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AGE OF SURREALISM

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

CRITICISM
Rimbaud
Jacob's Night
Clowns and Angels
Ernest Psichari
De Villon a Peguy
La Purete dans VArt
The Clown's Grail

POETRY
Intervalles
Matines et Vers

From Chartered Land

NOVELS
Sleep of the Pigeon
Sun Suicide
CONTEMPORARY CRITICS

Yvor Winters
In Defense of Reason

Allen Tate
On the Limits of Poetry:
Selected Essays: 1928-1948

Wallace Fowlie
Age of Surrealism

George Arms & Joseph M. Kuntz

Poetry Explication:
A Checklist of Interpretation since 1925 of
British and American Poems Past and Present
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 AGE OF

WALLACE
FOWLIE

Surrealism
Copyright, 1950, by Wallace Fowlie
Printed in the United States of America.
All rights reserved.
Published simultaneously in the Dominion of Canada by
Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Canada Ltd.
Designed by Frank Lieberman
r-

in
to HENRI PEYRE
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

I ORIGINS 11

// LAUTREAMONT: the temperament 28

III RIMBAUD: the doctrine 45

IV MALLARME: the myth (Herodiade) 63

V APOLLINAIRE: the poet 83

VI BRETON: the manifestoes

'

102

VII COCTEAU: the theatre 120

( VIII^LUAKD: the doctrine on love 138

/ pt PICASSO: the art 157

X CONCLUSIONS 174

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 193

INDEX 199
 / •
ORIGINS

The word surrealism, although it has

only very recently entered the language of dictionaries, al-
ready designates an historical period. It has one closed and
confining use to describe the artistic movement centering
in Paris in the years between the two World Wars, 1919-
1939. In the 20's and the 30's, surrealism was an organized
movement, iconoclastic and revolutionary in nature, with
its leaders and disciples, its manifestoes and publications,

its exhibitions and even its street brawls. It became inter-

national during those years to such an extent that fourteen

countries were represented in its 1938 exhibition.
But surrealism has another meaning, perhaps even an
eternal meaning,and a context far wider than that of the
Andre" Breton group which chronologically succeeded da-
daism about 1924. This book has been so devised as to
maintain some manner of just proportion between the
achievement of the literal 20th century surreal-
historical
ism and profounder and more philosophical mean-
its

ing. Some of the chapters, then, will deal with the self-
appointed exponents of the school, such as Breton and
Eluard. Other chapters will be concerned with artists who
were close to surrealism and yet never actively participated
12 Age of Surrealism
in it, such as Apollinaire and Cocteau. Still other artists

were close to it and yet by the magnitude and universality

o£ their work, surpassed it: Picasso, for example, who is
the subject of the next to the last chapter. The opening
studies are on the immediate often-acknowledged ances-
tors of surrealism: on Lautreamont, first, whose impor-
tance and influence have been stressed more steadfastly
than those of any other writer; and then, on Rimbaud
and Mallarme, who have enjoyed much more intermittent
favor with the surrealists than Lautreamont. Of course,
many other names will be evoked and accredited. The sur-
realists were always concerned with discovering in the past,
both near and distant, confirmation for their beliefs and
practices. They demolish their adversaries as vigorously as
they extol spirits kindred to their own. Thus Breton claims
Heraclitus as a surrealist dialectician, and Baudelaire as a
surrealist moralist. Not only do the surrealists traffic fa-
miliarly with such obvious names as Sade, Hegel, Marx,
Freud, Saint-Just, but they also permit entrance into their
chapel, through a side-door perhaps and a bit grudgingly,
to Dante, Shakespeare, Gide.
The term itself of surrealism has already passed through
the period when it was considered a joke, especially by
academic circles and even serious critics who refused to
pay any attention to it. There is still some scoffing at its
expense, but I believe it comes now from those who are
totally uninitiated to art. I spent several days at the Inter-
national Exposition in Paris of 1938, which has been the
biggest show put on by the surrealists to date, and still
remember the tittering and even jeering on the part of
some of the by-standers. And today in the Museum of Mod-
ern Art in New York and in the Art Institute in Chicago
one can witness the same attitude of scepticism and marked
some of the tourists who turn up there. The
distaste in
importance and the seriousness of surrealism equal now
the seriousness granted the other two contemporary move-
 Origins 13

merits of communism and neo-thomism. These three "rev-

olutions" seem to be the most important for an under-
standing of our modern world, and although they appear
to us now of almost equal importance, I shouldn't be sur-
prised that in time surrealism, because of its subtle alli-

ances with communism and the problem of spirituality,

will grow into its real stature of the most vital and reno-
vating movement of modern thought and art.

If, then, in a contemporary sense, surrealism takes its

place mightily and pervasively beside communism and

neo-thomism, in an historical sense the word seems more
and more to justify a place beside the two words classicism
and romanticism which for so long have been the cause of
controversy and definition in Western art. As in the case
of surrealism, there is a limited meaning of these terms ap-
plicable to an historical movement of twenty years, when
manifestoes were published and aesthetic programs enun-
ciated: classicism, in France, between 1660 and 1680; and
romanticism, between 1820 and 1840. But it is futile to
limit these three terms to any specific period of twenty
years. An organized school of art, like an academy or a
university, tends to disintegrate into pedantry and sterile
rules. The great exponent of these modes of art usually
stands outside the officially titular school, asLautreamont
does for surrealism. In fact, the greatest artists have been
claimed by both the romantics and the classicists, and now,
since the advent of surrealism, are claimed by the surreal-
ists. Shakespeare, for example, might be named a classical

writer because he wrote his tragedies in five acts, but an

excellent case might be made out for the romanticism of
his temperament, and I am confident that one day an im-
portant and much needed work will be written on Hamlet
as surrealist hero. (When Hamlet's irrationality in the sur-
realist sense is finally acknowledged, much of the useless
and tiresome theorizing about his motivations and prob-
lems will be discarded.)
14 Age of Surrealism
I do not intend to review the many definitions of clas-
sicism and romanticism in order to set forth more ade-
quately a definition of surrealism. All I shall attempt at
this point is a statement about what seems to be the most
basic differencebetween these two seeming adversaries in
art form and then indicate the relationship of surrealism
to one of them.
The immediate words which come to mind when we
think of classicism are order, control, condensation, choice,
synthesis, rules. The classical moment is that one when
the artist is faithful not only to the rules of his art, estab-
lished by such an authority as Aristotle, but faithful also
to the government of his political state. As an artist, he
is in accord with the moral, political and aesthetic beliefs

of his society. His personal sentiments are so universally

shared by his contemporaries that they have ceased being
personal and have become classical. Classicism then seems
to be the aesthetic counterpart of political absolutism.
This fundamental interpretation of the classical spirit is
offered by such diverse critics, but all equally pontifical in
tone, as Grierson, Brunetiere and Herbert Read.
In this light, romanticism, as the opposite of classicism,
is always in some form or other associated with revolution
and liberation. The classicist is closely bound up with so-
ciety and the romanticist is the artist quite alone and apart,
the individual who is opposed to society and who finds the
rules for his art in himself. In its highest sense, romantic
art is created by a single artist, as opposed to classical art
which is created by a society. The early romantics of the
19th century were justified to some degree in identifying
art with romanticism. The way is not very far from a be-
lief in the autonomy of the artist, in his isolation and
uniqueness, and a belief in automatism or automatic writ-
ing which the surrealists extolled as being the legitimate
method of the creative artist. To seek in oneself, on all the
various levels of consciousness of oneself, the rules and the
 Origins 15

form of one's art is the romantic method, but it is also

the surrealist method. And that is why surrealism appears as
a reaffirmation of romantic principles. It would not be dif-
ficult to prove that the romantic or surrealist conception of
the artistis not limited to the 19th and 20th centuries, but

ison the contrary an ancient belief, firmly established in

the cultures which have formed our world. In Plato's Ion,
Socrates says: "The poet is a light and winged and holy
thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been
inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer
in him." I don't remember
the surrealists ever having used
this text, but one which they might well have ex-
it is

ploited. From the Old Testament, the words of Samuel

might also be evoked, especially those he addressed to Saul
when he said: "I am the seer: go up before me unto the
high place; for ye shall eat with me today, and tomorrow
I will let thee go, and will tell thee all that is in thine

heart." Both the Greek and Hebraic worlds, as well as

providing our world with almost every idea and belief it
functions by, formulated surrealist definitions of the artist.

II
Surrealism, during the years which sepa-
rate the two world wars, seemed particularly concerned
with negation, with r evolution and the demolishing- of
ideals and standards. The surrealists were "anti" every-
thing, but especially anti-literature and anti-poetry. They
were asking for not much less than a total transformation
of life. The formula which they combatted the most re-
lentlessly was that which called literature an expression of
society. This they considered the goal of bourgeois self-
satisfied literature, and in denouncing it they were attack-
ing what we have already defined as a basic aspect of clas-
sicism.
However, long before the period of surrealist invective,
there had been in France a marked shift of preferences, a
16 Age of Surrealism
shift away from the kind of literature which was a social
expression and a sociological document to forms of writing
in which the artist tries to be sincere with himself, to ex-
press his thoughts and experiences with maximum degree
of candor and honesty. It was obvious from the beginning
of the century on, that preference of younger writers and
critics, only some of whom were to become literally sur-

realists, was moving toward a literature of absolute sincer-

ity. The word realism had taken on offensive connotations.

The realistic creed had worn itself out tiresomely and

monotonously.HThe two leading examples in this shift of
preference are, first, in poetry, the ascendancy of Baude-
laire, whose art is preferred to the cold impeccably formed
Parnassian documents and the worn-out exercises of sec-

ond-rate symbolists; and secondly, in prose, the prefer-

ence accorded to Stendhal over Balzac. Younger readers in
France had become irritated with the clearly denned moti-
vations and the over-simplified psychological formulas of
Balzac and other realists. Francois Mauriac was able to
record early in the century, that young men were protest-
ing against the real: "les jeunes etres se dependent contre
le reel." The success in 1913, when
was first published,
it

of such a novel as Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier

was proof of the eagerness with which the French public
accepted a work dealing with the world of dreams and the
strange attraction of irrationality. The first part of Proust's
novel Du Cote de chez Swann was published in 1913, but
it wasn't read until after the war.
The need for sincerity in literary expression, felt
strongly in France during the first twenty years of the cen-
tury, is man's
really the belief that the conscious states of
being are not sufficient to explain him to himself and to
others. His subconscious contains a larger and especially a
more authentic or accurate part of his being. It was found
that our conscious speech and our daily actions are usually
in contradiction with our true selves and our deeper de-
 Origins 17

sires. The neat patterns of human behavior, set forth by

the realists, and which our lives seem to follow, were found
to be patterns formed by social forces rather than by our
desires or temperaments or inner psychological selves. This
discovery or conviction that we are more sincerely revealed
in our dreams and in our purely instinctive actions than
in our daily exterior habits of behavior (tea-drinking or
cocktailing, etc.) is of course basic to surrealism. It is ad-
mirably summarized in a sentence of Andre Gide's auto-
biography, Si le grain ne meurt, when he speaks of the dif-
ficulty of our knowing the real motivation of any of our
actions: "le motif secret de nos actes nous echappe."
Reality, then, as demonstrated by the realists and as seen
by man's own limited conscious self, entered upon a pe-
riod of disfavor when it was considered imperfect, transi-
tory, impure. And many of the new writers are character-
ized by their refusal of reality. Refusal and denial, in terms
of reality, become currently used words. This is negative,
a movement of anti-realism, but contains, as most nega-
tions do, an overwhelming positive aspiration. A new kind
of absolute is in sight, which, although it contains a re-
fusal of what we usually call logical intelligence, is an ele-
vation of the subconscious of man into a position of power
and magnitude and (the word now forces itself on us) sur-
reality.
Behind this discovery or elevation of surreality lies the
denial or refusal of reality, and still farther behind that,
liesa more permanent state of mind of modern man for
which the French have an excellent word: inquietude,
which in its English translation of "restlessness" seems in-
adequate. The current explanation of this inquietude is
the fact that man in the 20th century is forced to live in a
period of threatened warfare or literal wars of such in-
creasing cosmic magnitude that his state of mind is any-
thing but peaceful. War is the most obvious human ex-
perience which accentuates the instability of the world.
 —
18 Age of Surrealism
It certainly explains to a large degree the urgency felt by
artists of the 20th century to discover a philosophy and art
forms which will express their permanent sentiments of
instability and restlessness.
If what is usually called real life or realistic life, ceases
to have meaning, or represents a trap or ambiency for
false
the human spirit, reaction against reality is to be expected.
An entire literature has come into being whose avowed
goal was to escape from the real, to create an antidote for
the insufficiency of realism. It might be called a literature
of evasion and escape, in which the hero undertakes, not
an exploration of the world with which he is most familiar,
but an adventure in a totally exotic land or an investiga-
tion of his dream world. The example of Rimbaud in
Ethiopia served as a model for the creative artist who was
able to cut loose from all the stultifying bourgeois habits
of living. And Lafcadio, the hero of Andre Gide's Caves
du Vatican, whose goal is to commit a gratuitous act, an act
having no motivation and no reason, also epitomized much
of the new literature. Rimbaud always remained one of
the gods of the surrealists, and Les Caves du Vatican was
the book they preferred to all others of Gide, the only one
of his which they wholeheartedly accepted.
The new hero is the unadaptable man, the wanderer or
the dreamer or the perpetrator of illogical action. He rep-
resents what psychologists would define as the schizoid
temperament. His method, and even his way of life, is in-
trospection. For any man to understand himself, he must
analyze all the varying and contradictory elements which
go to form his personality. The great prose masters of this
—
method of introspection Dostoievski, Proust, and Gide
were heeded and studied by the surrealists who continued
their method and pushed it so far that what is simply in-
trospection in a Proust became in surrealist art the dis-
sociation of personality, the splitting apart of the forces of
a human character.
 Origins 19

In whatever century we study him, man seems to remain

strangely the same and recognizable. We can discover in
each period the same human problems. What does change
is the emphasis and the importance of these problems. But

no matter what particular problem emerges as central and

characteristic of an age, whether it be political or religious,
philosophical or psychological, the artist goes about his
work in much the same way. Whatever the problem of his
particular age is, the artist, by his very vocation, has to
make himself into the articulate conscience of the prob-
lem. The artist does not create the problem of his age, but
he does create the myth of the problem. That is, the form
by means of which the problem may in some sense be un-
derstood and felt by his own age and by subsequent ages.
The form given to a problem by an artist, which is a myth,
is precisely that form which will permit the problem to be

understood in the general hierarchy of all human prob-

—
lems. The myth of surrealist art although it is perhaps
too early to be certain of —may well turn out
it to be the
myth of the subconscious. That is, the myth of knowledge
derived from data of man's subconscious activity.
Three writers especially, one of whom
was venerated by
the surrealists, presided over the emergence of this myth.
First, the philosopher *j[enri r\f r g* nr demonstrated by his
f

lessons of intuition the need to exceed the bounds of logi-

cal intelligence. Then, Andre Gide p romulgated his lyrical
lessons on self-affirmation. One of his early books, his most
persuasive statement of doctrine, Les Nourritures Terres-
tres, is a paean of liberation from the traditional standards

of society. It is a program of search for self-realization, self-

integration, for morality of self, and especially a sensuous

rejuvenation and understanding of self. The third among
thesemajor thinkers of modernism is, of course, Freud ,

whose illuminations on the subconscious form the leading

principle of the surrealist creed.
It would be inaccurate to consider Bergson, Gide, and
20 Age of Surrealism
Freud as forerunners of the specific school of surrealism.
They have influenced, in France, especially, and in those
countries which follow France as a civilizing force, almost
every aspect of modern thought. But the surrealists have
derived from them a kind of subterranean impetus and
confirmation.They have contributed help to the tremen-
dous problem of sincerity for the modern artist: Bergson,
in his lessons on the sincerity of intuition; Gide, on the
sincerity of individual morality; Freud, on the revelations
of the subconscious mind. The intellect alone, or a life
regulated by the fixed standards of society, or our con-
scious states of being considered the sole source of self-
knowledge, became for such thinkers as Bergson, Gide, and
Freud, three barriers to sincerity, three ways of leading
man into contradictory and deceitful life where actions,
sentiments, and thoughts would be uncoordinated and un-
fruitful. If the principal problem for a Stendhal around
1830 seemed to be: how should I act? what should I do?,
the problem one hundred years later appears to be: what
am I? how can I attain to the center and the reality of my
being? The problem of action for the hero of 1830 became
for the hero of 1930 the problem of personality. The sur-
realists riveted themselves to this problem and in order to
attain to some approximation of it have not ceased inter-
rogating subconscious states of man, hypnotic states, and
echolalia.
The surrealist found himself preoccupied with a con-
temporary hamletism. If he found himself unadaptable to
society, it was because the secret of his being had to be re-
vealed before he could actively engage in life, before he
could follow any familiar course of action. This hamlet-
ism, which is an excessive analysis and study of self, an
effort to probe into the deep restlessness or inquietude
of modern man which results in immobility and inactivity,
seems to be a new form of the mal du siecle, the romantic
malady of the early 19th century. Proust has been the full-
 Origins 21

est recorder of this inquietude. He has played the role of

analyst for our world which Rousseau and Chateaubriand
played for the 19th century.

Ill
This new mal du siecle or hamletism
came into great prominence after the first World War. In
fact dadaism, which is a violent expression of it, originated
in 1916, in Zurich, before the end of the war. The move-
ment of Dada was soon replaced in the early 20 's by sur-
realism, but not before it had expressed its strongly nega-
tive emphasis on many respectable notions and activities.
It rebelled against society, language, religion, intelligence,
and especially literature. The shattering effect of the war
—that is, the defeatism of the war, felt even after the
Armistice of 1918 —explains to some degree and perhaps
very considerably, the inquietude of the young men in the
post-war world, their sense of futility, and their attacks of
open remonstrance which find their expression in early
surrealism.
The direct experience with war accounts therefore
somewhat for the sense of futility and the philosophy of
nihilism apparent in much of the surrealist art and litera-
ture. Andre Malraux, not a surrealist, but one of the best
prose writers of contemporary France, who in 1947 an-
nounced unexpectedly his affiliation with De Gaulle and
right-wing politics, wrote in his early book, Les Conque-
rants: "Nous avons ete formes dans l'absurde de la guerre."
In this sentence, "We
were formed in the absurdity of
war," he expresses an underlying thought of his genera-
tion, which is that of the surrealists. The first surrealists
were also the first dadaists, and they had all been affected
and marked in some personal way by the war: Breton,
Eluard, Aragon, Peret. It is significant that the genesis of
surrealism, between 1916 and 1922, developed under the
influence of the war and that the literary works most ad-
22 Age of Surrealism
mired by the surrealists, the writings of Lautreamont and
Rimbaud, came into being at the time of the other war,
that of 1870, in a comparable spirit of defeatism, in a com-
parable urgency to destroy traditional values.
The new movement was named before the end of the
war by Guillaume Apollinaire. In a letter to Paul Derm£e,
of March, 1917, Apollinaire stated that he preferred to
adopt the word surrealism rather than surnaturalism, and
added that surrealism wasn't yet in the dictionary. Apolli-
naire at this time was the main god among the living for
the first surrealists: Breton, Eluard, Aragon, Peret, Sou-
pault. They also admired Max Jacob and especially the
painters: Picasso, Matisse, Laurencin, le douanier Rous-
seau, Derain, Braque, Fernand Leger. The four earlier
writers whom they all read and studied and claimed as the
first gods of surrealism, the real ancestors, were Nerval,

Baudelaire, Lautreamont, and Rimbaud.

The initial destructive element of surrealism might be
illustrated by the character and the tragic end of Jacques
Vache. Before the war Vache had been an art student in
Paris, of not too great promise. He was sent to war and at
the front was wounded in early 1916. He was treated, for
his leg wound, at the neurological center at Nantes where
Andre Breton, who had begun his career as a medical stu-
dent, was an interne. The meeting in 1916 at Nantes of
Breton and Jacques Vache was of capital importance for
the history of surrealism. In applying the principles of his
personal philosophy, Vache was to become for Breton and
for most of the young surrealists, the dramatic symbol of
their revolt, the man who dared to live his principles, who
dared to surpass the mere eccentricities of behavior with
which most of them stopped.
When Vach£ was released from the hospital, he spent
his time unloading coal on the wharves of the harbor at
Nantes, or, dressed in impeccable elegance, frequenting the
lowest dives of the city. He used to wear alternately a Brit-
 Origins 23

ish uniform or a French aviation uniform, and give him-

self invented titles or tell about himself totally imagined

adventures. The word he was the most serious about de-

fining was humor, which he called "un sens de l'inutilite
th£atrale et sans joie de tout, quand on sait." Humor, thus
defined as the "theatric uselessness of everything," is an
admirable clue to the meaning of dadaism, over which
Jacques Vach^ seemed to preside as a kind of prophet. The
seemingly senseless actions of Vache were really perpe-
trated in order to create about himself a world of unreal-
ity. He tried quite literally to live within the realm of his

imagination.
He left no work of importance, save a volume of letters,
Lettres de Guerre (Au sans Pareil, 1919), published after
his death. His importance was his effect on, first, Andre
Breton, who said he owed the most to Vache ("C'est a
Jacques Vache que je dois le plus"), and then on his many
admirers for whom he was a lucid and brilliant exponent
of a way of life, or rather a way of looking at art. There
are passages in his letters of literary nihilism, which be-
came the manifesto of dadaism: "We have no liking for
art or for artists —down with Apollinaire!" ("Nous n'ai-
mons ni Tart ni les artistes —a bas Apollinaire!") Such sen-
tences as "Nous ignorons Mallarme" ("We don't know
who Mallarme is") were said in a tone both of scorn and
high seriousness. They came from his fundamental belief
in the ludicrous or useless display of art, or at least what
was traditionally admired as art.
Vache pushed his philosophy to its logical conclusion by
taking his own life, at the end of 1918 in Nantes. He was
a tall red-headed fellow who easily attracted people by his
physical appearance. His personality and personal convic-
tions were so strongly felt by his friends and admirers that
they not only accepted the idea of his suicide but also the
fact that he took a friend's life at the same time. The
means of his suicide was an overdose of opium and he gave
24 Age of Surrealism
the same amount of opium who had asked to be
to a friend
initiated to the drug. It is more than probable that Vache
knew what the result of the two doses would be. I mention
this tragic story first to illustrate the sense of defeatism
which was felt at the end of the war, and secondly to il-

lustrate the attraction toward death and self-destruction

which is apparent in much of surrealist art. Prophecy,
doom, destiny, occultism, and suicide are all manifesta-
tions of the pessimistic or nihilistic aspects of surrealism,
and they will be studied at suitable points throughout this
book. Vache's suicide was immediately interpreted as a
kind of martyrdom. He was a martyr to the futility and the
doom of life, and his action was celebrated as a poetic or
surrealistic justification of selfhood.

IV
all times seemed to offer
Surrealism at
suicide as one alternative. But its other alternative has for-
tunately been believed in and practiced more assiduously
than the suicidal interpretation. Belief in suicide has been
strongly counteracted by belief in the miracle of art, in the
magical qualities and properties of the artist. Surrealism
receives this belief as a heritage from the early romantics
of the 19th century, from a conviction about the artist and
his work which had steadily grown in force and clarity
throughout the century. The role of the writer was seen
as usurping more and more the prerogatives of the priest,
of the miracle-worker, of the man endowed with super-
natural vision. The work itself of the writer, and particu-
larly of the poet, was seen more and more to be a magical
incantation, an evocative magic or witchcraft whose crea-
tion and whose effect were both miraculous. The artistic
work might be compared to the "host" of sacramental
Christianity which contains the "real presence." The poet
then is the priest who causes the miracle by a 'magical use
of words, by an incantation which he himself does not fully
 Origins 25

understand. And the work, thus brought into being, is a

mystery which can be and experienced without neces-
felt

sarily being comprehended.

For the most part, the surrealists were poets and hence
specialists in language. Poetry was for them, as legitimately
as science and philosophy were for others, the way of
knowledge. In the deepest sense, surrealism is a way of life,

a method by means of which we may accept the enigmas

of existence and in daily living learn to transcend impo-
tencies, defeats, contradictions, wars.
In this way of knowledge, by which we are denning sur-
realism, there is one primary precaution always stressed,
and this precaution helps to distinguish surrealism from
other ways of knowledge: in the poetic or artistic creation,
the poet must not intervene too consciously. He must
learn the method of making himself into an echo, the
method of echolalia. To become the magician, or the seer
(the voyantj as Rimbaud calls him), he must learn to fol-

low his inner life, or his imagination, as if he were an ob-

server. He must learn to follow his conscious states, as
when asleep he observes his dreams. Freud taught the sur-
realists that man is primarily a sleeper. The surrealist must
therefore learn how to go down into his dreams, as Or-
pheus descended into the underworld, in order to discover
his treasure there.
One poet, more profoundly than all others, is the ances-
tor of the surrealists. The position occupied by Charles
Baudelaire in the history of modern poetry is remarkably
equidistant between the two extremes or two heresies of
modern poetry: first, the theory usually referred to as the
art for art's sake theory (L'art pour Vart) and stressing the
independence of art from any other occupation or pre-
occupation of man; and second, the utilitarian theory of
art which stresses its use and application. Baudelaire's
life-long avoidance of falling into either one or the other
heresy of art, is so important and so remarkable that I
26 Age of Surrealism
think his position in art might be compared to that of St.

Thomas Aquinas in theology, who especially in his articles

on one of the two possible
grace, always avoided falling into
heresies: ofdeterminism or predestination on the one side,
and of total liberty and independence of man from God's
help on the other side.
Baudelaire's lesson on the autonomy of the imagination
was to become a principal article of surrealist faith. For
Baudelaire, the work of art is work of the
essentially a
imagination and yet it is true and real at the same time.
This is perhaps the best way of defining what is meant by
the sincerity of a work of art: the fidelity with which it
adheres to the imagination of the artist. Additionally, for
Baudelaire, a work of the imagination comes from a very
real kind of anguish. Not so much the impermanent and
transitory anguish of daily living, of insecurity, of war
and love, as the inner and deeply permanent anguish of
man which is usually repressed and covered over with will-
ful forgetfulness. As in the treatment of psychoanalysis, the
poet has to go very far down into his past, into the signifi-
cance of his childhood. Considerable heroism is demanded
for this facing of oneself in one's past.
The supernatural heroism of Baudelaire, which is the
outstanding mark of his genius, was never matched by any
surrealist writer. But the method and the ritual of his hero-
ism were used and imitated by the surrealists. Baudelaire's
self-discovery in his anguish and his self-revelation in his
writing were archetypal. The artists who followed him, and
especially the surrealists, have reenacted his method almost
as a religious mystery, with the conviction that if all as-
pects of the ritual be observed, the mystery will again be
achieved. All literature is to some degree psychoanalytic.
Baudelaire went so deeply into psychoanalytic exploration
that he passed beyond the personal reminiscence into the
universal. That moment when the poet arrives at the cen-
ter of himself and therefore at the center of human destiny,
 Origins 27
when he participates in the consciousness of the world and
there establishes a point of contact between himself and
the world, would be claimed by the men whom we are
going to study, supremely surrealistic moment.
as the
Baudelaire, and the man he claimed as spiritual brother,
Edgar Allan Poe, whose life paralleled in so many ways
Baudelaire's, would offer in their literary works sufficient
material to establish the origins of surrealism. The particu-
lar kind of heroic anguish which they had to go through
before they could attain to what we have called their sur-
realistic moment, appears to us, as time goes on and we see
more clearly, propitiatory. An artist like Baudelaire as-

sumes in himself much humanity and by pro-

of the evil of
jecting it in his work relieves humanity of its evil. When we
read the flowers of evil of Baudelaire, poems whose subject
is known to us in varying degrees, we are thereby purged of

the very evil which was in us. One of the most precious
concepts of our world is the cathartic principle of art,
which we owe to the Poetics of Aristotle. The surrealists,
with the example especially of Baudelaire, have given to
the doctrine of catharsis a renewed and vigorous interpre-
tation. The myth of psychoanalysis, or rather the myth of
the subconscious, which would be one facile way of de-
scribing the myth created and recreated by the surrealists,
was formed in the wake of invasions, wars, and revolutions,
in company with neo-thomism and communism, as a way
of integrating and uniting scientific determinism and
poetic sublimation. *When one knows oneself (science*
means knowledge), at the end, say, of the performance of a I
tragedy, or after the reading of a poem, or after contem-
j

plating the spectacle of a painting, one has lived through \

both a human experience and its absolution. Infinitely

more than practices which might be called classical, or
romantic, surrealism has emphasized the closeness of art to
a certain kind of psychic human experience and the reme-
dial effect which such an art has on the human spirit.
 II LAUTREAMONT: the temperament

i
The word most often used to describe
the romantic temperament is individualism. The romantic
is generally considered the type of artist who has broken the

rules and constraining bonds of an established order. By

individualism is meant the prestige of liberty with which
the artist has covered himself, the intoxication of freedom
and rebellion. But before attaining to this experience of
himself, the romantic has had to go through a longer and,
I believe, a far -more significant experience which is that of

solitude —a very particular kind of solitude which results

in forming the prevailing temperament of the great mod-
ern artists.

The destiny of a classical artist, like Racine, is implicit

in the work which he is called upon to write, which lies
ahead of him in the rules of composition, in the ideals of
art, in the beliefs and needs of a society, in all the peda-

gogical and sociological privileges which he inherits. In

this sense, the classical artist writes in the midst of a vast
company, both past and present. He is never without
models, and never without teachers and critics and a public.
 Lautr^amont 29
The romantic, or his successor, the surrealist, has no such
inheritance and no such guidance. He finds himself in the
midst, not of a vast company, but of a vast solitariness.
The world he discovers is in ruins. The early romantics
very literally used a d£cor of ruins as the familiar setting
for their thoughts and their experiences. Such a man has no
model but himself; he has no destiny to accomplish, but a
destiny to discover and invent.
It is true that the modern schools of poetry —
the roman-
tics, the parnassians, the symbolists, and the surrealists all —
have their various meetings and gatherings, their cenacles,
their cafes and even their salons, such as Mallarme's apart-
ment on the rue de Rome; but the artists remained solitary,
always uncertain of their artistic enterprises for which there
seemed to be no precedent and no public. They no longer
wrote about celebrated heroes, whose adventures were
known, because each one had to become a new and unique
solitary hero, discovering in his own conscience and his own
memory the subject matter of his works.
The experience of solitude probably explains more
about modern literature and art than any other single expe-
rience. And I am thinking of the solitude of such different
geniuses as Vigny in his ivory tower, Hugo on his islands,
Rimbaud in his voyages and escapes, Claudel in his reli-
gious meditations, Joyce in his exile from Dublin. In his
solitude, which is his inheritance, the modern artist has
had to learn that the universe which he is going to write
or paint is in himself. He has learned that this universe
which he carries about in himself is singularly personal
and unique as well as universal. To find in oneself what
is original and at the same time what can be translated

into universal terms and transmitted, became the anxiety

and the occupation of the modern artist. The romantics
held this belief partially and intuitively. The surrealists
made it into a creed and a method. Surrealism was actually
founded on the doctrine that the artist does not belong to
30 Age of Surrealism
any one period and that he must discover solely in himself
his universe.
The man who did more than any other to bridge the
gap between the romantic perception, only faintly illumi-
nated, and the surrealist dogmatism was Isidore Ducasse,
who called himself Comte de Lautr£amont.
No portrait exists of Lautreamont and almost no facts are
known about his life. One set of facts were indeed published
about him, whereupon the surrealists, who prefer to main-
tain an atmosphere of mystery and anonymity about their
ancestor, set about to prove, and did so, conclusively, that
the published facts concerned another Ducasse. The bio-
graphical details about Lautreamont which do seem au-
thentic, and which have been parsimoniously given out
by the surrealists, may be summarized in a few sentences.
He was born in 1846 in Montevideo, Uraguay, where his
father, whose family originally came from the Pyrenees,
occupied a post in the French Consulate. At the age of 14,
Isidore Ducasse crossed the ocean and came to France. He
was a pupil in the lycee de Tarbes, and then at the lycee de
Pau (in the Basses-Pyrenees), where in 1865 he seems to
have completed his year of philosophy, Or final year at the
lycee.
He then went to Paris, ostensibly to present himself
for entrance at the Ecole Polytechnique. Here any accurate
trace of him is pretty much lost. He seems to have studied
the piano and lived in various small hotels, particularly
number rue Vivienne, which is named in an important
15,
passage of his writings, and number 7, faubourg Mont-
martre, where he died on the 3rd of November, 1870, at the
age of 24. Two years before his death, in 1868, Lautrea-
mont printed, at his own expense, the first canto of Mal-
doror. The following year, 1869, he found a Belgian pub-
lisher, Lacroix, who agreed complete work,
to publish his
the six cantos which compose Les Chants de Maldoror.
The edition was printed, and then it seems that the pub-
 LautrIamont 31

lisher became terrified at the boldness of the text and re-

fused to put it on sale. The first edition was not sold until
ten years later, in 1879. The only other publication during
Lautr£amont's lifetime was a small work called Preface aux
Poesies , brought out just a few months before his death,
and was destined to become for the surrealists a text as im-
portant as Les Chants de Maldoror. It was not until 1890
that a new edition of Lautreamont was brought out, this
time chez Genonceaux. The work was unknown during
the symbolist period. Gide states, in one of his books, that
Lautreamont exerted no influence on the 19th century,
although in the 20th century he became one of the most
influential writers and opened up the dykes of the new
literature.A new edition of Les Chants was published in
1920, under the direction of the writer Blaise Cendrars,
and since then many other editions have appeared and
made the writing of Lautreamont very accessible.
The surrealists have venerated the obscurity and the
solitude of Lautr£amont's life. The absence of any photo-
graphic resemblance of him has incited them to create
imaginary portraits based upon
the literary testament
which he left. Les Chants de Maldoror come from a single
mind, from the sensibility of one man who lived in almost
total solitude in the midst of modern European civilization
and who, like Rimbaud (who was writing his first poems
when Lautreamont died), traversed in the space of just a
few years, approximately 1865-1870, a whole century of
human experience. A few readings which are traceable in
his work, in addition to the particular kind of solitude he
lived, were sufficient to call forth from him a series of
images and of themes, whose intensity and meaning go very
far in explaining much of modern art. His temperament,
formed by a modern genus of solitude, created a series of
images, which are those of the modern artist, and which
seemingly can be explained best in terms of this mysterious
temperament.
32 Age of Surrealism

II
important to remember that for the
It is

surrealists, Lautreamont was much moresignificant than

a mere literary figure could ever be. He is their ancestor
not so much by virtue of having created a new literary at-
mosphere or a new literary work, as by virtue of having
created a domain inclusive of literature and art but far
more extensive. For the surrealists the language of Lautrea-
mont seems to have a dissolving power. What he literally
committed to the page is striking and bold and almost un-
thinkable at times, but what is important is the degree of
life and vision, and particularly of futurity in life and
vision, which can be evoked from the work. Its language
and its image may therefore dissolve into a reality greater
than they, a reality which is not translatable into language.
Certain modes of experience are so ineffable that when
an attempt is made to cast them into language, they appear
estranged from themselves, weakened and vilified. Much
of 19th century poetry is inferior to the experience with
which it is became an art which generated
concerned. It
itself, which emoted over itself and kept within its florid

bounds of rules and similes and commonplaces and cliches.

