SOURCE: "Anarchism, Action, and Malraux," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 24, No. 3, Fall, 1978, pp. 272-89.

[In the following essay, Langlois discusses the publication of the post-World War I French avant-garde magazine Action and its influence on the political writings of André Malraux.]

In the autumn of 1920, after a long and shattering conflict, French literati were groping in many directions seeking to reformulate an aesthetic for the new, postwar world. It was at that time that the 18-year-old André Malraux published his second literary effort—a prose-poem entitled "Prologue"—together with a negative review of the new André Breton-Philippe Soupault work, Les Champs magnétiques. Both items appeared in the October issue of Florent Fels' little avant-garde magazine, Action.¹ The text of the review is particularly noteworthy. Although Malraux agreed that Breton's book was "plus susceptible d'être imité que les poèmes de M. Tzara, par exemple, si caracterisés que ses disciples sembleraient des plagiaires," he was nevertheless convinced that "qui voudra écrire une oeuvre en fonction de l'esthétique des Champs magnétiques n'en fera qu'un pastiche, donc oeuvre sans valeur." For him, "de nombreux enfants des Champs magnétiques vont surgir, mais ils ressembleront trop à leur père" to be really aesthetically valid.

Clearly, the young man felt that the work pointed in a direction which was essentially sterile, and during the next two decades when Surrealism was at its height he maintained a rather aloof attitude toward the movement. As far as he was concerned, there were certain other possibilities being put forth at the time which would ultimately be more fruitful than the one being formulated by Breton and his followers.² Although Breton's force of personality and astute leadership enabled his movement rapidly to achieve an almost complete hegemony over the avant-garde in the immediate postwar years, historians who wish to understand the intellectual climate of that period must resurrect and re-examine some of these neglected alternatives which were being proposed around 1920. The one represented by Fels' review Action is particularly deserving of such a reappraisal, if for no other reason than that it will help clarify certain elements of the aesthetic context in which young Malraux wrote his three earliest—and most puzzling—works (Lunes enpapier, Journal d'un pompier du Jeu de massacre—also known as Ecrit pour une idole à trompe, and Royaume-Farfelu³ and help explain the basis for his rejection of the Dada-Surrealist aesthetic proposed by Breton and his followers.

Action appeared for only 12 issues, published between November 1919 and May/June 1922, but it has an unusually interesting history.⁴ Essentially it was the brainchild of one man: Florent Fels. Fels was born in Paris in 1893, the child of a bourgeois family named Felsenberg.⁵ His father—a middle-level official in the Treasury Department—was highly intelligent and had pronounced Leftist political ideas. A militant member of the Parti Ouvrier Français, he inaugurated a number of programs to benefit workers and their families, and in 1919 he even founded an Ecole Socialiste-Marxiste, supported by Léon Blum, Charles Cachin and Victor Basch.⁶ From an early age, Fels was encouraged by his father to read "des auteurs socialisants" and he was taken to rallies where political leaders like Jules Guesde and Jean Juarès spoke out to demand greater social justice for the working masses. In his middle teens, Fels was sent to Denain, near Valenciennes, in the coal and steel producing area of northern France, where he worked as a smith. It was there that he first came into direct contact with Anarchism, a movement which was strong among the local unionists. The French Union-Anarchists were basically not very radical. Primarily what they wanted was for the bourgeois government to cease exploiting the working class and more forcefully to oppose nationalistic wars which always weighed most heavily on that class. The anti-militarism which Fels encountered among his unionist friends was strengthened a few years later when he himself became a soldier during the First World War. His four years in service were more terrible than anything he had ever imagined. As he subsequently recounted in his autobiography, he became particularly opposed to war after the infantry mutinies of the spring of 1917, when he himself—although not directly involved in the rebellions—narrowly missed being shot, "pour l'exemple."⁷ Among his comrades in arms, those who were most strongly anti-militarist belonged to a semipolitical group called "anarchistes-individualistes," and he soon became good friends with a number of them.

The Individualist Anarchists were one of three branches of a movement which had begun with certain 18th century French philosophers (notably Condorcet, Rousseau, Roux, Varlet and Leclerc), and which had taken general shape in Europe around 1840, with William Godwin in England. Max Stirner in Germany, Kropotkin and Bakunin in Russia, and above all Proudhon in France.⁸ Today most people consider the term "Anarchist" to be almost entirely pejorative. It generally suggests wild-eyed radicals who are committed to throwing bombs and other violent acts, but as one of the characters in Malraux's L'Espoir points out, Anarchists were fundamentally idealists: "Le Christ? C'est un anarchiste qui aréussi. C'est le seul,"⁹ On a political level, they envisaged a society in which the individual would be freed from all governmental coercion and restraint, his conduct being directed by a personal, inner moral commitment.

