Jean Paulhan in the crucible of influences

Bernard Baillaud

In this intervention, I would not like to content myself with taking stock of the influences undergone by Jean Paulhan in his long youth, before setting out some milestones which seem significant to me in his editorial action. By influence, I mean nothing mechanical (in the sense of positivist literary history) nor magical (in the sense of Max Jacob), but as far as it is possible to measure it, the result of the currents by which Paulhan was formed or deformed, against which he had to develop escapes or oppositions which were so many responses to him. Jean Paulhan did not accept everything about the heritage that was passed on to him. He is not a pure product of contemporary thought and his youth, in this respect comparable to that of André Gide, was marked by many hesitations, more numerous than his assertions. And the movement of thought, with Paulhan as with others, is more interesting than the determined statements to which it gives rise. Recently, we have seen Paulhan as a triumphant strategist. It seems to me that this image is doubly marked: by the very complicit, insufficiently critical entourage of the 1950s and 1960s, and by a certain contemporary literary discourse, halfway between biography and sociology, which risks drawing literary paths as if they were intentional trajectories, necessarily concerted strategies. Now if Jean Paulhan succeeded in anything, it is because he knew, undoubtedly better than any other, to integrate his own weaknesses into the process at the end of which he appeared to others - but not to himself - as strong and triumphant. Jean Paulhan has never been a deliberately ambitious man. Or if he was, it is for reasons that touch on his most intimate fragility. A man of editorial power, Jean Paulhan puts all his weaknesses into the game. The promiscuity of weakness and strength, power and non-power, power and impotence is present before 1914.

At the Cerisy-la-Salle conference in 1998, the participants observed two main approaches, which were methods, but which both chose and modified their objects. Some worked on the archives, correspondence in particular, and were interested in the editorial role of Jean Paulhan; the others worked on his most abstract works and sought to understand his thinking, and even to accompany him. The dangers faced by both appear clearly: the former risk getting lost in minor documents whose importance they exaggerate; the latter risk giving in to more or less clearly conceptual metaphorization by mimicking Jean Paulhan. Paper dust on one side, psychological mimicry on the other. This double profile portrait of Jean Paulhan reflects his personality quite well: a writer coupled with an editor (or the reverse). This morning I would like to try to create some links between these two portraits, chosen from the first years of his active life.

