for specific mission requiring any other use of us as intellectuals stop.”

  Striving for intellectual heft, Breton favored philosophical and political essays in Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution but otherwise made his presence felt, as always, with épater les bourgeois demonstrations. There was, most notoriously, the screening he organized of Luis Buñuel’s film L’ge d’Or at a Montmartre cinema whose lobby was hung for the occasion with scabrous paintings by Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, Hans Arp, Joan Miró, and Man Ray. Right-wing militants, including an “Anti-Jewish Youth League,” took exception to Buñuel’s portrayal of Jesus as a Sade-like child molester and trashed the premises, splattering ink over the screen, destroying the projector, hurling stink bombs, attacking spectators with blackjacks, damaging the art, and tearing up copies of Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution on sale. In a front-page article, Le Figaro inveighed against the film as detrimental to everything of human dignity. Not closing it down would be tantamount to official complicity with “the work of intellectual Bolshevism making its mark in the heart of Paris” under cover of “avant-gardism.” Hadn’t the leagues done what the police ought to have done? Their violent foray was the “instinctive defense” of upright people (“honnêtes gens”) against a “satanic enterprise.” The author, Gaëtan Sanvoisin, praised the high-mindedness of a municipal councillor at whose behest the authorities had made cuts in the film and quoted his letter to Chiappe, the prefect of police:

  I attended a showing on Sunday. The spectators were mostly youths and foreigners. We elected officials are responsible for them. Our responsibility extends to a bookstore next door to the cinema, where a review called Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution is on sale, along with so-called avant-garde literature. I have several issues for you to peruse. It is because they tore up this garbage that young members of the Ligue des Patriotes were jailed for a night last week. To avoid such incidents, which will unfailingly recur, you have a dozen policemen guarding the cinema, while suffering from a shortage of personnel elsewhere. I won’t press you further. Knowing you as I do, I know where you stand. Your men will tire of stifling their just indignation to defend a spectacle conceived by neurotics and an agency of revolutionary propaganda. More of us than ever will no longer put up with the systematic poisoning of society and French youth.

  Sanvoisin was certain that Chiappe, if he bothered to peruse the review, would find abundant evidence of Bolshevik sentiment. It declared, among much else, that Indochinese revolutionaries served the oppressed of all nations by fighting to throw off “the French yoke.”

  Breton’s break with Communism followed his break with Louis Aragon. Largely responsible for their estrangement, after thirteen years of literary partnership, had been Elsa Triolet, a Russian novelist better known for her close ties to Ilya Ehrenburg and to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky than for her own writing.7 Tired of his role as the fidus Achates of one despot, Aragon fell under the spell of another, who made it her business to unburden him of his Surrealist past and remodel him along party lines. As labile a personality as Drieu, and as desperate for an ideological home, Aragon lent himself to the remodeling, in the course of which 1930 proved to be a significant year. It was the year that the Congress of Revolutionary Writers took place at Kharkov. Aragon attended it in November, representing the Surrealists, whose review he touted with apparent success and whose grievances against members of the PCF were heard with apparent sympathy. Elsa Triolet (distraught over the recent suicide of Mayakovsky) stood beside him, translating. When the congress ended, five days later, Aragon was prepared to sign a letter drafted by the party demanding that he retract his criticism of Barbusse, repudiate Breton’s “Second Manifesto,” eschew Surrealist activities, purge himself of Freudianism, and submit all future work for party approval. “This was the first time that I saw open at my feet the abyss that since then has taken vertiginous proportions,” wrote Breton.

  Soon other long-term companions defected to the Communist camp, notably the poet René Crevel. In 1935, Crevel joined Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Malraux, and Ilya Ehrenburg on the organizing committee of the Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture. Except for Crevel, Breton was not much loved by any of the above. By Ehrenburg he was hated. In Ehrenburg’s study of contemporary French literature, the Surrealists were described as mentally ill or charlatans playing the part of madmen for attention or profit. “These young self-described revolutionists will have nothing to do with work,” he wrote. “They go in for Hegel and Marx and the revolution, but work is something to which they are not adapted. They are too busy studying pederasty and dreams.… Their time is taken up with spending their inheritances or their wives’ dowries; and they have, moreover, a devoted following of rich American idlers and hangers-on.… In the face of all this, they have the nerve to call the rag they publish Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution.”

