Free Rein.

Before opening this volume of Andre Breton's essays, I turned to the ancient and yellowing copy of The Penguin Book of French Verse, volume 4, in which I first encountered his work. The editor was dismissive, declaring that Breton's "poetic style suffers from coldness and stiffness," and complaining of the "narrowly sectarian atmosphere" imposed on the Surrealist movement "by the powerful personality of Breton, who if not the Pope, frequently behaved like the Lenin of the Parisian literary world." The introduction to Free Rein wasn't very encouraging either: "Breton's prose is often discursive and convoluted, sometimes obscure, always replete with literary and philosophical allusions."

This baleful promise is amply fulfilled in the opening essay of this book, the first English translation of La Cle des Champs. Entitled "Marvelous versus Mystery," it contains a sentence that defies belief (not to mention comprehension). The decrepit and monstrous rhetorical edifice in question is too long to quote in full, so I'll restrict myself to a single parenthesis: "Maeterlinck, the only one after them among all the symbolists proper who accomplishes the miracle of opening the blue plush box of Serres Chaudes (Hot greenhouses) and Chansons (Songs) on a woman's back streaming with golden rain." This is a clear case of bad poetry masquerading as analytical prose. Reading it I wondered if it really was true that Breton was the kind of literary figure who was more important for who he was than what he wrote.

As it was, things turned out much better than I thought. Breton's style can be a problem, but for the most part his thinking is clear and the rhetoric is kept at an acceptable level. Curious and unexpected insights abound. In a piece celebrating the Surrealist show in London in 1937, he digresses into a lengthy discussion of the English Gothic novelists of the late 18th century, whom he correctly regards as precursors of Surrealism. In the midst of this discussion he suddenly announces that "a work of art worthy of the name is one that gives us back the freshness of childhood emotions. This it can only achieve on the express condition that it does not rely on the history of current events, whose deep reverberations through the human ear can only be produced by a systematic return to fiction."

What is touching about the essays is that Breton believed absolutely in the powers of "the marvelous" and "the fantastic" to transform human life. He was to be bitterly disappointed. His friends, notably Aragon and Eluard, deserted him, cravenly submitting to the dictates of Moscow. Breton never did. He loathed Stalin and all his works. Throughout these essays (all written between 1936 and 1952) his opposition is unswerving. He is particularly adept at using the words of communism's founding fathers to demolish the dogma of socialist realism. He points out that in Stalin's Russia Marx would have been regarded as a dangerous formalist, and, in a bitter but entirely justified riposte to Aragon, he pronounces what should have been the last word on the subject: "There are plenty of us throughout the world who think that 'socialist realism' is but one more imposture to lay at the door of a regime that alienates human freedom, systematically corrupts all the words that could predispose men to universal brotherhood, and eliminates in an ignominious way those who did not bow their heads soon enough."

Taken together these essays present a portrait of an artistic and intellectual movement that fell victim to a tragic paradox. Breton believed that "the poet of the future" would "surmount the depressing idea of the irreparable divorce between action and dream." No doubt his intentions were noble, but it was precisely strict adherence to this doctrine that led Aragon, Eluard, and others into a shameful collaboration with tyranny. However degraded and vile the Soviet Union might become, they could not break with it. To do so was to admit that the revolution had failed, was to abandon forever the hope that there might one day be a union of action and dream. To his great credit Breton did not delude himself. He saw that what had happened in the Soviet Union was not "unity," but the enslavement of art by the state, which resulted in nothing more than "bombastic asininity - the absolute denial of the marvelous.

John Ash's most recent book, A Byzantine Journey, was published by Random House in 1995.