THE GENIUS OF FRANCE

7

Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares

André Breton in his verse ( which is himself, that is to say, anybody ) displays all the conventional virtues of french poetry : the Racine of the drama, the Baudelaire of strict quatrains - expanded to a false looseness. This is not true, there is no looseness in Breton's work, it is all calculated, the tight plot precedes all composition, a coralization microscopic in the detail of its vastness. I was tempted to say its limitlessness - but refrained for good reasons.

As with Catholicism and Sovietism everything is planned in Surrealism of which Breton gives here, in his new book of poems, such a balanced display. (All this is contrary to the spirit of the Constitution of the United States.) Complete freedom of enterprise is unknown there. That is why they exported The Statue of Liberty to New York harbor and kept only an insignificant replica for the Seine. A closed system.

That is definitely the enormous virtue of the French and their despair. Breton is well acquainted with all this and for that reason (secretly) has been willing to accept all the imposters from America and elsewhere into the confraternity of Surrealism. All but one whose name need not be mentioned since everybody knows it.

Thus it is with Breton's simple and crystal clear verse: Everybody knows beforehand everything that will be said. It is completely without invention in the American sense - this is its greatest achievement. Everything Breton will say we know is completely predictable and is thus reassuring to schoolmistresses

EA's note: Arida Dollars

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and the young who need the support of the master.

How is it that from France whence we have come to expect
nothing but disastrous uncertainties we get this crystal clear
writer? I say it is because of convention, the great convention of
french thought, from Descartes to the present day. And before
Descartes and on into the timeless future. WE CAN EXPECT NOTHING
NEW FROM FRANCE IN THE WORLD ANY MORE. This Breton recognizes and
proves in his revolutionary work, this is what he is saying over and
over, this makes him a leader of modern - What shall I say?
perception? thought? accomplishment.

No.

Nothing of this! This is antithetical to Surrealism. It
is for this that renegades who succeed are expelled from the group.
It is for this that emigres are retained as brothers. BECAUSE THEY
ARE TRAITORS.

Traitors to what? TO FRANCE!

Just as Picasso the Spaniard has destroyed Paris, made it
a mews of the world so that no Frenchman can any longer paint -
but must yield his strength to American women ( as it did until
recently to others ) - so Breton must covertly uphold the convetions
of the great past of his native country.

But it must be done sub rosa. It must be done without
letting the others discover how quietly flows the great river of
his genius beneath the false soil of the fields and skies he paints
in his poems with the brushes used by miniaturists in making their
copies of the portraits of Napoleon by David. It makes one think
of Le Place Henri IV in Paris today.

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Oh but this is difficult and onerous work. A man must
labor under strange restraints to accomplish it. One could see Breton
in New York for the past four years walking the streets or sitting
drinking with his cronies at the Mond D'Or on E. 48th Street but
never, never could one see beneath that pudgy surface the true son
of France sleeping far from the dull gazes of the casual passersby.

Thence emerges this magnificent and quieting book : *Young Cherry Trees Secured Against ~~Hares~~*. What title could be more subtle or more revealing? We see the features of the author disclosed (through an aperture in the dust jacket) as those of Liberty surrounded by the otherwise familiar characters of Bartholdi's famous statue. Is this pawkiness an attempt to attract the pennies of the casual reader? Of course!

I say the gesture is courageous and TRUE. It is France redivivus. It is Andre Breton with absolute seriousness prescribing the history, the literature and the thought of France, the calculator, the crystalizer of reason in the world - for the ease of our tormented spirits. It is a flight from abstraction to common sense. What is liberty? Andre Breton. Could anything be more necessitous? The book is for sale. Or refreshing?

I say that by this self-limitation ( which solely permits
the excess of design familiar to us today) this classic coldness of
line, this lack of invention among the physical materials of the poem,
THIS COMPLETE EXCLUSION OF THE PERCEPTIONS (AS TO WHICH UPON
OUR OWN POETRY IS FOUNDED, in this restraint, of french literature
generally, we see perhaps the only possible MODE by which such
extremes of thought as the world faces today may be disciplined.

American poetry which seeks to smash the line apart, to

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model it after an expanding universe, to admit to its forms the same
character of natural forms - is warned by Breton ( in this book )
that such an attack is futile and cannot succeed. Opposite our
iconoclastic adventures he displays for us the cold outlines of a
classic past - disguised, to be sure, made modern by a reapplication
of terms to new mechanisms but in reality the continuing great
conservatism of french thought - which no one but he who in himself
personifies that pure lineage can fully know.

Look at the titles of his poems: *Sunflower*. *Freedom of Love*. *Fata Morgana*. *War*. *To the Wind*. *The Vertebral Sphinx*. What more usual or prosaic? Simple as green beans. Pure classicism. Oh we do not realize what France means to the world! Especially to this world whose end we think we see - and see nothing clear - nothing but change without reference to THINGS, of which the world is made. Until we learn through such as Breton how to apply our senses anew.

W.C.Williams,M.D.
9 Ridge Road
Rutherford, N.J.