1: A Brief History of Dada
Tristan Tzara says that Dada was born in 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. There is some dispute about this place and date, but Tzara's word ought to be final: after all, he founded Dada. He is a Rumanian, small and graceful, who belongs to a family of formerly rich merchants; educated in France and Switzerland, he adopted French as his native tongue. It is wholly fitting that this new school of art and letters should have been founded in a cabaret, by a young man so thoroughly expatriated that he could not speak more than three words of his native language. It is fitting, too, that Dada should have transferred itself to the two banks of the Seine.
But Tzara was still in Switzerland when he wrote the Dada Manifesto in March 1918. At that time André Breton and Louis Aragon, who would later become the French leaders of the movement, were serving at the front. When these very young soldiers came home after the Armistice, they joined forces with Philippe Soupault, Paul Eluard and others to found the magazine Littérature, which soon became known as a Dadaist review. At the beginning of 1920 they formally invited Tzara to Paris.
That was the period of the great Dada manifestations. At a matinee on January 23 Tzara was introduced to the public. He read aloud a newspaper article, while an electric bell kept ringing so that nobody could hear what he said. A meeting was held at the Grand Palace of the Champs Elysées; several thousand people attended it. Tzara afterward wrote in an article for Vanity Fair that they "manifested uproariously it is impossible to say exactly what, their joy or their disapproval, by unexpected cries and general laughter, which constituted a very pretty accompaniment to the manifestoes read by six people at once. The newspapers said that an old man in the audience gave himself up to behavior of a more or less intimate nature, that somebody set off some flashlight powder and that a pregnant woman had to be taken out." At the Theatre de l'Œuvre two months later, twelve hundred people were turned away. "There were three spectators for every seat; it was suffocating. Enthusiastic members of the audience had brought musical instruments to interrupt us. The enemies of Dada threw down from the balconies copies of an anti-Dada paper called Non in which we were described as lunatics. The scandal reached proportions absolutely unimaginable." But the scandal was even greater at the Salle Gaveau. "For the first time in the history of the world, people threw at us not only eggs, vegetables and pennies, but beefsteaks as well. It was a very huge success."
Whether the public, the idiotic public, expressed its interest in terms of beefsteaks or applause, Dada was launched. It exactly suited the temper of a world disorganized by the war and ruled, so the Dadaists said, "by aggressive madmen"; now it was time for a literary movement that would outdo the politicians in lunacy. All over Europe Dadaist groups had sprung into being, and everywhere they repeated the same pattern of childishness and audacity: they played violently with art and politics and paper dollies. The Dadaists in Berlin had their own magazines, their publishing house and a Dada Club which soon brought to light great talents---Tzara believed that their many demonstrations helped to produce the German revolution. In Cologne an allied group was permitted by the city authorities to hold a Dada exhibition in a public urinal, with free admission. By 1922 there were Dadaists in all the European capitals, even Moscow; lectures on Dadaism were being delivered at the University of Tiflis, in Soviet Georgia, before a proletarian audience. A world congress of Dadaists was held in France. But at this conference, which demonstrated the strength of the movement, there was a split in the ranks, a division between those who wished to carry Dadaism into public life and those who were content to express their disgust in practical jokes, without being bothered by the police. Friendships were broken, adherents dropped away: at the very moment when Dada seemed most successful, it was dying at the heart. Soon it was replaced by a new movement, Surrealism, which in turn was causing its scandals and enlisting its adherents. One could write, "Here lies Dada, 1916-1924."
But the history of Dada was in reality much longer. Its existence was rendered possible by a succession of literary schools beginning before the middle of the nineteenth century. There had been the art-for-art's sake school of Théophile Gautier; there had been the Naturalist school (or at least the part of it which surrounded Flaubert and the Brothers Goncourt); there had been the Parnassians, the Decadents, the Symbolists; in England there had been the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Oxford Aesthetes, the group surrounding the Yellow Book---then the tempo increased: there were the Post-Impressionists, the Cubists (schools of literature and schools of art were amalgamating), the Neo-Classicists, the Fantaisists; in Italy the Futurists, in England the Vorticists, in America the Imagists, in Germany the Expressionists, in Russia the Constructivists---still the dance moved faster, so that a single artist like Picasso might successively adhere to several schools, was even expected to changer d'école as one might change a coat---then, at the summit of this long development, came Dada, like a last act that cast a light of farce on the preceding acts, like a capstone self-crowned with a dunce cap.
Edmund Wilson was the first American critic to show that a single impulse persisted through eighty years of quarreling doctrines and self-devouring schools. In Axel's Castle he suggested that the name Symbolism was broad enough to cover this whole literary movement. His book was extraordinarily illuminating. Nobody before him had written a better exposition of Yeats, Joyce, Proust; and he did not confine himself to expository criticism: he placed these writers in historical perspective and considered the values that their work implied. Yet Axel's Castle has an obvious weakness of structure. Midway in the book, Wilson changes his conception of the subject; so that although he continues to describe it by the same name, he is really talking about two different things. In the first chapter he is discussing Symbolism primarily as a method, as "an attempt, by carefully studied means---a complicated association of ideas represented by a medley of metaphors-to communicate unique I personal feelings." But at the end of the book he is discussing Symbolism as an attitude, an ideology, in reality a way of life that was adopted by a whole series of writers.
This changing conception of his subject led Wilson into making two complementary mistakes. The Symbolistic method is less important than he believes it to be: its history was shorter and its influence less widespread in the world of international letters. But the attitude toward life which he attributes to Yeats and Valéry and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was also that of many writers who could not in any technical sense be regarded as Symbolists. During the course of a long history, this attitude affected not only poets and novelists of different schools, but also painters, sculptors, composers, dramatists and ordinary people who confessed with bitter humility that they weren't "creative," that they were unable to "express themselves artistically." Boys of my age in Pittsburgh and Chicago had acted in a certain fashion, read certain books---they had felt themselves to be cut off from and secretly superior to the dull mass of their schoolmates---because they were influenced by what might be called the religion of art.
