5.

The Dada Manifesto

Breton extends his group. After the Armistice, jubilation; enter poet Paul Éluard and his wife, Gala, who will both, in different ways, exert a significant influence on the development of surrealism. Duchamp returns to Paris on a visit, and travels back to New York with 50cc of Paris air. In January 1920 Modigliani dies, aged thirty-four, marking the end of an era.

Those in the habit of pacing the streets in the small hours at the start of 1918 were already beginning to hear the first strains of jazz drifting up from the odd smoky basement in Montparnasse. Cocteau, hearing it in obscure basement nightclubs, was keen to claim it as Paris’s new music. In fact, he had already discovered it the previous summer, at the Casino de Paris; the singer Gaby Deslys had returned from a period in New York, bringing with her the first jazz band the city had ever heard. Cocteau thought the disruptive, underground sounds of jazz signalled the power to effect change. Étienne de Beaumont agreed – he had already hired the entire American army band to play jazz at a private concert in his home. One of Satie’s friends, composer Darius Milhaud (one of an avant-garde group, Les Nouveaux Jeunes, later renamed Les Six), was another great admirer – he had first heard the music in jazz cabarets in Harlem. Another friend of Cocteau, writer and diplomat Paul Morand, discovered it the following year. ‘In the bars of the post-Armistice period,’ he wrote, ‘jazz produced such sublime and heartbreaking accents that we all understood that we must have a new form of expressing our own feelings. Sooner or later, I said to myself, we must respond to this call from the dark, must go and see what was behind that imperious melancholy’ (a musical impulse that seemed to signal an appeal from the unconscious, transforming melancholy into marvel – an approximation in music, if you like, of the sur-real).

For Cocteau the sounds of jazz recalled the spirit of raw improvization Apollinaire had identified in painting as l’esprit nouveau and called sur-réalisme when he wrote about Parade. Taking Parade as his jumping-off point, Cocteau was writing a series of jottings, published later that year as a seventy-four-page pamphlet of aphorisms, Le Coq et l’arlequin: Notes autour de la musique (Cock and Harlequin: Notes Concerning Music), exploring the implications of the new music. He also reflected, in passing, on the arts of the circus and the music hall. Le Coq et l’arlequin was itself a kind of written jazz, consisting of improvised thoughts, one jamming off another, and including whichever of Cocteau’s reflections on life came to mind as he wrote (‘An original artist cannot copy. He only has to copy to be original’; ‘Debussy played in French, but he pedalled [the piano] in Russian’). Once again, he was castigated: when Le Coq et l’arlequin was published it provoked flurries of indignation in both Paris and New York, in journals as different as the conservative Nouvelle Revue française and Picabia’s avant-garde 391. Cocteau’s aesthetic fluctuated between cubism and vaudeville, sneered one reviewer. But that was nothing to the abuse he would soon be being subjected to by André Breton and his burgeoning group.

On night duty at the Val-de-Grâce, Breton and Aragon carried out their duties; they had both been moved to the Quatrième Fiévreux (Fourth Fever ward), for the mentally ill. One day Aragon showed Breton a copy of an issue of Vers et prose magazine from January 1914 which included a reprint of the first canto of Lautréamont’s Maldoror. Now Breton, in his turn, discovered the writer’s unrestrained excavations into the depths of the human psyche, the ultimate, so it seemed to them, in freedom of expression. Soupault managed to find them a rare copy of the book, which included all six cantos. After dark, the patients locked in their cells, Breton and Aragon read Maldoror aloud to each other, punctuated by the patients’ screams of anguish. Breton managed to get their shifts re-timetabled so that they were both on the night shift; they would lie on the floor wrapped in regulation blankets, reciting passages from the novel. Lautréamont had also written a thirty-page pamphlet, Poésies, published in 1870. In the Bibliothèque Nationale Breton tracked down the only existing copy and spent days transcribing it by hand. Aragon later said the impact of the pamphlet on the two of them had been like an earthquake; more so, he thought, than Maldoror. If Maldoror tested the limits of fantasy, Poésies challenged issues of authorship and authority, offering a possible blueprint for real rebellion; it was also to be one of the earliest influences on Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. Most astounding to Breton and Aragon was Lautréamont’s exhilarating treatment of writers and philosophers whose reputations had seemed inviolable. ‘I accept Euripides and Sophocles: but I do not accept Aeschylus.’ The author dismissed in one fell swoop the whole notion of an immutable hierarchy. ‘Poetry must be made by all. Not one. Poor Hugo! Poor Racine … Poor Corneille! … Tics, tics, and tics.’ The list of ‘dismal hacks’ to be discarded included ‘Sand, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Musset, du Terrail, Féval, Flaubert, Baudelaire …’ – virtually all the modern heavyweights. This echoed the Dadaists’ vehement rejection of authority – also fundamental to surrealism, as it came to be defined.

