In Search of André Breton: A Biographer’s Confession

In a way, I’d been looking for André Breton most of my adult life. As far back as high school, experiments with what I’d later come to know as automatic writing ushered me into a world that seemed absolutely and inexplicably right, like the confirmation of something never seen but always known. Later, the fabulous stories told by one of my college professors opened up a more spectacular side of Surrealism’s history: heroic, wild, full of humor and drama. I developed a profound admiration for the group, and in particular for Breton, its founder and prime theorist. Here, I thought, were people who had clashed joyously with the miserable constraints of their time; who, well before the Hipsters and the Beats, had refused to bow in quiet acquiescence. Surrealism struck me as a gloriously colorful explosion in a world mournfully etched in black-and-white.

What I saw in Breton tended only to support my attraction. At first glance, both his writings and his public actions seem insistently to invite the reader to come closer, to visit him in the “glass house” in which he claimed to live. Even before the Surrealist movement was officially launched in the mid-1920s, he had emerged as one of the most visible French writers of his generation, a man of phenomenal charisma and leadership who had gathered around him some of the most radical minds of the time (the well-known list includes Miró, Dalí, Ernst, Artaud, Desnos, Picabia, Bataille, Tanguy, Magritte, Man Ray, and many others). Much of Breton’s life, and that of his movement, was led in broad daylight, its outsized dramas performed in the streets and cafes of Paris, as well as in the press and countless broadsides.

In addition, Breton’s more intimate writings, such as his 1928 magnum opus, Nadja—a blend of autobiography, psychological case study à la Freud, a philosophical manifesto—seem to open his innermost thoughts to the reader’s boundless scrutiny. His entire approach to writing was one of enticement, a beacon sent out to the like-minded few rather than an appeal to mass admiration. Because of the apparent intimacy of his confessions, one feels entitled to a sense of kinship, of understanding his deepest psychological knots—which, moreover, he openly dissected in several of his books.

In time, however, I began to realize that this invitation—like the celebrated courtliness with which Breton greeted newcomers—held one at a distance rather than in proximity, that the apparent confessions and candid apologias were in fact a more subtle form of dissimulation, as if Breton’s private reality were only another facet of his larger-than-life public persona. I had by now amassed a huge quantity of details about this writer who so ably, as he said of someone else, veiled and unveiled the facts of his existence—enough details to see that there were some glaring contradictions between Breton’s stated principles and his way of living. He was a champion of social and psychological liberation famous for acting like a Machiavellian despot. His outspoken and provocative defense of sexual freedom stopped short of tolerating promiscuity or homosexuality. He condemned the bourgeois mentality, all the while leading an existence that was in many ways a model of French middle-class regularity. He sought out the unconventional and marginal, yet was unprepared for true demonstrations of insanity (as evidenced by his dealings with Artaud or the supposedly schizophrenic Nadja). Who was this man, once the facade was stripped away? Apparently Breton didn’t want the answer known, for he stipulated in his will that his manuscripts and letters should not be made public for fifty years after his death. (They were finally released, a little ahead of schedule, after his private collection was auctioned in 2003.)

In part this secrecy is a matter of generation: born in 1896, Breton came of age at a time when certain facts were simply not to be aired. But more to the point, he spent his life surrounded by polemic and opposition, and like many a controversial public figure he reacted by maintaining strict control over his utterances, out of fear—not entirely unjustified—that an unguarded moment might be used against him. Particularly in the 1930s, when Breton replaced Surrealism’s original, hermetic definition of “psychic automatism in its pure state” with a call to militant political action, his and his friends’ doings became the stuff of widespread debate, critical scrutiny, and even fodder for the gossip columns.

I knew these things: they were the grist of literary history. But by now I wanted more. I wanted (to use Breton’s own term) to see the “empty moments,” the ones that so often reveal the most. The existing biographies did not take me very far: generally academic (and not very trustworthy) monographs or fragmentary overviews, they offered a well-worn tourist itinerary, when I was seeking the uncharted terrain. I wanted to know how these seemingly contradictory bits of information fit together, what role the curious tension between public and private played in Breton’s life.

My first moment of bona fide revelation came as I was studying the events of the year 1929, perhaps the most turbulent period in Surrealism’s history. The trouble began in March, at a meeting of French leftist intellectuals, held at a seedy café called the Bar du Château, that Breton had called in view of defining a common ground for political action. As it turned out, the ostensible goal was never discussed, for the meeting ended in tumult after Breton spent the evening hectoring some younger writers over an ideological faux pas, ultimately causing a number of those present—including a large faction of Surrealists—to leave in disgust. Many saw this show trial as a needless exercise in café autocracy (one witness accused him of trying to be a “poor-man’s Stalin”). But Breton, in the vituperative Second Manifesto of Surrealism that he published at year’s end, defended his actions as a necessary step toward flushing out armchair revolutionaries before they could compromise Surrealism from within: “Why should we go on acting fed up and disgusted? A policeman, a few gay dogs, two or three pen pimps, several mentally unbalanced persons, a cretin…is this not the making of an amusing, innocuous team, a faithful replica of life, a team of men paid piecework, winning on points? SHIT.” Even less to his former friends’ liking, he then went on to give detailed public critiques of their personal shortcomings. In response, a band of twelve “ex-disciples,” playing off Breton’s abhorred sobriquet “the Pope of Surrealism,” excoriated their former messiah in the broadside A Corpse, its cover illustration featuring a head shot of Breton (who was, moreover, thirty-three at the time) retouched with a bleeding crown of thorns.

