THE HAND AT THE PEN

surrealist dissidence or second surrealist revolution?

par Henri Béhar

December 25, 2023

Conference given as part of L'APRES at the Halle Saint Pierre December 9, 2023

Saturday, December 9, 2023, 3:00 PM. The Hand at the Pen (1940-1944): introductory conference by Louis Janover. Conference by Léa Nicolas-Teboul. Readings with Morgane Tennessee. Round table on the place of "The Hand at the Pen" in the history of surrealism, with Anne Foucault, Louis Janover, Marine Nédélec and Léa Nicolas-Teboul.

Download this article in PDF

My work aims to reinscribe The Hand at the Pen in the history of surrealism, to rehabilitate The Hand at the Pen's contribution to surrealism. And this cannot be done without questioning the construction of this history or interrogating the reasons for the forgetting of this group's experience.

In 1953, Breton classifies The Hand at the Pen as "surrealist tendency activity" for the general chronology of surrealism that he establishes for Flair1. The Hand at the Pen would be a foreign body, with unclear status.

Later, The Hand at the Pen gradually emerges from the shadows, first with Nadine Lefebure's broadcasts on France Culture in 1966, then with Michel Fauré's journalistic work, published in 19822. But it is to make it a dissident experience, apart, detached from the history of pre- and post-war surrealism. An experience finally situated between the Réverbères group and Revolutionary Surrealism.

This reading amounted, on the political history side, to limiting The Hand at the Pen to resistance or even companionship with the Communist Party. Aesthetically, it willingly situated The Hand at the Pen in the margins of surrealism, as were the Réverbères, a post-dadaist journal active in the late thirties, from which several members of The Hand at the Pen came.

My bias is as follows: it is by reinscribing The Hand at the Pen's experience in the history of surrealism that we can grasp its scope. What is the significance of this historical object, both extremely dense and tenuous? What critical gesture does it constitute for reflecting the history of surrealism?

Maintaining surrealism.

The Hand at the Pen was formed at the beginning of the Occupation, in Paris, in the autumn of 1940. The group is first a response to what is experienced as a desertion: the exile of Breton and a large part of the historical surrealists to the United States or Mexico. In fact, those who remain in Paris consider that they must respond to the historical catastrophe and the crisis of surrealism that is attendant upon it. Either because they decided to stay, or, more fortuitously, but it amounts to the same thing, because they did not have the means to leave.

Several central figures in the formation of The Hand at the Pen ensure liaison with the historical surrealist group. Robert Rius, above all, but also Jean-François Chabrun, who joined the surrealists, and the FIARI, very young, in 1938. Or also Adolphe Acker.

Rius was an intimate friend of Breton in the last pre-war years. When he left Paris, Breton gave him the keys to the apartment on rue Fontaine and Rius was charged with watching over the works, the collections, of taking care of certain documents deemed compromising. Péret, before his departure, participated in the first discussions that would lead to the formation of the group. In short, The Hand at the Pen does not only have second-hand knowledge of the movement. Surrealism is a very much alive experience for those who founded the group.

And it is thanks to this capacity for transmission and gathering that many pre-war surrealists will collaborate with The Hand at the Pen. Dominguez, Ubac, Hérold, Belgian surrealists, Mariën, Magritte. More isolated personalities like Maurice Blanchard or Léo Malet. As for Éluard's participation in The Hand at the Pen, it was active between the autumn of 1941 and the winter of 1942, but it does not meet with unanimity within the group and results in a resounding break in the summer of 1943, after the Éluard / Aragon rapprochement and Éluard's request for re-registration in the Party.

