Interview with Jean-Claude Zylberstein, on Jean Paulhan

ITW: Jean-Claude Zylberstein, hello and thank you for welcoming us to your law firm to talk to us about Jean Paulhan. I remind you that you are also a multifaceted man, you are an editor, a tireless pioneer of texts and an immense reader. What we would like to know today is what were the particular circumstances that led you to meet Jean Paulhan?

JCZ: Look, they're a little bit, in retrospect, I find them... ridiculous — it's too strong. But how to say? They are Paulhanian, a little strange, "Paulhan in the acclimatization garden". So, for me, how does this translate? I was already fascinated at the time, I must have already had the spirit of collecting, as I was told later, a label that was put on me and that I fully assume, and I already really liked catalogs. Today, it's more exhibition catalogs, at the time, it was publisher catalogs, and as for my career as "publisher" or "collection director", it was very useful to me to have a collection of catalogs.
And I had in particular, and it was a sort of Bible for me, the catalog of NRF editions, where I had underlined with crosses, colored pencils, the books that I had read, the books that I wanted to read, the authors that I knew well, the authors that I did not know, and I have a good visual memory, and I had filmed in a way, as you are doing, the Paulhan page, where there was, as you know as well as me, especially this title, a priori a little mysterious, FF or the critic.
With that, I'm going to dinner, but I hadn't read anything by Paulhan at the time, it's simply the basis of what follows. I'm going to dinner at a friend's house.

ITW: Were you a very young man at the time?

JCZ: Yes, I am 23 years old. And this friend was afflicted with a girlfriend, a friend, who had a sharp tongue and a very critical mind. And throughout the dinner, she... as they say today, she dresses for winter several of the people whom we knew in common, but who were not around the table, as Paulhan could say. And I tell her, typographical flash, her name was Françoise, and a last name which also begins with F, let's imagine, Françoise Forestier, and so I think I'm smart, and I tell her "FF don't be so critical". The father of my friend, Jean Latais, who was a remarkable photographer, took the plunge and said to me, Jean-Claude, have you read at least the text by Paulhan to which you have just alluded? I told him no, but it intrigued me. He told me, regarding the activity of criticism, you have to, since you also do criticism in jazz, but that doesn't matter, you have to read that. I go home, and I remember that, six years ago, I bought two issues of the NRF, the only ones, and why? Because there was a short story by Mandiargues, a little erotic, entitled in the NRF Vanina, that subsequently gave Le Lys de mer, at the time erotic readings were not common, I did not yet know Histoire d'O, and I said to myself, but hey, there was, in one of the two issues, the second, that of November 1956, a text by this Paulhan whose first three lines to the time discouraged me. So I found the famous November 1956 issue of the NRF quite easily, and I started reading the Letter to a Young Partisan. And there, here again I am perhaps paraphrasing a little what Paulhan could have said, Zen shock, the sky opens up, the lights come on, and life becomes less dark. And I understand, finally it's the school of relativism, I understand that I don't need to try, as I did at the time, to decide whether I should rather go and enroll in the Communist Party, or whether I should enroll in Sartre's existentialist line, but that having as was my case, I'm going to try to be polite, with my butt between two chairs, it's also a situation, since as Paulhan says in the famous letter, he is a democrat morning, an aristocrat when he decides to go to the theater to see a Shakespeare play, Shakespeare the best so as not to offend anyone, and then a man on the right at the moment when a fire breaks out in the theater and a man taller and with a stronger voice than the others evacuates the room at the moment when there begins to be a panic and adds Paulhan, you also remember, "there are only two or three women burned, not yours", he says to his imaginary interlocutor. And this text for me was really a kind of intellectual liberation and I said to myself but this guy is great, this is great, what else has he written? So I probably go a few days later to my little local bookseller, the Three Musketeers on boulevard Voltaire, and I see a very small book, Braque le patron, yes, rue de la Boétie, a painting with fish, and then les Fleurs de Tarbes, and at first reading of Fleurs de Tarbes, I capitulate. And I say to myself but he must have written something else, but we can't find anything in the bookstore. And so rather than going to law or medicine classes, I no longer know what I was doing at the time, I started at the Sainte-Geneviève library in particular, searching in the files, we didn't have the internet at the time, the texts of Paulhan that I could find. And I see prefaces, catalog texts, articles in the NRF, and so I start collecting all that as we could at the time. And then, more and more, intellectually seduced by this thought which I will not describe here, which you know as well as me. And then, at one point, I comes across, there is a notebook, a special issue of Cahiers des Saisons dedicated to Paulhan, I tell myself that, notebooks, a special issue devoted to Paulhan, I have to read it, nowhere to be found. And I still started to have some ideas.