Most romantic, parnassian, and symbolist poetry is starkly
and laboriously conventional. Poetry had largely suc-
cumbed to its fatal and always imminent disease of facile
rhetoric. When poetry becomes wholly dependent on the
currently used, easily understandable language of its own
period, it dies of itself, and boredom.
of inertia
Lautreamont and Rimbaud, the two adolescents of
French have uttered the strongest invective
literature,
against 19th century poets. In the work of each of them a
page devoted to a listing of names and to a violent exer-
is

cise of name-calling. They were the most deeply aware of

the impasse against which poetic convention had pushed
poetry, and, because they were young, didn't hesitate to
 Lautr£amont 33

made them
use destructive criticism. Their very youth had
more demanding and more impatient with poets
of poetry
who exacted nothing from language and hence were un-
able to create language. Lautreamont sensed the need for
the poetic temperament to undergo a fundamental change.
Rimbaud forced the word, the poetic communication, to
undergo a comparable change.
—
A revolutionary and Lautreamont was certainly that
in terms of poetic sensibility —
may be very easily accused
of madness and perversity. Leon Bloy and Remy de Gour-
mont both used the word "insanity" in speaking of Lau- i

treamont, but the surrealists always stressed the fact that

no clear demarcation can be made between a state of poetic \

creativity and a state of insanity. Both states are confused,

and rightfully so, they believed, because in both, man has
to leave himself, move out from his habitual conventional
reactions and see everything in the world, and particularly
his own thoughts, in a totally fresh and unpredictable
manner. Therefore, according to the surrealists, chance
coalitions which may take place in free imaginative states
of mind are more valuable in the making of art than the
logical juxtapositions we impose upon words and sounds
and colors in our trained consciously focused states of mind.
This is why Paul Eluard could call surrealism a "state of
mind."
At the beginning of Lautreamont's work, in the first
canto of Maldoror, we learn that the experience which is
going to be related is the career of evil. On page 3, Lau-
treamont says that Maldoror, after living for a few years,
made the discovery that he had been born wicked, and "il
se jeta resolument dans la carriere du mal." This phrase,
"the career of evil," is announcement for a work
a violent
sombre revelation
of art. It prepares us at the outset for a
and informs us that the work is to be read as a book of
negation. The subject matter is to be the disaster and
catastrophe of human experience. The narrative of Mal-
34 Age of Surrealism
doror is therefore not to be what we often find in literary
—
works a sublimation or an embellishment of life. It is to
—
be the reverse of all that the going backwards of man
(since evil is the negation of the good), the plunge into
human existence at a point which will often appear, as we
read Les Chants de Maldoror, pre-historical, a point in
time before human existence began. The large number of
animals, and particularly of sea animals (sharks, whales,
crabs, frogs, octopuses) and birds of all kinds,which inhabit
the pages of Maldoror, accentuate this important theme of
the reversal of chronology, this turning back of man in
order to track down the origin of his dilemma and anguish
and evil.
Throughout the six cantos, Lautreamont maintains, as
one of his primary themes, the relationship of man with
the physical universe, with what often appears to be the
prehistoric physical universe. The hero Maldoror, who is

in many respects the outstanding surrealist hero, is con-

ceived of as a man still very close to his memory of animals,
still very close to the time when he himself participated in
an animal existence. He is the hero closely and fervently
animalistic, and hence sadistic; the being who moves and
acts in accordance with cruelty. He finds himself midway
between two beings: between the purely physical being,
such as a shark, and the purely spiritual being whom he
calls God. Maldoror finds himself equally distributed be-

tween matter and spirit, and therefore equally drawn

toward animals and toward God. But since the cantos
are to narrate his career of evil, he describes his sadistic
impulses more exclusively than his spiritually motivated im-
pulses. The initial phrase, "the career of evil," implies that
Maldoror feels closer allegiance to the physical than to the
spiritual, that he going to attempt to live solely by sadis-
is

tic evil. Yet, the career of evil never completely obliterates

the career of the spirit, and Maldoror states, also in the
first canto, his need for the infinite: Moi, comme les chiens,
 Lautreamont 35

fSprouve le besoin de I'infini. But such a need as this is

followed by the need to feel himself the son of a shark or of
a tiger.
I suppose that never has a literary hero felt so perfectly

ambivalent as Maldoror. This evenly partitioned ambiva-

lence, unique perhaps in Lautreamont, has its antecedents
throughout the history of man, in the age-long struggle be-
tween good and evil, God and Lucifer, the spiritual and
the material, the unicorn and the lion. The duality of man
is inescapably reflected in art. In every work of art is present
an element of beauty, so persistently recognizable in every
age, so closely identical with every spectator's aspiration
toward the ideal, that we can call it by no other term than
eternal. Undefinable and mysterious as it may be, this eter-
nal element marks every kind of work of art, whether it be
a Greek statue or a tragedy of Sophocles or a sonnet of
Mallarme or a painting of Dali. And then, secondly, to
complete this duality, each work of art is characterized by
an immediate temporal aspect. It may reveal some conno-
tation of its period in history, or a system of morality, or
the reflection of a personal anguish or passion. A work of
art is always made by a temporal man who catches in one
moment of time the color of that moment as well as its
eternality. So, the Greek statue, as well as giving its intui-
tion of timelessness, adumbrates a purely temporal marble
and the ideal human body according to an historical period
and mores.
The duality of man and the duality of all art are fur-
ther exemplified in the very particular duality of the art-
ist whose temperament or temperamental ambiguities are
projected in highly dramatic fashion in Lautreamont. The
permanent drama of man is the struggle between good and
evil. This is treated directly and vehemently in Les Chants

de Maldoror. But it is prefigured in the permanent drama

of every artist. This drama is the struggle to attain some
harmony between the two needs of the artist: first, the
36 Age of Surrealism
need to be a man of the world, that is, a man who some-
how understands the world and the reasons for the customs
of the world; and second, the need to be the specialist,
chained to his palette or his marble or his language.
The conflict in every artist is the need to understand the
world and the need to live apart from it. But he has to
understand the world not in the usual moral and political
way, but in a manner which I have already described as
prehistorical. The great artist —and this I take to be the
surrealist lesson of Lautreamont — has to be able to return
to those shadowy worlds existing before birth and after
death. The great artist has to remember everything: not
merely the wars and revolutions of his time, but of time
before time, of the war in heaven, of apocalyptic wars and
infernal punishments.
Most men are simply curious about history and politics.
But in the artist, this curiosity grows into a monstrous kind
of passion, into a force which is fatal and irresistible. It
makes of him a singular being capable of all metamor-
phoses. This is, to a large extent, the subject matter of
Les Chants de Maldoror. On one level, Maldoror is able
to metamorphose himself into an animal, in much the
same way as a character of Kafka changes into a cockroach.
But on the other level, his tortuous pride and his memory
make him desirous of equaling God. Again in the first
canto, we come upon this sentence: il voudrait egaler Dieu.
This surrealist metamorphosis of Maldoror, which moves
in two directions, one toward the physical and the other
toward the spiritual, is really the annihilation of time, by
which the hero is able to descend into the mysterious past
when man was one with God. He has never recovered from
the haunting memory of some distant and buried crime
which turned him against God.
To use the word consecrated and especially defined in
French literature by Charles Baudelaire, the modern artist
has become the "dandy." Le dandy is the being dramatized
 Lautr^amont 37

and allegorized by Lautreamont in his character Maldoror.

The dandy, according to Baudelaire, has critical intelli-

gence and a finely developed sensitivity and character, but

he is constantly aspiring to a coldness of feeling, a hardness
of character, an insensibility, an inscrutability. This is a
mask which he must forge every day in order
tight-fitting
not to betray himself when in the world. The dandy learns
how to feign hostility and indifference until they become
naturally instinctive in him. His fear is the same as Mal-
doror's fear — that to appear sincere in his worldly relation-
ships would be equivalent to appearing ridiculous.
This problem or dilemma of the artist's particular dual-
ity has reoccurred in some form or other, according to some
type or other, in each age since the Renaissance, since the
so-called beginning of modern history, and seems indeed to
be one of the distinguishing features of the modern world.
It is apparent in the "gentilhomme" of the 16th century,

in the noble who wants to be at the same time scholar and

humanist. Montaigne, for example, was always fearful of
being considered a professional writer, and strove to main-
tain an attitude of detachment and even of derision toward
the pedant and the industrious scholar. In the 17th century,
the "honnete homme" is another name for the same kind
of man, who avoids becoming a specialist in order to know
something about everything and thus show his preference
for nothing. La Rochefoucauld's maxim which states that
the "honnete homme" refuses to be disturbed or involved
(qui ne se pique de rien) is a code not unlike that of the
libertine of the 18th century, who practices a licence on
morals as well as in thought, and of Baudelaire's dandy of
the 19th century. The which is our study
case of Maldoror,
of the surrealist temperament, an instance and a deep
is

study of the Baudelairian dandy and hence of the modern

artist —the man who has to see the world, who has to live
in its center, and who all the time has to remain hidden

from the world. Such an ambiguous r61e, which I think

38 Age of Surrealism
can be traced to the early Renaissance when Christendom
began its secularization, allows us quite justifiably to con-
sider the modern artist the secularized priest, the one who,
forced by his vocation to live apart from the world, is never-
theless the profoundest conscience of the world, the most
accurate recorder and interpreter of the world's problems.

Ill
In this light, the experience of solitude
for the modern artist is religious. It is the experience of a
sacrament. Both preparation and absolution, it effects a

complete change in the human being. The solitude of

Lautreamont, who was known personally by so few people,
whose itinerary, only eighty years ago, through such a mod-
ern city as Paris, is not traceable, and the solitude of his

hero Maldoror who contemplates one scene after another

in the world, only to lay waste to it when he himself partici-
pates init, have the same secret force of a destiny. Solitude

seems to be the destined climate and need and fulfillment

of the modern artist. Baudelaire, in his personal journal,
Mon coeur mis a nu, acknowledges this same thought:
sentiment de destinee eternellement solitaire.
The center of this inescapable solitude is the scene of
Lautreamont's revolt against God, made all the more
dramatic and bare because of the solitude. Les Chants de
Maldoror illustrate what Baudelaire analyzed as the mod-
ern type of beauty, namely a commingling of mystery and
tragedy. Mystere and malheur were the words Baudelaire
used, and he referred to Milton's Satan as a leading type of
virile beauty. This Baudelairian definition of the beautiful
might easily be applied to the art of other periods, to the
Oedipus of Sophocles and the Phedre of Racine, for exam-
ple, but Lautreamont, writing in the wake of Baudelaire's
doctrine, made a shocking and violent use of it, and the
surrealists held steadfastly to this particular illustration
of the theory.
 Lautr£amont 39

The celebrated scene between Maldoror and a female

shark which takes place almost at the end of the second
canto, would serve to depict the Baudelairian and surreal-
ist type of beauty, as well as to indicate the main traits of
Maldoror's revolt against God, and hence the dandy's in-
difference about life.

The scene is prefaced by an important passage dealing

precisely with the theme of solitude, of predestined soli-
tude which may well explain the excessive action of sadism
and bestiality. Maldoror says that he had searched every-
where for a kindred spirit, for a soul which resembled his,
but he had found no one. By day a young man had ap-
proached him, offering his friendship, but Maldoror had
turned him aside. By night he had spoken to a beautiful
woman but had been unable to accept her love. This is the
setting of a parable. The first act of the drama now begins.
Maldoror, seated on a rock by the shore, watches a storm
rise up and hurl a large ship against a reef. The drowning
men try to prolong their lives because they fail to recog-
nize the fish of the sea as their ancestors. Fetishistically,
Maldoror prods his cheek with a sharp piece of iron in
order to increase the suffering of the victims from the boat.
This is the first strong note of sadistic pleasure which Mal-
doror is deriving from the shipwreck scene. He takes his
gun and few who are on the point of
finishes off those
escaping, especially a boy who, stronger than the rest,
swims to only 200 meters off the shore. But Maldoror says
that he was tired of always killing, that his pleasure had
diminished, that he was not really so cruel as later he was
accused of being. We half see in such a statement that
cruelty is a willed regimen, an experimentation. Yet Mal-
doror makes no effort to excuse himself: he acknowledges
that, when he commits a crime, he knows what he is doing.
A second act, more terrifying than the first, begins when
the ship finally sinks into the sea and the many survivors
are left floundering about on the surface. A school of sharks
40 Age of Surrealism
adds a new horror and the water becomes crim-
to the scene
son with blood. At that moment
a huge female shark,
famished, arrives and destroys all but three of the male
sharks. Maldoror kills one of these with his gun, and then
dives into the ocean to attack with his bare hands and a
knife one of the sharks while the female slays the one re-
maining monster. Alone, then, in the water with the female
shark, Maldoror unites with her in a ferocious embrace.
This, of course, is the culmination of the drama, which is
in itself a kind of metamorphosis. Maldoror recapitulates
the introductory theme, when he says that the shark re-
sembles him, that he is no longer alone and that he has
experienced his first love.
Such a scene as this, I might say, in the violence of its
beauty and its horror, has not been exceeded in the writ-
ings and the paintings of the surrealists. For a scene of
comparable power and awesomeness, one would perhaps
have to go to Dante's Inferno, to the circle, for example,
where thieves are punished by having their bodies united
with the bodies of snakes. This shark scene of the second
canto is exemplary of two fundamental literary qualities
mentioned by Baudelaire in his work, Fusees, two qualities
—
rigorously adhered to by the surrealists supernaturalism
and irony. The attraction of the shark is at least mysterious
if not supernatural, and Maldoror's first discovery of love

in his mating with the sea monster is strongly ironic, ac-

cording to any ordinary measurement of human standards.
The act of love is here portrayed in a scene which reveals
its most primitive aspect of torture —
as the act of prayer
might easily be portrayed in its most primitive aspect of
magic. But for our specific purpose, which is an understand-
ing of the meaning of surrealism, this scene, so strongly
primitive in its ferocity and incredibility, so reminiscent

of our dream world where we cohabit with monsters,

might help us to establish the myth of the artist, as specifi-
cally enacted by Maldoror. Again we return to Baudelaire,
 LautrIamont 41

for textual confirmation in his journal, Mori coeur mis a

nu, where he writes that only three types of men are re-

;
spectable, as judged by the temperament of the artist.
These are the priest, the warrior and the poet. All other
men exercise what Baudelaire scornfully calls professions;
that is, I suppose, perfectly measurable and conventional-
ized lives. With each of these three types, Baudelaire associ-
ates a verb, that is, a strong action. For the priest, it is "to
know," for the warrior, "to kill," for the poet, "to create."
—
These combined roles in the artist of priest, warrior, poet;
—
or of knower, killer, creator form the myth of the artist,
and are, curiously enough, quite evident in Maldoror's
scene with the female shark. First he presides over it as a
priest might preside over a complicated ritual: he predicts
and knows it and seems even to control it. And then, like
the warrior, he participates in actual destructiveness and
slaughter. Finally, like the poet, he creates anew form of
himself in his union with the monster.
The entire passage shows the combined contradictions
of feeling which every artist experiences before the spec-
tacle of life: the feelings of horror and ecstasy. The ecstasy
of the priest, who knows transcendently, and the horror
of the warrior, who kills in obedience to a deeply im-
bedded primitive instinct, have to be combined in the
creation of the poet which isthe formalized metaphor of
horror and ecstasy. The orderly evolution of the three
verbs, to know, to kill, to create is at once the expression
of a temperament and the process of a myth. It is in close
accord with the aesthetic doctrine which defines the beauti-
ful in terms of mystery and tragedy.
If the mysterious and the tragic are permanent traits in

all art, they are intimately related to the surrealist (or even
modern) hermeticism of poetic form and content. This
hermeticism or obscurity or secretiveness in both the for-
malized aspect and the subject matter perhaps best charac-
terizes the intensity of the new art, and especially surrealist
42 Age of Surrealism
art. Every human life ismore characterized by mystery and
secretiveness than by comprehensiveness and lucidity. For
the surrealists the secret of Lautreamont's life was the sign
of the inaccessible character of his work. The difficulty or
obscurity of artistic form always comes from the mysteri-
ousness or inaccessibility of the content. The content of
Les Chants de Maldoror, as is evident from the shark epi-
sode is perhaps the most incomprehensible of all possible
themes, because it is the insubordination of man to God.
This theme of man's revolt against God is in almost all of
the greatest literary works: in Aeschylus, in the story of
Moses, in Dante's Inferno, where it is the only subject,
in Milton, Goethe, Baudelaire. Maldoror's pride is that
of the damned, whose beauty is horror and whose memory
is ecstasy.

IV
The newness of Maldoror and his spe-
cifically surrealistic character is his exaggeration of revolt,
its absolute quality, and the humanized and degraded
portraiture he gives of God. Maldoror appears not only in
a state of revolt against God, but as a rivaling and neigh-
boring monarch to God. In his need to equal God, he utters
extreme blasphemy and at the same time he creates meta-
phorically in his writing an important aspect of art usually
called the "grotesque." The long passage which terminates
the third canto is a brothel scene in which Maldoror lis-
tens to the speech of a gigantic hair fallen from God's head.
The blasphemy consists of thinking of God as having
committed sin and crime. The divine misdemeanors had
awakened from their sleep of centuries in the catacombs
under the brothel, which significantly was once a convent,
the nuns who, like those of us living in the modern world,
are overcome with a strange malaise and anxiety. So, God
Himself receives the stigmata and has to strive to rehabili-
tate Himself in the world of men. God talks about His
shame as being endless as eternity: ma honte est immense
 Lautreamont 43

comme Veternite. In such scenes in which God is degraded,

Maldoror reveals himself as an integral anarchist, as the
destroyer not only of human but also of divine values.
If the writer Lautreamont was in revolt against what was

currently accepted in his day as "literature," namely the

well-rounded inflated sentence of romantic style, his charac-
ter Maldoror was in revolt against conventionalized feel-
ings and respected taboos. The surest and crudest way to
overcome dramatized feelings and pompous and stub-
bornly stated affiliations is to make fun of them. Les Chants
de Maldoror, even in such serious scenes as those of the
female shark and the hair from God's head, contain an
aspect of the modern type of humor and the comic which
is so important in the work of Picasso, Joyce, and Proust. I

am confident that Lautreamont and the surrealists were

scornful of the traditional type of comedy, as exemplified
in Aristophanes and Moliere. They were as strongly op-
posed to the exaggerated verbal logic of romanticism, of a
Chateaubriand, for example, whom Lautreamont called the
"melancholy Mohican," as they were opposed to the intel-
lectual logic and rule of good common sense, which have
always been extolled and exemplified by the culture of
France. Lautreamont and the surrealists, in their role of
ardently minded revolutionaries, would have been morti-
fied in using any of the traditional forms of comedy and
tragedy. Blasphemy, which is a combination of the serious
and the comic, is their mode. When art is somewhat domi-
nated by the grotesque (which is always allied with blas-
phemy) the spirit of modern man is more at ease in con-
sidering the serious, the tragic, the religious. I am thinking
here not only of Lautreamont and the surrealists, of
Picasso, Proust, and Joyce, but also, to a lesser degree, of
course, of The New Yorker, Mickey Mouse, Charles Chap-
lin, Fernandel.
Maldoror, in his many experiences of violence and re-
volt, is trying to destroy the voice of his conscience, to for-
get the lessons of tradition and convention. He turns
44 Age of Surrealism
against the family, as the prodigal son did, and initiates a
fervent line of modern prodigal sons, of whom the most
illustrious are Rimbaud and Gide. In him, love and hate
are perfectly fused, as they must inevitably be in any real
experience of blasphemy. Both the writer and his creature,
both Lautreamont and Maldoror, are the same adolescent
who makes of his revolt, so equally composed of love and
hate, a search for the absolute. This is a mark of ado-
lescents: they are the most fervent seekers of the absolute.
As they grow older, only the few among them who become
by vocation poets, philosophers, and saints remain seekers
of the absolute.
So, the adolescent revolutionist turns against his family,
against the books of his schoolmasters, and against his
society. But after knowing during their adolescence the
passion of revolution, most revolutionists become lovers.
Lautreamont, as far as his book is concerned, did not
become His book deals only with the principle of de-
lover.
struction, and not with the principle which follows destruc-
tion, when the revolutionist becomes lover, namely the
principle of possession. Lautreamont, then, represents the
first an evolution. He is the pure example of revo-
stage of
lutionist. Hewill be followed by the lover, whose principle
is possession, and who will be followed in his turn by the

poet, whose principle is creation.

These three types, revolutionist, lover, and poet, are not
always graphically discernible. The adolescent usually con-
ceals his revolt and world to see, another
acts out, for the
kind of life. In Lautreamont, for example, the revolt is
only parabolically manifested. The lover, also, in most
cases, has to conceal his love, or at least the intensity of
his love. He becomes thereby, not so much the actor which
the adolescent revolutionist becomes, as the buffoon or the
clown who hides his tragedy by means of mimicry. And
finally the poet, in the third panel of this triptych, con-
ceals his experience by means of a metaphor.
 /// •
RIMBAUD: the doctrine

Without always realizing it, Rimbaud

explicated by the example of his life and by the far less
mysterious example of his work, an aesthetic doctrine
which had been slowly formulating in France during the
19th century. Baudelaire had made the most significant
contribution to the doctrine. He had almost systematized
it, in a fragmentary way. He had substantiated it by his

critique of the writings of Swedenborg and Poe. He had

become, what Rimbaud justly acclaimed him, the first
visionary (le premier voyant) and king of poets (roi des
poetes). Baudelaire died in 1867, ten years after the publi-
cation of his Fleurs du Mat, and all during the 1860's
Mallarme wrote his first poems which were efforts toward
the perfecting of this poetic theory. The poems of Mal-
larme are the purest achievements of the new doctrine.
At the very end of the 1860's and during the first three
years of the 1870's, Rimbaud gave vent to this doctrine,
as a child might, in a veritable storm. His brief existence
as poet— —
about four yeara had the compressed turbulent
beauty of a storm, of some cosmic upheaval which spends
itself in brilliant flashes. The fire and heat of an earth-
46 Age of Surrealism
quake explode after a long period of preparation, after a
long period of waiting and compressed power. In the case
of Rimbaud, the years of repression were long for a child
during which he had received no normal affection from his
mother and when his father, who might have loved him,
was absent from the home and whose name the son was not
permitted to mention. In no literary work, not even Lau-
treamont's, is one so aware, as in Rimbaud's, of a former
existence, of a life of the spirit which grew inwardly and
deeply because of an outward life of repression. His writ-
ing is so composed of flashes, of magnificent restless flames,
that one can explain it not by the usual method of biog-
raphy and literary sources and philosophical concepts, but
by the theory that it springs from a deep and hidden life,
a former life perhaps, at least an unreal or surreal life.
To define, at first very briefly, this doctrine, intimated
by Baudelaire, perfected by Mallarme, and given by Rim-
baud its most explosive expression, as in some violent
dream, we might say that it seems to be a belief in the re-
lationship which necessarily exists between a poem and
witchcraft or magic or sortilege, as the French call it. A
poem comes into being due to a process which, like al-
chemy, is magical and therefore foreign to the rules of
logic and even the rules of instinct. According to this pre-
cept, a poem originates in this hidden life of the spirit and
therefore is a reflection of this previous or submerged life.

Rimbaud never knew the writings of Lautreamont. The

two adolescents were unknown to one another, but wrote
almost at the same time. Lautreamont had just completed
his Chants de Maldoror when Rimbaud was writing his
first poems. With the innocency of a child, Lautreamont

stepped out of the period we designate as history or as time.

And Arthur Rimbaud did likewise. History is man's free-
dom in good and evil. The end of history will be the end
of this freedom. And the period before history we can only
call the period of God's creativeness. But into some fie-
 Rimbaud 47

tional replicas of that Lautreamont

time-before-history
and Rimbaud entered. Their freedom from good and
evil was almost consummated there, because they seem,
in their writing, which is their exceptional memory of time-
before-history, to have ceased being men choosing freely
between good and have become personalities,
evil, and to
now of good, now of evil. They give the impression of hav-
ing been subjugated by good and evil without having made
the choice themselves, by use of their own will-power. As
we read their story in the hard glazed brittleness of their
language, we see more and more clearly the contours of the
strange myth from which their experience springs. From
the myth before time and from before the incarnate ex-
pression of love. Every man, even if it is only for an hour
or a day of his life, experiences, I believe, the reality of this
myth. The myth of the void is myth of the
as true as the
creation, and for the creative artist, the first myth, that of
formlessness and nothingness, is the most terrifying story
of mankind.

II
The document on Rimbaud's
principal
method is a letter he wrote on May 15, 1871, usually re-
ferred to as the Lettre du Voyant. It marks the culmination
of the first period of his poet's existence, characterized not
so much by a poetic production as by a finding of himself
and especially a discovery of a poetic theory. Most of his
poetry is be written between the summer of 1871, when
to
he composes Bateau Ivre and the summer of 1873, when he
completes his final work, Une Saison en Enfer.
The months leading up to May of 1871 had been filled
with excessive kinds of living and disturbing experiences.
January was largely given over to extensive readings on
magic and allied subjects in the Public Library at Charle-
ville. In February he escaped from home for the third time

and went to Paris. On returning home one night, the artist

 48 Age of Surrealism
Andre Gill found Rimbaud asleep in his studio and sent
him off with ten francs. Rimbaud returned penniless and
famished to Charleville in March, only to be off again to
Paris in April when he hoped to participate in the Com-
mune and enlisted in the "tirailleurs de la Revolution."
After a violent physical experience in the barracks, he
returned to Charleville in May, from where he wrote the
letter which is today considered a veritable poetic mani-
festo. He had spent much of the spring in low dives and
bars drinking quantities of beer, especially when he was in
Charleville, and smoking incessantly on his pipe. I men-
tion these details because Rimbaud was only sixteen at
this time and was unquestionably, with the vanity which
characterizes a genius adolescent, engaging upon a kind of
defiance of himself, testing himself in a willful manner.
By means of physical excesses and exhaustions, of a nature
thatwould be shocking to his mother and all bourgeois
standards, he was trying to arrive at a spiritual lucidity, *

at a state of inner awareness which he will call la Voyance J

or vision. By degrading his physical and social self, he

hoped to attain to a new functioning of his spirit. Rim-
baud was actually performing during the spring of 1871 an
inverted or ironic exercise of asceticism.
On May he sent a letter to his teacher Izambard
13,

who had befriended and guided him during the entire

year of 1870. This letter is a kind of first draft of the
more important letter he is to write two days later. In it he
denounces Izambard for remaining too much the school
teacher, for being too bent on an academic career and
being already too fossilized. Then he defines the principle
F
of his recent life: his willful seeking of degradation: je me
fais entretenir; je m'encrapule; and, still more important,
the reason for this principle: je travaille a me rendre voy-
) ant ("I am laboring to become a visionary").
Rimbaud felt Izambard didn't understand this
that
letter, nor the poem he inserted in it. So, two days later,
 Rimbaud 49
on the 15th May, he wrote a long letter to a friend of
of
Izambard, Paul Demeny, from which I shall extract a few
themes which appear essential for an understanding of
Rimbaud and much of modern poetry and especially for
the aesthetic doctrine of the surrealists.
The letter is a violent revision of values, and begins,
curiously enough, with mention of the poetry of antiquity,
which Rimbaud says culminates in Greek poetry. In Janu-
ary, he had been reading books on Oriental religions, and
on the tradition of Orphism in Greek poetry. Much in
Rimbaud is reminiscent of the rites of purification and
secret initiation by means of which one attains to an
ecstasy which is the liberation of the soul from the body.
Pythagoras and Plato had been initiates of these mysteries.
In fact, the essence of the Greek spirit might be denned
as the will to mount toward spiritual unity, where the
spirit will be able to perceive pure reality. I believe it
would be false to overemphasize this influence on Rim-
baud, as Rolland de Reneville does in his book on Rim-
baud le Voyant, but it unquestionably exists to some de-
gree, and might well be called upon to explain the first
formal and vital pronouncement of the letter.
Th is pronouncement: Je est un autre C ^Ijts another \

*
self") stands almost at the beginning of the letter aTper-
haps the key to the document. Rimbaud follows it by a
statement which clearly has something to do with the reason
for the kind of life he has been leading. He says that he has
been watching the birth of his thought, that he has been
listening to it, as if his thoughts were rising up from the
depths of a being different from his own being. ( fas- . . .

siste a Veclosion de ma pensee: je la regarde, je Vecoute.)

This phrase, je est un autre, seems to mean that, in addi-

tion to the every-day familiar self we believe we know be-
cause we are constantly seeing it act and react, breathe, and
eat, there is another self which is the real self. In order to
arrive at this real self, this God-like self we would say if
50 Age of Surrealism
we accepted a Pythagorean influence on Rimbaud, we have
to destroy the familiar self which is after all only fictional.
This would clearly make out of Rimbaud's doctrine of
voyance a metaphysical contemplation of the absolute.
The passage in the letter which begins with: Car je est
un autre, ends, a page and a half later, on an important
sentence which, at first sight, appears mysterious. Auteur,
createur, poete, cet homme n'a jamais existe. But its mean-
ing may well come from this partially Greek or Platonic
interpretation of Je est un autre. When Rimbaud writes
that never did an author, creator, or poet exist, he seems to
mean, in the light of the preceding part of the letter, that
the so-called creative or poetic work has come from the
false self, from the fictional self that we believe in too
much. We learn to generate words and phrases in a false
mechanical way, working on them in a stupidly conscious
manner, and thus equating the creator with the func-
tionary, the hackwriter, the ''literary" writer.
When the right moment for the genius comes, he has
to make himself into a stranger to the land which bore him.
He has to renounce, in some way or other, the society and
the family into which he was born and which he never
chose. This an important ritual in the myth of the artist,
is

and is closely allied, of course, with the ascetic discipline

of the religious. In harmony with this ritual of alienation,
the poet, when the right moment comes, has to make him-
self into a stranger of the language of his people, to the

familiar language he has always heard and used, and dis-

cover the other language which exists in the other self, the
real or the mythic self. This is the language to which he
—
awakens, in and I use here a phrase from Rimbaud's
—
letter "the fullness of the deep dream" (la plenitude du
grand songe).
In any study of Rimbaud, and especially of Rimbaud's
influence on surrealism, the problem of the source of lan-
guage and the meaning of language is the most important
 —

Rimbaud 51

to elucidate as well as the most tenuous and subtle about

which to stateany convictions. The entire movement of !

surrealism may one day be considered essentially an ex- I

periment with language. In order to begin a discussion of

the doctrine of language, or rather the fragmentary notions
which Rimbaud and the surrealists proffer concerning lan-
guage, I should like to quote a line of the surrealist poet,
Robert Desnos, one of the finest figures of the movement,
who lost his life in a German "^concentration camp a few
years ago. This line was recently quoted in an article of
Louis Aragon, who was a friend of Desnos, and at one time
an ardent surrealist himself.
The line reads: Mots, etes-vous des mythes, et pareils aux
myrthes des mortsf ("Words, are you myths, and similar to
the myrtle-leaves of the dead?") The line is curiously com-
posed of four key words, each beginning with m: mots,
mythes, myrthes, morts, the last three of which myths,
myrtle-leaves, dead —
serve as elliptical and provocative ex-
planations for the first term, words. Perhaps the best start-
ing point in this problem of language would be to re-
member the sacred importance of words in all the major
religions of the world. Words, and very often isolated
words, are the masters and disciplinarians of religious sys-

tems. According to Genesis, the universe itselfcame into

existence by an utterance or a God: "And God
word of
said, Let there be light." Other examples which instantly
come to mind are: the incantatory power of words in
prayer, repeated endlessly day after day, Our Father who
art in heaven; the inviolate words of Holy
power of the
Scripture, which must mean even if they contradict con-
temporary notions and discoveries; and finally, the tran-
substantiating power of the central words of the mass:
This is my body. Lovers usually have a private code:
. . .

phrases or words which evoke for them the deepest part

of their experience and which one will use to call the other
back to the proper state of attentiveness. You remember
52 Age of Surrealism
the magical words of Swann and Odette in Proust's novel.
. . . Each one of us has words acquired in childhood,
which, although they no longer have any meaning for us,
are permanently lodged in our dreams and subconscious
states. was taught long passages from
In the third grade I

Longfellow's Hiawatha, and do what I may, I am unable

to eradicate from my memory the lines:

On the shores of Gitche-Gumee,

Of the shining Big-Sea-Water ...

These words are in me forever, I think, as something al-

most sacred, even if I do consider them today as an exam-
ple of bad jingling verse. Other phrases exist in us
. . .

as condensed expressions of our belief and our very life, as

summarized vocalisms of what we hold to without under-
standing, and whose very articulation gives to our life a
fervent resilience: "Though I speak with tongues of men
and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sound-
ing brass or a tinkling cymbal."
To answer the question asked in the line of Robert
Desnos, we might say that, yes, words are myths. The echo
of syllables may be so strong in men, that we are perhaps
more guided by words than by any other single power.
Slogans convince us politically, and phrases from old songs
shape us sentimentally. Rimbaud speaks of this power in
his Saison en Enfer when he evokes the imaginative force-
fulness in our memory of such words as tavern signs, fairy
stories, pornographic books, the Latin of the mass; and

James Joyce does also in Ulysses where the phrase La ci

darem la mano from Don Giovanni forms an important
theme. In some of the still lifes of Picasso, words are
painted in, such as in the painting Ma Jolie, and possess
an evocative power comparable to that of the color and
composition of the canvas.
If words are myths and similar to the myrtle leaves of
 Rimbaud 53
the dead, we are implying that the words themselves are
more real than the objects or the ideas which they signify.
Words then are the reality, and not the things which they
describe. To create a poem is therefore equivalent to re-
arranging words, to fixing words in new unaccustomed
juxtapositions so that they will show different aspects and
colors of their myth. Rimbaud and the surrealists and
modern poets in general will not try, in their poems, to
explain experience. And Picasso, in his paintings, will not
try to describe experience. They are too humble, or rather
too despairing of ever understanding so complex and vari-
able a subject as human experience. All that they are in-
terested in doing show a kaleidoscope view of life, a
is to
new arrangement of signs, an unexpected set of formations
which may cast new lights and shadows on life but without
thereby deciphering it. Words are myths, because they are
not understandable in any ordinary sense. They are similar
to the myrtle leaves of the dead, because they do not
describe or reveal or resurrect the dead, but because they
symbolize the glory and the achievement of the dead. They
"remember" the dead, as a leaf fallen from a tree ceases to
be the tree but remains symbolic and evocative of the tree.
Poetry is not for Rimbaud, and hence it isn't for the
surrealists who were his most orthodox disciples, a way of
knowledge in the ordinary sense of knowledge. But it is
the way left to us for knowledge about the multiple myths
of mankind. Myths are, by definition, unknowable, and
words which communicate the myths are likewise unknow-
able.

Ill
The second theory announced by the
Lettre du 15 mai concerns what should be the first study
of the man who wishes to be a poet. Here Rimbaud's
pedagogic intention becomes clear: the letter is much more
than a mere communication about poetry to Demeny; it
54 Age of Surrealism
is indoctrination by a youth who considers himself, for the
moment at least, seer and prophet, a kind of poet-Samuel
who has finally understood the voice speaking to him in
the darkness. Rimbaud says that the poet must first know
himself. He must search for his soul, and then examine
tempt it and finally know it. Other men may
it fearlessly,

be content with learning that they have a soul. The poet

has to know what his soul is. Man seldom knows how to
see himself as a complete being. There is an erroneous way
of knowing oneself, which for Rimbaud is self-deceit, and
which he defines as being intellectual progress. In this
erroneous technique we become learned about things not
ourselves. The new way, advocated by the sixteen year old
poet, consists in making of one's soul something mon-
strous. This is the way of the vojant, of the visionary and
his reasoned derangement of the senses. The derangements
and monstrosities which are self-revelatory are not un-
named in this text. Rimbaud lists them: love, suffering,
madness. One has to know and exhaust the poisons of life

in order to retain their essence. This is a process familiar

to medicine whereby we insert poison into a living body
in order to make the body knowing of poison and hence
resistant to it. The supreme kind of Savant or knower will
become that only after he has passed through malady,
crime, blasphemy. Only then does he reach the Unknown.
Rimbaud is here talking not about knowledge in the
encyclopedic or academic sense, but about the knowledge
of vision, or the surreal. The numberless unseen visions
which exist in each man may be arrived at by a discipline
of the senses, which is a derangement. Implicated in this
theory, very briefly stated in Rimbaud's letter, are all the
mannerisms and methods of the surrealists: automatism,
the subconscious, the dream in an awakened state (le reve
eveille), intoxication, occultisms, the violation of memory,
paranoiac exaltation. Although far from satisfactory, it is
probably the most lucid statement about surrealism; and
 Rimbaud 55

it was made by the young boy of Charleville whom Mal-

larme appropriately called ce passant considerable.

The passage unquestionably has something to do with
the memory of words. It was Bergson, I believe, who said
that we are not able to have any single perception without
the aid of memory. We don't learn, in any simple sense;
we simply remember what we once knew. There seems to
be a strong relationship between this doctrine of the soul
and its memory, and the first theory about words and the
other self. The new order, in the poetic creation, is ex-
plicitly this: a word engenders a universe, and then our
ideas try to equal or harmonize with the words.
This use of language, which is the most revolutionary
aspect of Rimbaud's doctrine, states that language is not
a means of knowing, but a means of forgetting ordinary
knowledge, a means of losing oneself and discovering one's
monstrous nature. Our ordinary knowledge, acquired by
what Rimbaud disdainfully calls intellectual progress,
maintains us within standard forms, inadequate and in-
sincere regimens of belief and action. The other method,
that of losing oneself, is fairly comparable to the method of
incantation in religious practice by means of which one
arrives at the inexpressible. This is perhaps as close as we
can come to defining the anarchical method of surrealism.
The sentence, which heretofore had been the expression of
logic and order, is now for Rimbaud the new unit for
delirium. He expects that this new approach to words will
reanimate worn-out poetic methods. Dadaism, between
1916 and 1920, practically excluded language, but the sur-
who succeeded the dadaists, recalled words ban-
realists,

ished by other schools and readapted them provided they

were magically or mythically used in accordance with this
doctrine of Rimbaud.
The important precept of this doctrine or poetic mech-
anism is, in the creation of a poem, to start with words
rather than to start with an object or a sentiment or an
 —
56 Age of Surrealism
idea. And this rule in surrealism is comparable to the law
of the three unities in the classical theatre. It is quite as
tyrannical as the older Aristotelian law.There is an enemy
to be avoided by and that enemy is what we
surrealists,
usually designate as reality, an object or a conscious expe-
rience which we falsely and clumsily denominate as "real."
Rimbaud seems to advocate that we approach words as we
would magical recipes. They are self-contained myths, and
not contraposed to the words of history or the words of
science. They are a unique kind of truthfulness in them-
selves.
The first important poem of Rimbaud, Bateau Ivre,
which he was to write soon after the letter of the 15th of
May, illustrates his method as outlined in the two state-
ments: 1. Je est un autre, and 2. the necessity of becoming
a voyant and forging a monstrous soul. Bateau Ivre begins
with this same Je, the self who is going to awaken to the
surreal part of existence:

Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles.

From this first line on, in which the self, the Je, is de-
scribed as a boat going down impassable rivers, the poem
is a series of brilliantly arranged words which contain the
incoherence of dreams and the madness of thought. At no
point in the poem, which contains one hundred lines
and this is its most remarkable aspect — is there any use of
language which is not mythical. At no moment in the
poem is the imagination forced into familiar and recog-
nizable patterns. One has only to read the first stanza to
realize that the key words are not from the real world of
Rimbaud, of the town of Charleville on the Meuse River.

Comme Je descendais des Fleuves impassibles,

Je ne me
sentis plus guide par les haleurs:
Des Peaux-Rouges criards les avaient pris pour cibles,
Les ayant cloues nus aux poteaux de couleurs.
 Rimbaud 57
No longer borne down impassable rivers,
I tracked the canal to the whim of the haulers:
Naked and spitted to barbarous totems,
The Indian yelpers had claimed them for targets.
(translated by Ben Belitt)

The rivers of the poem and tremendous, scorn-

are passive
ful of suffering and frustration. The men on the banks are
Indians who nail the boat's haulers naked to totem poles.
These words are thrown out as if they came from a
dream. The words themselves: Fleuves, Peaux-Rouges,
poteaux de couleurs, are going to engender the poem.
They are going to explode in a series of images, each
bolder and more colorful than the last. The drunken boat,
the Je of the poem, which explicates the Je est un autre
of the letter, isno mere symbol of Rimbaud the boy and
the poet, eager to escape from the oppressiveness of Charle-
and the maternal tyranny. It is the self engaging in
ville
unknown, mythic experiences. 77 arrive a I'inconnu, the
letter states. It is not only the primitive innocency of child-
hood, the verts paradis of Baudelaire, the memory of those
places we know as a child although we never physically
visited them. The scenes visited by Rimbaud's boat, as
well as those visited by Lautreamont's Maldoror, are do-
mains seen and conquered by a very special poetic method
and talent. They come into being as a ransom for the
artist's sensitivity and suffering and solitude.

