The Vice of Surrealism
The Abbe Gengenbach:
A Jesuit Abbe, he had fallen in love with an actress at the Odeon and
in her company frequented restaurants and dance halls. Defrocked by
his bishop, he had lost his mistress, who loved him only in his cassock,
and had happened to pick up an issue of La Revolution
surrealiste at
the moment he was thinking of suicide. Hence he did not fling himself
into the Gerardmer lake as he had planned, but entered into relations
with Breton and his friends. He was to be seen at the Dome or the
Rotonde, a flower in the buttonhole of his soutane, which he had begun
wearing again as a provocation, a woman on his lap, vilified by the
respectable passers-by whom he delighted in scandalizing. He divided
his time between a scabrous worldly life, periods of calm with a Russian
woman, an artist, in Clamart, and retreats at the Abbey of Solesmes.
When there were rumors that the prodigal was about to return to the
bosom of the Church, Gengenbach enlightened the surrealists in a letter
to Breton:
It is my custom to go several times a year to rest and recover
my spirits with the monks... and the surrealist circle is well
aware of my pronounced taste for escapades in
monasteries...As for the ecclesiastical habit, I wear it by caprice
for the moment because my suit is torn...I also find it affords
me certain advantages in initiating sadistic relations
with the
American women who pick me up in the Bois at night...
I have found no solution, no escape, no pragmatism that is
acceptable. There remains my faith in Christ, cigarettes, and the
jazz records I love--"Tea for Two," "Yearning" --and above all,
there remains surrealism.
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