Falling In Love With The Elusive Nadja

Greg Gipson on Surrealism's Heartiest Heartthrob

Dear Republic,

It seems for some reason to be turning into 1920s week at The Republic of Letters. Yesterday, it was John Dos Passos and that slightly pseudo-Paris feeling. Today it’s the genuine article with André Breton and Nadja.

-ROL

FALLING IN LOVE WITH THE ELUSIVE NADJA

Léona Delcourt, photographer unknown

I didn’t read Nadja first, I read L’amour fou. Translated by Mary Ann Caws, in a compact pink edition from the University of Nebraska that has not changed in 20 years, the little paperback was in the trunk of her car. I asked her what it was, and she said I must read it. She wasn’t my lover, just a friend in a period of self-isolation, in the sun of California, which in its own way in the 90s was my Paris of the 20s. Or something. So I read Mad Love, by André Breton, the founder and leader and principal hype man of Surrealism, at least till others began exporting it to new frontiers. I loved it, it burned, I was hooked, the singing music of glorious coincidence, of wonder, of simply being able to live in the world in a state of excitement, was electrifying. So of course the next thing was to read Nadja.

Richard Howard did a hero’s work, translating, per Wikipedia, a minimum of about 45 books from French to English, doing more than almost anyone to provide something in English of a vast corpus of French literature that was otherwise unavailable. His translation of Nadja, Breton’s first major non-manifesto work of prose, has been the only one in English for about 65 years. I am deeply grateful to him, but I have been just about literally vibrating since January 4, 2024, when I emailed New York Review Books Classics’ recommendation address, which I do occasionally when I think of books I want to read that I don’t have, because I am a nerd. In January 2024, I wrote, “I implore you, Mark Polizzotti, translating Nadja, and inclusive of their correspondence, would be a revolutionary improvement of the Surrealist picture in English.” Editor Edwin Frank replied that this was happening already, and due “Spring of 25.” Sure enough, Nadja released June 17, 2025.

Self-portrait by Nadja

Polizzotti — the author of Why Surrealism Matters — is, for me, the preeminent translator of French working today in English. He has often worked on writers and writing that has, as he puts it “a fairly understated style.” “Breton” he notes, before I can interject to this effect, “was not quite the same thing. … He used to call his sentences sinuous, and they are, they’re very serpentine. … My job as a translator was to try to keep that sense of sinuosity but at the same time make it comprehensible in English.”

Nadja’s world is a fragile, shadowy, enticing one, where wonder and coincidence coexist with squalid desperation and a certain wild-eyed revolutionary fervor. It is, Polizzotti observed, as much about Paris of the 1920s — and a Paris that even the Parisians of the 1920s did not really inhabit, a secret place within the place — as it is about the people Breton describes. The book, misnomered a novel when it is something else, something unclassified and malleable, tells the story of Breton’s meeting with a woman who catches his eye on the street and turns out to be a kind of savant for the weirdness he is seeking. She is perceptive, highly intelligent, plucks details out of the air about him that are correct, and charms him and the reader.¹ Her name is given as Nadja, supposedly in suggestion of the Russian word for “hope,” and at one point she tells him “you’ll write a novel about me, I know you will.” For about nine days, Breton meets with her in various places, has intense and revelatory conversations, travels with her (and, not coincidentally, they become lovers and he loses interest in her). Many of the details of their meetings and encounters are highly specific: Breton had an excellent memory, and he took notes. In researching Revolution of the Mind, his 1995 biography of Breton, Polizzotti found that several of the passages describing physical places or factual occurrences in Nadja were lifted almost verbatim from Breton’s letters to his wife, Simone Kahn (yes, he was married, and writing to his wife about his weird obsession; he was French, ok?) and others, recounting his adventures with Nadja in Paris. As a sidenote, part of the reason Polizzotti had those letters and documents to draw on for the biography was because, despite the acrimony of their divorce (which did not happen in the immediate aftermath of Nadja, but in connection to the affair begun with X of footnote one), Breton’s ex-wife Simone saved voluminous records of the early days of Surrealism, “including all his letters to her. He, alas, did not return the favor.”

