13.

Surrealists Explore l’amour fou

Picasso meets Marie-Thérèse Walter. Duchamp is (briefly) married, astonishing all his friends. With the publication of the first instalment of Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Breton positions Max Ernst at the centre of surrealism. Paul and Gala Éluard separate. The grand opening of La Coupole attracts the fashionata of the Right Bank. Ernst meets seventeen-year-old Marie-Berthe Aurenche and paints surrealist flowers.

Picasso and Michel Leiris had been cruising the grands boulevards ‘in search of l’amour fou’. On the evening of 8 January 1927 Picasso thus encountered blue-eyed, blonde, buxom seventeen-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter – in every way a contrast to Olga, his dark, disciplined dancer wife. Marie-Thérèse came with the added attraction of a touch of scandal, being the illegitimate daughter of Leon Volroff, who fathered four children with Marie-Thérèse’s mother after she divorced her husband. Marie-Thérèse had been shopping for a col Claudine and matching cuffs (mock-demure ‘Peter Pan’ accessories adopted in the wake of the success of Colette’s novel of 1900, Claudine à l’école, a fashion which seemed to be having a comeback) when Picasso stopped her in the street and told her she had an interesting face. She had no idea who he was. When he took her to a bookshop and showed her a book about his work (in Chinese or Japanese, she thought), she was none the wiser. A few days later she visited his studio, where he sat closely observing her before asking her to come back the following day. From then on, she was his lover, model and muse.

Marie-Thérèse ushered in a new phase of Picasso’s work. His portraits of her are playful, sensuous and flooded with colour, especially vibrant reds and yellows. He drew and painted her voluptuously asleep, sprawled naked in a patterned armchair, her beads flung over her shoulders, not quite like Chanel’s. In both Marie-Thérèse endormie dans un fauteuil à motifs (Marie-Thérèse Asleep in a Patterned Armchair) and Femme endormie (Woman Asleep), she seems to be playfully stretched widthways, like the reflections in a hall of mirrors. In other, even more experimental works the large-nosed, moon-shaped profile which was only partly hers (it had appeared in Picasso’s work before) now gained Olga’s black hair and startled eyes as Picasso mingled Olga’s features with those of Marie-Thérèse. Painting her, he joyfully remodelled the female form. She spent many hours upstairs in Picasso’s studio, Olga apparently oblivious downstairs, while he made luscious, sensual, endlessly inventive portraits of his new model or transformed her on canvas into a guitar or the shadowy silhouette of a dove. Their relationship was like the flight of a bird, he once said. Outside the studio Marie-Thérèse was energetic and sporty, enjoying boating, swimming, kayaking and skating; Picasso went with her and watched her as she sailed around the rink. In Montmartre they went to the amusement parks and the circus, sometimes accompanied by Picasso and Olga’s now six-year-old son Paolo, who apparently said nothing to his mother. When Marie-Thérèse said she had been deprived of her own childhood Picasso took her shopping for toys. That spring he rented an apartment for her near the Gare St-Lazare, where she lived, while keeping up the pretence that she had a job in Paris. None of Picasso’s friends, except possibly Leiris and Tzara, was allowed to meet her.

In February Duchamp returned to Paris and took a two-room apartment on the seventh floor of 11, rue Larrey, not far from the place de Clichy. He returned from New York a bachelor, apparently content to resume his affair with Mary Reynolds and ‘an ever-changing supply of demi-mondaines’, until Picabia’s wife, Germaine, introduced him to Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, the curvy daughter of an automobile magnate, son of the co-founder of Panhard cars. M. Sarazin-Levassor was keen to divorce his wife and marry his mistress but his wife had made him promise to do nothing until their then twenty-four-year-old daughter was safely off their hands. Duchamp made a diary note of his first meeting with her – ‘desastrous’ [sic] – but he was keeping an open mind. After two or three meetings he was invited to the family’s country house at Étretat, where he proposed to her. He kept his apartment on while looking for a marital home, and when no financial assistance seemed to be forthcoming from the bride’s family the couple moved into the rue Larrey together. The wedding was set for 8 June.

