The surrealist imagination is an imagination at war. Born out of the horrors of the European trenches and catapulted into the nightmares of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Holocaust, surrealism has always responded to the historical violence that has shaped and energized it. At the same time, however, surrealist responses to war are all too aware of their struggle to articulate their political nature. How can surrealism write war? What is the political import of surrealism’s indirect aesthetics? How might surrealist writing advance our understanding of the complexities of wartime subjectivity? This chapter explores these questions by turning its attention to two dark allegorical novels: Ruthven Todd’s Over the Mountain (1939) and Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome (1941). To date, discussions of British surrealist writing have confined themselves to the aesthetic and political contexts of interwar and wartime poetry. But there is a need to complicate this literary history if we are to better understand the diversity of British surrealist writing before, during, and after the Second World War. Whilst the novel was very much a marginal practice in 1930s and 1940s surrealist circles, it nevertheless emerged in the wartime period as a dark form of literary political enquiry; one that, coming through from the counter-Enlightenment impulses of the Gothic, poses disquieting questions about wartime human appetites for violence, corruption, and absolute power.

Rooted in automatism, surrealism spawned a new kind of autobiographical writing, beginning in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism. This new style of autobiographical writing sprang from a desire to identify a lived experience that comprised both waking life and the rich world of unconscious dreams and images. Functioning like Dorothea Tanning’s mirror-door, her preferred metaphor for painting, surrealist autobiographical writing is rooted in everyday reality, within which surreal experiences may surge. Only the autobiographical mode could encompass the multiple voices of surrealism and provide readers with the chance to discover surrealist principles as the surrealists discovered them themselves. This chapter presents a short history of surrealist autobiographical writing, from Robert Desnos’s Mourning for Mourning (1924) and Liberty or Love! (1927), to Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1937), Michel Leiris’s Manhood (1939), Leonora Carrington’s House of Fear (1938), The Oval Lady (1939), and Down Below (1944), Tanning’s Birthday (1986), and Kay Sage’s unfinished China Eggs (1955; published in 1996). These texts show artists and writers seeking self-realization through self-knowledge in the hope of fulfilling Rimbaud’s injunction to ’change life’.