I confess that I am slightly confused with a passage in Surreal Lives, somewhere near the end of the chapter “Dada Comes to Paris.” At this point, Breton is attempting to find a way “out of Dada.” On a Dada spectacle organized by Tzara, you write:

My question: what exactly sets Breton off in such a violent rage? Because he perceives that de Massot has insulted his friends Picabia and Pablo Picasso, or is it something else?

I think it’s more that Breton, Eluard, Péret and the other Surrealists had had it with Tzara and all his rather repetitious works, and that this marked the breaking point, the moment when Surrealism moved on and Dada stayed put. It’s clear Tzara was expecting violence — the whole evening was a sort of staged fight. Breaking Massot’s arm was Breton demonstrating outrage in an outrageous manner. Because it was so forced and serious, it went too far. He was in a genuine rage, but it was about Tzara continuing to hog the spotlight. Massot was just its unfortunate recipient.

Another slightly unclear point for me in Surreal Lives comes with the final break-up between Breton and Picabia: what finally ended their long but desultory friendship?

Partly it was the cumulative effect of Picabia’s determination to go his own way and not be dictated to by Breton, combined with Breton’s inability to deal with irreverence directed at himself (as when Picabia printed Breton’s pedantic rejection of an invitation to contribute to his magazine 391 under the heading ‘A Letter from Grandpa’). In fact, unusually, it was Picabia who broke off the relationship — on that very occasion, when he commented: “When I’ve smoked a cigarette, I’m not in the habit of keeping the butt.” Generally, it was the charismatic Breton who did the breaking-off, and the excommunicates who moped in the solitude of rejection. It was also that Picabia was and remained a Dadaist, and Surrealism moved on and left him behind.

Why did the Surrealists come to view the novel as an inauthentic form of literary expression?

Novels need plot and form, of some sort — even Tristram Shandy is not shapeless, and it’s certainly not spontaneous. Surrealism is about spontaneity and whim. And as Breton and Soupault’s Magnetic Fields shows, that, in book form, is quite simply unreadable. So in a way the notion of a Surrealist novel is a contradiction.

There is a great sense of immediacy in Surreal Lives — I felt that all these writers and artists, some of whom go back to almost a hundred years ago, were audible, had truly come to life on the page. I wonder if you’ve considered extracting a screen play based on Surreal Lives?

For some years now, I’ve been meditating a film about Duchamp and Henri Roché in Dadaist New York, seen through the eyes of Beatrice Wood, the lover of them both. It would be a sort of decadent New York Jules et Jim (which of course was from a novel by Roché). I do think it would make a really wonderful film — extremely sexy, that mad hellish atmosphere of World War I New York, all those German spies, Arthur Cravan… But it’s a question of finance, as usual. And time, which is the same thing.