LETTERS TO SIMONE KAHN, ANDRÉ BRETON

Présentation par Jean-Michel Goutier

June 15, 2019

Extrait de l'introduction

[…] During the eight years of life together, Simone and André tried to maintain total frankness in their exchanges. However, the vicissitudes of their independence-loving life and their unrepressed amorous impulses prevailed over the will for absolute transparency of out-of-the-ordinary behaviors, claimed in the couple, which amounts to an admirable and ambitious challenge. The freedom that each left to the other to face their impulses and to carry their experiments to their conclusion, on condition of concealing nothing, was the accepted rule as if it were a pact tacitly sealed between them. The prolonged absences, each year, of Simone, to join her cousin Denise Lévy in Sarreguemines or Strasbourg or to spend vacations with friends far from Breton, and, above all, her unconfessed liaison with Max Morice were painfully experienced by André. Similarly, the poet's violent passion for Suzanne Musard, a destructive experience carried to the confines of extremes, perfect incarnation of "Drop everything" and, to a lesser degree, the tragic parenthesis linked to the meeting with Nadja; these attempts at ascending transcendence of the limits of human relationships were certainly not easy to accept by a woman, rather broad-minded for the time and the milieu from which she came. In the absence of Simone's letters, in the archives of the rue Fontaine workshop, this correspondence could resemble a Journal if it were not to ignore Breton's ultra-sensitive or violent reactions to his wife's missives in the heart of the passionate turmoil and which give them all their excess! "It's about passion, isn't it. The word love would serve no purpose here. I don't want to lend myself to these ridiculous distinctions: love-passion, love-tenderness, love for love's sake, love of a being, love of love as the other says: enough already." (Letter of October 8, 1928.)

Chosen by Breton as a particular and permanent confidante to whom he relates all the variations of his intimate thoughts as well as the evolution of feelings that concern her, primarily, but also the discoveries or disappointments arising from his readings, his contacts with painters who will mark the twentieth century with their imprint, the meetings of new inventors of modernity, not forgetting the eventful life of the Surrealist Group, what an implicit responsibility for a young woman like Simone! During the time, which goes from the meeting at the Jardin du Luxembourg, in 1920, until the end of a love, which concludes with the letter of November 15, 1928, an incomparable trajectory of "free freedom" is drawn. This testimony on the decisive first years of the Surrealist Movement will be followed by other much more controlled correspondences, none of which will reach the degree of abandonment that Breton allows himself in these pages and where appears the fragility of a character that his legend tends to freeze in a granitic dignity.

The strong moments of this period of nascent surrealism are known through the accounts drawn from them by Breton's friends and witnesses who lived the related events as well as by the historians of surrealism, but the reality of the facts takes its true dimension when it emanates from the main protagonist of this intellectual trajectory; the same gap that separates, for example, Maurice Nadeau's History of Surrealism from André Breton's Interviews. It appears from this observation that the portrait of Breton conveyed by Literary History as an intolerant pontiff, governing by ukases and consolidating his power by the practice of exclusions amounts to caricature, but nevertheless remains inscribed in filigree in collective memory. Quite different appears the man who wrote these letters and whom I find again in confidences left by friends of the poet. I think particularly of two testimonies perfectly revealing of the capacity and intensity of listening, exceptional aptitude, that Breton reserved for his visitors. On the one hand, that of Matta who relates the memory of December 31, 1937, spent at rue Fontaine, in a small committee, an evening and part of the night, far from the external agitation of a holiday, to give full freedom to speech:

"I surprised myself saying things I had never spoken about, as if a crowd was pressing inside me to manifest itself [...] I believe that this quality of revealing the tragic man and his power in each of us, this triggering of freedom of oneself, was André Breton's genius. This triggering of freedom and love in us, that's surrealism. 1"

On the other hand, that of Charles Duits who evokes his first meeting with Breton in New York in 1942:

"It seemed that the act of seeing was his first and essential act. Everything happened as if his essence had been a gaze that did not blink, eternal, which came from extreme places, and was slightly colored blue as it crossed the cornea.

He was forty-five years old at that time, but he appeared much older, humanly speaking, because he was also ageless, like a tree or a rock. He appeared weary, bitter, alone, terribly alone, bearing solitude with animal patience, silent, caught in silence as in lava that was finishing hardening.