ITW: Jacques Brenner's Notebooks of the Seasons?

JCZ : Voilà ! I decide to go to rue de l'Université to the headquarters, I will probably telephone, and they tell me yes, there is the collection, you can come and consult it on site. So I go to rue de l'Université, to the ground floor, and they tell me, well, Mr. Brenner is there, we told him that you wanted to see the Cahier Paulhan, so he said that if you want, you can meet him. So I enter Brenner's large office, who was smoking his pipe with his dog at his feet, and he says to me, so you're interested in Paulhan, well, he really is a survivor of the distant mountains. I tell him, listen, yes, that's when he tells me that you're absolutely right, it's true that it's a bit paradoxical in appearance, but it's an interesting work, and he said to me, you are undoubtedly in the new generation - so I was 23, 24 years old - one of the few I meet who is interested in Paulhan, you should go see him and explain to him that you are doing this bibliography, and then also go see Yves Berger who is preparing the complete works. So firstly, I think I'm going to see Yves Berger, who welcomes me very kindly, to whom I show my bibliography, who tells me, "that's wonderful, you've done extraordinary work, it's very useful to me, and when the first volume of the complete works comes out, I'll send it to you".

And then with that, I go to see Paulhan, I telephone Rue des Arènes, I am given the number, I hear the voice of an old lady who says "hello", so I say "hello ma'am, I would like to speak to Mr Jean Paulhan", "it's me", well, there you go, listen, Jacques Brenner, Cahiers des Saisons, said to me, as I am interested in what you write, could I come and see you?

• Come see me at the NRF.

Well, appointment set, I'm going to the NRF, the NRF office, it was something, a kind of Church, there was an impressive atmosphere, because it was silent. Dominique, with her pretty legs in front of her desk, Paulhan in front of the window, the two large desks, and Arland on the other side, Arland reading, Dominique with his nose buried, and you, finally me, in this case, facing Paulhan who says to me, who expected me to bring him a manuscript, like the majority of people, so he says to me "do you write?", I tell him no. “Oh well, so that’s why?” I said to him "there, no I'm very interested in what you do, because we don't find many of your books", "oh well", he said, and then I didn't really know what to say, and I ended up telling him, yes, I don't even know how I managed to say to him, "there I have two girlfriends, and I don't know which one to choose, I thought you could advise me". So I think, he said to himself, that's a journalist's joke, it's a hoax, they're setting me up, so he said to me, well, look, I'll think about it, what is your address? and a few days later, I received one of his most mystifying books, The Causes Famous, with this dedication, supposedly taken from the Upanishads, "for Jean-Claude Zylberstein", with the beautiful writing that we know,

"one finds one's salvation where one thought one would find one's downfall,
and one's downfall where one thought one would find one's salvation",

