Like most philosophical systems put together by artists – like neo-Platonism itself – surrealism was intellectually shaky, but, artistically speaking, the shakier the intellectual structure, the better art it produces. (Christianity has produced some perfectly respectable painting, even poetry.) The British could never take its philosophic pretensions seriously; none of the surrealists knew any maths, and besides, they kept dragging sex and politics into everything, including the relations between men and women and the individual and the state, where every good Briton knows sex and politics have no right to be. Nevertheless, surrealist art is, in the deepest sense, philosophical – that is, art created in the terms of certain premisses about reality; and also an art that is itself a series of adventures in, or propositions and expositions of, this surrealist philosophy.
It was also a way of life; of living on the edge of the senses; of perpetual outrage and scandal, the destruction of the churches, of the prisons, of the armies, of the brothels. Such power they ascribed to words and images. A poem is a wound; a poem is a weapon:
It has been said that it is not our right but our duty to start with words and their relations in order to study the world scientifically. It should be added that this duty is that of living itself, not in the fashion of those who bear death within them, and who are already blind walls, or vacuums, but by uniting with the universe, with the universe in movement, in process.
Poetry will become flesh and blood only when it is reciprocal. This reciprocity is entirely a function of the equality of happiness among mankind. And equality of happiness will bear happiness to a height of which we can as yet have only a faint notion.
(Paul Eluard)
Surrealism posits poetry as a possible mode, possibly the primary mode, of being. Surrealism was the latest, perhaps the final, explosion of romantic humanism in Western Europe. It demanded the liberation of the human spirit as both the ends and the means of art.
Surrealism = permanent revelation
Surrealism = permanent revolution
So it didn’t work out. Those surrealists who are not dead are very old and some are very rich, which wasn’t on the original agenda. Since poetry has to pay its dues at the custom-house of translation, it rarely travels, and, besides, the nature of outrage is not the same at all places and at all times. The Dadas are more fashionable at the moment, since we live in nihilistic times. Surrealist romanticism is at the opposite pole from classical modernism, but then, the surrealists would never have given Pound or Eliot house room on strictly moral grounds. A Mussolini fan? A high Tory? They’d have moved, noisily but with dignity, to another café. You don’t have to collaborate, you know. La lutte continue. It continues because it has to. This world is all we have.
It is this world, there is no other but a world transformed by imagination and desire. You could say it is the dream made flesh.
Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was a key book. When we dream, we are all poets. Everywhere, the surrealists left their visiting cards: ‘Parents! Tell your children your dreams.’ The Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries was opened at 15 rue de Grenelle, Paris, in October 1924. ‘The Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries is engaged in collecting, by every appropriate means, communications relevant to the diverse forms which the unconscious activity of the mind is likely to take.’ The general public were invited to visit the Bureau to confide their rarest dreams, to debate morality, to allow the staff to judge the quality of those striking coincidences that revealed the arbitrary, irrational, magical correspondences of life.
Antonin Artaud fired off letters to the chancellors of the European universities: ‘Gentlemen: In the narrow tank which you call “Thought”, the rays of the spirit rot like old straw.’ To the Pope: ‘In the name of Family and Fatherland, you urge the sale of souls, the unrestricted grinding of bodies.’ And to the Dalai Lama: ‘Teach us, Lama, material levitation of the body and how we can be held no longer by the earth.’ Note the touch of oriental mysticism creeping into the last missive. A bit more of that kind of thing and Andre Breton, the Pope of surrealism, its theoretician, propagandist, and mage, expelled him from the group. Like many libertarians, Breton had, in action, a marked authoritarian streak. Artaud vanished from this world into that of madness.
In 1922 Max Ernst had already painted a group portrait: ‘At the Rendezvous of Friends.’ The friends were the poets Rene Crevel, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupoult, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, Andre Breton, and Benjamin Peret; Dostoievsky had also arrived. Jean Arp, like Ernst a former Dada, was a poet as well as a sculptor; Giorgio de Chirico and Ernst himself are primarily painters, even if Ernst is the most literary of all painters and de Chirico wrote an enigmatic novel, Hebdomeros, that begins in the middle of one sentence and ends in the middle of another. The surrealist freemasonry encompassed all kinds of art because it saw all kinds of art as manifestations of the same phenomena.
