Saint-Pol-Roux

Paul-Pierre Roux
Born 15 January 1861
Marseille
Died 18 October 1940
Brest
Pen name Saint-Pol-Roux
Occupation Poet and writer
Nationality French
Period 20th century
Genre Poetry, opera, drama
Literary movement Symbolism
Children One daughter, Divine

Paul-Pierre Roux, called Saint-Pol-Roux (15 January 1861, quartier de Saint-Henry, Marseille - 18 October 1940, Brest) was a French Symbolist poet.

Life

Marseille

Saint-Pol-Roux was born to a middle-class family in Marseille, where his father was an industrialist. He studied in a lycée in Lyon, and left it as Bachelor of Arts in 1880. He then wrote some plays under his own name.

Years in Paris

He left the south of France to install himself in Paris. He particularly frequented the salon of Stéphane Mallarmé, for whom Saint-Pol-Roux had the greatest admiration. He won a certain notoriety, trying out several pseudonyms before finally becoming "Saint-Pol-Roux le magnifique". He even got one of his plays, La Dame à la faux, put on by Sarah Bernhardt, and was interviewed by Jules Huret as a member of the Symbolist movement. He perhaps participated in the Rosicrucian aesthetic of Péladan. Nevertheless, he wrote nothing on the movement or on its founder although Saint-Pol-Roux seems to have been interested in this audacious literary attempt.

Voluntary exile

Saint-Pol-Roux leaves Paris in 1898, having come to hate it for his being ostracized, and for the mediocrity of the literary criticism circles, ignoring it with as much pride as he himself had been ignored. On a clairvoyant's advice, and also to escape his creditors, he left, firstly for the Ardennes. There he settled with his wife in Roscanvel, in Finistère, where their daughter Divine was born. After his father's death, he moved to Camaret and made Britanny the center for his work.

Living off the revenue he earned from his libretto for the opera Louise, he bought a house overlooking the ocean, above the Pen Had beach, on the road to pointe de Pen Hir, and transformed it into a manor in the Baroque style. He named it the 'Manoir de Coecilian', after his son's name, or sometimes 'Manoir des Boultous'. He wrote "Facing the sea, man is closer to God" ("Face à la mer, l'homme est plus près de Dieu"). He welcomed several artists and writers, notably Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who looked up to him as an ancestor, and even Jean Moulin, then 'sous-préfet de Châteaulin', who visited in 1930.

Saint-Pol-Roux was a member of the académie Mallarmé from 1937 to 1940.

Death

Ruin of Saint-Pol-Roux Manor
Reproduction of the Manor of Saint-Pol-Roux in Camaret-sur-Mer, Brittany, France

During the night of 22 to 23 June 1940, a drunken German soldier invaded the manor, killed the family's faithful governess, raped Saint-Pol-Roux's daughter Divine, and seriously injured her in the leg with a revolver bullet. Saint-Pol-Roux miraculously escaped death in the incident, but was later taken to hospital in Brest on October 14, where he died of a broken heart when he heard that the manor had burned down with his unpublished manuscripts inside.

The following month, Louis Aragon published an article on the poet's "assassination," as he called it - "Saint-Pol Roux, ou L'Espoir" - in the journal Poésie. It was the first article published by Aragon after the fall of France, and was censored by the Vichy authorities.[1]

A forgotten poet

On the Liberation, Divine tried in vain to ensure that her father's work was not forgotten. It is in large part due to the salvage work, editing and publication of editions of his work by Rougerie during those years, which she called "purgatory", that his poems, essays and plays that had escaped Nazi barbarism were edited and re-edited anew. A considerable number of unedited manuscripts (Le Trésor de l'Homme, La Répoétique) survived the pillaging.

Saint-Pol-Roux is the archetypal "forgotten poet". It was under this title that he was a dedicatee of André Breton's Clair de Terre (also dedicated to "ceux qui comme lui s'offrent le magnifique plaisir de se faire oublier (sic)", or "those who like him offered themselves the great pleasure of making themselves forgotten"), and Vercors's Le Silence de la mer ( calling him "le poète assassiné", or "the assassinated poet").

Corpus

Saint-Pol-Roux attempted to create a total work of art. This dream of Symbolist literature consisted of creating a perfect work responding to all the senses. Saint-Pol-Roux himself was therefore very interested in plays and operas during his Parisian years. At the end of his life, he marvelled at the artistic possibilities offered by the cinema.

Saint-Pol-Roux equally created the notion of "idéoréalisme". He desired an artistic fusion between the real world and the world of ideas in a Neoplatonic perspective. He imagined a cosmology in which Beauty - lost in the real world - has to be revealed by the poet.

Works

Under the name Paul Roux
Under the name Saint-Pol-Roux
Posthumously published

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ An English translation by Helen Burlin appears in Aragon: Poet of the French Resistance, editors Hannah Josephson and Malcolm Cowley, Duell, Sloane and Pearce, 1945
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