Yvon Belaval & Jean Paulhan, 1944-1968
Yvon BelavalJean Paulhan“Belaval, like so many others, first addresses Paulhan as an ambitious young author. But very quickly he put himself at the service of the work of his publisher, reversing the relationship which characterized most of Paulhan's literary relationships [...]. He subjects Paulhan's manuscripts to careful reading, spotting clumsiness and typographical errors. He pesters his eldest to meet the deadlines he sets for himself. However, even this frenzied determination to see the accomplishment of his master's work was of little use. Because Paulhan no longer needs encouragement: he writes much more than before the war, despite - or undoubtedly because of - his growing isolation in the literary world.
It is therefore not the outline of a work that we see emerging in these letters, unlike the majority of Jean Paulhan's correspondence. Here we witness the difficulty that this work presents to others, even to those who are most capable of understanding it, such as Yvon Belaval, a philosopher by training, but also author of various writings on poetry and lover of painting. [...]
Paulhan is now invested with a clear idea of what he must accomplish, a clear idea which is necessarily relayed by an area of obscurity, by a secret, which forms a silence at the heart of this correspondence.
Anna-Louis Milne.
Publisher : Gallimard