Jean Paulhan's bouquet of violets

This text appeared in the [nrf homage issue to Jean Paulhan] (nrf-hommage-a-jean-paulhan) in May 1969

In 1946, Antonin Artaud, in the Préamble which was to open his complete works, after having said why he refused to include his first book there: Tric Trac du Ciel, this collection of poems quite similar to those which had previously been refused to him by Jacques Rivière for La Nouvelle revue Française, recounts how he experienced this refusal:

Here is the text of the letter that I received from Jean Paulhan, then his secretary, around September 1923:

Dear Sir,

Here are your poems, in which I find great charm. It seems to Jacques Rivière that this charm is neither firm enough, nor yet assured enough.

However, we know, both from the Correspondence with Jacques Rivière and from the letters written to Génica Athanasiou, that it was Jacques Rivière himself who, on May 1, 1923, replied to Antonin Artaud that he could not publish these poems.
It would be too easy to say that this is a false memory, an unlikely false memory since, this Correspondence, Antonin Artaud had just reread it, this is seen in more than one sentence of the Preamble, and that, precisely, it begins with the letter of refusal from Jacques Rivière. It was rather a matter of ensuring that, in this volume I, the letters which demonstrated Jacques Rivière's incomprehension were preceded by a letter, by the text of the letter by which Jean Paulhan would, as if without touching it, indicate his disagreement with the director of the magazine. Thus, the injury that Rivière had inflicted by resolving in the negative the question of the admissibility of these poems was, already, in 1923, would have been compensated by the disavowal of his secretary Jean Paulhan, a disavowal given here as a prelude to a long, friendly and faithful attention.
If Jean Paulhan never belonged to the surrealist group, from 1919, well before they asserted themselves as such, he maintained friendly relations with André Breton, Aragon and Philippe Soupault; and he brings them Eluard. What Paulhan says, André Breton later wrote, recalling this period, and, even more, what he implies, the ulterior motives that he excels in highlighting, all of this is at this moment very close to us. Moreover, the character seated in the center of the painting painted by Max Ernst in December 1922, At the meeting of Friends, is it not Jean Paulhan?

Also, when he became, on the death of Jacques Rivière, director of La Nouvelle Revue Française, he worked to publish the texts of André Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Crevel, and it is to his influence that the publication, in 1925, of L'Ombilic des Limbes, where Antonin Artaud's membership in the surrealist group is revealed to more than one sign, and that Rivière, who had criticized him for not arriving in general at sufficient unity of impression, would most likely have refused. It was again Jean Paulhan who, two years later, took the decision to publish in volume the Correspondence with Jacques Rivière, whose singularity he was not without appreciating and what irremediable turning point it caused the written thing to take.

I look forward to reading your correspondence. (And for me, I hear you, I follow you: I wonder, however, what you want to keep - if it is life simply, I mean existence, this simple current of air or water; motionless.)

The correspondence in question here was a project by Antonin Artaud: exchange a correspondence with Vitrac on the current sinister state of affairs, but how far we are, in this response from Jean Paulhan which dates from February 1927, from the style of appeasements lavished by Rivière, from his psychological-moralist dissertations. What is striking, moreover, in the few letters from Jean Paulhan to Antonin Artaud which have reached us is their seriousness, their firmness.

From 1925 to the beginning of 1927, only two years have passed, but they are as if stretched by passions and events. To cite, as far as he is concerned, only the most notable: in January 1925, Antonin Artaud was appointed to direct the Central Office of Surrealist Research; in May, he presented with Génica Athanasiou, at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, Au Pied du Mur, by Louis Aragon; in August, Le Pèse-Nerfs appears in a collection directed by Aragon: “Pour vos beaus Yeux”; in September-October 1926, he founded the Alfred-Jarry theater with Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron; finally in November, he was excluded from the surrealist group. During all this time, Jean Paulhan helped, supported Antonin Artaud, not only by regularly publishing his texts in La Nouvelle Revue Française (including the first manifesto of the Alfred-Jarry theater), but by introducing him to people capable of supporting him, by acting so that the magazine Commerce included in its summary Fragments d'un Journal d'Enfer. If there was between them, during the year 1926, a slight dispute at a time when Antonin Artaud risked the role of intermediary to bring the surrealists to publish in La Nouvelle Revue Française, an enterprise doomed to failure, the antinomy of the parties involved, the struggle for influence which ensued could only torment the intermediary, put him in a difficult position, make him want to leave everything there, to break everything, this dispute was short-term. And when the surrealists demonstrated Au grand Jour the exclusion of Antonin Artaud, which replied to them A la grande Nuit, Jean Paulhan published in La Nouvelle Revue Française a notice signed Jean Guérin which was sufficiently severe with regard to the surrealists for him to receive insulting letters from them and believed it necessary to send his witnesses to André Breton. The duel did not take place, but the fact that Paulhan had risked it for him touched Antonin Artaud deeply, who felt rejected, banished, and that this rupture affected more than he wanted to admit. However, Jean Paulhan's attitude was not just blind bias. Let's go back a little, just at the moment of this exclusion, before Au grand Jour appeared.

