This was in L’Express on August 9, 1962. André Breton, aged 66, is interviewed by Madeleine Chapsal. He returns to a little-known episode in his life, when, at the beginning of his twenties, having given up medicine, he was on the verge of falling into poverty: “Paul Valéry, alerted, came to my aid, as did Gide. They found me a small job at Gallimard. On their recommendation, I was also tasked with proofreading a work by Proust which, as a result of the incessant additions and overwritings by his hand, presented, as you know, the appearance of a labyrinth. Proust’s work, because of the social milieu it depicts, hardly appealed to me, but the man, whom I was often able to meet, was very charming and extremely affable.”
These exquisite words can be found in a special edition of the Pléiade bringing together the two Manifestos of Surrealismother texts by Breton, and 150 pages of the most captivating: the transcription of radio interviews conducted by André Parinaud in 1952, where Breton’s intelligence (genius?) illuminates all his answers. The centenary of surrealism, celebrated with great pomp by various exhibitions and sales, is an opportunity to reread its theoretician. We know his skeletons in the closet: his dictatorial side, his arrogance and his unfortunate homophobia – which according to some fueled his contempt for Cocteau, whom he considered “the most hateful being of our time”. But his style and his vista command admiration.
Born in 1896 to a father who was a gendarme, Breton was not a “son of”. At the age of 18, the apprentice poet met Valéry, who would be an essential support for him within the literary institution. He became passionate about Rimbaud when the Great War broke out. A godsend! A military nurse in Nantes, he met Jacques Vaché there, whose dandyism would leave a mark on him – until Vaché succumbed to an opium overdose. It was also in a hospital, in 1916, that Breton saw Apollinaire (“lyricism personified”) for the first time, the day after the author ofAlcohols.
A year later, as an intern at Val-de-Grâce, he crossed paths with Aragon. Together, they discovered Lautréamont, which would remain the biggest shock of Breton’s life. With Aragon and him, Philippe Soupault was the third musketeer of the original gang, who launched the revue Literature in 1919. Soupault and Breton experiment with automatic writing (Magnetic Fields)but it doesn’t feed his man. It was at this time that, penniless, Breton landed this incredible little job: going to reread to Proust, out loud, the corrected proofs of The Research. He was then hired as a librarian by the couturier-collector Jacques Doucet. Proof of the young Breton’s flair, he had Doucet buy works by Duchamp, Chirico, Miró, Picabia, and especially The Young Ladies of Avignon of Picasso (he speaks of it in a hilarious manner in his interviews with Parinaud). After having flirted with the Dada movement, Breton freed himself from it. And in 1924, it was a scandal: with his comrades, united by black humor, a taste for the marvelous and a disdain for sacred cows, they published the brochure A corpsewho (unfairly) toppled the statue of Anatole France. Shocked, Doucet fired Breton. At 28, he was going to have to fly on his own. This was perfect timing: the Manifesto of Surrealism is about to appear.
It’s hard to applaud Stalin when you venerate Alfred Jarry.
In the preface to this new volume of the Pléiade, Philippe Forest speaks of “rhetorical fireworks” on the subject of Manifest… He is right. If Breton stole the term “surrealism” from Apollinaire (in The Breasts of Tiresias), all the rest is his. He sometimes displays a polemical verve that makes one laugh, for example when he attacks newspapers “trying to flatter public opinion in its lowest tastes” and “the realistic attitude” that “gives rise to these ridiculous books”: “A pleasant consequence of this state of affairs, in literature for example, is the abundance of novels. Everyone has their own little observation. In need of purification, Mr. Paul Valéry recently proposed to bring together in an anthology as many as possible of the beginnings of novels, from the insanity of which he expected a lot. The most famous authors would be put to contribution.” Happy Breton who did not have to put up with certain stars of the current literary rentrée! He would mock the novel, this silly genre, all his life, preferring to seek “the gold of time” and lead a poetic life. Will Guy Debord do differently, a generation later? Debord and Breton resemble each other in their haughty posture and their sparkling writing; alas for the former, situationism produced nothing artistically, while surrealism marked the 20th century and is still running a hundred years after the Manifest…
What is the pope of surrealism most criticized for? Having successively excommunicated Soupault, Desnos or Aragon – and almost all of his best friends one after the other. This would be proof that he had no heart. Let us recognize one merit in him: he thus managed to maintain a coherent aesthetic line to the end, which never varied. Another feat of glory: not having drowned in communism. Too elitist, too snobbish, or quite simply irreducible to politics, Breton was wary of the “social quarrel”. In his Second manifesto…published in 1929 and then reissued and completed in 1930, he devotes a few juicy pages to Pierre Naville, a former surrealist rentier who had converted to Trotskyism. After settling his score with him, he writes more calmly: “I do not believe in the possibility of the current existence of a literature or an art expressing the aspirations of the working class. If I refuse to believe it, it is because in the pre-revolutionary period the writer or the artist, necessarily of bourgeois training, is by definition incapable of translating them. […] I make it a question of sensitivity and honesty for him.” It is also difficult to applaud Stalin when one venerates Alfred Jarry…
“Public approval is to be avoided above all else”
What would Breton think if he were still alive? Two years ago, a painting by Magritte, The Empire of Lightswas sold for 71.5 million euros at Sotheby’s. The exhibition Surrealismwhich is held at the Centre Pompidou, is received unanimously by the press. Breton noted this in his Second manifesto… : “Public approval is to be avoided above all else. The public must absolutely be prevented fromenter if we want to avoid confusion. I add that we must keep him exasperated at the door by a system of challenges and provocations. I DEMAND THE DEEP, TRUE OCCULTATION OF SURREALISM.” He will never say anything else. His posterity is therefore paradoxical: the word “surrealist” is used in all sauces, often for the worse. Where is the spirit of Breton? We are looking for it.
In any case, drawing inspiration from his thinking remains a new idea. Still in his interview given to L’Express at the end of his life, Breton ends the conversation with these testamentary words, which are also the last lines of this fascinating volume of the Pléiade: “If life, as with all others, has inflicted some defeats on me, for me the essential thing is that I have not compromised with the three causes that I had embraced at the beginning and which are poetry, love and freedom. This supposed the maintenance of a certain state of grace. These three causes have not brought me any disappointment. My only pride would be not to have deserved it.” Can we wish for anything else?
Manifestos of Surrealismby André Breton. La Pléiade/Gallimard, 1135 p., €65.