André Breton in Exile

The Poetics of "Occultation", 1941–1947

Victoria Clouston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317181231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Following the journey of André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, into exile during the Second World War, the author of this book traces the trajectory of his thought and poetic output from 1941–1948. Through a close examination of the major – and as yet little studied – works written during these years, she demonstrates how Breton's quest for "a new myth" for the postwar world led him to widen his enquiry into hermeticism, myth, and the occult. This ground-breaking study establishes Breton's profound intellectual debt to 19th-century Romanticism, its literature and thought, revealing how it defined his understanding of hermeticism and the occult, and examining the differences between the two. It shows how, having abandoned political action on leaving the Communist Party in 1935, Breton nonetheless held firmly to political thought, moving in his quest for a better world via Hermes Trismegistus across the utopian ideas of Charles Fourier and the "magical" practices of the Hopi Indians. The author finally reveals Breton's misreading of the situation in postwar Paris on his return in 1946, and his failure to communicate the span of his ideas for creating a better society while at the same time maintaining a close connection between art and life.

1Breton’s poetic quest

With Pierre Mabille, June–July 1940

In this opening chapter I will set in context Breton’s initial movements after demobilisation (in the wake of the armistice between France and Germany in June 1940), when, having rejoined his wife and child, he sought shelter with his friend and colleague Pierre Mabille, first in Salon-de-Provence and then in Martigues, close to Marseilles. These were turbulent times for Breton, both intellectually and actually, finding himself in straitened circumstances, homeless in his own war-torn country, and with little or no means of supporting his family.

I will show how the shift already represented in Breton’s Second Manifeste, together with the strong influence of Pierre Mabille, and his own research into occultism thereafter, began to shape a new trajectory in the course of his work. While tracing this thread, I will also make particular reference to Pleine marge, the first of two poems written immediately prior to his leaving France in 1941. Further, I will examine what Breton meant by “myth”, looking also at his concept of “the sublime point” and establishing the first appearance of both in his early writing and their passage throughout his work. The Second Manifeste places “the sublime point” at the centre of a lifelong quest which led Breton to penetrate ever more deeply into occultism and early German Romanticism, from which he took inspiration in his search for the reconciliation of the antinomies of existence.

1. André Breton: “the great undesirable”

By the summer of 1940 Breton had become “the great undesirable” of his own self-assessment:

Dying Heraclitus, Pierre de Lune, Sade, the cyclone with head of a millet seed, the anteater: his greatest desire would have been to belong to the family of great undesirables.¹

In the years between the wars, Breton had been loud in his condemnation of the prolongation and overall handling of World War I. He had even predicted, as early as 1925,² the inevitability of sliding into another war with Germany. The disappointment and disillusion he felt when that war came, to find that the country was to be led by one of the very figures he had so criticised, fuelled his rejection of contemporary society and its values and his consequent determination to establish social change. As early as 1935, with his famous initial command, he had been calling for a revolutionary change in the social order.³ Thus he found himself contesting the authority not only of the out-going government of the Third Republic, led by Paul Reynaud, and the invading Nazi regime, but also that of the new French State, led by Marshal Pétain, with its increasingly collaborative character and totalitarian attitudes.

Breton, despite his criticisms of the maladministration of the Great War, had gone back into service in the 22nd Section of the Army Medical Corps. Stationed at various places, he finally found himself at the Noisy fortress in Romainville, a northeastern suburb of Paris. This enabled him, among other things, given the privileges of rank and veteran status, to sleep in his own bed in the rue Fontaine in Paris each night. His attitude was, at the very least, ambivalent:

So it was that he had re-donned his ill-fitting uniform in a riot of contradictory expectations and fears, tempering disdain with curiosity, anticipation with withdrawal.⁴

This comment could be said to sum up the feelings of a great number of those with whom Breton spent his time. While initially he managed to remain in Paris, it was not the Paris of peacetime. When the German occupying force entered Paris in June 1940, one of their priorities was to set up a branch of Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, The Propaganda Abteilung, whose purpose was to keep a watching brief on the French press and art world. The art market had already collapsed and galleries closed down. From this time, Breton fought the dislocation, both mental and physical, that was an inevitability of the disruption of war by trying to maintain or recreate his own cultural surroundings, whether in Paris or, later, in Marseilles, Martinique or New York.

