All lovers of 20th-century French literature have heard of Jean Paulhan (1884-1968). Or have they? As an influential editor at Gallimard for more than 40 years, as editor-in-chief of the prestigious La Nouvelle Revue Française from 1925 to 1940 and 1953 to 1963, as a driving force behind several other reviews (Commerce, Mesures, Les Lettres françaises, Les Cahiers de la Pléiade), Paulhan discovered, motivated and published most of the important French writers and poets who emerged during a period extending from the end of the First World War through the 1960s. In some cases (like that of the ebullient, stylistically brilliant Charles-Albert Cingria), it has become clear only recently, long after Paulhan’s death, how deeply he could discern the lasting value of certain “unclassifiable geniuses.”
    Moreover, the diaries and letters of countless contemporaries—brought to light during the past few years—recount Paulhan’s subtle diplomacy. At Gallimard, he eased conflicts between writers and the testy, unpredictable André Gide, who for many years was the most influential luminary at the publishing company while making occasional glaring blunders (such as when the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time was rejected—probably without even being read). Often, it was the far-seeing Paulhan who made amends for his colleagues and tried to re-establish relations with a disgruntled writer after a manuscript had been foolishly overlooked. A missive included in Paulhan’s absorbing three-volume Choix de lettres (Gallimard), for instance, evokes Julien Gracq’s first novel, Au château d’Argol, which was rejected by Gallimard in 1938. “I have never been able to find out [what happened],” Paulhan confesses to Gracq. “But I am certain that Au château d’Argol was never put into my hands.” In the same letter, Paulhan kindly requested Gracq’s next manuscript. (As it turned out, Gracq continued to publish his books at the Editions José Corti until 1989, when he finally let Gallimard bring out the first of two volumes of his collected works, in the celebrated Pléiade series.)
    Archival research has likewise proven that Paulhan helped authors he could not publish at Gallimard to get their manuscripts accepted elsewhere (notably at Editions de Mi-nuit, in its early days). And despite long hours spent perusing man-uscripts, the author of Les Fleurs de Tarbes (a provocative discussion of literary history and the ethics of literary criticism) also found time to elucidate the misunderstood work of such modern artists as Georges Braque, Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier. Yet this was not all. Paulhan’s knowledge of the Malagasy language (which he had learned during a three-year sojourn in Madagascar) induced him to pen an arresting study of “hain-teny dispute proverbs.” Alongside this scholarly contribution to comparative linguistics stand his lively reviews of all kinds of books and especially his incisive portraits of a host of fellow writers, eventually grouped into two books, Les Primitifs et les maîtres and Les Amis, les voisins.
    Still another aspect of Paulhan’s personality was his concern for the burning national issues of his time. During the Second World War, the energetic homme de lettres risked his life in the French underground movement; then after the war, he courageously took the unpopular stand that writers who had collaborated with the Germans should be forgiven. Later, in 1954, he was accused of being the author of Histoire d’O, an erotic novel pseudonymously written by “Pauline Réage” and prefaced by Paulhan. Only in the mid-1990s was it revealed that the novel was actually penned by Dominique Aury, Paulhan’s lover and colleague at Gallimard.
    From the onset of his career, Paulhan was fascinated by love and sexuality in all its manifestations. One of his earliest manuscripts was self-mockingly entitled Progrès en amour assez lents. The book is a collection of funny, sometimes even ludicrous episodes about the narrator’s first clumsy amorous encounters. For all his own use of understatement, Paulhan was also attracted to the explicit and the extreme. After the war, he raised public controversy by championing the writings of the Marquis de Sade, notably in his well-argued apology Le Marquis de Sade et sa complice. His advocacy of the author of Justine resulted in a hearing in 1956, before the judge of Paris’s 17th Chambre correctionnelle. Ultimately a controversial yet highly respected man, he was elected to the French Academy in 1963.
    Because of these better-known aspects of his career, which have indelibly marked French literary history, it tends to be forgotten that Paulhan was a subtle fiction writer in his own right. However, “fiction” is not really the right term for writings that above all anticipate, by more than a half-century, the “personal essay,” a currently popular genre. The first volume of Paulhan’s Oeuvres complètes, brought out in 1966-1970 by the Cercle du Livre Précieux, is devoted to these still eminently readable autobiographical (or, at most, very lightly fictionalized) narratives.
    The tome exhibits his mastery of the droll, tongue-in-cheek allusion. Basically realist and autobiographical in orientation, Paulhan simultaneously employed an abstract style, as the poet Catherine Pozzi observes in a letter. (Their oft-lively correspondence was issued by the Editions Claire Paulhan in 1999.) Although Pozzi does not elaborate on this remark, she rightly pinpoints Paulhan’s concern for an overarching narrative stance that accurately communicates his vision of life—which was no common one. By means of a sequence of short prose texts, Paulhan typically expresses ideas, memories and closely focused perceptions in a crisscrossing way that suggests not so much a continuous flowing narrative but rather a Cubist painting.

