©Kristine Harley No part of this excerpt may be reproduced without written permission from the author.
In a small storefront on the rue de Grenelle where the Surrealist Research Bureau made its headquarters, we sat on hard chairs with about a dozen young men in a cramped room, and were subjected to a long and tedious lecture by the founder of the movement, André Breton. He seemed a pleasant enough man, heavy-set and earthy, his russet hair rising back from his face in waves as if he constantly faced a strong wind, his smile having a certain hilarity behind it—but as a speaker he was dull. And even when he remarked upon this in his speech, it made for a dim joke.
Aside from a complete negation of the norms of bourgeois life, the goals of Surrealism were still not clear to me, even after we sat there for what felt like hours. It seemed that the movement started out with a playfulness that was slowly being strangled by Breton’s insistence on orthodoxy. These men were interested in consciousness, in tapping the powers of the unconscious and becoming willing mediums for its revelation of what they called the Marvelous—but the more Breton expounded on the hidden, fantastic reality that was said to exist behind normal everyday appearances, the more dry it all began to sound, and I waited in vain for an explanation of how Communism fit into all of this. Breton’s talk about dreams was interesting, but apparently his idea of the future was a placid society served by adoring, sexually uninhibited, and obedient maidens. Justine fairly bristled with rage as he rattled on.
When I began to yawn, Desnos smothered a laugh and surreptitiously handed me an early copy of La Revolution surrealiste, the group’s official publication, which consisted mostly of Artaud’s writing and his. My glancing through this during Breton’s speech earned us some seriously disapproving looks from the other members, while Desnos smiled back at them in all innocence.
Good God! I thought as I absorbed the pamphlet, ignoring Breton entirely now. His voice buzzed around me like a timid fly, never alighting on my interest. The language in the pamphlet was shocking, outrageous, offensive, and damned funny. At least it was interesting, much more interesting than Breton’s dry doctrine. It appeared to me that Breton headed a new Nicene Council that was about to strike the apocrypha from its bible.
After the lecture, Justine looked on in amazement as the group broke up, some to go to the theatre, others sitting down to play checkers or cards or do a little automatic writing. “That’s it?” she exclaimed. “It’s over?”
“Want to leave?” Roger asked immediately. He held her coat for her and she slipped her arms quickly into it. As we headed for the door some pale young man materialized before us. “Monsieur Breton does not want guests to leave at this time,” he warned in an ominous tone, and it made me want to laugh, all this superseriousness. From behind our guard another voice hissed, “Oh, screw Breton—I don’t want her to leave!” That end of the room erupted into masculine laughter over the admiring glances toward Justine. Having decided to remain at the Bureau, Desnos waved good-bye to us, and gestured for me to keep the pamphlet.
When the three of us reached the sidewalk, Justine could hold her anger back no longer. “What a disappointment! So much for radical ideas. I’ve never heard anyone sound so bourgeois while criticizing the bourgeoisie.” Her words were punctuated by the clacking of her high heels on the pavement.
“You’re absolutely right, Justine.” Roger looked up at the sky as thunder rumbled faintly.
“Dreams, eh? The unconscious? As long as it’s mired down in unintelligible esoteric fluff, removed from anything real—”
“All right, Justine!” Roger exclaimed, still amused. “We hear you! We agree!” Justine huffed, her breath flying past her face in the chilly air, and huddled deeper into her coat. “By the time Breton’s through with that bunch, there won’t be a true Surrealist left,” Roger told us. “He isn’t good at putting ‘movement’ into the movement, but he is good at defending its purity. I wish Artaud, Desnos, and Roger Vitrac would get together and expel him.”
“Would he leave?” Justine asked cynically.
“No, but it would be a beautifully subversive act, considering all three of them have been accused by Breton of not being subversive enough.”
Subversion. Revolution. Movement. Loyalty. “What utter childishness!” I burst out suddenly. Artaud’s piece in the pamphlet came back to me: “We don’t give a shit about your canons, index, sin, confessional, clergy, we are thinking of another war, war on you, Pope, dog.... The petrified Spirit cracks beneath the great stones crushing it and it’s because of your decadent logic. Leave us be, sirs, you are only usurpers. Who are you to codify intelligence, to dole out diplomas of the soul?” Who were they, indeed. Artaud’s followers were doing to Surrealism exactly what Artaud criticized the Church for doing to metaphysics; they were turning the mysteries of life into tradition, into lifeless ritual and empty conventions. How much braver than the rest of them he was, this man who slept in the street, who wandered about the stage like a somnambulist.