Man Ray, Simone Kahn with a Sculpture from Vanuatu

‘Adventures’ may not be the right word, exactly, because Breton is not, say, hopping in a car and roaring across the country,² or robbing banks and shooting it out with the cops. But adventures seems right, because through Nadja, within Nadja, Breton was enacting something of his most deeply held artistic and philosophical prescriptions. Nadja is a record of his confirmation of his own beliefs in what he refers to frequently as “the marvelous” but which also may be understood to be the linkage of our minds and experiences by unconscious conduit, and the hope to find those conduits and explore them like you would a path into unknown wilderness. The early days of Surrealism found Breton and others fascinated by automatic writing, essentially writing in trance or without conscious attempt to control meaning. Breton and Soupault published The Magnetic Fields³ in 1918, the first collection of automatic writings. Robert Desnos, who later became one of the better-known poets of Surrealism, was famously productive and prolific at this material. Breton and others spent days at a time holed up, writing furiously, in a kind of delirium of creation.⁴

Breton had served as a medical aide in the war, and read Freud at the same time as he worked with traumatized (“shell-shocked”) patients. Speaking with them, he was charmed and fascinated by the way that they could be on the one hand affectless or disengaged, and yet say the most perfectly odd things that to him were poetic and revealing. “Of course, to them, it wasn’t poetry, it was just whatever reality they were able to process,” Polizzotti says, and to a degree that explains all of Surrealism’s appeal. Just as he would later fall under the spell of Nadja’s intoxicating combination of acute, perceptive revelation and be alienated by her visibly crumbling sanity and simultaneous sad ordinariness, Breton was deeply influenced in this wartime period by his friendship with Jacques Vaché, a slightly older soldier who was profoundly disaffected, cynical, and nihilistic. They exchanged feverish letters (almost the only writings Vaché left behind, see @las Press’ 4 Dada Suicides⁵) and had intense conversations, but Vaché was no artist; he was too pure to ever create anything, and too nihilistic to ever believe in the value of any act. He died of an overdose in 1919, Breton always maintaining it was suicide and a true expression of Vaché’s beliefs.

Jacques Vaché

If Vaché was cynical, Nadja was the polar opposite. She lived in extreme poverty (Breton is always sending her money), often unsure where her next meal would come from, and seemed able to float above the ordinary concern of such matters, drawing dreamlike images that to Breton embodied Surrealism’s juxtapositional wonder and play, and saying and writing words of startling wisdom or effect (to him). In Nadja, she attaches herself to Breton, and he to her, recounting their adventures to everyone he knows, obsessing over her well-being, and in awe of the, for lack of a better word, “bohemian” life she leads despite having no particularly artistic ambition. Nadja is like the Platonic ideal of the garreted artist or holy fool that the post-war American scene of “beatniks” and “hipsters” desperately wanted for itself. It isn’t (or isn’t only) Hemingway from A Moveable Feast that they were drawing on, it was Nadja, and the pale, tedious imitation Henry Miller afforded with his own work from the time. She dances through life, leaving behind pieces of what might be art without any apparent design or effort, or any separation between her life and her work. Her poverty was both holy and exhausting. She might write to Breton: “I have a request to make. Could you help me one more time. … Believe me, it’s the pressing need that pushes me towards you, the date approaches.”⁶ The same correspondent could also write to say: “My Darling, the path of kisses was beautiful, wasn’t it … and Satan was so tempting. …But I always descend again alone the stairs that lead to happiness.” One of Breton’s persistently best qualities as a human, and in his writing, is a willingness, really a passion, for wonder, and for a joyful kind of wonder, at the endless variety of existence. It also meant that he loved novelty, and thus lurched ahead or around his friends, leaving them pointedly in the dust, sometimes permanently.

You’ve probably guessed where this is going, though. Nadja ends up hospitalized, isolated, and alone. Breton essentially fades out on her story, having said what he wanted to say and having no real way to say more about her. Polizzotti notes that in the book Breton claims that he abandoned her, essentially cutting off contact, when in real life he was told, ambiguously, that a visit could not be arranged. It seems Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon did visit her, however. Nadja died in 1941, still hospitalized. Until relatively recently, her full name was unknown, and the people who did know about her guarded her secret carefully. As Polizzotti recounts in his introduction to the new edition, much of the final detective work was done by a Dutch novelist, Hester Albach, whose novel-biography, Léona, Héroine du Surréalisme, remains untranslated into English. NYRB, if you are listening, please get this going ASAP. Nadja, whose picture heads this piece, was born Léona Camille Ghislaine Delcourt, and she came to Paris in 1920 from her home near Lille, at 18. She left behind a child, Marthe, with her parents, having refused the local butcher’s son’s marriage proposal after the British officer who got her pregnant at 17 returned to England. She was initially accompanied in Paris by an older man, identified as a “protecteur”⁷ who offered her shelter and financial support. She eventually pulled away from this relationship, and ended up taking a variety of jobs as well as making use, apparently, of a variety of men to support her, in which condition she met Breton.