Spurred on initially by his friendship with Vaché, supported by Soupault and Aragon and now by his discovery of Poésies, Breton began his impassioned, ongoing argument with the whole notion of establishing individual reputations. ‘Personal poetry has had its day of relative juggling tricks and contingent contortions,’ Lautréamont had written. Another of his convictions was that poetry was inextricable from philosophy. For Breton this intellectualization of poetry was revelatory and liberating. On the authority of Poésies, God was dead, man was all-powerful, individual reputations were suspect, hierarchies despicable, sentimentality useless. The bourgeois search for stability and moral certitude was pointless. ‘We say sound things,’ he had written, ‘when we do not strive to say extraordinary ones.’ After reading the pamphlet Breton took up his own poetry again, abandoning his semi-formal verse (the pretty things he had sent Apollinaire for approval) for new styles of composition, experimenting with sparse verbal collages in which silences – the spaces between words – were as significant as words. In May, Breton and Aragon took the medical examination which would qualify them as auxiliary doctors. Aragon, who passed, was sent straight to the front line, where during the next few weeks he saw some of the heaviest fighting of the war. In a single day he was buried three times by the fallout from grenade explosions, once even declared dead by the military authorities. Breton (having failed the exam) was sent first as an orderly to the instruction centre in Nouailles, then to a regiment in Moret-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, where he spent the summer getting to know riverside artists, planning a collaborative volume around the idea of l’esprit nouveau (which came to nothing) and generally gathering his forces.

Further respite came in the form of two weddings. Apollinaire had obtained special leave to marry Jacqueline Kolb in Paris on 2 May, in the town hall of the 7th arrondissement (Saint-Germain-des-Près), with a religious ceremony in his parish church of St Thomas Aquinas. Picasso’s wedding gift to the couple was a cubist painting, L’Homme à la guitare, painted that year. On 12 July Picasso married his Ballets Russes dancer, Olga Khokhlova, in a civil ceremony at the same town hall, followed by a religious ceremony in the Russian Orthodox Church on the rue Daru. Picasso’s witnesses were Apollinaire and Max Jacob; Olga’s were Valerian Svetlov (ballet critic and friend of Diaghilev), and Cocteau, of whom Olga was extremely fond (she enjoyed his sparkling personality and admired his bourgeois heritage). It was ‘a real wedding’, Cocteau observed, impressed. ‘Lunch at the Meurice. Misia in sky-blue. Olga in white satin-tricotulle. Very Biarritz.’ As guests of Picasso’s new friend Eugenia Errázuiz, the couple in fact honeymooned in Biarritz, in those days one of France’s smartest seaside resorts. Picasso spent his time decorating the walls of Eugenia’s rented summer cabane with murals and making sketches in his notebooks. Gertrude Stein identified the period following Italy and Parade as Picasso’s ‘second naturalistic period’, during which he was mainly painting beautiful portraits (including of Olga), rather than breaking new ground. Stein thought the works of that summer had ‘the serenity of perfect beauty but they have not the beauty of realization. The beauty of realization is a beauty that always takes more time to show itself as beauty than pure beauty does … it is only beauty when the things that follow it are created in its image. It is then that it is known as beauty on account of its quality of fecundity, it is the most beautiful beauty, more beautiful than the beauty of serenity. Well.’

That autumn Breton began in earnest the attempt to establish himself in Parisian literary circles. Towards the end of the summer Étienne de Beaumont and his wife had opened their salon in the rue Duroc. One consequence of the war was that (both at the front and in Montparnasse) new meetings took place across classes; the one or two (penniless) artists invited to de Beaumont’s soirées would never have been considered suitable guests before the war. As his ‘comrade behind the lines’, in Paris Cocteau acted as his ‘liaison officer’. On 3 September he gave a reading of Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance (The Cape of Good Hope), a poem (published in 1919) written in homage to Roland Garros, the fighter pilot Cocteau had accompanied on some of his reconnaissance flights. The poem, though long, was a concisely composed reverie on the pilot’s aerial view of the world, as quirky, in its way, as Parade, ingeniously composed in sparse arrangements of words that give the reader the impression of being in the sky. In advance of its publication Cocteau gave a preview performance of the poem for friends and guests in Valentine Gross’s apartment in the Palais Royal. Those invited included Picasso, Misia Sert, Proust and – perhaps via Adrienne Monnier – future ‘Pope of Surrealism’, André Breton.