One example is enough to show the difference between Wilson's two conceptions of the subject. In the first chapter he explains that Symbolism was a reaction from the Naturalism of novelists like Gustave Flaubert and the cold objectivity of poets like Théophile Gautier. But later, when he describes the anti-social philosophy connected with Symbolism, we can see that Gautier was one of its founders and Flaubert perhaps its principal sage. Among the many episodes preserved in the best informal record of those times, the Journal of the Brothers Goncourt, there is one that seems especially significant. It shows that the religion of art very quickly expressed itself as a way of life, and one that was essentially anti-human. . . . Flaubert with several of his friends once visited a brothel in Rouen. On a bet, before them all, he made love to a prostitute without removing his hat or taking the cigar from his mouth. The gesture was something more than an ugly boast. It announced a furious contempt for everything held sacred by society---as if he had said to the honest burghers of his time, "You think that life has meaning, that the act of love is holy, yet all of you together, the whole pack of lifelings, couldn't write one passable poem or even recognize the beauty of a sentence patiently carved in marble." It is as if he proclaimed that nothing had value in itself, that everything outside the world of art should be violently rejected. "Art is vast enough," he wrote in one of his letters, "to occupy the whole man."
Although such a doctrine might produce, and has in fact produced, great works of art and ingenious technical discoveries, it does so at a sacrifice. The religion of art is too dehumanized to nourish rich careers or to bring forth characters that compel our admiration. The "pure poet," the "artist proper," goes stumbling through life, often under a burden of neurosis. Each new artist spies out the mistakes of his predecessors and tries to guard against them by making some theoretical change. He thinks that a little more foresight will render his position secure: he sets to work deepening the moat or razing some vulnerable outwork of his ivory tower, but nevertheless it crumbles---and still newer artists rebuild the ruins according to an improved design. Always there must be---changes---and there is even a moment when change itself, change for its own sake, becomes an article of doctrine.
Nor was this the only tendency implied by the religion of art as it moved inevitably toward extremes. Once the artist had come to be regarded as a being set apart from the world of ordinary men, it followed that his aloofness would be increasingly emphasized. The world would more and more diminish in the eyes of the artist, and the artist would be self-magnified at the expense of the world. These tendencies, in turn, implied still others. Art would come to be treated as a self-sustaining entity, an essence neither produced by the world nor reacting upon it: art would be purposeless. No longer having to communicate with a public, it would become more opaque, difficult, obscure. It would be freed from all elements extraneous to itself, and particularly from logic and meaning, statistics and exhortation: it would become pure poetry. The independence of the artist would be asserted in always more vehement language: be would be proud, disdainful toward family duties and the laws of the tribe; he would end by assuming one of God's attributes and becoming a creator.
But this privileged function is also a limitation. The creator cannot be a copyist: he must not content himself with reproducing nature, must not utilize the creations of other artists, must not even copy his own creations. As soon as anything has been reduced to a principle---by no matter whom---it must be abandoned to the mere disciples. The "artists proper" must always prophesy, explore, lead the way into new countries of emotion; and they cannot turn back: they are confined to the frontier, to the ever-receding land beyond the boundary of the last formula. They are first authorized and then as it were condemned to go forward, to make discoveries and leave them behind, to advance in all directions, faster, faster, till their headlong charge can scarcely be distinguished from headlong retreat.
And yet these diverse tendencies, these paths continually diverging toward the four horizons, all set forth in the beginning from one easily apprehended principle. Art is separate from life; the artist is independent of the world and superior to the lifelings. From this principle, the hostile schools were born, and the manifestoes that canceled one another, and the wholly unintelligible poems they called forth. By this principle were guided the careers of great poets and novelists, and the ambitions toward which their careers were directed---Huysmans' attempt to build an artificial paradise, Mallarmé's to invent an algebra of literature, Ezra Pound's frantic flight from his admirers, Joyce's ambition to create a work of genius, Proust's attempt to recapture his own past in the longest novel ever written---all these belonged to the religion of art; and even Valéry's forsaking of art was a development out of that religion. There is a sort of law that governs such developments, at least for the lifetime of the particular culture in which they occur. The law is that no aspiration or tendency of the human mind that has once revealed itself in the culture is permitted to disappear until all the paths it suggests have been followed to the end, nor until the ends have proved futile and conflicting, nor even until the whole search has been turned to ridicule by the searchers. Seen from a perspective of years, the process is as logical as the growth of a tree; one might say that the Dada movement and its ending were both foreshadowed in the letters of Gustave Flaubert. Edmund Wilson believes that the Symbolist way of life leads naturally toward two extremes. "There are, as I have said, in our contemporary society, for writers who are unable to interest themselves in it either by studying it scientifically, by attempting to reform it or by satirizing it, only two alternative courses to follow, Axel's or Rimbaud's."---He has just been describing the hero idealized in a novel by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Lord of a lonely castle in the Black Forest, Count Axel of Auersburg is a young man with a "paleness almost radiant" and "an expression mysterious from thought." He penetrates the Rosicrucian mysteries, he discovers a vast hoard of gold and jewels, he meets a young woman who equals him in beauty, learning, pride, who begs him to enjoy with her all the world's splendors, or at least to spend with her one enraptured night---Axel refuses: he convinces her that mere living is futile, and both of them commit suicide out of pure disdain for life.
If one chooses the first of these [Wilson continues], the way of Axel, one shuts oneself up in one's own private world, cultivating one's private fantasies, encouraging one's private manias, ultimately preferring one's absurdest chimeras to the most astonishing contemporary realities, ultimately mistaking one's chimeras for realities. If one chooses the second, the way of Rimbaud, one tries to leave the twentieth century behind---to find the good life in some country where modern manufacturing methods and modern democratic institutions do not present any problems to the artist because they haven't yet arrived.
Here, briefly and eloquently described, are the two courses adopted by what is perhaps a majority of the "pure poets" and "artists proper." But they are not the only alternatives. There is, moreover, a serious error in Wilson's formulation of the problem. What he calls the way of Rimbaud is not the one Rimbaud actually chose: instead it is the path followed by Paul Gauguin (or at least the path that Gauguin was described as following in The Moon and Sixpence, a novel enormously popular just after the war, and one that was until recently propelling the tourists of art toward Tahiti, Bali, Majorca and other islands still unspoiled by modern methods of production). It is the course generally described as that of "escape"---we have all met people who spoke of "running away" from New York, London or Paris, of "finding a refuge" from skyscrapers, cocktail parties and neuroses.
