Robert Desnos, “The Night Watchman of Pont-au-Change”
The last photograph of Desnos, at Theresienstadt, shortly before he died on June 8, 1945. Desnos is in the middle, leaning slightly to his left.
Listen to us in your turn, sailors, pilots, soldiers.
We wish you good morning.
We do not speak to you of our suffering but of our hope,
On the threshold of a new day we say good morning,
To you who are near also to you
Who will receive our morning prayer
At the moment when twilight, in straw boots, enters your houses.
And good morning just the same and good morning for tomorrow
And good morning of good heart and all our kin
Good morning, good morning, the sun will rise over Paris
Even if hidden by clouds it will still be there
Good morning, good morning, with all of my heart bonjour.
– Robert Desnos, from “The Night Watchman of the Pont-au-Change,” translated by Carolyn Forché
Robert Desnos died in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt after having been captured as a member of the French resistance.
In his life before the Nazis took over what became known as Vichy France, he was a central ‘member’ of the surrealist group in Paris, and then of the Dada group. The first recognized that dreams and the subconscious life were more ‘real’ than the quotidian humdrum we so often take for ‘reality.’ Then the Dadaists rejected rationality altogether, believing the convoluted logic of the rational mind led to the destructive and tragic excesses of modernity. The ultimate of the rational/bureaucratic would ultimately become the ‘Final Solution,’ which Norman Mailer once called (with precision) “the cold murderous liquidations of the totalitarian state.”
Of all the writers who tried to access the subconscious and the unconscious directly, writing or narrating out of a trance or a dream state, Desnos was the most successful. He attained serious status among the Surrealists and Dadaists as a poet and novelist who could figure forth his unconscious on the page.
But he broke with many of his fellow surrealists, and moved away from a ‘literary life.’
Desnos’s opposition to autocracy and tyranny, in his time and with the implacable march of history, led him to the French Resistance. An active participant of struggles against the Nazi ‘occupation’ of France, he was at length captured and sent from one concentration camp to another. Following his arrest, his imprisonment reads like a directory of concentration camps: first Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, then Flossenburg, and finally Terezin.
It is neither of the Surrealist Desnos nor Dada Desnos that I am writing, but of the engaged member of the Resistance. Although there may not be as great a distance as I am suggesting between ‘reality’ and the imagination: Always, always, Desnos was a believer in the imagination [1]. Still, the authoritarian and destructive force, with which the Vichy government collaborated, did its work in the real world, the world of people and arrests and torture, and this force was the one Desnos rebelled against [2]. Surrealism under Breton claimed that the world could be revolutionized if everyone got in touch with his or her unconscious. Breton in later years came to a different view, and – politicized—he joined the Communist Party in France. Desnos joined the Resistance; his late art was engaged, even as he recognized that ‘imagination’ and not merely opposition was required in the titanic struggle against Naziism.
This background brings us to a long-ish poem (four pages) entitled “The Night Watchman of Pont-au-Change.” I do not plan to discuss the whole poem, although I will cite some of its lines, but only its final stanza [3]. The poem is a statement by a night watchman in Paris during the war: “I am the night watchman,” the poem begins, recounting a number of bridges which the speaker oversees. “I keep watch while Paris sleeps.” He continues,
To the south, to the north, the east, the west,
There is nothing but the thunder of war approaching Paris.
The speaker recognizes that, specific as his location is – a bridge over the Seine, in Paris – his words resonate “over the whole world that surrounds and crushes us.”
I am the night watchman of Pont-au-Change
Watching not only this night over Paris
This stormy night over Paris in her fever and collapse
But over the whole world that surrounds and crushes us.
In the old air all the columns of war
March toward this place where, after so long a time, men still live.
As the world lurches into war, the night watchman hails all who resist, those whom he calls his “comrades.”
I salute you who sleep
After secret hard work,
Printers, bomb carriers, unriveters of rails, fire starters
Distributors of tracts, smugglers, message bearers,
I salute you, all of you who resist, children of twenty
And men more enduring than bridges, sturdy men of all seasons.
I salute you at the threshold of a new day.
