François Mauriac & Jean Paulhan, 1925-1967
François MauriacJean PaulhanCorrespondence Jean Paulhan & François Mauriac, 1925-1967
For François Mauriac, then a young novelist whom Genitrix (1923) had made known, La Nouvelle Revue française was, as he asserted, “his gospel”. Jean Paulhan, who had just been appointed editor-in-chief in 1925, maintained and strengthened the link with the writer, calmly established by Jacques Rivière. But Jean Paulhan did not hesitate to make him feel that the NRF would never be, for him, a safe or acquired place: from 1928, André Gide, who multiplied the arrows against religion in his Journal, criticized François Mauriac for “loving God without losing sight of Mammon”; in 1930, Jean Prévost and Marcel Arland were not kind towards his books which they had to report on; in each delivery, François Mauriac can detect an attack against the Catholicism that he represents: "The Revue is no longer this compass rose that I loved despite and against everything", he regrets in 1931, on the eve of founding his own magazine which will never succeed in acting as a counterweight, Vigile... However, he is aware of the very particular role that The NRF can play for him: “You are the only bad place,” he wrote to Jean Paulhan on July 21, 1936, “where I can say certain things....” In February 1939, there was no longer any question of double dealing: certainly at the instigation of the director of the NRF, Jean-Paul Sartre attacked the successful novelist head-on: “God is not an artist; Neither does Mr. Mauriac.”
The Resistance, in which they both joined, in the company of their mutual friend Jean Blanzat, brought them together, making them almost accomplices. In the fight against the excesses of the Purge, they are also on the same side, despite some occasional disagreements. But in January 1953, the NRF, compromised under the Occupation by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, rose from its ashes under the direction of Jean Paulhan and Marcel Arland: Mauriac, who had become the co-director of the magazine La Table Ronde, was indignant, mocking “this dear old shorn lady, whose hair took eight years to grow back”… The last decade of their correspondence, more sparse, mixes politics, in particular the Algerian war, erotic literature (Sade and Histoire d'O) and the disturbing reality of faith - this central axis of François Mauriac, which Jean Paulhan never ceases to question or provoke, sometimes with malice, often with gravity -, from his first letters and throughout their exchange: "But I will not soon stop ask, he wrote on April 21, 1943: would François Mauriac have invented Christianity (and what part of it would he have invented) if Christianity had not been given to him? (Perhaps the question seems chimerical to you? I am sure, however, that you must have asked it often.)”
Despite divergent literary tastes and often opposing political and religious convictions, their epistolary conversation (293 letters over more than forty years) is truly that of two “free minds and sensitive hearts”, as François Mauriac wished. It ended in 1967, a year before the death of Jean Paulhan, three years before that of François Mauriac.
• Edition established, introduced and annotated by John E. Flower. Work published with the support of the La Poste Foundation.
• 293 letters exchanged. 11 letters reproduced in facsimiles. 2 unpublished photographs in n. & b. Index of people cited. Index of titles cited.
• First edition: released on November 19, 2001. “Correspondences of Jean Paulhan” collection. Edition of 1100 copies. New revised and corrected edition, printed in 800 copies: end of December 2001. Printed in Esprit characters, on 90 g. ivory Minotaure paper, under a speckled sea green filled cover.
• 13 x 21.5 cm. 376 pages. ISBN: 2-912222-15-X.
• Public sale price: €28.
Publisher : Claire Paulhan