Robert Desnos

Robert Desnos was a French poet who joined André Breton in the early Surrealist movement, soon becoming one of its most valuable members because of his ability to fall into a hypnotic trance, under which he could recite his dreams, write, and draw. Desnos' poems were first published in 1917 in La Tribune des Jeunes (Youth's Tribune) and in 1919 in the review, Le Trait d'union (Hyphenated), and also the same year in the Dadaist magazine Littérature. In 1922 he published his first book, a collection of surrealistic aphorisms, with the title Rrose Selavy (upon the name (pseudonym) of the popular French artist Marcel Duchamp).

In 1919, he met the poet Benjamin Péret who actually introduced him to the Paris group and André Breton, with whom he soon became a friend. While working as a literary columnist for Paris-Soir, Desnos was an active member of the Surrealist group and developed a particular talent for "automatic writing". He, together with writers such as Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, would form the literary vanguard of surrealism. But although he was praised by Breton in his 1924 Manifeste du Surréalisme for being the movement's "prophet", Desnos disagreed with Surrealism's involvement in communist politics, which caused a rift between him and Breton. Desnos continued work as a columnist.

In 1926 he composed The Night of Loveless Nights, a lyric poem dealing with solitude curiously written in classic quatrains, which makes it more like Baudelaire than Breton. Desnos fell in love with, a singer whose obsessed fans made his love impossible. He wrote several poems for her including those in his collection La liberté ou l'amour! (1927). By 1929, Breton definitively condemned Desnos, who in turn joined Georges Bataille and Documents, as one of the authors to sign "Un Cadavre" (A cadaver) attacking "le boeuf Breton" (the ox Breton). He wrote articles on "Modern Imagery", "Avant-garde Cinema" (1929, issue 7), "Pygmalion and the Sphinx" (1930, issue 1), and Sergei M. Eisenstein, the Soviet filmmaker, on his film titled The General Line (1930, issue 4).

His career in radio began in 1932 with a show dedicated to Fantomas. During this time, he became friends with Picasso, Hemingway, Artaud and John Dos Passos; published many critical reviews on jazz and cinema; and became increasingly involved in politics. He wrote for many periodicals, including Littérature, La Révolution surréaliste, andVariétés. Besides his numerous collections of poems, he published three novels, Deuil pour deuil (1924), La Liberté ou l'amour! (1927), and Le vin est tiré (1943).

During World War II, Desnos was an active member of the French Résistance, often publishing under pseudonyms, and was arrested by the Gestapo on February 22,. He was first deported to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, Flossenburg and finally to (Theresienstadt) in Czechoslovakia in 1945, where he died from typhoid, only weeks after the camp's liberation. He wrote poems during his imprisonment which were accidentally destroyed following his death.He was married to Youki Desnos, formerly Lucie Badoul, nicknamed "Youki" ("snow") by her lover Tsuguharu Foujita before she left him for Desnos. Desnos wrote several poems about Youki. One of his most famous poems is "Letter to Youki," written after his arrest. He is buried at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.

I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make
your dear voice come alive again?

I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my
chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many
days and years, I would surely become a shadow.

O scales of feeling.

I have dreamed of you so much that surely there is no more time for me to wake up.
I sleep on my feet prey to all the forms of life and love, and you, the only one who
counts for me today, I can no more touch your face and lips than touch the lips and
face of some passerby.

I have dreamed of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much
with your phantom, that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom
among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow the
moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.

~Robert Desnos

No, love is not dead in this heart and in these eyes and in this mouth
hereby announcing the opening of its own requiem.
Listen, I've had it with picturesqueness, colorfulness, and charm.
Love's what I love, its tenderness and its cruelty.
Still, the one whom I love has but one name and form.
Everything's transcient. Mouths may plaster themselves against my mouth
But still, the one whom I love has but one name and form.
And if some day you happen to think of it
Oh you, exact form and name of my love,
Some day, on the seas between America and Europe,
When the last ray of sunlight is flashing off the surface of the tossing waves,
or on a stormy night beneath a tree in the country, or in a speeding car,
One spring morning on the Boulevard Malesherbes,
Or on some rainy day
At dawn just before getting into bed,
Tell yourself, I insist of your innermost soul, that I loved you more than any
other man did, and that it's a shame that you didn't realize it.
But tell yourself, too, that there's nothing to regret: long before me Ronsard and
Baudelaire sang of the sorrows of old women and thoroughly dead
women who despised even the purest love.
But as for you, when you die,
You'll still remain both beautiful and desirable.
I may already be dead by then but incorporated in your timeless and immortal body, in your incomparable
image present forever among the wonders of human life and eternity, on the other hand
should I outlive you
Your voice and its intonations, your gaze and its radiance,
The fragrance of you and of your hair and many, many other things about you,
will still go on living in me
Yes in me, a poet who's neither Ronsard nor Baudelaire,
Just Robert Desnos who, for having known you and loved you so well
Have become their equal.
Just me, Robert Desnos who except for loving you, doesn't want to be remembered for doing anything else
he's ever done while walking the surface of this miserable, despicable earth.

~Robert Desnos

Desnos was renowned through Europe at the time the war began. According to William Kulik, one of the two translators of The Selected Poems of Robert Desnos, Desnos was a French surrealist poet, a novelist, a film, art, record & literary reviewer, a songwriter, a radio playwright and the writer of 3,000 commercials.
His fame was so widespread that the young Czech. medical student who helped care for Desnos when Desnos was dying of typhus at the Terezin concentration camp after liberation asked Desnos, on seeing his patients name, if he knew the famous French writer Robert Desnos?
As recounted in Ann Weiss's photography book The Last Album: Eyes From the Ashes of Auschwitz (2001),

Desnos looked up at the student
with eyes I will never forget
and exclaimed

I am Robert Desnos.

A Christian by family background, Desnos was born in 1900. Active in anti-Nazi resistance activities, he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp and at Auschwitz. He died of typhus in 1945 at Terezin.

Further in his preface, Kulik writes that in 1928 Yvonne George was in a Swiss sanitorium dying of tuburculosis.