As the 19th century advanced, this Utopian vision won a certain amount of support, but because of the movement's accent on individual freedom it remained rather diffuse in its ideology. However during the latter part of the period—most notably after 1880—three distinct currents became evident. The first of these (the one which Fels had come to know through his father and the men with whom he had worked in northern France) was Union Anarchism. The partisans of that position believed that the fundamental unity of society was the unity of work, and that the best means of abolishing the oppressive capitalist system imposed by the bourgeoisie was the strike, the weapon par excellence of the workers. A second current—less widespread until around 1900 but increasingly important after that date—was what one might call Leftist Anarchism, either Socialist or Communist. Closely linked to Marxism, it differed from Union Anarchism on the questions of the basis of society (the commune and not the work unit), and on the means to be adopted in fighting the bourgeoisie. The Leftist Anarchists believed in strikes, as did the Unionists, but they also advocated more direct or violent action—such as insurrection or revolution—to destroy bourgeois capitalism. Thanks to the success of the Russian Revolution and the increasing diffusion of Communist ideas, after 1919 this current rapidly came to dominate Anarchism. However, paradoxically, in falling under the influence of the Russian Communists—who were predominantly Stalinists, it betrayed its origins and itself became more and more authoritarian, and less and less Anarchist. (This was true to such a point that in 1937 the Russian and Spanish Communists massacred the Anarchists of Catalonia in order to "purify" the movement!¹⁰) In principle the Union Anarchists and the Communist-Socialist Anarchists were both opposed to war, but they nevertheless remained sufficiently nationalist to forget this particular tenet, and in 1914 almost without exception they rallied to the colors.

In late 19th-century Anarchism there was also a third current, which one may call Individualist. In opposition to the ultra-conservative bourgeois mentality so characteristic of the Second Empire, in the years after 1850 many artists and intellectuals began to support this third type of Anarchism. They were attracted to the ideals of personal freedom and social justice which it proposed. By the end of the century, this Individualist current had become quite strong and had won support from some well-known artists and writers. Among the former were Van Rysselberghe, Signac, Vallotton, Van Dongen and—a bit later—Camille and Lucien Pissarro and many of the "Fauves," with Vlaminck in the lead. As for the writers, a majority of the Symbolists were more or less directly linked to Individualist Anarchism, and at Les Temps nouveaux Jean Grave counted among his collaborators Tailhade, Richepin, Mirbeau, Bernard Lazare, Paul Adam and Stuart Merrill. Beginning in 1892, under the direction of Francis Viélé-Griffin, the monthly Entretiens politiques et littéraires became largely a review of the Individualist Anarchists, numbering among its literary collaborators Valéry, H. de Régnier and Remy de Gourmont, while the strongly antimilitarist L'Endehors received the support of men like Mallarmé Verhaeren and Saint-Paul Roux.¹¹

It is clear that most of these artists and writers were little concerned with questions of social or political doctrine and even less with programs for revolution. What attracted them above all, as Mallarmé put it in 1895, was the Individualist Anarchist spirit, curious about everything that was new in all areas of human endeavor.¹² Moreover the Anarchists' desires for intellectual independence and personal liberty, together with the value which they gave to experience as an end in itself, were also very appealing. After the declaration of war in 1914, this wing of the movement gained additional supporters, particularly among the pacifists; for at a time when almost all the other Anarchists were abandoning their antimilitarism, the Individualists remained faithful to their ideal and continued to proclaim their opposition to all wars. It is not surprising that young Fels, deeply interested in literary and artistic questions and more and more horrified by what he was witnessing as a soldier in the trenches, should have been attracted to this group.

In April of 1918, Fels began to collaborate regularly on one of the major Individualist Anarchist publications, the Armand-Chardon bi-monthly newspaper, La Mêlée.¹³ However after the end of the war he and Marcel Sauvage, one of his co-workers on the paper, became dissatisfied with the increasingly doctrinaire position which the editor was taking on a number of questions. Moreover Fels felt that in many respects La Mêlée was too exclusively oriented toward a working-class public and was neglecting the literary and artistic groups in French society. He himself had become involved in several such circles in Paris, most notably the one centered around Max Jacob (through whom he met the writers Paul Morand, Jean Paulhan, Georges Gabory, André Salmon. Pierre Reverdy, Jean Cocteau and—a bit later—André Malraux, Antonin Artaud and the young Raymond Radiguet). A number of these individuals encouraged Fels in his idea that a review would be a better forum than a newspaper for meaningful discussions about literary, political and artistic subjects. In a review, one would be "plus à l'aise pour développer sa pensée, pour y puiser des sujets, pour y contrebalancer les études bourgeoises." As Fels envisaged it, his review would be "hospitalière aux penseurs et aux artistes originaux, un récueil des idées diverses et nouvelles. Son rôle, si le journal doit se disperser parmi les travailleurs et les foules, sera d'attaquer lesmilieux dits intellectuels."¹⁴ In addition it would also support a program of lectures, meetings and art exhibits in various places and would undertake the publication of pamphlets, posters and brochures in order to spread Individualist aesthetic ideas and establish contacts among "tous ceux qui se rapprochent de nous."

It was not until Fels received his demobilization bonus in the spring of 1919 that he had sufficient funds to initiate his project.¹⁵ By early summer he had organized it sufficiently to be able to announce in La Mêlée that the first issue of the new Cahiers individualistes would appear the following October. He also published a kind of manifesto to indicate the character of this publication (which was soon to become Action):

Notre idéal s'identifie bien moins à ce que le monde appelle anarchie, qu'à notre volonté de plus de beauté et d'ordre.

La force des masses est impuissante, si elle n'est pas coordonnée en vue d'atteindre un but plus noble que la satisfaction temporelle de ses appétits immédiats: soif, faim, besoins sexuels, habitation.

