JEHAN MAYOUX'S NIGHT IN USSEL

par Jean-Luc Peurot

1. Chevalerie is the name of the village where Jehan Mayoux was born on November 25, 1904, near Cherves-Chatelars, in Charente, where his mother and father were teachers. It was a Friday, day of Venus (his grandfather was a stone breaker). No doubt the term of this village predetermined him. "There is nothing more precious in the world than the poetic spirit, and chivalry in feelings." (Charles Baudelaire, letter to Mme Aupick, January 9, 1856). No doubt that his line was, throughout his life, from birth to death, poetry, and that poetic spirit of which Charles B. reproaches his brother Alphonse for being devoid.

At the end of his life, the strategy of avoidance requires disappearing — body and goods: the incineration of the mortal body has to do with the loss of Sade's body. The place, the place without place, the famous "first thicket on the right, where M. de Sade wanted his grave to be dug"[1] strangely resembles this dispersion, this dissemination — this wandering. Does the theme of the tomb, which is dear to us, disappear de facto? Does the cemetery journey fade away? Such an earthly disappearance, some seven decades later, amounts, in our eyes, to the same will to get lost.

It is as if the final dispersion were legitimized a posteriori by the concentration, density, omnipresence of life. Why not advance the term, certainly bold for an atheist as radical as he, of faith, fidelity, belief in poetry and belief in its categorical imperatives?

2. It is not banally childhood that Jehan Mayoux magnifies, but primordial childhood — that with the taste of poetry, which is said to be innocent. It is this innocence that seduces us in him, so far from mawkishness and poetic poetry. It is the imaginary: "The imaginary is one of the categories of the real and reciprocally," a phrase constituting an entire book. What better motto than this book of life?

William Carlos Williams affirms that "The imagination does not have to withdraw from reality, nor from description, nor from an evocation of objects or situations, it has to say that poetry does not falsify the world, it moves it."[2] The great surrealist lineage is not usurped, is not aligned (how, moreover, to align poetry, neither alignable nor alienable — which neither aligns nor alienates?) Human rights, and in their strongest sense for Jehan Mayoux, are also the rights of thought, the rights of poetry. To live as a poet is to be a man in the full sense.

It is an essence that Jehan Mayoux will never renounce, and that is why the poet is admirable. What pushes us to point the finger at this lineage originating in Sade? It is doubtless the constancy, permanence and obstinacy — precisely. The image of incineration and fire refers, in a singular shortcut, to the night and, precisely, to this "sieve of the night," to this night pierced with stars, to this Corrèze night of Ussel.

3. In a letter to René Lourau, dated November 11-13, 1966, Jehan Mayoux writes to him from Ussel: "A confidence: a surrealist state of society is not realizable here and now; there will never be a surrealist state of society: surrealism is not a state, but a movement, a desire."[3] The great word is pronounced: desire. It is a matter of distinguishing, in the transfigured night of Ussel, the silhouette of his friend Hans Bellmer, leaning on the window of the house on avenue Turgot, who, in 1948, realizes his portrait which will be that of the frontispiece of the collection Au crible de la nuit, collection edited at G. L. M. (Hans Bellmer will moreover paint in 1950 a "Sade Corset").

Jehan Mayoux appears in Annie Le Brun's collection Les mots font l"amour with this quote "I give life to an object and it eats for me" (extract from À perte de vue, Ussel, 1958). Indeed, Jehan Mayoux officially belonged to the Surrealist Group for 35 years from 1934 to 1969. He was linked with Yves Tanguy, Benjamin Péret and André Breton. He signs in 1960, with other members of the Group, The Manifesto of the 121 on the right of insubordination during the Algerian war. The courage of thought never left him and will never leave him. The courage of love either, "love that moves the sun and the other stars."

Reading Jean Joubert's book Le Mouvement des surréalistes, or Le fin mot de l'histoire,[4] dedicated moreover "To the memory of Jehan Mayoux," we note that during the last nine years, between 1961 and February 8, 1969 (date of the de facto self-dissolution of the original Group), Jehan Mayoux and Bernard Roger participated in the activities of the Surrealist Group.

4. Bernard Roger, for his part, published a first work, Paris et l'alchimie in 1981, at Alta editions, and a second, A la découverte de l'alchimie. L'art d'Hermès à travers les contes, l'histoire et les rituels maçonniques.[5] In chapter V of this work entitled "History and alchemy," in its second part "The king's fool" (p. 244 to 265) we read: "most of the figures of fools in iconography and mainly in ornamental sculpture. These are (...) in Tulle that one (the character) of a house on Church Square" and, further on, regarding fools "However, we must wait until the 14th century to have historical proof of their existence alongside the kings of France, through texts which are mostly accounts of the royal silverware. We learn in this way that in 1350 the future Charles V, then dauphin, had a fool named Micton or Mitton, while his father, King Jean, had one called master Jehan, both dressed like people of quality."

In the collection La rivière AA, Jehan Mayoux writes: "I met the singular fool who wants to kill time". It is indeed such a desire that has always driven Jehan Mayoux. Master Jehan — pronounce Géant — has the simplicity and modesty of giants. He knows that using his strength would be vain and would be an admission of weakness. He knows the intelligence of restraint, the intelligence of being haughty. He also knows the intelligence of staying away (with its constraints, certainly), while actively engaging, signing collective tracts and participating in meetings and common actions of the Surrealist Group, moving from Ussel to Paris.