We are accustomed to associating the poet or the painter

with the craftsman, the man who has mastered a certain
technique. And now, in accordance with Rimbaud's doc-
trine, we have to associate him additionally with Pyg-
malion. A craftsman is able to compose a poem, but only
a Pygmalion, that is, a sorcerer or a magician, is able to
call the image to life. The surrealist poet will have to be

a combination of a poet, in the Greek sense of a man —

—
inspired or possessed and a maker of images in the prim-
itive sense who effects thereby a magical change. We re-
 —
58 Age of Surrealism
member that the rules of magic, for the most part, involve
a special use of words, a practice of incantation, and that
the actual words thus used have in many cases no recog-
nizable meaning. But these words, when submitted to a
patient and systematic method, work miracles: the sick are
cured, the warrior is emboldened, the child ushered into
the state of manhood. Every major event of existence
babyhood, the games of childhood, religious practice, love,
—
death are all carried out and consecrated by a use of lan-
guage.
Rimbaud's method of poetry, if it is at all clear by these
remarks, is not only a very lofty experience, but it is a
perilous one as well. It exacts so much destruction, of
order and conventionalities, of familiar patterns, and of
rules which had seemed indispensable disciplines, that it
risks making of the poet a despiser of order, an anarchist
in temperament and technique. Rimbaud's ambition is
clearly marked in the way and the wake of the Drunken
Boat, which is quite literally a divorce from the real world.
I call this way perilous, because it opens the gates to all

kinds of charlatans, of undisciplined writers, of false vision-

aries. Many weak and ineffectual surrealists have claimed
relationships with Rimbaud and have tried to legitimatize
their work by appeal to his doctrine. They are examples
of artists who, heirs of a dangerous technique, bore false
testimony to a poetic method because they never possessed
the passion of Rimbaud's soul, nor the inner structure and
discipline of his human experience.
In the wake of the Drunken Boat, poetry became an
extreme experience in spirituality, so extreme, in fact, that

some theorists believe that it will replace for modern man,

unable to believe as men of other ages have, the religious
experience. My personal reaction to this theory is that
poetry, rather than replacing religion, will disappear if

religious belief disappears. The two experiences are re-

 Rimbaud 59

lated: the religious experience the greater; the poetic expe-

rience the lesser.
Rimbaud's Bateau Ivre is at the confluence of modern

poetic rhetoric, as the poem on the subconscious memory,

on the other self of man, the unknown self. It is a poem of
poles and zones, of tropical flowers, of maelstroms and sea
monsters, of a great opening out to the beyond. That open-
ing outward, filled with peril and silence, is the action of
the unknown self of the poet. As the opening out to the un-
known is the most delirious goal of the surrealist poet, so
the opening out to the Absolute or to God is the most
delirious goal of the mystic. Poetic belief is concerned with
the unknown or the surreal, and religious belief is con-
cerned with the unknown or the supernatural.
These beliefs converge, however, in the goal of both
experiences, which is the discovery of unity. Both are op-
posed to conformity. The purity of the instincts in both
poet and mystic urges them away from convention, which
always means a separation of self from unity and oneness.
The poet Rimbaud believes that the unity of the world has
a perfect counterpart in the unity of each individual be-
ing. To attain to this unity of being is therefore to attain
to the unity of the world. —
The poem and we see this
poignantly articulated in such a poem as Bateau Ivre —
establishes the symmetry between the two structures of the
world and the spirit. The word of the poet, then, creates
the world of his spirit, as, on another level and in accord
with another but related belief, the word of God created
the world of matter.

IV
In his letter, after defining the other self
of the poet, Je est un autre, and after defining the method
of the visionary, faire Vdme monstrueuse and the vision-
,

ary's voyage into the realm of the unknown, Rimbaud ex-

plains a third part of the poetic experience. This has to do
60 Age of Surrealism
with what the poet brings back with him from the un-
known, or from the source to which he gained access by
means of sensuous derangements. Rimbaud says that if
what he brings back has form, he gives it form. (Si ce qu'il
rapporte de la-bas a forme, il donne forme) But if orig-
inally, at the source, it had no form, he gives to it a form-
lessness. (Si c'est informe, il donne de Vinforme.) This
important passage seems to be concerned with the integrity
of the poetic experience.The poet is the translator of his
own truth, of what has been vouchsafed to him from uni-
versal truth and universal language.
In the letter of May 15th, Rimbaud explains the man-
ner in which to read his future work. Une Saison en Enfer
is work of legend, in which Rimbaud consummated a
a
precious and irrevocable break with verbalisms. After de-
scribing his method at the age of sixteen, he illustrated
it in the writing he accomplished during the next two
years, and went so far in his own method that he couldn't
continue farther. This is one way, perhaps not possible to
authenticate, to explain why Rimbaud ceased writing at
the age of nineteen. The miracle is that at his age, which
is generally a flamboyant highly imitative age for writers,

he wrote, not a literary work, but a legend, the myth of

himself. The word itself, season, which is the title of his
last work, is a mythic word, impossible to define with any

scientific or linguistic accuracy. It seems quite appropriate

that the artist should have disappeared behind this myth.
Rimbaud was followed by two sets of hagiographers, two
sets of critics who have tried to claim and explain accord-

ing to their own beliefs this Season in Hell. The Catholics

are the first group, who, despite the exigencies and seem-
ing narrowness of their dogma, have written the most bril-

liantly and profoundly about Rimbaud. The second group

of exegetes is the surrealists, both the strict surrealists and
those who approach Rimbaud as essentially a surrealist
writer. Among the Catholic critics, Claudel, one of the
 Rimbaud 61

very first, called Rimbaud a mystic in a savage state (un

mystique a Vetat sauvage); Mauriac called him the cru-
cified man in spite of himself (le crucifie malgre lui);
Riviere went so far as to call him the being exempt from
original sin exempt de peche originel). This last
(I'etre

interpretation, no matter how one comes to it, either lit-

erally or metaphorically, is, I believe, the most illuminat-
ing critical statement ever made about Rimbaud. Surrealist
doctrine is of course infinitely more difficult to articulate
or even to discover than Catholic dogma, and the surreal-
ists seem to have reproached Rimbaud for only one thing

(they addressed this same reproach simultaneously to Bau-

delaire): for having made possible in their writing and in
certain acts of their lives a religious explanation.
The Catholic thesis stresses the evolution in Rimbaud
from heroism to holiness, and the surrealist thesis stresses
the importance accorded the subconscious. But Rimbaud
is beyond any one explanation, and the most penetrating
critics, both Catholic and would accept this. As
surrealist,
a living poet, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, he
rebelled against everything. Today his work is rebellious
and recalcitrant against any labeling, against any limited
categorizing. Critics of all schools, and readers of all ages
agree that the human drama contained in Rimbaud is of
an unequaled intensity.
The mystically inclined, who see Rimbaud essentially as
a prophet, are struck by the theme of general menace
which pervades much of his writing: wars, invasions, de-
struction, deluge, cataclysms. The surrealistically inclined
read in Rimbaud a testimonial to the personal pride of the
poet as magician, to the renewed myth of Babel and lan-
guage, of Titans and of Prometheus, the stealer of divine
fire. The Catholically minded
are struck by Rimbaud's
consciousness of good and and place him in company
evil,

with Pascal, Blake, and Baudelaire. I say good and evil,

but I might easily have given their impermanent but con-
62 Age of Surrealism
temporary equivalents of love and madness. With mad-
ness, in our present world, usurping first place. The sur-
realists believe that the world is led by those whom the
world calls insane: Nerval, Holderlin, Baudelaire, Lau-
treamont, Dostoievski, Kafka, by all those who have deep
memory of time before history.
In the penultimate passage of Une Saison en Enfer, the
brief section called Matin, which Rimbaud wrote in Au-
gust, 1873, when he was staying at his mother's farm at
Roche, on a wind-swept monotonous plateau, he speaks
of his ever-present restlessness and need to be off: Quand
irons-nous par dela les greves et les montsf And then he
speaks, in the mysterious prophetic vein so characteristic
of his work, of the two sets of readers who are going to
explain his work. To the Catholics, Tdchez
first, he says,

de raconter ma chute ("Try to tell of my fall"); and to

the surrealists, next, he says, Tdchez de raconter mon som-
meil ("Try to tell of my sleep"). And then he signs off, as
if for all other readers: Je ne sais plus parler ("I don't

know how to speak").

Each age is reflected in its poetry. The profoundest study
of civilization is in the secret correspondences between life

and poetry. Rimbaud may be studied as the poet who turns

hisback on the city, the poet whose poem is about exotic
marine landscapes and whose season is spent in hell, and
who thereby explains his age of separation, of exile, of
schizophrenia. He revived the myth of the strangest of all
exiles, that taking place within words. Rimbaud's exile in
words, in the myths protected by words, as the myrtle
leaves protect the dead, will culminate in the prolonged
exile in words of Finnegans Wake.
 IV MALLARME:
•
the myth (Herodiade)

i
On no poem, more than on Herodiade,
did Mallarme expend time, anguish and painstaking care.
The poem, or rather the character who gives her name to
the poem, was a kind of perpetual muse for the poet. He
returned to her intermittently, as to an old fidelity, or at
best, as during more than thirty
to a well-loved habit,
years. Mallarme composed Herodiade at the beginning of
his career, soon after he arrived in the city of Tournon
where he occupied his first post as school teacher. At the
time of his death, at Valvins, on the Seine, where he spent
so many summers, the manuscript of Herodiade was open
on his desk and gave evidence to the fact that it was among
his last preoccupations.
Mallarme arrived at Tournon in November, 1863, at the
age of twenty-one.The following year, in October, 1864,
he announced in a letter that he had begun work on Hero-
diade. And he spoke immediately of the terror which this
enterprise inspired in him, a terror which seemed to spring
from the conviction that the language of the new poem
must necessarily come from a new poetics. He attempted in
this passage of the letter to give a definition of this poetic
64 Age of Surrealism
theory: peindre, non la chose,mais I'effet qu'elle produit.
("To paint, not the thing, but the effect that it produces.")
This sentence, used by Mallarme to describe the new writ-
ing of Herodiade, has served more than almost any other
definition, to summarize the art of symbolism, and espe-
cially that aspect of symbolism developed by Mallarme.
Thirty-four years later, in a letter written in May, 1898,
the year of his death, he described a day of work and in
referring to Herodiade, put the matter in the future tense,
by saying that the poem will come about gradually and
that he is somewhat in possession of himself. {Herodiade
ira lentement, mais ira, je me posse de un peu.)
Herodiade is not simply an early poem which Mallarme
recast at the end of his life. It is a poem he lived with or
rather struggled with all his life, and it illustrates perhaps
better than any other piece Mallarme's intense love for a
poem and the desperate difficulty he underwent in achiev-
ing it, in finding fora form or expression suitable to
it

translate the idea. On

one level of interpretation, Hero-
diade is a cold virginal princess who stands aloof from the
world of men, but she may also represent the poem itself,
so difficult to seize and possess that the poet ultimately
despairs of knowing it. Herodiade is therefore both a char-
acter whom Mallarme tried to subdue, and a mythical
character whose meaning goes far beyond the comprehen-
sion of the poet. She presided over Mallarme's life as poet
in a dual role of princess and myth, of character and
symbol.
Herodiade was the poem of Mallarme's winters. The
three years spent at Tournon were among the most pain-
ful, in terms of material discomfort, of the poet's life. But

they were also the most fruitful in terms of poetic creative-

ness. His correspondence of the latter part of 1864 is re-
plete with references to Herodiade, but when the winter
is over, he abandons work on it for another new poem,

more suitable for spring and summer, on the theme of a

 Mallarm£ 65

faun, which ultimately is to be called L'Apres-Midi d'un

Faune. It is significant that the three major poems of this
period: L'Azur (written possibly before Mallarm^ came to
Tournon), L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune, and Herodiade, all
composed during the most abundantly productive years
of his career, deal with the same theme of artistic sterility.
Whether it be the cold bejeweled princess of the winters
or the lascivious faun of mid-summer, Mallarme is essen-
tially preoccupied with the problem of fertility and birth,

with the staggering impossibility of achieving the perfect

birth of a poem. No been made
poet, I suppose, has ever
so completely a. prisoner of his own poem as Mallarme.
He became so much a part of the poem that he was always
fearful of being unable to project it outside of himself.
Mallarme's love for his own creation tended to obstruct
and obscure any articulation he might give to his love.
Mallarme as a poet was in a certain sense the kind of lover
who converts the beloved into a mystery and whose silence
is adoration.
Mallarme's life-long preoccupation with Herodiade is

significant not only for an understanding of his own

poems, but also for the much wider context of modern
literature, especially for the entire movement of symbolism
and the so-called decadent literature of the latter 19th cen-
tury, and for surrealism in the 20th century. Mallarme's
princess Herodiade has an extensive literary genealogy.
The year that he began the composition of Herodiade,
1864, he discovered Flaubert's novel Salammbo, which was
first published in 1862. Salammbo and Herodiade have the

same characteristics of aloofness. Their beauty is mysteri-

ous and hermetic. It is shattered or would be shattered by
marriage. Midway between the early version of Herodiade
and Mallarme's death, Villiers de 1' Isle-Adam, a close
friend of Mallarme, published in 1885-86 his symbolist
drama Axel, whose leading character Sara bears an inti-
mate affinity with Herodiade. Sara's death is consummated
66 Age of Surrealism
in a blaze of jewels and she wills her own death at the
moment of marriage when she is on the verge of happiness,
because she, like Herodiade, is a soul seeking to escape
from the state of becoming. She, like Herodiade, and
like Herodiade's most recent descendant, Valery's Jeune
Parque, is a young girl of a philosophical turn of mind,
who is anxious to attain the preferable state of being, even
if being takes on for her the form of death.

The principal thought on which Mallarme's poem seems

to depend is that expressed at the beginning of the dia-
logue between Herodiade and her nurse: the thought that
beauty is death. This doctrine, expounded in its most psy-
chological form in Mallarme's Herodiade, is the culmina-
tion of a century of philosophical inquiry, which is usually
denned as pessimism. When the beauty of woman, such as
Herodiade's is cold and inaccessible, it summarizes the
void of life and hence translates a philosophical concept.
The splendor and magnificence of Herodiade's appearance,
as well as Salammbo's in Flaubert's novel, and Sara's in the
play Axel, symbolize sterility.

This feeling about the void of life is apparent in the

very early manifestations of what we call today the roman-
tic movement
in Western Europe. Examples are numer-
ous: at theend of the 18th century, the suicide of the
young English poet Chatterton, and Goethe's early novel
Werther; in the first years of the 19th century, Chateau-
briand's stories which not only express pessimism about
life but also give some of the first illustrations of the lonely
and hence sterile beauty of woman. The cosmos, felt as a
flux and as an eternal movement in each individual soul
who seeks to find stability somewhere else, usually in death,
is the subject matter of much of the writings of Nerval,
Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Mallarme, and the sur-
realists.

The poem Herodiade, a creation of a poet, bears of

course a strong relationship to the poet, but its theme
 Mallarm£ 67

comes not only from Mallarme but from many of the poets
and thinkers who preceded him. As a human being the
princess Herodiade opposes the flow and the change of life
by her studied and concentrated frigidity. Her opposition
to normal life and vicissitude is the projection of the myth-
ical role of poet which Mallarme believed in and practised,

of which there exist examples before him in the 19th cen-

tury and which the surrealists will reenact in the 20th
century. I refer to the magical property of the poet, to his
function of hierophant, of priest and miracle worker. The
poet feels all and changes of the
the cosmic vibrations
world, but establishes outside of them, by means of his art,
which is the alchemy of language, a reality which by its
durability is a denial of flux and change.
The word magical as applied to an artistic creation seems
startlingly new in the 19th century. The poet holds the
secrets of his creation. He is the new dealer in occultism
or hermeticism. Hugo considered himself the echo sonore
of a world not heard by ordinary ears, of a supernatural
world not submitted to the logic of a changing world. For
Mallarme, and, to a lesser degree, for other poets of the
century, there is a point where poetry passes into the realm
of the unexpressed. In Herodiade he seems to leave poetry
juston this side of that point. But in Mallarme's final
poem, Un coup de des, it is quite possible that he takes
poetry over into the realm of the unexpressed or the inef-
fableand hence creates in a very absolute sense a surrealist
poem. But the method and principle of surrealism may be
more easily studied and apprehended in such a poem as
Herodiade.
In considering the main function of the poet as that of
magician or symbol-maker, Mallarme was giving to the
symbol an occult power very close to the mystical power
of the Word or the Logos. Baudelaire in his doctrine of
Correspondances had stressed the spiritual reality of the
physical world and hence the spiritual reality of the sym-
68 Age of Surrealism
bol. In this doctrine, Baudelaire was perpetuating the les-

sons of Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestina. Novalis also had

taught that the poet sees the invisible and feels the supra-
sensible.
This definition of the poet's function, which has some-
time been called angelism, because in it the poet withholds
his secrets, places him in a category comparable to that of
the priest, and therefore to the type of individual who is
isolated from society, who serves society in his isolation, in
his hieratic calling. Nietzsche has said that all poetry is

originally hieratic.
Thus poetry becomes one of those activities of the hu-
man mind whose nature and purpose are spiritual. The
poet finds himself, by the mystery of his vocation, the
guardian of creative secrets, in much the same way that
Herodiade make herself into the guardian of her
wills to
own being. The man who is engaged in the alchemy of his
own language, like the princess who is engaged in the be-
numbing of her senses and emotions, is a poet not only in
the creation of his own world, but in the creation of his
own divinity as well. The poet in this sense is both priest
and god. Here culminate the romantic dream and the ro-
mantic temperament. Rousseau had once described this
quietistic state of being when nothing exterior to self
exists, when one is sufficient unto oneself as God is. The

modern poet has revindicated his ancient role of Prome-

theus and Orpheus, of fire-stealer and mystical singer. He
learned once again, during the century that was copiously
consecrated to the definition of the philosophy of science,
the meaning of divine madness which Plato had once used
in characterizing the poet.
Poetry's esoteric principle was explored by Stephane
Mallarme and incarnated in his princess Herodiade. The
three leading aspects of this principle, angelism, hermeti-
cism, and narcissism, are also the three leading characteris-
tics of the princess. Angelism seems to signify that the poet
 Mallarm£ 69

creates hisown world and lives within it. This would cor-
respond to H£rodiade's desertion of the world, her return
to the tower, and her isolated existence. Hermeticism is
on the one hand the secret meaning of poetry, jealously
guarded by the poet, and on the other hand the magical
practices of Herodiade or even the ritualistic manner of
her life. by far the most significant and
Finally, narcissism,
most obscure of the three aspects of the esoteric principle,
is a required attitude of every poet who is himself the sub-
ject of his poetry, and is revealed in Herodiade's words
addressed to her mirror.

II
The poem, as it appears in the most
recent editions of Mallarme's work, is an
in three parts:
overture, Ouverture Ancienne; a dialogue between Hero-
diade and her nurse, called Scene, which is the main part
of the poem; and a short detached lyric spoken by St. John
the Baptist, called Cantique de saint Jean.
The overture was written after the first version of the
dialogue, during the years 1865-66, when Mallarme was
still in Tournon, but it was never published during the

lifetime of the poet. The poem, which is ninety-six lines

in length, remained among his papers and manuscripts
until long after his death when his son-in-law and literary
executor, Dr. E. Bonniot, published it in the Nouvelle
Revue Frangaise, in November, 1926. The entire piece is
spoken by the nurse as a kind of incantation. It serves to
set the scene for the subsequent dialogue. The nurse talks
about what she sees from the tower. First, the landscape,
which is desolate under a dawn now abolished. Abolie is
the first word of the poem.
had been used previously in
It
the hermetic poetry of Gerard de Nerval, and was to be
used by Mallarme in seven important passages. The dawn,
once golden and red, is now abolished or pallid, and has
chosen for its tomb the tower where the nurse awaits the
70 Age of Surrealism
return of Herodiade. There is the suggestion that the
tower had been used by Herodiade for propitiatory or
and its present abandonment has spread
occult practices,
to the autumnal scene of the landscape. The room and the
bed appear empty to the nurse. She wonders if the voice
she hears is her own or the empty echo of some voice of
the past. Everything is funereal and tenebrific and monot-
onous. The nurse refers to the young girl exiled in her
—
precious heart an early very direct allusion to Herodi-
ade's narcissism —
but especially accumulates words of an
esoteric import: prophecy, dreams, stars, books of magic.
The dominant theme is the emptiness of the present. The
setting and the repetition of certain words are reminiscent
of Poe. The mood is built up for the strange dialogue
which follows.
The cry of the nurse announces the return of Hero-
diade. The older woman bends down to kiss the rings of
the princess, but Herodiade, who is to spurn everything,
wards her off. In order to explain why
would killa kiss
her, she speaks instantly of her blond hair which, immacu-
late, is the symbol of her immortality. In its fire and light,

her hair opposed to the principle of her cold body. She

is

has just come in from a morning whose splendor is now

dying (this theme was announced in the Ouverture), in
order to be again with her nurse of the winters (6 nourrice
d'hiver). She had been able to walk among the lions un-
harmed (according to legend they are respectful of virgins)
had represented the dangers of the outer world
as if they
or the menaces to the integrity of her being. The reminis-
cences of the world, which she has left, are not in herself

but in her hair which she asks the nurse to comb indolently
before a mirror:

Aide-moi
A me peigner nonchalamment dans un miroir.
 Mallarm£ 71

Her hair imitates the wild manes of the lions and the bril-

liantly jeweled light of the sun. The beauty and violence

of the world have left her intact, but they have been re-
flected in her hair.She rejects all perfumes because she
wishes her hair to resemble not flowers nor the languish-
ing odor of flowers, but gold and the sterile coldness of
metals. As a young child her hair reflected the iron weap-
ons and bronze vases of the tower, and now as a virgin prin-
cess it must reflect the light of precious gold and jewels.
When the nurse holds up the mirror before her, Hero-
diade's actual are very brief, but their
words addressed to it

meaning pervades the poem. Deep in the mir-

rest of the
ror, as in a black hole, she has searched hours on end for
her memories and appeared to herself as a distant ghost.
On certain evenings, when the mirror resembled an im-
placable fountain (at this point it is obvious that the myth
of Herodiade is joining with the myth of Narcissus), she
realized the bareness or the reality of her dream: J'ai de
mon reve epars connu la nudite! Here she interrupts her
speech by asking the nurse if she is beautiful. The nurse
compares Herodiade to a star, but when she extends her
hand to raise up part of the princess' hair which is fall-

ing, Herodiade turns violently on the woman and accuses

her of sacrilege in trying to touch her. This is the third
crime the nurse has almost committed: first, the kiss on the
hand and rings; second, the offering of the perfume; and
finally the attempt to touch Herodiade's hair. For the prin-
cess these constitute three forebodings of disaster for this
day in the tower.
The second part of the scene begins when the nurse in-
sinuates that Herodiade must be waiting for some hero,
that she must be reserving her being and her purity for
some man. Herodiade's answer to this insinuation, which
is an ironical hope of the old nurse, constitutes the longest

speech of the scene. It is a kind of aria in three parts con-

72 Age of Surrealism
taining the psychological explanation of her life and voca-
tion. It begins like an aria with a line of strong narcissistic
import:
Oui, c'est pour moi, pour moi que je fleuris, deserte! All
the themes, heretofore partially announced, are now com-
mingled and made specific in this aria, which Herodiade
sings not merely to the nurse, but to the world, or at least
to the public in the theatre where she is performing the
scene. Mallarme's initial project was to compose a play on
the theme of Herodiade and in this monologue there is
something of the rhetoric of the theatre. This element of
drama was strong enough to permit Martha Graham to
compose a dance on the poem and the composer Paul Hin-
demith to write a musical setting which follows closely
each line of the poem.
Herodiade is flowering for herself, not in the usual kind
of garden, but in a garden of amethysts and precious
stones. Her beauty is like the hidden beauty of jewels deep
in the earth which contain the ancient secrets of the world.
The first part of the aria describes the beauty of Hero-
diade's eyes and hair as essentially a sterile beauty. Her
eyes are like pure jewels and her hair is fatal and massive
because it reflects the color of metal. Jewels and metal,
originally buried in the earth, are as sterile and useless as
the eyes and hair of Herodiade concealed in her tower
away from the world of men.

Oui, c'est pour moi, pour moi, que je fleuris, deserte!

Vous le savez, jardins d'am^thyste, enfouis
Sans fin dans de savants abimes eblouis,
Ors ignores, gardant votre antique lumiere
Sous le sombre sommeil d'une terre premiere,
Vous pierres ou mes yeux comme de purs bijoux
Empruntent leur clart£ melodieuse, et vous
Metaux qui donnez a ma jeune chevelure
Une splendeur fatale et sa massive allurel
Quant a toi, femme nde en des siecles malins
 Mallarm£ 73

Pour la m^chancete des antres sibyllins,

Qui paries d'un mortel! selon qui, des calices
De mes robes, arome aux farouches d&ices,
Sortirait le frisson blanc de ma nudite\
Prophase que si le tiede azur d'^te,
Vers qui nativement la femme se d^voile,
Me voit dans ma pudeur grelottante d'^toile,
Je meurs!

Yes, it is for me, for me, that I flower, alone I

You know amethyst gardens, buried

it,

Endlessly in learned dazzling abysses,

Hidden golds, keeping your ancient light
Under the sombre sleep of a primordial earth,
You stones wherein my eyes like pure jewels
Borrow their melodious light, and you
Metals which give to my young hair
A fatal splendor and its massive form!
As for you, woman born in wicked centuries
For the evil of sibylline caves,
Who speak of a mortal! according to whom, from the
chalices
Of my robes, aroma of fierce delights,
Would come forth the white trembling of my nakedness,
Prophesy that if the mild azure of summer,
Toward which natively woman uncovers herself,
Sees me in my shivering shame of a star,
I die!

The awesomeness of Herodiade's virginity is the theme

of the second part. Her chastity burns with the same pallor
that the snow casts against the night outside.

J'aime l'horreur d'etre vierge et je veux

Vivre parmi l'efrroi que me font mes cheveux
Pour le soir, retiree en ma couche, reptile
Inviole sentir en la chair inutile
Le froid scintillement de ta pale clarte
Toi qui te meurs, toi qui brules de chastete,
Nuit blanche de glacons et de neige cruelle!
74 Age of Surrealism
I love the horror of being virgin and I wish
To live in the terror which my hair gives me
So that at evening, lying on my bed, inviolate
Reptile, I may feel in my vain flesh
The cold scintillation of your pale light,
You who die, you who burn with chastity,
White night of icicles and cruel snow!

The night, which is cold and dead, is called the eternal

sister of Herodiade.

Et ta soeur solitaire, 6 ma
soeur eternelle
Mon reve montera vers deja
toi: telle
Rare limpidite d'un coeur qui le songea,
Je me crois seule en ma monotone patrie
Et tout, autour de moi, vit dans l'idolatrie
D'un miroir qui reflete en son calme dormant
Herodiade au clair regard de diamant . . ,

charme dernier, oui! je le sens, je suis seule.

And your solitary sister, O my eternal sister

My dream will mount toward you: such already
Rare lucidity of a heart which dreamed it,
1 believed myself alone in my monotonous kingdom
And everything around me lives in the idolatry
Of a mirror which reflects in its sleeping calm
Herodiade with her clear diamond gaze . . .

O last charm, yes! I feel it, I am alone . . .

This is and last movement of the song in which

the third
a fusion takes place between the sterile night and the ster-
ile image of Herodiade in the mirror. The poem at this

point reaches culmination in its inner action whereby

Herodiade attains to a oneness of being, to a vain state of
beauty in her monotonous kingdom.
It is narcissism pushed one degree farther than the limit

which Narcissus reached. Whereas the adolescent in the

Greek myth was content with watching in the mirror-
fountain the reflection of himself and in the reflected traits
 Mallarm£ 75

the world he loved and the being with whom he wanted

to unite himself, Herodiade represents the other sex, the
narcissism of woman. She seeks to establish not merely soli-
tude and her reflection in a mirror, but an absorption of
her being (of her beauty and her chastity) with the mate-
rial world. In order to know the secret of existence, she
wants to be as closely absorbed in the cosmos as the dia-
mond one with the earth in which it is embedded.
is

Every theme in Herodiade represents some aspect of

night: the literal fall of night outside the tower which
covers the monotonous landscape of approaching winter;
the night inside the tower; the night of necromancy and
dark magical rites; the perpetual night inside the earth
where the jewels and the metals sleep; the night of the
mirror which is like a black hole into which Herodiade
looks in order to see all the remembered and forgotten
memories of her life; and the final night of the reflection
in which Herodiade's being becomes useless and sterile.
From these various aspects of the night theme we are
led to realize that the poem of Mallarme involves a vaster
and more profound myth than the simple story of Narcis-
sus. It might be called the myth of self-destruction which

lies at the core of every human being and which the prin-

ciple of life and the principle of religious belief are con-

stantly trying to submerge or conquer or forget. The myth
of self-destructionis more closely associated with us than

we willingly acknowledge. It seems to be an important ele-

ment of many of the so-called principles of life, such as
birth, love, love of God, artistic creation. In order to ac-
complish anything, we have to destroy ourselves to some
degree. Herodiade, which we are considering a mythical
poem, is a symbolic or even choreographic expression of
an impulse which is deeply and natively human. Mal-
larme's princess wills to become an image of herself, un-
real and untouched, as each man wills, in his solitude of
76 Age of Surrealism
sleep or love or work or become more one with
prayer, to
the principle of his being, more harmoniously or inti-
mately himself.
What we have called the principle of self-destruction in
the poem Hirodiade might justifiably be named the prin-
ciple of transformation or metamorphosis. The eyes and
hair of Hirodiade are not only compared with jewels and
metals but also seem to be converted into the inert mate-
rial world. One remembers the suicides in Dante's Inferno,
canto whose bodies have been metamorphosed into tree
13,
trunks and one may well be struck by the analogy between
He'rodiade's desire for material immobilization and the
Dantean punishment accorded to the sin of suicide. Once
in the Mallarme* poem Hirodiade compares herself with
an inviolate reptile (v. 105-106). This is a further allusion
to transformation which also has its counterpart in the
Inferno, in the circle where thieves are punished by hav-
ing their bodies changed into snakes or fused with the
body of a snake.
If the deepest aspect of this will or action on the part of
Herodiade is self-destruction, a more immediate aspect is
the desire to know oneself and the world, to know the
unity of self and the world. During the past one hundred
years, and even slightly more if we include works of prose,
poetry has been submitted to a philosophical use. The ro-
mantic period in the first half of the 19th century, the
symbolist period in the second half of the 19th century
(at the beginning of which Herodiade sets the decor and
introduces the principal vocabulary), and the surrealist
period in the 20th century, might easily be considered as
one literary period or one artistic movement characterized
and unified by a unique philosophical preoccupation.
Herodiade stands therefore midway between the Corre-
spondances of Baudelaire and the activities of the surreal-
ists in the 1920's and 1930's when experimentation is

pushed very far in studying the relationships between man

 Mallarm£ 77

and the material world, when the figure of man and ob-
jects in the purely material world are commingled in
dreams and artistic creations. In the surrealist period the
meaning of man and of his existence is deliberately con-
fused with the meaning of art. Never was so much de-
manded of art and poetry, in terms of knowledge and
philosophy, as in the surrealist period. Herodiade stands
as a figure on the threshold of surrealism. The poem is an
initiation not so much to the methods of surrealism as to
the goal of surrealism. We have seen Mallarme's princess
partaking of the material and the spiritual worlds, joining
them, and thus explaining them and the unity which binds
them. The action of Herodiade does not merely involve a
fusing of subjective and objective elements, but much
more than an attainment to surreality, in a literal
that,
sense. She enters a domain above or apart from the real
world.

Ill
No such figure as Herodiade can exist
alone. She must have ancestors and descendants. When
related to them, she loses some of her enigmatical charac-
ter. She is not fully explained by them (no mythical figure

is ever fully recognizable) but they help to localize and

situate her in relation to our own changing world and our

paltry understanding of it. Her immediate ancestors are
women created by the romantic temperament and by
romantic artists, and her descendants are to be found in the
works of the surrealists: in books like Naja of Andre
Breton and in certain paintings of women by Picasso.
A first clue to Herodiade's ancestors might be in the
romantic equation of beauty and death. We saw how
Herodiade and night were fused as sisters in Mallarme's
poem. Beauty and death would be the equivalent abstrac-
tions used constantly by the romantics, or at least, on a
more elementary level, beauty and sadness. It is quite
78 Age of Surrealism
possible that in the myth of woman the most important
factor is the proximity or simultaneity of beauty and sad-

ness. Beauty of woman is real for man only when it is

imperiled, threatened with dissolution. The sentiment
of the beautiful generates immediately the sentiment of
melancholy. Chateaubriand has taught us that when we
look at nature, at an exotic landscape, we experience both
exaltation and melancholy. As pleasure and pain are in-
separable, so any intense knowledge of the beautiful is syn-
thesized with a knowledge of suffering. In many poems of
Baudelaire, such as Hymne a la Beaute, and throughout his
personal journals, we read of the inevitable commingling
of voluptuousness and sadness.
The implacable cold beauty and virginal aloofness of
Flaubert'sSalammbo and Mallarme's Herodiade would not
have been celebrated soon after 1860 if this type of woman-
goddess had not been preceded by the type of fatal or per-
secuted woman. The Medusa head an example of beauty
is

allied with the repulsive, and there persists an element of

the Medusan beauty in the countless examples of beauty
allied with physical suffering and torture in the late 18th
century and early 19th century heroines. Examples might
be chosen from both good and bad literature, and from all
countries: Gretchen in Goethe's Faust, Atala in Chateau-
briand's novel, Antonia and Agnes in Lewis' novel The
Monk, Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's tales of terror, especially The
Italian, theMarquis de Sade's stories, such as Juliette and
Justine, where voluptuousness is achieved in scenes of
crime and destruction.
This theme of crime and perversion, associated with love
and the beauty of woman, is not only an important back-
ground for such a poem as Herodiade, but it is also a
theme renewed and recapitulated by the surrealists, al-
though not perhaps in their major works. In fact, what has
been called the attraction of the horrible and the mon-
strous in surrealist art is not so apparent or so strong as
 Mallarm£ 79

that in the early and post romantics. The urge to commit

a crime or a mortal sin in order to discover in an innate
it

element of beauty is more easily studied in Sade, Baude-

laire, and Dostoievski, than in Breton, Eluard, and Desnos.
In Flaubert's Tentation de Saint Antoine, there is a closer
identification of lust and death than in the writings of
Lautreamont. The richest documentation on the study of
beauty as springing from the paradoxical source of horror
and suffering would be, first, in the poems and prose of
Baudelaire; that is, in the example of his poems and the
critical judgments and exegeses of his prose writings; and,
second, in the paintings of Eugene Delacroix whom Baude-
laire admired so unreservedly. Beauty, on the canvases of
Delacroix, is almost always translated in terms of frenzied
action and scenes of sadism. Baudelaire, in his poem on
painters,Les Phares, in the stanza on Delacroix, calls him a
"lake of blood" (lac de sang). Delacroix illustrated some
of the more terrifying scenes of Goethe and Byron, and
chose as subjects for his paintings: the interior of harems,
or drowned Ophelia, or the sack of Constantinople. In the
many names with which Baudelaire apostrophized his
mistress, Jeanne Duval, we begin to see the transformation
from fatal woman or suffering heroine to the type which
culminates in Herodiade: tigress, cruel beast, demon,
vampire, frigid idol, black Venus, Amazon. Jeanne is
feared by Baudelaire, almost as if she were a Clytemnestra,
who, like the women of Lesbos, murdered her husband.
The evolution from early and late romanticism to such
a work as Herodiade marks the shift from the drama of
sadism, as illustrated in such writers as the Marquis de
Sade, Baudelaire, and Lautreamont, to the drama of oc-
cultism, as illustratedby Gerard de Nerval, Villiers de
l'lsle-Adam, Mallarme, and Huysmans. These two dramas
cannot be fixed chronologically. Lautreamont, for example,
wrote his sadism-permeated cantos after Mallarme had
composed his first version of Herodiade. However, the
80 Age of Surrealism
drama of hermeticism seems to succeed in time the drama
of sexual violence, although there always remains an ele-
ment and a memory of sadism in occultism. These two
words might easily be translated by the Nietzschean terms:
Dionysos and Apollo. Nietzsche's work, The Birth of
Tragedy, which states that art contains something of both
the Dionysian and Apollonian strains, was first published
in Leipzig in 1872, just three years after the first appear-
ance in print of Herodiade. The terms we have been using
of sadism and occultism seem to be narrowed and particu-
larized synonyms of what Nietzsche means by Dionysos and
Apollo. They represent two traits of distinction Or dis-
tinctiveness by which the writer is able to isolate himself
from the rest of society: first, as a psychological man whose
instincts seem shocking and reprehensible; and, second,
as artist whose work is difficult to understand. The artist-
Dionysos is the reprobate and pariah in terms of bourgeois
society, such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud. The artist-
Apollo is the priest and guardian of creative secrets, such
as Mallarme and Andre" Breton. In Herodiade it would be
possible to point out elements of sadism, as well as the more
obvious elements of occultism and the general romantic
temperament, but all these elements appear conventional-
ized and Mallarme has condensed in a single
disciplined.
poem much of the literary and artistic efforts of a century.
He has, therefore, in a certain sense applied a classical
method to romantic traits and themes.
In the Gothic tales and the so-called "romans noirs" of
Sade, Lewis, and Radcliffe, the heroine or the beautiful
woman is The scenes of orgy and destruc-
treated as victim.
tionshow her as a kind of sacrificial victim and the means
by which man's passion and frenzy are aroused. But, as it
often occurs in the evolution of religious practice when
the victim becomes god, so in this literary evolution the
victimized or fatal woman becomes a
of the romantics
goddess in such a work as Herodiade. The art form in
 Mallarm£ 81

which she appears is so placid and bejeweled that it re-

sembles Byzantium art and is often referred to by the term
Byzantianism. H£rodiade in her final state attains to a
closed metallic useless perfection. The words of the poem
take on something of the vain beauty of jewels. The hair
of H£rodiade as the symbol of a cold and golden treasure,
becomes a commonplace in literary symbols of the latter
19th century. It was a facile transcription of the psycho-
logical moment when the dream about life had succeeded
in exhausting the impulse to live.
The exoticism of such a state of mind as well as the
simple exoticism of Herodiade's appearance are types very
easy to confuse with mysticism. At best, Herodiade's might
be called a mystical exoticism since it takes her outside the
actualities of time and space. This will be a goal repeatedly
announced and described by the surrealists. Whereas the
real mystic seeks to move outside the world in order to
unite with Divinity, Herodiade's exotic goal appears much
more narcissistic, more closely allied with the enigmatical
and androgynous mystery of Leonardo's Gioconda, cele-
brated by Walter Pater, and with the psychic powers of
Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci.

I saw pale kings, and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
—
They cried 'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall 1'

The shift from Baudelaire's Jeanne Duval, called ti-

gress and vampire, to Mallarme's Herodiade, virgin and
priestess, is paralleled in the shift from Delacroix' paintings
of women to Gustave Moreau's. After the fiery drama of
Delacroix' oils we come to pictures of a cold static state in
Moreau. Mario Praz in book The Romantic Agony has
his
pointed out how Moreau worships his subjects from out-
side, how they are all ambiguous and androgynous figures,
as Herodiade is.

