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89 Henry Church and the Literary Magazine Mesures “The American Resource” Claire Paulhan Henry Church was born January 3, 1880, in Brooklyn. He was a descendant of one of the Mayflower pilgrims and also of a pharmacist who owned a monopoly on the marketing of bicarbonate of soda in the United States (the source of Church’s immense fortune). At the age of twenty-one, Church went to Europe. He studied music in Munich and chemistry in Geneva before beginning a sojourn in Paris in 1905. After his return to the United States, he married for the first time and had a daughter. For Church, however, America was “neither the wind nor the sea gull’s cry; it’s a façade with nothing behind it. But it’s a fine façade, and people are constantly striving to discover what it means.”1 After a second Parisian sojourn (1910–1912), Church returned to Paris in 1921, accompanied by his second wife, Barbara, whose background was Bavarian and whose father was a rich coal merchant.They settled inVille d’Avray,on the southwestern outskirts of the city, where they hired Le Corbusier to convert and reconstruct first two and later three contiguous houses, which were then furnished by Charlotte Perriand. Henry Church, a handsome, reserved man with a weak heart,and his chic wife could afford to live the high life: palatial mansions, extensive travel, and spa treatments in the fashionable towns of Old Europe; jewels and evening gowns; memorable fireworks displays in Ville d’Avray, where their garages housed three Bugattis and a Hispano-Suiza. Soon there were rumors about masses of available money; some indelicate artists and gallery owners clamped on to the prosperous couple, perhaps with a view to cheating them,and as a result the Churches felt a certain “disappointment in their social relationships,” in the words of Jean Paulhan. A further result was that Henry Church made the acquaintance of a legal and financial adviser, Monsieur Moreau-Lalande, who became his faithful friend. Moreau-Lalande made it possible for Church to begin a career as a generous but sensible and judicious arts patron: we know that he materially helped artists and writers, that he financed some shows and concerts in the brandnew Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, that he created an association, the “Jeunes Amitiés Internationales,” which organized meetings among students from different countries in the 1930s, and that he contributed handsomely to a fund that made it possible for Thomas Mann to leave Germany in 1933. 90 ClairePaulhan But Henry Church, who considered himself “a scientist and an autodidact,” loved literature most of all.2 He began writing during his first Parisian sojourn , during which he met Jean Royère and collaborated on his literary magazine , La Phalange. Shortly after his third return to Paris in 1921, Church made a modest entry into publishing, founding Les Éditions des Deux Amis, which was soon taken over by La Librairie de France. Church was the author of a poetry collection, four plays, and several works of fiction. The most important of these include: Les Clowns (drawings by Georges Rouault, Éditions des Deux Amis, 1922), Indésirables (Librairie de France,Collection des DeuxAmis,1922),and“Bacillus subtilisArtis”(Mesures, 1936). Henry Church also translated several plays into French, among them Shakespeare’s Richard III, G. K. Chesterton’s Magic, and Georg Kaiser’s Von Morgen bis Mitternacht. The American poet Wallace Stevens, who closely followed developments in French literature and culture from his home in Hartford, Connecticut, told his friend Henry Church, “I love to hear from you. You have so thoroughly lived the life that I should have been glad to live.”3 Since the death of Jacques Rivière in 1925, Jean Paulhan had been the editor in chief of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF). He and Church were probably introduced by one of Church’s close friends, Paul Boyer, director of the École des langues orientales and also the uncle of Jean Paulhan’s first wife. Church and Paulhan began an epistolary relationship in 1934. The two correspondents had the same ambition, a project that must already have brought them together on more than one occasion: to create a new literary review. Church financed and managed the magazine, and Paulhan proposed the material for each issue and directed the editorial work “in secret”—officially, so as not to interfere with his activities as editor of the NRF. Their collaborators included the...

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