Max Jacob & Jean Paulhan, 1918-1951
Max JacobJean PaulhanCorrespondence Jean Paulhan & Max Jacob, 1918-1951
It is a rather rare desire that that expressed by Max Jacob who asked
his executor to destroy upon his death not his own letters, but those he had received from his various correspondents. Could he imagine for a single moment that his recipients would act in the same way, denying his missives the quality of work? This would have been a shame, because Max Jacob is a great letter writer and a remarkable witness of his time, whom the lover of literary history, but also of style and psychology always takes great pleasure in reading... The correspondences of Max Jacob, which have until now seen the light of day thanks to his respectful correspondents, but also thanks to the passion of the specialists of his work, play a fundamental role, which the reissues of his texts do not accomplish: removing the literary personality of Max Jacob from a certain image of friendliness and fantasy which annoys and sometimes harms him.
Whether with Jean Cocteau or Michel Leiris, Max Jacob's magisterial figure is undeniable - although he denies it with pirouettes -, but it is above all his role as passer, of introducer which is truly at work - and his intellectual plasticity, which makes him welcome under his non-conformist wing not only young people with a pleasant face, but also writers who are searching for themselves, even temporarily, through him. And we see that by allowing a young writer to define his poetic art, he refines his own and, thus immersed in the literature in the making, Max Jacob becomes a sentinel, modest and mischievous, of literary modernity.
His correspondence with Jean Paulhan does not really belong to this register, although it begins under these same auspices: it is the illustrator Albert Uriet, Jean Paulhan's best friend, his double, his brother, met at the start of the Great War, who became emboldened, in September 1915, to write to Max Jacob, because he represents the literature of tomorrow, of the aftermath of the war. From the outset and for the entire duration of their relationship, Max Jacob and Jean Paulhan will know how to read each other, criticize each other with finesse and depth, pay attention to each other's judgments, converse together... Unfortunately, we can only guess, from Max Jacob's responses, the relevance of Jean Paulhan's remarks: out of 165 letters, 156 are in fact from Max Jacob, and 9 from Jean Paulhan.
In 1918, it was Jean Paulhan who gave an article in La Vie on this “work
of unique art”, The Dice Cornet (1917) by Max Jacob; in 1941, shortly
before the brutal interruption of this correspondence and for no other reason, it seems, than the terrible vagaries of the Second World War, it was Max Jacob who nimbly comments on his reading of Les Fleurs de Tarbes (1941) by Jean Paulhan: “You're making a shell of yourself; you turn there; you dive into it. We hope that you will come out with some wonderful aesthetic curiosity and we are not disappointed: it is both a brilliant crustacean that you bring back and a very refined comic. The pure pleasure of this book, so new (I want something new too!), so fertile, is also the pleasure of inner laughter. I will reread it a hundred times.”
Between these two dates, Max Jacob also presented new minds to the one
who became, after the death of Jacques Rivière, the editor-in-chief, then the
director of the N.R.F.: for example, Charles-Albert Cingria in 1926, Jean Grenier in 1927, or Edmond Jabès in 1937. Between these two dates, Jean Paulhan did everything to ensure that Max Jacob took his place, imbued with original influence, in the summaries of the N.R.F.
One day in September 1936, Max Jacob found the means to put a name to the real reason for their astonishing and lasting friendship, despite a few moments of tension quickly forgiven: “I found here boxes full of letters (1920-1928), yours of today are in the faithful tone of those of then – But, there, how many signatures then so friendly have since become those of incomprehensible enmities (I am not naming anyone, as the priest says in his sermons). If I were Seneca I could write a little philosophical treatise on the inconstancy of human things and the price that should be attached to contrary virtue. / I pride myself, just like you, on this virtue.” Praise of constancy, or fidelity, in friendship, a virtue to which both were very deeply attached.
Claire Paulhan
Publisher : Paris Méditerranée