by Gary Lachman
For us, inured to theatrical violence through years of performance art, the idea of someone pulling a gun on an audience is no longer shocking. Yet what is really strange – I was about to say ‘surreal’ – about the event is that no one else in the theatre that night seemed to have witnessed it. None of the dozens of reviews of the play made a mention of it. Vaché himself, who, it is true, was not a prolific writer – if a writer at all – never remarked on it in his letters to Breton. Two of Breton’s biographers both suggest that the incident may have been invented, or at least that its importance may have been exaggerated by Breton.5 Then again, perhaps, as Breton himself would argue, such an event needed the illuminating eye of a poet, for its true significance to come to light.
Breton and Vaché met in Nantes, Vaché’s hometown, in February 1916, in the middle of World War I. Breton, who was twenty, was there serving as a medical auxiliary in the neurological centre; Vaché, twenty-one, was hospitalised with a wound to his calf. Breton was struck by Vaché’s appearance, and in subsequent writings, described him in terms that, to today’s sensibilities, suggest at least a touch of homoeroticism, although Breton’s antipathy to homosexuality would later become legendary. Breton spoke of Vaché as “an elegant young soldier with flaming red hair,” and admits that he was immediately captivated by his “studied arrogance and otherworldly detachment.”6 As Ruth Brandon points out, Vaché was everything Breton wasn’t and yet yearned to be: “confident, cynical, stylish, where Breton was awkward, earnest, enthusiastic.”7 Enthusiasm in particular was something for which Vaché had nothing but disdain, and this pose of nihilistic dandyism fascinated Breton.
Vaché impressed Breton with his total indifference to practically everything, and his preoccupation with seemingly insignificant matters. Breton remarks on how Vaché, who was supposed to be an art student, would spend a morning while convalescing arranging objects on a small table, devoting considerable attention to the correct placement of photographs, flowers, paint pots and other items, in a kind of exercise in feng shui. Breton, who was devoted to poetry, spoke with Vaché of his interests and heroes, yet Vaché dismissed nearly all of them, except for the work of Alfred Jarry, the creator of Ubu Roi and other black comedies, with whom he shared some things in common.8 Like Jarry, Vaché adopted the demeanour of the then stereotypical Englishman, perfectly dressed, sporting a cane and monocle, unruffled by anything; he even spoke with an English accent and claimed English descent (he did actually have Irish ancestry).9 Also like Jarry, he had a penchant for adopting disguises and striking disconcerting poses. Vaché would sign himself Harry James or Jean-Michael Strogoff, a character from Jules Verne. He would dress as an airman, a hussar, or a doctor and walk down a crowded street. If he saw you, he wouldn’t always acknowledge you, and might simply walk by, as if you were a stranger; when he was with you he would often leave abruptly, without a word: he never said hello or goodbye. He told Breton that he wanted to create a military uniform that would be mistaken by either side as one of their own. He would introduce Breton to others as the famous poet André Salmon, or by some other name, and once told Breton that his ambition was to “wear a red shirt, a red cravat and high boots – and to belong to a pointless Chinese secret society in Australia.” Breton also noticed that this “bitterly light-hearted poseur,”10 spent a great deal of time drawing sketches that looked like men’s fashion illustrations.
Vaché’s attitude toward women was equally bizarre. He professed no interest in them at all, except, perhaps, for “some mysterious, inscrutable little girls” who would nevertheless need to be killed off before they lost their charm. Vaché did live with a woman, Louise, and even shared a bed with her. But the relationship was platonic; Breton also noticed that when he visited Vaché, Louise was made to sit quietly, in a corner. The only attention Vaché showed her was to kiss her hand after she had made them tea. Vaché was apparently fond of Baudelaire’s remark apropos women: “Woman is natural, in other words abominable.” It doesn’t take much to find in this at least a suspicion of homosexuality. Breton’s own attitude toward women was as different as possible, nearly puritanical, seeing in them the embodiment of the poetic muse.