However, the vital forces of The Hand at the Pen represent a sort of spontaneous surrealist generation that adheres to surrealism but without having participated in the pre-war group. Many come from the Réverbères, like Noël Arnaud, Jacques Bureau, Régine Raufast. But not only. There is first Dotremont, who arrives in Paris in the spring of 1941, when he has barely met Ubac in Brussels. Already an interesting poet and surrealist activist, he maintains liaison with Belgium throughout the war. During the course of the war, other young people also arrive like André Stil, Marco Ménégoz, Boris Rybak. These literate young people but who do not yet have works and come, for some, from modest backgrounds, directly link their entry into surrealism to a historical taking of sides. It is adherence, let's say, to an aesthetico-political platform.

This platform implies a certain idea of poetry founded on the equality of intelligences and a confidence in lyrical affectivity. It also implies a capacity for ideological resistance to the poisoned air of the Occupation, and an ethical and political positioning, anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist.

The group published a journal, which changed its name with each issue to escape German censorship, very severe towards the press3. The journal's economy fits unambiguously into the history of surrealist journals: through the relationship between essays or manifestos, poems, critical texts devoted to such and such an artist, plastic work. And also, through the work of the paratext which inscribes all signed texts in a critical and aesthetic tradition. Such a quotation mocking great men, a news item exalting the mad, or collages of quotations defending the collective and universal character of poetry.

The group therefore invented a very large number of formats and types of publications to respond to material constraints and German censorship. This editorial policy consists in making "the surrealist state of presence" live in the literary and artistic field but while refusing the legal publication policy, adopted by journals of the Southern zone declared to Vichy censorship. In economic terms, The Hand at the Pen responds to the paper shortage, and to the shrinking of the social space of degenerate art, while publishing beautifully crafted surrealist dialogue books.

The group published, for example, the Free Pages of The Hand at the Pen, a very thin surrealist collection that appeared in 11 fascicles between January 1943 and January 1944. Each issue was a simple folded and illustrated sheet. The collection published the cohort of poets and poetesses of The Hand at the Pen but also reissued Breton's Pleine Marge and Péret's tales from the 1920s.

Beyond its editorial activity, the collective life of The Hand at the Pen was extremely rich. In terms of collective writings, games, collaborative works, but also of common theoretical research work. The collective was both a place of creation and a space for debate and political formation.

One of the singular traits of The Hand at the Pen is therefore its insistence on "the communism of genius," as the first surrealism did. All issues of the journal included collective poems called "The Poem Factory"; many theoretical texts insist on this underground literary tradition, which goes from German romanticism to surrealism and which makes poetry a universal and shared faculty.

The other side of this "communism of genius" is the organic intertwining between militants and surrealist poets and plastic artists. What I called trotsko-surrealism in one word. The group is a sounding board for political debates, Trotskyism, participation in the resistance. For militants like Adolphe Acker, Daniel Nat, Maurice Nadeau, the Social Revolution and the philosophy of surrealism are one.

The surrealists wanted a revolution like that, global, well I walked into it, then I said to myself, we were still in the war, I said to myself, yes but Breton left for America, Péret is in Mexico, well Éluard and Aragon have become Stalinists, but what remains? So I participated in a small group called The Hand at the Pen where there were also arrested comrades, some didn't come back like Robert Rius. Well, we tried to do something, on the basis of this utopian revolution.

(interview with Maurice Nadeau from 1989 by Jean-José Marchand, Archives du XXe siècle).

As if what was declarative, or speculative in the surrealist project was taken literally at The Hand at the Pen. I think of the opening appeal of Surrealist Decentralization, a pamphlet edited by André Stil at Le Quesnoy in close collaboration with The Hand at the Pen in Paris, which is a sort of rewriting of Breton's appeal to high school students in the Second Manifesto4.

I also think of the surrealist counter-propaganda techniques used by Henri Goetz and Christine Boumeester, often accompanied by Christian Dotremont and Régine Raufast at the beginning of the Occupation. These techniques consisted in distributing politico-poetic messages in mailboxes, church pews, or covering certain Nazi propaganda posters. The surrealist messages became tools of proto-resistance to the Occupier.

