In response to a manuscript meditating his contributions to the 1930s fascist journal Combat and the distance he would have had to traverse from the margins of Action Française to the “passivity beyond all passivity” of his later excursus on literature, Maurice Blanchot, in a letter of 1979, zeroed in on what he called an “exemplary” error in the text I had sent him. It turned on a footnote that quoted first Claude Roy on Blanchot's transition from “Maurrassian nationalism” to the Resistance, then a passage from Léautaud's Journal in which Drieu la Rochelle – in May 1942 – is heard on the subject of the editorial assistance at the Nouvelle Revue française he has received from Blanchot during a period in which he was overworked. Blanchot, in his letter to me, had eyes only for the Leautaud entry and insisted on setting the record straight. He recounted how he had in fact turned down an offer from Drieu to assume “free” editorship of the journal (with Drieu himself retaining nominal authority as a safeguard). Blanchot, in consultation with Paulhan, first stalled, then came up with a list of “great writers” for a new editorial committee. Given their anti-Nazi sympathies, Drieu declined. Thus Blanchot in his letter of 26 November 1979.

The most striking aspect of the letter was less the correction of Léautaud's second-hand account, about which I myself had expressed doubts, than its marginality to the principal subject of my essay.