The New Criterion

Despite his central role in one of the most influential of modern art movements, André Breton, the “pope of Surrealism,” poet, essayist, polemicist, and intellectual agitator, has long remained an enigmatic and somewhat elusive figure. This seems all the more surprising when one considers that he lived out most of his life in public—in “a glass house,” to use his own words, and in a “glass bed, with glass sheets.”

In part this elusiveness has been owing to the fact that, until recently, much of the documentation of his more intimate life has not been available to researchers. (Indeed, the correspondence between Breton and poet-novelist Louis Aragon—dear friend and early Surrealist collaborator until the latter fully embraced Stalinism in 1932, after which Breton never spoke to him again— still remains under lock and key.) It also stems from the fact that Breton’s “public” self—as standard-bearer of Surrealism, but also as the first-person voice of the many prose works that combine essay, autobiography, lyric flights, and philosophical speculation—was actually a carefully crafted persona revealing very little of the real man, the charismatic if choleric leader who, despite his fierce and often arbitrary fulminations against fellow-Surrealists and friends, commanded, at least up to a point, their loyal and loving respect. But perhaps for more than any other reason, Breton’s character has defied posterity’s full comprehension because of the profound contradictions at the very heart of the man, contradictions which he indeed cultivated as part of his “artistic research” but probably understood far less than he believed.

Mark Polizzotti’s new biography, Revolution of the Mind, admirably dispels much of the mist surrounding the figure of Breton and gives us a splendidly clear picture of the man himself. In a richly documented, seamlessly composed narrative that is as engrossing as it is informative, Polizzotti has brilliantly succeeded in filling in many of the lingering gaps in our knowledge of the life of one of the seminal cultural figures of our troubled century. Interweaving Breton’s personal and intellectual involvements with the passions, polemics, and shenanigans of the complex and colorful bohemian milieu of Paris from Dada to the eve of World War II (and then to the more subdued cultural world of postwar Paris), the author paints a broad, sweeping canvas of the age while taking care to present all of Breton’s relationships and conflicts from as many sides as possible, never intervening to pass judgment or to defend his subject, but rather letting all the circumstances and principal parties speak for themselves. If the best biographies go beyond mere advocacy or enmity to present, as much as possible, the full human complexity of their subjects, with all their foibles and virtues, then Polizzotti, with this, his first book, has given us an exemplary model of the art.

And Breton’s foibles, like his virtues, certainly make for an interesting tale. Born in 1896 in Tinchebray, Normandy, the only child of an unambitious lower-middle-class father and a strict, zealously churchgoing mother of the same social milieu, André Breton appeared to be on his way to a medical career after proving an unexceptional, if at times highly promising, student. He had also shown a keen interest in poetry from early adolescence, but since his eye was above all for poets marginally or not yet fully accepted into the French canon, especially the poètes maudits—Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud—he had no particular incentive to undergo the classical, humanistic education usually given to those with a literary bent, and opted for a more science-based training. The literary pursuits continued unabated, however, and as soon as he went to Paris in 1913 for his P.C.B. certificate—a standard, year-long science program preliminary to medical studies—he got in touch with Symbolist poet Paul Valéry, then forty-two years old but not yet the national celebrity he would soon become. The older poet was suitably impressed with the “Mallarméan” poems of the seventeen-year-old and encouraged him duly, but it wasn’t long before the opportunistic Breton also sought out and won the approval of another prominent poet of the time, Guillaume Apollinaire, champion of Cubism and other avant-garde causes and future inventor of the term “Surrealism.”