From Romainville, Breton was transferred to Poitiers in January 1940 – about a hundred miles away from Royan on the Atlantic coast, where his wife, Jacqueline Lamba [1910–1993], and their four-year-old daughter, Aube, were then staying at the invitation of the painter Picasso [1881–1973]⁵ and his partner, the photographer Dora Maar [1907–1997]. At least he was now able to spend any leave he had with them there, staying either with Picasso and Dora Maar or in some small hotel nearby. This also enabled him to renew contact with Picasso, whose generosity to both him and Jacqueline in terms of shelter and financial help greatly touched Breton.

Displaced from Paris, with his wife and child in another part of the country, Breton found himself now in a similar situation to the many refugees from other parts of Europe who had sought refuge in France. Although it was still his country, the Vichy government was in many ways as alien to Breton as the Nazi regime, giving him the impetus to seek out others of the Surrealist movement with whom to collaborate in artistic endeavour. Forced to face up to the reality of what was going on around him, and in order to deal with the disruptions in his life, Breton realised he was on the brink of something new.

During the military inaction of the ‘Phoney War’, Breton occupied himself first by pursuing his publishers with regard to the Anthologie de l’humour noir, then with helping to bring about another International Exhibit of Surrealism in New Mexico, and publishing a text, ‘Carte postale’, in the Belgian Surrealist magazine L’Invention collective (No. 2, April 1940). A very short poem, dedicated to Benjamin Péret [1899–1959], it nonetheless conjures up images reflecting the current state of unease at the beginning of the war, and, importantly, indicates clearly the direction in which Breton intended to take the movement during the war years. From mention of “the war” in the first line, to the combination of reference to “the rebirth” together with “the hermetic life”, Breton outlined his trajectory. Subtle use of imagery conjures the discomfort and threat of war with which they would all have to live – the breaching of “the barricades”, the presence of “stinging flies”, “empty whale hiding places”, the tap on the shoulder – before reaching the end of “the time of crisis”.⁶

In a letter to Jacqueline,⁷ Breton describes it as “a little bit of casual writing […] in agreeable reaction to the pompously zero ‘Poèmes’” published in a small review edited by Lise Deharme [1898-1980] and Georges Hugnet [1906–1974].⁸ As he commented many years later, it seemed to him vital that this purely military defeat should in no way impinge on intellectuals, or be allowed to crush their spirit.⁹ Evidently Breton remained determined, whatever happened, to keep alive the creative spirit of his movement at a time when both liberty and truth were threatened in a hitherto unprecedented manner.

By the summer of 1939, according to varying accounts of the state of the relationship between Breton and his second wife, Jacqueline Lamba, the stability of the marriage was in question.¹⁰ Lamba, herself a painter, felt the need to guard her freedom, making trips alone to the Midi, leaving Breton with their small daughter. Later, after he had been called up, Breton was obliged to ask the four-year-old to persuade her mother to write to him, contact between them having become so infrequent.¹¹

However, demobilised in August 1940 under the terms of Article 4 of the armistice, it is significant that the friend to whom he turned at this time of crisis, and who offered him both shelter and companionship, was Pierre Mabille. At his invitation, Breton went with Jacqueline and Aube to join him in Salon-de-Provence. Friends since 1934, the two had much in common – having himself set out on a career in medicine, Breton admired Mabille’s competence as a doctor, as well as enjoying his interest in and knowledge of occultism. As he commented in a letter to Jacqueline soon after their meeting, Breton found in Mabille “an extremely unusual person” with whom he shared “an extraordinary affinity on very specific points, how would you say, of having complementary insights into certain very difficult things”.¹² In the course of the letter, he expands further:

He is the former head of a clinic in the Paris faculty, which means that he is a professional of the highest order, and, what’s more, he is extremely w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Breton’s poetic quest: With Pierre Mabille, June–July 1940
• 2 Transit Marseilles: August 1940–March 1941
• 3 Arrival in New York: The new direction
• 4 Looking back to the future: Breton, Hugo, and the poet as “seer”
• 5 Arcane 17: Towards mythical harmony
• 6 L’Ode à Charles Fourier: A new social perspective in the wake of the “great visionaries”
• 7 Breton’s situation at “the eye of a storm”
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index