The marriage of Lydie and Duchamp astonished all his friends. In New York word reached Alfred Stieglitz, who passed on the news in amazement. ‘Duchamp married!!! … At any rate it’s a woman he married.’ If, as has been speculated, Duchamp married in the hope of money, he was disappointed. When the marriage contract was presented for signature it emerged that Lydie would receive a mere two thousand five hundred francs a month (a singularly modest sum for the daughter of a successful businessman), which astounded even her. Nevertheless, she enjoyed her white wedding, with bridesmaids, a modishly short dress and high heels and a veil that swathed her head like a bandage, trailing yards of white tulle, in the fashion of the day. Man Ray filmed the couple as they left the Protestant Temple d’Étoile (Lydie’s family were Protestants). After their gastronomic honeymoon (sampling restaurants throughout Paris, this being Lydie’s particular passion) they returned to the rue Larrey, where she was amazed to discover that Duchamp had absolutely no possessions other than an old trunk containing some photographs of his work. To friends in New York the artist reported that it had all been ‘a charming experience so far, and I hope that will continue. My life hasn’t changed in any way.’ He realized he would need to make money but was clear in his own mind that, though Lydie was ‘really very nice’, he had no intention of supporting them both. When in mid-July he received a commission to design a spiral staircase he rented a hotel room to work on the drawings and was soon passing more of his days there alone. When he did return to the rue Larrey and Lydie, he seemed to spend most of his time smoking his pipe and staring into space.

The ensuing events might almost have been directed by François Truffaut or Jean Renoir. That summer Duchamp and Lydie set off in her little Citroën for the south of France (Lydie was at the wheel; Duchamp could not drive), to Moulins, where they were staying in a house built by her father. Friends also on holiday in the region, including Man Ray and Kiki de Montparnasse, kept Lydie company while Duchamp went off to Nice to play in a chess tournament, which, according to Man Ray, irritated Lydie so much she got up in the middle of the night and glued his pieces to the board. At the beginning of September Duchamp was off again, this time to play chess in Chamonix. Lydie drove over to collect him at the end of the tournament (he came seventh), a journey hampered by the Citroën’s unreliable engine and dodgy suspension. Back in Paris they returned to an apartment Duchamp had rented for them at 34, rue Boussingault, near the Parc Montsouris (the rent to be paid by Lydie, the furniture to be supplied from her parents’ house), but when the day came for the move, the furniture still unpacked, they spent the night in the rue Larrey, where Lydie made another disappointing discovery. While she had been moving her belongings into the rue Boussingault, Duchamp had taken the opportunity to tidy up the rue Larrey apartment, reinstating it as his bachelor pad. The next day, he left to play chess with Man Ray. He never returned to the rue Boussingault and Lydie hardly saw him again until late October, when he asked her to join him in the rue Larrey for a talk. Explaining he could no longer bear the responsibility of marriage, he asked her for a divorce, which was granted on 25 January 1928, whereupon Duchamp happily regained his freedom. To Lydie (who eventually remarried) the entire episode apparently remained forever bewildering.

Aragon’s love affair with Nancy Cunard had also hit a rocky patch. On holiday with her in Normandy he had been dashing off ten pages a day of his inflammatory work Traité du style (A Treatise on Style; ‘I shit on the entire French army …’) while Nancy resolutely continued to try to enjoy herself. By the time they returned to Paris he had been driven to distraction by her volatile moods and drinking sessions. He sought solace with an old friend (Simone Breton’s married cousin Denise), only to discover that Denise was already having an affair. In his despair, Aragon hit on the solution of destroying one of his other works in progress, a novel he had been working on in private for four years, La Défense de l’infini, of which he had already written fifteen hundred pages. He had read a passage or two to the surrealist group, who had responded with contempt. Now he removed the central section (a free-standing, more or less pornographic piece later published as a work of short fiction, Le Con d’Irène (Irene’s Cunt), and started a bonfire with the rest. All but a few pages of his magnum opus, those snatched from the flames by Nancy, were destroyed. The romance with Nancy survived (and/or was temporarily enlivened by) this moment of high drama and they returned to Normandy, where Nancy wanted to buy a country house, before leaving together the following year to travel through Italy.

