Biography

MYTHOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD AND REVOLT AGAINST THE BOURGEOIS ORDER

1900-1922

A child of Paris, Robert Desnos was born on the 4th of July 1900 in the "Les Halles" district of Paris, where his father was an agent. After living on Boulevard Richard Lenoir, his family lived in Rue Saint-Martin, then Rue de Rivoli.

This Paris of craftsmen and shopkeepers would appear abundantly in all his work. His daydreams were nourished by the varied spectacle of images offered to him by posters, the illustrations in l'Épatant and l'Intrépide or the illustrated supplements in Le Petit Parisien and Le Petit Journal. A childish mythology took shape, where Victor Hugo's sailors, Gustave Aimard's Indians and the elusive Fantômas crossed paths.

With cinema becoming more prominent, the bookish adventures transformed into on-screen reality. Desnos testified to all this in his stories and film reviews. His father wanted him to study for a professional career, which opposed his fierce desire to become a poet and he left school with his high-school diploma. Forced to make up his mind about his career choices, he lived off odd jobs and forged a vast self-taught culture. He frequented young people who revolted against the massacres of the first world war that dragged on from 1914 to 1918. His supporters were a right-thinking bourgeoisie whose spokesmen included Barrès and Anatole France.

His first poems echo his literary discoveries - Apollinaire, Laurent Tailhade, Germain Nouveau, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. Some of them were published in small magazines.

Despite his efforts, he did not succeed in becoming a key player with the young people of the Dada movement, who advocated the systematic destruction of values and attempted to disrupt the "proper" social order. To his great despair, his military service in Chaumont and then in Morocco kept him away from Paris in 1920-1921. When he returned to Paris in 1921, the Dada fuss was over.

The surrealist adventure was about to begin.

THE VOICE OF ROBERT DESNOS

1922-1930

André Breton and Philippe Soupault had already invented "automatic writing", a form of expression that was as uncontrolled as possible by reason, when Desnos joined the Surrealist group in 1922.

He immediately made his mark with his exceptional verbal abilities and his enthusiasm for the most diverse experiments. Not only did he practice automatic writing effortlessly, but in a state of sleep similar to that of mediums, he "spoke surrealism at will", the flow of his words being inexhaustible, strongly rhythmic, the words being called by sound affinities. Asleep, he answers questions from assistants, starts poems or drawings.

"Surrealism is the order of the day, and Desnos is its prophet", said Breton.

Desnos moved to an old studio in Rue Blomet, Montparnasse, near the Bal Nègre, which he frequented assiduously. He had a hopeless passion for the moving singer Yvonne George, "the mysterious one" who haunted his dreams and reigned over his "darkness" poems. His activities as a journalist, his refusal to submit to any group discipline, be it surrealism or political commitment, his "narcissism", which Breton denounced, made his relations with his fellow surrealists increasingly tense, until they broke up in 1929.

The poetic collection Corps et bien (1930) takes stock of this period, which is also illustrated by the stories Deuil pour deuil (1924) and La liberté ou l'amour! (1927).

His articles on cinema and his record reviews show how sensitive he was to these new modes of expression, which brought the magic of images and the warmth of voices to the solitary dreamer.

In 1928, Man Ray made a short film, L'Étoile de Mer, based on a script proposed by Desnos, who appeared at the end of the film, accompanied by Kiki de Montparnasse.

A trip to Cuba in 1928 revealed to him the rumba, discovering that the sounds vividly combined poetry with music. As The Night of Loveless Nights or Siramour, long poems written in 1927-1929 but not published until later, suggest, this prestigious surrealist period came to a painful end for Desnos. The death of his "star" Yvonne George in 1929 and the break with Breton sent him into a profound solitude.

THE LAMENT OF PHANTOMAS

1930-1939

With the economic crash of 1929, the effects of which continued into the early thirties, Desnos had to look for further income in print media, which no longer sustained him as it previously had.