  Breton was all the more eager to address the congress for having been slandered by its chief impresario. Crevel, despite his defection from the Surrealist movement, persuaded fellow committee members to let Breton speak. The arrangement was canceled a few days later, however, when Breton encountered Ehrenburg on the street and slapped him. The Soviets insisted that Breton be excluded. Breton, in turn, made no apology. Crevel tried to reconcile the parties, shuttling between them frantically, as if life itself depended on the success of his negotiations. And indeed it did. They failed and, four days before the congress opened, he killed himself. “The silly incident was the last drop for René Crevel,” wrote Ehrenburg. “Of course a drop is not the whole cup, but it grieves me to recall it.”

  His suicide succeeded where his mediation had not. The shocked antagonists agreed that Breton should have his say, unofficially and through a proxy. Paul Éluard read his speech late at night on June 24. It was restrained but nonetheless staunch in its opposition to a policy and a doctrine for which the USSR wanted endorsement from European intellectuals: the doctrine being realism and the policy her treaty of mutual assistance with France. Pacifists traumatized by World War I deplored a treaty that might justify the aggressive strategy of French warmongers.8 “Is it not true,” Breton asked, “that … ultra-imperialist France, still stupefied at having hatched a monster in Hitler, invokes the blessing of world opinion … to accelerate the arms race? If Soviet leaders regard their rapprochment with France as a matter of harsh necessity … let them at least not allow themselves to be guided like blind men or to be swept into making a sacrifice greater than that which is required of them. Beware of faith independent of reason, of lurking fideism! The Franco-Soviet pact may be necessary, but it befits us as intellectuals, now more than ever, not to desert our critical senses.… So long as bourgeois France has an interest in it, there is danger.” It was very much on his mind that Premier Daladier had agreed to Stalin’s demand, as part of the Franco-Soviet pact, that Trotsky be expelled from France, where he had been living in exile.

  Breton, who was known to threaten followers with expulsion from the movement for writing fiction, or even for defending a genre he scorned, addressed the issue of realism with as much tact as he could muster. While revolutionary Western writers were urged to survey “the great tableaux of collective life” in Soviet novels (which he dubbed “a school of action”), the Soviet writer was urged to visit “the great provinces of the inner life” reflected in Western literature. “Romain Rolland, describing ‘the role of the writer in present-day society,’ comes to this lapidary conclusion: ‘Lenin said “One mu
st dream”; Goethe said “One must act.” ’ Surrealism has never aspired to anything else; all its efforts have tended toward a dialectical resolution of these alternatives.”

  “Dialectical” rolled off many tongues in the extreme heat of June 1935, like the verily verilies of panting celebrants. It rolled off Breton’s again when he came to denounce the mythology of patriotism. “We Surrealists don’t love our homeland,” he declared.

  A photomontage by René Magritte of sixteen Surrealists. It appeared in issue 12 of La Révolution Surréaliste, December 1929. Magritte’s hermetic caption reads, “I don’t see the woman hidden in the forest.” Breton is in the middle of the top row. To his right is Louis Aragon, who defected to the Communist Party several months later.

  As writers or artists, we have stated that we do not at all reject the cultural legacy of centuries. It is exasperating that we should be obliged today to recall that it is a universal legacy, for which we are indebted to German thought no less than to any other.9 Better yet, we can say that philosophy written in German is where we have discovered the only effective antidote to the positivist rationalism that continues to ravage us. This antidote is dialectical materialism as a general theory of knowledge.

  Reserved for the peroration was a mordant reference to “genuine poets” who had traded “the inner life for the externality of propaganda,” meaning their birthright for a mess of pottage. He declared that they would not succeed in “liberating the mind forever” with hackneyed impeachments of Fascism. Everyone familiar with Surrealism’s feuds knew that the reference was to Louis Aragon.