This was not, however, the first reading of Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance. Cocteau had read his poem a year earlier, in June 1917, in his diplomat friend Paul Morand’s apartment, where, according to Morand, the small audience had been spellbound. Not so the group who gathered in Valentine Gross’s apartment in September 1918. Valentine’s fiancé, Jean Hugo, afterwards reflected that the event had struck a wrong note from the outset. It was late starting, held up by Proust, who was late. Eventually Cocteau started without him, yelling at him when he finally appeared (‘Va-t-en, Marcel!’ – he was interrupting the reading). Throughout, Breton remained ostentatiously stony-faced and afterwards made no attempt to mingle. He stood still as Cocteau made his way over to him. ‘It’s very good, isn’t it?’ said Cocteau. ‘But it’s not what’s needed, it’s too sublime and –’ (with a glance at Jean Hugo) ‘too Victor Hugo.’ Breton was dumbfounded; Cocteau, pale with irritation, stood coolly waiting for him to make his way to the door. (When Cocteau gave another reading at the end of the year, in the back room of Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop, Breton was there again, this time with Soupault. Adrienne noticed they held themselves straight, ‘radiating hostility’.)

Apollinaire continued to communicate with Breton. He asked Breton to help him with a new play he was writing, which Breton did, until 22 September, when he returned to the Val-de-Grâce in preparation for retaking his examinations. Then he broke with his parents, left the family home in Pantin and moved closer to the centre of Montparnasse, taking a tiny room in the in those days notably unprepossessing Hôtel des Grands Hommes, near the place du Panthéon, a building so dilapidated that when Soupault visited he was afraid the floor would collapse. But it was illustriously situated, close to the prestigious Bibliothèque Geneviève. Soon afterwards chance brought about Breton’s first meeting with Picasso. Back in Paris in early October Picasso had sent word to Apollinaire – ‘My old pard [partner] … need to see you, if you have a moment … Je t’embrasse.’ Then the Picassos began to look for a new home, ideally in a quartier well away from all Pablo’s old haunts, to begin married life. Paul Rosenberg arranged for them to rent an apartment at 23, rue la Boétie, on the Right Bank, in the building next to his own. If Cocteau had crossed the river to revel in the bohemian ambience of the Left Bank, Picasso now migrated to the Right. Apollinaire visited him in the rue la Boétie, shortly afterwards falling ill again. Picasso went to see him in the boulevard Saint-Germain. In the hallway he passed a young man in a blue soldier’s uniform: this was Picasso’s first, fleeting encounter with Breton.

All of a sudden, as if out of nowhere, the event everyone had stopped daring to hope for at last took place. On 9 November 1918 the Kaiser announced his abdication. After four years the war was finally over. (The Armistice was announced two days later.) Paris went mad with joy, though the day was tinged with tragedy. That morning Picasso and Max Jacob rushed to Cocteau’s mother’s apartment, looking for their friend. They had just been to visit Apollinaire, whom they had left with Jacqueline. They called Cocteau’s doctor but by the time Cocteau arrived to join them back in the boulevard Saint-Germain it was too late. Cocteau recorded the scene. ‘His little room was full of shadows … of his wife, of his mother, of ourselves, and of others … whom I did not recognize at all. His dead face illuminated the pillow beneath it with a laureate beauty – radiant as if we were looking at the young Virgil. Death, in Dante’s gown, was tugging him, like a child, by the hand.’ Aged thirty-eight, his lungs already weakened, Apollinaire had succumbed to the influenza epidemic which at the end of the war took another million lives.

De Chirico had contracted it, too. He had been fighting in Ferrara, Italy, when one night in barracks in his sleep he ‘heard a loud noise and dreamt that I saw two hens as big as ostriches’. In his delirium he was posted to Reggio Emilia and sent for observation to the hospital, where ‘men who looked as though they would collapse at every step were declared fit for active service’, then to an old convent converted into a vast hospital for those suffering from influenza, where ‘in the night the priest and two nuns would regularly rush up, mumble prayers in Latin and another body would be wrapped in a sheet and removed’. When he recovered he returned to the hotel where he had been living with his mother and his brother. He was painting an interior in his bedroom, the canvas balanced on a chair, when the shouts of an excited crowd reached him from the street below. His brother rushed in with the news that Germany had requested an armistice; the war was over. (De Chirico was confined to Rome for the next year, working as a clerk in a military record office, until Italy officially exited the war.)

At 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918 all the guns ceased firing. Paris was bathed in sunshine; the streets were heaving with jubilant crowds. Civilians and soldiers streamed out of the Concorde, singing Madelon! Madelon! (La Madelon was a popular French First World War song) and the songs of the English Tommies, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ and ‘Home, Sweet Home’. As the correspondent for the London Times reported, ‘Paris went charmingly off its head.’ But peace came at a devastating price. Seven per cent of France’s population (1.4 million Frenchmen) had been slaughtered. Tens of thousands of husbands, fathers and sons were never coming home. Food was still rationed. The Rotonde retrieved some of its old clientele but restaurants and cafés were still under curfew; movement remained restricted while the fuel shortage continued. Apollinaire, in the estimation of many the very cornerstone of modern art in Paris, was dead. In Montparnasse the mood soon became subdued. To control the reintegration of thousands of surviving soldiers the government restricted the discharge of many for a further year.