The first intellectual figure that was proposed to young Paulhan was that of the scholar. But this figure comes to him from the outside. From his father first, Frédéric Paulhan, Protestant, philosopher as we understood it at that time, experimental psychologist without a laboratory, constantly published by Félix Alcan. A student, Jean Paulhan keeps his father at a distance, while undoubtedly regretting that his father stays at a distance: “But dad is too strict. He is a man of science.”(1) The figure of the scientist is also proposed to him by his friends. Miss Sviette, for example, does not share this irony in speaking about intellectuals: “You will be a future scholar”(2), she said to Jean Paulhan at the end of the 1903-1904 academic year. And Paulhan will remember this itinerary which could have been his, an unfulfilled future whose memory he closes by writing at the beginning and end of one of his stories, Aytré who loses the habit: “there are days when I would like to become a scholar” before deciding: “Ah, he also wanted to become a scholar” (3). There is, I believe, no coincidence that Paulhan had these sentences printed in February 1921, at the very moment when, at the N.R.F., he was becoming something other than a scholar. But nothing in this scholarly vocation is affirmed unequivocally. All will is threatened with wantonness by irony. Paulhan lets others draw portraits of him that hardly suit him. At the same time, his indecision does not push him to any radical revolt. He doesn't run away; he goes off on a tangent, always giving guarantees. In 1907, Paulhan left for Madagascar, delaying his marriage, thereby opening up the possibility, quickly dismissed, of entering the colonial administration. He accentuates his scholarly line, by choosing a subject, poems in the form of proverbs, by preparing Malagasy exams which he works on very seriously, by successfully presenting himself to the Malagasy Academy, by finally publishing his study in The Journal Asiatique and by the publisher Geuthner, that is to say among orientalist scholars. But at the same time, he frees himself from his obligations as a professor, criticizes the governor of the island, and with him all the French settled in Madagascar, and mentions Paul Claudel in his book, thus opening the possibility of a literary and poetic use of this apparently ethnographic study. The author's hesitation about his own intention is coupled with uncertainty about the identity of the readers. How do you know who to talk to when you don't know what you're talking about yourself? And how do you know what to say if you don't know whether you are a scholar or a writer? If Paulhan happened to keep at bay, through irony, the figure of the scholar that presented itself to him, he never happened, to my knowledge, to affirm that he had the intention of becoming an artist, writer or even critic. When it comes to his vocation, Paulhan hesitates, refuses and says almost nothing. But by departing from the scholarly lineage, while remaining in the activities of the mind, he creates the conditions for realizing the two neighboring hypotheses: being a critic, being a writer. We have no proof that Paulhan intended to be what he became. There is every reason to believe that he was the first “surprised and delighted” (4). That this surprise is merely possible makes self-knowledge, if not all knowledge, unnecessary. Why should I know and know myself if what is satisfying always surprises me? Paulhan discovers that being a scholar doesn't help you to be yourself - and perhaps even takes you away from it. The fact remains that Paulhan will never completely give up on obtaining the assent of scholars. Her project to write a thesis rose from the ashes several times, notably in 1936. Even if she avoided the most contemporary scientific debates, The N.R.F. rejects neither scientific themes nor the university public. In December 1941, at the time when he became aware of Maurice Blanchot's articles on Les Fleurs de Tarbes, Paulhan wrote to Henri Pourrat: "Remember that I find myself supported by billions of observers, scientists, linguists and psychologists, whose conclusions finally only have to be brought together, to hold them together" (5). As if, despite his evasions, Paulhan had never completely detached himself from the scholarly world; as if something had not been completely resolved in Paulhan's farewell to science; “As if I was waiting, to be satisfied, to be both others and myself.” (6). Now this space, in which one can be “both others and [oneself]”, if we admit that it can take a recognized professional or social form, could be that of the review or publishing. The editor would then realize the ideal which is refused to the scholar. We know that Paulhan was a magazine presenter long before becoming Jacques Rivière's secretary. Managing summaries was part of its activities before 1914, at least for two magazines, Le Spectateur and Demain. We will not take into account the Journal of Normal and Pathological Psychology to the extent that no document proves (nor suggests) that Paulhan played any role other than that of editor of reports. Frédéric Paulhan is present in these three magazines (7). Jean Paulhan is therefore apparently following in his father's footsteps. But it is also interesting to note that, among the journals to which Paulhan collaborated before the war, only one made an exclusive profession of experimental psychology, Le Journal de Psychologie, and that it is precisely in this one that Jean Paulhan does not occupy an editorial position. The closer the review is to the father, the less Paulhan occupies a central role; the further she moves away from it, while remaining in the same intellectual movement, the more Paulhan becomes active and becomes indispensable. From this point of view, the editorial activity is a response to his father: it allows Paulhan to build an activity different from the one whose model his father proposed to him. To be an editor is not to be a scholar. The problem comes from the fact that the activity of review host does not provide any significant remuneration. But on this point, it must be remembered that Frédéric Paulhan, except when he was a librarian in Nîmes, a position he had to leave for particularly political reasons, never made a living from his intellectual work. It has always been his wife, Jeanne Paulhan, who has provided for the family. By struggling to find social stability, Jean Paulhan is doing nothing other than his father. We can even say that the situation obtained at Gallimard allowed him to do better than his father, in terms of financial autonomy and social visibility. As a response to the father, the edition is a success.