Breton had spent the summer on a retreat of his own, in a medieval manoir in Varengeville-sur-Mer, where he had been struggling with the difficulties of transposing his relationship with Nadja into fiction. On 21 March she had been found in the hallway of her hotel ‘screaming in terror at visual and olfactory hallucinations’, removed from the premises and incarcerated. Breton was surprised but consoled himself with the thought that, for Nadja, there was probably not much difference between the inside of a mental institution and the world outside. The tragic outcome did however unleash his long-pent-up fury with the psychiatric profession and the way the mentally ill were treated (recorded, notably, by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway (1925), which depicts the treatment of a shell-shocked soldier by bullying (fictional) psychiatrists Bradshaw and Holmes). Despite the advances in psychiatric literature published by Freud and others such as Charcot and Pierre Janet, the mentally ill, once incarcerated, were restrained, put on peculiar diets and sometimes locked up for years. Nadja’s incarceration vividly brought back to Breton his wartime experiences of psychiatric units, ‘the sound of a key turning in a lock, or the wretched view of the garden, the cheek of the people who question you when you want to be left alone’. Conversations came back to him (‘ “You’re being persecuted, aren’t you?” – “No, Monsieur.” – “He’s lying …” … “You hear voices, do you?” – “No, Monsieur.” – “You see, he has auditory hallucinations” ’), which he eventually included in his novel. In 1927 the arena of psychiatry was still something of a hit-and-miss affair. Yvette Guilbert had once been invited to a psychiatric hospital, where she was introduced to musicians, opera singers and other professionals; it had taken a while for it to dawn on her that she was lunching with the inmates. As a young woman Jane Avril (one-time star of the Moulin Rouge and immortalized by Toulouse-Lautrec) had had a similar experience; as a patient she had been encouraged to behave like a madwoman when the psychiatrists did their rounds, to help them justify their theories.

As Breton saw it, ‘all confinements are arbitrary. I still cannot see why a human being should be deprived of freedom. They shut up [the Marquis de] Sade, they shut up Nietzsche; they shut up Baudelaire.’ And they shut up Nadja, whom Breton apparently never visited, though Éluard and Aragon went to see her. Perhaps, Breton reflected, he should not, after all, have encouraged her to abandon what he called ‘the jail … of logic’; he simply had not realized she could lose, or might already have lost, the instinct for self-preservation he and his friends took for granted. (Nadja remained in the institution, the Perray-Vaucluse, for fourteen months, after which she was transferred to a hospital near her native Lille, where, having provided the material for his truly marvellous chance encounter, in February 1927 she was thus conveniently removed from Breton’s life.) For some months he found it impossible to write the book – until the end of August, when his unproductive labours suddenly turned a corner. In just two weeks he produced the bulk of the novel; by the close of the month he was ready to return to Paris, with only the concluding section still to write. (He published the first part that autumn in Commerce, and a further fragment the following March, in La Révolution surréaliste, illustrated by one of de Chirico’s deserted landscapes featuring arches, cloisters and a fountain.)

The development of his other work in progress, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, was evidently proving less problematic. With the instalment published in La Révolution surréaliste on 1 October 1927 Breton effectively placed Ernst at the centre of the surrealist endeavour. With his collages, Breton claimed, Ernst had broken new ground, reassembling ‘the unrestorable fragments of the labyrinth’. In Ernst’s radical juxtapositions images yielded up new meanings, relinquishing all stale associations and any inference that the meaning of an image is intrinsic. Breton compared Ernst’s collages with Man Ray’s photography: Ernst’s images assumed new kinds of existence just as did ‘a lamp, a bird or an arm’ photographed by Man Ray; how amazed Man Ray’s beautiful models would be if Breton were to tell them that ‘they are participating for exactly the same reason as a quartz gun, a bunch of keys, hoar-frost or fern!’ With Ernst’s arrival, the artistic mood had irrevocably changed; he looked at the world as if through a window and noticed ‘a man with an open umbrella walking along a roof’ or, like Hieronymus Bosch, saw a headdress in a windmill. Furthermore, as Breton also pointed out, both Ernst and Man Ray were working directly from nature since, after all, nature herself was constantly cutting up and reassembling. ‘Nature rends things asunder … the sparrow-hawk rends the sparrow, the fig devours the donkey and the tapeworm eats man away!’ Nature, like the artist, ceaselessly transforms her materials, a phenomenon we miss only if we are not looking. If we chose to look, we would see nature’s collages continually before us.

