Paris Surréaliste

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But why, after all, was Paris the chosen city? Was it merely the coincidence of Breton and the others being there at the right time? Or a certain tradition of iconoclasm, of historical acts of revolt? Of anti-clericism? Of architecture, eroticism, the life of the streets? All these factors played their part, no doubt, and one must be aware, in retrospect, that what happened by chance may appear to have been inevitable, but even so the city connived and in part dictated the form in which Surrealism evolved. Its femininity acted as the ideal Surrealist muse; a role the movement assigned, much to the recent indignation of some women liberationists, to ‘Woman’ in general. No other city has this quality. Most cities are masculine.
The comparative failure of London to establish itself, despite the valiant efforts of E.L.T. Mesens, as a Surrealist centre is a case in point. No doubt there were many reasons: the absence of cafés (not at all a frivolous factor, as we shall see), the British mistrust of systems of thought (‘Paul Nash’, E.L.T. said, ‘was a gentleman first, a Surrealist afterwards’), a lukewarm and short-lived commitment to group activity, a Protestant rather than Catholic culture and so on, but even so the masculinity of London remains a major factor. It is a city with compensating features (although increasingly these are being eroded), but its charms are bluff, its vices oafish. In the nineteenth century, if Dickens is to be taken as evidence, there were still eddies and backwaters where mystery swam under the dark surface, but by the ‘twenties and ‘thirties these had been drained or diverted. Protected by the Channel, we remained obstinately insular and Surrealism, when it eventually arrived over ten years after its birth, was greeted with dismissive ennui by the majority of intellectuals, as a raree show by the public, and as a useful sauce to spice up their over-cooked imagery by those artists who were at a loss as to what to serve up next. With very few exceptions, nobody prepared to face the splendours and miseries of living, or trying to live, the Surrealist life, and those who did, both then and later, came almost exclusively from the provinces.
It could be argued here, as I stressed earlier that the same was true of most of the Parisian Surrealists, but for them the French capital distilled their efforts, sustained their beliefs and took them, whether friend or foe, seriously. London never did that.
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George Melly, Paris and the Surrealists (Honk Kong: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p.63