The NRF of Jean Paulhan, by Laurence Brisset
Bernard BaillaudText published in La Revue des Revues n° 33
Laurence Brisset, The NRF of Paulhan
Paris, Gallimard, 2003, 459 p.
Should we write the biography of a publisher, and thus transgress the Borgesian double prohibition: first, no bibliography; second, no biography? The services provided by Asselineau, Brunet and Pia are immense and deserve to be studied in turn. Remy de Gourmont, Jules Hetzel, Pierre Larousse and Auguste Poulet-Massis finally found their respective biographers, for a time. Before Frédéric Grover, André Malraux said in 1971 that the project of writing a biography of Paulhan was "an extraordinarily difficult undertaking". There are books that draw their strength from the prohibition that they transgress.
On Paulhan, we stayed, in 1996, with Frédéric Badré (Paulhan le Juste, at Grasset), followed by Julien Dieudonné, in 2001 (Les Récits de Jean Paulhan, at Champion). The first, often criticized, had the merit in my eyes of pointing out a demanding Paulhan, virulent in terms of intellect and in his style, and close to a certain noir manner borrowed from engraving but applied to publishing. Starting from the project of a biography, he arrived at the intense literary news, that of the magazine Ligne de risk. The second looked at stories, from an academic perspective, but aimed at making Paulhan better known and understood, this little-known, for example as a precursor of the performative statement. Let us not forget the works of Martyn Cornick, The Nouvelle Revue Française under Jean Paulhan, 1925-1940 (Rodopi, 1995), and of Michael Syrotinski, for Defying gravity (State University of New York Press, 1998), French translations of which would be welcome. Little by little, the elements of a vitality of Paulhanian studies (1), reinforced by an impressive program of publication of correspondences, emerged. With Laurence Brisset's essay, La NRF de Paulhan, a new stone joins the building.
Laurence Brisset set himself a challenge: to write, not strictly speaking the biography of an editor, but the monograph of a journal, as it appears, under the direction of a director. The personal journey, family or historical tribulations therefore did not enter into his initial project. But was Paulhan an editor? Laurence Brisset saw him first and foremost as a reader, the only editor being Gaston Gallimard. A director of conscience? Obsolete term, unsuitable for its purpose. On the other hand, it is a matter of restoring the image of the journal director, this neutral and not too prestigious figure in the field of letters; more deeply, to understand the meaning of this revuist itch which Dominique Aury characterized Paulhan. We will therefore avoid the facilities of two commonplaces: the oracle and the mystifier. Beyond the "suspended judgment" that it evokes, the notion of direction supposes a determined intention, in the journal and in the works of the authors. When it comes to magazines, Paulhan is an eclectic monotheist: around the NRF, Mesures, Le Disque Vert, Les Cahiers de la Pléiade were more or less directed by him. Commerce, Les Éditions de Minuit, Le Navire d'Argent and Le Nouveau Commerce — opening and closing the loop — regularly benefited from his activity. Adventures, messages, Fontaine, 84 and a hundred others have been linked to his influence. The “Metamorphoses” collection can also be understood, in the distorting mirror of literary history, as a literary review, with a poetic emphasis. It is obviously not unrelated to the notion of metamorphosis, as Paulhan implements it in his reflection on language. If we want to align — or stack, to avoid curvature — the fascicles of the NRF between 1919 and 1940, those of the annexed or related journals, then the published correspondence of Paulhan, we will recognize that the mass of printed matter is considerable. To this must be added a number of scattered testimonies, several unpublished correspondences, including that with Jean Schlumberger, and the press files unevenly kept by Paulhan himself. Laurence Brisset does not go into unpublished details; However, nothing is missing from his study.