With that I am well advanced, to choose a girlfriend, end of the first act, and I probably continue a little bit, well I was doing something else anyway, to complete my bibliography, and then I see in the newspaper, probably a Sunday newspaper, the publication of the first volume of the complete works is announced, to the circle of the precious book. So again I show a little initiative, and I telephone the precious book circle and say hello, I would like to speak to the person who takes care of the complete works of Paulhan, and they give me Pierre Oster, and I say hello sir, there you go, I am Jean-Claude Zylberstein, I gave my bibliography to Mr. Yves Berger, who told me that when the first volume was going to come out, I would receive a copy, so there you go, I'm waiting, oh, Pierre said to me, you're lucky, Yves Berger has given up on dealing with the complete works, and we have just received five boxes, with books, pamphlets, photocopies, things like that, in the greatest disorder, if you have made a bibliography, come and see us. So I went to the precious book circle, where I was received very kindly by Pierre Oster, with the double of my bibliography, and who said to me quite suddenly, practically straight away, do you want to take care of the complete works with me, proceed with the classification, we have a plan, but we don't really know how, and you apparently have, for your part, lots of things that we don't have in the famous boxes. So following that - that must have been about a year after the first episode, where I went to see Paulhan and Brenner - so I was taken, I think, with Pierre Oster, I went to Boissise, and I very quickly became familiar with Paulhan, and all the more so since I had a very handicapped material situation at the time, I had abandoned medicine to start law, which did not enchant me more than that, because I was already more than attracted, well, captivated, by music, books, and also young girls, as I am used to saying today, with the immodesty of old men, and my parents, obviously, did not appreciate the situation very much, so I went to live on Rue des Arènes for a few months. En contrepartie, je classais la bibliothèque de Jean, qui était restée dans un état de désordre assez grand, notamment ce qui m'a permis de retrouver un certain nombre de textes qui ont été utiles aux œuvres complètes. I can continue, but you may have questions...

ITW: So here you are Jean-Claude Zylberstein, a young man who entered the house on Rue des Arènes. So you meet Jean Paulhan every day. Can you tell us how it’s going? Did you also know Germaine Paulhan?

JCZ: Listen, Germaine, I only came into the room once and she was bedridden. But no more, I never spoke to him. I think it was only Jean who was talking to him. I believe that even Jacqueline, in those years, no longer had any useful contact. I don't know how it happened. But I didn't see Paulhan every day, to the extent that he was already going, it must be 66, he was already going, or 65, he was already going to Boissise a lot. He had gotten angry with Gaston, he no longer went to Gallimard. What I forgot earlier is that, simply, his election to the Academy is 64. And his reception at the Academy, 65? I no longer remember how I was invited to both the Academy and the Hôtel Meurice. I don't know anymore... was it thanks to Yves Berger again, or had I already started working on the complete works. I need to find the timeline.

ITW: What was it like at work? How did your relationships develop? Did he test you first? Your first conversations?

JCZ: The first conversations and the few exchanges of letters I had with him were “What should we read?” ". He recommended Borgès, Jean Grenier, and Jouhandeau to me. And then, secondly, he told me “No, Jouhandeau, it’s not worth it.” And he replaced Jouhandeau with another essayist from the same period. But I admit that right now, I don't know which one anymore. I know I took all the books, Grenier, anyway. I'll find it, I'll send you a little note to Paulhan... And so, in any case, the impression that I got from it each time and that I express, each time that, precisely, I am told "Yes, but then, he had the reputation", you know that as I do, of being able to be cruel, ironic, etc. I answer, “Listen, I knew Jean Paulhan, the grandfather, and he was for me, like a grandfather, full of good nature, full of kindness.” He offered me several of his small manuscripts, including the manuscript of the Letter to a Young Partisan which I had brought to him, like a dog brings a bone to its master saying “Ah Jean, I found the manuscript”. “Ah, you obviously have the interest that I had in this text, which I had republished much later in a small booklet, sort of by Alia, and to which I gave a very small afterword to explain the shock that it had been. And so, I found it in retrospect... I think it's always very different at the time and afterwards. For example, at that time, I was reviewing records, I was in charge of the jazz section at Nouvel Observateur, and I met backstage at the Olympia, because I had a pass, all the big names in jazz of the time, from Duke Ellington to Miles Davis, including Coltrane, Bill Evans, etc. and I very little had the idea of ​​having records signed. While today, autographed records of these great names in jazz are truly, not only are they worth money, but they are relics that we put in exhibitions, I just have a copy of the most famous modern jazz record, which is called Kind of Blue, autographed by Miles Davis and all the other musicians. So, for me, the image I keep of Paulhan is Paulhan with whom I play croquet, at the arenas, not, I'm confusing, the game of boules, it wasn't really bowls, but I played croquet with him, when I went to work in Boissise, to ask him for clarification on the texts, his memory was starting to fail a little, I think. But hey, I found things, years, things that were more than half a century old, and it's not always easy. And then, I think it amused him, I could almost say, it was a sort of game of policeman and thief, “oh well, you managed to find this, well, that’s good, that’s good! I didn't know, I don't think it was true, he must have known, but I think it amused him, to know that I was playing a sort of Sherlock Holmes in search of lost texts, like in this famous letter, in volume 4, where he tells how he tries to find a manuscript that someone sent him and that he can't find.