I would now like to evoke, quickly, two projects of The Hand at the Pen particularly important in my eyes and which testify to the last period of the group's activity. To do this, research into new sources was particularly decisive since these two projects remained unpublished. They were abandoned in the summer of the Liberation, with the consequences that we will see on the recognition of The Hand at the Pen after the war.

First, The Object, the group's last pamphlet, fruit of a year of collective research. This pamphlet represented a veritable theoretical culmination for The Hand at the Pen, even if its elaboration process was very conflictual, with in the background the conflicts raised by Jean-François Chabrun's request for registration in the Communist Party in January 1944. However, this pamphlet testifies to a remarkable confrontation with the great theoretical issues of thirties surrealism, particularly Breton's "Crisis of the Object" and leads to several fascinating proposals.

The first aims to make the everyday a central paradigm of surrealist research, on the eve of the publication of Lefevre's first Critique of Everyday Life.

What I called "everyday surrealism" is turned on the one hand towards an exploration of the ordinary object, intimate banalities and uses. This method, Dotremont calls it "banalization of surrealism," in opposition to the aesthetics of surprise and disorientation. For him, this "banalization" is also a war machine against the extraordinary and separate character of artistic objects, including surrealist ones.

On the other hand, everyday surrealism is based on a renewed dialogue between the philosophy of surrealism and other domains of knowledge, particularly science. In "Morality," the postface written by Rybak and de Sède, what they call "lyrical surrealism" dialogues with quantum physics, biology and opens certain theoretical propositions, which I qualify as pre-structuralist.

The pamphlet The Object also seems to me to be a culmination in The Hand at the Pen's theoretical journey, in the sense that its innovative propositions truly attempt to incorporate into the philosophy of surrealism the experience of The Hand at the Pen, what the group lived and went through during the war. I think for example of a text by Jacques Bureau, "The Nail," written from Fresnes prison and which is an account of his relationship with a nail that was in his cell. This account is a testimony, almost a document. And it also questions, in an epistemological way, the capacity for knowledge that isolated, extraordinary objects, highlighted by surrealism, offer us.

At the same time, the group was preparing a monograph devoted to Jacques Hérold, which was to bring together notably a text by the painter, preliminary version of his Maltraité de peinture, several critical texts by members of The Hand at the Pen and reproductions of his works, notably The Eagle Reader, his wartime masterpiece. Within The Hand at the Pen, Hérold found a space for material and ideological survival, which allowed him to develop his work and thought in an absolutely remarkable way.

And in a way to find under the name of crystallization his place within surrealist painting, a place which could be summed up in these words dating precisely from the collective research on the Object: "the soft world ceased to live in 1944. I oppose to Dali's soft structures the object constructed with needle, broken glass, sharp blades, crystal."

In particular, Hérold worked in the companionship of Boris Rybak, who was a biologist. And we see in their respective works an incessant dialogue between the painter's hand and the scientist's thought. As a duo, they also made false papers. Rybak published in Surrealist Information in June 1944, the first text devoted to Hérold's painting, "Attention Painting." Hérold illustrated The Shroud of Tides, a poetic collection by Rybak. And the collective research on the object of The Hand at the Pen always appears as an existential and theoretical foundation of their activities.

These two last projects of The Hand at the Pen, which were almost completed in the summer of the Liberation, and particularly significant of the group's activity, were abandoned. Which seems to me symptomatic of this break that occurs almost immediately at the Liberation between the Hand at the Pen sequence and the post-war period. Even though La Révolution la nuit, Bonnefoy's journal which appears in 1946 proposes in its first issue a text on the Object which owes much to The Hand at the Pen's research5, and that Hérold's text which appears in the catalog of the 1947 international surrealism exhibition is more or less the one that was to appear in The Object. But already no one speaks of The Hand at the Pen anymore. The group dissolves in the summer of the Liberation.

Why this break with historical surrealism?

The war represents an enormous historical and existential rupture. This young generation of "20 years old in the year 40," as Simonpoli calls it in Surrealism Still and Always6 comes out extremely scarred from the war.

