[C.a.s.] en forme de poème

“Retrouvant sous mes pas des senteurs d’Asphodèles,
Je cherche éperdument un ‘Deutique’ binaire,
Sur l’albe immaculée d’un vélin Caravelle
Des mots mallarméens entrechoquent leur nerfs…
Voilà qui vaut Pibrac ! Amitiés, Georges.”

“In literature, the adolescent Perec also devoted himself to poetry. Before 1957, few of his letters or postcards are without a bad quatrain or a limping alexandrine” (Bellos, p. 103). Here is an example, sent to his former classmate from hypokhâgne, Bernard Quilliet. Perec chose a postcard depicting the church of Blévy, where he was staying in September 1955.

A rare piece of material surviving from this period, and one of the earliest known. Bernard Quilliet had shared his year of hypokhâgne with Perec at Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Having left in June, Quilliet spent the summer, from mid-July, at Blévy, a small village in Eure-et-Loir near Dreux, where David and Esther Beinenfeld — Perec’s uncle and aunt and legal guardians since 1945 — had bought a country house in 1951. Perec would spend much of his school holidays there in the years that followed; it was in this same house that, during the Easter holidays of 1974, he would type the final draft of W ou le souvenir d’enfance and read it, chapter by chapter, to his beloved aunt, “while she rested in an armchair in the shade of the garden trees. Ela [her daughter] was there too. Having listened to some very fine pages, she declared, so that her mother would hear clearly: ‘Now he is truly a writer’” (Bellos, p. 404).

For the moment, in September 1955, Perec was not yet a writer: his hypokhâgne year had ended in failure, and that September he was awaiting the start of the university term in October, having passed his propédeutique examination in June — the common examination for all arts students at the end of preparatory classes, allowing them to obtain an equivalence and begin a licence. He would choose History at the Sorbonne.

With Quilliet, he had attempted a great deal in writing: several abortive attempts at plays, a comic strip for which Perec never finished the dialogue. It was with Quilliet that Perec made his first genuine literary attempts.

His thirst for writing, at the start of this 1955 term, still seems unquenched. The freshman writes to his senior these almost nostalgic verses, in which Perec, for several months, on the small squared paper of the “La Caravelle” brand common in the 1950s, searches for his words and his path, invoking here Guy du Faur de Pibrac, the sixteenth-century poet-magistrate — a figure Quilliet had evidently introduced him to, having repeatedly drawn Perec’s attention to authors of whom he was fond. Perec never lost this interest: Quilliet himself would go on to become one of the foremost specialists of sixteenth-century France, professor emeritus of modern history at the University of Paris VIII.

Letters from Perec’s youth are particularly rare on the market. The only known early private correspondence, addressed to Jacques Lederer, begins on 15 February 1956.