Lucien Scheler

Lucien Scheler (1902 - 23 April 1999) was a French writer, poet, publisher and bookseller who participated in the literary resistance against Nazism.

Biography

Scheler was born in Kassel, Germany. He was the grandson of philologist Auguste Scheler. From 1926 to 1928, along with Armand Henneuse, Lucien Scheler ran Les écrivains réunis, a publishing company that specialized in poems of Michel Seuphor (a monograph on Masereel), another of Stanislas Fumet about Marcel-Lenoir. He settled in Rue de Tournon in Paris during the war, and worked as a bookseller and expert in ancient books. He then published Bibliographie de France where he mentioned the works produced by the Resistance writers.

From October 1942 to August 1944, he helped Paul Éluard and Nusch (both recommended by Monny de Boully). The two needed shelter since the police had come to investigate their home. This shared living situation was interrupted once by a four-month stay of Éluard in Lozère during the winter of 1943 and, again, shortly before the Liberation, by some short, forced absences of a few days, for tactical reasons, by Jean Tardieu, Michel Leiris or the Zervos[1]

As a result of the activities of Éluard, his bookstore (where counterfeit documents were forged) became a rallying point for the messengers of the Éditions de Minuit. This included a network of writers and thinkers including Yvonne Paraf (known as Yvonne Desvignes). Lucien Scheler signed under pseudonyms (Jean Silence or Jean-Paul Mazurier) the poems he entrusted in 1943 to Paul Éluard and Jean Lescure for L'Honneur des poètes.[2] In April 1944, he established the second issue of a Bibliographie de France, a perfect imitation of the official edition, in which he listed all the literary publications produced by the clandestine editions.

In 1944, the first issues of L'eternelle revue (an illegal magazine created by Éluard with the help of Jean Lescure and Louis Parrot) were published in his bookshop, which appeared on 1 June and in early July.

Lucien Scheler subsequently accompanied with prefaces or postfaces the re-editions of several works by Éluard (Donner à voir, Dernières poèmes d'amour). The author of several collections of poems, Lucien Scheler also devoted himself to publishing the complete works of Jules Vallès in fifteen volumes and those of Paul Éluard, in two volumes, for the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

In December 2000, two vacations dispersed his collections of original editions, autographs and works of art. This included Les Amies by Delvaux, Les chevaux (1944) by Dubuffet, Paul Éluard (1952) by Valentine Hugo, Landscape of Ridgefield. New Jersey (1913) by Man Ray, two paintings by Henri Michaux.<ref>Anne Foster, La collection Scheler, rendez-vous de poètes, La Gazette de Drouot (15 December 2000), and others.

Bibliography

Poems

Souvenirs

Scholarly works

Critical editions

Sources

References

  1. ↑ Lucien Scheler, La Grande Espérance des poètes, 1940-1945, Paris, Temps actuels, 1982, p.178-180
  2. ↑ "Helped by Jean Lescure, Paul [Éluard] collected the texts intended for L'honneur des poètes(...). I had not written poems for a long time, and my only activity as a writer was limited to publishing articles of literary erudition in Humanisme et Renaissance, a review of the seizièmistes edited by Eugénie Droz (...). However, in this creative aura, the desire to participate in a return to the common work soon became so imperative, that one day in the subway I surprised myself composing alexandrines (...). The result of this creativity translated into two texts that I submitted to Paul [Éluard] who, choosing for me "John Silence" as my war name, incorporated them into the collection being prepared." (Lucien Scheler, La Grande Espérance des poètes, 1940-1945, Paris, Temps actuels, 1982, p.233).
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.