Even granting that every instance of exile is unique, all would seem to have one thing in common. They involve a certain marginalization of the exile. Life in exile, in other words, is life at the margin. Something of the exile will always resist complete assimilation to the form of life of the host culture, just as something essential about the host culture will always remain foreign to the exile. This is especially true of the temporary exile, who often doesn’t have the means or the motivation to move in from the margin. Such was the case for André Breton when he chose exile in North America during the Second World War.

Breton’s experience of exile, which really began even before he went to America, is captured in some of the major poems he wrote at the time. His poem “Pleine marge” (“Full Margin,” in Edouard Roditi’s translation) was written when circumstances first uprooted Breton from his home in Paris. The epic poem “Les États généraux” (“The Estates General”) was written later, after he settled in New York. In both we can see something of the tensions of a time when not only Breton but Surrealism, for which Breton was founder, theoretician, and public embodiment, had to survive at the margin of an alien culture.

Both “Full Margin” and “Les États généraux” were published in America, the latter making its first appearance there. “Full Margin” appeared in full in Roditi’s English translation in 1946 in Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares, a slender bilingual edition presenting a selection of Breton’s poems. Roditi had been Breton’s editor at Editions Sagittaire in Paris before the war; it was he who had suggested that Breton put together the Anthology of Black Humor. “Les États généraux” was published in French in February 1944 in the final number of the American magazine VVV, while the section “au vent”, which Roditi translated as “To the Wind,” appeared separately in Young Cherry Trees.

*

“Full Margin” was composed on the first stage of Breton’s two-stage exile. When he wrote the poem in August of 1940, he had been demobilized from the French Army’s Medical Service following the defeat of the French Army by the invading army of Nazi Germany. Knowing he’d be persona non grata under German occupation, Breton left his home in Paris and took up residence near Marseille in the unoccupied zone, where he and his family first moved in with his friend Pierre Mabille, and then moved into the Air-Bel villa with a handful of fellow Surrealists and others hoping to leave Europe. There, he inhabited a kind of liminal space, a neither here-nor-there between his life in Paris and the North American exile he soon would feel compelled to undergo. To be sure, Breton’s existence in Paris had been marginal – culturally, politically, and economically -- particularly as the 1930s wound down. And while Marseille wasn’t Paris, it wasn’t as alien as America, where he ended up for the duration of the war. There, Breton was doubly marginalized: as an avant-garde artist, and as a temporarily resident foreigner who didn’t speak English. At least in Marseille he was in a Francophone environment that included the kind of café life that, while perhaps not up to Parisian standards, was there to be had. There would be no such thing in New York.

Going into exile wouldn’t be easy, but Breton had good reason to believe that staying in France would be worse. In December 1940 in anticipation of a visit to Marseille by Philippe Pétain, head of the German-aligned government of Vichy France, Breton and the other Air-Bel residents were subjected to search, interrogation, arrest, and four days’ detention in the hold of a passenger ship docked in the harbor. The following February, publication of his book Anthology of Black Humor was denied because its author was judged to be “the negation of the spirit” of the Vichy regime’s “national revolution” (Polizzotti, pp. 442-444 & 435).

*

“Full Margin” is powerful in the sense of displacement it expresses. It is a poem of transition and uncertainty, of renunciation and affirmation, whose speaker self-consciously locates himself at the margin –the plain margin—of life. Ultimately, though, it is a kind of credo for Breton – a poem of faith in the particular vision that found its expression in the Surrealist project.

“Full Margin” is notable for being a deliberately constructed poem. In this regard it contrasts with the free associative, automatic writing Breton had favored for earlier work. In a letter to Roger Caillois, Breton described it as “exceptionally, a very ‘controlled’ poem, which I wanted to be able to justify word for word” (quoted in Clouston, p. 25). Its structure lucidly implies a tetraptych unfolding dialectically: an opening anti-credo (the first negation); an homage to the female principle (a negation of the first negation); an examination of his state of mind (a second negation); and, in a final negation and overcoming of the previous negations, a closing invocation of Surrealism’s spiritual forebears and a reaffirmation of the movement’s vision.