The term ‘surrealism’ was coined by Guillaume Appollinaire in the preface to his play, Les Mamelles de Tiresias, to describe the human ability to create the unnatural. Man’s first surreal act, he opined, was the creation of the wheel. The wheel imitates the physical function of motion but creates a form entirely independent of forms known to exist in nature. It was a product entirely of the imagination.
At the première of Les Mamelles de Tiresias, at the Conservatoire Maubel, on 24 June 1917, the young Andre Breton observed an acquaintance in the audience; this young man had come to the theatre with a revolver in his hand, and excited by the scandal of the performance, was threatening to fire into the audience. This Jacques Vache, a Baudelairean dandy, exercised a far greater influence over surrealism than his exiguous life would suggest; ten years later, Breton would write in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism: ‘the simplest surrealist act consists of going out into the street revolver in hand and firing at random into the crowd as often as possible.’ Fifty years later, Buñuel filmed just such a random assassin in The Phantom of Liberty. A judge condemns the man to death and he walks into the street, free. Girls cluster round him for his autograph.
Put together your own set of connections between these events.
Vache wrote to Breton: ‘Art is nonsense.’
In 1917, at the home of the ubiquitous Appollinaire, poet, art critic, modernist, Breton found issues of a magazine from Zurich, Dada. Which confirmed his intuition that, if art was nonsense – then nonsense might be art.
When Tzara arrived in Paris two years later, he, Breton, and friends organised a series of provocation-performances similar to those he had staged in Zurich; announcing a poem, Tzara would read from a newspaper, accompanied by bells and rattles. Breton would chew matches. Others screamed, caterwauled, or counted the number of pearls in the necklaces of ladies in the audience. But Breton could not keep up the pace for long. Nihilism can never be an end in itself.
Surrealism was born out of the row between Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara. It was the creative negation of destruction.
The young poets, the friends, who assembled around Breton concerned themselves with a direct relation to the unconscious: then ensued the period of automatic writing, of trance, of the recitals of dreams. Robert Desnos was so good at tranced pronouncements they thought he was faking it. A photograph of him, tranced, published in Breton’s novel, Najda, in 1928, oddly prefigures the face of a man near death. It was by this photograph that a Czech student, working in the German concentration camp where Desnos lay dying of typhus, recognised him at the end of the Second World War.
What did these young people do with themselves when they were not engaged in the revolutionary act of sleep? For a start, they played games.
They played: the question game, in which you make a reply without knowing the question.
For example: Raymond Queneau: ‘Who is Benjamin Peret?’
Marcel Noll: ‘A zoo in revolt, a jungle, a liberty.’
They played: l’un dans l’autre, a thing described in terms of an analogy.
For example: George Go
ldfayn describes an armchair as if it were a hedgehog. ‘I am a very small garden armchair whose springs pierce the leather cover under which I draw back by feet whenever someone comes near.’
(This kind of exquisite whimsy is the only thing the British have ever found tolerable about the whole damn crew.)
They drew analogical portraits; they collaborated on portraits; they invented animals, the flora and fauna of dream; they compiled manifestos, put together magazines, quarrelled, demonstrated, shocked the bourgeoisie. There is a beautiful photograph I have seen of Benjamin Peret snapped in the act of insulting a priest.
The surrealists also fell in love. Love, passionate, heterosexual love, together with freedom, from which it is inextricable, was their greatest source of inspiration; their women live vividly on the page at second hand. Gala, who left Eluard for Dali. Elsa Triolet (for whom, and Communism, Aragon left surrealism). Youki Desnos. The three wives of Breton – he transferred his passion en bloc to each in turn. The surrealists were not good with women. That is why, although I thought they were wonderful, I had to give them up in the end. They were, with a few patronised exceptions, all men and they told me that I was the source of all mystery, beauty, and otherness, because I was a woman – and I knew that was not true. I knew I wanted my fair share of the imagination, too. Not an excessive amount, mind; I wasn’t greedy. Just an equal share in the right to vision.
When I realised that surrealist art did not recognise I had my own rights to liberty and love and vision as an autonomous being, not as a projected image, I got bored with it and wandered away.
