Part Four: The Surrealists Were Even Cooler Than You Thought

the Surrealists. They're just getting started. You all the datas, they're like snoweight Now ur surrealis that sounds more fun. Andre Berton was a Freudian physician helping soldiers deal with shell shock, and he and others folks are like their

fucking outh automatic. Writing in nineteen twenty four, Breton writes Surrealist Manifesto, this doesn't kick things off, It's already been happening, but it's the cultural touchstone for everyone except that other group from the big split with Zara that where they were like fighting each other and shit. They actually put out a different Surrealist Manifesto like two weeks earlier, but no one remembers it because it's not the one that's stuck. I think they got into a fist fight about it,

about having these two different manifestos. Okay, And in the end, Breton's surrealis just kind of outnumbered the other folks.

and doing automatic drawing and some actually mostly writing. At the beginning, it actually starts off more of a literature movement. It actually like takes a.

following political things. And by the way, the following specific people are specifically not part of our movement anymore because we don't like them, because they don't approve of our belief in collective action in the following, narrowly defined way. Most of these splits which keep happening are fundamentally political. Obviously, Dali is run out for being a fascist, but it's also like who likes Trotsky and who likes Stalin and

who likes anarchism and all this shit. But most of the people who are expelled don't actually stop being surrealist, right, because it's not actually it like claims to weve be

a member organization. It is not a member organization. Some people do leave surrealism, like there's a diehard Stalinist who like, there's a bunch of people who are like, actually Stalin says that surrealism is bad and only Marxist really or whatever the fuck is good and we need to represent things in materialism and blah blah blah blah blah, like

whatever bullshit. Those people stopp being surrealists. Overall, all the splits and purges and shit, it's just weird infighting drama and not stopping people from looking for the marvelous and fighting against miserableism. Then in nineteen thirty six, Friend of the Pod, the Spanish Civil War kicks off. Franco is a fascist Catholic and he tries and fails to throw a coup against the republican government of left leaning Spain, and a motley assortment of leftist band together to fight

him back. Spoiler alert, they lose, but this is a huge deal internationally, this whole fight, and it's the first war against fascism in history, and the surrealists are all about supporting the republic against the fascists. You can hear other half of the Bechdel Cast talk about the Spanish Civil War on the episode probably called the Spanish Civil War with Jamie Loftus. But if you just searched Jamie Loftis Spanish Civil War, probably fine.

the Kathalan spelling of it. Okay, yeah, and it is pro fascist. It's the other side of the Civil War right, and like it comes out kind of a it's like ants the bugs life. Yes, it's like a couple of years later. Although you know what, I'm not a big fan of what are you on? And yeah? No, and it's it's fucked up. It's kind of worth watching, just as like this like weird, like so what are the people who wish that? Who are Glad franco one think of all this?

or so. Oh god, okay, so does that one? And then there's Libertarios which is awesome, which is about anarchist women fighting, and then there's Land Freedom by Ken Loach who's like my favorite did he did the Win, the Shakes the Barley, So he's like one of my favorite directors because he the my favorite movie. But the Irish Civil War or Irish Revolution and the Civil War and okay, that's it might be all this. I'm sure there's more. Oh, the Anarchist Wife, which is the worst name for any movie.

It's a French movie. Okay, this is not Margaret lists all the Spanish Civil War movies. Anyway, I did enjoy that very much, though, thanks, We should watch it. I would love to see get your take on il Bosky.

fascism in history. I already read this part, so at least four of the surrealists are like, let's fucking go. I think a bunch more did, but like, there's four that I've currently tracked down, and there are two couples, and it's actually happened a lot like couples would just go and join the army together to go fight against fight against the shit. Because this is one of the also the first times you have organized military forces in the Western world that have men and women both fighting

alongside one another. One couple. They joined the same force that George Orwell later joined, called the Poom and these are the anti Stalinist Marxists who basically end up allied with the anarchists in the Civil War within a civil war where Stalin decides to try and kill half of his own side to consolidate the other half. The other couple they joined the Drudi Column, which is an anarchist unit, and I'm one of these people who went to fight. I'm going to single out Mary Low because she's sort

