La peste

La Peste [The Plague]
Gallimard, Paris 1947, 12 x19 cm, original wrappers
First edition, an advance, service de presse copy.
A very good copy.
Autograph inscription signed by Albert Camus to the Surrealist Roland Tual.
Copies of this text with inscriptions are rare and sought-after. Gallery-owner, journalist, producer and literary critic, Roland Tual met Camus in 1943 at Gallimard, both of them going on to be members of the jury for the prestigious but short-lived prix de la Pléiade prize. It was at the final occasion that the prize was awarded that Camus gave him this handsome copy of his second novel.
A friend of Michel Leiris and Henri Kahnweiler, to whom he introduced André Masson, and later Juan Miro and Antonin Artaud, he took part with them in the Surrealist adventure from 1924 to 1929. André Breton himself was floored by the outstanding intelligence of this man who "trepaned the works of his contemporaries," and to whom the Pope of Surrealism apologized for not "understanding certain extraordinary things [that he said]".
An artist without works (except two films in 1941 and 1943 with Robert Desnos and Henri Jeanson), Roland Tual nonetheless exercised a major influence on a number of writers and artists of the avant-garde, serving as a sort of guardian angel for them. In Le Temps dévoré, Denise Tual records Aragon's opinion about this absence –and none could be more Surrealist – of a body of work by her husband: "Roland had such an elevated idea of literature (the sort he would have wished to leave behind) that he never had the courage to actually write, for fear of finding himself disappointing."