MALRAUX (André). - Lot 154

MALRAUX (André). Born in Paris (1901-1976). Writer and politician. Committed intellectual. Minister of Culture. L.A.S. "André Malraux" to the essayist EMMANUEL BERL. S.l.n.d, July 23 [1952]. 1 page 1/2 in-8 to his address [19bis avenue Victor Hugo. Boulogne S/Seine]. BELLE ET INTÉRESSANTE LETTRE AMICALE À UN INTIME DE LONGUE DATE, LESSAYISTE EMMANUEL BERL QUI AVI DÉDEDÉ SON PREMIER OUVRAGE " MORT DE LA PENSÉE BOURGEOISE " EN 1929 : ...J'ai donc fait une réchute de plus. It's getting tiresome. Anyway... For Volume III [of LHistoire de lEurope, Gallimard, 1951], I hope the [press] service has been done properly (I obviously haven't seen it). If not, give a call to Beuvet, who will be at my place from August 1st... He continues with the autobiographical novel "Sylvia" that Berl had just published, also with Gallimard: ...I don't find what you say about Sylvia discouraging. I've always thought that the strange barrier between you and the public would break down one day. Why not on this book, which you seem to be obsessed with, and which intersects with so many important things in you? No doubt the barrier will fall by a kind of natural decay, coinciding with a promotion board (somewhere in hell); still, it's good to help the dead wood fall... As for politics!... Journalist and essayist Emmanuel Berl (b. 1892, Le Vésinet, near Paris) frequented the Surrealists, in particular Aragon, and his former classmate from the Lycée Carnot, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, with whom he published a short-lived periodical "Les Derniers jours", then contributed to Georges Valois's Cahiers bleus. In 1928, he met André Malraux and dedicated Mort de la pensée bourgeoise (Grasset, 1929), a pamphlet denouncing contemporary conformist intellectual thought, to him. In 1932, he launched the weekly Marianne, then Pavés de Paris, which he ran until 1940. Successively favorable to Pétain and hostile to national revolution, he broke with Vichy and went into exile in Corrèze in July 1941, where he was joined by Bertrand de Jouvenel, cartoonist Jean Effel and André Malraux and his partner Josette Clotis. After the war, he gave up politics to devote himself to writing autobiographical works. In 1967, he was awarded the Grand Prix de littérature by the Académie Française, and was a close friend of Malraux, who reproached him for his lack of political will: "Your relationship with politics is bad because you don't want anything" [Tant que vous penserez à moi, in collaboration with Jean d'Ormesson, 1968, p. 60], Malraux told him. Nevertheless, the two writers struck up a lasting friendship. In interviews with Patrick Modiano at the end of his life, Berl confided to Modiano the reasons for the longevity of his beautiful, intellectualized friendship with Malraux: "I think there's a link between his metaphysics and mine, without which we wouldn't have been able to put up with each other for so long, so many years, so many hours. There's an obsession with the divine felt as absence, which you have to think about all the time without ever talking about it...".