Rimbaud himself had no desire to escape into an artist's paradise. His temperament was adventurous, aggressive, and in three brief years he had made astonishing conquests in the world of art. Now he wished to leave that world behind, either because his achievements there seemed easy and unexciting, or else because he had confused literature in general with the homosexuality of his friend Paul Verlaine and had decided that "all that" was bad. Very clear in his mind was the idea that by obstinate patience, by pure will, he could make equal conquests in the more difficult world of life. When he finally reached Abyssinia, after a dozen wild attempts, he did not sit dozing or making verses in the shade of a banyan tree: he bought coffee from the natives and sold them modern rifles. Even a gangrened leg did not keep him from making long journeys on horseback, so great was his energy, so bitter his determination. . . . Rimbaud in the end was as tragically defeated by life as he had been triumphant in art. Yet his, too, was a possible course, and a heroic one, and there have been "artists proper" who tried to follow his example.
Still another extreme was that depicted by Paul Valéry in his imaginary portrait of M. Teste and his two essays on Leonardo (as indeed in his own career). He suggests that a great poet might abandon literature, not to embrace life, but in order to retreat still farther from it. Literature is regarded as something impure, tainted with action, and the "man of the greatest mind" will avoid all forms of action and, by dint of rigorous thought, will end by reducing himself to a state of practical hebetude in which he stares at his consciousness like an Oriental mystic staring at his navel. And there are other extremes to which the religion of art has led or might possibly lead. Valéry in one place speaks of "the chess game that we play with knowledge." There happens to be a highly talented artist who abandoned painting in order to play chess. When he found that he could not become the greatest chess player in the world, he half abandoned that also, and spent his time carving bits of marble into lumps of sugar; he kept a bowl of stonesugar on his table for the amusement of his guests. And this, too, is a possible extreme. If carried beyond a certain point, the religion of art imperceptibly merges into the irreligion of art, into a state of mind in which the artist deliberately fritters away his talents through contempt for the idiot-public that can never understand.
But what I am trying to make clear is that all these extremes---Teste's, Rimbaud's, Axel's, the way of escape and the retreat into futility--existed side by side in the Dada movement. They were mingled there with an infusion of youth, vigor, Paris after the war and a not unnatural taste for novelty and scandal.
But what was Dada anyway? ... Not many people have seriously tried to answer this question, and the Dadaists themselves took pains to avoid it. So great was their disdain for the public, and for the idols of clarity and logic worshiped by the public in France, that they could scarcely bring themselves to offer explanations. "I am by principle against manifestoes," said Tristan Tzara, "as I am also against principles. . . . To explain is the amusement of red-bellied numbskulls. DADA HAS NO MEANING." And yet this meaningless movement published its manifesto, offered its explanations, and propounded its philosophy in the same breath as its hatred of philosophers. It had reached a point beyond the bounds of logic, but had reached it by a perfectly logical process. In every direction it was a carrying to extremes of the tendencies inherent in what I have called the religion of art.
It was, for example, the extreme of obscurity. That was a tendency that had been growing for half a century, and soon James Joyce would carry it to a point at which the reader was expected to master several languages, and the mythology of all races, and the geography of Dublin, in order to unravel his' meaning. Gertrude Stein carried it still farther. She seemed, indeed, to be writing pure nonsense, and yet it was not quite pure: one felt uneasily that much of it could be deciphered if only one had the key. But in reading a Dada poem it was often useless to search for clues: even the poet himself might not possess them. The door of meaning was closed and doublelocked; the key was thrown away.
Dada was also the extreme point reached in the long search for "absolute art" and "pure poetry." In discussing that topic the Dada Manifesto was serious and eloquent:
The new painter creates a world.... The new artist protests: he no longer paints (i.e. reproduces symbolically and illusionistically), but creates directly, in stone, in wood, in iron and tin, rocks and locomotive organisms that can be turned in every direction by the limpid winds of his momentary sensation. Every pictorial or plastic work is useless.... Order = disorder; ego = non-ego; affirmation = negation: all are supreme radiations of an absolute art. Absolute in the purity of cosmic and ordered chaos, eternal in the globule-second without duration, without respiration, without light, without control. ... Art is a private matter; the artist does it for himself; any work of art that can be understood is the product of a journalist.
Dada, in art and life, was the extreme of individualism. It denied that there was any psychic basis common to all humanity. There was no emotion shared by all men, no law to which all were subject; there was not even a sure means of communication between one man and another. Morality was a snare, "a plague produced by the intelligence."---"Thought is a fine thing for philosophy, but it is relative. There is no final Truth."---"Logic is a complication. Logic is always false."---"Everything one looks at is false." In a word, nothing is real or true except the individual pursuing his individual whims, the artist riding his hobbyhorse, his dada.
But the world could not be abolished merely by denying its reality. The world---and specifically the French public---remained as a hostile force to be fought, insulted or mystified. As for writers who tried to please the public, they were utterly beneath contempt: mere floor-walkers of the literary business, they did not realize that they were betraying an ideal. . . . This high disdain for the public and for popular writers had always been a tradition in the religion of art, but it had lately been emphasized by the revulsion that followed the war, and the Dadaists pushed it forward to extremes of anti-human feeling. The world, they said, "left in the hands of bandits, is in a state of madness, aggressive and complete madness."---"Let each man cry: there is a great labor of destruction and negation to perform. We must sweep and clean."---"What there is within us of the divine is the awakening of anti-human action." So deep was their disgust that they no longer trusted in words to express it: manifestoes must give place to manifestations and poems to deeds, to "significant gestures." Thus, "I proclaim the opposition of all the cosmic faculties to this gonorrhea of a putrid sun produced by the factories of philosophic thought; I proclaim a pitiless struggle with all the weapons of Dadaist Disgust. Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is dada; to protest with all the fists of one's being in destructive action: DADA."
