If you had to choose your favorite Surrealist, who would it be?

Duchamp, except he wasn’t one. Buñuel.

Why did the Surrealists hate Anatole France?

I guess because he represents, in every particular, the world they were rebelling against — that is, the world that had allowed the carnage of World War I to happen. Surrealism was absolutely a product of World War I: they were the generation that had been expected to fight in it, wanting to destroy everything about the old world that had fomented it and sent them off to die. The ‘celebrated limpidities’ of France’s prose, his honours, his membership of the Académie Française, etc, were an encapsulation. “Un Cadavre” literally buried all that.

What are your own opinions about Breton’s Nadja?

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What a strange and revealing book that is. I like it — its atmosphere of the marvelous and the magic, especially its strange photos. And the way it trails round Paris. But it also says pretty horrendous things about the author — his absolute egoism, his total inability to recognize that he’s dealing with another human being, his horror, really, when he’s forced to recognize that — that Nadja isn’t just a projection of his Surrealist imagination. That was something he always found it hard to accept about people.

Aragon’s life was a strange and tumultuous one, and, from a literary standpoint, tragic, his pen having gone silent for more than forty years. Your thoughts?

I found him a rather sad figure. Extraordinarily brilliant and charming, and terribly weak. You can see why communism and Elsa Triolet so profoundly enthralled him — they took him over, gave him a framework. All they demanded in return was — himself. After the visit to Russia, he was no longer able to be an artist. But he obviously thought that a price worth paying — if he even realized it had happened. After all, he still went on producing poems. They just weren’t any good.

The fact that (as everyone knew) he was actually bisexual, but would never admit it publicly, says something about the homophobic atmosphere surrounding Surrealism.

Dalí’s career was a magnificent one from every point of the compass. However, one certainly can see a weakening of his work in his later life, to the point of utter inauthenticity of artistic expression.

Another extraordinary talent that buckled under the weight of its own neuroses. His early paintings are quite wonderful, very powerful. The one they used on the cover of Surreal Lives — fantastic. And then that cheap crap at the end…

The truth is, that Dalí really needed Breton. He needed Breton’s disciplining eye. Until 1938, his paintings carry this weight of dreamlike power. But as soon as they split, Dali was lost, artistically — though of course, tremendously successful commercially. Nothing but cheap repetition. Avida Dollars indeed.

By then Surrealism, too, was in decline. World War II was approaching, and Breton was running out of steam. America was the coming place: Breton hated everything about it, but Dalí loved it, and it loved him.