I worked for a long time in the office, more exactly at Tristan Tzara's desk, rue de Lille, shortly after his death. It is thus that I became imbued with his mental universe, with what had been able to crystallize his emotions throughout his life. Everything was within reach. The original editions of his works neatly arranged in the vast library, it was enough to open a folder to find, besides the manuscripts of the poems, their offprints, the carefully classified letters, the documents likely to enlighten them. Turning to the left, I could admire on the wall the wonderful cubist Head of a Man by Picasso (1912), acquired by the poet at the second Kahnweiler sale in November 1921; drawings and engravings by Chirico, Hans Arp, Giacometti; a pastel by Miró. Further on, the three watercolored engravings by Max Ernst, an air of object lesson, that Tzara had acquired during the artist's first exhibition that he had contributed to bringing to Paris, Au Sans Pareil, and especially these rarities that were Kurt Schwitters' assemblages, notably a Mirror Collage that I never tired of decomposing, not to mention a luminous Delaunay from 1913 and the Landscape with a Castle by the Douanier Rousseau. And everywhere the fetishes from Africa and Oceania that he had known how to recognize and situate as early as 1917: "My other brother is naive and good and laughs. He eats in Africa or along the Oceanian islands (1)." In such a way that he had naturally become an expert, not only of African art, but also of the Pacific islands and even pre-Columbian art. Here, I would like to rise against a foolishly widespread opinion that would oppose Dadaism attached to Negro art in the person of Tzara, to surrealism prospecting Oceanian art by Breton's will. Nothing could be more false. Witness the magnificent Oceanian headrests acquired from Jacques Viot in 1928, the Trobriand Islands shield bought at the Rupalley sale in 1930, the Easter Island statuette brought back by Pierre Loti, and the paradoxical hourglass drum from the Torres Strait that summoned his library. However, I cannot help evoking the purity of a Dan mask, which should inevitably lead me, as soon as I set foot in Ivory Coast, to spend up to the last CFA franc to acquire one that would obviously not equal it, and also this impressive Guro-Bété mask that would make me forever hostile to the west of the country. But for me, the centerpiece of the collection, the most appropriate to Tzara, will remain the Kwélé mask from Gabon, covered with kaolin, with eyes slit obliquely, so sad. Hearing the hours punctuated, through the courtyard, by the Radio-Luxembourg jingle, I did not imagine, then, that I would have to fight so much to virtually reconstitute such an ensemble, or at least find traces of it to establish the poet's Complete Works, and especially to indicate its continuity, so much did painting and poetry make common sense in his thinking. The dispersion of the collections from the apartment on rue de Lille (succeeding avenue Junot), it's a bit the same thing as that of 42 rue Fontaine for André Breton. It took place in several stages and did not arouse collective emotion. And yet! There was all the memory of Dada, a good part of that of surrealism and the avant-garde of the 20th century. With it was affirmed the unity of a thought, of a work and, if I dare say of man in his time. To Sacha Pana who proposed to entitle "Poems Before Dada" a collection of his Romanian poems, Tzara refused to let "suppose a kind of rupture in my poetic person [...] due to something that would have happened outside of me (the unleashing of a similimystical belief, so to speak: dada) which, properly speaking, never existed, because there was continuity by more or less violent and determining jolts, if you will, but continuity and interpenetration nonetheless, linked to the highest degree to a latent determination. (2)" However, it is not for lack of having alerted the public authorities to the damage that would result from such scattering. Approached by the family, who wished to bequeath the entire collection provided that the mention "Tristan Tzara Fund" was made, the National Library refused. For a time, the National Museum of Modern Art (which then sat on avenue du Président Wilson), in the person of Bernard Dorival, assisted by Michel Hoog and strongly encouraged by Jean Cassou, became interested to the point of acquiring furniture for this purpose. I don't know why the negotiations between the institution, the tax authorities and the poet's heirs failed, probably for the same reason that, some thirty years later, would lead to the public sale of the Breton collection. In the end, the goods left by Tzara were segmented into four groups. His books and journals were sold by Kornfeld and Klipstein in Bern on June 12, 1968 (3). And thus the Doucet fund remains deprived of the para-dadaist journal Das Bordell (1921), which intrigued François Chapon so much when I first came to explore its treasures in 1962, or of Stupid and the complete collection of Creacion, Trossos, Grecia, and so many others who published the poet in pre-original. Thanks to an anonymous donation (4) and the generosity of his son Christophe, his manuscripts and correspondence entered, at François Chapon's initiative, the Jacques Doucet Literary Library from 1967 to 1972, which gives an idea of the amount of work necessary to inventory its content5. His collections of primitive art and modern paintings were dispersed at Drouot under the hammer of Me Guy Loudmer in November 1988, and an important part of his library four months later (6).