Those not yet demobilized included Breton, and Vaché, who on 14 November wrote to Breton in despair. He was in a state of collapse, drained of ideas; the war had made him senile before his time. Most poignantly: ‘How am I supposed to last another few months in uniform? (I have been assured the war is over). I’m at the end of my tether …’ Twelve days later he wrote to Breton again. He could feel the alcohol meandering through his body, turning him blue. He was done for, apoplectic. But suicide was against the law. Ten days later Breton attended the premiere of Couleur du temps (Colour of the Time), the play he had been helping Apollinaire to stage. During the interval a young officer and poet made his way hastily along the row of seats, approaching Breton but calling an unfamiliar name. He had mistaken Breton for a comrade believed to be lost in battle. Embarrassed, he rushed away. When they met again the following spring, Breton would remember having briefly seen the man – Paul Éluard – before.

On 6 January 1919 Jacques Vaché was found dead of an opium overdose in a hotel room in Nantes. L’Express de l’ouest reported that neither he nor the other young man present was a habitual opium user; Vaché’s overdose was attributed to inexperience. Coincidentally, on the day of his death Tristan Tzara wrote again from Zurich, this time to Breton, asking him to contribute to the fourth issue of Dada. Breton, shocked and grief-stricken, read Dada 3 (published in December 1918) and realized what he had been missing. It included Tzara’s Manifeste Dada 1918, in a sense the precursor to Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, though notably different in tone (where Tzara’s Dada manifesto was sarcastically mock-didactic, Breton’s later surrealist tract was contrastingly nuanced, essentially poetic). In Tzara’s call to Dadaist arms he reiterated his fury against slaughter and censorship, which (particularly now, in the wake of Vaché’s death) made almost as strong an impression on Breton as had Maldoror.

In a tone of pretend-academic solemnity Tzara set out the justifications and principles of the manifesto. ‘To launch a manifesto, you must insist on A.B.C., and strike out against 1.2.3. [A white space followed, in parody of Anastasia the censor] … sign, shout, swear, arrange the text in the form of absolute, irrefutable evidence, prove your non-plus-ultra, and affirm that your new publication resembles life the way the final apparition of a cocotte proves the necessity of God … DADA – here is a word that leads ideas to the chase … Dada signifies nothing. Thus DADA has come into being*) out of a need for independence, for suspicion towards community.’ Tzara’s manifesto was also vigorously anti-art, like the Futurists’ before him (and like Dalí’s later writings), arguing that the artist’s responsibility was not to paint reproductions or illusions but to develop a language of protest. ‘Every pictorial or plastic work is useless …’ On it went. The text was dotted throughout (as in this extract) with irrelevant punctuation and unnecessary typographical marks, mimicking the appearance of wartime newspapers. Tzara’s message – nonsensical but also fundamentally parodic and essentially anarchic – could not have appealed more directly to Breton’s state of mind at the time. He was excited by its break with logic, its nerved-up, provocative tone, and especially by its deeply controversial internationalism at a time when patriotism was still de rigueur. The important thing, as he later reflected, was that ‘the same currents were forming in two countries that only yesterday had been enemies’ – the best justification, in Breton’s view, for aligning himself with the Dadaist cause, which, he now decided, was clearly not simply desirable but vital. Dadaism unleashed wild, untrammelled anger, directed at every aspect of the so-called civilized political culture that had resulted in mass human carnage, appalling mental anguish; and the loss of his friend.

Meanwhile, Parade had made an impact beyond Paris. News of the sur-realist production had reached Tzara in Zurich, by which time he had been vigorously canvassing for the past year, sending copies of his two reviews, Dada and Dadaphone, to writers and editors in all the capital cities; he had already contacted all the prominent figures in French artistic circles. Now the names of those associated with Parade – Satie, Picasso, Cocteau – began to appear in Dada, whereupon one of Apollinaire’s more socially influential artist-friends (Francis Picabia) immediately set about poisoning Tzara against Cocteau, who, according to Picabia, was ‘on very bad terms with everyone. Erik Satie calls him an idiot and all the others a parasite …’ The Dadaists went on playing Satie’s music at their events but began sending up both Satie and Cocteau in their pamphlets. ‘Auric Satie with the Cocteau nut’ – one ridiculous squib combined the names of Cocteau, Satie and Auric (one of Les Six) in a pun on ‘coconut’ and the colloquial expression à la noix (‘not up to much’). Tzara, whose own Vingt-cinq Poèmes (Twenty-five Poems) had somehow found its way to Paris (and been reviewed by Aragon), was looking for a French distributor for Dada. In the drive to extend his network he wrote to Cocteau and Breton, both of whom responded, separately, by inviting him to Paris. Ignoring Picabia’s warning, Tzara also invited Cocteau to contribute to the magazine. He received a friendly reply, and another invitation. Cocteau did not wait for an acceptance before publicizing Tzara’s arrival, already scheduled – by Cocteau – for April.