All this may sound like fairly tame material, familiar to fans of Monty Python and other forms of ‘absurd’ theatre. But for Breton it was a revelation. “The time I spent with him at Nantes in 1916,” Breton wrote of Vaché, “seemed almost enchanted. I shall never forget it, and although I still meet people I am drawn to, I know I shall never abandon myself to anyone in quite that way again.” Remarks like these suggest that Breton was simply in love with Vaché, whether they were actual lovers or not, which seems doubtful. Vaché seems to have had on Breton the effect that Neal Cassady had on Jack Kerouac, as documented in On The Road: both seemed to be characters that embodied the ideas and attitude toward life that both writers embraced. In Breton’s case, his attraction to Vaché is reminiscent of Valery Briusov’s predilection for ‘ecstatic types’ (see Agents of Suicide in A Taxonomy of Suicide), individuals of a freer, less inhibited character; like Briusov, Breton had a stern temperament, and was known for his ‘totalitarian’ personality. Opposites attract, and while for Breton Vaché’s good fortune was to have produced nothing, the disciplined and determined Breton went on to erect a formidable apparatus of philosophical, literary and political ideas that influenced French culture for forty years.
Aside from Vaché’s behaviour – which we could call ‘subversive’ or ‘transgressive’ or simply annoying – what impressed Breton most about him was his idea of ‘umour’, a notion of what Breton later called ‘black humour’ and which certainly has its roots in Jarry’s Ubu plays, and which Breton gleaned through the letters he received from Vaché while they were separated during the war. The essence of ‘umour’, as Mark Polizzotti puts it, is in its “dismissive whatever”11, an attitude today enjoyed by readers of Michel Houellebecq. Vaché’s own attempt at a definition, while less succinct than Polizzotti’s, is equally deadpan: umour for Vaché meant a recognition of “the theatrical (and joyless) futility of everything.” At twenty-one, Vaché had seen through it all, and, like the Dadaists Breton was soon to encounter, he was prepared to accept nothing, trust no one, and ridicule everything. In this he was truly ahead of his time, and what was for Breton a manifestation of “joyful terrorism” (and not ‘joyless’, as Vaché characterized it) is today pretty much taken as read.
Yet even more than his umour or diverting antics, it was Vaché’s death that had the most profound impact on Breton.
On 7 January 1919, Le Télégramme des Provinces de l’Ouest ran a headline that read “Two Youths Dabble with Drugs,” and went on to report a “regrettable incident that brings tragedy to two of the most respected families in Nantes …”12 One of those families was Vaché’s, and the regrettable incident was the death of Jacques Vaché and a “Paul B.” from an apparent overdose of opium.
At around 6:00 p.m., the article continued, an American soldier named Woynow had rushed from a second floor room at the Hotel de France in Nantes, demanding to see the manager. Two young men, his friends, he said, had died in the room. A physician was called and on entering the room he found two men lying stretched out on the bed, “undressed for sleep,” which, later reports explained, meant naked. One of the bodies was cold – this was Paul Bonnet – the other, that of Vaché, was still warm. The doctor diagnosed an opium overdose and turned his attentions to the warm body, which he was nevertheless unable to revive. He then treated Woynow, who had by this time become ill with the drug as well. The police later found a small container filled with the narcotic, a knife bearing remnants of it, an opium pipe, and “innumerable Egyptian cigarette butts” near the bed. The report continued that Vaché and Paul Bonnet – as well as Woynow, we assume – belonged to a group of “French and American ‘thrill-seekers’ ” who “frequented places of amusement,” and had apparently killed themselves in pursuit of “the high that this terrible drug brings.” A follow-up article ask
ed, “Can’t these hare-brained youths understand that, in their quest for certain unhealthy sensations, they shouldn’t carelessly play around with a drug that stupefies even when it doesn’t kill?” It also suggested that the facts surrounding the case indicate that they “could not have been experienced smokers.”13
Vaché’s death may very well have been the most profound emotional event to happen to Breton. He told the poet Jean Paulhan that it was “the most painful event of my life,” and that ever after he had to wear a “suit of armour” against emotion.14 To another friend he wrote, “I cannot express here the pain that the news of his death caused me, or the trouble I had getting over it.”15 All this is understandable, but what Breton made of the death became something of an obsession. Although on the face of it, Vaché and his friend had succumbed to an unfortunate but not uncommon misuse of the drug, Breton became convinced that the deaths were intentional, that Vaché planned his suicide – and also the apparent murder of one, and attempted murder of another, of his companions. It was, Breton maintained, the crowning display of umour.