L'agitation causée par des meneurs ou leaders est inféconde parce qu'elle atteint la foule en "surface" et non en "profondeur".

Notre action sera peut-être plus lente, mais sachant où nous désirons aller, et pénétrant les milieux les plus vivaces, elle se développera en dépit des persécutions des gouvernements républicains, bolchevistes, ou communistes, malgré les morts que nous laisserons en route; parce qu'elle s'emploie à affirmer une doctrine de vie, la force de l'individu libéré.

Une seule chose mérite d'être sauvée de notre civilisation actuelle, ce sont les monuments d'art passé, et dans le présent l'acquis des lettres et des arts, qui est une chaîne in interrompue de périodes classiques et de recherches esthétiques. . . .¹⁶

It is difficult to see just where a program founded on something as vague as "la force de l'individu libéré" would lead, even when supported by the theoretical bases of Individualist Anarchism, and this initial manifesto of the Cahiers individualistes is a rather surprising mixture of conservatism (order, veneration for the artistic monuments of the past) and of avant-garde political, artistic and literary enthusiasms.

A few weeks later, La Mêlée revealed that in order to avoid confusion with Les Cahiers idéalistes, the name of the forthcoming Cahiers individualistes was to be changed to Action: Cahiers individualistes de philosophie et d'art. A quotation from Romain Rolland clarified the choice of the initial word in the new title: "L'action la plus efficace qui soit en notre pouvoir à tous, hommes et femmes, est l'action individuelle d'homme à homme, d'âme à âme, l'action par la parole, l'exemple par tout l'être."¹⁷ As for the word "art," the term was understood to include not only literature and the plastic arts (with which Fels was quite familiar because of his grandmother's long intimate relationship with the great critic and collector, Théodore Duret¹⁸), but also music and dance—in which the young man was deeply interested as well.

As has been suggested, Fels was in contact with several somewhat different literary cliques in Paris, and it was to friends in these groups that he turned initially for materials for his planned publication. First, there were the intellectuals who were his associates in the Individualist Anarchist movement, notably Han Ryner, Maurice Wullens, Gabriel Brunei, Marcel Martinet, Laurent Tailhade, and Francis Vaud. Then there were the avant-garde writers of Max Jacob's coterie and other Montmartre-Montparnasse literary circles (especially those who collaborated on the reviews Nord-Sud and Sic) who could be broadly characterized as "literary Cubists." In addition to Jacob, this included Cendrars, Cocteau, Gabory, Reverdy and Salmon, and to a lesser extent Radiguet, Artaud and Malraux. Finally there were Fels' friends who were artists, art critics, gallery owners, and collectors—both those of the older generation whom he had met through Théodore Duret, and those whom he had come to know during his visits to Montparnasse and to the Bateau Lavoir on Montmartre. Even while gathering materials from these varied literary and artistic sources, Fels wrote several times in La Mêlée that he was counting heavily on "les camarades sincères et actifs pour diffuser notre revue qui sera la première grande manifestation individualiste."¹⁹ Indeed, in order to attract the support of the paper's readers—whose interests were primarily doctrinaire, he even took pains to identify the aims of his new publication in terms that would be comprehensible to them: "Que tous comprennent qu'il s'agit d'une v ìtable action philosophique. Entremêlée de poèmes et de nouvelles, afin de toucher le grand public, notre revue sera individualiste et didactique. Nous planterons le grain profondément, insensiblement, mais sûrement. Puisse la moisson être belle."²⁰

Fels made arrangements with a certain Buschmann, a printer in Antwerp, and sometime around the first week of October of 1919 he sent him the final manuscript of the first number of the new review, scheduled to appear early the following month. How can that ensemble be characterized?²¹ It would appear that the young editor counted heavily on the first article, "La Conception stendhalienne du héros: Julien Sorel" by Gabriel Brunet—which took up 26 pages, or almost a third of the publication, to set an "individualist" tone for the issue; in any case it presented Julien as a striking example of a certain "exaltation" of the Individualist personality. Most of the remaining poems and prose works in the issue can be linked to this same Individualist ideology, understood in its broadest sense, particularly the contributions of Marcel Millet, André Salmon, Max Jacob and Georges Gabory. In point of fact, it was young Gabory who made the most extreme (and in the eyes of the authorities most compromising) statement of one aspect of the Individualist Anarchist position in his half satirical, half ironic little essay, "Eloge de Landru." Publication of this first number was delayed considerably by the printer, and when the issues finally arrived at the Franco-Belgian customs in early February 1920 they were immediately confiscated by authorities there. They claimed that Gabory's article in praise of a man—Landru—who had murdered ten women was subversive! It took Fels several months of appeals to various officials before the shipment was released.²²

During the second half of 1919, while awaiting delivery of the first number of Action, Fels had continued his collaboration on La Mêlée. An article which he published there in November is particularly interesting and important. The very title of the essay—"Une Littérature d'avantgarde: L'Esprit nouveau"²³—immediately establishes its links with the seminal lecture of Apollinaire, "L'Esprit nouveau et les poètes," printed a year earlier in the Mercure de France. Since Fels' article suggests the aesthetic principles initially espoused by Action and its supporters, it deserves close attention.

