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A poor student at the Communal School on the rue des Archives ("talkative, disorganized, disobedient, scatter-brained, negligent, inattentive, deceitful, and lazy") and the Turgot commercial school, he then worked as a drug salesman for a company of wholesale druggists, and translated medical prospectuses for the Darasse Brothers pharmaceutical laboratories from 1917-19. He had made friends with Vitrac, Limbour, Peret, but while they engaged in Dada activities, he did his military service from March 1920 to May 1921 in France, and in Morocco from May 1921 to January 1922 with the Thirtieth Regiment of Algerian artillery. On leave he met Breton and Tzara, but had no real relations with the future surrealist group except through letters from Peret, until September 1922. Desnos finally became a doctor's secretary before turning to journalism. In 1916, he had begun to transcribe his dreams, to draw, and in 1917 to write his own poetry, usually in a rather unadventurous alexandrine form. Always fascinated with words, with their power of evocation and persuasion (hence his equal interest in the alchemy of language and in journalism), he excelled in the verbal experiments and the writing games played seriously by the surrealists, and in the rapidity of pure automatic writing and speaking, particularly in the era of hypnotic sleeps, where he outdid all the others in "spoken thought", communicating with Marcel Duchamp (some of his word games, illustrated here, are played in the name of Rrose Selavy, Duchamp's alter ego) as well as Hugo and Robespierre. In his "Manifesto" of 1924, Breton said of Desnos that he was of all of us, perhaps the one who came the closest to surrealist truth, the one who...in the course of the multiple experiences to which he has lent himself, has fully justified the hope which I once placed in surrealism and who encourages me to expect a great deal of it still. Today Desnos speaks surrealist when he chooses to. The prodigious agility he displays in following his thought orally produces all the splendid discourse we could want, all of it lost, Desnos having better things to do than to write them down. He reads in himself like an open book and makes no effort to return that sheets flying away in the wind of his life.
During the great surrealist period 1924-30, he shared the typical surrealist attitudes toward suicide (playing Russian roulette, for instance), toward collective endeavor (in 1923 he wrote Comme il fait beau, a play in collaboration with Peret and Breton), and in particular toward the exaltation of woman. For ten years he devoted his entire admiration to Yvonne George, famous for her renditions of sailors' songs at the Empire and at the Olympia; she was the inspiration for A la mysterieuse, Les Tenebres, and La Liberte ou l'amour! When she died in a sanitorium, Youki, who had been the wife of the Japanese painter Foujita before her marriage to Desnos, replaced her as the incarnation of the mythological heroine.
But at the same time the interests of Desnos diverged from those of the surrealists: he worked in "public relations" and, at the invitation of Eugene Merie, became a journalist for such periodicals as Paris-Soir, Paris-Martin, Paris-Journal, Le Soir, and Aujourd'hul. Again, as in the period of surrealist sleep-writing, he was know for his spontaneous facility with language, simply telephoning his pieces to be published without changes. In 1928 he visited Havana for meetings of a press congress, and there developed a great interest in Cuban music ("these new songs with a new accent but which, more human than others, spoke a language familiar to me"). From 1927 to 1929, during the period when Breton and the others, having turned from anarchism to communism, were chiefly involved in the effort to reconcile surrealism and political activity, Desnos gradually separated himself from the group: he had come under attack for his "non-involvement" and the strain led to the open break in 1929 and to Desnos' own "Third Surrealist Manifesto," quoted in another section.
From 1932 to 1939, Desnos worked in radio advertising, for Paul Deharme in "Information et Publicite," doing what he called another sort of poetry. In the postface to Etat de veille (Walking State), he explained: "I threw myself passionately into the almost mathematical, yet intuitive, work of adapting words to music, of fabricating sentences, proverbs and mottoes for advertising, the primary exigency of this work being a return to the people's taste in the way of rhyme." He adapted poems, novels, plays, popular songs for the radio, convinced of the importance of wide communication. From this period comes little poetry as such, but many productions in a popular vein, such as the Complainte de Fantomas (1933), the Complainte du pirate (1936), the Sans cou (The Neckless), the texts of some documentary films, some songs set tomusic by Poulenc, Honegger, and a few cantatas, one of which, the Cantate pour l'inauguration du Musee de l'homme (1938) was set to the music of Darius Milhaud, and Les Quatre Elements. All these are, as we have noted, of a more public character than the surrealist works studied here: there is no indication of shadows (Les Tenebres) or mystery (A la mysterieuse) or of the battle between love and freedom (La Liberte ou l'amour). Rhythms mattered now more than images, and these productions are the result of a desire to combine poetry and music and poetry and mathematics, as Desnos explains in a note to Fortunes, the collective title for the poetry of this period.
When war broke out and his work for radio was halted, Desnos turned to his poetry, but it was now of a different bent from that of the years between 1923 and 1927, and far more accessible in content and form, this development already having started in the longer poems of 1929 and 1930, as we explain elsewhere. The poet of Resistance was no longer either the poet of surrealism or of an individual love: he was part of the Front Commun, joined in communist and surrealist manifestations, wrote in Commune and in Europe.
Desnos was conscripted in 1939, sent to the south of France but was back in Paris in the fall. Between 1940 and his departure in 1944 for the series of concentration camps in which he was to spend the last part of his life, his resistance poetry (some of it in slang appeared under the names of Lucien Gallois, Pierre Andier, Valentin Guillois, and Cancale: the title of the 1944 collection, Etat de veille), with its emphasis on alertness indicates the mood of the poems. He was demoted by the Nazis to the lowliest tasks at the newspaper Aujord'hui, he joined the group gathered around the journal Combat and the resistance group Agir. Just before his deportation, he wrote the light verses of Trente chantefables et chantefleurs pour les enfants sages (a chanter sur n'importe quel air), the "realistic" novel Le Vin est Tire, and the graver poems of Calixto and Contree (1943), all these in classical verse forms, the formed peopled with mythological personages (the nymph Calixto, Alcestes) and the latter, descriptions of town, country, and landscape revolving around questions of heroism, virtue, dreams of the past and the reality of the present. When the Gestapo came to arrest Desnos, who had been denounced by Alain Laubreaux, he was preparing the satirical underground journal Les Nouveaux Taons.
He was sent to Fresnes, then to Compiegne (see the poem "Sol de Compiegne," 1944, signed Valentin Guillois), where Youki saw him for the last time as he was being deported. Then he was sent to Auschwitz, to Buchenwald, to Flossenburg, to Floha, and finally to Theresienstadt. The stories which come to us of Desnos behavior in the camps all indicated his rare thoughtfulness and enormous generosity toward his fellow prisoners and his courage in the face of his captors: sharing his bowl of thin soup with someone who needed it more, insulting a guard who mistreated one of the captives, and who took revenge smashing Desnos' glasses, riposting--to the psychological torture of the German declarations that all the prisoners were soon to die--by telling a cheerful fortune from the hand of each prisoner. Desnos died of typhoid fever on June 8, 1945. Before he died he was recognized by the student Joseph Stuna from his picture in Breton's Nadja. His answer to Stuna's questions: "Do you know the poet Robert Desnos?" was simply "Le po¸te Robert Desnos, c'est moi." The contents of a tin box in which Desnos kept what he was writing during his imprisonment were thrown away so we have only, for the last part of his life, the legend of that poet, the real indications offered by the traditional poems of Calixto and Contree and the irony of the loss.