It had already occurred to Breton to try to keep Tzara and his Dadaist activities to himself. Anyway, as Soupault diplomatically pointed out, too eclectic a band of supporters was surely to be avoided, as it would ruin Dada’s reputation for carefully targeted iconoclasm. When he discovered Cocteau was also courting Tzara, Breton was incensed. Within a few months he, too, was warning Tzara to keep away from Cocteau. ‘My feeling – altogether disinterested, I assure you – is that he is the most hateful creature around today. Once again, he’s done nothing against me and I assure you that hatred is not my strong suit.’ Not all that disinterested, then. In fact, Cocteau had done nothing against Breton, other than flaunting his social advantage (and perhaps taunting him with Jean Hugo’s privileged, socialist heritage), but it was becoming clear even to Cocteau that Breton would have to be dealt with. He wrote to him, offering ‘bells, beautiful princesses, celebrations of a friendship that I offer you by the handful’ – unsurprisingly, to no avail. Breton wanted the Dadaists to himself, since he was already beginning to see how their activities might lend a degree of authority to his own germinating ideas (eventually coalesced into the agenda of surrealism).

Breton, determined that Tzara would arrive in Paris as his guest, impatiently awaited him, meanwhile occupying himself by putting together a magazine of his own. He had appointed the editors – himself, Aragon and Soupault; they just needed a title. After some deliberation (rejected suggestions included Max Jacob’s Ciment armé (‘Reinforced Concrete’)) they settled, somewhat contrarily, on Littérature (‘Literature’), which, though hardly cutting edge, could at least be excused as ironic. The first prospective publisher made off with the funds, which had to be replaced with a substantial portion of Soupault’s inheritance; then somehow Cocteau got wind of the magazine’s imminent publication. He bypassed Breton and corresponded instead with Aragon, still stationed on the Rhine; their correspondence continued throughout 1919. Cocteau’s idea was to contribute Le Coq et l’arlequin (presumably in excerpts); Aragon evidently saw no reason why not. He eventually persuaded Breton to include Cocteau’s name in the list of contributors to the inaugural issue, which kept Cocteau at bay while the twenty-four-page magazine was rushed into print, to be distributed by Adrienne Monnier, with no contribution by Cocteau.

Littérature no. 1 (in some ways the precursor to Breton’s later, specifically surrealist newspaper La Révolution surréaliste) (The Surrealist Revolution)) was published in March 1919. Its only obvious competitor, the avant-garde magazine Nord-Sud (which Apollinaire had supported) had been discontinued due to lack of funds, and Littérature no. 1 was well received, including by Proust, who took out a subscription and wrote Soupault a twelve-page letter praising the editors’ boldness. At last, just as he had always intended, Breton and his team were the hot young men on the scene, invited to all the literary gatherings. At around the same time, Cocteau’s Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance was published as a single work, introducing more readers to his virtuoso, freewheeling style, his skill in combining gravity and lightness, dreams and lucidity, and to his uncanny acrobatic ability to juggle a range of projected selves. Even though this kind of virtuosity put Breton out of his league, Breton still regarded Cocteau as a competitor and a threat. He feared his talent, his connections and the force of his personality, all of which made him furious. At the end of that month Aragon returned to Paris on leave and he and Breton went for long evening strolls together through the city streets, deciding during their lengthy discussions to become ‘the kind of people one didn’t associate with’. Taking their cue from Dada – and from Lautréamont’s Poésie – they decided there was little point in publishing one more novel, one more collection of poems, by an individual; instead they should be expressing in literature their outrage at anyone’s blithe acceptance of the unacceptable human condition. A mere poem was inadequate for that purpose; instead of writing more poems they should be looking for ways of mounting the ‘poem-event’. If a poem was a poster, would the public pause to read it? Literature should not be enhancing individual reputations, it should take the world by force … At which point the stranger who had mistakenly hailed Breton in the theatre reappeared, this time on Breton’s doorstep.

When Paul Éluard turned up at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes in March 1919, sent by a mutual friend, Breton already knew of him as a poet and had written inviting him to contribute to the next issue of Littérature. (As would soon become apparent, the first cluster of surrealists had already begun to form.) Éluard, the author of three books of poetry published at his own expense, fitted naturally into Breton’s burgeoning group. Tall, slim, blond, with ‘a poet’s noble and faraway gaze and an asymmetrical but handsome face’, he suffered from mild tuberculosis and a tremor, possibly a symptom of meningitis. Born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel (for his pen name Éluard used his maternal grandmother’s name), at twenty-three he was already married with a ten-month-old daughter. After three months at the front he had spent most of the war in military hospitals and had not long been back in Paris, where he was living in the rue Ordener with his parents, baby Cécile and his wife (also tubercular; the couple met in a sanatorium in 1914), twenty-one-year-old Russian émigrée Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, nicknamed Gala.