The poem’s opening sets out Breton’s position in plain terms:

I am not for the adepts
I’ve never lived in that place known as “The Froggery”
My heart’s lamp smokes and soon sputters on nearing a parvis

With these first lines, Breton gives us an anti-credo that announces his marginality vis-a-vis French bourgeois life. “The Froggery” is Roditi’s translation of “La Grenouillère,” a popular Belle Epoque resort on the Seine whose bourgeois elegance was made famous by an 1869 painting by Monet. Breton declares that he’s never lived there, that this resort and all it stood for wasn’t the place for him. A “parvis” is a courtyard to a church; its capacity to deaden his feeling for life – to extinguish the flame of his heart’s lamp – tells of Breton’s lifelong antipathy to Christianity.

Who are the adepts that Breton, who at this time was enthusiastically exploring Western occultism with Mabille, was against? Perhaps they are the leading figures in the literary and cultural worlds in relation to which Breton, who in 1940 hadn’t published anything significant since 1937’s Mad Love, felt himself marginalized. Unlike Breton, these figures were adept at negotiating the politics of the literary world, a world whose alignments and alliances were undergoing an upheaval brought on by France’s defeat and the imposition of German oversight of French cultural life. During the occupation many of these people would indeed prove adept at maintaining their positions, whether through collaboration or, as in the case of Breton’s former close friends Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, resistance.

Who, then, was Breton for? In the first place, “women at odds with their time” (“maille a partir avec leur temps”). There is a prefiguration here of a theme that Breton would develop more fully in 1944’s Arcane 17, the theme of woman as, in Anna Balakian’s words, “source of spiritual guidance...redemption and self-realization” (Balakian, p. 209). For Breton the catastrophe of the present war, like that of the previous war in which he also had served, was proof of the failure of a civilization defined by male principles and which would have to be eclipsed by what he saw as the female principles of intuition and the valuing of the natural world.

One of these women was Breton’s second wife, Jacqueline Lamba, who appears in “Full Margin” as “that Queen of Byzantium whose eyes so transcend[] the ultramarine.” As Elise, his third wife, would in Arcane 17, Lamba here serves as a condensed symbol for what Breton hoped would be the female principle ascendant. Unfortunately this second marriage wouldn’t survive the Bretons’ exile in North America.

*

Breton always disavowed interest in what he considered to be the sterile rationalism of Western thought and its Latin heritage. Particularly from the beginning of the 1940s onward, he instead looked for inspiration toward Gothic literature and Romantic thought, as well as to Celtic myths. Never a systematic thinker, here we find him denouncing systematic philosophies and seeking solace instead in direct experience of the natural world:

The gigantic shells of completed systems which stand revealed in irregular clefts across the land
With their mother-of-pearl stairways and their gleams of old lantern panes
Hold me only in so far as vertigo...

I find my needs in the crevices of rock there where the sea
Hurls its globes of horses ridden by howling dogs

Beyond what it tells us of Breton’s state of mind, this passage provides a beautiful example of Surrealist analogy in which the sight and sound of the surf, with its bubbling foam, isn’t likened to unrushing horses – who themselves have been transformed in their collectivity into “globes” – but become them through a hidden correspondence. In addition, Roditi’s choice of “hurls” to translate Breton’s “précipite” sets up an intertextual rhyme with the dogs’ “hurlent” (“howling”) in the French text.

If not in the arid ground of systematic, Enlightenment-derived thought, where does Breton find the green shoots of intellectual flourishing? In the heterodox whom orthodoxy rendered marginal: Pelagius, Cornelius Jansen, François of Paris, Joachim of Fiore, and Marie-Catherine Cadière. But especially in three figures who seem to have served as his daimones—his tutelary or guardian spirits:

Meister Eckhardt my master in the hostel of reason
Where Hegel says to Novalis with him we have all we need and off they go
With them and the wind I have all I need

Meister Eckart, the 13th-14th century German theologian and mystic, doesn’t turn up often in Breton’s writings. But significantly, in “The Situation of Surrealism between the Two Wars,” Breton’s December 1942 address to Yale’s French students, Eckhart is one of the named figures whose dialectic, Breton asserts, can “resolve the antinomies that keep man in fetters” (Breton, p. 66). Novalis (1772-1801), the German Romantic poet and philosopher was, as Breton told interviewer André Parinaud, a key foreshadower of Surrealism’s quest “to force open the doors of mystery and fearlessly advance over uncharted territory despite every prohibition” (Conversations, p. 62).