Perhaps most pertinently of all from Breton’s point of view, Ernst had acknowledged in his work a deep connection between painting and the unconscious. In the same issue of the magazine Breton printed transcriptions of Ernst’s two earlier hypnotic experiences – of the girl who appeared before him in a semi-transparent red dress and the mesmerizing experience of staring at the wood panels in his room that had led to his discovery of grattage. By this time Ernst had developed the connection still further: his work of 1927 included powerfully evoked forest landscapes set against nocturnal grounds that look as if they are made of steel or verdigris, with great corrugated, metallic-looking structures in place of trees, in which appear huge, bright white or yellow circles that may be suns, moons or just painted rings; he was experimenting with perspective as if to push at the limits of space itself. His figures by now were stretched, fluid, biomorphic, metamorphic, moving towards monumentality in paintings such as One Night of Love, in which he seemed to be inventing a new pictorial language of desire. The forest pictures began to include figures with flying hair, holes for eyes; dark, brownish, loosely ape-like forms unleashed against pale grounds. Breton saw such works as harking backwards to Bosch, the Symbolist poets and the German Romantic tradition and moving forwards in the sense that Ernst was not copying but finding equivalents in paint for strong, barely expressible emotion – things as yet unsaid, even unsayable. Breton concluded his piece by reminding readers of Edgar Allan Poe’s observation that the artist sees beauty in deformity – or, more precisely, that the pure imagination selects for examination elements, whether beautiful or ugly, which have never before been combined. Breton also quoted Poe’s remark that if we wish to identify the traces of those with lasting influence we should read not the biographies of so-called great men but the memories of those left to die in prison or wandering the wings of our asylums. With such insights, especially as visualized by Ernst, Breton insisted, the texture of the world itself seemed freshly made. ‘An inexorable rain, gentle and certain as the twilight, began to fall.’

By the time Breton’s piece appeared in October Ernst had undergone a major metamorphosis in his personal life. That autumn in a gallery he met blonde, blue-eyed, twenty-year-old, convent-educated Marie-Berthe Aurenche, with whom he embarked on an exhilarating courtship. When her parents found out, they called the police – not only was their daughter below the age of consent, she was also, or so her mother claimed, a member of the royal family of France. She and Marie-Berthe’s father (Director of Records at the Chamber of Commerce) forbade the union – none of which made the slightest impact on Ernst, who eloped with Marie-Berthe to the Île de Noirmoutier, where the couple were married. When they returned Ernst rented a house for them in Meudon, the quiet village just outside Paris where Rodin had lived and worked. Even among Ernst’s friends, not everyone approved. Those he fell out with during this period included (temporarily) Éluard, who called Marie-Berthe a liar for some remark she made about Gala, whereupon Ernst punched him in the eye. Éluard was already suffering, since the death of his father on 3 May, which although it had left him rich (he inherited the colossal sum of over a million francs, the equivalent today of several hundred million), had also left him shocked and depressed. For a while he confined himself to the house, giving Gala the opportunity to amuse herself, in Paris and elsewhere. He wrote to her, as ever, declaring his undying love: ‘Je t’adore à l’égal de la lumière que tu es, de la lumière absente. Tout le reste n’est pas que passe-temps. Vous êtes ma grande Realité, mon Éternité’ (‘You are the light of my light, wherever you are. Nothing else has meaning. You are my great Reality, my Eternity’). But it was time to let her go. The impact of his father’s death had made him tired and sad; he was disillusioned with everyone. Eventually he also grew tired of trying to keep Gala when she clearly wanted to be independent. ‘Enjoy your freedom,’ he told her. Thus encouraged, Gala prepared herself for new adventures.