Breton’s ‘evidence’ for this reading of Vaché’s death is indeed suggestive. He quotes a remark Vaché was said to have made only hours before his overdose: “I will die when I want to die … But I’ll die with someone else. Dying alone is too boring. Preferably with one of my very best friends …”16 If that was the case, then Vaché wasn’t reluctant to engage in murder in the cause of umour, and he then joins the ranks of Harry Crosby, Heinrich von Kleist and Arthur Koestler, as a suicide who took others with him. In a letter to Breton’s friend, Theodore Fraenkel, Vaché wrote of “some funny murders” he wanted to tell him about, and of his dream of performing “some good well-felt Eccentricities, or some amusing deception that would result in lots of deaths,” although it has to be admitted that he thought of performing these “while wearing a very light athletic-style form-fitting costume … with wonderful open-topped canvas shoes.”17 (Then again, no clothes at all is pretty close to a “very light form-fitting costume” …) Vaché’s penchant for the absurd non sequitur makes judging the cogency of these remarks difficult; yet his letters leading up to the time of his death do display a sense of crisis. While the war was on, Vaché could indulge his nihilism with some justification; now that it had ended (he died shortly after the armistice) he seemed to succumb to a sense of aimlessness: “You see, I don’t know where I am any longer,”18 he wrote to Breton from Brussels. Mention of suicide is made in the later letters, and there is a shrill anxiety in passages like “ART IS STUPIDITY – Almost nothing is stupid – art must be funny and a little tiresome … Everything is so funny, very funny, it’s a fact – Everything is so funny! (and if we killed ourselves also, instead of merely going away?”)19 He was at the end of his rope, but he still looked forward to “the rather amusing things to do once I’m unchained and at liberty.”20 He had also told Breton that he didn’t want to die in wartime – meaning that he didn’t want his death to be as banal and uniform as those of thousands of other soldiers. He had to, as Nietzsche advised, “die at the right time,” and although Vaché had little use for Apollinaire, the old master, he said, was at least “wise to stop in time,” remarking on Apollinaire’s death only a month earlier. Perhaps coming so soon after Apollinaire’s death (two months separated them), Vaché’s death had to be special for Breton – a conceit shared by many literary suicides. Yet, whether Vaché had achieved this or not, Breton was in no doubt; he was determined that the death of the man most important to him, whom he once described as “more beautiful than a reed pipe,” would be special. His death was “admirable,” Breton declared in one of the four essays he wrote introducing Vaché’s letters, “in that it could pass for accidental.”21 And his unfortunate friends’ ignorance of the power of the drug, allowed Vaché the opportunity to commit “one last ‘humorous deception’ at their expense.” Again, if this was the case, then Breton is close to applauding his friend for committing murder.
Yet the evidence for an accidental overdose is just as suggestive. To begin with, as Mark Polizzotti points out, there were originally four men in the room with Vaché, not two, and at least one of them was homosexual (the two others left early, one not interested in drugs, the other because he felt ill after taking the opium; he later had his stomach pumped: along with smoking opium, they also ate it.) The newspaper article which reported that Vaché and Paul Bonnet were “undressed for sleep” cushions the fact that they were simply naked, early in the day, in an unheated room in January. When we remember Vaché’s curious relationship with Louise, and the fact that he found only “young girls” – who often have boyish figures – attractive, we can be excused for wondering if sleep was the only thing on Vaché and Bonnet’s mind – at the same time recognizing that opium is one of the least aphrodisiacal of drugs. And for all his dandified nihilism, there is scant evidence that Vaché was a particularly experienced opium user, as Breton had suggested. As for his intention to kill himself and a few close friends, Woynow, one of the elect group, denied that there was anything in Vaché’s behaviour that day to indicate this, although of course Vaché was adept at concealing his intentions, if he had any, under one of his adopted personae. But if Vaché planned to take a close friend with him, did he really want to take four of them?
