Trotsky Read online

  Breton arrived in Mexico City in mid-April with his wife and muse, the Surrealist painter Jacqueline Lamba, who was the inspiration behind his 1937 adventure journal, L’Amour fou. Forty-two years old, leonine and noble in appearance, Breton possessed an intimidating air of authority. A fanatical idealist with a weakness for the occult, he was by all reports a charismatic speaker. He also had the reputation of being something of a tyrant. He both charmed and terrified his followers, conducting café “excommunications” of nonconformists with the inquisitorial swagger of an art commissar. Friends and detractors alike called him “the pope of Surrealism.” Breton and the beautiful twenty-eight-year-old Jacqueline—blond, lithe, and birdlike—were taken in by Diego and Frida. Breton, who was moved to tears by the majesty of Rivera’s murals, was bewitched by Frida’s little windows into the unconscious mind. With no guidance from Surrealism, he marveled, her art had “blossomed forth…into pure surreality.”

  Breton and Jacqueline made their first visit to the Blue House at the beginning of May. Breton later described his state of excitement as he was led across the patio, his heart racing, his mind barely conscious of the bougainvillea, the cacti, the stone idols along the walkway leading toward the French doors to Trotsky’s study. Inside the well-lit room filled with books stands the living legend himself. Breton is astonished to find him looking so young, his complexion as soft as a young girl’s, his eyes a deep blue, his brow impressive beneath an abundance of silver-gray hair. It begins to sound as if Breton has wandered into Madame Tussaud’s, but then the figure before him begins to move: “As his visage becomes animated, as his hands express with extraordinary finesse this or that remark, he radiates from his whole person something electrifying.”

  Somehow Breton was able to maintain his composure, and the two men and their wives had an enjoyable visit. News was exchanged, but no major topics were discussed. Trotsky was sizing up Breton. He was keen to learn the reactions in Paris to the Moscow trials, particularly of the writers André Malraux, who had gone to fight in Spain and remained loyal to Moscow, and André Gide, who had repudiated Communism after his 1936 visit to the Soviet Union. The date of Breton’s first lecture, set for the Palacio de Bellas Artes, was approaching, and Trotsky asked Van to organize an unobtrusive security force from among the Mexican comrades in case the Communists tried to disrupt the event.

  Their next meeting—on May 20 at the Blue House, with Natalia, Jacqueline, and Van sitting in—was more memorable. Trotsky quickly launched into a defense of Zola, a favorite target of the Surrealists. “When I read Zola,” Trotsky said, “I discover new things, things that I did not know. I enter into a broader reality. The fantastic is the unknown.” Breton, taken by surprise, visibly stiffened. “Yes, yes, I agree. There is poetry in Zola,” he replied, swerving to avoid a head-on collision.

  Trotsky then challenged Breton’s claim on psychoanalysis. “Freud raises the subconscious into the conscious. Are you not trying to bury the conscious under the unconscious?” It was a charge that Breton had heard many times before and he did not hide his impatience. “No, no, obviously not,” he said. “Is Freud compatible with Marx?” he came back at Trotsky. Surrealism, its adherents professed, reconciled Freud and Marx, although Breton had always made clear that no theory, not even dialectical materialism, would be allowed to interfere with Surrealism’s “experiments with the inner life.” Trotsky parried Breton’s thrust. Freud analyzed the individual, he said, while Marx interpreted society. “One would have to enter into an analysis of society itself.”

  Natalia served tea and the mood lightened, as the conversation turned to art and politics. The Nazi government had recently staged its notorious antimodernist exhibition “Degenerate Art,” which opened at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and then traveled to other cities in Germany and to Austria, which Hitler had annexed two months earlier. Stalinist influence over culture, meanwhile, was being spread more insidiously, through a proliferation of centers, committees, and congresses, making it difficult, as Trotsky put it, “to trace the line of demarcation between art and the GPU.” To counter this threat, Trotsky proposed the creation of a federation of independent revolutionary artists and writers. Breton endorsed the idea and agreed to draft the founding manifesto.

