Surrealism. Penelope Rosemont

communication problems affected almost the entire group; they all must have wondered about us. Why had we come? Why had we continued to attend meetings? What did we want to do? There was no way to explain it. Even to those who spoke English it was hard to express our deeply felt commitment to surrealism.

      One day, after we had been in Paris perhaps two and a half months, depressed, thinking my French would never be adequate, I suggested to Franklin that we must write something and have it translated into French to be read at a meeting. Then our friends would understand and comment. We must do it. Jean-Claude Silbermann, Benayoun and others agreed.

      I celebrated my 24th birthday in Paris on January 22. It was a gray but bright day; we spent the morning at the St. Ouen flea market in Montmartre. The market stalls were built permanently into a row of small garages; people were stamping and moving about in a lively way because of the cold; there was furniture, silver, bizarre stuff, and very few books. We went largely for the experience, not to purchase anything, but to enjoy the bizarre juxtaposition of stuff, to imagine Fanny Beznos at her stand, dressed warmly against the damp cold, the days of surrealism before World War II sandwiched into an odd period of history, the less than twenty years between the two great wars, a time of vast transformations. And now, 1965, was just twenty years after World War II ended.

      Back in the Latin Quarter, Franklin purchased a book for me on the Jardin des Plants with many engravings. In the evening, we went to the “Échaudé,” a restaurant downstairs in the rue de l’Échaudé; it served the finest onion soup gratinée imaginable. The restaurant was always packed with young people, the tables so close together it was a miracle the waiter could get through; then the rest of the evening we walked through the nearby streets glistening in the darkness.

      One morning, through our forwarded mail, Franklin received a letter from his draft board; he replied that he was on his way to Tangiers for his health and could be reached there care of American Express. For more humor, the state of Illinois wrote suspending my driver’s license for six months and Peoples Gas sent a bill for $600.00, then a fabulous amount of money for a gas bill.

      Bernard wrote they had found a new location for Solidarity Bookshop at 1941 North Larabee for $30 per month and he added that Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, was now putting out a newspaper called New Left Notes. He commented, “I’ve seen a copy and, my god, it is notes!” Further, he thought all the names in the paper looked like a roster of the ruling class. A few friends had an anarchist group meeting; John White had suggested they call themselves the “Anarchist Horde.”

      Maureen wrote from Lake Forest College that Mayor Daley and Dick Gregory had apparently been invited to the college on the same day at the same time, but confrontation was avoided when the college asked Daley to cancel. Later she wrote to mention that she had been propositioned by a multimillionaire catalog heir, when she called about her loan for the semester’s tuition. Maureen, sick of being pushed around, became assertive and raised a storm of protest.

      Meanwhile, in quest of more and warmer clothes, I purchased a brown turtleneck sweater at a classy nearby boutique called Gudule on St.-André-des-Arts for the incredible price of $35. Also, turquoise velour slacks, a fabulous luxury. The new clothes were a huge improvement.

      Franklin came down with a bad case of la grippe in January. He spent weeks sick, getting better, and then sick again. A neighborhood doctor, Dr. Robert-Henri Polge, who had his office on rue Mazarine, came and gave Franklin a going-over in a charming Sherlock Holmes manner. He spoke excellent English, prescribed some medicine, and recommended that Franklin might try to stay in bed long enough to get well. While Franklin was ill, I got Vietnamese food to go on an oval china plate with a metal cover, this place was the Hanoi, decorated with metal sculpture made from wrecked airplanes, across the street was the Saigon. We were aware that Paris was not a “to go” city. Although the phrase book plainly said “à porté,” when we tried to get a Coke “à porté,” we were ignored. Finally, the exasperated bartender said in perfect English, “How are you going to carry it, in your hands? This isn’t the U.S., we don’t have paper cups.”

       The Situation of Surrealism in the U.S.

      Franklin sat scribbling in his bed, as Marat had in his tub, and we began the task of getting together our document for the Surrealist Group. We now had plenty to think about and talk about. What should we say? The document, finished only a week or so before we left Paris, was called “The Situation of Surrealism in the U.S.” It began: “The splendid Watts Insurrection of 1965 should be seen not as an isolated fragment of revolt but as part of a deeper, more complex pattern woven on the other side of the ‘American dream,’” and it pointed out that “as Herbert Marcuse has shown in his important work Eros and Civilization, the material conditions in the world today are historically ready for a revolution greater in scope than ever conceived by parties and groups of the traditional Left, a revolution aiming at the total liberation of man or, in Marcuse’s words, ‘a non-repressive civilization.’”

      “Everywhere one sees the formation of associations of resistance and combat (by American Indians, by gypsies, by Mexican Americans, by individuals opposing war, etc.).”

      Meanwhile, capitalism was “tending toward the manipulation and control not only of the means of production, the machinery of the state, the military, the press, the trade unions and organized religion, but also of the sciences, of art, of every aspect of everyday life, state and ruling-class power . . . becoming more and more totalitarian.”

      Revolution was necessary; “all true art, all poetry, every human action worthy of the name must be directed . . . toward the earliest possible realization of this revolution. . . . We recognize in Surrealism . . . a potent weapon of offense and a means of research, invention and discovery which can admirably serve to discredit, deface, dismantle and ultimately destroy the limitations imposed on man by immediate reality, expose the extreme precariousness of the human condition, and thus lend invaluable assistance to the realization of the fundamental tasks of the entire revolutionary movement.”

      We recognized that the situation of surrealism in the U.S. was in many ways different from that in France, that we were involved in a new period of “une vague des rêves” and “pure psychic automatism.”

      We planned to do a journal, a surrealist exhibition, an international bulletin, and vowed “we shall disturb ceaselessly and without pity the complacency of the American people.” We concluded: “Elements of a new mythology are everywhere around us. It is up to us to give them a reality. More than ever, we can say with certainty: Surrealism is what will be.”

      We gave our text to Jean-Claude, and he undertook the task of getting it translated and passing it around the group. A slightly abridged version appeared in October 1967 in the second issue of the new surrealist journal, L’Archibras.

      It was a delight to realize that we had been there when L’Archibras was still a dream, when it was being named. I like to think that perhaps the students of the Sorbonne read our statement in L’Archibras and found there a confirmation of their own aspirations, ideas that expressed themselves in the uprising of May ’68. In Chicago, we printed the “The Situation of Surrealism in the U.S.” in our wall-poster Surrealist Insurrection in January 1968 and in the first Black Swan book, The Morning of a Machine Gun that came running off the press by chance in May ’68 as we heard and followed breathlessly the events of May in Paris, hoping that our friends in France would have the pleasure of being part of a successful revolution.

      The threads of choice and chance flew back and forth across time and space, making these exhilarating days and delirious nights.

      On our tiny radio we listened to Radio Luxembourg and an illegal station from England that was broadcasting from a ship in the middle of the English Channel. In every café, we heard the Rolling Stones on the radio or jukebox, “I can’t get no satisfaction!” Sometimes they played it when we walked in, a comment on our long hair and Franklin’s leather jacket. There was no doubt, however, that the Stones were popular. A kid working in the Italian restaurant downstairs asked us what “Hey, hey, hey, that’s what I say” meant in French. I translated. Something was definitely