ITW: And how was Dominique towards you?

JCZ: So, not like a mother, because she was younger, but she was completely affectionate, both towards me, and also towards Marie-Christine, because, well, Paulhan died relatively quickly, I knew him for 3-4 years, but then, I spent a long time with Dominique to prepare the raw material which was then pruned, perhaps, in my opinion, a little excessively, I would have preferred that in the volumes of correspondence there were fewer notes and more letters, to the extent that some footnotes, I think it's interesting, but to claim that, thanks to notes, we will be able to enlighten people who don't know who Paulhan is or his correspondents, I think it's a bit illusory, because I think that if we don't even know who Paulhan is, we don't want to read the correspondence, so to make notes on Marcel Arland and others, it's a little bit superfluous, but I know that it was the sine qua non condition for receiving help from the National Book Center. Still, after Paulhan's death, and for, I think, at least 5 years, I spent a large part of my weekends at Dominique's in the countryside, where I had taken over Jean's room, and Dominique liked to cook, she notably had a recipe for duck with onions and sage, which was particularly delicious, and are years old, in retrospect, and there too, I think that I perhaps did not quite realize on the suddenly, I did not realize it sufficiently at the time, these were privileged moments to take a Paulhanian expression, once again, but I kept a lot of Paulhanian expressions as it seems in my speech, while practicing the ellipsis, unlike what I do today.

ITW: So it was access to this Paulhan room that gave you, and subsequently published, the famous Dictionary of Rare and Precious Words?

JCZ: Absolutely, it was something very amusing, because, as I explained in the little text that I wrote at the time of the reissue, there was in Paulhan's room this famous dictionary which had intrigued me a lot, obviously, a French-French dictionary of Rare and Precious Words, and then it disappeared, because it had become an extremely rare book, so that when I talked about it around me, people told me but no, it doesn't exist, and I said to myself I must have dreamed this book, because it happened to me, in the years that followed, I think I dreamed myself several times, returning to Paulhan's room, to find there, finally to discover new unpublished things, finally truly spooky things, and I said to myself, I must have, in one of my dreams, in which I looked at the shelves of his library, imagine, dream this book, and so my surprise was very joyful, when I finally found, in a Seghers catalog, the mention of this dictionary.

ITW: Let's come back, if you wish, or a few years, during which you were able to rub shoulders with Jean Paulhan, did you feel an evolution in your relationships, was he a bit like your mentor, did he behave like a teacher?

JCZ: Not at all, no, no, no, it's...

ITW: He didn't advise you in your personal life, for example?

JCZ: So... no, not... at least not directly, I know that my career, well my career, my livelihood, concerned him, because he knew very well that it was not by dealing with complete works that I could earn my living, that's moreover, I will tell this later, finally, I make a digression, it was during the launch cocktail, at Tchou, of the first volume, that I met Guy Dumur, who also said to me, "but what do you do in life, apart from that, I imagine that it is not your livelihood, the complete works of Paulhan?", so I do a little music criticism at Jazz Magazine, but without that, I try to continue my law studies, without enthusiasm, because commercial leases, divorces and accidents were not really what could keep me awake at night, and he told me that there is no one for jazz at the Observateur, come on! So already, the fact of having dealt with the complete works of Paulhan was an opening to the world for the son of immigrants that I was, who was a child of the Republic, in the sense of a child of the Place de la République, that is to say of the Polish Jewish ghetto of the 11th arrondissement, it took me a certain time, moreover, for like a little cat, for my eyes to open, I understood very late, in particular, that you could be a lawyer dealing with copyright, press rights, all matters about which I had not the slightest idea. I thought at the time that since the only lawyer I had met who was my parents' lawyer, all lawyers were either criminal lawyers or commercial lawyers, traditional civil lawyers. I didn't know there were specialist lawyers.

