They hovered round the edge and dipped in, to everyone’s benefit. But they had their own games to play, which they weren’t about to subordinate to Breton’s. And he accepted that. That was why he found Duchamp so fascinating — because Duchamp was someone he could never control. But that was OK, because he wasn’t a Surrealist.

Breton’s head wasn’t a very comfortable place to be. It was a very complex and contradictory place. What he yearned for was spontaneity, the unbridled, the outrageous and uncontrolled and the juxtapositions they led to. But emotionally, spontaneity was terribly hard for him. He did excess all right. But it was forced excess, from the head, not the gut. By nature he was inhibited, repressed, romantic and fanatically orderly. For instance, in the famous Surrealist investigations of sex, he said, ‘I desire a woman when I love her. This is absolutely not accompanied by an erection. If you love a woman it is absolutely impossible to masturbate while thinking of her, except…when there’s a formal agreement between the man and the woman. If for example it’s been agreed that you’ll both masturbate at five o’clock.’ There’s Breton: a formal agreement and precise timing for — masturbation.

Breton’s real and huge gift was for the politics of art. In fact that was really a combination of two gifts: for spotting new and significant talent, in which he succeeded Apollinaire, and for keeping up momentum. That was the big difference between Dada and Surrealism.

That was why he fell for Jacques Vaché in the way he did. Vaché embodied everything he would have loved to be but was not. He was a dandy, cynical, stylish, outrageous to the point of murder, whereas Breton was earnest, awkward and enthusiastic. Breton liked to define the ultimate surrealist act as going into the street and shooting someone at random: something he could never have done. But Vaché did actually brandish a pistol in the theatre — it was Apollinaire’s Mamelles de Tiresias in 1917 — and when he committed suicide, he made sure to take someone else with him. Breton was lost in admiration, and in a very real way, what would later become Surrealism was modeled on Vaché. There were other elements too, of course — the pursuit of chance, dreams, psychoanalysis. But Vaché was always there, at least in Breton’s mind — which, as I’ve said, was Surrealism.

Breton’s real and huge gift was for the politics of art. In fact that was really a combination of two gifts: spotting new and significant talent, in which he succeeded Apollinaire, and keeping up momentum. That was the big difference between Dada and Surrealism. Both Breton and the Dadaists — Tzara, Arp, Hans Richter and the rest, and also Duchamp in his New York Dada phase — evolved their artistic stance in reaction to, or rather against, World War I. But where Dada never moved on from there, Surrealism under Breton kept evolving. Dada was a scream of outrage; Surrealism was always more than that. It was never just artistic, it was political — a political movement headed by Breton. He’s called the Pope of Surrealism not just because of his habit of ‘excommunicating’ Surrealists he disagreed with, but he was really more like a Stalin, you had to keep up with the whim of the moment. That was why the communists could never really accept him, or Surrealism. He was a rival, not an acolyte.

Yet the politics that evolved around World War I, which was essentially a war of soldiers, and which spawned dictators, including Breton, were of no use during World War II, in which every civilian was a participant. That was the milieu that gave rise to Existentialism. And in that world, Breton and all he stood for simply seemed out of date.