Being excluded, Antonin Artaud has difficulty admitting it; it is a break, a cut against the effects of which he must defend himself at all costs, react. And he then turns to what he, in the company of his former friends, vomited, withered, since the issue of La Révolution Surréaliste, composed under his impulse, had the general title: 1925: End of the Christian Era. We do not know exactly who could have dragged him to Meudon, to Jacques Maritain, but we are justified in assuming that it was Max Jacob, a great provider in the matter, and it is a fact that he had, for a very brief period, undoubtedly as a reaction against the ideology to which those who had chased him adhered, and therefore against them, to give in to the temptation of the ideology professed at Meudon.
Antonin Artaud then wrote an article (which very likely he would subsequently destroy) where he both put surrealism on trial and, as if out of bravado, made the irrational gesture of declaring himself Christian. We know this from the footnotes, which respond to each other, in Au grand Jour and in A la grande Nuit.
That he is right in thinking that the surrealists were aware of his article, we know from a letter that Jean Paulhan sent to him before the publication of the two brochures, since it can be dated April 1927. This letter tells us the title of the article: The Barbarians; it also tells us that at least one of the accusations that Antonin Artaud aimed at the surrealists and that he returns to him is that of bestiality; she confirms to us that it was in this article that he declared himself a Christian:

_Artaud, I frankly regret, I told you, that Gallimard does not want _ Barbarians. But I must nevertheless tell you the reproach I make of them.
_It is that you lower and reduce the question. Consider that you were alongside Breton and Aragon, you accepted and loved them; it is they who have changed since then, more than you. Well if they changed out of simple villainy and bestiality, of course they no longer interest me at all, it's too simple. Isn't it the same bestiality that accounted for their surrealism? And what were you going to do in there? Artaud, be careful that by being too absolutely rebellious against your friends, you diminish yourself. Now if we stop believing in you, if we stop putting ourselves in your place, your articles no longer move us, and have almost no meaning. (This article word disgusts me, but what can I do about it?) If you were wrong about Breton to the point of not seeing all the monsters you are telling us about today, what confidence can I still put in you? What confidence still exists when I see you so lightly declaring yourself a Christian?
I understand that what carries you away is also a fury against the past Artauds and that you are severe for yourself before being severe for this one or that one. You proceed by destruction and suicides. But suicide wins: it also removes all existence from what preceded it (if we do not take the side of death in principle).

If the attacks of the Surrealists, which it must be admitted were above all passionate, like, in part, the reactions of Antonin Artaud, could only exasperate him, rob him, Jean Paulhan's letter, his reproaches, must have carried a much different weight. There was no more talk of the Barbarians, the Meudon episode had no aftermath. Antonin Artaud found himself solicited by other concerns: the launching of the Alfred-Jarry theater, the production of his screenplay, La Coquille et le Clergyman. And on October 19, 1927, a few days after Jean Paulhan had sent his witnesses to André Breton, Antonin Artaud could write to him:

Thank you for the friendship you show me in all circumstances. I can't tell you how much it moves me. But I know I owe you an explanation, not on a specific point but on myself. I will give it to you.

We are authorized to think so, through this explanation about himself Antonin Artaud was going to try to revive the confidence that the lightness of his declaration of the Barbarians had been able to call into question.
However, a serious quarrel, which would last almost two years, was about to occur. If Jean Paulhan himself had supported the first show of the Alfred-Jarry theater, given on June 1 and 2, 1927 at the Grenelle theater, by publishing, in September 1927, in La Nouvelle Revue Française, a note signed Jean Guérin:

_But it seemed on the contrary that they [the characters] were straightened out and strengthened by the staging: a reality of consequence arose; the question was posed on a level of the mind, which is not used to being solicited. Finally, through his ruptures, his imbalance and his false lighting, thanks to a precise sense of equivalences, the director revealed to us the true meaning of the Mysteries: the about-faces and the undulation of thought seized in its sources and which seeks its outcome in the expanse of reality,

the statement made by Antonin Artaud during the second show, on January 14, 1928: "The play that we were kind enough to perform before you is by Mr. Paul Claudel, ambassador to the United States... who is a traitor!" collides with Jean Paulhan and separates them, while, curiously, on this occasion, the surrealist group rallies and reopens for him. (A sort of scourge, this Alfred-Jarry theater: it is the performances of its third show: Le Songe, by Strindberg, which will bring about the definitive break with the surrealist group.)
Having so brutally ended his friendship with Jean Paulhan weighed heavily on Antonin Artaud and, on November 9, 1929, he decided:

