Pierre Minet

Pierre Minet (4 June 1909 – 16 September 1975) was a French poet, novelist, memoirist, dramatist, literary critic, journalist and radio producer. He was associated with the Phrères Simplistes of Reims and contributed to the first issue of the avant-garde review Le Grand Jeu in 1928. His early books included the poetry collection Circoncision du cœur and the autobiographical novels L'Homme Mithridate and Histoire d'Eugène.

Minet was known within the Reims circle as the , or “slender brother”. He was not one of the original four schoolmates who formed the Simplist group, but was accepted as an honorary or fifth member. He also helped connect the young writers with the Parisian publisher Léon Pierre-Quint, who became an important supporter of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and the projected review.

After a serious illness around 1930, Minet withdrew for many years from sustained literary publication and worked principally in journalism and radio. He returned to fiction after the Second World War with La Porte noire and published his best-known book, La Défaite, in 1947. Subtitled “Confessions”, it recounts his youth in Paris and his association with the Grand Jeu while judging what Minet regarded as his abandonment of a radical poetic vocation. The book was praised by Antonin Artaud and André Breton and was later translated into Spanish and Italian.

Minet subsequently became a prolific producer for French radio. He also wrote literary and cultural criticism, drama and portraits of writers connected with the Grand Jeu and the wider Parisian literary world. During his later years he played a central part in the legal and editorial effort to publish Gilbert-Lecomte's correspondence and collected writings.

Early life

Minet was born in Reims on 4 June 1909. At sixteen he left his family and moved to Paris, where he lived an unsettled bohemian existence between Montmartre and Montparnasse. He supported himself irregularly, moved among artists, writers, vagabonds and the habitués of cafés and cheap hotels, and wrote poetry while living in considerable poverty.

In La Défaite, Minet recalled meeting René Daumal and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte in Reims on 1 May 1925, while briefly selling the royalist newspaper L'Action française along the route of a workers' demonstration. Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte were struck by his disregard for conventional behaviour and by what they regarded as the unmediated, visionary character of his poetry. He soon entered their circle.

Minet preceded Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte and Roger Vailland in moving to Paris. His first years there later supplied much of the material for his early novels, his journal and La Défaite.

The Phrères Simplistes

The original Phrères Simplistes were Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte, Vailland and Robert Meyrat. Their deliberately altered spelling of combined schoolboy wordplay with the idea of a spiritual brotherhood. Simplism was intended to preserve childhood imagination against the adult world of logic and utility and to recover a condition preceding conventional divisions between dream and waking, visible and invisible, and individual and collective life.

Minet was younger and had not belonged to the original schoolboy group. Dennis Duncan describes him as a friend from Reims and an “honorary phrère”, while other accounts call him the fifth Simplist. The group nicknamed him the and sometimes treated him as its own Rimbaudian figure of the untutored poet-seer.

The Simplists created private names, myths and rites and experimented with dreams, altered states, somnambulism, mirrors, supposed extrasensory perception and forms of depersonalisation or “doubling”. The most detailed surviving accounts concern Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte and Meyrat. Minet belonged to the circle in which these practices and their shared language developed, but the sources do not establish that he took part equally in every experiment.

Minet played a practical part in the circle's entry into Parisian literary life. He showed Léon Pierre-Quint, who worked with Philippe Soupault at Éditions Kra, a photograph of Gilbert-Lecomte. Pierre-Quint travelled to Reims to meet the poet, and their ensuing friendship enabled Gilbert-Lecomte to visit Paris regularly and develop links with writers including Robert Desnos. Pierre-Quint subsequently introduced Daumal to André Rolland de Renéville and became one of the principal supporters of the future Grand Jeu group.

Le Grand Jeu and early publications

The former Simplists began planning a review during 1927. Published under the title Le Grand Jeu, it combined poetry, prose, criticism, visual art, political revolt, altered states of consciousness, psychical research, Hindu philosophy and what its principal theorists called “experimental metaphysics”. Three issues appeared between 1928 and 1930.

Minet was associated with the group but did not occupy the same editorial or theoretical position as Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte, Vailland, Renéville or the painter Josef Šíma. His direct contribution to the review was concentrated in its first issue of June 1928, which included several poems and a letter.

His poetry had already appeared in Les Cahiers du Sud in June 1927 and in the English-language modernist magazine transition later that year. Poems and prose subsequently appeared in reviews including Bifur, Feuillets inutiles, Orbes, Au Disque Vert, La Nef, the Nouvelle Revue Française and the Cahiers du Sud.

In 1928 the American publisher Edward Titus issued Minet's poetry collection Circoncision du cœur. His first novel, L'Homme Mithridate, appeared the same year in the Nouvelle Revue Française's “Une Œuvre, un Portrait” series. The volume included a portrait of Minet by the American painter Lillian Fisk, engraved on wood by G. Aubert.

His second novel, Histoire d'Eugène, first appeared in Bifur in July 1929 and was published as a book by Éditions du Carrefour in 1930. The novel attracted praise from Max Jacob and the Swiss writer Charles-Albert Cingria.

