A Surrealist’s Tribulations in the Difficult Year of 1935

January 18, 2006 With Blast-Furnace (1935), Andreas Embiricos undoubtedly became the first surrealist poet in Greece. Even though precedence cannot in and of itself act as a basis for evaluation, in this particular case, all Greek surrealists grant first place to Embiricos by dint of the radiance his work and personality has had on them. Already by 1938, when the volume Surrealism was published (being a kind of collective appearance of Greek surrealists) Embiricos was officially granted first place in the book (he translated Breton, the ‘founder of surrealism’), whilst the last, but certainly not least, place was given to Engonopoulos, who translated the other uncompromising dadaist, Tzara. Today we are in a position to observe that by having Embiricos and Engonopoulos open and close the volume on Surrealism, we are offered a good picture of the surrealist movement during the inter-War years. Indeed, these two poets, through their work and overall attitude, wrung the relatively loose (in terms of size) literary life of our country, certainly not with the aim of strangling it (utterly harmless as they were) but in order to rid it of its polluted effusions.

Year One for Greek surrealism therefore starts in 1935, with Blast-Furnace. There follow: Odysseus Elytis’ Orientations (Ta Nea Grammata review, vol. 7-8, July-August 1936); A Contract with Demons, by Nikos Kalamaris (Randos), in November 1936; Nikos Engonopoulos’ Do Not Distract the Driver, October 1938; and, Nikos Gatsos’ Amorgos, in 1943. (I choose to draw a line here because after this date come the surrealists of the next generation who, in my opinion, are poets of different problematics and variant experiences.)

If surrealism marks a radical break from a traditional poetic past and, possibly, a rhetoric rupture with the prevailing conformist spirit (whereas in all other modernistic styles of writing only a strong deviation from it is witnessed), to think that Ta Nea Grammata of 1935 covers the whole spectrum of new poetry would be fallacious. After all, if we need more proof and find that what Elytis wrote in his Cards Laid Open about the spirit that pervaded the publishers of the review is not enough, we only need to look at the poems that were published in the 1935 and 1936 volumes of the review; all the poems by Elytis, Saradaris and Seferis, and the translations of Eliot and Pound in the 1935 volume, as well as all the poems by Antoniou, Drivas, Eleftheriou (aka Ritsos), Elytis, Saradaris, and the second translation of Eliot’s Wasteland in the 1936 volume leave surrealism out (with the exception of the second poems of Elytis, which, however, belong to a more moderate and eclectic surrealism).

Embiricos reminisces about his lecture in 1935: “Katsibalis was against, and Karandonis was wary.”* The fact remains that there is no critique on Blast-Furnace in Ta Nea Grammata, with the exception of a four-line comment by Karandonis (Feb 1936, p. 167) when he takes stock of the books published during 1935; in this he defers the problem of dealing with the book for a future issue.

Embiricos will find a publication to shelter him for the first time in Ta Nea Grammata of May 1937 (vol. 5), in which he publishes the first six poems of the series ‘The Vertebrae of the City’, from Inner Land. In April-May 1938 (vols. 4-5), the remaining eight poems from that series are printed, whilst in spring 1940 (vol. 1) he publishes the first nineteen poems of the series ‘Altamira’s Tentacle’ (Inner Land), as well as three texts from the Writings from the series titled ‘Fiction’.

Can it be pure chance that the poem that was omitted from the ‘Vertebrae’ series was ‘A Maiden’s Advantage Is the Joy of Her Man’? Or that the three poems from Castles of the Wind, the three poems from the series ‘The Tenderness of Breasts’, the four poems from Prouthos’ Birds, all of which were written before the ‘Vertebrae’ series, get to be published only in May 44 (vol. 3, new period for the review), in spite of the fact that in the midst of the radical climate of the Occupation, general attitudes had changed and the receptivity of both the public and the specialists had grown?

By these hopefully not too pedantic details I wish to argue that, during the later years of the inter-War period, Embiricos’ surrealist mode of writing was expressed within a limited circle and was met with scepticism even by the supposedly most avant-garde review of the time, Ta Nea Grammata. Uncompromising surrealism, expressed through its two main proponents, still played only a fairly marginal role, and was assimilated very gradually, pari passu with the increase in the production of poetic material by more moderate representatives of modernistic writing. The writings of these more moderate writers leaned (subtly and unconsciously) towards the surrealists, accepting the validity of such audacious writing, since the criteria by which the critics judged poetic phenomena had been altered not because of the forms of surrealism but because of the lessons it had to teach. May I remind you that 1935 did not simply have a month of hardships – the entire year was a full of hardships. The Plastiras movement, possibly an attempt to curb the reactionary tendencies of the regime, ended up in Kondylis’ dictatorship (sending not only Glinos into exile, but also Varnalis, who was, politically, harmless). This in turn led to the falsified referendum and Glucksburg’s restoration, who made circumstances secure for himself on August 4th.

