Modern Books and Manuscripts

The Houghton library recently acquired the manuscript of a novel by Georges Bataille (1897-1962), the French surrealist and existentialist writer whose work spans genres from pornography to economic theory, poetry, philosophy, and some intensely personal novels. In fact this manuscript is for a novel that doesn’t even have a single title: it was first published as Histoire de rats (Story of Rats, 1947), then as a section of Haine de la poésie (Hatred of Poetry, also 1947), before reaching its final form as a section of L’Impossible (The Impossible, 1962). This changing of titles (and rearranging of contents) was not unusual for Bataille, who worked from a constantly shifting set of plans, most of which remained unfinished.

Histoire de rats, Haine de la poésie, L’impossible is Bataille’s most beautiful and mysterious book. It is both spontaneous and distilled, a bewildering ride through strip clubs, erotic social evenings, theological disputations, snowy forests and hills, a gloomy chateau, a deformed servant, a hunting rifle, and a lovely, troubled girl—a girl who inspires a love so intense that it destroys all language and structure around it, eventually destroying even the narrative itself, smashing it into disconnected paragraphs and then lines and sentences that feel like desperate lonely witnesses to a catastrophe. But in the midst of this breakdown, a human voice accompanies the reader. It is this voice, I believe, that attracts people to Bataille – people who, for different reasons, turn to his body of works for a stabilizing, humane reference point in a world disrupted by change and catastrophe.

The manuscript acquired by Houghton is the original first draft of Histoire de rats, the main novelistic section of L’Impossible. This manuscript was unknown to scholars until the winter of 2021, when it was sold at auction during the heart of the Covid lockdown.[1] When the auction was over, it looked as though the manuscript would disappear again into private hands, but in the fall of 2021 the word got out that the buyer was a bookseller: Librairie Métamorphoses in Paris. Thankfully, this bookseller wanted to place the book in a public collection, and Houghton Library was able to raise the funds to make this happen. The manuscript was acquired in the summer of 2022, joining another important Bataille manuscript, Le Bleu du ciel (The Blue of Noon), which Houghton acquired in 1985.

First page of manuscript draft for Histoire de Rats. MS Fr 754, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Le Bleu du ciel and L’Impossible are Bataille’s two most accomplished novels, and they are major works of 20th century literature. One (Bleu du ciel) is realistic and political, a tale of leftist activists in pre-Civil War Spain; the other (L’Impossible) is surrealistic and subjective, a tortured love story set in Paris and in a snowy region of central France. Between them, the two manuscripts make Houghton into an important center for Bataille scholarship.

When the authoritative “Pléiade” edition of Bataille’s fiction was being prepared in the early 2000s, the earliest known manuscript for L’Impossible was the manuscript of Histoire de rats held by the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin. That manuscript had been acquired in the 1970s by the American collector Carlton Lake, from Bataille’s friend and fellow surrealist Georges Hugnet.[2] It was clearly not the first version of the novel, however, since it began life as a fair copy which Bataille then revised and corrected. The manuscript just acquired by Houghton is the original first draft.

The manuscript consists of a small pocket notebook which, when opened, fairly explodes with contradictory intentions: words are crossed out, rewritten, and overwritten, whole paragraphs are carefully cross-hatched into oblivion, and occasional dated entries suggest a diarist intention, but novelistic section titles suggest an intent to fictionalize. Words are written in pen, in pencil, carefully or in haste, sometimes added in such a tiny hand that a magnifying glass is needed to decipher them. Every page is a palimpsest of these different creative or destructive energies, and reveals the workshop of Bataille’s creative process at its most passionate and chaotic.

The manuscript was auctioned in 2021 with the estate of Paul Destribats, a prestigious collector of avant-garde books who had worked as a commodities trader. Destribats kept this manuscript in a specially-made leatherbound box which also housed a luxury first edition of the book, Histoire de rats, illustrated with engravings by the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966). The box that housed the manuscript and first edition was created in 1972 by the modernist bookbinder Pierre-Lucien Martin (1913-1985), and was presumably commissioned by Destribats though this is not known for certain. The box is pleasant to handle, understated yet luxurious. Its leather surfaces are slightly scuffed by previous readers, and a small drawer slides out of the spine to reveal the manuscript notebook, nestled in a tailor-made compartment. Another sleeve in the spine houses the printed book, bound in a hard, glossy, bakelite material. The pages within are of beautiful thick paper, and the fine metallic lines of Giacometti’s etchings shine forth from them occasionally with the turning of a page. Thus the manuscript, the illustrated first edition, and their box compose an integrated whole, which is not just an object of study but also of stylish elegance, functionality, sensuality, and artistic beauty.

Book and manuscript for Histoire de Rats by Georges Bataille. Case made by bookbinder Pierre-Lucien Martin (1913-1985). MS Fr 754, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Prior to Destribats, the manuscript and the book had belonged to Yves Breton, a prosperous “notaire” (contract lawyer) in Avignon who purchased manuscripts from Bataille in the 1950s.[3] Although unrelated to the surrealist leader André Breton, Yves was interested in surrealism, and in 1951 he commissioned Bataille to write down his memories of the movement. Bataille was able to produce only a short piece, “Le Surréalisme au jour le jour” [Surrealism day-to-day], which is nonetheless an important document for understanding the early history of the movement. It was in the same year 1951 that Yves Breton also bought the manuscript of Histoire de rats. The Giacometti-illustrated first edition carries an undated inscription by Bataille to Yves Breton on the title page, and a second inscription on a back page in Bataille’s hand, dated 29 July 1951.

The purchase of manuscripts and first editions by collectors was a form of patronage common in the French literary world of the 20th century, and one which Bataille, often short of cash, often availed of. This cultural practice ensured that the writer got an appreciable sum of cash for an object that had little or no market value, in exchange for which the collector got a piece of the writer’s inner world which he alone would covet, until some future time when he might sell it to another collector. Bataille sold manuscripts or parts of manuscripts in this way to a number of collectors, often joining the manuscript to a first edition of the finished book, and addressing a letter to the collector that explained where the manuscript pages fit into the composition process.

Thus the luxurious binding of Houghton’s new acquisition, and its complicated combination of formats and inscriptions, are a window into Bataille’s social life as well as to his compositional process. Like many French avant-garde writers, Bataille wrote for a small elite audience: his print runs rarely exceeded 3,000 copies, often just a few hundred. In spite of the chaos and transgressionality of his themes, Bataille was an artist who created for the luxury market. Only after his death did theorists like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard bring his work to the attention of a wider audience.

[1] Christie’s Live auction 18402, “Paul Destribats : une bibliothèque des avant-gardes, partie III”, Paris, 2 February 2021, lot no. 28.

[2] Carlton Lake, Confessions of a Literary Archaeologist, New York: New Directions, 1990, chapter 6.

[3] On Yves Breton’s relationship with Bataille, see the memoir by Yves’s son Jean Breton, Un Bruit de fête: journal, réflexions, récit (Paris: Le Cherche-Midi, 1990), p. 73.

Thanks to researcher Wes Wallace for contributing this post.