Fels began his study by pointing out that—following the example of Rimbaud and Mallarmé—a "certain nombre de poètes ont entrepris de créer une nouvelle forme d'expression du lyrisme, dégagée de toute contrainte prosodique, nourrie de métaphores et d'images rigoureusement neuves, et ne prenant sa force que dans l'esprit." Two contemporary poets in particular: Apollinaire and Salmon; a poet-painter: Max Jacob; and a painter: Picasso had laid the foundations for this new aesthetic in which the mind ("l'esprit") was to play an important role. For Fels, this aesthetic had a rather solid philosophical, psychological and emotional basis: "Il est admis communément que derrière le monde des réalités sensibles où nous vivons, existe non moins réel—puisqu'il nous est possible de l'évoquer et même d'y participer—une autre forme de vie. Tout homme a la faculté de se transporter par le jeux de sa sensibilité du monde apparent au monde du rêve; tout homme qui a la faculté de transporter [le] monde apparent au monde du rêve est un poète. Il n'y a point là effect de la volonté, mais bien un phénomène psychologique, dont le sujet est pour ainsi dire irresponsable; c'est le don."

But if it is true that the gifted poet ought to permit his heart to sing freely, he must also "travailler son chant." This second and more intellectual phase of the making of a poet, noted Fels, is "peut-être la plus importante car il ne s'agira pas uniquement d'une aptitude lyrique (ivresse dionysiaque), mais d'un ensemble d'heureuses dispositions dominées par l'harmonie, qui n'est pas une simple qualité naturelle mais le résultat d'un tempérament sain et d'une culture générale sérieuse." Thus, in his view, in order to create poetry there must be not only the lyric exaltation of the Romantics (or the voyance of the Surrealists) but also a stable and cultured personality which could formulate or organize that lyricism. Fels also pointed out that modern poetry was directed toward a somewhat different end than had been the case in the past. "Cette sorte d'exaltation, que l'on pourrait appeler l'état lyrique, n'a été mise jusqu'à présent qu'au service de l'évocation directe d'une vision plastique, tendant à évoquer des lignes, des contours, une atmosphère, mais non à créer dans l'esprit du lecteur une émotion précise ressentie par l'artiste, au moment où, animé de cette faculté créatrice, il lui est possible de FAIRE LE POINT." It would appear that the young critic conceived of true modern poetry as "l'expression idéaliste et éternelle" of a world which the individual artist recreates incessantly. In that re-creation, modern poets seek a certain form, but it is "une forme que leur soit personelle et neuve. Ils prétendent être libre de tirer tous les effets possible de la disposition typographique, emploi des 'blancs,' des encres de couleur, [et] absence de ponctuation."

Fels concluded his study by emphasizing that for the previous decade many poets of the young generation had expressed themselves by means of a lyricism which has been designated by the vague—and often pejorative—term of Cubism, but it was clearly evident to him that "le plus pur individualisme règne parmi eux." Yet in spite of their individualism one could distinguish some characteristics that they had in common—in addition to their veneration of certain predecessors like Rimbaud and Mallarmé. In a few sentences, Fels sums up his views of this new poetry which—according to him—was a mixture of Romanticism and of the same intellectualism or idealism that characterized much of the Individualist Anarchist movement:

La poésie moderne, en réaction contre toute tentative d'explication scientifique du monde, s'affirme antididactique, ennemie de la déclamation, de la description, du symbole, des grands impératifs et de ce qui est traditionellement poétique d'expression ou d'esprit . . . , du mot rare, de l'érudition qui pare d'un faux clinquant ce qui ne doit briller que par ses propres charmes composites.

Elle ne contemple pas la vie, mais la regarde, cherche plus à la rendre aimable qu'à la comprendre. Si l'intelligence peut intervenir à la formation d'un poète, elle reste étrangère à la formation du poème, qu'elle ne pourrait qu'alourdir; il s'agit bien moins de volonté, que d'action spontanée, d'analyse que de synthèse. Ces oeuvres, leurs auteurs n'ont pas la vanité de vouloir les faire revivre dans l'esprit du lecteur, qui [y] apportera sa sensibilité particulière, ses dons Imaginatifs, ses goûts .. . Il ne s'agit pas de raconter une petite histoire suivant les troisthèmes généralement adoptés: l'homme, la nature, les forces, mais de créer des oeuvres capables d'exister de leur vie particulière, ayant leur existence propre, individuelle . . .

Of course this conception of literary activity and of the literary work of art (which is closely linked to the ideas of Max Jacob and—subsequently—of Malraux) was going to play an important role in the aesthetic advocated by Action.

Sometime in December 1919, when it became clear that Buschmann was not going to deliver the first number of the new review on time, Fels decided to change to a Parisian printer and to proceed with the preparation of the second number, scheduled to appear in late February or early March of 1920. Possibly in the hope of appealing to a larger circle of readers, he dropped the adjective "individualiste" from the title, but the issue still included a number of contributions by writers who were active in that wing of the Anarchist movement, notably Han Ryner and several regular collaborators from Wullens' review, Les Humbles. Among the purely literary materials there were essays, poetry and prose pieces from Jacob, Salmon, Suarès, Cocteau, Henri Hertz and Ivan Goll, suggesting a new accent on belles-lettres to the neglect of theory or philosophy. This second number also put a much stronger emphasis on art—particularly painting—indicating that Fels' personal interests had evolved considerably in the nearly six months since he had prepared the initial number of Action.²⁴