Hegel seems to be the anomaly here. Not only was he the epitome of the philosophical system-constructor, but he was far from a marginal figure in French intellectual life, which he in fact dominated from the 1930s through the 1960s. Nevertheless, he was a central inspiration for Breton, who claimed to Parinaud that he had been “imbued with his views” since he was first introduced to Hegel’s work as a student “around 1912.” We also know that Breton was one of the attendees of Alexandre Kojève’s famous seminars on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which he presented at the École des hautes études in 1933-1939. Interestingly, though, we find little of Kojève’s Hegel in Breton’s Hegel. The former’s Heideggerian reading of Hegel, with its emphasis on a future-oriented temporality as well as on the Master-Slave dialectic, contrasts with Breton’s own focus on the Hegelian notion of objective humor and on the Hegelian concept of the dialectical Aufhebung, or transcendence/reconciliation of opposites. As he acknowledged to Parinaud, his famous assertion in the second Surrealist manifesto that Surrealism’s primary task was to approach “that certain point at which” all antinomies are resolved or dissolved, was a Hegelian notion. Breton further underscored his debt to Hegel when he told Parinaud that “[w]hen the Hegelian dialectic ceases to function, for me there is no thought, no hope of truth” (Conversations, p. 118). It is entirely appropriate then that when at Air-Bel in 1940 Breton and other Surrealists created the so-called Marseilles deck of playing cards, Hegel was made the Magus (the equivalent of the standard deck’s King) of Locks, the suit symbolizing knowledge.

*

The sense of marginality that “Full Margin” expresses contains an uncanny echo of what Breton, in the Anthology of Black Humor, described as the “desertion within oneself” of Jacques Vaché, his friend from the previous world war. For Breton, Vaché’s attitude of utter indifference and unwillingness to serve any exterior purpose was the counterpart to physical desertion and beyond that, the mark of an individual life asserting itself against the life of the collective. To the extent that it was authentically lived and not simply put on for Breton’s benefit, Vaché’s desertion within was, in effect, a fundamental choice of negation vis-a-vis the world around him. And to be sure, in denying the power of the world to compel one to accept what isn’t acceptable, desertion within – I prefer to call it internal exile – is a gesture of negation. And yet at the same time, it is an affirmation. That is, if we see it not as withdrawal from the world but as a form of reaching back within oneself to reaffirm what it is that sustains one in the world, and of confronting once again on intimate terms what it is that structures that world as both the source and the object of meaning. Vaché’s version of internal exile may have been a manifestation of his purported nihilism and thus of pure negation, but for Breton the Hegelian, negation had to carry within itself its own negation, thus leading to a superseding affirmation. I believe it is this affirmation that in the end comes through in “Full Margin.”

With Eckhart, Novalis, and Hegel as his daimones, Breton had what he needed to sustain himself and his movement in their time of marginalization; in “Full Margin” his affirmation of their presence negates the negations that have come before. And yet this affirmation represents an overcoming that doesn’t quite overcome.

*

“The Estates-General,” named for the representative body of ancien régime France whose meeting in 1789 precipitated the French Revolution, was composed in New York in the summer and autumn of 1943. Some of it was written during Breton’s visits to the Long Island house his wife, from whom he was now separated, was sharing with the American sculptor David Hare. Breton was a frequent if frequently uncomfortable visitor, since it gave him the opportunity to visit with Aube, the daughter he shared with Lamba. (Breton, marginalized in America, was marginalized within his own family as well.) Like “Full Margin,” “The Estates-General” is a deliberately composed work. Breton structured it in seven parts six of which, following an unheaded opening section, are headed by a phrase from a sentence he’d heard in a hypnagogic state: “Il y aura toujours une pelle au vent dans les sables du rêve” (“There will always be a shovel in the wind in the sands of the dream”). The language can be extravagant and the images dream-like, as is typical with Breton, but the weight of the poem largely lies with the meditative rather than with the marvelous.

