‘It Is Poetry That Needs The Revolution’

Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara

MIT Press, 360pp, £24.95, ISBN 9780262027540

reviewed by Ian Birchall

‘Total pandemonium. The people around us are shouting, laughing, and gesticulating. Our replies are sighs of love, volleys of hiccups, poems, moos, and miaowing of medieval Bruitists. Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost.’

The antics of the Dadaists, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 and after the war in various European cities, are notorious. What they actually signified is more problematic, and there is much to be learnt from this carefully documented and extensively illustrated biography of the Rumanian-born Tristan Tzara, who played a key role in the movement. (Claims as to exactly who deserves credit for Dada are and remain contested.)

It is easy to dismiss it all as a joke. But though Tzara and friends were scathing about the ‘seriousness’ of conventional thought, they were not joking. Certainly the many personal disputes that marked the history of Dada and then Surrealism can seem trivial and undignified, like the show organised by Tzara at which André Breton broke Massot’s arm with his cane and Tzara called the police. And Tzara was of little help when he professed to define Dada: ‘Dada is against the future, Dada is dead, Dada is idiotic, Long live Dada, Dada is not a literary school howl.’

Yet its influence was undoubted. The Paris avant-garde magazine SIC had a ‘literary thermometer’ which (anticipating Spinal Tap’s amplifier) was on a scale of 0 to 11; Dada got the top score. This can only be explained in terms of the historical context. If Tzara was an angry man, he had much to be angry about. As a Jew in Romania he had seen vicious and pervasive anti-Semitism, aggravated by the fact that his secular family were alienated from the religious Jewish community.

And the Dadaists were not in Switzerland because they liked mountains: they were draft-dodgers, escaping the slaughter of World War I. Even if, unlike Tzara’s near neighbour Lenin, they were not organising against the war, it was constantly in their minds: as Hugo Ball wrote, ‘They cannot force our quivering nostrils to admire the smell of corpses.’ Internationalism was thus always an important theme in Dada – the 1921 journal Dada Au Grand Air constantly alternated between French and German, a pointed gesture so soon after the end of the war.

Dada was not so much anti-art as an attempt to renew art by bringing together different styles and different genres and encouraging cross-fertilisation. But as the Dadaists tried to rethink poetry and language itself, their writings often contain apparent anticipations of existentialism, Situationism and post-modernism. They took great interest in what was then rather patronisingly called ‘primitive art’, recognising that the Western cultural tradition was only one among several. It’s worth noting that Tzara achieved a reasonably comfortable lifestyle, not by his literary endeavours, whose circulation was often limited, but by ‘the shrewd sale of artworks and manuscripts.’

The 1930s presented Dadaists and Surrealists with new problems, problems that could not be resolved in the sphere of artistic practice alone. Tzara, who had had little time for politics in the twenties, now saw that, with fascism on the ascendant throughout Europe and a new world war looming, poetry’s role was secondary: ‘The social revolution does not need poetry, it is poetry that needs the revolution.’ In this context the rebels of the twenties moved in different directions. Louis Aragon joined the Communist Party and abandoned surrealism in favour of Stalinist socialist realism. André Breton refused any external discipline, though he made a temporary alliance with Trotsky.

Tzara took a path between the two, arguing that ‘The highest poetic value is that which coincides, in its own proper terms, with the proletarian revolution.’ He became active in the Communist-controlled AEAR (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists), though he did not join the Party till the 1940s. During the German Occupation he was doubly at risk, as a Jew and a Communist sympathiser. With false papers he took refuge in a village in South-West France. He was in particular danger in 1943 when he was fingered in a mass circulation paper by Robert Brasillach – ‘What he is doing in France, and what his current resources are: that is what we would like to know.’ But he survived. (It is hard to feel any indignation at Brasillach’s execution in 1945.)

Though he became a Communist after the war, Tzara was never a party-line writer; His preoccupation with anagrams in the poetry of François Villon was scarcely a political priority. Then in October 1956, just before the uprising, he visited Hungary; on his return, while Russian tanks were suppressing the rising, he publicly condemned the ‘divorce between the people and the governing class.’ Though he was not expelled, old comrades cut him dead and he could not get access to Communist publications.

He died in 1963; predictably, his funeral saw a confrontation between Communists and Lettrists, both claiming to be his true heirs. Sadly, he did not live to see 1968, which he would certainly have greatly enjoyed. But he should be remembered as one in whom poetry and politics came together in the aspiration for human emancipation:

Open up eternal heart
To enter the road of stars
In your life countless like the sand
And the joy of seas
May it hold the sun
In your breast where the man of tomorrow shines
The man of today on the road of sea stars
Has planted the forward flag of life
As it should be lived.
Ian Birchall is a historian and translator. His most recent book is Tony Cliff: A Marxist for his Time.