Presentation of the NRf at the Club du Faubourg

Naturally, at the N.R.F., we are the last people in the world who can talk about literature in general and our journal in particular. We are in it. We are there like a fish in its bowl, we do not see it.
If you are asked why you are happy with civilization, why you prefer to be civilized than savage, you answer nonsense: that it is because of the telephone, and the radio and the Club du Faubourg. And of course, that's not true. If there were not more serious reasons—with the exception, of course, of the Club du Faubourg—there would be no point in being civilized. There are much more serious reasons. There is, for example, literature. But since we are caught up in civilization, we usually don't see them. Well, I can say that we are caught in the N.R.F. It turns out that it is a very exciting adventure for us, that it is a very sufficient reason to live. And I see very well, in any case, why it is a fascinating adventure.
There is at least one difference between the civilized and the savage: it is that the civilized knows that he is civilized. He even knows it so well that he asks himself every day if he wouldn't be better off becoming wild again. He observes himself, he studies himself, he observes his character, his love, his adventures. He wonders what his reasons for living are. He happens to find them. In short, the civilized person is literate.
I wouldn't want to raise my voice, I wouldn't want to take a solemn tone, but we all know that if there were civilizations in the past, it was because there were writers, it was because there was the Odyssey and the Tao-tö king, and the Divine Comedy. Well, we call, we help, we serve in advance the writers capable of transforming the strange times in which we live: of making it a civilization.
We may very well be simpletons and make mistakes every day. But we serve a cause that is infinitely bigger than us. It goes beyond our worries and our pleasures. And fortunately it turns out that even errors, even a certain stupidity, even ignorance are not useless.

1 Against politics and morals

In any case, failing to distinguish what we want, we distinguish very precisely what we do not want. For example, I clearly see what separates us from a moralist or political magazine, like Esprit or Les Temps Modernes.
We can read, on the cover of Modern Times, a curious declaration: that the magazine does not accept manuscripts from those condemned to death or those who are unworthy nationals. That’s a bit of a surprising statement. I have no particular sympathy for the national unworthy. But anyway, I don't see at all why it wouldn't happen for someone unworthy of the country to write a very beautiful poem, or a fascinating novel. I see it all the less since literature is a bit like all patient work: it is done very well in prisons. An author must think quietly. He must patiently question his condition as a man, his reasons for living. He must not be disturbed all the time by his job, by his wife, by his children, by money worries, by the neighbors' radio. When we think about it, we wonder how it can be possible to produce literature anywhere other than in prisons.
Moreover, Sartre frankly explained it. He declared, in the Modern Times manifesto, that he was determined to only admit writers who shared his ideas: existentialist writers. But he supposes that a person condemned to death cannot be an existentialist. It is his right, and there is nothing to say against it.

There is nothing to say, except perhaps this: it is that honest people have always understood by literature or poetry, not at all the works of propaganda or advertising, or of popularization - even if it were a question of popularizing the most intelligent philosophy in the world -, not at all literature in the sense in which we speak of the literature of the Urodonal, or of the literature of the medicines from Abbot Chaupitre. No, but quite the contrary, freely written and freely thought works. Joyful and unconstrained works, which allow everyone to form their opinion on the world instead of serving them ready-made. Works that change the world in our eyes. Much like a new love transforms for us the value and meaning of things in the world, and even of men and women. It's the complete opposite of popularization. It's the opposite of pharmaceutical leaflets and evening classes.

