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1/29/2020 https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/paul-eluard/letters-to-gala/print/
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/paul-eluard/letters-to-gala/print/ 1/1
Kirkus Reviews
LETTERS TO GALA
By Paul Eluard
ISBN: 1-55778-119-2
A collection of the French poet's letters immortalizing his great love for the
musewife he shared with Salvador Dali. Eluard (1895-1952) and Gala met
in 1912, when both were 17. They married five years later. From 1919 on,
he was associated with surrealism, and the letters--dating from 1924 and his
assumption of the editorship of that epochal surrealist magazine,
Minotaure, to 1948, four years before his death--chronicle his friendships
with a galaxy of artistic acquaintances including Aragon, Breton, Bunuel,
Char, Giacometti, and Picasso, thus forming a veritable journal of the
movement. The letters of this Resistance hero--the poet of love in time of war--to a woman whose
"presence [was] sovereign" in him, and for whom woman was not only the other half but the be-all and
end-all of man, memorialize the vestiges of the passion of two lovers, "two shadows in a single night."
Through silences, separations, reunions, the "partaken nights" of these two became, as they divorced and
both remarried (Eluard to "Nusch" and Gala to Dali), the stuff of memory and poetry. Eluard's letters
bequeath to posterity, if not individual stylistic masterpieces, then--in addition to an invaluable, firsthand
account of a seminal artistic movement--a poetic testament to an enduring love.