CHAPTER 29
Many plans would remain vague until the last and would always be marked by unforeseen developments. But in November 1945 it was Blanchot’s turn to leave Paris, and he would not return to live there for many years. After one or two weeks in Chalon, with his family, he stayed in Grasse in a boardinghouse on the Boulevard Reine-Jeanne, in the upper part of town. At that time he was thinking of moving to somewhere near Monte Carlo for a period. Health reasons were not without influence on this choice.
The beginning of January indeed found him on the outskirts of the principality, at Villa Margot in Beausoleil, in a dwelling that seems to have disappeared today. This new arrangement was not definitive—none ever was. For the whole period up to 1957, during which he lived (demeure) in the south, Blanchot would come up to Paris frequently but very irregularly, sometimes for months at a time—without counting passing visits to Chalon and some solitary stays in Quain.1
He returned to Neuilly in spring 1946 but was back in Beausoleil by the summer. In November he referred to an imminent move to Èze, where he indeed set up home at the end of the year, with assistance from his brother, in a small house that was charming but still not entirely comfortable. For example, he remained without electricity for several weeks; it was wintertime, and the experience of Èze, where so many récits would be written, thus began in night.
The year 1946 was nonetheless one of intense participation in various journals. Critical activity weighed on Blanchot, but as well as being a contributor to L’Arche, he played a decisive role at Critique, wrote for Saisons and then Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, and even Les Temps Modernes. His position in these numerous journals was clearly due to more than simple respect.
The authors he discussed were less numerous and more carefully selected than during his periods writing for L’Insurgé or the Journal des Débats; these choices set the stage for his championing of aesthetic modernity. Blanchot’s decisive turn was made clear by the presence of Sade, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, the three main figures referred to by Acéphale, Bataille’s prewar journal. His interest for the writers he named “men of blackness” (Sade and Lautréamont, but also Restif and Cyrano), to whom he would dedicate numerous articles, was just as evident in Saisons as in Les Temps Modernes.
Saisons: Almanach des Lettres et des Arts was a luxury review, which appeared irregularly and ephemerally, and was edited by Marcel Arland for the Pavois publishing house. It reproduced the facsimiles of manuscripts, drawings or etchings, and secured high-quality literary and artistic contributions. It would lose this role to the Cahiers de la Pléiade, founded by Paulhan in April, to which Blanchot immediately gave an extract from The Most High, just as he had done for the Cahiers de la Table Ronde. The first issue of this new publication, typeset by Fautrier, featured the names of Gide, Dubuffet, Michaux, Char, and Caillois. Blanchot would give two further articles to these Cahiers, both of them prepublications: a preface for Restif’s Sara, and a text on Kafka that appeared simultaneously in The Work of Fire. To some extent, he therefore played the game of reputation-building and literary publicity in this journal, which also published Bernanos, Chardonne, and Boutang.
The important questions, however, lay elsewhere. Blanchot published little in Les Temps Modernes, but when he did so, it always demanded attention, whether because his signature featured at the head of the article, or due to the length of the texts, or their placement in the journal (his text on Sade, in July 1947, headed up the issue). All this shows that he was able to elicit some appreciation or at least toleration both from Sartre—who had previously slated him—and from Gide, who had replied sharply to the first editorial of Les Temps Modernes.2 Blanchot thus featured in the two reviews that claimed to be the successors of the NRF: L’Arche, whose benefits for him we have already looked at, and the Les Temps Modernes, which at the time was strongly linked to Sartre’s theoretical manifesto on “committed literature” and to Jean Pouillon’s article against the Indochina war, the first in the French press. He was even one of the rare writers able to straddle both journals. He commented on Sartre’s novels in L’Arche the same month as the first issue of Les Temps Modernes appeared. Similarly, at a time when Bataille was far from forgiving toward existentialism, Blanchot (a member of the editorial committee at Critique) was the only writer apart from Leiris (a member of the editorial committee of Les Temps Modernes) who maintained some relationship between the two journals that were the new leading lights of the literary and intellectual field.
The first issue of Critique appeared in July 1946.3 We know how important Blanchot was for Bataille in carrying out his project: “Without Blanchot, and without Éric Weil, I could not have founded the journal,” he said in an interview with the Figaro Littéraire (17 July 1947). Blanchot’s physical distance, however, did not make things easier. He did not even assist with preparing the first issue, in which he features only because he is named as part of the editorial committee, and he initially refused even this. It seems that his role was more advisory and hidden than active or day-to-day. As early as December 1945 when Bataille presented the project to Prévost and Girodias, the shape of the book reviews which formed the entire output of this multidisciplinary review was clear: “We will take as a model the studies by Maurice Blanchot (which are now being published in L’Arche and are collected in Faux pas).” Blanchot would give key articles to Critique, nine over two years, which would complement those from L’Arche and Les Temps Modernes in the collection The Work of Fire.