It begins with Breton’s oblique invocation of the muse:

Say what is below speak
Say what begins
And polish my eyes, which strain to catch the light
Like a thicket searched by a sleepwalking hunter

The formula “polish my eyes” (“polis mes yeux”) runs like a refrain throughout this first section. It calls up a number of associations: of clarity of vision, and by extension clairvoyance; of the eyes as windows into the mind, being rendered transparent as polished glass, or conversely, as mirrors of the world, polished to provide a true image. The composite image that emerges is of a merger of imagination and perception, of an interplay between the sensible and suprasensible. The opening promises that the world the poem will present is the world as dreamed as well as seen.

Consistent with its title “The Estates-General,” like “Full Margin,” summons the spirits of the rebellious. The first of these is Louis Charles Delescluze, introduced in “there will be” (“il y aura”), the second section of the poem. Delescluze was the republican journalist who, as a leader of the revolutionary Paris Commune, was killed when government troops retook the city in 1871:

And every May 25th in late afternoon, old Delescluze
In an august mask descends towards the Château-d'Eau
One might say that mirror cards are being shuffled in the shadows.

Breton imagines Delescluze’s ghost emerging each anniversary of the revolutionary’s death and, appearing like the moving reflections of a dim light, proceeding to the barricade on Place Château-d'Eau – the spot where Delescluze made his last stand.

Delescluze is a vanquished rebel, but for Breton he is a figure embodying the hope for more equitable social arrangements. And in fact later in the poem, in the section headed “a pail” (“une pelle”), Breton expresses his own utopian vision of an egalitarian world in which racial hierarchies are abolished:

It was enough that the people conceived of themselves as one whole and became that
So that it would raise itself to a sense of universal dependence in harmony
And that the difference of colors of skins of traits throughout the earth
Shows that the secret of its power
Lies in the free appeal to the primordial genius of each of the races
Turning first to the black race and the red race
Since for a long time they have been the most abused

The second rebel Breton devotes significant space to is the thirteenth century Occitan noblewoman Esclarmonde de Foix, whom we encounter in the poem’s “au vent” section. She was a leading figure among the Cathars, the heterodox Christian movement that was violently suppressed by the ecclesiastical and temporal authorities. Like the women who appear in “Full Margin,” Esclarmonde is at odds with her time. And perhaps of ours as well, but for Breton she will be the inspiration for the poetry of the future. As for the poetry of his own day, Breton paints a scathing portrait. In Roditi’s translation,

...I know which were the poetic directives of yesterday
They are no longer valid for today
The little songs will die the death that they deserve…
It would be wise no longer to be content with the gruel
Cooked up in rhythm in blinking rooms
While justice is being administered by three quarters of beef 

Against this, Breton demands that

Once and for all time poetry must rise from the ruins
In the attire and glory of Esclarmonde
And claim right out loud the full share of Esclarmonde
For there can be no peace for the soul of Esclarmonde
In our hearts and may those words die that are not good rivets for the hoof of the horse of Esclarmonde
Before the precipice where the edelweiss still holds the breath of Esclarmonde

Through the inspiration of Esclarmonde the death of yesterday’s poetry, gaudily tricked out in frivolous rhythms and impotent in a brutally administered world, will be followed by a poetic resurrection inspired by her rebellious spirit.

There are two other marginal figures mentioned in passing in “The Estates-General” who are worth noting: the occultists Fabre d’Olivet and Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre. Breton’s attention at this time was turned increasingly toward the esoteric. By the early 1940s we hear less about, say, humour noir and more about what Breton felt was the need for the redemptive power of myth in a modern, secular age. His invocation of Esclarmonde is consistent with this growing orientation, since her Catharism, as a late variety of Gnosticism, situates her within the Western esoteric tradition.