In the animation of the Demain magazine, Jean Paulhan only occupies a third position. He was contacted by his friend Tony Dubois, who himself assisted Doctor Toulouse, chief doctor at the Villejuif asylum. According to Tony Dubois, who wrote during Paulhan's stay in Algiers, the circulation of the magazine amounted to 3000 copies (8), significantly more than Le Spectateur. The personality of Doctor Toulouse, whose anthology of works Antonin Artaud prefaced, and whom Bernard Groethuysen consulted in 1937 about the notion of “voluntary madmen” (9), and the ignorance in which we still remain regarding the extent of Paulhan's collaboration with the journal Demain justify us dwelling a little on this subject. Demain is a clearly terrorist magazine, which seeks to protect its readers “against the sophisms and charlatanisms of all parties and all dishonest companies” (10). Tony Dubois is thinking of “introducing [in the section “Yesterday and Tomorrow”] in clear and rigorous lines” number of “bold ideas”. His lexicon is both medical and aggressive. “In small, toxic doses,” he wrote, “we could bite on brains [...] with revolutionary force.” (11). “There are things to be destroyed”, writes Artaud in his preface to the works of Doctor Toulouse: “There are distortions of thought, there are mental habits, there are vices in short, which contaminate the judgment of man when he is barely born. We are born, we live, we die in the atmosphere of lies. Our educators, those whose blood made us close, were, it must be said, not consciously, but unconsciously, through ancestral habit, bad advisors. (12) Independent of commercial, advertising and political interests, freed “from conventional morality and social prejudices” (13), the magazine Demain warns its subscribers: "Take care of your mind", threatened by the mass circulation press, by "the hasty and abundant information, the numerous and empty documentation, the futility in all areas" (14). Demain presents itself as “the antidote to other newspapers – prisoners of groups, businessmen and Orvietan sellers” (15) and worries about the harmful consequences that superficial reading of newspapers brings to the mind. He points out the distinction between (good) journals and (bad) newspapers with a large circulation. He justifies the small format of the magazines by the difficulty we have in reading newspapers, which are too cumbersome; he advises all journals to follow his example by excluding articles that are too long, and preferring those whose title and signature can be seen at a glance, “without having to turn many pages.” (16). A fan of brevity, he offers a physiology of reading, answering in the negative to the question “Should we read in bed?” (17), but also a method of reading, made of concentration and reflection. The reader is committed to reacting with his own slowness against the rapid reading imposed on him. Far from being a constraint or censorship which would tend to select titles, this method allows you to read everything: “Read the newspapers you want - to criticize and understand them with the method of thought that Demain advises” (18). On the front cover, Demain reproduces Rodin's The Thinker (19) - which Paulhan criticizes in his notebooks. But this review refuses abstraction which renounces effects; she wants to use the power of thought. “Tomorrow is both very intellectual and very practical,” assert the advertisements (20). In another version: “Tomorrow is intellectual and very practical; this double character is unique” (21). “Read well to know how to think and act better.” Thought is present in all levels of society, including in what is commonly called daily life, and which is perhaps for Paulhan only life as it lends itself to an anarchist gaze. In principle, this notion of daily life should cover all social situations. However, we quickly notice that in Demain, as in the arguments of Spectateur, daily urban life is privileged. The rural world offers Paulhan the unsatisfactory walks of a bored city dweller: “My God, your nature is beautiful but it is far from us” (22). In the Gard department, as in Madagascar, do you need at least villages to give rise to interesting customs? (23). If the magazine can claim to have an effect, it is in the mind of the urban reader, confronted with the mechanization of the press and the automation of language. Faced with the daily repetition of slogans and advertising messages, the urban reader perceives the need to think about this new use of language. Magazines like Demain want to exercise their right to criticize newspapers. They make fun of institutions which, like the Academy's dictionary, "retain a nominal importance, while experience shows at all times that their practical influence is zero." (24). In a letter to Paulhan, Tony Dubois notes "the mediocrity, [...] the insignificance, and above all [the] lack of true usefulness of all the journals". Demain must be an exception. It is naturally difficult to measure the "practical influence" of the magazine Demain, which participates in the general movement of alienist doctors in favor of physical and mental hygiene. It can, however, be noted that the themes chosen, without any appeal to fiction, relate to both practical questions and contemporary subjects.