But the old juices can still run, as in the mouths of Pavlov’s dogs, when I hear the old, incendiary slogans, when I hear that most important of all surrealist principles: ‘The marvellous alone is beautiful’ (First Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924).
Surrealist beauty is convulsive. That is, you feel it, you don’t see it – it exists as an excitation of the nerves. The experience of the beautiful is, like the experience of desire, an abandonment to vertigo, yet the beautiful does not exist as such. What do exist are images or objects that are enigmatic, marvellous, erotic – or juxtapositions of objects, or people, or ideas, that arbitrarily extend our notion of the connections it is possible to make. In this way, the beautiful is put at the service of liberty.
An aesthetic of the eye at the tips of the fingers; of the preter-naturally heightened senses of the dreamer. They liked William Blake; and they liked Lewis Carroll; and they liked Bishop Berkeley. Leonora Carrington was British and wrote, still writes, prim, strange, surrealist fictions but the movement never travelled across the Channel, not even in the Thirties, just as women never took it over. Breton died in 1966, securely ensconced as one of France’s greatest modern writers.
So does the struggle continue?
Why not. Give me one good reason. Even if the struggle has changed its terms.
(1978)
TOMATO WOMAN
To eat is to fuck.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
• 14 •
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine and other Dishes
‘Be modern – worship food,’ exhorts the cover of The Official Foodie Handbook. One of the ironies resulting from the North/South dichotomy of our planet is the appearance of this odd little book, a vademecum to a widespread and unashamed cult of conspicuous gluttony in the advanced industrialised countries, at just the time when Ethiopia is struck by a widely publicised famine, and the rest of Africa is suffering a less widely publicised one. Not Africa alone, of course, is chronically hungry all the time and acutely hungry some of the time: at a conservative estimate, eight hundred million people in the world live in constant fear of starvation. Under the circumstances, it might indeed make good twentieth-century sense to worship food, but punters of ‘foodism’ (as Ann Barr and Paul Levy jokily dub this phenomenon) are evidently not about to drop to their knees because they are starving.
‘Foodies’, according to Barr and Levy, are ‘children of the consumer boom’ who consider ‘food to be an art, on a level with painting or drama’. It is the ‘art’ bit that takes their oral fetishism out of the moral scenario in which there is an implicit reprimand to greed in the constantly televised spectacle of the gaunt peasants who have trudged miles across drought-devastated terrain to score their scant half-crust. (‘That bread alone was worth the journey,’ they probably remark, just as Elizabeth David says of a trip to an out-of-the-way eatery in France.) Art has a morality of its own, and the aesthetics of cooking and eating aspire, in ‘foodism’, towards the heights of food-for-food’s sake. Therefore the Third World can go suck its fist.
The Official Foodie Handbook is in the same format as, and it comes from the same firm that brought out, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. That is to say, it is ‘a Harpers & Queen Publication’, which means it springs from the loins of the magazine that most consistently monitors the lifestyle of new British affluence. These ‘official handbooks’ are interesting as a genre. The idea has been taken up with enthusiasm by Harpers & Queen, but the original appears to be The Official Preppy Handbook, published in the USA in the early days of the first Reagan Presidency. This slim volume was a lighthearted checklist of the attributes of the North American upper middle class, so lighthearted it gave the impression it did not have a heart at all. The entire tone was most carefully judged: a mixture of contempt for and condescension towards the objects of its scrutiny, a tone which contrived to reassure the socially aspiring that emulation of their betters was a game that might legitimately be played hard just because it could not be taken seriously, so that snobbery involved no moral compromise.
The book was an ill-disguised celebration of the snobbery it affected to mock and, under its thinly ironic surface, was nothing more nor less than an etiquette manual for a class newly emergent under Reaganomics. It instructed the nouveaux riches in the habits and manners of the vieux riches so that they could pass undetected amongst them. It sold like hot cakes.
