The Surrealist Parade: Literary history

The menace of surrealism was so frequently advertised that any reader of this book should be allowed the impudence of demanding my credentials. So opens Wayne Andrewss The Surrealist Parade, a portrait of the movement in literature and art by a man who, at the age of nineteen, began to correspond with its major figures and afterward came to know them well. Under the name of Montagu OReilly, Andrews wrote the surrealist fiction Pianos of Sympathy (1936), the very first New Directions book. In later years, Andrews became a social historian, art archivist, and scholar of architectural history, publishing no less than sixteen books, among them his well-known study of the cultural roots of Nazism, Siegfrieds Curse, and a pungent biography of Voltaire (meanwhile, Montagu OReilly had made a reappearance on the ND list in 1948 with Who Has Been Tampering with These Pianos?). When Andrews died in 1987, he had completed all but the last chapter of The Surrealist Parade, his portrait of a movement in art and literature that took in such disparate temperaments as Andr Breton, Paul luard, and Salvador Dal. The book is, in the words of his lifelong friend and publisher, James Laughlin, a little insiders history Montagu is very much behind Wayne in these caustic yet admiring sketches.