We would easily find in Demain a good number of connections with Jean Paulhan's favorite themes, without certainty of influence however. I am not able to determine text by text the role that Paulhan may have played there, but it is enough to leaf through the magazine to understand that Paulhan found himself in familiar territory. The constant references to Antoine Meillet (on the “crisis of the French language” (26)) and Remy de Gourmont (on “The meaning of words” (27)) are consistent in Demain and Le Spectateur. The magazine Demain supports educators who trust the usage and present etymology as useless knowledge: “young people therefore have no need to learn it” (28). An extract from Mental Functions in Inferior Societies by Lévy Bruhl answers the question “Has the human mind always been the same?” (29). An opinion by Vincent d'Indy concerns the offensive use of the word virtuoso: "When, by chance, a student hears himself addressed this epithet, he leaves crying." (30). A testimony from Pierre Mille on his reporting to the armies affirms the enjoyment provided by “the formidable emotions of war” and “rejuvenation” which we experience, according to him, “in the midst of daily deaths”. It gives rise to this comment from Dr. Toulouse: “War has its attraction like the bull races, the circus games, the scenes of opium debauchery. And that’s why she’s formidable.” (31). A letter from the anarchist Émile Armand defends the right "to determine one's sexual life for oneself, as prompted by one's temperament, the conclusions to which one's romantic experiences have led one, one's personal appreciation of life." (32). The only reference to Madagascar that I was able to note in Demain mixes eroticism and sociology: it is a remark by Grandidier on the role of smell in the Malagasy kiss* (33). Demain praises this loving practice, which consists of sucking the soul of the loved one who escapes daily from one's lips, without going so far as to touch them. For the editor of Demain who presents this text by Grandidier, the Malagasy kiss is both more hygienic and more refined than the European kiss. Another remark, taken from Captain Cook's travels, on the Tahitians' reluctance to eat in public, recalls the entire logical structure of Jean Paulhan's essay, *Le repas et l'amour chez les merinas* (34) written in Madagascar (and not in 1912-1913, as the 1970 editor indicates). Another sign of Paulhan's proximity in the magazine Demain, we find several authors from Le Spectateur, René Martin-Guelliot (35), Marcel Pareau (36), Olry Collet (37). Tony Dubois

writes to Paulhan that, for Doctor Toulouse, “his magazine “Demain” is the genre of which the Spectator is a species”38 • The same letter from Tony Dubois imagines the merger of the two magazines. Finally, the magazine Demain inserts an advertisement for Le Spectateur, defined as “a review of critical culture” (39). This is not literary criticism. “The criticism in question is that which any intelligent person, in any situation of real life, exercises, spontaneously but with more or less method, on the formation of his opinions, his reasoning, the expression of one and the other, the interpretation of those of others.” Like Le Spectateur, Demain does not want to take stupidity as a target and prefers to criticize the Flaubertian gaze: “To tell the truth, several of the stupidities noted by Flaubert and his commentators are only such, when we look at them closely, from a narrow, special, momentary point of view. And isn't there some stupidity in finding them? The best thing is to apply the same reading rule to everyone, even mediocre ones: understand them. The less brilliant sometimes says interesting, profitable things; and what it lacks is rather expression.” (40). From the pen of Doctor Toulouse, Demain condemns, with Remy de Gourmont, this mockery which is nothing but incomprehension. Neither news items nor commonplaces escape critical scrutiny. But this critical view does not want to define itself as a superior form of intelligence or genius which would give itself the means to take stupidity as its target. In Demain as in Le Spectateur, the rubric of the sottisier, usual for example in Le Mercure de France, gives way to the sottisier of sottisers, who justifies ready-made formulas, even stupidities, against their ordinary criticisms. Paulhan is not an artist - a rapine - who would play the paradox card against bourgeois intelligence (41). Nor is he an intelligent bourgeois who would appear to despise popular stupidity. The terrorist perspective has nothing to do with the contempt that Frédéric Paulhan made the inevitable outcome of all thought. She targets the powerful but does not mock the weak. “One should not read with malice, but with tenderness,” said Remy de Gourmont (42).

