MALRAUX (André). - Lot 195

MALRAUX (André). Born in Paris (1901–1976). Writer and politician. Socially engaged intellectual. Minister of Culture. Autograph letter signed “André Malraux” to the essayist EMMANUEL BERL. No place, no date, July 23 [1952]. 1½ pages, in-8 format, addressed to him [19bis avenue Victor Hugo, Boulogne-sur-Seine]. A BEAUTIFUL AND INTERESTING FRIENDLY LETTER TO A LONG-TIME CLOSE FRIEND, THE ESSAYIST EMMANUEL BERL, WHO HAD DEDICATED HIS FIRST BOOK, *MORT DE LA PENSÉE BOURGEOISE*, TO HIM IN 1929: ...So I’ve had yet another relapse. It’s getting tiresome. Never mind... As for Volume III [of *The History of Europe*, Gallimard, 1951], I hope the [press] release was handled properly (I obviously haven’t seen it). If not, give Beuvet a call; he’ll be at my place filling in for me starting August 1... He goes on to discuss the autobiographical novel *Sylvia*, which 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 crumble one day. Why not with this book, which you seem to be struggling with, and which touches on so many important things within you? No doubt the barrier will fall through a sort of natural decay, coinciding with a promotion (somewhere in hell); still, it’s good to help the dead wood fall... As for politics!... The journalist and essayist Emmanuel Berl (born in 1892 in Le Vésinet near Paris) associated with the Surrealists, particularly Aragon, and his former classmate from the Lycée Carnot, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, with whom he published a short-lived periodical, *Les Derniers jours*, and later contributed to Georges Valois’s *Cahiers bleus*. In 1928, he met André Malraux and dedicated *Mort de la pensée bourgeoise* (Grasset, 1929) to him, a pamphlet in which he denounced contemporary conformist intellectual thought. In 1932, he launched the weekly *Marianne*, followed by *Pavés de Paris*, which he edited until 1940. Initially supportive of Pétain and hostile to the National Revolution, he later broke with the Vichy regime and went into exile in Corrèze in July 1941, where he was joined by Bertrand de Jouvenel, the cartoonist Jean Effel, and André Malraux and his partner Josette Clotis. After the war, he abandoned politics to devote himself to writing autobiographical works. In 1967, the Académie française awarded him the Grand Prix de littérature.A close friend of Malraux’s, who criticized him for his lack of political will—“Your relationship with politics is poor because you want nothing” [*Tant que vous penserez à moi*, in collaboration with Jean d’Ormesson, 1968, p. 60]—Malraux had told him. However, the two writers forged a lasting friendship. In the interviews he granted to Patrick Modiano toward the end of his life, Berl confided to him the reasons for the longevity of his beautiful, highly intellectual friendship with Malraux: “ “I believe there is a connection between his metaphysics and mine; without that, we could not have put up with each other for so long—so many years, so many hours. There is an obsession with the divine, experienced as an absence, which one must always think about without ever speaking of it...”