Although Fels did not publish a manifesto, he did prepare a kind of "prière d'insérer" for the press, to clarify the orientation of the review.²⁵ He noted that after four long years of war "nous avons besoin d'inattendu et surtout de joie" in literature, and he indicated that in Action "Nous avons voulu unir des écrivains choisis pour l'originalité de leur esprit et de leur forme . . . individualistes en ce sens qu'ils n'appartiennent à aucune école." This important affirmation emphasizes once again that Fels' individualism was eclectic in the broadest sense of the term, even though it had its origins in certain theories of the Individualist Anarchists with whom he had been closely associated for several years. The second number of Action appeared in March of 1920, as planned, followed in a few weeks by the first number, finally pried loose from the censor and put on sale with the fictitious date of "février 1920" printed on its cover. In May, these two issues were reviewed together in the prestigious Nouvelle Revue française. After having praised the tone of Action ("une revue ingénieuse, charmante, injuste"), the anonymous commentator expressed surprise that two literary figures as different as Han Ryner and Max Jacob were proposed as models, but he alluded favorably to the artistic content of the new periodical ("quelque bois de Derain, un beau dessin au pochoir de Gleizes"). Finally, he spoke of its literary materials, rejoicing that at a time when Dada was dominating much of the Parisian avantgarde there were "pas de dadaïstes" in its pages.²⁶ This is significant, for, as we shall see, Fels—like his friend Malraux—showed himself more and more opposed to the undisciplined, unreasonable, gratuitous and destructive spirit of this movement, which was rapidly coalescing around André Breton.

The intellectual climate in Paris during the immediate postwar period continued to be very unsettled, but during the months of January-February 1920—just as Fels was gathering the materials for his second issue—two events took place which would subsequently become very important. On January 23 the first "manifestation Dada" was held in France, clearly placing André Breton and his clique in opposition to a certain number of the other literary personalities of the avant-garde. The occasion, described in detail by Sanouillet from various sources,²⁷ was a "matinée poétique" organized by the review Littérature, "pour essayer de dire quelque chose" (according to Aragon) in the midst of all the contemporary aesthetic confusion. The manifestation included the reading of literary works, the presentation of some paintings, and the playing of a few musical compositions. At the last moment, Tristan Tzara arrived in Paris from Zurich and it was decided to include him in the program. This was a crucial decision because it changed what had originally been planned as a fairly restrained manifestation of the "Esprit nouveau" under the sponsorship of Littérature into a typical "épater-les-bourgeois" manifestation of the Dada—and later, Surrealist—type.

To be sure, the Littérature program included a goodly number of avant-garde writers who were not particularly linked to Dada, notably Salmon, Jacob, Reverdy, Cendrars and Maurice Raynal, but they were grouped in the first part of the matinée. They were followed by Breton who commented upon a number of canvases by Gris, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Chirico, Picabia and Léger, which were presented to the public. Most of these paintings were accepted without problem, although the Double Monde of Picabia, a "parfaite insulte au goût de l'assistance" as one of the eyewitnesses put it, did provoke protests from certain spectators who took modern art seriously. During the second part of the program, there were increased outbursts from the audience, which reached a climax during Tzara's "poetry" recital. When he began to read (to the accompaniment of two bells, energetically rung in the wings by Breton and Aragon) a speech which the arch-conservative Léon Daudet had recently made before the Chambre, a number of those in the audience for whom poetry was not a joke reacted strongly. This protest was led by Florent Fels, who—exasperated—cried out to Tzara: "A Zurich! Au poteau!" in the midst of the uproar. Shortly afterwards, he left the meeting, disgusted and very angry.²⁸

Following that Littérature matinée, Fels and a few of his friends decided that it was absolutely necessary to organize a countermanifestation to show the other possibilities or directions that were available for the evolution of a new literature and art. This matinée, advertised as "organisée par la revue individualiste Action" took place a month later, on Sunday, February 29, 1920.²⁹ In order to distinguish it as much as possible from the Littérature manifestation (which had been held in a little dance hall in a working-class quarter of Paris), Fels arranged to have his meeting in the Salon des Indépendants at the Grand Palais! Among those present were not only writers, but also critics, artists and members of the La Mêlée and Action readerships. The matinée began with the recitation of poetry from the works of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Jarry and Apollinaire. For the musical part of the program, Jean Cocteau made some brief remarks about the music of Erik Satie which were followed by the performance of several compositions of the master. To give a broader aesthetic dimension to the gathering, Fels called upon Madame Sondaz, the director of a dance school whose talent he greatly admired, to present a ballet.