In passages like this it is impossible not to recognize the presence of the crusading spirit. Dada, though it despised morality, was animated by moral fervor---and in this respect also it was the extreme of a long process. For nearly a century artists had been fighting against the necessity of making their works conform to the laws of the tribe. They had adapted from various German Romantic philosophers the principle that aesthetics was entirely separate from ethics---"Art has nothing to do with morality." As a result of famous trials involving the censorship of novels and pictures, they had succeeded in having this principle partly admitted by the courts and wholly accepted by a portion of the public. Then, having won this victory, they began to proclaim that the laws of aesthetics were superior to the moral laws enforced by Church and State. But the Dadaists went farther: they went to the point of believing that public morality ought to be abolished. The only laws that the artist should be forced to observe were private ones, the laws of art. Those laws, however, applied not only to his books or paintings: they also should govern his career and his judgments of the world. To be adventurous---to explore and discover in life as in art---was the Categorical Imperative. Actions like pictures should be dada. "The good life," if it was ever achieved, would be surprising, novel, picturesque, purposeless, abstract, incomprehensible to the public---it would merit all the adjectives that applied to a Dadaist masterpiece.
But there was one other tendency that helps to explain the otherwise inexplicable works of art produced by the Dada movement. Those who took part in it were not only guided by a rigorous code of morals or anti-morals: they were also buoyed. up by a feeling of liberty, which again was carried to the extreme. They believed that the new artist had freed himself from the limitations of the old artistic mediums. He was no longer confined to paint or words or marble: he was at liberty to utilize any methods or materials that might strike his fancy. He might, for example, make an arrangement of watch springs, ball bearings and kitchen matches, and photograph it (like Man Ray); he might clip illustrations out of old mail-order catalogues, shuffle them into an ingenious design and exhibit them as a painting (like Max Ernst, who later sold such pictures at a stiff price); he might devote himself to sculptures modeled from sealing wax and pipe cleaners (like Hidalgo); he might have his poems printed in the typography of advertisements for nerve tonics and cancer cures (like Tristan Tzara), or invent a new system of punctuation (like E. E. Cummings); he might even forsake all forms of plastic or verbal art and apply the same principles of self-expression to business, politics or, if he chose, to practical joking. Nobody in any case had the right to criticize.
It veritably seemed that Dada was opening a whole new world to writers. They had felt vaguely that everything was said, everything written, that all the great subjects of poetry and fiction had been seized upon by others, exploited and rendered unusable. Now they could take heart again. Here were new subjects waiting to be described, machinery, massacre, sky scrapers, urinals, sexual orgies, revolution---for Dada nothing could be too commonplace or novel, too cruel or shocking, to be celebrated by the writer in his own fashion. Or he might, if the notion struck him, desert the subject entirely---he might enter the stage of his drama and sweep all his puppets into the corner; or again he was privileged to disregard the limits of possibility ---if he was writing a novel about modern Paris, he need not hesitate to introduce a tribe of Redskins, an octopus, a unicorn, Napoleon or the Virgin Mary. It suddenly seemed that all the writers of the past had been enslaved by reality: they had been limited to the task of copying the world, whereas the new writer could disregard it and create a world of his own in which he was master. He was at last free! . . . He was at liberty to indulge his whims, to marshal his characters and lead them ahead like an Alexander marching into unknown countries. But in practice his freedom proved illusory, his creations were inhuman, were monsters that never came to life. He could at best lead an army of ghosts into a kingdom of shadows.
Nobody can read about the Dada movement without being impressed by the absurd and half-tragic disproportion between its rich, complicated background, and its poor achievements. Here was a group of young men, probably the most talented in Europe: there was not one of them who lacked the ability to become a good writer or, if he so decided, a very popular writer. They had behind them the long traditions of French literature (and knew them perfectly); they had the examples of living masters (and had pondered them); they had a burning love of their art and a fury to excel. And what, after all, did they accomplish?... They wrote a few interesting books, influenced a few others, launched and inspired half a dozen good artists, created scandals and gossip, had a good time. Nobody can help wondering why, in spite of their ability and moral fervor and battles over principle, they did nothing more.
Always Dada was bustling into action. There were the early meetings already described, the chief purpose of which was to mystify and insult the public; there was the later demonstration in a churchyard against religion (it rained and nobody listened to the speakers); there was the Dada trial of Maurice Barrès, which called forth angry headlines in all the daily papers; there were theatrical performances like one I attended that was given for the benefit of Tristan Tzara, in this case ending with fights on the stage and the police called in. Years later there was the famous incident of Louis Aragon and Les Nouvelles Littéraires---he promised that if his name was once more mentioned in the paper, he would wreck the editorial offices; his name was mentioned; the offices were wrecked. After that Aragon threatened to give a beating to any critic who reviewed his new book, which incidentally was a good one. No critic dared to review it ---and what then? The Dada manifestations were ineffectual in spite of their violence, because they were directed against no social class and supported by no social class. All their significant gestures were gestures in the air.
There were Dadaists who spent weeks or months in polishing and consciously perfecting a few lines of verse; those were the ones who most fervently praised the Subconscious. Others abused criticism and the critics in majestic essays that abounded in the keenest sort of critical observations. Still others devoted themselves to automatic writing and published the results of their experiments without, so they said, changing a word of it. There were many who deliberately cultivated the fine art of always being in bad taste. For a time it was also the fashion to be very busy à l'américaine: I remember the example of a Dadaist who simultaneously wrote novels, conducted four love affairs and a marriage, plunged into the wildest business ventures---he spent the next year recuperating in a sanitarium. I believe there was one who set sail for Tahiti, following in Gauguin's footsteps; another took ship for Rio de Janeiro. One very talented poet wrote nothing but postcards to his friends. There was a Dadaist who collected paper matches: he had the largest collection of them in the world. He was a very ingenious and elegant young man and determined to seek his fortune in America. Having borrowed his passage money, he landed in New York with a boiled shirt and two suitcases filled with letters of introduction. He presented some of the letters, tried bootlegging for a while, found the profession overcrowded, collected comic strips from the Hearst newspapers, married an American wife, took drugs, committed suicide---he was Jacques Rigaut, and after his death he became a sort of Dada saint. I am confusing my dates: in reality Jacques lived long enough to become a Surrealist saint, but the two schools had so many doctrines and members in common that they are often hard to distinguish. Shortly before he died, a whole squad of former Dadaists announced that they were abandoning poetry for communism, and were very serious about it, but not quite serious enough to be accepted by the Communist Party, which suspected that they might soon veer off in a different direction. A very few of them long afterwards became Communists in earnest; that is a different story. Mostly, while waiting for the revolution, for any revolution, it didn't matter, they spent their time in quarreling with one another.
