PICHETTE (Harry Paul, known as Henri). - Lot 244

PICHETTE (Harry Paul, known as Henri). Born in Châteauroux. 1924–2000. Writer, poet, and playwright. Autograph letter signed “Henri Pichette” to “Dear Pierre Brasseur.” Cargèse, July 28, 1948. 6 pp., large in-4 format, in red ink on lined paper. Crossings-out and cuts (preparation for printing?). Enclosed: leaflets (4 pp., 8vo), opening lines of *Apoèmes*. A superb letter to the actor Pierre Brasseur on theater and Antonin Artaud: Following the immense success of his play *Les Épiphanies*—a “profane mystery”—staged in Paris in 1947 with Gérard Philipe, Maria Casarès, and Roger Blin, Henri Pichette is preparing a new theatrical project:...Just a few words—please excuse me (...). I have, in fact, left for Corsica with my wife and our doll-like daughter. A month—albeit a flexible one—and then I’ll have to throw myself back into the Parisian hustle. HERE, in short, the sky and the sea are like a grand married couple. As for me, at a wedding, I naturally tend to get into fights. For one senses, through the sea air, that if one doesn’t set foot in the melting pot of the five continents, nothing will come together; and, at best, we’ll be living on nothing but a little lobster. NOW, a LOBSTER is a lesson in THEATER. The sets are crisp; the grace, clear; the scent, sublime and simple; everything is sharp, pointed, ready to receive the word that must first kill and then shine, in the night of the brain. I say that no one today—not even Artaud—makes theater or inspires it. No one: (...) because Artaud saw for himself alone what would have required at least a thousand pairs of eyes to see. To be 1,000, one must be mad, yet Artaud was not mad. A madman is different. “Molière remains theatrical, whatever the fools may say.” But working on a play now means thinking about as many consecutive and consequential problems as possible. “Inside Theater, Outside” will be my manifesto. Every life must find its joy, then flow toward death, where man is better than a lit chandelier. So I’ve got two or three years ahead of me. But I can, as a friend, promise you something better than a masterpiece nourished by reality (…). That’s because of Paris, which chooses the wrong lamps, and because of the theater, which strives to be understandable. People don’t understand one another any better. I create as much as Molière, as Shakespeare—who are eagles as wise as sparrows. (...) I’m sending you the sea, hungry for spectators: they are the tender yet fiercely combative seaweed... “You had the face I was expecting: that of a young, resonant barbarian well-suited to awakening noise itself,” Max-Pol Fouchet wrote to him in 1948, shortly after the premiere of *Les Épiphanies*, that explosive “profane mystery” that left its mark on French poetry in the second half of the century. Henri Pichette’s work had been premiered by Georges Vitaly at the Théâtre des Noctambules in December 1947, starring Gérard Philipe, Roger Blin, and Maria Casarès. The dramatic poem is divided into five chapters: “Genesis,” “Love,” “War,” “Delirium,” and “Fulfillment.” Pichette imbued this poetic challenge with a sumptuous, baroque language.