Michel Murat having formed the project of constituting an issue of the journal L'Herne devoted to André Breton, he asked me to deal with his relationship, to say the least complicated, with Jean Paulhan. At the time, the correspondence of the two authors had not yet been published, but I had read their exchanges entirely in manuscript form, thanks to the kindness of Jacqueline Paulhan and Elisa Breton. It is a variation on the different meanings of the word "strangeness".

L'Herne Notebook No. 72: André Breton

Under the direction of Michel Murat with the collaboration of Marie-Claire Dumas.

From Breton himself, one will discover a beautiful ensemble of automatic prose and unpublished poems, ranging from the twenties to the fifties. As a counterpart to poetry, some articles from the day after the war, not yet reprinted in volume, testify to the sometimes desperate vigor of Breton's interventions in public life, and to the accuracy of his views. The iconographic notebook, composed of photographs from the author's archives and largely unpublished, offers a beautiful sequence of Breton, from his youth to the end of his life. The critical and documentary contribution is of the first order, mainly on three points. The first concerns the period of Breton's return to France after the war, a period marked by the exhibition at the Maeght gallery in 1947, around which dissident tendencies clashed. The other almost untouched subject concerns Breton's relationship with "traditional thought" and the relations he had forged in esoteric circles. The third point is an unpremeditated convergence of critical studies or testimonies that sheds light on a great poet that the author of Manifestos had left in the shadows. A detailed chronology and an important bibliography, which give much space to old texts, make this volume a reference work.

Summary More than to surrealism, this Notebook is devoted to Breton's personality, his thought and his style, as well as to the image that other writers, his contemporaries and peers, formed of him. With among others many unpublished poems, studies devoted to Breton's return after the war, to his relations with esoteric circles.

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Extensions "An astonishing correspondence that André Breton and Jean Paulhan exchanged for more than forty years: one discovers there the deep intellectual complicity that linked the leader of surrealism to the director of La NRF and the first fires of the surrealist adventure, to which Paulhan fully participated at its beginnings, then the relations, made of desires and tensions, between the avant-garde and the institution. These letters finally reveal the intimacy of a relationship that seeks, until the end, the formula of a friendship so desired by Breton, between revolutionary ideal and need for recognition. One thus witnesses the pursuit of this 'distant' friendship, crossed by many great figures of letters and arts. It is a whole history of modernity that is written, and which gives a better reading of the thought of the two authors, each illuminated in a new light. And if their friendship never managed to flourish, at least these two minds met in the same ardent quest for the mysteries of thought — mysteries of the unconscious for one, of expression for the other." C. B.