Georges Perros & Jean Paulhan, 1953-1967
Georges PerrosJean Paulhan“I sometimes dream that we could have known each other before. With the same age. I think we would have remained friends.” (Georges Perros to Jean Paulhan)
1953: The Nouvelle Revue française rises from its ashes. Jean Paulhan, then in his seventies, looked for new perspectives: Jean Grenier introduced him to young Georges Poulot, just thirty years old, a former member of the Comédie-française with Gérard Philipe, reader for Jean Vilar's TNP. This is how someone who takes the name Georges Perros begins at La NRF.
Fifty-eight reviews and some “pasted papers” later, the “little rater” became a writer in his own right. In the meantime, he preferred to slip away, take a tangent on his backfiring motorcycle and take refuge in the depths of Brittany.
Refusing to be published in volume or to compete for literary prizes, Georges Perros assumed his “social insignificance”: “What these notes brought me,” he explained in September 1954, “satisfied me. You know what I mean. The important thing is to continue, although fulfilled.”
Wild, unstable, Perros does not discourage Paulhan. On the contrary, his tormented personality intrigues him, his ironic and deadpan spirit excites his curiosity. Better: he sees in his younger brother the very figure of living literature – the one that must be supported, published, pushed to its limits.
But Georges Perros is also one of the rare correspondents of Jean Paulhan to read his work in a disinterested manner and to follow him on this terrain of language which haunts the director of La NRF: “You revolve around the central difficulties – and nothing less than literary –,” writes Perros in his very last letter, like a tiger who would like to eat a piece of the thigh of truth. Not without courage, he tries to understand the secret of Jean Paulhan, using the prisms of poetry and psychology. “What is happening (at the place that occupies us), he replies, is so bizarre and contradictory that it is at first difficult to defend oneself from the conviction that one is empty, quite precisely that one is nobody. But I believe that you have to defend yourself and that you are rewarded fairly quickly. Well your pages are one of those rewards.”
There are other “rewards” at the heart of these 211 letters which punctuate “the ordeal of companionship” from the two letter writers: games of boules at the Arènes de Lutèce, visits to the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes or news of the seasonal migrations of sardines in the bay of Douarnenez…
Edition established, annotated and introduced by Thierry Gillyboeuf.
Biographer of Georges Perros (in 2003), Thierry Gillyboeuf also established and annotated for the editions La Part commune, in Rennes, his correspondence with Carl Gustaf Bjurström (in 1998), with Jean Grenier (in 2007) and with Lorand Gaspar (in 2007).
• 211 letters. 59 illustrations no. and bl. Appendices. Index. Collection “Correspondences of Jean Paulhan”.
• 13 x 21.7 cm. 400 pages. Publication: March 23, 2009. ISBN: 978-2-912222-30-5.
• Public sale price: €39
Publisher : Claire Paulhan