However the most important part of the program by far—the one which marked without any possibility of misunderstanding the distance that separated the partisans of Action from the Breton-Picabia-Tzara group—was the opening lecture, presented by Fels himself.³⁰ In his discussion of "Les Classiques de l'Esprit nouveau," subsequently published in the pages of the Individualist-Anarchist newspaper, L'Un, the young man tried to delineate the basis for a new poetry that would be more valid than the one which was in the process of taking shape around Tzara and Breton. In the course of his commentary, Fels reiterated some of the ideas which he had already presented in his article on the same subject, published in La Mêlée three months earlier. However now it was clear that he was directly attacking the Dada movement and—by implication—Breton's nascent Surrealism. He began by pointing out that "ces messieurs du Dada chantent... sur un mode mineur, orchestré par M. Picabia," a rather ridiculous and frivolous aesthetic, and he emphasized that "si Tart n'est point sans un certain sérieux, il meurt de l'ennui." Moreover he found it equally unfortunate that among modern writers there were some, "comme ces Messieurs du Dada, plagiant les futuristes italiens," who were (or who pretended to be) mentally unbalanced, in order to "épater les naïfs." At the opposite pole from the writers of Dada, there was an equally sterile conservative group: those who turned their backs on what was happening in the contemporary world in order to busy themselves almost entirely with "acquisitions syntaxiques [et] élégances de style." According to Fels, these "grands couturiers" of literature, these fashionable poets who "travaillant pour la foule, ont tellement le souci du succès immédiat qu'ils mettent leur idéal au niveau de la rue ou du cirque," had no more to do with true or authentic literature than did the posturing Dadaists.

For Fels, true modern poetry was humanist and idealist. As he saw it, "chaque génération éprouve le besoin de briser ses idoles, et chaque recherche l'amène vers des conceptions plus pratiques et plus humaines; la production artistique en est ainsi plus ardente et plus généreuse." But at the same time, "le poète est le témoin à charge du temps .. . A chaque moment solennel de l'histoire, nous retrouvons les poètes comme ces statues antiques, qui, à la croisée des chemins, d'un large geste du bras montraient la route aux égarés." If there are no longer any truly great poets, he said, it is because they will not participate fully in the life of their period; "détachés des contingences et du véritable héroïsme du temps, ils dédaignent de venir concourir à la grande oeuvre qui va transmuter le monde." Concerning poetic techniques, Fels conceded that "il n'y a pas de règles définies dans la nouvelle poésie. Il y a des tendances—ne pas plier à l'asservissement de la rime, aux vieux clichés de forme et de métrique. Exposer directement, sans rhétorique, l'objet. De l'image ainsi isolée se dégage l'émotion. Emploi du mot juste, exact, technique." As for the message of modern poetry, "trois thèmes se proposent: l'homme—la nature—les forces." But what was most important was that the poem be born "dans l'enthousiasme," that it be "spontané, vivant de jeunesse ardente." Since a work created in such love and joy would be very fecund, it would be "à son tour génératrice d'idées. Le véritable artiste est toujours audessus de la nature. Il va plus haut, il spiritualise. L'artiste toujours synthétise, car il n'y a pas d'art sans création." Obviously, with such affirmations Fels was placing himself in a current which went counter to the conception of poetry to which the Dada-Surrealist group was increasingly committed.

Toward the end of his lecture, Fels reiterated the general terms of the aesthetic credo which served as the basis for his review, Action. This text clearly has definite links with certain of the humanitarian ideals of the Individualist Anarchist movement with which he had long been associated, and it reaffirms the orientation of his new publication (emphasis is his):

Individualistes nous sommes, parce que nous écrivons d'abord pour nous, avec le souci d'être d'accord avec notre conscience . . . La littérature [chez d'autres] n'est même plus considérée comme une profession, mais comme une affaire. Pour y atteindre, à défaut d'idées on cultive les mots, et de la littérature à la vie les phrases remplacent l'action. On parle, on rit; on n'agit plus. C'est contre cet esprit que nous avons conçu la revue Action—si je n'ai pas fait précéder le premier numéro d'un manifeste, c'est que le seul moyen de nous affirmer était de créer une oeuvre d'union entre les artistes, écrivains, lecteurs,—individualistes en ce sens qu'ils n'appartenaient à aucune tendance, aucun cénacle, aucune école. Choisis simplement pour l'originalité de leur esprit et l'équilibre formel de leur expression. Voici tout notre orgueil: offrir au public des oeuvres recommendables non par le nom de leurs auteurs, mais par leur valeur intrinsique et surtout ne pas sacrifier à l'ambigu, à la pataphysique prétentieuse des néonormaliens de Saint-Sulpice, ou aux excentricités de certains farceurs moroses.

L'art est la fleur d'un cerveau équilibré fécondé par le génie. Je parle de l'art n'ayant à souffrir ni des contingences, ni du temps. La beauté est l'expression de l'infini, dans le temps. L'utilité, je dirai presque, l'utilité matérielle de l'art, c'est de transmettre aux générations successives, les idéaux les plus élevés de l'humanité. Le témoignage le plus haut est du plus grand poète et devient vérité.

It is obvious that such a vision of art—and of poetry in particular—is basically classical, humanist, and idealist. It is at the opposite pole from the one which was gradually taking form among Breton and his disciples, and many of those who were present at the Action matinée found it a welcome antidote to the irrationalism and gratuitous pleasantries of Dada.