The Tzara Fund at Doucet

The Tzara archives at the Doucet Fund go back practically to the time of Dada in Paris since it was in 1922, through the mediation of Aragon and Breton, that Jacques Doucet himself acquired the manuscript of the Twenty-Five Poems accompanied by a note, three unpublished poems and a letter from the author to the collector, explaining to him the making of the collection and especially the historical circumstances of its elaboration (7). The account contains some exaggeration, but overall precious information that posterity has been able to authenticate. Several poems had been recopied on the original edition (see (8) OC I, p. 641). However, the most notable consequence of this acquisition was the publication in 1946 of the Twenty-Five and One Poems, the 26th where the Centuries of Nostradamus explicitly reappear, having been communicated to the publisher by the Doucet Library. The work, illustrated by Arp, was given to the library by Tzara. One will appreciate at its true measure this return on investment!

The Correspondence

The fund preserves the letters or notes addressed to Tzara by nearly seven hundred correspondents during the fifty years of his creative activity. Before being distributed under the name of each writer, the file established by the BLJD allowed one to grasp at a glance the numerical importance of his interlocutors. Having noted it from its constitution, I am in a position to appreciate its quantity. Among those who wrote to him more than forty times, I note, in descending order of frequency, the names of the Dadaists: Francis Picabia, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Philippe Soupault, Walter Serner, Hans Arp, Hans Richter, Max Ernst; and also of those who were his companions during the surrealist period: Théodore Fraenkel, André Breton, René Char, and Joan Miró, who was very close to him. The next tier (30 to 40 letters) includes mainly avant-gardists like Kurt Schwitters, the creator of Merz, more Dadaist than Dada, Gabrielle Buffet, the Belgian E.L.T. Mesens, the Spaniard Guillermo de Torre, the Dutchman Théo Van Doesburg, who signed I. K. Bonset his contributions to Dada. Among those who addressed him more than twenty times, we count his parents, his wife Greta Knutson, but also Paul Éluard, Pierre Reverdy, Marcel Arland, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, Man Ray, Pierre de Massot, and for editorial reasons, Georges Hugnet, Bernard Fay, Marcel Raval and the painter Louis Marcoussis. They sent him more than a dozen letters, besides Maya Chrusecz, his Zurich companion, his compatriot Marcel Janco and Hugo Ball, the founder of the Cabaret Voltaire, the Italians Gino Cantarelli, Julius Evola, Francesco Meriano, Moscardelli, De Pisis, Marone, Prampolini, Raimondi, San Miniatelli; the Germans Baader, Walter Mehring, Ferdinand Hardekopf, Christian Schad, Schoenberner and Herwart Walden, the animator of the Sturm, Christian Zervos that of the Cahiers d'art; his dear friend René Crevel, Benjamin Péret, Aragon, and the publishers: Jane Heap, Léon Pierre-Quint of Sagittarius, Pierre Betz