Rounding out the program was actor Sean Probert, who read extracts from Breton’s writings.

In opening the meeting, Calder remarked, “I hope this will not be the last collaboration between our two bookshops.” An A-Z guide to London published in January by The Times described Calders Bookshop and Pathfinder as “two of London’s most unusual bookshops.”

The national daily went on to say that Pathfinder “specializes, in the words of Jonathan Silberman, its representative and leader of the Communist League in the United Kingdom, in ‘pulling together the history and lessons learned from the many class-struggle events worldwide.’ A few doors along is the bookseller and publisher John Calder, whose early business from 1949 on was primarily in translated classics. The McCarthy era pushed overseas American writers, whom Calder embraced.”

Calder’s introductory remarks traced the roots of the surrealist movement—one of the most influential currents of art and criticism in the 20th century—to the Dada school, centered in Switzerland during World War I. With the government in Zurich pursuing a policy of official neutrality in the conflict, the country provided a place of temporary exile for revolutionary leaders and nonconformist artists alike.

“The Cabaret Voltaire, a few doors away from where [Russian revolutionary leader V.I.] Lenin lived at the time, became a headquarters for these poets, artists, performers, and writers,” said Calder. These artists believed that since “the world was going mad, so art should go mad.”

While drawing inspiration from the Dadaist experiments, surrealist leaders like Breton rejected the apolitical stance of these artists, and identified themselves with the revolutionary socialist movement during the deep capitalist crisis of the 1930s.

Breton, said Calder, “believed in the superiority of the imagination and free association over everyday perception and logic and of the poetic over the humdrum. Breton’s writings as a whole have had an extremely important influence. Most of these can be found in the book, What Is Surrealism?” he said.

Like all cultural movements, said Jonathan Silberman, surrealism was a product of its time. The 1920s and ’30s were marked by deepening capitalist crisis and intensifying class struggles, played out in such developments as the victory of fascism in Germany, the financial crisis in Europe and across the globe, the Franco-Spanish war against Morocco, and shifting alliances among the big powers as they prepared for war.

Breton and others were profoundly affected by “the new force which had burst onto the scene” at the beginning of this period, said Silberman—“the October socialist revolution in Russia, which gave hope to the oppressed and downtrodden and gave an impetus to revolutionary struggles in Asia and elsewhere.”

The revolution “was a beacon of hope for many artists and intellectuals who sought an alternative to crisis, decadence, and decay,” Silberman said.

Drawing on the wealth of material in What Is Surrealism? Silberman described how the French-born Breton, deeply influenced by the revolution, fought pressures to adapt to the nationalism of the French capitalist rulers and opposed the war against Morocco. Later in life, following World War II, Breton supported revolutionary struggles in Indochina and Algeria.

Then as now, said Silberman, the imperialist rulers used nationalist poison to draw working people behind their course toward war at home and abroad, “as is happening in Spain in the wake of the Madrid bombing” on March 11.  
 
Defense of artistic freedom
After joining the French Communist Party in 1927, Breton aligned himself with the international left opposition and its leading figure, Leon Trotsky, in resisting the counterrevolutionary policies of the Stalin government in the cultural and political fields. While rejecting Stalinism, Breton did not join the camp of intellectuals and artists who renounced communism and refused to defend the Soviet Union against imperialist attack.

During Leon Trotsky’s exile in Mexico, Breton collaborated closely with the revolutionary leader. Together they championed the stance toward art of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin, who had died in 1924. Rejecting “socialist realism”—the code words for exalting the bureaucratic layer that Stalin represented—they defended the “total independence of the artist” from commercialism, capitalist repression, and bureaucratic control.

One product of this collaboration was the 1938 manifesto, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, signed by Breton and Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist.

In a 1938 talk by Breton entitled “Visit with Leon Trotsky”—published, along with the manifesto, in What Is Surreal ism?—Breton said that the defense of artistic freedom in the manifesto “owes more to Trotsky than to Rivera or myself…. It was Comrade Trotsky, indeed, who seeing my formulation for ‘Every liberty in art, except against the proletarian revolution,’ put us on guard against the new abuses that could be made of the last part of the phrase, crossing it out without hesitation.”

The manifesto went on to assert that the revolutionary state has the right to defend itself against the counterattack of the bourgeoisie even when the latter is draped in the flag of science or art. “But this is the opposite of the state dictating to artists that they blow a trombone in a revolutionary fashion,” Silberman said.

A lively discussion ensued.

To a woman who asked, “Why so much stress on politics?” Calder replied, “You cannot avoid politics in political times.”

Another participant drew laughter from the audience when he said Lenin had only visited the Cabaret Voltaire to “demand that the surrealists keep the noise down.” Silberman commented that the joke implied that the Marxist leader was uninterested in art and culture. “The opposite is the case,” he said. Like Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the founders of the communist movement, “Lenin and Trotsky held great store by culture, including the need for working people to conquer the best of bourgeois culture.” These leaders of the communist movement believed that workers become richer the more access they have to literature and art. “A cultural revolution for millions of humanity is one of the objectives of a socialist revolution—and I don’t mean the repressive so-called Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong in China,” said Silberman.

In answer to a man who asked if surrealist art is exhibited in Cuba, Silberman said that the Cuban Revolution and its revolutionary leadership have embraced artistic freedom of expression, and rejected the Stalinist template of socialist realism. Wilfredo Lam (1902-80), an artist of Afro-Cuban and Chinese-Cuban parentage whose striking work was embraced by Breton and others, is renowned throughout Cuba, he said. Not only are Lam’s works exhibited, he said; one of Havana’s major art galleries is named after him, and his centennial was widely celebrated in 2002.

The lively discussion continued into the evening. Questions and contributions covered Breton’s development after World War II and contributions as a poet; the influence of surrealism today; the position of women and homosexuals in the surrealist movement; and Leon Trotsky’s unwavering defense of the Soviet Union in the 1939 war with Finland and in the world war that followed.

For over a decade What Is Surrealism? has been unavailable in the United Kingdom. Since Pathfinder obtained the rights to distribute the book there again last October, dozens have been sold. In the last four months people have bought 39 copies, putting the book at sixth on the publisher’s best-seller list in the United Kingdom.  
 
 
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