ITW: Did you discuss readings with Jean Paulhan, books you had read, paintings you had seen?

JCZ: Paintings, there too, I was still quite ignorant, but it was through him that I undoubtedly discovered Cubism. There were exhibitions during his lifetime. There was an exhibition in the 7th, in a gallery whose name escapes me at the moment. A small exhibition. In any case, it helped me to open my eyes more to modern painting.

ITW: And on reading, did he advise you, did he make you a reading plan?

JCZ: Not complete. Above all there was Borgès, Grenier; Sartre told me it wasn't worth it... He had sympathy for Camus, not at all for Queneau, and because, around the same time, I had joined Gallimard, I met Queneau who thought I was coming to see him, and when he understood that I was coming to see him to talk to him about Paulhan, the welcome was reserved. And on the other hand, there is someone else who was much more friendly, and of whom I have very, very good memories, he was someone very warm, it is Brice Parain. And I find that the Paulhan-Parain correspondence, however limited it may be, is one of those which seems to me the richest around this notion of language, and there is this formula from Paulhan in one of the letters, "we both sought to reduce the disagreement between men, which is created because not everyone speaks the same language".

ITW: Some people told us that they had met, that they had known a very desperate person in Paulhan, was that your feeling? desperate in the sense that he had not found what he was looking for, from an intellectual point of view.

JCZ: Listen, I think, referring to the volume where I had the privilege of writing a short text at the same time as Belaval, that Paulhan undoubtedly wanted to avoid believing in God, and that his failure was not being able to find the key to replace it. He needed a belief not to be desperate, but in any case in daily life he was in my memory, despite his poor health, he wore a corset, he had pain problems... he was very happy. I know that I remember that we had card games especially in Boissise where we had a lot of fun. He had a very great sense of humor about him, of joking, of playing on words, well he liked... me in any case, "desperate inside", I don't know, he never told me, but at least not at all on the surface, he wasn't at all someone... I've never seen, it's an image, holding his head with both hands, playing the thinker or things like that.

ITW: Do you remember a conversation about metaphysics with him?

JCZ: Listen, I had to ask him a few naive questions, I imagine that he must have gotten away with it to the extent that I had not studied philosophy through one of his pirouettes but which... like the dedication he had given me on the conselèpes, that is to say I believe that he had undoubtedly advised me to read Lao-Tseu also to try to find a form to 25 years old, 28 years old seeking serenity is undoubtedly premature, finally a minimum of balance. I believe that the conversations I had with him, rather than metaphysics, were probably more about morality: what was the right thing to do? was it okay to have multiple girlfriends? was it better to be with just one? this kind of thing... I also think in retrospect that I was still quite stupid when I knew him. I had to go to law school, finish my...become a lawyer to feel like I had become an adult.

ITW: A few years after Paulhan's death you published for the first time the radio interviews and Robert Mallet, was this something you had seen with him during his lifetime? Did you talk about it?

JCZ: Not much. When I discovered, I think it was in the attic in a box, the very scratched copy of the original typescript, part of which had disappeared, it was published in Volume 4... so... I had to talk about it with him... I had to talk about it with him and he was a supporter I think of the version, the corrected version. When we see the...

ITW: You say in any case in Volume 4, you say that it had been revised by Paulhan. I think he had answers prepared. He liked ping-pong but not on the radio and Mallet wanted to reissue the rhythm of his interviews with Léautaud, so very fast ping-pong, it's a rhythm that didn't correspond at all to Paulhan who was someone who gave demonstrations, in an elliptical way, in a rapid way, but I think that there was Frédéric's son who was a logician, a logician in his own way, but in any case a logician, and we can't to demonstrate each time in 3 words, it takes a certain time to achieve... and therefore this is the reason why in the manuscript and Robert Mallet's questions fell by the wayside and that left room for the complete development which was in Paulhan's will.