Éluard had brought some of his unpublished poems to show Breton. Before the jury of three (Breton, Aragon, Soupault) he presented his work, in his affecting, slightly tremulous voice. Éluard was an original and technically sophisticated poet. Breton thought the work promising; he accepted one poem, ‘Vache’ (‘Cow’), for the third issue of Littérature. (‘On ne mène pas la vache/À la verdure rasé et sèche,/À la verdure sans caresses’ (‘You would not put your cow/To pasture in grass razed and dry/With no comforting caress’). A poem about the war, ‘Perspective’ (in the collection Mourir de ne pas mourir (Dying of Not Dying)), was more nuanced (‘Ils ont des armes/Ils ont leur cœur, grand cœur,/Et s’alignent avec lenteur/Devant un millier d’arbres verts’ (‘They have arms/And their shared heart, their big heart/They slowly line up/Before a thousand green trees’); his love poems read like dances, syncopated, elegant and poised. (Only later, after he met Max Ernst, did he produce more searing, uncompromising poetry and prose.)

Gala was not present at that first meeting of the group of poets, who immediately absorbed Éluard into their midst. Their shared views included their intolerance of the repressive older generation, the reprehensible values of the bourgeoisie and the equally despicable behaviour of politicians and the military. Their goal was liberty, the price of which, they considered, had already been more than paid. But how to create an art form truly capable of giving honest expression to their feelings about their slaughtered friends, their own lost – or, at best, compromised – youth? In the cafés they drank grenadine or café crème, showing no interest in drugs; they believed paradise should be achievable on earth through free-thinking, not narcotics. They smoked cigarettes brunes, a habit they had got into during the war, those with tuberculosis – Éluard and Soupault – smoking the most. Or they went to the cinema to see Musidora in Les Vampires, semi-nude in a provocative black garment that hugged her long lithe body like a creeper. Perverse, dangerous, libertine, Musidora was their idol. And they all read Maldoror. To them, Lautréamont’s novel meant magic and incantation; it seemed to open the door to a possible world of fantasy and dream, and to release them from the expectation, established in childhood, that they would all live obedient, bourgeois lives. Lautréamont taught them, before any of them read Freud, that they were civilization’s discontents. Most evenings after dark they wandered the streets together by gaslight, talking about Maldoror.

At the Grindel home in the rue Ordener the chants of Maldoror could be heard through the walls. Éluard recited it at the top of his voice, and Gala loved it, too. She took it to bed, to read in the afternoons. She was pursuing her own cult of beauty, always characterized for her by the unorthodox or unusual. As a young Russian woman married into a comfortable French family, she had no desire for independence, other than the freedom of spirit she demonstrated in everything she did. If she bought a dress, she re-cut and re-tailored it to make it exclusively her own; everything had to be original. Lautréamont’s best-known aphorism – that a young boy’s beauty was like the encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table (still today, though it predates surrealism, regarded as the quintessential surrealist image) – appealed to her cast of mind. Uninterested in any formal sense in women’s suffrage, she demonstrated an unusual degree of influence within the framework of her marriage. With Éluard she was used to reading and discussing poetry so, initially, she expected to join in conversations with the men. She soon discovered they were less than keen to include her. In fact, they found her disconcerting. (Musidora on screen was one thing …) Sometimes she went along anyway and sat listening in silence, when she was not wandering around Paris on her own, buying dresses or searching the brocantes for beautiful junk.

The men seemed to be on the verge of forming their own Parisian version of Dada. Éluard (possibly at Breton’s instigation) sent some poems to Tzara in Switzerland. Less confident than Breton in Dada as a movement or philosophy, he was nevertheless willing to go along with it. Breton was still preoccupied with the idea of poetry as advertising (art could be polemic; equally, polemic could be art). That April he wrote to Aragon, now in Alsace, ‘For me, poetry, art stop being an end [and] become a means [of advertising].’ Breton was writing collage-poems inspired by Apollinaire’s Calligrammes; in nos. 2 and 3 of Littérature (April and May 1919) he reprinted the full text of Lautréamont’s Poésies. That summer, in a street near the Closerie des Lilas (at least, so the story went) he came upon a stranger he took for a tramp; or, more poetically, ‘a poor, abandoned, enlightened man’, who had read Poésies in Littérature and wanted to talk to Breton about it. The man was Modigliani, back in Paris, by now ravaged by tuberculosis, drugs and general deterioration. He had returned on 31 May 1919, alone, leaving Jeanne safely in the south of France, and was borrowing a friend’s studio in the rue de la Grande-Chaumière. Friends (Kisling and others) kept an eye on him and brought him coal every week for his stove. Surviving mainly on tinned sardines and wine, he somehow continued to paint.

