Poésie et Vérité 1942

When Poésie et Vérité 1942 was published by Éditions de la Main à plume in October 1942, Louis Parrot, worried for Paul Éluard, whose name appeared on the cover, urged him to take refuge in Switzerland. The poet refused and instead sought shelter with José Corti: he “had had to leave his home in haste and did not know where to spend the night — that night and the following ones. I told him we would gladly take him in, but that if he really wanted peace and safety, we could not guarantee them; the place was not entirely without risk […]. At the moment when Éluard was trying to disappear into the landscape, sheltering him would have been our dearest wish; it would have been very reckless. He accepted our reasoning, and we parted a little later with my promise to find him an ideal refuge in the provinces. He would soon discover, on his own, the refuge he would not leave again until the Liberation” (Souvenirs désordonnés, p. 101).

The publisher on the rue de Médicis, who had brought out Éluard’s work under the Éditions surréalistes imprint (L’Immaculée Conception, 1930; Comme deux gouttes d’eau, 1933), was in fact suspected of publishing clandestine tracts and pamphlets: the instigators of the “Éditions de Minuit” were especially sought after, and his son came under close surveillance. The Yugoslav refugee Monny de Boully, whom Éluard met by chance, recommended him to the bookseller Lucien Scheler, who took him and Nusch in on the rue de Tournon in October 1942. This marked the beginning of Éluard’s clandestine life.

Éluard nonetheless remained in contact with Corti and wrote a preface for Horace Walpole’s Gothic tale Le Château d’Otrante, published by Corti in 1943 in a translation by his son, Dominique Corticchiato. The “Romantique” series, founded in 1941, favored translations from English, such as William Blake’s Le Mariage du ciel et de l’enfer, translated by André Gide and published in 1942 — an illustration of the publisher’s determination to have, as stated beneath the compass rose that served as the house’s emblem, “nothing in common” with the occupying authorities and the flood of translations from German being inflicted on the French public. Corti later recalled: “The war had ceased to be amusing and France was occupied. The radio of our victorious masters did its best — its worst — to win us over to the extravagant idea of total collaboration. […] Poor Rose des Vents! What was purest became the emblem of what was most abject. Looking at my own books, I felt as ashamed as if the whole world might think I had placed them willingly under this abominable sign. […] I sought a way to protest cleverly and discreetly, to wash myself clean of this appearance of complicity. […] And suddenly it seemed to me that these three small words, Rien de commun [Nothing in common], could encircle my Rose and protect it like a shell” (ibid., p. 25).

Although Éluard and Corti came together again in 1945 to publish Rêves d’encre, with “twenty-eight images presented by Paul Éluard, René Char, Julien Gracq and Gaston Bachelard,” the drawing up of successive “blacklists” of writers who had collaborated, compiled by the Comité national des écrivains — on which Éluard and Aragon were among the most intransigent members — led to their falling out. After Maurice Chapelan, who was on those lists and had been excluded by Aragon, requested permission to include in an anthology a text by Éluard published by Corti, Corti sent the poet this mischievous note: “I did not know Aragon ran a laundry business.” The remark proved fatal to their friendship: “I telephoned three or four days later,” Corti recalled. “‘I am just writing to you,’ Éluard told me, ‘for you have caused me a great deal, truly a great deal, of pain.’ Astonished, I asked how and in what way. He added: ‘To attack Aragon is to attack me.’ I was, as they say, taken aback. His letter reached me soon after. In it I read what he had already told me by telephone in essence. It was only later, much later, that I understood that this letter — though nothing in it made it explicit — was to be the last, and marked the end of our friendship” (ibid., p. 102).