155 4-74
82 Age of Surrealism
Huysmans in his novel, A Re b ours, imagines that his
hero, des Esseintes, acquires two paintings o£ Moreau: one,
Salome, in oil, and the other, L' Apparition, in water color.
These two paintings depict the two aspects of woman em-
phasized by the romantic and decadent movements of the
19th century. In the water color, L' Apparition, Salome is
cowering half-naked and horror-struck before the severed
head of John the Baptist. In the oil painting she appears as
a symbolic deity, reminiscent of ancient Helen, and holds
in her hand a Lotus flower, the Egyptian and Indian sym-
bol of fertility. Mallarme uses for Salome her mother's
name because she is the woman who has conquered terror,
who incarnates at the beginning of the modern world fe-
male beauty and cruelty, and who thus perpetuates a par-
ticular myth of woman which had been fashioned earlier
by the Sphinx, by Pasiphaea, Leda, Europa.
The same character, in Mallarme's own time, was
treated by Flaubert and Laforgue and Oscar Wilde as
well as by Richard Strauss in his opera. But Mallarme's
creation is more significant psychologically. It is, in a
sense, a synthesis of the entire symbolist and decadent
movement in art. His Herodiade, a kind of Emma Bovary
become priestess, represents the anguish of loneliness. One
idea dominates Herodiade: the triumph over all her long-
ings, the effort to make of herself a human star (un astre
humain). In Picasso's painting of 1932, Girl before a
mirror, we have an example in painting of what Mallarme
did in poetry: a psychological or even surrealist portrait of
an hysterical girl overcome by a kind of hieratic indolence.
Mallarme's Herodiade and Picasso's Girl before a mirror
both speak to the mirror as if they are speaking to the stars
and to the void.
 V APOLLINAIRE:
• the poet

Prophet-like, Rimbaud, during his life

as poet, existed quite alone and separated from his age.
Guillaume Apollinaire is another type of writer, solidly
a part of his age, and so integrated with a group of artists
that his work has been somewhat overshadowed by a period.
He was so flamboyantly the initiator and spokesman of
a period, the first decade and a half of this country, that
it is difficult to think of him as an individual writer. His

close friend Max Jacob once jokingly referred to "Apol-

linaire's century" (le siecle d' Apollinaire). The joke indi-
cates the role of leader he played in the Paris art circles.
He dominated and his friends, investing them with
his age
and vigor and humor, and thereby dimin-
his sense of life
ished, without wishing to do so, perhaps, the importance
of his poetry. Apollinaire became, first, his century, and
then, one of the poets of his century.
For Paris, he created out of himself such a legendary
character, ubiquitous and colorful, that this self-made
legend became more important for his friends and con-
temporaries than the verse he published. He was pre-
eminently the character in Paris: the impassioned and
84 Age of Surrealism
Bohemian artist who spoke volubly and wittily on art and
any other subject; the exuberant and affectionate friend
who was seen everywhere: in the offices of newspapers and
publishers; at the Bibliotheque Nationale looking up some
erudite subject, because he earned money as ghost writer
for eminent professional authors; along the quais where
he walked endlessly and untiringly; in the various caf£s
frequented by his friends. And always, no matter where he
was met, an article or a poem, unfinished, was stuffed into
his pocket. The excessively lived character of Guillaume
Apollinaire has always made it difficult for critics, those
who knew him and those who came after him, to look at
his work. It has encouraged everyone to consider the legend
of the man. The real fantasy of Apollinaire, however, is

that of his work, to which we shall come. But first, since it

is inevitable and unavoidable, a word about the fantasy of

his life and his personality.
His life was like a brilliant reign. In many ways he was
comparable to an artist-monarch, both real and symbolic,
whose energy and humor formed in Paris for ten years a
veritable art-civilization. And yet the elements of this
life-reign seem to be a curious mixture of tragedy and
caricature-burlesque, of mystery and childlike naivete.
He was born in Rome on the 26th of August, 1880, not
with the name Guillaume Apollinaire, but rather Wilhelm
Apollinaris de Kostrowitsky. His mother seems to have
been Polish, but actually she is just as mysterious as her
son in everything that concerns accuracy of biographical
detail. The darkest mystery in Apollinaire's life is his
father. Some claimed that his mother once said he was an
Italian officer, but most friends of Apollinaire believed
the father was a prelate in Rome, and quite probably a
cardinal. A
few even insisted, somewhat maliciously, that
he was the pope himself. Such obscurity of birth is an as-
sured beginning of legend, and Apollinaire's friends made
the most of it. Picasso, who made many portraits of Apol-
 Apollinaire 85
linaire,shows him in one, clothed in a bishop's vestments,
a mitre on his head, a bishop's staff in one hand, and the
pastoral ring on the other hand. Investigations of the
Polish-Lithuanian background have tried to prove that
the ancestors were noble and warlike, and thereby explain
Apollinaire's bravery and love of duels.
His mother was very rarely present in his life. The boy
received a Catholic education, first at the College de
Monaco, then at Cannes, and then at Nice. This Mediter-
ranean climate was his where he developed a nostalgic
first,

predilection for ancient civilizations and for varied kinds

of exotic cooking. By eighteen, when he completed his
studies, he was independent, and came to Paris where he
secured employment as a bank clerk. He became almost
immediately the friend of many young artists and writers
who were to become later leading figures in the French capi-
tal: Andr£ Salmon, Picasso, Paul Fort, Vlaminck, Max

Jacob, Marie Laurencin, Jarry. Apollinaire depended upon

the continual presence of his friends. His close friends were
always worried about the ease with which Apollinaire
talked with strange and sometimes dangerous characters in
the streets or cafes, and his habit of bringing them home
with him to continue endlessly whatever conversation was
underway.
With his earliest friends, Andre Billy and Andre Salmon,
he began his literary career of journalist, art critic, and

poet. Apollinaire always seemed to become leader and

animator of the various groups of artists, of the "cenacles
poetiques," which met at the favorite cafes: la Closerie des
Lilas in Montparnasse, the Lapin Agile in Montmartre,
the Bateau Lavoir of the rue Ravignan where Picasso lived
and where he received his "Bohemian" friends. Apolli-
naire protected and encouraged the painters. Two, es-
pecially, owe him a great deal in the role of publicist and
personal encourager: Rousseau le douanier and Marie
Laurencin. Apollinaire participated in innumerable and
86 Age of Surrealism
ephemeral art-literary magazines. Three were more or less
founded in his honor, one of which, Les Soirees de Paris,
appearing between 1911 and 1914, contains many precious
documents for any historian of the period.
The year 1908, which was exactly ten years after Apol-
linaire's first arrival in Paris, might conveniently be taken
as the time when the new century had begun, when new
forms of art and new philosophical forces had replaced
much of what we consider 19th century art and thought.
Inspired by Bergson's lessons on the primacy of intuition
and dreams, artists were looking for a more "real" world
than the exterior world. The music of Debussy and jazz
music, the nostalgic quality of the "blues" and the exciting
rhythms of Negro rag- time music, were affording a kind of
irrational remedy for much that was considered worn-out
and dated in 19th century art forms. The canvases of Pi-
casso and the poems of Apollinaire at this time were con-
cerned with a series of strange "saltimbanques," of clowns
and acrobats who represented pictorially and metaphysi-
cally a defiance of common sense. The ballets russes were
providing a vast caricature of the period in their buffoons
and multi-colored marionettes. Petrouchka was the hero
of the age, half -comic, half -tragic, half -real, half -surreal.
The kingdom of the poets extended from the Cafe des
Deux Magots on the Boulevard St. Germain to the Boule-
vard Montparnasse, and throughout it reigned a curious
form of inquietude or restlessness or subdued pessimism,
often projected in a tense staccato kind of gaiety. The
poets drank and smoked and quarreled in an atmosphere
of cynicism and witticism, the very kind of atmosphere
which serves as cloak and disguise for the deepest feelings
of uprootedness and dereliction.
Apollinaire grew out of this atmosphere and created it
at the same time. He became the critic of painters, the
exponent especially of cubism, which is the most calculated
and mathematical of all arts, the most barren of incident
 Apollinaire 87

and story and representation. Apollinaire's love for cubism

is in striking contrast with his own poetry, so irrational
by nature and definition, so suffuse with its subdued and
fragmentary narrative quality. One thinks instinctively
of Delacroix' love for Mozart, of the strange principle
whereby an artist harbors within himself opposing loves
and dreams. It almost seems that a great artist creates his
art only by opposing a whole side of his nature, by dis-
ciplining and castigating a rich instinct and love of his
nature. Apollinaire was a thinker, a critic, almost a philoso-
pher for an entire generation of French artists, for a
period that was truculent and unruly, fascinated by the
early films of the cinema and the movie-characters of
mechanical Petrouchka-like gestures.
He was for his age both sorcerer and legend. His curios-
ity over things of the spirit was as closely followed as his
love for good food, for the various national cuisines: Pro-
vencal, Chinese, Jewish, Spanish, Russian, Arabian, Greek,
Polish, Turkish. Highest in his estimation were Italian and
French cooking. Lowest was the British with its monoto-
nous red meat. He liked almost everything from fried onions
and petits fours to goulash with paprika. In September,
1911, when the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre,
Apollinaire was accused of the theft and put in prison
for six days, at the end of which he was found to be inno-
cent and released.
In 1914, he joined the French army. He wasn't a French
citizen and hence not mobilized. I suppose there was no

single motive for this act. It was perhaps love for his
adopted country, or desire for adventure, or belief that
he would be able to reenact the legend of war. He was seri-
ously wounded in March of 1916, by a piece of shell which
struck his head. He underwent two operations, two tra-
panations, and his appearance in Paris afterwards, with
his head heavily bandaged, provided a final chapter for
his legend. Picasso made another drawing of him in this
88 Age of Surrealism
ultimate disguise. He became literally the "star-head poet,"
(le la tete etoilee). In late October, 1918, he fell
poete a
sickwith grippe, and died a few days later, on the 9th of
November. On the day of the Armistice his body was being
carried through the streets of Paris in the direction of
Pere Lachaise, while the crowds ironically were shouting
hisname Guillaume, Conspuez Guillaume, but meaning
by it the German Wilhelm.

II
The story of his life was the effort he
made guard
to secrets and
mysteries, and to create for his
friends and his public a character whom they would love
and yet not know too intimately. The buffoonery of his
character, his endless anecdotes and pranks, permitted him
to conceal or disguise the nostalgia and sadness and even
perhaps the tragedy of his life. But the poetry of Guillaume
Apollinaire is not mask and deceit. It is fantasy in the
deepest sense of the word. It is lawful fantasy: its images
rightfully conceal and communicate at the same time the
emotions he experienced.
His poetic fantasy was, first, that of revolt, by which he
always remained precious and close to the surrealists. He
broke with the familiar patterns of thought, with the
poetic cliches and literariness of the Parnassians and Sym-
bolists, and with the familiar units and rules of syntax.
His poetry comes together in a great freedom of composi-
tion, as if he allowed the images and emotions to compose
themselves. In his poetry, phantoms, wanderers, mythic
characters bearing sonorous names, appear and disappear
as the laws of syntax and prosody do. His verse is not liter-
ary in any strict sense, and in that, he marks a revolt against
the poetic research and endeavor of the entire preceding
period. He didn't read the obvious books that were being
read in his time: Stendhal, Zola, Whitman, Rimbaud
(although he was decidedly influenced by Rimbaud). But
 Apollinaire 89

he read Fantomas avidly, which was a series of popular

detective-mystery stories.
It was quite appropriate that Apollinaire, coming after
the highly self-conscious and studied literary school of
symbolism, would, in rebellion against such artifice, seek
to return to the most primitive sources of lyricism. I have
a feeling that only because such a fully developed literary
tradition was in him, as a part of his background, was he
able to allow in his verse the seemingly spontaneous mix-
ture of emotion and irony, of nostalgia and cynicism. Both
by the form and content of his poetry, he seems to be mak-
ing a kind of plea or defence for moral disorder, or moral
relaxation. The adventure of Apollinaire, if we were to
extract such a subject from his work, would closely re-
semble the adventure of Gide: the lessons on freedom and
gratuitousness and individual morality, which were being
formulated at the same time. Apollinaire thus prolongs
the lesson of Rimbaud and Mallarme\ in considering
poetic activity as a secret means of knowledge, self-knowl-
edge and world-knowledge.
A legitimate part of poetry must therefore come from
hidden occult forces in us. To seize them, or to cause them
to rise up, we may have to set traps: play the fool, enact
farces, experiment with chance and free association. The
image may be seen in its full autonomy when we risk
everything in poetic composition on the unpredictable,
the unforeseen. Magic exists everywhere around us, and
not solely in the artfully contrived. It is unexpectedly
found in the trivial and commonplace. Poetry is perhaps
the opposite of literature. The poetic is perhaps the op-
posite of the formalized.
In dogmatism, the moral is impossible
all this aesthetic

to dissociate from the poetic. Surrealism is an entire way

of life, and not merely a set of rules governing an artistic
production. As the soul of the artist learns how to free
himself from the usual restrictions and enslavements and
90 Age of Surrealism
the formal habits of society, so the language which exists
in the deepest regions of our being, in the state of pre-
articulation, learns to rise up to our consciousness freely
and unhampered. The poet learns how to give voice to a
stammering and stuttering which have always existed in
him. The original sound of words, which is not usually very
audible, becomes a clear and resounding echo when the
poet is able to establish an interrelationship between the
real and the imaginary worlds.
The example of Apollinaire's life and character strongly
influenced the surrealists of the 20's and 30's, but today,
in the few years which have followed the end of the Second
War, the influence of his poetry on the young poets is more
marked than it has ever been, stronger and more apparent,
I think, than the influence even of Rimbaud's poetry.

During the season of 1947, Poulenc's opera on Apolli-

naire's play, Les mamelles de Tiresias, was a major event.
Doctrinally he taught the surrealists by the actions and
habits of his life, by his anecdotes and oracular statements,
so many of which have been piously remembered. Apol-
linaire became a kind of patron saint and intercessor of
surrealists. But in the 1940's, in the new poetry, the actual
form and resonance of his verse have been recaptured.
He has finally become the poet, and more preeminently
the master poet, than any single surrealist poet who fol-

lowed and revered him.

The practical example of Apollinaire's poetry is a warn-
ing against the two most dangerous temptations of poe-
try, the two traps everlastingly set to stifle its life vigor:

first, didacticism or moral preaching; and secondly, over-

conscious intent or exaggerated artifice. When poetry avoids

these two pitfalls, as Apollinaire's does, it is able to become
a complete and autonomous universe, capable of encircling
us and assailing us. When we read this kind of poetry, we
know that a world is being organized and constructed
around us. It gradually becomes so ordered and achieved
 Apollinaire 91

that we end by recognizing this new country and end by

recognizing ourselves in it.

The universe of great poetry is always composed of pas-

sions and images: passions which are the experiences of
suffering and therefore of knowing; and images which in
their rhythmical form are the unique way a poet has to
express his passion. Apollinaire's volume, Alcools, of 1913,
is this kind of universe. The poems have the quality of
folk-lore and fairy tales. The inhabitants are nymphs and
blond Loreleis, pot-bellied prelates, clowns and saltim-
banques, thieves and little girls. These are all projections
and images of Apollinaire himself, selves of the poet
which permit him in the joyously free realm of poetry to
marvel at everything and compose anything into the unity
of a poem or of a book. Critics have pointed out that Apol-
linaire is the only one of the major poets who never sounds

the theme of mysticism, who, unlike a Peguy or a Claudel

or an Eliot, seems impervious to the religious problem in
any form. This critical statement seems to me too absolute
because of the primitive mystical quality in magic. There
is no true or matured mysticism in Apollinaire's poetry,

that is certain, but the way between the mysterious and

the mystical is not very far. The poet Apollinaire is like a
mystical child, enchanted but not inspired, too humble and
too fearful, too wondrously imaginative to consider or
need the experience of religious ecstasy.
The first poem of the volume Alcools, called Zone, was
actually the last poem to be composed. One evening in
the summer on the
of 1913, Apollinaire was in a small bar
boulevard de Clichy, between the Place Blanche and the
Place Pigalle. His companions, among others, were Mar-
coussis, Juan Gris, and Raoul Dufy. As far as one can tell,
Apollinaire was depressed. It was the time when Marie
Laurencin, whom he loved, had deserted him. The con-
versation, inspired by a very fine white wine, had caused
him to consider the whole expanse of his life, the develop-
92 Age of Surrealism
ment and evolution of his character. He went home alone
to an apartment on the boulevard Berthier, lent to him by
a friend, and in the space of one night composed the
poem Zone. an expansive freely written piece, a kind
It is

of spiritual autobiography and a condensed history of

Apollinaire's period. At the beginning of the poem stands
the Eiffel Tower in the image of a shepherdess watching
over her flock of bridges:

Bergere, 6 Tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bele ce matin.

Initially in the poem this line illustrates an aspect of

surrealist art in its unexpected and humorous
slightly
analogy. Throughout the poem Apollinaire accentuates an
urban magic, the new poetic force visible in bridges and
machines, in automobiles and airplanes. During the cafe
conversation, which perhaps initiated the poem, Juan Gris,
in pointing to some affiches: some billboard signs or ad-
vertisements, had exclaimed: Voila notre poesie! Some of
the brutal and multi-colored modern advertising is carried
over into Apollinaire's verses. Catalogues, billboards, and
newspapers have their own dynamic rhythms, which are
those of the modern city and machines, and they represent
legitimate experiences of the poet on which he may draw.
Apollinaire's poem Zone originated in a Paris bureau de
tabac (devant le zinc d'un bar crapuleux) on the boulevard
de Clichy in 1913, and W. H. Auden's poem of 1947, The
Age of Anxiety, originated in a New York bar on 3rd
Avenue. The two titles Zone and Age are not dissimilar,
and the prewar inquietude of Apollinaire, or his lassitude
of the first line (A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien) bears
relationship with Auden's war-engendered existentialist
Anxiety.

Ill
Poets, in order to live and create, have
to destroy the poetic tradition out of which they came. In
 Apollinaire 93
such a poem as Zone and the other earlier poems of Apol-
linaire which follow it in Alcools, one can sense the revo-
lutionary use to which poetry being put. The strong 19th
is

century poetic tradition was hard to kill. Apollinaire op-

posed to its formalized emotion and rhetoric, a poetry of
irony and paradox and indirectness. All the familiar child-
hood and religious nostalgia is still there in his poetry, but
it is treated in a new freshness and humor. In referring,
for example, to the Ascension of Christ, Apollinaire says
that He goes up to the sky better than aviators:

C'est le Christ qui monte au ciel mieux que les aviateurs.

One of the longest poems of Apollinaire, and in many

ways his finest writing, is the third in this 1913 volume:
La Chanson du Mal-Aime. The remarkable and ambiguous
effect of this poem is that it illustrates surrealism in tech-
nique, theme, and expression, and at the same time re-
sembles very ancient poetry of France by its form and
texture. It is as new as surrealism, as old as Villon, and as
old-fashioned as Verlaine. It is impossible to read it with-
out hearing the resonances and remembering the affinities

it has with Villon and the tragic mask of Verlaine, and yet
it is also brilliantly unique: Apollinaire's poem and only
his.

I have alluded many times to the magical property of

poetry, to the contained magic of words, and believe that in
La Chanson du Mal-Aime we have an admirable example
of poetic phrases, which, when recited over and over again,
take on new and unexpected meaning. Formally, in the
literal and accustomed meaning of the words, we learn one
thing —and then gradually, as if in another part of ourselves,
rarely exposed to words, we may hear an echo of this poem,
an elucidation of our own experience, which is the poem's
also. In every great poem, there is always an aspect of
eternal childhood, which in Apollinaire's Chanson be-
comes identified, almost miraculously, with our own. And
94 Age of Surrealism
there is also, in every great poem, the apocalyptic tradition,
the threatening image of mortality and the threatening
image of some period in time, which in La Chanson du
Mal-Aime tragically that of our own age. According to
is

this theory,which is a very personal one of mine, every

poem begins by being the poem of an angel (which is the
memory of childhood and childhood innocency), and ends
by becoming the poem of an exiled angel. Rimbaud would
be the most dazzling example of this theory. Apollinaire
would be a more moderate, or more modest, example, but
quite as authentic.
The dedication of La Chanson du Mal-Aime to Paul
Leautaud, director of the Mercure de France, is easily ex-
plained. One day Leautaud met Apollinaire on the boule-
vard Montparnasse and asked him why he had sent nothing
to theMercure. Apollinaire replied that he had sent in a
poem a long time ago and had heard nothing from it. On
his return to the office,Leautaud discovered the poem, La
Chanson du Mal-Aime, in a pile of discarded manuscripts,
read it, and published it.
In no other poem of Apollinaire does one feel so persist-
ently the presence of an intimate kind of suffering, which
however is never made precise. It is quite certain that the
Chanson is about some secret catastrophe, some incura-
ble sadness, but the poet-Apollinaire so completely disap-
peared from his own life that we are never able to formu-
late a specific dilemma. His friends liked to believe that
the poem about his unhappy love for the painter Marie
is

Laurencin, but Apollinaire at all times led so strictly a

surrealist life that we have no documents about him, only
anecdotes; no biography, only legend.
The title of the piece is perhaps very meaningful. It is
not a love poem, it is a love song. A poem would be more
more exclusively and pointedly on the subject
organized,
But a song has no strict form and La Chanson du
of love.
Mal-Aime is seemingly on many different subjects. The
 Apollinaire 95
theme of love becomes subtly and significantly prominent
throughout the work because it is the one subject always
carefully avoided. It is the subject changed into all other
subjects. The poet here is no lover. He is the timid singer
of a song. His life has been transformed into songs for
sirens, but those are precisely the songs we seize and under-
stand so profoundly at certain moments of self-lucidity.
The poem begins like a ballad or old romance:

Un soir de demi-brume a Londres

Un voyou qui ressemblait a
Mon amour vint a ma rencontre
Et le regard qu'il me jeta
Me fit baisser les yeux de honte

I don't know any more ambiguous beginning of a poem

of
than La Chanson du Mal-Aime. The mal-
this first stanza of
aime (or lonely lover or poet) is walking through a London
fog when he meets a voyou. The word is untranslatable, but
refers to a young boy of dubious character and appearance,
a kind of city tramp, usually associated with Paris, who
exploits the feelings and pocketbooks of those he encoun-
ters. This voyou of the poem, Apollinaire tells us, re-

sembles his love, and the boy's expression makes the poet
look downward in shame. I call this initial stanza ambigu-
ous because in the light of what follows, it is not what one
thinks it is, and yet one is never sure!
The second stanza continues with the strange narrative:

Je suivis ce mauvais garcon

Qui sifflotait mains dans les poches
Nous semblions entre les maisons
Onde ouverte de la mer Rouge
Lui les Hebreux moi Pharaon

The mal-aime or poet follows the voyou who, whistling

and his hands in his pockets, plays the predictable role of
studied indifference and nonchalance, a kind of inverted
96 Age of Surrealism
adolescent Pied Piper of Hamlin luring the nobler souls
of the city. But three of the five lines in the stanza are a
strikingly pure surrealist image of this pursuit and flight.

The street is the Red Sea, the voyou is the children of Israel,
and the poet is the Egyptian Pharaoh. We
have suddenly
left the restricted area of narrative and entered the bound-
less region, where we stay henceforth in the poem, of allu-
sion and imagery.
We soon arrive, in the fifth stanza, to another episode of
resemblance and recognition. This time it is an intoxi-
cated woman coming out from a pub who reminds the
poet of his love. The voyou wasn't quite a man, in the
poet's first encounter, and this woman of the second en-
counter inhuman {e'etait son regard d'inhumaine). She
is

bears a scar on her neck, as if she might be a victim of vam-

pirism. These two apparitions in the London fog, the
whistling voyou and the vampire woman (the type of
femme overwhelming pre-
fatale), objectively describe the
monition of the poet around which the romance is to be
constructed: the falseness of love itself: La faussete de
V amour mime.
This ends the introduction of the Chanson. The fog
dissipates, as in a dream, and it never forms again. This
initial thought is cruel and startling, and yet it is spoken
with the gentleness and the ellipsis of a ballad. We were
introduced only to the dream and the two characters who
half emerge from the mistiness of the dream as the per-
verted or transformed characters of legend. Apollinaire, in
his role of mal-aime, accepts the falseness of his love with
the humility of a simple man, like the surrealist who learns
how to submit himself to the miracle and magic of exist-
ence where the world of dreams and the conscious world
are eternally interdependent.
There is a difference between the romantic attitude and
the surrealist attitude. The romantic's is a pose: his heart
and his pride have been offended, and he stands off from
 Apollinaire 97

the world in a magnificent sullenness. His grievances

mount up in resonant periods and he vituperates directly
against the false mistress or the false society. But the sur-
realist attitude is the discovery of a curiousand pathetic
unity between falseness and truth, between the real and
the surreal world. In the 1 1th stanza of La Chanson du Mal-
Aime there is another boat of memory, another metaphor
of sea voyage where Rimbaud's drunken boat is sobered,
where the final stanzas of Bateau Ivre with their deep
pathos, are remembered in even greater ballad simplicity.

Mon beau navire 6 ma memoire

Avons-nous assez navigue
Dans une onde mauvaise a boire
Avons-nous assez divague
De la belle aube au triste soir

The violence of Rimbaud's experience, so equally sharing

in the romantic and surrealist attitudes, is here in Apol-
linaire subdued into the most gentle kind of irony where
the impossibility of love is the experience of the ineffable,
of the unspeakable. The loneliness of the mal-aime is best
transcribed by the distant milky way of the heavens (Voie
lactee 6 soeur lumineuse) in the 13th stanza, and by the
memory of another year, in the 14th: Je me souviens d'une
autre annee.
Bohemian Apollinaire, his favorite characterization, is

here a poet who about himself a romance so totally

sings
mysterious, so totally indecipherable, that he sings about
every man. The lonely voyou of the first two stanzas never
really leaves the poem. He is joined with the poet himself
in his need to tempt life without resolving it, in his will
to live without assuming responsibility for life. What is

—
going to become the surrealist attitude namely, the child-
like acceptance of reality and surreality, the childlike
acceptance of the oneness of life —is prepared in the Bohe-

mian poet of the first decade of the 20th century, in Apolli-

98 Age of Surrealism
naire's mal-aime, who is really a voyou, in Petrouchka
whose tiny heart beats in a straw-stuffed body, in the sal-
timbanques of Picasso, in the real clowns of the Cirque
Medrano, who were so admired by Apollinaire and Picasso
and Cocteau, in Charlie Chaplin's eternal role of the tramp,
the American version of the European clown and the inno-
cent voyou. In Chaplin's most recent film, Monsieur Ver-
doux, he abandons the role of tramp for the dandy, the
other choreographic expression of the modern artist. The
clown is the poet who doesn't speak. He is like the mal-
aime who so compresses language and experience that he
sings them. He pretends that love is dead (L'amour est
mort fen suis tremblant says Apollinaire's mal-aime in
stanza 20) but who remains, throughout all his pretence,
"faithful and sad" (Je reste fidele et dolent, stanza 20).
This is the characterization of Chaplin in all his early films:
the vagabond who wanders from saloon to saloon in try-
ing to convert a real experience he never refers to, into a
fictional pattern, a surreal ballet.
If we are unable to see very clearly the mal-aime, an-
nounced in Apollinaire's title, we are able to follow the
transposed version of his drama. In it there are no traces
of realist art or analytical art. What remains in the poetry
is the human drama, but so grief-stricken and obscured
that has become mythical. The poem engenders a dark-
it

ness, both a physical and metaphorical night, in which all

kinds of opposites cease opposing one another, in which
all kinds of contraries are harmonized: sadness and joy;

memory and actuality; a poet and a voyou; a poet and a

vampire woman. The two deepest opposites are the con-
scious and the subconscious which are so unlimited by their
nature that they have to create myths in order to give them-
selves some boundaries whereby they may see themselves
and reflect themselves. Thus, in La Chanson du Mal-Aime,
where the inner world of the ego and the exterior world
form only one world, the poet truly becomes the child or
 Apollinaire 99

the angel who is able to pass from one world to the other
without perceiving any difference between them. This uni-
fied climate of the poem is the climate of the myth, where,
for a Rimbaud a mosque is seen in the place of a factory
or a drawing room at the bottom of a lake, or a family as
a litter of puppies, and where for Apollinaire his beloved
appears to him as a voyou or as an inhuman woman com-
ing out from a pub.

IV
The profoundest lesson of surrealism
has to do with unity or unification, and Apollinaire's
poetry may be considered a transcendent part of this
lesson. A true poem, according to this doctrine, should
reveal some aspect of the original unity of the universe.
This seems to signify that poetry, which is created out of
suffering (as the world itself was created out of chaos), pre-
serves the memory of suffering (as the world preserves the
memory of chaos), teaches man how to bear it and weaves
a marvellous myth which then becomes a part of all the
myths of mankind.
The surrealist is hereby stating a thesis not at all un-
familiar: that poetry is a method of knowledge, a way of
knowing. In the history of French poetry, Baudelaire was
the first to be explicit with this idea. Modern poetry owes
almost everything to Baudelaire. Mallarme\ in a sense,
became the philosopher of this theory, the most extraordi-
nary dreamer and abstractionist of modern poetry. Lau-
treamont and Rimbaud were the dazzled initiates, the
victims of the strange illumination. Apollinaire, without
possessing the poetic genius of a Mallarme" or a Rimbaud,
was very necessary in the unfolding of this poetic theory.
He was able to bring poetry back from its Mallarmean
hermeticism and Rimbaldian violence to tenderness and
nostalgia, to the gentleness of the clown. With Apollinaire's
period the clown became the most sensitive of the modern
100 Age of Surrealism
heroes, the living receptacle for all dramas, the hero who
refused to see them The
surrealist hero is
as tragedies.
visibly the clown: whether he be Chaplin or Donald Duck,
the sad saltimbanques of Picasso and Apollinaire, or the
voyou who temporarily has forgotten the meaning of his
heart, Jean Gabin or the habitues of the rue de Lappe, or
their great ancestor Hamlet. There is a significant rap-
prochement, quite easy to make, between the adjectives
clowning and surrealist. One might read the Chanson of
Apollinaire as if Petrouchka were the mal-aime.
This is the psychological diagnosis of the poet in Apol-
linaire's poem, La Jolie Rousse, the final poem of his
volume Calligrammes, published in 1918. He is judging the
order of Adventure. In the 19th century the romantic hero
was always judging the order of his heart, but in the 20th
century the surrealist hero judges the order of his adven-
ture. The word adventure, when considered in its strict

etymological meaning (advenire), explains a valid aspect

of surrealism. It is experience without design, a hazardous
enterprise of uncertain issue, a peril or a jeopardizing of
oneself. But this order is limitless: it is the future, the
adventure of the spirit which
ahead of us. Adventure
lies

is the drama of the conscious and the subconscious, of

the vast and strange domains we know and don't know.

The most courageous type of hero to embark on such an ad-
venture is the clown-voyou. The final stanza of the poem,
La Jolie Rousse, is Apollinaire's cry of a clown. It begins:

Mais riez riez de moi

Hommes de partout surtout gens d'ici

But laugh laugh at me

Men everywhere and especially you here.

This is Pagliaccio's invitation to laughter, the clown's dis-

may in the ring which incites laughter in the public. Then
comes the confession:
 Apollinaire 101

Car il y a tant de choses que je n'ose vous dire.

For there are so many things I don't dare tell you.

which is the silence of the songs, the literal silence of the

performing clown, the hermeticism of Mallarme' and the
surrealists. And the second confession:

Tant de choses que vous ne me laisseriez pas dire.

So many things you wouldn't let me tell you.

In no other line do we read such an explicit statement con-

cerning the drama of the clown as clown, or the poet as
poet.
The public always ends by being irritated by the clown
who controls his silence. And that is why the clown por-
trays so admirably the artist in the solitude of the world,
and the surrealist far from the real world. In the very last
words of the poem, Ayez pitiS de moi (Have pity on me),
are summarized the burning humility of the clown and his
universal pathos.
 VI •
BRETON: the manifestoes

During the fall term of 1942, most stu-

dents in American universities were preparing to leave for
the war. Classes were beginning noticeably to diminish in
size. I was teaching French literature at Yale, and remem-
ber particularly, about that period of deep unrest, the
unusual attentiveness of students during their last classes
and their concern over which books they should take away
with them.
On December 10th, on the invitation of the French and
Art departments, Andre Breton, who was then working
for the O.W.I, in New York, came to New Haven to deliver
a lecture on "The between the two
situation of Surrealism
wars." A and towns-
large gathering of students, faculty,
folk turned out to hear the lecture. M. Breton spoke in
French, which was a strain for many of those present, and
some passages in the lecture he read were difficult to follow
even for those who knew French well. His style is highly
polished and intricate. His ideas, which might in a more
simple form be easily recognizable, are in his own form
intensely abstracted and intellectualized. Breton's writing,
and this lecture he gave at Yale was essentially a written
 Breton 103

devoid of the facile and the obvious and the cliche\

text, is
However, during the entire lecture, slides of the well
known surrealist paintings were constantly being thrown
on a screen placed over Breton's head. At the beginning,
I, like everyone else present, I am sure, tried to see the
relationship between what was being said and what was
being shown. But it soon became evident to me that there
was no direct relationship. The pictures didn't illustrate
the lecture. They formed a moving and colorful back-
ground: a kind of second lecture in graphic form which
one might follow, if one tired of oral expression or found
it incomprehensible.
Breton's appearance was majestic and noble. was very
It

easy to credit him with the first role of leader and spokes-
man and theoretician of surrealism. He is a very large man
with a handsome leonine head. His countenance bore an
expression of solemnity which I don't remember his ever
breaking with a smile. His gestures were sober and re-

duced. His voice had resonance and great beauty. At the

end of the lecture, he read more eloquently than I have ever
heard a poet read, poems of Apollinaire, Tzara, Eluard,
Peret, and one of his own poems.
His speech, which was very pointedly directed at the
students present, has become, since its subsequent publica-
tion, a kind of third manifesto of surrealism, or at least a
summation of the first two manifestoes which Breton pub-
lished in 1924 and 1930. He was very much aware of the
strangeness and uniqueness of that occasion on December
10, 1942. A world war was going on. He was in exile while
his country was governed by Vichy and Nazi-Germany. He
was speaking on the subject of surrealism in a provincial
New England city, to a group of American students who,
no matter how impressed they were with seeing the cele-
brated leader of surrealism, were thinking above all about
the gravity of their imminent departure. Even if they had
learned the names of Apollinaire, Breton, and Lautr^a-
104 Age of Surrealism
mont, other names such as Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, Libya
were uppermost in their minds. But because of the very
unusualness of the situation, Breton was unable to explain
and heighten certain aspects of surrealism which appear
to be among the most important.
He exalted the appeal which surrealism has always made
to the young. Surrealism has been kept alive by the par-
ticular kind of genius we associate with the young. Breton
and the early surrealists were all young themselves and
affirmed a boundless faith in the type of youthful genius:
in Lautreamont, who died at twenty-four; in Rimbaud,
whose writing was completed at nineteen; in Chirico, who
painted his best canvases between the ages of twenty-three
and twenty-eight; in Saint-Just, member of the National
Convention, who was guillotined at the age of twenty-
seven; in the German writer Novalis, who died at thirty;
in Seurat, who died at thirty-two; in Jarry, whose play
Ubu Roi was composed when he was fifteen and character-
ized by Breton as the great prophetic avenging play of
modern times (la grande piece prophetique et vengeresse
des temps modernes). Breton himself was twenty-three
when in 1919 he published with Soupault the first chapter
of Les Champs Magnetiques, illustrative of the new auto-
matic method of writing.
Surrealism was founded in the years which immediately
followed World War I when the young intellectuals, re-
turning from the front, discovered in the older thinkers
and an inadequacy and an unrelatedness to their
artists

own thought and state of mind. Those who like Breton

were to become surrealists turned against Barres, Claudel,
and even Bergson to some degree. The death of Apolli-
naire, at the precise moment of the Armistice, had upset
them. His had been the intellectual adventure they had
followed the most confidently and joyously, as they had
literally followed the large figure of the man in his pale
blue uniform of first lieutenant to the Cafe* de Flore on
 Breton 105

the boulevard de St. Germain during the war years. They

were tired and disgusted with the literary eloquence and
verboseness of the 20th century. Their age had become a
verbal nightmare for them. The radio, with its perpetual
flow of words, was converting the world into a delirious
cacophony. The language of man was being prostituted
and degraded as it had never been before.
Breton was one of the first Frenchmen, who was not a
psychoanalyst, to study Freud. He told us, in the lecture
at Yale, that when he was twenty, on his various Paris
leaves from the army, he tried successively to interest Apol-
linaire, Valery, and Gide in Freud. But they all turned
him down with indulgent smiles and a friendly pat on the
back. Breton's enthusiasm and veneration for Freud, as far
as I know, have never diminished. He believes that Freud
is one of the greatest forces in helping modern man to

rediscover the meaning and the vitality of words.

In his first manifesto of 1924, Breton emphasized the
meaning of the word liberty as being a basis for surrealism
(le seul mot de liberie est tout ce qui m'exalte encore)
and in he used the w ord again with all
his speech of 1942, T

the fullness of meaning it had at that time and on that

occasion. The sentence he quoted from Saint-Just, the "con-
ventionnel" at the time of the French Revolution, had a
deep resonant effect and appropriateness: Pas de liberte
pour les ennemis de la liberte. ("No freedom for the en-
emies of freedom.") He interpreted liberty as being the
guiding motivation of all surrealist activity, and explained
tKe many excommunications which he, Andre Breton, per-
formed as surrealist pope, in terms of infidelity to liberty.
The excommunicants were those artists who disqualified
themselves by some infringement on the sanctity of this
doctrine liberty.
Liberty for the artist, according to Breton, means first

a liberation from rules of art. The artist expresses his lib-

erty iconoclastically. In poetry, the leading examples would
106 Age of Surrealism
be Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Mallarme in his final poem,
—
Un coup de des, Apollinaire especially in his "poemes-
conversations" of C aliigrammes. In painting, the examples
would be Van Gogh, Seurat, Rousseau, Matisse, Picasso,
Duchamp. These lists vary from year to year with Breton.
His life is a series of fervent friendships and violent de-
nunciations of former friends. At the time of the New
Haven speech his most eloquent invective was leveled at
Dali, who had been excommunicated on two grounds.
First, for having bartered his soul for money. Breton had

devised a humorous anagram out of the name Salvador

Dali. He refused even to say the real name but spoke only
the anagram: Avida Dollars: a half -Spanish, half -American
clue to Dali's current sin. And second, for having revealed
Fascist tendencies in painting the Spanish ambassador,
who, because he was the representative of France, was im-
plicated in the oppression of Spain and even in the death
of Dali's friend, the great Spanish poet, Garcia Lorca.
The disquisition on liberty would constitute the pro-
legomenon or the preamble to the surrealist creed. From
all the writings of Breton, especially the two manifestoes

of 1924 and 1930, and the Situation du Surrealisme of

1942, as well as from other theoretical writings, one might
draw up a kind of program in five parts consisting of those
beliefs which seem to have fluctuated the least in the minds
and the works of the leading surrealists.
1. The importance accorded to dreams and the

subconscious life of man. Here the teachings of Freud are

all important and seem to validate the practice of auto-

matic writing or direct note-taking of one's subconscious

states.