But the interesting feature of the quarrels is precisely that they could not have been avoided: they were conflicts of principle inherent in the movement from the first. I have said that the Dadaists were animated by fierce moral convictions. They believed that life should be rash and adventurous, that literature should be freed from all impure motives, and especially from the commercial motive---thus, writing an article for a commercial magazine (like Tzara's piece for Vanity Fair, from which I quoted) was almost a sin against the Holy Ghost. But in practice they could not do what they preached. They did not live in a free society, nor did they belong among the, rulers of the society that exists. For the most part they were poor young men of middleclass families with their way to make. They sooner or later had to betray their high principles; not many of them chose to starve. The uncompromising ones abused and excoriated the others---and then were forced to compromise in turn, and be excoriated. Dada began to split into smaller and smaller fractions. One of these, the largest that remained, issued the Surrealist Manifesto, became famous for a while, gained many adherents, but the process of fractioning continued---after a few years almost the only writers of talent left in the movement were Louis Aragon, who had been the most active and brilliant of the Dadaists, and André Breton, the most forceful in character. The two had been friends since childhood, but in the end they quarreled like the others, on a matter of principle. One might say that Dada died by principle: it committed suicide.
As for the religion of art, that broader tendency of which Dada was the extreme manifestation, it seemed to be growing more popular even while Dada was dying. It was gaining more adherents every year. Its foremost writers, its saints, were not widely read, since their books were too difficult for the public; but they exerted a wide influence and enjoyed a tremendous underground prestige.
Edmund Wilson explains that the postwar reputation of writers in this tradition "was due largely to extra-literary accidents":
When the prodigious concerted efforts of the war ended only in impoverishment and exhaustion for all the European peoples concerned, and in a general feeling of hopelessness about politics . . . the Western mind became peculiarly hospitable to a literature indifferent to action and unconcerned with the group. Many of the socially minded writers, besides, had been intellectually demoralized by the war and had irreparably lost credit in consequence; whereas these others---Yeats, Valéry, Joyce, Proust---had maintained an unassailable integrity.
It ought to be added that the intellectual world of the 1920s was repeating an old pattern. The art-for-art's-sake tradition had first been established in the middle of the nineteenth century, at a time when the intellectual atmosphere of France was not unlike that prevailing in postwar Europe. Many French writers had become emotionally or physically involved in the Revolution of 1848--Baudelaire, for example, fought on the workingmen's side of the barricades---and when the Revolution was defeated, some of them lost faith in social causes and began to seek in art the ideals they no longer hoped to see realized in life. Rimbaud and others had the same experience in 1871 during and after the Paris Commune: the great poet of individualism at one time tried to draw up an ideal constitution for a socialist state. After the war of 1914 and the betrayal at Versailles, the process was repeated more rapidly on an international scale.
And there was another reason, too, for the popularity at that time of a literature hostile to society. The religion of art is not at all a poor man's religion: a degree of economic freedom is essential to those embarking on a search for aesthetic absolutes. In the decade before 1930 more writers and painters than ever before, and especially more Americans, had leisure to meditate the problems of art and the self, to express themselves, to be creative. And the artists were now surrounded by a cultured mob of dilettantes, people without convictions of their own who fed upon them emotionally, adopted their beliefs and encouraged their vices. In a world where everybody felt lost and directionless, the artists were forced often in spite of themselves to become priests.
Yet the religion of art was approaching its end. For nearly a century now it had played an important role in literature, first in France, then in all the Western world. It had inspired men of talent wholly to consecrate themselves, to produce great works at a sacrifice and to refine the methods of poetry and fiction---even to embark on a search for the absolute that threatened to carry them beyond the frontiers of art. The search had been continued more frantically by their successors. After Dada, however, it became evident that all the diverging paths had been followed to the end, which was always the same--each path seemed to lead toward an infinitely bustling futility, a dance of fireflies in the twilight. After Dada, the historical role of the movement was completed and only the busy ghost of it was left. And so when Dada died it did not perish alone. This fact is enough to explain its importance. In a sense, the whole religion of art died with it and was buried in the same grave.(5)
But Dada still was strenuously alive in the winter and spring of 1923, when I was learning to know the movement at first hand. The quarrels by which it was already divided did not seem to be fatal ones. Its adherents had begun to look back a little wistfully toward the days of the great early manifestations-when, as Aragon said more than once, they were too busy and excited even to sleep with their mistresses---but they also looked forward to a future still busier and more significant.
I was now seeing the Dadaists often, both factions of them, not only on my Wednesdays in Paris but also during the long weeks in Giverny. Aragon spent two months there, working on his new book: in the afternoons we tramped through the meadows fresh with primroses and English daisies while he recited poems from memory hour after hour or expounded his theories of writing. Often on week-ends Tzara came to visit us with a very pretty American girl who smoked sixty cigarettes a day to the great profit of the French government tobacco monopoly, while Tzara made puns, invented games and innocently changed the rules for fear of losing. And sometimes, but not when Tzara was there, all of André Breton's friends. arrived on Sundays, a whole performing troupe of Dadaists with their mistresses or wives, or both. They were very serious, angry young men, on principle, but they laughed a great deal and enjoyed themselves and it would have been hard not to like them.