”Backbiting doesn’t strike me as very subversive,” I snapped, while Roger and Justine listened gravely. “These men should focus on their enemy, if they’re serious about dismantling a dead civilization, and not attack each other like vultures. Why form a group at all if you’re just going to eat each other alive?” But the minute I said this a chiding voice spoke in my ear: Or get married, Geoff? Why get married if you’re only going to eat each other alive? Wasn’t that what you and Marianne did to each other? Wasn’t it?
My hand plowed through my hair and my lips were moving with the angry cadence of my thoughts. I dreamed it all. The creature, the body, everything. Why hadn’t I hunted Marianne down after she left, and flung myself to my knees before her, promised her anything to get her back? Why hadn’t I chosen passion and melodrama over hard work and stoicism? Instead I stayed on that farm and invented things that weren’t true. “Such isolation doubtless affects one’s character.” Oh, it had affected mine, all right.
And my son. Why didn’t I want my son? What kind of man didn’t want to be a father to his own child? “The illegitimate offspring from a rape of my mind”—Artaud’s words again. Not illegitimate, I thought, but from a rape, yes, a rape, even if I was her husband. If I hadn’t wanted a child I should have kept my damn hands off her, and accepted our life as she wanted it! As she could stand it. As much as she could stand me.
The trees shook their branches as a strong gust of cool air hit our faces. I slowed my pace, suddenly conscious of the fact that Justine and Roger were struggling to keep up with me. They had fallen silent, glancing at me as we walked. Roger started to say something and Justine cut him off. “Leave Geoff alone.” We kept on walking, me with my eyes to the pavement. “It’s going to rain,” Justine commented casually. “It’s too dreary to be almost June!”
“So are we going back to the Flore, or what?” Roger asked her.
The sky was growing darker, the pools of light thrown by the lampposts becoming misty. To the left of us wound the Seine, dull and dark, reflecting nothing. The branches rattled like bones. Gray as slate, the sky began flinging intermittent drops that hit the ground with blunt slaps. I felt the beginning of the headache that always accompanied this type of weather. “Uh—” I began, pausing on the sidewalk, and when they looked at me I shoved my hands into my pockets, suddenly at a loss. “I think I’ll go home. Thanks for the evening.” Justine exchanged a look with Roger and walked over to take my arm.
I was staring at the ground. It isn’t the sense of being insane, I thought, it’s the sense of coming out of insanity and no longer understanding its weird logic. I don’t want to remember it! I shrieked inwardly as I felt my mind reaching for that madness, scrambling to reconstruct the link, intuitively needing to recover what had been lost, what had been so clear only days ago. As if being insane was a rock to cling to above an even greater chasm. I covered my face with my hands. That doctor was right, after all—I had gone mad! Marianne had left me and I had done nothing about it, nothing but let my health degenerate and my mind collapse, and it had driven me mad. I had nearly died, and I hadn’t even been afraid until now, because secretly I had wanted to die.
“Stay with us, Geoff,” Justine urged as she gently squeezed my elbow. I looked up and saw Roger’s encouraging smile. “Come on. We want you to.” Her hand slid into mine. And Roger, noting this, restored his sense of equilibrium by taking her other hand.
The sound of rapid footfalls reached us and Artaud emerged from the mist, half-running with his hands stuffed in his pockets, his cigarette falling from his lips. Glancing nervously over his shoulder, he caught Justine’s arm and began marching her back in the direction from which we had just come. “This way. Hurry.” Her hand slipped from mine.
“What’s the matter with you, Artaud?” Roger demanded, exasperated, and still hanging on to Justine.
“Let go!” Justine yelled, but it was Roger’s grip from which she was trying to free herself.
Artaud’s face was furious. “Shut up.” But he didn’t sound angry, he sounded alarmed. “I am taking Justine this way. If you two want to stay here and tangle with him, fine.” He kept twisting his head around, frowning at something behind us as Roger and I fell into step behind him. The mist was too fine to obscure the buildings lining the street, but the sidewalk behind us faded into infinity, and the bridges dissolved halfway across the Seine. It gave me the sense that we were walking in place. “Some man,” Artaud said finally, “is following me.”