Breton was obviously playing both sides of the fence, in a manner that he himself would later refuse to tolerate in his associates. But his heart was really with “the new,” and though he would continue for a while to write “symbolist” poems, his propensity for radical experimentation, in art as well as life, would soon become manifest. Meanwhile the Great War had broken out, and in his experience in the army medical corps he made friends with a patient named Jacques Vaché, a dandyish young nihilist of the sort cropping up all over Europe at the time, whose snide intolerance of art and literature—he mockingly called the poetically inclined Breton le pohète—deeply impressed and influenced Breton for the rest of life. Indeed, though Vaché died only a few years later of an opium overdose—an event that probably determined Breton’s lifelong, resolute intolerance of drug use— the memory of the young soldier would forever remain a kind of inner, other self for Breton, who created for his lost friend a legend and a posterity that Vaché clearly would never have otherwise enjoyed.

Breton would soon find an echo of Vaché’s anti-art nihilism in the nascent Dada movement and its anarchic leader, Tristan Tzara, whose favor he was quick to solicit, and whom he labored hard to persuade to bring his Zurich-born “enterprise” to Paris. Quickly bored with Valéry’s middle-aged conservatism-cum-rationalism, and dismayed by the newfound French nationalism of the foreign-born Apollinaire (of Polish and probably Italian parentage), the young Breton was looking for other contemporaries to share his peculiarly subversive understanding of literature; for him, both Valéry and Apollinaire still subscribed to l’art pour l’art, while he envisioned a poetry that would, as in Rimbaud’s words, changer la vie. By this time he had already met future fellow-Surrealists and soul mates Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, and with them had founded, in 1919, the ironically named review Littérature. Breton and his co-editors opened their pages to Tzara’s group, but also to some of the “rear guard” (including Valéry and Gide), in addition to publishing their own attempts at “experimental” verse (mostly word-collages) and polemical essays in support of Dada.

But the generally playful, satirical Tzara, a Romanian Jew by birth, and the moody, rather humorless Breton, who hailed from one of the gloomier corners of France, were clearly cut from different cloth and often clashed over the direction each felt that Paris Dada should take. The collaboration did not last long. For despite his “anti-literary” stance, Breton yearned for something more than Dada’s absolute mockery of art, and already began to make his break in 1920, though the final rift didn’t occur until 1922, on the occasion of the disastrous “Congress of Paris,” which he had organized to debate the current positions of the literary and artistic avant-gardes.

The medical studies, though little more than a fond memory at this point, were not without echo in Breton’s literary endeavors. Indeed, Breton’s only real interest in the medical profession had always been for the fledgling psychiatric field, and this had led him to the writings of Freud and of the French psychoanalyst Pierre Janet, whose ideas informed his wartime dealings with soldiers suffering from traumatic ailments caused by the new means of warfare. His experience with Janet’s methods of using verbal automatism as therapy, and the remarkable things that patients said when practicing it, had led him to believe that it had great poetic and even metaphysical potential as a means for liberating man from the constraints of what he saw as outdated and repressive cultural, social, and literary norms. The application of automatism to writing thus yielded, in 1920, the book-length collaboration with Philippe Soupault called Les Champs magnétiques (“The Magnetic Fields”), considered by most to be the first Surrealist text.

Believing they had made a major discovery, Breton and Soupault communicated their enthusiasm to Aragon and their other associates, who now included Benjamin Péret and Paul Eluard. In the next few years, then, riding the crest of the excitement generated by the novelty of automatic writing and by experiments in such still current psychoanalytic practices as hypnotically induced sleep—here used to “creative” ends—this group of poets would form the first Surrealist nucleus. Taking their literary cues from such contemporaries as Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy and such predecessors as Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, and Lautréamont (whose series of nightmarish prose poems, Les Chants de Maldoror, would assume an almost scriptural importance for Breton), the Surrealist poets thus already had a powerful head of steam when Breton wrote the first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, published that same year together with his most impressive automatic text, Poisson soluble (“Soluble Fish”).

The Manifesto is probably the best known of Breton’s works. It was written in the middle of a very fertile period for him, coming just after the poetry collection Clair de terre (“Earthlight”), which features many of the new Surrealist techniques, and the essay collection Les Pas perdus (“The Lost Steps”), and coming one year before the establishment of the hyperbolically named review La Révolution surréaliste, of which he was chief editor.

