THE POPE OF SURREALISM
A book review of Mark Polizzottiâs Revolution of the Mind: The Life of AndrĂ© Breton
THE POPE OF SURREALISM
Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton by Mark Polizzotti. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995. 754 pages.
Artistic groups form and fall apart according to their own physical laws. Artists are typically individualists until the time comes that they would like to get anything substantial done on a plane beyond the immediately creative. Gallery shows are put together, magazines are founded, manifestos drawn up, all in the service of a group mind. With the group comes group dynamics, and with group dynamics come power struggles and clashes of personality.
This was never more truer than it was for the âSurrealistsâ as they morphed over something like five or six decades during the tumultuous 20th century, when modernism as an artistic concept began to have real effects, the rubber hitting the road. Mark Polizzottiâs Revolution of the Mind: The Life of AndrĂ© Breton gave a full-scale biographical cross sectioning of the life of perhaps the greatest personality playing the personality game in the French Surrealist movement. Over 624 pages (plus notes) we get the life of this charismatic, charming poet and theoretician who could be found mostly in Parisian coffeehouses leading meetings of his group like a corporate CEO doing trust exercises with his staff â and often, if they had displeased Breton or diverged from the groupâs principles, letting them plummet to the ground unsupported. (Breton fled Europe during World War Two and set up shop in New York City, an absconding that would at times work against him when he returned to war-torn France after the Nazis were beaten. Other artists were not as well-connected and swift with getting papers to leave and had to stay in France and contend with life under the Nazis; some of them joined the Resistance.)
Anyone spending time thinking about the fissiparity of artistic movements, how they clump together and fracture along the fault lines drawn between fields of personal individual charm, would be interested in the story of how Breton behaved with his friends, colleagues, and enemies. It seemed that the Surrealists were forever drawing up statements of intent and excommunicating those who went off the script. Breton would do things like conduct mock trials for other writers and artists in and out of the group and declare them persona non grata at surrealist functions. I would need to reread the book to gain a greater mastery of the whole cast of characters swirling around Breton and their movements, their tendentious friendships with Breton. A recurrent motif had individuals meeting Breton on the streets of Paris by chance, extending their hands for a handshake, and Breton snubs them for some offense, saying âWe are not friends and weâll never speak again.â Snubs and social cutting happened all the time in this milieu.
The combat between Breton and Spanish painter Salvador Dali provides some of the funniest reading. Surrealism was always welcoming in new members â like an army needing more bodies â and then getting into internecine squabbles with its own people. Daliâs ego and desire for publicity and outrage made him a natural foe of Breton who seemed to want more of the limelight for himself. I can only imagine the theatrical, destructive, rude scenes in the coffeehouses or brasseries where Breton and Dali would publicly go at it, in the name of art.
It was always about the art. And the impulse for constant activity. After World War One and the nihilistic virulence of the Dada movement from Zurich and Berlin which caused its own waves of conflict, the number of publications, books, magazines that sprung up to publish the works of the surrealists and their adjacent numbers was positively swarming. Paintings and drawings by visual artists exchanged hands and became the subject of formidable gallery shows, catalogs and retrospectives. Again, I canât recall the names of individual artists involved beyond Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, who as self-sufficient artists were never really in the inner circles of Surrealism but were definitely moving in the broth.
Surrealism can be defined as an aesthetic movement that took cues from the âautomatism of the subconscious mind.â Parlor games, borderline seances and âtrance parties,â automatic writing sessions pushed the boundaries of group creativity in what was a relatively new environment of Freudian psychoanalytic thought. Breton tried to draw the Viennese doctor into the Surrealist orbit on a few occasions and the blank expression on Freudâs face when Breton finally got an audience with him is priceless. Freud had a distaste for the surrealistâs wacky shenanigans and thought they were all weirdos.
Significantly, Dali cracked the shell around Freud where Breton and others failed, causing further rifts: to watch how these artistic personalities pursued celebrated authority figures for their own somewhat propagandistic ends brings up curious and uneasy questions. Politically, Europe was under the sway of the cults of personality surrounding leaders like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, and Surrealists in an pursued leaders, charismatic nodes of concentration in individual people, in an oddly similar fashion that seems counter to the notions of âpersonal freedomâ that they valued. Breton goes to great lengths to try to get on the same wavelength as Leon Trotsky hiding out in Mexico before his assassination. No movement seems exempt from this inevitable worship of a leader, a decision maker, someone to rally followers â or to serve as a focus for rebellious hate. One aspect of the book I found rather tiresome, although I understood its major significance, was the seemingly irresistible suction of Communism upon the Surrealists. It was a strong orbit that Breton and the group at first succumbed to, but then as years went by and the horrors of Stalinist maneuvering became more evident, they tried to pull out of, often unsuccessfully. Creative freedom, the revolution of the human unconscious, does not easily go hand in hand with the struggle of the proletariat. There is a split between the force of historical materialism and the offbeat ideas of the artist chasing dream-imagery, and they donât serve each other as neatly as the Communists wanted. The Communists were as confused as Freud was at the Surrealists, but wanted to bully them into shape, and some like Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon were with it, but many werenât.
