Paul Léautaud

Early life

He was born in Paris, and abandoned by his mother soon after birth. His father, Firmin Léautaud, who begrudgingly brought him up, was a prompter at the Comédie-Française, and because of him Paul first became familiar with the world of the theater.

As others viewed him

According to Nancy Mitford in The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (p. 251), Leautaud was an eccentric literary critic and diarist who said he loved cats and dogs more than people, lived on nothing but potatoes and cheese for eight years, and never travelled further than Calais.

Mavis Gallant described him in her Paris Notebooks (Toronto: Stoddart, 1988):

He was mean, slanderous, and cruel; he could also display generosity and great delicacy in his judgments. Even at his most caustic there was a simplicity, an absence of vanity, rare in a writer. He talked about death and love, authors and actors, Paris and poetry, without rambling, without moralizing, without a trace of bitterness for having fallen on hard times. He was sustained, without knowing it, by the French refusal to accept poverty as a sign of failure in an artist. Léautaud, at rock bottom, still had his credentials. His monumental diary "Journal Littéraire", which he kept for over 50 years, can without exaggeration be described as the greatest study of character ever written. (p. 143)

He would not stand for any form of grandiloquence where writing was concerned, and words such as "inspiration" were shot down rapidly: "When I see my father dying and write about his death I am not inspired, I am describing." Asked why he had been at his dreadful father's deathbed at all, he said, "It was only curiosity. Cu-ri-o-si-té." (p. 145)

He hated the pompous Comédie Française delivery and thought nothing of bawling objections in the middle of a classical tirade. If no notice was taken of his protest, he simply went to sleep. When he admired a play he put off writing about it because he wanted to take time and thought. As a result the best productions were never mentioned. Often he wrote about something else entirely (his most quoted non-review is about the death of a dog called Span) with one dismissive sentence for play and author. (p. 146-7)

He had been with Mercure de France for most of his adult life. Only once had he ever thought of going, and that was in 1936, when Georges Duhamel became director and committed several sacrilegious acts: he got rid of the gas lamps and had the offices wired for electric light; he installed one telephone, ordered one typewriter and hired one female secretary. Léautaud, who preferred candlelight to any other, was bothered by the reforms: "Why change something that suits me?" (p. 147-8)During a radio interview he remarked that he had always wanted a pair of checked trousers. A young boy immediately wrote that his father, a tailor, would be glad to make them for nothing. Léautaud took it as an insult and snapped, on the air, "Do these people imagine I go around bare-arsed?" (p. 148)He wanted to say before he died, "I regret everything," words, he said, "that will sum up my life." The last thing he did say before dying in his sleep was, "Foutez-moi la paix," ["Leave me the hell alone."] which was more typical. (p. 151)

Works

1900 : Poètes d'Aujourd'hui [1880-1900], morceaux choisis accompagnés de notices biographiques et d'un essai de bibliographie, with Adolphe van Bever, Mercure de France :

Original edition (1900):

Poets in the second edition (1908)

Poets in the third edition (1929):

1903 : Le Petit Ami, Société du Mercure de France

1926 : Le Théâtre de Maurice Boissard : 1907-1923

1928 : Passe-Temps, Mercure de France

1942 : Notes retrouvées (Imprimerie de Jacques Haumont, Paris) : « Lundi 25 août 1941. En triant de vieux papiers, je retrouve une série de notes que j'avais bien oubliées. Je ne sais plus si je les ai utilisées, ni si elles se trouvent à leur place dans mon "Journal". Je les regroupe ici par ordre de dates (de 1927 à 1934). »

1943 : Le Théâtre de Maurice Boissard - 1907-1923 - avec un supplément

1945 : Marly-le-Roy et environs, Éditions du Bélier

1951 : Entretiens avec Robert Mallet, Gallimard

1954 à 1966 : Journal littéraire 19 volumes

1956 : In Memoriam

1956 : Lettres à ma mère, Mercure de France

1956 : Le Fléau. Journal particulier 1917-1930, Mercure de France

1958 : Amours

1958 : Le Théâtre de Maurice Boissard : 1915-1941 (tome 2)

1959 : Bestiaire, Grasset

1963 : Poésies

1964 : Le Petit ouvrage inachevé

1966 : Lettres à Marie Dormoy, Éditions Albin Michel, réimprimé en 1988.

1968 : Journal littéraire, Choix par Pascal Pia et Maurice Guyot

1986 : Journal particulier 1933, présenté par Edith Silve, Mercure de France

2001 : Correspondance de Paul Léautaud. Tome 1, 1878-1928 recueillie par Marie Dormoy

2001 : Correspondance de Paul Léautaud. Tome 2, 1929-1956 recueillie par Marie Dormoy

2004 : Chronique poétique, Éditions Sigalla

2012 : Journal particulier 1935, présenté par Edith Silve, Mercure de France

Further reading

Journal of a Man of Letters, translated by G.Sainsbury, Chatto & Windus 1960.

Lost Illusions: Paul Leautaud and his World by James Harding, Allen & Unwin, 1974.