I didn't regard myself as one of the Dadaists. I tried to judge them dispassionately and take no part in their quarrels; I was a foreigner after all and would soon be returning to my own country. Still, I could not help absorbing their notions of literary conduct, as if from the atmosphere. One evening when my wife was away, Dos Passos and Cummings came down from Paris. With Aragon we went to a restaurant and had a gay dinner with several bottles of wine; then we returned to my studio over the blacksmith shop. I made a speech against book fetishism. The burden of it was that wherever I lived books seemed to accumulate; some were bought, some were gifts, some came by mail and others appeared one didn't know how; they moved in like relatives and soon the house was crowded. I sympathized with De Quincey, who used to rent a room, wait until it was full of books and then move away, leaving the books behind him. Here in France my American books couldn't be sold and nobody wanted them as presents, yet I felt an unreasoning and almost Chinese respect for the printed word that kept me from destroying them. We all had that weakness and should take violent steps to overcome it.... I went over to the shelves and pulled down an assortment of bad review books and French university texts that I wouldn't need again. After tearing some of them apart I piled them all on the asbestos mat in front of the stove; then I put a match to the pile. It was a gesture in the Dada manner, but not a successful one, for the books merely smoldered. We talked about bad writers while the smoke grew thicker; then Cummings proved that he was a better Dadaist---at least in someone else's studio---by walking over and urinating on the fire.
Jack Wheelwright arrived for a longer visit, with a lot of expensive luggage. Jack, whose father had been the architect of the Lampoon building in Cambridge, had already achieved a distinction of his own: he was the only student ever expelled from Harvard for misspelling a word. The word was "nausea" and he shouldn't have used it when he was in a fix already. After a series of minor misdeeds Jack had been put on probation for simply forgetting to take the final examination in one of his courses. Students on probation had to attend all their classes or offer an excuse that was convincing to the dean, who was hard to convince. Jack missed a class and then appeared in the dean's office with his excuse in writing: "I was absent yesterday from English 14"---or whatever the course was---"because I had acute nausia after seeing the moving picture, Broken Blossoms." He had been sent home to the family house in Back Bay. Now he appeared at Giverny with a sheaf of his own poems, full of fresh images and original spellings, and another sheaf of manuscripts that Gorham Munson had assembled for the next two issues of Secession. Jack was to have them printed in Italy, where prices at the time were even lower than in Vienna. I wondered what the issues would look like after being set in type by Italian printers who couldn't speak English and then proofread by the worst speller who ever failed to graduate from Harvard (though he might have run a dead heat in a spelling bee with F. Scott Fitzgerald of Princeton). I felt like sending a cable to Munson. "Make Jack submit proof," but then I reflected that if he didn't send proof the result would at least be arbitrary, surprising and utterly dada.
Reading over the letters I wrote that spring and early summer, and the entries in my notebook, I can see the extent to which my thinking had been influenced by my new friends. "The famous two years are ending," I told Kenneth Burke on July 5, in my last letter from Normandy, "with little accomplished and much learned.. Yet it seems to me that their value was not so much the knowledge of books and writing they helped me to acquire as the aid they gave me in reaching a personal philosophy." I was using a big word. My philosophy was really an attitude, or at best a collection of beliefs, some of them evolved by myself and others merely adapted from my French friends. Let us try to set them down as a case record.
I believed, first of all, that the only respectable ambition for a man of letters was to be a man of letters---not exclusively a novelist, an essayist, a dramatist, but rather one who adopts the whole of literature as his province, "who devotes himself to literature," I wrote with fervor, "as one might devote a life to God or the Poor."
I believed that the man of letters, while retaining his own point of view, which was primarily that of the poet, should concern himself with every department of human activity, including science, sociology and revolution.
I believed that more writers were ruined by early success than by the lack of it, and was therefore willing to make a fool of myself in order to avoid being successful.
I was violently opposed to what I called "the fallacy of contraction." "Writers," I observed in my notebook, "often speak of 'saving their energy,' as if each man were given a nickel's worth of it, which he is at liberty to spend---one cent on Love, one cent on Livelihood, two cents on Art or other wasteful activities, and the remainder on a big red apple. . . . To me, the mind of a poet resembles Fortunatus's purse: the more spent, the more it supplies.
"There are many writers who deliberately contract the circle of their interests. They refuse to participate in the public life of their time, or even in the discussion of social questions. They avoid general ideas, are 'bored' by this, 'not concerned' with that. They confine themselves to literary matters---in the end, to literary gossip. And they neglect the work of expanding the human mind to its extremest limits of thought and feeling--- which, as I take it, is the aim of literature."
I was grandiloquent in those days; I was also highly moral, but in a fashion acquired from my Dada friends. A writer could steal, murder, drink or be sober, lie to his friends or with their wives: all this, I said, was none of my concern; but my tolerance did not extend to his writing, from which I demanded high courage, absolute integrity and a sort of intelligence that was in itself a moral quality. And I was romantic, too, in the strict sense of the word. After a period of admiring French classicism, I had taken to reading and praising the writers of the Romantic era, from Monk Lewis and Byron to Gerard de Nerval and Pétrus Borel. At the same time I was interested in applying their methods to new material drawn from the age of technology and high-pressure selling. I was determined to be humorless, having developed a furious contempt for "those beaten people who regard their own weakness with a deprecatory smile." And I had catchwords that reappeared in everything I wrote: "disinterestedness," "indiscretion" (I considered it a high virtue), "disdain," "significant" or "arbitrary gestures," "violence," "manifestoes," "courage."
My letters were filled with impractical projects:
"Yesterday, Kenneth," I wrote on June 29, "it struck me with the force of revelation that the time has come for us to write some political manifestoes. We are not critics or short-story writers; we are poets: in other words, we are interested in every form of human activity. To be ticketed and dismissed as such and-such a sort of writer gives me a pain behind the ears. Also, I am eaten with the desire to do something significant and indiscreet. An Open Letter to President Harding. An Open Letter to the Postmaster General on the Censorship, in which I admit the right to censor, point out how dangerous my opinions are, even in book reviews, and demand why I am not suppressed. And other manifestations: for example, a call to voters to cease voting, an attack on the liberals, an attack on the Socialists and Communists. Imagine all these documents appearing together in a political issue of Broom. What a stink. But the stink would mean something. In a country as hypocritical as the United States, merely to enumerate the number of laws one has broken would be a significant gesture. And if all the literary forces of law and order rose up against us, we could always retire to farming or reading proofs. Think it over. The step is not to be taken tomorrow. And I have the feeling, Kenneth, that some such courageous and indiscreet step is required of us, if we are not going to resign ourselves to petty literary wars with Ezra Pound, Robert McAlmon, even Floyd Dell."
