Surrealism. Penelope Rosemont

just as we were shaking up the world a little. Heady day to be there. Never will forget it.

       three

       Paris Days – Winter to Spring

      Our counterculture bookshop group in general had been thinking more and more about a cultural critique, about the synthesis of anthropology, Freud, and Marxism that for us centered around surrealism. Herbert Marcuse’s work Eros and Civilization and its discussion of Freud was important to us, especially his concept of surplus repression. There has been a concerted attack on Freud, an attempt to discredit Freud and especially discredit the idea of the repressiveness of civilization. The Right sees this not altogether incorrectly as the basis of the ’60s radicalism. After all aren’t we the freest people imaginable? We have the freedom to buy anything we want. What else is freedom? The entire concept of the repressiveness of society has been dismissed. A mistake.

      By December 1965, Franklin and I thought IWW efforts were slowing down and were eager to go to Paris. Robert Green and Lester Doré were already traveling there and sending back reports. Lester sent Provo and Revo literature from Amsterdam and wrote that there was a tremendous youth scene. Maurice Nadeau’s History of Surrealism had just come out in English and we read with enthusiasm, “the surrealist state of mind or, better still surrealist activity is eternal. Understood as a certain tendency, not to transcend but to penetrate reality, to ‘arrive at an ever more precise and at the same time ever more passionate apprehension of the tangible world.’” I read Nadja: a mysterious and sensuous tribute to a free-spirited woman. “Who am I? . . . perhaps everything amounts to knowing who or what I ‘haunt,’” Breton had written. Fascinated by the idea of wandering the streets of Paris directed by chance alone. What would André Breton be like, I wondered?

      First, we planned to go to London and visit the anarchist Freedom Press there. We expected to be gone six months or more, spending most of the time in London, maybe a week in Paris. Only a week in Paris because we didn’t know anyone in Paris that we could stay with and felt our French needed a lot of work. Further, we were shy about meeting André Breton. We were just kids; we hadn’t really done anything we considered significant yet. But drawn to surrealism, we wanted to go and see for ourselves what was happening. What would the surrealists be doing, thinking, would we be able to meet them? Would we be able to meet Breton? He was nearly seventy, but still living at 42 rue Fontaine where he had lived when he wrote Nadja. We wondered, would we be able to see the famous 42 rue Fontaine?

      When we left it was indeed dismal days for the bookshop; Solidarity Bookshop was in storage, driven out of 713 Armitage by irate neighbors, the school board, police, red squad, etc. Our tolerant landlord, Jerry the hairdresser, was visited by the FBI and he worried his beauty shop business would suffer. We were determined, however, not to give up. Tor Faegre and Bernard Marszalek were going to search for a new storefront. Larry and Dotty DeCoster would soon arrive on the scene. At Union Station we boarded the train for New York. From there our plane left for London.

       New York, December 1965

      During our brief stop in New York we met Nicolas Calas at his apartment. Probably the tallest surrealist, Calas was close to seven feet. From his coffee table I picked up a copy of the surrealist journal La Brèche; in it I found the names Franklin Rosemont and Larry DeCoster. Their friend Claude Tarnaud had sent a letter to Robert Benayoun in Paris, describing his meeting with them. The letter had been published two years ago, in 1963. What a surprise, we were astonished, it seemed a remarkable sign.

      We left and strolled randomly through the streets of New York unmindful of the raging blizzard about us. We came upon a man standing on a corner in the snow near Rockefeller Center, but standing there so rigid and so tall, I thought he was a statue, wearing a long cape that flowed in the wind, a Viking helmet, shoulders and beard frosted over with snow. Even up close I couldn’t tell if he was alive. So I said, “Who are you?”

      “I am God!” came a deep, booming voice with long pauses between words. I had to smile; I was not expecting to run into a god standing on a street corner in a Manhattan snowstorm, “but people call me Moondog.”

      “What’s that you’re carrying?” said I.

      “Music, music that I wrote. Do you want to buy some?” Well, it turns out this was Moondog, a remnant of the old beat scene gone practically catatonic on a street corner.

      Then to the airport and on to our BOAC plane; this was our first flight, first time up in the air, but I wasn’t frightened, I was elated because of my desire to see the Earth from the air, because of my excitement of going, going across the ocean, going to England, going to France, going on a great adventure, doing it together with my lover.

      Leaving just before Christmas, the plane was not crowded. It was a long flight, perhaps eight hours; the plane was so empty we stretched out, lying down over three seats, and slept a bit. Mostly we enjoyed being in cloudland and staring down at the gray endless ocean and dreaming of what could be awaiting us on the other side of the vast wilderness of water.

       Our Adventures at Heathrow Airport

      At Heathrow Airport in London, we got in line, we were dressed in simple beatnik style, black turtleneck shirts and jeans. Franklin was wearing his black leather jacket; I was wearing a fringed black tweed shawl Franklin’s mother made for me; it made me look spectacularly countercultural. We waited in line impatiently to get through customs. Finally, it was our turn; the agent asked us, “How long are you planning to stay?”

      “Three to six months.”

      “How much luggage have you got?”

      “Four pieces.”

      “Rather a lot of luggage, don’t you think?” he commented and asked, “How much money have you got?”

      “A thousand dollars.”

      “What are your occupations?”

      Franklin answered, “Musician.”

      “Mmm,” said the agent, our first clear indication of hostility. “We’ve rather enough musicians here already! What about the draft?”

      Franklin answered, “I’ve got a student deferment.”

      Agent, “Well, you can’t very well be a student and be here at the same time, can you? You can’t do it in this country at least. I think you are trying to avoid the draft, trying to emigrate to our country.”

      We insisted this was not the case. It didn’t work.

      “We’re going to send you back on the next plane.”

      “Wait,” I interrupted, “I want to appeal, I want to see someone else about this.”

      “Well, there’s no one else to see tonight, we’re going to keep you in detention overnight and then back you go.”

      Very dejected, we were shunted off to overnight detention in some cement-block rooms that looked like motel rooms but with no windows, and were locked in for the night. We weren’t the only ones; there were quite a few people from Pakistan who were likewise enjoying the hospitality of Heathrow.

      In the morning, however, we were ready with our arguments; these would probably have fallen on deaf ears except we had purchased only a one-way ticket and had come on BOAC, the British state-owned airline. Therefore, because of international agreements, they would have to return us at their own expense. We were escorted around the airport from bureaucrat to bureaucrat accompanied by an entourage of two guards (so we wouldn’t escape) and two luggage carriers. This situation attracted plenty of attention from other travelers who thought we must be bank robbers or at least rock stars. In retrospect it has provided us with a lot of amusement.

      After arguing with three different sets of officials I finally said, “How about if we purchase a ticket to Paris; you can ship us on to Paris and you’ll be rid of us!” This definitely appealed to them, passing this bureaucratic problem on to the French; we put out