Henri Pourrat & Jean Paulhan, 1920-1959
Henri PourratJean PaulhanThe fervent and faithful friendship of Jean Paulhan and Henri Pourrat (1887-1959) may be surprising, such is the distance between their experiences and their environments, one in Paris at the heart of literary and intellectual life, the other isolated in his native Auvergne, near Ambert, driven by an almost exclusive taste for peasant life and culture. However, it began in the early 1920s, after Paulhan suggested to the poet of “Montagnards” (1918) that he write critical notes for La NRF. In forty years of exchanges and services, of common concerns and activities, the two writers have been “on the same journey” (Paulhan) and have given each other, on all levels, personal and professional, “the real handshake” (Pourrat).
Shedding light on the work and days of the two men, in sometimes painful contexts, their correspondence is essentially devoted to their literary activities for the NRF, a publishing house and magazine. Paulhan advises, with care and admiration, but without complacency, the novelist of The Bad Boy and The Lost City; and the publisher supports his Auvergne friend in the great enterprise of collecting and literary transposition of popular tales which will occupy him after the war, and of which he will compose the universal treasure.
Finally, Paulhan will always remain attached to this benevolent criticism that Pourrat exercises in the columns of the review, often relating to works where nature and rural life occupy the foreground. There emerges the defense of an open and broad regionalism, which is as much that of a fraternal earthling as that of a moralist and a believer, attached to the beauty of the incarnation, the meaning of life and the salvation of men: “If man does not remain in connection and friendship with natural things, he becomes dehumanized.”
Extract from the column by Mathieu Lindon on February 29, 2020 in Libération
The friendship between the two men was not self-evident. Jean Paulhan, born in 1884 and died in 1968, strong man of Gallimard editions, benefited from “a deep presence in the heart of Parisian life” in the words of Michel Lioure in his introduction, and was resistant. Henri Pourrat, born in 1887 and died in 1959, lived in “constant confinement in a remote province” (Auvergne and precisely Ambert, famous for its fourme cheese), had an “almost exclusive taste for peasant life, traditions, culture and civilization”, and was a Pétainist. He is the author of Gaspard des montagne as well as a slew of volumes of Trésor des tales and in 1941 won the Goncourt prize for Vent de mars. However, nearly six hundred of their letters appeared (more than five hundred additional letters are available on the Internet) testifying to a constant closeness, even during the war when Pourrat supplied Paulhan with potatoes. They met in 1920 through the magazine La Vie.
Around Paulhan and also Pourrat parade a multitude of French-speaking writers: Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, André Gide, Francis Jammes, Charles-Albert Cingria, Emmanuel Bove, Antonin Artaud, Jean Giraudoux, Joë Bousquet, among others. And Jean Giono who in 1931 promised his next six novels to Gallimard and his next five to Grasset. “I believe […] that Giono honestly believed that he would complete twelve novels in a few months,” writes Paulhan. And André Malraux who told in 1936 “terrifying stories of aerial combat” in Spain, “with a very absent air”. And Paul Claudel writing to Paulhan in 1937, we learn in a note, his dissatisfaction that his text in the NRF review borders on “the rantings of a doting sadist who obviously suffers from the side of the spinal cord” (it’s not Henri Pourrat!). And Marcel Jouhandeau whose wife Elise is responsible for what Paulhan calls “an incident” - that she denounced him as a Jew at the beginning of 1944. And then the strange Alexandre Vialatte, close to Pourrat, adopted by Paulhan, the first French translator of Kafka and the writer most present in this Correspondence.
And “G.G.”, Gaston Gallimard, about whom Pourrat never stops complaining. Paulhan is perpetually interfering. Just as he buries his reservations about his friend's texts under compliments, he does not hide from him what the house thinks of his correspondence. Could it be that the sales director is angry? Paulhan goes to see Louis-Daniel Hirsch: “What can I tell you? He answers everything: "I don't have time. I'm already overworked. I can't give Henri Pourrat ten times more time, as he would like, than all the other authors. […] And how can I respond to all of Henri Pourrat's letters? I don't have time. No, I don't have time." All while raising your arms to the sky.”
