THE SURRE.1.LISTS
13
reason that people work there; and this, to their minds, is the "wind of
cretinism."
The same freak who was disturbed by the "wind" is quite frank in
confessing: "What revolted me m9re ·than anything else was their 'Road
to Life'. I was angered at the sight of these young ... " (there follows
an unprintable word) "for whom work was life's one goal, its one mean–
ing, whose general style was that of a street-car conductor, and who,
upon going into a brothel, where at least there are bodies and a song, can
think of nothing better to do than to throw themselves on the women in
a screaming rage and tear down those flaming words, which I would
gladly give them as a program: 'Eat, sing and make love to the girls'."
Their own program, in any event, is clear: they first read
Marx,
then hang out the sign of a bawdy-house. ·They have a contempt for the
manufacture of saucepans and such like utilitarian pursuits. What
dif~
ferencc does it make to them, in what sort of pan the cook prepares their
putrid roast? What interests them is drinking, singing and making love
to the girls. This may be, for them, a sufficiently comprehensive pro–
gram, but there is nothing particularly super-realistic about it. Tens of
thousands of young fellows of the well-to-do-class divert themselves in
the same fashion. But these phosphorescent young men are more ambi–
tious. They are incessantly seeking to stir up
a
scandal which will get
them talked about at every turn.
What is it they do, these unrecognized geniuses and noisy revolution–
ists? What is there for them to do? Well, they might at least. get out
and demonstrate with the unemployed. But the police are in the habit of
dispersing the unemployed, and the police carry rubber billies. That is
unpleasant-the whole performance
IS
lacking in luster; who ever talks
about the unemployed? For revolution, to them, means nothing more or
less than a chance for self-advertisement. They began with noncommittal
statement. They took pains to cram their publications with the spoken
rather than the printed terms for the various portions of the human anat–
omy. The French police, however, are extremely liberal in the matter of
obscenity, and it never occurred to anyone to confiscate a phosphoescent
pornography of this sort. And so, 'from terminology the Surrealists went
on to philosophy.
They are naive enough to admit that their program is, "to make love to
the girls" ; but they are shrewd enough to realize that they cannot go
very far on this road. Women for them are merely an opportunistic con–
cession. They have another program to unfold, consisting of onanism,
pederasty, fetishism, exhibitionism, and even bestiality. But in Paris, these
things are scarcely so much as noticed. It is here that reality gets the
better of their super-realism, helped out by a little badly digested Freud,
