Seuls demeurent
One of the first 13 copies on vélin pur fil (no. II).
Presentation copy inscribed by Char to Louis Broder: “À Louis Broder. De “L'avant-monde” au “Visage nuptial” par la route des terres impossibles. En bien amical souvenir. René Char.”
The copy is enriched with two autograph poems mounted at the front: “Force clémente” and “Partage formel.”
The first is the sixteenth poem of the first part of the collection, “L'Avant-monde”; the second is the penultimate long aphorism of “Partage formel,” a set of fifty-five aphorisms which Char described, according to the manuscript of the collection, as “subsidiary propositions”: these were originally “additions” to an earlier collection of aphorisms (Moulin premier, published in 1936), intended to set the work apart from Surrealism. The manuscript presented here is one of the most important, closing the whole with the very definition of the poem, “a mystery that enthrones,” and of its author, the “Grand Commenceur,” an important and lasting phrase. These poems would later be included in Fureur et mystère.
Seuls demeurent bears witness to the first years of the Occupation and to René Char’s involvement in the Resistance (1941–1943).
Char had nonetheless considered publication as early as April 1941, as a letter to Gilbert Lely reveals, but this prospect faded once the maquis began to organize: “I do not wish to publish in a journal the poems I am sending you. The collection from which they are drawn, and on which I keep working despite adversity, could be titled Seuls demeurent. But I repeat that they will remain unpublished for a long time, until something occurs that entirely reverses the unspeakable situation in which we find ourselves” (note to Francis Curel, 1941).
Seuls demeurent was completed in the spring of 1943, with “Hommage et famine” and “Louis Curel de la Sorgue”; it was never revised again and was sent to the publisher in July 1943. According to Antoine Coron, Char received a very favorable opinion from Jean Paulhan, but when the poet sent his publishing contract to Gallimard, he expressed the wish that the collection appear “only once the situation of our country has been definitively clarified.”
The collection is composed of three sections: “L’Avant-monde,” which gathers prose poems written between 1938 and 1943 — Char would add a final poem, “La Liberté,” in 1945, though he had sent it to José Corti in August 1942; then “Le Visage nuptial,” a set of five love poems in verse dating from the summer of 1938 and the beginning of the war; and finally “Partage formel,” a series of aphorisms on the role of the poet, written in 1941 and 1942.
The collection was published in February 1945, in an extremely limited deluxe-paper printing: only 13 copies on vélin pur fil (three hors commerce, A, B and C, followed by 10 numbered in Roman numerals), followed by 1,000 copies on châtaignier paper.
René Char kept two copies for himself: A and IX. Five others are currently recorded, of which only one bears an inscription — that of Georges Hugnet.
A superb sober jansenist binding by Patrice Goy.