Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life (review)

I am unable to take surrealism seriously. The reasons are simple. It was insufficiently Schopenhauerian. There was not a trace of Merz in its makeup. Surrealists, though, took themselves seriously. Yet even a surrealist might find serious books about surrealism hard to stomach. To do justice to the book under review, a comic writer of the caliber of P. G. Wodehouse would be needed. He would have made much of the Oxford comma in the title, of the author's finishing "a draft of the manuscript to the sound of lobster boats and seagulls," and of her picture on the endleaf of the dust jacket. I could have made something of the sound of lobsters, but the sound of lobster boats is a surrealist touch too far. The real has a knack of imploding on the surreal. Speaking of Wodehouse, he became the inmate of a former lunatic asylum in Silesia, having been arrested by the Germans at Le Touquet in 1940. I suspect he never knew the asylum's previous occupants had been subjected to the Nazi version of euthanasia. Robert Desnos, the subject of this book, also went to Silesia. After arrest in Paris in February 1944, the itinerary of his final months reads: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Flössenburg, Flöha (one of the smaller of the 10,000 camps established by the Germans), and Terezin. At this last, Robert died in June 1945 of sustained abuse, dire mistreatment, severe malnutrition. You could call the Holocaust surreal, but the Germans were serious.