In broad daylight

Surrealist activity has just gone through a crisis which must end. In the absence of any external manifestation of this activity, equivocations, tendentious interpretations, hasty conclusions were inevitable. If the time seems ripe to denounce them, it is because in their variety, the set of arguments that are presented to us is such that we will only have to face them to make our true situation objective. We will not fail to find new on our part this concern for what will be said. It's very bad to know us. We have always made it our duty to characterize our moral attitude as clearly as possible at all times. This is still what it is about, and this only: in vain, in the texts which follow will we seek the expression of poetic or political concerns, depending on the kind of interest that each one has in us. We will not deal with it here. If we bring together these few letters, it is, on the one hand, that practically we see here an advantage in their different recipients being able to compare them. On the other hand, it is easy to understand that beyond these occasional recipients whom we consider differently, we have in view, more than their individuals, the general theses that they support. Therefore, the publication of this file aims to put the documents of the trial in the hands of anyone interested in the moral basis of our actions.

In the name of a certain principle of honesty which must, according to us, come before all others, in November 1926, we broke up with two of our former collaborators: Artaud, Soupault. The remarkable lack of rigor that they brought among us, the obvious contradiction implied, as far as each of them was concerned, by the isolated pursuit of the stupid literary adventure, the abuse of trust of which each of them was in some capacity zealous, had been the object of our tolerance for too long. In no time, we are done, for the second with this incomprehensible darting, for the first... (1). At a time when for each of us it was important to condition, really to condition, the surrealist action, unanimously aware of its revolutionary goal, and for this to assign to this action the exact limits that it entails, limits which, revolutionary speaking, are not imaginary but real, we only had to consider these two defections. If, moreover, and only depending on our respective moods, we did not all believe it necessary to join the Communist Party, at least none of us took it upon ourselves to deny the great concordance of aspirations which exists between the communists and it. In their ranks, whatever day he set for returning to his post, without it being too late, no one wanted to let people believe that he would not be found. We are sure enough of each other now that we don't have to wait for each other. But it is here of a first attempt at recognition, accomplished by five of us, that we would like to report. Perhaps it is about the orientation of some future men, who will like to be kept informed of certain of our initiatives and will judge them without bias. After all, it can be as edifying as the story of a trip to Soviet Russia. Without any dogmatism, and by only trying to take the words on the spot, thanks to what several letters dated the same day allow us to think, we hope to give the measure of our current means, to make people appreciate what an effort of accommodation is worth to us such, in any case, as we have never made, to have recognized this will which we know and which nothing is about to destroy.

We would begrudge ourselves not to be more explicit about Artaud; it is demonstrated that he has only ever obeyed the lowest motives. He vacillated among us to the point of nausea, to the point of nausea, using literary tricks that he had not invented, creating in a new field the most repugnant of clichés.

We have wanted to confuse him for a long time, convinced that a real bestiality was driving him. That he only wanted to see in the Revolution a metamorphosis of the interior conditions of the soul, which is characteristic of the mentally deficient, the powerless and the cowardly. Never, in any field whatsoever, was his activity (he was also a film actor) anything other than a concession to nothingness. We saw him live for two years on the simple utterance of a few terms to which he was incapable of adding anything living. He did not conceive or recognize any matter other than “the matter of his mind,” as he said. Let's leave him to his detestable mixture of daydreams, vague assertions, gratuitous insolence, manias. His hatreds - and undoubtedly currently his hatred of surrealism - are hatreds without dignity. He could only decide to strike if he was fully assured that he could do so without danger or consequences. It is pleasant to note, among other things, that this enemy of literature and the arts has only ever known how to intervene on occasions when his literary interests were at stake, that his choice has always fallen on the most derisory objects, where nothing essential to the spirit or to life was at stake. Today, we have vomited this scoundrel. We do not see why this carrion would delay any longer in converting, or, as she would no doubt say, in declaring herself Christian.

    1 - Soupault: The Good Apostle, Heart of Gold, etc. ↩

See also Jean Guérin's note on Artaud's response to the surrealists.