Gaston Gallimard & Jean Paulhan, 1919-1968
Gaston GallimardJean PaulhanCorrespondence Jean Paulhan & Gaston Gallimard, 1919-1968
Gaston Gallimard and Jean Paulhan are characters we know well, but people we don't know. This famous publishing couple has attracted so much attention that their mask is more familiar to us than their face. Luckily, the two men left us a most beautiful correspondence, which spans nearly fifty years. Gaston Gallimard took off his bow tie, Paulhan his gray jacket: we discover, with these two men in shirt sleeves, the underbelly of the NRF. Nothing is more lively or more disconcerting sometimes than this exchange made of parts and pieces: there we find both scribbled notes and elaborate letters, white years and dark years, declarations of friendship and taxes. Paulhan and Gallimard worked together and saw each other easily; their letters are most often familiar, without ceremony. And often without follow-up since they call or prolong a conversation, thanks to an illness, a trip or a Sunday.
This informal correspondence, in which Claude Gallimard will gradually take his part, was above all professional. But it is a very curious profession, which would rather be in the order of a profession of faith. Paulhan believed in fact that his “real life” had begun the day Gaston Gallimard came, with Jacques Rivière, to ask him to join the NRF. Gallimard will also invoke the missing friend to seal their alliance: “Since the death of Jacques Rivière, the NRF, the house, is you and me.”
- Gaston Gallimard-Jean Paulhan, Correspondence 1919-1968 by Bernard Baillaud in Cairn.info
- Gallimard and Paulhan: correspondence by Camille Koskas
Publisher : Gallimard