Lot n° 109
Estimation :
8000 - 10000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 26 000EUR
André BRETON et Philippe SOUPAULT.
Correspondence addressed to Nelly Kaplan. 1954 - 1965.
Meeting of 16 signed autograph letters and 2 autograph poems of 31 ½ pages in various sizes, 11 envelopes, modern red half morocco box.
Loving correspondence addressed by the authors of Champs magnétiques many years after their break-up, to their common muse, the filmmaker and writer Nelly Kaplan (1931-2020): it includes eight letters in the hand of André Breton as well as eight letters and two autograph poems by Philippe
Soupault.
Born into a Jewish family from Russia established in Buenos Aires, Nelly Kaplan had settled in Paris in 1953. Soon afterwards she became Abel Gance's assistant, with whom she developed the Magirama film process. This technique attracted the attention of André Breton at the very beginning of 1957: "I suppose it is for a laugh that you are afraid to disturb me. I like to see your writing, I like the way you speak, and I don't frown, on the contrary, at the little hesitations you may have in writing in a language other than your own - always charmingly, by the way," he wrote to her on 5 January.
Breton announces at the same time his contribution to the homage to Abel Gance and mentions L'Art magique, of which he has just finished "one of the most sensitive pages": "It was a question of appreciating the clearly unfavourable reactions of ethnologists and sociologists to the very idea of a magical art.
Their first meeting was to take place the next day, the day of the "Feast of the Queens". It was, according to the young filmmaker, the beginning of "a dazzling friendship in love": "I don't know which way you led me this morning; Breton wrote to her the same day, all of this is strangely set in a décor that I could believe I had dreamed of: what do these statues have to do with it, which are in all the books, and that your presence, your existence burn in my eyes almost without leaving any ashes? [...] You know that I can hardly hold your gaze for a few seconds because I get marvelously lost in your eyes. [...] I see on the sly, in pure vertigo, the splendid curve of your body when you walk beside me, I see the passionate spirit that inhabits it. I worship them indiscriminately, I wonder what this exorbitant, totally intoxicating flower is doing in my path..."
During the seven months that followed, Breton sent her a number of passionate letters: "You see, there is no doubt that you are on your way, fully committed and with the star on you there too. [...]
But there is this vocation that takes you away from me and that I love, because it is yours. I would never forgive myself for having thwarted it in any way. That would be an absurdity that revolts me. I want you to be triumphant in every respect.
Do not misunderstand what I am saying. If I were to lose you, I would have lost everything; if I were to renounce you, even out of humility, I would at the same time renounce myself, everything that has conditioned me for ever" (January 19).
At the end of July, a tyre seems to sound the death knell of the passion: "I think of that lamp, sister of the one with the silver beak that glides over the Seine and which has been placed between us this morning with such gravity. I see the protagonists that it illuminated blind them, two of whom had lost sight of each other in their youth and who are back again, without it being possible to specify anything about their relations, which were certainly intimate, if only by the look they once had for this lamp with the silver beak (which they were then alone in having. I think of the formula so beautiful, but also so mysterious - who will explain it? [...] Here they are, I said, and here they are, as if gathered, as if gathered into themselves by the gaze of another, to whom they grant insight and, if necessary, even more clairvoyance. And Lautréamont's lamp is therefore you, on which they all risk burning their wings, since they still have some, without being able to go so far as to blame themselves in depth for putting this lamp above everything [...]. Inextricable situation... [...] Nelly, my love, I don't want to lose you. Your blood and your sap flow into my heart."
It is around Philippe Soupault that the couple was to fall out soon after. A quarrel at the Café de la Paix signified the rupture.
"I loved you, Nelly, with all the violence of which I am capable. You had heard of this violence, it didn't take you too far, perhaps that's even what attracted you to me a little. As long as you did not refuse to feed it passionately, you know very well that I was not fabricating, or rather that the whole top of the fable was YOU" (July 30).
The very morning of this letter, Nelly Kaplan had brought him his correspondence "in the state of confetti": "I had no more eyes to see you this morning than I did yesterday at
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