Marcel JOUHANDEAU (1888-1979). Autograph manuscript... Lot 452

Marcel JOUHANDEAU (1888-1979). Autograph manuscript of a speech, 1967; 11pages in-8 with erasures and corrections. Speech delivered at a banquet at the Senate, January 21, 1967. In it, Jouhandeau humorously analyzes his personality. "It seems paradoxical to me that I should be called upon this evening to preside over a banquet which brings together societies concerned with giving young people a sporting culture, I who, from my tenth year, at my father's request, had to be excused from gymnastics and who have never been interested in tennis, soccer or boxing. [...] I am no less a staunch supporter of today's concern for the physical development of young people. [...] in spite of the contempt in which I have held my muscles, I am aging quite cheerfully". He recalls his debilitated childhood and fragile youth. It was in 1920, "when I was enthusiastically welcomed by the group of N.R.F. writers, Jacques Rivière, André Gide, Roger Martin du Gard, Marcel Proust, Jean Schlumberger, that, freed from the anguish of nurturing a perhaps presumptuous vocation, confident in my talent, supported by a certain number of readers, I blossomed physically. [...] Starting from nothing, a butcher's son from the most modest department in France, I was in no way predisposed to the destiny that was - as if by surprise or by dint of obstinacy - mine. On the other hand, I never saw myself as a writer. I've always wanted to be a teacher. Teaching young people was my most certain vocation. Describing never seemed like a profession to me. I wrote the way a civil servant climbs mountains on vacation or spends his evenings studying astrology. For thirty-seven years I taught French and Latin at the Pensionnat de Passy. Jouhandeau then examines his work: "If I have the greatest concern for expression, for style, and if my passion is the knowledge of the human being, it is without literature, without concession to literature [...] I willingly pass for a moralist, with this nuance that if I advocate as much as possible the search for the sublime, it is by attaching more importance to the elegance of the heart, to the moral than to any morality or conformism. [...] The hallmark of my temperament and character is optimism, an irreducible and unconditional optimism based on a pact of love between the Eternal and Man"...