CANÇONER SELECTE II: FRANZ SCHUBERT

Over the years of preparation this volume has required, many have helped in its organization and realization. I would like to thank them all, and in particular the following: Yves Bonnefoy, Franc¸ois Chapon, Marie-Claude Char, Rene´ Char, Marie-Claire Dumas, Etienne-Alain Hubert, Tina Jolas, Judith Young Mallin, Robert Motherwell, Renate Pon-sold Motherwell, Yves Peyre´, Dorothea Tanning, Seth Young, Virginia Zabriskie. For his patience in helping me put this act together, my son Matthew Caws, and for their encour-agement, Hilary and Jonathan Caws-Elwitt. I have had superb backing at the MIT Press, now and formerly: Roger Conover, Deborah Cantor-Adams, Julie Grimaldi, and all the highly skilled designers, in particular, Yasuyo Iguchi. For all the help with the archives from which many of these documents are taken, I am grateful to the librarians at the Bibliothe`que de l’Arsenal, the Bibliothe`que nationale, and the Bibliothe`que litte´raire Jacques Doucet in Paris; to the Scottish National Art Gallery in Edinburgh; to the Museum of Modern Art and the Columbia University Library in New York, as well as the archivists at Art Resource and the Artists Rights Society, VAGA, ADAGP, and the Bridgeman Art Library Interna-tional. Many thanks also to the various persons and publishers who have granted permission to reproduce the texts included here. I have made every effort to trace the copyright holders, but if I have inadvertently overlooked any, I would be pleased to make the necessary ar-rangements at the first opportunity.

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Matta (Echaurren), Un Poe`te de notre connaissance (A Poet We Know), 1944; Pierre Matisse Gallery. ARS.

Am I a Surrealist?

Surrealism for me draws its inspiration from nature. I recall the account of Tanguy walking along the beach noting the tiny marine forms, studying the seaweed and the rocks. Then he would go back to his studio and create a painting which made references to what he had seen, yet nature would only be the starting point for his imagination. I adopt a similar approach, though at the same time, abstraction would also be exerting its influence upon me, giving me the benefit of geometry and design to match and balance and strengthen the imaginative elements of a composition. Outer eye and inner eye, backward and forward, inside out and upside down, sideways, as a metaphysical airplane might go, no longer classical or romantic, medieval or gothic, but surreal, transcendent, a revelation of what is concealed in the hide-and-seek of life, a mixture of laughter, play and perseverance.

You see the shape of a tree, the way a pebble falls or is formed, and you are astounded to discover that dumb nature makes an effort to speak to you, to give you a sign, to warn you, to symbolize your innermost thoughts. Chance is not a neutral but a distinctly positive force, the surrealists believe that you can get on good terms with chance by adopting a lyrical mode of behavior and an open attitude.

My own method is to put myself in a state of receptivity during the day. I sit about sometimes for a quarter of an hour or more, wondering what on earth I am doing, and then suddenly I get an idea for something. Either it is the beginning of a title or just the germ of a visual image. Later on, if I am stuck with a half-finished painting, I might take a snooze and after that it comes together quite simply. It may well be that we hunt too much when we are completely on the alert. Too much awareness can be as inhibiting as too little.

One must have a hunger for new color, new shapes and new possibilities of discovery. The twentieth century has begun to realize that most of life’s meaning is lost without the spirit of play. In play, all that is lovely and soaring in the human spirit strives to find expression.

To play is to yield oneself to a kind of magic, and to give the lie to the inconvenient world

Memoirs of Surrealism

Eileen Agar, The Angel of Mercy, 1934; plaster, collage, and water color, Whitford & Hughes, London/

Bridgeman Art Library. ARS.

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of fact, and the hideous edifice of unrelieved utility. In play the mind is prepared to accept the unimagined and incredible, to enter a world where different laws apply, to be free, unfettered.