It is this, Surrealism’s early, “heroic” age —which would last until 1930, after weathering a few storms—that to me has always seemed the most fecund, the most innocent, the most unmarred by the darker side of Breton’s personality. For the moment, anyway, the Surrealist idea, while guided by Breton and following his lead, clearly transcended and exceeded his directives, forming a vast, fluid whole capable of accommodating a broad range of literary and artistic talents and personalities, including Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard, Antonin Artaud, and André Masson. With their fixation on the themes of love, liberation, fantasy, and dream, the Surrealists were the Romantics of modernism, bringing new passion to a literary culture long beclouded by the pessimism of fin-de-siècle decadence and the nihilism that had followed it.

Polizzotti takes us inside the day-to-day developments of this whirlwind of events, showing how Breton’s catalytic role in the movement lay not only in establishing the theoretical foundations of Surrealism but also in acting on a keen sense of strategy and an ability to create scandal among an already jaded public. Many of the Surrealists’ antics—disrupting other art manifestations, beating up opponents, provoking minor riots—may seem appalling to us now, the stuff of rowdy schoolboys hardly worthy of being called artists. What is perhaps more problematic, however, and somewhat taken for granted in Polizzotti’s narrative, is that such behavior actually had a certain “pedigree” by the time Surrealism came along, and that, despite its ability still to arouse indignation, it was, at least by some standards, “normal”: not only had notorious precedents been set by the Futurists in Italy and the Dadaists in Zurich, Berlin, and Paris; there was also the much more ominous example being set by the “free-lance” political groups of the time—Mussolini’s thugs, and later Hitler’s, as well as various anarchist and Communist groups— who seldom hesitated to use force to break up opponents’ rallies or intimidate individuals who refused to be cowed.

It was in fact in those first heady years of avant-garde success that Surrealism, ever true to Breton’s premise that the movement must reach beyond art and into the sphere of direct action, began its long and unfruitful flirtation with Communism. If this political involvement, the source of many of the disputes and rifts that would riddle the Surrealist group in the future, brought out some of Breton’s most tyrannical tendencies, it also, paradoxically, brought out some of his better qualities. From the start a strained relationship, the Surrealists’ courtship of the Communists would linger for some seven years, while Breton persevered in his attempts to convince them of the Revolution’s need for his particular vision of “art.” But what the Communists found hardest to stomach was precisely Breton’s insistence on the liberation of man’s “inner world” as well as his stubborn emphasis on the independence of the artist to conduct his search for man’s liberation as he saw fit. To them, indeed, the proletariat really had no need for artists, and Breton, in particular, they saw as little more than a troublesome anarchist.

By 1930, however, Breton had consolidated his grip on the Surrealist group through a series of “excommunications,” most of which were politically motivated. Usually the guilty parties were perceived as being too concerned for their “careers” or material circumstances—as was the case with Desnos, who by now had also had the temerity to write some poetry in verse. Breton’s intransigence in such matters seemed to many particularly hypocritical at this time, since he, unlike they, at least had a major publisher (Gallimard) to print his works. The contradiction in Breton’s behavior was further highlighted by his continuing insistence on the independence of the artist in his ongoing involvement with the Left, while in his dealings with the Surrealists he jealously resented any hint of individual independence from the group. The Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930) is colored by the vitriol and vindictiveness that marked this period of Surrealism, and lacks the playful spirit of the first manifesto. The Second Manifesto also marks a further rapprochement with the Left, a short-lived and unsuccessful experiment that saw the movement’s “organ,” La Révolution surréaliste, reborn as Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution. Engineered to a large extent (though as ever with Breton’s approval) by Aragon, who by this point had joined the Party, this phase would end with the latter’s “excommunication” in 1932.

