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And, at the circus, when she is in her erotic disguise, it is as if the spectacle of Miss M. suddenly transformed from visible spirit (she is slight, fair, pale) to palpable if simulated rosy flesh is too much for Mr Anon, who is, as ever, watching her. He refuses to allow her to degrade herself still further and takes her place in the circus ring on an unruly pony for the last parade, suffering a fatal injury while doing so. Miss M., therefore, out in the world on her own for the first time, tremulously experimenting with the appearance of sexuality, and, indeed, of work, too – for this circus turn is the first time she has attempted to earn her own living – actually loses her soul; and has to undergo an ordeal in the same neglected garden of Wanderslore where she used to meet both Fanny and Mr Anon before she can start out again on the path to regeneration, the return home.

This ordeal concludes with a balked attempt to poison herself with the fruit of the deadly nightshade, with ‘forbidden fruit'.

This is not the first time she has been tempted by forbidden fruit. In the secure garden of childhood, she has ‘reached up and plucked from their rank-smelling bush' a few blackcurrants very similar in appearance to the ‘black, gleaming' poison berries on which, in her extremity, she gazes ‘as though, from childhood up, they had been my one greed and desire'. But, desire them as she may, she cannot eat them; she seems physically incapable of doing so. She picks one, its ‘bitter juices' jet out upon her, and then, overcome, she flings ‘the vile thing' down. The fruit remains forbidden. Whatever taboo it represents remains unbroken, and the breaking of this taboo involves the ‘stinking mystery' of mortality, anyway.

So the central core of the novel remains mysterious to itself; we never penetrate the real nature of the ‘stinking mystery' in the
garden, represented by the rotting carcase of the mole. Miss M. will remain a stranger in this world. She will not even learn to rejoice in her estrangement, although at last she rejoices in her solitude. But that is not the same thing.

The image of forbidden fruit has all the more potency because Miss M. customarily subsists on a fructarian diet. She drinks milk, nibbles biscuits but partakes freely only of cherries, slices of apple, strawberries, nectarines. Her diet is similar to that of the heroes of de la Mare's metaphysical novel for children,
The Three Royal Monkeys
, who promise their mother never to taste blood, to climb trees, or to grow a tail; their diet is a sign of their spiritual ascendancy over the other apes and Miss M. marks the beginnings of her own spiritual erosion in London when a doctor puts her on a strengthening diet of white meat. She starts to put on weight and that seems to her also a sign of degeneration; there is an interesting touch of the anorexic about Miss M. revealed in her choice of words to describe her padded circus costume: ‘monstrous mummery'. This is connected with an odd little episode during her life at Mrs Bowater's, when she buries a bloodstained nightdress in a rabbit hole in the Wanderslore garden, just as young girls sometimes attempt to hide the evidence of their menses. (Miss M. tells us that this blood, however, comes from a scratch.) Mr Anon later returns this nightdress; nothing, nothing whatever, can be hidden from him. No wonder he annoys her.

After she throws down the forbidden fruit, untasted, she suffers a period of derangement and hallucination. We know in advance from her editor's preface that sufficient private means are stumped up somehow to buy back for her her father's house, and there she lives on, in seclusion, with Fanny's mother to wait on her. We leave Miss M.'s life in the same state of purposeless rustic gentility as it began but we already know she will be ‘called away', by, it is implied, that spiritual messenger from the Other World, perhaps the beautiful stranger she saw in the audience in the circus tent. And yet the mystery of her departure seems arbitrary and forlorn.

De la Mare has certainly equipped the novel with hermetic meaning, yet this does not, finally, seem to console even the writer. The metaphysical sub-text seems to me a decoy; he offers a key to a door behind which is only another door. The novel remains dark, teasing, a system of riddles, leaving a memory of
pain, a construct of remarkable intellectual precision and scrupulous dovetailing of imagery, finally as circular as hopelessness.