The earliest anecdote told of me, at the age of four (when my stature was of little account), was of me looking up at the ornate ceiling lavishly painted with naked ladies and flying cupids in the large restaurant where my parents were lunching. I said: ‘‘I see something but I mustn’t tell.’’ Was this a shocked awareness of what went on in the clouds? The second anecdote is of my constant and pressing request to all and sundry to buy me a balloon.

I was obviously intent on exploring those clouds for myself.

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Remembering Jacqueline Remembering Andre´

for Aube, for Hilary, and for Matthew

I had been sent by Yves Bonnefoy that day so long ago in the 1970s, to see the former wife of Andre´ Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, to whose startling blonde beauty L’Amour fou (Mad Love) had been addressed. Bonnefoy had expected—and his expectation proved not to be wrong—that she would not mind, that she might indeed welcome, a talk with me. Not for my knowledge, especially, but for my receptive ear and general enthusiasm.

For years, I had been writing on surrealism, translating Breton’s poetry, teaching and loving his prose, which I found more poetic by far than his poetry, and more sustained in its flow. My first, very brief book had concerned Breton. It was called Surrealism and the Literary Imagination: Bachelard and Breton,¹and then I think I remember another subtitle along the lines of ‘‘A Poetics of the Possible’’ or the equally gooey equivalent. Printed in 600 copies, it sold out and sank instantly: dead on the spot, all ninety-two glittering pages. I have lost my only copy, and it seems unavailable even on the web. But that surrealizing imagination, or something like it, stuck in my mind. I was never to read contemporary poetry the same way.

It was, in the beginning, Breton’s face I had loved, wherever I saw it.²In photographs, on the front and back covers of books, and, particular to my own love of Joseph Cornell, in boxes or not—his collage of Man Ray’s most famous photograph of Breton, in his adapta-tion of that photograph—adding alchemical symbols around it, or then light curls, as in his Laundry Boy’s Charge. Everyone else seemed to find that face leonine, massive, strong, impressive. I was no less impressed, but found it in the picture to be as vulnerable as it was striking; and so I loved it. I had no idea where his anguish came from, or what kinds of gestures it would have prompted, were I to have known him. He had always been presented as infinitely commanding, triumphant, a writer of manifestoes and statements. I saw some-thing else.

Memoirs of Surrealism

Andre´ Breton, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky, Mexico, 1928; photo: Fritz Bach.

Something troubled about his relation to himself. You may think me boring, he used to say; but Pierre Reverdy is still more so. Perhaps he was. Greatness can scarcely be thought to rule out self-denigration.

Jacqueline Lamba, Simiane-la-Rotonde

So, because of my friendship with a great poet, I went in 1973 to meet the ex-wife of a great poet. I returned from an expedition to Russia, left those domed cathedrals and my vain search for the Maiakovski museum, and for any trace of the Rayonists I had so loved—

Natalia Goncharova? I asked at first; no such person, they told me. I was surely mistaken, they said.

I sought out Jacqueline in Simiane-la-Rotonde, carrying my first-ever tape recorder, wearing my best espadrilles, apprehensive. And I found, on the spot, someone I sensed to be quite as remarkable as her ex-husband had been. One look at her astonishingly sensitive countenance, and I hoped we would be friends—as indeed we always were to be. I turned the tape recorder to the bare white wall, just as her paintings were turned, in the high room in the house on a hill overlooking the plain.

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Dora Maar, Portrait of Jacqueline Lamba, from Minotaure 8 ( June 1936); courtesy of Aube Elle´oue¨t.

Memoirs of Surrealism

Aube Elle´oue¨t, Hommage a` Talisma Nasreen, 1995; collage. Courtesy of Aube Elle´oue¨t.

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Aube Elle´oue¨t, La Goutte d’eau (The Drop of Water), 1990; collage. Courtesy of Aube Elle´oue¨t.

The house seemed bare, and echoing. A sort of arcade near it, or under it, I cannot remember, but can sense its shape now. Simiane, on a hill, was like most of the towns I have loved in the South of France, and of America. On the days she was painting, she would hang out a red flag if the neighborhood children could come up and chat with her.

