Poésie et Vérité 1942

The first collection of Resistance poems by Éluard, and the last he published openly, Poésie et Vérité 1942 borrows its title from Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, whose first complete French translation, by Pierre du Colombier, had just appeared from Aubier in early 1942 and been awarded a prize by the Société des gens de lettres. When Éluard’s booklet went to press that autumn, it was backdated to April 3, 1942 — partly to circumvent the new requirement, in force since May 15, that printers obtain official approval to secure paper, and partly to turn the book into a manifesto-response to the occupying authorities, less discreet than that of Claude Roy, who in August 1942 published a poem also entitled “Poésie et Vérité” with the Éditions de la revue Fontaine.

In the autumn of 1941, Éluard made contact with the Surrealist group La Main à plume (a name drawn from Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer: “La main à plume vaut la main à charrue”), and in particular with the young Noël Arnaud, the future publisher of Poésie et Vérité 1942. From late October 1941 the two men were already collaborating, as shown by the letters and pneumatic messages Éluard sent Arnaud, photocopies of which are preserved at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal for the years 1941–1942. “I am thinking of that line of Montesquieu, which might serve us, if only as a quotation,” Éluard wrote to him: “To do great things one need not be so great a genius: one must not be above men; one must be with them” — a maxim drawn from Montesquieu’s Cahiers, just published by Bernard Grasset that spring and widely discussed in the press.

Writing from Vézelay, where he was staying with Nusch until mid-March, Éluard sent Arnaud a letter from the Hôtel du Cheval Blanc: “life is easier here than in Paris. And this country is very beautiful under snow. Are you working? […] I shall stay away as long as possible. Write to me.” Back in Paris, Éluard contacted Arnaud again on April 9 about publishing selected pieces of “Poésie involontaire et poésie intentionnelle” in the next issue of La Main à plume (having already contributed a text to Transfusion du verbe in December); after much negotiation, Poésie involontaire et Poésie intentionnelle finally appeared in July.

What soon occupied Éluard and Arnaud, probably from May onward — around the time the poet entrusted Fouchet with the manuscript of “Liberté” / “Une seule pensée” — was the publication of Poésie et Vérité 1942. The two men worked on it without mentioning it in their brief exchanges, which sometimes required strict discretion: “would you telephone me late tonight or very early tomorrow morning. I need to see you during the day,” the poet wrote on a pneumatic card on June 12. Serious difficulties disrupted the activities of La Main à plume in July, delaying the project, so that Éluard considered in parallel a separate edition of Poésie et Vérité 1942 in the unoccupied zone or abroad, as he explained to Parrot in late August: “It might do well at Poésie 42, because of the title, or at Éditions Charlot? Otherwise, in Switzerland? Jouve’s publisher? or at my own expense” (Scheler, p. 152). The booklet was finally published in October by Noël Arnaud’s La Main à plume, at 11 rue Dautancourt — Arnaud’s personal address in the 17th arrondissement, given on the cover.

As early as October 5, 1942, Éluard sent Louis Parrot, in the southern zone, five hundred copies of Poésie et Vérité 1942; others were passed to the painter Cicero Dias at the Brazilian embassy in Vichy, who forwarded them to Roland Penrose in London. Parrot gave a reading in Clermont-Ferrand; Gabriel Audisio did the same in Marseille: “It was a message of hope reaching us from the other zone, a message like those prisoners sometimes managed to send us from their cells. The RAF dropped thousands of copies over all of France” (Louis Parrot, L’Intelligence en guerre, p. 99). Soon translated by Penrose, the text achieved extraordinary resonance throughout the “free world.”