Something awful is looking out of the windows of the novel, just as it looks out of Fanny's eyes in Miss M.'s startling description of her: ‘a beautiful body with that sometimes awful Something looking out of its windows.' De la Mare himself found this image sufficiently striking to use a version of it again in his own Introduction to the 1938 Everyman edition of a selection of his stories, essays, and poems:

Feelings as well as thoughts may be expressed in symbols; and every character in a story is not only a ‘chink', a peephole in the dark cottage from which his maker looks out at the world, but is also in some degree representative of himself, if a self in disguise.

All fiction, as Balzac said, is symbolic autobiography. Miss M.'s ‘M' may stand, simply, for midget, or Midgetina; or, Metaphor. Or, Myself.

(1982)

Surrealism celebrated wonder, the capacity for seeing the world as if for the first time which, in its purest state, is the prerogative of children and madmen, but more than that, it celebrated wonder itself as an essential means of perception. Yet not a naive wonder. The surrealists did not live in naive times. A premonition of the imminent end of the world is always a shot in the arm for the arts; if the world has, in fact, just ended, what then? The 1914–18 war was, in many respects, for France and Germany, indeed the end of the world. The Zurich Dadas celebrated the end of the world, and of art with it. However, the Russian Revolution of 1917 suggested the end of one world might mark the commencement of another world, one in which human beings themselves might take possession not only of their own lives but also of their own means of expressing the reality of that life, i.e. art. It is possible for the true optimist to view the end of the world with sang-froid. What is so great about all this crap? Might there be something better? Surrealism's undercurrent of joy, of delight, springs from its faith in humankind's ability to recreate itself; the conviction that struggle
can
bring something better.

Any discussion of surrealism must, first of all, acknowledge that it was never a school of art, or of literature, as such. The surrealist painters and poets were not in the least interested in formal art or literature, and if they started to show signs of becoming so, Andre Breton, the supreme arbitrator, kicked them out of the group. It was the irreducible psychological element that makes a wonder out of the commonplace, the imagination itself, that obsessed them. As for art, anyone can make it; so they
made art, out of word and image, though their techniques were haphazard and idiosyncratic, and it must be said that some of them were better at it than others, though an unfair proportion of them all had that ability to light the blue touchpaper of the imagination and then retire, which a more élitist culture than the one at whose service the surrealists placed their work, or play, would have called genius.

Surrealism was not an artistic movement but a theory of knowledge that developed a political ideology of its own accord. Its art came out of the practice of a number of men and women who formulated and committed themselves to this theory of knowledge, some for a few years, some for their whole lives. They were practitioners and theoreticians at the same time. A poet, Andre Breton, wrote the Surrealist Manifesto; a film-maker and a punk painter, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, made the two most comprehensive surrealist visual statements,
Un Chien Andalou
and
L'Age d'Or
, though Dali later recanted on the whole thing. Buñuel never recanted, kept turning them out, the greatest poet of the cinema and of love, who used the camera like a machine-gun, the dialectic like a
coup de grâce
.

However, surrealist theory is derived from a synthesis of Freud and Hegel that only those without a specialist knowledge of either psychoanalysis or philosophy might have dared to undertake. Over the surrealists, or, rather, around them lie the long shadows of Plato, amongst whom they moved as if they were made of flesh. The immediate literary avatars are easier to assimilate: Baudelaire, Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry. The surrealists soon incorporated Marx, yet, with digestions like so many boa constrictors, were greedy for occult phenomena and utilised a poetic methodology based on analogy and inspiration, the free play of the unconscious, tangling with the French Communist Party – losing Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard to it. Most of the painters found themselves prize exhibits in the Hitlerian gallery of decadent art. The poetry, especially that of Eluard, with its themes of freedom and love, was used as propaganda in the French Resistance.

Like most philosophical systems put together by artists – like neo-Platonism itself – surrealism was intellectually shaky, but, artistically speaking, the shakier the intellectual structure, the better art it produces. (Christianity has produced some perfectly
respectable painting, even poetry.) The British could never take its philosophic pretensions seriously; none of the surrealists knew any maths, and besides, they kept dragging sex and politics into everything, including the relations between men and women and the individual and the state, where every good Briton knows sex and politics have no right to be. Nevertheless, surrealist art is, in the deepest sense, philosophical – that is, art created in the terms of certain premisses about reality; and also an art that is itself a series of adventures in, or propositions and expositions of, this surrealist philosophy.

