Silence & The Great Poet
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Paul Valéry (1871 - 1945) ~ Biography
Source. Paul Valéry, who published his most important verse between 1917 and 1922, is the greatest French poet the 20th century produced.
He was born in 1871, along the Mediterranean, near Montpellier, to a Corsican father an Italian mother. In his youth he spent his vacations in the north of Italy, whose architecture fascinated him. He attended the lycee at Montpellier and, for a while, the law school at the University there. But he was early interested in poetry, and of a precise kind; as Stendhal found the basis for his prose in the code Napoleon, Valéry during his military service found much to admire in the compressed language of the regulations, which left a stamp on both his poetry and prose.
One day on the terrasse of a cafe in Montpellier, Valéry fell into a literary conversation with a young stranger from Paris, who turned out to be Pierre Louys. Louys sent Valéry to see Andre Gide, and Gide in turn brought Valéry to meet Stephane Mallarme, with whom the young man from Montpellier had already corresponded. Mallarme lived at 89, rue de Rome, where in his fourth-floor apartment he held receptions on Tuesday evenings for his disciples while from the Gare Saint Lazare, across the street, the whistling and clanging and steaming of engines rose upward to mingle with the talk of hermetic poetry. Valéry, just twenty, became a regular member of the group. It departed many argent conversations with the lead of the similes the group. He took part in many ardent conversations with the leader of the symbolists for the next seven years, until Mallarme's death in 1898.
Valéry, who had visited England during the nineties and had even worked there, took a job in 1897 at the Artillery Munitions Bureau, one of the centers of excitement at the time of the Dreyfus affair. Valéry left the bureau in 1900, the year of his marriage to Jeanne Gobiliard, niece of the painter Berthe Morisot. He took a positionwith the Havas News Agency which he held until 1922. In 1937, the College of France created a professorship of poetry for him, and he taught there during most of the remaining years of his life. Elected to the Académie française in 1925, Valéry was obligated by tradition to praise his predecessor. This happened to be Anatole France who, during his lifetime, had disparaged Mallarme. Valéry's expected eulogy was a subtle attack upon Anatole France, but this made little difference - until the words found their way into print - because Valéry had a weak voice.
In his youth, Valéry had apparently been a rather prolific poet. His verses were in the symbolistic vein; hermetic, supposed to embody a kind of magic; esoteric, full of private references; emblematic, with the visible having a corresponding spiritual entity, suggestive, with statements made connotatively rather than denotatively. The symbolist based many of their practices on ideas expressed in Baudelaire's sonnet Correspondances, which exemplified Swedenborg's ideas of the material having a spiritual correspondence; Baudelaire also said in this poem that nature is a temple, and "L'Homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles" - "There man wanders through forests of symbols." The official symboliste school, headed by Mallarme, believed that poetry was more a matter of the sound of words, with associations, than of words with evident meaning. Valéry has reported a conversation at the home of Edgar Degas, when that painter lamented his inability to write sonnets, though he was full of ideas; Mallarme told him that sonnets were not made with ideas but with words.
Valéry not only wrote poetry during the nineties, but also some distinguished prose: Introduction a la methode de Leonardo da Vinci (1895: Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci) and La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste (1896; An Evening with Mr. Teste). Valéry found the mind of Leonardo worth more than anything the artist had created. With M. Teste, Valéry drew upon the older version of the word tete, or head; Mr. Head was a distant relative of Rabelais' Messer Gaster, or Mr. Belly. Teste is, as Valéry presents him, the comically monstrous extreme of overintellectualization. Monsieur Teste was re-edited in 1919, and another new edition, augmented by previously unpublished fragments, appeared posthumously in 1946.
Because of a crisis Valéry underwent in the late 90s, brought about by a love affair, he virtually stopped writing poetry. For about 20 years he used his leisure time for speculation and study of such subjects as mathematics and dancing. But at last Gide and Louys persuaded him to bring out a volume of his earlier verse, which had appeared in the little magazines devoted to the symbolistic movement. Valéry published these in 1920 as Album des vers anciens (Album of Old Poems). He had intended, when he agreed to issue the volume about eight years earlier, to add one item of about two dozen lines, but as he worked over this it grew to more than five hundred, which he published seperately as La Jeune (1917; The Young Fate). This difficult work was highly appreciated in literary circles, and Valéry immediately recognized as an important poet.
