Robert Desnos

'1922: Near Place Blanche, in the apartment of Andre Breton, the lights are out. Only the flashing neon signs from the nightclubs on the Boulevard Clichy eerily illuminate the room. Suddenly the young man, his long hair combed back, slumps in the chair where he has fallen asleep. He electrifies his audience with sort aphoristic poems in the style of Marcel Duchamp, whom he has never met. He inspires one participant, Louis Aragon, to describe the assembled group as "surprised utensils" confronted by a poetic voice resonating as profoundly as the voice of the sibyl at Delphi to which they all feel connected as though by a huge underground sea.'

'1927: Robert Desnos, thin from lack of money and food, lives in a drafty studio inherited from Andre Masson, in Montparnasse. His best friend, Georges Malkine, is such a frequent guest from Nice that he is practically a roomate. On the walls hang a couple of works by Francis Picabia and photographs by Man Ray as well as a current watercolor-in-progress by Desnos. A wax mermaid hangs on the wall where Desnos can see her when he awakens. Her realistic head tilts backward, the eyes closed, as if in a swoon, while long hair tumbles over her shoulders and bare breasts; her torso is covered in sequins, wile her delicate, curled tail seems to be made of silk. Jazz plays on the gramophone perched on the huge table among piles of books and objects collected at flea markets: seahorses, a starfish in a jar, a crystal ball. Seated opposite each other, Desnos and Malkine work on a book with an English title: "The Night of Loveless Nights." They were so close at the time, Malkine would observe later, that he could just as well have written the poem and Desnos have drawn the illustrations.'

1936: On a saturday night in a large nineteenth-century apartment just blocks from the Seine, Robert Desnos, a glass or red wine in is hand, holds court at his weekly open house. He is surrounded at different times by friends and acquaintainces from across Paris and beyond France's national borders, including the actor couple Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud, the Cuban writer and composer Alejo Carpentier, the Doctors Theodore and Michel Fraenkel, Ernest Hemingways, whom Desnos had met through their shared sympathy for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and the singer Damia. Quick to anger, though just as quick to reconcile, this Desnos, together with his beloved wife Youki, alternates rumbas, jazz, and tango records as guests come and go. He listens closely to songs that he will play on his radio show the following week or inspire the poems he hopes musicians wil feel free to set to their own music.

1943: A man. looking perpetually tired, with a sort brush haircut, horn-rimmed glasses, and a herringbone tweed overcoat, shoulders his way to the back of a crowded cafe, wher he manages to find two seats before going to the counter to order drinks for himself and his companion. Waiting in the back of the cafe, which he has not entered in some time, abosrbing the familiar smells and sounds, sits Dr. Michael Fraenkel, the younger brother of Desnos' friend Theodore. He hope that his yellow star fails to draw attention to the fact that, according to the laws of Vichy France, he has trespassed into a space forbidden to Jews. He wonders as well if anyone knows that the man oredering their drinks is at once Robert Desnos, "Pierre Andier," and "Lucien Gallois," pseudonyms for the author of militant, provocative, and clandestine poems, published at considerable risk.

1945: One month short of his forty-fifth birthday, an emaciated man with huge dark eyes, wearing a tattoo from Auschiwitz-Birkenau and a worn striped uniform, sits in the chaotic former concentration camp of Terzin, ouside Prague. Two medical students, Josef Stuna and Alena Tesarova, look over the list of former prisoner, now patients, awaiting transport home. Stuna sees a name he recognizes and looks up at the man who is weak from dysentery and exhaustion. He aproaches him and asks, in French, "Do you know the poet Robert Desnos?" "I am Robert Desnos, the French poet," answers the man at the same time that the Czech student recognizes him from a Man Ray photograph taken twenty years earlier.

These are the anecdotes which head each of the five chapters of Katherine Conley's Robert Desnos, Surrealism and the Marvelous in Everyday life (University of Nebraska Press, 2003). Created from the first hand testimonies to his life they are perfect emblems for this fascinating and affecting book.