I find so many missing girls among Surrealism, my milk carton heroines, like Nadja. Or the mysterious Suzanne who participated in some of the trance experiments in the early 20s who Penelope Rosemont briefly mentions in her anthology on Surrealist women. There is another Suzanne, Suzanne Muzard, Breton’s mistress who he names X at the end of Nadja, rhapsodizing as “The Wonderful One.” Who are these women, these artistic-girls that flitter through portraits of this period, always elusive? On Google I find a photo of Suzanne Muzard: she is with another girl in one of the first photo-booths. A former prostitute, the Internet tells me (of course).
Breton was not in love with Nadja, he was just surgically fascinated with her. He is interested in her as a character, not as an embodied woman. He notes her “quite desperate” material conditions, that she had dealt cocaine and been taken to the police station. He offers to give her money in exchange for her company. It’s almost like she has to perform to hold his interest, and when she becomes too needy or real he dumps her. He seems to despise her, in fact, as an ordinary suffering being. At the end he uses the fact of her institutionalizing for a poetic riff on containment, but this is really about the great (male) writers, not Nadja as a potential author or artist. Although at the end of Nadja there is some materialist critique that her isolation and poverty are what dooms her in society (her gender, I would also add), and that she was committed for disobeying the social codes of propriety. And yet he appears to agree with the dominant narrative that she is mad, and he never investigates what happens to her or visits her once she is put away. (He grows bored with her once he uses her for his own purposes, he wasn’t faithful to his women he turned into characters.) Everyone who writes about this woman mythologized as Nadja repeats and accepts this master narrative that she was mentally ill, even though we know almost nothing of her life, we know that she was a patient of Janet (repeated in Wikipedia, “a mad patient of Pierre Janet”), and that her real name was Leona Camille-Ghislaine D., that she died in the hospital in 1941, but we don’t even know her last name. It is almost as if her narrative ends when HE is done with her. On Wikipedia, a maddening repetition: the Baroness was insane, her mother was insane. Yet the Baroness said to Djuna of her mother: “Djuna — she never one minute had been ‘insane’ but ‘sane’! Honest!” (I love the aggressive ecstatic thrust of her epistolary style.)
What remains in the novels and in the dominant biographies surrounding these women is a skewed historical record that diagnoses and demonizes. The HAGiography or demonology — every remaining scrap is preserved and archived as evidence of genius, the women discarded or lost or mythologized (a form of being lost, for the real truth about their embodied life is never told, the telling was made nearly impossible). There are so many biographical details online relating to every woman tangentially connected to Henry Miller, every address where the married Millers lived, even trying to unravel the origins of Jean Kronski, the 21-year-old poet and artist who became a lover with June and who Henry made a character, everyone is obsessed with every detail of the godheads. She is important only as connective tissue to the Great Man.
The desire to write the other biography, the one that was not told. Like what Jean Rhys performs in Wide Sargasso Sea, rewriting the demonized Bertha Mason, breathing humanity into her, the mad-woman kept up in the cold cobwebby attic, loving her by telling her life, by seeing her, by rescuing her from one-dimensionality. These women who are flattened out as characters. Zelda crying out in the asylum that she is trapped in the pages of HIS book.
They know how to undress her but not how to unravel her. (Troppmann on Dirty: “I thought, no one can know her any less than I do.”) Yet they didn’t LOVE her. And by that I mean they didn’t SEE her.
They forget or erase the real, embodied subject. Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin who try to untangle June’s origins, to deconstruct the mysteries of their Robin Vote. “He enters the labyrinth with a notebook! In her place I might close up too,” Nin writes. But so little is known still about June Miller, whose name is changed once she is married, whose origins are erased, like the mythology of any traditional wife, yet who also was somehow untraceable (more so Jean, who June helped mythologize as descending from the Romanoffs). Once they divorced we don’t know much about what happened to June. What we can piece together is terribly sad. In the 40s moving around New York hotels like a down-and-out Veronica Lake or Frances Farmer, she may or may not have worked as a social worker (calling to mind her deep wells of empathy never really documented in literature), she probably had electroshock in the 50s, when it was all the rage for rage-filled women, one particular horror story has her breaking bones while falling off the table during a session. Who knows whether it’s true or not.
Can I examine any of these brilliant girls as heroines of a sort? Were they heroines? They were ultimately silenced and contained, institutionalized in asylums, where they experienced dehumanizing, degrading treatment. They suffered terribly (bodily, psychically). Also institutionalized in literary works that stole their identity.
When Jean Rhys writes that she is possessed with her character Antoinette Cosway, or when Anaïs Nin writes “I have become June”—is this different than Flaubert asserting that Emma Bovary IS him, that HE is SHE? Anaïs Nin who felt that she understood June Miller more than her husband ever could:
Yet I have given her life. She died in Paris. She died the night she read Henry’s book [mss. of Tropic of Cancer] because of his butchery. She wept and repeated over and over again, “It is not me, it is not me he is writing about. It’s a distortion. He says I live in delusions, but it is he, he who does not see me, or anyone, as I am, as they are. He makes everything ugly.”
Of course Anaïs also did objectify June, by making her into a character, just like Djuna did with the Baroness and Thelma. Is making someone a character giving them life, or taking it away? Perhaps making someone a character is a way of alienating them from themselves, so that their lives are read through the character. Djuna did strip her real-life exemplars of their subjectivity (and artistry). Her rendering of Robin Vote does read, at times, as a one-dimensional revenge amidst an otherwise glorious novel about society’s misfits who live in the gutter-margins (unless, like Duras with Lol Stein, she is making a commentary on her as the blank object of desire). But Djuna did love the Baroness, and worried over being faithful to her life, worried over using her life as material for the novel while stalled writing her promised biography in the 30s.