of one of the most interesting. She was born in nineteen twelve. She was a British woman and a poet, and she became a surrealist. Her partner was a Cuban surrealist poet named Juan Bria, who is one of the founders of the Cuban Surrealist group, and he kept getting arrested everywhere he went for his communist agitation, both in Cuba and Spain, and then he kept getting in trouble with the communists because he wasn't the right kind of communist AKA, he wasn't a Stalinist, because he and Mary

were both Trotskyists, so they're like less authoritarian communists. Way more of the people who end up on this show follow the not stalin people will be surprised to know. The other couple is a woman named Remedios Varro and her partner Benjamin Pere. And Pere, since he's like he's like the surrealist founder and the white guy who's fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he's often written about as the one surrealist who fought in the Spanish Civil War.

This is just not true. But he's cool as shit and he fucking threw down to try and stop fascism at the very beginning, so he's great. All four of them fight on the Aragon Front against the fascists, all

while writing about their experiences for various newspapers. Right because they're like, well, we're writers and artists and shit, you know, so we will use our communication skills the best way we can, which involves both shooting guns at fascists is a very direct form of communication, and then also speaking about these experiences and putting out like radio broadcasts and newspapers and stuff. And Mary Lowe she actually funds, like she funds the English language version of the pum's paper.

And at first I was like, oh, she's like a rich kid right now. She right before she went to Spain, she won a ton of money at while gam Oh nice, she just like went and played Roulette ed La Like hell yeah, use that money for the revolution by putting out the English language paper for her unit, okay, And they're also doing radio broadcasts, and Mary does an English one and Benjamin does one in Portuguese. He's French, but

he speaks Portuguese. And then the Stalinists try to force everyone into their command structure in the middle of this war, and the POM and the anarchists are like, no, you just showed up. You can't tell us that you're in charge. And so the Stalinists are like torturing and murdering all the other leftists and literally flaming people and shit and

being bad. Jan Bria, the Cuban surrealist. He gets arrested twice by the Stalinists in only a few months while he's in the middle of trying to fight their common enemy, right, and then they try and kill him. A car tries to run him down in an alley, and he's like, this is a fucking movie. The way he gets out of this assassination attempt is he is to literally break down a door in the alley to like escape, you know. And so the couple flees Barcelona rather than get murdered.

The other two leave Spain about four months later, I think, for more or less the same reasons. And getting back to France after this must have fucking sucked, right, because this is like revolutionary Spain is like this is it. We were doing it right. All of the things we've dreamed of, they're actually happening. We're creating a pluralistic like leftist revolution. We're collectivizing all these workplaces. We are like abortion is legalized, like divorce is legal made easier. I

don't remember exactly about the divorce. I remember the abortion part clearly. They get back to France and everything's starting to fall apart, and Benjamin is arrested for distributing anarchist literature by the French government and he has to flee to Mexico. Right. Mary and Juan they're broke as hell and they're watching the Spanish Republic fall to the comb forces of Stalin and Franco. They hang around for a while, they're just like living, broke as shit, and they write

a book called The Red Spanish Notebook together. Then they go to England and get married, and then they go to Qubo.

clear before I started writing. And then I had three weeks to write the whole thing, and I just hid in my partner's apartment while they were teaching and listened to Dope Throne by Sleep over and over again and wrote terrible, the worst shit I've ever written. I'm saying, yeah, anyway, that is like the book that they wrote, the Red Spanish Notebook. While they were living also broke. They went

to England to get married. Oh, I almost went to England to marry actually my partner from then, but I didn't. They went to Cuba for a while, then they traveled around Europe, and then they had to flee the Nazi occupation of Prague and literal Nazi custody right, and they used the help of some literary friends to get out of Nazi custody and got the fuck back to Cuba to just follow just close out their story. One died

of this or that illness in nineteen forty one. Mary married another Trotzkist and helped overthrow the Cuban capital's government, all while raising a bunch of kids, then fucking Stalinists. She'd settled into the Revolutionary society as a professor, being like, hooray, we've made a communism. Her husband was a his civil servant, and then Castro was like, hey, sorry, I have to persecute all the Communish aren't exactly the right kind of communist. So the couple had to flee. This time they went

to Florida. I think Margaret complains about Stalinists. This is probably the free space and cool people did cool stuff bingo. But Mary lived a long ass time stay in suru to or politics right to the end. She died in Miami in two thousand and seven at ninety four years old. And if you want to live to ninety four years old, what are you promising near bag cut supplements? Right? Isn't that a thing we should start selling? Is that a

cool thing? If we could promise people eternal life? Vamporism, Yeah, there we go.

