TLS - as another sees us

Some homages to the TLS cover have appeared in a gallery in Marseilles.

 In place of the offerings that reader know well enough there are paintings and collages of a broken red cross, a black arrow over a child's wood and a meeting of stick men around a yellow table.

I like to think they are offered in a generous spirit. The only one alien to our own spirit is the meeting around the table: the TLS is not famed for formal meetings although the yellow is lovely.

 The artist is Claude Royet-Journoud.

 Brief research shows that he is not always well loved at home.

In 1972 when Gallimard publishes a 96 page book entitled Le Renversement, the critic of Le Figaro is unimpressed. Under the title "So much white, so much white", he writes "That much white would certainly inspire dreams. Why not of a first communion procession in a snowy field ?" "Can you then be surprised that our contemporaries don't seem to give a damn about poetry or poets! The latter - or their publishers - need only stop taking them for idiots."

In 1978 Gallimard publishes a 112 page book by Royet-Journoud entitled La notion d'obstacle. The man from L'Humanité comments: Arranging ten lines (the first of which repeats the title, vois ci ) on six pages does not strike me as such a feat; nor does placing one word, "fragility", all alone in the middle of a page. It's as if the last century's Mallarméan enterprise had degenerated into an intellectualism which is naive and, in the last analysis, without perspectives.

Such outbursts, according to one defender of  our artist, 'border on an infringement of creative freedom'. Accusations such as intellectual naivete or scorn for the public deny literature its rightful activity, and are 'closer to denunciation than critical discussion'.

 At the TLS we too prefer critical discussion to denunciation but are not surprised when, from time to time, the objects of TLS articles mistake one for the other.

I look forward to future TLS covers by M. Royet-Journoud in the very best spirit of our trade.