Breton met his own blonde that November, the mistress of a potential sponsor for La Révolution surréaliste. (Were all these women really blonde, or had they all just ‘gone blonde’?) ‘Blonde, sensually beautiful, with … a slightly haunted shadow behind blue eyes’, Suzanne Muzard was soon dashing off to the Midi with Breton, who sent regular updates to his long-suffering wife Simone, reassuring her that Suzanne was everything he had hoped for; and by the way, could Simone please get in touch with Gallimard to ask where his proofs of Le Surréalisme et la peinture (due to appear in spring 1928) had got to? For the next few months he divided his time between Suzanne (who wanted him to marry her) and Simone (who had no desire to divorce him). The experience was fruitful in one sense, since Suzanne gave him the idea for the third and final section of Nadja. He had been planning a final meditation on Nadja’s ‘jolts and shocks’ of beauty. Instead he added a brief, more general reflection, a ‘manifesto on the intrusion of marvellous chance and “jolting” beauty in human life’. With Nadja he had learned that desire disappears on possession, but that was not how he concluded his book. The final words of Nadja now read, ‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all,’ long regarded as Breton’s definitive encapsulation of surrealism, though it raises an interesting question – at what point in Breton’s thinking had desire become synonymous with beauty? Unless he was still thinking of Poe’s definition of beauty, deformed (and reformed) within the artist’s imagination. In Poe’s sense, Nadja’s beauty becomes complex and multifaceted, an endlessly changeable (convulsive), moving collage; and her life, as she wanders the wings of her asylum, as valuable and meaningful as any obviously meaningful life – at least, to the observer.

The problem of the surrealists’ misogyny has been noted by commentators including Angela Carter, who was vehement in her view that the surrealists were not good with women. But it should be remembered that though the 1920s seems in retrospect to be the decade of liberation for women (short skirts, late nights, blatant promiscuity), the Married Women’s Property Act was introduced only in 1928; women did not easily find employment (except in wartime); and most apparently liberated women were in fact enjoying someone else’s money. We know about the exceptions (Chanel was in a league of her own); the literature of the time should suffice as a window on so-called independent women’s lives as they were actually lived (novels by men as well as women, that is, by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway as well as by Jean Rhys; and, for a consummately subtle example of the impact of deft misogyny, try Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat). The surrealists’ art took the female figure apart, inspected her – as it were – through a microscope; sifted through the parts of a woman with a metaphorical scalpel. The artists were baffled by women and wanted in their work to dissect and inspect the female – which does not quite excuse Breton for his treatment of Nadja (who was not posing but all too poignantly real).

The opening of La Coupole on 20 December 1927 identified Montparnasse not only as the hub of daytime café life but also as the fashionably arty locus of Parisian nightlife. The former owner of the Dôme had acquired a huge venue a few yards away on the boulevard du Montparnasse, and the glamorous new restaurant/bar became overnight the place everybody went to be seen. According to legend, the two thousand guests who attended the launch party included film-makers, actresses, journalists, writers and artists including Cocteau, Man Ray (with Kiki de Montparnasse, and other adoring women) and Hemingway, well known by this time as the author of A Farewell to Arms and also surrounded by fashionable women. Before midnight (so the story went) one thousand five hundred bottles of Cordon Rouge had somehow disappeared and someone was sent urgently in a taxi to the Mumm depot for more. La Coupole immediately eclipsed the Rotonde and the Dôme as the most popular venue in Montparnasse. With its eye-catching geometric glass-and-steel art deco electric light-shade at the entrance and fashionable murals depicting dancing couples decorating every pillar, it was filled every night with joyous party-goers, the women sparkling in short sequinned flapper dresses and costume jewellery, the men in natty suits and highly polished shoes. Lined up outside along the kerb, even the cars were two-toned. Everyone came to La Coupole; le tout Paris crossed over from the Right Bank for their demis bien tirés, their whiskys réconfortants; and to overhear all the latest Left Bank gossip. The chef, dressed as the gatekeeper in A Thousand and One Nights, served exotic curries. La Coupole quickly became the symbol of ‘the new Montparnasse’. At the same time, a few streets away in the rue de la Gaîté, Yvette Guilbert, now well over sixty, sang retro songs lit up in crimson and yellow lights against a gold curtain to packed houses in the Bobino Music Hall, just as she had in the 1890s. Nostalgia was enjoying a comeback.