it'll come up later. One of the reasons that surrealis love the Progue surrealists, the prayer of surrealists love the prog cerealists, is because they were like your city's so like mystical and magical and like anti rationalists and steeped in like basically, they're all like vampire fans, you know, they're like, this is cool, which I mean. I also felt the like week I spent drunk in Prague when I was like twenty, so Mary Lowe was. Mary low had a much worse time in Prague than I did.

She was bravely in Prague before it fell to the Nazis. While she was there, she was hanging out with the Progue surrealists who were cool as fuck. And we're gonna use another non binary or trens masculine hero named Toyan as our example, and this time I'm gonna use he hymn pronouns because I have a bit more evidence that this person who's like assigned female at birth would have preferred either those or maybe they them. And Toyen also is like one of those people who's like I only

have one name. It's toy In, which is fucking cool. Toyen was born in nineteen oh two and when he was sixteen, he was kicked out of his house for being an anarchist. He started working at a soap factory to afford to get to go to art school in Prague, which I guess is a thing you can do as a runaway in Prague in the late nineteen tens. Is go to art school based on working in a factory.

One of those things that people are like, we've come so far, and I'm like, have we He's hanging around with all the cool artsy anarchist types and he's going to organizing meetings and shit. By nineteen twenty three, he changes his name to toy In, which is a play on words. He has like a bunch of different It's like data where they're like, oh it's this, no, it's that, No, it's this other thing, you know, but it probably roughly means it is he in check and he refused to

use feminine endings for words describing himself. And he wore men's clothing and he also wore women's clothing. He dated mostly women, but had two His like life partners were probably platonic art relationships with men m and he also once declared that he took his own virginity. I think when people were like because everyone was like, well, you're a girl, so let's talk about who you fuck. And he's like, I fuck myself like that Banks songs and it's a pop song and I know it. Maybe it's

not actually a popular one. Maybe I know it because it sounds like a goth song. Anyway, I actually don't know this. Wait, it is this this artist Banks, who's a pop singer I really like, who has a song called like fuck with Myself? Like I fuck with myself more than anybody else.

I read like ten years ago. Anyway, Toyen mostly drew erotica, lots of stuff with like male and female forms all mixed up, and he illustrated Marquis de Sad's writing like the person the word Sadism comes from. He is like very unabashedly into sex and sexual stuff. Right in nineteen thirty four, he helped form the Czech Surrealist group, but he was also always trying to hustle up money in that awesome proletarian artist way, the equivalent of ghostwriting novels.

He writes a travel guide to pair for Chech speakers. He designs fabrics, He designs book covers. Klin, Have you had to do weird shit like this for money?

won't be me. There was tension in the surrealist movement pretty much as soon as the Czech Surrealist group started, because all of the political stuff from Paris was starting to come to a head around this time, and so there's this tension between Stalinism and freedom right in the surrealist movement and in Prague. While Breton and some others from Paris are visiting visiting the nineteen thirty five because they're obsessed with the Czech surrealists, they're like, oh my god,

you all are so authentic. You're like spooky, you know, you live in like this booky city, which is like whatever, Like that's how again, that's how I felt when I was there. Sure, So while they were there, they got into a literal fight in the streets with Soviet delegates because the Soviet delegates accused, or a Soviet delegate accused the Surrealus of pederasty. And in this case they didn't mean we think you have sex with children or promote

sex with children. It was like, y'all are gay, because there was a long period of time where that's coming back where you can decide that anyone who's you know, it's basically be like your groomors, you know, right. And so there's one version where they got into a fist

fight about it. There's one version where it wasn't like a two way fist fight and said Breton slapped the Soviet delegate in the face several times, which it does hit the point of like you slap someone, You're like, well, one, that's not part of my daily life, right, but you're like you slap someone several times, it's like it's now you're really fucking mad. And there's a couple I've read a bunch of different ways of how to interpret this.

