A startlingly contemporary portrait of drug addiction in prewar
Paris
Published in 1943 (just a year before its author was arrested by the
Gestapo for his Resistance activities), The Die Is Cast was a
departure for Robert Desnos: a shift from his earlier, frenetic
Surrealist prose to a social realism that borrowed as much from his life
experience as his career as a journalist. Drawing on his own use of
drugs in the 1920s and his doomed relationship with the chanteuse Yvonne
George, Desnos here portrays a band of opium, cocaine and heroin users
from all walks of life in Paris. It is a startlingly contemporary
portrayal of overdoses, arrests, suicides and the flattened solitude of
the addict, yet published in occupied Paris, years before "junkie
literature" established itself with the Beat Generation. An anomaly both
in his career and for having been published under the Occupation by an
active member of the Resistance, The Die Is Cast now stands as timely
a piece of work as it had been untimely when it first appeared.
Robert Desnos (1900-45) was Surrealism's most accomplished
practitioner of automatic writing and dictation before his break with
André Breton in 1929. His career in journalism and radio culminated in
an active role in the French Resistance. Desnos was arrested by the
Gestapo in 1944, and passed through several concentration camps until
finally dying of typhoid in Terezín in 1945, a few days after the camp
he was in was liberated.
