The first edition with two portraits of Père Ubu drawn by Alfred Jarry.
Half brown morocco over marbled paper boards by G. Gauché, spine in five compartments, raised bands with blind ruled fillet, gilt date to foot of spine, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, covers and spine (repaired) preserved, top edge gilt.
A rare, handsome autograph inscription signed by Alfred Jarry: “Georges Rodenbach's copy. Alfred Jarry.”
Provenance: from the personal collection of President Georges Pompidou with his ex-libris to endpaper.
“He showed that he could, at the same time, love Racine and Soulages... Poussin and Max Ernst... Virgil and René Char, and from that point of view, he was outstanding.” (Alain Peyrefitte).
From behind a desk in the école Normale and high up in the government administration, in the bank, and finally as a politician, Georges Pompidou put together in the heart of his personal collection an “anthology” of French literature. This handsome copy of Ubu Roi reveals his identity as a man of letters, between classicism and the avant-garde. Pompidou, whose literary training would imbue both his thinking and political speeches, showed a taste, cultivated alongside his wife Claude, for modern art, cinema, and the theatre: we know that he was well acquainted with Jules Romains, read Beckett and was a great admirer of Louis Jouvet. The arts, among other things, owe him a debt for the unfailing support he showed the Théâtre National Populaire of Jean Vilar, who presented a new staging of Ubu Roi in 1958 at Chaillot.
This copy of Jarry's masterpiece also bears witness to its famous first owner, the Belgian Symbolist Georges Rodenbach, “one of the most perfect writers in Flanders,” who received this work with a signed inscription from the author, his fellow contributor to the Revue blanche. They were both disciples of Stéphane Mallarmé, meeting every Tuesday with their master at his salon in the rue de Rome. Also a member of the circle of the Hydropathes in which Jarry was an active participant, Rodenbach published in the same year as Ubu one of his most important collections of poems, Les vies encloses, inspired by the occultism of Novalis and the German Romantics. With Jarry claiming to be a follower of Pantagruel as Rodenbach did of Baudelaire, one of them struggled with the incomprehension of the public, while the other revelled in it: they developed at the two extremes of the Mallarmé spectrum.
An admirable witness of the Parisian literary and bohemian microcosm, this work with its prestigious provenance brings together two great names of the avant-garde theatre and fin-de-siecle poetry: Jarry, the ultimate mystifier, and Rodenbach, the nostalgic poet of cloistered lives.