5. Jehan Mayoux is indeed this four-season merchant on the Ussel market, this charming and faithful merchant of spring, autumn, summer and winter. "Rrose Sélavy knows the salt merchant well' (Robert Desnos, Rrose Sélavy). Does she know this other Marcel Duchamp well? "The month of October is a bell in the salt box" (Au crible de la nuit). Salt, in alchemical symbolism, is a principle symbolizing wisdom and science. Offered with bread, it constitutes, among many peoples of antiquity, a mark of hospitality, as it is the purifying principle in the unfolding of ancient mysteries. In the alchemical tradition, salt realizes the union, the crystallization, between mercury and sulfur, respectively passive and active principles, of which it operates the synthesis: it is the allegory of the marriage of the king and queen, union effected in the athanor.

And how not to dream of the identity of the fusion principle of love, of the act of love, with the fusion principle of the alchemical operation? Rebis is a symbol used in the 14th century by the faithful of love to designate the son of art, the little king, the golden king or basilisk or phoenix who is born at the end of the alchemical operation.

Jehan Mayoux is one of these faithful of love, these knights of love: the faithful of love or Fedeli d'Amore. "Your place in the shade/And your place in the sun/On the great road I won you/It's you the key/It comes from brick monuments/And insect works/At the sieve of the night".

6. The night, still the night... that welcoming the neighboring and contemporary poet Raoul Hausmann. How not to dream, again, at least of a meeting between the artists of Ussel and Limoges, so far so close, during these thirty years between 1946 and 1971? Raoul Hausmann expresses himself thus:

18. IX. 66

The night
The night in the night
It's the black night
The night
Blackish nocturne

The night [6]

R. H. and J. M. are indeed equals, very high ones. Moreover, Peralta was Benjamin Péret's nickname during the Spanish Civil War. And it is indeed he, Benjamin Péret, who makes the artistic and mental link between Jehan Mayoux and Raoul Hausmann. F. Gaffiot in his "Latin French Dictionary" cites Cicero: "iste vir altus et excellens," that is to say "this man of elevated spirit and superior to contingencies'. Yes, Peralta means very high, very elevated, very deep. The posture of grandeur, of intellectual exigency, to the highest degree, suits Jehan Mayoux so well.

7. Another neighbor then presents himself, coming, on foot, from La Marche. Is it L'Ange, is it this poor Tristan — the first named Jehan, the second, a gentleman from La Marche, known to be the author of the collection Les Amours[7]? According to Pascal Pia, the editor in 1959 at the Cercle du Livre Précieux of L'Escole des Filles, or la Philosophie des Dames, the other presumed author, with Michel Millot, of this licentious work of the 17th century (of 1655 precisely) was Jean L'Ange, with a predestined name, the manuscript being moreover in his hand. Jean L'Ange "was one of the intimates of the poet Tristan L'Hermite, originally from the castle of Solier, in La Marche" and there existed at the same time other Lange, lords of Solier. "Wouldn't L'Ange have been Marchois?" wonders Pascal Pia. Tristan L'Hermite, consumed by phthisis, dedicated a sonnet to him in 1654. L'Escole des Filles was reissued by Auguste Poulet-Malassis, the publisher of Les Fleurs du Mal, two centuries later in 1865 in "Brussels, at the expense of the ladies of rue des Cailles'.

The trial documents teach us in the "First report of the Lieutenant general civil and criminal' that "... after which interrogation given by the said individual who told us his name was Jehan Lange and lived on rue des Roziers at the home of Madame Faret..." The arrest of L'Ange (and this expression would doubtless have pleased the surrealist poet Jehan Mayoux) took place on June 12, 1655 and the sentence on August 7. Is not this branding a sign of distinction, a sign of honor and nobility?

The mark, permanently highlighted on the shoulder, will bring him luck. "A shoulder of afternoon/Asks for the whip/The bark laughs like a mirror/The water repeats with hands of snow/The words must go away/Bare shoulder/Tree of shadow and fire".

*

The anagram of the verb to read is the verb to bind. Beyond the primary link between author and reader, it is permitted to advance that the one with Jehan Mayoux is amplified by his belonging to surrealism. Reading Jehan Mayoux's poems confirms to us that surrealism remains indeed the maddened planet of lyricism, a planet born from the night of time, if indeed lyricism is the receptacle of poetry — at least of that which finds grace in our eyes.

Jehan Mayoux is indeed one of the historical links of this Limousin golden train going, across the centuries, from the troubadours of the 11th-12th centuries, initiators of Occitan and European lyricism, to Tristan L'Hermite in the 17th century and extending to the 20th century. It is to this tradition (from the Latin traditio, from tradere "to hand over, to transmit"), that is to say to this transmission, that it is still a matter of referring. Let us not fear to affirm that Jehan Mayoux has indeed revealed himself as one of its purest guarantors.

    1 — . Legend by Gilbert Lely inscribed on his personal album Iconographie sadiste. ↩     2 — . Le Printemps et le reste, Unes, 2000. ↩     3 — . Letters to René Lourau in La Liberté une et divisible — Critical and political texts, Complete works, vol. V, Ussel, Peralta, 1979. ↩     4 — . Maurice Nadeau, 2001. ↩     5 — . Dangles, 1988. ↩     6 — . Raoul Hausmann, Les cahiers Raoul Hausmann/Cahier 2, p. 72, Musée Départemental de Rochechouart, 1998. ↩     7 — . Les Amours de feu M. Tristan, et autres pièces très curieuses, edited by Gabriel Quinet, at the Palais, in the Galerie des Prisonniers, at the Ange Gabriel in 1662. ↩