Ghost ships
by Seamus Sweeney
[ bookreviews ]
Ostensibly dealing with the love triangle between the surrealist poet and impresario Paul Eluard, his Russian wife Gala, and the German painter Max Ernst, Robert McNab's handsome book is really a more general text about the surrealists. From the introduction and promotional material, one would imagine that the book is a detailed account of the events in 1924 that saw first Eluard travel alone to Saigon, then Ernst and Gala follow, and then Gala return with Eluard and Ernst return alone. In actual fact it isn't, for the journey is not terribly well documented; a few telegrams and letters and photos are all that survive. McNab is aware of the lacunae; indeed "the affair was barely mentioned by them and so the episode came to be forgotten." This forgetting, for McNab, is revealing; "brushing things under the carpet is only possible if there is something there in the first place."
One can detect, perhaps, an echo of Warren Roberts' famous monograph of 1978, "Jane Austen and the French Revolution", which inferred, from the total silence in Austen's works on the French Revolution signified that it was a central preoccupation of the novelist, whose silent presence could be felt at every point in her works. The details of the "love triangle" are sketchy at best, and sources for what exactly happened on the successive trips to Indochina are even paltrier. At times McNab's attempts to reconstruct just what happened, to speculate as to just what Eluard or Ernst or Gala felt at a particular time, grate. Phrases like "may have", "might have" and "must have" recur with frequency during the narrative, particularly when McNab tries to establish that Ernst "must have" visited Angkor Wat.
While this is sometimes irritating, generally it isn't; McNab manages to hold the readers attention by drawing in what others thought and wrote about the East; Pierre Loti, Andre Malraux, Joseph Conrad. We read of the provincial postman Joseph Cheval, who built an enormous Angkor Wat style palace in his hometown of Hauterives. The Surrealists adopted Cheval as a spiritual brother, while they excoriated the Imperial triumphalism of the Angkor Wat replica built in Paris for the 1931 Exposition Colonialle. McNab is strong on the Surrealists engagement with the outer world. It is also a beautifully illustrated book. In showing how the journey to the east directly influenced their art, McNab links the anguished depictions of Europe in post war ruins of Ernst's 1940s works with the image of a lost city overwhelmed by jungle, the haunting image which Angkor War seared on Western imaginations.
Surrealism is often seen as a psychologically inward-looking movement; techniques like automatic writing and word association mirrored the Freudian psychoanalysis that was so influential in the first half of the 20th century. They distrusted rational, "enlightened" ways of seeing the world, but that does not mean that they avoided looking out at the world. McNab's account of the Surrealist's travels reminds us that the movement was as concerned with outer reality as inner experience; with "one eye on the imagination, the other on the outside world."
Now that travelling to the East is a commonplace, the exoticism of travel is lost. McNab reconstructs the claustrophobic world of life at sea, the genuine sense of adventure that is now rather spoiled by air travel. Eluard's trip was on the SS Antinous, an innocuous sounding French vessel whose lurid history was of a German World War I privateer, the SMS Wolf, a vessel which had an extraordinary war time career of daring raids in the Pacific.
The trip also indirectly contributed to the later political split in the surrealist camp. Eluard was radicalised by the first hand experience of colonialism, witnessing the casual inequality between coloniser and colonised. The international French network of penal colonies, with the gaol at Poulo Condre becoming an incubator for Viet Minh nationalism, would provoke the surrealists into producing carefully catalogued records of abuses; efforts that McNab regards as precursor to the development of Amnesty International and similar groups.
McNab doesn't explicitly explore the paradox that this very process of colonialism had opened the possibility of such trips in the first place. Neither Eluard nor Ernst nor Gala would have been anywhere near Indochina without it. Their disdain for the popular, romantic view of imperialism masks the fact that their own enchantment with travel and the exotic sprang from the same psychological well.
The story does not end happily for any concerned. Gala would later become Dali's mistress, and would break down after rejection from Eluard's son. Eluard would later be an apologist for Stalin and author of an embarrassing ode to the dictator; the resulting falling-out with André Breton, always aware of the true nature of the Soviet regime, would split the surrealists. Ernst, later exiled in America, would try to stay neutral in this conflict, which of course meant that he had to keep his distance. Never would they enjoy the same intimacy as before. McNab, after all his efforts, ultimately has to conclude that "we will always be free to imagine how Ernst treated Gala, how she responded and how Eluard looked on in the heat." His stronger claims may not convince, but his book is a valuable addition to the vast literature on the Surrealists.
