Claude SIMON (1913-2005). Typescript signed... - Lot 162 - Ader

Claude SIMON (1913-2005). Typescript signed with autograph additions and corrections, The Candidate, [November 1958]; 5 pages in-4 (printer's marks). Ironic account of a political meeting in the provinces, published in the weekly Arts on November 26, 1958 [some elements, reworked, will find their place in his novel Histoire (1967)]. The typescript is overloaded with autograph corrections and additions, including an 11-line bequet at the top of page 3. "It was hot and through the open windows the sound of the loudspeaker reached the room. From time to time the voice would stop and applause would be heard. Since the words could not be distinguished, this voice and the applause in the night might have seemed incoherent, but if you paid attention you would realize after a while that voices and applause were responding to each other, as if a kind of pact, of mutual complacency, made them alternate, and not randomly, the voice following a certain modulation that, by degrees, raised it to a precise point - intensity and tone - where, automatically, the noisy enthusiasm of the audience was triggered. ... The magic formulas, as I could see when I arrived at the place where the speakers were installed, were quite few in number (about three or four) and the candidate speaker returned to them without fear of repeating himself - often with great difficulty and at the cost of dubious acrobatics in terms of both syntax and logic ... In the first place came the terms Kominform and Kominformist, and the rhetorical figure of interrogation; the candidate had the eloquence of church people, "the Kominform and the Kominformists were brandished as Hell and Devils, the division of votes presented as a mortal sin and, to strike the spirits were added some parables of Evangelical turn "... And to conclude with the portrait of the candidate, crossing the town hall square after the meeting, recalling "those male stars, tenorinos or champions of something, awaited by the crowd after an exhibition. ...] His supporters also smiled, gave him light slaps on the shoulders, turned their heads at the same time as he did towards the balconies and terraces, while they were talking to each other with that slightly contemptuous and confident look of those who, at the races, knew how to bet on the right horse...".