An endearing puzzle named Jean Paulhan
Jean Paulhan Gaston Gallimard Francis Ponge Alexandre Vialatte Paul Léautaud Dominique Aury
Causeur, Jacques Aboucaya, 20 mai 2024
Who was Jean Paulhan really? Too many fragmentary or conventional portraits have hidden him from us - not to mention legends and partisan judgments. One undeniable fact: for half a century, he reigned over French literature - but from the shadows. Without ever appearing as a "major contemporary." A kind of Pere Joseph exercising his magisterium in Gaston Gallimard's orbit. This role of eminence grise is what has mostly been emphasized. It ended up freezing him as a Commander statue, with the share of mystery attached to men of the shadows. All wrapped in a formidable seriousness of finicky grammarian and moralist. Many writers, of all genres and all sides, have left testimonies about him. That is because for a long time he was indispensable. Most often, esteem and respect outweigh reservations sometimes caused by incomprehension. What is certain is that his sureness of judgment was accompanied by a sense of friendship, and that opportunism was always alien to him.
A complex and mysterious personality
In several columns, Alexandre Vialatte speaks of him kindly and with a touch of mockery. Affectionate mockery: did he not owe him publication of his Kafka translations? For his part, in his 1928 Journal, Paul Leautaud pokes fun at " his little sing-song and mannered tone " and takes little pleasure in his cool humor. " Remarks of that sort ," he notes after a conversation concerning Gaston Gallimard, " must be his way of playing the fantasist ." As for Francis Ponge, he describes him as follows: " Tall, with an athletic bearing thanks to the parallelepiped of his torso, an imposing interlocutor, he speaks little, in a rather high register voice, but soft ." Dominique de Roux, in Immediatement (1972), hazards a psychological portrait at the very least nuanced: " Jean Paulhan: restrained, secretive, allusive, always having lived in the full whirlwind of his inner castration (but without Mallarme's superior and often magnificent cunning) ."
So many observations, among many others, each containing a part of truth, but above all revealing how difficult the man and his work remain to pin down.
A conscientious biography
You can be convinced of this by reading or rereading Paulhan le juste by Frederic Badre, the first attempt to reassemble the puzzle. It follows step by step, from his birth in 1884 to his death in 1968, the path of the young man from Nimes who "moved up" to Paris with his family in 1894 and whose career led him all the way to the Academie.
Yet this meticulous biography, packed with details and the fruit of work whose probity is hardly in doubt, still leaves the reader unsatisfied. One senses that the essential always escapes through some side opening. To put it plainly, it singularly lacks breadth. No overall view, no perspectives. Little analysis, much accumulation. Useful, certainly, but in the end a fragmented Paulhan, even if captured in intimacy, in strict chronological order, and still preserving a good share of his mystery. The biographer should not be blamed for that: the undertaking was not easy.
And it is true that disconcerting aspects abound in this man passionate about rhetoric and language - but also about painting. He had the ambition of making " literature more literary ," and wanted to be at once theorist, judge, and actor of that enterprise. His work, inaugurated by an essay on Malagasy popular proverbs, an unfinished thesis he was preparing under Levy-Bruhl, often resembles a subtle and ambiguous game.
It culminates in Les Fleurs de Tarbes, a reflection on literary form and creation, whose definitive edition dates from 1941. In between and afterward, Paulhan published books devoted to painting (on Braque, Fautrier, Cubists, informal art) and narratives, often short, written in the first person, but the autobiographical part serves only as pretext - when it is not invented outright.
An eminent role in our literature
Above all, he played a major role as catalyst of literary life and discoverer of talent. In charge of the NRF from 1925, at Jacques Riviere's death, first as editor-in-chief, then as director, he gave the review exceptional influence, opening its pages, without the least sectarianism, to writers as diverse as Giraudoux, Georges Limbour, Aragon, or Marcel Jouhandeau, among many others. Drieu La Rochelle succeeded him between 1940 and 1943.
For Paulhan, having entered the Resistance (he is among the founders of the clandestine Lettres francaises), would return only in 1953 to head the NRF, with Marcel Arland. A convinced resistant, then, and for a time a fellow traveler of communists - constrained and compelled in a way. During the purge, his attitude was exemplary. Resigning from the National Committee of Writers (CNE) in November 1946, once he perceived the iniquity of a blacklist he had refused to sign, he rose violently against the arbitrariness inflicted not only on disapproved writers but on all good-faith French citizens condemned by the liberators.
An unambiguous commitment
One must read De la paille et du grain (1948) and Lettre aux directeurs de la Resistance (1952). There Paulhan appears fiercely anti-communist and defends the legitimacy of the Vichy government, the only government " that had the authority to judge betrayals committed between 1940 and 1944 ." Astonishing language for someone from his side. Pen in hand, he battles to defend his friend Jouhandeau and all those people pretend to muzzle, polemicizing with Aragon, Martin-Chauffier, Claude Roy, Claude Mauriac. He reveals himself as a pamphleteer, though his domain had seemed limited to preciosity, affectation, and more or less erudite, Byzantine inquiries. His cool humor, his irony, often hit the mark. One can never stress enough the intellectual probity and courage of this man whom everything - beginning with his origins in good Protestant, republican, Dreyfusard society - inclined to the left, and who in the darkest moments kept his lucidity intact. A sincere patriot (" It must be ," he writes to the Resistance leaders, " that beyond your tricks and cheating there exists something true called the homeland "), this Gaullist would, in the 1960s, take the side of French Algeria, little concerned with provoking the vindictiveness and sarcasm of an intelligentsia he had already defied many times.
Thus we owe him, in 1952, publication of Lucien Rebatet's Les Deux Etendards, a cursed writer among the cursed. In the issue of L’Infini devoted to Jean Paulhan, Dominique Aury, who was long his secretary, returns to this episode: " Paulhan entrusted me with reading this manuscript that he (Rebatet) had written in prison. I was given this manuscript one afternoon. I read it through until the next evening, including the night. I am the first reader of Les Deux Etendards. Later, when I met Rebatet, I told him his book was admirable, but his wartime articles were abject. He answered: ‘Those fools, they did not shoot me.’ Yes, you would not have stolen it ."
This issue of L’Infini offers other valuable contributions, beginning with letters from Paulhan to Franz Hellens on communism. Written in 1949, they clarify the writer's intransigence. One should also consult with profit the third volume of his Correspondance covering 1946 to 1968. For this secret man, at once cold and sensitive, skeptical and passionate, can there be approached most closely.
Paulhan le juste, Frederic Badre, Grasset, 328 p.