QUENEAU Raymond. - Lot 201

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Lot n° 201
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QUENEAU Raymond. - Lot 201
QUENEAU Raymond. MANUSCRIT autograph signed "Raymond Queneau", Battre la campagne, [1967] ; 162 pages in-4 (21 x 27 cm). Complete manuscript of the poetic collection Battre la campagne. Battre la campagne was published in February 1968 by Gallimard in the collection Blanche. It is the second part of the trilogy started the year before with Courir les rues (Queneau had considered for a while the title Courir la campagne), and completed in 1969 with Fendre les flots. Let's quote from the blurb: "This book follows on from Courir les rues. The streets, if you follow them to the end, lead to the fields or the woods. One meets peasants, plants, animals, but the city advances along the main roads. Will there always be peasants, plants and animals? Or rather, will there always be peasants, plants and animals? Looking back to his childhood, the author remembers that he met his peasants, his plants, his animals. Memories and questions are presented in the form of poems. To denounce the cruel order of things, Queneau often diverts proverbs or ready-made expressions, as well as fables by La Fontaine. Let us quote the last poem which gives its title to the collection: "He puts his fever out of the window to dry it out, he drinks the good herb tea while watching the beeches fly and the roads and ruins fall apart [...] the animals have put on their Sunday clothes, it's a fairy tale, the sick man is better, he takes up his wrung-out temperature on the board, it was all just a hitch in a too-tight fabric. This quasi-final manuscript, which has been cleaned up, is written in black and blue ballpoint pen on the front of watermarked sheets of paper by L.J.&Cie; it contains numerous autograph corrections, some poems being heavily corrected, others not at all: in all, there are 249 corrections, including lines that have been crossed out (sometimes an entire stanza), words that have been changed, and a few rare spelling corrections; these corrections concern 58 poems out of the 155 in the collection. It remained unknown to Claude Debon for the Pléiade edition. The title page bears a dedication to his wife in the upper right-hand corner: "for Janine", deleted in the edition. The rest of the manuscript is numbered in pencil from 2 to 157 (with the numbering changing from 132 to 134), followed by the table of poems on 5 unnumbered pages. Page 13 is accompanied by a photocopy. In the table are two crossed-out titles: Le langage des fleurs and Une clé qui ne sert à rien. All the poems follow the order of the printed collection, except for Exode, here located between Le Songe végétal and Modestie, at the very end of the manuscript (it will be placed in the book between Un précurseur and Le Ténébreux). Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, tome I, edition established by Claude Debon, 1989 (p. 433-526, and notice p. 1372-1374).
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