Near the end of September 1922, Kiki, Man Ray, Desnos, André and Simone Breton, and a few other friends listened as the writer René Crevel recounted the adventure he’d had on the Côte d’Azur over the summer holidays. He’d met a young woman in an orchard near a beach, and she’d invited him to her home. There among shelves sagging with esoteric books on the occult, she introduced him to a family friend, an elderly spiritualist calling herself Madame Dante. They held a séance in which Madame Dante put him into a hypnotic trance. Crevel remembered few of the evening’s details but was sure that in his haze he’d made the most beautiful speeches.
Now in Paris, they wondered if they could adapt Madame Dante’s methods to suit their own needs. To communicate not with the departed but with their own buried selves in a search for inspiration. Theirs would be a rational program for drawing out the irrational. They would derange their senses through exhaustion and then answer questions posed to them in their twilight states. Their dream-thoughts were sure to be poetic once brought to the surface. By making themselves into conduits between the sleeping world of truth and the waking world of lies, they would express themselves with absolute purity, unconcerned by the need to make sense or avoid taboos. Crevel and Desnos were twenty-two years old, Simone Breton twenty-five, and her husband twenty-six. Kiki was just shy of twenty-one. Man Ray at thirty-two ranked as the senior figure. A few of them had read some Freud.
So started the stretch of months they came to call “the period of sleeping-fits.” They held the first session in the Bretons’ apartment above a cabaret on rue Fontaine, near the Moulin Rouge, in a darkness spoiled only by the neon glare from the street and a sliver of moon. Sitting around a circular table in a room cluttered with masks, statues, books, and carefully piled stacks of river stones, they clasped hands. The Bretons, Crevel, Desnos, and a few others took turns lulling themselves toward the fuzzy edge of sleep while the Bretons’ dog Peticoco wriggled between their legs. Kiki, who grew up hearing folktales about the powerful and not always benevolent influence of visitors from the spirit world, watched anxiously and refused to take part. It’s unclear if Man Ray joined in or merely observed.
Each participant rooted around his mind like a mole in the ground while the others recorded his ramblings. They spoke of trips to the equator with film stars; visits to floating lands populated only by giant plants. They sighed, chanted, scratched the table, laughed uncontrollably, and bore witness to confessions of infidelity, bloodshed, and ecstatic revolution. One of them predicted the assassination of another. Their sunken voices sounded oddly different from their normal ones. Kiki left the room terrified when a trembling Crevel ventriloquized the voice of an attorney defending a woman who’d honored her husband’s request to drown him. The tales they spun, Simone Breton later told a friend, were as horrifying as the darkest passages from Lautréamont’s Maldoror. No one had any memory of what he’d said. All swore the stories unfolded of their own volition. It felt as if they were taking dictation from the astral plane.
Over the next weeks, they repeated the experiment, and their group swelled. Man Ray documented one night’s proceedings, or a re-creation of the proceedings staged for his camera. He photographed Simone Breton typing out Desnos’s speech, crowded by a half-circle of men with brilliantined hair and black coats. André Breton commands the frame’s center, peering down at the typewriter like a biologist at a petri dish, his hand cupping his chin and mouth. Desnos below him has a palm out in supplication as though begging patience from his listeners. It’s a picture of private dreaming elevated to public performance. Man Ray titled it Waking Dream Séance.
Desnos showed the greatest capacity for working in the realm of dream logic. He could put himself under in any noisy bar, or alone in his room with a pen and paper to record his automatic writing. Normally shy and secretive, he became effusive in slumber, answering any question he was asked. His pronouncements nearly made sense. He sleep-spoke of standing with Robespierre facing a crowd, a guillotine, and a bird of paradise. During one trance, he rose from his chair and, supposedly sleepwalking, grabbed a kitchen knife and chased Paul Éluard around the room. He recited telepathic communications he said came to him directly from Rrose Sélavy across the Atlantic—but never from Rrose’s creator Duchamp. Another participant, Louis Aragon, wrote that Desnos delivered his prophecies in a voice so full of “magic, revelation and Revolution” that in a different time he could have started a religion, or overthrown a government, or founded a city.
