Malcolm de CHAZAL (190-1981). Autograph manuscript signed, Letter to W.H. Auden, Curepipe (Mauritius) December 8, 1964; 24pages in-4 on blue paper. Long, remarkable open letter on poetry, in homage to the English poet Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973). [Auden had prefaced Chazal's American translation of Sens-Plastique in 1948]. Chazal reacts to the remarks of the critic Gross, who has understood nothing. ... "The poet's tragedy has always been his inability to move into the other, something the child does naturally, who 'becomes' flower to know flower, who 'becomes' chrysalis to know chrysalis. And he who does not come out of himself, even through the gratuitous act, will know nothing. Everything else is prometheism and literature. I'd like to explain the poet's drama here. All poets - I'm talking about those worthy of the name, and for whom poetry is a means of knowledge - have understood that to arrive at essential reality, it is necessary to go beyond antinomies, to abolish opposites. For God cannot be found in a game of opposites. So the poet has always wanted to go beyond the antinomies of good and evil. [...] We have Baudelaire, Edgar Poë, Rimbaud and the Surrealists, who weigh on the "evil" side of the moral scale, in order to defeat God. William Blake, on the other hand, in his approach beyond morality, advocated the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which was to reinforce equivocation, because good and evil, within their magical oppositions, are joined in equivocation. Finally, it was Frédéric Nietzsche who, seeking to go beyond good and evil, turned to the myth of the superman and the will to power, and also exalted constraint. Nietzsche's tragedy is that, having said that "God is dead", he was unable to name the place where God is buried. For God is buried in every church on earth. The poet, like the child, sees God beyond the churches: the universe is his temple. Nietzsche's tragedy was that he wasn't poetic enough. If he were like a little child, he would have known God beyond good and evil, for the child's God is not the moral God, but the God of innocence. [...] Arthur Rimbaud's tragedy was words. Rimbaud could not go beyond words. And when words locked him up, Rimbaud should have taken up his brush. [...] The Jewish prophets were inspired, and therefore poets, and righteous. The Bible itself is the Book of the Just. The Christian religion, dragging its fetishism with it, has emerged from this moral book. [...] The unity of the Bible is in Poetry. [...] Eternity is but an endless poetic life, inseparable from the couple. The knowledge of God through the couple is the whole kingdom of God. The fall began with the fall of the couple, and humanity is redeemed by the couple as presented by the Bridegroom and Bride of Revelation. [...] What's happening today? [...] Instead of the harmony of the couple through true hierarchy, there is the false equilibrium of the equality of the sexes, which engenders the neutral sex [...] This "neutral sex", a defect of form and linked to complexes, is the same as we find in the case of machines, the car which cannot copulate with the car, but gives birth to a new car, the car which is in fact a work of impotence in an aphasic, repetitive gesture"... Etc. At the top of the page, Chazal adds a few words to Marie-France Armstrong-Rose.