Lettres à Denise Lévy 1919-1929 (review)

"On passe sa vie ici à faire du surréalisme" writes Simone Breton to her cousin Denise in April 1924, a few short months before the publication of André Breton's first Manifesto of Surrealism (182). This fascinating collection of letters, formerly available only in fragmentary form in the footnotes to Marguerite Bonnet's seminal André Breton ou la naissance de l'aventure surréaliste, chronicles the beginning of the surrealist movement from the so-called "period of sleeps"—when the proto-surrealists experimented with hypnotic transes and the automatic production of poems and texts while in a second state—to the time in 1924 when the first surrealist journal was in preparation: "Ils font du surréalisme pour la Revue: La Révolution surréaliste," Simone writes Denise, "Je vais essayer d'en faire aussi pour m'amuser" (197). Her effort, a short text published in the first number, in December 1924, imagines an exchange between a young woman and a young man in which the young woman audaciously tells the young man she wishes he could have as many sex organs as fingers on his right hand, to her satisfaction immediately transforming him through her expressed desire into a starfish (254).

Simone's letters tell the story of her first encounter with Breton—"un type intéressant"—in July 1920 (55). They describe daily life in the Breton household—the many guests who visit every day and often stay over, leaving the couple little privacy; the trips to Brittany to visit Breton's parents; the dogs, birds, and cats they love; the paintings they acquire. And the letters trace the couple's shared happiness followed by growing distance over the years, as Breton becomes so preoccupied with surrealism he fails to notice that Max Morise, the friend he frequently sends in his place to accompany his wife, slowly begins to displace him in her heart. As Georgiana Colvile explains in her introduction and as the letters themselves make clear, these missives also record the story of an intimate friendship between two women separated by a geographical distance that made almost daily letters desirable for them both; hopefully some day it will be possible to read Denise's answers, and to see in them something of the poetry Simone praises. Above all, thanks to these letters, Simone Breton is revealed as a talented writer, as sensitive to an effective turn of phrase as she became to the qualities in paintings that make them marketable—for these letters also show her growing skill at buying and selling art, the occupation to which she would devote herself professionally starting in the 1940s.

Breton's well-known narrative of the first group sessions of automatic activity published in Littérature clearly took many details from Simone's epistolary record. She evokes these sessions in her letters as having the power to transport all of those present outside of time: "Me voilà mon petit," she begins her letter of October 9th, 1922.

Et je date ma lettre. Je sais encore dater. Pourtant nous vivons en même temps le présent, le passé et l'avenir. Après chaque séance, on est tellement égaré et brisé qu'on se promet de ne pas recommencer, et le lendemain on n'a plus que le désir de se retrouver dans cette atmosphère catastrophique où tous se donnent la main avec la même angoisse.

(108)

She describes Robert Desnos as he speaks while in a trance, answering questions, writing and drawing, and then uttering his first one-line poems in the style of Marcel Duchamp's aphorisms. For Breton and his friends, these are "une manifestation essentielle de l'esprit actuel" (109). Simone captures that spirit and the shared excitement of those involved in forging this new way of thinking called surrealism.

Despite the clever transformation in her own surrealist text of a man into a starfish, Simone's view of writing tended less towards the magical shape-shifting typical...