A timeline can be helpful. We know that Paulhan entered the service of the NRF in 1920 after having suffered, before 1914, two refusals from Jacques Copeau. His first steps were marked, on the publishing side, by the development of Colombe Blanchet, an unpublished work by Alain-Fournier, brother-in-law of Jacques Rivière, by the correction of Marcel Proust's proofs, and on the magazine side, by the management of subscriptions, by maintaining the "la revue des revues" section - he is there like a fish in water. Two faces, to say the least, then appear, and perhaps take turns: that of the writer, author of The Severe Healing, of Aytré who loses the habit (Jacob Cow the pirate has his supporters) and that of the magazine director, devoted as anyone to the work of others. The writer faded behind the director, who in turn had the elegance, much later, to let him have the last word. Two pediments mark Paulhan's first action on the NRF: the famous "haï-kaïs" of September 1, 1920 and the Mallarmé of November 1, 1926. After the death of Jacques Rivière in 1925, Gaston Gallimard oversaw for a long time a succession dispute which put most of it in danger. The Second World War got the better of the NRF, but by highlighting its absence, by giving rise to comparable and complicit journals, it very obscurely prepared the resumption of 1953. At a time when the journals were becoming exclusive of each other, the long duo of Jean Paulhan and Marcel Arland at the head of the NRF — which one would then hesitate to call simply the Revue — carried out without end, until the unsituable moment when Jean Paulhan chose to complete his complete works. We will let the specialists complete, as far as they are concerned, the data provided by Laurence Brisset; Above all, we will let the reader discover, after the stages of the chronology, those of the critical analysis.
On the cover, a photograph taken, ironically, by Michel Cournot, places the reader face to face with a pleasant, slightly smoothed face, with sparkling eyes and radiant hair. It must have been good, they said to themselves, playing bowls with that man. And in fact, Laurence Brisset's remarks consist of the portrait of a generous reader, whose openness of compass, when speaking with surveyors, is astounding, from Artaud to Claudel, from Michaux to Patrice de la Tour du Pin. From the magazine to the editorial reader, is there only one step? The front cover seems to ask the question, by printing the name of the magazine in white, but in color that of its "author", thus rebalancing, through color, the inequality of the bodies of character, which seemed to represent the author. He is indeed a sympathetic Paulhan, an impeccable friend, attentive to the most difficult situations, with exemplary loyalty and accuracy. If we still meet, here and there, publicists who doubt that Jean Paulhan ever discovered anyone (we would like to wish them the learning of a better lucidity, which knows how to go beyond the simple mythological "discovery"), the list of major proper names speaks against them: Artaud, Blanchot, Jouhandeau, Michaux, but also Benda, Bousquet, Suarès, Supervielle. If not all of them were exactly discovered by Paulhan (but again: what would that mean?) all of them saw their work modified, and almost all of them enlarged, by him. Paulhan is the one, said Joe Bousquet, who knows how to gift writers. But attributing to Paulhan the role of the author, of the one who gives something to say, or even prescribes others to write the work that he does not write himself amounts to depriving him of the benefit of friendship. As long as one is concerned with a humanity of letters, friendship is well worth strategy — or even sociability. Whatever virtuosity we may think of, writers are not instruments.
This sympathetic Paulhan has his downside. The reproach of cynicism surfaces, under the praise of irony; the shaggy radiance turns into hedgehog spikes. The hypothesis was proposed by Pierre Oster, during the second Paulhan de Cerisy conference: wouldn't Paulhan have lost his hand, towards the end of his life? Here no one agrees anymore. Some regret his indifference to Yves Bonnefoy or Edouard Glissant, others to René Char or Jean-Paul Sartre. We suspect that they are not the same. Everyone will try to distinguish: it would have been in vain to detach a poet from a publisher who suited him and who was not so far from the Gallimard area, the Mercure de France (Bonnefoy); there are unjust remarks which do not ring so false - and in some way avenge the reader, this power (Char); the greatest authors (Sartre) have their inequality and deserve to be told it—silence being for the others. On the reverse of the medal, the names of Samuel Beckett (an accident of censorship), Julien Gracq (actually, Crémieux's fault) and Nathalie Sarraute ("Do you love me?") should be engraved. We can clearly see from this what we expect from Paulhan: infallibility, even in its relationship to our own tastes (which are not so constant). We also see clearly what threatens Paulhan in his turn: the indistinguishable strategy, perceived (and experienced) as a deviation from the editorial spirit, as a perversity renewed monthly, at the risk, as we see clearly here, of the mimetic game. And there is no shortage of anecdotes about the reception of the young writer, rue Sébastien-Bottin, a scene for which Pierre Bourgeade has just sketched (2). Elsewhere, bitterness rears its ugly head. Between friendliness and trembling, between shyness and sadism, in the too symbolic exchange between sweets and manuscripts, there would certainly be cause for despair in Jean Paulhan. But that's not my opinion.
