Idolatry & Confusion

This incendiary pamphlet, rejected by the review Tribune and published by Jacques B. Brunius and E.L.T. Mesens in March 1944, surveys the critical reception of French literature in England and denounces “the black market of Resistance literature,” attacking English critics wholesale. Aragon is called “the Déroulède of the faubourgs,” and the authors of this tract adopt a radical Surrealist stance that admits no compromise, no blandness and no intruders. The publisher Toni del Renzio, rebaptized “Ranci del Conno,” is extensively attacked as someone who “tries to imitate Breton and, having vaguely heard that he was at odds with Éluard, launches into an attack on the latter.” Del Renzio replied to these criticisms with his own “Incendiary Innocence,” as early as April 1944.

On a copy given by Mesens to Magritte, the author, unrepentant, later noted that “these texts, ill-informed in 1944, written in haste,” remained nonetheless “prophetic.”

A fine copy of this fragile publication, apart from a thin strip of Filmoplast at the folds.