Traitor Comet, page 11
Artaud made a futile search of his pockets for another cigarette. “Let me answer this way: In 1914, who was Kaiser of Austria? Wilhelm II. And who really plunged your nation into war? Count Leopold von Berchtold, without Wilhelm’s permission.” Those eyes of his darted at me from beneath his straight brows. “N’est-ce pas?”
I nodded, without adding that my family had actually moved to Berlin before the War. It did not matter; both Germany’s and Austria’s economies were in ruins.
“Peasants!” Louis sneered. “I mean the Surrealists. Parisian potato farmers of the unconscious, Muscovites in Sunday mackinaws, that’s all they are. Would they sacrifice their suppers and starve, on principle?” He pointed at me.
“You gave away your supper,” Justine said in disbelief.
Louis declared, “Well, now I’m hungry.”
I smiled at Louis and quickly popped the last piece of bread in my mouth. “I’ve already eaten it, comrade. From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.”
Roger and Justine laughed while Louis threw his napkin at me.
“You could eat his vomit, on principle,” Artaud said to Louis, “as that is Communism’s essence.” Because I was still chewing, I glared at Artaud. He cut his eyes at me playfully, then stared out the large window.
Louis grinned around his cigarette. Justine rolled her eyes. Roger stood up and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Good evening, Schlafmann.” He left our table and weaved his way toward the counter while making snoring noises.
“Come with us tonight, Geoff,” Justine pleaded, keeping an eye on Roger as he bought cigarettes at the counter. “To the Research Bureau, when we go. I have a feeling Roger’s trying to make a move, and I don’t want to be alone with him. I really want to go, but not because of him.”
Artaud murmured, “If I were you, Justine, I’d watch my step with Roger.” He continued to stare out the window.
Justine waited, looking at me, and I wondered why Artaud couldn’t go instead, since he was her childhood friend and still a Surrealist leader, however precarious his position was. But then I remembered that mutual glare between Artaud and Benjamin Péret. “I’ll go with you if you want…” I said reluctantly, and Justine brightened.
Robert Desnos banged through the café door. His strange clown’s face beamed over at us in glee, and he greeted us while marching across the room with a rendition of the “Funeral March”—“Dum, dum-te-dum, dum-te-dum-de-TEDIUM.”—delivering his last note at the table just as Roger returned.
“Sorry,” Desnos oozed at us, “I don’t know the ‘Internationale.’” He spied the pamphlet and seized it, and pantomimed wiping his posterior with it. “Ah! I feel refreshed.” He stuffed the pamphlet into Roger’s breast pocket. Everyone sniggered.
Roger threw his cigarettes onto the table, saying, “Anyone?” He sat down again.
Desnos entertained us with his wheezing impressions of this André Breton, thrusting out his chest and squinting behind an imaginary monocle. “N’est-ce pas?” he joked. “How very interesting. Haarrrumph!” Justine and Louis burst into laughter. It only served to remind me of that Philippe Soupault sliding down the lamppost, and that Vitrac who had imitated Breton, too. With my purloined dinner eaten and having nothing to add to the conversation, I suddenly felt stiff and strange again. Desnos bent forward until his globular blue eyes were level with mine, and he smiled when I smiled. He sat down beside me and punched my arm.
Roger leaned back in his chair, regarding the thin, silent man across the table. “In light of recent events, Artaud, I wonder who really controls the Surrealist Research Bureau—Breton or you.” I was startled by the harsh edge to his voice.
His face as blank as ever, Artaud paused before he answered. “That depends on what story you’d swallow. Take my presidency and you’re welcome to it.” His reply held real menace, and Roger’s smirk faded.
Roger pushed back his chair and stood, picking up Justine’s coat for her. She caught my eye, and I stood up also. So did Desnos.
“We have to go, or we’ll be late,” Roger growled.
“Don’t get sent to Siberia,” Louis said cheerfully. Before Roger could retrieve his cigarettes on the table, Artaud quickly pulled one from the pack and lit it. Roger glared at him.
