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Louis Aragon pronounced [lwi aʁaˈgɔ̃] in French) (October 3, 1897 – December 24, 1982), French poet and novelist, a long-time political supporter of the communist party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.
Early life (1897-1939)
Aragon was born and died in Paris. He was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, believing them to be his sister and foster mother, respectively. His biological father, Louis Andrieux, a former senator for Forcalquier, was married and forty years older than Aragon's mother, whom he seduced when she was seventeen. Aragon's mother passed Andrieux off to her son as his godfather. Aragon was only told the truth at the age of 19, as he was leaving to serve in the First World War, from which neither he nor his parents believed he would return. Andrieux's refusal or inability to recognize his son would influence Aragon's poetry later on.
Having been involved in Dadaism from 1919 to 1924, he became a founding member of Surrealism in 1924, with André Breton and Philippe Soupault. In the 1920s, Aragon became a fellow traveller of the French Communist Party (PCF) along with several other surrealists, and took out his card in January 1927. In 1933 he began to write for the party's newspaper, L'Humanité, in the "news in brief" section. He would remain a member for the rest of his life, writing several political poems including one to Maurice Thorez, the general secretary of the PCF. During the World Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture (1935), Aragon opposed his former friend André Breton, who wanted to use the opportunity as a tribune to defend the writer Victor Serge, associated with Leon Trotsky's Left Opposition.
Nevertheless Aragon was also critical of the USSR, particularly after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1956) during which Stalin's personality cult was denounced by Khrushchev.
The French surrealists had long claimed Lewis Carroll as one of their own, so it came as no surprise when Aragon tackled The Hunting of the Snark in 1929, "shortly before he completed his transition from Snarxism to Marxism", as Martin Gardner puts it. Witness the key stanza of the poem in Aragon's translation:
“ Ils le traquèrent avec des gobelets ils le traquèrent avec soin
Ils le poursuivirent avec des fourches et de l'espoir
Ils menacèrent sa vie avec une action de chemin de fer
Ils le charmèrent avec des sourires et du savon
”
Gardner calls the translation "pedestrian" and reminds the reader of Carroll's Rhyme? And Reason? (also published as "Phantasmagoria"). Gardner finds also the rest of Aragon's writings on Carroll's nonsense poetry full of factual errors, and cautions the reader that there is no evidence that Aragon intended any of it as a joke.
The Commune (1933-1939)
Apart of working as a journalist for L'Humanité, Louis Aragon also became, along with Paul Nizan, editor secretary of the journal Commune, published by the Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists), which aimed at gathering intellectuals and artists in a common front against fascism. Aragon became member of the directing committee of the Commune journal in January 1937, along with André Gide, Romain Rolland and Paul Vaillant-Couturier. The journal then took the name of "French literary review for defence of culture" (« revue littéraire française pour la défense de la culture »). With Gide's withdrawal in August 1937, Vaillant-Couturier's death in autumn 1937 and Romain Rolland's old age, Aragon became its effective director. In December 1938, he called as chief editor the young writer Jacques Decour. The Commune journal was strongly involved in the mobilization of French intellectuals in favor of the Spanish Republic.
Director of Ce soir (1937-1953)
In March 1937, Aragon was called on by the PCF to head the new evening daily, Ce soir, which he was charged with launching, along with the writer Jean-Richard Bloch. Ce soir attempted to compete with Paris-Soir. Outlawed in August 1939, Ce soir was re-opened after the Liberation, and Aragon again became its lead, first with Bloch then alone after Bloch's death in 1947. The newspaper, which counted Emile Danoën among its collaborators, closed in March 1953.
World War II (1939-1945)
In 1939 he married Russian-born author Elsa Triolet, the sister of Lilya Brik, a mistress and common-law wife of Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. He had met her in 1928, and she became his muse starting in the 1940s. Aragon and Triolet collaborated in the left-wing French media before and during World War II, going underground for most of the Nazi occupation.
