Feuillets d’Hypnos

An outstanding Resistance provenance, presented to the Grillet couple: the painter Ciska Grillet had taken part in the Resistance in the maquis of Ganagobie and had hidden René Char. She was briefly his mistress before becoming his loyal confidante and friend.

A free, independent woman, she was also very close to Nicolas de Staël. René Char championed Ciska’s painting, organizing an exhibition at the Galerie Claude, rue de Seine, in June 1949. Her companion, André, operated in the Resistance under the name Marcel. At the Liberation, he became sub-prefect at Briançon. Char writes him a fine letter here, full of affection and regret at being unable to visit him more often in Briançon.

Feuillets d’Hypnos was written between 1943 and 1944 at Céreste, when the poet, “Capitaine Alexandre,” headed the Landings and Parachutings Section of the Basses-Alpes. He then called himself “Hypnos,” the man who watches over his people through the night: his fragmentary writing was dictated by the demands of his engagement in the Resistance: “I write briefly. I can hardly be absent for long,” notes René Char at fragment 312, who from summer 1943 stopped working on Seuls demeurent to record only brief notations in a notebook.

A first typescript of 72 fragments was drawn up at the Liberation, which he revised the following year: “I have thrown myself violently into work,” he wrote to Gilbert Lely on 17 July 1945. “It is called: Carnet d’Hypnos (Hypnos is a man’s name), 1943–1944. I was fortunate enough recently to recover the notebook I kept at Céreste, buried in a wall before my departure for Algiers. It is this notebook I am going to publish […]. I am putting it in order, abridging or expanding as needed.” He added in particular fragments 204 and 221, written in Algiers in the summer of 1944. This work resulted in August 1945 in a second typescript, intended for the printer, now held at the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, with this note: “There is no other manuscript of the Feuillets d’Hypnos. I destroyed, for reasons easy to understand, the notebook of originals […] except for one leaf kept as a witness.”

Albert Camus read the fragments in Fontaine, where the first were published: a shock. He wanted them published in the collection Gaston Gallimard had just entrusted to him, “his” collection, “Espoir.” A first letter, a first meeting. René Char dedicated to him, in the first printing, the book edition, marking the beginning of the friendship between the two men; the collection is moreover not unrelated to ideas Camus would later develop in L’Homme révolté: “We are in nihilism. Can one escape nihilism? That is the question forced upon us. But we will not escape it by pretending to ignore the sickness of our time, or by deciding to deny it. The only hope is, on the contrary, to name it and take stock of it, in order to find the cure at the far end of the illness. This collection is precisely such an inventory.”

On André Grillet, see in the “Feuillets,” O.C., p. 191 (no. 65); on René Char’s meeting with Ciska Grillet, see O.C., p. 687; Coron (ed.), René Char. Catalogue de l’exposition de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, 4 mai – 29 juillet 2007, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France / Gallimard, 2007, p. 79, no. 106.

A good copy.