If there is any merit in my hypothesis that Embiricos’ lecture and Blast-Furnace in 1935 are gestures of revolutionary ilk (this being the reason why no one embraces such a hypothesis), then we may move on to question yet another myth. It has been maintained that Greek surrealism is stunted compared to the French surrealist movement; that Greek surrealists were not political revolutionaries as well, like their French like-minded counterparts. Although Embiricos, just like Elytis and Engonopoulos, was influenced by the Left for a certain period of time, let us ignore this so that we may proceed with our argument. What kind of liberties was the Greek regime willing to put up with and what kind of sensibilities did the Greek intellectual public posses at the time? In what kind of environment could an intellectual Left ideology, with open political views, take root and develop? Simera review barely lasted over a year (1933-1934). The coterie of Young Pioneers felt suffocated by the review’s political expediencies. People’s evaluations of the 1917 experiment were shattered by the Moscow trials. At an international level, too, the allure that the USSR held for intellectual and artistic circles in the ’20s had begun to visibly wane in the ’30s. In such a climate, any artist who wished to maintain his intellectual independence (which is arguably tantamount to the need for an honest relationship with the tools of his craft) came up against difficulties with regard to his political choices.

Be that as it may, Embiricos cannot be politically pigeonholed in the Left. Does that mean he is to be slotted in the Right? After all, based on what evidence does his work serve the ideology of the Right of the inter-War and post-War era? Merely by dint of its lacking any political dimensions? How many scintillas of political scope does Breton’s work, or that of his entourage of surrealists, have? Such categorisations are extremely facile and very impressive to boot, but only go that far.

I mentioned the ideology that Greece’s state and suprastate authorities promoted in those years, but it falls outside the scope of this treatise to delineate it in depth. I shall limit myself to suggesting that this ideology climaxed in the proclamation of the Third Hellenic Civilisation by dictator Metaxas and his theoretician Nikoloudis. Palamas and his fellow-poets, with their worship of Greece, are as responsible for the way it was falsified by the regime as Nietzsche was for the way his work was read by Hitler’s followers. In spite of this falsification, the prevailing ‘Palamic’ climate fostered constructive work (notice how suddenly we have texts such as ‘The Twelve Words of the Gypsy’ or ‘Satirical Exercises’), whilst, from a political perspective, it is expressed with the 1909 events, and the liberating wars, although after 1922 it loses its social underpinnings. It is not surprising that another intellectual tendency, embodied by Kavafis, began to have an effect on our literary life. Kavafis was already known since 1903, thanks to Ksenopoulos, but became prominent, to some extent, only after 1922, and much more broadly after 1935. Varnalis, a revolutionary in his mature age, was raised in the Palamic tradition yet struggled to reverse it, but to little effect. Kariotakis, who experienced this situation at a younger age, reacted in a more direct and nonconformist manner. As for his fellow-travellers, they remained trapped elsewhere, even though they, too, opposed this tradition.

Embiricos, five years younger than Kariotakis and full of a different kind of potential (a cosmopolite, in all truth) began, admittedly, with Palamic poems, but almost immediately went on to experiment by searching for another function for poetic language. From that moment on, during the 1927-31 period – which was critical for French surrealism – Embiricos’ shift from psychoanalysis, which he had been studying, to surrealist exercises came as a totally natural matter of course. In fact, if we take into account that Embiricos is one of the most prolific Greek writers, which means a considerable ease at writing, the automatic writing of his first poems became a genre and was obviously within his capacities.

The 1935 edition of Blast Furnace includes 63 poems; these poems are only a selection of what he had written “before 1935 […] with the method of automatic writing”. I do not know the criteria that Embiricos used to select eight poems out of the 63 for the phonograph record Embiricos reads Embiricos. In other words, we have no way of knowing whether he considered them to be his best or the ones more digestible for the public.