2. The
second belief would be a corollary or a
result of the first. It has to do with a denial of what we
usually consider contradictions or paradoxes in our expe-
rience. The human mind is able to attain a state where
forces which appear opposed are harmonized and unified
 Breton 107

into one force. The sentence of Breton's second manifesto

which states this belief is so important and so admirably
composed that it should be quoted in its entirety: "There
is a certain point for the mind from which life and death,

the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the
communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the
low cease being perceived as con traditions." This sen-
tence is actually a development of a passage in the first
manifesto where the resolution of dream and reality is
conceived of as being absolute reality or surreality.
3. The third belief is concerned with the most
puzzling of the so-called contradictions: thejmtinomy be-
tween man and nature, the conviction that one is of a
different order than the other, and that hence there exists
between the two a perpetual state of discord. The Breton-
answer to this contradiction is obscure for the
surrealist
surrealists as well as for the outsider. The action of
"chance" (le hasard) or "coincidence" seems to be the
mystery to decipher and the key to this particular contra-
diction. It is possible that as we learn to progress along the
way of the subconscious, we shall learn more about the
phenomena of "chance" which do appear to play a part in
our daily existence as well as in such a humanly or con-
sciously calculated enterprise as a war.
4. The fourth part we have already somewhat
discussed in the emergence of the surrealist attitude as the
result of the experience of war, of the psychic upheaval
caused by war. Wars are fought by young men at an age
when they, if they weren't engaged in warfare, would be
organizing, systematizing, and planning their lives and
their careers. They would be choosing a philosophy, learn-
ing and imitating the art and the thought of older men.
If, at the age of twenty, one wears a uniform and engages
in warfare, one is thereby dissolving the permanencies and
stabilizing beliefs which usually form the architecture of a
life. The young Frenchmen of 1919, Breton and the others,
108 Age of Surrealism
returned from war, having learned there how to attach
very little importance to matters considered important in
terms of peace. Their greatest sacrifice had been the sac-

rifice of thought, and they immediately turned upon their

philosophers and poets and demanded of them the same
sacrifice. Having fought, were told, for ideas, for
as they
the safety of democracy, for example, they turned against
ideas in a paradoxical but recognizable psychic reaction.
There is a kind of humor which is visible at the most
solemn and even tragic moments of existence. Nerves can't
stand too much tension and often are relieved by a para-
doxical explosion. The comic aspect of early surrealism
and its program of destruction so often carried out as an
embittered joke, may well be explained in this way.
5. The fifth belief is essentially psychological in
nature. It concerned with the distinction between the
is

self and the ego. The French words soi and moi are per-
haps clearer translations of these two terms. The self (soi),
as opposed to the ego (le moi, or the consciously aware be-
ing of man), is composed of all manner of powers stolen
from man's conscience and kept separate from any control
of conscience and consciousness. This self is the area, or
the arena, if we use the image of Freud, in which a signifi-
cant and central fight is waged. Freud calls it the fight
between Eros or the instinct of love, and the instinct of
death or self-destruction, which we discussed in connection
with Mallarme's Herodiade. This is the area or arena
where the permanent myths of man, as we saw in Lautrea-
mont, are recognized and reenacted. It is precisely here in
this domain of the self, as separate from the domain of the
ego, that the surrealist believes he may take down the dic-
tation of his thought during a time when there is a total
absence of any control exercised by his reason or by any
moral code. It is the absence of any consciously-
aesthetic or
This activity of the self might easily
arrived-at codification.
be compared with what Baudelaire said about the image-
 Breton 109

provoking power of opium. The images induced by opium

are surrealistic in that they rise up spontaneously and des-
potically without the man (smoker) invoking them. They
are involuntarily generated images.

II
These five might
categories of belief
serve as the theoretical bases of surrealism. They were
evoked and discussed during a period of fervent artistic
activity and experimentation. Each one corresponds to ex-
periments and quarrels and expositions and exposures. Sur-
realism might conveniently be analyzed in its history of
scandals and manifestoes.
The movement, in anything that resembles an organi-
zation or conscious group activity, seems to have been
initiated by its "sleep period," by its so-called epoque
des sommeils. This was experimentation with sleep and
dreams, a whole new manner of thinking, in which the
sleeper or dreamer might experience unprecedented images
in their strangeness and richness. Some, and especially
Robert Desnos, who was champion in this trick, learned
how to fall asleep at will and hence live, whenever he
wished, in a surrealist panorama of dream-images which
he had not willfully induced. The dream-image of the sub-
conscious eliminated for the surrealists any enigmatical
character of prophecies and dreams, in the Bible, for ex-
ample. They could see a poetic unity joining such words
as Nebuchadnezzar's dream in the book of Daniel, and the
revelation made to St. John on the island of Patmos, and
Les Chants de Maldoror, and Une Saison en Enfer.
By the time of Breton's first manifesto, in 1924, the sur-
realist attackon the novel, as a form of art, was in full
swing. The form of the novel, as exemplified by a Balzac,
answered man's craving for logic and description wherein
false and ludicrous practices would be employed such as
giving a name and an age to a character. It is apparent that
110 Age of Surrealism
a surrealist, accustomed to living in a dream-world where
factors of timeand space are not rigorous, would deplore
an art in which the physical setting for an action would be
minutely described.
Anatole France died in this same year of the first sur-
realist manifesto. He served the surrealists as a horrible
example of conventional writer whose art was empty and
false. In a pamphlet, lugubriously called Un Cadavre, they
went to work to achieve the artistic demise of Anatole
France. This attack on one of the most loved and eminent
writers of the day brought attention to the surrealists and
their potentialities as iconoclasts. In the good French tra-

dition they had chosen a cafe where they congregated reg-

ularly, the Cyrano, at the Place Blanche, conveniently near
the rue Fontaine where Andre Breton, their acknowledged
and self-appointed leader, was living. The Place Blanche is
a section of Paris frequented by prostitutes, pimps, and
circus people. The Cirque Medrano, a favorite spot for the
surrealists,was close by.
Itwas approximately the following year, 1925, that some
respectful attention began to be paid to the surrealists from
those outside their ranks. Both Eluard and Aragon were
assuming the proportions of poets. Max Ernst and Andr£
Masson were being approached by art dealers. It looked
as though surrealism might even pay. I believe this was
the year that Breton read Trotsky's book on Lenin and
announced his allegiance to the Communist Party. His ap-
proval of the Russian Revolution is quite audible in the
new name he devised for the contemporary world: "the
period," as he called it, "of Lautreamont, Freud, and
Trotsky."
The year 1928 is generally singled out as the year of
pronounced achievement Their rival movement
surrealist
in popularity and notoriety was the Catholic revival among
intellectuals and artists. Conversions and reconversions
had made almost a vogue out of Catholicism. The exam-
 Breton 111

pies of such men as Maritain, Massis, and Cocteau (who

at least temporarily reoccupied his place at mass) did not
prevent the surrealists from denouncing bitterly and un-
remittingly any religious solution to the problems of mod-
ern man. By this time surrealism had been in current
fashion long enough to have circulated misleading em-
phasis and belief about itself. However, in all justice, it

must be been
said that the surrealists themselves have
largely responsible for some of the misconceptions about
surrealism. They flaunt a startling theory or practice be-
fore the public, and then when the slow-moving public
mind finally accepts or understands the theory, the sur-
realists begin denying it and accusing the public of falsi-
fication or over-simplification. This is the period when the
surrealists vociferously attacked all the various stands or
beliefswith which the public wanted to associate them:
Freudianism, relativism, gratuitousness of thought and ex-
pression, the cult of Rimbaud, the mania for suicide, auto-
matic writing.
The surrealists are irked by having their work defined
and categorized. To name a theory, as to name a character
in a novel, is to limit its freedom, to diminish its vitality

and meaning. The academic definition

surrealist's fear of
is another aspect of his love of freedom. It is true that sur-

realism is a state of mind or a view about art which is

constantly changing and growing. Its adherents and de-
tractors move about as men on a chessboard. The actual
works of surrealist art, poems and paintings, seem always
to be overshadowed by the stronger works of a polemical
nature, by the argumentative and only slightly disguised
didactic works, such as Aragon's brilliant Traite du Style
of this same crucial year, 1928.
The second manifesto of 1930 enlarged somewhat the
scope of the surrealist program, but gave especially the in-
spired statement, already quoted, about the point which
the mind must reach in its unifying and uniting power.
112 Age of Surrealism
One senses in this second document that the fight has really
been fought, that it is a more verbalized and philosophical

expression of the strong program of the first manifesto.

Breton now rejects all the early patronages of Rimbaud,
Baudelaire, Poe, Sade. He excommunicates more abun-
dantly than ever, and allies himself closely with the revolu-
tionists. But those whom the leader castigates, join forces
against him, and Breton himself is the object of an attack
by surrealists. A pamphlet against him, given ominously
the same name as the earlier one against Anatole France,
Un Cadavre, is full of personal animosities and party jeal-
ousies. Among those who participated in the effort were
Queneau, Desnos, Prevert.
They fought among themselves, but let one be attacked
by any outside and they would all rally generously
force,
to his defence. This happened in 1931, when Aragon, who
had attended the 2nd International Congress in Karkhov,
published his poem Front Rouge, and was prosecuted for
provoking or extolling assassination. Breton, supported by
his followers, led the defence with the watertight surrealist
thesis that since a poem is the manifestation of the sub-
conscious, the author cannot be held responsible for At it.

the conclusion of this "Affaire," Aragon withdrew from

surrealism in order to become whole-heartedly communist.
But if it had
surrealism lost in 1931 an important figure,
gained a few years before, a luminary from Spain, Salvador
Dali, a kind of "enfant terrible/' of the movement. From
the outset he was the scandalizer and practical joker, but
in creative terms one of the most prodigiously gifted of all
the surrealists. Natively he was surrealist before becoming
one literally in Paris. When he was a student at the Madrid
School of Fine Arts, his teacher gave the class one day the
subject of a Gothic Virgin to paint. Dali painted a pair of
scales, and when the teacher remonstrated, the premature
surrealist replied that if the others saw a Virgin, he saw a

pair of scales.
 Breton 113

Dali had been interested in the Italian Futurist school

and especially in the other Italian school, headed by Chi-
rico and Carra, known as the scuola metafisica. This school,
with its emphasis on the inner perceptiveness and meta-
physical concern of the painter, was an excellent back-
ground for surrealism. On his first visit to Paris in 1928,
he met Picasso, and when he returned the same year, he
met Miro and the writers Desnos and Eluard. He found
immediately a vocation in surrealism which opened up to
him many means by which to discredit the world of reality.
In Freud, he read a justification for the intense love he
had always felt for his childhood, for the terrors and ecsta-
sies of his childhood. He learned, as a very special revela-
tion, about the womb-like protection which sleep affords.
Enthusiastically he accepted the leadership of Andre" Bre-
ton and the principal doctrines of the manifestoes.
Dali added a further term to surrealist jargon: his pri-
vate method which he called paranoiac-criticism. He always
insisted that he was much more the madman than the som-
nambulist. His method sounds at first like accredited sur-
realism when he claims spontaneous and irrational knowl-
edge, but when he bases it on an interpretive -critical
association of phenomena which arises from states of de-
lirium, he is adding to original surrealism a paranoiac sen-
sitivity. The hidden meanings which Dali finds in the

phenomena he studies, come to him, he claims, from tem-

porary states of insanity. The paranoiac is the man who
appears to have a normal kind of health and attitude, but
who privately is fashioning the world in accordance with
his own desire and the imperiousness of his desire.
Dali directed his paranoiac criticism on the legend of
William Tell, which, rather than illustrating for him
paternal love, is an example of incestuous mutilation. He
saw in Millet's famous painting of the Angelus an exam-
ple not of religious humility but of sexual repression, and
uses it in paintings of his own to stand for that idea. He
114 Age of Surrealism
was interested in combining the worlds of the animate
and the inanimate, and hence in his painting of Vermeer,
the painter, whom Dali admired unreservedly and whose
technique he imitates closely, he represents Vermeer as a
ghost extending a leg which becomes a table. Movie tech-
nique has employed this interpenetration of the animate
and inanimate, and Dali, who, contrary to Matisse who at-
tends the movies frequently in order to forget his labors,
goes very frequently, but for stimulation and inspiration.
One of the striking Dali objects at the International Exposi-
tion was a taxi in which sat the wax figure of Columbus.
Rain was constantly falling in the taxi and drenching the
immobile Columbus. The work, which was hooted at, takes
on some meaning when one realizes that Dali believed
Columbus, like himself, was a paranoiac. By his conviction
that the world was round and by his voyages which there-
fore would be endless, Columbus revealed his fear of per-
secution and his hope that he might always escape from his
persecutors.
By 1935, so many of the surrealists had joined the Com-
munist Party that the movement itself seemed to be allied
with the cause of communism. The statements of Marx
about the need of world revolution were said to find sup-
port in Rimbaud's sentence that life had to be changed
(il faut changer la vie). The advent of Dali had brought

a second youth or new impetus to surrealism. The reign

of the "marvellous" in art (le merveilleux, as Breton called
it) which came from man's passiveness and submission to

his subconscious, seemed to have definitely displaced sym-

bolism, with its emphasis on artificiality or contrived
artfulness. The International Exposition of 1938 was the
culmination of surrealism, when seventy artists from four-
teen countries were represented. It was a success despite
the wrath and acrimony of many of the critics. The war
dispersed the surrealists. Breton, Eluard, and P£ret were
mobilized at the beginning, in 1939. But Breton soon came
 Breton 115

to New York, where and

he broke completely with Dali,
where he founded the surrealist magazine VVV, which had
a brief existence. P£ret spent the war years in Mexico;
Tanguy and Masson in Connecticut; most of the others
remained in France.

Ill
In addition to his critical and polemical
writings Breton has produced works of a more purely cre-
ative nature, which are not only independent works of art,

among the best written of the century, but are also illus-

trative of the surrealist preoccupations. There is especially

Nadja, first published in 1928, another work of that central
year in the history of surrealism. I should like to describe
the book briefly and then relate it to the manifestoes: to
the promises and the principles of surrealism.
Nadja is divided into two parts: a long preamble or in-
troduction of seventy pages which is almost half of the
book, and then the story, if so meagre a narrative can be
called a story, about the character Nadja.
The introduction is a kind of illustrated essay on sur-
realism, a preparation for the strange tale Breton is going
to give of his encounter with Nadja. The opening sen-
tence is a question: Qui suis-je? ("Who am I?"), which
I have mentioned in other contexts as being the key
question in all aspects of modernism, whether it be sur-
realism or existentialism, as opposed to the key ques-
tion of the preceding age: "What should I do?" The in-
quiry about action has shifted to the inquiry about being.
There is throughout surrealism a deep metaphysical con-
cern, not usually couched in philosophical terms, but pres-
ent nonetheless and distinctly audible in the early pages of
Nadja, where Breton answers his own question by saying
that he is going to learn a small part of what he has for-
gotten. But his attempt of memory and recollection is

going to be involuntary. He is going to remember effort-

116 Age of Surrealism
lessly what happened to without commentary
him, relate it

and without investigation, and hence hope to arrive at

some knowledge of what constitutes his differences from
other men, his uniqueness in this world where everything
and every being seem to be patterned and standardized.
His method therefore will be to speak without any pre-
determined order and plan, to embark with one strand of
memory and to proceed with whatever forces itself on his
consciousness. His point of departure is to be the Hotel des

Grands Hommes at the Place du Pantheon, where he lived

about 1918. But before actually beginning, Breton refers
to an unrelated series of episodes in his life which came
about by an extraordinary and mysterious chance of co-
incidence. One of these might suffice as example. At the
premiere of an Apollinaire play (Couleur du Temps),
Breton was speaking in the balcony with Picasso during
the intermission, when a young man broke into their con-
versation and immediately excused himself by saying that
he had mistaken Breton for a friend who had been killed
in the war. Soon after that, Breton, through a mutual
friend, began corresponding with Paul Eluard whom he
had never met. When he did finally meet him, on a leave
from the army, Eluard turned out to be the same fellow
who had spoken to him at the theatre.
Several stories and reminiscences of this nature skillfully
induce in the reader the mood of surreality in which to
read the illusory tale of Nadja. It begins on the rue La-
fayette, in the late afternoon of the 4th of October when
Breton is walking aimlessly in the direction of the Opera.
Suddenly he sees, about ten steps away, a young woman
poorly dressed, who looks at him at the same time. She has
beautiful eyes, curiously made up, and Breton speaks to
her without hesitation. She pretends that she is going to a
on the boulevard Magenta, but he knows and
hairdresser
sheknows he knows that she was going nowhere. They sit
down on the terrace of a cafe near the Gare du Nord where
 Breton 117

she relates various fragments of her life. The name she

chose for herself is Nadja, which in Russian, is the begin-
ning of the word for hope. When they are about to sepa-
rate, Breton asks Nadja the question which according to
him, stands for and summarizes all questions: Qui etes-
vous? ("Who are you?"), the very question with which he
had begun the book, and which this time receives a worthy
answer, when Nadja replies: Je suis Vame errante ("I am
the wandering soul").
The next day they meet at a rendezvous at a bar on the
corner of the rue Lafayette and the faubourg Poissonniere.
Nadja accompanies Breton home in a taxi and leaves him
at the door. She says that she is going first to return to the
place where they began at the rue Lafayette and the fau-
bourg Poissonniere. They had fixed a rendezvous for the
6th of October, but before the time appointed, they met
by accident on a different street, rue de la Chaussee d'An-
tin. She confesses that she had planned not to come to the

rendezvous. No meeting was fixed for the 7th, but from

a taxi Breton felt he had seen her turning down a street.
He followed his hunch and found her. This is the kind of
meeting that continues to occur for several days: fortuito us,
almost resembling an intervention on the part of destiny.
There are only rapid glances into Nadja's life of debts and
distress and childishness. She disappears only to reappear
unexpectedly. Often, when they are seated at a cafe she
draws herself with the features of Melusine and feels that
she is close to that mythical character. By means of the
brief diary-like entrances of his meetings with Nadja, Bre-
ton draws a mental landscape where it is impossible to see
any clear demarcation between sanity and madness. Even
after Nadja has been committed to an asylum, Breton con-
tinues to think of her as the one character who was not
enigmatical, the one who by the strange power she had of
substituting herself for other characters passed beyond the
state of enigma. "Beauty," he tells us in the last sentence
118 Age of Surrealism
of the book, "will be convulsive, or will not be." (La
beaute sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas.)
Nadja, as a piece of writing, seems to escape the narrow
limiting aspect of surrealism which demands that a book
adhere to the one process of automatic writing and dicta-
tion, and to reach a larger view of the doctrine, which is
a philosophical attitude and even mystical attitude. A
chance meeting on the street of a man and a woman, an
event which I am confident would be called in one kind of
language a "pick-up," becomes the source of a new kind
of poetry of incoherences. A "pick-up," which on one level
of existence is thoroughly commonplace or even vulgar,

might become the source of deep happiness and exultant

discovery. The movies have made out of this theme a real
kind of beauty. It often happens that when we are waiting
for someone, in, say, Grand Central Station, the people
who go by and whom we are, alas, not waiting for, are far
more attractive and mysterious than the one we are wait-
ing for. Surrealism, and movie technique in so far as it is
surrealistic, provides for the lyrical transformations of real-
ity, for all those chance meetings, unpredictable, unusual,
out of which a new meaning of life may be evolved. In
such meetings we make up stories 1 about ourselves, as
Nadja did, who in her partial state of dementia was prob-
ably falsifying many things: but under such condi-
lies,

tions, reveal some of the deepest truths about ourselves,

truths we are unable to face when we talk with people who
know the facts of our biography and our background.
If the realist is concerned with establishing the contact
between a man and his life (the physical objects and forces
which touch his life), the surrealist is concerned with es-
tablishing the contact between a poet and his destiny (the
physical objects and the supernatural forces which form
his destiny). This latter, the coming together of an artist
and his destiny is always the mark of a great work of art. ,

One has to break with the things that are in order to unite \
 Breton 119

with the things that may be. Breton, in his first manifesto
defined man as that "definitivedreamer" (I'homme ce
reveur be poetry, has to be
definitif). Poetry, if there is to
conquered in the midst of great danger. It is comparable
to the chance meeting of a man and woman on a Paris
sidewalk, comparable to the danger for the man in the
mystery and the unknowable in the woman's past. Poetry
is the domain of the marvellous (le merveilleux) which

becomes so familiar that it becomes real. The surrealists

refrain from analyzing this experience of the marvellous
in order to safeguard and preserve the power of the im-
agination, and thereby belong to the tradition of the
visionaries (of the voyants) who see without explaining.
The initial question which Breton asks himself in Nadja:
"Who am I?" might easily be transcribed in the light of
the story by "Whom do I haunt? Whom do I go with?
Whom do I see in my dreams?" Because the ineffable or
the unspeakable is always stifling the poets, they have to
cheat. Surrealism is a most honorable form of cheating.
The poet jumps from the invisible to the visible, from
the angel to man, from Nadja or Melusine to woman. His
uniqueness, and this is discernible in such a work as Nadja,
is his symbol-making power of the savage forces which are

in us and which the social machine suppresses. So, the

poet is the prestidigitator but one who always works with
his sleeves rolled up. And this name of prestidigitator leads
us quite naturally to the case of Jean Cocteau.
 VII •
COCTEAU: the theatre

Like a true citizen and genius of the

Renaissance, like one of Castiglione's perfect courtiers,
Jean Cocteau is a man of many parts and diversified ac-
complishments. He is poet, critic, novelist, draftsman,
actor, play producer, movie director. But his greatest role,
that on which I believe his fame will have its surest foun-
dation, is playwright. Cocteau is essentially a man of the
theatre. The universe he has created is opposed to the
natural universe. He is seen best in the artificial light of

the stage, from the confined night world of the theatre

where a very secret alliance is formed between actors and
spectators, and where a still more mysterious connivance
is established between that ill-assorted but all necessary

trio: the author, the cast and the audience. I don't know

how the miracle is produced, but it often seems to be that

Cocteau is all three at once: magician, rabbit, and de-
lighted child-spectator.
For thirty years — impossible, by the way, that
it is this
boy is growing old —he has produced Paris regular in at
intervals plays of great diversity. Even a partial list is im-
pressive: the now distant Parade of 1917, a ballet written
 COCTEAU 121

in collaboration with Satieand Picasso and presented by

the Ballet Russe in the Chatelet;Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a
pantomime with collaboration, this time, from Darius Mil-
haud and Dufy, played by the clowns Fratellini at the
Com£die des Champs-Elys£es, in 1920; Les Marie's de la
Tour Eiffel, hailed in 1931, as a surrealist play; his three
plays on Greek themes, where Cocteau is the real fore-
runner of the contemporary interest in the Greek thea-
tre illustrated in the works of Giraudoux, Anouilh, and
Sartre: his plays Antigone of 1922, with music of Honeg-
ger and settings of Picasso; Orphee of 1926, played by
the Pitoeffs; La Machine Infernale of 1934, his greatest
achievement, perhaps, in the theatre. Then, just before
the war, in marked contrast to his Greek plays Les Parents
Terribles, an excursion to the "theatre de boulevard."
During the German occupation, his new work Renaud et
Armide, played at the Com^die-Franc.aise, seemed an ex-
ample of the French classical theatre. At the beginning of
1947, exactly thirty years after his debut with Parade,
Cocteau was holding first place in the theatrical season in
Paris by occupying two large theatres and selling out every
night: Les Parents Terribles, in a revival of tremendous
success at the Gymnase; and his newest play, L'Aigle a
Deux Tetes, in the Theatre H£bertot.
This last play, presented in New York in translation
and hence in inferior form, with Tallulah Bankhead, is
still a different kind of writing for Cocteau, a romantic

melodrama, and this time, more immediately than usual,

he converted a large public in Paris to his work. The crit-
ics have been divided, but that is usual in Cocteau's case,

and even those who dislike the play, seem certain that it
will continue for more than one hundred years. The story,
like that of Victor Hugo's Ruy Bias, out of which Cocteau
is now making a film, is the tragic love between a queen

and a man of the people. He said that he wanted to write

a, play about an anarchist queen and an anarchist with a
122 Age of Surrealism
royal soul. L'Aigle a Deux Tites is a new proof of Cocteau's
extraordinary sense of the theatre, of the uncanny rela-
tionship he is able to create between a text and a public.
His career, which one day will be studied with the mi-
nuteness and critical acumen it deserves, is one long series
of ruses in artificiality, so prepared and carried out that
he has become the legend of himself before his time. He
is the city or the urban poet. More than that, he is the poet

of a small closed-in space, of a room, of a child's room

peopled with phantoms. That room easily became the
stage, when the child grew up, where in the limited space
between the footlights and the backdrop he could con-
tinue to play with phantoms who spoke words he devised
for them, in order to create and recreate an illusory world.
A Cocteau play is the demonstration of a mystery. His
real voice has often been heard in actual performances of
the plays. He recited the part of the chorus in Antigone,
for example, through a hole in the center of the set. It is

his voice that heard in The Blood of a Poet. Even in

is

the most serious plays, the principal scenes are converted

into seances of prestidigitation through the writer's per-
sistent need to amaze and startle. The secret connivance
by which he captivates the public is always something in
the form of a miracle. His theatre is close, closer than that
of any other contemporary dramatist, to the original and
ancient function of drama: that of religious ceremonial,
during which the myths of the people will be reenacted.
People are joined with one another only in the presence
of a miracle. This function of the theatre was once purely
religious, and in the age of surrealism, Cocteau religiously
created magic out of the theatre. The simplest of objects,
when placed together in startling juxtapositions, create a
surrealist decor and upset the monotonous routine of daily
life.Cocteau presents the most commonplace objects, but
from such a new or surrealist angle, that the spectator may
well believe in the presentation of something new. Puns,
 Cocteau 123

enigmas, puzzles, oracles, tricks, coincidences, premoni-

tions are all means of satisfying our permanent appetite
for a miracle, for a wonder-working change of the usual.
This deep human need which the theatre is able to satisfy,
has always been consciously and brilliantly exploited by
Cocteau.
Not only in his plays, but in his life as well, Cocteau has
played the prestidigitator. By his voice when he is actor,
by opium, by his conversion, by his conversations, by
his
his remarkable friendships, he is constantly changing his
world. His personal genius is like the surrealist genius of
Giorgio di Chirico, who in his paintings creates a magical
world where a Greek temple may cohabit with a glass-
covered wardrobe, where a perspective and trompe-Voeil
convert a familiar world into a mystery.
Poetry Cocteau has called the secular mystery (le mys-
tere laic), because the poet, like the alchemist and the
astrologer, has his fetishes and his miraculous tricks. The
ultimate miracle to be achieved by a poem is its self-suffi-

ciency. Words meanings and connotations

lose their usual
by cutting themselves off from their native world, by sever-
ing all the bonds which hold them back. Then they are
able to mount platonically toward their essences away from
their objective forms. This theory invites the image of
magic. The poem finally exists alone, as a trick does, as a
house of cards, without any of the usual props. Words of
a poem bear the minimum of their daily alliances. This
research in magic might also be called the search of preci-
ositywhere a word will exist in a new and unpredictable
meaning.
Cocteau belongs natively not to Bohemian Montmartre
or Montparnasse, but to the section of the Champs-Elysees.
His Paris is the elegance of the Madeleine, or, in his won-
der world, the flora and fauna of the deep ocean. His leg-
end of scandal and surprise has been eagerly promulgated
by the Paris public, but behind the legend is a man guided
124 Age of Surrealism
by his sense of proportion and purity and labor. His debut
was like the eruption of a ballet russe. He was ushered into
the world of art as a brilliant feted genius. His first real
teacher was Picasso through whom avowedly he learned
the low depths of his bad taste and the universe of beauty
which up until his meeting with Picasso he had not known.
The deepest part of our life seems to be formed by an en-
counter with some person, very often a chance encounter
with the one being who is able to illuminate what we had
always been looking at without seeing.
The early examples of painting and music, especially
those of Picasso and Erik Satie, turned Cocteau, at the
very beginning of his career, in 1917-18, into a critic. His
critical method, which he has developed throughout his
life, is comparable to his poetic method in that it must per-

form a kind of chemical action whereby the critic will dis-

cover the unknown and hidden forces of a work of art,
whereby he will reveal the spiritual climate pervading the
work. This definition of the artist by which he is seen to
be the man in contact with the obscure powers which
engender an art may explain somewhat the statement of
Picasso that the technical aspect of the profession is what
can't be learned: le metier c'est ce qui ne s'apprend pas.
By metier is usually meant the rules and habits, all the
mechanical devices by which a work is assured. In other
words, the metier is usually that which is taught, and
Picasso, in his maxim, seemingly overthrows a well-estab-
lished belief. The career of Cocteau illustrates perhaps
what Picasso means. Each new book of his has been dif-
ferent from all the others. The metier in this sense is the
art, which is not an experience but an experiment, an

attempt, a risk. The works of Cocteau form a series of at-

tempts and experiments, of tricks that may come off or
may not. And this might well be said for Picasso and for
every great artist who inevitably gambles on a chemical
formula.
 Cocteau 125

II
From the work of Cocteau, which has by
now reached considerable proportions, I propose to choose
two examples, a play and a film, to illustrate the miracu-
lous aspect of his art. They are both defiances of public
opinion, the play in the 1920's and the movie in the 1930's,
and they have both by now won a public for themselves.
They are two works on the subject of death, or at least
they are works which make a magical representation of the
world of death.
The play, Orphe'e,was first performed at the Theatre
des Arts in 1926, with Georges Pitoeff as Orpheus and his
wife Ludmilla Pitoeff as Eurydice. The tragedy, as the
prologue tells us, is played very high up in the air. That
means, its action is as purely magical as could be devised.
Like a poem, in the Cocteau sense, it has cut itself off from
all material and realistic strategies, and, like some trapeze

formation, it is enacted in a sphere other than the usual

one. And yet, as in a tight-rope stunt, we recognize familiar
beings and occurrences: a man, a woman, a horse, a win-
dow-repairer. But the danger exists throughout the tragedy
that the players may fall, and our excitement is enhanced
by knowing that there is no net to catch them.
Orpheus and Eurydice are engaged in a domestic quar-
rel. On the one hand, Orpheus is under the spell of a horse,

an unusual horse which has given him such a strange mes-

sage that he is it in poetry. And Eu-
going to immortalize
rydice is under the wicked woman in town, Aglao-
spell of a
nice, who seems to be bewitching all the women. When
Orpheus recites to his wife the mysterious phrase of the
horse, Madame Eurydice reviendra des enfers ("Mme.
Eurydice will come back from hell"), the whole action is
thrown into the future, or higher into the air than ever.
The sense of the supernatural grows stronger and we are
willingly convinced that the actions we watch are being
126 Age of Surrealism
dictated by the gods. The context seems to be both super-
natural and comically natural. Orpheus as well as the spec-
need of a bomb or a scandal to clear the air.
tators feel the
The when Orpheus darkly suggests that
quarrel culminates
Eurydice breaks a pane of glass each day in order to have
the window repairer come up. He himself breaks the win-
dow this day and leaves his wife with Heurtebise. We be-
gin to see the multiple services and uses of this man. He
has brought from Aglaonice some poison, in the form of
a piece of sugar, for the horse, and a self -addressed enve-
lope in which Eurydice is to return acompromising letter.
Just before the poison is administered to the horse, Or-
pheus returns unexpectedly for his birth certificate. Heur-
tebise jumps on a chair and pretends to be busy at the
broken window. When Orpheus absent-mindedly removes
the chair, the man remains quite placidly suspended in the
air, and in a few moments the chair is put back under him.

But Eurydice has seen all. It was not enough to have a

speaking horse in the house, now she has a friend who is

able to float in the air. We begin to realize that the large

panes of glass which Heurtebise carries strapped on his
back are perhaps wings. Orpheus has gone out again, but
Eurydice, for whom all mystery is an enemy, has lost con-
fidence in her friend. She licks the envelope for Aglaonice,
only to collapse a few minutes later. She has been poisoned
by Aglaonice who with her wicked women are gradually
taking on in the play the form of the bacchantes. Heurte-
bise puts Eurydice in her room and goes out to find
Orpheus.
The action of the play has been slowly accelerating ever
since the beginning, but we become especially aware of its
increased tempo in the next central scene, when Death, as
a beautiful woman in evening dress, with her two aids
dressed as surgeons, Raphael and Azrael, come in to per-
form the death Death first gives the sugar to
of Eurydice.
the horse who disappears, and then enacts a ceremonial
 Cocteau 127

on the absent body of Eurydice.

half-surgical, half-mythical
It is over and they have gone, when Orpheus and Heurte-

bise return. When Orpheus in his grief swears that he will

take his wife away from death, Heurtebise says that there
is a way, since Death forgot to take with her her rubber

gloves which are still on the table. The way to Death is

through the mirror, and Orpheus, wearing the rubber
gloves, enters the mirror, and disappears for a second of
our time when the mailman delivers a letter to Heurte-
bise. Orpheus comes back through the mirror leading
Eurydice. Only one detail has to be remembered: Orpheus
must never look at his wife or she will disappear. But the
myth is inexorable, for this is exactly what happens dur-
ing the course of the renewed domestic quarrel. Orpheus,
alone with Heurtebise, now reads the letter which had
come when he was in the realm of the dead. It is anony-
mous and announces that Aglaonice and her women, in-
furiated by discovering that the first letters of Orpheus'
celebrated sentence, Madame Eurydice reviendra des en-
ters, spell a vile word, are marching on his house and want
his death. The play ends rapidly with the murder of
Orpheus by the bacchantes and with the disappearance of
his body. Only his head remains and finds its place on a
pedestal. The last scene is in heaven where Heurtebise
is undisguisedly the guardian angel and is taking lunch

with his two wards, Orpheus and Eurydice, who have

finallybrought peace to their domestic situation.
Such an action as I have just outlined, permits Cocteau
to treat lightly and subtly very profound preoccupations
and problems and causes of human anxiety. As children
often do, Cocteau willfully tries to puzzle and perturb by
the fantastic secrecy of his writing. A sentence in Breton's
manifesto might apply to Orphee: "What is admirable in
the fantastic is that it ends by becoming real." We are so
accustomed to seeing miracles all around us, that we cease
calling them miraculous. Picasso once said that a miracle
128 Age of Surrealism
occurred every time we take a bath. It is a miracle that a
man doesn't dissolve in a tub of water as a piece of sugar
does.
Orphee is on death wherein Cocteau mi-
a meditation
raculously rescues death from disappearing in a void. We
might say that in the play death escapes death or the fate
of nothingness. Cocteau can usually be found wandering
between life and the void. This is what is meant by Coc-
teau's angelism, or the lesson of equilibrium he is always
teaching. His favorite setting is the circus tight-rope, with
heaven above and death below. He is the Parisian artist,
the upstart who was trained by severe muses, but who has
rid himself of all pedagogic traces. His simplicity is very
deceptive. Orphee should be played with the swiftness and
directness and ease of a trick in prestidigitation. But it is
a play of condensed richness, a surrealist enactment of the
most tender and the most profound myth of mankind: the
descent of a living man into the realm of Death and his
return from there. Men cannot accept truth directly. Coc-
teau says in one of his aphorisms that truth is too naked:
it has to be at least partially clothed in order to attract or

excite men. (La verite est trop nue; elle n'excite pas les
hommes.) It is almost in these terms that the surrealists
attacked realism.
I know of no more pathetic or moving interpretation of
death in French literature than Cocteau's Orphee. This
may seem like an exaggerated claim, but no other work
succeeds so well as Orphee does for me in making of the
myth of death, or the fantasy of death, something extraor-
dinarily real. At the beginning of the play Orpheus is at-
tracted toward death by the horse whose messages come
from the realm of the dead, and then he is attracted toward
it, more insistently still, by the death of Eurydice. Cocteau

conceives of death as a magical substitution for life, as a

passage through a mirror. The which separate life
limits
from death lose in his play all hardness and precision. The
 Cocteau 129

swiftness of the action and the mathematical neatness with

which everything is evolved are in themselves sufficient to
create the illusion of the supernatural. Orpheus and Euryd-
ice fulfill their destiny on time, as Cocteau, who has very
little sense of the mystical, places his bet on the magic of
the myth: conundrums, mirrors, poison.

