Leiris and Jouhandeau, nights and punishment
Marcel Jouhandeau Michel Leiris
Libération, Mathieu Lindon, 29 janvier 2021
An unlikely pair, the one formed by Marcel Jouhandeau and Michel Leiris, by the author of Pincengrain and the author of La Règle du jeu, by the homosexual and the so-called impotent man, the antisemite and the ethnologist of L’Afrique fantôme who knows the "vanity of any psychology based strictly on race or nation," the collaborator and the resistant. And yet this pair is described by their correspondence published today, at the same time as Leiris's Journal reappears in an improved critical edition. In 1992, this Journal had revealed that Louise, Leiris's wife, was not Lucie Godon's sister but her daughter, and therefore that art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was not the writer's brother-in-law but his father-in-law, a secret that scarcely concerned Leiris himself. The relationship with Jouhandeau is another matter.
The author of Monsieur Godeau was born in 1888 and died in 1979; the author of L’Âge d’homme was born in 1901 and died in 1990. Leiris is not yet 23 when he meets his elder in 1924. Their nights of March 26 to 28 will have lasting biographical and literary consequences. Letter from Leiris, April 1924: "I am punished in my flesh: it is from my bed, where I lie ill and suffering, that I write to you." Reply from Jouhandeau (which he does not send) in what this edition of the correspondence calls Leirisiana, notes concerning Leiris in the archives Jouhandeau deposited at the Jacques-Doucet literary library: "Absence, silence, the remorse of knowing you ill through my fault... a hundred times I would have died since Saturday, if I were sure my death would be more useful to you than my life."
Leiris in L’Âge d’homme (book accepted by Jean Paulhan at Gallimard at the end of 1935 but not published until 1939, perhaps because Jouhandeau first read it in 1935 with a feeling of betrayal), without naming names: "My friend and I had gone very far in our conversations, raising them to such a point that it could pass for a violation of taboo or a sacrilege. So it seemed normal to me that I should incur punishment. 'I am punished even in my flesh,' I wrote to him." Leiris has already evoked in the text how "I escorted my companion home, almost dead drunk and gripped by nausea, then slept with him after humiliating my mouth and his in a reciprocal bewilderment." Summary in the chronology of the new Journal edition: "Night of drunkenness and debauchery with Marcel Jouhandeau."
Their physical bond will not endure (there will only be the "awful night" of April 28, 1929, when Leiris displays his group-sex impotence before the Jouhandeau couple), but Denis Hollier evokes in his preface "a kind of fusional asceticism in two voices." In 1927, Jouhandeau turns their moral adventure into fiction in Ximénès Malinjoude, which he dedicates to Leiris as follows: "Are you quite sure you are not the author of this book? If I wrote it for you, when I reread myself, I think I am reading you." Letter from Leiris: "I do not think I read myself when I read you like this; shall I rather say it is you I think I read when I read in myself?" "You will always be for me, whatever you do, the one who wanted to murder God," he also writes, returning to their "pact." Jouhandeau in the Leirisiana, 1924: "Oh, monsters of purity - or cowards who do not have the courage of their desires." Leiris in Fourbis, second volume of the La Règle du jeu tetralogy, published in 1955: "For years I kept brooding over this sentence You dare not go to the end of your desires that had once been said to me by a man to whom I was bound by a passionate friendship." Leirisiana from 1924: "Nothing reduces me to impotence like love. I have never been more chaste than during the weeks of my heroic passion for you."
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Leiris - Jouhandeau Correspondence (1923-1977)
What do Michel Leiris and Marcel Jouhandeau have in common? Between the author of La Règle du jeu and the author of Chaminadour? Between the writer-ethnologist of the Musée de l’Homme and the one who took part in the trip of collaborationist intellectuals to Weimar?
One night in March 1924, the young apprentice poet and the admired author of Monsieur Godeau intime lived together through "something that happened in the Absolute," as Michel Leiris would write. In the 1920s, the two men entered into a secret, Rimbaldian pact, which this previously unpublished correspondence reveals.
This volume brings together around one hundred letters exchanged over nearly fifty years, despite serious breaks before and during the war. Excerpts from Leiris's and Jouhandeau's notebooks and diaries, as well as a cross chronology, also testify to this decisive "friendship under the ashes."