Robert Desnos came from a merchant-class family and served in the French army during both World Wars. He was the most prolific of the early “automatic” poets, slipping easily into a trance and producing reams of poetry, or letting his weird images and sayings fall from his lips as the others listened. Rumors that he faked his “trances” from René Crevel, his nemesis in the Surrealist group and a jealous competitor for attention and acclaim, could hardly detract from the talent or imagination of “Surrealism’s prophet,” but conflicts with André Breton over his increasingly dictatorial style eventually drove Densos from the movement and into a career on Paris radio.
He was said to be able to fall asleep in the middle of sentence, then wake up hours later to finish his conversation. Desnos finally abandoned automatism because it led to erratic and sometimes violent behavior in its participants, and during one of Densos’s trances Crevel tried to talk him into suicide. (In fact, years later it was Crevel who would take his own life.)
Desnos was born on July 4, 1900 in the Quartier St-Merri, the Brooklyn of Paris (Third arrondisement), north of Notre Dame, where the youth spent his time exploring the winding streets close to the open-air market of Les Halles (now Forum des Halles, a park close to the Centre Georges Pompidou museum). A mediocre student, his talent was apparent early, but his impatience with routine and defiance of authority labeled him among his teachers a “troublemaker who does not live up to his potential.”
Above is a view of rue Quincampeaux, on which Desnos often played as a child, now an intriguing and artsy neighborhood (when I visited in 2003), with narrow streets that evoke the Paris of a past age. Like most of Paris, it is now high-priced and trendy, and somewhat snobbish and artificial, but the Quartier St-Merri has retained most of its charm (unlike the boulevard Montparnasse).
Next post: the boulevard Monparnasse