Fracture

by Philipp Blom

  When Vaché was sent back to do active service, the intense relationship between the young men was continued by correspondence. Vaché was an excellent and eccentric writer whose missives were charged with anarchic poetry and who reveled in the “theatrical (and joyless) pointlessness of it all.”4 Breton’s close relationship with the alluring Pierre Vaché came to an end with horrible suddenness when Vaché was found in a hotel room lying naked on the bed with two other men, all dead from an overdose of opium.

  After the end of the war, Breton worked at the Val-de-Grâce hospital in Paris as an assistant doctor in the closed psychiatric ward. Here, during the lonely night watches, alone in the dark corridors of the hospital and listening to the ravings and cries of his patients, he experienced the force of irrational expression, of insanity and despair, and here he delved once again into the writings of Sigmund Freud.

  The idea of the subconscious fascinated and frightened Breton, because his own brief experience of fighting and suffering had made a smooth return to civilian life difficult for him and, he observed, for society at large. “You came back from the War,” he wrote, “but what you could not come back from was what you then called the head-stuffing [bourrage de crânes] which within four years had turned beings who want nothing but to live and . . . get along with their like into beings who are distraught and frenzied, and not only exploited, but liable to be decimated at whim.”5 Four years of fear, inhumanity, and military propaganda had left indelible traces, he concluded, and it had debased people more than ever before.

  Holed up in Breton’s flat and in a drugless trance, Breton and his friend the writer Philippe Soupault decided to collaborate on a literary work like none other. It was to be the result of automatic writing, tapping the subconscious with as little interference as possible from their conscious thoughts. The experimental setup was simplicity itself: for one week they would write down everything that came into their heads, without revision, writing until they were exhausted, until their minds started to swim in a sea of words and spontaneous images, adding new and wondrously nonsensical phrases to the text as they attempted to give free rein to their subconscious.

  Writing their work of half-conscious, ecstatic prose revealed itself to be as exhilarating as it was dangerous. No literary judgment, no conscious filter of any sort was to be applied, but they would write with “a praiseworthy disdain for what might result from a literary point of view,” as Breton would later remember. “The ease of execution did the rest.”6 The result of their collaboration, Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), was published in several installments in the journal Littérature, and as a book one year later, in 1920. The automatic writing contained in it was a sequence of images akin to walking through a series of paintings by Hans Arp:

  The cave is cold and one feels that it is time to go; the water calls us, it is red and the smile is stronger than the fissures running like plants over the house, O magnificent and tender day like this extraordinary little hoop. The sea we love cannot carry men as skinny as us. We need elephants with women’s heads and flying lions. The cage is open and the hotel is closed for the second time; what a heat! In the main place one notices a beautiful lioness who claws the lion tamer on the sand and lies down from time to time to lick him. The large phosphorescent swamps create pretty dreams and the crocodiles take back the suitcase made of their skin.7

  After The Magnetic Fields, Breton did not continue his explorations of automatic writing. The exhaustion of his week with Soupault had brought them both to the brink of insanity, he felt, and during his work in the psychiatric ward he had encountered too many men who had been pushed over this brink. He had finished with this and was pushing for alternative routes to an art that would strike a fatal blow to the petty bourgeois world, the world he himself had grown up in and which he held responsible for the catastrophe of the war. Gifted with great rhetorical talent as well as an apparently limitless capacity for striking poses and convincing himself of the epoch-making importance of whatever he happened to be thinking and doing, he was a leader in the making. Restless as ever, he was ready for something new, and he prepared to meet the harbinger of a revolution that would, Breton believed, transform not just literature but all other areas of life as well.

  Tristan in Paris

  THIS CHANGE WOULD COME from Zürich, the young poet thought, for it was there that he had found his most astounding poetic master and soul mate yet, the enigmatic and fearless Tristan Tzara, the prophet of Dada and its demolition of all certainties. Breton had begun to correspond with him the previous year, and now, in 1920, the arch-Dadaist himself was bound for Paris. Breton could hardly wait, and his expectations were heightened further by repeated announcements of Tzara’s imminent arrival in the capital—all false alarms.

  When Dada finally came to the French capital, it did so suddenly. On January 17, 1919, Germaine Everling, mistress of the painter Francis Picabia, who had invited Tzara to come see him in Paris if ever he was in town, heard a knock at the door of Picabia’s apartment, where she was looking after her two-year-old daughter. She asked her nanny to send the inopportune visitor away, but he would not budge and finally entered the bedroom. There he stood, Everling remembered later,

  small, slightly stooped, swinging two short arms at the ends of which hung chubby, but certainly sensitive, hands. His skin was waxy, like a candle: behind his pince-nez his myopic eyes seemed to be searching for a fixed point on which to alight. He hesitated at the doorway, and mainly seemed very embarrassed to be there. . . . Constantly, automatically brushing a long shock of black hair from his forehead, he said in a thick Slavic accent: “I am very sorry to bother you, Madame, but I don’t know where to put my bags.” . . . I realized that he intended to settle into my home.8

  And so he did. The penniless master simply commandeered the living room, used a Louis XV console as a table on which he would write on a huge typewriter, refused the maid access to the room because he deemed his possessions too important for her to touch, and had all his correspondence sent to the Picabia home. He stayed for almost a year.

