Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health. Part Fifteen Section Two of 'The Poet As Surrealist'

The Poet as Surrealist - Section Two by Dave Jaffe


      The 1920's were a time of disruptions in France and the surrealists and their leader Andre Breton led disruptive lives.
   Breton joined the French Communist Party in 1927 but then left it in 1935. He had a quarrel with the Soviet Communist writer Ilya Ehrenburg. At a Soviet-sponsored conference of writers,  Breton read a pamphlet written by Ehrenburg. It accused the surrealists of being 'pederasts' or gays. Breton slapped Ehrenburg and the surrealists were then expelled from the Communist movement.
     Breton was a bit of an autocrat who sometimes ran the movement with an iron hand. He threw quite a few people out of the movement he helped found. He expelled Salvador Dali from the movement after Dali starting making lots of money, Breton used an anagram of Dali's name and called him 'Avida Dollars'. Also the Surrealists worshipped Sigmund Freud but Freud didn't worship them. "Until now," Freud wrote to his friend Stefan Zweig after Salvador Dali visited him in England, "I have been inclined to regard the surrealists as complete fools."
     Though he had been kicked out of the French Communist Party, Breton remained a progressive. He visited Leon Trotsky in Mexico, and worked with Trotsky on an artistic manifesto. "Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world," said Breton after he arrived in Mexico and couldn't find his way to a destination.
    In 1941, Breton escaped  France, for the German Nazis who would have killed him had they got hold of him. Like many other artists, he was helped by Varian Fry, who is now called 'The Artists's Schindler'. Breton ended up in New York City where he and many of his compatriots kept their distance from many Americans. Still, Breton organized a great exhibition of surrealist art at Yale University. Breton's presence in New York City along with other surrealists, definitely helped trigger the rise of the Abstract Impressionist movement
in the U.S.A. at the end of the Second World War.. By war's end, surrealism had spread around the world. It influenced fashion, theatre, film, poetry, novels and drama.
     After the war, Breton went back to live in Paris. By now he had written many books, including
a fine novel called 'Nadja'. He also wrote other books and many poems. He helped the anarchists in their struggles with the French government and later he hid anarchist fugitives who supported the Algerian rebels in the Algerian War.
    Did Surrealism die in 1966 when Breton passed away? Impossible to say. Yet by the late 1960's, surrealistic-type writings surfaced again in Paris during the massive revolt that swept France in 1968. "Take your dreams for reality," students wrote on city walls during their rebellion against Charles De Gaulle's government.
    "I attach no importance to life," Breton wrote in his poem 'The Spectral Attitudes'
    I pin not the least of life's
    butterflies to importance.
    I do not matter to life."
  Breton was married three times, and fathered a daughter with one of his wives, Jacqueline Lamba. Breton also helped father surrealism. He was one of the most significant  French artistic figures of the 20th century.