Youhi Foujita now shared the poet's life. She was the "light", but also a worry. For her, he wrote poems that had a song-like quality.

It was not until 1933 that, thanks to Paul Deharme, he embarked on a radio career, where his imagination, humour and warm words would work wonders.

On 3 November 1933, on the occasion of the launch of a new episode of the Fantômas series, he created the Complainte de Fantômas on Radio Paris, where the lament, set to music by Kurt Weil, punctuated a series of sketches that evoked the most striking episodes of the novels by Allain and Souvestre. Antonin Artaud, who directed the play, played the role of Fantômas, while Alejo Carpentier was responsible for the soundtrack. It was a great success.

Desnos, within the Information and Publicity agency, led a team responsible for inventing advertising slogans and programmes broadcast by the Parisian Post Office and Radio Luxembourg. He tried to make his listeners dream thanks to the suggestive capacities of radio and to make them active in the communication by calling on their testimonies.

Thus in 1938 Des songes was a great success, broadcasting dream stories sent by listeners.

Desnos aimed to offer a culture without frontiers: all the countries of the world were called upon, classical music sat alongside popular songs and variety shows, Pascal or Leibniz had their place alongside investigations into haunted houses or regional sayings.

Desnos and Youki live in the Rue Mazarine where every Saturday they welcome their friends.

In this happy period, Desnos was aware of the rise of fascism in Europe; the Spanish war upset him. He felt it was necessary to take a stand. So, as a fellow traveller, he agreed to lend his support to events organised by the Maisons de la culture, and he gave record reviews to the communist newspaper Ce soir.

Taken up with radio activity, he abandoned poetry. He published Les Sans cou in 1934, invented poems for the children of his friends and in 1936 challenged himself to write a poem every evening. He especially sought to collaborate with musicians: Darius Milhaud for the Cantata pour l'Inauguration du musée de l'Homme, with Arthur Honegger or Cliquet Pleyel for film lyrics.

THE WATCHMAN OF THE PONT-AU-CHANGE

1939-1945

Desnos was mobilised in 1939 and fought the "phoney war", convinced of the legitimacy of the fight against Nazism. He did not let the defeat of June 1940, nor the occupation of Paris, where he lived with Youki, get him down. His radio activity having ceased, he became a journalist for Aujourd'hui, a newspaper that was quickly subjected to German censorship but where he managed to publish, "in a small way" as he put it, literary articles that encouraged the preparation of a free future. The struggle was now clandestine. From 1942 onwards, he was part of the Agir network, to which he passed on confidential information that reached the newspaper, while also making false papers for Jews or Resistance fighters in difficulty. Under his own name or under the mask of pseudonyms, he returned to poetry. Après Fortunes (1942), which takes stock of the thirties, he devotes himself to research in which poem, song and music can be combined, with the "couplets" of État de veille (1943) or Chantefables (1944) "to be sung to any tune". Le Bain avec Andromède (1944), Contrée (1944), and the slang sonnets continue, in various forms, the fight against Nazism, for "it is not poetry that must be free, it is the poet". In 1944, Le Veilleur du Pont-au-Change, signed by Valentin Guillois, made a vibrant call for general struggle, but Desnos was arrested on 22 February.

First imprisoned in the Compiègne camp, he was deported to the Flöha camp in Saxony, then evacuated under the pressure of the Allies in May 1945 to the Terezin camp in Czechoslovakia. Exhausted by mistreatment and forced marches, he died of typhus on 8 June 1945, with the ultimate comfort of being recognised by Josef Stuna and Alena Tesarova, two young Czechs who assisted the dying deportees.

Thus Robert Desnos emerged from the anonymity of a simple registration number tattooed on his arm. As soon as the news of his death became known, a legend was born. From a poem he had written in 1926, J'ai tant rêvé de toi, the last stanza, through translations into Czech and French, became the poet's final message to the woman he loved under the title Le Dernier Poème. The voice of Robert Desnos now resounds in a poem that has ceased to belong to him and has become the voice of all.