  Unconcerned about issues of domestic comfort, Breton could hardly contain his excitement at meeting the man who could transform European literature, whose revolutionary energy might revolutionize society itself. When he finally clapped eyes on the short, nearsighted Romanian, he was utterly nonplussed, but soon he was won over by Tzara’s other qualities. “They had expected Tzarathustra, not the waxen-faced homunculus fidgeting before them,” writes historian Mark Polizzotti, but “included in his Zürich baggage was three years’ experience in getting the public’s attention, not to say its goat.”9 With an arsenal of poetic provocations that included staging simultaneous readings of several works interrupted by shrill shrieks, sobbing, and loud banging on all sorts of objects, Breton believed that he had finally struck gold. “For Tzara, performance should be as loud as a gun burst, and as irritating as a pebble in the shoe,” notes Polizzotti.

  At the first public performance it fell to Louis Aragon to recite Tzara’s poem “The White Leprous Giant in the Countryside,” which contained these memorable lines:

  The salt collects in a constellation of birds on the padded tumor

  In his lungs the starfish and bugs sway

  The microbes crystallize into palms of swaying muscles

  Good morning without a cigarette tzantzantza ganga

  Boozdc zdooc nfoonfa mbaah nfoonfa.10

  The audience was predictably and deliciously outraged. For lack of other projectiles, some of those who had paid to hear all this hurled their house keys at the stage in fury.

  But for Breton, this brand of provocation soon lost its appeal. He wanted to move something forward, and he wanted a movement. Dada with all its anarchic antics, he began to feel, could not provide him with this. He was too serious by temperament and perhaps too controlling by disposition for mere explosions of festive nonsense. More public events followed, more outrage was generated in the press, but Breton began
to cast his net wider. During his honeymoon he took his new wife, Simone Kahn, to Vienna to visit Sigmund Freud, only to be disappointed once again. The aging psychoanalyst had little time to sacrifice to the young French assistant doctor who appeared on his doorstep unannounced and whose interest in psychoanalysis was mainly artistic, not scientific. Coming from very different backgrounds and generations (not to mention opposite sides in the war), the two men had very little to say to each other, and Breton, needless to say, was bitterly disenchanted by the fact that his former idol failed to see the deep significance of his work. Despite this personal disappointment, however, Breton continued to be fascinated by Freudian ideas.

  Back in Paris, Breton continued to cast around for a role of importance in the literary world. In 1922 he organized the International Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit, to which he invited Europe’s leading writers and artists. This kind of event—sober, ordered, and above all important—was more to his taste than Dada antics. In an attempt to forestall any spontaneous and unwelcome interventions, he demanded security measures, including the option of withdrawing the right to speak from any speaker and the freedom to restore order by all means necessary, even by calling the police.

  Having recently fallen out with Tzara, who did not like the direction Breton’s activities were taking, he also published a statement denouncing “a publicity-mongering imposter . . . a person best known as the promoter of a ‘movement’ that comes from Zürich, whom it is pointless to name more specifically, and who no longer corresponds to any current reality.”11 Dignified and not at all anarchistic for once, the Romanian replied, “An ‘international’ Congress that reprimands someone for being a foreigner has no right to exist.” Those invited to the congress themselves disowned the dictatorial antics of its convener.

  Breton was bruised by this disastrous turn of affairs, but far from deterred. It was time to move on, as he wrote in a prose poem in the pages of Littérature:

  I can only assure you that I don’t give a damn about any of this and repeat:

  Leave everything.

  Leave Dada.

  Leave your wife, leave your mistress.

  Leave your hopes and fears.

  Drop your kids in the middle of nowhere.

  Leave the substance for the shadow.

  Leave behind, if need be, your comfortable life and promising future.

  Take to the highways.12

  His self-imposed exile took the form of further experimentation. Together with a group of friends, he engaged in sessions of hypnosis at his apartment in the rue de Fontaine, during which René Crevel, the most gifted subject of them all, would fall into a trance and recite his visions, as Breton’s wife, Simone, would write to a cousin: “It’s dark. We are all around a table, silent, hands stretched out. Barely three minutes go by and already Crevel heaves hoarse sighs and vague exclamations. Then he begins telling a gruesome story in a forced, declamatory tone. A woman has drowned her husband, but he had asked her to. ‘Ah! The frogs! Poor madwoman. Maaaaadd. . . .’ Painful, cruel accents. Savagery in the slightest images. Some obscenity as well. . . . Nothing can match the horror of it.”13

  By 1924, Breton’s constant and headstrong (and occasionally inspired) interventions, his provocative writing (which by now included two published prose works), and the sheer allure of the severe intellectual persona he had crafted for himself had made him a real presence on the Paris cultural scene. At twenty-eight years of age, he appeared to have achieved his ambition of becoming the leader of an artistic movement. Having been unable to co-opt Dadaism for his purposes, he now proceeded to invent his own, and in 1924 he published a Surrealist Manifesto, a truly remarkable document in which he summoned a young lifetime’s experience as a seeker for great truths and, arguably, even greater gestures.

