On the problems posed by biography.

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NQL: You published, twenty-five years ago, an imposing biography of André Breton, which you revised and reissued in 2005 with Fayard. Now, the ban having fallen, André Breton's correspondence is beginning to appear. Do you think you should put your work back on the drawing board, based on what this correspondence will reveal to us?

Henri Béhar: No, not immediately, for the excellent reason that, if Breton had, by will, imposed a fifty-year delay for the publication of his correspondence, he had not refused its reading. So that, for my part, I do not expect any earth-shattering revelation from it. I explain myself below.

Because you believe that surrealism is, by far, the literary, artistic and much more movement that will mark the intellectual history of the 20th century in Europe.

Because you admire the personality of André Breton, its leader with undisputed charismatic power.

Because you do not reject for all that those who separated from him for various, even opposite, reasons, such as Aragon, Char, Eluard, Tzara or Vitrac.

Because you are not satisfied with the conventional clichés about him such as "pope of surrealism," "sectarian tyrant," "intolerant dictator," "false revolutionary," etc.

Because sympathy does not prevent you from keeping a cool head,

You decide to take up the question afresh. You reread, pen in hand, the totality of his writings, then everything that has been written about his work and life. You then form the project of devoting a biography to him. Not that the previous ones are condemned, but because they seem to you fragmentary, incomplete or partisan. You take up the investigation from scratch. You discover, for example, that he is attributed two birth dates: February 18 or 19, 1896. To have the heart of the matter, as the legislation gives you the right, you request from his birth town hall an extract of civil status. You then note that, far from being resolved, the uncertainties only grow since on these official documents he appears as a bigamist! Taken by the demon of absolute truth, and because you want to understand the reason and interest of such manipulations, however minimal they may be, you have all the archives, public or private, opened to you; your thirst for information and verification knows no limits. It is thus that you discover the registration register of the Nantes School of Medicine on which André Breton has written by his own hand a birth date anticipated by one day, which corresponds to that of his cousin, of whom he speaks in The Communicating Vessels. As you believe that texts must be read and deployed in all their referential dimensions, you follow the trail of this new character and you arrive at this conclusion that the poet proceeded to a symbolic exchange, not by carelessness, but for reasons of... poetic and sentimental order, nuancing the initial text, giving it a completely different thickness.

Of course, you don't stop there. Having access to diplomatic archives open to the public after a thirty-year delay, you seek to determine the exact role of André Breton that a certain enthusiastic annalist presents as the one whose fiery words triggered a revolution in Haiti, while he himself, in his very precious and very measured Interviews, minimizes the weight of his remarks. You plunge into the local press of the time, you contact the witnesses and actors of this historical moment, you operate the synthesis of all this information and you have the satisfaction of specifying, here again, the dates, the duration of the stay, the exact nature of the speeches delivered, their impact on a young public who only asked to let themselves be won over by the writer's haughty word, in turn moved by the beauty and misery of the Caribbean peoples.

You relate all this, following, as faithfully as possible, the chronological order, without flourishes or bias, refusing to use the work to clarify the obscure points of existence, saying what you have learned and understood, marking the limits of your investigation, not keeping silent about your uncertainties. You publish and you wait for the public's reactions, first and foremost from this "intellectual foam" that criticism forms, according to Vitrac's word.

You are surprised by the silence of certain journals, or certain media, as one says to designate these opinion makers that are radio and television. By nature anxious, you think you are the cause. Then you analyze certain echoes, and you wonder if Breton does not remain the object of a strange ostracism, at the exact moment when his ideas triumph and are admitted by all. You rejoice to note that the title he chose for himself in 1930 of "great undesirable," remains justified. Rereading calmly the press clippings accumulated on this subject, you set aside the too lively temptation to annotate and note them, as your profession inclines you to do. Taking some height, you think of proceeding to a content analysis of the press discourse, but the game seems too cruel to you. You try to extract from it the pertinent traits of a critical reception, while knowing how much the exercise, in which you are involved, is aleatory since it only concerns certain press organs. You eliminate the clippings that are content to reproduce your own argumentation, count those that stick to a news agency dispatch and you classify the others which, all in all, circumscribe three fundamental problems relating to the nature of the biographical genre: the relationships between life and work, the share of the individual in the collective, the distance between myth and what you believe to be reality.

Fortunately, biography is not a stabilized genre, with strictly defined canons. When dealing with a character whose celebrity holds as much to his writings as to his acts, it is appropriate to operate a constant back and forth from one to the other, the difficulty being not to privilege one of these two elements, under the pretext that in the eyes of posterity only the writings remain. Certain critics lament that one hears more the noise of daily steps rather than the masterpieces, of which I have nevertheless endeavored to extract the broad lines and impact. It is true that the biographer supposes here that the reader will go consult the work, insofar as it is easily accessible, which is the case for Breton, now consecrated by the publication of his complete works in the Pléiade library, and of which most of the works are published in pocket format collections. Should one, for all that, sacrifice to the facility which would consist in summarizing the works of which one speaks? I do not believe so, since I have indicated all the ways through which life communicates with the text, forming, to take up an image dear to Breton, a veritable capillary tissue. One example will suffice: evoking this strange narrative, of a nature difficult to qualify that is Nadja, it would be possible to analyze its structure, to show how the first part, relating in an apparently random order what Breton calls "slide-facts" and "precipice-facts" is there to condition the reader in order to allow him to apprehend as it should the coming of this free genius, of this surrealist being par excellence that is Nadja, who intervenes and fades away, it seems, only to announce the irruption of a woman called X, whom we now know to be Suzanne, Emmanuel Berl's companion. Now the chronological thread that I followed proves that Breton could not indulge in a learned construction of the text, unless it was unconscious, insofar as he could not foresee this encounter. That being, one can always suppose that the narrator was thus setting the threads of his narrative to trap in it the intoxicating and too distant Lise, who refused herself to him in the very time when he was writing this text, at Varengeville. Conversely, it is permitted to think that Breton, attentive to signs and intersigns, persuaded himself, in writing to exorcise the memory of Nadja, that she must give way to the Marvel and that the first encounter that occurred confirmed him in his belief. The reader is free to choose and interpret; it is not for me to dictate a choice to him. Parodying Breton, I would say that "I confine myself to agreeing" that such a fact occurred in his existence, of which I establish the authenticity by cross-checking the information in my possession.