The best of this Correspondence, however, is when the two men discuss nature, in particular, for Paulhan, when he is in Port-Cros (an island subject to an interminable trial for the reader). 1921: “I took a naturally tame little squirrel who sleeps nowhere but in my pocket, shreds a hazelnut or drinks milk, sneezes, goes back to sleep.” 1928: “There are so many cicadas that everything we say, barely said, is lost in the air. Nobody hears. There are also strange winged lion ants (like double dragonflies) and arbutus butterflies, as big as moths. The fort you see under the branches is that of the Supervielle. […] But ours is wilder and cannot be photographed.” 1932: “There came another naturalist who caught lizards with a lasso (I learned) and frogs with a net.” “We have extraordinary little cats who climb up to our necks, as if we were trees.” 1935: the garden “is seized by a sort of madness more animal than plant, and throws out flowers and stems on all sides that we barely recognize”. Pourrat reported in 1929 an opinion from Ramuz on his work: “He finds that the almanac lacks rocks and running water. Yes, it’s too much lawn and foliage.” 1937: “So much brown moss, so many sprays of fresh ferns, and water so clear that we had to drink it.” 1939: “Yesterday, we were in the mountains, snow at the side of the roads, landscapes like doormats.” 1949: “I prune pear trees a little, while feeling less and less sure of my knowledge. But it is so pleasant to prune and slice, pruning shears in hand, imagining that we are thus working for the good of the creature. Pleasure of the surgeon, of the moralist.”
Extract from Robert Kopp's column on March 23, 2020 in the Revue des deux Mondes
It's a real surprise: a correspondence of more than a thousand letters, exchanged between 1920 and 1959, half of which appears in a volume presented and annotated by Claude Dalet and Michel Lioure, and the whole in electronic edition. Only a few were known to us from the three volumes of Choice of Letters by Jean Paulhan (Gallimard, 1986-1996).
However, it is difficult to imagine two writers further apart. Jean Paulhan (1884-1968), of Protestant origin, but agnostic, director of La NRF, gray eminence of the Parisian literary world between the two wars, curious about all the new things but tormented by the powerlessness of language. And Henri Pourrat (1887-1959), Auvergne, Catholic, who spent his entire life in Ambert, regionalist writer, lover of folklore, anxious to find real life in the popular tales that he inventories in his region. It is moreover this distance from Paris which explains the density of his correspondence with Paulhan, the telephone being hardly in common use in the countryside.
A meeting after the First War The two writers had met after the First War at the magazine La Vie, founded by Marius and Ary Leblond, winner of the 1909 Goncourt Prize for their joint novel En France. In April 1920, Paulhan, always looking for new collaborators for the NRF and authors to bring into the collection of the young Gallimard house, asked Pourrat, whose poem he had appreciated, Les Montagnards: Chronique paysanne de la Grande Guerre (Archon-Desspérouses prize awarded by the French Academy), to take charge of a note on The Rustic Poet by Francis Jammes. It appeared in the June issue of the same year, inaugurating a diligent and regular collaboration, which was to last until the start of the Occupation. It ceased, due to Pourrat, when Drieu la Rochelle was imposed by the Germans as director, to resume, but in a less intense way, in 1953, when it was again authorized to appear.
From the start of La NRF, in 1909, reading notes occupy an important place in each issue. Notes written by writers and not by journalists or academics, because the first audience an author addresses is that of his colleagues. In the eyes of the founders of the journal, writers should first be judged by their peers, at least as a general rule, Bernard Groethuysen, Albert Thibaudet or René Lalou constituting the rare and brilliant exceptions.
In Pourrat, Paulhan had found a friend who was always available, a collaborator who agreed to be mobilized at the last moment, an insightful columnist who performed punctually. He provided “notes” by the dozen, on Claudel, Cocteau, Ramuz, Giono, Virginia Woolf, but also Lafcadio Hearn, René Boylesve, Jean Ajalbert or Maurice Fombeure. He also took charge of certain sections such as "L'Air du mois", thought about new sections such as "Le Carnet du spectator", "La Revue des revues", sparing neither his time nor his energy to bring to life this review firmly anchored in tradition and yet eager to open up to current events. What place should we give to theater, cinema, exhibitions, concerts, in short to not only literary but cultural life as it is practiced on a day-to-day basis?