2 Against pleasant works

There is one point, however, on which we part ways (with regret), I fear, from common opinion. But it only takes a moment of reflection to realize that it is common opinion that is wrong, and we who are right.
You all know La Parisienne, which is a very alert and lively young magazine. Jacques Laurent presented it in a small manifesto, where he said that La Parisienne would only have one program: she would seek to please. Well, she succeeded very well and there is nothing to say against it, except perhaps that this is a project which contains a certain contradiction. Who are the pleasant writers in La Parisienne’s group? We knew it straight away: from the first issue, they were Paul Léautaud and Marcel Jouhandeau, Audiberti and Cingria. This is a very good choice. They are indeed writers who please, and who deserve to please. But there is one point that embarrasses me.
How long have they been popular? Paul Léautaud began writing around 1900, Jouhandeau around 1920, Cingria around 1910 and Audiberti around 1930. They only began to please between 1950 and 1953. Léautaud had to leave Le Mercure because readers did not like him: because they even strongly disliked him. And when Cingria started writing to the N.R.F., there was a small shower of unsubscriptions. So that La Parisienne would have had to wait, to publish Léautaud or Cingria, something like forty or fifty years. We can say, without hurting anyone, that she would not have had them when they were first fresh.
Nor would she have had them in their greatest merit. We have witnessed, for three years, after a long injustice, the apotheosis of Gide and Claudel; an apotheosis comparable to the apotheosis of Voltaire during Zaire. But after all, Zaire was not what Voltaire did best; and Christopher Columbus and The Vatican Cellars are certainly what Claudel and Gide wrote — if not the most mediocre — the weakest.
The reason is not difficult to see: it is that a writer who counts brings with him his personal measures, and it is as if literature starts again with him. He brings them so well that he begins by embarrassing everyone, and beauty is not pleasant: there is at first something formidable and embarrassing about it. To discover a new world, to believe in it, you must first let go of the old world. This is not done without risk and without embarrassment. And we also know that women, for whom we will later have a great passion, begin by seeming extremely unpleasant to us. It's a bit of the same thing that happens in literature.

3 Against professional literati

I still have to say the hardest part. Naturally, I believe that to serve Letters well we must begin by ruthlessly separating them from everything that we are too inclined to confuse with them: from politics and morality and even from pleasure and charm. But we must still distinguish them from literature itself.
Because it is extremely tempting to say to yourself: of course literature is not morality, nor simple pleasure. It's a specialty. It is a separate and completely autonomous activity, which has its laws. And provided that these laws are tested and respected and that we even refine on them, we will carry out valid works, and entirely worthy of admiration. All it took was a little intelligence and method. This is what we called art for art's sake. This is also what journals as reasonable as Le Mercure or La Revue des deux mondes once said. At least that's what they did. It's extremely tempting, yes. And yet, we must admit that this is false. It is very true that there are, in a novel as in a poem, rules and laws, and even procedures. And perhaps even in the writer the kind of cynicism which makes him content with laws and rules. It is still necessary that he does not begin with these laws and rules: that he discovers them at the end, and quite innocently: that he himself be surprised to discover them.
I don't say anything bad about tradespeople. It is necessary. There are times when we are very happy to find them. When you have eight hours to spend on the train, you are very happy to come across a novel by Mr. Dekobra or Mr. Van der Meersch, or even a detective novel. All I say is that the profession is not enough, and that literature is too serious a thing to be left to the literati.
It is not like cooking or medicine, where we call on specialists. It would rather be like love where professionals act a bit like chestnuts; where there is always something a little fishy about them. However clever and knowledgeable they are. Especially since they are better informed.
Yes, for us it is about defending something that resembles love. And like love, it is something that is found among little boys and girls of the street and Sunday poets as well as among scholars and great intellectuals. It happens to completely naive and uneducated people, and even crazy people, to get it right on the first try; to naturally catch this sort of revelation, after which professional people run.

Conclusion

I said that we were doing our best to serve literature. Well, I believe that serving literature is first of all this: it is ruthlessly separating it from everything that we are too inclined to confuse with it: morality and politics, literature of charm and sensation, and even false literature which admires itself and takes itself as an idol. But I would like to say again what brings us closer to all the other journals: what we have in common with them. And that's different from all the books.

This is because a book is an accomplished work, which has its beginning, its middle and its end. It is sufficient in itself. And as long as it's a good book, the universe passes through it. He provides us with keys to all things in the world. In short, he strongly gives his reader the feeling that literature is an event that has happened once and for all — so that there is nothing left to do but learn or imitate it.
But in a magazine, it's completely different. There we see literature which is formed and invented and gropes between a thousand dangers. We take part in it. We try it several times. This is because a review is only valuable if we see, alongside a few established authors (as they say), young writers who are starting literature again at their own risk. We see the Letters in their nascent state. We want to come to their aid. We feel very well that the business is difficult, and that they need to be helped.
This is what I wanted to tell you from the beginning: that we need, even more than readers, advisors and friends. Or rather that our readers generally have a surprise, or better give us one: they very quickly become our friends and our collaborators. And even if we only gained one friend tonight, I think we wouldn't have wasted our time.

1953