I do not want to dwell this morning on a magazine, Le Spectateur, which I have already spoken about three times, in L'Infini, in my thesis and more recently in Plein Chant (43). The collaborators of the Spectateur wanted to “observe everyday conversations”, and would have liked to “give advice”, explains Paulhan to Robert Mallet. If they come from varied professional backgrounds, not exclusively literary (engineers, notaries, professors), they aim less for a truly practical utility than an intellectual one. To be useful is not to collaborate in the proper functioning of a tool or in the organization of work. It is to act on the course of reflection, by observing the formation of truths - precisely the subject of one of Paulhan's student duties Because Paulhan does not define truth as a permanent higher authority, but rather as the result of an association between an idea and other psychic elements, feelings, beliefs, foreign or even contrary notions: "Thus all truth rests, from a logical point of view, on an error or on a sophism. hardly sees that it could be otherwise: an abstract idea, a pure idea, because it is freed from any relationship with matter, becomes, in practice, useless or harmful.” (45). If we want a truth to be useful or favorable, it is inevitable to work towards a “profanation” (46) of the idea of truth. Nothing is pure in the mind. Better: this lack of purity is a guarantee of usefulness. What is logically confusing is practically useful. Strength does not come from logic, but from the synthesis of heterogeneous elements, such as ideas and feelings. When Charles Péguy (47) is outraged by the linguistic falsifications in use among parliamentarians, for example regarding the words “resumption” or “restart” of the Dreyfus Affair, Paulhan is only concerned that “parliamentarians will soon become slaves to their own language and formulas” (48). Paulhan does not denounce in others an improper use of language, with the risks of resentment or anti-parliamentarism that he would run in this case, but seeks to free the mind from the illusions in which it locks itself, when it comes to language and thought. The purity of the idea is one of these illusions. The usefulness of contradiction, on the other hand, is a truth to be conquered. Faced with the industrialization of press techniques, faced with the massification of arguments in a republican society, and without school having ever taught him rhetoric in the sense in which we understand it, Paulhan participates in two magazines, Demain and Le Spectateur which offer their readers a critical perspective. We know that Les Fleurs de Tarbes in 1936 and 1941, the texts much more clearly polemical on purification, continued this critical line, against all forms of massification of thought. We must not underestimate the offensive dimension of Paulhan's collaboration with Demain and Spectateur. Experimental psychology as it is transformed in these useful journals has completely different ambitions than adherence to the world as it is. Anarchists are constantly present there, less for their economic or social positions than for their critical energy. Perhaps we will understand better, in these conditions, that Paulhan found himself so naturally in his place in the Dada movement, alongside Paul Éluard and André Breton.

At the end of 1918, from Tarbes, Jean Paulhan sought to meet Jacques Rivière, assigned to Toulouse. They barely miss each other, Rivière being about to return to Paris to work on the resumption of the N.R.F. In a letter to Isabelle Rivière, Jacques Rivière speaks of “a certain Jean Paulhan, who is a vague young writer” and who asks his permission to submit an image by Albert Uriet on the “Miracle of the three village ladies”. But Rivière would not keep Paulhan's image of this “vague young writer” for long. Barely becoming Rivière’s secretary, Paulhan becomes this “Messiah” for him. that he was waiting for. Paulhan then worked on the manuscript of Colombe Blanchet, the unfinished novel by Alain-Fournier - discreetly, since the author was not officially declared missing. On Paulhan's entry into the N.R.F., Marcel Lecomte, from Belgium, finds incisive words: "It seems that we have not yet asked much about what Jean Paulhan was doing among the writers of the Nouvelle Revue française" (49). Since 1920, Paulhan has worked intensively with Jacques Rivière. Their correspondence bears witness above all to their summer exchanges, when Rivière on vacation gave his instructions to his secretary. But beyond Jacques Rivière's repeated injunctions, trust quickly established itself, to the point of allowing Paulhan's confidences about a divorce that Rivière did not suspect. Can we measure Paulhan's role in the summaries he composed with Jacques Rivière? On two occasions, it seems to me so.