When we reached the sidewalk Roger snorted, “Artaud’s so damned touchy! I was only joking.” We had to crowd together to fit on the narrow stretch of sidewalk here.
“This is evidently a touchy situation, Roger,” Justine replied.
I said, “I’d say he got you good. You’re the one being touchy.”
“Thurmon, you know you have to control your flippancy about Surrealism,” Desnos replied quietly. He trailed a finger along the partially collapsed wall to our right. “If you bait Artaud, you’ll get the teeth.”
“You mean, control your flippancy as you do?” Justine teased Desnos.
Roger snorted. “Artaud has no frivolity.”
“But no pettiness, either,” Desnos insisted. “You don’t understand; he doesn’t kid around. From day to day he’s poor, working or looking for work, and totally dedicated to his goal—a revolution of consciousness, led by individuals who confront themselves, exorcising their dishonesty and their fear. He has no patience for politics.
“I mean, to expect Artaud to give a damn about labor conditions or the eight-hour-day—even to ask him whether his shoes match or not—it’s like trying to read Karl Marx to your cat.”
The three of us turned and looked at him. “Cat, huh?” Roger teased.
Desnos raised his voice. “I can back that up. No, listen!” He talked over our sniggering. “Think about being an animal, living as an animal, owning nothing, saving nothing. Half the time he’s penniless, and now he’s homeless again. Does he care? Sure, when he’s hungry or cold, but he won’t compromise. He has almost no practical sense but he’s a free man, so why would he care about the Party? Communism! It’s merely the bourgeoisie by another name. Breton will never go through with this shit. It’s a phase!”
Desnos flung out a hand as we walked, and his voice grew louder. “Frankly, seeing these two fight is painful for me, too. Breton says a film career is ‘bourgeois,’ but so what if Artaud acts in films? Surrealism should embrace cinema, not shun it! But no, Breton’s suddenly decided film acting is a betrayal, but it wasn’t a betrayal when Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp filmed Entr’acte. Breton can afford to stuff his studio with ‘bargain’ Picassos and African masks, and when he needs money he sells them at a profit—so why isn’t that ‘complicity with the bourgeoisie’ as Artaud’s acting supposedly is?”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” agreed Justine.
Roger held up his hands. “God, Desnos, calm down! I’m on your side. Breton’s a hypocrite. We know that.”
“I just wish the infighting would stop.” His lips pursed, Desnos flicked away a piece of loose plaster from a windowsill as we walked past. “That hypocrite happens to be my friend. We used to all be friends, once. It used to be great.”
“You mean Artaud doesn’t even have a place to live?” I asked, amazed he would offer to buy me a meal. “Where does he go?”
Desnos shrugged. “Sometimes he sleeps on a different friend’s sofa every night, including mine. Now that his play has closed, he’ll probably start sitting up late at the Flore again. In the summers he goes home to his family in Marseilles. And he has Génica, although nobody likes playing ‘dodge the concierge’ in a woman’s hotel. Otherwise, who knows? I wouldn’t put it past him to spend the night on a bench. The man isn’t afraid of much.”
In a small storefront on the rue de Grenelle where the Surrealist Research Bureau made its headquarters, we and a dozen or so young men briefly introduced ourselves all around. Then we all sat on hard chairs in that cramped room and listened to a long and tedious lecture by the founder of the movement, André Breton.
As a figure Breton was imposing—tall, with a handsome oval face, strong features, and full lips. He seemed a genial man, heavyset and earthy, his russet hair rising back from his forehead in waves as if he constantly faced a strong wind, and with a jocular smile—but as a speaker he was dull. And even when he lampooned this in his speech, the joke fell flat.
Aside from upending the norms of bourgeois life, the goals of Surrealism were still not clear to me even after we sat there listening to Breton for what felt like hours. I suspected the movement had started out with a playfulness that was slowly being strangled by Breton’s pompous hair-splitting. These men were interested in consciousness, in tapping the powers of the unconscious and becoming willing mediums for what they called the Marvelous, but the more Breton pontificated on this hidden, fantastic reality behind the surface appearances of the world, the stuffier it sounded.