Following the very successful matinée and the subsequent appearance of the first two issues of Action, many young writers rallied to Fels' banner; they came to him "les mains pleines de copie" as he put it.³¹ It was at this time that young Malraux—whom Fels had known as a friend of Max Jacob—approached him with his first literary text, a prose poem entitled "Mobilités." Since the piece was entirely in keeping with the general aesthetic orientation of Action, Fels was delighted to accept it. He subsequently published some eight other contributions of various kinds by Malraux. When financial pressures forced a reorganization of the administration of the periodical late in 1921, Fels asked Malraux to become a member of his Conseil d'Administration, and the young man actually became a co-editor for the last number of the review, which appeared in the late spring of 1922.³²

In examining the dozen numbers of this struggling but remarkable little literary magazine (whose demise was largely the result of the increasingly crushing predominance of Breton's Surrealism), what evaluation can be made of it? As we have seen, Action had its origins in the Individualist Anarchist movement, but it really took form—if one can use such an expression to characterize a review that was eclectic by principle—primarily in opposition to certain elements in the Dada-Surrealist aesthetic. Unlike many of the other avant-garde publications of the period which were preoccupied above all with maintaining a certain ideological purity, Action opened its pages freely—as Fels put it—to "quiconque veut exprimer librement sa pensée," requiring only that contributions be "oeuvres ardentes et novatrices . . . de style viril" which would combat "toutes décadences" and help insure the victory "de tout ce qui a de la valeur."³³

Obviously the magazine is a mine of information about the intellectual and artistic life of the period, and as we have indicated it is particularly revealing of at least one important alternative which was proposed around 1920-22, immediately before Surrealism became dominant. For those of us who are interested in Malraux, it not only throws a whole new light on his youthful prose poems or tales (which continue to be somewhat of a puzzle, in spite of Professor Vandegans' lengthy exegesis of them), but it also helps to explain the many dark hints during the Phnom Penh trial about the young man's links with certain "subversive" political movements in Paris. Finally, it gives a new depth to the favorable portraits which Malraux makes of certain Anarchists, notably in Les Conquérants and in L'Espoir. As such, it certainly deserves resurrection, and we can all be grateful that the young Parisian publisher Jean-Michel Place is issuing a facsimile edition of the entire run of Action, so that all scholars may study it in greater detail.

¹ A[ndré] M[alraux]. "Les Champs magnétiques—André Breton et Philippe Soupault," Action, No. 5 (Oct. 1920), p. 69. This unfavorable review was followed by his enthusiastic comments about André Salmon's La Négresse du Sacré-Coeur (pp. 69-70). Malraux's prose-poem "Prologue" is on pp. 18-20 of the same issue of Action.

² Malraux obviously had a certain commitment to the alternative represented by Action, for in addition to the two items listed above he also made the following contributions to Fels' magazine:

"La Genèse des Chants de Maldoror," No. 3 (avril 1920), pp. 33-35.

"Mobilités." No. 4 (juillet 1920), pp. 13-14.

"Journal d'un pompier du Jeu de massacre," No. 8 (août 1920), pp. 16-18.

"L'Entrepreneur d'illuminations, par André Salmon," No. 9 (oct. 1921), p. 33.

"Aspects d'André Gide," No. 12 (mars/avril 1922), pp. 17-21. The planned second half of this study never appeared because the review ceased publication with this number. Malraux was also listed—along with Paul Dermée and Georges Gabory—as a member of the Comité de Rédaction in the 10th and 11th issues, and for the final number he was a co-editor.

³ Comparison of texts published (under different titles) in various issues of Action, Signaux de France et de Belgique, Dés, Accords, and '900 indicate that Journal d'un pompier du Jeu de massacre and Ecrit pour une idole à trompe are actually the same work. For details see various chapters in André Vandegans' exhaustive study, La Jeunesse littéraire d'André Malraux: Essai sur l'inspiration farfelue (Paris: Pauvert, 1964).

⁴ The dates printed on the numbers are as follows: No. 1—février 1920 (actually originally scheduled to appear in late October or early November, 1919); No. 2—mars 1920; No. 3—avril 1920; No. 4—juillet 1920; No. 5—octobre 1920; No. 6—décembre 1920 (Almanach 1921); No. 7—mai 1921; No. 8—août 1921; No. 9—oct. 1921; No. 10—nov. 1921; No. 11—Numéro Hors-série [Feb. 1922]; No. 12—mars/avril 1922.

⁵ For information on Felsenberg, see Florent Fels' autobiography, Voilà (Paris: Fayard, 1957), pp. 31-33. The biographical information in the present paragraph was taken from Voilà, and from several interviews (in 1961 and 1967) which we had with his friend and associate, Georges Gabory.

⁶ See in Action, No. 1, p. [86], an advertisement for that school, established to conduct "la recherche de valeurs nouvelles, de doctrines communistes, bolchevistes, maximalistes, etc. par les orateurs et les professeurs les plus compétents du Parti Socialiste international." Action shared office space with this school at 18 Rue Feydeau for about six months after its founding.

⁷ Fels relates this whole incident in Voilà, pp. 57-65.

⁸ Our information on the general question of Anarchism has been taken from Jean Maitron, Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France: 1894—1914 (1955); Henri Avron, L'Anarchisme (1961); George Woodcock: Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962); and Guérin's excellent Ni Dieu ni maître: Histoire et anthologie de l'anarchisme (2 vols., 1969). See also the theoretical writings of Proudhon, Benjamin Tucker, Kropotkin, and George B. Shaw.

⁹L'Espoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), p. 39.

¹⁰ For a summary of this terrible historical incident, see Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961), pp. 424-429.

¹¹ Woodcock summarizes various aspects of the question of this literary influence of Individualist Anarchism, pp. 305-307.