*

We know that Breton’s time in America was largely an unhappy one and that he rarely spoke about it after he returned to France. Still, parts of “The Estates-General” give us a glimpse of the mundane details of his life in New York, such as its wartime power outages (“...incandescent filaments as they appear before the lamp goes out/when the main power has been cut”) and the Amerindian artifacts he collected on trips to a local antique shop with his friend Claude Lévi-Strauss (“...slits for the eyes and the mouth are black...it wears black bull horns from the tip of which plunge crow feathers”). More substantively, we get a window into his emotional struggle as well. Consider this syntactically knotty yet emotionally direct passage from the “always” (“toujours”) section of the poem: 

One of the beggar’s ideas that inspire in me the most compassion
Is that one believes one can grouse about anachronism
As if in a causal relationship to interchangeable mercy
All the more so in the quest for freedom
Contrary to popular opinion one had no authority to hold to memory
And all the weight that comes with it
For the by-products of imagination
As if I had the least reason
To believe myself to be myself in a stable manner
While only a drop of forgetfulness suffices it isn’t rare
So that the moment I consider myself I come to be completely other and of another drop

Here, Breton considers the question of the effacement of identity, partly borne of the need to drop the weight of memory – that it isn’t a mercy to hold onto a grievance over what was and is no more. But the result is a displacement of one’s sense of oneself analogous to the physical displacement of oneself that exile brings on: to live outside of one’s place is at the same time to live outside of one’s time, anachronistically, because one is separated from the world in which one’s memories were made. In the last four lines of the passage in fact we get an echo of Rimbaud’s “I is another” – but not as the result of the deliberate derangement of the senses, but instead of the inevitably destabilizing rearrangement of one’s former life into new and unrecognizable – because unmoored from memory – combinations.

*

When Breton returned to France at the end of May, 1946, he found that attitudes toward him and his movement were mixed. Some who had chosen to stay behind during the occupation saw Breton’s own choice of exile as an act of abandonment. By contrast André Thirion, member of the Gaullist resistance and former Surrealist, described Breton’s wartime broadcasts to France for the US Office of War Information’s Voice of America as “an encouraging call” (Polizzotti, p. 459). The French Communist Party, which included former Surrealist friends-turned-enemies Aragon and Éluard, held a strong position within the country’s post-war cultural life and was not well disposed toward Breton or Surrealism. In addition, the Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had eclipsed Surrealism in attracting the avant-garde as well as the fashionable. Surrealism was largely dismissed as a relic of the interwar period, as indeed Sartre argued in “Situation of the Writer in 1947,” an essay in which he notably said of the former refugees that “those who have returned are exiled among us” (Sartre, p. 185). The situation of Breton himself in 1947 and afterward was such that, although he was acquiring a measure of recognition from the cultural establishment, he would never again have a place at the vital center of French intellectual life. He would continue to be active and would maintain some semblance of a Surrealist group until his death in 1966, but the fact is that he, and it, had been pushed away from the center, and out toward the margin. The full margin.

References and resources:

Anna Balakian,  André Breton: Magus of Surrealism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). Internal cite to

Balakian. 

André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor. Translated by Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997).

—, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism. Translated by Mark Polizzotti (New York: Paragon House, 1993).

Internal cites to Conversations.

—, Poésie (Éditions du group “Ebooks libres et gratuits”,” n.d.). For French texts of the poems. Translations from Les

États généraux are my own, with the exception of the “au vent” section, for which I used Roditi’s translation.

—, “The Situation of Surrealism between the Two Wars,” in Free Rein. Translated by Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline

D’Amboise (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). Internal cite to Breton.

—, Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares. Translated by Edouard Roditi. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

1969).

Victoria Clouston,  André Breton in Exile: The Poetics of “Occultation” (Oxfordshire: Routledge/Ashgate, 2018). Internal

cite to Clouston.

Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton 2nd edition (Boston: Black Widow Press, 2009).

Internal cite to Polizzotti, and source for details of Breton’s life in Marseille and New York. 

Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? tr. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Harper & Row/Harper Colophon, 1965). Internal

cite to Sartre.