Fortunes

Fortunes is Desnos’s second major collection of poetry published by Gallimard, following Corps et biens in 1930. It gathers and reorganizes a decade of poetry, from the great lyric texts of the late 1920s to the more formal experiments pursued through the 1930s. The volume notably includes The Night of Loveless Nights, a long love poem composed in 1926–1927 and published in Antwerp in 1930, as well as Siramour, Les Sans Cou, Les Portes battantes and several groups of poems previously scattered or issued in very small numbers.

The volume was published in occupied Paris in 1942: Desnos had by then been back in his apartment on the rue Mazarine for two years. He worked at the newspaper Aujourd’hui while entering the Resistance, his literary activity now extended by intelligence work, the production of false papers, texts published under pseudonyms and clandestine poems.

Raymond Gallimard, brother of Gaston Gallimard and associated with the firm’s administrative direction, had evidently shown considerable “patience” in the face of the poet’s hesitations, delays and repeated revisions. Desnos responds with a pleasingly paradoxical promise: to become, at last, “a serious author.” He would have little time left to keep it, unaware that his own time was already numbered: two years later, on 22 February 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo, interned at Compiègne, then deported to Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Flossenbürg, before being transferred to the Theresienstadt camp. Exhausted by deprivation and stricken with typhus, he died there on 8 June 1945, a few weeks after the camp’s liberation.

From the libraries of Raymond Gallimard (presentation inscription) and Jacques Attali (bookplate).