of Point, Wieland Mayr of Free Leaves, the painters and poets Sonia Delaunay, Naum Gabo, Yves Tanguy, Francis Gérard, Vicente Huidobron, Max Jacob, Émile Malespine, Sacha Pana, Clément Pansaers, Joe Bousquet, Jean Cassou, Pierre Robin, Mary Wigmann, Ilya Zdanevitch. To give an idea of the multiplicity and diversity of his epistolary relations, here are, in alphabetical order, those who sent him more than five notes: Apollinaire, Archipenko, Étienne de Beaumont, Pierre André Benoit, Bertelé, Caillois, Cocteau, Maria D'Arezzo, De Ridder, Decaunes, Delteil, Dietrich, Marcel Duchamp, Duthuit, Otto Flake, Pierre-Louis Flouquet, Benjamin Fondane, Giacometti, Goll, Roch Gray, Juan Gris, Paul Guillaume, Hein Bela, Illyes, Matthew Josephson, Kassak, Kiesler, Lacôte, Laporte, Lefebure, René Leibovitz, Michel Leiris, Jacques-Henry Levesque, Malkine, Marcenac, Alice Marcoussis, Henri Matisse, Montandon, Morhange, Moussinac, Neitzel, Parisot, Puel, Zdenko Reich, Jacques Rigaut, G.-H. Rivière, Sadoul, Salacrou, Salgues, Savinio, Segal, Van Hecke, Vigorelli, Vischer, Yamanaka. It would also be necessary to specify the extreme dates of each relationship, some brief, others extending until the end of the correspondent's life. Of course, this survey could not say the value of each letter in relation to the work or for literary history. Having been able to read many of them, I assure that a good number of them would deserve publication. In any case, they are indispensable for supporting any discourse on the history of the avant-gardes in the 20th century, on the role of Tristan Tzara at the crossroads of poets and aesthetics (I think of Catherine Dufour's thesis (9)) and, a fortiori, his earthly adventure, witness the use that is abundantly made of it in the biography written by François Buot (10). A part of this correspondence was published, before its entry into Doucet, by Michel Sanouillet in appendix to his thesis on Dada in Paris (11). All the interested parties had given their agreement, with exemplary liberality, and André Breton even went so far as to entrust him with copies of the letters he possessed from Tzara. He was satisfied with the publication, but conceived a certain anger at the journalistic comments and decided from then on that the correspondence addressed to him would only appear fifty years after his death! Subsequently, many researchers have published, commenting on them, various letters now preserved in this Tzara fund. I have drawn up the list in the bibliography, in volume VI of the Complete Works. It would now be necessary to tackle the establishment of a general correspondence of Tzara, which implies, of course, going in search of the thousand letters that he himself addressed to the correspondents listed in this fund... The enterprise would be titanic, requiring knowledge of several languages. But it is not inconceivable for a laboratory of researchers working as a team, at least as I understand it (12). One can see from here what would result from it, if only for the precise knowledge of production relations in the European avant-garde of the twenties!

