Some letters to Joë Bousquet

The following extracts from letters were published in the exhibition catalog Jean Paulhan through his painters organized by André Berne-Joffroy

Letter
dated: Monday, probably March 27, 1939
Touchant Breton

Breton believed, too quickly perhaps, that it was enough to know (that there was) this point of the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary cease to be perceived as contradictory. Well, but what if this point of the mind was unconscious? Br., yet so accustomed to putting the unconscious in every way, does not even ask himself the question: the fact is that for him it is not unconscious by nature (which would not support being made conscious) but only by accident. He hardly sees the unconscious as anything other than a sort of candidate for consciousness. And his “crisis of conscience” is little more than the reception of this candidate.
...About the Montaigne de Chantilly (which T. had recommended to me) I would say that failing to consider the nose and the forehead, the hair and the teeth as indifferent as other plants or stones, the wisest thing (to reform at least in us an exact attitude) would still be to regard them as waste, ready to join the red dress and the shells. (M. has his mayor of Bordeaux costume), and like this that M. was getting rid of. The portrait helps a little too much from this point of view, where M. has a cowardly, false and perfectly cruel face...

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Ticket
dated: Friday - April 1, 1939
Touching Klee

...Klee is more precious to me every day. I think of the unknown room quite often. If you want a Light, I will gladly send you mine.
(following my letter from yesterday) because there is also this that we must avoid knowing too much... knowing too precisely (if indeed a certain obscurity is part of it)...

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Map
dated: July 15, 1942
Touchant Fautrier, Picasso

...I saw Fautrier again, more and more given to abstract painting, playing only with color like Picasso with lines. This gives some admirable successes and (it seems to me) a lot of rubbish...

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Letter
dated: Wednesday, May 19, 1943
Touching Max Ernst

If you'll let me buy one of the Max Ernsts, I'll be happy. Don't hesitate to give me the prettiest one, if it's the one you don't prefer. I love nothing about Ernst more than your butterflies. One day I would like to have a large canvas and a small gouache from Ernst. The forest, a forest that would enchant me...
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...Ernst is not who he thinks he is. I believe he is a little master, made like all cruel people (and he is) for the cutesy and the subtle...