Ill
Cocteau's film, Le Sang d'un Poete, is a
further preoccupation with the mysterious properties of
statues and objects, and especially a further meditation on
death. The title of the work is explained in the preface of
the film. A poem, it says, is like heraldry or a coat of arms
on which the symbols may be deciphered after the shed-
ding of blood. The film is dedicated to certain painters of
heraldry and blazons: Pisanello, Paolo Uccello, Piera della
Francesca. (One remembers the surrealists' admiration for
Uccello.)
Here, more solemnly than in Orphee, Cocteau defines the
poet as hierophant or as a priest whose function is to ini-
tiate the public to mysteries. The film, which is made pub-
lic, isabout a poet whose secret symbols are distinguish-
able only after the expenditure of his blood. This is not

unlike the hermeticism practised by Mallarme in his priest-

ess Herodiade. Nor is it unlike the art of surrealists who,
content with expressing the language and image of dreams
and of free association, do not seek to interpret the dreams
or the images of their work. A mystery exists in itself and
must be felt as a mystery. And thus with a poem, which if
explicated and paraphrased ceases to be a poem. Fantasy
may be enjoyed only as long as it remains fantasy and
totally closed off from the logical and the rational. A poem,
a mystery, a fantasy, or the film, Le Sang d'un Poete, may
appear at first too inaccessible, too personal or private in its
symbols. And precisely this charge was made of Cocteau's
film: it was denounced as oneiric, as being incompre-
130 Age of Surrealism
hensive to anyone save Cocteau himself. But surrealism,
largely because of its important affiliation with psycho-
analysis, has taught that what is often called a personal
symbol, occurring in the dreams of one individual, is really
universal. We meet the past and the future in our dreams
where nothing is absolutely private. Time has a oneness, a
uniqueness. We actually live many more lives than our
own. We are responsible for many more souls than our
own.
The tower which we see falling at the beginning of the
film and whose collapse is completed at the end of the
film, indicates that what we see in between is a dream or
some psychic experience which cannot be denoted by the
usual concept of time. The rapid tempo of Orphee and of
Cocteau's plays in general, is here pushed even farther
thanks to the art of the cinema. We have to suspend our
usual belief about time in this film, where there is no date
and where there are costumes of different periods, as well
as our belief about natural laws, because we see a man go
through a mirror as if it were water, as Orpheus did in
the play, and a young girl fly up to the ceiling. Cocteau
never forgets for long his symbols of deep-sea diving and
of tight-rope walking.
I. The film has four parts, the first of which is

called: La main b lessee ou la cicatrice du poete ("the

wounded hand or the poet's scar"). At the beginning of
this part we hear Cocteau's voice say: "While the cannon
at Fontenoy thundered in the distance, in a simple room.
..." And the story begins with a young man, obviously
the poet-hero, drawing sketches of a face. He is Cocteau, at
least spiritually, because on his shoulder he bears Cocteau's
star-signature as well as a scar, and graphically he is the
movie hero, resembling Rudolph Valentino. After a knock
is heard on his door, he notices that the mouth of his draw-

ing is living, and tries to rub it off with his hand. The
visitor, who is horrified, leaves almost immediately, and
 COCTEAU 131

the artist sees that the mouth is now on the palm of his
hand. It begins to breathe and ask for "air." The man
kicks an opening through the window and puts his arm
outside. But the mouth remains on the hand. With it the
poet caresses his body and falls asleep. On awakening
now
he places his hand on the face of a woman's statue and the
living mouth is transferred to hers. Her voice is heard to
say: "Isn't it foolish to dry oneself on furniture? Isn't it
foolish to awaken a statue from its sleep of centuries?"
The —
the mouth, which orig-
central symbol of this part
inally drawn by the artist on paper, and then adheres to
is

the palm of his hand and is finally clapped on the lips of a

statue —
combines the experience of eroticism and poetry.
The mouth both kisses and speaks. It is used both to arouse
the sensations and to transform them into art. It might
well be a convenient symbol for the dual nature of art: the
madness and the reason of art, the Dionysian and Apollo-

nian aspects of art. It would represent the indulgence of

sensuality and the origins of form. This first episode is also
reminiscent of the myth of Pygmalion, whereby the cre-
ated work of the artist takes on a life of its own and liter-

ally ends by transcending the life of the artist. This is im-

plied in the mysterious words of the statue, which awakens
from a long sleep. A statue, as it is being made, is enslaved
to the genius of the sculptor. It is almost victimized. But
when the statue is completed and released, it becomes, in
its turn, the victor and the master. The "sleep of centu-
ries" is the sleep of the subconscious which awakens in
dreams only to dominate and victimize the sleeper.
II. The second episode is entitled: Les murs
ont-ils des oreillesf ("Have the walls ears?") The mouth of
the statue says: "Do you think it is so easy to get rid of a
wound, to close the mouth of a wound?" The room is more
than ever a prison for the artist's isolation. But the door
becomes a mirror and he dives through the mirror as
through water, as Orpheus did in the play. And this time,
132 Age of Surrealism
we follow the poet into his hell which appears as a hotel
corridor. He becomes a voyeur in looking through four
keyholes as he moves down the corridor.
1. In the first room he sees a Mexican
being assassinated by a firing squad. The film is then re-
versed and we go backwards in the action of the shooting
scene. The voice says: "At daybreak, Mexico, the boule-
vard Arago, the ditches at Vincennes and a hotel are equiv-
alent." The seeming free associations of four places are
united by the ever-imminent possibility of life becoming
death. Life continues by the very cycle of life-death-life.
So, time continues and is reversed also. This second corri-
dor scene is a kind of dream within a dream, or a movie
within the movie. The eye of the artist-dreamer is the cam-
era and his brain is filled with the pictures it records.
2. The second room which the poet-
voyeur observes is an opium den. Here again, it is the vi-
sion of a dream, or the dream of a dream which he sees.
An unwinking eye looks back at him. In a dream one is
seen by what one sees.
3. The third room is called lecons de

vol ("flying lessons") in which we see a young girl pun-

ished by a woman who is obviously a schoolteacher armed
with a whip. The girl rises up to the ceiling from where
she is able to mock her teacher. In dreams we are able to
do what we dream of doing in life.

4. The fourth scene, Un rendez-vous

desespere, is the only one in which the poet ceases being
a voyeur in order to participate in the action. We see a
bull's eye revolving on a screen, a sofa with the head of a
woman and legs of a man, a hand holding a revolver, and
we hear a voice which gives the command to fire. After the
explosion, the poet appears dressed with laurel and a robe
— and the voice says: "I open the way to glory." Then he
tears his laurel and robe, and returns through the water-
mirror, as we hear the words: a typical Cocteau pun: "Mir-
 Cocteau 133

rors ought to reflect a little before giving back their

images." With an axe, the poet destroys the statue. And
the voice ominously warns: "In breaking a statue, you risk
becoming one yourself." (A casser une statue, on risque
d'en devenir une.)
These two episodes are united, and magically so, be-
cause one is the world of the living and the other the world

of the dead. They both take place in rooms or closed-in

spaces which emphasize the mystery on which they are
founded. The four scenes in the hotel all bear some rela-
tionship to death: 1. the execution of the Mexican peasant;
2. the opium death of consciousness and the senses; 3. the

death by terror and sadism in the schoolteacher scene; 4.

and finally the suicide of the poet. If the first episode of
the speaking statue represents, among other things, the
Pygmalion myth, the second episode of the hotel corridor
represents the after Pygmalion. After the myth of the
myth
creation and comes the myth of destruction and death.
life

In his act of creation, a poet is inexorably destroyed by

what he creates.
III. The last two episodes are united as the first
two are, and the setting this time is outside. In the part
called "The snowballfight" (La bataille des boules de
neige),Cocteau uses the opening scene of his novel, Les
En]ants Terribles, and even the name of one of the charac-
ters, Dargelos. During the course of the snowball fight be-
tween school boys playing in a courtyard, a bronze statue
disappears asif it had been made of snow. Dargelos, "the

fighting cock of the class," the bully, stands beside the va-
cant pedestal, strong and defiant, almost as if the hardness
of the statue had gone into him. After Dargelos hurls a
snowball, which he has made hard and icy, at his friend, he
runs off. The voice says: "The snowball marked the heart
of the victim, and marked the blouse of the victim erect in
his solitude, the dark creator whom nothing protects."
The fatal snowball is probably the origin of the poet's
134 Age of Surrealism
wound which we saw in the first episode where the hero
appeared naked to the waist. The wound on the boy's heart
changed to his shoulder in manhood and is confused with
the star, which is Cocteau's personal signature of his work.
The physical snowballwound symbolizes the spiritual
heart wound of the boy who was in love with Dargelos,
and hence victimized by him. Later, when the boy victim
becomes poet- victor, the wound becomes star: the boy be-
comes Cocteau. The boy, once victimized by the "coq" of
the became Cocteau (a pun possible only in French).
class,

The experience which killed him, or which caused

literal
him to suffer, is transformed into the art-experience which
makes him creator. In the first two episodes, the action per-
—
petrated by the artist on the statue first, in giving it life,
—
and second, in destroying it is now recapitulated in the
third episode, which is a throwback to childhood when
Dargelos, the hero-bully of the class, inspires love in his
schoolmate and then kills him with a hard snowball.
IV. The fourth and last episode of the film, La
Carte Volee ("The Stolen Card"), is a continuation of the
third. After seeing a statue come to life, we now witness
the reverse: a living boy turn into a statue. The murdered
boy lies on the snow, a kind of statue in death, with which
the slayer, now the poet, is to be victimized. When the poet
grows up, he both Dargelos and the boy slain by Dar-
is

gelos. A card table has been placed over the boy's body,
and a scene takes place strongly reminiscent of the scene
of Death and her two aids in Orphee. At the table, playing
cards, are the hero, dressed in tails, and a woman in eve-
ning dress, who is the statue. At some distance from them
are two groups of people in open loges who follow the spec-
tacle indifferently. The poet draws out from the coat of
the boy under the table the ace of hearts. Any human ex-
perience, hidden under its symbol, might be compared
with a card trick, whereby an artist both realizes himself
as artist and deceives the spectators. The people in the
 Cocteau 135

loges represent the public's incapacity to follow the poet.

A naked Negro, whose oiled body is in appropriate contrast
with the snow of the scene, is the guardian angel or even

possibly Michael himself, who takes the dead boy away.

St.

He plays the part of Heurtebise in Orphee in directing the

action of the denouement. He takes the ace of hearts from
the poet who shoots himself. The woman walks off and we
see at the end of the film the bull of Europa, the lyre of
the poet, the head of the woman now become a statue, and
we hear the voice saying: ennui mortel de Vimmortalite
("the mortal boredom of immortality").

IV
Le Sang d'un Poete is a story in reverse
action. We begin by seeing the poet. The first episode is

dominated by the symbol of the mouth, which is the symbol

of poetic speech. It is the story of poetic creation. The
second episode, dominated by the symbol of the eye, is

the effort of the poet to see into himself, to see back of the
present and the symbol-laden poetry he is composing. The
third episode is the specific scene of childhood which has
dominated the poet's life, the scene in which he received
his poet's wound, and which he has come upon in this deep
exploration of himself and his past. Here the sense of touch
is the most exalted in the film, both the sensation of mak-

ing the hard snowball and of feeling its impact. The fourth
episode is apothesis. The card trick might be taken as the
symbol of art, surrounded by its various signs of immor-
tality:the angel, Europa, the lyre.
In a way, the film is a season in hell. But hell is con-
ceived of as being within a man, an inner darkness of
strange moving figures, quite independent from any theo-
and not only the
logical hell. All the writings of Cocteau,
specificworks of Orphee and Le Sang d'un Poete, raise
the problem of artistic subterfuge, of the poetic lie or
transformation. It is a central problem for every artist.
136 Age of Surrealism
Montaigne, Rousseau, and Gide advocate the need of
confessing everything. A literary work should be a public
avowal. Flaubert said just the opposite. In many of his
letters to Louise Colet, he emphasizes his unwillingness
to reveal anything of his personal life in his writings. The
surrealist method of confession is the dream relation, the
bringing to life of all the shadowy figures who stalk us in
the obscure parts of our being. The pure method
surrealist
would be the direct narration of these experiences as they
come to us in free association. Cocteau takes this method
one step farther, or leads it to its necessary conclusion, by
imposing on the confessional dream-world a very deliber-
ate and calculated form. His works are formalized by a
provocative relationship with the persistent myths. Myths
come to life over and over when an artistic work has
enough formal solidity to contain them.
The difference between Montaigne's confession and a
surrealist confession might be the difference between
sincerity and lucidity. It is one thing to be sincere and
another thing to be sufficiently lucid to have something
to be sincere about. There is also the problem of having
someone to be sincere to. Pascal pointed out, for example,
that the Catholic Church doesn't oblige the sinner to tell
his sins to everyone. Gide has pointed out that lying isn't
one of the capital sins, and that Christ never formally
forbade lying.
In the soul of the lucid man, of the man who heeds both
his conscious and subconscious states, there seems to be
an equal proportion of tragedy and ambiguity. Much of
surrealist art and Cocteau's theatre are concerned with the
existence of ambiguity. In Cocteau's use of fables, he snares
heroes, Orpheus, Oedipus, Pygmalion, Galahad, who are
too gigantic for us and who have to be reduced somewhat
by means of comedy and enigma. In one of his poems, he
says: Je suis un mensonge qui dit la verite. ("I am a lie
which is speaking the truth." Opera.) Art may well be that
 Cocteau 137

form of a lie which leads us closer to truth. Montaigne in

speaking of the make-up which women use, their disguise,
as he callsmakes the point that thereby deception is
it,

honorable. We are led to the truth by a false door. (Ill, V)

The main struggle we go through each day is with those
forces which prevent us from being authentic. The sur-
realist believes that this struggle is resolved in the method
of free association where we may have a revelation of the
basic truths about ourselves. Of course, very few are able
to stand these truths. Surrealism was first attacked on the
grounds that it was not understandable. Then, when
people began to realize that it was understandable, it was
attacked on the grounds that it revealed too much, that
there are some secrets about us which should be left
secrets. As soon as truth begins to invade the realm of the
taboo, it will be ostracized.
have often thought that The Blood of a Poet, and for
I

that matter, all the writings of Jean Cocteau,might be ex-

plained in terms of the Greek hero Philoctetes, the warrior
who is wounded and who holds the bow in his hand.
Philoctetes relates theambiguous myth of the genius, who
is both strength and weakness, who is both power and im-
potency. It would seem that the genius of the artist has
a propitiatory or sacrificial origin. Genius is allied with
illness, and in many cases literally with the loss of blood.

Strength cannot exist without mutilating itself. The writer

is like the trapeze-artist who has to practice day long
all

in order not to break his neck at the evening performance.

And so, the artist holds the very ancient privilege of fool
and and quasi-prophet. He reappears today as clown,
idiot
voyou, voyeur, card-dealer, and as that newest incarnation
of magician: the movie director.
 VIII -
ELUARD: the doctrine on love

i
In February of 1917, Max Ernst, a Ger-
man artilleryman, was engaged in bombarding, at the dis-
tance of a kilometer, a trench in which Paul Eluard, a
French infantry was standing guard. Three years
soldier,
later, Max and Paul Eluard,
Ernst, the surrealist painter,
the surrealist poet, were friends in Paris, engaged in a
movement which for them went far beyond aesthetic doc-
trine and criteria. It was taking on for them the form and
the potentiality of the total emancipation of man.
It seemed for a moment, at least in the early part of its
history, that surrealism was obliterating the solitude of the
artist, of that special kind of solitude which I described in

the second chapter as the most important characteristic

of the modern artist. True poetry for the surrealists was
seen to be a part of every force which was working for the
liberation of man. The poet was no longer the inspired
man; he was the one who inspires. And because he is
involved in the life of every man, in the common life, his
art seeks to reduce the differences which exist between
men. The most exultant claim which the surrealists made
for poetry is this absolute force it possesses for purifying
 Eluard 139

man. Eluard and the other surrealist poets often repeated

Lautreamont's statement that poetry must be made by all
and not by one man. If surrealism is, according to one of
its major propositions, an instrument of knowledge, it

must work to reveal the profoundest conscience of man.

Knowledge of self will lead to knowledge of all men and
from there to the union of all men.
If we say that the greatest fear of man is that of losing his
freedom, we may say the same thing about poetry.
Throughout its long history, which appears to be quite as
long as the history of man himself, poetry has always
trembled at not possessing sufficient freedom, at having
to give up some precious part of itself to the institutions
of man: to religion, to politics, to morality. Poetry fights
for its purity as man fights for his freedom, and both are
usually degraded. The history of poetry (and we might
say the same thing about the history of man) is so exclu-
sively the history of its degradations, when it was made the
accomplice in very subtly arranged compromises, that we
hardly know what poetry, in its pure state, is. Poetry has
been allowed to exist only when it would renounce or en-
slave —
some part of its being. We will let you sing, it was
told, only if you sing such and such a subject and only if
you sing it in a specific way.
The enslavement of poetry parallels the enslavement of
man. Its history might be written in terms of the gains
and losses of man's freedom. It embraces so generously the
problems of man that it is impossible to separate them, that
we cannot speak of one without speaking of the other.
It has often occurred to me in reading surrealist texts that
surrealism considers the history of man as if it were a long
sleep filled with the phantom-like movements and patterns
created by the characters of a myth. At the beginning of
time, as soon as man felt himself a being distinct from the
universe, his conscience was formed, and the main activity
of man's conscience has been the engendering of his myths.
 —

140 Age of Surrealism

In his myths, he accomplished the universe, by returning to
it and by seeking to establish his relationship to it. Man's

poetry is a very obscure and very incomplete search for

precisely this knowledge of what his relationship to the
universe really is.

But poetry may not be considered a history or a myth

or the history of a myth. The only thing we can feel certain
—
about poetry and to this the experiment of surrealism
has made an illuminating and reassuring contribution
is that its essence has something to do with the present.

It has something to do with the revelation of the eternal

present. Poetry must recapitulate that feeling of oneness,

that reality of the ego which was the birth of man's con-
science at the beginning of time. Poetry is a kind of ex-
way back to
plosion of that ego, a release of the ego in its

the Like every explosion, poetry takes place

universe.
after a period of compression and repression when dis-
parate elements can no longer cohabit together, when
they must break asunder and return to their primitive
sources, as fire returns to the air. This image may help
us to understand the surrealist belief that poetry is born

from the destruction of principles, of superstitious rule

and artistic prejudice. The surrealists called for the sui-
cide of art and the renascence of poetry in the same
way that they called for the demolition of social and
political barriers and the emancipation of man.
The surrealist poets, Breton, Eluard, Tzara, Soupault,
continued the tradition of the voyants of the 19th century.
In the wake of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme, poetry
continues to be for them the effort to find a lost language.
The image or the metaphor is the result of a certain kind of
chemistry. In symbolism, the chemistry was too conscious
of its means and ends. Surrealism tried to go beyond the
elaborate consciousness of symbolism to the very source of
poetic imagination, to the very sleep in which the myths
of man are preserved.
 Eluard 141

The miracle of poetry or the wonder of its history is, I

suppose, its uselessness, its total lack of value. In the light

of certain theories of history in which man is characterized
by an economical struggle for survival, the persistence of
poetry is a difficult fact to account for. Poetry is the history
of man's disinterestedness. Among all the occupations of
man, which have no value or use in a material sense, the
art of poetry is the most impressive. And he comes to it,

usually at the end of adolescence, just at a time when he

might well be considering more practical matters. Most
boys from fourteen to eighteen spend a good deal of time
dreaming and day-dreaming. A dream, however, is not a
poem. These boys become poets from eighteen to twenty-
two, if they convert their dreams into images. It has been
said that it is no proof that a man is a poet if he writes
poems at twenty. The proof is if he writes them at thirty
and at fifty. The period of images, which is the period of
poetry, may be succeeded by a period of thought. The poet
may become critic or philosopher. The philosopher is an
old poet whose communication is no longer made by use
of images. The engagement of thought is one of the surest
means of defeating the anguish of solitude. The limitless
solitude of Baudelaire, for example, was never defeated
by his activity of poet. The reason for this has perhaps
something to do with the nature of the image itself.
I feel there is some connection between the limitless

solitude of the poet and the magical properties of the

image which are, in another sense, limitless. In this effort
to define the image, I am thinking particularly of certain
emphases which the surrealists gave to its character. In the
poetic images, everything is comparable to everything else:
Evening may be spread out against the sky, as Eliot says,
like a patient etherized upon a table. In the image every-
thing finds an echo and a resemblance. It may be denned

by its power becoming and discovering, by its limitless-

of
ness. It contains both resemblances and oppositions, and
142 Age of Surrealism
illustrates what Baudelaire called in his Spleen de Paris:
the logic of the absurd (la logique de VAbsurde).
As the dreamer preceded the poet, so the dream precedes
the poem. Behind every poem exists a vision which is
dead and consumed. A dream sensitizes the universe, but
a poem desensitizes it and permits man to see a different
world, or to see the same world differently. The greatest
privilege which the artist enjoys, and we might say it is
his only privilege, is that of being himself and of being
anyone else he wishes to be. The poet's means of exercising
this privilege is the creation of an image. The image has
the same compulsion for the poet that color has for the
painter and that three dimensional form has for the sculp-
tor. When the surrealist painters undertook to illustrate

the surrealist poets, they made no attempt to describe the

images of the poems; they created further images which
serve to enlarge the meaning of the verbal images. This
process may be studied in Picasso's drawings for Max
Jacob (Le Siege de Jerusalem), in the drawings of Ernst
for Breton's Chateau etoile, in Tanguy's illustrations for
P£ret (Dormir dormir dans les pierres), in Marcoussis' il-

lustrations for Alcools of Apollinaire, in Dali's pictures for

Lautreamont, and in many other collaborative works.
An image is a pure creation of the mind. No surrealist
was ever able to create, as he would have liked to, a purely
spontaneous image, whose nature was entirely private and
oneiric. The memory of each one of them was so densely
crowded with images from the romantic poets and others,
that their images are often traceable. But their images are
recognizably surrealistic in their quality of precipitates.
They are more diaphanous and imponderable than the
images of other poets. Their aim is to avoid the danger of
using the image to communicate some point. The image
must not be useful;must be innocent. Surrealist art must
it

be stripped it must never seek to prove any-

of rhetoric:
thing. The great common error which the surrealists never
 Eluard 143

ceased attacking was the belief that language was created

in order to help men in their relationships with one an-
other. This was an aberration, for Andre Breton. The
highest goal of language, for which it was created, was the

attainment to a disinterested purity. So, poetry is some-

thing other than language. It is the deviation from ordi-
nary human speech, a deviation in which words are juxta-
posed and pressed against one another in unusual combina-
tions. If ordinary language is the communication of what
is thinkable with what is thinkable, poetry is the communi-

cation of what is thinkable with what is unthinkable.

In the creation of romantic poetry, the initiative was
always taken by the poet's sentiment and feeling. Then
the words were found to correspond to or to translate the
sentiment. In surrealist poetry the initiative is left to the
words which then embark upon an extraordinary adven-
ture of discovering the sensation or the dream or the ob-
scure experience of the poet. In romantic art, sentiments
registerand engender words. In surrealist art, words, the
most innocent ones which form with the minimum of pre-
meditation, engender and register the sensations and the
experiences of the poet. So, it might be said that the poet's
words, and the images which magically come together in
his words, construct the poet. He is made out of his words.
There is no such thing immediate poetry or
literally as
the spontaneous creation of a poem, but there is a species
of passivity and of submission by which the poet is worked
upon, which, beyond any doubt, plays an important part
in the creation of a poem.

II
Modern poetry has been obsessed by a
search for purity. During eighty years this obsession has
been constantly expressed in such poems as L'Invitation
au Voyage of Baudelaire, Herodiade of Mallarme\ and in
all of his writings for that matter, in Fragments du Narcisse
144 Age of Surrealism
and La Jeune Par que of Valery. These poems, which are
among the finest poetic achievements of our age, have led
the art of poetry almost to a mortal extremity where its

very attainment to purity seems equivalent to self-annihi-

lation. In all of these poems, the purity of the formal
expression is inextricably allied with the theme of the ab-
sence of love. The figure of Narcissus, of self-love, of eva-
sion of love in the ordinary sense, has settled down over the
poets' obsession for purity and justified it by serving as its
solitary and deepened myth. Andre Gide, in his early books
especially, exalted the thirst for love and depreciated its
satisfaction. Narcissus replaced Eros as god for poets. The
art of poetry became equivalent to the evasion of life, the
evasion of living by assuming the ordinary responsibilities.
Love was not celebrated as much as the fear of love. The.
poet would dare to fall in love only with the phantom of
an unknown woman met in his dreams. This is the subject
of Verlaine's Reve Familier:

Je fais souvent ce reve etrange et penetrant

D'une femme inconnue et que j'aime et qui m'aime.

The solitude of the genius was more firmly barricaded

than ever, and his poetry was reproached for its hermeti-
cism, for its purifactory ideal which had driven out all the
familiar stories and sensations. Rimbaud was admired as
the poet-magician, the poet-alchemist, and not as the poet-
lover. The last of the great love poets was Baudelaire, but
his conception of love had been so tragic and anguished,
that he had perhaps been more responsible than anyone
else for the poets' abandonment of love.
The surrealist revolution, when it first broke out in its

eloquent statements and histrionic behavior, called for

total liberty in all human activities, including the activ-
ity of love. At the beginning, this freedom of love, in the
surrealist sense, seemed to be fairly synonymous with the
 Eluard 145

freedom for licence or licentiousness. Love was an experi-

ment with unusual sensations. Rimbaud's celebrated
phrase, "the derangement of the senses," was easily inter-
preted as being an encouragement to the practice of per-
verted forms of love. The problem of love in the lives
of Lautreamont and Rimbaud —
a problem which I
should like to say will always remain obscure and inde-
cipherable but which if we knew more about it and if we
understood more deeply the meaning of love, would appear
more sane and universal than many now believe seemed —
to justify waywardness and experimentation in love. But
this initial intoxication with freedom in love never de-
veloped to any degree within the ranks of the surrealists.
The two leaders especially, Breton and Eluard, due
perhaps to the very freedom they felt about such problems,
discovered in the experience and the meaning of love a
lesson of purity quite opposed to the purity of love's
absence. They discovered (or rediscovered) the pure love
of woman and have sung of this love as ecstatically and
vibrantly as any Ronsard. Their very intoxication with
liberty seems to find an outlet in their love of woman, in
their joy over this love. The secrets of the human spirit
were revealed to the surrealists, one after the other in
accordance with the surrealist process of free association,
of spontaneous and involuntary revelation. Their concept
of woman seems to spring from the deepest part of their
subconscious and to rise up to their consciousness with a
primitive and almost sacred insistence. It would not be
exaggerated to say that the surrealists have contributed to
a rehabilitation in literature of the role of woman as the
fleshly and spiritual partner of man.
Love, even when it is treated negatively as a force in
absentia, is the essential theme of all poetry and all

literature. Love is at the same time, paradoxically,

. . .

our surest way of escaping from the world and our pro-
foundest way of knowing the world. Paul Eluard is perhaps
146 Age of Surrealism
the most eminent among the surrealists, as D. H. Lawrence
is perhaps the most eminent modern writer outside the
ranks of the surrealists, who have maintained an extraor-
dinary and lofty awareness of this truth. They both knew
that behind the multiple hyperboles and absurdities of
love, behind the delirious profusions of love, it is the one
force in man capable of breaking through the iron gates of
language and reason: the two obstacles to love which have
been inherited from man's age-old fear of love and its
falsely named debilitating power.
I thought for a long time that Eluard's particular con-
ception of love was comparable to the system of chivalric
love, to something quite similar to courtly love of the
early romances of the troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo
of Guinizelli and Cavalcanti, where man lives in an idola-
trous submission to his lady. There are moments in his
poetry when this comparison might justifiably be made.
But on the whole, I now see his conception of love possess-
ing a somewhat different emphasis. Woman is quite often
absent from his poetry, but his love for her has made prac-
tically impossible the kind of solitude which is so charac-
teristic of previous poets. The experience of love has finally
dominated the experience of solitude, or has made out of
the literal experience of solitariness another kind of posses-
sion. The eternal presentness of love is the new experience
which Eluard explores in his verse.

Ill
It would almost seem that his volume of
1926, Capitate de la Douleur, is a new approach to the
doctrine of love, a new which love is
erotology, one in
reconsidered as the great cosmic drama for man and in
which the particular role of woman is accorded a new pre-
eminence.
Eluard's thought plays with the reality of love as if it
were the poet's magnet. He moves toward it and then
 Eluard 147

moves away. Although his amorous ecstasy is always severe

and illuminated, one feels that love itself is an experience
which has taken place at a great distance from the earth
and beyond the limits of time, in some dark abyss. Love is
the experience greater than man himself which he records
and reproduces. It is older than he and more rigorously
solitary than he is. It is also that experience in the midst
of which man is unable to rest or establish himself with
respect to space and time. Love is so perfectly composed
of desire and despair that it is always in motion. Man is
unable to fix himself within any part of it. He lives and
grows and changes in love. And poetry is his metaphysical
book on love, his guide book perhaps, the summa of all his
questions and answers. Love is the supreme experience

where the flesh and the spirit cease contradicting one

another, and this is the exact phrasing which Breton used
in defining surrealism in his first manifesto. After all the
poems on the obsession of purity, Capitate de la Douleur
comes as a book on the obsession of love in which man is
portrayed as being both tragically and spiritually depend-
ent on love.
The poem Premiere du Monde (p. 101) is dedicated to
Pablo Picasso, and contains in its images, as many canvases
of Picasso do in their lines, the secret of woman, of the
first woman, and the secret place she holds in the universe.

Captive de la plaine, agonisante folle,

La lumiere sur toi se cache, vois le ciel:
II a ferme les yeux pour s'en prendre a ton reve,
II a ferme ta robe pour briser tes chaines.

In the first of the five stanzas, the images of the plain and
of madness describe the unlimited power of woman and
the strange uniqueness of her vision as contrasted with
that of man. Light, which is a usual image to describe the
infinite, is hidden on woman, and the sky itself is con-
ceived of as closing its eyes in order to attack her dreams.
148 Age of Surrealism
The sky closes her dress in order to break her chains. This
isher myth: she is not dependent on the light of the sky
because she has it within her. She is the being who is
uniquely free. Man looks at the universe and can see only
a woman.

Devant les roues toutes nouees

Un eventail rit aux eclats.
Dans de l'herbe
les traitres filets
Les routes perdent leur reflet.

The second stanza, with its startling juxtaposition of

wheels and a fan, describes woman as the circumference
and the womb and the sex of the world. The tied-together
wheels, which bear the weight of the world and propel it

through its destiny, designate the physical responsibility

and function of woman. But the laughing fan, the other
symbolic circle of woman's power, is the object of her
charm and seductiveness, the simple lure by which she
accomplishes the rotation of the world. So, woman is both
principle (the world's wheel) and every particularity of
the principle. In the same stanza the image of the grass
where roads lose their reflections and their character, de-
scribes the drama of man and woman. She is the grass
(as she was first the plainand the limitless light of the
sky) and he is the road which first cuts across the grass,
only to be lost in the new growth, covered and absorbed
by woman's principle of eternality. Man loses his original
form and personality in the experience of love. Woman is,
and man is always trying to be.
By comparison with such images as those of the wheel
and the grass, the cult of man in the 19th century and his
vehement regimen of individualism take on an almost
absurd aspect. Eluard surpasses in such a poem as Premiere
du Monde the glorification of the solitary male genius.
In his poetry man is no longer looking at himself for he has
begun to contemplate the mysteries and has quite right-
 Eluard 149

fully begun with the mystery woman. Ezra Pound made

of
once a profoundly prophetic statement when he said: "Our
time has overshadowed the mysteries by an overemphasis
on the individual." The poetry of Eluard marks a great
increase of illumination on an idea which has been subtly
growing ever since the hermetic sonnets of Gerard de Ner-
val.He was perhaps the first of the modern poets (and
modern men) to be subjugated by the meaning of woman
in somewhat the same way that Eluard makes so explicit.
Baudelaire fought and struggled tragically, like one of
the damned, against this idea of woman. Nerval seems to
have foreseen what Eluard feels: the magic of all the ob-
jects of his desire, the all-encompassing realm of magic
which woman represents and creates.

Ne peux-tu done prendre les vagues

Dont les barques sont les amandes
Dans ta paume chaude et caline
Ou dans les boucles de ta tete?

Ne peux-tu prendre les £toiles?

Ecartelee, tu leur ressembles,
Dans leur nid de feu tu demeures
Et ton eclat s'en multiplie.

The next two stanzas of Premiere du Monde pose two

questions which are overwhelmingly revelatory. The man
asks these questions of the woman (or we might say that
the poet asks them of Eve). The first question: "Can't you
hold the waves in the palm of your hand?" signifies
woman's possessiveness of all that is unruly and vain, her
power of control and the physical supremacy of her being.
The second question: "Can't you hold the stars?" is an
image of the marvellous in the surrealist tradition. Woman
resembles the stars because she is ecartelee; that is, she is

extended on a rack (this is the recurring wheel image of

the second stanza) and drawn toward the four opposing
150 Age of Surrealism
directions. She is everywhere in the universe, as the sky
is spread out, and she is unique at the same time. She is

one being and all beings. Her brilliance is multiple like

the myriad fires of the stars, and it comes from a prodigious
distance in space and time.

De l'aube baillonnee un seul cri veut jaillir,

Un soleil tournoyant ruisselle sous l'ecorce.
II ira se fixer sur tes paupieres closes.
O douce, quand tu dors, la nuit se mele au jour.

dawn is gagged (l'aube baillon-

In the final stanza, the
nee) as the wheels, in the image of the second stanza, were
tied together (les roues toutes nouees). It is as if the sun
were trying to pour out from under the bark or some
covering. (Un soleil tournoyant ruisselle sous l'ecorce.)
Then the image is explained when the poet speaks of the
sun on the closed eyelids of the woman. During the sleep
of the woman, night is joined with day. She is the being
synonymous with light, independent of light because she
contains it all. O douce quand tu dors, la nuit se mile au
jour. She is like the dawn, bound and gagged; like the
wheels of the sun chariot, tied together during her sleep.
In such a poem, it is quite possible to see what surrealist
inspiration, largely under the influence of Rimbaud,
whose methodology in Les Illuminations is here appro-
priated, has been successful in creating. What once was
epic drama and historical recital, is now cerebral and psy-
chic.The drama of love is played in the mind. It is lyricism
of one moment, a flash of time, that is never over, that is
anonymous and universal and hence mythical. The mind
appears before itself, filled with the image of woman so
resplendent in her nudity that she is all degrees of light:
angelic and demonic, carnal and spiritual, unique and
universal.
The final poem of the volume, Capitate de la Douleur,
is appropriately placed at the end because it summarizes
 —

Eluard 151

the work and the theme, and appropriately entitled: Celle

de toujours, toute ("She of all time, all"). The poem is

the apothesis of song, the opening out of meaning and de-

liverance in which we may see more
anywhere
clearly than
else in the book the relationship between man and woman.
The other poem
have just analyzed is principally a
I poem
about woman. But now the poet tells us that woman is not
the femaleness of his body C'est qu'elle n'est pas celle de
—
mon corps and that explains why he has to abandon her.
He has never boasted of accomplishing absolute union
with woman. As the fog through which he has moved
doesn't know whether he passed or not, so woman, in her
eternal and all-encompassing principle, is unaware of the
passing or the accident of man in her life.

Si je vous dis: "j'ai tout abandonne"

C'est qu'elle n'est pas celle de mon corps,
Je ne m'en suis jamais vante,
Ce n'est pas vrai
Et la brume de fond ou je me meus
Ne sait jamais si j'ai passe.

That is the introduction. In the second stanza, which is

the longest part of the poem, the man speaks of woman

and proclaims that he is the only one to speak of her, the
only one who surrounded by the mirror of woman. Here
is

is a further notation on the mirror-symbol, where Hero-

diade saw herself, in Mallarme's poem, and through which

Orpheus passed, in Cocteau's play, and through which
every poet must pass as into the ocean, into the principle
of maternity, which may be disguised by the words ocean,
sky, stars, cloud, fog. All of these images of woman recur
persistently in this poem, and in the others of Eluard. At
the end of the stanza, the generosity of woman, her princi-
pal characteristic so clearly opposed to the selfishness of the
male, which has already been described by the image of
limitless light, is translated now by the image of blood,
152 Age of Surrealism
le sang de la generosite, with all its multiple meanings of
life, sacrifice, birth, sexuality.

L'e>entail de sa bouche, le reflet de ses yeux

Je suisle seul a en parler,

Je suis le seul qui soit cerne

Par ce miroir si nul ou Fair circule a travers moi
Et l'air a un visage, un visage aime,
Un visage aimant, ton visage,
A qui n'as pas de nom et que les autres ignorent,
toi
La mer te dit: sur moi, le ciel te dit: sur moi,
Les astres te devinent, les nuages t'imaginent
Et le sang repandu aux meilleurs moments,
Le sang de la generosite
Te porte avec delices.

The ending of the poem, the final eight lines, is the

definition of the poet. He is the singer, the one who sings
the joy of singing about woman, whether she is present
or absent. This would seem to be the key to the new ero-
tology of Eluard. Woman, by her very existence, suppresses
the concept of absence. She also suppresses any meaning we
can give to the words hope, ignorance, oblivion. The mys-
tery of the poet's song is that mystery in which love created
him and liberated itself. Creation is freedom. By the fact
of his existing, he knows that woman exists and surrounds
him at all moments. His principle is defined by his freedom
to move within woman, She is everything that he is, but in
a higher degree, and this is set forth in the final line where
woman's purity is sung of as being purer than man's.

Je chante la grande joie de te chanter,

La grande joie de t'avoir ou de ne pas t'avoir,
La candeur de t'attendre, l'innocence de te connaitre,
O toi qui supprimes l'oubli, l'espoir et l'ignorance,
Qui supprimes l'absence et qui me mets au monde,
Je chante pour chanter, je t'aime pour chanter
Le mystere ou l'amour me cree et se delivre.
 Eluard 153

On a very superficial level, on a narrow psychoanalytic

level, the particular relationship which man bears to
woman, as shown in this poem, might be defined as maso-
chistic. But the meaning seems to me to go much deeper
than that. Man is attached to woman, as he is attached to
all the mysteries through which his life He is
unfolds.
attached to woman because he is man and dependent upon
her for the event of his life. Eluard's is not the worship
of the chivalric poets. They had nothing of the deep sense
of tranquility which is the principal character of Eluard's
love. The particular suffering of love, generated by the
coming together of the Christian concept, the Agape,
with the Pagan concept, Eros, which became the drama of
love in the Western world from the story of Tristan to the
novel of Proust, is not completely absent from the poetry
of Eluard, but it is strongly counteracted by a worship of
the mystery of love, by a tranquility in the presence of love
which seems far more primitive than either Christian or
Ancient. Picasso, more than any other single artist in
Europe, helped to reveal during the years which just pre-
ceded the surrealist movement, the power and the charac-
ter of primitive or Negro art. Something of the tranquil
worshipfulness of woman as a mystery, which Eluard may
have first seen in the paintings of Picasso, as well as those
of Gauguin, has been carried over into his verse, where
thereis an abundant song of woman without the harassing

agony of sexuality. Love is not for Eluard, as it is for Tris-

tan, the experience and the desire for death; it is rather
the sense and meaning and ambiency of life.

IV
Appearing more than ten years after
Capitate de la Douleur, Eluard's volume Chanson Com-
plete, of, 1939, has an opening poem, Nous sommes, which
demonstrates his continued and deepened preoccupation
with the doctrine of love.
154 Age of Surrealism
The
first part of the poem, 24 out of the entire 34 lines,

is dominated by the motif tu vois and the category of

things which woman sees. In the first category, woman sees
such things as the evening fire, the forest, the plain, the
snow, the ocean; and almost each one of them is character-
ized by a brilliant image, such as the evening fire which
emerges from its shell: Tu vois le feu du soir qui sort de sa
coquille. This is the list of immensities and infinities with
which woman is so often compared in Eluard's verse. Then
we read a kind of second category, of more humble and
more finite objects: stones, woods, towns, sidewalks, a
square where solitude has its statue and where love has a

single house. These are the second things seen by woman

which have their place and their name within the limitless-
ness and the namelessness of her vision. Animals are here,
too, like twins or perfectly resembling brothers who are
comprehensible to woman in their destiny of blood sacri-
fice.

