Surrealism’s Declining Years: An Interview with Monique Fong
Monique Fong and Octavio Paz, Paris c. 1950.
In Caesura’s inaugural print issue, Art & Freedom, Roberto Calasso wrote in his newly translated article “Adorno, Surrealism & ‘Mana’”:
[T]he true principle of Surrealism is not the reality of art, but rather its own destruction in the fulfilment of life: that is its greatness, too weakly defended — to tend towards “that which is more than simple form,” the utopian future. But that passion came to terms too easily. When it was affirmed in the mouth of the movement’s own Father Breton — “Transform the world,’ Marx said. ‘Change life,’ Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us.” — he did not fear enough for the absolute powerlessness of speech in the face of a praxis that was raising executioners for the masters of the Word. In this sense, the cold irony of Nizan and Sartre is completely justified. […] How little the Surrealists were really able to realize of their project is today all too clear; no one can take ironically, as it was meant to be taken, the title of their first review: Littérature.
As Monique Fong says herself, she is a very rare person, one of only three people left to have met both Andre Breton and Octavio Paz. A young translator and intellectual in post-war France, she encountered the Surrealists in a moment of historical transition, when their big fires were “only embers.” While her peers read Sartre, she followed her curiosity for a movement whose time had passed but which nevertheless continued to stir the heart. I would like to thank Mrs. Fong for taking the time to share her reflections with us so that we at Caesura may better understand our own fascination with that century old ember — and for indulging my own interest in Breton’s colorful opinions on music.
—Erin Hagood
//
I'm a very rare person at this point. Not because I'm 95, but because I think there are only three people left in this world who have known both Breton and Octavio Paz.
I was a member of the Surrealist group, as was Nathaniel Tarn — under another name at the time — when we were 23, 24, something like that. And all of our contemporaries died before the age of 70, which is really not old. There are very few survivors. If you knew Octavio Paz, you did not necessarily live in France. People knew him in Mexico, in India, in the States. I'm pretty sure that the only people to know both Paz and Breton are, at this point, Jean-Clarence Lambert, Nathaniel Tarn, and me.
How did you come to know Breton, and how did you come to be a part of the Surrealist Salon?
Well, it was way back when I was 18, something like that. My parents had a friend who actually was a research chemist. But he had been born in 1874, way back. And when he was 40 years old — he was about one generation before most of the Surrealists — he was interested in their work in the 20s, which is about the time I was born, and he had, I think, even supported them financially. And I know he had all their publications of the 20s, 30s, 40s. And when I was finishing high school, he gave me Nadja to read, which is not something that was in my parents' library. So, he gave me Nadja, and I was very grateful, I gave it back. And then from Nadja, I read Arcanum 17, which for me is one of the major, major books in my life. And then I really wanted to meet Breton, and time went on, and I went to college. I wanted to meet him and wondered whether there was still a group meeting. For most of my high school — actually, I finished high school the day we were liberated, or the year before — France was under German occupation, so there wasn't that much interesting liveliness going on. And it so happened that I was invited to dinner at the house of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the sociologist, who was the husband of my daughter's friend's mother. And he said, "Oh, your mother wants to meet Breton. That's alright, I can invite her to dinner with him. I was 23, something like that, and I didn't say a word. I was totally overwhelmed, and somehow or another, I was invited. There was a letter I had written Breton, he finally wrote back, and I met him. And the day I met him, he took me along to the café where the others met, and I started going there once or twice or three times a week. And that was the end of '49, the beginning of the 1950s.
You said that Arcanum 17 was a major book in your life. What about it made it so central for you?
I recently ordered a reproduction of the book. It's just such, such an incredible book. It's so beautiful. It touches so many things. In fact, I was talking at NYU one day and somebody was saying, "How could women like Surrealists?" You really didn't read them because they treat them as such objects, as a service, as an asset. But that was a few decades ago. I said, "Yes, but can you imagine the dreams we had of being that woman they described, that we will never be?" I've known the woman who is [in Arcanum 17], Paz said she was a wonderful person. I've never looked at her with the same eyes. But it wasn't given whether we were already working, or housewives, or anything. There was no way we could be like the descriptions of women by poets.
It’s funny, I had that same experience you’re describing when I read Mad Love.
You know the funny thing is that she wasn't that incredible. Really!
Well, I suppose nobody can live up to the descriptions of the women in those books…. What was your experience of the Surrealist Salons?
Octavio Paz wrote somewhere that at the time he met the Surrealists, which was roughly the same time, the big Surrealist fire was only embers, and it's true. It wasn't that exciting because they were not. There was Breton and he was remarkable. And there was Péret, who was not a conversationalist. But there was nobody terribly brilliant, and the others didn't come much. I mean Max Ernst came for a meeting, he didn't live in France anymore. There have been so many breaks. When I recall the people of my generation, I remember a letter Breton wrote to Duchamp, who read it to me when I visited when I lived in Washington Heights. And in the letter Breton said, "It might be my fate to end up my life surrounded by idiots." He knew, I mean, he knew! But he needed an entourage. Breton could not live like Duchamp, he needed to be surrounded by people who were responding, echoing, but he knew that if you compared the new generation to the people that had been around him in the 20s, 30s, 40s, even in New York, that the people that were around him in the 50s at the core were not that interesting. And the interesting ones, like André Pieyre de Mandiargues, didn't come as regularly. So, he knew. The letter will never be found because Duchamp threw everything away until he got married, and his wife kept everything. But I remember Duchamp showing me the letter and he said, "This is what he says, 'I've ended my life surrounded by imbeciles.'" So, it was very sad, but it was true, and he knew it.