Roger opened his mouth for a flippant denial, thought better of it, and muttered, “Probably one of your amateur Bolsheviks.” He caught my glance and rolled his eyes.
“No, a strange man,” Artaud insisted, “middle-aged, although I couldn’t see clearly. He has followed me the last couple of nights. He stands outside café windows and stares at me, and tonight, as I passed a doorway, he emerged from the shadows and spoke. And he struck at me!”
Justine’s eyes grew big. “Are you serious?” Roger gasped, all cynicism gone. “What did he say?”
“I don’t know—it was all garbled.”
Justine quickened her pace until she was the one yanking Artaud along. I was astonished at how fast she could go, especially with those flimsy things she was wearing on her feet. “Hold on,” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder to slow her. “Don’t panic. Let’s turn down this alley.” In the narrow passage lined with grilled windows we gathered together and waited. The rain stopped, and the wind blew colder. For a few moments there was no sound; then, the unhurried ringing of shoes on the cobblestones reached us. Justine tried to push her way past me. “No,” I whispered, “wait. We want to see him.” The footsteps came quite near, then stopped. There was a pause. They resumed, then paused again, while we held our breaths.
“Oh! Let’s run!” Justine cried, and before anyone could stop her she darted out of the alley and ran screaming toward the Seine. We followed her, of course, and I saw the mischievous gleam in Artaud’s eyes before he too let out an unearthly shriek loud enough to splinter one’s spine. Justine’s cry ended in a shout of laughter as she gathered up her smeared skirt and galloped along the riverbank with Artaud flying after her, both of them yelling their terror and exuberance. Rain began to fall again, lightly but steadily. “Never a dull moment with him, that’s for sure,” Roger chuckled as he and I ran after those two. Their animal cries cut through the moist, cold air, and we caught up with them only when Justine finally sank to the ground, completely exhausted. “Justine! Your dress!” Roger was laughing at her.
“I’m tired,” she answered.
I pointed at Justine and Artaud. “That was a performance, a poem,” I said in between gasps, “reinterpreted for the modern theatre. ‘Annabelle Lee.’”
Artaud, leaning against a tree trunk with his arms folded, smiled a little, and Roger nodded. “A bit morbid, but I can see that. Very good.” Roger reached down to pull Justine to her feet. “Come on, Annabelle, arise from your sepulcher down by the sea—or by the river, rather. People are cold.”
“So am I...” Justine said faintly, and erupted into violent, barking coughs. Artaud shuddered, that undersized gray jacket of his nearly soaked through. We were all nearly soaked.
Returning to the street, we hailed a taxi, persuaded the frowning driver to carry all four of us, and piled in with me in front. Roger looked on, worried, as Justine and Artaud collapsed next to him on the back seat like dolls, like orphaned children, their eyes closed, their lips parted, their foreheads touching in tender abandonment. “They’ll be ill. My place isn’t that warm.” And he shrugged. “Half of the time there are people sleeping over whose names I don’t even know.”
I remembered Louis’s squalid, drafty apartment on the rue Blomet, and knew that Justine’s would be a twin to it. When I gave the driver my brother’s respectable address he looked shocked, then sneered condescendingly, but obeyed. “I can’t be certain what kind of reception we will get,” I warned Roger.
“Your family seems very tolerant, Weidmann.”
“Harumph!” interjected our driver, as if he were dying to get a word in. He jabbed a thumb toward Justine and Artaud. “Gypsies! Don’t be taken in by them, messieurs—they are thieves. I implore you, let me pull over right here and leave them. Human garbage!” He stared stonily ahead as those two pairs of eyes popped open.
Artaud’s voice was low and menacing. “Theft, eh? Why don’t you take more detours!” Justine quickly laid a hand on his, shaking her head.
“Just drive, please,” I said, fervently hoping that the driver wouldn’t stop right then and order us out, for if he did, I resolved grimly, I’d wrestle him for the wheel. Maybe then Roger could drive us; all I knew was horses. But the driver said nothing more. When he pulled up in front of the house Justine popped open her little beaded purse, and his eyes bulged at the wad of bills she thrust at him.
“I wanted to throw it in his face!” she cried, near tears, as I took her arm and led them to the door. It was raining heavily now.
I said, “You made your point with him, Justine.”