Jean-Richard Bloch & Jean Paulhan, Correspondence 1926-1940
Jean-Richard BlochJean Paulhan“Is there anything more important to us than the truth?”
Jean-Richard Bloch and Jean Paulhan were both 36 years old in 1920, when their correspondence began. Founder in 1910 of L'Effort libre, Bloch was then under contract with the editions of the NRF, where Lévy in 1912 and ...Et Cie in 1917 appeared. For his part, Jean Paulhan, who self-published Le Guerrier appliqué in 1917, was the devoted secretary of Jacques Rivière, director of the NRF since 1919.
Their exchange grew until 1932, the year of publication of Bloch's novel, Sybilla, dedicated to Paulhan, who had become editor-in-chief of La NRF. This one, who had shown himself to be “disappointed” in 1925 for not having found, in Kurdish Night and On a Cargo, "the severe, the incorruptible Jean-Richard Bloch", then attempts to link with the writer a complex dialogue on the power of words: "Where there is power, there are no words, and where there are words, there are no power.” But Bloch is required by his political commitments – participation in the first Congress of Soviet Writers (1934), organization of the Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture (1935), trip to Madrid (1936) – while Paulhan, Popular Front municipal councilor in Chatenay-Malabry, orchestrates in the pages of The NRF a lively politicization of the debates…
Then Bloch agreed to direct with Aragon the communist daily Ce Soir, the first issue of which came out on March 1, 1937. The day after the German-Soviet pact concluded in 1939 in Moscow, the “embarrassment” between Jean-Richard Bloch and Jean Paulhan is at its height, and the scuttling of the magazine Europe, which Bloch would have intended to “retake”, ends up distending their conversation. Bloch then notes that “Europe, the war, the men of politics have tangled their spindles”.
After the German offensive of May 10, 1940, these differences seemed “outdated” to Jean Paulhan for the benefit of brotherhood in arms alone and, soon, entry into the Resistance. On the eve of Bloch's departure for Moscow, Paulhan sought dialogue one last time – which in his eyes always involves “language questions” – by sending him, on February 22, 1941, the beginning of his Fleurs de Tarbes.
Intellectuals and reviewers if ever there was one, Jean-Richard Bloch and Jean Paulhan, both writers, knew each other, esteemed and linked in a friendship that could only be shady, due to their respective relationships with politics. Their understanding, and the very possibility of this exchange of letters, presupposed this difference between them, and a way of fully assuming it.
• Edition established, prefaced and annotated by Bernard Leuilliot.
• “Correspondences of Jean Paulhan” collection.
• 22 illustrations.
• Index of people cited.
• Edition: 500 copies, printed by the Renon printing house (Ruelle-sur-Touvre) on Olin Regular Ivory 90 gr paper, under cover filled with Fedrigoni Woodstock Noce 285 gr paper.
• Publication: December 30, 2014.
• 13 x 21.5 cm.
• 344 pages.
• Public sale price: 36 euros.
• ISBN: 978-2-912222-47-3.
Resources
Publisher : Claire Paulhan