33 - René CHAR. Three letters addressed to Henri Michaux. Paris, November 10, 1962; L’Isle-sur-Sorgue, January 23, 1965, and September 18, 1981.

René CHAR. Three letters addressed to Henri Michaux. Paris, November 10, 1962; L’Isle-sur-Sorgue, January 23, 1965, and September 18, 1981. 3 signed autograph letters: 1 page in-8 for the first two and 2 pages in-8 for the third; 3 envelopes, the first marked “c/o Galerie Cordier.” Three letters of thanks from René Char, an admirer of Michaux’s pictorial and literary work: the poet expresses his fascination with the “seismic” ink of the author of *Apparitions*. After visiting the exhibition at Daniel Cordier’s gallery: “I will live on for a long time yet with your great, inspired drawings—which you have led me to my deepest refuge, the one one reaches only once or twice in a lifetime. Thank you—a thank you rarely spoken.” “Thank you for being who you are to us who love you. Thanks to you and your ‘avant-pays,’ the great, silent Dentellière facing us has something essential to tell us now—something that could not have been conveyed any other way.” After reading *Affrontements*: “No longer questioning ‘the great Voice,’ having heard it from beyond and from nothingness, no longer applying ‘the blindfold,’ having turned and turned the night and its babbling secrets over and over to my heart’s content, I love to find you again like this, to rediscover you anew with your piercing, pirate-like writing—but that of a consoling pirate, cutting through nets and unsettling the rulers, while men’s structures crumble to the ground. I have barely emerged from *Affrontements*. A reading without a script or a prompter in his box, it offers itself—in tears—to unite fire with light by denying it… A block of tantric lava from which movement has not yet entirely departed, an underlying movement of writing and drawing. And silence and speech here, as you so peremptorily put it, do without theater. So much the better. The inner ear is attuned solely to its own reception, to its own suffering. My only desire was to thank you with affection and thoughtful admiration. And now I have let myself be carried away in the wake of your ink, your seismic ink!” Henri Michaux undoubtedly received these three enthusiastic letters with a certain reserve because, as Jean-Pierre Martin points out, he shunned social gatherings and had little fondness for the company of his fellow poets. In the case of René Char, “if Henri Michaux had wanted to avoid him forever, he would not have gone, one day in 1976, to the Point Cardinal: it was for the opening of an exhibition of Char’s poems illustrated by Wifredo Lam. An exceptional occasion.” The opening in question was that of *Contre une maison sèche* (see no. 39).