Unique manuscrit autographe du poème Lyons-la-forêt. « Sale pays sans porte où il n'y a pas même de suicide pour l'apéritif »

A four page handwritten poem of 102 lines, written in black ink on two leaves of school paper, Seyes ruling, written recto-verso. In the upper margin of the first page there is an inscription in red pencil, probably written later: “19 Lyons-la-Forêt.” Part of this note is erased, but we can assume that it would read: “19. In Lyons-la-Forêt, it goes very very badly.”
Exceptional original manuscript complete of this important and rare poem, composed in the automatic writing style of the pre-Surrealist years of Aragon's youth.
This superb and abundant poem, which was, for a long time, thought to be lost, was only found in 1974, and was published for the first time by Aragon in the fourth volume of his Œuvres poétiques published between 1974 and 1981.
In an introductory note, Jean Ristat reveals the circumstances of its rediscovery: in the 70s Aragon received, from a collector, a duplicate of this poem of youth that he thought had been definitely lost. On this copy, the poet replaced the title Lyons-la-Forêt, written in red on the upper margin, with Dans la forêt and added the supposed date: “early 1927.” There is also a duplicate of this first duplicate with the text retraced and corrected by the author in blue ink in order to facilitate the transcription for the printers. For publication, Aragon added a title page to the proofs, modifying the dating slightly: “text lost and re-found (presumably summer 1927).”
These two corrected facsimiles are preserved in the Fonds Triolet-Aragon (Triolet-Aragon Collection) with all of Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet's manuscripts that the poet returned “to the French Nation” in 1976 under the direction of the CNRS.
The original manuscript of this poem, preceding the poet's violent breakup with Surrealists and written on a fragile paper extract taken from a school exercise book, is one of the rare documents of such significance that survived the historical and ideological uproar of the 20th century and which is still in private ownership.
If this long text in free verse with no punctuation evokes the writing games of emerging Surrealism, Aragon himself confers yet a very different status. Indeed, in the great compilation of his Œuvres Poétiques between 1974 and 1981, Aragon does not include this poem in the chapter of the first attempts at automatic writings, introduced by Breton's Les Champs magnétiques and generally dated between 1919 and 1921.
By dedicating an exclusive chapter to this lost and re-found poem, and by dating it 1927, the poet clearly distinguishes it from the Surrealist beginnings and places it in a period of stylistic maturity. The few but interesting modifications that he brings to the initial text testify to the quality of the text as much as to the poet's desire to offer the reader, not only a simple vestige of youth, but an accomplished and fully assumed poem.
Thus, in 1974, his transformations are more semiotic than stylistic: “Are you not the Semiramis against a city where the gardens chase their dream without chlorophyll in cellars” from the original version, in 1974 becomes “Are you not the picture rail against...”; “and ask the glow of light for his papers because he is not sure that she is not skinny because of her disregard for the harvests from walking with her radium feet on the uncleared fields” changes to “fields without fear”; “the movement of her bosom disturbs the order of the planets [...] the shooting stars are afraid [...] of being less bright and less desperate than her” is abandoned in favour of “fear of being less blazing,” etc. The end is itself shortened by one verse: “their cow tigress horns,” thus slightly erasing the first reference to Asia that appeared in the original poem.
The only significant modification is more likely to be attributable to an editorial mix-up than to deliberate decision. Indeed, the front and back of the second leaf of the manuscript have been reversed and the version published in 1974 (and used in La Pléiade) is, evidently, dismantled. Although the poetic and automatic writing lends itself to several free interpretations, the text's internal coherence, as much as the manuscript sheets, clearly reveal the order of the pages.

If Aragon, who had probably provided the printer with a photocopy of the original leaves, ironed and corrected in ink, did not necessarily cause this error, the dating of the poem that he himself suggested, seems itself questionable. Indeed, as Olivier Barbarant recalls in the La Pléiade edition of the Œuvres Poétiques, the date indications “that came fifty or so years later, are not absolutely reliable.” Also, bibliographers situate the writing of this text to be more between 1923 and 1924, perhaps from an automatic poem in 1919.
Several indices and intertextual relations confirm this dating:
The mention of the “marten,” an animal that is part of Aragon's bestiary of automatic writing: it first occurs in the incipit Une leçon de danse, 1919; the allegory of “rubber” is also used in Nous sommes les vaporisateurs de la pensée, 1924; the return of the “the stone breakers,” is a reference to Courbet, which already serves as a refrain to La Philosophie sans le savoir, 1919; the emergence of the rural theme that echoes his frequent travels to Normandy from 1923.
