ARAGON (Louis). Autograph letter signed to... - Lot 48 - Osenat

ARAGON (Louis). Autograph letter signed to Denise Kahn. Paris, January 1924. 4 pp. in-8. " ... You will have been told LE BANQUET LOUIS DE GONZAGUE-FRICK [the poet Louis de Gonzague-Frick had presided over a banquet in honor of the symbolist poet Paul-Napoléon Roinard on January 12, 1924, at the Closerie des Lilas], and Madame Aurel [the woman of letters and salonnière Aurélie de Faucamberge, known as Madame Aurel], etc. I did not want to stay, it was not possible that day to put up with the fools, nor to yell at them, nor even to put up with my friends in a group. Everybody took it very badly, we don't like these cowardly ways. However, I had good reasons... what reasons, by the way, I ask you a little what? Well, I forgot. But good reasons, quite bad reasons. Funny evening that followed: Monday Paris has a hypocritical face. I have been, by the way, shall I tell you where I have been? It doesn't matter to you. At midnight, NOLL MEETS ME AT THE NAPOLITAN, MAKING SMALL POEMS OF THE KNOWN KIND [writer and journalist Marcel Noll, who met André Breton's group through Denise Kahn who had known him in Strasbourg]. All fire, all flame. He was delighted with his evening, "You are wrong not to stay". Maybe I was wrong not to stay. It's since that evening that I have this mania of having someone with me all the time. That was the only event of the week, imagine that. The other days dragged on and on. LIMBOUR HAS REPEATED [the writer and art critic then close to the Surrealists Georges Limbour]: he works eight hours a day doing sums and checking in an insurance company. DESNOS moves in on Sunday on rue Thérèse. ANDRE [BRETON] IS ALWAYS VERY FRIENDLY WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD: IT DOESN'T GIVE HIM MUCH AMUSEMENT FOR HIS POLITENESS. I have tried cinema as others have tried cocaine. It is a drug that does little more than make you sleep, besides the fact that you can always think of something else with the shadow and the music. FRANCIS PICABIA WRITE TO ME FROM CANNES TO ASK ME FOR A PREFACE FOR HIS BOOK: on a photo that he encloses he is of an elegance! I RECEIVE FROM ROME A NOTE FROM ELUARD, VERY SENTIMENTAL. HIS PORTRAIT BY CHIRICO MUST BE COMPLETED, he gives his address in Chamonix. Here are the facts: great adventures for ardent hearts, pay (January 1924). And above all on all the department stores is spread twice as high as Citroën [Louis Aragon framed the name of this brand with its chevron logo] on the boulevards the magic word White or White [he calligraphed the words "white" in the image of luminous advertising displays]. White everywhere, my beautiful dominoes. A good day, a bad day: it's all equal, singularly so, isn't it? Write to me, Denise, so that I can write to you, without that... but today I would copy for you some poems from La Quadrature de l'amour [Henry Bataille's collection] which I reread yesterday and which are all that distracts me for the moment with a few verses from HUGO. I don't have the book at hand. So I'm going to go for a walk, I don't know where or how, to try to catch a glimpse of a character like BENJAMIN PERET: it's always that. Everything goes, you see, as if my mind were entirely dispossessed of the rest of itself. What is it that has nested there? A sort of destructive little animal that jumps incessantly from one bar to another of the cage. They say that the ministry will fall. Give my regards to George... Hello! I'm listening." A TIME CLOSE TO THE SURREALISTS, GERMAN TRANSLATOR, DENISE KAHN (1896-1969) was the cousin of André Breton's first wife, Simone, and was successively the wife of Dr. Georges Lévy (1921) and then of the writer, philosopher and sociologist Pierre Naville (1928). She was an ardent supporter of the ideas of Leon Trotsky, whom she met in the early 1930s. DENISE KAHN INSPIRED A CRAZY LOVE TO LOUIS ARAGON WHO WOULD EVOKE HER UNDER THE FEATURES OF BERENICE IN HIS NOVEL AURELIEN (1944). Joined: an autograph letter signed by Charles Hugo, and 2 autograph letters signed by Jules Massenet.