« I NEVER TOOK LITERATURE SERIOUSLY

Review par Dominique Rabourdin

[Dominique RABOURDIN has kindly entrusted us with the complete version of his review published in La Quinzaine littéraire, number 1016 from June 1 to 15, 2010.]

If there is a man who could flatter himself on conducting, like a roller coaster, both his friends and his readers in the opinion they had of him, it is Philippe Soupault, whose very long life cannot be considered without a certain astonishment. Did he not play in the history of surrealism, with Les Champs magnétiques, the "book by which everything begins," the irreplaceable role that no one, and especially not André Breton, thinks of contesting, is he not one of those who, according to the Manifesto's formula, "have performed an act of absolute surrealism," "he who rises with the stars," before being one of the first excluded from the movement? What happened to the very young poet whom Guillaume Apollinaire introduced in 1917 to André Breton by ordering them to be friends? There was friendship. But numerous trials crossed it, sometimes seriously. A biography of Philippe Soupault, especially when it is the first, and even more if it follows countless interviews and volumes of memories and memoirs, cannot fail to address the history, anything but simple, of two men who began by sharing the same ideas, but without measuring in the same way all the demands of their approach, to the point of arriving at an inevitable separation. As long as it lasted less than ten years, very little in the end—it was rich in events and promises, and decisive for the personal trajectory of both men and the entire history of surrealism. But these years were also those of the "bankruptcy of friendships." What happens that so exasperates Breton in his friend's attitude? His "vanishing" into journalism and the novel? He comes to leave blank, in May 1923, four pages of their journal, Littérature, under the title "PHILIPPE SOUPAULT," prelude to the official exclusion of 1926 and the declaration of "total infamy" of the Second Manifesto in 1929. One can understand that Soupault and especially his close ones have still not digested this "frightful harshness."

The reader, if he is not content with beatific admiration, has trouble finding his way. Philippe Soupault is nevertheless the man who makes Aragon and Breton read Les Chants de Maldoror, then will write superbly "It is not for me, nor for anyone (do you hear, Gentlemen, who wants my witnesses?) to judge M. le Comte. One does not judge M. de Lautréamont. One recognizes him in passing and salutes to the ground. I give my life to whoever will make me forget him forever." Breton remembers this in his 1952 Entretiens: "This declaration, in the form of a pact, without hesitation, I would have countersigned it." But it is the same man who, in 1927, in his Introduction to the Complete Works, ridiculously trips over his own feet by taking up fantastical rumors that make him confuse Isidore and Félix Ducasse. Those who loved the total freedom of his poems have trouble finding him in his innumerable journalistic activities and in a first "novel" barely saved by its casualness, Le Bon apôtre.

"He admires Lautréamont. But his intellectual curiosity has led him to very diverse terrains, increasing his culture, and the intense need for realizations, for activity, has led him, in appearance at least, quite far from his starting point. He has already written three novels Le Bon apôtre, A la dérive and les Frères Durandeau. He is preparing essays on the most diverse subjects: Gandhi, William Blake, the decadence of England..." The author of this lucid judgment is... Philippe Soupault in a self-portrait written for an Anthologie de la poésie française edited by him in 1925. In 1927, in his beautiful autobiographical narrative Histoire d'un blanc he will make this strange confession that shows he has not forgotten his passage through Dada and surrealism: "I have no respect for literature and I often despise myself for being what is called on civil registry records a man of letters." 40 years—and some dozens of books later—he has not changed when he declares to Jean-Jacques Brochier, for the Magazine littéraire: "I have never taken literature seriously and I mock posterity. I have forbidden the reissue of my books." A turn begins in 1969: "I the undersigned Philippe Soupault declare by this present that I couldn't care less about my literary works and their reissue. Also in good logic and in law, I give my friend Lydie Maria Lachenal carte blanche to deal with any publisher who suits her for the publication of all the works I have written or that I may have written before my death." In 1980, finally in his interviews with Serge Fauchereau, Vingt mille et un jours: "I am very negligent regarding my writings. I have never managed to take myself seriously, you know... Also incapable of remembering what I have written... So I feel capable neither of the courage to reread my literary reviews nor my reportages nor the tales I published formerly. Too bad or so much the better. I cannot judge. And then, another weakness, I don't like and don't know how to correct my proofs. Nor my errors..." For here is indeed THE great problem of this biography: Philippe Soupault, most often in all good faith, is formidably imprecise. He lived his memories: perhaps, by dint of repeating them, he has further deformed them. Example among so many others, which it would be tedious to enumerate: in Profils perdus, in 1963 (already!), his memory makes him take the famous "Barrès trial" of May 1921, as a consequence (!) of the scandal unleashed by the "cadaver" published at the death of Anatole France three years later, in October 1924.