  Then came the excursions and the road trips. Trotsky and Breton, sometimes in the company of Diego, picnicked in Chapultepec Park, ascended the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl in Xochicalco, dined along a frozen lake in the crater of Popocatépetl, traveled to the snow-capped volcano of Toluca, and toured Cuernavaca, where they took in Rivera’s frescoes on Mexican history at the Cortez Palace. Breton declared Mexico to be a “land of convulsive beauty” that was destined to become “the Surrealist place par excellence.” In making this pronouncement he mentioned Mexico’s mountains and flora and the mixed race of its people, though there were other Mexican treasures that he wished to claim for Surrealism. He greatly admired his host’s extensive collection of pre-Columbian sculptures from Chupicuaro: ornate clay figurines representing naked women with conspicuously rendered genitals. On the road Breton and Rivera would forage through small villages in search of these three-inch ladies of Chupicuaro, while Trotsky looked on with obvious disdain.

  Breton later confessed to have fallen hard for Trotsky. “Cette séduction est extrême,” he told an audience of Trotskyists in Paris as he recalled Trotsky’s magnet pull. He also confided that there had been “skirmishes” between them, by which he meant several testy exchanges about Surrealist theory, which put Breton on the defensive. Trotsky remained skeptical of Breton’s concept of the unconscious as a tool for social liberation. On one occasion he questioned whether the poet’s true concern was to “keep open a little window on the beyond,” his hands tracing a small square in front of him.

  There were other kinds of skirmishes as well, which Breton would not have cared to speak about in public. One afternoon, the two of them, together with Van, stopped to visit a church in a small town near Puebla. The interior was low and dark, its left wall and pillars covered with retablos, the ex-votos, or votive offerings, painted in oil on sheets of tin. Breton was instantly captivated by these folk-art treasures—to the extent that he removed several of them, perhaps a half dozen, and tucked them under his jacket. Van could see from the expression on Trotsky’s face that he was infuriated. These were, after all, personalized religious icons left by humble people, not objets trouvés. Should the police discover this theft, moreover, it could be used by Trotsky’s enemies to discredit him. Van braced for an explosion, but it never came. Instead, “Trotsky walked out of the church without saying a word.”

  It was at the start of June that Trotsky began to press Breton for the promised draft of their joint manifesto. “Have you something to show me?” he would ask the celebrated maker of manifestos each time they met. Trotsky quite naturally slipped into the role of the stern schoolmaster, which inhibited Breton completely. It came to a point where Breton pulled Van aside and asked him to do the writing assignment for him. Although sympathetic, Van wisely declined.

  These were the circumstances in place when two cars pulled away from the Blue House in the middle of June and headed for Guadalajara, about 350 miles northwest of Mexico City. The lead vehicle was Trotsky’s Dodge, driven by Joe Hansen, with Breton riding up front and Trotsky and Natalia in back. This seating arrangement was Trotsky’s idea, since he wanted to talk with Breton. Van rode in the second car, driven by Sixto, with Jacqueline and Frida in back. Diego was already in Guadalajara painting, and the plan was to meet up with him there.

  About two hours into the eight-hour trip, the Dodge slowed and rolled to a halt. The trailing vehicle did likewise, some fifty yards behind. Van got out and walked ahead to find out the reason for the unscheduled stop. Hansen, walking back toward him, said, “The Old Man wants you.” Breton, meanwhile, had also gotten out. As he passed Van, “without saying a word, he made a gesture of baffled astonishment.” Van took Breton’s place in the Dodge, which started off again.
Trotsky offered no explanation for this switch, and Van understood from his ramrod straight attitude that he had better not ask. Afterward, Hansen could shed no light, since Trotsky and Breton had conversed in French. Natalia, who understood perfectly well, was vague about it.

  Arriving in Guadalajara, Trotsky’s party went directly to their hotel without making plans to meet up later with Breton and Diego. Once settled in, Trotsky asked Van to arrange a meeting with the muralist José Clemente Orozco, who was painting in the city. In those days, Orozco was Rivera’s only equal as a muralist. Although the two painters were not personal enemies like Siqueiros and Rivera, they were tacit rivals. By establishing contact with Orozco, Trotsky apparently intended to put some distance between himself and the Rivera-Breton group. Van was able to set up a meeting for the following day.

