=An Alphabet of My Creative Icons=

He was born Samy Rosenstock, which is an okay name as names go, but after trying on several different aliases eventually struck upon and stuck with the euphonious Tristan Tzara, as cool a name as they come.

“You’ll never know why you exist,” he said, “but you’ll always allow yourself to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.”

For the entirety of his life, he was determined as cancer not to be so persuaded.

He was born on April 16, 1896 in Romania. Early on, he was a Symbolist poet. As sixteen, he started a literary magazine with his friends. But he skedaddled to Switzerland pretty quickly. Romania wasn’t a great place for Jews to be and it was soon to become a much worse place for them to be as the double-disasters of the world wars approached.

He was barely nineteen when he arrived in Zurich. He quickly fell in with a group of similarly disaffected oddballs. Soon he was participating in performances and formulating the ideas that would eventually develop into one of the most influential art movements ever: Dada.

He was short. He wore a monocle, which was the hipster affectation back in those days.

H wrote a ton of manifestos. He wrote another ton of poems, songs, plays, and broadsides. He came up with that idea of writing a poem by randomly picking words from a cut-up newspaper out of a paper bag. He was Dada’s chief propaganda minister and theorist. He is the face of Dada even though just about everyone recognizes Marcel Duchamp as the face of Dada. How can that be? Maybe it’s more accurate to say that Duchamp is the mask of Dada and Tzara is the real face underneath.

What was Dada after all? Even Tzara couldn’t come up with a single, non-contradictory definition. One of them, however, seems to sum up all the rest. Dada= “Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.”

As early as 1924, Dada, as a distinct movement, was done for. At that point, Tzara was living in Paris. Andre Breton, who glommed onto the movement, and attached himself personally and artistically to Tzara, was already making his play to become leader of a whole new movement of his very own, which would eventually become Surrealism.

Surrealism was basically Dada with a political and social and psychological purpose. True Dada, if there could ever be such a thing as “true” Dada, eschewed purpose.

Everything is basically Dada. If you’re breathing you’re experiencing Dada.

Tzara would fall in and out with Breton and Surrealism from that point on. Fascism drove the basically apolitical Tzara to political engagement as a Marxist, even a Stalinist for a time. Hitler had a way of doing that to people. 

He joined the Resistance against the Nazis during the French Occupation.

After World War II, he turned against Stalinism and supported the Hungarian revolution. With the imminent and extreme threat of Hitlerian fascism eliminated, Tzara once again devoted himself to being a Dada stick in everyone’s ribs.

In his final years, he applied himself to the unlikely study of the 15th century French poet Francois Villon. He championed African and primitive art. He protested the French oppression of Algeria.

The literary establishment awarded him a bunch of honors before it was too late. He died on Christmas Day, 1963, at the age of sixty-seven.

“Always destroy what is in you,” he said.

He might have added, “There’s always more to destroy where that came from.”

Now he's dead, but you  get the feeling that he really had himself a great time while still alive.