Poésie et Vérité 1942

All the poems collected in Poésie et Vérité 1942 had appeared within the previous year in periodicals: in Fontaine for “Sur les pentes inférieures” and “Une seule pensée” / “Liberté,” in Poésie 42 for “Dimanche après-midi,” in Messages for “Écris plus vite”; some had also appeared in a collection (“Dimanche après-midi” in Le Livre ouvert II) or as an offprint (Sur les pentes inférieures), occasionally in a confidential form (La Dernière Nuit). Éluard’s purpose in gathering them was to capture the mood of a pivotal historical moment, which he experienced as a turning point, and to mark the collective entry into resistance.

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

In the autumn of 1941, Éluard had made contact with the Surrealist group La Main à plume (a Rimbaldian name drawn from 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 had shared projects, as shown by the letters and pneumatic dispatches Éluard sent Arnaud, of which the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal preserves photocopies for 1941–1942 only. “I am thinking of that sentence of Montesquieu’s, which might serve us, if only as a quotation,” he wrote: “To do great things, one need not be so great a genius; one need not be above men; one must be with them” — a maxim drawn from Montesquieu’s Cahiers, recently published by Bernard Grasset and widely reported in the press.

Éluard’s avowed aim was to revive a “collective Surrealist action,” as he wrote to Arnaud on 5 December: “I have received a letter from [Adolphe] Acker meant as a lesson. It would not matter if I had not wished us to be absolutely united. Since this is not the case, please withdraw my text from your publication. Believe me, I sincerely regret it, for you had revived the immeasurable hope I long held in a collective Surrealist action.” In his Histoire du surréalisme sous l’occupation, Michel Fauré traced in detail the vicissitudes of Éluard’s relations with the group.

From Vézelay, where he stayed with Nusch until mid-March, Éluard wrote to Arnaud from the Hôtel du Cheval Blanc: “Life is easier here than in Paris. And this countryside is very beautiful under snow. Are you working? […] I shall stay away as long as possible. Write to me.” While Pierre de Lescure and Vercors were clandestinely publishing Le Silence de la mer in Paris, Christian Zervos openly published Éluard’s Le Livre ouvert II at his Cahiers d’Art, including the poem “Dimanche après-midi,” which Arnaud reproached the poet for having published instead in Pierre Seghers’s review Poésie 42, out of reluctance to submit texts to censorship.

On his return to Paris, Éluard contacted Arnaud again on 9 April to publish selected passages of “Poésie involontaire et poésie intentionnelle” in the next issue of La Main à plume (having already contributed a text to Transfusion du verbe, published in December): “Would you come by Saturday [11 April] around 5 o’clock, or Sunday at 11, to collect the text I am finishing? I think it is too long, and difficult to typeset. And perhaps, because of the quotations, too much of a set piece. So much the worse, or so much the better. In any case, we shall look at it together.” Whether or not the meeting went as Éluard wished, three days later he was already thinking of Seghers as a rival publisher for the text: “Could Seghers publish, quickly, very quickly, a text of mine followed by a small anthology, under the title Poésie involontaire et Poésie intentionnelle? About 48 pages. But the first condition is speed,” he wrote to Louis Parrot on 14 April (Scheler, p. 106). Seghers, enthused by Le Livre ouvert II — “admirable in courage and tone,” he flattered Éluard — quickly agreed on 20 April: “I shall publish a book of yours with the greatest pleasure, and I promise to give it priority over everything else.” Éluard, grateful, replied in a letter offered here, explaining that the text “rests on the strongest part of what was a shared will, a very lofty desire.” After much negotiation and difficulty, Poésie involontaire et Poésie intentionnelle appeared in July.

What soon occupied Éluard and Arnaud, probably from May onward, when the poet was preparing to entrust Fouchet with the manuscript of “Liberté” / “Une seule pensée,” was the publication of Poésie et Vérité 1942 (see the introduction on this point). The two men worked on it without mentioning it in their brief correspondence, 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 12 June. Serious difficulties disrupted the activities of La Main à plume in July, delaying the project, to the point that Éluard also considered another edition of Poésie et Vérité 1942 in the unoccupied zone or abroad, as he confided to Parrot in late August: “Might it be with Poésie 42, because of the title, or with Éditions Charlot? If not, 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 own address in the 17th arrondissement, given on the cover.

As early as 5 October 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 read it aloud in Clermont-Ferrand, and Gabriel Audisio in Marseille: “It was a message of hope reaching us from the other zone, similar to the messages prisoners sometimes managed to send us from their cells. The RAF dropped thousands of copies over the whole of France” (Louis Parrot, L’Intelligence en guerre, p. 99). Soon translated by Penrose, the text achieved extraordinary resonance throughout the “free world.”