ITW: And what gave you the desire after that, I think it was in 71, to publish The uncertainties of language with Gallimard?

JCZ: So I was against the title but François Herval who directed Idées at the time, the language was fashionable, and it was he who had suggested this title I was told well listen since it's his choice we do it like that, and I was very very very happy I have to say that, maybe you can feel it in a little text that I say it at the end when Jean Mater suggested that I republish the interviews at the radio under this title in the Arcades collection.

ITW: Pascal Pia says in an interview, on Swiss television I believe, that Jean Paulhan is the man who meant the most to him because, and when we ask him why, he answers that it is because it is someone who helped him not to write. This is a paradoxical answer because...

JCZ: I could perhaps say the same since I don't write even though I was asked, I was encouraged a lot in any case to tell my story and I have, but it's already been too long it's been 2 years, the intention actually, for example, to say that we must never be discouraged even if at 30 we still have our feet in the water, to tell what I intend to title selected pieces, that is to say that, here again the formula is undoubtedly Paulhanian, I don't think it will be interesting every day so I'm not going to do 600 pages recounting in detail from the war until today everything that has happened to me but there is undoubtedly the material for 4 or 5 chapters...

ITW: What you have already done for American heights, for example selected pieces, ontologies.

JCZ: Yes. And so here, it is a question of carving out in my existence the period of the war which remained something very significant. Then there is a long period which is completely blank apart from my... the beginning of my passion for jazz, the meeting with Paulhan, I get married, I resume my studies and I become, well, a lawyer, and then at the same time, and this will be the subject of another chapter, I will not have 2 chapters, then my trajectory in publishing and the different people I met, but without claiming to make complex portraits either of Bernard de Fallois, of Christian Bourgois, I would just have, like Paulhan, a few lines about each one, and then perhaps about my job as a lawyer. That's if I succeed, I promised to publish this with my friend Dominique Gauthier who is...

ITW: The dilettante

JCZ: I don't want to appear to take myself seriously, I want a cover, perhaps not farcical but still a little...

ITW: Light.

JCZ: Light, like pieces chosen for school... a parody of a 6th grade book.

ITW: How do you look back on Jean Paulhan's fortune, his literary fortune today, how would you classify him today? what is his position?

JCZ: I believe that today, the better the books are, the less well they sell, with a few rare exceptions. I include in these exceptions an author like Philippe Roth, whom I always find, like a Woody Allen, of great intelligence, and an intelligence within the reach of... I would not say of the greatest number since, we know what the greatest number read, well of a fairly large number of readers... or of a Vargas Llosa, who are both storytellers, imaginary or realistic, that we always read, well I always read with a lot of pleasure and as I often repeat about Philippe Roth, I have the impression, to paraphrase again a famous film title, that I am growing old with him, that we are growing old together. So I'm not quite, I'm not yet in the same state as some of his heroes, but I have a lot of affinities with his way of thinking, perhaps that comes from one of his first books which was The Portnoy Complex, and in which there too I was able to recognize myself in my relationships with my dear mother, Jewish. and then... Paulhan, so for a very long time I was scandalized by the fact that there were no more readers than those brought together by the Society of Readers of Jean Paulhan, again with hindsight, I say to myself that what I am going to say is very reactionary, but a thought of this level, which has not made any particular effort to be read by a large number of readers, is normal that it remains, as they say, it is a bit of a commonplace, but why not when it comes to Paulhan, let it remain relatively confidential.

ITW: Do you have a new project with Paulhan, about Paulhan, on Paulhan?

JCZ: No, apart from the few pages that I can obviously devote to my adventure with Paulhan in this little book of selected pieces, it will obviously be part of... it's a very important moment in my life, which was a booster for my personal development, and I think that Paulhan saved me from suffering too much morally, I think it was a liberator.

ITW: Apart from the Paulhan family, did you make any friends at the arenas during the arena years, that is to say when you were very young?