However, it is especially the significant intertextuality with La Défense de l'infini that encouraged bibliographers to consider this text as an integral part of Aragon's mythical work, on which he worked in secret for four years before burning his manuscript in Madrid in 1927 whilst traveling with his mistress Nancy Cunard.
“I threw myself, as if to deny the [Surrealist] group, into an undertaking without any other example in my life, I did not hide from my friends, but without them knowing the true development, the perspectives, the drawing, the design... this novel to which I sacrificed four years of my madness, of which only the title that I gave it then barely remains, which would surely not carry forward, La Défense de l'infini, and which I destroyed in 1927.” (Aragon, Je n'ai jamais appris à écrire ou les Incipit, 1969)
In éloge de l'infini, Sollers questions this so-called destruction of a work that he considers one of Aragon's most significant: “What does the burning of books, including Aragon's book, in autumn 1927 in Madrid mean? What is left of the thousands of pages (thousands? who knows!) of this Défense de l'infini that now come to us in entire sections, dripping with energy and genius?”
We have in fact discovered fragments of the manuscript in Texas in Nancy Cunard's archives. It also appeared that several texts published by Aragon himself were originally chapters of La Défense, such as the famous Con d'Irène, published anonymously in 1928.
After the poet's death, all of these fragments are collected together thanks to the care of Edouard Ruiz or Lionel Follet, which notably include Lyons-la-Forêt, without actually giving it a precise place within this immense protean and incomplete work.
“Edouard Ruiz suggested that it be identified as a fragment of La Défense de l'infini, and I endorse this point of view, while placing it carefully in the appendices, in the absence of Aragon's formal testimony. [...] The tone of these pages is in harmony with La Défense de l'infini and we can quite easily recognise Aragon behind the features of the ‘Perce-Oreille [...] Louis Quatorze,' near this double incarnation of Nancy, ‘La Lézarde' and ‘La Palpitation': ‘A woman who balances the storm in her hands and despair on her forehead.'” L. Follet, preface to La Défense de l'infini)
This integration into the corpus of the very elaborate texts that make up La Défense de l'infini calls into question the supposed spontaneity of this poem, having the appearance of automatic writing but also showing itself to be much more complex than the immediacy allowed by the Surrealist game.
As such, the manuscript provides decisive perspective, as Lionel Follet notes: “Is it automatic writing? A question without a guaranteed answer. The strange, almost carefully exaggerated written form of the first lines would prove the opposite, but this could be a controlled starting point, before getting going.” Indeed, the poem's written form varies throughout the pages. Firstly it has a strange style, it changes throughout a writing that tilts and accelerates, passing its rhythm on to the reader. This modification suggests that the text opens with a rewriting of an old text upon which the poet relies to feed his imagination.
However, this evolution of the writing's rhythm is only one of the numerous distinctive features of the surprising written structure of this handwritten poem, which none of the publications have been able to transcribe, to Lionel Follet's great displeasure: “The typographic layout poses a complex problem: the original manuscript splits the text into (irregular) verses, which are not easy to define, when they are devoid of initial capital letters and they cross over the lines. On the other hand, in L'Œuvre Poétique, Aragon removes numerous line breaks, thus joining together several verses into one single fragment, and here and there he adds in or removes capital letters. The logic behind this rewriting seems to be poor; it has varied from the copy to the final text.”
Large white spaces compared with overlapping words, writing that is slow and then accelerated, characters of varying size and geometry, and all of this on overloaded school notebook paper which ends beyond the last ruled line... the Lyons-la-Forêt is obviously much more than the first draft, be it automatic or worked, of a poem to be published. It is a complete object in itself, demonstrated by its form and its medium, as much as by its content, following the example of André Breton's manuscript Le poisson soluble, also written on school notebook paper in 1924.
Born out of one of Aragon's most intense periods of creativity, this manuscript of youth, without either a date or location (even the original title Lyons-la-Forêt seems later than the manuscript), free from all stylistic or political ideology, is a unique work in which the fragility of the medium and the violence of the words combine, mastery of the writing and madness of the imagination on two leaves overloaded with ink, leave the reader with a strange feeling of incompleteness and infinity.