SIMONE BRETON, LETTERS TO DENISE LÉVY. 1919-1929

Review par Tania Collani

In a very beautiful paperback edition published by Joëlle Losefeld, with a cover where bright pink contrasts with the black and white photo of Simone Breton holding a "primitive" art statue in her hands, Georgiana Colvile has collected the letters that Simone Kahn wrote to her cousin Denise, in the period 1919-1929 indicated in the title, who became her correspondent more or less since her meeting and marriage with André Breton.

Reading this correspondence, one finds the very personal, and nevertheless extremely perceptive, perspective that Simone Breton offers of the surrealist years. Through the distant mediation of her beloved cousin – Denise lives in Sarreguemines and will move to Strasbourg after her marriage to Georges Lévy in 1920, while Simone has lived in Paris since her departure from her native Peru when she was still a child – Simone overcomes her difficulty in writing and recounts her associations with the very first members of the group (Desnos, Eluard, Morise, Crevel, Péret, Aragon), the meetings and hypnotic sleep sessions that were held at the couple's home at 42, rue Fontaine, her activity in local galleries, her contacts with contemporary painters and artists, her flirtations, friendships and torments with the men who surrounded her - from her youthful love Valdomar to Max Morise, from Jacques-André Boiffard to her unrequited passion for Robert Tual.

The private confidences concerning the feelings and family problems of a well-off and cultured young Parisian girl are thus intertwined with the glimpse of the cultural panorama of 1920s Paris: outings to theater and cinema, frequenting cafés and cultural cabinets, piano lessons and courses at the Sorbonne, the description of the latest trends in Parisian fashion and very numerous references to books and essays in vogue in her entourage. Simone speaks with Denise about Nietzsche, her admiration for Barrès, Oscar Wilde, Stendhal, Gide, Claudel, Baudelaire, Verlaine and, obviously, all the new publications by those who were regulars at rue Fontaine.

Simone's letters are, as the Bretons' studio becomes the meeting point for all the surrealists (even future surrealists before 1924), increasingly dense with portraits of the characters who gather at the couple's home every evening. Breton is from the beginning the moderator and point of reference for all the others; Desnos is the lyrical soul of rue Fontaine and the protagonist of hypnotic sleeps; Aragon poses problems because of his collaboration with Paris-Journal and his tendency to want to be at the center of attention; Soupault, after having written The Magnetic Fields with Breton, distances himself from the group's activities; Artaud and De Chirico are luminous meteors in Simone's correspondence. A privileged place is reserved for Max Morise, who will be Simone's faithful friend throughout the twenties and also, in part, the cause of her divorce from André Breton. Marcel Noll and Pierre Naville are also at the center of the two women's preoccupations, because of their very close relationship with Denise (Pierre Naville will be her second husband in 1927, when she decides to move to Paris).

It is because of this very prolific exchange that we regret not being able to read in the same work the responses that Denise wrote to Simone. Georgiana Colvile rightly speaks of these letters in her introduction and finds there a completely different style, much less polished than Simone's; however, this remark must refer to the letters that Simone wrote after 1922 because, on reading, the first two years of correspondence especially, do not seem to us so impeccable.

In the present edition, Simone Breton's letters are enriched by documents, quite heterogeneous to tell the truth, that she wrote at different times, which renders the idea of the complete title of the work: Letters to Denise Lévy 1919-1929 and other texts 1924-1975. To the very strong unity of the first part, based on the symmetry between her emotional life beside Breton and her contact with the surrealist group, follows a second part, much more reduced and very fragmentary, if one considers the nature of the documents and their temporal distribution. We find a small oneiric text from 1924 taken from n° 1 of La Révolution surréaliste; an unpublished conference on surrealist painting that Simone presented in several Latin American countries on the occasion of a business trip by her second husband Michel Collinet, in 1965; the text The Exquisite Corpses, which Simone wrote for the catalog of an exhibition in Milan in 1975 at Arturo Schwarz's gallery; and, at the end, four letters to Sarane Alexandrian (dated 1971-1975) to thank him for sending his works.

Impossible to confront Simone's evolution with such heterogeneous materials: the youthful letters to cousin, friend and confidante Denise are not to be compared with the very formal letters exchanged with Sarane Alexandrian, which she writes fifty years later. We thus remain with the image of this lively and passionate young woman, who loved to feel herself in the middle of a literary and revolutionary movement. We want to remain with the self-portrait of this woman who loved to surround herself with friends, especially when they were of the opposite sex, but who never questioned her unconditional love for André Breton, the "mountain" and "emperor" who - even in the last letters of 1928, when he was in the company of Suzanne Muzard and Simone at La Ciotat with Max Morise - did not lose his privileged place in Simone's heart. She writes to Denise, September 8, 1928: "André is truly a wonderful and exquisite man, always above what one can expect from him, and from a man."