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PARTISAN REVIEW
Breton seems to have made himself into a remarkable kind of human
being. He brings to things a unique balance (unlike his movement) . He
appears as essentially wise and human, displaying modesty alongside of
a sure poetic gift. And what is II}Ore rare, there is in him an effort towards
scrupulousness that is highly dramatic, as if one were waiting for justice
to point its finger. And yet I wonder if his own movement doesn't pre·
scribe him, restrict him, force him away from the indigenous. His specu·
lations on "The Great Invisibles" seem not so audacious or original as he
expects it. And when Breton names Bataille, Caillois, Duthuit, Mason,
Mabille, Carrington, Ernst, Etiemble, Peret, Calas, Seligmann, Henein,
as minds "among the boldest and must lucid of our time" one wonders
just how limited Breton has become. I recall the younger, less scrofulous,
Pound writing, "... one has to (at least) observe, admit the capacities of
people who like what one does NOT like. Life wd. have been (in my
case) much less interesting if I had waited till Joyce, Eliot, Lewis, Law·
renee, etc., complied with what my taste was in 1908."
Outside of William Carlos Williams' poem which, through its grace,
its distribution of weights, becomes as indestructible as bronze, there is
little to recommend.... Seligmann's "The Evil Eye" is casual and satisfy·
ing, and then there is an arresting picture of tlie flood by Kircher, a 17th
century German Jesuit.... Peret's "The Thaw" is what makes a burlesque
of surrealism: the very first lines: "The road bordered by blue trees hid
itself in a well. A fine rain of red wine fell on the cottony ground. A man
advancing spinelessly with quilty steps, giving anyone who watched him
a sensation of softness, rose with a galaxy in his hair from the well over
the spongy road. As he approached, I noted, to my surprise, that he did
not have a galaxy on his head, but that his skull sweated stars, which rose
into the red air and burst white." This is caprice, and evil. A sleepy child
sucking its fat thumb is a model of responsibility.... Harold Rosenberg's
piece is a miscue with the writer hurriedly chalking up, but belatedly, as
is in the nature of a miscue. It doesn't get any where near the level of his
usual prose and one might very well wonder whether Rosenberg wasn't
doing a made·to·order surrealist job.... The "creatures of mythology"
score·chart could have had meaning. Some of the "creative" pages of
VVV
might have been turned over to the writers and painters to say
1) what the creatures mean to them, and 2) why they respond as they do.
This uncommented·upon score card as it stands is about as exciting as last
year's stock reports.
That is all, more or less. The literature is inconsequential, the photo·
graphs are ordinary, the art scatt.ered and unorganized. Maybe surrealism
has had its day. It is entirely possible that those things surrealism fought
for and successfully isolated have become part of a general, enlightened
body of knowledge, and that a concerted, strict surrealist movement has
no longer any reason for being.
Out of respect to Breton and the surrealist history, this review has