Here, when a wasp would come, she would feed it, cherish it, as she did all animals, and her friends, among whom I was infinitely proud to be counted. When we were returning to Simiane from my cabanon, a small owl was perched atop the hood of the Deux Chevaux, looking at her hard. It was like that.

Nothing was surprising around Jacqueline. As the very long day went on, she turned a few of her works to face me, one at a time, slowly, as we talked.

Her voice was that of a painter, of the kind of painter she was. Skies she painted, or sometimes painted, sometimes trees, sometimes houses against a mountain. Her absolutist attitude to everything seemed marvelously in accord with what I had loved in surrealist writing and imagining, and also in two faces, first that of Andre´ Breton, and then hers—

a beauty not so much physical as thoughtful. Everything about her was out of the ordinary:

Memoirs of Surrealism

Joseph Cornell, Laundry Boy’s Charge, 1966 (photograph of Andre´

Breton by Man Ray, from 1931). Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

her masses of hair piled atop her narrow, aristocratic head; her way of walking, like a dancer;

her long skirts she had worn ever since visiting Frida Kahlo in Mexico. When, years later, I found one of Kahlo’s letters addressed to her in terms that could only be interpreted as those of love, it was instantly understandable. What Jacqueline cared about, the way she spoke, the way she looked at you—these were unforgettable.

When she spoke of Breton, it was almost always just ‘‘him’’—‘‘lui.’’ Sometimes, ‘‘An-dre´,’’ but more often, just ‘‘lui.’’ This was not, or so it seemed to me, a love that had ever diminished. She had not wanted to be just Madame Andre´ Breton. Could Andre´ Breton

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Jacqueline Lamba, Landscape at Simiane-la-Rotonde, n.d. Courtesy of Aube Elle´oue¨t.

have possibly wanted her to be just that? In any case, she was, and remained, Jacqueline Lamba. Difficult, exigent, in her friendships as in her love. She was the sort of person you did not want to let down.

The one thing she hated the most was the self-sufficiency that speaks in the bearing of some intellectuals, the good opinion about oneself that lies in wait for the unwary. When I saw this self-sufficiency and her swift reaction, it was like seeing the vengeance of a god, the nemesis of ancient myth. People should have been more wary of Jacqueline than they knew how to be. She never ceased being wary, of herself and others.

About Andre´, she talked for four hours. There were other subjects, such as Antonin Artaud, to whom she had remained close, and others she had loved and cared about. But to this topic, this ‘‘him,’’ she would always return. There were always new things to tell me. Some I would recall afterwards, some not. What concerned her most was that never

Memoirs of Surrealism

Jacqueline Lamba, Untitled Black and White, n.d. Courtesy of Aube Elle´oue¨t.

would she speak—or so she thought—as well as Andre´. In any case, she spoke as no one else I remember has spoken, and the day could have gone on even longer.

I know Andre´ Breton married again; I spent time with Elisa also, and she was kind to me.

I know Jacqueline married, and loved, David Hare. But none of that changed what was so instantly and so continually visible: Andre´ and Jacqueline shared something that leaps out of the magnificent photographs Claude Cahun took of them against a curtain, and is clearer still in Claude’s photographs of Jacqueline alone—a radiance unlike any I had encountered before or have again, after her.

What did we talk about, talking about him? Of course, their meeting. How he had seen her in the club, how the poem ‘‘Sunflower Night’’ had predicted her, how poetry worked magic. What sorts of things Breton believed in, how he went about coordinating his group. His heroes: Duchamp in particular. Did I love Duchamp’s face, as she had, and Breton’s even more? Yes. And also the face of Atonin Artaud, as Breton had. What an odd friendship they had had. When Artaud returned, haunted, from Ireland, Jacqueline had continued walk-ing with him, and remembered for me how he would place his blackthorn stick straight in the way of some oncomer, and demand a sum to remove it. How he had trusted her. His tragedy and his greatness. Their joint mental adventures. The time when the playwright Arthur Adamov had gotten him out of the asylum, hoping, and they had all gone to the The´atre du

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Jacqueline Lamba, Landscape in Black and White, n.d. Courtesy of Aube Elle´oue¨t.