One that I seems to be the most likely is basically the surrealis are fighting physically to defend their right to include queer artists and queer themes and specifically like to not drive out the fact that there's a fuck ton of openly gay surrealists at this point, and this anti gay repression coming from the proper communist left led to the suicide of one gay surrealist named Renee Creval, and most of his friends defended him after his death.

This is like where they're like the kind of like splits that sort of are like almost like jokes to me in the twenties, right where they're like, oh, well you fuck you, no, fuck you. At this point, it's like Stalinism has driven this kid to kill themself, right yeah, And most people are like, fuck the Communist Party, We're getting the fuck out of this nightmare. And others are like, no, the immortal science of Marxist Leninism just demands that I

spit on my gay friend's grave. Fuck those people, because and I pay more attention to historical drama than present day politics.

When the Nazis took over in nineteen thirty nine, they explicitly ban toy In from presenting his work publicly. They were like, you're on the list of degenerates, right, You're not Jewish, so we're not going to kill you. But unless you step out of line or do anything, which case will kill you, but you're.

try to escape when the Nazis first take power. But there's this fucking piece of shit who's like robbing people, trying to be like, oh I got you, I'll set you up, I'll get you out here, and it's just like a scam, right, So he hides his Jewish partner, and until that Jewish partner died of illness in nineteen forty two, so during the occupation, and then hit at least one other Jewish anti fascist for the entire course of the war, I don't know how many, and then

also kept organizing surrealist stuff completely illegally, publishing degenerate art at great risk, including like our other non binary surrealist a bunch of calls for Nazis to defend. This is like a huge thing of what surrealists are doing. Is like you're clearly on the evil side, Like you're the baddies.

What are you doing? You know? One Jewish surrealist photographer that he hit is named Yindrich Hasler, who developed new art techniques like new dioramic techniques of like super macro photo close ups and shit like for his art while living in Toyen's bathroom. Whoa, which is just like a fucking cool way to invent I mean, it's an awful, horrible way to invent a new form of art, but

it's also fucking cool, you know. And apparently this guy, the way he would escape from like Nazis they'd come by in search everywhere, you know, is that when when the Nazis were coming, he'd like gaily skip down the front steps and like wave hello and then just like head off, you know, like at a jaunt as if he's like totally nonplussed about there being Nazis coming, so he's not worried at all. So everyone just so they're just like hey, I belong see it, you know.

like I think he lives Breton for years, you know. Yeah, and so like the famous ones, the ones who like make it in the art world are like fucking pain. Everyone else's rent, you know, fucking rules. Yeah, and he's Antoya is fucking weird the whole rest of his life. He's so cool. When he's hanging out with people and feels that they lack poetry, he just doesn't talk. He's just like quiet the whole time. He refers to it as putting on his spacesuit.

Anarchists Federation. At this point, they start refusing to take sides. They there's growth here. When when the French Anarchists Federation keeps having it's it's like dumb splits, the surrealists are like, we're not taking sides in any of that shit. We like, we're actually all on the same side here. Get the

grow the fuck up. Surrealism becomes a bigger deal again in the sixties, both under the name surrealism, including having spread to the US, where like the Chicago Surrealists Group Champions. It develops the phrase make Love not War, and threw down alongside the students for Democratic Society, who keep showing up in a bunch of my episodes, and also through its ideological descendants, probably the most famous of which are the situationists and situationists in France. But I want to

cut back in time to before ads. No, this transition isn't yeah more or less. Here's where I was gonna say, I trying to sell you stuff. But honestly, other people use my work to try and sell you stuff, which is fine.