At the start of 1928 the art market in Paris rocketed, then plummeted. ‘Painters and Painting go up and down like Wall Street Stock,’ Duchamp grumbled to Alfred Stieglitz. Invited back to New York to manage a gallery, Duchamp had been on the point of accepting before remembering he was quite happy in Paris, enjoying his bachelor life in the rue Larrey. Why move? Man Ray told him he could earn ten thousand dollars a year if he would only return to painting; Duchamp said he had accomplished all he wished to in paint and saw no point in repeating himself. On 11 February Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la peinture appeared in book form, with an additional section on Miró. He made up for having so far overlooked Miró by designating him the painter who best exemplified automatism in painting, perhaps even ‘the very reason why he could perhaps pass for the most “surrealist” of us all’. In his work there was ‘a pitchfork in every star’. Perhaps he had seen one of Miró’s most striking pieces of 1928, Portrait d’une danseuse (now in the Surrealist Galleries of the Pompidou Centre), a delicate, minimalist construction made of cork, feather and metal on painted paper. Balanced on a cork pierced through with a ball bearing on a long spike, the feather drops from the steel ball like a dancer after a leap. No one else, Breton wrote, had ‘the same ability to bring together the incompatible, and to disrupt calmly what we do not dare even hope to see disrupted’.

By spring the Galerie Surréaliste permanently housed work by artists including Arp, Braque, de Chirico, Ernst, Masson, Miró, Picasso and Man Ray – a significant line-up. The March issue of La Révolution surréaliste included advertisements for the forthcoming publication of Nadja and of publications by Freud (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, The Interpretation of Dreams, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, My Life and Psychoanalysis) and yet another hatchet job on de Chirico. This time the attack was personal – compared to the youthful painter of mystery, melancholy and dream, de Chirico had become merely an unsavoury old copyist. From now on, the artist viewed Breton (not the author of the attack) with pure, unmitigated hatred – though Breton continued to reproduce de Chirico’s early work in the newspaper. Also that year Cocteau published Le Mystére Laïc, his book of jottings with five lithographs by de Chirico; improvised reflections included one of his most celebrated remarks: ‘Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.’ The book also contained Cocteau’s further reflections on de Chirico, among them the insight that, despite their air of solemnity, his ‘paintings borrow nothing from dreams. His paintings seem rather as though they are sleeping and dreaming of nothing.’ Cocteau compared them instead with photography and film and remarked that the works look as if they have been made into statues. And he compared de Chirico’s work with Picasso’s, coming up with a subtle distinction. One day, he predicted, ‘our age will be called the age of mystery. People paint mystery as they used to paint the circus. Chirico is a painter of mystery. Picasso is a mysterious painter.’

As it headed towards closure, the tone of Le Révolution surréaliste became ever darker. In that same March issue Breton and Aragon celebrated the centenary of Freud’s great revelation of 1878 that hysteria was the expression not of sickness but of passion. Six large photographs of a hysteric (spanning a page and a half) accompanied the article, which was printed entirely in capitals. They announced that, following centuries of misappropriation, in which hysteria had been successively regarded as divine, infernal, mythical, erotic, lyrical, social, savant and irreducible to definition, they were here sharing their own conclusion: ‘L’HYSTÉRIE N’EST PAS UN PHENOMÈNE PATHOLOGIQUE’ (‘HYSTERIA IS NOT A PATHOLOGICAL PHENOMENON’). In the same issue there also appeared the findings of a two-part seminar held by Breton on sexuality; in it he posed the question, could a man love two women at the same time? Man Ray supplied his answer: yes, but in that case, he would need more than two.

