Surprisingly, given that they were so very much a product of a particular time and place, there didn’t seem to exist the kind of book
I envisaged, setting them in their historical/political and personal context. There was reams of stuff, of course, but either it was about the pictures, which in my view are the least interesting aspect of Surrealism, or else it was in French, which as far as writing goes, means a very different approach from mine — rather reverent, every detail an icon, which is always unproductive and particularly bizarre in the context of the Surrealists. Useful as a sourcebook, but not much more. And nothing in Spanish. (I’m not talking here about memoirs and biographies, which of course abound.)

What interests me is really the antithesis of that kind of iconographical, worshipful approach. It seems clear to me that movements like Surrealism begin because particular people react to particular events in a particular way.

One reason why I enjoy writing group biography is because it’s the ideal way to examine that phenomenon. I’m less interested in the credo than the human mechanics of how it evolved —the psychology, the political situation, etc. What interests me about the ideas is how they reflect the people. The opposite of an art history approach. I was actually asked to give a seminar on my book in an art history department. When I finished, the dean remarked that this was the first time he’d heard art treated as a series of personal interactions. But in the sense that all art is surely the most unmediated possible transferal of brain/heart to paper/canvas or whatever other medium, how can you think personal context unimportant? Less so in painting, perhaps. As I said, I don’t think surrealism is primarily about painting.

As to the complex form of the book, it was always fairly clear to me that that was the only way to go about it — as a series of chronological episodes tracing the movement’s history and evolution through different groups. The technical problem is that it’s hard to get started. It’s like Benjamin Britten’s ‘Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’. You start with one instrument, but you don’t get the full band playing until the end.

You begin Surreal Lives with a straightforward thesis: Breton, so passionate about freedom, both personal and artistic, was totalitarian in his impulses, a dictator in the age of dictators. Can these two impulses — to freedom and total control — possibly be reconciled? This is the clash at the heart of the Surrealists’ story.

Please elaborate how this contradiction lead to André Breton’s glory and demise, and the type of Surrealism he helped create and nurture.

Well, of course Breton was Surrealism. That’s the first thing to realize. The whole thing is really just a huge, often overblown materialization of whatever happened to be going on inside his head. If you couldn’t accept that, you couldn’t be a Surrealist. That was what laid at the root of Breton’s great bust-up with Dalí — Dalí didn’t accept the control, yet went on insisting he was a Surrealist — hell, the Surrealist. The really big figures that could compete with Breton in stature, like Apollinaire and Picasso and Duchamp, remained his friends because they were never part of Surrealism proper.