As much as it is tempting to reduce Nadja to just another man telling a woman’s story, Nadja herself was kind of a badass, and seems to have pushed Breton to write the story as much as he was himself eager to do it. She wanted something from him as well is what I am saying. Maybe when those letters make it to English we can find out whether she got it or not, but for now, I am saying, go read Nadja and see for yourself whether beauty is beauty without convulsion, the rupture, the remaking of the world by pure will and imaginative openness, or if it’s just a little bit of elegant distraction to stave off the dread of our impermanent and changing existence. Nadja herself was unequivocally not of or for this world, but Breton saw his fortuitous encounter with her as a gift worthy of giving to the world of letters and a way to provoke a new and better way to live, with awareness of the beauty underlying dullness and grime, a way to see that marvelous hidden space, a way to transgress without himself falling over the edge (Breton admired transgression but was almost hilariously upright and stodgy in his much of own life and mannerisms), and perhaps a way to rebut or at least respond to the final word of his lost comrade with something contrary to mere despair. If it boils down to only one thing, it is, says Polizzotti, “[t]hese moments of wonder, these moments of marvelous beauty, happen unexpectedly, they happen fast, and really your job is to be open to them … don’t let them pass you by.” For me, Nadja has been a touchstone for the hope and the dream that art can — should — be all, not decoration, calm salons, mere ornament. For me, it has always been true, before I knew it was true, that beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be at all.

Greg Gipson remains at present a pseudonymous lurker on Substack. He (long ago) published at Grist.org and The Believer but has largely marinated himself in books and thoughts about books and ideas for books (as well as some other notable experiences) for the last few decades, never quite starting the grill. In his day job he writes, but not that kind of writing.

1. Unless, sadly, you are Michael Patrick Brady, who is otherwise a sterling reviewer and thinker about books but who thinks Nadja is just a manic pixie dream girl by another name. Neither he nor I even mention the other unnamed woman who features in Nadja but who gets less time and is correspondingly less human or real (albeit who only appeared in Breton’s life towards the end of the events summarized in Nadja). As X, she features heavily in Communicating Vessels, a 1932 volume (also published in a translation by Mary Ann Caws by Nebraska) which is commonly summarized as “an effort to show how the discoveries and techniques of surrealism could lead to a recovery from despondency.”

2. It is likely not a coincidence that Nadja was first translated when it was, given that passages like this were firing up American youth: “…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’” (On the Road)

3. Currently in print in English from NYRB, in translation by Charlotte Mandell; an older @las Press edition reprinted the David Gascoyne translation.

4. For work that isn’t automatic writing, but more like the flâneurism of Nadja, look to Last Nights of Paris by Philippe Soupault and Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon.

5. Copious correspondence with family and other friends has since been published — at least in France — and Polizzotti pointed to “White Acetylene” as “a kind of ‘story.’” For some further discussion see https://www.alexandriesse.com/the-letter-as-literature

6. All quotations from her letters in this paragraph are taken from “Léona Delcourt and Suzanne Muzard: A Gendered Perspective on Flânerie” in Dada/Surrealism 22:1-12, November 2018 by Marylaura Papalas, which includes discussion that did not fit here of how Breton and the male Surrealists could exalt wandering the streets as Baudelaire’s flâneurs but for women the presumption of such open-ended exploration was prostitution or other inappropriate conduct, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328621218_Leona_Delcourt_and_Suzanne_Muzard_A_Gendered_Perspective_on_Flanerie

7. I asked a French friend — a professor, no less, about this term, explaining that in one sense it sounded like a legal or quasi-legal guardian but in another way like something more sinister. He said, “Well, I don’t know the whole story but it definitely sounds like a euphemism for pimp.”