The young girl who is the center of the of the narrative is one of the three Parcae, or Fates, of Greek Mythology. As if at the borderland of sleeping and waking, she broods, and does so in rapturous recitatives which are surprisingly the work of a man who praises analytic language. She broods upon the elemental themes of love and death. In the remarkably sensuous printemps (spring) section, the young Fate yearns for death to protect her, lest she yield up to the ardors of an intensely personified springtime which melts the frozen fountains, fills the trees to bursting with leaves, and as it appears, mysteriously and astonishingly, it laughs while it rapes ("L'etonnant printemps rit, viole..."). The girl, who doesn't wish to create life through maternity, implores the Gods, who do not answer; but a tear that comes into her eye becomes transfigured into a symbol of various phases of her experience, mostly of her hidden self-knowledge. Before going back to the celestial dwelling place, the young Fate turns away from death and affirms life, life with all its negative aspects and its perils, life with its brilliance. As the girl returns to her element she says,
I cherish you, brilliance which seemed to know me,
Fire against which rises up a blood virgin
Through the golden nature of a thankful heart.
Difficult as the poem may be, with one intricate and metaphysical scene after another, it remains a great poem. Technically, it is superb in the original, with the music of the language projecting a wide variety of effects. And the story is not merely one of an isolated incident, for it deals movingly with the problems all mankind must face, and it dramatises a moment of final choice. Valéry's other poetic masterpiece, Le Cimetiere marin (The Cemetery by the Sea), first published in 1920, leads to a somewhat similar conclusion.
Besides this volume and that containing his Old Poems, Valéry in 1920 also brought out a book of Odes. Charmes (1922; Charms) was his last volume of verse before the collected edition, Poesies (1942). Valéry continued to write prose; his criticism appeared in the five Variete volumes between 1924 and 1944. Since his death some of his correspondence has been published; but its his several hundred cahiers, or notebooks, from which he often drew for his writings, that are of the greatest value when in relation to his work as a whole.
Old Poems: one of the most charming of them is "Helene," who is of course Helen of Troy; a poem which excitingly begins, "Azur! c'est moi...":
I am the blue! ... I come from the caves of death
To hear the sea break in its measured sounds
And I see again the galleys in the dawn
Revive from the darkness in rows of golden oars.
Her hands recall the kings whose salty beards she played with. She wept, and they sang of hidden triumphs and of gulfs their ships sailed across; she hears the conch shells, and the war trumpets which command the movement of the oars as the song of the rowing men enchains the tumult. And on the beaked prows the carved arms of the Gods hold out forgiveness to her.
This early poem seems more classically parnassien than symboliste except perhaps in that short opening sentence. The rest of the poem uses symbols in the traditional way, and the entire method seems quite different from the one employed in such intrinsically symbolistic poems as Mallarme's l'Apres-midi d'un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun), in 1865 first written and circulated in manuscript, and printed in its definitive edition in 1876 (one slight change was made for the 1887 reprint). Mallarme's poem time is not representational, but is rather an invasion of the reader's intuitions. Ironically, it was first written for the theatre, and for a time the actor Constant Coquelin even considered presenting it at the Comedie francaise; because it is so analogous to other arts (Edouard Manet made an illustration for the limited edition in 1876), it is fitting that the poem is the most widely known through Claude Debussy's orchestral pollute a Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune, which Nijinsky and others have danced as a ballet; Debussy's music has an appropriately dreamlike quality. To mention the work of Mallarme's at this point is to indicate how little, in such poems as Helene, Valéry seemed to be an authentic symboliste in the early nineties, although he knew l'Apres-midi well, for in his last year at the lycee at Montpellier he had copied the poem in a notebook, and he could recite it from memory. But Valéry's later poems such as The Young Fate are definately in the connotative-suggestive vein of true symbolisme, and indeed live somewhat in the shadow of Mallarme.
Some of Valéry's early work, however, seem partly symboliste, as in Feeie (Enchantment), in which "the Shadow" comes to dream in the moonlight, continually scattering on the waters, for the swans, the petals of a snowy rose. Asking if this is living, the poet evokes a voluptuous desert where, using a secret doorway of crystal echoes, the feeble passing of the speckled water dies. Then:
The vague flesh of indolent roses begins
To tremble, if with one cry the fatal diamond
Cracks with a thread of dawn the whole huge fable.
Paul Valery lived to see the liberation of France, and indeed after it became the president of the National Committee of Writers, which published a review, Les Lettres francaises. He didn't live, however, to complete his three-part comic play on the Faust theme, rough-draft fragments of which came out posthumously as Mon Faust (1946; My Faust).
When Valéry died in 1945, his friend Jean Cocteau was away at the seashore and heard the description of the funeral on a radio in a fisherman's hut. The accounts of the torchlight procession, and then the funeral voice paying its tribute seemed to Cocteau far removed from the Valéry he knew, "so gay, so little the captive of solemnity," the man whose eye and moustache were so vivacious, and the depths of whose soul were broken open by laughter.
More/Source: Twentieth Century French Literature
Links
Paul Valéry:
Biography >>
Sartre >>
Camus >> Jean Cocteau's Raymond Radiguet Biography >> Jean Cocteau >>
Alain Fournier >> Andre Gide >> The Dreyfus Affair >>
Links >>
Posters available at Allposters.com >>
Advertise here >>
Paul Valéry Books and Dvds available @ amazon.com
