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Over There; Purple nasturtiums; A breath of oxygen; With tweezers; The best and the worst

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Max Clarac-Sérou, José Corti, Émile-Paul, Jean Fautrier, Pierre Gueyraud, Knut Hamsun, Sadegh Hedayat, Édouard Jaguer, K. Wilhelm Jensen, Roger Lescot, Maria Martins, dite Maria, Gérard de Nerval, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Patrick Waldberg, Adolf Wölfli, Victor Brauner, Salvador Dalí, Roberto Echauren Matta

Description

Handwritten notes intended to appear in the issue 8 of Médium, informations surréalistes in June 1953.

Breton sent these notes from Saint-Cirq-Lapopie to Médium to be published (anonymously) in the 8th issue of this bulletin of ‘surrealist information’ in June 1953. André Breton greets the publication by José Corti of Sadegh Hedayat’s novel The Blind Owl, a new ‘revolutionary’ process by Jean Fautrier, and a Balance Sheet of Current Art, prepared by Robert Lebel. But the most astonishing note is the one mentioning a false text under André Breton’s name that had been sent by a psychotic or prankster to the poet and twelve leading lights of ‘international politics’. The price of fame - or perhaps more subtly the result of a very old fascination with madmen. The whole dossier was included in the third volume of the Œuvres complètes. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Handwritten manuscripts, signed Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, 20 June 1953.
These five handwritten texts are titled, dated and signed by André Breton with erasures and corrections.
‘Over There’, a critical text in which André Breton reports on four works by Pierre Geyraud who conducted a series of investigations in Paris: ‘Among Sects and Rites’, ‘The Small Churches in Paris’, ‘The Secret Societies of Paris’, ‘The New Religions of Paris’ and ‘Occultism and Paris’:
‘M. Geyraud continues to defy the threats of serious reprisals made against him due to his disclosures’.
‘Purple nasturtiums’:
‘Sadegh Hedayat, who killed himself in Paris on 9 April 1951, has given us The Blind Owl as a frantic sign in the night, coming to us in Roger Lescot's beautiful translation.
‘With tweezers’ in which André Breton denounces a text falsely attributed to him and given with false signature, as due to ‘a certain Jean Junod residing at Noirmont 9 in Lausanne’. There is only one incomplete page of the final text. Published in Médium, no 8 [sale catalogue, 2003].

*This entry was translated from the French by Michael Richardson

Bibliography

André Breton (Édition de Marguerite Bonnet avec la collaboration de Philippe Bernier, Marie-Claire Dumas, Étienne-Alain Hubert et José Pierre), « Médium, informations surréalistes », Alentours II, Œuvres complètes, tome III, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, p. 1090-1092, note p. 1462-1463.

Place of origin