And so I was planning to carry literary ideals into the political world; I was contemplating a crusade and was prepared to be one of the leaders. But I was also a disciple: for the first and last time in my life I admitted to having a master.
"I have been intending to write you a letter about Louis Aragon," I said on June 4, "for his is a character which demands a long explanation.... Imagine this elegant young man, from a family whose social position is above reproach: a young man so gifted that the word 'genius' must have been applied to him ever since he was four years old and wrote his first novel. A brilliant career stretches in front of him. He has read everything and mastered it. Suddenly, at a given age, he rejects his family and social connections and, with a splendid disdain acquired from his early successes, begins to tell everybody exactly what he thinks. And he continues to be successful. He has so much charm, when he wishes to use it, that it takes him years to make an enemy; but by force of repeated insults he succeeds in this aim also. He retains all that hatred of compromise which is the attribute of youth---and of a type of youth we never wholly possessed. He disapproves of La Nouvelle Revue Française; therefore he refuses to write for it, although all other channels of publication are closed to him already.
"He lives literature. If I told him that a poem of Baudelaire's was badly written, he would be capable of slapping my face. He judges a writer largely by his moral qualities, such as courage, vigor of feeling, the refusal to compromise. He proclaims himself a romantic. In practice this means that his attitude toward women is abominable: he is either reciting poetry, which soon ceases to interest them, or trying to sleep with them, which they say becomes equally monotonous. He is always seriously in love; he never philanders. Often he is a terrible bore. He is an egoist and vain, but faithful to his friends.... I have met other people whose work is interesting, but Aragon is the only one to impose himself by force of character. I ought to add that he has a doglike affection for André Breton.
"My apologies for this long digression, but I think it will explain a good deal." Aragon, indeed, was affecting me more than I liked to admit. Under his influence I was becoming a Dadaist in spite of myself, was adopting many of the Dada standards, and was even preparing to put them into action.
During the last three weeks before sailing for America, I wrote no letters. I was much too excited to write letters; I had never, in fact, spent prouder, busier or more amusing days. I was being arrested and tried for punching a café proprietor in the jaw.
He deserved to be punched, though not especially by me; I had no personal grudge against him. His café, the Rotonde, had long been patronized by revolutionists of every nation. Lenin used to sit there, I was told; and proletarian revolts were still being planned, over coffee in the evening, by quiet men who paid no attention to the hilarious arguments of Swedish and Rumanian artists at the surrounding tables. The proprietor---whose name I forget---used to listen unobtrusively. It was believed, on more or less convincing evidence, that he was a paid informer. It was said that he had betrayed several anarchists to the French police. Moreover, it was known that he had insulted American girls, treating them with the cold brutality that French café proprietors reserve for prostitutes. He was a thoroughly disagreeable character and should, we felt, be called to account.
We were at the Dome, ten or twelve of us packed together at a table in the midst of the crowd that swirled in the Boulevard Montparnasse. It was July 14, 1923, the national holiday. Chinese lanterns hung in rows among the trees; bands played at every corner; everywhere people were dancing in the streets. Paris, deserted for the summer by its aristocrats, bankers and politicians, forgetting its hordes of tourists, was given over to a vast plebeian carnival, a general madness in which we had eagerly joined. Now, tired of dancing, we sipped our drinks and talked in loud voices to make ourselves heard above the music, the rattle of saucers, the shuffle of feet along the sidewalk.. I was trying, with my two hands on the table, to imitate the ridiculous efforts of Tristan Tzara to hop a moving train. "Let's go over," said Laurence Vail, tossing back his long yellow hair from his forehead, "and assault the proprietor of the Rotonde."
"Let's," I said.
We crossed the street together, some of the girls in bright evening gowns and some in tweeds, Louis Aragon slim and dignified in a dinner jacket, Laurence bareheaded and wearing a raincoat which he never removed in the course of the hot starlit night, myself coatless, dressed in a workman's blue shirt, worn trousers and rope-soled shoes. Delayed and separated by the crowd on the pavement, we made our way singly into the bar, which I was the last to enter. Aragon,, in periodic sentences pronounced in a beautifully modulated voice, was expressing his opinion of all stool pigeons---mouchards---and was asking why such a wholly contemptible character as the proprietor of the Rotonde presumed to solicit the patronage of respectable people. The waiters, smelling a fight, were forming a wall of shirt fronts around their employer. Laurence Vail pushed through the wall; he made an angry speech in such rapid French that I could catch only a few phrases, all of them insults. The proprietor backed away; his eyes shifted uneasily; his face was a dirty white behind his black mustache. Harold Loeb, looking on, was a pair of spectacles, a chin, a jutting pipe and an embarrassed smile.
I was angry at my friends, who were allowing the situation to resolve into a series of useless gestures; but even more I was seized with a physical revulsion for the proprietor, with his look of a dog caught stealing chickens and trying to sneak off. Pushing past the waiters, I struck him a glancing blow in the jaw. Then, before I could strike again, I was caught up in an excited crowd and forced to the door.
Five minutes later our band had once more assembled on the terrace of the Dome. I had forgotten the affair already: nothing remained but a vague exhilaration and the desire for further activity. I was obsessed with the idea that we should changer de quartier: that instead of spending the rest of the night in Montparnasse, we should visit other sections of Paris. Though no one else seemed enthusiastic, I managed by force of argument to assemble five hesitant couples, and the ten of us went strolling southeastward along the Boulevard Montparnasse.
On reaching the first cafe we stopped for a drink of beer and a waltz under the chestnut trees. One couple decided to return to the Dome. Eight of us walked on to another café, where, after a bock, two other couples became deserters. "Let's change our quarter," I said once more. At the next café, Bob Coates consulted his companion. "We're going back to the Wine," he said. Two of us walked on sadly.. We caught sight of Montrouge ---more Chinese lanterns and wailing accordions and workmen dancing with shopgirls in the streets-then we too returned to Montparnasse.