A further paradox in Breton’s behavior is that what at first looks like ruthless political maneuvering at the expense of long- cherished friendship—the priority he gave, in Polizzotti’s terms, to “ideological friendship” over “affective friendship”—sometimes ends up looking like principled bravery when all is said and done. The friendship with Aragon is a case in point. Once Aragon had left Surrealism, his loyalty to Communism was as staunch as it earlier had been to Breton, and he was loath to criticize Stalin even at the time of the show trials and purges. Still, it is strangely he, and later Eluard—who left Surrealism behind for Communism at the onset of World War II, never to look back—who appear the more human in their obvious anguish over losing their lifelong friend Breton, who for his part seems unable to see a difference of opinion as anything other than a personal affront.

But whether this sort of valuation of ideas over human sentiment is not perhaps a version of the same fanaticism under whose fire and metal so many have fallen in our century remains a question whose answer lies beyond this remarkable account of Breton’s life and times. For the path he traveled indeed lies strewn with the lives of those he sacrificed to his ideas. From the banished friends to the wives and lovers whose human frailties may have ill-disposed them to fleshing out the fluid Ideal on which it appears his very identity depended, the people he left by the wayside during his life often corresponded very closely to the particular personal obsession they were each supposed to embody or illustrate at the time. This is especially true of the women inspiring the prose works Nadja (1927), The Communicating Vessels (1932), and Arcanum 17 (1944). The case of “Nadja,” the half-mad waif who so briefly captured Breton’s fascination as the embodiment of the Surrealist ideal of freedom and the rejection of conventional bourgeois life, is particularly poignant in Polizzotti’s account of it. It is as if the work itself, and the objectification of the person in it, at last make off with the spirit and life of the living being. And Breton’s callous insensitivity and ultimate indifference to the tragic consequences of his actions in this case cast a pall over what in his telling is a rather charming, faintly sad story.

Yet it is at least in part this talent for objectifying, even mythifying, personal experience that makes Breton’s story a tale worth telling. Early on he made a habit of giving universal, symbolic meaning to the conflicts and triumphs of his life, in a kind of metaphysical megalomania that at once lent lyric power to day-to-day experience and provided the lyric impulse with ready raw material. It also enabled him to incorporate within his own vision whatever ideas, styles, attitudes, or beliefs he deemed fit to inform his poetic and philosophical ideals, regardless of whether he ultimately rejected or embraced the source. Most important, perhaps, it lent a power of conviction and vehemence to the underpinnings of the Surrealist idea as he defined it: the belief in the possibility of dissolving the fundamental antinomies of life as conceived in the Western tradition—subjective vs. objective, transcendence vs. immanence, dream vs. waking —through passion, desire, love, and the agency of an art that would express the spirit directly, unmediated by logic, reason, or the critical sense.

It is no doubt this idea and the special urgency and singlemindedness with which Breton communicated it that attracted so many artists from around the world to his circle, ever ready to expose themselves to the hazards of his association so that they might subscribe to a vision that promised the fruits of otherworldliness without the usually requisite rigors of belief in a transcendent being. But it was also this same sort of monomania that ultimately limited the farthest extent of Breton’s own achievement to having suggested a possible metaphysics of art and action beyond other available models.

For Breton, too, may have been a victim of the singlemindedness with which he clung to his idea of Surrealism. The figure he cuts in Paris after the war, trying desperately to revive the same atmosphere of agitation, the same obligatory, tiresome café meetings, the same banishments and intimidations (though somewhat more restrained now), elicits nothing so much as pity. If only he had been able to temper his scorn for the image of the “man of letters” and let himself contemplate, as a writer, the concepts and passions driving his ambitions, he might have found a trace of the detachment so often propitious to the development of ideas beyond their initial state of fascination. Perhaps then might he have come closer to a true “revolution of the mind,” at least in his writing. As it is, it is still no small feat to have indicated, albeit at some cost to himself and others, the potential for renewal within ourselves.