Lillian Fisk, illness and withdrawal

In Paris, Minet entered a relationship with Lillian Fisk, an American painter approximately twenty-five years his senior. She became his first major love, encouraged his writing and supported him materially during periods of poverty. She drew the portrait used in L'Homme Mithridate, and material concerning her forms a substantial group within Minet's surviving papers. An Italian translation by Stefania Ricciardi, La sconfitta, appeared from Neri Pozza in 2023.

Journalism and literary criticism

Minet wrote literary and cultural criticism for the press. His outlets included Combat, where he worked during the period associated with Albert Camus, as well as La Nef, Paru, the Nouvelle Revue Française, the Cahiers du Sud, the Revue des Deux Mondes and other literary reviews.

In 1972 he produced a series of six radio portraits devoted to Albert Camus, drawing on testimony from Camus's friends, colleagues and readers.

Minet also produced work for television, although radio remained the principal medium of his professional career.

Theatre

Minet wrote dramatic works for the stage and radio. His historical drama Georges Cadoudal, concerning the Breton royalist and counter-revolutionary leader, was first staged in 1960 in the Paris region and was subsequently performed at a festival in Carnac. It was later produced for France Culture.

The legal proceedings helped clear the way for the publication of Gilbert-Lecomte's Correspondance by Gallimard in 1971. Minet edited the volume and supplied a substantial preface. He also wrote an introductory text for Gilbert-Lecomte's two-volume Œuvres complètes, published in 1974 and 1977.

Minet's later essays and recollections preserved portraits of Daumal, Renéville, Adamov, Luc Dietrich and other writers connected with the Grand Jeu and its immediate surroundings. His perspective was that of a participant rather than a detached historian. His accounts combine documentary recollection with grief, admiration, resentment and retrospective judgement, especially concerning the different ways in which the former Simplists abandoned, transformed or attempted to fulfil their youthful programme.

Drawings

Minet also drew throughout his life. His graphic work included portraits, sketches and images preserved in his journals and papers. The 1989 volume Pierre Minet: Des âges téméraires... reproduced a selection of the drawings, most of them by Minet himself.

A solo exhibition entitled “Pierre Minet – Dessins” was held at the Galerie Octant in Paris in 1986. Drawings and other iconographic material are also preserved in the Minet archive at the Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine.

He died in the 15th arrondissement of Paris on 16 September 1975, aged 66.

Several works appeared after his death. His final novel, Un héros des abîmes, was published by Pierre Belfond in 1985 with a foreword by Jacques Baron. Les Hérauts du Grand Jeu et quelques proches followed in 1997, and Patrick Kremer edited selections from Minet's journal as En mal d'Aurore: Journal 1932–1975 in 2002.

Minet's principal archive is held by the Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine. It includes manuscripts of his literary and dramatic works, drafts and documents relating to La Défaite, his journal, correspondence with Pierre-Quint, Richard Weiner and others, radio production files, photographs, drawings and material concerning Lillian Fisk, Gilbert-Lecomte, Max Jacob, the Phrères Simplistes and the Grand Jeu.

Other manuscripts, correspondence and audiovisual material are held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques-Doucet, the municipal library of Reims and the archives of Radio France.

Selected works

Poetry and fiction

“Poèmes”, in Les Cahiers du Sud, no. 91 (June 1927) “Poem”, in transition, no. 7 (October 1927) Circoncision du cœur (Edward Titus, 1928; reissued in Le Nouveau Commerce, 1985) L'Homme Mithridate (Nouvelle Revue Française, 1928) “Poèmes” and “Lettre”, in Le Grand Jeu, no. 1 (June 1928) Histoire d'Eugène (Éditions du Carrefour, 1930; reissued 1989) La Porte noire (Éditions du Sagittaire, 1946) La Défaite: Confessions (Éditions du Sagittaire, 1947) Un héros des abîmes (Pierre Belfond, 1985; posthumous)

Memoirs, essays and journals

“Fragments d'un carnet berckois”, in Au Disque Vert (1934) “In Memoriam Roger Gilbert-Lecomte”, in Les Cahiers du Sud (1944) “Au temps du Surmoralisme”, in La Nef (1947) “Antonin Artaud”, in 84 (1948) “Récit d'un témoin”, in Cahiers de l'Herne, no. 10, Le Grand Jeu (1968) “L'Amitié, la Jeunesse et la Mort”, in the Nouvelle Revue Française (1969) “Deux Poètes de la Connaissance”, in Les Cahiers de l'Herméneutique (1973) Les Hérauts du Grand Jeu et quelques proches (1997; posthumous) Roger Gilbert-Lecomte: portrait illustré de photographies originales, with Wols (1997; posthumous) En mal d'Aurore: Journal 1932–1975, edited by Patrick Kremer (2002; posthumous)

Translations of La Défaite

La derrota: Confesiones, translated and introduced by Julio Monteverde (Pepitas de calabaza, 2018) La sconfitta, translated by Stefania Ricciardi (Neri Pozza, 2023)

Theatre and radio

Georges Cadoudal (first staged 1960) Souvenez-vous de Marcel Proust (radio programme, 1950) Hommage exceptionnel à Roger Gilbert-Lecomte (radio programme, 1963) Portraits: Albert Camus (six-part radio series, 1972) La Porte noire, radio adaptation (broadcast posthumously, 1976)