Life in the Present Tense

American Poetry Review, The, Mar/Apr 2005 by Kulik, William

FORCE-MARCHED BY THE NAZIS RETREATing from the concentration camp at Floha, arriving at the Terezin camp the day before the war ended, Robert Desnos was recognized by two Czech medical students from Man Ray's photograph of him in André Breton's novel Nadja. "Do you know the poet Robert Desnos?" one of the students asked him. "I am Robert Desnos, the French poet," he answered. Happy to find that they knew French, he talked about Surrealism, Paris and freedom during his few final days, holding a rose the students had given him, refusing to give it up even when it had faded. He was cremated with it. "Unthinkable," he had said, in a sombre poem written well into the Occupation, "To think of yourself as a memory,/ A dream, a soul without a body." Without a body ...

In the sixty years since his death, Desnos has acquired what is likely to be a lasting reputation as one of the most accomplished lyricists of the 2oth century. Perhaps even more significantly, his name has become synonymous with freedom-artistic, personal, political-and with a native optimism that springs not from faith in a merciful God or an afterlife, but rather from a faith in the power of physical appetites, the intense beauty of the life of the senses. Such a life, he believed, must and will go on. Consider the message of hope in "The Watchman of the Pont-au-Change," written at the height of the Occupation, or the glowing soul who moved through the poor wasted shadows about to be dispatched to the Auschwitz gas chambers, reading palms and predicting happy outcomes and the arrival of what he calls "the beautiful season" in "The Voice," one of his best-known poems. Time and again the sensuous value of life is affirmed-extolled-embodied in poems set in the vibrant landscape of rural France, or in the shadowed mysteries of his beloved Paris. Everywhere in his work alchemical transmuting of experience results from the blend of the marvelous and the ordinary by means of the sheer intensity and daring of the poet's sensibility, his gift for handing the reader a ball of light shining out of the tiniest things: the encounter at the bend in the path, the thrill of voices heard first thing in the morning; the pleasures of wine and comradeship; a world of sweet odors, sparkling water and distant cries, of voices here and gone, fleeting in a fleeting world; the bittersweet beauty of the glimpse of another that one was fated not to know. And, first, last and always: love erotic and fraternal. Love of women, love of mankind. Love of the natural world and love of freedom-without compromise. He was the last of the Romantics, and the most passionate, one who cried out to the very end "Seize the day!" Despite the Nazis.

The painter Jean Dubuffet, born in 1901, a year after Desnos, noted the spirit of individualism prevailing at the turn of the last century that encouraged "what was disobedient, independent and libertarian," an attitude "that reigned among intellectuals and artists, provoking the innovative spirit manifested by this period and its creations." True, if you think of Picasso and Braque creating Cubist painting, of Max Jacob and Pierre Reverdy writing Cubist poetry, of the dazzling poetic experiments of the movement's great publicist and theoretician, Apollinaire, and of the spirit of revolution against whatever was old, stale, or customary. This meant, first and foremost, the insistence on the complete freedom of each artist to define for himself what art is, and by extension, as complete a freedom from bourgeois morality as might be possible. First cultivated high up in Montmartre in a world of artists and models, lovers and mistresses, this spirit spread-by the time Desnos was a man-across the Seine to the heights of Montparnasse.

But back to the realities of bourgeois life, to the world of an ordinary Frenchman, like Lucien Desnos, Desnos père, with his poultry concession at the huge Les Halles market, with his devotion to family life and the church, doing his best to inculcate in his children the virtues of hard work, piety and self-discipline that had served him so well. Around the time the free-living, free-loving Picasso was painting Les demoiselles d'Avignon, Robert made .his First Holy Communion. But what religious training he had seems to have produced instead an aversion to all creeds. The adult Robert wanted "Not to be the anti-cleric of only one religion" but of all: "parish priests, pastors, rabbis, Moslem hermits or Brahmins, even voodoo priests" And on the belief in the afterlife? "A man is a man only from birth until death. Before as after, he is simply matter even if that matter determines his human fate."

Desnos was no more fond of school than he was of religion. When he graduated from the Lycée Turgot in 1916, he was done with formal education. He loved literature, but was indifferent to the rest of the curriculum, preferring comic books and pulp fiction to textbooks. He appears to have had a completely original intelligence that would not be bound by anyone else's notions of what he should be learning: Robert would decide what Robert wanted to learn. And so precocious! At ten he started keeping a diary of his dreams. At twelve he did his first watercolor. At sixteen he published his first poems, at nineteen his first book. And later, his fascination with popular culture, with movies, radio, the music hall and-especially-recorded music. He seems never to have cared about being this or that, doing this or that. He was, and is, impossible to categorize.