punks and goths in Nashville, North Carolina. One of my roommates lived on the back porch and a coffin that she had built. She was another Yeah, she was weird. She's another trans woman, though neither of us knew it back then. She would have called herself a drag queen back then, and I would have called myself repressed. She taught me how to shave well enough to pass, oh to be twenty two or whatever? Shave right put on

address anyway. Another roommate lived in an airstream out back and had kinky sex so loud we could hear it inside. I lived in a loft in the basement where I couldn't sit up without hitting my head on pipes covered an asbestos. But another roommate, there's an awful lot of roommates who lived in this place. Her mom owned a costume shop and only hired murderouses because like, after they get out of prison, right, not while they're because, as

she pointed out, they make the best employees. They need work, no one will hire them. But a murderous, most murderous has just killed some fucking dude who needs a killing. Like most are won and done. They're like, my husband kept doing horrible things, so now he's dead.

thirties murderesses. On August twenty first, nineteen thirty three, an eighteen year old woman named Violet Nozare poisoned her parents, slipping them barbituates in their drinks. Her father died, her mother survived. She fucked off with some of their money and was caught pretty much right away. She confessed, and she gave her motive immediately to the officer who arrested her. Her father had been sexually assaulting her for six years, and the French press rushed to see who could accuse

her of being a liar. The soonest, odious accusations an abominable lie. Are some headlines. The judge opened the case by telling the jury quote, remember the defendant is a liar. It's not a good way to be a judge.

done sex work. Hating her is all the rage. One paper said, quote, she is the inverted muse of youth, the scarlet idol of a capsized world, the flower of evil of our age.

the left wanted to condemn her. The Communist Party friend of the pod was like, she's hanging out with decadent bourgeois students, so she's like bad or whatever, you know, And the right is like, fuck her. She's destroying the natural social hierarchy of patriarchy and family. She had two categories of supporters. She had, the women who wrote the papers trying one hundred years too early to be believed in kind of like a me too sort of way.

And then there are the Surrealists, who probably a lot of them were women who were writing from a met to perspective. Right. The Surrealists wrote endlessly in support of her. They published a book of poetry and artwork in her honor while the trial was happening. Paul l u Ard, a Surrealist poet, wrote in there quote, Violet dreamt of undoing and undid the hideous vipers, not of blood connections.

The Nazis hated the Catholics, but the right wing in France and Spain fucking loved the Catholic. So here's the story of redemption, the fallen woman who found God or whatever the fuck, and so her sentences changed to twelve years. She gets out in nineteen forty five. She marries a middle class dude like a prison clerk, has five kids with them, and then diaza cancer in her fifties. But she joined the ranks of the surrealist heroines for killing

her abuser and breaking free of the patriarchal family. And this is alongside another scandalous case at the time in nineteen thirty three also when two sisters who are servants for some rich focks finally they just like can't take it anymore and they killed a shit out of they They gouge the eyes out and beat to death both their mistress and her daughter. Yeah, their case is very true crime podcast. There's probably a true crime prodcast about this, if not Sophie.

and you know what, that's possible. It seems far more likely that their version of the story is true, which is that it was self defense against a horrible, cruel mistress. The second affair was immortalized in a play called The Maids by a by a guy named Jean Jannat and I want to talk about him in our last little profile. In this Exquisite Corpse, get it because there's corpses.

of the Surrealist heyday. Because while this we'll talk about what he was doing during the Surrealist heyday, but he ends up a part of the theater of the absurd that came after the Surrealists. And this guy is the opposite of a trust fund kid. This is a very crime part that's coming up. Jean Jannat is a thief, a sex worker, a vagabond, a queer, and a prisoner. Those are his main occupations before he becomes a world famous novelist and playwright and pro Palestinian activist. We stand,

Jean Janet. I promised you I would you stand? In the script?

getting arrested for vagrancy. By the time he was fifteen, he was sent to a penal colony, which I thought meant like sent to South America, but it actually is just sort of a in this case, like a crime boarding school whatever. You call those places, A bad prison for.

and rites, and he despised organized religion. Near the end of his life, he's actually he's hanging out in a Palestinian refugee camp where he like lives for six months and is doing all this work. And they're like, what religion, and he's like, none, but if you insist Catholic and I really identify with that. So yeah, he spent almost all of World War Two in French prison, so he wasn't like a political activist, right, He's just a fucking prisoner.

