One of the central figures in my novel Swimming with Tigers is based on a real historical person connected to surrealism in the 1920s known as Nadja. In this post, I want to share with you how I transformed this shadowy figure from history into the character of Suzanne.
Breton’s Nadja
In 1926, the leader of the surrealist movement André Breton met a woman who called herself Nadja on the streets of Paris and was immediately smitten with her as a person and with her entirely original way of living and seeing things. Breton wrote a book entitled Nadja about his encounter with this elusive and unstable visionary woman in 1928.
Breton’s portrait gives tantalising glimpses of her originality and frailty; she is a free spirit but cripplingly shy and insecure, with terribly low self-esteem. Nadja is a fascinating document but is, in the end, about Breton himself, and Nadja exists primarily as his creation.
Their relationship takes place over ten intense days, during which he meets her by chance or arrangement in various places in Paris. She behaves in a way that fascinates and occasionally irritates or even bores him, seeing occult connections in banal scenes and objects such as statues, railings and shop signs, and experiencing hallucinations.
He supports her financially, realising with distaste that her only alternative income is from prostitution. They conduct an affair and spend one night together outside the city (this passage did not appear in the original edition), but Breton becomes gradually alarmed at her aberrant pronouncements and reckless behaviour. He records a suicidal and murderous attempt by her while he is driving a car. She ‘pressed her foot down on mine on the accelerator, tried to cover my eyes with her hands in the oblivion of an interminable kiss…desiring…that we should collide at full speed with the splendid trees along the road’. Describing this as an act of ‘total subversion’, Breton regards himself as having failed the test.
All of Nadja’s sayings and actions are related in terms of his own interpretation and the way in which they affect him. The book opens with his words: ‘Who am I?’ and does not even introduce Nadja, the title character, until a third of the way in. However, some of her drawings and collages featuring symbolic elements of cats, stars, mermaids and hands are included, alongside other documentary photographs of people and places.
Nadja is only the second known fictional text to be accompanied by photographs but, while there are several photographs of people in the book such as an actress, some of Breton’s friends and a spiritualist medium, there is no picture of Nadja, just a very disconcerting photographic collage of her eyes repeated in a row.
By the end of his account, Nadja is committed to a mental institution, and Breton decides not to visit her, giving his disenchantment with psychiatry as an excuse. Instead, he abandons her.
Could I Put Nadja in a Novel?
When I was looking around for an idea for a novel back in 2008, I wondered if I could tell Nadja’s story, drawing on Breton’s account, but using my own imagination. I wanted to give her centre stage this time. What a gift to a novelist! I spent quite some time searching and expecting that such a thing had already been done, but I seemed to be the first to attempt to bring Nadja to life in a novel.
Then, when I read in the introduction to the 1999 Penguin edition of Nadja, that there were rumours in the 1970s that she didn’t die young while still locked in an asylum as was generally thought, but was instead living in France and working as a typist, my novel started to really come to life. I wanted to create a new myth to rival Breton’s, in which she did not die incarcerated but lived on, free and independent.
How I Did It
Using Breton’s book as a starting point, I re-named Nadja Suzanne and allowed myself plenty of time to conjure her up as a physical presence.
In his book, Breton relates his first chance encounter with Nadja and how he was struck by her eye make-up and hair colour. I gladly adopted these. He describes her make-up as follows: ‘the rims of her eyes were dark for a blonde, the rims only, and not the lids’. I took this to be black kohl and made it a feature of Suzanne’s appearance, as well as giving her blonde hair. I also took the colour of Nadja’s clothes — black and red — for Suzanne. I find that, in the same way as borrowing aspects of a location such as a doorway or a stand of trees (even if these were not necessarily there at the time the book is set), having physical details seems to fire up my imagination and gives me more rather than less scope to invent.
To bring out all of the associations her story had accumulated, I used the technique of freewriting, in which you write continuously and without censoring the content. This allowed me to range widely and invite unintended elements into my creation.
Here is an extract from some early freewriting I did on Suzanne:
The bird girl, the butterfly girl, the hurt girl, the disowned. The gothic ghost, the fey child, the polluted whore, the cast-off mistress, the naive poet, the schizophrenic.
The skipping girl, the coquette, the cat-like, the acrid. The heroine, the First Cause, the one carrying it all and yet not able to steer it, or say anything to it. The traumatised one, the delicate-featured.