At the end of the categories, a climactic stanza brings

back the mirror-symbol of woman, so suitably conclusive
to the elaborate litany of her visions. She is one with all the
women who preceded her, who come down from their an-
cient mirror bringing her their youth and faith and espe-
cially their illumination which permits her to see secretly
the world without herself. Woman sees the universe, but
man is myopic. He sees solely himself, or he sees himself
in the objects he looks at. The mysterious vision of
woman is the key to her sensitivity.
The title of the poem, Nous sommes, is explained at the
end, where men are described as harvesting their dreams.
They are first the workers, the laborers, but they are es-
pecially the dreamers and hence the poets. "We are,"
according to the poet, Nous sommes, in relationship to
woman, who sees, who, sun-like, illumines all. Man is de-
fined by a mystical dependence on woman. He is, when he
is with her, when he is sleeping in her or under her shadow.
 Eluard 155

The complete song of man, the Chanson complete, which

serves as title for this volume of Eluard, is lullaby (ber-
ceuse), love song and lamentation at death, all so ingen-
iously composed by man the poet, and all reflecting himself
in the mirror which is woman.
The mystery of passion — I have studiously avoided this
word until my conclusion of the chapter — is a dialectic
in which man makes an extraordinary request, but one
which is clearly articulated in the most serious part of the
surrealist program. In asking for the experience of passion,
he asks for the resolution or the dissolving of the antinomy
between the subject and the object, between love and
death, between man and woman. It is because of love that
the universe is dissonant, and it is also because of love that
the universe is still resonant with the most wonderful
harmonies that man is able to hear. The world has a kind
of weight about it, a heaviness and a materiality; ^nd love
is precisely that one force or that one mystery capable of

so condensing the world that it becomes weightless, sum-

marized into a few words which have no more weight than
the tiniest breath of air, the briefest exhalation from the
lips of a man. The power of love is able to convert the
material world into an imponderable dream, into as imma-
terial a reality as hope.
Love is the immediate (Eluard has brilliantly entitled
one of his volumes La Vie Immediate); it is the domain of
immanency, and it is described only by its ever-forming
images. We can begin to see the distinguished lineage of
surrealism, firstin the images of Rimbaud (the most im-
portant literary background for Eluard), and then behind
him and so on back through Poe to Cole-
in Baudelaire,
ridge,whose imagination was so influenced by The Monk
of Lewis. Kenneth Burke is quite right in calling Kubla
Khan a surrealist masterpiece, which even follows the rule
of automatic writing. But more perhaps than in the mys-
tery poems of Coleridge and the Gothic tale of Lewis, a
156 Age of Surrealism
distant example in the English tradition of this contempo-
rary doctrine on love would be found in certain passages
of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, who, in the ap-
proved surrealist tradition, had composed her novel at an
early age. The heroine of Wuthering Heights, Cathy, is
hard to describe in ordinary terms of a vibrant and pas-
sionate girl. Emily Bronte is more at ease when she com-
pares her to the elements, to the wind and snow on
Wuthering Heights, to the moors and crags, to the earth
mysteries and the fidelity of supernatural phantoms. When
Cathy tries to describe her love for Heathcliff, she does it
in terms of the ineffable, of an all possessing spirit in which
Heathcliff is absorbed, where his identity is lost in her. She
says: "He shall never know how I love him: and that, not
because he is handsome, but because he is more myself
than I . . . My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal
rocks beneath. ... I am Heathcliff."
After Cathy's sickness, she makes no real effort to re-

cover, but says one day to her servant: "I'm sure I should
be myself were I once among the heather on those hills."
She represents a vegetative principle, and dies when pre-
vented from living in accordance with her limitlessness
and nature-ness. Heathcliff, dark as a demon and a kind
of spirit himself, is the only one to understand this, and
he says in speaking of Cathy's husband: "He might as well
plant an oak in a flower pot, and expect it to thrive."
With such images as these, Cathy feels for
with such love as
Heathcliff, in the world and beyond the world, with the
constant interpenetrating of reality and the supernatural,
Wuthering Heights is not only the greatest of the Gothic
tales, but a surrealist novel as well. Cathy is like the woman

compared by Eluard to the grass of the earth or the heather

of the moors which bear the footprints of man and then
efface them in the duration and the presentness of love.
 IX •
PICASSO: the art

The theory of chance, or objective haz-

ard, as related to the creation of art, so copiously analyzed
by the surrealists in their manifestoes and critical writings,
might be justified by stories from many schools of art,
throughout the entire history of art. A story, connected
with some work of Picasso, not only defines this theory but
contains in the words of Picasso an explanation of the
theory.
At the dress rehearsal of Cocteau's play Antigone, in
December, 1922, one part of the backdrop which had been
painted by Picasso was still unfinished. Cocteau and the
actor Dullin and others were in the orchestra looking at
the stage. Picasso was on the stage walking up and down
in front of the set. It was painted blue with an opening
on the left and right. In the center was a hole through
which the role of the chorus was to be recited by Cocteau
himself by using a megaphone. Over the hole Cocteau had
hung masks of women, boys and old men, and had placed
under them a white panel, which remained to be con-
verted into a part of the set. After considering the white
panel for some time, Picasso rubbed a piece of red chalk
158 Age of Surrealism
(baton de sanguine) over the surface which gave it some-
what the aspect of marble. Then he took a bottle of ink
and traced some majestic-looking motifs on the panel. Sud-
denly, when he blackened a few empty spots, three beauti-
ful and appropriate columns emerged, so unpredictably
and so much to the surprise of the few spectators that they
couldn't refrain from applauding. Later when Cocteau left
the theatre with Picasso, he asked the painter whether he
had calculated the appearance of the columns or whether
he too had been surprised by their sudden emergence.
Picasso replied that he had been surprised, but then he
added the surrealist explanation that an artist is always cal-
culating without knowing that he is.
The privilege has been accorded to Picasso, as it has
been to very few artists, to prove his life before his death.
His greatness, acknowledged during his lifetime, has proved
him tobe a man equal to the world. His statements, many
of which already appear apocryphal, have often the ring of
a man able to sustain an individual's competition with the
world: "When I haven't any blue, I use red," he once said.
(Quand je n'ai pas de bleu, je mets du rouge.) His posi-
tion in the world of art is in good harmony with existing
schools, such as surrealism, in whose exhibitions he is al-
ways represented and in whose manifestoes his name occu-
pies a place of honor, and at the same time his position
is far beyond any facile classification, isolated actually in

its own created universe. The event of Picasso in our world

serves to prove once again that in the history of art there

are not really any schools, there are just isolated geniuses,
strong makers of art.
The same case might be made out for Mallarme, whose
work, usually classified with symbolism, appears more and
more now to exceed the doctrinal limitations of that
school. Mallarme's poetry, vastly more limited in output
than the paintings of Picasso, has a comparable strength
of uniqueness, which, remaining in some sense an art of a
 Picasso 159

period and closely allied with a school of that period, is

in its deepest sense the example of an art characterized by

its heroism, its solitude, its extraordinary equation with
the world. Both Picasso and Mallarme have the same kind
of greatness in that imitation of their art may well be dis-
astrous. Less original artists may be imitated profitably
and skillfully, but the style of Mallarme and the style of
Picasso, when attempted by others, degenerates into carica-
ture and weakness. Such painting as Picasso has done is a
world by itself. It is completed by him: there is nothing to
continue.
Mallarme and Picasso are also alike —and this is perhaps
always a characteristic of their particular stature of great-
ness —in the secrecy of their heart, in the absence of any
real knowledge about them as men and personalities. Many
of Picasso's closest friends have tried to write about him
personally: Gertrude Stein, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Andre*
Salmon, Cocteau, Maurice Raynal; but none has succeeded
in revealing anything more than anecdotes and sayings and
picturesque but vaguely outlined portraits. Picasso's work
is and rendered so com-
so projected outside of himself,
plete and autonomous, that there are no ties between him
and it. This mark of heroic completeness is the mark of
anonymity, the mark of a work, as Lautreamont and the
surrealists wanted it, done by all. The work is the person-
ality, because the artist's personality, so completely used
and absorbed, disappears into it. Picasso draws his profile
countless times, but never a profile that resembles his own.
He is recognizable in his style, not in his features, as Mal-
larme* is recognizable in the style of L Apres-Midi d'un
'

Faune and the sonnets and never discoverable in any self-

related traits.

Picasso's career has been a series of revolutionary acts,

close in spirit if not in literalness to the revolutionary stim-
ulus of surrealism. He does the varied and the unpredict-
able in the constant depiction of himself which is not a self-
160 Age of Surrealism
portrait. Hewas a revolutionist when, in 1917, he went off
to Rome with Cocteau and Diaghilev to paint the sets for
the ballet Parade. This desertion of the Cafe" de la Rotonde
in Montparnasse, which at that time was the center of
painting, to become a theatre decorator was just one of
many such abrupt turns and discoveries composing a life
of constant rejuvenation and reanimation. In Rome he
painted for the ballet a horse which Mme. de Noailles
described as a tree laughing, and blue acrobats which
Proust compared to the Dioscuri: Castor and Pollux. (In
the program notes which he wrote for Parade, Apollinaire
spoke of the "surrealism" achieved in the ballet. This was,
I believe, the first appearance of the word in print.)
Picasso's existence, so unlike that of most men and even of
most became inseparable from the existence of the
artists,

world. The creation of art is always the way taken between

the subject and the object, and in Picasso's art the way back
and forth between the two poles is so frequently and so
feverishly covered that the poles finally merge into one.
The way of art becomes the existence of art.

II
The career of Picasso has been briefly
chronicled many times. His so-called periods of style, char-
acterizedby a dominant color, have succeeded one another
rapidly and overlapped, until the principle of his life as
painter seems to be his perpetual need of self-renovation.
This need of discovery and fresh contest with the world
so dominates his art that it may be wondered whether
painting itself isn't something accessory to Picasso, whether
the act of painting isn't the outer manifestation of another
principle or goal. Picasso doesn't seem to be a painter in
the more narrow and the purer sense that Matisse, for ex-
ample, is a painter. The work of Braque is more exclu-

sively and fervently the work of a painter for whom the

universe was made to end in a painting, if we appropriate
 Picasso 161

and modify the formula once used by Mallarme* to char-

acterize the poet.
Picasso is much more than a painter and is constantly
breaking through the bounds of painting. He is prophet,
interpretive historian, magician, and necromancer. He is

perhaps the great psychologist of the century, the Span-

ish doctor who replaced the Viennese. By the recklessness
with which he views art and by the lyric frenzy in which
he works, he exemplifies the surrealist precept that art is

not so much the production of an object —a poem or a

painting — as it is the expression of an attitude, of a rev-
olution of a metaphysics. The artistworks in a kind of
anonymity, in collaboration with many more beings than
himself. The traditional act of the artist is that of repro-
ducing the world, but for Picasso and the surrealists the
major act might be defined as that of participating in the
world, moving within it, understanding it. It is no longer
a question of painting a human figure against a back-
ground of the material world, but of trying to untie some
of the hundreds of complications in the relationship where
man finds himself with nature. When Picasso painted the
backdrop for Cocteau's Parade, in 1917, the painted fig-
ures combined with the living actors on the stage. For the
first time, the set participated in the action.
Before Picasso, the impressionists had made tremendous
innovations in pictorial art, and the Spaniard from Malaga
carefully studied all the school of French painting. He
knew the recipes of Poussin, Corot, Cezanne, Toulouse-
Lautrec, and he has used them all. But his greatest paint-
ings are those in which he demonstrates a scorn and an
avoidance of traditional technique and method. Like the
surrealists, he makes a tabula rasa of the past, but like the
surrealists also his memory is full of the art of the past.
Picasso came to Paris at the turn of the century, and
during the first ten years moved successively and swiftly
through his "periods," denominated by blue, rose, Negro,
162 Age of Surrealism
and cubist. He was in his twenties and living most of the
time in his studio on the rue de Ravignan in Montmartre.
He was poor (he willingly sold his drawings for twenty
francs each) and his friends were poor. They were for the
most part writers, Andre" Salmon, Max Jacob, and Apol-
linaire, precisely those who, with Picasso, were to stimulate
and guide the early surrealists. His first paintings have a
strong literariness about them. Picasso helped to reinstate
the anecdote or narrative element in painting, and this
aspect of his work was continued and explored by the sur-
realists.

The paintings done between 1901 and 1905, placed to-

gether would resemble a court of miracles. It is a blue
world of pathos and misery: beggars, blind figures, ema-
ciated children and mothers. Between 1905 and 1906 the
colors became more diversified and the figures more grace-
ful. The emaciated children now became circus children,

tumblers, and youthful acrobats. The sad youths are now

sad clowns and athletes, Harlequins who are more elegant
in their sadness, more detached and nostalgic. These are
all true paintings, in that they have remarkable plasticity

of form, but they show such tenderness on the part of the

painter, such an affectionate union between him and the
figures on his canvas, that it is impossible to look at them
without experiencing a pathos and sentimentality usually
associated with literature. These first paintings were exer-
cises in seeing, in liberating the painter's vision, in attain-
ing to what Rimbaud had called la voyance.
Picasso followed the inevitable principle of art in these
early paintingsby choosing, simplifying, and deforming to
some degree. A studio is always a laboratory, and as far
back as the rue de Ravignan period, Picasso showed what
he found, according to his celebrated phrase, Je ne cherche
pas, je trouve.Guillaume Apollinaire, who spent so much
time with painters, and especially with Picasso, influenced
them deeply by the sensitivity of his mal-aime and his feel-
 Picasso 163

ing for the strange isolated existence of the clowns and the
saltimbanques at the Cirque Medrano. Picasso, who is go-
ing to learn through the years how to question severely
the universe and to exact from
an increasingly tragic
it

subject matter, learned first how it with the

to question
tender nostalgia of Apollinaire. His Harlequins and salt-
timbanques belong to the species of voyou-poet (Villon
and Rimbaud in certain aspects of their poetry, but espe-
cially Apollinaire) whose heart is disarmed in the midst
of his more cruel brothers. The clown-Harlequin, the type
of incomplete and lonely hero, ever since Watteau painted
Gilles in the early 18th century, has been continued and
has reached in modern art a unity of tragic attitude and
spiritual fervor, whether it be in Stravinsky's Petrouchka,
or the poetry of Verlaine, or in the painting of Picasso and
Rouault, or the films of Chaplin. These artists have been
fascinated by the role of the clown who is able to give back
to the dull unknowing public a compressed picture of it-

self, man condensed into a face of white grease-

a parable of
paint and a few wild antics. The performance of a clown
was seen to be not unlike a poem or a painting, not unlike
the strange subterfuge of an image in words or in oils. The
behavior of a clown is sufficiently improvised, sufficiently
drawn up from a deep subconscious understanding of the
world, to make it resemble the creation of a poem or a
painting in the surrealist sense, namely the sense of spon-
taneous or automatic creation, of dictation from the
subconscious.
Many
of Picasso's brief elliptical statements about paint-
ing,which have been piously collected and preserved, cor-
roborate much surrealist doctrine and in many cases have,
I suspect, helped to formulate it. The age of Picasso in
Paris, which began at the turn of the century and seems
to have reached some kind of conclusion in the Salon ex-
hibition of the autumn of 1944, held right after the lib-
eration of Paris, is best characterized by an enriching and
164 Age of Surrealism
fervent interchange of ideas between poets and painters.
Not only do poets write about painters: Apollinaireon
cubist painters, Cocteau on Chirico and Picasso, Valery on
Degas, Breton on Matta; but painters engage upon the art
of writing, and in forms more creative than journal- writ-
ing, such as Delacroix had done. Rouault published prose
poems and Picasso a play. It is a period when many barriers
are broken down between the arts, heretofore so carefully
departmentalized, when canvases might be described as gra-
tuitous, in the same way that Lafcadio's act in Gide's Caves
du Vatican is called un acte gratuity and a certain kind of
writing is called gratuitous. Picasso has said that a painting
is not decided upon or arranged in advance, that in the
actual act of painting, everything may be questioned and
changed. As the process of thinking constantly changes
and develops, so a canvas changes as being painted, and
it is

continues to change, after it is completed and exhibited,

when submitted to all the various attitudes and states of
mind of the spectators.
The surrealists are in accord with Picasso in believing
that the emotions or feelings of the artistwhich are to pro-
duce the art, may come from every possible source: from
the expanse of the sky or a spider's cobweb, from a forest
or a snail, from a bit of celluloid or an empty wine bottle.
The artist has to choose what is suitable for him to depict,
and even then in the state of fullness over whatever he has
chosen, whether it be the figure of a woman or a candle-
stick, he has to channel or delete or evacuate much of his
feeling of fullness before he can work. One assumes an
emotion when the idea of a work of art occurs, and then
one deliberately expels the emotions when the work be-
gins. Painting for Picasso is not the application of any doc-
trine, of anything that might be called a canon of beauty.
It is a conception of his mind and instinct, quite inde-

pendent of any program or precept of painting. "A picture

 Picasso 165

comes to me," he has said, "from miles away and yet the —
next day I can't see what I've done myself."
In 1906, Picasso was twenty-five years old. He had al-
ready produced two hundred paintings and several hun-
dred drawings: or what might be considered the work of a
lifetime. The "blue" paintings had described a fin-de-siecle
despair and pessimism. The acrobats of 1905 and the
"rose" paintings had shown a more tranquil and classical
state of mind. He had begun his series of cubist paintings
under the influence of Cezanne, El Greco, and primitive
masks. Les Demoiselles d' Avignon (1906-07), the large
painting in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art,
marks the shift from a narrative kind of painting to one in
which the figures appear as pure elements of form. Itdem-
onstrates the breaking up of recognizable figures (in this
case, five women) into formalized shapes. The more lit-
erary elements of pity and pathos have given way to a
strong dynamic quality. This has been considered by some
critics as the painting which initiated the cubist move-
ment. Perspective as well as most representational elements
have disappeared from it. In the painting itself the three
figureson the left are close to the mask-like figures painted
in 1906, and the two figures on the right show a marked
tendency toward distortion and even dislocation. Compact-
ness and angularity increase in Picasso's painting until
1909, when his and Braque's paintings are difficult to dis-
tinguish.
The word cubism had been coined by Matisse when he
had spoken a about some paintings of Braque
bit scornfully
in 1908. The cubist paintings of Picasso were to find even
more favor with the surrealists than the paintings of his
earlier periods. They developed the two surrealist aspects
of the fantastic and the psychological, the two terms which
Breton was to define later as le merveilleaux and Vincon-
scient. They were paintings in which recognizable char-
166 Age of Surrealism
acteristics of the object gave way to pure forms. Cubism
always considered a picture as an object creating lyricism.
A painter may indulge in any liberty provided he gen-
erates the lyricism of forms. He owes nothing to nature
because his goal is not imitation but the plasticity of forms
and colors.
Picasso was never the artist of a landscape, or of a figure,
for that matter. Inwardly he bore no image of a concrete
object, but a kind of desert where any object might form
and then be submitted to multiple transformations. This
desert-characteristic of his mind, the need of constantly
evicting images as they form in him, is stated in Rimbaud's
Saison en Enfer, in the passage on the "Alchemy of Lan-
guage": J'aimai le desert, les vergers brules, les boutiques
faneeSj les boissons tiedies. This list of the desert, dried
orchards, faded shops, and tepid drinks, is inducement to
ascetic behavior necessary for the creation of art such as
cubist and surrealist art. By 1912, after passing through a
few years when cubist art had been almost a collective
work, it reached a remarkable point of loftiness and sever-
ity in Picasso and Braque (although Picasso's drawing was

always more tormented than Braque 's) when the intensity

of the painting was austere and economical.
But Picasso never remained for long with any one mode
of painting. His personal myth might well be that of Dio-
nysos, the god whose rites alternate lamentation with re-
joicing, whose celebration was both dramatic and magical.
Picasso is not a changing or vacillating artist in his need
for freedom and diversity; he is multiple. As the cult of
Dionysos was enacted to insure the regeneration of plants
and the multiplication of animals, so Picasso, who has come
nearest in our day to the creation of a cult, has regener-
ated and multiplied his works of art. The cult of Dionysos,
quite evenly divided between mystery and savagery, could
be paralleled in the cubist paintings of Picasso and the
studies of monsters which followed. Picasso's predilection
 Picasso 167

for the bull and tauromachy is also involved in the myth of

Dionysos who was often represented in the shape of a bull
or in some tauromachic practice, such as the slaughter of
the bull in the vegetation rite.
Picasso was never closer to dadaists, like Tzara and
Picabia, and to surrealists like Chirico, Survage, and Mir6,
than when he began modifying abstract architectural
cubism by unusual proportions and by half-human, half-
inhuman forms which are seen in dreams. Picasso became
a prolific fabricator of monstrous forms, quite as terrifying
as those created by Lautr^amont in Les Chants de Mal-
doror. After the rose or the Medrano period and the few
years of cubist painting, when his art had become more cere-
bralized and intellectualized than ever, he was painting
exactly as he conceived, goaded on by an imperious need of
knowing, which has always characterized his work. The
monsters of Lautr^amont and Picasso, far from being pic-
turesque or ornamental decorations, testify to subconscious
paroxysms and to a will to understand the most inac-
cessible of man's dreams. Picasso, like his great Spanish
ancestor, Don Quixote, finds it difficult to distinguish be-
tween the phantom and the real worlds. He is the con-
temporary amateur of catastrophe, who, like Cervantes
again, knows how to indulge, after moments of paroxysm,
in passages of profound peacefulness, where the theme of
a mandoline, of flowers and the female figure, proves that
Dionysos has to recover from intoxication after ravaging
the countryside and seeing with the derangement of his
senses. The passage on the sleeping hermaphrodite in Lau-
treamont's second canto is a comparable passage of peace-

fulness and even tenderness inserted between scenes of

violence.
Dionysos, god of vegetation rites, metamorphosed into
a goat or a bull, and Don Quixote, who converted sheep
into soldiers,are mythical and national phantoms in
Picasso, whose method and principles of painting are always
168 Age of Surrealism
investigations. Beauty, as Breton said in Nadja, must be
convulsive, or not be at all. Most men live in a perpetual
night, and the conventions of society carefully preserve the
obscurity which is their climate. Those who are able to
look at the monsters of Picasso (or read about the monsters
of Lautreamont) are the men who remember dreams
their
and are not terrified by them. Nature is an appearance of
things. The function of the greatest artists is to renew this
appearance, to change it so that we may see more truth-
fully what we look at.
In speaking once to Christian Zervos, Picasso said: "I
don't know in advance what I am going to put on the can-
vas. Every time I begin a picture, I feel as though I were
throwing myself into the void." This statement is close to
the surrealist doctrine whereby in the process of artistic
creation, all links with the objective world are broken, and
the artist is able to enter the realm of subjective fancy and
dream. It is the method, brilliantly illustrated in Lautrea-
mont, of preconscious imagery where observation is re-
placed by intuition, where reality is replaced by symbol-
ism, but a special kind of symbolism where the symbols
have the unpredictable dimensions of a submerged world.

Ill
During the authentic and controlled pe-
riod of surrealism in Paris, 1925-39, Picasso influenced
and was influenced by the exponents and artists of the new
art. As the large painting of 1906-07, Les Demoiselles
d' Avignon, was annunciatory of a new interest and way of

composition, so the painting of 1925, The Three Dancers,

marks another turning point, after which Picasso follows
surrealist tendencies in revealing in his paintings psycho-
logical disturbances or torments. These years of both gen-
eral and specific surrealist adherence culminated in the
Guernica mural on which Picasso began work three days
after the German planes bombed the Basque town on
 Picasso 169

April 27, 1937. In the light of the paintings done by

Picasso during the years of this decade, 1940-45, Guernica
is just a first culmination of vigor and historic protest. He
didn't literally paint the second World War, in his Paris
studio, but he has said himself that the war is in all the
canvases he painted during that time.
The meaning and the experience of the war are in
Picasso's works, in the very way inwhich he saw the figures
he painted. This illustrates his permanent method which
extends back to the already now distant "blue" kingdom
where the were related and bound to the world by
figures
their suffering. Picasso has always been a romantic artist.
As the romantic art of his "blue" period became more
etherealized in the "rose" and "cubist" years, and as it
became more exultant in the "surrealist" and "war" pe-
riods, his temperament seems simply to have deepened its
sombre, revolutionary, and subjective traits. Like his tem-
perament, his problem as painter has remained the same
throughout half a century: that of seeing. To see, for
Picasso, is equivalent to transforming and to forgetting.
His goal remains steadfastly revolutionary, in that it always
means liberating his vision. One thinks instinctively of
Rimbaud's theory whereby his soul will be con-
of voyance,
verted into something monstrous. Each of Rimbaud's
prose-poems, Les Illuminations, is quite independent of
the thing he saw, and in the same way, each picture of
Picasso ends, through his particular process of painting, by
becoming independent of the subject he imitates. He may
start with a woman, or a guitar, or a pot of flowers, but
then as the composition progresses, these objects take on
the function of a scaffolding, which when the picture is

completed, disappears because no longer needed. The

it is

picture emerges indifferent toand independent from the

subject matter with which it started. The same process
occurred in Les Illuminations when Rimbaud knocked
out from under the construction the recognizable supports
170 Age of Surrealism
and Rimbaud debauched his themes and sub-
buttresses.
jects, and Picasso does likewise in the arabesques of his
lines, in the only partially human terrors he reveals, in his
long series of distorted figures.
Other painters were more literal-minded in their accept-
ance of surrealism: Max Ernst, Andre Masson, and Chi-
rico, the greatest perhaps, who during the few years of his
surrealist fidelity gave a rich documentation on the paint-
er's subconscious. But Picasso's art, in its abundance as

well as in the methods it illustrates, is the greatest testi-

monial to the energies and the forces which underly sur-
realism. All the various articles of surrealist faith may be
exemplified in Picasso: paranoiac-criticism, usually asso-
ciated with Dali; the art of dislocation wherein a supra-
human meaning may be found in the work; a psycholog-
ical intuition which involves both eroticism and violence.
But more than any other aspect of surrealism, Picasso uses
a sense or a vision which is magical and which relates him
to the function of the artist and the meaning of art elab-
orated on by Mallarme.
By magic, I mean the extraordinary possession of reality
which Picasso makes when engaged in the act of painting.
He has told in this respect a humorous story about him-
self. During lunch at a friend's house, he had paid par-
ticular attention to a buffet in the dining-room. Some time
later, in his studio, he used this buffet, which he had car-
ried in his memory, in a painting. When he returned later
to the friend's house, and sat down again for lunch, he was
surprised to discover that the buffet had disappeared. "I
must have taken it away," he said, "when I painted it."
(J'avais du le prendre sans m'en apercevoir en le peignant.)
Even in those paintings of Picasso which are the most
explosive, in which the dominant character is dynamism
of a psychic order, he opens up a dream world of magic
and the supernatural. Picasso maintains the primitive
meaning of magician as being the man who explores the
 Picasso 171

unknown. In this trait, he is close to the demiurge, whose

role has been captured in the modern world by the artist.
For the world at large today, the artist, more than the
priest or the prophet or the magician, reveals the existence
of an intangible psychic life which is constantly partici-
pating in our every day life. The artist today is the last
exponent of the mysteries, the last believer in the duality
of our world, the last teacher of the method whereby we
may establish contact with the mysterious and convert the
mysterious into the credible.
The large number of paintings and drawings done dur-
ing the three years 1927-30 are perhaps the richest in terms
of the pure inventiveness of magical and fabulous forms.
This unusual studies which follow one another in
series of
a lyrical potency are the productions of Picasso the most
calculated to affect and control the imagination of the spec-
tator. One has literally to submit to them, to allow oneself
to be moved by them. Otherwise they are impossible to
look at. They are studies of figures which have been caught
by the painter moment when they are changing
just at the
their form, at the precise moment when they are midway
between the old form they are leaving and the new form
they are assuming. There are almost no clues to their iden-
and that is why it is so difficult to look at them. They
tity,

are eventsby themselves, separate from the world of men

and the world of objects.
This period in Picasso's career might well represent his
attainment to greatest freedom in the creation of art,
when he was able so to absorb everything within him, that
what he actually painted was the abandonment of all he
saw, the release from all he had experienced. By so com-
pletely absorbing the real world, he was able to go beyond
it. He was able to annihilate it and to create in its absence

visions and forms that man has hardly ever seen. Here
Picasso showed himself more resolutely anti-conformist
than ever before. Like Mallarme's cult of the void and of
172 Age of Surrealism
absence, where the symbol would so absorb the experience
that all recognizable narrative element would disappear
and only the shell of the symbol would remain as the
poem, only the vain useless beauty of Herodiade as testi-
monial to an experience we may guess at, so Picasso's cult
of this exact moment of metamorphosis prevents any com-
fortable recognition on the part of the spectator either of
the form from which the study comes or the form toward
which it is moving. Picasso has depicted the literal act of
magic, the moment of suspension and suspense between
two worlds.
Thus, Picasso cannot be placed solely under the myth
of Dionysos, god of violence, intoxication, and taurom-
achy. Dionysos would at most explain only one half of
his art, as he explains only one aspect of surrealism. An-
other myth of magic and transformation would have to be
evoked, to accompany the myth of dynamic violence. I
suggest that the old legend of Melusine might serve as
mythical explanation of this particular aspect of Picasso's
genius. Melusine was the beautiful woman in the myth
associated especially with the province of Vendee, both
wife and mother, who was condemned to watch the lower
part of her body, on the night of each Saturday, turn into
a serpent's tail. Her husband had promised never to seek
to look at her on that particular night of the week, be-
cause if him as the serpent- woman,
she were ever seen by
she would have to remain that. When Melusine was half-
serpent, on Saturday nights, she was able miraculously to
fly out of the window and to build castles all over her

province of Vendee. Not only had she given ten sons to

her husband, but she was on Saturday nights the chateau-
constructing fairy. But one Saturday, her husband peeked
through the key-hole and saw her legs growing into a mon-
strous tail. And so Melusine was condemned henceforth
to fly about in the air, to haunt all the places where she
had once been happy, and each year to detach one stone
 Picasso 173

from each had built in many Vendee

castle she localities:

Tiffauges, Mervent, Chateaumur, Vouvant.

Picasso, like Melusine, is an excessive builder, and like
her seems to inhabit the air as well as the earth. She might
be called goddess of the fantastic (le merveilleux) presid-
ing over artists like Picasso who have not ceased dreaming
of a world truer than the real world. The marvellous is
perhaps for us today the faculty of wonderment, the power
of wonderment which is behind many paintings of Picasso
and which places him in the distinguished line of art-
ists who created such stories as The Girl and the Uni-
corn, Beauty and the Beast (converted recently by Cocteau
into a surrealist film), Alice in Wonderland.
Picasso is both nihilist and wonder-maker, both Dio-
nysos and Melusine. But in both roles he is the lover of
freedom. He recently said, when he joined the Communist
Party, "Through design and have tried to penetrate
color I

deeper to a knowledge of the world and of men, so that

this knowledge might free us." During the last few years
there have been demonstrations in Paris against Picasso,
firston the occasion of the Salon exhibition in 1944 and
then at Abbe Morel's lectures on Picasso in the Sorbonne
in 1946. Different reasons have been offered to explain this
hostility against the figure, who is perhaps the greatest of
our age. It is true that the newest paintings are increas-
ingly difficult to look at and to accept. The fantastic has
given away again to the violent and the destructive. The
cycle of changes in Picasso is delirious to follow. The same
change took place in the career of Joyce, from the simple
to the complex, from the real to the surreal. Both Picasso
and Joyce, in their respective arts, observed the doctrine
of primitivism. For Picasso, as the pictorial artist, there is

equal value in things seen and not seen, a belief of prim-

itive man, and this is perhaps the ultimate meaning of
magic in art.
X CONCLUSIONS
•

i
The new international surrealist exhibi-
tion, which opened in Paris, in the Galerie Meaght, in
July, 1947, came as a very positive reaffirmation of con-
tinued life among the ranks of the surrealists, and as a
denial of the charge that the cause of surrealism was en-
tombed and extinct. The exhibition was directed by
Marcel Duchamp and Andre Breton, and the actual in-
stallation and arrangement were in charge of the American
architect, Frederick Kiesler. The avowed purpose of the
undertaking was to testify to a persisting cohesion among
surrealist artists and, more especially, to a program and
development of their art. The initial announcement of the
exhibit made much of the fact that the surrealist move-
ment was the search for a new myth of man and that the
present display was so arranged as to show the successive
stages of an initiation. The ground floor of the galery was
given over to a retrospective exhibit called "les surrealistes
malgre eux," which included works of pre-surrealists, such
as Bosch, Arcimbaldo, Blake, Carroll, and works of con-
temporaries who at some time in their career had been
associated with surrealism: Chirico, Picasso, Masson, Dali,
 Conclusions 175

Paalen, Magritte. Then on the second floor, the initiation

to the various mysteries began.
Even from this preliminary sketch of the surrealist ex-
hibition, it is obvious that the surrealists have maintained
the strictness of their beliefs. The theoreticians have al-

ways been writers. (For impressionism, on the contrary,

painters like Seurat and Cezanne defined the aesthetic.)
And painters, particularly, have found surrealism a diffi-
cult creed to follow. Andre Masson, for example, has said:
"I am more a sympathizer with surrealism, than a sur-
realist or a non-surrealist. The movement is essentially a
literary movement."
The underlying forces of surrealism exist in most forms
of great art. The creative process itself uses the conscious
and the subconscious and might well be denominated
as surrealist. The English sculptor, Henry Moore, has
stated: "All good art has contained both abstract and sur-
realist elements, just as it has contained both classical and
—
romantic elements order and surprise, intellect and im-
agination, conscious and unconscious." There is a pedantic
side to surrealism, an overemphasis on the exclusive use
of the automatic method of producing a work of art, which
has perhaps preventedits fullest development. So much

time and energy have been given over to policing and

judging, to manifesting and defining, that I often feel the
greatestworks of surrealism are ahead of us, and are yet to
be produced.
The existentialists in Paris, since 1944, have taken over
the first place in the French literary scene. Sartre has more
or less proclaimed the demise of Breton. He has described
the surrealists as being in exile among the French because
they have nothing more to say. The veracity of this ver-
dict may be strongly doubted.
The existentialist despair of the 1940's is sombre and
sullen as contrasted with the surrealist pessimism of the
1920's and 1930's. Whereas existentialism is essentially
176 Age of Surrealism
characterized by a mournfulness and a nauseating submis-
siveness of existence, of heavy Germanic origin, surrealism
was born under the guidance of two or three extraordinary
poets in revolt, adolescents who in their revolt demon-
strated a fierce energy and demanding human spirit:
Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Jarry. Whatever greatness and
productiveness surrealism has achieved is largely due to its
origins in the revolt of these exceptional adolescents.
Thanks to them, the surrealist revolt has been mainly con-
cerned with the two greatest subjects of revolt: love and
poetry.
It isnot perhaps too early to say that surrealism is essen-
tially concerned with poetry, and existentialism with phi-
losophy. The vision of poets is infinitely deeper and more
fructifying than the vision of philosophers. Poetry has al-

ways something to do with the primitive and eternal mys-

teries of man, and philosophy, when all is said, if it remains
philosophy and doesn't become poetry, is always related to
mere history. about what men think con-
Philosophy is

cerning the universe at a given time in history. Poetry is

about what men know concerning the universe, what men
have always known consciously and subconsciously about
the universe. Philosophy is timed, as history is; but poetry
is man's one activity invulnerable to time, his one perma-

nency. Poetry is the annihilation of the moment, or of

any unity of time, and the surrealists made this doctrine
into their ecstasy and glory. If it weren't for the fertility
of the surrealist poets today, in the 1940's, for the poetry
of Reverdy, Prevert, Michaux, Eluard, Aime Cesaire,
French letters would be completely submerged in the exis-
tentialist nausea.
The time will come, if it has not already come, when
the surrealist enterprise will be studied and evaluated, in
the history of literature, as an adventure of hope. The
passion for knowledge, expressed more poetically than phil-
osophically, which means perhaps, more mythically than
 Conclusions 177

metaphysically, underlies all the surrealist works. Human

nature, which they studied, is limitless, as well as their
curiosity about it. Everything can help in their study of
human nature: dreams, subconscious states, eroticisms. But
all these represent means by which to attain to that ulti-
mate goal of man: his total liberation. Breton's celebrated
phrase, le seul mot de liberte . . . , stands as the funda-
mental surrealist attitude.
In describing the form and the function of the image in
poetry, have already used the analogy with an object
I

which is cut loose from the world, which is allowed to rise

up by itself into the air, separated from the bonds and the
reality with which it is usually joined. This process applies
in a general way to surrealist art which possesses the genius
of flight and lightness and airiness. It is a winging up-
wards. When it fails in its act of flight, when it has not
loosened from all the bonds which hold it down to
itself

its original forms and models, it fails in achieving itself in

its surrealist renovation. This process of flight upwards
has its necessary counterpart, in the tradition of surreal-
ism, in the flight downwards, the free uninhibited descent
into sleep and dreams where modern man is able to engage
in a primitive mode of activity, where, according to the
theory of Freud, he is able to experience a decrease in his
repressions, and where he ceases to resist authentic parts
of his nature.
By these two flights, the surrealist realizes himself: first,

by winging upwards, by reenacting the myth of Deda-

his
lusand becoming the man-bird; and second, by his floating
downwards, by reenacting the myth of Joseph and becom-
ing the dreamer. Dedalus and Joseph opposed a total en-
slavement to the real, as the surrealists exercise their will
from the familiar objects which sur-
in freeing themselves
round them. This fundamental act of the surrealist is the
gesture of freedom, a deep-seated instinct in man to de-
stroy what attaches him to the world: rules of the family,
178 Age of Surrealism
of society, of the state, of sexuality. Surrealism began as an
effort to destroy art itself: canvases and books; and to ob-
literate the usual appearances of nature.
continued in It

its revolutionary and liberating flights to such a degree and

with such doggedness that the entire movement may be

seen as an angelic temptation, as a great fear of falling
down from the air to the earth.
The revolt of the early adolescents, of Lautr£amont and
Rimbaud, had in it a deep fascination for the spiritual ab-
solute, for the total transcendency of the world. The need
for a spiritual absolute is felt more deliriously in adoles-
cence than at any other time. In a period of war, such as
our own, the number of adolescents in the world, those
who live by revolt, diminishes, with the result that the
urgency of human enthusiasm, of revolt, of spiritual tran-
scendency, is manifested only slightly. Surrealism repre-
sented for the young the fantastic (le merveilleux) and
limitless possibilities of existence, a salvation by means of
dream, love, desire, liberty. If existentialism treats the soli-
tude of an individual man in an absurd world where every
gesture of freedom is vain, surrealism starts from the emp-
tiness and corruption of the world to mount on an impulse
of implicit hope toward the limitless sky.