Extract from the column by Bernard Baillaud on November 25, 2020 in the Revue des deux Mondes
We were waiting for the test results, the proof is in place. Two entire columns in Libération, several candidates for Europe, but only twenty-five short lines in La Montagne, edition of Ambert: Henri Pourrat is therefore not a regionalist writer. If he were, he would have had a full page in La Montagne, announced on the front page, a warm article in Centre-Presse, not to mention L'Auvergne littéraire (which no longer exists) and nothing at all in Libération, any more than in Les Lettres françaises, Le Figaro or La Revue des deux mondes. It was the opposite. Let's go quickly: it's not about region, nor province, but about literature. In January 1921, Henri Pourrat denounced “The sin of regionalism”. How lucky we are.
Among the three thousand nine hundred correspondents of Jean Paulhan, Henri Pourrat has distance and duration on his side: four hundred and forty-nine kilometers (“it’s like a department store price, not to reach 450,” he writes) and thirty-nine years. From one to the other, a thousand hundred letters. Henri Pourrat sometimes has regrets when it comes to agreeing on reading notes: “The distance complicates everything.” Other considerations come into play: “a trip to Paris is so tiring, and when work is going pretty well, how can I interrupt it?” One year of broken arms, we read the approximately five hundred letters from Jean Paulhan preserved in the files of Boulevard Lafayette, in Clermont-Ferrand...
Chronicle of Tristan Hordé on November 18, 2020 in Sitaudis
The correspondence begins with a letter from Paulhan dated April 19, 1920, asking Pourrat for a note, for La NRF, about a book by Francis Jammes; the note is written and the two writers send each other their books. Paulhan regrets the distance from Pourrat, who lives in Ambert, and quickly requests regular collaboration. After some exchanges of more personal elements - but Pourrat's letters are absent until September 26 - Paulhan ends his long letter of June 15, 1920 with "I am your friend" and begins the next with “My friend”, to which responds “Dear friend” followed, as will often be the case, by new developments.
Everything seemed to separate the two men, apart from the geographical distance: Paulhan (1884-1968) had a job, at the same time as he was the secretariat of the NRF before taking over its management, in 1925, on the death of Jacques Rivière; this position introduced him to the literary world, from Gide and Valéry to the surrealists: he wrote in Littérature, André Breton's review. Henri Pourrat (1887-1959), suffering from tuberculosis, had to abandon his training as an agronomist and live in Ambert; he published poems very early on, collaborated with regional newspapers in Auvergne and found his way with the publication of Les Vaillances, farces et adventures de Gaspard des montagne in 1921. The differences were put in parentheses and the two men quickly discovered reasons to exchange.
Pourrat often expresses a very strong, living link to the nature that surrounds him, keen to develop a vegetable garden, to plant fruit trees, and he writes about the changes in the mountains over the seasons, the harshness of the winters, the simple pleasures of the countryside (“I pick pink mushrooms in pretty meadows”). All his work is written mainly "on the people of Auvergne, their customs, their morals", that is to say about the peasant world whose possible death he observed, as an informed observer, and, he wrote in 1928, "It could be interesting (...) these transformations that we have before our eyes, and [to] separate ourselves from a whole regionalism." His descriptions of everyday life, like his books, were always very favorably received by Paulhan who was also an observer of nature. He says that in Paris a newsagent kept a salamander in her kiosk which she fed with salad, or that Paul Éluard “brought her a chameleon from Tunisia”; he himself raised green lizards and gold fish. He notes that at the time of the swallows' migration, the oldest take care of the youngest and that in June, his garden is "taken by a kind of madness much more animal than plant, and throws out on all sides flowers and stems that we barely recognize." It would be easy to multiply the traces of concern for nature in their correspondence; Again in October 1937, Pourrat added at the end of a letter, “Yesterday we saw such a beautiful monstrous salamander. I thought about capturing it for you.”
