I, too, trust contrariness. But it is one that is intuitive, left open to its own raw and rough edges, dark and often unresolved. This kind of operation is not always easy to undertake when you have also been influenced by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Wallace Stevens, Eliot, Heaney, Hughes, and others who have trod the well-worn path of Romantic academic poetry fed to the young on undergraduate courses. Do I contradict myself? Well, then, I contradict myself... This attitude is undoubtedly rooted in the fact that I am a working class kid educated to highfalutin middle class intellectual values.

So, on the one hand I am a poet – the ne plus ultra of post-romantic narcissistic navel-gazing. On the other, I hate that kind of widely accepted and highly-acceptable form of egocentricism. Poor Andrew, torn between the ego-impulse to express himself and desire to lose the 'self' in a more communal project!

Anyway, a few years ago this came to a head. I've always been too much of a misanthrope to be enthused by 'community arts' and so instead I was drawn into the more cerebral collective adventure of surrealism.

One day I was browsing through one of the larger chain-store bookshops when I came across a strange 'calling card' which had been left in a book of surrealist short stories. I can't recall what it said exactly but it intrigued me enough to contact the authors. I thought it was a flyer for a magazine and I had just starting writing 'surreal' poetry and so I sent them a letter with a couple of poems and told them I was familiar with surrealist history and had even translated a novel by Georges Bataille at university. They wrote back immediately and set up a meeting in a nearby pub. So I then met up with four people calling themselves The Leeds Surrealist Group. They were four friends who'd originally met at university, united by a passion for black attire and exploring the darker side of the imagination first begun in the 1920's by Breton and his band of collective adventurers.

For some time the Leeds Group had been adhering to strict Bretonian principles: collectively drawing and writing, and devising games in the single-minded pursuit to wrench the imagination back from the all-devouring profit-motive and market forces. It was all very idealistic, historically informed and seemingly exactly what I was looking for. Inevitably we hit it off and I passed the 'interview' – my wife and I were invited to one of their creative evenings. In the candlelight and semi-gothic darkness we'd sit drinking red wine discussing the politics of surrealism, the activities of other groups in Prague, Paris and Stockholm, the mutual respect for Artaud and the equally mutual hatred of 'Avida Dollars'. We'd play exquisite corpse and initiate new games. Once every week we'd sit in a pub, seething into our beers with hatred for the 'system', all the while plotting a 'revolution of the mind' by collectively drawing on a beer mat.

The real glue that held everyone together was a deep, though often fraught, friendship. Being newcomers, it took some time for the others to let their guard down and let us into their inner sanctum of trust and bonhomie. And yet, group dynamics being what they are, a certain strained tension was never far away. There was a definite leader of the group. He was the one who would organise sessions, the intellectual force behind the whole project, be the overall spokesman etc. Coming into the group from my own intellectual position (my 'Bataille' to his 'Breton') shifted the weight in the boat a little. Not that this would come out in any overt way – we never argued – it was more subtle in the way I would question given assumptions or undermine some of the pomposity of what we did with humour. The group could be very serious, sometimes to a point of blind self-righteousness. I find it difficult to be totally serious about anything that doesn't appreciate the absurdity of one's own human, all too human, situation.

There is no text without a context, and I wanted to understand more the context of what made the group and its friendships tick. I therefore devised a collective game called The Misfortunes of Memory which would explore the limits of surrealistic discourse and what held us all together. The game itself was quite complex, involving players choosing objects from their past, writing them down and distributing them secretly among the others where they would undergo various 'transformations' (visual representations, narrative reconstructions, etc). One controlling individual called 'The Puppet Master' would have little to do with the game except at the end when he would create a small 4 act play based on material given by the others. The players would then have to act out this play. The fifth act would be an act of revenge whereby the actors view the puppet master's objects and devise an ending to the play (including the Puppet Master's inevitable 'death') based on this new material.

The idea of the game would be for people to give up some aspect of their past, like a gift (in more anthropological terms, an act of 'potlatch') and allow this to be manipulated and changed by others to create something new. It would be an act of artistic trust and faith in the Other. What it ultimately meant was that no act of self-reflection would fall into a single 'fetishised' discursive form; it would be open to a series of manipulations and interpretations outside any individual's controlling ego. All-in-all I thought it quite an exciting (and difficult) challenge and felt it would take the group's activity to a new level.

My wife was equally enthusiastic about it though the rest of the group were highly suspicious of my motives. They didn't seem to take in the spirit it was presented: as a game. They wanted to analyse it and discuss it further, reformulate it so it conformed to a mutually agreed format with a more defined outcome. The fact that the game was dictatorial was intentional; imposed by an Other like so much that goes on in society. That's why I included the role of the Puppet Master (i.e. the role of Authority) who has an unequal amount of power yet gets his comeuppance. What I hoped the game would produce was a microcosm of the power structures both within the group's own dynamics and in society 'out there', as well as how collective engagement (i.e. artistic friendship) could transform and corrupt power's own corruption through the work of the imagination. It was everything we'd talked about, enacted. OK, it might not work as a piece of art – it was the taking part that was most important – lessons would be learned; the armour (amour) of our friendship would have been tempered in the white-hot forge of collective and imaginative engagement. Blimey, it would have at least been a laugh!

It was not to be. I felt by this time the group had moved on and fallen foul of the need to justify its existence through the production of more bone fide 'works'.

Endless discussions, overt lack of enthusiasm, needless suspicion… it was the beginning of the end, at least for us. And my wife and I began to see less of the group.

In the end we re-enacted one of the more sordid episodes in the history of surrealism – the ideological split. Breton vs Bataille all over again.

You cannot blame the group or any individual for this outcome. It was an experiment after all. It's just disappointing that we couldn't take the risk and that, in the end, the ego's defences were set too strong for this particular collective adventure.

People confuse my contrariness with being just plain awkward or difficult. Perhaps I am. But being contrary, for me, means exploring given assumptions about the world, seeing how far you can push things before they fall off the edge or transform into something new. For me it's nothing aggressive or nasty; it should be fun, playful. It's just a tool of the imagination that many poets and artists employ. How far should it go though? Should this imaginative prodding extend to the bonds and boundaries of friendship too? As I found out there's a risk involved. Is it worth taking? That depends. One man casts the other gathers…

CODA
All this happened six or seven years ago now and I haven't heard from the group since. Despite our differences, I still think about them and wonder what they are up to. As for myself, I still live a contrary life – relatively alone - between writing acceptably narcissistic poetry (which has found a modicum of success) and devising more 'weird' stuff with a new writer, Anton Brassiere (which has also had a slight drizzle of public approval).

My wife and I have also resurrected the Misfortunes of Memory game which we are currently playing: less as husband and wife but, more comfortably, as friends. Where it's going, we're not sure yet, but we are enjoying the ride!

BIO NOTE: 

Andrew Boobier was born in Haworth, West Yorkshire in 1963. He has published poetry and translations in the UK & US. In 2003 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Andrew is also the editor of the Alsop Review's prestigious online quarterly magazine, Octavo . Andrew has just launched his own web site. He'd be pleased to hear from you.
 
 

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