The British version duly appeared on the stands a year or so later, tailored to the only slightly different demands of a youth newly gilded by Thatcherism. The Official Foodie Handbook mentions two fresh additions to the genre in the USA: The Yuppie Handbook (‘the state-of-the-art manual for Young Urban Professionals’) and The Official Young Aspiring Professionals Fast-Track Handbook. There seems to be no precise equivalent for the Young Aspiring Professional in Thatcher’s Britain: the Tory Trade Unionist (or TUTU) might fill the bill in some ways, but not in others. The Yuppie is, presumably, driven by an ambition he or she now has the confidence to reveal nakedly, an ambition to go one better than the vieux riches. In Britain, it is never possible to go one better than the vieux riches, who always own everything anyway. Harpers & Queen, the self-appointed arbiter of these matters this side of the herring-pond, identifies the strivers peremptorily as Noovos, or Noovs. There is something a touch Yellowplush Papers about all this, but there you go. It would seem that The Official Foodie Handbook is an attempt to exploit the nearest British equivalent to the Yuppie market, for, according to the arbiters, food is a cornerstone of this hysterical new snobbery.
Very special economic circumstances, reminiscent of those of the decline of the Roman Empire and also of the heyday of Edwardian England as described by Jack London in People of the Abyss, establish gluttony as the mark of a class on the rise. The Official Foodie Handbook notes: ‘It takes several things to support a Foodie culture: high-class shops, fast transport bringing fresh produce from the land, enlightened well-paid eater-outers who will support the whole expensive edifice, lower-paid workers to make the food. Suddenly they are all present.’
Piggery triumphant has invaded even the pages of the Guardian, hitherto synonymous with non-conformist sobriety. Instead of its previous modest column of recipes and restaurant reviews, the paper now boasts an entire page devoted to food and wine once a week: more space than it gives to movies, as much as it customarily gives to books. Piggery has spawned a glossy bimon
thly, A la Carte, a gastronomic Penthouse devoted to glamour photography, the subject of which is not the female body imaged as if it were good enough to eat, but food photographed according to the conventions of the pin-up. (Barr and Levy, ever quick with a quip, dub this kind of thing ‘gastro-porn’.) The colour plates are of awesome voluptuousness. Oh, that coconut kirsch roulade in the first issue! If, as Lévi-Strauss once opined, ‘to eat is to fuck’, then that coconut kirsch roulade is just asking for it. Even if the true foodie knows there is something not quite . . . about a coconut kirsch roulade as a concept. It is just a bit . . . just a bit Streatham. Its vowels are subtly wrong. It is probably related to a Black Forest gâteau.
A la Carte is an over-eager social climber and is bound to give the game away. ‘Do you know the difference between a good Brie and a bad one? One made in a factory or on a farm? If you don’t, your guests might.’ Then you will be universally shunned and nobody will attend your dinner parties ever again. This mincing and finicking obsession with food opens up whole new areas of potential social shame. No wonder the British find it irresistible. Indeed, in Britain an enlightened interest in food has always been the mark of the kind of person who uses turns of phrase such as ‘an enlightened interest in food’. If a certain kind of upper-class British cookery represents the staffs revenge upon its masters, an enthusiasm for the table, the grape, and the stove itself is a characteristic of the deviant sub-section of the British bourgeoisie that has always gone in for the arts with the diligent enthusiasm of (as they would put it) ‘the amateur in the true sense of the word’. This class is more than adequately represented by Mrs Elizabeth David.
In An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, a collection of her journalism dating back to the Fifties, there is an article describing the serendipitous nature of provisioning in London just after the war. Mrs David remembers how ‘one of my sisters turned up from Vienna with a hare which she claimed had been caught by hand outside the State Opera House.’ A whole world is contained within that sentence, which could be the first line of a certain kind of novel and sums up an entire way of life. It is no surprise to discover that Mrs David admires the novels of Sybille Bedford, nor that she was a friend of Norman Douglas. It is a little surprising that she has never turned her acclaimed prose style to fiction, but has always restricted herself to culinary matters, if in the widest sense, taking aboard aspects of history, geography, and literature. Her books, like her journalism, are larded with quotations, from recherché antique cookery books to Virginia Woolf, Montaigne, Walter Scott. Her approach is not in the least like the gastronomic dandyism of the ‘food-for-food’s sake’ crowd; she is holistic about it. She is obviously a truly civilised person and, for her, knowing how to eat and to prepare good food is not an end in itself, but as much a part of civilisation as is the sensuous appreciation of poetry, art, or music. In the value system of the person who is ‘civilised’ in this way, the word carries the same connotation as ‘moral’ does in the value system of Dr F. R. Leavis.