Letter to René Daumal

The following letter appears in the correspondence Paulhan-Daumal published by l'Obvil

dated: (Sunday) June 12, 1932
[to Daumal?]

My dear friend,
Would you like us to schedule our meeting for Monday, June 20? Do you also want us to meet at my place, in Châtenay, on Sunday evening? So we could start our interview on Monday morning fairly early, and perfectly rested.

It seems to me that we can now agree on more than one point. Tell me if I'm wrong (in which case, these are the very points that could become objects of dispute between us).

It is a series of reflections on Letters and on Theater or Poetry which also led us to the approach or knowledge of a truth – outside of which any strictly literary operation or any reflection on Letters (of the order of literary criticism, for example) seems miserable to us. This is either because the Letters are in fact more suited than any other subject to reveal it, or because they were for us the opportunity that any activity could have offered as well.

Without wishing to specify here what order, what nature this truth is and if we agree on it in every point (this will be the subject of our discussion) we must note that its knowledge lends itself infinitely to degradation or ruin: and that it is extremely easy to lose it when we have once held it. The decline of surrealism seems to me to be a serious symptom here.

We do not recognize in the order of thought, any authority in which we can trust without reservations. Whatever the place that the work of Marx, Guénon, Freud, Spinoza or Hindu philosophy holds in the concerns of each of us, it is only as materials that we accept them – keeping ourselves equally free on any given point to follow them or reject them.

Nothing seems more ridiculous to us than a “school” whether literary or philosophical. If we come together it is to go a little further together on an internal path clearly opposed to the sensational, the external, the declared and everything that a “school” is. feeds. It is perfectly indifferent to us to carry out an action, to be considered, to “impose” ourselves.

Perhaps we could agree on this for the morning of Monday: each of us, following an order fixed by the drawing of lots, will present, for approximately three quarters of an hour, our convictions and our reasons. The rest will be left to chance (the garden is large enough and the rooms numerous enough to allow us to spend the rest of the day, if we prefer, isolated.)

Yours, kind regards.

Jean Paulhan.