The publication of Nadja on 25 May made little impact for the first few months; it was only towards the end of the year that the book began to get good reviews. That was not right either, as far as Breton was concerned, for if surrealism was gaining acceptance, what had happened to its agenda of rebellion? To Éluard he complained that there seemed to be fewer and fewer conversations worth having. ‘Endless games. The phonograph. What’s the use of it all.’ He could no longer count on Aragon’s friendship either, since Aragon’s private life had taken a dramatic downturn that summer. During their travels he and Nancy had visited the Hotel Luna in Venice, where the band consisted of four black musicians playing jazz improvisations and swing melodies. Nancy adored the music, which she thought better than anything she had heard in Paris. The musicians also appealed to her, particularly striking-looking Henry Crowder, in the city with the band for the season. No sooner had they struck up a conversation than she was immediately swept away. Within three years, with Henry’s help she had set up a publishing house, and in 1931 published Negro, an extraordinary 460-page album of profoundly significant writings on the African-American experience, incorporating pieces on music, education and law, poetry and accounts of racial injustice; it also included Lincoln’s ‘Proclamation of the Emancipation of the Slaves’ as well as writings by some of the first influential female poets and abolitionists. (By contrast, Josephine Baker got a single mention, as one who had ‘obtained a success in a special art. The taste of the times for exotic song and dance has brought to her artistic recognition but no social admittance in America’.) Meanwhile, at the end of the Hotel Luna’s 1928 summer season Henry accompanied Nancy back to Paris, where he resumed his former existence playing in small bars in Montmartre and Montparnasse. For a while the three of them hung out together, ‘en groupe’, as Aragon drily put it. Sometime later, probably in mid-September, Aragon took an overdose of sleeping pills and lay down in a hotel room to die … except that someone found him in time and took him to hospital, where he recovered.

In October he reappeared in Paris, where he and Breton attempted to revive their spirits by writing a theatrical sketch together, Le Trésor des Jésuites (The Treasure of the Jesuits); although based on the true story of an unsolved murder, it was primarily a tribute to Musidora, the wild silent-movie star of their youth. They interspersed the drama with references to current events, yet it was seeped in nostalgia, and reviewers dismissed it as fatally dated. Musidora was fifty by now, remarked one (actually, not quite forty); the authors were clearly just trying to relive their youth. All they had achieved was ‘a poor pastiche of Surrealism, with its stereotyped insistence on seedy hotels and café tables and “mysteries” as flabby and middle-aged as Musidora herself had become’.

As if to confound everyone (including Breton) yet again, Ernst’s large exhibition of December 1928 at the Galerie Georges Bernheim included fresh new work in pale colours incorporating shells, feathers, crystals, jellyfish, reeds and jewels. Snow Flowers (1927) was among the first of these works in an entirely original style. The catalogue included an introductory text by René Crevel: ‘All his friends are metamorphosed into flowers. All the flowers are metamorphosed into birds, all the birds into mountains, all the mountains into stars. Each star becomes a house, each house a town.’ ‘L’entrée des fleurs; comment ne suis-je pas cette charmante fleur?’ (‘Entry of the Flowers; why aren’t I this Charming Flower?’ was the title of one of the paintings). The preface broadened out this wholly novel question: why are we not flowers? Such an enquiry seems almost to supersede surrealism, referring forward to questions such as that posed a decade later by Virginia Woolf in The Waves: ‘ “like” and “like” and “like” – but what is the thing that is beneath the semblance of the thing.’ In Ernst’s shell paintings, shells are encrusted as though washed up from the depths of the sea. In his flower pictures, the flowers seem suspended completely from the picture space, signifying nothing; in a world – as it were – of their own. Ernst continued to develop this idea; his Shell Flowers of 1929 are more like jewels. (Dalí pastiched them in a work of the same year, The Accommodations of Desire, which features shells containing miniature lions’ heads, human skulls and ants).

In Montparnasse by the end of the year most of Breton’s friends had been lured by the glamour of La Coupole, a milieu Breton loathed – he found it too smart, too fashionably arty, nothing to do with mystery or chance. In the final issue of La Révolution surréaliste (which eventually appeared in December 1929) he planned to publish his readers’ responses to a questionnaire on love. ‘Quelle sorte d’éspoir mettez-vous dans l’amour?’ (‘What sort of hope do you place in love?) he had asked. ‘Comment envisagez-vous le passage de l’idée d’amour au fait d’aimer?’ (‘How do you picture the passage from the idea of love to the reality of loving?’) Did anybody still care?