Poésie et Vérité 1942
Trial copy, printed on tinted laid paper, with the first, unprinted double wrapper, on the glazed white vélin paper that would later cover the deluxe copies.
The copy comes from the archives of Noël Arnaud — the publisher of the booklet printed in October 1942 — with his bookplate on the verso of the front cover.
The first collection of Resistance poems by Éluard, and the last he was able to publish openly, Poésie et Vérité 1942 takes its title from Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, whose first complete French translation, by Pierre du Colombier, had just appeared from Aubier in early 1942 and been crowned by the Société des gens de lettres. When Éluard’s booklet went to press that autumn, it was backdated to 3 April 1942 — partly to circumvent the new requirement, in force since 15 May, that printers obtain official approval to secure paper, and partly to turn the book into a manifesto-response to the occupying authorities, bolder than Claude Roy’s own poem entitled “Poésie et Vérité,” published in August 1942 by the Éditions de la revue Fontaine.
In autumn 1941, Éluard had made contact with the Surrealist group La Main à plume (a name drawn from Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer: “La main à plume vaut la main à charrue”), and in particular with the young Noël Arnaud, the future publisher of Poésie et Vérité 1942. From late October 1941 the two men were already planning joint projects, as shown by the letters and pneumatic messages Éluard sent Arnaud, of which the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal preserves photocopies for 1941–1942 alone.
From Vézelay, where he stayed with Nusch until mid-March, Éluard wrote to Arnaud from the Hôtel du Cheval Blanc: “life is easier here than in Paris… I will stay away as long as possible. Write to me.” Back in Paris, Éluard resumed contact with Arnaud on 9 April to arrange the publication of extracts from Poésie involontaire et poésie intentionnelle in the next issue of La Main à plume; after much negotiation, the piece finally appeared in July.
By May, as Éluard was preparing to entrust Fouchet with the manuscript of “Liberté”/“Une seule pensée,” he and Arnaud had turned to the publication of Poésie et Vérité 1942. Their correspondence remained deliberately discreet: “Would you telephone me late tonight or very early tomorrow morning? I need to see you during the day,” Éluard wrote on a pneumatic card on 12 June. Serious difficulties affecting La Main à plume in July delayed the project further, so much so that Éluard also considered a separate edition in the unoccupied zone or abroad, writing to Parrot in late August: “Ce serait bien à Poésie 42… ou aux éditions Charlot? Sinon, en Suisse? l’éditeur de Jouve? ou à mes frais” (Scheler, p. 152). The booklet was finally issued at the very end of September or the beginning of October by Noël Arnaud’s Main à plume, at 11 rue Dautancourt — his own address in the 17th arrondissement, printed on the cover — certainly before 6 October, since one of the Japanese-paper copies bears an inscription dated that day and described as the “premier envoi” (the Spyridaki copy).
The day before, on 5 October 1942, Éluard had already sent five hundred copies of Poésie et Vérité 1942 to Louis Parrot in the southern zone; further copies reached the painter Cicero Dias at the Brazilian embassy in Vichy, who forwarded them to Roland Penrose in London. Parrot gave readings from it in Clermont-Ferrand, Gabriel Audisio in Marseille: “It was a message of hope reaching us from the other zone, like those prisoners sometimes managed to send us from their cells. The RAF dropped thousands of copies over France” (Louis Parrot, L’Intelligence en guerre, p. 99). Soon translated by Penrose, the text achieved extraordinary resonance throughout the free world.
Despite occupied Paris, despite the danger, despite the raids that decimated half of La Main à plume in July, Noël Arnaud, Paul Éluard and the printer Lucien Cario nevertheless undertook to produce a deluxe issue of the booklet, on various papers, almost certainly with makeshift means:
– 1 copy on nacre Japanese paper (no. 1, bound by Martin, Destribats, I, 2019);
– 4 on Imperial Japan paper (no. 2, inscribed to Hugnet; no. 3, inscribed to Spyridaki; and two unnumbered, uninscribed copies, one bound by Marguerite Fay [Bibliothèque Gwenn-Aël Bolloré, Sotheby’s, 2002, no. 21], the other by Pierre-Lucien Martin [Bibliothèque Jean-Pierre Guillaume, 1995, no. 165, then Houdayer, I, 2021, no. 97]);
– 10 copies on Hollande paper;
– 20 on tinted laid paper;
– 30 on gray Ronsard paper;
to which must be added one copy on strong vélin, not announced in the limitation, marked “exemplaire d’auteur” in Éluard’s own hand (Artcurial, 2014, no. 213).
That makes 66 copies in all, to which must finally be added a 67th, in an unprinted trial wrapper, “rescued from the discard pile” by Arnaud — who might well have justified it as the “exemplaire d’éditeur”!