LITMIR.BIZ

      It looked as though a medical future also awaited a third poet, a man of the same age, Philippe Soupault. He came from the family of a famous doctor, and studied jurisprudence, but his greatest enthusiasm was poetry. In 1914, while in London, he wrote his first notable poem: “Chanson du mal aimé”. In 1916, he obtained a deferment, but was then drafted into the artillery and sent to officers’ school, though he never actually got to the front. Soupault spent many weeks in hospital after the officers had been given an anti-typhoid serum in an experiment. There he wrote poems which he sent to Apollinaire. In 1917, Apollinaire published a poem of Soupault’s in the journal SIC, and introduced him to Breton and Aragon. None of them was thinking about medicine any more. The three poets planned to found a literary journal.

      The journal Littérature came out in February 1919, taking over from SIC and Nord-Sud. Many in the world of letters hailed the birth of the journal, including Marcel Proust. As well as their own poems, the three printed those of Apollinaire, Isidore Ducasse, Rimbaud and the Zürich Dadaist Tzara. An unknown serviceman, Paul Éluard, submitted a poem to the journal. His real name was Eugène Grendel, but he used his maternal grandmother’s surname, Éluard, as a pseudonym. After he left school, he contracted tuberculosis and spent two years in Switzerland in a sanatorium. In Davos, Éluard met a Russian girl, Elena Diakonova, whom he married in 1917. Elena entered the world of the Dadaists, and later, by which time she was known as Gala, “the muse of the Surrealists. “At the front, Éluard was exposed to German poison gas, and, following a period in the hospital, he made his way to Paris.

      Later, after he arrived in Paris, Picabia joined the group, followed by Duchamp as well. In the spring of 1919, Littérature published the first chapters of a work by Soupault and Breton entitled “Magnetic Fields”. They wrote these pieces together, and one can only guess at the authorship of the individual poems. Soupault later stated that in the course of his experiments, he had tried using “automatic writing” – a method which makes it possible to become liberated from the weight of criticism and the habits formed at school, and which generates images as opposed to logical calculations:

      Breton wrote that the “Magnetic Fields” constituted the first Surrealist, as opposed to Dadaist, work, although Surrealism was destined to appear officially only in 1924. Granted, one can find there much evidence of the influence of the French Symbolists and Lautréamont. Granted, the nihilist character of Dada is still present. However, the poems of Soupault and Breton did not make a complete break, either with logic, romanticism, or reflection on aspects of real life and modern times. A new style of literature and fine art was prefigured in the combination of all these qualities.

      James Guy, Venus on Sixth Avenue, 1937.

      Oil on paperboard, 59.7 × 74.9 cm.

      Columbus Museum, Columbus.

      The appearance of Tzara in the home of Francis Picabia in Paris coincided with the start of an event staged by the Parisian Dadaists. Tzara’s experience of work in the Cabaret Voltaire instilled new energy into the plans of Breton and Soupault’s set. The first evening took place on January 23, 1920, in the hall of the Palais des Fêtes at the Porte Saint-Martin. The show included a reading by Breton of poems about artists, and a display of paintings by Léger, Gris and de Chirico. When Picabia’s pictures were shown to the public, their obscene content provoked a storm of indignation. The audience left the hall, and the organisers felt that Dadaist art had brought them closer together. They were very young, they regarded the audience with contempt, and they were openly aiming to destroy the rules and norms that had been inherited from the past. They usually got together at the home of Picabia, where they discussed their plans.

      The second public event took place in the Grand Palais on February 5. Tzara published a provocative announcement in the newspapers that Charlie Chaplin was going to be present, and this brought in the crowds. The Dadaist manifestos also sounded provocative when they were read aloud. “The audience reacted with fury”, Ribemont-Dessaignes later recalled. “The organisers of the evening had achieved their main objective. It was essential to incite hostility, even at the risk of being taken for utter fools.”[32] Someone accused them of promoting German propaganda. All the same, the owner of the Club du Faubourg in the Paris suburb of Puteaux offered the Dadaists his hall for the next event, which took place two days later on February 7. A naughty speech by Aragon incited a squabble between the anarchists and the socialists, which was brought to an end by Breton’s reading of Tristan Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto 1918”. Afterwards a demonstration was held in the People’s University in the suburb of Saint-Antoine. The following evening, on March 27, there was a musical and theatrical event at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre. There, Breton read aloud Picabia’s “Cannibal Manifesto”,

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