introductionxxxixweapon. Breton and several others took refuge in Marseilles at the Bel Air
mansion, owned by the American Jane Gold; it was there that Varian Fry
ran the Committee for Political Refugees, orchestrating plans for the
foremost intellectuals to leave France for the United States. Breton was
among the French refugees in New York, which was not to his liking (he
preferred the West and Native American culture). In New York, he was
briefly associated with Charles Henri Ford’s small elegant magazine of art
and literature called View. Home to the Abstract Expressionists and their
expressive personal visions, the magazine occupied an opposite pole from
the Partisan Review and The Nation. With the help of the American artist
David Hare, Breton, who learned no English, set up a rival magazine
called VVV, where the Surrealists could publish, as they often did, in
French.
Although Breton managed from his New York headquarters to keep
up his and the group’s enthusiasm for collective manifestations and the
seriously played games of Surrealism, he returned to France as soon as it
was safe to do so. But once there, he discovered that conditions were no
longer as conducive to the kind of poetry he had championed. In re-
sponse, he turned toward a more mystical context, still invoking chance
and the everyday marvelous, surrounded now by a younger group of
adepts.
In the meantime, Surrealism had spread internationally. The Martini-
can journal Tropiques displayed a Surrealism of negritude that was as
vivid as anything that had preceded it in Paris. Aimé Césaire, René Ménil,
Léon-Gontran Damas, and other Francophone poets held an ongoing
belief in the marvelous, that is, the power of surprise, in the Surrealist
sense of the word (le merveilleux), the overwhelming encounter with a
person, an object, or an event that can happen in everyday life to someone
in a state of readiness or expectation (disponibilité). This openness was to
endure beyond the political upheavals of the French presence in Algeria
and other tribulations from which poetry often seemed an escape. Mar-
tinican Surrealism was a memorial to su√ering. Césaire’s Cahier d’un
retour au pays natal (Return of a Manchild to the Promised Land) is a
noble record of the poetry of the heart, as are many other postcolonial
poems in French. Latter-day manifestations of Surrealism, such as those
of Joyce Mansour in her violent texts and the incendiary prose of Annie
Le Brun, bear witness to the ongoing force of the Surrealist spirit.
In 1966, the year of Breton’s death, it was apparent that the modern
poetic spirit was not monolithic: the new experiments di√ered, ranging
from the place-oriented poems of René Char, who had been a Resistance
leader, celebrated for his poetic war journal (‘‘Feuillets d’Hypnos’’) and
his lyric evocation of Provence, to l’objeu (the object game) of Francis