I have wanted to write to you for a long time. I made a gesture with you that was more than unfortunate, base, and which to many would appear irremediable. However, I cannot forget this gesture and for two years or so it has never ceased to weigh on me. I could have expressed my regret to you much earlier. But he would have been suspicious to you. And only time could give me the right to be sincere.
_To my present sincerity, Jean Paulhan, it matters a lot to me that you believe. I know what I owe you and what a friend you have been to me. And the memory of your friendship, human and safe, among so many dirty friendships, only increases my regrets and my remorse.

Afterwards, nothing further disturbs this close friendship. From 1930 to 1937, Jean Paulhan stepped up to help Antonin Artaud in every possible way. Regular publications in La Nouvelle Revue Française where appear, among other things, almost all the texts which together will make Le Théâtre et son Double; one of them (Le Théâtre balinais), originally was a letter sent from Argenton-le-Château to Jean Paulhan. Antonin Artaud plans to found a theater: Jean Paulhan then seeks sponsors for him, solicits writers to form a patronage committee; he authorizes the use of the title Théâtre de la N.R.F., for this enterprise which will become, will try to become, The Theater of Cruelty.
His concern, never moralizing, allows him warnings that Antonin Artaud would have difficulty accepting if he did not feel them motivated by an unfailing friendship, whether it be the possible direction of a theater:

You are wrong, I believe, to want to take upon yourself such a worrying task, and necessarily petty and in any case also  different from what is yours, that the  direction of a theater. It seems to me that your discouragement is already creeping in there. On this side, anything can paralyze you, and nothing will save you. (But I already told you that.)_

Or the question, always distressing, of this opium which is both necessary and formidable:

I have great friendship for you. You know what worries she may have been going through: perhaps one day you will put aside this distrust you have towards your friends, this reserve that is ready to become irritated at any moment; perhaps you will also abandon a much more dangerous taste or habit, — not only for our friendship, for your thoughts.

The confidence that Antonin Artaud had in him in return was demanding, sometimes recriminatory, but great since, when it came to the essential, that is to say the texts he submitted to him (here The Theater and the Plague), he could write:

I will never blame you for being sometimes rigorous with me: this will always encourage me to look deeper within myself, because I do not have and do not want to have false vanity. But quickly a word to tell me unvarnished and in all sincerity what you think of this new ending which is definitive for me. Don't send me any more new proofs. Just review the text printed on the manuscript which I reviewed very closely.

When, at the end of 1936, Antonin Artaud returned from Mexico, a trip that Jean Paulhan, by intervening at the Quai d'Orsay with Jean Marx, helped to make possible, what could be done to help him effectively? What support can be given to a man whose illness is a fundamental incompatibility between him and the Western world as it is? In the few months which will precede his departure for Ireland, Antonin Artaud throws himself into the unreal and unrealizable adventure of a marriage project with Cécile Schramme, a young girl from Brussels good society, for the eventuality of which he asks Jean Paulhan to be his witness, and who will resist neither the confrontation with the Schramme family during a trip to Brussels where he must give a conference on "the decomposition of Paris", nor the possibilities of understanding and endurance of the young woman; he submitted to two painful detoxification cures which seem to have been without result, the derisory being that they had only been undertaken with a view to marriage; he has no resources, no means of existence; what job, what place in our society for the man he has become? After, it seems, several steps leading to refusals, Jean Paulhan's insistence ended up obtaining him, at the end of January 1937, as "emergency aid", six hundred francs from the Caisse des Lettres (it was Jean Paulhan who, discreetly, paid the hospitalization costs relating to the first detoxification treatment). And yet, during these very difficult months, Antonin Artaud wrote the preface to Théâtre et son Double, corrected the proofs of the volume, wrote The Dance of Peyote, The New Revelations of Being. D'un Voyage au Pays des Tarahumaras appeared in La Nouvelle Revue Française, in August 1937, while he was in the Aran Islands in search of the last authentic descendant of the Druids. Those who were outraged that this text appeared signed with three stars must now know that in this Jean Paulhan complied with the express request of Antonin Artaud.
What else can I say? It was Jean Paulhan, worried at not having any news, who inquired with the French Legation in Dublin. Thanks to him, we can find traces of Antonin Artaud. It’s Sainte-Anne, then Ville-Evrard for Antonin Artaud. It's soon war, then occupation for those who are "outside".
In 1943, to Robert Desnos who intervened to have Antonin Artaud transferred to Rodez, to Doctor Ferdière, Jean Paulhan, who more than once pushed him to detoxify, asked himself this question: But morphine?  by which he proves to have understood where the real problem is, that it is not a question of drug addiction in the usual sense, but of the necessity, perhaps appalling, of this indispensable adjuvant for Antonin Artaud to behave as if he were in good health. Jean Paulhan, undoubtedly because he has known him for a long time, because he was able to get to know him, understood that the total deprivation of opium imposed in the asylums is in this case, and because it is imposed, a sort of conditioning in the state of illness. So he sends tobacco, but we feel that, if he could, he would send a little of this opium that Antonin Artaud has been asking for since in 1939, from Ville-Evrard, he started writing to him again. In this same letter to Robert Desnos, Jean Paulhan undertakes to send, each month, a sum of money, and he will do so. And from 1945, when, upon receiving Antonin Artaud's letters, he saw the possibility of removing him from the Rodez asylum, it was he who persuaded Jean Dubuffet to go see him there, encouraged Henri Thomas to write to him, supported the effort of Arthur Adamov who solicited donations from painters, writers for an auction intended to raise funds for Antonin Artaud's release, agreed to be the president of the Committee organization set up for this purpose, then the Society of Friends of Antonin Artaud which will manage the funds thus collected.
Jean Paulhan is undoubtedly one of the few who knew how to never give Antonin Artaud the feeling that he considered him to be sick, but on the contrary to be a free man. And, in May 1947, he gave him new proof. Jean Dubuffet had been appointed treasurer of the Society's funds and had to pay a certain sum each month to Antonin Artaud for his personal needs. Things should have happened simply, but they didn't. Antonin Artaud's relationship with Jean Dubuffet very quickly resembled that of Baudelaire with Ancelle and deteriorated in such a way that Jean Dubuffet had to resign from his position. On May 7, Antonin Artaud wrote to Jean Paulhan:

