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group, which he hoped would "gather representatives of the varIOUS
non-Stalinist revolutionary movements" into a unified front. Trotsky
thought that the project should be inaugurated with a manifesto, and he
had asked Breton to draft one. In the several weeks following, however,
Breton had found himself too intimidated to write anything at all, and
the delay soon began to anger the exacting elder comrade. "Breton,
with Trotsky breathing down his neck, felt completely paralyzed," wrote
Heijenoort. 'Have you something to show me?' Trotsky would ask
whenever they met. As the situation developed, Trotsky assumed the role
of the schoolmaster before a Breton playing the recalcitrant pupil who
had not done his homework." Breton was so mortified that he even
asked Heijenoort to draft the manifesto in his stead, but Heijenoort de–
clined.
Trotsky's wrath had finally exploded one day in early June, during a
car trip to Guadalajara. The details of the argument have never been
made clear, but it evidently had to do with Breton's delays and Trot–
sky's impatience. Breton obliquely evoked "the misunderstanding on the
road to Guadalajara" in a subsequent letter to Trotsky: "At the time . . .
I was no less offended than you, because I could not accept that Trotsky
should ascribe to me, even under the most contradictory appearances,
motivations completely opposed to the ones I have always felt towards
him." In the middle of the argument itself, Trotsky's car suddenly pulled
to a halt and Breton, with a look of "barned astonishment," walked
back toward a second vehicle following behind. He passed the rest of the
SOO-mile journey exiled in this second car with Jacqueline and Frida,
while Heijenoort replaced him next to a "stiff and silent" Trotsky in the
front vehicle. During the several days they stayed in Guadalajara, Breton
did not once see Trotsky.
Instead, he and Rivera had spent their time indulging their "artistic
temperaments," like schoolboys playing hooky. They went in search of
paintings and antiquities to a run-down private museum, where they
were guided by a "pathetic and likable" old man who asked to be paid
only in lottery tickets (he had, he proudly informed his guests, already
spent 26,000 piasters on such tickets without ever winning). Swarms of
impoverished families went about their business in the courtyard, and on
the upper balcony an elegantly dressed young man sang at the top of his
lungs. "All of Mexico was there," Breton later wrote . During the trip,
Breton also discovered the earthy, powerful photographs of Manuel
Alverez Bravo, some of which he published in
Minotaure
the following
year. And while visiting a dilapidated mansion - which he dubbed the
"Slum Palace" - he was wonderstruck by "an admirable sixteen- or sev-