And he starts writing. He starts writing in prison, and he writes stories about all the cool crime stuff he's been up to, and he like sexualizes the role of the prisoner in society. The only thing I've read by him is I've read chunks of the Thieves Journal, and it's just like, basically, it's like I adore all of these like hyper masculine men in prison who all like hide things in their butt and want to have sex

with me. It's pretty fun. And it's funny because the stuff that gets you condemned literally to spend your life behind bars. The literary crowd eats up. Not that I capitalize off that myself. No, sir, he wasn't a famous writer yet. He started his first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, on his like prison job that he was supposed to be making paper bags out of like brown paper, you know, And so he's like writing his novel on it.

So they burn his first draft and send him to solitary, and he had to rewrite the entire book from memory, which he claims he like did it word for word. I don't believe him, but I don't care. He got out, and he kept getting arrested again, and he was about to get a life sentence in nineteen forty nine under the notorious ten strikes your outlaw, which is like, I mean, yeah, I gu it's fair.

for life, Like that just doesn't. But the literary world, in the art world is like, no, he's our guy, and like Sart and Picasso are like, no, police, don't imprison him. We're famous and we like him, and they're like okay. So he goes free and he actually never goes back to prison again. And all this time he's sort of obsessively non political, or at least he's read that way. I would argue that he's a nihilist. He

is functionally a nihilist anarchist at this point. He's against politics, but he's writing about anti colonialism and anti racism and against all institutions of power. He loves all rebels, including people doing lots of bad shit too, right, He's just like, oh, you're fucking a rebel. I'm like criminal. Queer is its own political position, and eventually when he finds like more traditional ideological politics, it's somewhere in the anarchist communist spectrum,

which is in the late sixties. He in the late sixties, he gets involved more politically. He spent six months in refugee camps. He makes friends with the Black Panthers. He starts writing in the Black Panther Papers. He sneaks into the US, like multiple times, illegally because the US is like, no, you can't come in here. You're just a crime guy. And he's like, but I want to come and they're like, no, you're a crime man. And he's like, all right, I'll

go to Canada and then walk over or whatever. I don't know how he sneaks in, but he sneaks in multiple times. And in France he's getting involved in the fight against police brutality of like Algerians, like basically, you know, black people in Paris are getting murdered and ship by cops,

and he's fighting against that. During the uprising in France in nineteen sixty eight, he writes one of my favorite quotes about revolutionary symbolism that I've ever read, which is, unfortunately, I don't think we can win without the red and black flags, but they must be destroyed afterwards, which is like, I think a really useful way to think about labels, right, being like, are these politically useful to us, then we should consider them, but they are not our goal, you

know or not? A goal is not to have a specific ideological position, right. Another quote I like by him one time he was giving a speech to a Yale audience and he his quote was basically like, your universities are quote comfortable aquariums where people raise goldfish capable of nothing more than blowing bubbles.

and that's how I said it. The show is October sixth, which I think is right around the corner of when this episode comes out. You can go to link tree slash Bechtel Cast to grab tickets if they're not already sold out, but I mean brag, they probably will be people people you can oh the live stream exactly, so oh my gosh, Sophie, you're a genius. If the show is sold out the live show, you can live stream it from anywhere in the world.

I don't feel guilty about this, and it's just like literally my more personal shit that isn't And also I have a thing that is probably kickstarting as you are listening to this called Defenders of the Wild, which has is a board game and role playing game, and I've been doing some world design on both, but I'm especially involved in the tabletop role playing game part of it.

So if you want to play a game where you are a badger, ooh, my favorite character right now is is a bear with a frying pan who is really at organizing people and fighting machines. And if that sounds fun to you, then Defenders of the Wild is on Kickstarter. Might the full title of the kickstarters probably defenders the wild by outlandish Games. That's it, except for Sophie. What do you got Sophie? Well, what do we got? Margaret?

some other people reading me stories. We have a couple of different ideas of what we're going to do with it, and the very first thing we're going to do with it is four Sundays in a row, we're going to have me reading Robert Evans, my novella The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, which is more or less about a punk house full of weird people that burns down, only in this case, it's a squatted punk town that is occupied by a three antler demon deer that eats people

who act irresponsibly. Hell yeah, yeah, so check that out. And I'm really excited about it. Yeah, we've been working on it for a while. That's what we got. We'll see you next week.