  Like Rivera, Orozco had practiced his craft in the United States in the late twenties and early thirties, with commissions in New York City, at Pomona College, and at Dartmouth College, where in 1932 he painted a mural cycle on the history of the American continent. After his return to Mexico in 1934, at the behest of the governor of the state of his native Jalisco he moved to Guadalajara, where he painted murals at the university and in Governor’s Palace. At the time of Trotsky’s visit, the fifty-five-year-old artist was at work in the Hospicio Cabañas, a deconsecrated church, executing a monumental mural cycle about Mexican history, The Spanish Conquest of Mexico, widely considered to be his crowning achievement. In part because of his pure Spanish blood, Orozco was often called “the Mexican Goya,” yet he was the only one of his great contemporaries not to have studied in Europe.

  Trotsky, along with Natalia, Van, and Hansen, met Orozco at the assembly hall of the university. Pale and gloomy in appearance, an impression reinforced by his thick-lensed glasses and a bulwark mustache rising above a perfunctory smile, Orozco was the tormented introvert to Rivera’s affable extrovert. His mournful demeanor, like the dark violence of his art, was often attributed to the boyhood explosives accident that had reduced his left arm to a stump at the wrist, though Orozco himself scoffed at this suggestion. Orozco did not portray pre-Hispanic Mexico as a utopia, the way Rivera did. Another contrast was Orozco’s depiction of the Mexican Revolution as a tragedy marked by violent struggle, demagogy, and ideals betrayed. And unlike Rivera’s, Orozco’s brush dealt no less harshly with the poor than with the rich. His style is marked by sharp diagonal lines, oblique angles, and dramatic contrasts of light and dark. His tone is severe, sardonically bitter, even nihilistic.

  “He is a Dostoevsky!” Trotsky exclaimed after viewing Orozco’s university murals. High above, in the spacious cupola, is Creative Man, with idealized images of a worker, a philosopher-teacher, a scientist, and a rebel. On the walls below, in three panels, is The Rebellion of Man. Here, in the central panel, the exploiters are not capitalists, but prophets of a false ideology, among them figures resembling Marx, Trotsky, and Siqueiros. Art historians and tour guides continue to draw such associations, although Orozco assured Trotsky that these false prophets were not modeled on actual people, living or dead.

  The time he spent with Orozco was the highlight of Trotsky’s visit to Guadalajara. He started back to Coyoacán without having made contact with Diego and Breton, in part because he had tired of their bohemian antics. The two artistic couples, undoubtedly more relaxed without Trotsky there to supervise, passed the time wandering around the city in search of old paintings and photographs and antiquities—like schoolkids playing hooky, as Breton remembered it.

  After the return from Guadalajara, relations between Trotsky and Breton slowly warmed up again, so that a trip to Pátzcuaro was planned for the first week of July. This time, there would be no drama en route, as Van went ahead with Breton and Jacqueline. High in the mountains of Michoacán, some 230 miles west of Mexico City, they found a quiet and charming town of narrow, dusty cobblestone lanes, large squares, and one-story whitewashed adobe houses with red-tile roofs. Three miles to the north was Lake Pátzcuaro, dotted with islands and surrounded by wooded mountains and extinct volcanoes. The hotel they had chosen was a large old house of a dozen rooms and a garden lush with ferns and flowers. Trotsky and Natalia showed up two days later, and Diego and Frida arrived separately.

  Once everyone had assembled, the group took a boat ride on the lake and after sunset ate pescado blanco on the tiny cone-shaped island of Janitzio. The plan was to make excursions to the small lakeside villages during the day, while the evenings would be set aside for discussions of art and politics. These would then be published under the title “Conversations in Pátzcuaro,” with Trotsky, Breton, and Rivera as authors.

  During the first session, Trotsky did most of the talking, much of it in a utopian mode. In the communist society of the future as he envisioned it, art would wither away, as Marx had said about the state, and dissolve into life. Professional painters and dancers would become extinct, as ordinary people decorated their homes beautifully and moved about harmoniously. This is reminiscent of the uplifting passage at the close of Literature and Revolution, where Trotsky describes a world in which man’s movements become more rhythmic and his voice more musical, a world in which “The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.”