Aragon must have had some special insight into the realms between consciousness and unconsciousness, having been buried in rubble from grenade explosions—several times—as an auxiliary battlefield doctor, once so deeply he was mistakenly declared dead on the field. He, Desnos, and the others met “like hunters, comparing . . . the tally of beasts we’d invented, the fantastic plants, the images we’d shot down.” They grew desperate, as Aragon worded it, to spend as much time as possible “in oblivion.”
They went from holding a séance every few weeks to holding several in an evening. They pushed each other to take things further and further, even while feeling shattered. No one wanted to be the one too scared or exhausted to continue. Crevel and Desnos competed to see who could fall asleep first and most productively. Desnos, who friends described as someone who seemed to burn with a perpetual fever, looked even closer to collapse than usual. They lost their appetites. They started second-guessing one another’s motives. They wondered whether their visions were truly improvised or staged performances. (To Aragon, the distinction was pointless. One way or another they’d been pushed to make something new, negating any discussion of whether the product was somehow “false.”) They started to admit to each other their fears about the psychological toll of spending so much time drowned in their other worlds. The period of sleeping-fits wound down.
They’d found some of the inspiration they’d been seeking. The visions made their ways into poems and novels, whose effectiveness varies with the degree of patience one has for listening to other people’s dreams. More important was that through their experiences, they’d seen how two incongruous ideas could be fused together to form a third one, how the rational and irrational could comfortably occupy the same place at once. Their minds had been unleashed, rewired to accept chaos without judgment, to welcome the unexpected. No longer bound by seeing reality and the unreal as polar opposites, they pushed past this binary to form a broader definition of experience and entered into the “shared horizon of religion, magic, poetry, dreaming, madness, intoxication, and this fluttering honeysuckle, puny little life,” as Aragon wrote. Charged by this new approach to thinking and writing, they applied it to their reading, going back and discovering what Aragon called “a great poetic unity” running though earlier prophetic works—the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud; Lautréamont; the Old and New Testaments—that held mysteries to be solved by those who knew how to single out those “certain words” containing the power to “exhilarate.”
They were reaching toward the language of Surrealism. The word had been brought into being five years earlier by Apollinaire. Many in Montparnasse saw the late poet and critic, dead of Spanish flu two days before the Armistice, as the spiritual godfather of the avant-garde, one of the earliest champions of Cubism and of Duchamp. Apollinaire had witnessed firsthand the smashing of reason and reality while fighting for France (though born in Italy) as an infantry officer. He first used the term sur-real to describe the staging of the Ballets Russes production of Parade (1917), created by Picasso, Cocteau, Satie, and the Russian choreographer Léonide Massine. But the word, the idea, lingered, holding other possibilities. The small group of explorers that had coalesced around the period of the sleeping-fits wondered if their subjective feelings of exhilaration and intoxication might be collectively channeled toward something beyond an artistic revolution: a fundamental change in the way people lived.
Kiki, for one, quickly lost interest in their nocturnal games. They never stopped talking, these poets so full of misdirection. She thought of them as silly kids from good families playing at being dangerous by poking around in the hidden depths of the mind. (She wasn’t wrong: Breton, Tzara, Picabia, and a few of the others in their circle had trusts or inheritances that relieved them of much financial pressure.) She enjoyed talking with some of them, especially Aragon, Breton, and Desnos. “What I liked about them was that they were so clearly just a bunch of wise-asses. . . . They’d go see clairvoyants, played with their Ouija boards, talked to spirits.” But she felt that as a group, they dealt too heavily in theories and abstractions. And she thought most of them were hypocrites. “Here were people who insulted the bourgeoisie . . . but who lived exactly like the people they were proposing to burn at the stake. . . . They were too cynical for me. I never understood them.”
They were Surrealists. Kiki was a realist.