Pierre Drieu la Rochelle & Jean Paulhan, 1925-1944
Pierre Drieu la RochelleJean Paulhan“Will we talk politics?” Drieu asked Paulhan, one day in 1936, after ten years of broken promises and vague reproaches. The dialogue will be vain, perhaps, but he is sincere, although the gap widens, until 1943, between the municipal councilor of the Popular Front and the thug of Doriot, between the patriot who calls for “hope” and “silence” in June 1940 and the fascist who dreams of creating a single party in Vichy, between the old and the new director of the NRF imposed by Otto Abetz. Their dialogue is even remarkably direct: “Our relations are strange,” Drieu wrote to Paulhan on December 12, 1942: I have a real fondness for you which came to me quite late, in use, shortly before 1939, and at the same time I think that we are enemies and we fight each other.”
These 169 letters exchanged show it: Paulhan never broke up intellectually with Drieu, trying to understand his unique logic. Paulhan never broke with the NRF, either: after refusing the co-direction of the review with Drieu, in the fall of 1940, it was he who set, in secretly, the rules of this forced cohabitation, aware that this “ anti-NRF” allows Gaston Gallimard’s publishing house to continue under the Occupation. “I believe that my (personal) reason for not writing in the nrf remains valid, Paulhan nevertheless clarified in June 1941: I can only be in solidarity with those of our collaborators whom I had invited and who we returns. »
Between Paulhan and Drieu la Rochelle, can we speak of a friendship? Was there other thing that the complex relationship between an editor and a writer, the advice advised by a journal director to his successor, and finally their paradoxical political discussions? Malraux will affirm: “For Drieu, Paulhan was not a resistance fighter, for Paulhan, Drieu was not a collaborator.” Is it for that, without asking questions, Drieu intervened with the authorities German forces in May 1941 to free Paulhan, arrested with other members of the Museum of Man network? Is this why Paulhan always kept the contact, and more, with the collaborationist director of the NRF?
If Drieu embodies the bad conscience of the intellectual community, Paulhan does not see however, not in him the traitor par excellence. In fact, the question of fidelity is at the heart of this correspondence (and it is no coincidence that it opens with the painful rupture between Drieu and Aragon, of which Paulhan is the referee reluctantly): loyalty to friendship, loyalty to oneself and to his political convictions, loyalty to France, to the magazine… For Jean Paulhan, as for André Malraux or Emmanuel Berl, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle has certainly seriously failed – particularly in his last years – but he did not did not betray himself. He would even have been “loyal” until his death by suicide, the March 16, 1945. Paulhan already meant nothing else to Gide, three years later early: “Drieu is kind and loyal to me in all this. (The rest of us editors of journals, we are correct in such cases). Barely, it seems, from time to time, address some secret reproach to me. » (March 15, 1942).
Edition established, introduced and annotated by Hélène Baty-Delalande, master of conferences in 20th century French literature at Paris-Diderot University, responsible for the critical edition of Etat-civil and Gilles, in Romans et news by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, published in La Pléiade, under the direction by J.-F. Louette, in 2012.
Collection “Correspondences of Jean Paulhan”
Publication: December 11, 2017
51 illustrations and facsimiles n. & bl. Appendices (“Letters Testamentary”)
Edition: 1000 copies. printed by Imprimerie Renon (Ruelle-sur-Touvre), on
Olin Regular Ivory paper 90 gr., and Antalis Keaykolour orange 300 cover
gr.
13 x 21.5 cm. 352 pages
Public sale price: €36
ISBN: 978-2-912222-53-4
Drieu-Paulhan : une singulière amitié - Le Figaro
Jean Paulhan-Pierre Drieu la Rochelle : une étrange amitié - Revue des deux mondes
Drieu la Rochelle - Paulhan, Correspondance 1925-1944, "Nos relations sont étranges" - Fabula
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle & Jean Paulhan, Correspondance 1925-1944, de Bernard Baillaud dans cairn.info
Publisher : Claire Paulhan