Andre Breton, Jean Paulhan, Correspondence (1918-1962)
Sitaudis, Tristan Hordé, 2 décembre 2021
The correspondence between Andre Breton and Jean Paulhan, remarkable for its duration, introduces readers to little-known aspects of surrealists' relations with the literary institution represented by La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, and makes clear, despite the absence of a large number of his letters, how essential friendship with Paulhan was for Breton. We also repeatedly encounter the vigorous polemicist who led the surrealist movement. In the first years of the correspondence, gaps prevent us from following Paulhan's reactions to Breton's statements, which is why the editor, Claire Barthelemy, precisely reconstructs the context of the exchanges and recalls the trajectories of both writers and, for Breton, the development of the journal Litterature and his relations with Jacques Riviere, who directed the NRF. The notes needed to illuminate the context are invaluable; so are the facsimiles of letters in the volume and the annexes (texts by Breton, Paulhan, and Jouhandeau linked to the correspondence), not to mention the highly useful appendices (indexes of names and titles, list of illustrations).
Breton's first published letter (June 18, 1918) responds to an offer of friendship from Paulhan, an offer copied and sent to Aragon. Breton wishes to bind himself to his elder (they are twelve years apart) and says so clearly: "You do not yet know the value I attach to what comes to me from you," he writes, and a little later in July: "You are precisely the friend I was waiting for at this time in my life." At that point he considers that Paulhan, to whom he dedicated his first published text, can in their exchanges provide answers to literary questions he is asking himself. An attentive reader of Valery (whose poems he copies into his letters), he admits the limits of his reading: "You grasp the total meaning of the poem while I am still playing with words." The first issue of Litterature, which he co-directs with Aragon and Philippe Soupault, opens with a text by Gide ("Les Nouvelles nourritures") and a poem by Valery ("Cantique des colonnes"), but also with Paulhan's "La Guerison severe," and in 1920 Paulhan publishes in three issues "Si les mots sont des signes ou Jacob Cow le pirate." This study aligns with Breton's concerns: "these pages on words solicit me in every direction," he writes to Paulhan.
For his part, as Clarisse Barthelemy notes, Paulhan, "in this vital, initiatory, radical ardor that characterizes Breton, (...) rediscovers his taste for freedom and a form of purity - and no doubt his first anarchist convictions." Both move forward with analogous questions about expression; however, the journal's gradual transformation - becoming La Revolution surrealiste on December 1, 1924 - distances Paulhan from surrealism. The project itself, stated in the first issue, could not suit him: "Since the trial of knowledge is no longer to be held, intelligence no longer entering into consideration, only dream leaves man all his rights to freedom."
Jacques Riviere, who directed La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, died in February 1925 and Paulhan, who had been secretary since 1920, took his place. Divergences between the review, Paulhan, and the surrealists, both aesthetic and political, grew until rupture, sealed by a brief letter from Breton on March 4, 1926: "I have the honor to inform you that I consider you a fool and a coward"; Paulhan replied in the same tone by telegram: "You have been pissing me off for a long time. You should have understood earlier that I consider you as cowardly as you are deceitful." One year later, surrealism's adhesion to the Communist Party, justified in the tract Au grand jour, prompted in the NRF a response by Antonin Artaud, A la grande nuit, and a commentary by Paulhan under the pseudonym Jean Guerin. Breton reacted with a filthy letter, Paulhan sent him his seconds, but Breton refused the duel. The break would last until 1935.
The editor sketches in broad strokes the history of surrealism during the 1930s. Separation from the Communist Party - whose reasons Breton explains in 1935 in the preface to Position politique du surrealisme - allows renewed dialogue with Paulhan; Breton notably accuses Soviet power of betraying the hopes of the 1917 revolution. Epistolary exchange resumes, but above all Paulhan publishes Breton in the NRF and in Mesures, Henry Church's allied review, then takes L’Amour fou into his "Metamorphoses" collection. Silence returns with Breton's exile to the United States from 1941 onward. He returns to France in July 1946 without meeting Paulhan; they only see each other during their temporary engagement in the pacifist organization "Citoyens du monde," initiated by Robert Sarrazac, who introduced Breton to Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, where the poet would settle. They reconnect fully on matters of literary criticism in 1949, with the publication on May 19 of a Rimbaud forgery, La Chasse spirituelle, with a preface by Pascal Pia; the forgery was defended by part of the critics, for example forcefully by Maurice Nadeau. As early as May 21, Breton denounced in a letter to the newspaper Combat the "particularly contemptible character" of the pastiche - the letter was published only on the 26th; that same year he published on this affair Flagrant delit, Rimbaud devant la conjuration de l’imposture et du trucage, welcomed by Paulhan: " Flagrant delit brings a great joy of mind and heart." Another affair would draw them together in 1960, the election of the "Prince of Poets" to succeed Paul Fort; despite Breton's efforts, and his hatred of Cocteau, he could not prevent Cocteau's selection. It seems exchanges ceased in the course of 1962 - Breton died in December 1966, Paulhan in October 1968 - without the reason being truly known.
Both men, uncompromising in their intellectual choices, recognized each other and met on literary questions essential to them. Breton often regretted seeing Paulhan too little and wrote to him in 1959: "I shall die without understanding why you and I, though sometimes so close, saw each other only intermittently, yet only the feeling of luck will remain." In the NRF issue paying tribute to Breton, Paulhan ended his article with these words: "it is not always possible for a man to say what he knows. Breton is dead. Everything must be begun again." One often reads in this correspondence precious testimony of a true friendship.