Repeatedly in the biography we see how violent it could get, even leaving aside the struggle of Communism. Interwar Paris was a place where you might have a poetry reading, a performance of a play, and opening of a film (a new medium), and a rival gang of artists or just thugs would show up and start shit. It was common for Breton or others to jump on stage and physically confront other people in the middle of a reading or a play. They seemed to have inherited some of this anarchic energy from Dadaists like Tristan Tzara. It was a fight over aesthetic and ideological turf. If you criticized a beloved writer, you might have three dudes show up at your apartment and stomp you. Where are such combatants today? On Twitter perhaps. The subtweet is the beatdown. Reputations get tarnished in a flurry of digital feuilletons. Clusters of writers engage in psychological warfare in social media spaces.
I canât let this review go by without mentioning the women. Itâs understood now from historyâs perspective that women do not get treated well even by progressive groups trying to promulgate cultural change. Tales of hippies from the 1960s are rife with women being put in subservient roles and unfortunately some of the behavior around Breton was no different. Women were often relegated to being muses and targets of love poetry, which is apparently very nice but not, intrinsically, a condition of freedom or equality. Breton was married several times but carried on affairs with other women, sometimes with the patient understanding of his wives, but always seemingly with a kind of artistic motive: love is the fuel for creativity, and when the creative juices arenât flowing anymore, out goes the woman. Movies could be made about the âtourism of loversâ around Europe as men and women in the Surrealist fold followed each other from French vacation spot to vacation spot, tug of wars over lovers that were never fully decisive. A perennial theme of such stories is the older man being rejuvenated by a relationship with a woman in her twenties. Bretonâs famous novel Nadja, the âfirst Surrealist romance,â is a semi-autobiographical narrative about Bretonâs meetings with a strange, somewhat mentally unwell woman on the streets of Paris, a series of romantically tinged encounters that seemed to crystallize in inexplicable ways, the ideas about the unconscious and randomness that Breton was trying to formulate in the 1920s. The actual woman who was the source for this character Nadja (Nadezhda is Russian for âhope,â so Nadja is a name that is a truncation of hope) was apparently too volatile for Breton to stay in touch with and the case could be made that he discarded her in some way.
Polizzottiâs book was evidently his first book, which is as Edmund White puts it, âastonishing.â As a historical document it is quite impressive and drew on a mass of letters, magazine articles, books, and radio interviews (Breton became in the post-war years a kind of eminence grise who strenuously tried to keep himself and surrealism in the center of the public discourse, even as his group was shedding older members and drawing in newer devotees). Readers who want to dig into a more thorough treasure trove of historical sources about surrealism and their cultural vicinity in France and beyond, or just the history of art in the first half of the 20th century, should look to this book. The case has been made, with some persuasiveness, that Surrealism has been one of the most influential trends in 20th century art and culture, giving breath and momentum to subsequent developments in painting, literature, music, cinema, pop art, punk aesthetics, and beyond. With Bretonâs input, as intransigent and difficult as it may have been, Surrealist France continued to prove itself as an epochal, history-diverting, monolithic source of ideas and energy that have infused culture so deeply we can hardly sort out the ectoplasm of the unconscious from among the fibrous grains of reality.
***
I read a lot of this massive book in the midst of awareness of the fissures and conflicts of âlit dramaâ as it bubbled up in the territory of indie lit that I find myself occupying a corner of. There are strong personalities and disputes even now. Itâs hard to tell what the substance of the arguments is at times. Reading about Breton and the Surrealists, itâs maybe facile to look to the history of earlier artists and art movements for lessons applicable to the present. Iâm not sure the people I see when I look out over the literary Twitter landscape are quite the equals of Breton and company. But my mind goes there. It certainly has a thrilling feeling to read about the many magazines back then in Paris between the wars that tried to get off the ground but found themselves lacking the financial resources to function and publish â and feel like Iâm seeing that happen today amongst my friends and colleagues. This is not a new story. The pressures of art and money and tense relationships are as old, I assume, as art and money and relationships themselves. Itâs sad to reflect that a group of friends of mine might be forced to liquidate an excellent publication, before it ever had the chance to assume solid, liquid, or gaseous form in the first place. Iâm mainly talking about money. No one has it for art. Artists donât have it in their lives. Publishing on a certain scale, a scale that seems to make a difference, requires money. And stability. But Iâll be damned if I say that the people and the passion and the talent isnât there. Real life intercedes. I have to say that Iâm happy I have this little chink in the wall, that I can whisper Pyramus/Thisbe messages through, to all of you. Itâs what I can afford. Thank you for reading this long-ass book review.
Clashes of egos... nothing new in the art world. I bet Renaissance painters were throwing palettes at each other too! The Surrealists however were particularly intolerant, divergences of opinions were not tolerated. It might be an echo of the totalitarianism of the times, also worth some reflection about artistic passion... can it be polite without being tame?