12
PARTISAN REVIEW
of a super-real world; and it may very well b-e that they feel more at home
in such a world as that. Who knows? After a rotten pheasant, the soul
may yearn for a phosphorescent wrapper?
The publication which appears in this weird wrapper is entitled
Sur–
realism in the Seroice of the Revolution;
for the Parisian snobs are very
fond of the "revolution," as they are of cocktails and sexual perversions.
The Surrealists are careful to quote Hegel, Marx and Lenin, :md to assure
their unsuspecting readers that they are "serving the revolution" by
th~ir
efforts; indeed, to hear them tell it, they are the only ones who are serv–
ing the ·revolution. Preoccupied with theories of masturbation and exhi–
bitionist philosophies, these phosphorescent youths would make themselve;;
out to be implacable revolutionary zealots and the champions of a prole–
tarian purity.
Andre Gide stood; up in a Communist meeting, and all who listened
attentively to what he had to say were at once aware that here was a
writer with some manhood speaking. The Surrealists, however, were
annoyed with Andre
Gide;
he was not revolutionary enough to suit them;
and the poet, Peret,-the same one whose book on "Imperial Japau" paper·
costs five hundred francs,-proceeded to write, in Gide's honor, a set of
verses of the sort that small boys commonly scrawl up on the urinals of
Paris. I quote a few of the more respectable lines from this quite un–
printable production:
They say, Comrade Gide,
That you are going
To run out your belly
As a red flag.
Yes, Comrade Gide, you shall ho.ve
The hammer and the sickle:
The sickle in the belly,
A11d the hammer down your throat/
The phosphorescent ·rowdies are displeased with the Soviet Union.
One of them writes: "The wind of cretinism blows from the U.S.S.R."
What is the meaning of this pompous, solemn assertion, with reference
to "cretinism"? It means, simply, that these young "revolutionists" will
have nothing to do with work. They go in for Hegel and Marx and the
revolution, but work is something to which they are not adapted. They
are too busy studying· pederasty and dreams. They wonder, irritatedly,
"how anyone can go into raptures over the manufacture of saucepans?"
For they. needless to state, are not in a position to manufacture anything.
Their time is taken up with spending their inheritances or their wives'
dowries; and they have, moreover, a devoted following of ·rich Amrican
idlers and hangers-on. They are put out with the Soviet Union, for the
