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 alludes to this planned “book on the Vaucluse,” intended as a faithful trace of their fraternity. The book could not appear during Camus’s lifetime, although the manuscript was ready in 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, with the aim of giving a face to “that hinterland which is in the image of our own, invisible to others” (Char).

The friendship between Char and Camus took a wholly original form in the creation of this book, published after Camus’s death. It had its origin in a shared love of a land, the Luberon, to which both men were deeply attached. René 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 traveling through this country, and of my own wish […] to obtain images, portraits, landscapes of the Vaucluse that would differ from postcard photographs […].”

In 1952, thirty photographs were selected and illustrated by Camus through prose poems. This fine book, now included in the Pléiade (vol. 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 home of the book’s publisher in Geneva, Edwin Engelberts.

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

A fine copy, enriched with a visiting card signed “de la part de René Char” and with five photographs taken at Les Busclats in 1966: these were taken 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 stay; they are held in the Engelberts collection (preserved at the Fondation Bodmer in Cologny) and were shown in 2019 at the exhibition René Char at the Fondation Jan Michalski. The prints in this copy — almost certainly duplicate prints given to Char by Engelberts — are unpublished.

The photographs also include 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 university 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.