La Postérité du soleil

La Postérité du soleil grew out of the friendship between Albert Camus and René Char after the Liberation. Their correspondence repeatedly mentions this planned “book on the Vaucluse,” intended as a faithful record of their friendship. The book could not appear during Camus’s lifetime, although the manuscript was ready by the early 1950s, once Char had added his “struggling and breathing” opening poem.

Camus’s poetic fragments accompanied photographs by Henriette Grindat (1923–1986), a Swiss artist who had come to meet Char at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in order to give a face to “this hinterland which is in the image of our own, invisible to others” (Char).

The friendship between Char and Camus took concrete and original form in the creation of this book, published after Camus’s death. It originated in a shared love of the land, the Luberon, to which both men were deeply attached. Char described the genesis of the book thus: “La Postérité du soleil was born of the encounter with a young photographer, Henriette Grindat, of Camus’s growing pleasure in roaming this countryside, and of my own wish […] to obtain images, portraits and landscapes of the Vaucluse that would differ from picture-postcard photographs […].”

In 1952, thirty photographs were selected and illustrated by Camus through prose poems. This beautiful book, now included in the Pléiade (volume IV), opens with a poem by Char, De moment en moment, and closes with one of the few texts the poet devoted to his friend Camus, Naissance et jour levant d’une amitié, composed at the house of the book’s publisher, Edwin Engelberts, in Geneva.

A separate offprint of the text exists, in the form of a small folding leaflet, also illustrated with a photograph by Grindat: a portrait of Camus taken in Provence in 1955.

A fine copy, enriched with a signed calling card “de la part de René Char” and with five photographs taken at Les Busclats in 1966, during Michel Soutter’s stay with René Char for the filming of René Char, made for Télévision suisse romande. The film, produced in 1966 for the program Champ libre, shows the poet in his own territory at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, at Les Busclats, and in the landscapes that nourished his work. It was broadcast on 20 November 1967.

Edwin Engelberts was present during the filming, and it is his photographs that document the visit; they are held in the Fonds Engelberts (preserved at the Fondation Bodmer in Cologny) and were shown in 2019 at the René Char exhibition at the Fondation Jan Michalski. The prints in this copy — almost certainly duplicates given to Char by Engelberts — are previously unpublished.

The photographs also show Anne Reinbold, then the poet’s very young companion. A student when she met Char in 1965, she came to Les Busclats as part of her academic research on his work. Their meeting almost immediately became a love affair, and Anne Reinbold would go on to share the poet’s life in this house for some twenty years.