Breton built his group (soon to become the first definitive surrealist group in Paris) like a rampart, still corresponding with Tzara in Zurich and doggedly avoiding Cocteau. In any case, both Cocteau and Picasso were busy that spring with work on Tricorne, Diaghilev’s new production for the Ballets Russes. Cocteau had also been commissioned by Paris-Midi to write weekly articles on the Paris scene; between March and August 1919 he published twenty. Littérature no. 2 included an article by Satie’s friend Darius Milhaud (under a pseudonym, Jacaremirim) describing the carnival at Rio de Janeiro as the inspiration for a new kind of music. ‘Perhaps I shall write a ballet about the carnival in Rio that will be called “Le Bœuf sur le Toit”, from the name of that samba … the band was playing tonight as all the Negresses danced and danced in their blue dresses.’ Cocteau picked up on the title and began writing the bizarre theatrical show he produced early the following year, which – sure enough – went out under the title Le Bœuf sur le toit (‘The Bull on the Roof’).

Breton was pressing ahead with his literary plans. He had found a new publisher (an old schoolfriend) for Littérature, who also published some works by friends of Tzara and an edition of Vaché’s Lettres de guerre (Letters from the Front), introduced by Breton, who selected for the slim pamphlet the most despairing examples of Vaché’s correspondence, which make dispiriting, sometimes heart-rending reading. Literature still seemed to Breton inadequate as a vehicle to put into words his outrage at the damage inflicted by the war (not to mention his general rage against the bourgeoisie). He was searching for a new direction, still preoccupied by the ideas and images produced in extremis by his shell-shocked patients at Saint-Dizier. In the aftermath of the war years he had been haunted as well by a recurring dream, or hallucination, of his own, a vision which took the form of ‘a man cut in two by the window’. Now he had another hallucinatory episode. One night before he fell asleep he seemed to experience (rather than simply hear) a phrase, clearly articulated, apparently unrelated to anything in his daytime experience but nevertheless insistent, and somehow of an organic character – the phrase itself, which seemed to have plastic form, ‘was knocking at the window’. Then a whole series of phrases appeared to him in rapid succession, which made him think perhaps he could ‘obtain’ from himself what he had collected from his patients – that is, a monologue produced without inhibition or rational intervention, which would as closely as possible resemble ‘spoken thought’. Soupault, who shared with Breton a basic familiarity with the work of Freud and other psychiatrists (including Pierre Janet), was also keen to explore the idea of writing an automatisme psychologique.

The idea that poetry might flow directly from the unconscious, tapping into untrammelled, uncensored feeling, was exciting to both. In late May or June they tried it out. Throughout the day they made jottings of whatever came into their heads. When they read them out to each other they were struck by how similar their thoughts were and revelled in the absurdity of what they had produced; they found some of it so hilarious they were seized with hysterical laughter. In essence, none of it was especially funny – perhaps the sheer exhilaration of working without any restraint overwhelmed them. The mood of most of what they produced was neither comical, nor indeed especially angry; rather it was a mood of mild wonder. Some lines reflect a kind of wistfulness: ‘À quoi bon ces grands enthousiasmes fragile, ces sauts de joie desséchés? Nous ne savons plus rien que les astres morts’ (‘What’s the good of those great fragile fits of enthusiasm, those jaded jumps for joy? We know nothing any more but the dead stars’). Others verge on the cinematic (or rather, they anticipate the cinema of later years): ‘Les couloirs des grands hôtels sont déserts et la fumée des cigars se cache’ (‘The corridors of the grand hotels are unfrequented and cigar-smoke keeps itself dark’). The least hopeful phrases seem to betray the underlying sadness of the pair. ‘Ma jeunesse en fauteuil à roulettes avec des oiseaux sur le manche de l’avenir’ (‘My youth in a bath-chair with birds on the future’s handle’).

June that year was blisteringly hot – a heat the colour of August, remarked Aragon, arriving back in sweltering Paris. In a café Breton and Soupault showed him the first four chapters of their emerging work. Aragon was riveted. Half a century later he was still calling it ‘the moment at the dawn of this century on which the entire history of writing pivots’. They wrote more, until they had a short manuscript, which they called Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields, and set about preparing for publication in September. Here was the first example of automatism, one of the most crucial early aspects of surrealism. (Picasso, shown the edited manuscript of an ‘automatic text’ scored over with amendments, said he couldn’t see much that was automatic about it.)

