Seuls demeurent

A witness to the early years of the Occupation and to René Char’s engagement in the Resistance, Seuls demeurent was first envisaged as early as April 1941, but remained in manuscript form as the poet’s commitment to active resistance deepened: “I do not wish to publish in a review the poems I am sending you. The collection from which they are taken, and on which I continue to work despite adversity, might be titled Seuls demeurent. But I repeat that they will remain unpublished for a long time, until something occurs that entirely reverses the unspeakable situation in which we find ourselves.” (letter to his friend Francis Curel, 1941). Seuls demeurent was completed in the spring of 1943, but when the poet sent his publishing contract to Gallimard, he expressed the wish that the collection appear “only once the situation of our country has been definitively clarified.”

The collection is built around three sections: “L’Avant-monde”, a group of prose poems written between 1938 and 1943, to which Char added a final poem in 1945, “La Liberté”, which he had sent to José Corti in August 1942; “Le Visage nuptial”, five love poems in verse dating from the summer of 1938 and the beginning of the war; and finally “Partage formel”, a series of aphorisms written in 1941 and 1942 on the role of the poet.

The collection was published in February 1945, in an extremely limited deluxe issue: only 13 copies on pur fil paper (three hors commerce, lettered A, B and C, followed by 10 numbered in roman numerals), followed by 1,000 copies on châtaignier paper. These first printings are now extremely rare.

This copy was presented to Lucien Biton, a friend of Clovis Trouille and Yves Bonnefoy. A Surrealist scholar, collector and bibliophile, his correspondence with Noël Arnaud is held at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.

Publisher’s wraparound band preserved.