First, in September 1920, about haiku. The head of the summary having suffered a series of setbacks, the editorial staff is interested in Jean-Richard Bloch's proposal, concerning several epigrams in French inspired by Japan. Initially, Jean-Richard Bloch only offered his own texts, accompanied by a study on haiku. Rivière does not know this form of poem. This is where Paulhan intervenes, because he remembers having read the book by Paul-Louis Couchoud, Sages and poets of Asia, published in 1917 by Calman-Lévy. Paulhan therefore called on Couchoud, who twice, in 1905 and in 1919, sought to unite a group of poets around the writing of haiku. Despite the disappointment that Couchoud's own poems arouse, Rivière accepts Paulhan's idea of forming, based on an idea by Jean-Richard Bloch, a collective of haijins at the top of the summary. Paulhan briefly presents the haiku. Jean-Richard Bloch's study will appear in Europe.

This episode seems significant to me in several respects. The available documents make it possible to measure Paulhan's contribution. Initially, a setback surprised Rivière, which Paulhan knew how to turn into an opportunity. Then, the refusal to let a single author publish his own productions accompanied by some sort of commentary. Finally, the call for a facilitator, capable of bringing together contradictory authors. Paul-Louis Couchoud clearly plays in the September 1920 haiku set the role that would long be that of Paulhan in numerous magazines. By its collective dimension, the set of haiku from 1920 constitutes a model of a summary. There is a summary within the summary. On the other hand, he juxtaposes poets that everything should oppose: Paul Éluard and Julien Vocance, for example. And this juxtaposition succeeds, at least on a human level, since Julien Vocance never stops, in his letters to Paulhan, asking for news of Paul Eluard, who acts in the same way on his side. On a literary level, it will be one of the last eclectic initiatives of the post-war period, before the failure of the Paris Congress and the breakup of the avant-gardes, for aesthetic or political reasons. Jean Paulhan's first intervention on the arrangement of the summaries of the N.R.F. is therefore characterized in two ways: creation of a literary workshop which wants to break with a long tradition of solitary writing and first publication of an essential author, Paul Éluard, whom Jacques Rivière did not know. Double success therefore, collective and individual. Paulhan found a way to present a small anthology in which he himself appears as a poet. For the first time undoubtedly, he manages to be “himself and others”.

A second example concerns the following summary, from October 1920, as Paulhan comments in a letter to Henri Pourrat: “I hope you will be happy with your number: there will be this short story by Max Jacob, a review by du Bos (which cites extremely interesting texts by Taine), your poems, an unpublished (notes) by Laforgue, and the Pincengrain. It’s a number that doesn’t belong a bit, and you know what I’m happiest to see there.” (50)

Assisting, replacing, advising, Paulhan undoubtedly did it better than anyone else. In terms of publishing, he is like a singer capable of replacing the leading role at a moment's notice. The death of Jacques Rivière in 1925 undoubtedly allowed him to access more quickly a more important and more interesting literary position. It allowed him to catch up on the delay with which he had entered a regular active life.