I add that such a procedure of investigation legitimizes itself from the fact that Breton always claimed to want to live in a glass house, "where who I am will appear to me sooner or later engraved in diamond" (Nadja, p. 9). In other words, this constant passage from life to work, and reciprocally, only has interest when it allows giving form to this project of existence formulated by the author. The writer has the right, like any citizen, to respect for his private life, even when he has become a public man. I do not believe myself authorized to infringe this law to satisfy the public's curiosity, eager for revelations about this "miserable little heap of secrets" of which Malraux did not speak, if not when the author invites us to it himself. Now Breton always advocated the unity of life and work, refusing literature in favor of life, "true life," in the sense that Rimbaud understood it. About Aragon's Treatise on Style, which he judged to lack humanity, he wrote to his wife: "It is not only the human that must be reached and that so few reach, it is the vital." If he succeeded in it, as I believe, opposing life and work seems to me, in this case and whatever Claude Roy may have said, the very type of false trial.

The second problem posed by André Breton's biography concerns the share of his personal approach in what one is accustomed to call, a bit lightly I must recognize, "the surrealist adventure." So much, in France, one and the other are identified with his person. Even when they admit, with Jean Schuster, that the surrealist group dissolved in October 1969, that is three years after Breton's death, historians nevertheless think that it had ceased to exist at the same time as its founder. Should one, then, paint in broad strokes the history of a collectivity, at the risk of no longer perceiving the individual traits of its leader, or should one stick solely to the character on which attention is concentrated, ignoring, temporarily, the elective group? False debate, I will say again, because one cannot be conceived without the other. If it is true, as has been observed, that the plural game obliges to, sometimes, force the note, it is no less true that Breton constantly worked in function of the group. Even before the explosion of Dada in Paris, he operates the junction between Aragon and Soupault, so as to form the trio of musketeers, as Valéry called them, to which Vaché, Fraenkel, Eluard will join in turn in the spirit of commentators. It is still he who will take the initiative to found the journal Littérature, whose headquarters will first be, and very officially, his room at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes, Place du Panthéon. He will ensure that the solicited contributions arrive on time, will correct the proofs, will control the layout himself, will negotiate the treaties with the publishers and depositaries, the Boutique d'Adrienne Monnier and the Sans Pareil first, Gallimard then. He will assume the same tasks, not without weariness sometimes, for La Révolution surréaliste, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution and many other journals still that formed the permanent crucible of the Movement, to which he brought a personal financial contribution. It is known that, despite certain reservations about the purposes of Dada manifestations, he did the most to ensure that the spectacle corresponded to the announced program. The same could be said for the tracts, petitions, collective declarations to which he lent his hand, striving to rally the maximum of people on the texts he wrote or approved. Two examples only, taken at two very distant moments of his trajectory: the "Call to struggle" conceived on the evening of February 6, 1934 to unite all forces hostile to fascism; the famous Manifesto said of the 121, on the right to insubordination during the Algerian war. In both cases, it is a question of texts with performative value, which had a serious impact on the collectivity. More, I will go so far as to say that the Manifestos of surrealism, written by Breton himself, and which owe their inimitable tone only to his pen, are the fruit of long collective debates of which they often bear the exacerbated mark.

But, I will be told, the exclusions, the insults of the second manifesto, are very personal, and directed against individuals who had opposed him, to his conception of the Movement, engaged on the political path while maintaining its autonomy. Certainly. However, one must make allowance for the pressure exerted by friends, at the forefront of whom Eluard and Aragon were not the least demanding, and by the sentimental circumstances that made Breton a cord stretched to the extreme, vibrating at the slightest stroke of the bow. For one must emphasize the paradox, which is perhaps the property of every great creator: Breton is a solitary man who needs the group to flourish, to test the strength of his ideas, to experience the quality of his writings. But this crowd buzzing around him importunes him with its permanent solicitations, its lack of autonomy, its remarks without grandeur. One can suppose that Breton would have been a more prolific writer and perhaps of a superior dimension if he had not insisted on putting forward his companions or, later, his young friends. How many times, in his correspondence, he tires of having to explain surrealism, write prefaces, respond to interviews where he will have to, once again, mark the course! Conversely, if surrealism owes him everything, it owes much to this ensemble, which has made of an individual of very modest origin, without any real or symbolic capital, one of the greats of our time, to such an extent that they become indissociable.

La Nouvelle Quinzaine Littéraire, n° 1157 (Sept. 12, 2016)