In July 1919 there were more ecstatic celebrations when the Peace Treaty was signed at the Palace of Versailles. On the eve of the 14th an estimated one hundred thousand people crowded along the Champs-Élysées. A temporary cenotaph occupied most of the huge vault of the Arc de Triomphe; soldiers with rifles kept vigil. All night long there was dancing in the streets. The Champs-Élysées, someone remarked, looked like a vast ballroom. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas watched from a friend’s hotel room as the Allies processed beneath the Arc de Triomphe. Knowing Paris would later become impossible to cross by car, they had risen at dawn for a last ride in ‘Auntie’ (the Ford truck they had driven in the latter months of the war, picking up soldiers returning to Paris on foot). ‘Everybody was on the streets, men, women, children, soldiers, priests, nuns …’ They watched as two nuns were helped into the branches of a tree to get a better view. Cocteau reported the event for Paris-Midi. ‘Here is General Pershing, rigid on his pink horse. His troops halt, mark time, and are off again, like chorus girls. The Marines, entwined in their silver horns, play the latest fox-trot.’ Irreverent? Max Jacob thought it was the best of Cocteau’s Paris-Midi articles. Cocteau’s August article for the same publication was entitled ‘JAZZ-BAND’. He quoted poet Blaise Cendrars, a friend of Apollinaire, who had lost an arm in the war: ‘Mais il y avait encore quelque chose, le saxophone qui pousse un long soupir humain’ (‘But there also something else, the saxophone, drawing a long, human sigh’). Jazz, he also wrote, meant ‘contacts sauvages. L’art se virilise’ (‘wildness, and a new kind of virility’ – the potency of chaotic, uncivilized drives, something to which the surrealist artists soon laid claim). He described an event at the Casino de Paris which indeed sounds wild – the musicians suspended in a kind of cage above the hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers, everybody’s voices drowned out by the noise, out of step, swaying to the rhythm anyhow. From these new tumults, Cocteau insisted, a new order was already breaking free.

Wandering through the passage de l’Opéra, one of the old arcades at the lower edge of Montmartre (now long gone), Aragon discovered a new venue for Breton and his group: Café Certa. The small workman’s café had a long bar, barrels for tables, cane chairs, dim lighting, a portable gas heater and a reputation for serving the best port in Paris, as well as cocktails of its own invention. They began to hold their informal meetings there. There was plenty to talk about. The Nouvelle Revue française had just reported that, with the war scarcely over, the artists of Paris were apparently listening to ‘drivel’ from Berlin. Breton responded with a letter of protest and wrote to Tzara in Zurich, asking him to respond, too. Tzara did so, denying any wartime partisanship. ‘People these days no longer write with their race, but with their blood (what a platitude!).’ In the cause of Dada, he added, he was simply looking for men to recruit to his cause (since the war had pulverized a generation of them).

That autumn Marcel Duchamp returned to Paris to help his brother Jacques, who was organizing a memorial exhibition (at the Salon d’Automne, reopening for the first time since the start of the war) in honour of their brother Raymond, who had died in 1918 of complications following typhoid fever. Duchamp had been saddened by Apollinaire’s death too, sorry the poet had died without seeing Apolinère Enameled, the artist’s dedicated and customized readymade. Duchamp dropped in at Café Certa but the Parisian Dada crowd failed to inspire him – unless the only three new works he produced at that time were in fact oblique responses to discussions there. Tzanck Check was an outsized cheque, hand-drawn to look printed, and made out to his dentist – a covert reference to the still-unseen Tzara, an outsized (over-inflated) blank cheque? The second work, L.H.O.O.Q. (the letters, pronounced in French, sound like Elle a chaude au cul, a slang expression for a woman who looks ‘hot’), was a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa, graffitied with a pencilled-in moustache and goatee beard (there had been a revival of interest in da Vinci’s works since the reopening of the Louvre). For the third work, Duchamp bottled a piece of Paris to take back with him to New York. In a pharmacy on the rue Blomet he had bought a large (five-inch-high), sealed glass ampoule, had the pharmacist break the seal, poured out the liquid, re-sealed it and called it 50cc of Paris Air. The work is one of the more marvellous transformations Duchamp effected by altering the context of a found object, rather than the materials. Suspended on a thin thread, 50cc of Paris Air becomes a delicate, fragile bauble.

As the year drew to a close, in the rue de la Chaumière Modigliani lay gravely ill. He died on 24 January 1920, of tubercular meningitis, discovered by friends in a state of delirium, Jeanne wrapped helplessly around him. Since the Italian Armistice had only just been signed, his family were unable to leave Italy. His brother sent a telegram: ‘cover him with flowers, we will reimburse you’. To the huge crowd of friends, models, waiters and virtually every Italian in Paris who followed the coffin, heaped with flowers, on its way to Père Lachaise cemetery, Modigliani’s death seemed like the end of an era. So, as Picasso was heard to comment, he finally got his revenge. ‘With Modigliani,’ someone else remarked, ‘the last Bohemian of his generation … Bohemia in the best sense of the word was disappearing. We felt it … All were there … burying their youth.’ Everything was about to change.