JCZ: Among Paulhan's relationships?

ITW: Yes... among the familiars...

JCZ: Listen, I... especially with the children, more friends with Jacqueline than with Frédéric, who was not very communicative, but I had very, very good relationships of trust and very affectionate with Pierre Paulhan for example when he had a... it didn't happen very often, but if he had a legal problem, he showed me, while I was still a relatively young lawyer, a confidence, again, in retrospect, which was very flattering. When hot, we don't realize things very well.

ITW: Last question please. I wanted to ask you, you also dedicated a film to Jean Paulhan in 1974

JCZ: 73. It came out after 74, I remember the year because I finished the film on the Côte d'Azur, we went to interview Ponge who was very funny because when I watch the film again, or when I hear it again, I still have the tapes in my ear, he always ended his sentences with "do you understand?" so I felt like a donkey who didn't understand anything and Ponge panicked at the idea that I didn't understand. And so I finished the film, shooting the film in Nice, and 15 days later I passed the capa so I know that it was in... in the fall of 73.

ITW: The question I wanted to ask you is that the title of the film is Paulhan the boss, in reference to Braque the boss, and I wanted to ask you if the image of Paulhan was always present to you during your work as editor, director, collection creator? Do you sometimes say to yourself “how would Paulhan have treated this text?”

JCZ: I don't know, it's perhaps vain the way I'm going to answer you, but I think that I have been so impregnated with my Paulhan of my own, that I don't need, well, I think that I am impregnated in my own way with the spirit of Paulhan and I don't ask myself the question of what he would have thought because what I do I think I do in the right line with what he would have done or what I think he would have done it, but without needing to ask me the question. I think that if I had, if I had not met him, I would probably not have had this parallel career that I had in publishing and I can see that, so I had the chance to deal with detective novels at Nouvel Observateur, which gave me a great knowledge of this literature, but each time I wanted to do what was best. Today I have created a small collection of essays at Belles Lettres, here again I am trying to bring back to bookstores authors like Steiner, well texts, I am not the only one to publish George Steiner, but here I am going to republish several books by Bertrand Russell, so I think that... Paulhan, it is quite elitist and I think that it has given me, people have gone so far as to reproach me for it, well in quotation marks "reproach", it has given me given an approach that is a little elitist, even snobbish perhaps, perhaps in the eyes of some, it is a little snobbish to want, to always claim what... to do in what one considers to be best without any concern, in fact, commercial. I am obviously delighted, because it was a substantial additional income, from the big success that the great detectives, the collection of detective novels, had for a few years, but what I had in mind apart from Paulhan, but in an infused way in a way, was what we saw for a moment on the packets of Benson & Edges cigarettes, English cigarettes whose motto was when only the best will do, "when only the best will do" as we said. Are these Benson & Edges?

ITW: There is no longer the mention

JCZ: Too bad, it was a very nice slogan. Today the slogans are now "smokers... very prematurely", we should not have allowed them to continue. It's in French too... it was the red packets. when only the best will do so, that has been my common thread, with this sort of Paulhanian heritage, but I consider it like a second skin, so it's something that I... I think of him, well what doesn't stop me, I think of the years, of my Paulhan years, always with a certain form of recognition, because, as I tell you, I think that it changed me, well it certainly changed my life. I met my wife elsewhere because I was working on the complete works through someone who also worked at the precious book circle. It was, again, a momentous meeting, not only because of the marriage, there are marriages which are not at all momentous, nor even heady. So, and there, basically, it was undoubtedly thanks to her and thanks to the psychological help of her family which I still needed at the time, that I resumed what I sometimes called "the fruitful path to university". A fruitful path including my readings, Sartrean in particular, or at the time the example of Malraux who was cited to us as an example when saying "studies are good for... well for those who have nothing else", etc. “you can very well become a minister without having your baccalaureate” and things like that, so it was the influence of my in-laws which was the other branch thanks to which I was able to make a recovery.

ITW: thank you Jean-Claude Zylberstein.

JCZ: thank you.