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André BRETON

Lettre autographe signée inédite adressée au critique Charles Estienne : "Allons, ce n'est pas encore cette fois que dans la révolte je parviendrai à introduire la "mesure" que nous prêche aimablement M. Camus."

Paris 8 janvier 1953, 21x27cm, 1 pages et quelques lignes sur un feuillet.

Unpublished, handwritten, signed letter addressed to critic Charles Estienne

Unpublished, handwritten, signed letter from André Breton addressed to critic Charles Estienne; one page and a few lines in black ink on a paper from the à l'étoile scellée gallery.
Two transverse folds from having been sent, a small corner missing in the upper right margin.
Very beautiful letter giving an account of the death of one of André Breton's dearest friends and of his quarrel with Albert Camus.
Breton tells his friend about the death of the Surrealist Czech artist Jindřich Heisler: “Your letter spoke of those days where it seemed “that there was only just enough fire to live”: on Monday there was far from enough fire, when it reached me: one of my two or three best friends, Heisler, taken suddenly unwell on his way to mine on Saturday, had to be hospitalised urgently and I had just received the pneumatic from Bichat telling me of his death. The event, no less inconceivable than accomplished, left me distraught for a long time: there was no-one more exquisite than he, putting more warmth into everything he did, the most constant of which was to lighten and embellish those whom he loved.” The two poets were indeed very close: Heisler participated, alongside Breton, in the launch of Néon in 1948 and supported him during a period of depression, accompanying him with other friends to the Île de Sein. “The beginning of 1953 was overshadowed by the death of Jindřich Heisler (4 January). Loyal among the faithful, he “lived entirely for Surrealism” according to Breton, who pays tribute to his activity as a leader: “This is how he was between 1948 and 1950, the soul of Néon, and until his last moments the greatest bearer of projects that, as if by magic, his talent gave him the means to achieve.”” (Henri Béhar, André Breton)
In this letter, laden with pain, Breton suddenly makes reference to L'Homme révolté by Albert Camus, published two years earlier: “Come on, it is not yet the time in the rebellion that I will succeed in introducing the “measure” that M. Camus kindly preaches to us.” The two writers met in New York at the end of March 1946 when Camus was invited to the United States for a conference tour as a representative of Combat. “The two agree on the best way to preserve the testimony of certain men free from ideological distortions. They dream of a kind of pact by which people of their calibre would commit to not join any political party, to fight against the death penalty, to never claim any credit whatsoever.” (ibid.) With other intellectuals, they founded the Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire (RDR) in 1948; but the idyll ended a couple of years later, in the autumn of 1951, when Camus published “Lautréamont et la banalité”, an extract from his Homme révolté, which was published later. Breton was extremely hurt and responded to him in an article entitled “Sucre jaune” (in Arts):
“This article [...] testifies to the part [of Camus], for the first time, for an indefensible moral and intellectual position. (...) He only wants to see a “guilty” adolescent in Lautréamont, whom he - in his capacity as an adult - must discipline. He goes as far as to find him in the second part of his work: Poésies, a deserved punishment. According to Camus, Poésies would be but a mass of “laborious banalities” (...) It could still be worse if the destitution of these views did not intend to promote the most suspect thesis in the world, which is that “absolute revolt” can generate only the “taste for intellectual enslavement”. This is a completely gratuitous, ultra-defeatist statement, which must incur even more contempt than its false demonstration.” Thus, two years later, Breton still holds out against Camus' crime of lese-majesty towards that which Breton constructed as the father of surrealism, but even more, this allusion to Camus' pacifist philosophy, bearing witness to the incompatibility between a thought of moderation and a poetry of revolution.
 
Exceptional melancholic letter on the disappearance of beings and the surrealist spirit in this post-war world, but written on the letterhead of André Breton's new gallery, L'étoile scellée, which will succeed in reviving the surrealist phoenix.

 

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