The Manuscripts

There is perhaps in this taste for collection something that relates to psychoanalysis, as Paolo Scopelliti has shown (13), but, as far as his own writings are concerned, a will to preserve the temporal thickness of the text, to mark all the stages through which it passed, from draft to manuscript proper and to proof sheets to arrive at a certain state, that of publication, which marks only a moment, capital, certainly, but always unfinished, of the poetic work. Let us observe that, without turning the iron and fire against himself and proceeding to the tabula rasa proclaimed by Dada, Tzara could at least have abandoned to their fate the different manuscript states of his writings to keep only the definitive publication. He did not do so, for reasons certainly personal, but also collective: the generation to which he belonged had a high consciousness of the preparatory states of the work and did not throw them in the basket, as we do virtually today in our computers. I was able to say that in a way Tzara was, on the side of the creators, the first partisan of contemporary textology and genetics, the second being Aragon, bequeathing his archives to the CNRS (14). We know well to what pioneering work he devoted himself in publishing the proofs of Alcools, acquired by exchange with Sonia Delaunay, which served him to establish his critical edition of Apollinaire's collection for the Club du meilleur livre and led him to new views on poetic language (OC V). At the initiative of Paul Otchakowsky-Laurens and thanks to Henri Flammarion's editorial choices, the decision was made to publish everything to constitute Tristan Tzara's Complete Works, following the chronological order of appearance in public of the 54 sometimes confidential collections, distributed among several publishers, depriving oneself, unfortunately, of the magnificent illustrations by Arp, Picasso, Matisse, Ernst, Miró, etc. This critical edition could only be accomplished by exploiting the manuscripts of the fund that had just entered the BLJD, carefully put in order by Mlle Zacchi and Mme Prévost. From the publication of the first volume, I indicated to the critics who pretended to be surprised by the care taken in publishing the spontaneous poetic texts of the Dada era, that this edition owed everything to the author himself, more exactly to his concern to preserve all the states of the work, despite adverse circumstances, moves, passage to storage. In short, it is indeed Tristan Tzara who, by the material care he brought to these traces of the text, built his monument, these Complete Works to which I lent a hand as a mason only erects the building conceived on plans by the architect. In other words, these accumulated documents prove that Tzara had a personal conception of Dadaist spontaneity, made of multiple corrections, not semantic but, most of the time, for phonic reasons. Thus, I was able to show, through the notes, that he had conceived a veritable strategy of the variant, relating to poetic necessity and not to a concern for perfection nor to the need to say better. In doing so, he led us to revivify the method of establishing the text, in other perspectives. To the literary positivism postulated by Lanson and his disciples is now opposed the materiality of poetic making. I have tried to account for it as closely as possible, without being able to reproduce in three dimensions the creative process. Most often, one goes from a list of words, thrown on a loose sheet or even on the back of an envelope, to a draft on a sheet folded in four, then to a manuscript text, constantly reworked, both in the first writing campaign and at reading and on successive supports, until the final proofs. It is thus that I was able, at the moment when I was giving the go-ahead for volume III of the Complete Works, to take into account the corrected proofs of Grains et issues, dedicated to René Char on February 8, 1935, aggregated to the Tzara fund in 1979. In the same way, I was able to show all the rewriting work operating by displacement or condensation then by amplification or, on the contrary, reduction of a dream narrative, such as the man with branches in Personnage d'insomnie. It is to be feared that the first-draft notes in pencil, and even the pen writing, will fade with time. This is why I would be tempted to invite our institutions to conceive a database which, besides its preservation function, would provide the reader, in facsimile, with the faithful image of each document, with the innumerable sketches, of an automatic character, accompanying in the margins the conception of the poem. A corollary of collection is cataloging, the establishment of lists, constantly recommenced. It is thus that from the different censuses carried out by Tzara himself on strong paper folders, adorned with his drawings so characteristically automatic, I was able to reconstitute a volume of his poetic criticisms, The Locks of Poetry, and The Power of Images, grouping his writings on art. In short, the collection is never more than a collection of texts scattered in journals. But Tzara had already sacrificed to this rite by constituting three times a poetic anthology: in the collection Poets of Today (Seghers, 1952), Selected Pieces (Bordas, 1947), From the Cup to the Lips (Rome, 1961), and by establishing his own bibliography (Berggruen, 1951). Such preservation of old papers, notably from the Zurich period, has made it possible to do justice to so-called abstract poetry and supposed invented words: more than 80 "Negro poems" (OC I) are transcriptions of African and Malagasy songs collected and published by missionaries. In the same way, I was able to show that Mpala Garoo, the book of poems that was to precede The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine, did exist, in the form of proofs, in the poet's archives who, if he had given up publishing them by reorienting his poetics, had not been able to resolve to destroy them. He would rather have tended to entrust them, here and there, to various solicitors. I was also able to reconstitute a very beautiful "experimental dream" from his surrealist period, Personnage d'insomnie (OC III); the entire file concerning the unique volume of the journal Inquisitions, including the entirety of Tzara's reflection on "The Poet in Society (15)"; bring to light the critical edition of Villon's poems prepared for a Book Club (OC VI, p. 533), and especially the endless work on Villon's anagrams, entitled The Secret of Villon (OC VI), a work to say the least surprising, likely to call into question all received ideas both on the poet of the Testament and on that of The Approximate Man. I privileged for the edition the most completed typewritten state in my opinion, but the place is largely open to other investigations of genetic, textual, hermeneutic type, etc.