As we have seen, the group was particularly politicized and exposed. The Hand at the Pen counted many Jews, foreigners, very young people. Hérold, Acker, Rybak escaped the anti-Jewish laws thanks to false papers. Manuel Viola, who then signed his texts J.-V. Manuel was a Spanish refugee, without a residence permit. By its social composition, the group experienced the violence of the Occupation head-on. Tita, whose real name was Edita Hirshowa, a Romanian Jewish painter and Hans Schoenhoff, a Jewish poet originally from the Sudetenland were deported and murdered at Auschwitz in September 1942. The poet Marc Patin died at the STO. And Robert Rius, Jean Simonpoli and Marco Ménégoz were shot by the Melun Gestapo after setting up a maquis at Achères-la-forêt. The maquis was denounced. Jacques Bureau, who was a radio operator for the Buckmaster network, was arrested and deported to Germany. But he will return at the Liberation.

The Hand at the Pen therefore suffered from its "desire to live history," as Noël Arnaud calls it in the last pamphlet of The Hand at the Pen, The Future of Surrealism, but also from a certain social and political marginality. As if maintaining surrealism under the Occupation and what it implies was an experience without a safety net. We count eight deaths in all at the end of the Occupation, which is really enormous for a group that gathered about twenty people.

This experience is obviously incommensurable with that of the pre-war surrealists, even the most militant like Péret. This represents a historical and existential rupture that explains that at the Liberation, it is very difficult to reconnect the wagons between what remains of The Hand at the Pen and Breton's group.

Another immediate consequence of the war, from the point of view of the international surrealist movement, The Hand at the Pen remained a sort of insular experience, circumscribed to the war period. Even though, paradoxically, it held the walls of historical surrealism. During the war, there is no communication with what is done and published Overseas. In the summer of 1943, The Hand at the Pen writes a long letter to André Breton, which synthesizes its artistic activity and political journey, but this letter, entrusted to a person who must cross the demarcation line, will never arrive. Significantly, also, Péret's first letter to Rius after his departure arrives in December 1944. It quite joyfully asks for news of Parisian surrealism, while Rius has been dead for nearly 6 months.

The only mention of The Hand at the Pen that reached Breton, to our knowledge, is a letter from Jacques Brunius, from London, who received Poetry and Truth 42, Éluard's collection edited by The Hand at the Pen. Brunius signals this collection to Breton, as well as the existence of a group of "more or less surrealizing young people" that he does not know, with the exception of Dominguez7. Outside France, on the other hand, close links were maintained with the Belgian surrealists, who collaborated in practically all the collective pamphlets and co-signed Nom de Dieu!, one of The Hand at the Pen's tracts directed against Bataille and the journal Messages.

But it is above all the political conflicts at the Liberation that explain the absence of descent from The Hand at the Pen. On the one hand, part of the ex-Hand at the Pen, Noël Arnaud, Christian Dotremont, Édouard Jaguer will form revolutionary surrealism, by adopting a strategy of generational rupture with Breton's surrealism and advocating rallying to the Communist Party. This surrealist dissidence comes directly from the war experience but it does not then claim at all from The Hand at the Pen, nor from its 4th International Marxism, nor from its research conducted right against Breton's corpus. On the other hand, the rare Hand at the Pen who returned to the surrealist group, Hérold and Acker, do not mention much the experience of The Hand at the Pen, which is tainted, according to Nadeau's words from 1945, because many of its members have sunk into "orthodox opportunism."

The transmission of The Hand at the Pen's experience is therefore completely blocked. On the side of war memory and resistance, no one really recognizes the surrealists' contribution to intellectual resistance, in the context of centralization around the National Committee of Writers and the Party. But The Hand at the Pen's contribution, yet decisive, to the international surrealist movement whose center of gravity remains Breton and the New World is just as invisibilized.

