Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

Leonora meets the illusionist Magritte on two separate occasions, finding him well dressed and withdrawn. There is gossip within the group that his mother’s suicide, when he was only thirteen, formed his personality. He saw her when they brought her back out of the Sambre River. ‘It’s not so much that he paints well,’ comments Leonora, ‘as that he thinks very well. He told me his only enemies are his bad paintings.’

They say that he covered the faces in The Lovers with the white dress of his drowned mother.

Péret and Breton are inseparable. Smaller than Breton and bald, while André’s head of hair radiates splendidly, Benjamin follows him into parties and meetings, never acknowledging that he is the more audacious of the two. Twenty years earlier, he was the first to attack the academics, the traditionalists, the famous. He referred to Maurice Barrès in such slanderous terms that he offended not only the bien pensants but even the Dadaists. At Anatole France’s funeral, Péret and his friends handed out a leaflet written by Louis Aragon, inviting the mourners to kick the corpse. The press called them ‘jackals’. It then occurred to him to turn up at a demonstration wearing a gas mask and Nazi uniform, shouting: ‘Long live France and long live French fries!’ He had the habit of attending official events with a bag of tomatoes, cabbages and eggs which he hurled with expert aim.

André renounces the hypnosis sessions directed by Benjamin Péret, as they had already turned violent years earlier. It became more and more difficult to rouse René Crevel, who repeatedly attempted and finally succeeded in committing suicide. And Robert Desnos, who pursued Paul Eluard with a knife. It was out of the question for Max and Leonora to agree to hypnosis sessions: ‘We are both too cerebral,’ he jokes.

Of them all, Leonora feels closest to Breton, who lived through the atrocities of the First World War and then treated patients who had suffered severe clinical depression. His worst side is his intensity, and his desire to control everything. To her, he seems like a good lion, whose mane she enjoys caressing.

Man Ray continues to insist he wants to photograph her and she continues to refuse. Max Ernst warns her: ‘He is fierce and could kill you if you don’t agree.’

‘Let him kill me!’

‘André, I think,’ Leonora begins, ‘that nobody here belongs to my world. Sometimes it makes me happy, but at others I’m afraid of losing my mind.’

‘Fear of madness is the last frontier you have to cross. Wounded minds are infinitely superior to sane ones. A mind in torment is creative. Eighteen years ago, on returning from the war with Soupault and Aragon, our minds were preoccupied by the aftermath of battle, and we discovered that automatism in art can be not only healing, but also creative.’

‘As for me I was educated in Logic.’

‘Me too, and much more than you, because I am both French and a doctor, little Leonora. You are a lot like Nadja — wealthy, arbitrary, and for these reasons, irrational.’

Leonora has no idea who Nadja is. Breton’s wife, Jacqueline Lamba, cuts her short.

‘He told me, too, that I was his “Nadja” and never introduced me as a painter. And “Nadja” ended up in a mental asylum without him so much as lifting a finger to save her.’

‘Say what you like, your husband is a good man.’

‘Yes, he is a good man, but the person who runs our home, receives our friends, empties the ashtrays and sweeps up after them is me.’

At 42 Rue Fontaine, Breton houses a splendid collection of African and Oceanic art, and out of the blue the Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam informs him: ‘I too could also be included in your collection.’

‘First paint your own totems, your own masks, your own Cuban essence.’

Ernst is in fashion, a man of the world, and his new lover amplifies his cosmopolitanism by being a gorgeous upper-class Englishwoman. Marcel Rochas invites them round and when Leonora asks: ‘What shall I wear?’ Princess Marie de Gramont answers: ‘Child, all you need to wear is your beauty.’ Leonora follows her advice to the letter and wraps herself in a sheet. At the high point of the ball, she lets the toga fall and stands naked in front of everyone. They are evicted on the spot.

In Paris, Max launches her into danger, teaching her never to doubt her desires: ‘Defy and you will overcome, Leonora. Life is for the audacious.’ Leonora tells him the visions she had as a child, and he recommends her to paint the Minotaur, the wild boar, and the horses from her father’s stable. Leonora has already been far more courageous than most of the Surrealists. ‘You have gone much further than anyone else you see around you here, and everyone knows it,’ her lover tells her. She is received with admiration, they want to hear what she has to say, read what she writes, look at what she paints. Max proudly displays her, calls her his beloved of the wind, his mare of the night.

‘So you are going to cross the River Lethe with her?’ Breton asks, with irony.

‘She is my Lethe.’

The Surrealists’ social life is intense. None of them worry if they sleep all day and stay out all night. The café is the altar at which André Breton officiates. His acolytes approach with reverence. Breton distributes indulgences, then condemns and sentences, attracts and repels. His congregation applauds Dalí’s expulsion following the accusation that he flirts with fascism, excuses Catholicism, and has an unlimited passion for money. When he is brought to judgement, Dalí attends with a thermometer in his mouth and a blanket around his shoulders. The courtroom descends into farce.

‘I love Gala more than my mother, more than my father, more than Picasso and even more than money,’ Dalí proclaims.

It is years since Antonin Artaud distanced himself from the group, yet he remains a target for their insults, the most acidic of which is voiced by Eluard: ‘Opportunistic scum.’

At the start, Breton charged Artaud with running the Bureau des Recherches Surréalistes , installing him at 15 Rue de Grenelle. ‘Artaud will pull together his researches better than anyone else because he is a universal genius, even if he never changes his sheets,’ André explained. All went well until, in La Revolution Surréaliste , Artaud published a letter insulting Pope Pius XI. Breton praised it. Artaud then published a second open letter, addressed to the Dalai Lama, in which he was invited to levitate, which Breton likewise accepted. A third, directed to the directors of Europe’s mental asylums with the intention of persuading them to liberate all their inmates, incited Breton to close down the Bureau .

As so often happens with certain liberators, the authoritarian and explosive Surrealist leader dismissed him.

Artaud travelled to Mexico in search of a truth now lost in Europe, which the Tarahumara people encountered through the peyote plant. In the capital, María Izquierdo and Lola Álvarez Bravo took him in hand, gathering him up in a state of near-fatal starvation and alcoholisation on the pavement of Calle Guadiana, in the district of Cuauhtemoc. On his return to Paris he lived in the most abject poverty, rejected by all. ‘He no longer has any teeth,’ commented Picasso. No-one noticed that Artaud, in discovering the Tarahumara, had brought a new dimension to Surrealism.

Leonora and Max invite Picasso and Marcel Duchamp to their house, the latter reluctant to leave his chess game. Benjamin Péret was inseparable from Breton until a redhead called Remedios appeared in his life and the two men began to see less of each other. ‘It seems as if the Spanish girl is very shy.’ Rue Fontaine was again filled with delusions and deceptions, and new trios formed as they had years earlier with Eluard, Gala and Max, causing Eluard to comment: ‘They have no idea what it means to be married to a Russian. I now prefer him to her.’