The Original Editions, Documents, Photos, Press Clippings

Other riches of the BLJD, it is the quality and quantity of head prints of original editions, its collections of press clippings and, less known, its iconographic fund. On this point, and under the shelf mark TZR 734, the Tzara fund preserves no less than 140 photographs, both small and medium and large format, showing Tzara at various ages, in Romania then in France, on his travels to the Tyrol, Venice or Weimar, in the company of the Dadaists then of the surrealists and his companions of the anti-fascist struggle. But there are also photos of Éluard, Dali, Crevel, Desnos, Man Ray, Buñuel, Reverdy alone. The whole constitutes, as one can imagine, precious documentation for anyone who would want to fix the features of these creators during the twenties or 30s. We already knew the collections of press clippings of Picabia, amply exploited in Michel Sanouillet's thesis already cited, from which I had drawn in turn in a study on the reception of Dada (16). It is now necessary to add those of Tzara, covering the period 1916-1933. Tzara was subscribed to the Swiss Argus then to the French Press Argus. He had not only asked for the clippings concerning his own person, but also everything that mentioned Dada then surrealism. The reader will be struck by the abundance of articles and especially their provenance from all countries. This is to say how useful these clippings are to the researcher to grasp the reception in the press of both movements, but also to fix such a detail on a manifestation, an exhibition, a public sale, the reception given to certain books, even advertising. A simple example, the account of the "first" art exhibition organized by Tzara at the Théâtre Pigalle in 1930, and the scandal it aroused. The systematic and thematic inventory of the factitious collections of Picabia and Tzara has been published by the BLJD team in Mélusine (17). The library already possessed a good number of these magnificent collections elaborated by Tzara with his painter friends, bought by Jacques Doucet: The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine illustrated by Marcel Janco, 25 Poems as well as Cinema Calendar of the Abstract Heart Houses illustrated by Arp. Through the gift of Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage was added Speaking Alone worked with Miró. It is, in my opinion, the most beautiful example of "dialogue through the book" to take up Yves Peyré's expression, and it is not by chance that two of its pages served as poster for the BLJD exhibition at the Sorbonne chapel from April 10 to July 12, 2002, and as cover for its book-catalog (18), so much is it visible that the complexions of the poet and the painter agree there. The emotion is great to be able to hold in one's hands the three small volumes of The Anti-Head each of which is illustrated by Ernst, Tanguy, Miró. While subscribing to the critic's analysis: "Ernst, Tanguy and Miró have pushed in this circumstance the art of dialogue to deepen further, for each the book was a true gestation, the rendering and palpitation of the exact, the preparatory notebooks testify to the scope of maturation, of constant invention that gives free rein throughout the ascent towards the book (19)", for my part, I would speak in this regard of deferred dialogue, since, if the poet discussed with each painter in particular, the poems serving as support for the illustration are well prior to the pictorial composition. To these artistic summits have been added in recent years the head prints, on Japan or Holland paper, sometimes with a double sending by the author, bearing the ex-libris of D.-H. Kahnweiler, bequeathed by Michel Leiris: At High Flame (Picasso), The First (Janco) then The Second Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine (Arp), From Human Memory (Picasso), Meanwhile (Henri Laurens), Cloud Handkerchief (Juan Gris), Speaking Alone (Miró), The Rose and the Dog (Picasso), Without a Blow (Suzanne Léger), Twenty-Five Poems (Arp). And also The Approximate Man, a truffled copy from the Breton collection, or again The Anti-Head (Picasso), The Travelers' Tree (Miró), The Hand Passes (Kandinsky) bequeathed by Tzara's wife, Greta Knutson.

As I have indicated, these original collections constitute the most beautiful part of the BLJD's heritage, certainly the most solicited for exhibitions, to which organizers necessarily have recourse, as we had to do in 1981 for the powerful typography exercise composed by Iliazd, the very rare Poetry of Unknown Words (1949) during the exhibition on the surrealist book at the BPI of the Georges Pompidou Center (20).

Thus the Tzara fund is far from being unknown to researchers and amateurs. For whoever traverses it emerges another image of the poet than that of "the adventurer with fine gestures" that he dreamed of becoming in his youth, another idea of his poetic creation and of his relations with university research: he not only practiced erudition in the manner of medievalists, but also took care to leave future researchers the documentation necessary for their investigations. One gets a more just representation of his poetic activities and of the part he devoted in his life to Dada, which constitutes only a sixth of his work and time. That said, it always seems necessary to me to pursue the regrouping of his collection, not to reconstitute an illusory "High Place of Dadaism" nor a "Tristan Tzara Workshop" as was done for Brancusi, but to perfect the knowledge we have of the poet. It would be necessary to join to it the sound archives, the word and the gesture. For I greatly fear that the recordings of his voice, his reading of his own works, his participation in the broadcasts of the National Committee of Writers on poetry, tend to disappear, if it is not already done, due to the fragility of the magnetic support. Like the marine shallows, these rocks that emerge to the surface of the water, the Tzara fund of the BLJD constitutes a strong massif, in the image of the inner world of the one who secreted it. But let us be reassured, if it is far from having been totally spotted on our portulans, it reserves no danger to whoever ventures to meet it, except pleasure.