...but this is to tell you, Jean Paulhan, that the fact of holding and being responsible for a sum belonging to me creates an embarrassing state of mind in the person who holds it and perpetually gives rise to painful situations.
Now Jean Dubuffet has resigned from his position and Pierre Loeb has replaced him. — and he also automatically takes the same attitude which consists of worrying about my expenses and the speed with which, he says, my assets are disappearing. [...]
Jean Paulhan, this annoying situation must stop.
There is no reason for me to continue to be held in guardianship and for someone other than me to have responsibility for the funds that belong to me, absolutely as if I were what we call a prodigal son or a man with a cracked mind who does not know how to direct himself in life. — You have known me for almost twenty-five years, you know that I have always  worked, did all the jobs, but that I always earned my living without being a burden to anyone. I therefore ask you purely and simply to have me given, to_  me, once and for all, the funds that were collected for me. So that  no one now has any more worry or responsibility. It will be up to me to make them last as long as possible. In any case you can be sure that no one will one day see me come and hit him with a fifty franc note. I have always managed to make a living from my work and I will continue, that's all._
This will put an end to the worry of the possible owner of my funds and will also remove the worry for me of wondering how I can dare to ask for a thousand or five thousand francs for this or that.

For some question of legislation, it was not possible to remit the Company's funds, deposited with a notary, directly to Antonin Artaud. Jean Paulhan then became treasurer, but was able to find the combination that allowed Antonin Artaud not to feel under guardianship by having the notary send him, without any other intermediary and regularly, the monthly payment, the amount of which he had taken the trouble to set. And if it happened that this sum was not sufficient, it was very simple, Antonin Artaud would tell Jean Paulhan or make him say it (it was during a commission of this kind that I saw Jean Paulhan for the first time) without experiencing the fear of either being refused or being lectured. These are things that are priceless.
After more than twenty years of a friendship as attentive, affectionate and patient as it was lucid, on March 4, 1948, Jean Paulhan, whom I had just warned, arrived in Ivry holding in his hand a small bouquet of violets which he slipped into other hands, those of Antonin Artaud. He joined us. There were a few of us there who knew that the final attack on Antonin Artaud's freedom would be to impose on him beyond life the major offense of what is commonly called a religious funeral. We probably would not have succeeded in avoiding this if Jean Paulhan had not spent the greater part of the day in Ivry waiting with us for those whose social legality suddenly made them the masters of a decision that Antonin Artaud would have denied them the right to make. Jean Paulhan perhaps knew this even further than we did. By his presence, his insistence, his address, the skill he displayed, the risks of scandal that he was able, when necessary, to evoke, it is he, we can say, who contributed best to forcing the hypocritical pomp of a religious ceremonial to be avoided. Thus, once again, he showed that he considered Antonin Artaud to be a free and conscious man; he stood close to him in the battle and helped him, with all his friendship, to win it, he helped to prevent the ultimate alienation.

Paule Thévenin