Paul Éluard (1895-1952)

13 May, 2018 12:53:00

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Paul Éluard, was a French poet and one of the founders of the surrealist movement...

Paul Éluard (1895-1952) - pseudonym of Eugène Grindel

French poet, a founder of Surrealism with Louis Aragon and André Breton among others, one of the important lyrical poets of the 20th century. Éluard rejected later Surrealism and joined the French Communist Party. Many of his works reflect the major events of the century, such as the World Wars, the Resistance against the Nazis, and the political and social ideals of the 20th-century.

I was born to know you

To give you your name

Freedom.

(from Poèsie et Vérité, 1942)

Paul Éluard came from a lower-middle-class background. He was born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel in Saint-Denis, Paris, the son of a bookkeeper, whose wife helped out with the household bills by dressmaking. Éluard became interested in poetry in his youth in Clavadel, a Swiss sanatorium, where he was sent for treatment of tuberculosis. When he returned to France, he joined the army and was badly injured by gas. His first noteworthy volume of poetry was LE DEVOIR EL L'INQUIÉTUDE (1917). During a leave from the service in 1917, he married a Russian woman, Helena Diakonova, known as Gala, whom he had met in Clavadel. Gala inspired several of Éluard's poems published in CAPITALE DE LA DOULEUR (1926), which established his reputation as a poet.

Like André Breton, Aragon, Péret, Soupault and other intellectuals, Éluard emerged from the war disgusted with commonly accepted values of the bourgeois society. He was briefly involved with the Dada movement, which declined in the 1920s as many of its proponents joined the Surrealists. Éluard's early statement in verse of surrealist theories was LES NÉCESSITÉS DE LA VIE ET LA CONSÉQUENCE DES RÊVES (1921). With the painter Max Ernst, who had moved to Paris in 1922, Éluard worked on a cycle entitled Les Malheurs des Immortels, a series of pictures made of scraps of illustrations cut out from old books.

In 1924 Éluard disappeared mysteriously. Rumours of his death were widely circulated and finally accepted as true. After seven months he appeared and explained that he had been on a journey from Marseilles to Tahiti, Indonesia, and Ceylon. The journey was later connected with the loss of his wife Gala to the surrealist artist Salvador Dali, although their affair started much later. Legally Éluard and Gala were divorced in 1932.

L'amoureuse

Elle est debour sur mes paupières

Et ses cheveux sont dans les miens,

Elle a la forme de mes mains,

Elle a la couleur de mes yeux,

Elle s'engloutit dan mon ombre

Comme une pierre sur le ciel.

Elle a toujours les yeux ouverts

Et ne me laisse pas dormir.

Ses rêves en pleine lumière

Font s'évaporer les soleils,

Me font rire, pleurer et rire,

Parler sans avoir rien à dire

(tr. by Samuel Beckett)

She is standing on my lids

And her hair is in my hair

She has the colour of my eye

She has the body of my hand

In my shade she is engulfed

As a stone against the sky

She will never close her eyes

And she does not let me sleep

And her dreams in the bright day

Make the suns evaporate

And me laugh cry and laugh

Speak when I have nothing to say

Freud's theory of the unconscious influenced deeply avant-garde writers; especially the technique of automatic writing was experimented as a method to liberate subconscious from the straitjacket of reason. However, Éluard practiced automatic writing very litte, but it was one of Breton's favorite subjects. From 1924 to 1938 Éluard was a central member of the surrealist group. In 1933 he was expelled from the Communist Party partly due to an article published in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, in which Ferdinand Alquié denounced "the wind of cretinization blowing from the U S S R ".

Éluard cooperated in 1930 with Breton in L'IMMACULATE CONCEPTION, a series of poems in prose, in which they entered into communication with the vegetative life of the foetus and simulated demented states. "Of all the ways the sunflower has of loving the light, regret is the loveliest on the sundial. Crossbones, crosswords, volumes and volumes of ignorance and knowledge. The doe, between bounds, likes to look at me. I keep her company in the glade. I fall slowly from the heights, as yet I weigh only what minus a hundred thousand yards will weigh..."

In the late 1930s Éluard abandoned Surrealistic experimentations as a result of his concern over the Spanish Civil War and political problems. He married in 1934 Maria Benz, known as Nusch; earlier she had been a hypnotist's stooge in a circus and a small-time actress and model. Nusch did not only inspire some of Éluard's most tender love poems, but she also inspired Picasso's portraits, and for a time, she was the artist's mistress.

During WW II, Éluard served in the French army and in the Communist Resistance. To avoid the Gestapo Éluard and Nusch constantly changed addresses. His poems Éluard published under such pseudonyms as Jean du Hault and Maurice Hervent. Éluard's most famous works from these years, 'Liberté' and 'Rendez-vous Allemand', were spread throughout France. Nusch died unexpectedly in 1946, she suffered a stroke and collapsed in the street. Éluard's third wife was Dominique Laure, to whom he dedicated the collection LE PHÉNIX (1951). Picasso, who once had potrayed Éluard as a transvestite, said that he is not going to honor him again by going to bed with his wife.

After the war Éluard was active in the international communist movement in the cultural field. He traveled in Britain, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, and Russia, but not the United States, because he was refused a visa as a Communist. Éluard's idealism and inability to see the reality of the Soviet Union, led the poet to admire Stalin. He saw poetry as an action capable of arousing awareness in his readers, and identified with the leftist struggle for political, social and sexual liberation. "So much fonfusion to stay so pure," wrote Salvador Dali on Éluard in his diary (Diary of Genius, 1966).

Éluard published over seventy books, including poetry, literary and political works, and poetic texts dedicated to such painters as Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso. Painting, like poetry, was for Éluard destined to disseminate truth belonging to both the real and the imaginary. The mission of poetry was to renew language in order to effect radical changes in all areas of human life, "poetry is a perpetual struggle, life's very principle, the queen of unrest." ('Poetry's Evidence', This Quarter; Surrealist Number, September 1932.) In Éluard's love lyrics woman performs as a liberating force. Love, to Éluard, was a kind of revolution of the spirit. In 'L'amoureuse' Éluard exemplified the effects of love, which unites one soul to another. Samuel Beckett, who translated the work into English, did not actually feel close to the Surrealists, but Éluard and Breton were among his friends.

Among Éluard's best-known later works are POÉSIE ININTERROMPUE (1946) and POÉMES POLITIQUES (1948). Éluard died of a heart condition on November 18, 1952 in Charenton-le-Pont. At his funeral, organized by the Party, Picasso was seated next to Dominique. "In fact," she said later, "it was Éluard who was a friend to Picasso, and the other way around only to the extent that Picasso was capable of friendship."

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