On several occasions, Laurence Brisset insists on Jean Paulhan's disinterestedness, on his open-mindedness, on his ability to publish writers, Sartre and Camus for example, whom he subsequently decried. And who could draw, for more than forty years, a regular line? Paulhan comes across as a blurmer, a follower of secrecy, a worshiper of “complexity”. He distinguishes between the "traffickers" (Anouilh, Carco, Colette, MacOrlan, Salacrou) and the "saugrenus" or "irregulars" (Cingria, Devaulx, Dhôtel, Malcom de Chazal). To describe him, with Malraux, as a "great mind who wanted nothing" is already to trace the circle beyond which analysis will become impossible.
But it remains to be said. Because if it is true that Jean Paulhan broke with the Surrealists in 1927, it remains no less true that he subsequently reconnected with almost all of them. It is not Paulhan who definitively quarrels with Aragon, but Breton. And in Éluard, if Paulhan rejects the indisputable Stalinist, it is not to omit the poet - nor the person, that is to say the unwavering friend. In political matters, it was customary, from the debates on the purge, to describe Paulhan as a reactionary, since he was anti-communist. In fact, from his collaboration on La Vie to the Algerian War, a line that can be described as reactionary — in the sense that colonialism is reactionary — runs through his work. But on both sides of July 14, the positions are often more similar than the conflict itself supposes. In terms of language, it would be wrong to focus on a rhetorical Paulhan, chasing the “terrorist” arguments — in the sense that misology is terrorist — as pure errors to which he himself would have been a stranger. There is in Paulhan, without mentioning his anarchist inclination, an initial terrorism, marked by his passage to Spectateur by René Martin-Guelliot, to Demain by Doctor Édouard Toulouse and even more in the Dada movement - his correspondence with Louis de Gonzague Frick bears witness to this. This initial terrorism did more than leave traces in subsequent editorial activity: Céline, Réage, Sade. For Paulhan, neither the commonplace nor the hunting of which he may be the target fully accounts for the awareness that we can have of language. Ideally, if we knew, and independently of any idea of truth, we would have to integrate Paulhan's long familiarity with "mystical" thoughts into this reflection. Everything plays out in this inevitably amputated linguistic consciousness, to the point that the writer who would achieve an exact awareness of language could (almost) dispense with his work itself, since the idea of the theme takes precedence over the theme. Here, we could name names, variably consenting (and perfectly furious for some).
Paulhan is the one who does not take his side willingly. He is the one whose thought of language is inseparable from his editorial activity. It is the scene, if you will, of an infinite conversation, between glossology and the journal management. An exemplary reader, editor by hook; a case, without any example. He invented the position he occupied so well that the question of his succession barely arose. The great merit of Georges Lambrichs was to overcome this impossible heritage. With Paulhan, the NRF of Jacques Copeau, André Gide and Jacques Rivière was therefore enhanced by a stroke of genius, dazzling and discreet. “Jean Paulhan begins” wrote Vialatte in 1968. Readers, amateurs and researchers who today focus on the Paulhan case know something about it.
(Text reproduced with the kind permission of the author)
1 - Please consult the website of the Société des Lecteurs de Jean Paulhan. ↩
2 - Pierre Bourgeade, The Human Object, Paris, Gallimard, 2003, p. 42-51. See also p. 24-25. ↩