Refusing to be a scholar, Jean Paulhan chose to be a critic. But if the figure of the scholar is the object of Paulhan's desire or irony, I do not know of a text where he explicitly states that he personally wanted to be a critic. The scholar is an identified character for contemporary society, while the literary or pictorial critic, floating between the two waters of thought and creation, does not have a completely identified social figure. If the scholarly vocation results from the view of others (his father and some of his comrades), the critical vocation is expressed in fact, but not explicitly, by the nature of the published texts, and by projection or identification (Fénéon). In his interviews with Jean Paulhan, Robert Mallet speaks of the “profession” (51)” that his interlocutor works at the N.R.F. for 32 years. Paulhan does not take up this term “profession”, leaving his main activity without any specific name. It seems to me that this void makes sense. Paulhan occupies a position that has no name. His main social activity is not a profession. It is the result of a set of hesitations between which he has not completely decided. It also seems to me that the lateral choice of being a critic and editor, incompletely formulated, left traces until the last years, and that it can explain the desire for recognition expressed by the candidacy for the Academy, very poorly understood by his contemporaries, who only saw it as a game or betrayal. Jean Paulhan is almost always more serious than he lets on. The feeling of a definitive intellectual failure, heightened by the preparation of the complete works, and the awareness of playing an important but somewhat vague role without occupying a specific place, culminate in the very late temptation to kill himself entrusted to Pierre Oster (52) - who was alarmed by this as one would think. At the end of his life, Dominique Aury's happy vivacity also had the function of protecting Paulhan against his most intimate and negative feelings. At the moment of the greatest weakness, of the greatest uncertainty, Paulhan doubts his work and his thoughts. He then blames himself for having lacked “proof” - scholar term, rather than artist or writer. And it is utility that allows him to resist the thought of suicide: “But what’s the point, when I am ready to complete what I have certainly done most usefully” (53). The long hesitation between the figure of the scholar and that of the writer did not find in her eyes the perfect synthesis that she hoped for in the figure of the reviewer or the publisher. Yet it is to this hesitation that we owe his work. There would therefore be a power of hesitation, as long as we manage, through language, to do useful work. So let us take care of our minds. And let's forget Paulhan's judgment on the English: “The English are extremely kind (in the streets, cafes, shops). But as impractical, as poorly organized as possible. Well, the opposite of what we think.” (54)

