Les Cloches sur le coeur
Illustrated with three full-page compositions by Louis Serrières-Renoux.
One of 150 copies on laid paper, the only printing apart from three copies on Lafuma paper (no. 89).
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour mon ami Armel Ferrand, ces cloches de quatre saisons (sentimentales, sensuelles, lasses et sanguinaires) en sympathie toute amicale de René E. Char. Nîmes, 30 juillet 28.”
Bound in at front, an autograph letter signed addressed to Armel Ferrand, sent with the copy (1 page on 1 leaf, folded, 100 x 135 mm), together with two manuscript poems, 2 pp. on 1 leaf (135 x 195 mm) and 1 p. on 1 leaf (160 x 160 mm). These are the poems “Sonatine,” dated November 1927, and, almost certainly, “Parallèles du cœur.” They are first drafts, on graph paper; both manuscripts are placed facing the corresponding printed poems.
Printed in only 153 copies, this collection is extremely rare: René Char would later destroy nearly all of them, disowning this early work: “its title soon became hateful to me; but in truth, behind that title, were poems I was hardly proud of.” The fate of these thirty-eight poems, written between 1925 and 1927 — juvenilia composed between his eighteenth and twentieth years — was singular and harsh: Char would no longer mention it in the bibliographies he later drew up, which he chose to begin with Arsenal.
Manuscripts by René Char from this period are extremely rare, and no manuscript of this collection — his first — survives as a whole; the few known manuscripts of individual poems have been dispersed among various volumes.
It was in Nîmes, where Char was serving, from 1927 and for eighteen months, in an artillery regiment, that he set about composing the collection. He completed it in the autumn of 1927; the edition, published at his own expense, was handled by a small Parisian publishing house that also issued a literary review, Le Rouge et le Noir, to which Char had regularly contributed between 1925 and 1927 — one of the poems in Les Cloches, “Ravage de la Lune,” had already appeared there, and Char dedicated the poem “Sonatine,” one of the last written (here present with its manuscript), to the review’s director, Henri Lamblin.
The copies, printed on “the presses of Albert de Mallortie, master printer in Roubaix,” were delivered to him in Nîmes in May 1928. The edition is illustrated with three full-page drawings by Louis Serrières-Renoux, a surveyor and, at the time, fellow artilleryman with Char in the same regiment in Nîmes. Serrières-Renoux also created the cover for the short-lived review Méridiens, founded by René Char in 1929, which lasted only three issues.
The surviving copies of Les Cloches sur le cœur reflect the intellectual circle of the young René Char: fellow poets who, like him, contributed to the small literary reviews of the day. Among this first circle of poet-friends was Armel Ferrand, who received his copy along with a letter of real significance, capturing Char at this early stage of his life:
“Mon cher Armel, je t’envoie mes Cloches.
Elles furent souvent d’amertume façonnées qu’elles sont au ventre des batailles, cette amertume même nous ne l’épuiserons jamais: nous sommes trop lâches et nous complaisons dans le mal que nous faisons égoïstement nôtre. Je souhaite de tout mon cœur qu’elles te plaisent et s’il s’en dégage un quelconque apaisement je serai comblé. À toi affectueusement. R. E. Char.”
Char gave away only a handful of copies: Jean Gleizes (Nîmes, May 1928), Lucien Franchi (Marseille, 1928), Maurice Courtois-Suffit (Nîmes, May 1928), Michel Rousselot (place unknown, 1928, with the manuscript of the poem “Pour une vierge,” the last in the collection), Julien Lanoë (place unknown, June 1928) and André Cayatte (Nîmes, May 1928); only one inscription to an already established poet is known, that to Jules Supervielle (Nîmes, May 1928).
Later, he gave away three further copies: to Yves and Jeannette Tanguy (1946); to Paul Éluard (1947); and to Yves Breton (1951).
Provenance: library of Armel Ferrand (drawn bookplate, facing the William Blake epigraph).