Last Essays 1952-1966 by André Breton – Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by Daniel Barbiero

Cavalier Perspective: Last Essays 1952-1966
by André Breton
Edited by Marguerite Bonner; translated by Austin Carder; edited and with an introduction by Garrett Caples
City Lights Books
August 2025, 256 pages, paperback, ISBN-13: 9780872869394

In 1952, a new word appeared in the Petit-Larousse, the leading dictionary of the French language. The word was “surréalisme,” the name of the movement founded by poet and theoretician André Breton nearly thirty years earlier, in 1924. The addition of Surrealism to what amounted to the official French lexicon signaled the recognition on the part of the French cultural establishment of the importance of Breton’s once-scandalous movement. Ironically, it came at a time when Breton, then in his late fifties and very much feeling his age, as well as the movement he continued to lead, were in decline. Nevertheless, Breton maintained an active role as a writer and public intellectual, as evidenced by Cavalier Perspective, a selection of his writings from 1952 until shortly before his death at age seventy in 1966.

Cavalier Perspective is a posthumous, mixed collection of essays, occasional writings, prefaces to others’ books, exhibition notes, survey answers, interviews, and published letters. It was originally put together by the scholar of Surrealism Marguerite Bonnet and published in France in 1970 as Perspective Cavalière, four years after Breton’s death and one year after Jean Schuster, Breton’s successor, formally disbanded the movement. City Lights’ translation joins The Lost Steps, Break of Day, and Free Rein, all three of which were published in recent years by the University of Nebraska Press, to make a complete set in English of Breton’s four essay collections.

As we might expect, a wistful, retrospective tone runs through many of these pieces, sometimes subtly and under the surface, and sometimes quite explicitly. In one 1952 essay, “ ‘You Have the Floor, Young Seer of Things…’”, Breton laments his inability to appreciate the new trends in postwar painting and contrasts that with the enthusiasm he felt in his youth for new art. He found himself caught between the alternatives of abstraction on the one side and socialist realism on the other, neither of which he found congenial, and seemed happier to recall a time when, in his late teens, new art filled him with “the most exhilarating glimpse of possibility.” The essay’s title comes from a 1916 letter to Breton from the much older poet Paul Valéry in which the latter lamented his own inability to understand the then-startling new art of Cubism, and invited the “young seer of things” – Breton – to express himself on the subject. In 1952, 1916’s “young seer of things” was no longer young, and in regard to the new painting, no longer a seer. (The irony of this is that postwar abstraction, either imported from America or responding to American models, was a direct offshoot of the influence of the European Surrealists on American painters when the former, Breton among them, were in self-imposed exile in New York during World War II.)

The disappearance of the “open eyes of youth” isn’t the only loss Breton records in these essays. Cavalier Perspective contains a number of reflections on friends, ex-friends, and former comrades now gone. There are appreciations of the early Surrealists Robert Desnos and Antonin Artaud, as well as Breton’s funeral oration for Francis Picabia, a collaborator from the old Paris Dada days with whom Breton had broken in 1924, but now remembered warmly. Also included is Breton’s eulogy for his close friend and personal physician Pierre Mabille, which originally appeared as the preface to the 1962 reissue of the latter’s 1940 book Le Miroir du merveilleux.

Mabille’s book was the product of his interest in myth and the occult, an interest that Breton increasingly shared from the 1940s on. Several pieces in Cavalier Perspective reflect this aspect of Breton’s late thought. “Everyday Magic,” a set of journal entries published in 1955, details the kinds of eerie coincidences that long fascinated Breton, while a 1954 interview on astrology finds Breton taking a complicated attitude toward the subject, which he considered “the ‘golden language’ of analogy” given its claim to be based on an intricate network of correspondences between the human and natural worlds. In his later years, Breton had become particularly drawn to the myths and art of ancient Celtic culture, partly in acknowledgment of his own ethnic heritage, and partly as a repudiation of the Greco-Latin culture he professed to disdain. “Surrealism and Tradition,” Breton’s answer to a survey on the work of the “traditionalist” philosopher René Guénon, spells out the kinship he felt between Surrealism and Celtic art, as does “Embers at Ceridwen’s Cauldron,” his preface to a collection of Celtic poetry published in 1956.

Several of the pieces in Cavalier Perspective reflect Breton’s role as public intellectual commenting on the social and political events of the day from a unique position on the unorthodox left. Left politics had been a point of reference for Breton since the early 1920s, although as editor Garrett Caples notes in his insightful introduction, the achievement of socialist society wasn’t for Breton an end in itself, but rather the precondition for the greater liberation of the human spirit that Surrealism had always been aimed toward. Although sympathetic to Marx, during his time as a war refugee in America Breton turned increasingly to Fourier’s utopian socialism, which he added to his long-standing admiration for Leon Trotsky and consequent passionate anti-Stalinism. (His remarkable anti-eulogy “Stalin in History,” written on the occasion of the Soviet Vozhd’s death in March 1953, is included in the book.) This position was not without risk for him, since the French Communist Party, with which, for both personal and principled reasons, he had an adversarial relationship, was a powerful institutional force in postwar cultural politics.

Naturally, the contemporary state of Surrealism was a subject at the heart of Breton’s concerns during these years. Despite its validation by the Petit-Larousse, the movement in its postwar incarnation had never really recovered the vital position within French art, letters, and thought that it had had between the wars. First Existentialism and then Structuralism surpassed it in popularity, to the point where it struck many as being the vestige of an avant-garde that was no longer avant; in addition, the group was increasingly wracked by intergenerational tensions and an overall sense of drift. Nevertheless, Breton continued to develop its theoretical base, albeit at a slower pace than had been true in the past. Among Cavalier Perspective’s highlights is a set of three texts on “the One in the Other,” a Surrealist game invented in 1953 which involved the enactment of the Surrealist concept of analogy-through-partial-resemblance, a concept whose canonical description can be found in Breton’s 1947 essay “Ascendant Sign.” These later pieces add living flesh to the theoretical bones of the earlier essay and demonstrate in practical terms how the catalyst that was the Surrealist image was supposed to work.

The last text included in the book is Breton’s preface to L’Écart absolu, an exhibition of Surrealist art that ran from December 1965 through January 1966. (Breton died the following September, on the 28th.) A poetic set of variations on the idea of the absolute deviation in which the beaten path is the path not to be taken, it stands as his final statement on the spirit of the movement he founded forty years before.

City Lights’ edition of this collection is beautifully presented. Austin Carder’s translation of Breton’s notoriously labyrinthine prose reads well, and Caples’ scholarly introduction helpfully situates Cavalier Perspective within the context of Breton’s history as well as in relation to some of today’s social and political concerns. In addition, the endnotes following individual pieces provide useful information on the people and events referred to in the texts.

Cavalier Perspective is a highly welcome addition to the body of Breton’s work in English translation. The Breton of these late writings may be diminished, but he is far from depleted.

About the reviewer: Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He has performed at venues throughout the Washington-Baltimore area and has collaborated regularly with artists locally and in Europe; his graphic scores have been realized by ensembles and solo artists in Europe, Asia, and the US.