II
Throughout the history of surrealism
there has been an evident tendency to consider it a cause
or even a battle. Its superficial or exaggerated aspects af-

fect, more than we realize, our daily life. Advertisements

and posters, movies, ladies' dresses and especially hats, car-
toons like Barnaby, have been influenced by surrealism.
But as a cause, and even as a way of life, it has deeply
affected and transformed only a small number of men.
(The recent film of Noel Coward, This Happy Breed, de-
picts the same period of years as that of surrealism, 1919-
39, and shows no trace of the movement.) It is perhaps
 Conclusions 179

too early for surrealism to have created any great heroes

and heroines. The novels and the epics, where individual
characters will be celebrated, have not yet appeared, and
of course may never appear.
In terms of heroes, surrealism may have to content
with the legends of Lautr£amont and Rimbaud, al-
itself

though in time it may well be that the literary artists will

create works about such figures as the three men who com-
mitted suicide. Surrealism, like every other cause, has its
martyrology. Jacques Vache, the young friend of Breton
in Nantes, whom I referred to in the first chapter, died
in 1918. He bequeathed the initial hate for literature and
scorn for traditional art. By the habits of his life he was the
type of mystifying dandy who played on the absurdity of
life. Then, on the 5th of November, 1929, the young secre-
tary of Jacques-Emile Blanche, Jacques Rigaut, shot him-
self. His case is so complex to unravel that legend has
already taken hold of it. The death of Rene Crevel, in
1935, is the third in this series. His case is tied up with
the relationship between surrealism and communism. Cre-
vel was a handsome, universally loved fellow, courted and
imprisoned by the fair ladies of worldly society and by the
mannequins of fashion. After his conversion to commu-
nism, he was expelled from the party, with Breton and
Eluard, in 1933, but was absolved and reinstated soon
after. His Breton was exemplary. The day of his
fidelity to
suicide was the opening of the "Congress of writers for the
defense of culture" (Congres des ecrivains pour la defense
de la culture), the congress at which the surrealists were
refused permission to speak.
The meaning of these three deaths is limitless. Vache
represents the dandy, the game of life, the precious notion
of accident. Rigaut marks the revolt against art and love,
and a marriage with mystery. Crevel's legend seems to lie
nearer to the attraction of fidelity and the fatalness of dis-
appointment. In any case, beyond whatever interpretation
180 Age of Surrealism
may be given to any one of these cases, the three suicides
have taken on for the surrealists the expression of surreal-
ism itself, which is always the extreme of liberation, or, if
we use the politically-connotative word, of liberalism, "of
freedom," as Kenneth Burke defines it, "projected into the
aesthetic domain."
The heroes express a Maldororian defiance in constantly
changing their form, in accentuating the principle of meta-
morphosis and diversity. The centaur, the man-horse, is an
excellent symbol of the surrealist hero, because he is char-
acterized by a will to efface any distinct resemblance with
either a horse or a man, and to partake incongruously and
triumphantly of two natures.
Likewise, the surrealist heroine, as in the painting of
Pollaiuolo, which hangs in the National Gallery in Lon-
don, on the subject of Apollo and Daphne, represents a
dual nature. Daphne is caught by the artist just at the mo-
ment of her transformation, when, in flight, her arms are
becoming branches. In Andre Breton's Nadja, the heroine
is the type of the woman-child (la femme-enfant) who ex-

ists in a dream-world and a real-world at the same time,

who has all the resources of feline independence and se-

ductiveness. Nadja can be successively playful and nostal-
gic, gay and melancholy, and all these varied tempera-

ments are put at the service of the man-genius. All these

moods serve to induce in the genius a deeper awareness of
himself and his art. The beauty of woman, in its multiple
manifestations and artifices, serves to make the worry and
agitation of man appear vain to himself.
Melusine is an extreme example of the woman-child.
She is the female counterpart of the centaur-image of man,
because she is woman and serpent. The moment of the
fatal Saturday nights when the lower part of her body
changes into a serpent tail corresponds to the moment in the
story of Daphne when her arms change into the branches
of a tree and her legs into the roots of a tree. The surreal-
 Conclusions 181

istemphasis on this moment of metamorphosis heightens

the dual nature of man and woman, and their relationship
with the material world. On the tragic Saturday night
when Melusine was seen by her husband to be the woman-
serpent, there is, between
of course, a very evident parallel
Melusine and Eve. Woman represents such a unique and
overpowering knowledge of the world that it will have to
be hidden from man. She is the source of the "fantastic"
in the world, and he is mere spectator or poet, the one who
contemplates the "marvellous" without understanding it.
In the legend, at the moment when Melusine knows that
she has been seen by her husband, she looks out of the
window into the night which is now for her the night of
enchantments through which she is going to fly. After
being pure woman tempted by the serpent (Eve), she be-
comes the serpent- woman, fairy of the air who penetrates
the night and casts a spell over it (Melusine), until in the
advent of day, she is transformed into the star of the morn-
ing, or star of the sea: Stella maris (Mary).
After the examples of the poet's solitude, in Baudelaire,
Rimbaud, Lautreamont; and after the examples of the
three surrealists who risked their talents and their lives:
Vache, Rigaut, Crevel —the example of woman: in Hero-
diade, who become the sister of night, motionless
wills to
and useless like the jewels and metals in the earth, in
Nadja, who moves as in a spell between the extremes of
dream and reality, in the legend of Melusine, who is fated
to haunt the night air and the castles she constructed mi-
—
raculously illustrates a oneness which is not a solitude, for
it is without torment. Woman is so able to merge with the

cosmos that she becomes it and loses her specific name and
identity. is really explained by the fact that the
Everything
surrealist hero Lautreamont or Vache, a man character-
is

ized by his particular drama of solitude, and that the sur-

realist-heroine is Daphne or Melusine or even Cathy in
Wuthering Heights, whose drama is not solitude but ex-
182 Age of Surrealism
pansion, change, absorption, the magical combining of
lives and states of being.

Ill
In Breton's first manifesto, in 1924, he
indicated considerable scorn for the form of the novel. He
seemed to consider game of information, a kind
it a banal
of chess game where each move is calculated long in ad-
vance, where the author knows omnisciently each action
of his hero. The art form of the novel appeared false to
Breton because it was too
willfully contrived, too tricky.
But twenty years later, in his lecture delivered at Yale Uni-
versity, he seems somewhat to have modified his views. He
expressed admiration for such a novel as Gracq's Au Cha-
teau d'Argol, and opened up the possibility of a surrealist
novel in which the characters would be endowed with ex-
ceptional powers of freedom, in which the hero would not
be fixed in a formula of a given sociological setting and
well-defined motivations, but in which he would illustrate
the equivocal, contradictory, and disturbing elements of
human nature. The surrealist novel would perhaps stress
the vacillation and change in human nature. It might even
create a new species of man or recreate the ancient species
of man-god. In the metamorphosis of man to archangel,
man would know the sacred, and
demonic metamor-
in the
phosis he would know the The
sacred and the
sacrilegious.
sacrilegious have affinities in the same way that reality and
surreality do. In the same way that the sacred myth of the
Grail was demonized in the 19th century by Wagner in
his opera Parsifal, so the realism of the novel, in the oppo-
site process, become surrealism when a character
tends to
is dilated and expanded into a mythical character.
In the last episode of Joyce's Ulysses, the long soliloquy
of Molly Bloom, composed of eight sentences of 5000
words each, the character has ceased being real in any
 Conclusions 183

usual sense. She is lying down in bed and the words which
pass through her in her half-dream, half-conscious state,
convert her into the mythical figure of woman, into the
figure of the earth She becomes united with the
itself.

movement of the earth and nature, as if she were a planet

caught up in perpetual rotation in space. The figure of
man, beside this mythical representation of woman, is di-
minished and almost comic. He appears like a puppet or
a toy in the presence of the cosmic purposefulness of
woman. And yet an important dignity is accorded to him
in the final word of Molly's soliloquy. To the mythical
representation of man, the symbol of departure, interrup-
tion, restlessness, search —woman, symbol of rotation, per-
manence, and nature, always says yes. If the symbol of
woman for Joyce is the earth in Ulysses, or the river in
Finnegans Wake, the symbol of man is Dedalus, the man-
bird, that being who is a visionary, a voyant, endowed with
miraculous powers of search. Man, in Joyce, reaches his
fullest mythical conception as wanderer, either as son:
Stephen-Hamlet, in search of a father; or as father: Bloom-
Earwicker in search of a son. Ulysses, the story of twenty-
four hours in Dublin, becomes Finnegans Wake, the story
of all humanity, from Adam on.
Joyce as a technician is the opposite of Mallarme, whose
art is condensation and compression. Mallarme's final sur-
realist poem, Un coup de des, attempts perhaps to summa-
rize and to resolve the story of man almost by means of
typography, by the sparseness of his text and the whiteness
of his page. But the moves in the other direc-
art of Joyce
tion toward a concrete thickness and complexity. His art
is the decomposing of syllables, sounds, and even letters

and their reconstruction in prolonged new syntheses and

meanings. The Anna Livia passage is the poem of the river
Liffey whose Latin name was Amnis Livia. Anna Livia is
river, nymph, woman, and the text of Joyce is as fast flow-
184 Age of Surrealism
ing and elusive as that river which Heroclitus, surrealist
dialectician, told us long ago we could never bathe in
twice.
But Joyce was at all times too conscious a technician,
too aware of pattern and ritual, to be associated in a lit-

eral sense with surrealism. The case of Henry Miller is

farmore applicable. His Tropic of Capricorn, the book
which Miller himself prefers to all his others, is quite iden-
tifiable with surrealist art. The character Mona is as mys-
teriousand enigmatical as Nadja. She is sought after in
the same mythical terms by which Apollinaire'.s Mal-Aime
searches for his beloved as if she represented both woman
and the secret of existence, the blind impulse which man
follows in his longing for the Absolute.
Miller learned to write by writing. When he began
writing, he encountered the usual problem of the young
writer: that of having an overabundance of rich emotions
and of having no focus for a literary expression of the emo-
tions. The art of writing is the converting of an experience
into the experience of writing. Henry Miller is as omniv-
orous a reader as he is a fertile writer. He reads, in an un-
academic fashion, haphazardly, works which are often of
a religious philosophical nature, or of a visionary pro-
phetic kind, such as the writings of Blake, Rimbaud, D. H.
Lawrence. This exercise of reading has provided him with
both stimulation and focus for his own writings. In Paris,
when he came upon the surrealists and especially the mani-
festoes of Breton,he was strongly attracted to surrealism,
and although he never actively joined the movement, he
has always manifested an interest and even a kinship with
it.

method of writing at moments of enthusiasm

Miller's
and and in great jets of fertility as if he were hyp-
fervor,
notized, and directed, and dictated to, is unquestionably
very close to the surrealist method. He imposes no pre-
conceived form on his narrative, which is more rhapsody
 Conclusions 185

than narration. In his greatest passages, which are long sus-

tained dithyrambs in lyric prose, charged with surrealist
images in free association, propelled by and inven-
listings
tories forming a background on which the images grow
and impinge, Henry Miller gives the impression of exer-
cising his spirit, of revealing it as few writers ever have,
and hence of indicating the endless possibilities of surreal-
ism. His search and inquietude are more religious, and
even more mystical than those of the early surrealists; they
are closer to the examples of Lautreamont and Rimbaud.
JjLJn time, when the inane falsely moralistic controversies
over Miller are exhausted in America and France, his
books will be reconsidered as the great lyric expression of
our twilight world.
It would be quite justifiable to read Miller's book Black

Spring as an example of prose written in exceptional free-

dom, in surrealist freedom, where accident or hazard is
juxtaposed with drama, and where dreams especially fill
the fast moving canvas. Miller constantly relives the drama
of childhood, the drama of the 14th ward in Brooklyn.
"Each man," he tells us, is "his own civilized desert, the
island of self on which he is shipwrecked." Each artistic
work, he seems to consider a flight off from this island of
self, and he alludes to the classic flights of Melville, Rim-

baud, Gauguin, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence.

One of the chapters in Black Spring, a passage of about
twenty pages entitled The Angel Is My Water-Mark!, is in
one respect a treatise on the surrealist method of composi-
tion. In it Miller describes his painting a water-color. He
feels like a water-color and then he does one. He begins by
drawing a horse. (Miller has vaguely in mind the Etrus-
can horses he had seen in the Louvre.) At one moment the
horse resembles a hammock and then when he adds stripes,
it becomes a zebra. He adds a tree, a mountain, an angel,

cemetery gates. These are the forms which occur almost

unpredictably on his paper. He submits it to the various
186 Age of Surrealism
processes: of smudging, of soaking it in the sink, of holding
it upside down and letting the colors coagulate. Finally it
is done: a masterpiece which has come about by accident.
But he says that the 23rd psalm was another accident. He
looks at the water-color and sees it to be the result of mis-
takes, erasures, hesitations, but "also the result of certi-
tude." Every work of art has to be credited, in some
mysterious way, to every artist. So Miller credits Dante,
Spinoza, and Hieronymous Bosch for his little water-color.
I should like to quote the last page of this passage as an

example both of surrealist art and surrealist theory. It is

in two paragraphs, and, although it may well have been
written without revision, it has its own structure and form.
The first paragraph is composed of a series of questions, a
list of possible things you might see, through the power of

association, as you look at the picture. They are the pri-

vate objects which an individual spectator will see and
which come as much from him as from the painting. Then
the second paragraph describes the one object in the paint-
ing which cannot be missed, the angel, formed by the
water-mark. If you hold a beautiful piece of paper up to
the light, you see its tracery, its real nature, its water-mark.
In Miller's painting, the angel is the water-mark, the one
element which cannot be scrubbed out, because if it were,
the painting would cease to be a painting:
"My masterpiece! It's like a splinter under the
nail. I ask you, now that you are looking at it, do you see
in it the lakes beyond the Urals? do you see the mad
Kotchei balancing himself with a paper parasol? do you
see the arch of Trajan breaking through the smoke of Asia?
do you see the penguins thawing in the Himalayas? do you
see the Creeks and the Seminoles gliding through the
cemetery gates? do you see the fresco from the Upper Nile,
with its flying geese, its bats and aviaries? do you see the
marvellous pommels of the Crusaders and the saliva that
washed them down? do you see the wigwams belching fire?
 Conclusions 187

do you see the alkali sinks and the mule bones and the
gleaming borax? do you see the tomb of Belshazzar, or the
ghoul who is rifling it? do you see the new mouths which
the Colorado will open up? do you see the star-fish lying on
their backs and the molecules supporting them? do you see
the bursting eyes of Alexander, or the grief that inspired
it? do you see the ink on which the squibs are feeding?

"No, I'm afraid you don't! You see only the bleak
blue angel frozen by the glaciers. You do not even see the
umbrella ribs, because you are not trained to look for um-
brella ribs. But you see an angel, and you see a horse's ass.
And you may keep them: they are for you! There are no
—
pock-marks on the angel now only a cold blue spot-light
which throws into relief his fallen stomach and his broken
arches. The angel is there to lead you to Heaven, where it

is all plus and no minus. The angel is there like a water-

mark, a guarantee of your faultless vision. The angel has

no goitre; it is the artist who has the goitre. The angel is

there to drop sprigs of parsley in your omelette, to put a

shamrock in your buttonhole. I could scrub the mythology
out of the horse's mane; I could scrub the yellow out of
the Yangtsze-Kiang; could scrub the date out of the man
I

I could scrub out the clouds and the tissue

in the gondola;
paper in which were wrapped the bouquets with forked
lightning. . . . But the angel I can't scrub out. The angel
is my water-mark"

IV
The most deeply spiritual aspect of sur-
realism, at times clearly acknowledged as in Breton's first
Manifeste, but at all times actively pervasive, is the will to
stress the continuities and similarities in men. Whenever
the mind is able to penetrate into the dark degree of
knowledge where opposites cease conflicting with one an-
other, it has reached a surrealistic state. In Eureka, Poe
describes the moment when the heart of man is confused
188 Age of Surrealism
with the heart of divinity. The surrealist experiment is the
most recent way (and the most ancient as well) of recon-
ciling man with the universe. In the Purgatorio, canto 18,
where Dante has seen the spirits of the slothful, he becomes
conscious of a new thought set within him and describes
how many other thoughts spring from it, so that finally he
closes his eyes through drowsiness and says surrealistically
at the very end of the canto:

e il pensamento in sogno transmutai

("and I transmuted thought into a dream")

Surrealism, in stressing the relationship between and even

the identity of spirit and matter, differs from supernatu-
ralism which in its Greek, Hebraic, and Christian forms
emphasizes the dualism of spirit and matter.
The movement itself, especially at its beginnings, and

to some degree through its brief history, is best character-

ized by its rejection, its violent and revolutionary rejec-
tion, of the human condition of man. The idea of warfare
against the purely human condition of man occupies the
dark center and focus of surrealism. Revolution is always
associated with sacrifice, with the idea of a personal dispo-
sition for sacrifice. The from Bau-
history of French letters
delaire to Vache and Crevel, from Lautreamont to Nadja
of Andre Breton and Au Chateau d'Argoloi Julien Gracq,
might be described as an extraordinary disposition toward
holocaust, wherein the hero is damned and sacrificed.
Georges Bataille, who was influenced by surrealism, wrote
in his book U
Experience Interieure: Nous sommes con-
duits a faire la part du feu. ("We are led to participate in
the fire.")
In countless passages of Baudelaire's Mon coeur mis a
nu, we can read an apocalyptic resonance, a terrifying vision
of man Baudelaire saw in Poe a victim
as sacrificial victim.
of conscience, an example of premeditated immolation. In
 Conclusions 189

the art of Daumier, the sacrifice of man is derisiveand sar-

donically bitter, but in Baudelaire, it takes on the form of
a mission, of an altar celebration and sacrifice. In his three
categories of great men, the poet, the priest, and the sol-
dier, we have the singer, the sacrificer, and the sacrificed.
They are all united in a single ritual. (Mon coeur mis a
nu: 48). From this aspect of revolutionary martyrdom,
from Baudelaire's notations on the supernatural volup-
tuousness which man feels in seeing his own blood flow,
the surrealists derived a tendency to depict sanguinary
marvels. What represents their efforts of liberation, inter-
pretation,and sincerity, often turn out to be a black des-
perate kind of caricature. This is not their fault, however,
but the world's and the great distance the modern world
has moved away from a belief in the free will of man and
the ultimate chance of his victory. The patrimony of ro-
manticism, on which we are all living, in the center of
which men like Baudelaire, Lautreamont, and Jacques
Vache opened up the darkest regions, has to be used up
first and completely exhausted before the sense of carica-

ture will disappear from modern man's enterprises, such

as surrealism.
Jean-Paul Sartre, in a recently published introduction to
the Ecrits Intimes of Baudelaire, has passed a cruel verdict
on the poet, but one that is quite in keeping with existen-
tialist philosophy. Sartre refuses to believe in the Greek
myth of the fates or the Christian myth of God's mercy and
intervention in affairs of the world. Baudelaire made his
own destiny and was completely responsible own for his
suffering according to Sartre. Because he willed to make
himself into the passive type, the boy who submitted him-
self to his parents, and then the man who submitted him-

self to the will of his mistress and usurers, he became the

type of the fouette, the man whipped.
What Sartre seems to have forgotten, or what he de-
liberately refuses to include in his analysis of Baudelaire,
190 Age of Surrealism
is the deliverance and liberation which the poem itself

brought to Baudelaire. The act of writing for the poet was

always the act of discovering the unity of the world, and
there the surrealists have fervently perpetuated the lesson
of Baudelaire. For Baudelaire and the surrealists, the imag-
ination is not simply that faculty of the poet which creates
and combines images. It is the faculty which goes much
more deeply, in the discovery of the ancient belief in the
world's unity. It is the faculty able to call upon the sub-
conscious forces which relate this belief. The doctrine of
Baudelaire's Correspondances may be traced back to an-
cient Greece and ahead to the surrealist experiments with
poetry where the human spirit is seen to be a single spark
in the midst of a cosmic flame. The region described in
—
Baudelaire's Invitation au Voyage La tout nest qu'ordre
et beaute —
is that point where the human spirit partici-

pates in everything, where the one is apprehended in the

multiple. Examine the final stanza of the poem as an ex-
ample of a surreal picture of the world, as a communion
with a peacefulness where opposites are united.
In his Confiteor de V Artiste, Baudelaire speaks of the
solitude and the silence of the poet where all things think
through him or where he thinks through them. {Solitude,
silence, incomparable chastete de Vazur! toutes ces . . .

choses pensent par moi, ou je pense par elles.) His mysti-

cism, like that of surrealism, is more heterodox than ortho-
dox, more a communion with himself and the universe,
than with divinity. He has called his worship of images, in
one of his most important sentences of Mon coeur mis a
nu, his unique primitive passion, (glorifier le culte des
images, ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion) In
his two sets of images, those of spleen and those of the
ideal, Baudelaire described the schizoid nature of our civil-

ization, as dramatically as the Netherlands painter, Jerome

Bosch, 450 years before surrealism, described the same na-
ture, in the infernal vision of mysteries, such as his Temp-
 Conclusions 191

tation of St. Anthony in Lisbon. Baudelaire and Bosch

would agree with the surrealists that much of man's inner
life is composed of caverns, fearful, guiltful nightmares

which must be explored, and whose projection in art is a

liberation of the human spirit.
Baudelaire was among the first to see in modern life, in
modernism as we call it now, the epic which
possibilities
the surrealists especially have exploited. He
was one of the
first to see the sublime motifs and the particular kind of

heroism in modern life. One hundred years ago, in his

Salon notes of 1846, he wrote a page on "heroism in mod-
ern life" in which he describes Paris as beset by occult and
contradictory forces. This is the passage in which he de-
fines beauty as composed of an eternal element and a tran-
sitory element and in which he states that the moderns
have their own kind of beauty. Cleopatra's suicide differs
from the modern suicide. The everlasting black suit which
the modern bourgeois feels he must wear in his evening
functions, Baudelaire elaborates on as the expression of the
public soul, the parade of modern politicians, lovers, and
bourgeois who are all celebrating, without realizing it,

their own funeral.

But Baudelaire would agree with the surrealists that
even in this modern age when men dress in black suits, the
marvellous (le merveilleux) surrounds us and feeds us as
the atmosphere does. During most of its life, the human
spirit lives in exile. In the creation of poetry, it leaves its

exile and returns into its natural climate, into the region
where it acquires its full powers of enchantment and witch-
craft and transformation. Realism is always just below po-
etry as mythology is always just above. Surrealism is an
exceptional way by which a correspondence is established
between realism and mythology.
Poetry is a definitive language. It may come from a va-
riety of experiences. Love, for example, in itself a transi-
tory and changing experience, when it is transformed into
192 Age of Surrealism
a sonnet or an elegy, becomes a miraculously fixed and
surreal experience. Keats says about the lovers depicted on
the Grecian Urn:

For ever warm and still to be enjoy 'd,

For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above.

Surrealism is the most recent effort to establish a com-

munion between the poet and the world, between the poet
and the masses men
of or the coolness of a forest or a
church or a poet is the man most able to pro-
prairie. The
jectand prolong his civilization into the future, because
he transmits a divinized or surrealistic picture of every-
thing in his own world, war and peace, joy and tears, to
the man of the future. Poetry is at once a practice and a
deliverance of the spirit.
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

General Works on Surrealism

Balakian, Anna, Literary Origins of Surrealism, King's
Crown Press, New York, 1947.
Lemaitre, Georges E., From Cubism to Surrealism in
French Literature, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, 1941.
Nadeau, Maurice, Histoire du Surrealisme , Editions du
Seuil, Paris, 1946.
Nadeau, Maurice, Documents Surrealistes, Editions du
Seuil, Paris, 1948.
Raymond, Marcel, De Baudelaire au Surrealisme, Correa,
Paris, 1933.
Reed, Herbert, Surrealism, Faber, London, 1936.

Articles on Surrealism

Bataille, Georges, Le Surrealisme et^ sa difference avec

V existentialisme , Critique, No. 2, juillet 1946.
Blanchot, Maurice, A propos du surrealisme, L'Arche,
aout 1945.
La Rochelle, Drieu, La veritable erreur des surrealistes,
N.R.F. aout 1925.
 ,

194 Age of Surrealism

Peyre, Henri, The Significance of Surrealism, Yale French
Studies, Fall- Winter, 1948.
Reneville, Rolland de, Dernier etat de la poesie surrealiste
N.R.F. fevrier 1932.
Ribemont-Dessaignes, Histoire de Dada, N.R.F. juin-aout
1931.
Riviere, Jacques, Reconnaissance a Dada, N.R.F. aout
1920.

Other Works to Consult

Aragon, Louis, Le Paysan de Paris, Gallimard, 1926.
Aragon, Louis, Traite du Style, Gallimard, 1928.
Baruzi, Joseph, La Volonte de Metamorphose, Grasset,
1911.
Cassou, Jean, Pour la Poesie, Correa, 1935.
Maritain, Jacques, Les Frontieres de la Poesie, Plon, 1927.
Monnerot, Jules, La poesie moderne et le sacre, Gallimard,
1945.
Reneville, Rolland de, L' Experience Poetique, Gallimard,
1938.
Reneville, Rolland de, Univers de la Parole, Gallimard,
1944.
Vache, Jacques, Lettres de Guerre, Au Sans Pareil, 1919.

Lautreamont
Lautreamont, Oeuvres completes, Corti, 1938.
Bachelard, Gaston, Lautreamont, Corti, 1939.
Blanchot, Maurice, Lautreamont et le mirage des sources,
Critique, No. 25, juin 1948.
Pierre-Quint, Leon, Le comte de Lautreamont et Dieu,
Cahiers du Sud, 1930.
Soupault, Philippe, Lautreamont, Cahiers Libres, 1927.

Rimbaud
Rimbaud, Arthur, Oeuvres Completes, Edition de la
Pleiade, 1946.
 Selected Bibliography 195

Blanchot, Maurice, Le Sommeil de Rimbaud, Critique,

No. 10, 1947.
Etiemble Rimbaud, Gallimard,
et Gauclere, 1936.
Fowlie, Wallace, Rimbaud, New Directions, 1946.
Fowlie, Wallace, Rimbaud in 1949, Poetry, December
1949.
Hackett, C. A. Rimbaud I'enfant, Corti, 1948.
Reneville, Rolland de, Rimbaud le Voyant, Au Sans Pa-
reil, 1929.
Starkie, Enid, Arthur Rimbaud, Hamish Hamilton, 1947.

Mallarme
Mallarme, Stephane, Oeuvres Completes, Edition de la
Pleiade, 1945.
Beausire, Pierre, Essai sur la Poesie et la Poetique de Mal-
larme, Roth, 1942.
Cohn, Robert Greer, Mallarme' s Un Coup de Des, Yale
French Studies, New Haven, 1949.
Fowlie, Wallace, Mallarme, University of Chicago Press
(to be published in 1951).
Mondor, Henri, Vie de Mallarme, Gallimard, 1942.

Apollinaire
Apollinaire, Guillaume, Alcools, Gallimard, 1927.
Apollinaire, Calligrammes, Gallimard, 1936.
Apollinaire, Les Mamelles de Tiresias, Editions Sic, 1918.
Billy, Andre, Apollinaire vivant, La Sirene, 1923.
Shattuck, Roger, Apollinaire (translations), New Direc-
tions, 1950.
Soupault, Philippe, Apollinaire ou les reflets de Vincendie,
Cahiers du Sud, 1927.

Breton
Breton, Andre, Manifeste du Surrealisme, Kra, 1924.
Breton, Andre, Nadja, Gallimard, 1928.
 196 Age of Surrealism
Breton, Andre, Second Manifeste du Surrealisme, Kra,
1930.
Breton, Andre, Le Surrealisme et la Peinture, Brentano's,
1945.
Breton, Andre, The Situation of Surrealism between the
Two Wars, Yale French Studies, Fall-Winter,
1948.
Gracq, Julien, Andre Breton ou VAme d'un Mouvement,
Fontaine 58.
Pfeiffer, Jean, Situation de Breton, L'Arche, juillet, 1946.

Cocteau
Cocteau, Jean, Le Rappel a VOrdre, Stock, 1926.
Cocteau, Jean, Orphee, Stock, 1930.
Cocteau, Jean, Essai de Critique Indirecte, Grasset, 1932.
Mauriac, Claude, Jean Cocteau, Odette Lieutier, 1945.

Eluard
Eluard, Paul, Capitale de la Douleur, Gallimard, 1926.
Eluard, Paul, Donner a voir, Gallimard, 1939.
Eluard, Paul, Chanson Complete, Gallimard, 1939.
Balakian, Anna, The
Post-Surrealism of Aragon and Elu-
ard, YaleFrench Studies, Fall- Winter 1948.
Carrouges, Michel, Eluard et Claudel, Du Seuil, 1945.
Delattre, Andre, Personal Notes on Paul Eluard, Yale
French Studies, Winter 1948.
Seeley, Carol, The Poetry of Paul Eluard, Western Re-
view, Fall 1949.
Parrot, Louis, Paul Eluard, Seghers, 1944.

Picasso
Apollinaire, Guillaume, Les Peintres Cubistes, 1912.
Barr, Alfred H., Picasso: fifty years of his art, N. Y. Mu-
seum of Modern Art, 1946.
Cocteau, Jean, Carte Blanche, 1920.
 Selected Bibliography 197

Eluard, Paul, A Pablo Picasso, Trois Collines, Geneve,

1945.
Laporte, Paul, Space-time concept in Picasso, Magazine of
Art, January 1948.
Raynal, Maurice, Picasso, L'Art d'aujourd'hui, Paris, 1924.
Uhde, Wilhelm, Picasso et la tradition francaise, Editions
des quatre-chemins, 1928.
 INDEX

Aeschylus 42 38, 40, 42, 45, 46, 57, 61, 62,

Age of Anxiety 92 66-68, 76, 78-81, 99, 108, 112,
Aigle a deux tetes 121, 122 140-144, 149, 155, 181, 188-191
Alain-Fournier 16 Belitt 57
Anouilh 121 Bergson 19, 20, 55, 86, 104
Antigone 121, 122, 157 Billy 85
Apollinaire 12, 22, 23, 83-101, Birth of Tragedy 80
103, 104, 105, 116, 142, 159, Black Spring 185-187
160, 162, 163, 164, 184 Blake 61, 174, 184
Apres-Midi d'un Faune 65, 159 Blanche 179
Aquinas 26 Bloy 33
Aragon 21, 22, 51, 110, 111, 112 Boeuf sur le Toit 121
Arcana Coelestina 68 Bonniot 69
Arcimbaldo 174 Bosch 174, 186, 190, 191
A rebours 82 Braque 22, 160, 165, 166
Aristophanes 43 Breton 11, 12, 21-23, 77, 79, 80,
Aristotle 14, 27 102-118, 127, 140, 142, 143, 145,
Au Chateau d'Argol 182, 188 164, 165, 168, 174, 175, 177,
Auden 92 179, 180, 182, 184, 187
Axel 65, 66 Bronte, Emily 156
Azur 65 Brunetiere 14
Burke, Kenneth 155, 180
Balzac 16, 109 Byron 79
Bankhead 121
Barres 104 Cadavre, Un 110, 112
Bataille, Georges 188 Calligrammes 100, 106
Bateau Ivre 47, 56, 59, 97 Cantique de saint Jean 69
Baudelaire 12, 16, 22, 25-27, 36- Capitale de la douleur 146, 150
199
 200 Age of Surrealism
Carra 113 Don Giovanni 52
Carroll 174 Dostoievski 18, 62, 79
Castiglione 120 Ducasse cf. Lautreamont
Cavalcanti 146 Duchamp 106, 174
Caves du Vatican 18, 19, 164 Dufy 91, 121
Celle de toujours, toute 151 Dullin 157
Cendrars 31 Duval 79, 81
Cervantes 167
Cesaire 176
El Greco 165
Cezanne 161, 165, 175 Eliot 93, 141
Chanson Complete 153, 155 Eluard 11, 21, 22, 33, 79, 103, 110,
Chanson du Mal-Aime 93, 94-98,
113, 114, 116, 138-156, 176, 179
100, 184
Ernst 110, 138, 142, 170
Chants de Maldoror 33-44, 46,
Eureka 187
109, 167
Experience Interieure 188
Chaplin 43, 98, 100, 163
Chateaubriand 21, 43, 77
Faust 78
Chatterton 66
Chirico 104, 113, 123, 164, 167,
Fernandel 43
4
Finnegans Wake 183
170, 174
Flaubert 65, 66, 78, 79, 82, 136
Claudel 29, 60, 93, 104
Fort 85
Cocteau 12, 98, 110, 119, 120-137,
151, 157-161, 164, 173
Fragments du Narcisse 143
France, Anatole 1*10, 112
Coleridge 155
Colet 136 Francesca, Piero della 129
Fratellini 121
Corot 161
Correspondances 190 Freud 12, 19, 20, 25, 105, 106,

Couleur du Temps 116 108, 110, 113, 177

Coup de des 106, 183 Front Rouge 112

Coward 178
Crevel 179, 181, 188 Gabin 100
Gauguin 153, 185
Gaulle 21
Dali 35, 106, 112-115, 142, 170, Genesis 51
174 Genonceaux 31
Daniel 109 Gide 12, 17, 18-20, 31, 44, 89,
Dante 12, 40, 42, 76, 186, 188 105, 136, 144, 164
Daumier 189 Gill 48
Debussy 86 Giraudoux 121
Degas 164 Goethe 42, 66, 78, 79
Delacroix 79, 81, 87, 164 Gourmont 33
Demeny 49, 53 Gracq 182, 188
Derain 22 Graham 72
Derate 22 Grierson 14
Desnos 51, 52, 79, 109, 112, 113 Gris 91, 92
Diaghilev 160 Guinizelli 146
 Index 201
Hegel 12 Machine Infernale 121
Heraclitus 12, 184 Magritte 175
Herodiade 63-82, 108, 143, 151, Mallarme 12, 23, 29, 35, 45, 46,
181 55, 63-82, 89, 99, 101, 106, 108,
Hiawatha 52 129, 140, 143, 151, 158, 159,
Hindemith 72 161, 170, 171, 183
Holderlin 62 Malraux 21
Honegger 121 Mamelles de Tiresias 90
Hugo 29, 67, 121 Marcoussis 91, 142
Huysmans 79, 82 Maries de la Tour Eiffel 121
Maritain 111
Inferno 76 Marx 12, 114
Invitation au Voyage 143, 190 Massis 111
Ion 15 Masson 110, 115, 170, 174, 175
Izambard 48, 49 Matisse 22, 106, 114, 160, 165
Matta 164
Jacob, Max 22, 83, 85, 142, 159,
Mauriac 16, 61
162
Melusine 117, 119, 172, 173, 180,
James, Henry 185
181
Jarry 85, 104, 176
Melville 185
Jeune Parque 144
Michaux 176
Jolie Rousse 100
Milhaud 121
Joyce 29, 43, 52, 173, 182-184
Miller, Henry 184-187

Kafka 36, 62 Millet 113

Keats 81, 192 Milton 38, 42
Kiesler 174 Miro 113, 167

Kubla Khan 155 Moliere 43

Mon coeur mis a nu 188-190
Lacroix 30 Monk, The 155
Laforgue 82 Monsieur Verdoux 98
La Rochefoucauld 37 Montaigne 37, 136, 137
Laurencin 22, 85, 91 Moore, Henry 175
LautrǤamont 12, 13, 22, 28-44, 46, Morel, Abbe" 173
47, 57, 62, 79, 99, 103, 104, 106, Moreau 81
108, 110, 139, 142, 145, 159, Mozart 87
167, 168, 176, 178, 179, 181,
188, 189 Nadja 77, 115-119, 168, 180, 181,
Lawrence 146, 184, 185 188
Leataud 94 Nerval 22, 62, 66, 69, 149
Leger 22 Nietzsche 68, 80
Leonardo da Vinci 81 Noailles 160
Lettre du Voyant 47 Nous sommes 153
Lettres de Guerre 23 Nourritures Terrestres 19
Lewis 78, 80, 155 Novalis 68, 104
Longfellow 52
Lorca 106 Orphee 121, 125-130
202 Age of Surrealism
Paalen 175 Riviere 61
Parade 120, 121, 160, 161 Romantic Agony 81
Parents Terribles 121 Ronsard 145
Pascal 61, 136 Rouault 163, 164
Pater 81 Rousseau 21, 68
Peguy 91 Rousseau de donanier 22, 85, 106
Peret 21, 22, 103, 114, 115, 142 Ruy Bias 121
Petrouchka 86, 87, 98, 100, 163
Phares, Les 79 Sade 12, 78-80, 112
Picabia 167 Saint-Just 12, 104, 105
Picasso 12, 22, 43, 52, 53, 77, 82, Saison en Enfer 47, 52, 60, 62,
84-87, 98, 100, 106, 113, 116, 109, 166
121, 124, 127, 142, 147, 153, Salammbo 65, 78
157-173, 174 Sang d'un Poete 122, 129-137
Pisanello 129 Sartre 121, 189
Pitoeff 121, 125 Satie 121, 124, 175
Plato 15, 49, 68 Seurat 104, 106, 175
Poe 29, 45, 70, 112, 155, 187, 188 Shakespeare 12, 13
Pollaiuolo 180 Si le grain ne meurt 16
Poulenc 90 Socrates 15
Pound 149 Sophocles 35, 3*8
Poussin 161 Soupault 22, 104, 140
Praz 81 Spinoza 186
Premiere du Monde 147, 149 Spleen de Paris 142
Prevert 112, 176 Stein, Gertrude 159
Proust 16, 18, 20, 43, 52, 153, 160 Stendhal 16, 20, 88
Purgatorio 188 Strauss, Richard 82
Pythagoras 49 Stravinsky 163
Survage 167
Queneau 112 Swedenborg 45, 68

Racine 28, 38 Tanguy 115, 142

Radcliffe 78, 80 Tentation de saint Antoine 79
Raynal 159 Toulouse-Lautrec 161
Read, Herbert 14 Traite du Style 111
Renaud et Armide 121 Trotsky 110
Reneville 49 Tzara 103, 140, 167
Reve Familier 144
Reverdy 176 Ubi Roi 104
Rigaut 179, 181 Uccello 129
Rimbaud 12, 18, 22, 25, 29, 31-33, Ulysses 52, 182, 183
44-62, 66, 80, 83, 88-90, 94, 97,
99, 104, 106, 111, 112, 114, 140, Vache 22-24, 179, 181, 188, 189
144, 145, 150, 155, 162, 163, Valentino 130
166, 169, 170, 176, 178, 179, Valery 66, 105, 144, 164
181, 184, 185 Van Gogh 106
 Index 203
Verlaine 93, 144, 163 Watteau 163
Vermeer 114 Werther 66
Vie Immediate 155 Whitman 88
Vigny 29 Wilde 82
Villiers de l'lsle-Adam 65, 79 Wuthering Heights 156, 181
Villon 93, 163
Vlaminck 85 Zervos 168
Zola 88
Wagner 182 Zone 91, 93
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