Aragon was mobilized in 1939, and awarded the Croix de guerre (War Cross) and the military medal for acts of bravery. After the May 1940 defeat, he took refuge in the Southern Zone. He was one of several poets, along with Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard, Jean Prévost, Jean-Pierre Rosnay, etc., to join the Resistance, both through literary activities and as an actual organiser of Resistance acts.
During the war, Aragon wrote for the underground press Les Éditions de Minuit and was a member of the National Front Resistance movement. He participated with his wife in the setting up of the National Front of Writers in the Southern Zone. This activism led him to break his friendly relationship with Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who had chosen Collaborationism.
Along with Paul Eluard, Pierre Seghers or René Char, Aragon would maintain the memory of the Resistance in his post-war poems. He thus wrote, in 1954, Strophes pour se souvenir in commemoration of the role of foreigners in the Resistance, which celebrated the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans de la Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée (FTP-MOI).
The theme of the poem was the Red Poster affair, mainly the last letter that Missak Manouchian, an Armenian-French poet and Resistant, wrote to his wife Mélinée before his execution on 21 February 1944. This poem was then set to music by Léo Ferré.
After the war
At the Liberation, Aragon became one of the leading Communist intellectuals, assuming political responsibilities in the Comité national des écrivains (National Committee of Writers). He celebrated the role of the general secretary of the PCF, Maurice Thorez, and defended the Kominform's condemnation of the Titoist regime in Yugoslavia.
Sponsored by Thorez, Aragon was elected, in 1950, to the central committee of the PCF. His post, however, did not protect him from all forms of criticism. Thus, when his journal, Les Lettres françaises, published a drawing by Picasso on the occasion of Stalin's death in March 1953, Aragon was forced to make excuses to his critics, who judged the drawing iconoclastic. Through the years, he had been kept informed of Stalinist repression by his Russian-born wife, and so his political line evolved.
Les Lettres françaises (1953-1972)
In the days following the disappearance of Ce soir, in March 1953, Aragon became the director of L'Humanité 's literary supplement, Les Lettres françaises. Assisted by its chief editor, Pierre Daix, Aragon started in the 1960s a struggle against Stalinism and its consequences in Eastern Europe. He published the writings of dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Milan Kundera. The monetary loss caused by Les Lettres françaises led to its ceasing publication in 1972. It was later re-founded.
In 1956, Aragon supported the Budapest insurrection, provoking the dissolution of the Comité national des écrivains, which Vercors quit. The same year, he was nevertheless granted the Lenin Peace Prize. He now harshly condemned Soviet totalitarianism, opened his magazines to dissidents, condemned show trials against intellectuals (in particular the 1966 Sinyavsky-Daniel trial). He strongly supported the student movement of May '68, although the PCF was skeptical about it. The crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 led him to a critical preface published in a translation of one of Milan Kundera's book (La Plaisanterie). Despite his criticisms, Aragon remained an official member of the PCF's central committee until his death.
The publisher
Beside his journalist activities, Louis Aragon was also CEO of the Editeurs français réunis (EFR) publishing house, heir of two publishing houses founded by the Resistance, La Bibliothèque française and Hier et Aujourd'hui. He directed the EFR along with Madeleine Braun, and published in the 1950s French and Sovietic writers commonly related to the "Socialist Realism" current. Among other works, the EFR published André Stil's Premier choc, which owed to the future Goncourt Academician the Staline Award in 1953. But they also published other writers, such as Julius Fučík, Vítězslav Nezval, Rafael Alberti, Yánnis Rítsos or Vladimir Mayakovsky. In the beginning of the 1960s, the EFR brought to public knowledge the works of non-Russian Sovietic writers, such as Tchinguiz Aïtmatov, or Russian writers belong to the Khrushchev Thaw, such as Galina Nicolaëva, Anatoli Kouznetsov's Babi Iar in 1967, etc. The EFR also published the first novel of Christa Wolf in 1964, and launched the poetic collection Petite sirène, which collected works by Pablo Neruda, Eugène Guillevic, Nicolas Guillen, but also less known poets such as Dominique Grandmont, Alain Lance or Jean Ristat.