London, May 4, 2001

Life..., p. 21.
Life..., p. 43
Aytré..., 1943, p. 21 and 64.
The Causes Famous, 1950, p. 55.
Paulhan à Pourrat, “Tuesday 23 [XII 41]”.
The Causes Famous, 1950, p. 60.
“The training to want”, Demain, t. III; “We see ourselves as we want to be”, Demain, t. VI, no. 45, p. 173-175
Letter from Tony Dubois to Jean Paulhan, partially legible receipt: MARCH 10, 1913.
Bernard Groethuysen, “Letter to Henry Church”, Measures, April 15, 1948, p. 57-59 [letter dated “Paris, December 19, 1937”].
“Subscribe to Demain to cultivate yourself,” Demain, t. VI, 1914, p. III of the supplement.
Letter from Tony Dubois to Jean Paulhan, n.d.
Au fil des prejudices, texts chosen and assembled by Antonin Artaud, editions of Civic Progrès, 1923, 298 p., text cited on p. V-VI.
Tomorrow, t. IV, 1914, supplement p. VII.
Tomorrow, t. IV, 1914, supplement p. III.
Tomorrow, t. VI, 1914, p. III of the supplement.
“The question of format”, vol. IV, No. 33, August 25, 1913, supplement, p. I-II.
“Should we read in bed?”, Demain, vol. VI, No. 42, January 10, 1914, p. 42-43.
“Subscribe to Demain to cultivate yourself,” Demain, t. VI, 1914, p. III of the supplement.
“How to read Demain”, Demain, vol. IV, No. 29, June 25, 1913, p. II of the supplement.
Ibid., p. IX of the supplement.
Ibid., p. VII of the supplement.
“We are sitting very badly in your meadows; and you have to think about many things and very deep and balanced things to be happy. La Vie..., “Sunday July 3 [1904]”, p. 41. See, however, the “lovely walk with Papa in Saint-Germain” on “Tuesday July 12 [1904]”.
See “pious custom” of “our little villages”, in La Vie.... p. 26.
Dr T., “The word 'amazing' at the Academy”, Demain, vol. II, n° 17, December 25, 1912, p. 357.
Letter from Tony Dubois to Jean Paulhan, n.d.
“The crisis of the French language”, Demain, t. V, no. 37, p. 153.
“The meaning of words”, Demain, t. V, No. 30, July 10, 1913, p. 240.
“Do we need to know the etymologies?”, Demain, vol. II, No. 12, October 10, 1912, p. 144 [after G. Rudler and N. Berthonneau, French through sensitive observation, Colin].
Tomorrow, vol. II, No. 10, September 10, 1912, p. 43-45.
n.s., “The virtuoso”, Demain, vol. II, No. 14, November 10, 1912, p. 214.
T. [Dr Toulouse], “The allure of War”, Demain, vol. II, No. 14, November 10, 1912, p. 211-212.
Dr Toulouse, “Free love and the anarchist doctrine”, Demain, vol. II, No. 10, September 10, 1912, p. 20-21. See also, in issue 8, an extract from “Woman, Love and the Anarchists” published in L’Anarchie under the signature of Émile Armand.
“Our poets and artists have attached to the kiss the meaning of an ideal act and of supreme refinement. In reality, it is somewhat crude and unhygienic. The Malagasy call it by its real name: suck, head; and the "savages" have a more refined kiss. "The Malagasy do not kiss their women like we do, any more than on the forehead, on the cheeks, on the lips, they approach their nose to the face of the beloved woman or the darling child and make a strong suction; in a word, they smell them, they smell them as one smells a flower mioroka or manoroka vady na zanaka, as they say, while "to kiss in the European way" is called mitsentsitra, to suck, to head. This nasal aspiration which, in Madagascar as in all of Oceania, replaces our kiss, has as its principle a more delicate idea than the very sensual one from which the custom of our embraces came: the air which constantly exhaling from the lips is not only for Malagasy as for the Oceanians, a sign of life, but an emanation of the soul, its smell, its perfume, and, by mixing the breaths, they believe to unite the souls. this oroka, or nasal aspiration, a sort of sniffing, is only practiced in Madagascar in private and never, or at least, rarely in public: it is reserved for husband and wife, lovers, mothers and grandchildren, but a brother who kisses his sister would be considered guilty of incestuous relations and considered a sorcerer. (“The Malagasy flair and our kiss”, Demain, t. IV, n° 28, June 10, 1913, p. 142-143) Grandidier's text is taken from the Bulletin of the Anthropological Society of Paris for 1913.
Meals and love among the Merinas, Fata Morgana, 1970, 86 p.
René Martin-Guelliot, “On some errors of common opinion” and “The recognized unknown”, Demain, t. V, 1913;
Marcel Pareau, “Technical words”, Demain, t. V, No. 41, December 25, 1913, p. 378-380.
Olry Collet, “Social logic and the initiative of Mr. Cochon,” Demain, t. V, No. 38, November 10, 1913, p. 216-217.
Letter from Tony Dubois to Jean Paulhan, n.d., “236 boulevard Raspail”.
Tomorrow, t. VI, 1914, p. XII of the supplement. See also t. IV, n° 33, August 25, 1913, p. XI of the supplement.
Dr Toulouse, “Foolishness and literary prejudice”, Demain, vol. II, No. 11, September 25, 1912, p. 92-94.
Ibid.
Text by Remy de Gourmont extracted from La Dépêche and cited in Demain, vol. II, No. 11, September 25, 1912, p. 93.
“Le Spectateur,” L’Infini, no. 55, fall 1996, p. 88-92; “René Martin-Guelliot”, Plein Chant, n° 69-70, p. 203-217.
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The Formation of Truths, 1° 35.
Ibid., f° 36.
Paulhan cites Les Cahiers de la quinzaine, twentieth notebook, fourth series, June 16, 1903, p. 41 ff; for us: “Parliamentary political recovery”, in Complete prose works, edition presented, established and annotated by Robert Burac, Paris, Gallimard, 1987, p. 1138-1198.
Ibid., f° 44.
Marcel Lecomte, “Jean Paulhan”, Sélection, 3rd year, no. 8, June 1924, p. 228-229.
Letter to Henri Pourrat, “Wednesday”, box 17.9.20. The summary includes in order: Max Jacob, “Good intentions” ; Charles Du Bos, “Notes on Mérimée portrait painter” ; Henri Pourrat, “Songs...” ; Jules Laforgue, “Notes from a diary” ; Marcel Jouhandeau, “The Pincengrains” ; the “Reflections on Literature” by Albert Thibaudet focus on Gide's La Symphonie pastorale.
O.C., IV, p. 478.
Letter to Pierre Oster, “Friday [February 10, 1967]”.
Choice of letters, vol. III, p. 265, letter 240.
Letter to Pourrat, “Thursday”, box 5.05.51