Most likely these questions will never be answered, although Breton’s notorious intolerance of homosexuality, coupled with his clear love of Vaché, suggest that he suspected something more than umour went on in that cold hotel room in Nantes that fateful January day. Perhaps in reaction to this, Breton created the myth of Vaché as an überdandy to counteract what could only strike him as sordid banality.22 That Vaché himself was uncomfortable with the significance Breton placed on him can perhaps be felt in his last letter, when Vaché, “What do you want of me – my dear friend? – UMOUR – my dear friend, André … this is no trivial matter,” and when he seems to pass on the burden of drawing out whatever importance this might have to his “dear friend”: “I’m depending on you to prepare the way for this deceptive God, sneering slightly and terrible in any case – You see, how funny it’ll be if this NEW SPIRIT breaks loose.”23
*
The new spirit did indeed break loose and, as may be expected, suicide was one of its concerns. In December 1924 the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste appeared, a journal edited by Pierre Naville and Benjamin Péret. Towards the beginning of the journal the editors had placed an announcement with an unusual intent.
Inquest
You live, you die. What has free will got to do with it? It seems you kill yourself in the same way as you dream.
This is no moral problem we are posing.
IS SUICIDE A SOLUTION?
The editors invited their readers to respond, and may have expected some remarkable replies, in keeping with the character of the inquiry – although no one, it seems, asked the obvious question: a solution to what? But what they received was something else. The Symbolist poet Francis Jammes answered with a perhaps surprising indignation: “Only a wretch would ask such a question, and if some poor child were to kill him or herself, you would be the murderer.” And, being a Catholic, Jammes added: “The only resource open to you, should you have the slightest conscience left, is to throw yourselves into a confessional.” Breton’s publisher, Léon Pierre-Quint, fared little better: “I can’t think of a more absurd question.” And Breton himself avoided any unequivocal response by citing the philosopher Théodore Jouffroy, who wrote that, “Suicide is a poor word; the one who kills is not identical to the one who is killed”24 The one clearly positive reply came from a relatively recent addition to the surrealist ranks, René Crevel. “A solution?” Crevel asked. “Yes,” he answered.
“It is said,” Crevel continued, “that one commits suicide from love, fear or venereal disease. Not so. Everyone is in love, or thinks they are. Suicide is a matter of conscious choice. Those who commit suicide are the ones who are not imbued with the quasi-universal coward
ice of fighting against a certain feeling in the soul which is of such intensity that it has to be taken, until it is proved otherwise, for the truth. This is the only sensation that allows a person to embrace a solution that is clearly the fairest and most definitive solution of all, suicide. There is no love or hate which is simply fair or definitive. But the respect – in spite of myself and notwithstanding a tyrannical moral or religious upbringing – which I am bound to show to anyone who does not timorously with-hold or restrain that impulse, that moral impulse, leads me to envy more and more each of those persons whose anguish is so intense that they can no longer accept life’s little games.”
That Crevel believed, “Suicide is a matter of conscious choice” must have enamoured him to Breton, and throughout their relationship, which was full of contradictions and crises, and which ended with Crevel’s own suicide at the age of thirty-five in 1935, Breton was something of a father figure for Crevel (who was only four years younger than Breton). That Crevel sought such figures and that the question of suicide was associated with them, is rooted in the gruesome circumstance of his own father’s suicide, when Crevel was fourteen. His father, a music-publisher, hanged himself, and René’s mother, an apparent sadist, intent on teaching the boy some lesson, forced him to look at the dangling body while she cursed it.25 Understandably, Crevel loathed his mother thereafter. The rest of his life was punctuated by episodes of a similar traumatic character. In answer to a similar questionnaire posed by another avant-garde journal, Le Disque vert (edited by Henri Michaux and Franz Hellens), Crevel had written, “Is not the fear of suicide the best remedy against suicide?” Perhaps Crevel didn’t fear it enough, or perhaps this is simply not true. Or perhaps Crevel was simply trying to bolster his own defences against something that he may have felt was inevitable, just as it is possible that his remark about suicides being free of the “quasi-universal cowardice” mistakenly associated with the taboo was a way of refuting the hysterical abuse his mother threw at the defenceless corpse of his father.