This is an actual and not a metaphorical struggle – not only distributors of tracts, but those who start fires, carry bombs, unrivet the rails so the trains carrying supplies and military personnel will crash – between the forces of destruction and those who can foresee a new day dawning. The final phrase of the stanza, “at the threshold of a new day,” prefigures the glorious ending of the poem, which we shall be considering.
“The Night Watchman of Pont-au-Change” is a poem which calls for universal opposition to the forces of Adolph Hitler, a clarion cry to enlist in the battle between humanism and those who would destroy huge swaths of humanity.
The night watchman understands the role of opposition: “I too have slaughtered the enemy.//He is dead in the gutter, Hitler’s man…” and understands that there is a brotherhood of those who stand prepared to struggle against a huge wave of destructive authoritarianism, of fascism. These are “Friends, friends, brothers of friendly nations,” as the watchman recognizes them, compatriots in the struggle.
I listen to your voices and I call you,
I call you in my language known to all
The language that has only one word:
LibertyAnd I tell you that I am watching and have killed Hitler’s man
He is dead in the deserted street.
The song of Liberty, the call of rebellion and insurrection, are “songs in the night” that are heard over all the earth.
For the earth is a camp lit by thousands of spiritual fires.
At the vigil of battle one bivouacs all over the world.
And perhaps, comrades, you hear the voices
That come from here when night falls,
Tearing at lips hungry for kisses,
And soaring long over open country
Like migratory birds blind to the light of beacons
Who hurl themselves against the burning glass.
I confess that I do not fully understand that last image, of birds who are “blind” yet, attracted by the light, crash into the glass atop lighthouses…. Yet, he claims, his voice reaches out all over the world, a voice “joyful and resolute,” singing of brotherhood and sisterhood and hope, singing of struggle against the forces of oppression.
And then, that final, glorious ending to the poem, the stanza with which this letter began. I know of nothing like it in all of poetry: An embrace of the world, the world he hopes will come, the world he knows will come as surely as he knows the dawn will follow the night. In my last year of teaching I began both semesters reciting these words to my students, assuring them that a “good morning” was sure to “be there” for each and all of them.
The stanza begins with a line that is both command and exhortation and invitation, “Listen to us in your turn, sailors, pilots, soldiers.” It is to all who fight in the world, fight against oppression. (I take the line to include those he referred to earlier, who print oppositional pamphlets, who distribute those messages, who engage in sabotage – starting fires, carrying bombs, misaligning rails – in fact, “all of you who resist.”) He has, after all, saluted “you at the threshold of a new day.”
And here, for the night watchman on his bridge, the new day dawns.
Listen to us in your turn, sailors, pilots, soldiers.
We wish you good morning.
We do not speak to you of our suffering but of our hope,
On the threshold of a new day we say good morning,
To you who are near also to you
Who will receive our morning prayer
At the moment when twilight, in straw boots, enters your houses.
What a marvelous wish, that the day be good. How common the words, even more in French than in English, “Good day.” “Bonjour.” So often the language of daily life is far more rich than our usual invocation of common words recognizes: The miraculous, as surrealism claimed, lies hidden beneath the obvious and humdrum. “Bonjour.”
I am not sure if a more wonderful line has ever been written: “We do not speak to you of our suffering but of our hope.” Suffering, which is the lot of all humans, gives way to hope [4]: To something unjustified, beyond reason, but which looks to the future with the optimism that lives deep within us, rather than a pessimism which “our suffering” should require. “Not without hope we suffer and we mourn,” Wordsworth wrote as the culmination of a poem which, as with this one, recognizes we humans live with suffering, “A deep distress hath humanised my Soul.”
So we say, “bonjour,” welcoming the new day: “On the threshold of a new day we say good morning.” We say it to those near to us, and also to those who are far – as twilight is to dawn, as a peasant in straw boots is to a watchman in the midst of cosmopolitan Paris – who likewise “receive our morning prayer:” “Good morning.”
There is more to come.
And good morning just the same and good morning for tomorrow!
And good morning of good heart and all our kin!
Good morning, good morning, the sun will rise over Paris
Even if hidden by clouds it will still be there
Good morning, good morning, with all of my heart bonjour!
