Liberty or Love!     by Robert Desnos, Translated by Terry Hale and Stanley Chapman Original language: French Published by Atlas Press Pub. Date: 1994 Pub. Place: UK Format: 133 pages ISBN: 094775766X List Price: $12.99, £6.50 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £6.99

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This novella was written during the hottest epoch of the Surrealist movement, around 1924 when for Europeans the end of World War I had seemed like the end of so many other things, of empires, faiths and philosophies. Desnos then was energetic and iconoclastic and Liberty or Love! springs from a young man’s untamed and dangerous sexual energy. The book manages though to be literary and lyrical in its outpourings of sexual delirium; a leopard flays itself to make a fur coat worthy of the naked skin of the heroine Louise Lamé and the silver backing of mirrors peels off ‘as a result of the many long years...spent reflecting fatal passions’.


Inside the surrealism and the excess is that French celebration of love as passion, as derangement, of what the Surrealists celebrated as l’amour fou, ‘mad love’; a liberating force that could and should disturb social and personal conventions and conventionality. A phenomenon summed up by Desnos in the lover who is ‘the adversary with whom one walks side by side, ever on the defensive and yet with utter abandon’. There is something quite serious and inspired about this book, so passionate and successful at beginning and end if a bit soggy in the middle section, as love often is.


Although desperately erotic (and banned at time of first publication) Liberty or Love! is an excellent case for the continuing argument about whether all erotic writing is pornography or whether literary quality (Desnos is primarily known as a poet) makes a difference. Compare Liberty or Love! with the unimaginative repetitions of commercial pornography, where one cliché endlessly rides the back of another cliché, and one sees that difference.


In fact a lot of political, cultural and as well as artistic strands meet in the book of this young man, who was murdered by the Gestapo at the age of 45.

‘At the Porte-Maillot, I recovered the black silk dress where she had discarded it. Naked, now she was naked under the fur coat. The evening breeze was charged with the sharp odour of canvas sails picked up off the coast, charged with the odour of partly-dried sea-weed washed up on the coast, charged with the smoke of locomotives en route for Paris, charged with the odour of hot rails after the passage of the fast express, charged with the fragile yet penetrating perfume of damp grassy lawns extending in front of sleeping châteaux, charged with the odour of the cement of churches under construction, the heavily laden evening breeze would be rushing in under her coat, caressing her hips and the underside of her breasts.’ p41-42