    An excellent example of this unsettling Cubist effect is Le Guerrier appliqué, a series of reminiscences of the First World War (during which he was wounded). The gruesome details of trench warfare are evoked almost in passing (which makes them somehow more gruesome), as Paulhan simultaneously takes chronological leaps and conspicuously leaves out background information that would have given the reader a more general picture of what is going on. In a word, the author refuses to fill out—with fiction—his fragmented, discontinuous memories. Does not this odd narrative viewpoint, indeed at once realist and abstract, provide vivid, prismatic reflections of a foot soldier’s actual experiences, or recollections, of a war in which he found himself suddenly, absurdly, immersed?
    Paulhan went on to compose a superbly ironic book about the clichés of Swiss life, Guide d’un petit voyage en Suisse, and a fantasy about spending one’s days riding the Paris Métro, La Métromanie ou les dessous de la capitale. One of his most interesting collections of short prose is Les Causes célèbres, a series of 21 mini-narratives, each of which is built around a paradox. One of the most biting pieces describes the consequences of a dawn raid by the German police, during the Occupation. A résistant and his family flee over the rooftops, but they eventually end up having to share a room in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly with their “faithful maid Emilie.” This uncomfortable cohabitation does not proceed quite in the way that the narrator expects. At once savagely witty and finely sketched, these paradoxical vignettes capture well the spirit of Jean Paulhan, himself a protean, paradoxical man._s

Rien ne s’oppose en principe à ce qu’une fois entré dans le métro, le voyageur (s’il a pris soin de se munir de vivres) y passe la journée : il lui suffit de changer à temps de voiture. C’est de préférence aux grands croisements : Trocadéro, Nation, La Motte-Piquet, Etoile. (...) Vers le soir, il aura parcouru dix mille kilomètres, pour une somme qui peut aller (suivant la carte ou le billet) d’un franc à un cinquante. Encore le voyage est-il gratuit pour qui prend soin d’entrer à reculons, et mêlé à contre-courant à la foule qui s’échappe par la sortie. Pour les voyageurs qui supporteraient mal un vide prolongé, l’on a ménagé divers passages à ciel ouvert : par exemple, la Seine à Passy (statue de la Liberté, forêts au loin), la Glacière (village nègre), la Seine encore à Bercy (tonneaux, pêcheurs à la ligne), les boulevards extérieurs (racolage, agressions nocturnes), le tout accompagné d’émotions montagnardes, à vrai dire sans les divers ennuis des montagnes : efforts, chutes et cet air si véhément qu’au retour des sports d’hiver les alpinistes ont coutume de donner à leurs poumons, fatigués de nourritures violentes, pour un repos bien gagné, l’air reposant, stable et pour tout dire modeste, que l’on respire dans le métro. Le danger demeure qu’ils en prennent l’habitude, forcent chaque jour le dose, à la fin ne puissent plus s’en priver. C’est ce qu’on appelle la métromanie.

Jean Paulhan’s granddaughter, Claire Paulhan, has founded an original, high-quality publishing company devoted to the publication of writers’ diaries and literary correspondence. A literary critic and literary-archives specialist in her own right, Claire Paulhan has brought out little-known documents often casting new light on important writers of her grandfather’s generation. Painstakingly printed and rigorously annotated either by herself or by other scholars, the publications of the Editions Claire Paulhan include Jean Follain’s Agendas 1926-1971, two volumes of Valéry Larbaud’s Journals, Catherine Pozzi’s diaries and two books by Jean Grenier, Sous l’Occupation and Carnets 1944-1971. She has likewise edited Jean Paulhan’s correspondence with Michel Leiris, François Mauriac and Catherine Pozzi. Of particular interest are Paulhan’s fascinating diaristic and autobiographical texts, collected under the title La Vie est pleine de choses redoutables. The entire list can be obtained from her Internet site, http://editionclairepaulhan.free.fr.


Photo: D.R. ©Collection privée