The del Renzio Affair: A leadership struggle in wartime surrealism

© Silvano Levy, 2005
it turned out, was never to receive official ratification. Del Renzio, a recent refugee, writes of himself as
marginalized and diminished; he regards himself as being in ‘this country that we have strayed upon like a
mangy cat upon a rubbish dump.’ The sense of ostracism, conveyed by the image of despised vermin, is
no exaggeration given that, as del Renzio explained, ‘I was on the hit lists of the agents of both Stalin and
Franco and not considered by the British authorities to be a candidate for protection: there was no one to
regret my elimination.’ 18 He later described the text as a whole ‘as seizing the incoherence of my mere
condition when I was isolated, threatened and perplexed.’ The counterpoint to his brutal selfdisparagement
and censure appears in the use of the royal plural personal pronoun. Of course, del
Renzio’s Romanov descent is a historical fact, as is his renouncement of his inherited titles: ‘we have
renounced our royalty. We who are a prince of the Steppes, a lord of Calabria.’ However, the text elevates
its author to an alternative supremacy: it is a subtle, but nevertheless unmistakable, declaration of primacy
within the surrealist entourage that del Renzio had, by then, clearly assumed. Whilst steering clear of overt
claims to leadership, the piece subtly suggests that del Renzio possesses a particular aptness to lead the
movement: it is only he, after all, who is said to be capable of certain privileged oneiric insights: ‘For who,
save us, can hear the mute cries of statues?’ A ‘statue,’ we are told, ‘has been a regular visitor to our
dreams.’ More significant, however, is that del Renzio claims to be receptive to a ‘hot wind’ blowing from
‘the north-west,’ that is to say from the United States, where Breton and other surrealists were then based.
Maddox and Robert Melville welcomed del Renzio’s initiative, seeing it as a constructive response
to the group’s inertia in the early 1940s:
Toni’s proposal was not unwelcome, since we both felt that the semi-Surrealist efforts of the
past years had produced superficial details and idiosyncrasies without making any real
contact with Surrealism. In such a ‘conspiracy of silence’ we saw no reason not to
collaborate with Toni. We assumed that he had had the support of Mesens and Brunius. 19
Arson made a point of demonstrating its allegiance to French surrealism: it not only printed texts
by Breton but also promised its readers a future publication of Breton’s poem ‘Fata Morgana’ in French.
Del Renzio’s own fidelity to the movement was evinced, even before the publication of Arson, by his
writing to Maddox to say that he had decided to forego exhibiting at the Leicester Galleries ‘because of the
need to adopt an unequivocal position in opposition to everything outside Surrealism.’ 20 The standing of
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Papers of Surrealism Issue 3 Spring 2005