It was first this immobility of the depths that was not concealed by the superficial agitation of words that touched me. 2"

Certainly these two testimonies of "aficionados" are among those I have never forgotten, to the point of visualizing them as if I were present at these interviews, no doubt because the two authors repeated them to me many times, especially Matta who was a prodigious storyteller. I think that all those who have had the chance to approach Breton preserve precious memories of a particular moment experienced in his company. Changing the world and transforming life also participates in the reunion of all manifestations of each one's libertarian individualism which, ember after ember, can provoke beautiful fires "Anarchy! O torchbearer!" 3

[…]

    1 — Germana Ferrari, Matta entretiens morphologiques, Notebook n° I, 1936-1944, Édition Sistan, London, 1987. [↩]     2 — Charles Duits, André Breton a-t-il dit passe, Paris, Les Lettres nouvelles, 1969. [↩]     3 — Laurent Tailhade, « Ballade Solness », Poèmes élégiaques, Paris, Mercure de France, 1907. [↩]

Sur papier à en-tête de La Révolution Surréaliste : Lettres à Simone Kahn : d'A. Breton à S. Kahn du 26 janvier 1925.

[Télécharger cette lettre]

Le 26 janvier 1925

Ma petite Simone n'est pas trop à plaindre à ce que je vois. Je suis tout heureux de ta lettre qui se faisait attendre et que je n'ai reçue que ce soir. La description de Megève est assez sinistre : c'est moi qui me serais laissé démoraliser ! Ne regrettes-tu pas un peu d'être partie, je le crains bien un peu, à cause du caractère obligatoire de ce départ mais l'humeur de mon chéri, qui ne connaît pas cette humeur ignore comment peut s'allier à la compréhension parfaite de la vie la plus étonnante légèreté de cœur. Devant elle je me fais l'effet d'un ours blanc devant la plus fine aiguille d'un glacier.

Je suis seul ce soir : Aragon a bu trop de champagne à midi, la famille Éluard fait la queue au concert Mayol ou ailleurs. Hier soir, de 8 h 1/2 à minuit, j'étais en compagnie d'Artaud, de Tual, de Péret et d'Aragon dans un nouveau café des boulevards. Tual était merveilleux ; ses discours, dépourvus de lyrisme conventionnel, ont suffi à m'occuper tout ce temps. Il est difficile d'en donner idée ; il ne semble pas qu'aucun sujet lui soit interdit et chaque sujet l'inspire d'une façon brillante et toute naturelle. Aucune déclamation, aucun apprêt, aucune longueur, pas la moindre envie apparente de se rendre plus intéressant qu'il n'est. C'est un grand plaisir de l'écouter seulement et il n'a pas l'air de beaucoup s'en douter.

Jusqu'ici l'activité d'Artaud a fait merveille : il propose et il dispose avec tout le tact et l'intelligence possibles. Par ses soins la Centrale est désormais « un lieu clos, dont il faut que le monde sache seulement qu'il existe ». Un comité composé d'Aragon, d'Artaud, de Leiris, de Naville et de moi décide en grande partie de ce qui doit se passer. Artaud a résolu tout d'abord de donner à notre activité intérieure ces deux buts : 1° la fixation au fur et à mesure qu'elles sont émises, fixation par écrit et défense, de toutes les idées surréalistes viables. 2° la constitution d'un dossier très important de notes relatives à tous les ouvrages ayant paru jusqu'à ce jour et dans la composition desquels il entre trace de merveilleux (type : ma note sur Le Moine dans le manifeste). Ce travail pourra donner lieu plus tard à la publication d'un glossaire complet du merveilleux. — À notre activité extérieure, Artaud demande encore mieux : que nous rédigions des adresses au Pape, au Dalaï-Lama du Tibet, aux recteurs de toutes les universités d'Europe et d'Asie, et parmi ces derniers particulièrement aux recteurs des universités d'Égypte, « actuellement emmerdés par les Anglais », aux directeurs de tous les asiles d'aliénés du département de la Seine, à l'archevêque de Paris, aux directeurs de grandes revues tels que Massis, Doumic, Rivière, etc., pour inviter ceux-ci à se prononcer nettement sur notre action internationale, aux critiques littéraires, picturaux, philosophiques, théologiques, pour leur signifier que nous ne les tiendrons au courant de cette action que dans la mesure où ils se seront prononcés en faveur du merveilleux, et au cas où ils y seraient hostiles, les invitant « à rentrer dans leur trou », etc.

Dès aujourd'hui nous avons adressé le télégramme suivant :

« Daladier Société des Nations Genève
La Révolution surréaliste émue votre odieuse activité Conférence Opium vous rappelle à l'ordre de l'Esprit.
Pour la Centrale surréaliste :
Aragon Artaud Breton Naville. »

et nous allons en faire tenir la copie à Herriot.

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