Back to Surrealism
After the death of his wife on June 16, 1970, Aragon came out as bisexual, appearing at gay pride parades in a pink convertible. Drieu La Rochelle had evoked Aragon's homosexuality in Gilles, written in the 1930s.
Free from both his marital and editorial responsibilities (having ended publication of Les Lettres Françaises — L'Humanité 's literary supplement — in 1972), Aragon was free to return to his surrealist roots. During the last ten years of his life, he published at least two further novels: Henri Matisse Roman and Les Adieux.
Louis Aragon died on 24 December, 1982, his friend Jean Ristat sitting up with him. He was buried in the parc of Moulins de Villeneuve, in his property of Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, along his wife Elsa Triolet.
Various poems by Aragon have been sung by Lino Léonardi, Hélène Martin, Léo Ferré, Jean Ferrat, Georges Brassens, Alain Barrière, Isabelle Aubret, Nicole Rieu, Monique Morelli, Marc Ogeret, etc.
Conclusion
Aragon's poetry is diverse and varied. He favoured equally poetic prose and fixed-form verse, to which he brought a renewed sensibility. After a very free early period, marked by surrealism and its subversive language, Aragon returned to more classical forms (measured verse; rhyme, even) clearly inspired by Apollinaire. He felt that this was more in keeping with the national emergency during World War II. After the war, the political side of his poetry gave way more and more to lyricism for its own sake. He never went back on that embrace of classicism. He did however integrate a certain formal freedom with it, sometimes recalling the surrealism of his early days.
As a novelist he encompasses the whole ethos of the Twentieth Century: surealist novel, socialist realism, realism, nouveau roman. Indeed he was one of the founding personalities of the novel of his time.
Bibliography
Novels and Short Stories
Anicet ou le Panorama (1921)
Les Aventures de Télémaque (1922)
Le Libertinage (1924)
Le Paysan de Paris (1926)
Le Con d'Irène (1927, published under the pseudonym Albert de Routisie)
Les Cloches de Bâle ("Le Monde réel", 1934)
Les Beaux Quartiers ("Le Monde réel", 1936, Renaudot Prize winner)
Les Voyageurs de l'Impériale ("Le Monde réel", 1942)
Aurélien ("Le Monde réel", 1944)
Servitude et Grandeur des Français. Scènes des années terribles (1945)
Les Communistes (6 volumes, 1949-1951 et 1966-1967 - "Le Monde réel")
La Semaine Sainte (1958) (published in English in 1959 as Holy Week)
La Mise à mort (1965)
Blanche ou l'oubli (1967)
Henri Matisse, roman (1971)
Théâtre/Roman (1974)
Le Mentir-vrai (1980)
La Défense de l'infini (1986)
Les Aventures de Jean-Foutre La Bite (1986)
Poetry
Le Musée Grévin, published under the pseudonym François la Colère by the Editions de Minuit
La rose et le réséda
Feu de joie, 1919
Le Mouvement perpétuel, 1926
La Grande Gaîté, 1929
Persécuté persécuteur, 1930-1931
Hourra l'Oural, 1934
Le Crève-Cœur, 1941
Cantique à Elsa, 1942
Les Yeux d'Elsa, 1942
Brocéliande, 1942
Le Musée Grevin, 1943
La Diane française, 1945
En étrange pays dans mon pays lui-même, 1945
Le Nouveau Crève-Cœur, 1948
Le Roman inachevé, 1956
Elsa, 1959
Les Poètes, 1960
Le Fou d'Elsa, 1963
Il ne m'est Paris que d'Elsa, 1964
Les Chambres, poème du temps qui ne passe pas, 1969
Essays
Une vague de rêves, 1924
Traité du style, 1928
Pour un réalisme socialiste, 1935
References
^ La Chasse au Snark, Pierre Seghers, Paris 1949
^ The Annotated Snark, edited by Martin Gardner, Penguin Books, 1974
^ Mélinée Manouchian: Manouchian, EFR, Paris 1954
^ French: « Et voilà qu'une fin de nuit, au transistor, nous avons entendu la condamnation de nos illusions perpétuelles... »
^ Ivry 1996, p.134