The resurrected, the alive-all-along, the re-found. Laughing and dancing, shouting in the corridor, blazing life then grey isolation.
The thin soles, the red coat, the bare legs, the messy make-up. The one who is starved or who starves herself. Until she is fed, and befriended. Saved.
The one with magic eyes, with mirrors, with windows. The one with wings in the mind.
Gradually, my fictional Suzanne began to feel real and to partially detach from Breton’s Nadja.
Next, I wrote some scenes in which Suzanne makes a friend who saves her from despair. I named this friend Penelope and mixed in details from the lives, works and appearances of several women surrealists such as Leonora Carrington, Eileen Agar, Lee Miller and Meret Oppenheim in order to create her (see my post about this).
Here is part of an early version of the scene when Penelope first meets Suzanne. By this time, I knew exactly how Suzanne would appear to a stranger:
‘Mademoiselle.’ The waiter placed a glass of red wine in front of Penelope, giving her an ingratiating smile. She watched him take the other glass from his tray and put it down at Suzanne’s place without a word.
‘He doesn’t seem to like you,’ Penelope murmured, once the waiter was out of earshot.
‘He thinks I don’t belong here,’ said Suzanne, getting out another cigarette.
Penelope looked at Suzanne dispassionately for the first time. Her clothes were cheap. The felted red coat with a dropped hem had fallen open to reveal a much-washed black crepe dress and her shoes were in ruins. Her face could do with a wash and there was a faint smell of tomcat about her, vying with a cheap, sharp perfume. Did Suzanne look like a prostitute? Was that what the waiter thought she was? What would Penelope’s mother say if she knew that her precious debutante was out in public with a woman of dubious reputation?
Suzanne was shifting awkwardly in her chair. No, she didn’t look like a prostitute, not exactly; she looked displaced.
My motivation
For years, Nadja was known only through Breton’s portrait of her as his muse, a ‘free genius’ who had demonstrated to him how to live with total abandon and originality. We have only some short quotations to suggest that Nadja had a poetic style all her own. She talks about a ‘blue wind’ that passes through the trees. Even her chance remark in the course of a telephone conversation with Breton’s wife who asks for her number, is memorable: ‘I cannot be reached,’ she says, and I took this as an epigraph to my novel because of its beauty and because the real Nadja can never really be known.
I had a personal investment in putting Nadja under the spotlight. Nadja said of herself: “I am the soul in limbo”, and in the past so many gifted, creative women have remained in limbo because they were unknown and unacknowledged. In my work as a university lecturer in literature and women’s studies, I contributed to the feminist enterprise of rescuing women writers and artists from obscurity and reassessing their place and contributions. This time, instead of a scholarly approach, I used fiction to draw attention to the gaps in history.
Nadja (according to Breton) explains how she plays a game: ‘Say something. Close your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name…Try it, it’s so easy…that’s how I talk to myself…actually, I live this way altogether’. This encapsulates the whole spirit of the surrealist imagination and random chance. Nadja does not just practice it in writing or art; she lives it. She was the original surrealist.
So Who was Nadja?
For years, Nadja was assumed to be mostly fictitious or at best an amalgamation of women connected to Breton but in the 1990s, information began to emerge. She was identified as Léona Camille Ghislaine D. (her full name was withheld), who had died in 1941 in a hospital near Lille, aged 39.
Since then, more has emerged about Nadja including her second name which was Delcourt. We now have a photograph of her and there is a biography (in Dutch and French) by Hester Albach who, after it came up in a series of auctions in 2000, was able to study Breton’s correspondence with her. Albach then struck gold by visiting her grave and contacting the florist whose number was on a card in a bouquet left there, which led her to Léona’s granddaughter.
But no amount of hard facts will ever entirely banish the deeply mysterious aura around the strange and compelling Nadja. She will always remain a true surrealist ghost, both real and imaginary at the same time.
All the quotes from Nadja by André Breton are from Richard Howard’s translation (originally published in 1960) in my 1999 Penguin edition, which contains Mark Polizzotti’s excellent introduction.
The drawing at the top of the post (“Qui Est Elle?”/”Who Is She?”) is by Nadja and reproduced in Breton’s book.
If you would like to read more on Nadja, here are some articles available on the web:-
“Something Wrong” Women Who Crash
Nadja: Surrealism’s Absent Heart
[Some of this material originally appeared on my website The Freewriter’s Companion.]