Reading manuscripts

Interview with Jean Paulhan by Marguerite Duras, 1960, unpublished

— Jean Paulhan, a large part of French literature has passed and still passes through your hands, whether it is published or not. What lessons do you learn from this experience?
— That literature, good or bad, is always useful; even when it is detestable, it shows a certain progress in the author who makes it. I believe that there is absolutely nothing to be discouraged in this vein.
It is in this sense that I had thought of publishing from time to time, on Bible paper obviously, a collection of all the manuscripts rejected during the year.
— There isn't a completely detestable, completely useless book?
— I've never read any. There may be some but I haven't read any. Never, no. It seems to me that there is always something to take from a book.
— Why do we write?
— I think that literature always teaches the person who writes it to see himself and the world in a more precise and complete way than he did until then. It is very difficult to see the world and to see ourselves, and this for an extremely clear reason: when we look, we distract a part of our mind or our thinking, so that what we see next is completely wrong and conventional. Any literature, even if it is very mediocre, very boring, is an effort to see the world as if we were not there. This is, after all, the goal of literature. This is what literature seeks and obtains, for everyone. But in any case, for its author, even when it is mediocre or insignificant, it achieves this result.
— An author, even a completely solitary one, always has a reader: himself?
— Always, and that’s very fortunate. All literature brings us closer to the truth and brings its author closer to the truth, even if it seems delusional because there is no completely delusional literature. Or say that Lautréamont is the type of delusional literature.
— So you use the word “literature” to describe raw literature.
— Yes. That which is published ensures — or believes that it will ensure — general progress for all readers, whereas unpublished literature, much more detestable, no doubt, only ensures the progress of its author. But it's already a lot, after all.
— Isn't the fact that a book is only "publishable" the source of possible errors on the part of readers?
— Yes. But the errors are very interesting. Often the reader, well the reader that I am, is surprised when reading a published book. He said to himself, “Why did the publisher publish this?”
But that's what we say to ourselves every day, when we see the books that people read: "How the hell can this character read a book like that?" It makes up for it. He's the one who reads precisely the books you don't want...
— If we were even more severe, I think that instead of the two hundred novels that Gallimard publishes, out of ten thousand manuscripts received, we should perhaps only publish barely fifty?
— No doubt. But it should be noted that literary prizes were often given to manuscripts rejected by all publishers. When Bedel won the Goncourt prize for Jérôme 20° de latitude... I don't remember... this book had been rejected by all the publishers in Paris. It had returned to Gaston Gallimard to whom Bedel had taken it, but entirely in desperation. And then he won the Goncourt prize, which encouraged Gallimard, and, I think, all the publishers.