It occurred to me that this twelve-month period contained—in its upheavals, purges, and inflated polemics, its moments of idealism and disillusionment—the key to Surrealism’s workings as a group, and to Breton’s motivations as an individual. I suspected that there was more to these incidents than what was commonly told: certainly more than could be gleaned from the embattled tracts and rhetorically brilliant self-justifications that flowed from Breton’s pen that year. Surrealism had undergone moments of crisis before this, and would see others afterward. What made the response to this particular crisis so vehement, so bilious? A little digging revealed the parallel story, a veritable soap opera.

In 1921, Breton had married Simone Kahn, with whom he shared a great intellectual and emotional complicity, but for whom, by mid decade, he seems to have had little physical passion. At around that time, he had fallen desperately in love with the poet and socialite Lise Deharme, who encouraged his attentions but not his advances. And in late 1927, just as he was emerging from his emotional distress over Lise, he entered into a relationship with Suzanne Muzard—one that, although consummated this time, was no less tortured, as Suzanne spent the next several years shuttling between Breton and her other lover, the writer Emmanuel Berl. Hoping to resolve the situation, Breton finally acceded to Suzanne’s demands in late 1928 and asked Simone for a divorce. But Simone, who had endured her husband’s infatuation with Lise, was less forgiving about his latest adventure, and had herself taken a lover from within the Surrealist group. What started as a relatively amicable separation had by 1929 turned into a bitter division—further complicated by Suzanne’s sudden marriage to Berl just as Breton was discovering his wife’s own infidelity.

Dizzy with the thrill of these melodramatic details, I began to see the purges of 1929 as nothing more than displaced rage against the two women who had betrayed Breton’s trust—and, conversely, to see Simone and Suzanne as symbolizing in his mind every personal and intellectual disappointment he had suffered since adolescence. The specifics of the case seemed to bear me out: The Bar du Château meeting was convened just after Breton learned of Simone’s affair and Suzanne’s marriage. The group of younger writers he humiliated during its course had shortly before rejected his invitations to join Surrealism. The most pointedly venomous attacks in the Second Manifesto were written when Breton, returning from an emotionally trying voyage with Suzanne, found that Simone had changed locks on their apartment, forcing him to live for several days in a third-rate hotel, cut off from the studio that had become “his crystal and his universe.” It is as if all these literary-political fireworks had been ignited by the small sparks of personal spite.

Had this been an isolated concordance of incidents, there would have been little more to say. But the psychic tincture beneath the 1929 purges bled forward and back, coloring many other key moments in Breton’s life. It soon became clear that these events, and others like them, revealed on Breton’s part a fundamental terror of betrayal and abandonment (whether emotional or ideological), of loss of control over those he kept around him—and, furthermore, that this terror could be traced back to his often hostile relations with his loveless, disapproving mother. Breton, playing out the classic love-hate relation that Freud pinpoints in Totem and Taboo, both absorbed from Marguerite Breton the authoritarian traits for which he was notorious, and spent his adult life on the watch for incipient defections. Many of Surrealism’s legendary “excommunications,” moreover, were directed against those who had begun showing too much independence, as if Breton, sensing an impending exit, made sure to fire the potential dissident before he could quit. So, I thought, here’s the truth at last; this is what it really comes down to. This was the real Breton who hid behind all those fancy verbal curtains.

But was it? In the midst of my self-congratulation, I imagined showing my findings to those who had known Breton closely, who had acted in the events I was merely reconstructing and helped formulate the justifications I was laboring to debunk. Would they, too, find this an accurate portrait? Instinct told me, sinkingly, that they would fail to recognize their man—and, worse, that they would have good reason to. And, worse still, that I would have good reason to, for something had changed in me as well. If in writing Breton’s life I had moved beyond the unconditional admiration of my initial contacts, so, too, had I outgrown the brief euphoria of catching him out, of simply piercing the mask. The figure I now saw was, to be sure, flawed; but the admiration I could ultimately feel for him was more genuine, more grounded. Losing sight of an idol, I had encountered a human being.

Although one cannot fully understand the polemics of 1929 and their particular acridness without taking into account the acute personal insecurities Breton was suffering, neither can one rely solely on private, hidden (and supposedly more authentic) data to explain every event. The fact is, Breton’s ideological concerns were quite real: he was afraid for the life of his movement; he was dismayed by the actions of some of his friends (which, in fact, were not always very laudable); and the specter of intellectuals who betrayed their first principles, a phenomenon he had witnessed all too often during World War I, did haunt him. Moreover, at the time, the Surrealists were engaged in a difficult attempt at rapprochement with the French Communists—Breton had briefly joined the Party two years earlier—which helps explain some of the purge mentality evident in his actions and writings. As a biographer, I could not, of course, simply take Breton at his word. But to ascribe the embattled tone of his manifestoes only to boudoir quarrels, brushing aside his published rationales as a mere screen, would have been to miss essential elements of who he was and what motivated him.

In the final account, a truly representative biography would seem to be an impossible limit: an attempt to see the subject simultaneously from without and from within, to reconcile objective analysis with the subject’s self-preserving retouchings—or even with his obvious moments of self-delusion, for these invented selves, too, are part and parcel of an individual’s broader reality. Neither viewpoint alone harbors the truth. Rather, truth, if it is to be had, stretches between the accepted version of events and one’s own independent judgment like water between two distant shores—sometimes scraping against the barrier reef of “ghoulishness” (to borrow an epithet from A. S. Byatt), at others running aground on the sandbars of hagiography, but in the best of cases netting one small particle of the human experience.

Mark Polizzotti

(Originally published in Agni 40)

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