Let us choose a different perspective to look at this poetic harvest, which has endured a great many attacks. Personally, I have no reason to doubt the claim that all 63 poems were written ‘automatically’; yet I do leave it open to question whether behind even the most automatic of writing lie certain inhibitions. I believe that this would more likely than not be corroborated by any psychoanalyst. Choosing from the first 15 poems, I quote only the verses that contain passages of a clearly erotic nature. I beg and hope that the reader will not limit him to these excerpts but will look up the entire poems.

From poem number 1 (Galaxias editions, p. 9): “and oblivion [...] lasts like a snare in the shell of the systematic narration of breasts”.

From poem number 3 (p. 11): “and at the refectory he was allowed [...] a symbiosis with the young ladies in the company of dancing seafarers traversing the present tense”.

From poem number 4 (p. 12): “and the skins of pears that prefer the erection of the penis to the lulling clouds of byways of chemical repudiation and discovery of excrement and jewellery”.

From poem number 5 (p. 13): “and the glow of her immaculate breasts came alive word for word, and almost diagonally”.

From poem number 6 (p. 14): “... A helix twists within us cutting the throats of cockerels and the tits of every redundant fibula”.

From poem number 7 (p. 15): “Only more freedom was given to the free, and the pain of yesternight’s orgy-monger subsided”.

Allow me to skip the intervening poems and quote poem number 15 (p. 23) in its entirety:

Earlier than even the copulation she would indulge in tomorrow, the suffering apex of the ultimate mountain range lowered her eyelids to receive the gifts of automatic gyrations. Thirty members of a hermaphrodite conversation confiscated the irremediable copse with pomp and fanfare whilst the monkey-parade brimmed with lobsters, mostly, and elegant lemonade in cartons. Since however no one lifted the net which others in this country call a Bavarian protrusion the blade of fabrics was torn in half and out forever came the dean of holy mania indistinguishable from the bird that pops out of a sock.
(‘The welcome of the peddlers’)

In all these excerpts, only one phrase in poem 4 flouts the conventions of the time, and even that is borrowed from scientific terminology. Knowing as we do the degree of outspokenness that Embiricos indulged in in his later writings, we may safely argue that what the automatic writing of his first poems brought to the surface from the depths of his unconscious were censored images – even though the brazenness of his style would probably have allowed for greater liberties, given that it was the style itself that was the most disturbing. Could this be due to bourgeois prudence? Could it be a consequence of his bourgeois upbringing? Yet the bourgeois had for at least over a century already allowed themselves much greater liberties in this area (cf. Communist Manifesto, 1848). Personally I believe that, in all likelihood, it is a case of inhibitions due to his upbringing in the specific milieu in which he was raised. Upbringing is not always determined by class, since we may encounter close- or open-minded types of upbringing in all social classes. A psychoanalyst’s feedback would be most enlightening at this juncture. Let us then be patient until somebody takes on the task.

I find Embiricos’ own avowal quite revealing. It dates back to the same period we have been discussing:

In 1931, I returned to Greece, and worked at our family business, a shipyard. In 1935, I resigned my post as a director. A short time before that there had been strikes, which had made me feel ill at ease. On one hand I didn’t want to prove inconsistent with my principles, but on the other I didn’t want to disappoint my father, to whom I was deeply grateful. Therefore I resigned and devoted myself definitively to literature and psychoanalysis.”
(From the same interview given to Andromachi Skarpalezou.)

Be that as it may, with Blast Furnace we find ourselves at the birth of a genre of writing and the beginning of a self-psychoanalysing individual’s expression, as he becomes more and more liberated as times goes by – if we judge by his later production, at least. His tone when calling for ‘absolute freedom’ grew steadily in intensity, so much so that he now has to keep his writings locked up in drawers because of other people’s inhibitions. As for his abandoning automatic writing, in no way was it some sort of retraction but it arose from a state of maturity, which became manifest for the entire surrealist movement already by the time of Breton’s second manifesto.

Thus, in the difficult year of 1935, Seferis and Embiricos, each working on two divergent curves, respectively published: “We have no rivers we have no wells we have no springs . . .” (Novel, X). “We have no quince . . .” (Blast Furnace, ‘Whitewash’).

About one to two hundred readers read them and interpreted them to the best of their abilities.


*Interview given to Andromachi Skarpalezou, March 1967. Vd. Iridanos review, vol. 4, Feb-Mar 1976.

From Consecutive Readings of Greek Surrealists, also published in To Dentro literary review, No 1, Sept. - Oct. 1979)