It was long after midnight, but the streets were as crowded as before and I was eager for adventure. At the Dome I met Tristan Tzara, seized him by the arm and insisted that we go for a stroll. We argued the question whether the Dada movement could be revived. Under the chestnut trees we met a high-brown woman dressed in barbaric clothes; she was thought to be a princess from Senegal. I addressed her extravagant compliments in English and French; Tzara added others in French, German and his three words of Rumanian. "Go 'way, white boys," she said in a Harlem voice. We turned back, passing the crowded terrace of the Rotonde. The proprietor was standing there with his arms folded. At the sight of him a fresh rage surged over me.
"Quel salaud!" I roared for the benefit of his six hundred customers. "Ah, quel petit mouchard!"
Then we crossed the street once more toward the Dome, slowly. But when I reached the middle of the tracks I felt each of my arms seized by a little blue policeman. "Come along with us," they said. And they marched me toward the station house, while Tzara rushed off to get the identification papers left behind in my coat. The crowds disappeared behind us; we were alone---I and the two flics and the proprietor of the Rotonde.
One of the two policemen was determined to amuse himself. "You're lucky,". he said, "to be arrested in Paris. If you were arrested by those brutal policemen of New York, they would cuff you on the ear---like this," he snarled, cuffing me on the car, "but in Paris we pat you gently on the shoulder."
I knew I was in trouble. I said nothing and walked peacefully beside him.
"Ah, the police of Paris are incomparably gentle. If you were arrested in New York, they would crack you in the jaw---like this," he said, cracking me in the jaw, "but here we do nothing; we take you with us calmly."
He rubbed his hands, then thrust his face toward mine. His breath stank of brandy.
"You like the police of Paris, hein?"
"Assuredly," I answered. The proprietor of the Rotonde walked on beside us, letting his red tongue play over the ends of his mustache. The other flic said nothing.
"I won't punch you in the nose like the New York policemen," said the drunken man, punching me in the nose. "I will merely ask you to walk on in front of me.... Walk in front of me, pig."
I walked in front of him, looking back suspiciously under my armpit. His hand was on his holster, loosening the flap. I had read about people shot "while trying to escape" and began walking so very slowly that he had to kick me in the heels to urge me up the steps of the police station. When we stood at the desk before the sergeant, he charged me with an unprovoked assault on the proprietor of the Rotonde---and also with forcibly resisting an officer. "Why," he said, "he kicked me in the shins, leaving a scar. Look here!"
He rolled up his trouser leg, showing a scratch half an inch long. It was useless for me to object that my rope-soled shoes wouldn't have scratched a baby. Police courts in France, like police courts everywhere, operate on the theory that a policeman's word is always to be taken against that of an accused criminal.
Things looked black for me until my friends arrived---Laurence and Louis and Jacques Rigaut and my wife---bearing with them my identification papers and a supply of money. Consulting together, we agreed that the drunken policeman must be bribed, and bribed he was: in the general confusion he was bribed twice over. He received in all a hundred and thirty francs, at least four times as much as was necessary. Standing pigeon-toed before the sergeant at the desk and wearing an air of bashful benevolence, he announced that I was as a pretty good fellow after all, even though I had kicked him in the shins. He wished to withdraw the charge of resisting an officer.
My prospects brightened perceptibly. Everyone agreed that the false charge was the more serious of the, two. For merely punching a stool-pigeon, the heaviest sentence I could receive would be a month in jail. Perhaps I would escape with a week.
A preliminary hearing was held on the following evening, after a night in jail and a day spent vainly trying to sleep between visits from the police and telephone calls from anxious friends. I stopped at the Dome to collect my witnesses; fortunately there was a party that evening and they were easy to find. They consisted of nine young ladies in evening gowns. None of them had been present at the scene in the Rotonde the night before, but that didn't matter: all of them testified in halting French that I hadn't been present either; the whole affair was an imposition on a writer known for his serious character; it was a hoax invented by a café proprietor who was a pig and very impolite to American young women.
The examining magistrate was impressed. He confided later to André Salmon that the proprietor of the Rotonde had only his waiters to support the story he told, whereas I had nine witnesses, all of them very respectable people, des gens très bien. That helped Salmon to get me out of the scrape, although he also brought his own influence to bear. He was a poet and novelist who was also a star reporter and covered all the important murder trials for Le Matin. Since magistrates liked to be on good terms with him, he managed to have my trial postponed from day to day and finally abandoned.
But the most amusing feature of the affair, and my justification for dealing with it at length, was the effect it produced on my French acquaintances. They looked at me with an admiration I could not understand, even when I reflected that French writers rarely came to blows and that they placed a high value on my unusual action. Years later I realized that by punching a cafe proprietor in the jaw I had performed an act to which all their favorite catchwords could be applied. First of all, I had acted for reasons of public morality; bearing no private grudge against my victim, I had been disinterested. I had committed an indiscretion. acted with violence and disdain for the law, performed an arbitrary and significant gesture, uttered a manifesto; in their opinion I had shown courage ... For the first time in my life I became a public character. I was entertained at dinners and cocktail parties, interviewed for the newspapers, asked to contribute to reviews published by the Dadaists in Amsterdam, Brussels, Lyon and Belgrade. My stories were translated into Hungarian and German. A party of Russian writers then visiting Paris returned to Moscow with several of my poems, to be printed in their own magazines.
The poems were not at all revolutionary in tone, but they dealt with a subject that, in those briefly liberal days of the New Economic Policy in Russia, had been arousing the enthusiasm of Soviet writers. They were poems about America, poems that spoke of movies and skyscrapers and machines, dwelling upon them with all the nostalgia derived from two long years of exile. I, too, was enthusiastic over America; I had learned from a distance to admire its picturesque qualities. And I was returning to New York with a set of values that bore no relation to American life, with convictions that could not fail to be misunderstood in a country where Dada was hardly a name, and moral judgments on literary matters were thought to be in questionable taste---in a city where writers had only three justifications for their acts: they did them to make money, or to get their name in the papers, or because they were drunk.