¹² Cited by Woodcock, p. 306. The foremost theorist of the French Pacifist Individualist Anarchist movement during the first three decades of the 20th century was Emile Armand. Armand published a number of Anarchist anthologies, translations of English and American Anarchist writers, and a large number of books and pamphlets. Notable among these are: Refus de service militaire et sa véritable signification: Rapport Présenté au Congrès antimilitariste international d'Amsterdam, juin 1904 (1904); Qu'est-ce qu'un anarchiste? (1908); Les Ouviers, les syndicats et les anarchistes (1910); L'Initiation individualiste anarchiste (1923); Ce que sont les individualistes anarchistes (texte de Benjamin Tucker, traduit de l'anglais, 1924); Les Differents Visages de l'anarchisme (1927); and Les Précurseurs de l'anarchisme (1933). This latter work includes discussions of Prometheus, Gorgias, the Stoics, the Carpo-cratians, various medieval sects, the Abbay of Thélème and the Utopians, La Boétie, Diderot, Sylvain Marechal, Burke, Paine, and William Godwin. Following the mutinies of 1917, Armand was tried for sedition (on the grounds that his pacificist preaching had encouraged dissenters), convicted, and sent to prison for several years.

¹³ The complete collection of La Mêlée—which is very rare—includes 39 numbers (several of which are double), published roughly bi-mensually between 15 March 1918 and February 1920. In addition several numbers of the newspaper L'Un, "anciennement La Mêlée" appeared in the spring of 1920, beginning with an issue dated "mars."

¹⁴ For the complete text of these comments made by his co-editor, Marcel Sauvage, see La Mêlée, 1-15 mars 1919 (Nos 21/22), p. 5.

¹⁵Voilà, p. 77.

¹⁶ "Les Cahiers individualistes," La Mêlée, 15 août 1919 (No. 30), p. 4.

¹⁷ "Les Cahiers individualistes," La Mêlée, 1 octobre 1919 (No. 33), pp. 1, 2. The quotation from Romain Rolland is to be found in the same number, p. 2.

¹⁸ On Duret, see Voilà, pp. 23-31. Somewhat of a Leftist, his political writings include: Lettres sur les élections (1863); Historie de quatre ans, 1870-1873, 3 vols. (1876-1880); Histoire de France de 1870 à 1873 (1893); Les Napoléons: Réalité et imagination (1909); and Vue sur l'histoire de la France moderne (1913). Fels undoubtedly got some of his political ideas from Duret. The latter's most important book of art criticism is his study of Les Peintres impressionistes (1878), expanded and republished in 1906 as Histoire des peintres impressionistes. In this text the author discusses Pissarro, Claude Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Morisot, Cézanne and Guillaumin. In addition, during his long career he also published about 15 studies on individual artists such as Cézanne, Courbet, Manet, Whistler, Lautrec and Van Gogh. His Critique d'avant-garde (1885) includes essays on the Salon of 1870, several Impressionists, Japanese art, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough, Richard Wagner, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Herbert Spenser.

¹⁹ "Essai sur l'individualisme," La Mêlée, 1 Oct. 1919 (No. 33), p. 4.

²⁰Ibid.

²¹ In addition to the Brunei and Gabory essays, the first issue of Action contained Jacob's "Entrepôt Voltaire," Marcel Millet's "Le Bal du Rector," a poem by Salmon, an essay on fine printing, a short article by Fels on the ballet, and notes on various subjects by Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Bertin and others. It also contained a "dessin au pochoir de A. Gleizes, bois et dessins originaux de Galanis et L. de La Rocha." An article on the ballets of Stravinsky by Leigh Henry was translated from The Egoist, a British Individualist publication.

²² See Gabory's account of the incident, confirmed in our interviews with him, in "Fait divers," Action, No. 11, Hors-série [février], 1922, pp. [1-3].

²³ For the full text, see La Mêlée, 1-15 novembre 1919 (no. 35), p. 4.

²⁴ In addition to the "Bois et dessin originaux de: André Derain, A. Domin, Galanis, Max Jacob" the issue featured reproductions of paintings of Alex, Boussingault, Braque, Coubine, Derain, Halicka, Galanis, Gimmi, Gris, Gromaire, Marthe Laurens, Lhote, Simon Lévy, Marchand, Marcoussis, L.-A. Moreau, Picasso, de Segonzac, Severine and Vlaminck. Among some twenty books on art which Fels subsequently published during his long career there are studies on Monet, Matisse, Ensor, Kisling, Utrillo, Van Gogh and Vlaminck.

²⁵ It was cited in the review of the first two numbers of Action, published in La Nouvelle Revue française, VII, No. 80 (1^cr mai 1920), pp. 772-773.

²⁶Ibid.

²⁷ See Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris (Paris: Pauvert, 1965), pp. 142-148, from which the description and quotations here are taken.

²⁸ Sanouillet, p. 147.

²⁹ For a description of the Action "matinée" (an event which has heretofore escaped the attention of scholars), see L'Un, mars 1920, p. 4.

³⁰ For the text of this lecture, see L'Un, loc. cit.

³¹Voilà, p. 77.

³² See above, note 2. Fels also invited Malraux to collaborate on the series Les Contemporains which he had inaugurated at Stock, and Malraux complied with a preface for Maurras' Mlle Monk (1923).

³³ "A Nos Lecteurs," Action, No. 4 (juillet 1920), p. 61. This announcement was repeated in a number of issues of the magazine.