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Joris-Karl HUYSMANS

Carte autographe signée à Stuart Merrill « Cela vous sort de la vie moderne, si banale, si scélérate, si lourde et je vous remercie de m’avoir enlevé à cet affreux milieu, par votre très-curieux livre »

s.l. (Paris) s.d (1891), 11,5x9cm, Une carte recto-verso.

"It leaves you out of the modern life, so banal, so cruel, and so heavy, and I thank you for having taken me from your frightful environment by your very curious book"
Exceptional autograph letter from Joris-Karl Huysmans to the poet Stuart Merrill. Huysmans gives his impressions on one of the masterpieces of Merrill, the collection of poems entitled The Pleasures: Thyrses - Sceptres - Torches , published in 1891.
The symbolic accents of Merrill's work seem to have profoundly affected Huysmans, who never ceased to praise the poems of a " very ardent beauty " of his colleague. The Fastes join the famous decadent and refined esthetics of Huysmans; A striking parallel can be drawn between the "tendency towards artifice" of the character of Des Esseintes in A Rebours , and the " artificial lilac and more charming, finer than nature " acclaimed by Huysmans in the letter.
The mutual admiration of Merrill and Huysmans goes back to the publication in 1887 of the first collection of Merrill, Les Gammes . Huysmans, to whom Merrill dedicates the Nocturne poem, discovers at the same time this "whispering Verlaine" and his "subjugating" poetry (letter from Huysmans to René Ghil). They both attend the Tuesdays of Mallarmé in his apartment in the Rue de Rome, a must for symbolist writers.
Evidence of a brilliant literary complicity between the two men, this letter full of poetry evokes the finest symbolist writings of the end of the century.

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