In the days following Breton's death (September 28, 1966), his emotion is perceptible. It gradually transforms into a settling of accounts. Souvenirs, the very approximate text he sends to Paulhan's NRF for its tribute issue, must be largely cut. "It seems that the exercise was only cathartic, the most virulent passages having been eliminated, by their author, before publication," advances Béatrice Mousli. There remain proofs partly unpublished that she quotes extensively without taking the trouble to distinguish what was published from what was not. She ignores—or does not judge it useful to recall—that these cuts were made, on Soupault's initiative (!) and after being submitted to him, by one of Breton's trusted men, José Pierre, who had just prefaced Futurisme et Dadaïsme, as she also ignores the meticulous clarification published shortly after by José Pierre and two of his surrealist friends, Gérard Legrand and Jean Schuster. In their tract entitled Holà! while saluting "the poet he sometimes was" they go so far as to speak, regarding his latest declarations, of an "inextricable jumble of false testimonies, debile judgments and chronological confusions of the worst kind." This to give an idea of some of the problems posed by the character whose first biography is proposed to us.

Before her biography of Soupault, Béatrice Mousli wrote those of Valery Larbaud and Max Jacob, and, (with François Laurent), a remarkable reference work on the Éditions du Sagittaire, of which Larbaud was one of the most important advisors and Soupault one of the first directors—with Léon Pierre-Quint—and, in this capacity, the publisher of Breton and the surrealists. She evaluates well Soupault's editorial work and knows the "network" that allowed him to publish Joyce, Fitzgerald, Gomez de la Serna, Thomas Mann and Gorky. But she does not have on surrealism the knowledge that one would be entitled to expect from the author of the biography of one of the principal initiators of the movement. Even if she is not always duped by the liberties taken by Soupault with history, one cannot say that she strives to reestablish the truth, an insoluble problem if one knows that the family had already opposed, at his death, the rectification of the errors that abound in the last—posthumous—volume of his Mémoires de l'oubli. She too often contents herself with taking up the history of the great events of dadaism and surrealism—including those in which Soupault did not participate—in their "approved" version and in her desire to give Soupault back the place that has too often been denied him she adds some errors of her own. To make him "Breton's oldest friend" (And Fraenkel? And Hilsum? And Vaché?), is to make some small arrangements with history. The rest is in keeping... Detail errors, hasty or second-hand references, documents reproduced without title nor date nor signatories, with only the indication of the Paris 3 site, which is at least casual when it concerns a key document in the history of surrealism like Au Grand jour! published in 1927 in pamphlet form by Aragon, Breton, Eluard, Péret and Unik. She too juggles with years: It is simply not possible to write that when Soupault returns to Paris in 1945 Aragon and Breton are "already at work"... But to affirm that Crevel's suicide "is also an ultimate revolt against Breton and his acolytes" would have outraged Soupault first, and says much about her feelings toward Breton.

At the beginning of the sixties, the questionable attribution of the title "Prince of poets" to Jean Cocteau their common enemy provoked a rapprochement between Soupault and Breton and his young friends. After Breton's death, Soupault multiplies in the press and begins to write his memories. Béatrice Mousli takes up some of the allegations, repeated with obstinacy and against evidence by "the only founding father still living," on the importance of Pierre Janet's research on automatism for the writing of Les Champs magnétiques, on Nadja patient of the same Janet, on an appointment with Nadja where Soupault, at her request, would have replaced Breton... She takes the trouble neither to verify them nor even to mention that they have been refuted by Marguerite Bonnet in the critical apparatus of Breton's works in the Pléiade, by Paule Thévenin and by Jean Schuster in his long and very measured Lettre différée à Philippe Soupault: "However fantastical your testimony may be, it is that of a poet," he concluded with a sort of affection. Béatrice Mousli closes the Nadja chapter with this sentence that leaves one dreaming: "In fact, five months after their meeting, Léona-Nadja is interned at Sainte Anne where she will die in January 1941."

Such approximations cast a shadow over a book that necessarily leaves one unsatisfied. By dint of prudence, by dint of not wanting to contradict, despite his "legendary lack of seriousness," the curious witness that Soupault was and of contenting oneself too often with long quotations from his own books, one misses the profoundly endearing man, the great poet he was, constrained to live by writing too much and too quickly, at the risk of losing himself in this "literature" that he had so violently denounced. Soupault's numerous friends defended him with passion. It is enthusiasm and passion that this very prudent—and approximate—biography lacks.