  Trotsky’s prophesying seems to have sucked the air out of the room. In any case, by the time he finished speaking it was his bedtime, so discussion was put off until the next evening. This was fine with Breton, who was unsettled by Trotsky’s egalitarian vision. “Don’t you think,” he said to Van afterward as they chatted in the garden, “that there always will be people who will want to paint a small square of canvas?” The next evening, Jacqueline informed the group that Breton had come down with a fever and an attack of aphasia, leaving him unable to speak. She reassured everyone that it was not the first such instance and that he was in no danger, but the announcement dampened the spirits of the vacationers. There would be no more conversations in Pátzcuaro.

  Back in Coyoacán, Breton made a surprisingly rapid recovery. No longer speechless, he had also managed to overcome his writer’s block, giving Trotsky a couple of pages of text written in his meticulously beautiful handwriting, using his trademark green ink: this was the long-awaited draft of the manifesto. Trotsky then went to work, adding passages of a more polemical character to balance Breton’s more theoretical approach. Trotsky’s contributions amounted to about half the final text. Van translated these from the Russian and the whole was then stitched together. The manifesto, titled “Pour un Art Révolutionnaire Indépen-dant,” was dated July 25, 1938, and signed by Breton and Rivera, as Trotsky decided to bow out in favor of the two revolutionary artists.

  Breton’s initial draft contained a formula borrowed from Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution: “Complete freedom in art, except against the proletarian revolution.” But Trotsky, aware of how this caveat could help produce an abomination like socialist realism, expunged the qualifying phrase and called instead for an “anarchistic” freedom in the arts. This did not mean art for art’s sake, however. The manifesto closed with an exhortation: “Our aims: The independence of art—for the revolution; The revolution—for the complete liberation of art!”

  To translate these principles into action, the manifesto called for the creation of an International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Artists, first with local and then national branches, leading to the convening of a world congress. As it turned out, the Paris branch, under Breton, was the largest, with sixty members; and there were small branches formed in Mexico City by Rivera and in London. But all three organizations were short-lived. In Europe, the threat of war, not the declarations of avant-garde artists, was the chief preoccupation. In the United States, Partisan Review published the Breton-Rivera manifesto, but the editors’ efforts to organize an American chapter of the federation proved to be, as they informed Trotsky, “a resounding flop.”

  Trotsky and Breton parted on July 30, 1938, as the sun shone brilli
antly on the patio of the Blue House. Trotsky presented Breton with the original joint manuscript of the manifesto. The poet was clearly moved by this gesture. He gave Trotsky a portrait of himself by Man Ray, with the inscription: “To Leon Trotsky, in commemoration of the days spent in his light, with my absolute admiration and devotion.”

  There remained one piece of unfinished business between the two men, which Breton decided to attend to in a letter he wrote to Trotsky during the voyage to France. He confessed to feelings of inhibition whenever he was in Trotsky’s presence; its cause was the “boundless admiration” he felt for him. It was a “Cordelia complex,” wrote Breton, invoking the name of the youngest of the three daughters of King Lear. It paralyzed him whenever he came face to face with the greatest of men—a pantheon by now reduced to Trotsky and Freud. “Don’t laugh at me, it is quite innate, organic, and, I have every reason to believe, ineradicable…. But I won’t bore you any more with these personal explanations. Let them serve merely to do justice to our misunderstanding on the road to Guadalajara, which you have every right to want to have clarified.”

  Trotsky, who was quite capable of delivering encomiums to Marx, Engels, and Lenin, evinced a certain queasiness at this manifestation of his own personality cult, and he let Breton know about it. “I am sincerely touched by the tone, so amicable and cordial, of your letter, dear friend, and—should I say it?—a bit embarrassed. Your eulogies seem to me, in all sincerity, so exaggerated that I am becoming a little uneasy about the future of our relations. From the danger of being embarrassed by the eulogies of friends, I am—thank heaven!—well protected by the much more numerous insults of my enemies.”