A new book by Pierre Bergé: L'art de la préface
« For as long as I can remember I have always loved prefaces. The first I ever read was by Théophile Gautier for Mademoiselle de Maupin. It doesn't appear in this book because it would be too long, but I have not forgotten it. It was the first time I was confronted by the notion of art for art's sake, a notion that was to pursue me from then onwards. I could say the same thing, and for the same reasons, about Marcel Proust's preface to John Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens. If I have chosen to entitle this anthology L'art de la preface, it is precisely in order to show that a preface is no ordinary text: an admiring tribute to the author, a critical analysis, an attentive search for detail. It is all this and much more still. The expression "It's quite an art" could not be more appropriate. »
Pierre Bergé
The work
For this collection Pierre Bergé has chosen to bring together 18 prefaces by remarkable writers such as Proust, Valéry, Claudel, Jouhandeau, Mallarmé, Gracq or Malraux, practically all written for French works.
These famous prefaces, often impossible to find, sometimes forgotten, are once again available here. All of them appeal to us for their classicism or their daring, their freedom of tone or their aptness. They stand out for their lofty sense of vision and the often unexpected encounter between a work and a writer transformed into a preface writer of genius.
Hence we see Claudel and Giono busying themselves with the Iliad and the Odyssey, discover that Gide liked to keep company with Goethe, share Tzara's bedazzlement at Villon's poetry, relive the Fronde with Morand presenting Saint-Simon, or read Chamfort through the eyes of Camus, Chateaubriand through those of Julien Gracq…
Pierre Bergé abandons theory in order to remind us of his prodigious taste for "art for art's sake". Himself an expert preface writer to these famous preface writers, Pierre Bergé pays tribute to the art of the preface, for it is indeed a genuine art. A man of culture, he has read and reread these works, pondered over their prefaces, these miniature universes in expansion that so eloquently plead the cause of literature.
L'art de la préface
Editions Gallimard
collection « blanche »
304 pp
ISBN : 9782070122813
22,00 euros
In bookshops as of October 9th 2008. Also available from the boutique at the Pierre-Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation.