The old meeting place of the Surrealists in Paris. Agence Vu.
Why do you think it was that the newer generation was so much less interesting than those that preceded it?
If you know anything about the Surrealists, you know that they constantly break up. And not every generation has people like Breton and who were Surrealists. Being a Surrealist, maybe to some younger people, may seem passé. When I was 20 years old, the big thing in France, at least in Paris, was to be existentialist. I mean, that was the fashion. It never interested me particularly. After all, at this point the manifestos were written almost 100 years ago, so people were interested in something else. There were people Breton's age, roughly, maybe a half dozen or less, and then there was a whole bunch of us who were in our 20s, and I would say none of us were as interesting, except possibly [Nathaniel] Tarn. He decided, after all, to write in English. Sometimes they took pictures because Giacometti visited or because Marcel [Duchamp] visited. But other than the visitors, the basic group wasn't that fascinating.
So why did you become interested in Surrealism as opposed to Existentialism or something else?
It came naturally to me. How could I put it? There was a restaurant in New York called The Blue Orange. It's called The Blue Orange because oranges are not blue, but there is a poem by Éluard where he said the world is blue like an orange. I think that bringing some things together that are disparate, that normally don't go together, creates a space in-between that is more creative than saying an orange is orange or an orange is round. And I think it was the way I felt when I was still in high school. You can't turn in a paper that says that necessarily, but it was a natural inclination for me, which might be why this friend of my parents, who actually gave me my first Rimbaud when I was 16, felt that I would be interested in Surrealism because he knew what it was about, and I was.
Do you think that history has affected Surrealism? And its ability to bring forth great poetry and great art?
I think it's so bizarre now. I won't say that Surrealism, as they described it 100 years ago, is mainstream, but if you take shop windows or even things people think are not Surrealist at all, they would have been shocking 100 years ago to be put together because they didn't go together. People get accustomed to not necessarily seeing Dalí or Max Ernst but an advertising artists inspired by their mood, like Tiffany's windows. People might not have known that they could possibly have been inspired by Surrealism. They would not have been possible at the beginning of the 20th century, I think. They allow things to go together, and we accept it, but for most people it would have been jarring before. Because after all, I was born with Surrealism which means, as I quoted Paz, by the time I could meet them, Surrealism was no longer fire, it was embers because the shock had been created. Now, of course, what would have happened if there hadn't been a war? Things got so upset. People went into exile and into hiding for four years. And so when Breton came back he, to some extent, was out of step with the younger people, people between him and me. The goal goes on for some reason, which I didn't take part in. But I think that Existentialism answered people's questions better in 1945.
André Breton, Max Morise, Jeannette Ducrocq Tanguy, Pierre Naville, Benjamin Péret, Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, Cadavre Exquis, 1928, MoMA.
What was the question people had that Existentialism could answer but Surrealism couldn’t?
To deal with the world the way it was. I don't know because I was really not a fully independent adult there, yet. First of all, politics became extremely important because people had to justify to themselves not actually being as heroic as they would have liked to be under the German occupation. Things go on. I mean, the Germans actually had a number of interesting poets then, of my generation, that were pretty different, and they had not been touched by Surrealism. It was a very fresh thing by the time. Max Ernst stayed in the United States after the war for a while, at least, and then went back but did not go back to meetings again. I would not have been surprised if people at the level of Max Ernst thought that the people of my generation at the cafés were less interesting, which was because they definitely were.
So the war and the politics of the war in some way demobilized Surrealism?
I guess so. Do you know that painter, [Roberto] Matta? Well, he was a Surrealist, and after he left he never went back. Things get undone because people go on slightly differently. And Breton was very bossy, let's say, very domineering. So it was easier for him to be surrounded by people who were one generation younger and acted like disciples. And he had turned against the Communist Party, which is the thing not to do, in the 1940s. So, he didn't speak to Éluard, he didn't speak to Aragon. [René] Char didn't come back to Paris. Some died, some lost interest, some were less interesting. By the time Octavio Paz and I started going, which was 1949–50, as he said, the big Surrealist fire was nothing but embers.
I just have one more question for you, Monique, about a remark you made in our email correspondence. What is it that Breton said about music? You wrote that Breton said that music was the worst art form, or something to that effect.
He detested music, but then Breton could not just say, "I don't like music," he had to find reasons. He wrote a letter to the then-director of the Museum of Modern Art. And he called Hegel and everything to the rescue to prove that music is an inferior art. I remember the first time that Nathaniel Tarn came to my house, way back when. I think the first thing he said to me was "Well, why did you turn off the radio?" And I remember I told him, "Because I thought you were a Surrealist, and you didn't like music." At the time he was 22 and I was 23. But I thought he really didn't like music. I remember on another occasion they took Elisa Breton one day to a church in Paris. And Breton was so indignant. And you know why they took her to a church? To listen to music. To Breton, it was almost worse than to take her to church because of the church. He was indignant.
And so he wrote that stupid letter. Now, I don't think Duchamp went to a concert either, but Breton being the kind of person he was, he had to write to the Director of the Museum of Modern Art about why music was an inferior art. And so I was embarrassed to tell a young Surrealist that I was actually listening to music on the radio. //
Transcribed by Tatyana Skalany
Pictured (left to right): Fernando de Szyszlo, Blanca Varela, Monique Fong, Klaus Wust, c. 1958.