To understand this total absence of heritage, we must also see that The Hand at the Pen's experience is completely against the grain of the two structural tendencies where surrealism finds itself caught in the immediate post-war period.

On the one hand, an increasingly strong movement of institutionalization; surrealist painting is increasingly integrated into the art market. This movement, Artaud for example will denounce it in his letters to Breton about the 1947 international surrealism exhibition. At the same time, surrealism finds itself marginalized or even provincialized, in the context of the dissemination of the avant-garde field.

Some leads for thinking about The Hand at the Pen's place within the history of surrealism.

The Hand at the Pen is too anchored to the founding foundation of the surrealist movement to really make dissidence. The Hand at the Pen is also not a revival of the Surrealist Revolution, the farce that repeats itself a second time, because it never ceased to position itself as surrealist in the face of the heritage, that is to say to re-elaborate and criticize it.

If there is a notion, therefore, that seems to us to do justice to The Hand at the Pen's place, it is what Luca and Trost call in 1945 The Dialectics of the Dialectics of the Surrealist Movement. It is not a question of breaking with historical surrealism but on the contrary of proposing a critical and living gesture turned against the movement itself. From within. By evoking its limits. And by seizing its vital forces. Luca moreover saluted in Surrealism Still and Always "the old combative spirit of surrealism of which we really felt the need" (letter to Brauner, n.d., 1946, Brauner collection). However, The Hand at the Pen joins Luca and Trost on this point. It radically departs from the moral and libidinal economy of the avant-garde where one must kill the father to invent something new. It is solidly anchored in the central nerve of the surrealist movement understood as a revolutionary or invented tradition. But, at the same time, it resembles an attempt to cut into the surrealist metaphor, whose limits Nougé had already shown in the thirties.

The surrealism of The Hand at the Pen, like the Infra-noir experience in Romania, is radically experimental and theoretical. Experimental surrealism, because it rests on a confidence in its own means, its own activity. It is isolated and seems almost riveted to the vivacity of its discoveries. Theoretical surrealism, due to its critical and political ambition, but also due to the war. The war, which puts everything back to square one, implies a critical resumption of the surrealist past. Moreover, the spaces of artistic work and expression are found to be narrowed and, economy of means obliging, surrealist artists ardently reflect on their own practices.

This opening to Infra noir and to the "dialectics of dialectics" also allows us to understand the war, not only as a tragic given that would impose itself on the movement from the outside, a constraint weighing on surrealist creation but a moment of fundamental creation and re-elaboration, even if it leads to a bursting, conflicts and a dissemination of the surrealist project.

Taking the war into account as a fundamental moment is also making the "salvation of tradition" (Benjamin) a critical gesture that is an integral part of a (non-linear) history of surrealism. On the genealogical terrain, the vivacity of this surrealism in the war holds to its capacity to attach itself to the "communism of genius" of the beginning of the movement but also to the decisive dialogue with Belgian surrealism. On the theoretical terrain, this gesture allows us to situate The Hand at the Pen's contributions on the level of the philosophy of surrealism, of the "great surrealism" that Bataille calls to think after the war.

1 A. Breton, "Flair – Chronology of Surrealism 1916-1953", http://www.andrebreton.fr/work/56600100515110.

2 M. Fauré, History of Surrealism under the Occupation, La Table ronde, 1982.

3 The Hand at the Pen, Nocturnal Geography, Transfusion of the Verb, The Conquest of the World by the Image….

4 André Stil, editorial of Surrealist Decentralization, Feuillets du 4.21, Le Quesnoy, June 1943.

5 Yves Bonnefoy, "For a New Objectivity", La Révolution la nuit no.1, 1946.

6 Jean Simonpoli, "To Our Readers", Surrealism Still and Always, Cahiers de poésie, special issue 4-5, René Debresse, August 1943.

7 Letter of June 6, 1943, in In the Shadow Where Gazes Knot, Éditions du Sandre, 2016, p. 171-77.