Discussions also regularly focus on the difficulties encountered in daily, personal and professional life. Pourrat and Paulhan share their health problems, those of their loved ones: for the first, he will suffer greatly from the death of his eldest daughter, aged ten, in May 1940, for the second, he sees the evolution of the illness of Germaine, his wife, who loses all her mobility. Rationing during the war gave Pourrat the opportunity to provide Paulhan, then living in Paris, with effective help by sending him bags of charcoal for heating and food, potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes and honey. We read on both sides a constant attention to the other and the reciprocal testimonies of friendship are also numerous with regard to their work, each keeping the other informed of what they write.
From the start of their relationship, in 1920, Pourrat thanked Paulhan for having published in La NRF some poems which helped to make him known; In the following decades, he continued to be grateful for his attentive and critical readings. We can see from Paulhan's remarks what an editor could be then; about a novel by Pourrat, The Bad Boy, he details all the good things he thinks about it (delicacy, accuracy, poetry) and, then, specifies what seems to him to be taken up - "I have to worry you on two or three points" —, to be lightened or deleted in the first part, etc. This editor knew how to discover in Pourrat something other than a "regional" writer, reading in a story a "feeling of horror or dread (...) which gives your work a tragic reason". However, he did not pose as a superior, insisting on the positive role of Pourrat for him, “You are my free man; there are many things that I choose or that I judge based on you, or on what I would be if I were you”, planning to write two novels together during a meeting, asking his opinion when he published a book or wrote it (“Wouldn't it bother you if I told you a little about the Flowers of Tarbes?”). Pourrat, for his part, always solicited and appreciated his friend's comments and advice: "I think of you as the one who gave me a sense of quality and as the best of witnesses, judges, godfathers", he wrote to him, and he regularly commented on Paulhan's books in his letters and in articles, very interested in particular in the art of storytelling.
Pourrat published a lot (it was his livelihood), partly with Editions Gallimard, and he often requested Paulhan's help to resolve problems of printing and promotion of his books, and he was sometimes furious by the casualness - the contempt? — manifested by certain members of the editions, such as Brice Parain; his letters regularly return to these difficulties, increased by his distance from Paris. Paulhan intervenes whenever he can and, moreover, gives him news of publishing life (in 1931, “Everything is really going very badly for books”) and magazines. Both discuss the writers they appreciate, Francis Jammes, Cingria, Bove, Ramuz, Joë Bousquet, etc., de Vialatte, whom Pourrat introduced to Paulhan.
During the war period, secrets became rarer. Paulhan very quickly became involved in the resistance, notably founding Les Lettres françaises in 1941 with Jacques Decour, while La NRF had come under the direction of Drieu La Rochelle in November 1940. He fought after the war against the excesses of the purge, knowing that his magazine, “tainted” under the occupation, could not reappear - it will be La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française in 1953. Pourrat, for his part, first saw in Pétain the one who resisted Nazism; he took in Jews in the dark years and, later, admitted that he had been partly blind, “I think of everything that I should have understood better from you”. Illness spoiled his last years and he saw the accelerated disappearance of the world he had described, “the man comes to work in Ambert to benefit from social laws”, he wrote in 1957.
This strong volume is a journey through forty years of literary history; We discover Paulhan's determination to ensure that his magazine develops and becomes a reference in the world of letters, and Pourrat's enormous work to restore the life and customs of a rural region. We also follow the developments of a beautiful friendship.
Correspondance 1920-1959 de Jean Paulhan et Henri Pourrat, le conteur et le politique - Le Figaro
Paulhan, advienne que Pourrat - Libération
Une amitié fraternelle : Jean Paulhan et Henri Pourrat - Revue des deux mondes
Jean Paulhan & Henri Pourrat, Correspondance 1920-1959, Lettres choisies - Revue des revues
Jean Paulhan, Henri Pourrat, Correspondance 1920-1959 par Tristan Hordé, Sitaudis
Jean Paulhan & Henri Pourrat, Correspondance 1920-1959 de Bernard Baillaud dans Cairn.info
Publisher : Gallimard