I waited in vain to hear how Communism fit into all this. Breton’s talk about dreams was interesting, but unlike Sigmund Freud, whom he lauded, Breton did not analyze dreams. The Surrealists wanted to connect dreams and wakefulness by using techniques such as “automatic writing,” “automatic drawing,” and trance. The Surrealists would blur the line between conscious and unconscious inspiration, and what came out was not art or poetry but raw experience. I found myself nodding in agreement.
However, Breton’s vision of the future was a placid society served by adoring, sexually uninhibited, and obedient maidens. Justine fairly bristled with rage as he rattled on. A group of men sitting very close together were sneaking admiring glances at Justine, for while we listened, she sat straighter and straighter with her hands mangling that poor beaded purse, and I had the sense that before the night was out I might see another rock, or in this case a loose brick, thrown.
When I yawned finally, that oily Benjamin Péret turned around in his chair placed directly—of course—in front of mine. With glee he seized my shoulders and shook me. He looked soft and foolish, but his grip was very strong, and when I pushed him off, he sneered a challenge in my face.
Desnos smothered a laugh and handed me a copy of La Révolution surréaliste, the group’s official publication. I saw this consisted mostly of Artaud’s writing and his. My glancing through it during Breton’s speech earned me some seriously disapproving looks, while Desnos smiled back at his colleagues. Péret deliberately jostled the volume in my hands. Justine kicked Péret’s chair and he beamed at her in pure lust. That long mouth in his pumpkin head seemed to stretch from ear to ear. With an effort I shut him out so I could read the publication. Breton raised his voice louder and louder as if trying to shout down my thoughts. Roger put his hands over his ears.
Good God! I gasped inwardly as I absorbed the pamphlet, ignoring everyone now. Desnos was uninhibited and playful in his writing, but Artaud’s language was downright blasphemous, and damned funny. How very interesting. I glanced up to see Breton again fumble with the monocle that swung in front of his chest. I doubted he truly needed it. He was lion-like and even dashing with a resonant voice, but he was also verbose and puffed-up. Now I realized Breton headed a new Nicene Council that was about to strike the apocrypha from its bible, whereas I could imagine Artaud nailing a list of grievances to the Research Bureau’s arched, ironically church-like door.
After Breton finally stopped speaking, Justine looked on in amazement as the group broke up with a great scraping of chairs, some to go out on the town while others sat down to play cards or do some automatic writing. Péret sat down with the five other men who had been staring at Justine all night. With their eyes still on her, this group quickly shoved a piece of paper around their table, each man scribbling before he passed it to his neighbor. I felt something building between them.
“That’s it?” Justine exclaimed. “It’s over?” She turned and stared at Breton, and I saw the color rise in his face.
“Want to leave?” Roger asked immediately. “Say the word and we’re goners. Heh. Hear that, Aragon?” I knew that was a poke at one man in her group of admirers who snuck glances at her over their scribbling. I walked over to see what they were writing. It was a drawing, with each man contributing part of it—a limb, a foot, Justine’s head, a hand holding a rock, and someone had added a tree trunk, and the last man was adding what looked more like another arm to me.
Roger held Justine’s coat and she slipped her arms quickly into it. As we headed for the door some pale young man stepped 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 super-seriousness. Someone threw a wadded-up sheet and it hit our guard in the head, making him start.
Another voice hissed, “Oh, screw Breton—I don’t want her to leave!”
That group of Justine’s six “goners” erupted in masculine laughter, still goggling at her in obvious admiration. One of them—Louis Aragon?—was very handsome but nothing like Artaud, more conventionally dapper with wavy hair, a well-built body, and a self-satisfied smile beneath his trimmed moustache. This rogue quickly turned around in his chair and held out to Justine the drawing the group had collaborated on.
“This is our portrait of you,” purred Aragon, lifting his eyebrows.
Justine strode toward him and ripped the paper out of his hands. She appraised it coolly. Behind us I heard Desnos snigger. Around this bizarre drawing someone, perhaps this Aragoner, had added hearts to make it into a playing-card queen.
