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André Breton écrivait à Alain Bosquet de New-York en 1942 : "Rien ne m'est plus précieux que de vous savoir tout près, dans cette ville." Saint-John Perse, en 1959 : "Vous étiez fait, mon cher Bosquet, pour vivre aux grandes époques de mutation littéraire, qui ne sont pas toujours les plus perceptibles. Votre combativité et votre sagacité y auraient été pleinement à leur aise." Laissons Paul Morand conclure, en 1972 : "Vous êtes un grand seigneur ; rien de nouveau, mais plus que jamais." Dans ce premier volume de ses souvenirs littéraires, Alain Bosquet, qui a connu les écrivains les plus rares et les plus marquants, évoque ses rencontres, notamment avec Maurice Maeterlinck, Thomas Mann, Saint-John Perse, Henri Michaux, Jean Paulhan, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Jorge Luis Borges, Jean-Paul Sartre. Il parle aussi de ses rencontres avec lui-même.
273 pages, Paperback
First published April 19, 1990
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About the author
Alain Bosquet
181 books13 followersAlain Bosquet, born Anatoliy Bisk (Russian: Анато́лий Биск) (28 March 1919 – 17 March 1998), was a French poet.
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December 9, 2021
Alain Bosquet was a major figure in French letters over the 20th century. (Also a man with a fascinating life story, who was born in Odessa as Anatoly Birsk and fought for three separate Allied armies in World War II.) This book of memoirs, published in 1990 just after his seventieth birthday, presents his accounts of meeting with other famous writers, some of whom were close friends he saw over many years, and others with whom he had only relatively a brief encounter.
The figures with whom Bosquet describes his meetings include Louis Aragon, Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton, Maurice Maeterlinck, Thomas Mann, Henri Michaux, Jean Paulhan, Saint-John Perse, and Jean-Paul Sartre. At the same time, in meeting with these figures at dinners Bosquet also met many other prominent people that are sketched herein, such as Pierre Mendès France. To write these accounts, Bosquet drew both on his own memories and on a diary that he had begun keeping from the early 1950s.
I got this book as part of a project to read everything about Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger), the French poet and diplomat. Other sections I only gave a cursory look at, but I’ll eventually update this review if I read through the whole book. But Bosquet’s memories of Perse are a major part of this book, taking up over 70 pages, more than any other figure. Bosquet met Perse some thirty or forty times over the 1950s and 1960s, besides exchanging many letters over these years.
Perse was a very private figure during his lifetime, but his biography, especially after his exile to the USA in 1940, is fairly well known now thanks to many volumes of his correspondence being published. However, Bosquet gives many details about the man that one could never gain from reading his own letters, such as his habit of retelling the same lengthy anecdotes at dinner parties (which change in the telling each time), his relatively poor English even after many years of residing in the USA, and most amusingly, his obsession with monkeys.
Today it is well understood that Perse painstakingly built up his own myth before his death and fudged the truth about his life. He provided biographical details to the Pleiade volume that were false or gave him an outsized role in events, and he even rewrote lost letters there out of whole cloth and presented them as authentic. Bosquet here was an early commentator on Perse as mythomaniac, and his account of Perse ends with the poignant observation that future generations will have no way of knowing the real man under the mask that the poet so carefully created. The picture that emerges here of Perse is not exactly a flattering one, but at the same time Bosquet’s admiration for the poetry itself – Perse was one of Bosquet’s idols from a very young age – is undiminished.
The figures with whom Bosquet describes his meetings include Louis Aragon, Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton, Maurice Maeterlinck, Thomas Mann, Henri Michaux, Jean Paulhan, Saint-John Perse, and Jean-Paul Sartre. At the same time, in meeting with these figures at dinners Bosquet also met many other prominent people that are sketched herein, such as Pierre Mendès France. To write these accounts, Bosquet drew both on his own memories and on a diary that he had begun keeping from the early 1950s.
I got this book as part of a project to read everything about Saint-John Perse (pseudonym of Alexis Léger), the French poet and diplomat. Other sections I only gave a cursory look at, but I’ll eventually update this review if I read through the whole book. But Bosquet’s memories of Perse are a major part of this book, taking up over 70 pages, more than any other figure. Bosquet met Perse some thirty or forty times over the 1950s and 1960s, besides exchanging many letters over these years.
Perse was a very private figure during his lifetime, but his biography, especially after his exile to the USA in 1940, is fairly well known now thanks to many volumes of his correspondence being published. However, Bosquet gives many details about the man that one could never gain from reading his own letters, such as his habit of retelling the same lengthy anecdotes at dinner parties (which change in the telling each time), his relatively poor English even after many years of residing in the USA, and most amusingly, his obsession with monkeys.
Today it is well understood that Perse painstakingly built up his own myth before his death and fudged the truth about his life. He provided biographical details to the Pleiade volume that were false or gave him an outsized role in events, and he even rewrote lost letters there out of whole cloth and presented them as authentic. Bosquet here was an early commentator on Perse as mythomaniac, and his account of Perse ends with the poignant observation that future generations will have no way of knowing the real man under the mask that the poet so carefully created. The picture that emerges here of Perse is not exactly a flattering one, but at the same time Bosquet’s admiration for the poetry itself – Perse was one of Bosquet’s idols from a very young age – is undiminished.
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