  In his manifesto, Breton railed against realism not so much as a style but as an attitude toward life: “I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. . . . It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by . . . flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity, a dog’s life.” Instead, he wrote, the banal and deadly world of waking and of rationality had to be fused with the reality of dreams “into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.” For those blockheaded enough to need a dictionary definition, he duly supplied one:

  SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.14

  Breton’s surrealism was born out of rejection—of former friends, of bourgeois reality, of artistic realism, and of the carefree anarchy of Dadaism. What the world needed, he thought, was a disciplined movement, a collective assault on bourgeois culture in an effort to subvert and finally topple it altogether.

  With its assertive tone and its apparent explanation of the motivation behind an artistic craze that had already attracted a good deal of publicity, the manifesto was a considerable success because it achieved what was most important: public attention. As the rebuttals, discussions, and controversies blossomed, Breton’s statue as the “pope of surrealism” became unassailable. Not yet thirty, the young man from the suburbs had quite simply invented a movement for himself to lead and turned himself into a public figure. He took to his new role with a Jacobin zeal, which led him to sanction all infractions of his unquestioned authority by cutting dissenters out of the surrealist fold and out of his life.

  Members of his group were required to be disciplined and to toe the ideological party line, and Breton even forbade other surrealists to publish in any magazine other than La Révolution Surréaliste, which he controlled. As Mussolini’s Italy was turning into a Fascist state, the pope of surrealism in Paris began to look disconcertingly like a pint-sized, poetic version of Il Duce. Breton himself was not shy about admitting this. In early 1925, he published an article entitled “Why I Am Taking Charge of La Révolution Surréaliste.” He meant more than just the journal, whose editor he had sacked.

  What had begun as angry rejection by a few young men, many of them former soldiers, of the society of their parents and of the rationality that had made possible the slaughter at the front had by now blossomed into a new kind of art, some (but not all) of which was assembled around Breton. Especially in and around Paris, surrealist artists and others with similar aesthetic ideas but no stomach for ideological discussions created works that found a visual language for portraying psychological, half-conscious states and processes. Among these artists were Francis Picabia (the onetime involuntary host of Tristan Tzara) and the German Max Ernst, who had moved in with a close friend of Breton’s, the poet Paul Éluard, who shared with Ernst his large house and his alluring wife, Gala, a Russian émigré who would later marry Salvador Dalí, then still an art student in Madrid.

  While poets and painters were engaged in vigorous experiments in living (similar emotional and marital constellations were to be found in the Bloomsbury Circle around Virginia Woolf), some of the most innovative surrealist works embraced not only the sensibility of the new period but also its technology. This dismayed Breton, who was acutely suspicious of aspects of surrealist production beyond his control and who rejected anything that could or would result in “cozying up to the establishment” by accepting money for art, being shown or performed in regular venues, and being produced with a professional budget.

  One of the productions drawing the master’s wrath was a 1924 collaboration between Picabia, the composer Eric Satie (he of the dreamy Gymnopédie), and the Swedish Royal Ballet. Satie had written the music for a new choreography, with Picabia designing the sets. For the intermission, Picabia and the filmmaker René Clair had produced a short movie, fittingly entitled Entr’acte, a wonderfully inventive tableau of images and scenes
that used new and unsettling visual effects. In one of the most arresting and recurring sequences, a ballerina is filmed dancing—from underneath, through a glass floor. The second part of the film is the funeral procession of a hunter who has been killed by another hunter on the roofs of Paris. The hearse is drawn by a camel, and the mourners follow the coffin hopping and jumping en masse. Eventually the hearse rolls off on its own, gathering speed, and sending the entire group of mourners off in a mad pursuit through the French countryside.

  Entr’acte was an amusingly provocative piece of work that succeeded in exploiting the technical and artistic possibilities of film. Another short movie shown for the first time during the same year and also ostensibly dealing with dance offered a different dimension of artistic accomplishment. Ballet Mécanique was written by the painter Fernand Léger, who was considerably older than the surrealist firebrands who were drawing so much attention. Before the war, Léger had been a cubist whose compositions were less haunted and foreboding than those of his colleagues and whose use of bright colors and graceful forms was more reminiscent of Kandinsky than of Picasso. After three years at the front and a gas attack he only narrowly survived; however, the optimism had seeped out of his paintings.

  Ballet Mécanique is a surrealist masterwork, an abstract film whose finely orchestrated use of shapes, movements, and rhythms lends coherence and dramatic development to this succession of strange images, kaleidoscopic effects, superimpositions, and fast cuts, accompanied by a savage score, famous in its own right and written for sixteen pianos, percussion, and street sirens by Georges Antheil. The real force of this fifteen-minute dreamscape, however, is its exploration of experiences and impressions Léger had been carrying around with him since his return from the trenches.