“Well, it doesn’t flatter me. You gave me six arms,” Justine sniffed. “Good thing you have six faces to slap. And six hearts to break. But that’s too much work for poor little me, also expected to serve six dinners and sweep six floors in your Surreal-Commie-topia. Aren’t there any women Surrealists?” She pushed the drawing back at Aragon, but her glare was definitely for André Breton, who was still standing at the front of the room like the classroom dunce.
“So I’ll pack six bags and walk out of six doors.” Justine turned resolutely now for the exit with that man snottily guarding it.
“I happen to be married,” Breton boasted.
“And let that be a lesson to you!” lashed Péret at their leader. I was so startled I laughed. Breton looked surprised, but he ignored Péret.
“Twelve cheeks to slap, if you use both hands,” I told Justine, but Aragon spoke over me.
“You have six charms,” gushed Aragon to Justine, “and each with six fingers. So linger.”
“Ooooh,” Justine cooed. “That would cost you a lot of rings and bangly things. But I don’t think your Bolshevik self is good for it.”
“You’re so bourgeois, Justine,” I teased, and she turned and smiled at me.
Roger told this Louis Aragon, “I hope you drew a portrait of everyone, comrade. The Politburo dictates it.”
I turned back to General Secretary Breton, who still stood before the haphazard chairs. I had to admit he cut a more imposing figure than Vladimir Lenin, but the room looked like an audience had suddenly bolted before a lecturer’s final sentence.
“Do we all have to distribute our dreams equally?” I joked. “What if there aren’t enough dreams to go around? Do we each get half a dream? A quarter? Joining the Party could get complicated.”
Breton’s face reddened outright. “I don’t remember inviting you,” he bit out.
“I don’t remember being invited,” I returned innocently, “but maybe our memories have been redistributed, too.”
“Well,” blustered Péret, “simp has found his tongue at last!” He leered at me again. My sudden comeback also surprised me. Rather, I would have already thrown a punch. Both Roger and Justine snickered at the look on Breton’s face, and I heard some muffled laughter around the room as well. Desnos shoved my shoulder, and then he sat down beside Aragon.
To my disappointment I didn’t see Philippe Soupault of the lamppost or that mischievous Vitrac with the peeled nose, but bat-eared Benjamin Péret stood up again, his great head rising like a moon. “Zingers!” he complimented Justine with a smirk. “I have six dicks. I wonder if you…”
Desnos stepped up to him and yanked him back by his collar like a naughty puppy. I decided to keep the copy of La Révolution surréaliste. We pushed past our sentry, who shoved us angrily, so I clamped a hand on the top of his head and twisted it away from our escape. Breton looked indignant too but Péret goggled with a grin, while Aragon watched Justine with hungry eyes. Desnos waved goodbye at us. We went through the heavy curved door and slammed it.
When the three of us reached the sidewalk, Justine could hold back her anger 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. It was still early evening but the clouds above were growing dark, and now we were alone on the street.
“Dreams, eh? The unconscious? As long as it’s mired down in unintelligible esoteric fluff, removed from anything real—”
“All right, Justine,” Roger exclaimed, sounding amused. “We hear you. We agree!”
Justine huffed, her breath flying past her face in the chilly evening air, and huddled deeper into her coat.
“By the time Breton’s through with that bunch, there won’t be a Surrealist left,” Roger told us. “He isn’t good at putting ‘movement’ into the movement, but he is good at word-torture. I wish Artaud, Desnos, and Roger Vitrac would get together and expel him.”
“What about Philippe Soupault?” I asked.
“Oh, him too. Definitely. The four of them kicking out Breton would be poetic.” Roger turned to me in surprise. “You know Soupault?”
“I met him, Georgia,” I joked, remembering that poem. “At a lamppost, Georgia.”
“Kick Breton out? Would he leave?” Justine asked cynically. “His own movement?”
“No,” Roger replied, “but it would be a beautifully subversive act, considering all four of them have been accused of not being subversive enough.”