It was also a way of life; of living on the edge of the senses; of perpetual outrage and scandal, the destruction of the churches, of the prisons, of the armies, of the brothels. Such power they ascribed to words and images. A poem is a wound; a poem is a weapon:

It has been said that it is not our right but our duty to start with words and their relations in order to study the world scientifically. It should be added that this duty is that of living itself, not in the fashion of those who bear death within them, and who are already blind walls, or vacuums, but by uniting with the universe, with the universe in movement, in process.

Poetry will become flesh and blood only when it is reciprocal. This reciprocity is entirely a function of the equality of happiness among mankind. And equality of happiness will bear happiness to a height of which we can as yet have only a faint notion.

(Paul Eluard)

Surrealism posits poetry as a possible mode, possibly the primary mode, of being. Surrealism was the latest, perhaps the final, explosion of romantic humanism in Western Europe. It demanded the liberation of the human spirit as both the ends and the means of art.

Surrealism =
permanent revelation

Surrealism =
permanent revolution

So it didn't work out. Those surrealists who are not dead are
very old and some are very rich, which wasn't on the original agenda. Since poetry has to pay its dues at the custom-house of translation, it rarely travels, and, besides, the nature of outrage is not the same at all places and at all times. The Dadas are more fashionable at the moment, since we live in nihilistic times. Surrealist romanticism is at the opposite pole from classical modernism, but then, the surrealists would never have given Pound or Eliot house room on strictly moral grounds. A Mussolini fan? A high Tory? They'd have moved, noisily but with dignity, to another café. You don't
have
to collaborate, you know.
La lutte continue
. It continues because it has to. This world is all we have.

It is this world, there is no other but a world transformed by imagination and desire. You could say it is the dream made flesh.

Freud's
The Interpretation of Dreams
was a key book. When we dream, we are all poets. Everywhere, the surrealists left their visiting cards: ‘Parents! Tell your children your dreams.' The Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries was opened at 15 rue de Grenelle, Paris, in October 1924. ‘The Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries is engaged in collecting, by every appropriate means, communications relevant to the diverse forms which the unconscious activity of the mind is likely to take.' The general public were invited to visit the Bureau to confide their rarest dreams, to debate morality, to allow the staff to judge the quality of those striking coincidences that revealed the arbitrary, irrational, magical correspondences of life.

Antonin Artaud fired off letters to the chancellors of the European universities: ‘Gentlemen: In the narrow tank which you call “Thought”, the rays of the spirit rot like old straw.' To the Pope: ‘In the name of Family and Fatherland, you urge the sale of souls, the unrestricted grinding of bodies.' And to the Dalai Lama: ‘Teach us, Lama, material levitation of the body and how we can be held no longer by the earth.' Note the touch of oriental mysticism creeping into the last missive. A bit more of that kind of thing and Andre Breton, the Pope of surrealism, its theoretician, propagandist, and mage, expelled him from the group. Like many libertarians, Breton had, in action, a marked authoritarian streak. Artaud vanished from this world into that of madness.

In 1922 Max Ernst had already painted a group portrait: ‘At the Rendezvous of Friends.' The friends were the poets Rene Crevel, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupoult, Paul Eluard, Robert
Desnos, Andre Breton, and Benjamin Peret; Dostoievsky had also arrived. Jean Arp, like Ernst a former Dada, was a poet as well as a sculptor; Giorgio de Chirico and Ernst himself are primarily painters, even if Ernst is the most literary of all painters and de Chirico wrote an enigmatic novel,
Hebdomeros
, that begins in the middle of one sentence and ends in the middle of another. The surrealist freemasonry encompassed all kinds of art because it saw all kinds of art as manifestations of the same phenomena.