We think of Surrealism as primarily a movement in the plastic arts, which is understandable, given the enduring fame - or infamy, in some cases - of such figures as Duchamp, Magritte, Max Ernst, and above all Salvador Dali. However, Surrealism had its beginnings in literature, or, more correctly, in a reaction against the literary remnants of the Age of Certainty that came to a cataclysmic end in 1918. The Great War left many enraged young men in Europe determined to spit in the face of the past and declare a cultural Year Zero. And few were as determined or enraged as Andre Breton, the Pope of Surrealism, and its most unlikely founding father.
It was Breton in his papal bulls who set out the doctrine of the movement. The "simplest surreal act," he said, "consists of going into the street, revolver in hand, and shooting at random into the crowd for as long as you can". When challenged on his extreme views - specifically, in answer to a question on the Marquis de Sade, one of his great heroes - he made the defining Surrealist distinction between art and life: "The imagination is free," he declared, "man is not". Certainly, Breton was not free, and he expended much of his formidable energy in trying to enslave others, emotionally and artistically. As Max Ernst once observed, "Breton is surrealism", and if you did not accept the Pope's infallibility, excommunication was inevitable. He fell out repeatedly with the charismatic but troubled Louis Aragon, a Tweedledum to Breton's Tweedledee, who left what is perhaps the only great Surrealist text, the fictional fragment Le con d'Irene (translation impossible in a family newspaper).
Breton, born in Normandy in 1896, had his first glimpse of the future in Paris in the summer of 1917, when he and his beloved friend Jacques Vache attended the first performance of Les mamelles de Tiresias, by Guillaume Apollinaire. "The curtain rose," writes Ruth Brandon, "a fat woman entered and unbuttoned her blouse to reveal her breasts: two gas-filled balloons. She pulled them out and flung them into the audience. The first Surrealist drama was under way." Although Apollinaire had already coined the word "surrealism", the movement that he founded, along with Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara and the sinister Marcel Duchamp, was Dadaism, that "howl of fury", in Brandon's phrase, at the waste and chaos of the world war. They in turn had been inspired by Rimbaud, Lautreamont and, of course, Sade. Dadaism was by definition undisciplined, anarchic and ridiculous; it took the iron-willed Breton to turn it into a religion. In the work and lives of derangers of the senses such as Lautreamont and Sade, and, most importantly, in the psychoanalytical writings of Freud, he found, as Brandon has it, "the route-map for the great artistic journey of the coming century: the journey to the interior".
For Breton and his acolytes Surrealism was the answer to the crisis in art that resulted from the Modernist revolution. All artists work in the force field between freedom and the law, a predicament that was acutely problematical for Breton, who was at once a fanatical revolutionary and a rule-bound bourgeois. Unfortunately, he was also not a great artistic talent. His importance lies in the influence he exercised on the movement which he, if not all its members, saw as his invention and subject to his absolute authority. His unending struggle to assert that authority is at the heart of Ruth Brandon's account of the surrealists and their larger-than-life lives.
The story she tells is one of fights, defections, rebellions, betrayals, reconciliations, and final failure. The French Surrealists left very little work of real worth. Even the nihilist Duchamp's attempts to destroy art, in pieces such as the signed urinal and the bewhiskered Mona Lisa, have been subsumed into the very mainstream of culture that he had wished to pollute. It was the Belgian Rene Magritte, who hardly figures in Ms Brandon's book, who took the methods of Surrealism - there is an argument to be made that he was not truly a Surrealist - and made some of the most startling, mysteriously beautiful, and surely enduring images of the century.
And then there were the Spaniards, Ruth Brandon's "Andalusian dogs". For Lorca, Dali, Bunuel, the discovery of Surrealism was the discovery of a wholly new way of living. They were all the products of affluent middle-class Catholic families. The Spain which produced them "was not part of the modern world," Brandon writes. "Not only was it isolated from international politics, so that uniquely in Europe their generation was untouched by the Great War; it was, to a large extent, still mediaeval in the arrangement of everyday life." All three attended the Residencia de Estudiantes in Barcelona, a student hall of residence based on the Oxford colleges, which was "a focus for advanced thought, and for everyone who was anyone in Spanish intellectual life". These brilliant young men had already discovered for themselves the surrealist forebears - autreamont, Freud, Apollinaire - but it was only when they travelled - Dali and Bunuel took themselves off without delay to Paris, the capital of culture - that they found their true voices. Of the three, Bunuel was the survivor. Lorca was shot by fascists in the Civil War, the coprophagic (yes, really) Dali turned himself into a grotesque joke - Breton's wonderful anagrammic nick-name for him was "Avida Dollars" - while in a long life Bunuel made some of the most startling films in the history of the cinema, from Le chienandalou to Belle de jour. Bunuel is a rare example of an artist who can work at the heart of a movement and yet transcend its limiting rules.
This is a wonderful book, full of masterly set-pieces, such as the occasion when a private showing of Le chien andalou was arranged for Cecil B. De Mille and his circle: "[they] were nailed to their seats as if hypnotized by a king cobra," and one of the party got violently ill (remember that image of the slit eyeball with which the film opens?). Brandon, as one would expect, pays special attention to the Surrealists' women, which is more than the Surrealists themselves did; with nice wit, she describes Breton's mind as "a region innocent of any notion of female autonomy". From Breton down, the Surrealists treated women with a sort of ecstatic contempt, constantly falling in love with idealised versions of them, and casting them aside when the ideal faded. Yet a bevy of magnificent females prowl like panthers through these pages: Nancy Cunard, the sisters Elsa Triolet and Lily Brik, Kiki de Montparnasse, and the ineffable Gala Eluard, who left the poet Paul Eluard to become Dali's combined muse and, some contend, his nemesis. There is hardly a commentator on the subject who has not condemned Gala as a monster of depravity and greed, so it is good to hear defended for once this woman who "lived entirely on her own terms", an unforgivable violation of the Surrealist code as it applied to women.
What is the legacy of Surrealism? Is it more than a few scraps of automatic writing and a soft watch or two? Brandon is clear-eyed in her assessment of what was achieved. Not much, she suggests. However, after Breton and his followers, the world is, as she says, a surreal place, and everyone knows "the bizarre concatenations, the dreamlike logic, that the adjective implies". And until Breton named it, "there was no word for this state of things - one that, perhaps more than any other, defines our time".