Memoirs of Surrealism

Vieux-Colombier to hear him speak. What Jacqueline had most feared, had happened. Artaud, unable to put his papers or thoughts together, had swept them off the podium, and they all wept. Jacqueline, telling me about it, in her low voice, wept again.

She talked about things large and less so, about the Andre´ she had loved. Small things sometimes, like his not wanting to be seen without his shoes on—Jacqueline enjoyed going barefooted. The way he talked, and walked. His relation to others, to himself. Why was she trusting me? The question never arose. I suppose she knew she could.

On my wall in the south of France, where she would come to visit in her long skirt, to the utter delight of my children, hangs one of her drawings of a group of houses against a mountain. She did not drive, nor did I. I took the bus to meet her bus; it seemed right.

And one day, she brought me a picture that hangs in my cabanon, arriving with it under her arm, immense and significant in its utter simplicity. If she arrived at noon, in the blaze and desperate heat of the midday sun, and the children wished to walk with her up the hill nearby to a chapel, she would set off with them instantly, against all prudence. Once, she fell down my stone step into the road, picked herself up, smoothed down her long skirt, gave me her most radiant smile, and started off, with a child on either side. That is what, among other things, Andre´—her Andre´—must have loved about her, that adventuresome spirit with which she was so marvelously endowed.

I gave her something too, just a piece of Provenc¸al cloth, bright blue and red, as I remember, and she hung it out on her line, for the colors to fade. That was right too:

everything, in those years, seemed right. About her, about our relationship.

Jacqueline Lamba, 8 blvd Bonne Nouvelle

When we had known each other a few years, I learned the way to telephone her. You let it ring four times, then you hung up; then you phoned again, and she, knowing it was you, picked it up. That quiver in her voice, that warmth, the way she would, whenever I came back through Paris, prepare me lunch, or tea, or both, with magical things in tiny wooden bowls. I loved to watch her gliding noiselessly about, taking care. I would climb up the five flights of stairs to her apartment, marked: ‘‘Jacqueline Lamba-Hare, artiste-peintre.’’

Here too, the paintings were turned to the walls. My grandmother, a painter too, so long ago, had she turned her paintings to the walls of her studio? I did not think so, but perhaps in her gleaming still lifes and portraits there was less mystery. About Jacqueline, there hung an air of great reserve, through which shone a great passion.

She wanted to know about Jacques Lacan—could we go together to his lectures? She wanted to talk to me about Groddek and his notion of the ‘‘c¸a.’’ She wanted me to tell

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Jacqueline Lamba, L’Atelier at 8, Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, n.d. Courtesy of Aube Elle´oue¨t.

her what Rene´ Char had turned out to be like, for she had known him so long ago. One day, she had finally gone to see him at L’Isle-sur-Sorgue, greatly moved as they both were by the idea and the reality. She had left there with him her roll of paintings that she had taken to show him. They were both surprised, it appeared, by their rediscovery of each other. He had preferred her to Andre´ Breton, had read me passages from his notes about them both. And he had found her, he told me later, after the first shock of sight, just the way he had known her. It had been a fine meeting.

Jacqueline had not always had an easy time. Once, about to be operated on, she had not mentioned that she was the wife of Andre´ Breton, through some reserve. She had, as an impecunious and anonymous nonperson, so she said, fallen prey to a surgeon with a knife more eager than his talent would support. Ever after, she had seen blood behind her eyes, had had difficulty painting, had had pain. Her beauty had almost caused her blindness.

Nor had she found the scene in America an easy one: she and Simone de Beauvoir had not exactly hit it off. Simone de Beauvoir had treated her, she said, like a maid, this

Memoirs of Surrealism

story illustrated in a way I do not care to tell. To lose Jacqueline’s confidence or trust was, I would have thought, to lose a great deal. But then, you can see how I loved her.

She was a staunch friend, frighteningly so. Hearing that I was once hesitating about

She was a staunch friend, frighteningly so. Hearing that I was once hesitating about