André Breton's "Martinique'

Fascists behaving badly

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

“Quickly the rumor spread that the first people to be called before the newly arrived officers had been more or less insulted. To a highly distinguished young scientist invited to continue his research in New York, they said: ‘Off to Pointe-Rouge (the name of one of the prison camps on the island)…. No, you are not French, you are a Jew, and the Jews who call themselves Frenchmen are worse than foreign Jews.’ To a Czech journalist, ‘A fine profession! Well, now you are through with your war!’ And when the accused offered to prove his continued loyalty to the French cause: ‘Off to Pointe-Rouge. You are in Martinique, where anything goes’.”
—André Breton, Martinique.

Here, in one of the finest passages that André Breton ever wrote, we see the essence of the fascist— the hatred, the witless sarcasm, the love of the exercise of power without fear of retaliation.

In Howard Hawks’s screen Hemingway fantasia, To Have and Have Not, Humphrey Bogart could outwit and, in the last reel, outgun the fascists of Martinique. But in the depressing world of reality, things didn’t go so smoothly. The followers of Marshal Pétain were able to operate a barbed wire paradise in the middle of the Caribbean; and while it might satisfy the small boy in us to believe that, after 1941, President Roosevelt sent a boatload of U.S. Marines to put an end to such witticisms, it didn’t happen. By 1945, no doubt every one of these shits-in-uniform was vying with each other to testify to his undying devotion to Charles DeGaulle and the forces of Free France. Pétain suffered and Laval died that the others, though equally bad, might live.

As Woody Allen neatly pointed out in his Crimes and Misdemeanors, the bad guys don’t always get theirs, and sometimes it’s the living saint who goes blind. While Breton notes the behavior of his Martinique “hosts,” he certainly doesn’t call upon Roosevelt to let loose the Marines. Breton seems to recognize that fascists, like the poor, will always be with us.

(Of course, Breton was quite dictatorial in his self-appointed stance as Leader of the Surrealist Movement--a title which incidentally could have as easily gone to Tristan Tzara, had Breton not seen fit to bump him out of line. He regularly "excommunicated" from the movement any and all who dissented from his vision. All of which suggests that maybe Breton didn’t disapprove of dictatorial treatment so much as he rued being on the receiving end of it.)

Martinique is a curious affair, less a unified work than a miscellany consisting of prose poems, literary essays, reportage and one lonely poem. Its works are united by the fact that all were written by Breton during his brief stay on the island. With this type of production, the quality of the individual pieces will vary.

Breton’s long essay on the Martinique poet Aimé Césaire is very fine. The prose poems are not without interest, and the accompanying line drawings by André Masson are always worth a second or third look. But in the end, Martinique is a worthwhile addition to the literature of Surrealism in translation chiefly because it talks about an aspect of Surrealism that we don’t much hear about: Surrealists as a persecuted political minority in the opening years of World War II.

Indeed most of the Surrealists and their fellow travelers were forced to flee France and seek shelter abroad. Some came to America, others went to Mexico. Those who remained in France either went underground, joining the resistance (Paul Eluard, René Char) or wound up interned and dying in concentration camps (Robert Desnos, Max Jacob).

For obvious reasons, Breton didn’t remain in Martinique any longer than he had to. But this volume is an intriguing memento of a hectic stopover.



To read responses, click here.