HENRI BÉHAR

1. Tristan Tzara, "Note on Negro Art", Complete Works, vol. I, Flammarion, 1975, p. 394.
2. Tristan Tzara, letter to Sacha Pana of No. 2, cited in the Complete Works, vol. I, p. 632.
3. Documentation – Library III, Parts of the Library and Collection Tristan Tzara Paris. Auction in Bern. Kornfeld und Klipstein, Bern, 1968, 70 p. + 10 p. of engravings.
4. Coming from the wife of a former socialist minister who had once reported in Les Cahiers du Sud on Tzara's essay on the situation of poetry.
5. The definitive inventory having been approved by all parties on November 7, 1972.
6. See the corresponding catalogs, very precisely: Modern Paintings on November 20, 1988, Primitive Arts on November 24, 1988, From the Library of Tristan Tzara on March 4, 1989.
7. On the circumstances of this acquisition, see: François Chapon, "The Literary Library of Jacques Doucet", Bulletin du bibiophile, I, 1980, p. 78.
8. I quote Tristan Tzara in the edition of his Complete Works published by me in 6 volumes, from 1975 to 1991.
9. Catherine Dufour, The Literary Cosmopolitanism of Tristan Tzara…
10. François Buot, Tristan Tzara, the Man Who Invented the Dada Revolution, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 2002, 474 p.
11. Michel Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, Paris, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1965: crossed correspondences Tzara-Breton and Tzara-Picabia, letters to Tzara from Cliquennois, Dermée, Guillaume, Max Jacob, Reverdy, Soupault, Zayas.
12. With the help of G. Doca I recopied and published commenting on the correspondence in Romanian or French by Ion Vinea, Fondane, Costin, Pana, etc. in "The Romanian Friends of Tristan Tzara", Manuscriptum, (Bucharest), 1981, No. 2, pp. 156-166, No. 3, pp. 131-145, No. 4, pp. 168-182; 1982 No.1 pp. 160- 165, No. 2 pp. 160-166. (See extracts in "Tristan Tzara Beacon of the Romanian Avant-Garde", Revue de littérature comparée, vol. 57, January-March 1984, pp. 89-104. See also Georges Baal and Henri Béhar: "The correspondence between Hungarian activists and Tzara; 1920-1932 in Proceedings of the Colloquium on Franco-Hungarian Cultural Relations from the 1920s to the Present organized in Paris from February 2 to 4, 1989. Cahiers d'Études hongroises, No. 2, Paris, 1990, pp.117-133.
13. Paolo Scopelliti, "Tzara and Breton Collectors", Mélusine No. XVII, 1997, p. 219-232.
14. See Aragon, "Of a Great New Art: Research", collective, Flammarion, 1979, pp. 5-19.
15. See: From Surrealism to the Popular Front, Inquisitions, facsimile of the journal augmented with unpublished documents presented by Henri Béhar, CNRS Editions, 1990.
16. Henri Béhar, "Should Dada Have Been Shot?", Les Nouveaux Cahiers, No. 5, June 1966.
17. Mihaela Bacou, Marilyne Leducq, Florence Palou, "Directory of Picabia-Tzara Press Clipping Collections". Mélusine, No. V, 1983, pp. 313-344. The 18 volumes of Tzara's clippings are found under shelf mark TZR 861.
18. Yves Peyré, Painting and Poetry. The Dialogue Through the Book, 1874-2000. Paris, Gallimard, 2001, 270 p.
19. Yves Peyré, op. cit., p. 145.
20. See the catalog of this exhibition in Mélusine, No. IV, pp. 337-380.