The sun will rise, the day will begin anew, and the night watchman and the poet will welcome it. I have added, to this wonderful translation, the exclamation points that were in the French original. This is a command, and exhortation. Eight times in six lines, emphasized of course by the rhymes, the poet chants “Bonjour,” “Good morning.” It is what I love about those lines, the repetition of that most common of phrases, here given weight so that it is an incantation, a ritual of celebration: Good morning. It is morning, and the morning is good. A new day is dawning. The ending of the poem is a simple as that.
Simplicity is too often overlooked, undervalued. Even if there are clouds which hide the sun from us, the sun has arisen, the day has dawned, and it is a new day. Bonjour, bonjour, bonjour, bonjour, bonjour, bonjour, bonjour, bonjour.
Try them out loud, those final lines. The welcome to the new day, to the world, to the future, is so clear. Nothing like these lines exists in all of literature. If poetry can be miraculous, and I think it can be, then the incantation at the close of this poem is as miraculous as poetry can get.
“We do not speak to you of our suffering but of our hope.”
Desnos, several years later, will die of typhoid in a concentration camp (sadly, after its liberation). Yet his message to the world is, as this poem insists, “Good morning…with all of my heart bonjour!” Stunning, remarkable, a beacon of hope. More stirring words have never been written.
Écoutez-nous à votre tour, marins, pilotes, soldats,
Nous vous donnons le bonjour,
Nous ne vous parlons pas de nos souffrances mais de notre espoir,
Au seuil du prochain matin nous vous donnons le bonjour,
À vous qui êtes proches et, aussi, à vous
Qui recevrez notre vœu du matin
Au moment où le crépuscule en bottes de paille entrera dans vos maisons.
Et bonjour quand même et bonjour pour demain !
Bonjour de bon cœur et de tout notre sang !
Bonjour, bonjour, le soleil va se lever sur Paris,
Même si les nuages le cachent il sera là,
Bonjour, bonjour, de tout cœur bonjour !
Footnotes:
[1] There is a famous and perhaps apocryphal story, though reputable historians claim it is true. I give it to you in the words written by Susan Griffin in 2004:
I am thinking of a story I heard a few years ago from my friend Odette, a writer and a survivor of the holocaust. Along with many others who crowd the bed of a large truck, she tells me, the surrealist poet Robert Desnos is being taken away from the barracks of the concentration camp where he has been held prisoner. Leaving the barracks, the mood is somber; everyone knows the truck is headed for the gas chambers. And when the truck arrives no one can speak at all; even the guards fall silent. But this silence is soon interrupted by an energetic man, who jumps into the line and grabs one of the condemned. Improbable as it is, Odette told me, Desnos reads the man’s palm.
Oh, he says, I see you have a very long lifeline. And you are going to have three children. He is exuberant. And his excitement is contagious. First one man, then another, offers up his hand, and the prediction is for longevity, more children, abundant joy.
As Desnos reads more palms, not only does the mood of the prisoners change but that of the guards too. How can one explain it? Perhaps the element of surprise has planted a shadow of doubt in their minds. If they told themselves these deaths were inevitable, this no longer seems inarguable. They are in any case so disoriented by this sudden change of mood among those they are about to kill that they are unable to go through with the executions. So all the men, along with Desnos, are packed back onto the truck and taken back to the barracks. Desnos has saved his own life and the lives of others by using his imagination.
[2] One needs to recognize that Desnos was half-Jewish: The Wannsee Conference, which charted the “Final Solution,” was held in January 1942, the year the poem was written. Vichy France, following the plan laid out at Wannsee, began deporting Jews to death camps in Poland in late March of 1942. So the poem has, perhaps, roots in this confluence of his own situation and historical events, and not ‘only’ in his rejection of Vichy authoritarianism and Hitler’s fascism, and his active political opposition as a member of the Resistance, the situation which led to his arrest.
[3] In the English translation, these lines are rendered as two separate stanzas, but in French they are just one stanza.
[4] Walt Whitman’s book of poetry, republished again and again with additions, was entitled Leaves of Grass. So ‘grass’ is central to his oeuvre. In what was to become Section Six of “Song of Myself,” he begins,
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Hope. [My emphasis].