The Night of Loveless Nights

Written in 1927 (in a single night, according to Alejandro Carpentier, though the heavily corrected drafts suggest otherwise), this harrowing poem of desperate lyricism — Robert Desnos’s longest — was not published until 1930, the manuscript having been lost in the interim. Recovered and entrusted to Théodore Fraenkel, it was published by Bernard Franck, a dealer and patron based in Antwerp, with an added prose section and a passage in short verse. Franck gave all the copies to Desnos and to Georges Malkine, the poet’s inseparable friend, whose three drawings illustrate this edition. The two men had met in 1924, sharing a studio in the rue Blomet in Paris, where they smoked opium together.

Associated with the first Surrealist group and a friend of André Masson, Georges Malkine was the only painter named in the 1924 Manifeste du surréalisme, André Breton awarding him a certificate of “absolute surrealism.” He exhibited in 1927 at the Galerie surréaliste, rue Jacques-Callot; but rather than encouraging him, the success of this exhibition prompted him to leave. He set sail for Oceania, wandered among its islands for three years, and returned to Paris ruined, taking work as a diver on a cargo ship. He then resumed painting and illustrated Desnos’s text. He gave up all artistic activity in 1933, not returning to painting until 1946, when he settled in the United States, before coming back to Paris one last time in 1966.

The text was not reprinted until 1942, when it was included in the collection Fortunes.

From 1930 onward, Desnos abandoned the virtuosity and exuberance of his Surrealist years, searching for a style that would answer his “need to express in poems the extraordinary, torturing beauty of life.” Somewhat surprisingly, this new direction arose from his reading of Stendhal, whose “merciless austerity of style” Desnos admired.

Skillful restoration to the cover.
From the library of Michel Demont (bookplate).